The Internets are on FIRE!

Man, there's a lot of stuff going on, and I don't have time to blog it all with the detail I'd like.



Here's a smattering of this week's interesting tidbits, and a quick thought or two on each. More when there's time... work's got me pretty busy right now.

• EA gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar, or rather in the Wikipedia, for makin' a little revisionist history. Jeez guys, I get why some clueless government lackey does this, but a tech company? Don't know know you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube? Also, I just don't get why people think their company's wikipedia entry is what gives tehm their rep. Your company gets it's rep from it's behavior, and thus ya just screwed the pooch a little more, didn't ya?


• Clint Hocking takes PC Gamer's Vederman opening salvo on Far Cry 2 ("will it be art? Will it have the power to affect you emotionally on anything other than a surface level? Probably not.") as a personal throwing down of the gauntlet. One thing about that Clint, he does love his wicked problems (see also here). Go Clint Go! We're rooting for ya!


• Bioshock is getting crazy good reviews. While I'm glad for the developer and for what it's doing for our platforms, I more depressed about it overall, and have a lengthier post I'd like to write about "local maxima and the game industry", but that's for another day.


• Not only is Facebook going to eat the social networking universe, it's also turning out to be a pretty compelling game platform as well - especially for play-by-mail type scenarios. No wonder people say it's a black hole.


• Related to the above, I think it's only a matter of time before Scrabulous (I've been playing the facebook app version) gets sued and shut down. Oh well, enjoy while you can!


• Parks Associates reports that gaming is the most popular activity on the web - more than blogging/reading/socialnetworking/youtubin', etc, etc. (And no, this doesn't contradit my previous post - the games will just move onto facebook - it's the platform, silly).


• EA says user created content is the next big thing in games. I agree. This is another subject I need to do a longer post on, but I have come around 100% on the UGC thing. I will say a couple quick things: (1) I don't think it's going to happen in the way EA anticipates - or likes, (2) there's going to be a TON of interesting discussion on user and creator IP rights, ownership, copyright protection, etc, in the coming years (like I said at the conclusion of my MIGS talk last year - Customer Ownership is going to come by granting customers ownership. Also relevant is this 2004(!) Clay Shirky quote: "So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast."

That's all for now. More once I catch my breath.

Microsoft: Go ahead, party on our game IP

OK, that's a bit of an overstatement, but our esteemed legal eagle and blogger DonkeyXote points us to Microsoft's recently released game content usage rules that are cool because (a) they let the gamer community use game assets for things like fan art, machinema, etc, and (b) because they are written in English, not legalese.

Snip:

We know that people like you love our games and sometimes want to use things like gameplay footage, screenshots, music, and other elements of our games (“Game Content”) to make things like machinima, videos, and and other cool things (your “Item” or “Items”). We’d like to make that easier for you. So long as you can respect these rules, you can use our Game Content to make your Items.

Yes, there are rules, but this is still pretty progressive for a large company. Pretty cool.

Jon Blow interview

If you haven't read it, it's great.

I am so looking forward to Braid.

A fool and her yen...

Via the awesome TokyoMango, comes The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief, a documentary about host-club workers, the hard drinkin', smokin' and hair-sprayin' young men that entertain women for money. The male equivalent of the hostess bar, a Japanese phenomema that Westerners already have a hard time understanding, it seems even more strange to many over here that women would pay for such companionship.

The documentary is great in how it peels the layers of the onion off the 'glamorous life' facade. And the twist that comes 30 or so minutes in was a complete and brilliant suprise. The closing shots of one worker drunkenly wobbling away on his bicycle in the early morning are a brilliant close to the film.

Watch documentary in full (~1hr) here.

[BTW, the movie is worth watching for the HAIR alone. This would make a list of 'top ten best hair movies', ranking alongside Saturday Night Fever, Gumball Rally, etc]

Mickey, Put on your Parka - Disney buys Club Penguin

To the earlier discussions about large media companies getting into the MMO space, today we here that Disney buys Club Penguin.

Things that are interesting about this:

• $350M. That's a lot of kippers, kids.
• Not sure how that compares to subscription revenue, but as I said earlier, I'm not sure it matters.
• Club Penguin is based in Kelowna, which is very close to some kick-ass skiing. Why was I not told!? This is important!

GameBizToon_005

After a long hiatus, my new tablet and a 10 minute gap between meetings inspired me to do the following:


Note to self:

- definitely lower quality than the last few, but less time spent.
- my handwriting is awful, and on the tablet it's worse. Maybe back to using the Comic font (finally a good use for it)
- When I have time to do a decent job, it's usually on planes. Thus 3/5 of my first comics being about air travel.
- Given the name, I should at some point do one about the game business!

What should World of Warcraft and David Copperfield both fear?

...someone giving away what they charge for, and tanking their business in the process.

Wha-wha-wha-what?!

I'll explain. But first a commercial interlude. Please watch this very short video. It's brief, and it's entertaining.



OK, so this is one of a series of clever little commercials (series of them can be seen here - thanks to boingboing for the link) for a company doing technical support. Very catchy. "See how simple it is when we explain how it's done?".

Now, if that series of commercials takes off, it could be a real thorn in the side of a busking street magician that makes his living doing these exact tricks. Of course, that's not going to bother Belgacom. After all, whats a couple street magicians compared to a successful ad campaign of a large corporation. Casualties of War. Can't make a cake without breaking a few eggs and all of that.

OK, so where am I going with this?

There've been few posts as of late (Techcrunch, Raph Koster, etc) about the new Barbie Virtual World. Some see it as a response to Webkinz, which in one way is true, but it's not the most interesting way to look at it.

Barbie and Webkinz are loss leaders. They are giving it away to sell dolls or plushies or whatever. MyCoke (FKA Cokeworld) is giving it away to build brand affinity only. You don't even need to buy a can of diet/vanilla/lemon/zero coke to play this version of Habbo, you just need to not mind hangin' with the red'n'white.

Developing games costs money. Developing virtual worlds/mmos costs even more money. Building the next Wow is going to be a 50-100M affair. Building a small high-quality 2.5d casual mmo is, what, maybe $1M-$2M (of course, some are hoping to lower that, but that's another story). Blowing a couple million on development of a game title means you are going to have to do a fair number of subs/item-sales to get into the black.

But if you are selling plastic dolls nationwide at Toys-R-Us, and trying to differentiate yourself in a crowded market, then 1-2M is an efficient spend on a differentiating feature.

And if you made $26B last year selling sugar water at a healthy profit, then a couple million bucks is, my guess, a blip on the screen of the marketing budget.

At Casual Connect this year, there was a lot of talk about the big media companies (e.g. MTV/Viacom) coming into the space. What I don't think people grokked though, is that not only will they come in and compete for the same customers, but they may completely upset the apple cart in an effort to get those gamers interested in their IP (and thus watching the shows, buying the dolls, eating up all the hollywood soup and washing it down with a sugary, fizzy dose of free-to-play branded mmo.

"Free" as a business model will certainly mix things up a bit.

Now, back to my analogy.

David Copperfield isn't worried about those videos. They aren't showing us how to make a buick disappear or anything like that. Same goes for WoW. No one's giving away THAT level of experience, so Blizzard doesn't have to worry.

Yet.

Thing is though, that this combination of Christensen effect ("not good enough" creeps up on you until you find that "good enough" is way cheaper than you and nipping at your heels) and big media money are going to make for a volatile and interesting mix in the MMO/VW space over the next couple years.

This is somewhat analogous to the America's Army game a few years back. Giving away a multi-million dollar FPS as a marketing tool, they didn't put Epic or Valve out of business, but there were a few less B-level FPS's sold as a result, I'd wager.

So the thought exercise for you (as I try to bring this in for a landing), is what do you do when your competitors business model suddenly is "free"?

