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.