BusinessWeek's BW Arcade page showcases a collection of acclaimed indie games, like One Ton Ghost's Iron Dukes, Joakim Sandberg's Noitu Love and Petri Purho's recent IGF winner Crayon Physics, to name a few.
The news magazine never expected to be the subject of one of these games, however. Dazzling tale of Web 2.0 subversion and revenge follows the jump:
As it turns out, one designer, Mark "Messhof" Essen, didn't take too kindly to having his game, You Found The Grappling Hook, "freeloaded" without a link back to his site. So in a clever act of subversion, Messhof went ahead and swapped the game BusinessWeek was linking with a brand-new one, You Found The Grappling Hook (Pro).
As it turns out, the "Pro" version of the game is a thorough send-up of BusinessWeek itself, featuring the magazine's writers and stories; BusinessWeek's Helen Walters called it "intricate and frankly hilarious."
By the way, in an ironic twist, the BusinessWeek editors learned of their come-uppance from a Digg link to a Facebook page.
So, no hard feelings, but Walters said she's learned a little something from the experience:
Then there's the other classic Web 2.0/social networking lesson: fixing your mistakes. The name of the Facebook group says that we "freeloaded" the designer's work. Hand on heart, that wasn't our intention, but it does make me realize that we didn't include specific links to the sites of the designers we featured. And we should have done, so we're going to go back and add them.
We launched this Arcade to celebrate indie creativity, and one of those we set out to celebrate has lightly bitten us on the hand. Sir, despite our bleeding fingers, we salute you.
Subversion alert: BW Arcade in a state of (r)evolution [BusinessWeek]