Just cranking out one last AoI before the impending avalanche of E3 news necessitates the next one…

Researchers have studied the relationship between in-game violence and player enjoyment. (Example: in one experiment, they exposed people to two versions of Half-Life 2, one with little violent imagery and one with much more.) Results: the amount of violence in a game did not predict how much players enjoyed it, nor did it influence purchase intent for sequels of the game.

For those of you who will be assuming new management roles soon, check out this surprisingly thorough and helpful article about the ways new managers can avoid making a bad impression on subordinates (an issues which, the article notes, can prove utterly crippling to new managers in the long term.)

EA is developing Tiger Woods PGA Tour Online, a free, streaming, browser-based 3D golf sim. No comment yet on revenue sources. Between this and Battlefield Heroes, EA appears to be making a real commitment to exploring f2p gaming, unlike some other major publishers.

Profs. Gee and Jenkins note that educational games that harness and promote player communities might stand a better chance of success. Might seem obvious to some of you, and yet there are very few educational games that actually do this in a meaningful way.

Sony has announced the “PSP Go”, which will sport a 3.8-inch screen, will be 43% lighter than its predecessor, will have 16 gigs of memory and will by all digital (no UMD.) Barring the larger screen, this sounds almost like my iPhone… minus the phone functionality and minus my desire to carry it with me everywhere I go, like I do my iPhone. *grin* (In all fairness, I’ll withhold judgement till I hear the price of the Go…)

2m+ users have registered for SOE’s f2p, family-friendly MMOG Free Realms within the first month. 75% of registrants are under the age of 17; 46% under 13. Notably, nearly a third of players are female.

Google has released an API for Google Talk that permits for asynchronous multiplayer games.

Nintendo is doing some interesting community stuff with Personal Trainer: Walking. For example, every player’s steps is added to a community total, and that total dictates how deeply into the galaxy the community will “walk.” I like it. It would be neater still if the community could interact within the context of the space walk.

There’s more to life than games:

The first black woman to ever be ordained as a rabbi; she’ll also be the first black rabbi to lead a majority white congregation. How lovely. :-)

Youtube: The Vendor Client relationship… in real world situations. This is brilliant.

Check out this presentation of Google Wave, which according to fans will replace email, instant messaging, wikis, forums, and SMS. It looks very cool to me, but I can never guess whether these things will overcome inertia

A couple of months ago, Eve and I played The Maw together, and I’ve been mulling a related post ever since. The Maw, for those of you who haven’t played it, is one of the more approachable titles on XBLA. It has relatively simple controls — for a modern 3D platformer, anyway — and a cute style and theme. I’m quite fond of it. Anyway, watching Eve grapple with The Maw was enlightening, to say the least.

A bit of background for newer readers: Eve is a perfectly capable smarty-pants, but she didn’t grow up with video games and is often frustrated by the few console titles that I have introduced her to. I knew that she would have trouble with camera management in a 3D space; that’s a skill that simply needs to be learned over time. And I knew that she’d have difficulty remembering which Xbox controller buttons mapped to which in-game behaviors, even though The Maw has relatively few mappings; that’s partially an experience issue as well, and partially a consequence of the Xbox 360 controller’s near-magical ability to terrify and stupify casual gamers.

Read the rest of this post >>>

I’m finally done with all the formalities of setting up my new consulting business. I’d love to tell you that I picked the name “Fuzbi” for some profound and/or touching reason, but no. I picked Fuzbi because it was a five-letter, pronounceable, available .com that (to my knowledge) does not mean anything in any common language. I’ve always liked the idea of picking a name that you can invest with your own meaning, like “Google.” And Fuzbi sounds fun to me, which is good enough for my purposes.

I owe a big hug to Danc for creating the Fuzbi logo. I wasted a good five or six hours making an absolute idiot of myself with Photoshop before Danc rescued me from myself. :-)

So there you go — I’m official. And I’m already working on a few interesting projects for clients both inside and outside the US, so I’m feeling sassy to boot! If you might be interested in learning more about my consulting services, or if you’d just like to hang out and help me celebrate my new business, I’ll be at E3 on the 2nd and 3rd of June. Just drop me a line!

Being social has always come natural to me. I enjoy meeting random people and hearing their stories — be they potential business partners, friends of friends, or my taxi driver of the moment for that matter. My parents like to tease me for striking up long conversations with the waiters at restaurants, which has, on more than one occasion, resulted in the swapping of contact information. :-)

One of the more pleasant consequences of my extroversion is a fairly robust professional network — this was true even before I joined Microsoft, and is certainly more true today. Some people have noticed this and asked me what my “secret” is. I’m always tempted to say something snarky, but rather than be unkind let me attempt to take the question seriously for a moment. I’ve never really had a “method”, but after thinking about it for a little while I came up with the following self observations that might be useful to the network-challenged among you:

Read the rest of this post >>>

iPhone apps and games have earned Apple just $20 to $45 million, according to rough estimates by Jeremy Liew. (Of course, Apple doesn’t care because the app store is more of a marketing tool for the iPhone than anything else, as far as it’s concerned.) The remaining 70% — $50m to $115m — hardly justifies any real interest in attempting to generate revenue by selling games; giving them away for free and monetizing with microtransactions, on the other hand, is interesting. And of course, I’d expect to see a boatload of (additional) advergames in the near future — perhaps some will even be good!