Getting back on the wagon

I'm using a combination of a job change (made a change of role within the casual games group here, but that's another post...) and my laptop migration, to clean up my act and get back on the GTD wagon.

How timely, then, that Google had Merlin Man, of 43 folders fame, come in and talk about the empty inbox. Lucky for us they posted it:

OMFG! Excel kungfuporn!

via lifehacker, comes this SWEET little excel tip:

a clever little Excel trick that creates a bar graph inside cells using the repeat (REPT) function.

REPT looks like this:=REPT(text,number_of_times)For instance, REPT("X",10) gives you "XXXXXXXXXX". For in-cell bar charts, the trick is to repeat a single bar "". When formatted in 8 point Arial font, single bars look like bar graphs.

to get this:

In-excel music visualizer can't be far off!

Sprechen der Sexy?

New laptop. Very slick. Way overpriced, but since I'll be hauling it everywhere I go for the next couple years, I didn't feel to guilty about getting the company to splurge.

It's toshiba's new tablet, and I was calling it the "it wishes it was a mac" laptop, but someone at work called it the stormtrooper laptop, and I like that better.

Now if I only had the time to actually set it up, transfer files, install software...

Inside, you find Iron Cajones of +12 Machismo

In the stranger-than-fiction category, this post over at Gizmodo tells the tale of a gamer who was abducted and held at gunpoint for several hours.

The kidnappers were trying to get him to give up his password to his account on GunBound (a korean mmo), thinking they could sell it online for a few thousand bucks.

Of course, they didn't count on the guy having more balls than brains and refusing to give it up. They eventually let him go.

The Fonz in a Pastel Blouse

Well, that's it. The whole video-game-console-cake meme has OFFICIALLY jumped the shark.

(via Kotaku)

Behold....

It is Rock Band. And It is Good.

Boneheaded

IMAGE_052, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Today I tried to make four deposits to my Wamu ATM. After the third, upon trying the fourth, I received the above message.

Uh? Hello? You have a problem with people depositing money into your institution? You are a bank, no?

I'm sorry sir, our computerized system can't handle a massive influx of deposits. The system was written in COBOL and has only 2 bits to track deposit numbers. A fourth deposit would cause it to carry the one.

Guess I'll just store it under the mattress

Casual Connect Day 2: Google - Adsense for Games

Terse notes I took, very quick cleanup done last night [my comments in braces]

Bernie Stolar [Yes, THAT Bernie, of Sony, Sega fame], Greg Schaffer - Team lead

Bernie comes out, talks 25 years history in the industry, blah blah.

Why is Google in game business [a question everyone came to find out]

In-game advertising. That's it.

No "G-Box", No Google Live, No Game Search, No Portal.

In-game advertising only. that's it.

Some notes on Google: 13k employees [that's it? wow]. 65% of worldwide search results. 112 languages, 157 international domains

Current work in games: Currently working with over 100 game pubs [via adsense - does that mean they know one another? Is that just "do a search on how many of our adsense partners have 'game' in their domain name"?]

Game relevant searches are popular.

How many people are Adsense partners? (1/4 of room, maybe 40 people?) - points out that Popcap raised their hands.

We currently have Adsense for search, Adsense for feeds, Adsense for audio -- now we are adding Adsense for games.

Adsense is about: Efficient workflow. Flexible buying. Robust reporting. Targeted reach. Engineered optimization.

The world (heart) games. 200M people worldwide play casual games games. [this appears to be one of two slides that were added to an otherwise template adsense pitch deck, IMHO]

As games continue to grow and cost more, ads can help. (more on budgets, growth) [Does Bernie really grok casual? Seems not. Seems to be stuck in console big budget game mindset]

Please partner with us! [Great, but he hasn't said what they are doing?]

"How will it work?"

starts with a conversation. Here's our email address.

[awkward moment where the two presenters are not sure who's queuing off of whom and when. This is a very poorly prepared pitch]

[I believe this is mostly cut and pasted slides from someone else's pitch (non-games pitch)].

"we work with advertisers to better think about users and what it means in games" [but when asked for examples, they were strugglin'. Clear that they get that games are different advertising medium, but also pretty clear it's not one they've worked in and actually spent any time selling to advertisers]

7.2B paid out to Google partners since 2003.

End and Q&A. [We're less than 30 minutes into what's supposed to be 45 minute pitch]

[WTF? What are they doing, how are they doing it? How will they tailor their experience to games, etc, etc.]

 

Analysis:

Best summarized as: WTF!?

This from the company that only hires PHD's that know kung-fu and have x-ray vision? The fact that I work for MS isn't coloring my opinion here. I think this was an embarrassment to Google. Talk around the show seems to indicate that many share my opinion. The presentation was poor, the product was undefined and seems to be non-existant. Didn't help that one of the presenters sat down through the whole thing. "I'm really excited to be here" - yeah, right. How about standing up while you say that. 

The audience questions were mainly along the lines of trying to extract a little information about what exactly they might be doing. Answers were vague, and seemed to indicate that while they see an opportunity to take adsense to in-game ads, they've started to think about the sticky issues that come up when you try to do so, but haven't yet thought of answers to those questions. Oh, they did indicate web first (didn't say when), then download PC (didn't say when), then consoles (didn't say when but hinted that it's Sony that they are talking to).

Casual Connect Day 2 Keynote: Steve Youngwood, MTVn/Nickelodeon

Terse notes I took during the Day 2 keynote. [My thoughts/impressions in braces]

Aiming to be premiere provider of branded entertainment communities, and gaming is key part of that strategy

It's not just kids & boys playing games, we have gamers in every demo; kids, moms, boomers... [note the lingo, this guy definitely steeped in the TV biz]

Our goal is to be the preeminent kids and family brand of the 21st century

Check out this demo reel.

(Lots of footage of celebs, TV properties, etc, *very* little games stuff thrown in there. Seems to be falling flat with audience. Only online property in initial vid clip is Nick.com, only a minute into it, and features all the TV properties, lasted about 5 seconds. No shockwave game footage)

"Demo-targeted brands, engaging the whole family"

[more talk along these lines. Clear the games piece is just that... a piece. Part of a well-rounded marketing campaign. Not "games first"]

"this is what our audience is doing online"

casual games are to digital as video is to TV [wtf?]

biz is about:

• Advertising
• Revenue stream
• Brand building

[so far, what he's said has seemed like brand-building is first, not 3rd)

on their kids sight, 4.5M kids registed in 6m - more than anyone in the space.

acquisitions - addicting games, shockwave, neopets...

• Addicting games --> teen boy targeted. 9M uu's. 100 games intro'd /mo, 4000 games in the library [not sure what their search is like, but maybe it's time to prune that library?]
• Neopets: 4.8 UU's - 172/min month per user average. launched item-based biz with nexon
• 1 billion games played per month across shockwave/neopets/addictingames

"future of a fragmented web - people not going to portals" [I agree with him on this one]

Will distribute content too, on other people's portals. 

over next 2 years:

100M investment in casual gaming sites, titles and platforms (big font, this is the big announce of the keynote I guess]

Will be invested in:

• myNoggin - preschoolers playing educational titles around brands like Dora, ... (Cox, Charter, Insight...) uses affiliate models ands ubscription model (ad free) [their answer to Club Penguin]
• Multiplayer and coop games will be focus on Nick.com
• Nicktropolis - Nick gaming club subscription offering - early 2008.
• For teen girls "TheN + addicting games" - early 2008 - N-Games.com - first casual games site targeting only teen girls. activities like "avatar prom", "Avatar mall". (Demo - tv trailer for "the hookup". 'a game of charm treachery and deceipt'. "get your flirt on")
• Addicting games - 'have just scratched the surface'. Increased emphasis on user-submitted game. intro'ing game making engine to make it easier. Expanded game offerings to intro casual mmos. "AddictingWorlds" Partnership with Habbo, Neopets, are indicative of direction. Will work with creators of all casual Mmo's.
• Shockwave - 35+ women. [WTF? Really?] Focus on innovation [hmph], Jigsaw video demo [not that impressive - youtube-quality flash movie played on jigsaw pieces.] Also will be increasing publishing and distribution of downloadable games across other sites (example - carrie the caregiver [this downloadable casual title did pretty well on the portals, IIRC])
• Neopets: Company now called Neostudios: continue momentum of neopets, build new mmo type experiences - a new virtual world ever other year. "Casual MMO's fasted growing segment in the industry"

Demo video 2. [There are games in this one. montage of existing game footage from the sites above, nothing new that lept out at me]

Thanks. $100M. etc etc.

