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An American’s Guide to the UEFA Champions League.

Posted on August 27, 2010 by jpv

The 2010/11 UEFA Champions League Groups have been fixed (a cheat sheet is available). My horrible predictions are below. My predicted winner of the group is in bold, runner-up in italics.

    Group A

FC Internazionale Milano (ITA)
SV Werder Bremen (GER)
Tottenham Hotspur FC (ENG)
FC Twente (NED)

Inter won the whole shebang last year, under the raucous tutelage of Jose Mourinho. They face a not-untalented group of teams, but I think they’ll swoop through. Twente are the reigning champions of Holland’s domestic league and are no strangers to international cups, but I don’t think they have sufficient oomph to break down the other three in the group. For their part, Werder Bremen are having one of those on-again, off-again starts that could mean fantastic, dramatic results. Or else failure to move on to the round of 16. I’m going for that, picking Tottenham Hotspur to place second to the returning champs.

    Group B

Olympique Lyonnais (FRA)
SL Benfica (POR)
FC Schalke 04 (GER)
Hapoel Tel-Aviv FC (ISR)

Lyon is a team of players rather than players-on-a-team, which will make the difference in their group stage matches. Many will scoff at picking Benfica over Schalke but I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em. Hapoel is like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory – just happy to be there.

This will be a recurring theme until we get down to a little Slovakian side that could.

    Group C

Manchester United FC (ENG)
Valencia CF (ESP)
Rangers FC (SCO)
Bursaspor (TUR)

You know the Yankees? That’s Manchester United. However, even the Yankees occasionally falter, and that too is Man U this year. Perennial nearly-there Valencia have a good chance to upend the giants in their group stage match. David Villa, fresh from a fantastic World Cup, is primed for mayhem (see comment below ;) , and Spanish players generally will be feeling like they can take over anything. Glasgow’s Rangers FC could prove up to something but I bet they don’t. Turkish Super League champion Bursaspor will have to do something truly incredible to get through.

    Group D

FC Barcelona (ESP)
Panathinaikos FC (GRE)
FC København (DEN)
FC Rubin Kazan (RUS)

Barcelona is my pick to win the whole shebang this year. See: Spanish players feeling like superhuman football giants, multiply that times Messi. This group is going to be highly entertaining, because in my mind there is no clear second. I’m giving the nod to Rubin Kazan on the basis of past history in the Champions League, and fighting spirit. But the same could be said of Panathinaikos. Copenhagen might also make a run. All of those are going to be great matches.

    Group E

FC Bayern München (GER)
AS Roma (ITA)
FC Basel 1893 (SUI)
CFR 1907 Cluj (ROU)

Bayern Munich were in the finals last year and very well could be again. Roma is aging, but sound, and miles above Basel 1893 or CFR 1907 Cluj of Romania.

    Group F

Chelsea FC (ENG)
Olympique de Marseille (FRA)
FC Spartak Moskva (RUS)
MŠK Žilina (SVK)

This is a difficult group and the notion that little Zilina can get through is perhaps funny ha-ha. But I tell you, I watched the matches against Sparta Prague, and they were a really, really good team in those two games. They may need to maximize their opportunities against their group opponents, but I think they might do just that. Intellectual honesty demands that I point out that Spartak is far more likely to go through. Marseille now feels all offended, but I think they’re incredibly boring. Oh, and Chelsea will win this group because they’re scary robot footballers from the future.

    Group G

AC Milan (ITA)
Real Madrid CF (ESP)
AFC Ajax (NED)
AJ Auxerre (FRA)

I’m taking another underdog in picking Ajax to go through behind Mourinho’s new squad Real Madrid. One would think that Milan would have no trouble getting through behind Real, but Milan seems to have nothing but trouble these days – I just don’t see them pulling together through three very difficult group stage matches. Ajax, on the other hand, appear ready to build on solid displays against Dinamo Kiev in the qualifying matches. Bad luck for Auxerre to be in such a group of death.

