SIGGRAPH 2006 started in Boston this weekend, and happily, it includes a full two days of game-centric content. Unfortunately, I’ve had to miss most of it for a variety of personal reasons. However, I did manage to catch two good sessions, plus a game of Guitar Hero 2.  :-)

The subject of the first session was Cloud, a game developed by students at USC and released to much applause in 2005. For those of you who haven’t seen it yet, Cloud is intended to evoke childhood dreams of flight. It also differs from most games in that you can’t lose or even feel like you’re losing (there are no points, countdown timers, etc). You play until you win. This is mostly old news, but the session revealed a few things that I found interesting:

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Ever since I saw the movie Ghost (how many years ago was that?) I’ve been idly musing about a game in which the player must avoid death’s agents. It goes something like this: at the start of the game, your character (along with several other people) has just died in a mysterious accident. Your ghost is standing over your body, in much the way that ghosts are frequently portrayed as doing so in popular film.

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Articles of Interest

• EA, ESPN, and ESPN.com will offer a $20 pay-per-view behind-the-scenes look at Madden NFL 07. An interesting stab at for-profit transmedia development, but the price seems so steep! I wonder if EA can pull this off?
• AMD is buying ATI for $5.4B; cites AMD’s growing relationship with Dell as one of the main reasons for the merger.
• Via Wonderland, news that Habbo Hotel in China is selling matching real-world and virtual goods (in tandem). Flowers, clothes, and movie tickets can be purchased online by customers, and the matching real items will be delivered to the purchaser the next day.

To my knowledge, most large media companies are still struggling with how to handle PR in the current online landscape. Some of the questions I’m most commonly asked include:

• Should we recognize bloggers? Which ones, and how?
• Should we participate in online forums or not?
• Can we influence democratic online news systems like digg.com?

There are no short (nor scientifically-proven) answers to these questions. But blogs, forums, and democratic news systems have become incredibly important mediums of communication, and major brands simply cannot afford to ignore them any longer.

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• Nice article about making games more fun by making losing more fun.
• South Koreans have so many free online game options that many now choose to frequently jump from game to game (and never pay anything).
• More information about gold farming in MMOGs; global annual sales of virtual items has reached $200M.
• GameTap adds in-game IM and multiplayer support to its service, in an effort to differentiate itself.

David Cole (of DFC Intelligence) has published an analysis of the Playstation 3. It’s well-written, so I thought I’d share parts of it with you:

We emphasize that there is a great deal of uncertainty because much will depend on how individual players execute their strategies over the next several years. However, two things are clear: 1) the high price of the PlayStation 3 is going to slow overall industry growth, especially for software and 2) if Sony does not change its current strategy for the PS3 the system will probably end up in third place in installed base. Microsoft and Nintendo have been handed that golden opportunity and both companies have a chance to make their systems the market leader. However, it looks like under any scenario the video game market is going to be severely fragmented, with several incompatible platforms having strong market share and even the possibility of a platform doing well in one region and struggling in another.

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• Peter Molyneux explains his views on game design and management.
• US game software sales were up 25% in June, and 15% when compared to the same period last year. Noteworthy culprits cited: games for the DS Lite, and THQ’s Cars, which sold 646K units in June alone.

Last week, the ever-outspoken Mark Rein (VP, Epic Games) publicly attacked the viability of episodic gaming. His arguments, while somewhat emotional, were nevertheless a bit different from those I’ve heard in the past, which leads me to write yet another defense of this emerging business model. The first of Rein’s arguments:

Customers are supposed to buy half a game for $20, then wait six months for an episode? When I put a game down, I want to try a new one. Episodic games that offer faster turnaround will inevitably be using a lot of recycled content, walking through the same environments and shooting the same enemies with the same weapons.

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• Good interview of Steve Allison, Midway’s Chief Marketing Officer. Some interesting anecdotes about concept testing, PR, and branding.
• The attach rate for Xbox Live amongst Xbox 360 users is now 60%, with 75% of connected customers using Marketplace, and 65% using Arcade.
• The University of California at Santa Cruz will offer a computer science degree tailored toward video-game design. Courses in art and narration will supplement technical classes.
• Ravi Purushotma, one of our graduate students, has some really neat thoughts on using properties like Neopets for educational purposes in Asia. He’s even found a way to make product placements (a big part of Neopets) work in an educational context.
• Mobile game market statistics:
• 53% of mobile games have been actively downloaded
• The most important purchase influencers are price, availability of demo, and familiarity with the game through other platforms. (Recall that Magid’s study of the non-mobile market found recommendations from friends to be far more important than game demos.)

One of C3’s research projects this academic year has been a study of the media consumption habits of American college students. I can’t reveal most of our findings (corporate partners get exclusive access to C3 research for a year’s time), but one thing caught my attention, and I wanted to share it.

In one survey we performed, students were asked to name a media property that they were a big fan of (they were primed to consider: TV, movies, bands, games, websites, books, magazines, and comics.) Of the respondents who gave a clear answer, nearly five times as many chose a TV property vs. video games (or movies, for that matter.)

It’s hard to say with any conviction what this really means. Perhaps not much. Or perhaps it indicates that the “best” TV properties still inspire more loyalty, mindshare, and/or emotion than the “best” game franchises. I don’t really know.

Still, this serves as yet another reminder that no matter how much games are chewing into TV consumption time (which, btw, still trumps hourly game consumption), the boob tube remains an important part of people’s lives. And that perhaps more media companies and game developers should be considering the Desperate Housewives route, in order to capitalize on (and enhance) powerful TV fandoms.