 

Thoughts:

Overall, indicative of a growing interest in online/interactive from the major media companies. They certainly are serious when you look at the acquisitions & interest. However, some were viewing that $100M number is a kind of "right hand turn" on their part. One interesting take on this is to ask "what percentage of their total 'R&D' (probably the wrong term in this case) does this represent?". How does it compare to the total amount the spend sourcing and developing new IP for shows, etc? My guess is 3-5%. If that. 

If that's the case, then it's not a right-hand-turn, but more of a toe in the water.

Of course, to those in the casual games space, it appears to be a big, serious, gnarly King Kong toe in the water!

Don't get me wrong, I'm not dissing the 100M. That's real money and they appear to have a battle plan. Should be interesting to watch.

Hey! You got GoPets in my Messenger!

Pretty cool product launch we did today that I thought was worth pointing out here.

If you are running Windows Live Messenger, and you try adding lilypanda@gopetslive.com to your friends list, and then start a conversation with Lily and say "play", you will (after some plug-in install fun the first time around) get an activity window that looks something like this:

GoPets, is a 3D persistent virtual world (some would say 'casual mmo meets tamagochi') with an in-game item sales biz model. Windows Live Messenger is a communications app with an installed base of over a quarter billion people. I'd say that's got some potential, no? :-)

Congrats to the GoPets team and the folks on the Messenger team that made this all happen.

Casual Connect 2007: Initial Thoughts

Today was day one of the "Casual Connect" conference. Day 2, officially, I guess, since they held a kind of intro/primer track on Monday.

We also held our Microsoft Casual Games partner day on Monday, an invite-only event for developer partners, and that's one of the reasons I haven't been posting much, as I was working on a bunch of the presentations for that event, including one that I gave. They'll be posted publicly at some point in the near future, and I'll post a link at that time.

The energy at Casual Connect is pretty palpable. Interesting mix of perceptions. Existing player both enjoying the 'vindication' of having been there first, but also seeming a little put off by all these people coming to "our show" (sound familiar, GDC old timers?), and perhaps a little nervous tone to some of their voices about all the big players showing up?

And big players there were. Of course Microsoft is there, but so's Google, and Viacom, and lots of analysts and VCs. Suits! At a casual games conference! Did they not get the memo? :-)

I'm going to have to blog some lengthy posts about impressions of the show and some individual sessions later this week. In the meantime, I'll leave you with two points I think are interesting:

• Among the people at the show, instead of the usual confusion about "what does 'casual' really mean?", there is a lot more agreement, but its falling into several very distinct camps: Casual in the web-or-downloadable-like-you'd-get-from-Popcap sense; Broad-appeal, mostly-retail console titles like Buzz or Big Brain Academy, and the casual-mmo-is-da-bomb-WoW-better-watchout crowd.
• A lot of conversations about all the new casual divisions at big publishers like Ubi, EA, etc. Personally, I htink this is going to be one of the more entertaining spaces to watch. Not because I think the best games will come from there (they might, they might not), but because I think it's going to be *really* interesting to see whether companies used to the process-heavy, gauntlet-running processes used to prudently conceive/greenlight/produce/market/sell $20M games are going to be able to *internally* adapt to the nimble nature of the casual market. I think it's going to be a painful adaptation for many, I beleive.

Another observation: If you hear someone say they beleive the future is in "MySpace + Facebook + MapleStory + YouTube + HabboHotel", you have just heard someone that has no frikkin clue what they are looking for, apart from something that will magically be worth a billion dollars in two years. Just walk away. If they are a VC, feel free to take their money first, by all means :-)

Polygon Family: Episode 2

Because YouTube is the bestest thing EVAR!

Long lost from the Siggraph Electronic Theater a few years back.

Game Trials, Rentals, Re-sales: Good or Bad?

The debate never ends. Some argue that all of these allow gamers to get 'free goods' without buying and thus negatively impact sales (the 'Why give away the cow?' crew). The proponents argue that these things ease people into purchases, attract more gamers to the fold, and let gamers spend more dollars because they feel their dollar go further (the "Spread the love" crew).

The argument comes up in discussion of rental or subscription to retail games as well as in discussion of free web-based casual games and other casual games distribution mechanisms.

I've blogged about this debate before, and how other industries might give us pointers.

On that note, two related pieces of research popped onto the radar today:

For the Nays: This piece of research on radio's effect on music sales, concluding that radio play does NOT boost sales of recorded music, and in fact may do the opposite. (As a side note, I am personally VERY skeptical of this peice of research. It seems to jump very quickly to support an argument for music licensors charging license fees to radio stations for airplay. I do wonder whether it has some bias behind it.)

And in the other corner: This post from Freakonomics on Libraries. While it doesn't argue that libraries are good for book sales, it does point out that books still sell despite them. It also asks out the provocative question "If libraries didn't exist, could you start one today?", concluding that the publishing industry would likely attempt to quash such an effort or at least shackle it with a license fee structure. I think most would agree that libraries are good for society and good for culture, and that they haven't yet killed the publishing industry. (Oh, and be sure to read the comment thread. There are some links to a number of cool things including some examples of people that ARE in fact starting libraries today, on the web)

Anyhow, there you have it. Arguments to back up whichever side of the debate you are on. Please ignore the other one.

Line Rider Runner Ad

via Adventure in Digital Marketing comes this nifty advertising banner/overlay, which is an Adidas ad play on Line Rider. Unfortunately it falls a little flat due to the lack of physics, which is what made Line Rider the sensational toy that it is. If the runner had jumped, rolled, etc, this could have been as good. Still a nifty try Adidas!

Activision taking the low road with Guitar Hero III

Arg! It's not enough that Sony's peeing in the pool, but Activision has to add to the melange?

This from Joystiq (via Raph):

They fully updated the graphics, including doing motion capture for the avatars, and the NPCs in the background, like the go-go girls in the stage that’s set in a strip club. Neversoft has a full-sized motion capture studio at their facility in California, so why not make good use of it? Especially if you have to mocap some strippers. Tough work, this rock stuff. Based on what we saw, the dancers will be giving Soul Calibur a run for the money. Jiggle factor five, Mr. Sulu.

Thanks, Activision! At least I know have my decision made easier for me. Rock Band it is!

Social Networking for Dummies

This video *brilliantly* explains social networking in laymans terms, in an entertaining fashion, in under two minutes.



[update: The authors of that video at CommonCraft have a number of others - brilliant]

Duelling Guitar (games)

I just blogged some more Rock Band footage, this time out of the E3 MS press conference.

Among the various bits of news leading up to and coming from E3, are a bunch of factoids released about the 2 duelling guitar games: The Activision-acquired Guitar Hero sequel Guitar Hero 3 and the MTV/EA published Rock Band from the creators of GH, Harmonix.

I'm starting to worry a little about the escalating arms race of spend going into both these titles to pick up various music licenses, band/musician signups, etc.

