games at large

gaming is coming home

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 15:48:00 +0000

aka 'We Have a Winner'

Sony's presentation at GDC last week has changed the way people think about the PS3 - a not-inconsiderable achievement given the general consensus in the gaming press that the PS3 would be the big loser in the current console generation. The demonstration shown at GDC is here:

The Sony presentation had two compelling elements: the demonstration of a new, fully customisable 3D platform game called LittleBigPlanet; and, of more interest to this blog, the announcement of Home. Home is a free, 3D virtual world, downloadable through the Playstation Online store and useable through the PS3 (but with the intention that it's functionality be offered through mobile phones and the PSP at a later date).

It really does look like the killer application for the PS3 - it certainly looks like a Second Life killer: a 3D world with high quality graphics, low latency and easy to use interface (three features that SL is notorious for not providing), with the added benefit that, as a space mediated by a giant media conglomerate, you won't need to worry about logging on and finding people exploring their polymorphous sexualities in your virtual living room. Of course, to a certain community of users, this is an in-built limitation of Home; for the vast majority of users and potential users, this is a feature. Home is also promising a fairly sophisticated level of customisation for avatars: again, not as free as SL's avatar customisation, but vastly more user friendly; and all rendered into smooth 3D by the PS3's multiple processors.

Avatar interaction is facilitated by a range of pre-scripted responses and actions - again, not nearly as flexible as a PC-based virtual world (and not likely to be ameliorated significantly by the virtual keyboard): the demo version shows a wide range of generic responses; whether they will be sufficient to build meaningful discourse, whether the virtual keyboard will suffice, or indeed whether this is the end of text-based communities and the start of persistent, voice-chat based communities, is yet to be determined.

Finally, the other major limitation of virtual worlds - the 'what do i do now?' problem - is solved: Home users can form pick up groups and go from the virtual world straight into PS3 games. Sony have outlined a free (sell any Linden Labs stock asap) 3D virtual world with a pre-defined, persistent community, high quality graphics and approachable interface.

There is always the possibility that Home will not do in practice what it is promising in beta, and that Sony will manage to make as big a mess of this as they (are commonly understood to) have done with the PS3 launch - but it's hard to see. Home is promising all the benefits of virtual worlds without the seediness; all the customisation and individualisation of the Mii, and all the persistence across games of Xbox Live. The current generation of consoles appears to have found it's killer app - and it's only available on the PS3.

more links, from Kotaku:
More Details on the Playstation Home
PS Home Information Overload

the ontology of gamers

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 15:54:00 +0000

last week was the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, which generated vast amounts of blog-worthy news. i'll get to the backlog over the coming week, starting with some interesting insights from Miyamoto Shigeru - creator of Mario, Donkey Kong, The Legend of Zelda, and head of game design at Nintendo.

Miyamoto-san gave one of the keynote presentations at GDC, and although he didn't introduce any new games or product, he nevertheless stole the show. Most notably, from the perspective of this blog, were his comments on his measure of the likely success for a game, which he referred to as the wifeometer - a measure of the likely interest of his wife in any game he creates. He described her as having no interest in Mario or Pacman or Tetris, and only grudging interest in Zelda - and only then because her daughter was playing it. However, the breakthrough came with Nintendogs, Nintendo's dog training simulation game, and Brain Age, their 'brain training' game:

I was watching our dog friends and my wife, I thought maybe if we could get these people and turn them into game players, if we could interest them, we could expand the user base, there were elements too of dog training that I thought I could turn into a videogame. So when I showed her Nintendogs, she finally saw a different perspective.

Then game Brain Age. This has turned her into a true gamer. She has accepted games as part of her daily life. She understands the unique interactive entertainment found in games. And today we have a Wii in our house.
...
This is the second version of Brain Age. It has a mini Mario game in it. Now my wife comes to me and says, I can beat you at this game, anytime. She’s bragging! To me! Looking at her scores, she’s right. She turned into a hardcore gamer much faster than I expected. Wifeometer has shot up dramatically. So there it is. Now she’s playing Wii sports. Not only that, she invites our friends over to play Wii sports.

source

Far be for me to think that adding my own opinion to Myamoto-sans's in any way increases his credibility, but he is entirely correct: the compelling feature that sells more games is not 'bringing gaming to users in different ways'; it is 'converting non-gamers into gamers'. and non-gamers are not non-gamers simply because they can't get access to games in the form or delivery system they wish - they're non-gamers because games don't speak to their lives.

