A Huge Week to Week Decline in the GGP!

I'm no financial expert, but I suspect that this week so one of the largest week to week declines in GGP in a long time.

What's GGP? You ask.

Gross Geek Product.

It's a measure of the total economic and bloggeriffic output by our nation's more geekish citizenry.

Two things hit this week that would have brought this number way down.

First is Spore being released on Sunday. Spore is Will Wright's new "Sim-Evolution" game. It's a big time sink, mostly fun, and the more detail oriented a person you are, the bigger time sink it turns out to be. Given that every stage of the game is customizable to an astonishing degree, ignoring just actually playing the game, if one were so inclined, one could spend hours just trying out different paint jobs on their creatures, or different roofs on their houses in the civ stage, or even different tonal moods for their world's national anthem in the space stage.

This game is huge, and huge in the geek community, so if you run a business and all of the sudden half your IT department missed a day or two, it's not an illness striking your business, it's this damn game.

As if that weren't enough to screw up the GGP, add to that the Tuesday release of Neal Stephenson's Anathem. Think of it as 935 hardbound, relatively small typed pages of pure, uncut, heroin (I'm including the 'calca', since true geeks don't mind 'doing the math'). SO, for the few non-god-game playing geeks out there who weren't struck unproductive by Spore, are more than likely Neal Stephenson-reading geeks who are in the midst of reading Stephenson's densely wrought (in a good way) alternate world satire of modern society (that may seem like a strange thing to say about a novel that focuses on tech avoiding math obsessed monks, but the kernel buried in this book is based on a 'what-if' extrapolated from our world grafted onto a not so alien culture).

My personal GGP has been hit pretty hard, as I've been afflicted by both Spore-playing and Anathem-reading, so other than the usual NFL related humiliation don't expect much output here for about another week.