Rock band has an advisory board.
Rock Band gets Metallica, plus has entire albums as DLC.
Slash to be the Boss in GHIII, plus do an original track for the game

etc, etc.

It's great for consumers, but I hope that (a) they remember that it's about the GAME, and (b) they both make money so we see more of the same.

To be clear, I'm sure they'll both see an assload of units, I'm just wondering whether the budget growth is outpacing the likely sales.

Facebook factoid

So I hooked up with some former Matrox co-workers last night in Toronto for dinner, and amongst other topics, the subject of Facebook came up. Some of that conversation became relevant to a thread over on Raph's blog, so I commented there and am reposting here.

I signed up for Facebook to check it out after several friends far more in-the-know about these things said that it was going to be dominant based on it’s prowess as an extensible platform (Marc Andreesen has a great blog post about this here).

Anyhow, I was surprised to see (a) how many people I knew were already on it, and (b) how they came out of the woodwork to find me, sans my searching for them. After perhaps 10 days of usage, it’s already my 3rd most useful SN service after linkedin and flickr. (I guess I have to add that Xbox Live is a SN service in many ways, and would come in #1 as most used, and perhaps #2 in most useful).

One trivial Facebook factoid that might skew the data: I’m a montrealer and have many friends in Toronto. Toronto has the largest population of facebook users of any city in the world, with over 700k users!

My own hypothesis on this is that it’s a combination of (a) higher BBand penetration in Canada than in US, (b) Facebook being relatively unknown in Europe/Asia (asserted by one of the dinner attendees, a Brit), and (c) Toronto being fairly affluent compared to the rest of Canada and certainly a bigger city than any other in Canada.

Note to Sony: Please quit peeing in the pool

Metaphorically speaking that is. They are really F***ing things up for the rest of us.

Thanks to N'gai Crole (via Alice) for the pointer to this ad for PS2 that Sony recently took out in India (rant to follow):

Here we have such a wonderful opportunity, with a growing, tech savvy, increasingly affluent, group of consumers in India, where gaming has been relatively small in the past, but is growing by leaps and bounds. Do we need to screw it up by importing our biased, misogynist, ass-backward marketing practices with us? We have enough trouble with our baggage of existing content, we don't need the marketing folks to push us further over the edge.

Thank you Sony! Thank goodness Indian women won't make the mistake of thinking they are welcome to purchase and play games. Good thing we'll make it clear from the get-go that games are for introverted pimply-faced boys. Wouldn't want anyone thinking otherwise.

Sheesh. As Alice asked, "Honestly. What kind of cavemen do they employ in Sony's marketing dept?"

E3 predictions

It's been a while since I've talked about the E3 Supernova and the resultant "Dwarf Star E3".

Since E3's kicking off this week while I rock the great white north, I guess now's the time to get predictions in. I think it's going to flop. Someone will claim victory by some standard of measure, but I think it's going to flop, and next years will either not exist, or be even smaller.

Perhaps rather than 'dwarf star', 'old yeller E3' would be a better name?

Sticks and stones...

..."and falling off the swings" perhaps should have been added to that kids rhyme. :-(

Healthy gaming

Dropping by the local mall here in Mississauga, I noticed the following sign

So I went in to check it out, and saw that it was a fitness club for kids all geared around interactive machines & games. PS2's hooked up to stationary bikes (stop pedalling and they switch off), DDR-style dance pad games, 3 motion sensing kung fu game, etc.

Here's a cell phone pick of the stations inside:

Very cool!

Ouch

IMAGE_046, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Jenny falling asleep with an icepack on her shoulder after falling off the swings.

This was before we realized it was a broken clavicle! Poor thing!

The fun continues...

So first day of "semi-working semi-vacation", my laptop goes belly up and I spend the day trying to get MS canada to get me a replacement.

On day two, my 3-yr old daughter Jennifer took a flying leap off the swing set trying to save a carebear from certain death and busted her clavicle in the process. Poor little thing.

So half of day one spent in the MS Canada IT department, half of day two spent in the emergency room.

Fun.

Does not compute...

...at least my laptop didn't after it went belly up hours after I landed in Toronto.

Arghh!

Was able to get someone at the MS office here replace it, but I lost a day and change of productivity in doing so.... >:-(

Video Clip of Harmonix's Rockband gameplay

Posted over on my other blog.

As the guys at Kotaku put it, it's like staring into the face of God.

The iPhone tipping point

OK, clearly my previous post was wrong and burning tablets have been popping out of bushes, as the hype behind the JesusPhone (aka the iPhone) seems to be justified. I have quite a number of friends that picked one up this weekend and the flurry of mail I've received is heavily laden with things like "sexy", "its like holding the future", "rules changing", "requiring pants-changing", etc.

I haven't looked too closely at the device (already seen a couple floating around the MS cafe this morning, before 8am even!) nor at the service & sign up. However, for all the stuff I read yesterday, one thing stood out:

Signup happens through Apple.

That is the single biggest thing about this entire launch. It fundamentally changes the rules of the game between device vendors and carriers - nay - between the tech industry (new guard) and the telco industry (old guard). Similarly to how iTunes, over time, changed the rules between the big music labels and the online services, only overnight, and more dramatically.

It took a pretty sexy device and a religious user base to get the telcos to sell their soul, but AT&T has done so. And after making a deal with the devil, I'm not sure there's any going back for them.

Obligatory (sparse) WiiWare commentary

If you heard something un-applish within this past week's din of prelaunch iPhone religious euphoria (seriously folks, it's not like burning tablets are scheduled to fly out of shrubs this week or something), that noise might have been Nintendo's beloved son, Reggie Fils Aime, announcing WiiWare, Nintendo's XBLA-like program for 3rd party downloadable games on the Wii.


Plenty of commentary so far (Dave and Ian both have good posts on the subject). Like both of them, I have a lot of questions and would go a step further to say that I think they either havent' thought things through entirely, or are being disingenuous in their promises.

I frankly do not beleive they can approach it in a way that titles are not vetted by Nintendo. They have stated that titles will need to be rated, and AO ratings would not fly, but I don't think that's enough.

Echoing and adding to the list of unanswered questions that David and Ian raised:

• What of content that might get an M or T rating, but that some groups would find offensive (e.g. Nazis), or for that matter, that some corporate groups would find offensive (would The McDonald Game fly?)
• If they aren't vetting concepts, then how are they prioritizing dev kits? From what I understand, there's a pent up demand for them, so how is this allocated if they have no idea what a dev is working on (or is this the real gating factor)
• If they aren't vetting concepts, but have the right to refuse games based on the above factors or other reasons, then might developers sink a couple hundred thousand into a game only to be turned away when showing up to Wiiware wanting to hang out their shingle?

I guess details will become clearer as we near the first release of titles, but I am skeptical to say the least.

Cool wedding story

PB060056, originally uploaded by Baron Von Zoobenstein.

Not the type of thing you'd normally find in my blog, but this is pretty cool. I learned today that Chris Mowrer, as graphic design lead in the casual games group here at MS, got married a few years back and did so... on the Pirates of the Carribean ride at Disneyland!

They didn't have permission either. They just got their whole wedding party in line, including minister, all got on the ride together, and then had the whole ceremony, vows and all, scripted and timed to fit into the rides timing between noisy bits.

Awesome.

Easy Rider

IMAGE_039, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

I forgot to mention... NEW BIKES!

Jenny's is pink with streamers off the handlebars, Tom's has a shark on it. Stereotypical but they got to pick.

Results of the Generic Defense Game experiment

Jim Greer of Kongregate points us to this great post from 'PsychoGoldfish', creator of Generic Defense Game. As the game's creator puts it, GDG "was built and distributed as an experiment to get some insight on the current state of the independent web-based gaming community"

It's a fantastic read, though I wish he'd actually disclosed figures behind comments like "The ads in the game were a real surprise to me. I did not expect the high level of performance the would ultimately yield".

