Being Random

Key to the Jobs approach is careful consideration of what he and Apple say — and don’t say. Harvard professor David Yoffie estimated that in the months between announcing and selling the first iPhone in 2007, Apple received $400 million in free advertising by not making any public statements, thereby whipping the media into a frenzy.

— How Jobs transformed Apple - Nov. 5, 2009

We assume that lobbies always recognize what’s best for their members. But they don’t, and, in the case of climate change, they may very well be missing what the companies that have resigned in protest have seen: global warming isn’t just bad for the planet; it’s bad for business.

— The business lobby and the Chamber of Commerce : The New Yorker

Unfortunately, if Oblivion’s defining, revelatory experience was spotting the ruins of an ancient castle perched on a distant hillside and realizing you could wander there if you wanted to, then Fuel’s defining experience was realizing that its world was vast on a soul-deadening, terrible scale. After downloading the demo, I began free drive mode and picked a direction and took off– and drove and drove, through the scrub and the dirt. The sun began to set; my bike’s headlight came on automatically. I drove. Suddenly wondering what the hell I was doing, I quit and deleted the demo, intending never to return to it, but later that evening I was seized by the idea that perhaps Fuel had unintentionally created the first game that dove into the depths of existential absurdity, a disguised meditation on the ultimate pointlessness of everything. Might Fuel actually be a game that explores the place of mankind in the cosmos by placing him in this ludicrously illogical, staggeringly gigantic world for no apparent reason? Was Fuel the secret Waiting for Godot of video games?

— Fuel, A Tragicomedy in Two Acts (Magical Wasteland)