I've had a pet project I've been working on for years, three of them if my memory is right. It started as a simple idea: You can judge a lot from a person's desk. I bet you could judge just as much from their home entertainment system. So I decided it would be fun to try and track down some pictures from the work desks and home gaming set-ups of the people who work in and cover the video game industry. Simple right? Not so much.

Turns out that many of the people are either too busy or too private to want to participate in such a project. To make matters worse, there's always fear that something sitting on someone's desk, that ends up in a photo, could actually be news worthy. Like a secret project or the next big thing. But I didn't give up and about once a year I'd harass a bunch of game developers for photos. Finally, this year, the harassment paid off.

What started as a trickle of photos turned quickly into the collection of galleries you'll find on the jump: More than 40 different photo galleries from 17 studios, seven publications, two industry movers and shakers and a couple of fun surprises.

You'll get to see the desk of such greats as Sid Meier, Peter Molyneux and Tetsuya Mizuguchi along with plenty of others. Remember you can comment both on the next page and on each individual photo if you click on them.

If I find there is interest, I will try to periodically update this gallery of galleries with more developers, journalists and industry movers and shakers. Have fun.

DEVELOPERS
2K Games

ASTRO Gaming

Buzz Monkey Software

Capcom

Eat, Sleep, Play

Electronic Arts

Firaxis Games

Flying Lab Software

Gearbox Software

Harmonix Music

Incognito Entertainment

Insomniac Games

Kojima Productions

Lionhead Studios

NanaOn-Sha

Naughty Dog

NCSoft

NetDevil

Neversoft Entertainment

Ninja Theory

Pandemic Studios

Petroglyph Games

THQ

Q Entertainment

JOURNALISTS

Blue's News

BoingBoing

EGM

The Escapist

GameLife

Joystiq

Kotaku

MTV

Slashdot Games

VE3D

VH1

INDUSTRY FOLK

MISCELLANIES
I AM 8-BIT

Penny Arcade

Whorecraft

Video Games Live

Which writer’s father bought a Playstation 3 specifically to play Grand Theft Auto 4?

1. Birth in an article
While some buzzwords grow in the wild, and some are introduced in books, most start in an ephemeral text medium like a magazine or blog: two media with a big news hole to fill and a tendency to fill it with bullshit. Among other gimmicks like numbered lists and quizzes, blogs and magazines attract readers with pop theories. The pop theory needs a buzzword.
Upon publication, the theory is actually being debated and honed. After writing up his "long tail" theory in Wired, magazine editor Chris Anderson hashed it out with bloggers in preparation for the next stage.

2. Book deal
A pop theory may be solid enough for an article, but once it's stretched to book length, the author is forced to invent supporting terms so the theory can "change the way you think about the world." In The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell names "Salesmen," "mavens," and "connectors;" in The Long Tail Chris Anderson discusses "The New Producers," "New Markets," and "New Tastemakers." The theory takes on a pseudoscientific structure; Anderson invents "the three forces of the Long Tail" and prematurely declares death to "the hit." This is because people who read pop-theory books are even more gullible than people who read magazines.

The book's cover is white, with the title in big letters and one simple, metaphorical image.

3. Co-optetition
By this point every other magazine has published a me-too theory, and Amazon has three other books to recommend along with the one the gullible reader purchases. If you think the world is flat, you may also want to "think without thinking" and tap into "freakonomics."

4. Widespread misuse
The buzzword has reached the gullible, those who need to impress the gullible, and people who read BusinessWeek. It now loses all real meaning. I recently heard a Facebook app maker say, "Monetizing our apps is all about the long tail — transitioning from viewers to users." He may as well have stuttered about "South Korea and the Iraq," because the "long tail" has nothing to do with turning viewers into users. I like to call this "alchemical thinking."

5. Backlash
This phase actually began shortly after stage 1, with a new wave of backlash for every stage after. Now the backlash has finally saturated among everyone who ever heard the buzzword. Blogs have satirized it, Fake Steve Jobs has ironically name-dropped it, and it's a category on Valleywag. The opposite of the buzzword has earned its own buzz, meaning that even a "short head" business can co-opt the buzz of the "long tail."

6. Hallmark of cluelessness
The real use of the buzzword has long since fallen out of use as people rediscovered the other, older words that meant the same thing: "tipping point" has become "breakout moment" and "black swan" has become "surprise." Anyone who still uses the buzzword is clearly an ass.

Nick Douglas writes at Valleywag and Too Much Nick. In two years he'll have a book called "Alchemical Thinking." Dude, it'll change your life.