Anyhow, here's the money quote from the whole article:

Now, a lot of commercialized sites have made it possible to earn a pretty good living in this industry without having to build your own income generating websites. These commercialized sites kicked off a whole new generation of talent, and really helped to raise the bar in quality…at least.. that was how it started.

Today, everyone from high-school kids to seasoned vetrans, are whipping off generic games (not just in the defense genre) because the big commercial sites will dish out $500 or so, for pretty much anything that works (and even some things that don’t). The casual players tend to stick to these commercialized sites, because they brand all the games they sponsor to the degree that the players feel these sites are where all the games are coming from. For many casual players… these are the only sites they check for new games.

This is great for these sites, as they build strong user bases, and stronger revenue streams. This is good for the developers because they can earn sponsorships without having to put fourth a great deal of effort. This is bad for the industry because the quality content is being buried by the quantity content.

Hollywood and Games summit panel

Joystiq has a summary of what sounds like a great panel from Hollywood and Games. (Gamasutra coverage here)

My fave quote comes from Ben Mattes (link to his blog on the right) who I bumped into back at MIGS, and who I hadn't seen since I knew him 15 years ago when I was friends with his sister in school. Anyhow, Ben says:

"There's not really room for "writers" in the video game world. We have game and story designers, not writers." Flint backed him up saying, "Your job is to give meaning to the gameplay."

Well put!

iPhone Odds and Oddities

Seems the blogosphere's abuzz with the imminent release of the iPhone. The hands-down coolest thing I've seen on this is that one of the internet betting sites has published odds for a bunch of iPhone release possibilities. A few examples:

Consumers are reported camping out waiting for an iPhone—3/1
Initial iPhones get recalled—30/1
iPhone sells at least 12 Million units in 2008—5/6
Apple’s stock jumps at least 10% in value in regards to the price on 6/30/07—1/2
Consumers pay at least three times the original price ($1,500) on ebay—2/1
The screen breaks/cracks like Apple’s first-generation nano (iPod)—150/1
There are mass reports of the battery life being less than the promised 8 hours—10/1
Someone is trampled while trying to get an iPhone—20/1
iPhone spontaneously combusts—150/1

Mass reports of battery life issues occur with EVERYTHING THAT HAS A BATTERY, so I'd give this one more like 1/10 :-)

No odds on Steve Jobs saying "BOOM!" during the release event.

Gaming Blogs of the Fairer Sex

It may just be proportional to the growth of the blogosphere, but I've noted a fair number of gaming blogs by and for the fairer sex. These have certainly been around a while (I've been a reader of Jane's site for a while, for example), but there do seem to be more of them cropping up.

My list of feeds includes:
Feminist Gamers (along with the associated Cerise 'zine)
GameGirlz (go Canada!)
New Game Plus
Heroine Next Door
Guilded Lillies

Just to name a few examples.

Anyhow, a new one came to my attention, Girl in the Machine. And with reviews/editorials like this one of Super Princess Peach, and posts with titles like Lara Croft's Ten Year Mam Jam, I have a new favorite feminist gamer blog!

Farming Gold on a Pauper's Margins

An interesting article by Daniel Terdiman (via Alice), in which he interviews Brock Pierce, CEO of Affinity Media, who used to own IGE, the pioneer firm in the area of barter and trade of virtual items.

Business is down, it seems, as pressure from competition, mainly Chinese, willing to live of thinner margins. The money quote:

...as Chinese competitors get more and more sophisticated, they are also willing to accept less and less profit margin. And that means, "they're perfectly happy to accept $20,000 in profit on $2 million of revenue." That, for all you out there without a calculator, is a 1 percent profit margin...

While I'm not surprised that the margins are thin, and that the pioneer in the area is being squeezed out, I *am* surprised that the 'living of 1% margins' idea goes unquestioned (not just in Daniel's article, but in general), when it's a Chinese competitor in question.

Is it feasible? Perhaps, but it often seems to go unquestioned.

Let's take this example. If indeed companies are selling $2M worth of virtual items & currency at only 1% over what it cost them, what other possibilities might exist?

• These competitors may actually be vertically integrated. These might be gold farmers (organizationally, a gold farming factory/sweatshop) that are looking to cut out the middleman. That 1% profit might be over the 5% they had to give up to a middleman in the past.
• They may be living off the float. Not sure what the turn-around time is on cutting checks to sellers, but with enough capital coming through, they could put that money to work during the month it takes them to pay someone.
• Trade off currency exchange rates between China & US.

I don't know that any of these is the case, of course. But it stands to reason that if they are only making one point off of it, there's something else helping pay the bills, cheap overhead or not.

A clear sign that games are getting too big

...is that they are building in features so that you don't have to play them.

Whaaa? Huh? Come again?

Recently, I'be been playing Forza 2. Great racing sim. Best I've played in a while, hands-down. My only complaint is that it's TOO BIG. Working my way through the career progression was taking forever, but I wanted to do it (a) for acheivements/gamerscore, and more importantly (b) to unlock all the cars and tracks. I want to see how the AC 427 Cobra drives compared to the one I used to own, and I want to race places like Nuremburg (sp?).

So I was surprised to find that at the start of a race, one thing you can do is HIRE A DRIVER! That driver will then go race for you and generally, will win. So I've been playing the game, but before I sign off, I'll pick one more race and let my Xbox go play by itself for 20 minutes, up-leveling me a little bit.

Now today, I read over on buttonmashing that discusses EA's "Sim to complete" feature in NCAA 2008. You basically can fast-forward ahead during a game, having the AI play for you, and jump in at the tail end of the game.

It's interesting that in the effort to justify big budget games, 'hours of gameplay' has become this metric that's frequently used, but is not necesarily what ALL consumers want. Some, like me, want the quality without requiring the quantity. I loved that the last Tomb Raider took me like 10-12 hours to complete. I've put off playing Oblivion because I hear it's great but takes >50 hours to play.

Building in of these features is kind of recognition that to some gamers, less is definitely more.

Over-criminalizing copyright

I'm giving yet another link to the amazingly-verbose-yet-worth-reading Patry Copyright Blog. This one to a post entitled "over-criminalizing copyright".

Short version goes like this:

He, and an English judge and copyright scholar, agree on the following: Copyright infringement is being treated as a crime, and therefore prosecuted using taxpayer dollars. This is unnecesary, since adequate civil remedies exist. Criminal proceedings should be reserved for large commercial piracy enterprises and the like.

In short, if the RIAA wants to sue teens, they should do it on their dime. Just because it's rampant and difficult for them to sue them all doesn't mean their mom and dads should have to foot the bill for it with their tax dollars.

He closes citing NBC/Universal's general counsel on their efforts to lobby the gov't for stricter IP enforcement and prosecution as an example.

It's interesting that many of these straightforward arguments get lost in the rhetoric that the special interest groups and their lobbyists throw around.

And now, a word from our sponsors...

I'm selling out. I'm putting up ads.

Not that I really think I can sell out for an significant amount of coin, but I want to play around a bit with the consumer-side of adsense and some of it's competitors, so I'm trying a couple things for a few months and I'll see how they pan out. I'll share results (if any) here at that time.

The first thing is putting an ad block on my blog. I'm using text ad links and as you can see (at right, under 'sponsors') they have yet to populate the feed. We'll see whether anything comes of it. Proceeds from these ads, if any, will go to my yearly contribution to the EFF. Ads won't be a big part of the blog and the blog will continue to deliver the miniscule value that it does by entertaining readers via my pedantic banter about games, kids, and my cat, etc. It'll also serve as the yardstick for the other thing I'm doing.

