“The most important factor in any online game or social network is the user engagement - the addictiveness and the fun factor,’” says Jon Radoff, chief executive of GamerDNA, an online community for gamers based in Cambridge. “If you can combine that engagement with a high desire for virtual goods, then you have something that is both a good experience for the user, and also monetizes well.”

That’s right. Online experiences actually need to be fun to make money. Surprisingly, it isn’t clear to a lot of people rushing into the online game space that this is important.

If you have been to one of my talks on market trends before, some of the data will look familiar–but there’s something here for everyone, new or old!  However, I was able to include some very recent data from Twitter that shows the stellar growth in game-related conversations for the last three months (7.6% compound week-over-week growth!) as well as shifts in Twitter conversation regarding games (e.g., the huge impact that The Beatles: Rock Band made on game-related attention in the week of 9/9/09).

The Twitter data is in the form of heatmaps, which are on slides 15, 16 and 45.  Here is the slide showing the heatmap of conversation growth for June through mid-September 2009.

The entire presentation is available in its entirety on Slideshare.  You can view it here:

Between the panel and a few business meetings with industry folks, I was able to squeeze in some time of my own at PAX.  A few of the highlights:

• Scribblenauts on the Nintendo DS was the game that really grabbed my attention.  Very unique game design.  I think it’s going to be a lot of fun for all ages.  This is a game you’ll love your kids to play.
• Played Diablo 3 as a Barbarian.  Fun times!  Looking extremely polished for a game that isn’t going to be done for quite a while.
• Messed around as a Goblin Warlock in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.  I went off the beaten track and tried to explore the world, but they dropped some invisible barriers around the island, and I couldn’t get to a cool-looking zone.  This should be fun to play once it’s out.
• Played Dante’s Inferno on a PS3.  Gorgeous graphics — plays a bit like God of War, which isn’t really my thing, but I bet lots of people are going to like it.
• Watched Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2, Left 4 Dead II and Darksiders — all of which look fun although I didn’t feel like waiting in line to try them hands-on.
• Picked up a copy of the Concept Art book for Guild Wars 2, which I’m certain I’ll play.  A few of the artists from the GW2 team were there to add their signatures to the book.
• Bought a box of Magic the Gathering 2010 Core Set boosters, plus a bunch of recent expansion boosters.  I haven’t gotten to play MTG much in the last year, but figured it was time to refresh my collection.
• Bought a box of “Call of Cthulhu: the Card Game.”  No idea if the game is any good… but it’s Cthulhu, y’know?  Had to get it.
• Someone from Upper Deck taught me to play the WoW trading card game.  It was easy to learn and surprisingly fun.  I bought a box of the Death Knight starter, plus 10 recent boosters to mess around with.

Later tonight I’m heading out to a party run by one of our customers at GamerDNA (CCP Games, the makers of Eve Online).  Should be a fun time!

To illustrate the shift, let me share some of the feedback we’ve gotten on a new product that GamerDNA launched just over a week ago: TweetMyGaming.com.  It’s an awesome way to see real-time tweets about games on Twitter.  We’re thinking of it as the “games channel” for the Twitter universe, and soon we’ll be rolling out even more functionality which will reinforce that.

The immediate feedback from the Twitter community was electric–most people loved it.  For example:

The bottom line:  if you remember Twitter when it first came out, and still think of it as a status-update tool–then you’re missing out on the innovation that’s happening here.  Give it another look.  If so, you might join some of these other commenters from the publicity surrounding TweetMyGaming:

• “I hated twitter when it came about but I’m a changed man now. I sign up to shit I want news on like Man United, Dtoid, Total Film, bands I like and it keeps me up to date on my mobile when I’m at work or whatever.”" — Kris S from Destructoid
• “Finally, something useful on Twitter!!” — ArchiGamer on Joystiq
• “Sure, there’s plenty of shit on Twitter that’s totally inane. Here’s the key, though: that’s true of any communication tool. The arguments against Twitter are absolutely the same things people said about blogs when they were novel; “Well, who cares what Joe Average thinks?” The answer is the same: probably not many people. But for content providers you already find interesting, it’s just a very fast real-time communication tool.” — eakolb on Kotaku
• “wow. That’s pretty strange…I just joined the dark side and signed up for a twitter account this morning :P” — kobeashi on Kotaku

Over the weekend, I switched Radoff.com to Slicehost… And wow, what a relief. If you’re comfortable with a command-line Linux environment, I don’t know why you’d ever want something else. You get a full Linux distro up in the cloud; you can run whatever operating system build you want (I went with Ubuntu Hardy). It took only minutes to get Wordpress up-and-running (although it took hours to extract my data from the aforementioned major Internet hosting/media company).

