I learned about ChatRoulette yesterday from the Sunday New York Times, ’cause I’m square like that. And today, two things made me laugh:

1. Tyler Coates’ “Listicle Without Commentary: The Top 25 Things Strangers Have Said or Typed Upon Connecting with Me on ChatRoulette This Weekend” on the Awl.

2. “The Game” as invented by Penny Arcade. (h/t to Fatboy Roberts for that one.)

Alison Hallett served nobly as the Mercury's arts editor from 2008-2014. Her proud legacy lives on.

5 replies on “Today’s Punchline: ChatRoulette”

  1. PA’s piracy cartoon equates to most of what I’ve seen from PA: Addressing one tenet of the argument. Steam has minimal DRM, users are not up in arms about it, and it is wildly successful. How much piracy of Left4Dead/2 exists? Of WoW?

    Companies can do it right, and have done it right, and yet PA thinks there is a strawman’s argument?

    tsktsk.

    As for Chatroulette: Yahoo did this ~10 years ago. Amazing the tech people will discover as “new” these days.

  2. The existence of other arguments doesn’t mean that no one is using a strawman argument. That seems so obvious that I might have misunderstood your point?

    And neither of those examples are console- or disc-based, right? Doesn’t online and streaming play still represent a tiny fraction of the total industry?

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