Word: gaming
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Tomb Raider was addictive enough to prompt millions of men--and, for the first time, large numbers of women--to spend long nights at the console. Smith, who naively thought he'd seen the last of Tomb Raider, had to spend many more long nights (two years' worth per game) devising enough fiendish traps and puzzles for three sequels...
Such excesses have popped up with some regularity for a few years, but the consequences for rule breaking are getting harsher. Jesse Jackson has made an issue of severe punishment in Decatur, Ill., where six students were thrown out of school for one year for fighting at a football game. But that sort of violence (a videotape of the incident shows a wild brawl) has long been cause for expulsion. What's new is that even pranks can land kids not just before the school board but before a judge. Two weeks ago in Virginia, a pair of 10-year...
webRIOT (weekdays, 5 p.m. E.T./P.T.) is, frankly, a fairly unremarkable quiz show: four contestants watch videos and answer rapid-fire questions from the relentlessly mugging Ahmet Zappa, on a set that's a cross between Sprockets and a Sega video game. What is interesting about it is its viewers. In each of its daily airings (one for each coast), as many as 25,000 of them will compete simultaneously, online, to post the fastest correct answers in order to win prizes like MP3 players and plaster their names on TV on the high scorers' list...
...programming before: Total Request Live takes e-mail video requests, and the network has held high-profile online auctions (as has Rosie O'Donnell, who's about as edgy as a Koosh ball). And Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy! and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire all have independent game sites. But webRIOT hopes to be the first to succeed with a broadcast in which online fans are integrated into the format...
...have a TV in the same room. But the knock against "interactive TV" has been that it's an oxymoron; no one's agitating for a choose-your-own-adventure version of Martial Law. webRIOT hopes to score with a sort of cheap-'n'-dirty, Scud-missile interactivity. The game (accessible at www.mtv.com requires no special hardware or complicated interface; players simply use the keyboard as a buzzer. And, notes MTV programming head Brian Graden, successful game shows already have an "interactive" element: yelling at the TV. "They create the illusion that you are faster and smarter than the contestants...