Making it possible for them to receive games in different manners, or binding the game delivery system to a home entertainment system, or delivering games in ever higher definition, in and of themselves are of no consequence - it is the gameplay, and the game itself that needs to change in order to transform non-gamers into gamers such that, like Miyamoto-san's oba-san, they become gamers.

more console jockeying

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 16:17:00 +0000

There has been a fresh wave of news articles out relating to current console sales, and projected console sales futures in the last week or so, and they throw up some interesting insights. Now, it has to be said that i'm not overly interested in which console wins this generation of sales - although i might offer the opinion that most of the previous console generations have had a successful duopoly, rather than a single winner (ps2/xbox; ps1, n64; sega/snes; etc), and so we should be punting for the likely loser, rather than the likely winner.*

That said, what i find interesting about the current console war is not the likely result, but the process of getting there: the presumption, 18 months ago, was that the likely result of the next generation would go the same as the previous generation (this is hardly surprising: i can vividly recall this issue of WIRED magazine, from 1993: cover story 'Sega's Plan for World Domination') - and thus that Sony and Microsoft would be duelling it out for supremacy, with Nintendo nowhere.

This presumption was reinforced by the technical specifications of the Wii - it's a GameCube rebadged, essentially, and the GameCube was the big loser of the previous game generation - and by the naming debacle (for some years, the new Nintendo console was going to be named the Revolution; only to be renamed the Wii quite late in the production process). Game journalists and market analysts overlooked the innovative controller - again, with some good reason, as Nintendo had past form in not supporting good hardware with good games (the Gamecube, again) - and the new forms of gameplay that this could provide, and just compared relative console power.

What is interesting about the current console war is the extent to which the new console generation is introducing turbulence into the existing market segmentation (i'm mixing my metaphors: i should really be referring to the turbulence being introduced into market flow). The appearance (and rapid success) of the Wii has thrown into doubt existing presumptions about the gaming market (ie, that it's dominated by technological fetishists and power-queens) and with them, the accepted consensus about the constitution and future of the gaming industry. As a result, we're seeing much chatter as observers try and guess which stable state the system will come to revolve around.

Have MS and Sony taken a dead-end in console design? Is the Wii a flash in the pan? Are gamers qualitatively different from non-gamers, or is a non-gamer simply a gamer who hasn't found a game they're interpellated by yet? the questions that the current console generation is throwing up are, to me at least, quite facinating.

UK Retailers Reporting Massive Demand for the PS3 - gamesinustry.biz
Analysts Downgrade Games Publisher Share Outlook - gamasutra.com
Is the Wii Novelty Wearing Off? - computerandvideogames.com
EA Playing Catch-up on Wii, Waking up to PS3 Failure - Information Arbitrage
Japanese Perspective on Console war in US - Kotaku

* and yes, even talking about console sales in terms of winners and losers is mendacious: although the GameCube might well have been a distant third in global sales in the last console generation, no-one could ever claim that Nintendo weren't extremely profitable over that period. the close correlation between market analysts and football commentators has been remarked upon by many people.

games are good for you

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:58:00 +0000

no, really.

the latest piece of evidence comes the Department of Psychology at the University of Rochester in the US, and concerns eyesight, specifically visual acuity and first-person shooters. Two researchers examined a group of non-gamers; gave half of the group Tetris, and the other half Unreal Tournament, and thested their visual acuity at the beginning and end of the project.

The study found that those playing Unreal Tournament had a 20% improvement in their visual acuity scores at the end of the one month study; the Tetris players had no significant increase.

So in fact, the title of this post is misleading: not all games are good for you; it's violent video games that are good for you. How about them apples?

Use Case VII

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 15:35:00 +0000

gaming, or metagaming, via mobile

A mobile/ VoIP software provider company by the name of Comverse has demonstrated a software application that allows users to run Second Life on their mobile phones.

Well, it enables interaction between a remote PC running the software client and the mobile phone, sending snapshots to the handset, and managing avatar interaction via IM and SMS. According to a Reuters report, it is not quite the same as usual SL interaction: they quote a Comverse representative as saying

“[Second Life] 0n the handset [is] a little more limited — it’s hard writing long sentences. It’s more just popping in, seeing who’s visiting your area.”

Nevertheless, the gaming case here is pretty strong - and closely linked to the earlier post about the possible uses of the Zune: gaming or at least metagaming (ie, checking on who is in yuor area, conducting trades, updating inventories, etc), streamed to mobile devices, is a whole new potential revenue stream for mobile operators, telcos, and game/ virtual world publishers.