A few of the things I like:

• Even the cheapest “slice” ($20/month) has more than enough computing power for most people.  I imagine that the early stages of a big commercial application would have no problems getting started with some of the bigger slices.
• You can do anything you want with it.
• Backups are built-in and a very simple interface; easier than anything I’ve seen on dedicated hosts.
• Customer service isn’t available by phone, but that’s a good thing.  The customer service folks are all in Campfire, and they’re just a click away from answering anything you might need help with.

It also seems that while services like Amazon EC2 seem to get significantly more expensive once any real scale is achieved, but that the pricing economics of Slicehost appear to remain superior to dedicated colocation even at commercial-grade scale.

Rackspace bought Slicehost last year.  I’m excited to see how they grow this business.

One of the biggest opportunities is for certain websites to become a platform for distributed community on the Web. What that means is making it possible to consume your content or application from many different distribution points.

One of the reasons Twitter is so successful is because they’ve achieved that. Twitter has worked its way into things as wide-ranging as CNN and GamerDNA and has even spawned a whole new group of desktop applications.

Our core mission with GamerDNA is to help gamers find out what’s really happening in the games they’re interested in playing. That’s why we’re building the Helix API, which makes it possible to dig into the same real-time gameplay trends, player information, etc., that we’ve built the GamerDNA service with.

Yesterday, we launched TweetMyGaming — which carries on our core mission in a new way. We want everyone to learn about the buzz surrounding games they might be interested in playing, and to do that in whatever community you participate in. For us, the latest community is Twitter. Using a combination of the GamerDNA and Twitter APIs, we can surface conversations on Twitter around games that we know are being played and talked about–revealing trends in conversations, and allowing you to drill-down into game-specific conversations. We’ve gotten some great feedback on it, and will be adding some of our community’s suggestions in the coming revisions.

We also think TweetMyGaming represents a new type of application. Mashups have been popular for combining data from multiple sources around a specific context that streamlines the process of consumption. TweetMyGaming is what I’ll call a “real-time mashup,” which is built upon multiple real-time APIs, where the information you view provides some type of new analysis (rather than just a composite set of information) that can only be generated by finding interesting intersections between data and real-time conversations.

If you have been to one of my talks before (or looked at one of the slide decks I’ve posted online), then the introductory section (slides 1-13) will look familiar–in line with my consistent position that games are getting more diverse in terms of audience and game types.

After that, you’ll see a lot of new data we’re releasing at the conference. Some of the cool stuff you’ll find inside includes:

• Some new ways to think about market segmentation rather than “casual versus hardcore.”
• Updated top-15 lists of Xbox Live games, broken down by male versus female players.
• Detailed breakdown of all Guitar Hero and all Rock Band games, showing how daily engagement shifted during the course of each franchise as games were released.
• Data on the games most played by Bioshock players, showing the emergence of a new market segment that is more about setting (gritty, story-oriented, dark) rather than by game genre.
• Competitive set analysis in the MMORPG marketing, demonstrating how World of Warcraft is played by people who don’t really play many other MMOs, versus the last three big releases (Age of Conan, Warhammer and Lord of the Rings Online) which tend to cater the a niche of players who try almost every new MMO release.

Enjoy!  If you have comments, I’d love to hear from you — either on this blog, or posted on Twitter. And if you aren’t following me yet, click here to join my conversations.

The other day I asked on Twitter whether people would prefer to have a replicator or a holodeck (credit for the question idea goes to @fattychubs).  Here are the results:

• Replicators won with 61% of the votes.
• The holodeck got 36% of the votes.
• About 3% voted ambiguously, including someone who said they’d rather have a transporter than either of those two.