The second thing I'm trying is a little more interesting, IMHO. Inspired by this Seth Godin post, I created another blog, with a very narrow focus. It'll get one post a day, and that's it. You can find it at www.gamebizvideo.com. Proceeds from the ads on this site (again, should there be any), will be used to market the blog itself. I want to see whether niche content + shoestring bootstrapping can work. Again, I'll share results here.

That is all, we now return you to regularly scheduled programming.

Can casual games industry draft behind poker?

Last month, I blogged about the Poker Players Alliance group that was trying to lobby for changes to gambling law to recognize games of skill as being just that, skill based, and therefore not under the umbrella of 'gambling'.

Today Kotaku points out that a resolution has been introduced into congress to tackle the subject.

The resolution can be found in full here.

Kotaku reads this as being relevant to MMO's, but it's clearly relevant to ALL games. The opening paragraphs of the bill reference Bridge and Mahjong, for example. Skill-gaming business models are currently a viable business model for casual games as well as core games like FPS games and the like. One of the reasons the model has been limited is that it's currently an 'arms length' business model, since many still see it as gambling.

Think about it. When you tell mom you are bringing home your new fiancee, and he/she is a professional poker player, what's mom's reaction? Now change that to professional chess player. You imagined a different reaction, no? Poker has come a long way in terms of public perception, though it still has some air of vice around it.

A societies laws reflect it's values, and vice versa, though generally the laws lag when the values change. If something like this were to become law, it merely reflects the fact that people are open to the idea of games of skill being something that can be an arena for fair competition.

I for one, look forward to watching ESPN's Celebrity Zuma Championship.

Don't get me started about henchmen

...has got to be my favorite line from Austin's book, Soon I Will Be Invincible, which I just finished yesterday. I really enjoyed it.

I'm not quite sure what to compare it with, but if you enjoyed the depth that something like Watchmen added to the comic superhero genre, then you'll enjoy the book, as it goes that much deeper.

The heroes and villains are richly portrayed, and I enjoyed the way many of them have disdain or envy of one another's powers or backgrounds (science-camp vs magic, born-with vs self-induced, etc).

I highly recommend!

Mocking Magritte

A threadless design I'd missed out on just got reprinted and I got mine in the mail today. Score!

Wacka Wacka Redux

Got around to playing Pac Man Championship Edition on Xbox Live Arcade tonight.

It's really quite good. Like most of the reviews are saying, it should have been called something else. Pac Man 2 perhaps. Anyhow, it's good. Check it out.

On Cathedrals, Copyright, and the Courts

Seems Sony's latest source of grief has been the Church of England getting miffed bout Manchester Cathedral being used as a locale in the PS3 title, Resistance.

The church threatening Sony with legal action, and Sony, staying true to the title's name, is resisting.

The subject seems frivolous at first glance, does it not? Games are art. The church is a building open to the public. Lighten up, folks in tall hats!

Now is the time you ask whether to take the blue pill, and keep on thinking that way; or take the red pill, and see just how far the entangled legal rabbit hole you want to go?

William Patry, who is Google's senior copyright counsel and maintains an awesome blog, has a great post on the subject.

Amongst the various facts at play here:

• Architecture is a creative work and therefore copied under copyright.
• Most copyright laws take this into account and allow for things like taking a picture in a public place where you might happen to get a building in the shot.
• The INSIDE of buildings is another story
• The laws are different in the UK and the US, and the game was made in the US but the 'source material' in this case is in the UK. The game is also sold there.
• When the building was built is also an issue, and while this church is quite old, it underwent some renovation more recently.

Crazy.

Anyhow, it's very relevant to anyone making games that may hope to include real-world environments. Go read it.

The pitter patter of little Twitters

Unless you've been on the moon, passed out in a Opium den, or otherwise incapacitated and off the grid, you've probably heard about Twitter, Jaiku, or a number of other similar start-up services.

Labelled 'micro-blogging' apps by some, 'group IM' or 'push messaging' by others, these apps let you build/join social networks and then post little tidbits of your life to them.

I'm torn. For things like conferences, where you may have a network of people sitting in conflicting sessions, trying to hook up for dinners/parties, etc, these seem like a killer app. For the rest of my life they seem like self-induced info-pollution.

Anyhow, if you are curious, this March post by Danah Boyd (inspired by use of Dodgeball and Twitter at SXSW) is a great piece on the topic, discussing pros & cons, and giving some fascinating perspective of the use of these apps (and social tech in general) by teens. A sampling:

"The biggest challenge with teens is that they do not have all-you-can-eat phone plans. Over and over, the topic of number of text messages in one’s plan comes up. And my favorite pissed off bullying act that teens do involves ganging up to collectively spam someone so that they’ll go over their limit and get into trouble with their parents"

One for the ladies?

Silverjet airlines in the UK is attempting to differentiate themselves by having at least one ladies-only restroom per plane. Nice differentiator.

This ad talking about it, while catchy, I think misses the mark of it's target audience.

At least I think so. I think I'll go watch it a few more times to decide...

Besting BestBuy, Outgeeking the Geek Squad

I have a personality flaw. Well, I'm sure many would argue more than one, but one in particular that is pertinent to this post. The flaw is that I, when dealing with people like sales clerks or customer service personal at technology companies or stores, am a snob. That is to say that I walk into an interaction with them, I come in with a prejudice that I know more than they do, and that if they were moderately competent, they'd have a better job. I know it's wrong, but I often feel this way.

It doesn't help that I am occasionally right. This is one of those instances.

A while ago, my wife's laptop started acting up. Slowing down, the fan spinning up into some high-power, high-heat state, becoming unresponsive, blue-screening. My first thought was a virus, my second was poor ventilation.

Virus scan showed nothing. Taking the laptop apart revealed a mountain of cat hair clogging up the heatsink/vents. That was easy enough to fix, but didn't help fix the problem. I figure a clean windows install is in order. However, the thing had degraded to the point of not even booting, so I can't get to where I can back up files (and we are looonng overdue for backup).

Needing to get some kind of bootable external drive going, I put the project on hold. Wife grows impatient, takes laptop to the geeksquad at Best buy.

They have it a week, I have to speak to them numerous times on the phone ("yes, I tried that. No, we don't want you to do that."). At the end of the week, they say they can't recover the data and can't help us. Thanks.

I go pick up the laptop, and the guy gives me back the wrong power supply for it. I tell him so, and he says he's sure it's the one my wife brought in.

It was. I realize she brought the wrong one in (for my laptop, also a toshiba). This means the geeksquad guys spent a max of 60 minutes on the machine, running it on battery until the battery died, and then gave up when they couldn't figure out why it wouldn't power up.

*sigh*

Long story short, I bought a hard drive, swapped it into the laptop, did a fresh Vista install, and bought an external USB drive enclosure for the old hard drive, plugged it in, backed up the needed files. All in all it cost me $140 and a few hours of my time, vs Bestbuy who would have charged me about $300 for the same work, but instead charged me a 1/2 hr labor.

I do think services like Geeksquad are a good idea. Dollar time, nickel job, and all that. Just don't expect them to do anything that even remotely veers from the well-beaten path.

What's a startup cost these days?

Blogosphere abuzz with Guy Kawasaki's breakdown of his "Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalist, Long Tail, Social Media site" startup.

Total cost: $12,107.09

Go read, discuss amongst your friends...

(I never asked my dad how much he and his cohorts spent on their little post-retirement web startup).