    Group H

Arsenal FC (ENG)
FC Shakhtar Donetsk (UKR)
SC Braga (POR)
FK Partizan (SRB)

This is a dream group for Arsenal, and you would think that they would rampage through it with ease. Which is why they’ll come second. Ukrainian side Shakhtar will punish the Gunners in their individual match and beat Braga and Partizan. Arsenal will redeem themselves against the Portuguese and Serbian sides, and then face some terrible matchup in the round of sixteen. This is how it goes.

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Best. Penny Arcade. Ever.

Posted on August 25, 2010 by jpv

Oh please god let Kevin become a recurring character. Maybe he already is – I admit that my PA fandom was late to the party.

But in the years that I’ve been reading, here’s what I’ve observed – it’s becoming increasingly difficult to place Gabe in the role of dunce. He’s just not anymore. He’s grown. He’s made valid points.

We need a good old fashioned jackass back. Enter Kevin.

On the topic of the comic itself (and the related belief in the cloud), it’s becoming increasingly apparent to the mucky mucks of the gaming universe that Steve Jobs is a goddamn genius. Amazon made the same play with the Kindle to universal applause. Now the Kindle-less murmur that they may use a different platform because of open formats, and the people with Kindles (and they vastly outnumber the smattering of people who care about stuff like this) go “yeah yeah, blah blah, pardon me while I read a book on my Kindle.”

When the market is closed, or even if the market is open but tightly controlled, you make more money. When mere punks can run to GameBarn and get a used copy of your thing, it’s less appealing. Indies, as a rule, cannot survive without the “one paid copy per customer” model, so like Jerry I come down firmly on the side of shackles and overlords.

At the end of the day, it’s a sort of indie-litism on my part. “If you can make money peddling wrestling then the consumers deserve what they get.” Meanwhile, things like World of Goo continue to be made.

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The Big Talk

Posted on August 19, 2010 by jpv

I was fortunate enough to be selected for Ignite Portland 9, and as I get into subject matter suitable for slides I’m beginning to realize that this topic is bigger than even the (comprehensive) gaming news coverage suggests. That’s not to say that it’s important, merely that in the context of play and game development, this is a big topic. So I’m hoping to live up to it. (Gulp.)

Some tidbits that I have been tracking:

The launch of Cow Clicker and subsequent copycatting of the game.

This:

I’m not entirely sure we’ve got an absolute conceptual handle on these platform native games yet – what they are, what they’re for. You sometimes hear that something can be “good for an XBLA/PSN game” or “good for the price” or “good until the next major release comes along,” which projects the idea that the products in these channels are something less than true games. The thing is, many (if not most) of my favorite games this generation fit this profile. I started listing them here in the post, and it got stupid very quickly.

And similarly, this:

In some ways, if a developer wants a player to gain an emotional attachment to something in their game, a location is a much safer bet than an NPC.

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Chess.com – Where Chess Happens

Posted on August 17, 2010 by jpv

So to follow up on my previous post about the relative strength of the competition on Chess with Friends: It’s low.

I’ve actually deleted the app from my phone. At one point I think I was juggling about fifteen games, and it was a little like doing a simultaneous exhibition in a mental institution. And there’s the horrible truth of chess, that playing someone too high above your level is demoralizing for you and boring for them. I’m no great shakes, but I can say I was bored.

I looked up my old haunt, PlayChess.de, and it appears to be plugging along. A quick search through the chess-on-the-Internet universe, however, made it clear that Chess.com is the center of that universe. It has a lot of grandmasters playing and writing, a weekly column from one of my favorite chess authors (the American IM Jeremy Silman), and a number of “social” features that make it an excellent service.

There’s even a Portland, Oregon group – although it’s a bit small and sad right now. That’s where you come in. Go create a membership (it’s a freemium service) and get connected on the Portland group – or any group that strikes your fancy. We can be friends and braid each other’s hair and stuff.

Best of all, you can leverage all the delightful resources that they have for people who want to actually improve at chess.

If you’d rather just live vicariously through me, the widget to the right should be your huckleberry. That 1672 rating is good enough to be in the top tenth of the players on the site, and roughly equivalent to my (now horribly out-of-date) USCF ranking.

