As Kotaku says; “raising money the awesome way”.  A great idea which is fun based.  Play for Japan is about gamers and the games industry helping out Japan from it’s latest problems with the earthquake and tsunami.  There’s autographed games, donation updates and more.  Check it out.

or via:

Twitter: @PlayForJPN / #playforjapan

Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/playforjapan

Tumblr: http://playforjapan.tumblr.com

h/t Kotaku

By now everyone knows about the massive 8.9 quake in Japan near Sendai city on the East coast. I could go on about the details of this unhappy event but you can all get it from the news yourself.

Shocking now that we see such things now in real time. When you see the cars driving around and houses swept away like a piles of cards you feel for the risks and hurt on the ground.

Seeing the small fires spring up was also sad. You can see, with all the junk jumbled together and no real capacity to slow it down, that they will spread and add to the damage considerably.

Japan can now take more decisive action to deal with the problem. No doubt there’s much to do especially with trapped people, fires and the coolant situation in the nuclear reactors. This will also have a financial impact which is hard to predict very well.

But it is not all bad news.

I am glad the tsunami’s spread across the Pacific didn’t hit as hard as it might have.

I think it’s important to also praise Japan’s engineering and building codes as well as the adherence to them. While I have no doubt some structures have failed, this is the very biggest quake on record. Without those efforts the damage, death and injury could have been immense.

With some luck the information gained from this earthquake and others, like the one in Christchurch, will help reduce the harm when the next one strikes.

Kotaku has an interesting view on how Japan’s gaming industry has reacted. CyberConnect’s Hiroshi Matsuyama has opened his studio which has room for about 30 Japanese. It is good to note that the Japanese are working together on this problem.