Reader question:

What is “game changer” as in: Whether it is a game-changer or not, it is causing content producers and advertisers to re-think their business strategies (Forbes, April 21, 2010).

My comments:

It refers to iPad, Apple’s latest revolutionary, world-beating gadget. By calling it a game changer, the author thinks it’s something that’ll greatly CHANGE the GAME of multimedia communication (online news and advertising).

As name suggests, a game changer changes the whole complexion of the game, the game being how an existing game is played with its fixed rules and regulations.

Oxford defines “game changer” as “a person, an idea or an event that completely changes the way a situation develops”.

Michael Jordan, for example, is, or was, a game changer to the game of NBA pro basketball. Before Air Jordan came to the fore in the late 1980s and 1990s, the game of basketball was centered around, well, the center, the tallest guy on the team. The center, so-called because he’s always asked to position himself in the middle of the offense, under and around the basket, used to the focal point of attack, dominating the ball in team offense. Thanks (or no thanks if you are Yao Ming, a center) to His Airness, who is a guard, pro basketball in America now revolves around guards and other smaller but agile players who operate outside, round the perimeter rather than the clogged lane (a painted area under the basket in which an offensive player is not allowed to, say, linger more than 3 seconds at a time).

The idea and subsequent introduction since the 1979-80 season of the 3-pointer, which credits a player with three points instead of the traditional two if he makes the shot behind the three-point line, was also a game changer. This allows teams to stretch the defense away from the packed middle, giving smaller guys an additional advantage.

Rule changes in general were, in ever sense of the word, game changers. For example, the hand-checking rule, which prohibits a defender from stopping an offensive player from moving past by hand, further created room for smaller players to dribble, drive and generally thrive on the hardwood.

Anyways, returning to iPad, you can view some of the more popular Apple products, including the iPod and iPhone, as game changers because they dramatically alter their existing markets. Significant inventions in general are game changing. Personal computers, say, enable everyone to write – and have consequently, I’m sorry to point out, put many traditional career typists, among others, out of work.

That shows how powerful a game changer is, for better or worse.

Now, let’s move on to media examples:

1. After eking out a living for decades with a beef cattle operation on the rugged border of Pennsylvania and New York state, Fran Westcott has hit the jackpot.

In the oil industry equivalent to a claims rush, energy companies have been flooding into this long-depressed patch of rural Appalachia to tie up land in the gas-rich Marcellus shale. Last year, Mrs. Westcott signed a lease with Calgary-based Talisman Energy Inc. that will allow the company to drill for gas on the 210-hectare parcel in northern Pennsylvania where she grew up and her daughter now raises horses.

She reaped a $489,000 (U.S.) initial payment, plus the promise of future royalties.

But the 65-year-old farmer has yet to cash in on her 371-hectare property in neighboring New York state, where she has lived for the past 12 years with her husband. Regulations in that state prevent energy companies from employing the technology they need to unlock the natural gas trapped in the shale rock thousands of metres below the surface.

Companies rely upon a drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing that shoots chemical-laced water deep underground to crack open the shale rock so the gas can escape. They must then dispose of waste water that flows back up the wells.

Echoing concerns from residents across the region, Ms. Westcott fears that hydraulic fracturing will taint the aquifers that feed local water wells. “I am really concerned about the water – I think it’s got to have an effect on the water when you start drilling like they’re doing in Pennsylvania,” she said. “I don’t know how something is not going to happen because they have to go down through the aquifer.”

The recent shale gas boom has been called a “game changer” in the North American energy picture. It promises to deliver abundant, cheap natural gas for decades to come. Utility companies are counting on it to generate electricity with half the greenhouse emissions of coal, while gas producers are touting it as the truck fuel of the future.

- Shale: The next energy game changer, TheGlobeAndMail.com, May 17, 2010.

2. Rupert Murdoch has lavished praise on Apple’s iPad, describing the device as a “game changer” for news media and predicting that “hundreds and hundreds of millions” of similar tablet computers will eventually be sold around the world.

Speaking as a global advertising surge and box office takings from the movie Avatar helped his News Corporation empire deliver a $2.5bn full-year profit, Murdoch predicted the iPad’s convenient style could reinvigorate journalism: “We’ll have young people reading newspapers.”

The Australian-born billionaire, whose businesses range from the Times, the Sun and the Wall Street Journal to Fox television and the Hollywood studio 20th Century Fox, believes the iPad is the ideal device to encourage consumers to pay for digital journalism.

“I think we’re going to see, around the world, hundreds and hundreds of millions of these devices,” said Murdoch on a conference call with Wall Street analysts. “There will be all sorts of things we can do with them. As they develop technologically, we’ve got to develop our methods of presentation of news.”

- Rupert Murdoch says Apple’s iPad is a ‘game-changer’ for news media, The Guardian, August 5, 2010.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

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