Tidbits from around the blogosphere...

Pressed for time (long weekend or no!), here are a few things that caught my eye this week:

• Google Earth has a flight sim easter egg. Like many, I thought "Steve.... what are you up to?", but he claims "nuffin!". (My first thought is that this is just like any other Christensen effect thing - Those that sell flight sims (like MS) just have to stay far enough ahead of free to justify the money.
• This story of the boorish behavior of one exec director of the "video game expo" at PAX (VGE seems to want to compete with them and was attending to poach talent and gather intel) is very funny. Good luck with your event there buddy.
• Ubisoft seems to be dipping their toe in the water with free, ad-supported full PC games. A few of the casual folks have been trying their hand at this, but this is the first I've seen it for full retail titles like Far Cry. Curious to see how it turns out (i.e. if you see more games showing up --> it went well!)
• There's been some fallout about the ESRB changing the rating on Manhunt 2 (from AO to M) and their not wanting to disclose what changed in the game or the rating of it. Sounds like the ESRB is rapidly turning into the MPAA. Now more than ever, I want to see this film.
• The 'shrimponomics' post on Freakonomics is required reading. First, read this one. Now answer the question, and only then (spoiler) read this one. The exercise, now that you've completed shrimponomics, is to think about how this applies to your company (i.e. in my case, game-o-nomics, console-o-nomics, and Redmond-o-nomics :-)
• Maven and her friends: The state of AI on a host of classic games (connect-4, Scrabble...)

Passed on Pax (again)

Another Pax goes by, and I didn't make it down again. Shame on me! It's in my back yard, too.

Anyhow, while I didn't make it, I sure am glad for the folks it brings to town. Drinks with folks a couple nights ago, and then today I got a note that Clint was in town to demo his game at Pax, so I hooked up with him and Chris Butcher for drinks and more interesting conversation.

Talking big-budget games certainly is a different conversation from the indie-related conversation of the other night. I can't really go into what was discussed, but it's just interesting how many different "spheres of perspective" there can be in this industry of ours.

Anyhow, on Pax, next year I'll attend! Promise!

Zero Punctuation reviews Psychonauts

Bravo! Even better than the last one, and it's bitter and profane WHILE being a *good* review!

Yeah, and for those of you that still haven't bought and played it, shame on you! Go do it now. You can get it cheap and the Xbox version is backward compatible on 360.

Link

The Wii and The Unhandy Valley

With Pax in town, I went into the city last night and hooked up with Jane, Casey, Andre and some other folks for good ol' geeky conversation.

A particularly entertaining piece of the evening for me was watching (sometimes facilitating, sometimes instigating) an argument between Casey and a guy (forget his name) from Nintendo, about the Wii and more specifically about it's controller.

Casey was expressing a complaint about the Wii controller that he was having trouble articulating. His point was that while it may sense motion, and that may be useful, he was dissatisfied with it because it didn't do what it *promised*.

As of late, I've been finding myself often, in discussions with coworkers, developers, other industry folk, coming back to this point about what it is that you promise the customer. It's a kind of very high-standard, high-level litmus test that you can apply to any product offering you are working on and see if it passes a straight-face test.

Anyhoo.

Casey's point was that Nintendo was directly or indirectly promising something with the Wii controller that ultimately it didn't deliver. That users expect it to sense position AND motion, but because it's only the latter, then have to get 'trained' on the device. Wii tennis, while fun, has that moment for everyone where they say "oh, I get it, it's not really like a racquet".

Further underlining the point, I added that in Wii sports baseball, it expects motion, not position, and thus bunting isn't an option. I can't just hold up the bat in the right place and let the ball hit IT.

The Nintendo guy couldn't quite grok why this was an issue, which is when I made what I think is a clever analogy:

Similarly to how there is an "uncanny valley" that refers to how, as artificial representations of humans illicit an aversive response as the approach - but don't reach - realism; I beleive there is an "unhandy valley" that occurs as methods of input to a simulation approach their real-life equivalents - but don't quite reach it.

Anyone who's tried any of the VR simulations of the past decade can attest to this, only most of those are disconnected enough that they don't approach the valley. I think the Wii controller gets near enough (or to Casey's point, sets the expectation that it gets near enough) that people have this disconnect on their first try with it.

Now, don't get me wrong, the Wii and Wii sports is good ol' fun. But there is that training step, and within it, a little bit of disappointment that it wasn't really magic after all.

I do wonder, as these types of controllers improve (position + motion, lower latency, higher precision, etc, etc), will consumers grow more enthralled with them... or will we find that the valley runs deep and wide?

ZOMG! Best game review EVAR!

Thanks to Ozymandias for the link to the Escapist new video feature, Zero Punctuation. This episode's review is of the Heavenly Sword PS3 demo, and it is the funniest thing I've seen in ages. Must see.

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).