Rock, Paper, Shotgun

We interrupt our regularly scheduled “staring aghast at irresponsible news media” to draw your attention to the RPS Twitter account. When we set it up a couple of years ago, we didn’t do a whole lot with it and thus didn’t promote it much. We reckon we’ve got the hang of it now though, so please follow @rockpapershot to get as-it-happens tip-offs to our bestest/silliest posts, occasional ranting and the odd bargain or freebie we’ve sighted. For instance, the news that the sublime King’s Bounty is currently a mere $2.50 for the next 24 hours. Goooooooooo! By the way, any other Twitter account claiming to be RPS isn’t.

You can also follow us individually, however: Alec, Jim, John and Quinns. We’re fantastically entertaining, especially when talking about the weather, cats and how tired we feel.

It’s the social web game du jour! It’s hilariously goofy. Basically, Dot War allows you to take 2 twitter account icons and wage a war against one another, by a process that transforms the icons into incy soldiers. It’s a little like Gratuitous Space Battles in that it’s the layout of colours in your icon that determines which mix of the various soldier types you get – so your chances of winning against any given opponent. It’s especially so in the easy mode where the troops go and fight automatically. There’s more skill in the mode where you get to give orders and so are able to squeeze a win. The aim is – basically – to do more damage to the opponents crystals than they do to yours. You don’t even need a twitter icon to be yours to fight – just enter in any names. You can see it in action below, and to start you off, you pick fights with RPS, Alec, Jim, John, Quinns and Me.
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Oh God, I’m writing a second post about Twitter in as many days. One of you rabid anti-social networking types is totally going to come and kill me for this. (As a side-note, the craziest angry-reader threat I ever received was, in response to an admittedly hurried review of the Star Wars: Empire At War expansion pack, a claim that he was going to find my house, construct a giant wax statue of me outside it, then set fire to the thing. I remain deeply disappointed this never happened).

Anyway, no pimping of RPS-related info-flows this time. Rather, it’s an interesting ad-libbed experiment that verges on being both interactive fiction and alternate-reality gaming.
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As John revealed yesterday, as part of a transparent attempt to raise his own follower count (coughhere’smecough), RPS has a Twitter thing. We’re so impressionable. In fact, we’ve had the account for a while, more to bag the URL than anything else, but being stupids we haven’t thought of how to best leverage this exciting new web 2.5 sociopathic networking micro-blogging brainfart technology as yet. Read the rest of this entry »

Barnett pointed me at this, via twitter, appropriately enough. Sam Houston is maintaining a list of twitter feeds of people in the industry who don’t mind it being public. And what a list for cheery stalking. For example, we can swiftly find out that Ragnar Tornquist‘s favourite comfort movie is Lost in Translation, George Broussard‘s wondering where the Pizza has got to and Valve Software – er- want us to know that there’s some deals on Steam. Well, it’s not all stalking on there, mores the pity.

As a matter of interest, how many RPS readers are on Twitter? I’ve done a poll beneath the cut. Feel free to explain your reasons in the comments.
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