Monthly Archives: March 2007

• Via Raph, a lovely game (to be shared with all skeptical friends and family) that attempts to explain how video games teach.
• Remarkable account of creative hiring practices employed by Mark Kern, founder of Red 5 (previously interviewed by me here.)
• Mixed news on the PS3 launch in UK, Australia, and France. Apparently, the French launch was a disaster, but the UK launch was solid. (PSP is apparently doing well in the UK as well.)
• Article about building user communities. Some of it will seem very obvious to you, but there are a couple of interesting ideas sprinkled in there.
• EA starts a music label. Yet another example of the increasing cultural and business impact of games (and of EAs inevitable progression to massive media conglomerate…)
• Very funny comic about Viva Piñata.  🙂
• Great article about Webkinz and Club Penguin. One thing I didn’t realize — Webkins limits the amount of time kids can play games, apparently to great effect. I guess busy adults aren’t the only people you can attract by avoiding typical timesink game designs…

• Recap of the Experimental Gameplay session at GDC. I was only able to attend the first 45 minutes or so, but what I saw was really entertaining. Most interested in the first slew of (sound-centric) games… unfortunately the recap only mentions some of them. Also, I learned of Petri Purho’s blog during this session; he’s a game designer with a great sense of humor. Check out his work.
• Recap of Clint Hocking’s GDC talk about self-exploration in games. He makes a great point about games that implicitly force you to be “very good” or “very evil” (which is pretty much all games with a moral slider). Doesn’t that arbitrarily limit the player? Doesn’t it cut out some interesting design opportunities?
• Three Rings’ Whirled will be a web-based UGC toolbox / virtual world where people hang out and create their own minigames. I know of at least three other projects along these lines; I wonder how many hundreds are in the works that I don’t know about.
• EA’s Neil Young talks about their new BattleCast feature (basically, other people can tune into your game session as watch along.)
• Microsoft finally announced Games for Windows Live; aka the Live service on your PC. Most people are talking about achievements, multiplayer, etc, but I’m more excited about ways this can help foster user-generated content.

Way, way too much interesting news over the past ten days. Will be breaking things up into several posts. First:

• Transcript of Will Wright’s amazing SXSW keynote. Just brilliant. Focuses on storytelling in games and on user-generated content. My favorite quote: “We could have the computer come to some understanding of the story the player is trying to tell… We can even present dramatic obstacles to achieving those goal states, and this amplifies the drama… If we can parse intended story, we can change the presentation, the lighting, music, events… I wish games were more like [the movie] Truman Show.” Interesting to contrast this talk with Warren Spector’s GDC presentation.
• Interesting casual game statistics from GDC: Puzzle Pirates is reaping $100K/mo from subs, $250K from microtransactions. Club Pogo has 1.4M paying subscribers. Good news on both fronts.
• Most of you have heard of Sony’s PS3 “Home” by now. Achievements meets Miis meets Flickr/YouTube, with ads. Honestly, a very cool initiative (how’s THAT for grudging praise!) Honest opinion: this will have little-to-no impact on Sony’s sales until they significantly drop the price of the PS3. “Home” (even assuming solid execution) is the kind of thing that existing customers love, but potential customers generally undervalue. Oh, LittleBigPlanet seems very cool, too.
• Viacom sues Google over YouTube, and (unrelatedly), analysts reveal that YouTube only reaped $15M revenue in 2006. Google better figure out how to squeeze more juice out of their $1.65B investment soon… $15M can’t even cover YouTube bandwidth costs (or legal fees, for that matter…)

• Konami is developing a Yoga Training game for the DS. Probably the most stark example of third party publishers buying into the mass-casual vision laid out by Nintendo.
• Acclaim is taking community-centric game design one step further by effectively launching the equivalent of American Idol/The Apprentice for game design. The “best” contributor to an existing project will become the “director” of a future MMOG. Neat stuff; looking forward to seeing whether this is purely a PR stunt, or a genuine attempt to loop users into game design (plus PR stunt).
• Lots of Google/YouTube news. TV networks are thumbing their nose. Google is developing its own DRM solution (to help appease the aforementioned networks, no doubt). But Google has reason to smile, because YouTube traffic keeps exploding.
• I love Penny Arcade. 🙂
• Always useful to be reminded how unbelievably compelling Xbox achievements are to some customers…
• GameTap is trying hard (short of significant first or second-party funding, as far as I know) to claim the mantle of “indie game champion.” All kinds of snide, competitive remarks are coming to mind, but I’m stiffling ’em. 😉