Virtual Property and Real Money Trading

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 15:14:00 +0000

one of the features that MMO environments/games lay claim to is the ability to make (real) money of in-game activity: Ultima Online has its gold farmers; Second Life has its virtual millionaires.

However, this real world financial benefit from virtual activity has some inherent problems - notwithstanding taxation issues, which many taxation authorities are starting to take interest in, and whether this benefit is being obtained through the operation of a pyramid scheme. Most notably, real world financial benefit - Real Money Trading, or RMT, as it's known - has a hazy relationship to property ownership: ie, if I 'own' a magic sword in an online world, does that sword belong to me, or to the company hosting the online world, to the holder of the world's IP, or to someone else?

In this light, it is worth noting that eBay has recently announced that it will suspend and remove all auction listings for all virtual artifacts; says the report on Slashdot:

[t]his includes currency, items, and accounts/characters; not even the 'neopoints' used in the popular Neopets service is exempt from this decision

According to Slashdot, who are carrying a comment from an eBay spokesperson, the reason for this decision is that virtual artifacts/ in-game property breaks eBay's digitally delivered property policy:

The seller must be the owner of the underlying intellectual property, or authorized to distribute it by the intellectual property owner

In many ways, this announcement from eBay - being reported around the interweb - is completely obvious: in what sense can i own my magic sword, really? However, this is also a serious threat to persistent game communities, whether they be MMO games or closed gardens like Xbox Live. If I can channel Fernand Braudel for a moment, whenever you get more than one person assembled in one place, you have a market (but note: not a capitalist market) - eBay clearly recognises and trades on this phenomenon, offering as it does a marketplace for pretty much any old shite you can imagine - and this market activity is one of the key functions in the development of community and reciprocal obligations.

There are obviously Intellectual Property issues that need to be resolved here in order that the IP holders make the monster profits they're envisaging. However, if it's true that Web2.0 = community = gaming, as we're being led (correctly, in my opinion) to believe , then attempting to so resolve these IP questions by removing the market-making ability of the participant communities would seem to me to be foreclosing the very monetisation routes the IP holders are dreaming of developing.

Not everyone loves the muscle-bound hunk

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 11:54:00 +0000

Who loves the Xbox360? A possibly daft question, I know, given the sales and success of Gears of War, and the anticipation for Halo 3. Nevertheless, I noticed a report on GamesIndustry.biz that Microsoft had cut their forecast for Xbox360 console sales for fiscal year 2007 from 13-15 million to 12 million.

Maybe it's because this is Friday, or because this is of no consequence (or maybe, just maybe, because most technology news sites are US-based, and so see the whole world through the distorting lens of the US market: viz the coverage of Apple's market-following, overpriced and underwhelming iPhone), but this announcement has generated very little coverage (caveat: at the time of this post) within the technology and gaming news sites.

However, I was immediately reminded of this aticle from Gamasutra last November, citing financial analysts worried about the high attach rate for the Xbox360. Now, normally a high attach rate is considered A Good Thing, but as the analysts cited in the article say,

We believe the unusually high attach rate on the 360 is a sign of an increasingly unhealthy console growth rate, and should be worrisome to publishers and investors.

They argue that the high attach rate at this stage in the console's lifespan is "a damning commentary on the limited hardware installed base, most of whom are hard-core gamers", and that without a big increase in the number of consoles sold, the Xbox360 would become a niche market device - popular with hardcore gamers, but with a very small footprint otherwise.

I've already posted that Sony and MS are overspecifying their consoles in order to position themselves for ownership of the living room; the clear implication appears to be that in so doing, they risk alienating the very no-gamer crowds they're appealing to - whilst meanwhile the little underpowered, Linux-based, open access Wii console is selling by the metric tonne. I can't even begin to unpack all the factors at work here - any list would have to include form factors, aesthetics, branding, price points, and market positioning before we even begin to address the Wii controller or the games selections - but I do think it's a trend that should not be overlooked.

everyone loves the wii

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 11:13:00 +0000

Even adorable little kittens with funny shaped ears. It's from a Japanese Wii-fansite, unsurprisingly.