Winds of change

Is it just me, or is this whole "when will games get credit for being an artform?" thing starting to get some traction as of late:

• An article on the subject here includes tidbits like the fact that South Korea drops mandatory military service for those that work in the games industry (because they are contributing to one of Korea's key cultural exports (IGDA site via Raph)
• CNN's got 'Presidential Pong' right there on the homepage. The games equivalent of the editorial cartoon.
• NYT beat them to the same thing a week or two earlier with Food Import Folly, a game about the pressure the FDA is under to try and protect the food supply with an ever growing percentage of imported food and no growth in the manpower to keep it safe.

Strangely, Jack Thompson is silent on the whole thing. And I think that's an accomplishment on it's own! :-)

Its a small world after all...

Adam, a former coworker at Intel, has a great post up about some of his recent work related travels.

We all hear plenty about the shrinking planet, how we're all more interconnected than ever, etc. This drove it home in a really palpable way. A snippet (as background, it's worth pointing out that Adam spent some time in the past working at Los Alamos):

"I had lunch with the local manager. i was thinking about it last night, the fact that in the past 2 years i have spend a significant amount of time in countries previously considered hostile (read: communist). both the last two places my parents would think their kids would never spend time. think about this for a minute: as soon as 1998, we were afraid of having bombs dropped on us from these people. now, i am having lunch in a country peopel used used to get shot at if they left, and now i am having lunch in a building in that country. i spent time building technology to help defend my country from these people.

It comes out during the discussion that the man across the table from me used to work at sarov. sarov is the los alamos of russia. so here we were, literally trying to kill each other 10 years ago (or protect our country from the killing machines of the other place), talking as if it never happened. i think about this again when discussing the mathematics of snowflake generation and modelling the collection on tree leaves when it reaches a critical threshold and falls off, startled when i hear the engineer say 'this is quite beautiful'."

Go read the rest.

Better pray, better not be gay

This says SO much about what is wrong with this country.

The moment I get citizenship, I'm voting for the first gay black atheist woman who enters the race, regardless of party affiliation or platform!

(via Freakonomics blog)

...but then you have to close

When I lived on the east coast, I never got acquainted with pressure washers. Then I moved to the Pacific Northwest and learned that the hundred-plus days of consecutive wet that we call winter (eat your heart out Noah) tends to make lots of things moldy/mildewy/mossy and so a pressure washer becomes standard household equipment.

I went out and bought one this weekend, and now the deck around the pool looks shiny clean.

When shopping for pressure washers, you quickly learn that there are two variables at play, and that they scale more or less linearly: Price, and Pressure (as in output water pressure ) rated in PSI. There's also a gas vs electric question, but I have a hunch that this is a non issue. Small ones are electric, big ones are gas, and that's that.

It only takes a couple minutes using one to figure out that more pressure means that you can hold the diverging spray further away from the work surface, and that this in turn means the spray is wider and you can cover a larger area in less time. Given that more powerful units cost more, there's a pretty clear time-is-money trade-off the buyer is making.

I don't think most people figure this out before buying one. Thus I was pleased when shopping for one this weekend and saw that Loews has all their displays with a uniformly presented rating translation. Something akin to "this pressure washer can clean a _25_ square foot area in 5 minutes.

I have a hunch, however, that they are leaving a bunch of sales on the table. What they should have done was connected the dots for buyers. Determine the size of the average deck or driveway, and then said "This unit will clean the average driveway in 4 hrs".

Customers would have a clear choice then of what their money bought them. "Hmm.... do I want to spend an extra $100 to save 2 hrs every time I do the driveway?"

Never hurts to make the value proposition crystal clear to the customer.

World of LastResortCraft?

Ok, I'm not a WoW player, so I don't understand teh mechanics of how all this stuff works.

However, I was surprised to hear (via Raph) that Blizzard is suing a company doing in-game spamming of their gold-farming services.

Normally, going the legal route is a last resort. It would seem that in an in-game scenario, for a game for which (a) Blizzard write the policies & terms of use, and (b) Blizzard and their partners administer the servers, there'd just be an easier and more effective way.

Resorting to the courts, especially in this case where (as Raph points out) the defendant is a company based in China, seems like a real last-resort type of effort.

Catchup

Sorry I'm behind on posting.

Busy week last week, the tail-end of which was a quick in-out to LA for some meetings. Managed to squeeze in super yummy Dinner with Justin, Merci, Alice & Cory; and had a super decadent poolside breakfast at the Viceroy with Souris and some of the FrieNDA crew (I'd say more, but of course, 'no one talks about fight club').

(pic via Souris. Hope she doesn't mind my snarfing her flickr pix!)

Oh yeah, and I immediately got a haircut after getting back home, after Alice told me I looked like a Roman legionaire!

Soon I will be invincible

...is the title of Austin Grossman's new book. Site here.

I just noticed it got a side-bar writeup in this month's Wired. It looks awesome. I can't wait to give it a read.

Go Austin!

hammerzeit

hammerzeit, originally uploaded by henrikki1.

Spotted on flickr, (henrikk1's photostream). Brilliant!

Convergence Shmonvergence!

Clint has a his feathers ruffled over Hollywood directory Michael Bay's forray into games.

At first glance it's the standard "those hollywood guys wouldn't know a good game if it hit them!" rant, but it's worth reading, as he hits on some of the key issues in the hollywood and games convergence debate:

Do they think that 10 years from now I won't be sure whether I just watched a movie or played a game? Again, I have to make some assumptions about what they mean to have this kind of crap make any sense at all... I can only assume they mean 'the production methodologies and business models are increasingly similar and it is becoming more and more practical to look at doing feature film development and game development simultaneously as part of a multi-media production that increases efficiency'. In other words, they mean convergence in the purest business sense.

Anyhow, worth a read. I agree with him a hundred percent.

Hath no one an itch to bitch about the pitch?

I have no idea what in-game product placements are going for in triple-A game titles these days. However, the Freakonomics blog points us to this interesting Businessweek post about the cost of product placement in TV shows like Martha, Oprah, etc, that may point to a high point for us to shoot for.

Stewart’s syndicated NBC show, which airs daily at 4 PM, is currently lagging in the ratings and can only charge advertisers about $10,000 for a 30-second spot, as opposed to $18,000 for The View or a staggering $100,000 for Oprah. But if an advertiser spends at least $250,000 total on ads during a season, the money also buys a special “branded segment” on the show, along with mentions in Stewart’s magazine and radio broadcast.

It seems the idea is working: airtime for Martha Stewart Living is sold out through the 2007-08 season. Latecomers or advertisers who don’t want to invest the full $250,000 can also buy a “one-time in-show oral mention with product close-up,” as BusinessWeek calls it, for $100,000, while a two-minute segment that “works in an advertiser’s talking points” starts at $250,000.

A couple things to observe related to gaming:

• The article seems to hint that product placements are being sold in packages along with commercial spots. Most of the game ad stuff I've seen seems to be selling one or the other, not both packaged together (though I'm not sure. I'll have to check what our guys do on MSN Games).
• Not that I've watched a lot of named-for-first-name TV shows, but the product placements are pretty clearly paid-for, and yet the audience doesn't seem to question Martha's cred. Hath no one an itch to bitch about the pitch?

Live on PC

IMAGE_034, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Check out the friend's list. Note Halo 2 for PC showing up on Live.

Sweet!

Stickin' it to the man

IMAGE_033, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Sticker someone affixed to the gas pump

TEEEEEVEEEE!

Souris called it Baywatch + Alias. I'd argue Baywatch + La Femme Nikita.

Either way, the trailer for the upcoming remake of The Bionic Woman has me giddy!

I'll be the first to call it: Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner cameos!

And can we get some bitchin' 70's track suits in there please?!

