In the business world of Hollywood, Xbox Live gamertags are becoming the new business card. In a rather intriguing article on Variety.com, writer Ben Fritz relates the story of how young Hollywood executives are using Xbox Live for networking.

We biz gamers are playing for fun, but valuable relationships sometimes result. "I can be at home at 2 in the morning with writers and directors and producers and executives who all vaguely know each other in the business," notes producer-manager Aaron Kaplan. "All of a sudden, I get to know people the way they really are."

One of the results of this new brand of networking (not too surprisingly) is the upcoming Gears of war movie. New Line executive Jeff Katz and script writer Stuart Beattie were online Gears buddies before they ever started working on the film project together. Now, most of their conversations about the film adaptation are done over Xbox Live.

Obviously, one of the advantages of this method is that these Hollywood folks will finally get a true sense of what some of these games are really like rather than going by hearsay. One can only hope that this will go a long way towards some decent game to film adaptations being made so we no longer have to rely on the Uwe Bolls of the world to serve us up their steaming piles of celluloid crap. Flynn De Marco

Young execs network via vidgames [Variety.com]

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