(I've been sitting on this pic for the last three days waiting for Friday to arrive)

ubicomp

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 10:37:00 +0000

an interesting list, which i might let speak for itself:

pda, ipods shipped: approx 85 milion each
game console ownership: 200 million
pc usage: 850 million
internet usage: 1.1 billion
landlines in use: 1.3 billion
tv ownership: 1.5 billion
mobile phones usage: 2.7 billion

source

these numbers are all approximations, obviously, and not all directly comparable (shipped pda's can't really be compared to mobiles in use), but for comparison purposes, it serves a useful function. the direction of ubiquitous computing research would appear obvious to me...

'platform over distribution'

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 22 Jan 2007 14:00:00 +0000

Richard forwarded on to me this link:

http://www.orb.com/

tag line:

Download Orb and start MyCasting all your media to any Internet-connected mobile phone, PDA or laptop. That's media freedom. Unlock your media - music, photos, videos and TV anyplace, anytime, with anyone

which reminded me of Slingbox, and their new product SlingMobile:

SlingPlayer™ Mobile turns your compatible mobile phone into your personal television, letting you watch and control your own TV from anywhere—at airports, shopping centres, at the park, or simply anywhere you go.

which in turn gets me to John Battelle's musings on the differences between old-school broadcast and narrowcast media and the nascent world of User-Generated Content:

The point is that people find the process of engaging in [User-Generated Content] fulfilling in its own right. Tens of millions of us love following the conversations on our favorite blogs, reading and participating in community-driven sites or social networking services. And where tens of millions of people go, profitable business models follow.

I would have thought the implication was obvious, so i'll finish Sphinx-like: what if you build it and they don't come?

Use Case VI

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 13:01:00 +0000

gaming as a creative process

Areae - MMORG meets Web 2.0 - for The Guardian's gamesblog:

[g]ames have a lot to learn from the way the Web works today, from almost every angle. Some of those lessons are the same ones that other content industries are learning rather painfully: about new distribution models, digital delivery, the value of free content, DRM, and so on... and others are about things like different development practices, "launch early, launch often," rapid feedback cycles listening to users, that sort of thing

In this post, one of The Guardian's games journalist interviews the renowned games designer Raph Coster, about his recently announced MMORG-meets Web2.0 game Areae. Coster points out that game design has not advanced much in the last decade, in terms of the interactivity it allows users (the meta-interaction ,that is): games are continually designed as closed gardens: proprietory clients with no interoperability; whereas the whole growth in online activity is premised on the exact opposite - openness, interoperability, client agnosticism. He also notes:

Practically everyone is a gamer -- it's really a question of what games they feel comfortable playing, be it bridge or Battlefield 2142.

secondly, we have:

Engagement Marketing: An Interview - from Henry Jenkins' weblog

Engagement Marketing is premised upon: transparency - interactivity - immediacy - facilitation - engagement - co-creation - collaboration - experience and trust these words define the migration form mass media to social media.
The explosion of: Myspace, YouTube, Second Life and other MMORPG's, Citizen Journalism, Wicki's and Swicki's, TV formats like Pop Idol, or Jamies School Dinners, Blogs, Social search, The Guinness visitor centre in Dublin or the Eden project in Cornwall UK, mobile games like Superstable or Twins, or, new business platforms like Spreadshirt.com all demonstrate a new socio-economic model, where engagement sits at the epicentre.

in this interview, the noted gaming/ cultural theorist Henry Jenkins talks with Alan Moore, a proponent of what Moore calls 'engagement marketing':

Engagement Marketing is built upon the fundamental notion of shared experience, something which 'interruptive' communications cannot do.
Mass media, presumes, only one thing of its audience that they are passive and they will consume as much as marketers can persuade them to.

Mass media is cold media, its push, its myopic, its about as relevant to the 21st Century as First World War military strategy. The age of set piece competition is over.

The overlap between these two articles should be obvious, and is certainly fortunate. I'll add another link, this time to Raph Koster's blog, and a post he made titled User Created Content, where he writes:

The lesson here is that everyone is a creator. The question is “of what.” Everyone has a sphere where they feel comfortable exerting agency — maybe it’s their work, maybe it’s raising their children, maybe it’s collecting stamps. Outside of that sphere, most people are creators only within carefully limited circumstances; most people cannot draw, but anyone can color inside lines, or trace. ... We must not forget that casual users aren’t stupid users, they’re just not adept at, or willing to invest in, that that particular system. They are likely heavily invested in creativity in some other aspect of their lives.

And whilst I'm here (although I feel as though I should save this link for a post all of its own - I may well post about it separately later), a list the business case for user created content, from Xbox Live planner David Edery: User-Generated Content - the List.