Many people also shared their reasoning.  Amongst people who voted for replicators, the most popular reasons given were:

• Food.
• Various get-rich-quick schemes involving replicating money.
• A theory that you could construct a holodeck by replicating all of the parts you’d need.
• Real objects are better than simulacra.

Amongst people who chose the holodeck:

• Sex.
• Various applications in gameplay or game design.
• Ability to experience the impossible.
• A number of Star Trek experts claimed that replicator technology was part of the holodeck, so you’d sort of get one anyway.

So  how about me?  I’d choose the Holodeck.  I’m a bit dubious about claims that the replicator can duplicate any advanced technology, including the holodeck (particularly whether it can simply generate all the software it would need!)  Plus, I think I have enough “stuff” — but my head has plenty of room left for experiences.

Join me on twitter for more discussions about technology, social media, entrepreneurship and science fiction.

What surprised me is how much of it inspires me with thoughts of our future technological and economic development.  And I’ve concluded one thing: we’re still mostly hunter-gatherers in almost every way other than food.

Let’s take energy as one example.  The vast majority of our energy is created because we travel from place to place, hoping to find a source of energy (sort of like our nomad ancestors who searched long and hard for the calories to gain from a few tubers, a few nuts, or a rare piece of meat).  When we find the energy, we consume it, and it’s gone . The quest continues.  We’re hunter-gatherers of energy.   Right now, many scientists, engineers and businesspeople are trying to figure out how we can truly become producers (rather than gatherers) of energy—that’s what the whole cleantech and renewable energy industry is about.  The possibility here is that in the long-term, we’ll spend far less of our aggregate human resources hunting and gathering energy—freeing up more people to do everything else that’s valuable to us.

Energy was one obvious case where we’re still in hunter-gatherer mode… but how about information? Certainly, we’ve come a long way on the distribution of information (the development of the alphabet, paper, the printing press and the Internet are great examples of this) but we’re still at the very beginning of becoming information producers.  Scientists and engineers labor hard to discover information (information hunter-gatherers), and information services companies are in the business of cross-tabulating and aggregating information so that it can be applied to problems too thorny for individuals to uncover (which might be the primordial version of information production)—but my sense is that we’re still at the very beginning of making the shift

It took millennia for people to shift from hunter-gatherers to food production, so perhaps it will take a while.  Applications like the new Wolfram Alpha are exciting to me because that’s the sort of technology that might enable an information-production age.  The Semantic Web, which remains unrealized, is another.  And social media such as Yelp, GamerDNA, Last.fm, etc. are good examples of software that can autonomously help individual people discover information that’s relevant by mining large amounts of consumer behavior.

The people who first leveraged food production to  allow significant parts of their population to become bureaucrats, soldiers, priests and artisan could probably not possibly imagine the complex outcome of their actions: the rise of states, technology diffusion, literature, etc.  What are the other parts of today’s economy that are still in hunter-gatherer mode, and what sort of things might we dare to imagine for the future?

Photo credit: this is a picture I took of a hunter-gatherer during a trip I made to Papua New Guinea; feel free to use however you like.

If you found this article thought-provoking, please leave a comment–or follow me on Twitter and leave a message there.

On Sunday I gave a presentation on “Top Trends in Online Games.”  Below is a Slideshare deck of what I presented:

Top points:

• Online games are tribal; social elements are key.  Games, including non-MMORPG products (such as games on Xbox Live Arcade) are becoming increasingly social.
• The combination of a strong social fabric, plus newer platforms (XBLA, iPhone, Web) are making some games a lot more capital efficient to develop.  Capital efficiency comes from lower cost of customer acquisition (social elements) plus lower costs of development (the new platforms cost a fraction of typical PC-based AAA titles), which means it is fertile ground for independent developers.
• The market is becoming a lot more diverse, fueled by the fact that 97% of teenagers now play games.
• There’s an opportunity for game developers to shift from “shipping the box” to delivering long-term entertainment value (i.e., attention), which has more lucrative business models.