I’m not exactly sure how this compares to the previous penetration statistics we’ve , but the US Census Bureau has just released a report on Computer and Internet Use in the United States: 2003.

The report covers a lot of information regarding general US internet usage from 2003. Some of the more interesting things are:

• 61.8% of homes have a computer, and 54.7% have internet access
• 75% of homes with 3+ people have a computer, with 66% online
• 81% of householders with a college degree have a computer, and 76% are online
• 92% of homes with $100,000/year have a computer and are online

There’s a lot more interesting statistics in there which show just how pervasive the internet is for today’s households.

(via Clickz)

I just got back from the Austin Game Conference. This is an event that has traditionally focused on large MMO type games. This year it was held in conjunction with the Women’s Game Conference and the Game Writer’s Conference.

Unfortunately I arrived partway through day 1 so I ended up missing what I heard were some great talks including Damion Schubert’s “What Vegas Can Teach the MMO” session (review on Raph Koster’s site).

For dinner we had a “planning” dinner for our Casual Games Evolution summit sessions the following day. We had some incredible discussion on the future (of humanity) and how we should or should not encourage further mapping of the human genome. At the very end of the meal we even managed to plan our sessions a little bit
After that it was off to the casual developer’s party hosted by Macrovision/Jessica Tams and Garage Games. There were lots of great people there and it reminded me of most smaller GDC parties in that there was a high percentage of very interesting people to talk to.

I didn’t go to the Day 2 keynote, and it doesn’t sound like I missed much. The two Casual Games Evolution Summit sessions sponsored by Game Trust seemed to go over extremely well. They were well attended completely filling the room, and we managed to have an incredibly diverse set of panelists. I was talking about advergames, Peter Glover was talking about Portals, Mark Cottam told how great they are doing with traditional publishing, Margaret Wallace gave us the casual developer perspective, and Adeo did a great job moderating and forcing everyone to share their numbers.

After lunch we had the tech panel featuring Tim Higgins from Macromedia and Chris Melissinos from Sun, along with Peter Glover and myself. I think we learned a lot, although I didn’t end up saying much as all my good questions had already been given to moderator Adeo.

That afternoon I went to the MMO rant talk which was incredible. I think Brian Green had the best rant in the form of a tongue-in-cheek letter (posted here) to Stephen King about how he could write better novels.

The final session was Larry Mellon and Nicole Lazzaro’s Fun Meters for Games (slides here). Nicole always gives incredible talks and this was no exception. She and Larry have done a lot of research on this space, and the tag team between the two of them was very informative.

That night we went to a reception hosted by the Mayor of Austin (who gave a well meaning, but hollow political speech), looked at the millions of bats living under a nearby bridge, and then had dinner where I learned about the incredible Rolling Road Show (an off the wall movie theater on wheels) from Billy Caine.

All in all this was an outstanding event, with a very high quality of attendees. There wasn’t a lot of content directly for casual developers, but almost everything was still relevant.

Update: The Thursday night party was also hosted by Garage Games, which is also a very big supporter of the game developer community.

I normally wouldn’t even post about this sort of thing if I hadn’t heard it from my Mom first. Yes that’s right, my Mom actually broke the news of this before I managed to see it on any websites
Apparently the new Xbox 360 kiosks that are being setup at Wal-Marts are messing up their inventory systems. My Mom is a manager of Electronics at a Wal-Mart and apparently once the Microsoft rep setup the new kiosk their Telxon wireless printers could no longer print anywhere near the electronics department. (These are the machines that print out all the price labels).

Apparently they figured out some workaround before the MS people could get back to fix it, but not until they had called around other local stores, and even the Arkansas store support desk to figure out what was going on.

In the end I’m sure this won’t even register as a tiny blip on the 360 launch, but it’s a bit interesting to note that even with all the hoopla surrounding the new console launch, many stores had to shut off the kiosk to allow them to keep working.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or not but it looks like the Spike video game awards are jumping from B-list celebs to an A-list roster.

According to this brief press releasish article Samuel L. Jackson will be hosting the 3rd annual awards this year, while Vin Diesel, Missy Elliott and The Rock are expected to present awards.

Last year’s show was pretty much universally blasted by the game industry as being all about fluff, with very little substance.

While this awards show will probably do very little to actually recognize and reward the actual developers who have worked hard on the games, it’s a definitely example of how far into mainstream culture games have gone. Perhaps we can finally get past the perpetual question of whether or not games are mainstream or fringe, and move on to worrying about things that really matter.

The website isn’t updated yet, but I’ll be speaking at the Austin Game Conference next week on the Casual Game Evolution Summit: Moving Beyond Downloads panel.

I’ve heard good things about this event in the past but this will be my first time attending. Hopefully I’ll see some of you there!