The takeaway here, is twofold: firstly, one of the major, if not the prime, use-cases for game design has to be user-created content, or user creativity. The second is that any prospective game platform that doesn't take this as its starting point has already failed, before it was even born.

Use Case V

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 16:34:00 +0000

I feel like I've said this before, but it seems to bear repeating:

Uploading and consuming media content via the game console

Streaming YouTube via Wii - via PlayThrough

SofaTube [is] a new web application allowing Wii surfers the ability to stream YouTube and Revver videos using an interface which has been optimized for widescreen televisions and longer viewing distances. Featuring large, easy to drag and drop elements, SofaTube is PERFECT for those Wii couch surfers looking for an easy way to watch someone setting themselves on fire while replying to Lonelygirl15.

Windows Home Server: User-uploaded content can be streamed to Xbox 360 - via Ars Technica

The idea behind Home Server is to provide a simplified way for home users to store their photos, music, and videos in a centralized place and make it easy to access this data from other computers and devices in the home, as well as a backup solution in case of hard drive failure. The software is based on Windows Server 2003, and users can access their files through a personalized Windows Live account. Data can be streamed to an Xbox 360 or any Windows Media Connect device for viewing on a television.

Honestly, it seems like such an obvious use case for a next generation of game console that it barely needed mentioning, or at most, could be mentioned first and we could move on to more complex use cases. But apparently not...

what do users want...

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 14:41:00 +0000

from their online game and content distribution system? A good question, and one which Microsoft have clearly been pondering as they plan a version of Xbox Live. One way of working out what users want is, well, to ask them: which one of MS's platform strategists has done on his blog; asking readers for their thoughts on future directions of Xbox Live:

Your Thoughts on the Future of Live

A thread worth following, especially in light of Xbox Live's move into Live for Windows, a service which will enable a variety of non-Xbox (but all MS) devices to connect (with reduced functionality) to Xbox Live.

inelasticity

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 16 Jan 2007 14:27:00 +0000

or: when a digitally distributed game platform goes down, do the game users swap to other games? the answer would appear to be no.

via Kotaku and Steam Review, i was pointed to The Day Steam Stopped, a post on the Online Gaming Zeitgeist which tracked what happened to game users when Steam's servers went down following a storm in the Seattle area last December.

Steam is the distribution platform that Valve software use to distribute and to authenticate Half-Life and Half-Life 2, amongst other games: without access to the Steam servers, there is very little the owner of a legitimately purchased copy of HL2 can actually do. They certainly can't play online multiplayer, which is one of the major selling features of the HL franchise.

One of the interesting questions for digital game ditribution systems is the question of demand management - ie, to what extent can game users be treated as commodity purchasers, and have their purchasing efficiently managed? In this respect, the outage of the Steam servers, as a result of massive power failures in the area where the servers are housed, presents us with some useful data about gamer activities, and game use management.

This is a graph of daily usage stats for the most popular first-person shooter (FPS) games on servers tracked by GameSpy's stats tracker, polled on an hourly basis. the tpo two lines are Half-Life (HL1) and Half-Life2 (HL2); these are far and away the most popular online FPS games on the market. the bottom three lines are for Battlefield 2 (BF2), its sequel Battlefield 2142 (BF2142) and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (W:ET). The big dip in the two HL lines corresponds to the Steam server outage - and the conclusion is obvious. I'll quote from Online Gaming Zeitgeist again:

[T]he fact that Steam wasn’t working didn’t immediately reflect on the number of players online on other games. That is, Steam users didn’t switch to another online game - either because they don’t have them installed or didn’t want to - and simply opted to wait for the system to be back.

How elastic is gamer demand? Not very, if this example is a good guide.

site report

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 16:03:00 +0000

So we've been going a little over two weeks now, and the task of populating the site with content continues. I've added tags/ labels to the entries, so the site is now searchable thematically as well as chronologically - clicking on the relevant label will bring up a list of all posts bearing that label.

The links list is still unpopulated, however, so any readers with links they'd like added to the link roll are invited to either drop me an email, or leave the link as a comment.

I've added a button for subscribing to the RSS feed, if you are using a browser (I'm looking at you, IE6) that doesn't natively support live bookmarks/ RSS feeds. Firefox (and Opera) users can just click on the feed icon in the address bar - but they can click the feed button too, if they so choose.