The iPhone lost its spot as top-selling phone to the BlackBerry Curve in the first quarter of 2009. The Curve succeeded thanks, in part, to Verizon’s “Buy one, get one free” deal and from availability via four major carriers as opposed to just AT&T.

Interesting article about level pacing in single player, hardcore action games.

EA’s digital game distribution revenue has almost doubled year-over-year to $80m, and digital revenue as a whole grew to $400m. EA trumpeted those numbers as heralds to a new age of PC-based gaming.

Nintendo has revealed the global lifetime sales figures for first party Wii and DS titles. For the Wii: Wii Play – 23m, Wii Fit – 18.2m, Mario Kart Wii – 15.4m, Smash Bros. Brawl – 8.43m, Super Mario Galaxy – 8m, Mario Party 8 – 6.7 million. For the DS: Nintendogs – 22.27m, New Super Mario Bros. – 18.45m, Brain Training – 17.4m, Pokemon Diamond/Pearl – 16.8m, Mario Kart DS – 14.6m, Brain Training 2 – 13.7m, Animal Crossing: Wild World – 10.8m, Super Mario 64 DS – 7.5 million

This interview with SOE about the marketing of Free Realms was interesting to me in part because it discusses the use of twitter and pseudo-”exclusive” access to the Free Realms beta as a mechanism for driving consumer excitement. This is one of the several potential uses of scarcity that I referred to in my MBA lessons, Applied lecture at GDC and the IGDA Leadership Forum.

Walmart has leased store space to E-play, which released 77 “Video Game Buyback” automated kiosks at select Walmart locations as part of a limited pilot program. Customers scan a game’s jewel case at the machines, at which point a buy back price point appears on the unit’s screen. If the customer accepts the buy back price, the machine confirms the authenticity of the game disc and issues a credit to the customer’s credit card.

There’s more to life than games:

Another great Gladwell article, “How David Beats Goliath.” Summary: relentlessness and/or unconventional tactics that exploit obvious weaknesses.

Speculation continues as to the timing of an inevitable drop in the price of the PS3. Most people seem to think a $100 drop is coming by end of summer. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say “who cares?” and “it really doesn’t matter.”

The PS3 is currently $400. A $100 price cut will put it at $300. Analysts appear to be fond of saying that $300 and below counts as “mass market pricing” for a video game console — as if timing, the current economic conditions, and the competitive landscape have nothing whatsoever to do with consumer demand.

If it were the middle of 2007, a $300 PS3 might be something to get excited about. But unfortunately for Sony, it’s the middle of 2009. If you’re a true hardcore gamer, by now you’ve most likely purchased the Xbox 360 or PS3 already. A select few consumers might be waiting for price drops to add a second hardcore machine to their collection, but the software libraries for the PS3 and 360 are so similar that most people won’t ever bother. Long story short: the war for the hardcore gamer is effectively over in this console generation.

Read the rest of this post >>>

Even BioWare can stumble when it comes to community management. Takeaway: few people are better candidates for extensive training than your community managers! (Also: do not try to tell Star Wars fans what does and does not happen in their universe…). But as I knew it would, BioWare ultimately did the right thing by its community. :-)

MadWorld, the “blood soaked” action title once identified by IGN as one of the most anticipated Wii titles, which nicked an 82 metacritic score, has sold just 66,000 copies in the US. I don’t claim to know why. Perhaps the reason is that if you like this sort of game, you’re likely to be already playing one or more competing titles on your Xbox 360 or PS3 — which you prefer for action titles, perhaps, thanks to the online service and/or better graphics? Or perhaps hardcore gamers have simply stopped paying attention to the Wii? I didn’t closely follow Madworld’s release, so I don’t know if it was poorly launched, and thus, if such speculation is off-base. What do you think? Meanwhile, here come predictions that EA will dominate the Wii games market in the near future. (Note: many of EA’s upcoming titles are family-friendly and/or based on known IP, and thus not comparable to Madworld.)

Raph tells an insightful story about an Easter Egg hunt game in Metaplace: “There’s no reward in this game, there’s no winner or loser, and there’s no endgame. Yet even during testing, I had to tear myself away, and when put into Metaplace Central, average session length for the day went up 50%. But… in some sense, it’s a crummy game.”

Soren shares some of Sid Meier’s fundamental game design rules. A good read!

Alice discusses some of the work that she has been doing with Channel 4: “In sum: find talent, identify the key areas, find a fun angle, sow many seeds, and give the growing ideas as much sunlight as possible. Be useful. Make people smile, and give them something helpful to their lives. Public service gaming is fantastic.”

There’s more to life than games:

Wise words from Seth Godin: “People don’t reply when you [email] them a resume, because it costs too much to do that ten thousand times… Stamps are underrated. Friction rewards intent and creates scarcity.”