gaming is coming home

aka 'We Have a Winner'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the ontology of gamers

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

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

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

Then game Brain Age. This has turned her into a true gamer. She has accepted games as part of her daily life. She understands the unique interactive entertainment found in games. And today we have a Wii in our house.

...

This is the second version of Brain Age. It has a mini Mario game in it. Now my wife comes to me and says, I can beat you at this game, anytime. She’s bragging! To me! Looking at her scores, she’s right. She turned into a hardcore gamer much faster than I expected. Wifeometer has shot up dramatically. So there it is. Now she’s playing Wii sports. Not only that, she invites our friends over to play Wii sports.

source

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

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

more console jockeying

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

games are good for you

no, really.

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

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

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

Use Case VII

gaming, or metagaming, via mobile


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

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

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

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

Virtual Property and Real Money Trading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not everyone loves the muscle-bound hunk

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

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

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

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

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

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