I've also added some counters: the blog is up on sitemeter (link on the right, under the RSS icon), and as of tomorrow, it will also be linked to clustrmaps. To be honest, the second is more for fun than anything else - although the graphical representation of visitors can be useful, I must admit. If you've got any other suggestions for developing this blog, please let me know!

Use Case IV

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 15 Jan 2007 14:46:00 +0000

homebrew: users wanting to modify and customise their consoles

It's Learn to Solder Month - Ars Technica
23C3 2006: Console Hacking conference - Kotaku
How easy is it to hack 3rd gen consoles? - from 23C3
Future Console Hacking events - 23C3 blog

In console land, it's still called hacking; but in the PC game world it's called modding, and is generally accepted (with some notable exceptions) - another future post (i'm building up quite a library of promised posts) will be about the practice and politics of modding, but for now, I'll list it simply as a use case that any game designer is going to have to account for.

The takeaway here would be that if even the Xbox360 can't be locked down, it's probably not sensible for others to try. far more profitable to accommodate this activity within the device specifications.

down with alice!

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 15:02:00 +0000

It's Friday afternoon, and so rather than more use cases and console stories, a wander off the range is in order. Today's wander starts with an article in yesterday's Guardian newspaper, titled Down with Alice.

The article is an extended interview with the auteur responsible for an online multimedia novel-cum-flash game called Inanimate Alice. The game/novel has been well-received critically, picking up awards and nominations at a range of digital and electronic art festivals across Europe, as a look at the site of the company funding the game demonstrates.

I'm sure the game is as good as its reviews and awards indicate - it certainly looks good, even though i haven't actually played it - but the quality or lack of the novel-cum-game isn't the point of this post. Rather, that can be found in the last two paragraphs of the article. Here, The Guardian tells us, the authors,

and other digital fiction pioneers like them, are keeping a close eye on the games industry, however. It has, they believe, a huge potential for storytelling

A potential that isn't currently being taken advantage of within the games industry. The problem being, apparently, that the games industry lacks an indie market:

Unlike Hollywood, however, the games industry lacks a vibrant independent sector, producing the kind of smaller budget, quirky, more challenging products that may not reach the multiplex but find enough of an audience to earn their makers an income from their work.

The article concludes with a quote from the co-author, reflecting upon this deficiency:

Spielberg has said that while video games are getting closer to a storytelling art form, the real indicator will be when somebody confesses they cried at level 17... but it's what, 25 years old?

And yet, there's an entire genre of gaming - the Visual Novel - that does precisely this. And so popular is the genre that there's a huge indie market for these games; there are companies that make money just by creating software to allow independent authors/ game creators create their own visual novels, and many fan creators/ indie authors go on to get their works picked up by large producers.

What's more, the main focus of visual novels is the emotional investment of the player* - anyone who has played Kanon or Kimi go Nozomu Eien and not cried is a dalek, and should not under any circumstances be mistaken as human. Oh, but wait: what was the name of that game? The second one? It wasn't English, was it? Eh? Oh. And there's the rub, and the reason for this post: as the (extremely excellent) Wikipedia entry on visual novels points out:

As of 2007, all major visual novels are produced in Japan.

Sure, there are some differences between Inanimate Alice and, say, Kanon. Alice uses flash to play the game via the web, Kanon is a PC game (ported to consoles) using cell-shaded animation; Alice is available in English, Kanon, like all visual novels, is in Japanese (although fan translations exist for this and many visual novels); Alice appears to be aimed at all ages; Kanon, like many visual novels, contains some adult content (although there are all ages variants as well).

Other than that, the main difference is time: Kanon was released 8 years ago, and looks like an eight year old game; Alice is currently in production. So in fact this story (the story of the visual novel) is not new. Interesting, sure, but not remotely new. So who do I blame for this? I could blame The Guardian: this was published in their books section, not their games or technology section, so of course they can be expected to lack game literacy. I could blame the company funding Alice: they're clearly looking for some press coverage, and there's not been a PR person created who lets the truth values of their output get in the way of getting good coverage.

But actually (and to bring this post back to some relevance to its readership), I would blame the woeful excuse that is games research here in the West. Sure, the Xbox (like the iPhone) is pitched at the North American market, and so they focus on the specificities of this market; other consoles might be focussed on other markets, so might be more interested in them. But generally, in terms of game design, development and use, the cutting edge is in Japan. All the innovative developments in this field - whether it's Kanon, or Katamari Damacy, or Lost Planet, or, yes, the Nintendo Wii, come out of Japan. Of the top 10 selling game franchises across the world, 7 are Japanese (including the top 3) (2 others are US-originated, the last is UK-based).