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Why I Use Sponsored Tweets

Posted on August 4, 2010 by jpv

I’ve encountered the occasional question about my use of Sponsored Tweets in the ephemera empire known as Twitter. If you don’t know about the service, you can check it out with no strings or with a single very small string attached. (The latter is a referral link: If you sign up as a tweeter and earn a dime, I earn a penny. If you sign up as an advertiser, some sort of other math happens, and I earn something when you deposit funds for campaigns.)

Most of the questioners have been curious about the reasons for running ads within my tweetstream. The backstory is this: I was initially looking at three services (adjix, TweetBucks, and Sponsored Tweets) as part of a larger thought experiment about promotional and word of mouth models for a blog piece over at Extreme Arts & Sciences. That never actually happened, partially because two of the three ended up being non-starters and partially because the thinkers sort of leapfrogged the whole question and took up the larger (and more interesting) questions of trust, content vs. endorsement, and the explosive growth of Facebook.

But there I was, with accounts in all three services, and offers coming in from Sponsored Tweets fairly regularly. What to do? Half lark and half “continuing study,” I went ahead and maintained my account over at Sponsored Tweets. In no particular order, these are the reasons why:

The writing was on the wall.

Back when Twitter had no business model, I did not have a conversation with a rational human that didn’t include ad revenue. If you look at user behavior and innovation on the platform, combined with search functions that can target interest areas, you will quickly come to the conclusion that Twitter is a demographer’s (and marketer’s) dream playground. At the time, advertising was coming to Twitter no matter what. In the here and now, it has arrived.

Targeting is only as good as the scope.

I was, and continue to be, impressed with Izea (the parent company behind Sponsored Tweets) – they get the whole notion of context within and around Twitter. They have displayed time and again a commitment to “getting it right” as far as each tweeter’s community of interest is concerned. They’ve continuously upgraded the keyword system that they employ to match offers to tweeters. They focus almost exclusively on user interest (“this is what my readership gets from me already”) as opposed to what the market will bear. In other words, the engine behind Sponsored Tweets works just as well for a jackass with 1400 followers (ahem) as it does for a Twitter megacelebrity.

I’m your loyal gatekeeper.

I’ve been offered 46 ads for my “fixed rate” and a whole truckload of PPC (I don’t have an accurate count of PPC offers because declining them makes them go poof). I’ve accepted exactly half of the fixed-rate offers – 23 sponsored tweets, and I’ve elected to tweet 8 of the PPC offers that appeared in my dashboard. I would guesstimate that that amounts to about 30% acceptance of offers (again, the number of PPC offers affects this total – I do know that I decline them at least 8 out of 10 times, hence the guess).

The declined offers were either super-stupid (MAKE A BILLION DOLLARS ON THE INTERNETZ), not a fit (a $2 coupon for Jimmy Dean Sausage because one of my topics is “cooking”), or lost out to an offer that I decided to accept (I take one per day max, and have the settings configured to limit sponsored tweets to once every 24 hours). The PPC ads are the ones that are the most likely to suck. Most of the offers were usually just a miss, either geographically or in terms of the target audience.

Anyway, at the beginning I swore to myself that I wouldn’t endorse something that I didn’t, you know, endorse. As a result, I only just reached the point where I’ve earned as much money as I’ve turned down.

I actually like writing ad copy

There is something perversely entertaining about writing an ad in 140 characters in a way that gets people to click on a link. I admit it. I’m especially proud of this Twilight: Eclipse Volvo sponsorship ad:

Remember kids, teen vampires drive Volvos for safety, beauty, and washable interiors. Check out #Edward’s XC60. #ad [link was here]

Or there’s this one for the silicone grill glove:

Incapable of using tongs? Want to safely juggle fire? Do you face every situation wishing you had an oven mitt? #ad [link]

That’s good times, people. I like to think that, between the careful screening of ads and my magic fingers, I’m adding some small amount of value to some percentage of the folks who read them. That’s all you can ask for, with advertising of any type.

Pin money!

I’m now about seven bucks away from reaching $50 earned, which is the “cash out” amount. Like the man says, that and five dollars will get you a cup of coffee.

There’s a certain “I’m worth it” thing about getting $50 for being a “spider” on Twitter. I dunno. Is that lame? It’s probably lame.

Anyway, to those who asked, that’s why. There are definitely reasons why NOT to use such a service, too, but that’s a subject for another blog post.

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