The phrase “the long tail,” coined by Wired editor Chris Anderson, refers to the increasing viability of selling to a small niche of consumers rather than marketing to the masses. In the book of the same name, this concept is parlayed into business advice based on the assumption that the web has made it not only possible, but, in the long run, more profitable to make more money off smaller groups of the most dedicated consumers without risking more up-front to gamble on blockbuster hits. The phrase refers to the graph of how sales might look in this model, with the most mainstream hits still in the “head” (selling a lot to many people) and an increasingly long, flat “tail” of materials garnering smaller sales to few people (but still selling enough to get by). Favorite examples of this theory in action are Amazon and Netflix, systems which make it possible to offer a broad array of unique products in addition to the usual hits, even if each of the more obscure products only reaches a small audience.

I recall this now because of an article in the Harvard Business Review, “Should you invest in the long tail?” The author’s research indicates that attention to blockbusters may actually be increasing, rather than decreasing, online; she suggests, “the tail is likely to be extremely flat and populated by titles that are mostly a diversion for consumers whose appetite for true blockbusters continues to grow.”

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I keep meaning to give a special mention to a few blogs featuring contributions by some of my talented friends and colleagues. Probably I should just break down and create a “links” page for this site at some point, but I have a really hard time keeping those at a manageable length. Also, I feel like just having a link to a page, while seemingly more permanent, doesn’t really pique my interest as a reader as much as a link offered with wholehearted endorsement in the context of a post. For now, then, let me tell you about a few of the blogs I’ve been meaning to mention.

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A few relevant links found their way to my inbox this week. Let’s have a look.

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Things have been busy with non-web writing lately, and are about to get busier, so updates may be sparse (or, I suppose, absent) around here for at least another week or so. Tomorrow I’m headed to Montreal shortly for the International Communication Association 2008 conference, presenting a paper on experimental comics and the concept of visual language. In the meantime, here’s a few links I’m not sure what to do with, but which seemed interesting enough to post.

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All right, here are all the links that didn’t make it to one of the “themed” posts I did recently. Please pardon me if you suggested one of these links a long, long time ago and I forgot to give you credit—they’ve been sitting in my bookmarks folders for pretty much forever now.

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I’ve been working on a really long links post in short fits and spurts over the last few days, realizing part way through that some of these links are thematically similar enough that they might as well be their own posts. Yesterday we got geek typologies; today, links and comments on conventions; and later this week, some links on geek fashion and on being a geeky woman.

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You may have seen a certain graphic making the rounds on the geek blogs lately. It’s “Wired’s Geekster Handbook, a Field Guide to the Nerd Underground,” describing six different kinds of geeks based on their interests and some (affectionately mocked) stereotypes. The list includes fanboys, music geeks, gamers, gadget guys, hackers, and otaku, perhaps hitting the major media of geek culture in broad swaths (and throwing in one so hip and mainstream that I doubt it would’ve made this list ten to fifteen years ago).

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In our discussion about what we should call heavily story-oriented games, we got to talking about what the different appeals of video game play may be. I encourage you to go join in that discussion if you haven’t yet, as I’d love your input on what to call “narrative games.” For now, though, I came across an interesting illustration of the different appeals that games have, and I thought it was worth sharing separately.

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I have been thinking a lot lately about how I want to talk about a certain subset of video games, but I don’t have precise enough terminology to do so. I’ve decided to enlist you, the bright minds of the internet, in helping to figure out a phrase for what I want to discuss.

A number of theorists and writers working in game studies have attempted to describe the shared formal properties of “games” under the assumption that Tetris and Mass Effect (for example) represent not just the same physical medium, but the same artistic form, and therefore share the same sorts of appeals. The more I write about the latter, story-oriented sort of game, however, the more I find that assumptions about the former, rules-oriented sort of game sometimes get in the way. In some ways, Tetris has about as much in common with Mass Effect as a Sudoku puzzle book has in common with a sci-fi novel. Technically, each pair belongs to a shared “medium,” but more in terms of technology and ancestry than in terms of formal conventions and aesthetic aims.

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Awhile back, I devoted an entire post to Bioshock, a highly anticipated and critically acclaimed game that got me thinking a lot about the medium and our standards for evaluating it. I recently played through one of the other blockbuster games of 2007—perhaps the other blockbuster game, according to some—Bioware’s Mass Effect. Like Bioshock, Mass Effect feels like an attempt to leap forward in how we think about games as a storytelling device.

Again, I’m not really in the business of doing reviews, but this game just gave me too much food for thought to ignore. I’ll remain generally vague here, but still, expect some spoilers to follow (especially in the forum posts I link to).

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