Game researchers neglect the Japanese game industry at their peril.

* i'm going to call them games and players from here on in this post, rather than game/novels; readers, player/readers or whatever. just because i re-invent the wheel and call it the Whagiggelator, doesn't mean anyone will give me a patent on it, y'know?

out of the console, into the living room II

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 12:15:00 +0000

i posted on monday that the big pitch at CES this year was the smarthome and the home server, with a quote from Bill Gates indicating his intention to leverage the xbox to 'get access to the living room'.

it's not just large corporations pursuing this goal: individual users (aka console hackers) are doing the same thing. my colleague at i2, Richard Carmicheal, pointed me to the Wii controlled smarthome:

Using the Wii-Mote and my Nintendo Wii, I have an onscreen Flash User Interface that lets me control the following aspects of my home: Lights, Thermostat, Security Camera, Music Playback, Cable DVR, and more.

full details are here, and this, and more Wii-hacks than you can poke a stick at, can be found at Liquid Ice's Wii Hacks site. There's a point to be made here about console hacking and user-created content, and another point to be made about console and walled gardens, but they deserve their own posts at another date.

Use Case III

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 10:51:00 +0000

enabling offline structures of sociality

Think video games are a time-suck for teenage boys? In fact, 30 percent of all gamers are women. Why? Because gaming's fun — especially when your guy is manning the other controller. "Playing video games allows you to bond and learn how to problem-solve as a team," says Susan K. Perry, Ph.D., a Los Angeles-based social psychologist. (Women's Health, Jan/Feb 2007 issue)

* On Being Virtual, from Danah Boyd's social media blog apophenia.

Content is King

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 15:10:00 +0000

a truism, and not just in the world of broadcast television.

on the question of why the Nintendo DS had outsold the technologically much more sophisticated PSP by an order of magnitude, the President of Sony Worldwide Studios, Phil Harrison, recently admitted in an interview with mtv.com:

Our achievement has been to deliver console-quality gaming in the palm of your hand. But that could also be considered a missed opportunity — that we have yet to really deliver PSP games that speak with their own voice and stand for what the machine can do on its own.

I could rant here about technological fetishism, but instead i'll just point out the obvious: what matters is what the device enables, not what it does. Good gameplay beats good frame rates, every time.

Use Case II

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 14:49:00 +0000

User wants interconnection between disparate devices, to share content

But I know that deep down that the real reason I picked the Zune ... is because I hold out hopes that one day Microsoft is going to announce some crazy, amazing connectivity between it and the Xbox 360. Like maybe it will let me use Live Anywhere and I can use it to track my Rainbow Six Vegas stats or stream video from the Live Store. (from Kotaku)

* Kotaku: Zune in "Might Play Glames" Shock
* Ars technica: Zune Games Coming Soon
* Penny Arcade: Your Heart is My Sky (and supporting webcomic)

Actually, i think there are at least four different Use Cases in here: 1, where the user wishes to get content via one device and use it on another; 2, user wishes to share content via multiple devices (as in the webcomic example); 3, where a user wishes to play a game on multiple devices; 4, where a user wishes game on one device but meta-game on the other ("I can use it to track my Rainbow Six Vegas stats") - but i'll list them all here for now as one Use Case.

Use Cases

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 10:22:00 +0000

i'm going to post a series of gaming use cases; they're going to be unstructured, they'll consist of examples i've found online, they're going to be posted over time, reasonably frequently but not necessarily regularly.

Use Case 1: Multiplayer LAN gaming with dedicated gamers.

Best part was 32 men in the map with a knife trying to stab each other like some gangster fight. The guys sitting beside were traumatised when they saw 32 people playing Counter Strike: Source together. They went, “WTF? 32 people playing CS in a LAN shop?! And they are all friends?!?!?! Let’s join in!”.

Welcome to the Offline Meeting of the Invisible 34
SG Anime Blogger LAN Rumble
Who Attended the CS Battle Royale? The Nerd Horde!

who's winning this round, then?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 11:54:00 +0000

everybody, if analysts are to be believed:

Xbox 360, PS3 Meet Sales Targets (Bloomberg)

except that it's not about gaming, per se:

Sony is billing PlayStation 3 as a complete home entertainment system. In response, Microsoft said yesterday it will enable the Xbox to function as a television set-top box in time for year-end holiday shopping.

meanwhile, in a post entitled Will Wii Win, a games developer blogging at Japanmanship answers simply: "Yes". he gives many reasons, including price, availability, IP and game choice, but the interesting takeaway is:

Whereas Sony and the unlucky but plucky Microsoft are pushing power over anything else, Nintendo has wisely focused on the products, the products that will sell the console.

