Google really wants you to play ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’

Looking for an entertaining way to feature the Google Knowledge Graph, the search company added support for the popular Kevin Bacon game.

First noticed by The Next Web earlier today, Google has added a new, custom search element for people addicted to playing ’Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’. For anyone unfamiliar with the game, the player is given the name of an actor or actress and they attempt to link said actor or actress to Kevin Bacon within six steps. The player is allowed to link to other actors from television shows and feature length movies. For instance, Jimmy Stewart appeared in Airport ’77 with Kathleen Quinlan and Kathleen Quinlan appeared in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon. In addition, other players can attempt to link the actor or actress to Bacon in a fewer number of steps in order to win the round. 

In order to see this on Google, simply type “bacon number Jimmy Stewart” into the search field. The results will appear at the top of the search engine results page, likely in the shortest number of steps. While someone could simply cheat at the game by conducting secret Google searches on a smartphone, the tool will be handy for movie and television buffs that want to verify their choice for the shortest path to finding a Kevin Bacon connection. 

Pointed out by New York Magazine, the Google results are light on including politicians in the game beyond a handful of U.S. presidents. When asked about the absence of politicians included within the results, Google senior communications associate Roya Soleimani claimed that the Bacon number is based on Google’s Knowledge Graph rather than results from popular movie site IMDB. 

Soleimani stated “Google’s Knowledge Graph is our ‘map’ of real-world people, entities, and the connections between them. For most celebrities and some public figures, the feature will return their Bacon Number based on the connections in the Knowledge Graph. Our team is constantly working to make search smarter, and features like the Bacon Number equip our users with ways to explore and discover more.”

The concept for ’Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’ was created approximately eighteen years ago by three students attending Albright College. The trio first came up with the game after watching a couple movies during a snowstorm that starred Kevin Bacon and the game developed into a fun party trick.

As the game become more popular, the trio had an appearance on Jon Stewart’s short-lived MTV show and they eventually landed a book deal. While Kevin Bacon originally disliked the concept of the game, he eventually warmed up to it and ended up writing a forward within the book for the three authors. Bacon also appeared in a Visa commercial poking fun of the concept in an attempt to prove his identity. 

Bacon has capitalized further on the popularity of the game by founding SixDegrees.org, a charitable organization that partners with Network for Good. Through SixDegrees.org, people can purchase gift cards that can be redeemed by charities or use the platform to create a fundraiser for a good cause. Since the inception of the organization, Bacon has helped raise nearly four million dollars in donations for charities and other worthy causes.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Watch Kevin Tancharoen’s rejected Hunger Games pitch reel

Though he never landed a directing gig on The Hunger Games, we're big fans of what Kevin Tancharoen had in mind for the project.

There you are, sitting on your couch or in your office, and you read the above headline. “A pitch reel? Seriously? Why would I want to watch an alternate take on a film I enjoyed from a director whose ideas were rejected by the film’s producers?,” you wonder, hoping that we might somehow offer a convincing reason to hit “play” on that clip embedded below. Fortunately for you, we have many reasons why you should watch director Kevin Tancharoen’s pitch reel for The Hunger Games.

Tancharoen, though far from a household name, is one of the most interesting up-and-coming directors in Hollywood. Remember that awesome live-action Mortal Kombat vignette starring our beloved Michael Jai White as Jax? That was Tancharoen’s work. Warner Bros. even tapped the man to film a 9-part live-action Mortal Kombat series around the same time that its video game division was releasing the various iterations of the most recent Mortal Kombat game. In short, the guy has proven directorial chops.

Secondly, we caught The Hunger Games in theaters and while it was a perfectly acceptable blend of romantic notions aimed directly at impressionable teenage girls (and the surprisingly impressionable adult women they inevitably grow into), the world created by director Gary Ross was a bit too clean for our tastes. Here’s a dystopia where newly-pubescent youths are forced to fight to the death, and yet the film’s aesthetic tone was as bright and relatively chipper as any of the Twilight movies (which, in fairness, makes a canny sort of fiscal sense). Tancharoen’s vision of The Hunger Games however, skews more towards a sort of dark, depressing urban sprawl that more accurately mirrors the macabre fate awaiting the movie’s attractive, MTV-ready cast. That’s not to say there isn’t spectacular beauty however. Tancharoen’s vision works specifically because he contrasts the wealthy with the poor, and by rapidly showing us the physical edifices that each group have constructed to live and work in, Tancharoen demonstrates that he has a keen understanding of the kind of societal dysfunction that might spawn an entertainment medium built on the literal blood and sweat of high-school-aged children — or, at least, that he has a pretty solid idea of what it might look like.

We also like the fact that Tancharoen’s pitch reel is seemingly designed to work with or without the presence of major movie stars. We’re well aware of all the myriad reasons why Hollywood relies so heavily on recognizable faces for its big tent pole productions, but by removing that element of “hey, I know that guy from …” viewers are more inclined to identify with emotions and concepts, rather than individuals. The version of The Hunger Games that was released to theaters was acceptable, but it seemed that director Gary Ross wanted to create a “bubblegum action movie,” that would be both appealing to the key demographic of the original Hunger Games novel, and as easy to digest as any Schwarzenegger flick from the late ’80s. It’s an entertaining spectacle to be sure, but we can’t help but feel that Tancharoen’s version might have a bit more nuance, or at least inspire people to discuss the worrying prescience of the story’s vaguely allegorical ideas of where our modern, reality-TV-soaked culture might lead.

The last reason why we want you to watch this thing is simple: How often do you get a chance to watch a pitch reel for a major Hollywood film? Unless you’re Harvey Weinstein or Brian Grazer a chance like this probably doesn’t come around that often, so you may as well take advantage and see what you think. If nothing else, it should be entertaining to see how many of the pitch’s scenes you recognize as belonging to another film. Apparently that’s how they do these sorts of things. See, you learn something new every day.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com