I had a fascinating conversation with Barry Hitchens, the exhibition consultant of the excellent Game On exhibition, which is currently at the Science Museum, it’s eleventh venue in a world tour that started in the Barbican in 2002.
You can listen in to Barry’s vast knowledge of video games and hear about the trials and tribulations of touring the show around the world.
The show has changed over the years, and Barry gives a lowdown on what has worked and what hasn’t, while outlining the history of significant stages of video gaming.
If you like video games, you’re going to love this.
Interview with Barry Hitchens – Exhibition consultant Game On
Following the success of the launch of the Nintendo Wii in the US where 600,000 units were sold within the eight days – that’s nearly one per second, the buzz about the UK launch continues to heighten. 
Globally Nintendo is planning to ship 4 million console before the end of 2006, a record for them. 
The organisers of Game On, clearly have amazing contacts with the games industry having been running the exhibition for the last four years around 11 venues around the world. It’s contacts like this that has led to them getting hold of Sony’s PS3 and Nintendo before it’s launched in the UK – four months in the case of the PS3. 
Who’s going to win?
The Nintendo Wii and Sony’s Playstation3 (PS3) will be available for play at the Game On exhibition at the Science Museum from Wednesday. Expect queues. 
When you get bored of all the new stuff, by way of a stark contrast, you’ll be able to play the world’s first computer game, Spacewar!, from 1962 as well. 
The pricing of PSone games to be played on the Sony PSP have been announced. 
It was initially envisaged that Sony would give access to the Playstation Store through the PSP using its WiFi connection. We can see one advantage of not doing this – people wanting to use the service will need to buy a PS3! 
We see that Engadget are offering a charity auction for Save Dafur. 
Ever self-aware, Engadget also point out they understand the irony of raising money for a Dafur charity, by playing a video game called Gears of War. Their defence is that their readers chose the charity and that they’d already decided what the event was going to be. As some step towards balancing this, Engadget have named the event Gears of Peace. 
Nintendo’s eagerly awaited 
The first punter to get his hands on the shiny new console was the time-rich Isaiah Triforce Johnson, who had sat outside a New York store for more than a week. 
Sony had shipped 400,000 PlayStation 3s in North American stores at the end of last week, but Nintendo boasted that it would have “five to ten” times as many Wiis available at launch, with an end-of-year shipping figure of 4 million units expected. 
To defeat the pain of trying to enter text using an on-screen keyboard using your gaming controller to peck out a letter at a time, Blue Orb have released Texter, a small device that sits between the game controller and the game box. Using some general cleverness, the box will appear as a USB keyboard. 
We’ve not tried it yet, but looking at the usage diagrams it initially looks a little complex. That’s not to say that using it wouldn’t become easier after some practice. We’ve had a lot of experience in having to use different ways of putting text in, normally by having to review so many different mobile phones. Once you get past the initial pain of using the new method, some of them can be pretty fast.
Reality TV programme, Big Brother, is moving to Second Life on 1 December, or “First virtual piglet Brother” as the BabelFish translator put it. 
How do you temp a Second Life player to take part when they’re likely to not like, or possibly hate TV? Give them something they’d love … a tropical island in Second Life. Reuters report the value of it being worth about US$1,675 (£883). 
UK sports minister, Richard Caborn, has said that Britain would not protect online gaming executives from extradition requests if they took Internet bets from countries in which they were illegal. These won’t be welcome words to the people running the gambling companies, who have already taken a hit with the arrest of two execs in the US earlier this year.