Sony and MS have over-specified their consoles because they're targeting non-gamers via making their devices more than gaming machines; Nintendo have gone the other direction, and are converting non-gamers into gamers via an under-specified but innovative machine. it certainly remains to be seen who does best out of this current console generation, but it's safe to conclude already that Nintendo will be doing much better this time round than they did last time with the GameCube.

How much better they do may well define the direction of the next generation of game devices.

who cares about Second Life?

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 14:46:00 +0000

a not entirely disingenuous question.

Linden Labs, the makers of Second Life, announced in early December that they had two million users - and that they had gone from one million to two million users in barely eight weeks. Now, it's well known that judging MMORG users accurately is about as successful as herding cats, but it nevertheless made news.

The problem is that - much like Web 1.0's use of 'pageviews' as a correlate for unique users - equating registered users with active users is somewhere between disingenuous and dishonest, not to mention spurious. (A good article describing the pointless nature of total registered users can be found here). Attempts to render these figures into metrics more commonly used by the game industry have been notable for the lack of co-operation that Linden Labs provided.

Persistent efforts have finally resulted in Linden giving comparable numbers to Fortune magazine, and they break down as follows:

2.3 million 'Residents' (ie, total registered users)
1.5 million unique users
250,000 users have come back after initial log-in
25,000 active users

Churn rate (the percentage of users who leave to never come back) is etimated at 85% (relatively high by MMORG standards); maximum number of concurrent users is estimated at around 18,000 (quite low, by MMORG standards: World of Warcraft's equivalent value is 660,000).

The question of interest here would be: does this matter? And i think the answer - in spite of my lack of desire to participate in Second Life - is probably not. I think it comes down to 'what is Second Life?' If it's a game: then it is, notoriously, not a very good one - and not one people continue to play after their initial login. If, on the other hand, it is something else, then maybe this lack of participants doesn't matter - after all, not all beta tests have to be successful.

One gamer, taking aim at Second Life's dodgy statistics, wrote on her blog:

Look, it’s simple. Open ended virtual worlds like Second Life are best suited for the types of people who love to create content. ... [I]f you don’t have the time and patience to learn about modeling and animation tools, then you are going to log into Second Life, take a look around, scratch your head, shrug your shoulders, and log out again.
On the other hand, if you prefer to be a consumer of entertainment content, as I am, and as I suspect much of the world is, then games are your nectar of the gods. Give me laser guns and gory aliens that, when blasted, spill out gobs of fluorescent goo.

The contention that people don't want to create content can be argued, but the conclusion - that Second Life is not a game - seems solid to me. The answer, perhaps, can be found in an entertaining overview of the web in 2006 by Swiss-Japanese branding consultants Information Architects: they listed Second Life as one of their top 50 sites of the year - in the category of social networking:

out of the console, into the living room

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 14:30:00 +0000

it's January, which means that somewhere in the world (specifically, Las Vegas), the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is occuring. CES is one of the big consumer electronics shows (the hint is in the name, really) - and coming as it does at the start of the year, it allows companies to pitch to the general public their views of the coming year in CE.

this year, one of the big themes would appear to be home servers:

Sony to Enable TVs to play Internet Video
A Home network, on the cheap
Bill Gates sees a home server in your future
Apple, MS to unveil digital media systems
HP pitches home servers

the best takeaway from this raft of stories comes from Bill Gates, in an interview with Kotaku:

"The reason we got into Xbox was not just for gaming," he said. "It's a general purpose computer. ...

"We wouldn't have done it if it was just a gaming device," he said. "We wouldn't have gone into the category at all. It was strategically getting into the living room. This is not some big secret, Sony says the same things."

'people want to do things with their content across multiple platforms'

and indeed, BBC News is reporting that Bill Gates' main pitch at CES was for the Windows Home Server:

Mr Gates also unveiled a new product in conjunction with HP which lets people store all their data on a central device and access from any number of Windows-connected products, including the Zune portable music player, the Xbox 360, PCs and phones.
The Windows Home Server is a storage system which can hold more than one terabyte of data.
Photos, music and videos can be saved to the system and accessed from many other devices in the home and even remotely via the internet.