Hit (or miss) driven businesses

The Freakonomics blog points us to this article on the publishing business. Some choice snippets:

• [on picking hits] The answer is that no one really knows. “It’s an accidental profession, most of the time,” said William... “If you had the key, you’d be very wealthy. Nobody has the key.”
• [On enthusiasts for the medium making up the core of the employees in the segment] "The people who go into it don’t do it for the money, which might explain why it’s such a bad business"
• [on impressions of the business] ...whenever he discusses the industry with people in other industries, “they’re stunned because it’s so unpredictable, because the profit margins are so small, the cycles are so incredibly long, and because of the almost total lack of market research.”
• “The whole thing is educated guesswork, but guesswork nonetheless. You just try to make sure your upside mistakes make up for your downside mistakes.”

The article, of course, is talking about the BOOK publishing business. However, if you were thinking games, it'd still be right on the money.

Nice to know we're not alone.

Safe sims

These *awesome* safe sex public service announcements from France have a very Sims-inspired look to them. Far more positive and realistic message than what you see here in the US (the slogan at the end translate to 'Live long enough to find The One')

Caution: They are NSFWIPA (not safe for work in prudish America), and if that's true for the hetero vid below, it's especially true for the gay version.

Pub AIDES Baby Baby
Uploaded by PeteRock

Power(up) to the People

In a bizarre example of cultural mash-up, Gamejew (who I chatted with briefly at GDC) covers the police brutality during the LA May Day protest.

Slippery slopes

IMAGE_032, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Did some spring skiing at Whistler as part of a group trip. Weather, snow, and fun were exceptional.

Got rather sunburned though!

Back to work today *sigh*

Are bullet points the new hem length?

Some time ago, Guy Kawasaki blogged about SlideShare, a web startup for sharing/storing presentations, and a contest they were having to judge the best presentations.

The contest winners were announced, and they are worth looking at.

A few thoughts:

• These of course aren't presentations at all. They are slide decks. Presentation materials. Minus the speaker, they aren't exactly 'presented'. That being said, I think the site/service is interesting. It would also be interesting if they supported posting video/audio of a talk along with the deck, or perhaps a transcript (like I described in my presentation-related post a while back).
• Most of the presentations subscribe to the very image-heavy, minimal-text style used by Lawrence Lessig, Steve Jobs, and others (more on this here). The judges of this contest, like me, beleive this to be a 'winning' style of presentation. I do wonder though, if we are collectively blinded by the fact that its just plain different than what we are used to seeing. Is this the optimal solution, or are presentation styles just that... styles. Will text quantity vary with trend? And if so, as I asked in the title of this post, are bullet points the new hem length?
• [It would be interesting to ask Seth Godin, who himself favors this style of presentation, what he things a 'purple cow' presentation looks like when all presentations look like purple cows :-)]

Those comments aside, some thoughts on the specific contest-winning 'presentations':

• "Shift Happens" is a great example of using visuals to give facts some punch.
• "Meet Henry" is a great story-telling, single message sales pitch.
• While a little text-heavier than the others, "Unlocking Cool" uses some 'big font' slides to drive key points home (Slide twelve's "Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast" slide is a great example)

In any case, there are some good lessons to be learned here. The site is worth bookmarking.

Skill vs Chance and the law

The Freakonomics blog has an interesting post about the current debate about poker, and whether it is a game of chance or a game of skill.

The reason it matters at all is because games of chance are covered by a whole other set of laws, namely those covering gambling. The online version of which has recently been outlawed.

Recently a group called the Poker Players Alliance has been trying to lobby for the legitimization of poker, esp online. Annie Duke (of TV poker fame) has a good post on it on her blog. Her post discusses how games of skill can be identified by a "can I throw the game?" test. It's a compelling argument but I suspect it's flawed. As an aside, I predict that mathematician blogs will go through a veritable meme-circle-jerk on this topic over the coming week or two :-)

Does this matter to those of us in video games if we aren't involved in making a poker variant? It does.

The game of skill vs game of chance debate is relevant to any online multiplayer games, especially if any kind of 'play-for-cash' or 'pro tournament for cash prizes' is going to be explored as a possible business model.

Currently, play-for-cash services (e.g. we offer one on MSN Games, in affiliation with a partner) go to great lengths to ensure that there are no random numbers generated differently, or other factors that could result in a randomization of the problem set thrown at the two players in such a way that could affect outcome. As a result, there's a fairly limited set of games they can work with, as each has to be customized for the service.

It's possible that precendent set with poker could affect whether the play-for-cash model thrives or withers.

Silver Surfer

Back before I bought my Cobra, I did a fair bit of research into the different replica manufacturers and how they differed.

Kirkham motorsports was considered one of the premium manufacturers, and one of if not the only one making aluminum bodies, like the originals used.

So if you find yourself blowing the extra cash to get an aluminum body vs fiberglass, how do you show it off? Well one way is to not paint it.

I knew that they offered a brushed aluminum finish, but only today saw that they offer a POLISHED aluminum body. How bad-ass is this car?

Is there not a law against driving a big frikkin mirror around? You could blind somebody!

Will game schools let students actually *make* games?

In a conversation with some Digipen students at the IGF at GDC (their game was a finalist), I was *shocked* to learn that they didn't actually have the right to commercialize their game, but that the Digipen school owned the rights to any games created by their students.

I was shocked. I was also naive. I turns out many of today's educational systems are imposing unreasonable copyright terms on students in their media programs. To my knowledge this isn't happening with written works so much as with film, games, etc. I can't see why one would be treated differently than another.

In an interesting development, Boing Boing today posted something about students at USC's film school protesting the copyright policy, and petitioning to have the right to have their works licensed under Creative Commons.

I hope they are successful, and I hope places like Digipen follow suit (or are forced to).

Let there be Bible Fight

From the folks at Adult Swim, comes perhaps the most sacreligious game ever. Bible Fight

From a mail list I'm on:

Bible Fight is a free web game on adultswim.com and part of their new strategy of offering original games for the masses to play when they should be working. Originally conceived as Sunday School meets Street Fighter 2, Bible Fight blends two of America's favorite past times - religion and violence - to tell the tale of a long lost contest between some of the greatest names of the Bible to see who among them is most deserving to sit at the right hand of God.

Search your hearts, dear friends, and take special care to listen for that quiet knocking. That knocking is Bible Fight, here to fill that persistent nagging emptiness that worldly possessions and success just can't satisfy. Bible Fight will cure what ails you. It will lift you, seperate you; it will turn you into a nine-year-old Hindu boy.

Naughty game designer! You'll burn! :-)

Gametap: Jack of ever-more trades...

This announcement today that Gametap is adding more types of content (current release PC titles), and more business models (ad-supported/free, paid download) to it's already wide mix of offerings.

I don't beleive it's going to help.

As I've said before, I think their problem is that they don't offer a clear best-of-breed, 100% complete solution to any one customer need. Just many things, none of them well.

Dellaro Imbroglio!

I consider it an honor and a priviledge to call Jason Della Rocca a friend and former co-worker. Even more so, now that he's acheived that most notorious of game industry accolades: getting chastized on CNN by Jack Thompson.

For those that haven't followed, it went something like this:

• Guy goes nuts, shoots up Virginia Tech and kills a large number of students in the process. (This would be "The part that really sucks")
• JT gets on the media bandwagon and blames the shooting on this guy's game playing, etc.
• JDR posts something on his blog calling JT an ambulance chaser.
• JT is asked about this on MSNBC, just about poops himself and calls JDR a "jackass" and an "idiot". Video here:

• JT challenges JDR to a public debate on the subject.
• JDR takes the bait, mails JT on interest to debate.
• JT agrees, provided he is paid $3000 for the speaking event.
• JDR doesn't want to get paid for this, JT declines freebie.
• JDR posts whole thread to his blog.

I don't have any specific commentary here other than to point out the sheer lunacy of it all. JT is a buffoon, American media is a corporate ad-revenue-driven machine out of control, and there doesnt' seem to be much that can be done about either.