Gamasutra has posted an article sharing ten lessons for designing games that appeal to “older gamers” — which they also call “silver gamers.” Most of the lessons seem obvious, but it’s worth being reminded of them.

I would have liked it if some of the lessons were expanded upon. For example, lesson #1 emphasizes the importance of repeatable tutorials, but tutorials are simply one means of addressing a larger issue: that of teaching people what they can do in a game, and then helping them to remember those lessons later on. (Lesson #2 was “better printed manuals, reiterating the importance of this issue.) Given the tremendous length of some games, and the fact that busy adults may spread that gameplay over weeks or even months, it’s easy to forget the lessons taught in a tutorial.

This problem is exaggerated in games, such as Assassin’s Creed or MGS4, that pack large amounts of functionality into disparate objects and/or context-sensitive situations. (Though MGS4 does some things nicely, like automatically displaying all the ways to use an item when you select that item from the menu.) The request for meatier printed manuals, like repeatable tutorials, is ultimately a symptom of this larger problem.

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Given my work at MIT on Cyclescore (a platform that fused original games with stationary cycling), you can imagine my excitement over Wii Fit. The Wii + Brain Age-style game design seems like a match made in heaven. Having now played Wii Fit, I think I can say with confidence that it absolutely will be a match made in heaven someday soon. Probably v2, but not quite v1. I’m sure I’ll have more to say after using Wii Fit for a month, but here are my first impressions:

The good

A virtual exercise group: in some exercises, there are several Mii avatars around you, participating in the routine. If you’ve created Miis for your friends and family, it will be those Miis exercising around you. I don’t know how long the effect will last, but in my first experience with Wii Fit, I really enjoyed seeing that!

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Ten months and countless hours later, I’ve finished my book. There are still a round (or two?) of edits to be made, but the bulk of the writing is finished. It’ll be in stores in October. I’m looking forward to when I’ll be able to post an Amazon URL here. :-)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I still can’t seem to summon the energy to write a long and thoughtful blog post about, well, anything right now. All I really want to do is work in my garden and hang out with long-neglected friends and family. However, this experience has taught me a few things which I think are relevant to Arcade games (not just books) and which I’d like to share while the memories are still fresh:

From what I’ve gathered, less than 1% of published books turn out to be hits. The odds for a first-time author (who isn’t a big name, like Bill Clinton or Alan Greenspan) are so incredibly low that even if your publisher loves your book, your marketing/sales forecast is unlikely to exceed 20k copies at best. At that level, it simply doesn’t make sense for the publisher to do much in the way of marketing until the book has already proven itself. Even though the Arcade console game space isn’t nearly that tough, there are parallels. After all, because of the economics of the Arcade space today, most publishers aren’t willing to spend more than $100k on marketing their games (and usually far less than that.)

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Ah, irony of ironies. Two days after EA CEO John Riccitiello claimed the game industry is no longer ripe for mergers, Activision and Vivendi Games announced their intent to merge into Activision Blizzard. (Wonder twin powers, activate! Form of known IP! Form of Warcraft!)

Analysts will flutter, of course. But when they hype dies off, what will this ultimately mean for the game industry?

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Every so often, I hear someone say that the demise of the video game console is inevitable (and likely not far off). Their reasons vary: “closed platforms can’t survive”, “consoles are becoming too specialized”, etc. Having thought about it, I just can’t come to the same conclusion. Consoles aren’t going anywhere in the next ten+ years or so (beyond which I can’t claim to understand what the market will look like. There’s too much cultural and technological uncertainty.)

To be clear: I’m defining “console” as “a closed or semi-closed hardware platform dedicated primarily to interactive entertainment.” Does that necessarily mean “software and hardware designed, produced, and distributed by a single company?” No. There could be alliances on the software or hardware side of things, and those alliances could result in independent product variants that share a base level of compatibility. What matters is the presence of very stable standards that lead to a reliable, accessible, and affordable gaming experience. In other words, a guiding hand still matters.

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Yesterday, the XBLA team posted on Microsoft’s Gamerscore blog for the first time. Our purpose: to ask the community what it wants (games, service features, etc.)

I’ve read about 500 comments, and I’m nowhere near the end of the list. :-)

The feedback is telling. If you’re very interested in XBLA, check it out. Of course, bear in mind that people commenting on Gamerscore are (generally) pretty hardcore. Nevertheless, their opinions definitely matter — they usually buy a lot of games and they generate plenty of buzz for us.

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Next-Gen recently published an editorial entitled The Road to a Universal Platform which (to be blunt) rejected one naive assertion about the fate of the console with an equally naive (if well-intentioned) proposal to the industry. Let’s dive right in:

David Jaffe recently came under some criticism for a few statements to consumer website 1UP about his future visions of the game industry. The big headline, repeated across the Internet for a day or two, was “Ten years from now there will be one console”.

Like there’s one computer processor? (AMD vs Intel) Or one brand of cola? (Coke vs Pepsi) Or one consumer operating system? (Mac vs Windows) Etc…

There won’t be “one console” anytime soon because market forces won’t tolerate the existence of a single player in this space — not as long as “consoles” are defined as they are today. The market opportunity is simply too great for potential competitors to ignore. And of course, there are the social and legal dimensions to this.

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While in Beijing, I visited the “gray market” in order to learn more about video game piracy in China. I’m not sure what I expected… something between an official street market in New York and those guys near Times Square who try to sell you DVD ripoffs (and who pack up their stuff the instant they spot a cop.) I couldn’t have been farther off the mark.

The gray market in Beijing is nothing less than a clean, very commercial, very visible shopping complex. It’s brimming with small stores (one might call them fancy “stalls”), each staffed by several people. The stores have no visible brand, advertising, or sales strategy to differentiate themselves from one another. They don’t need to — there are more than enough customers to go around.

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Last week was an interesting one for enthusiasts of user-generated content.

“You” rock

Time Magazine named “you” (as in everyone) the person of the year. Not surprising, but notable in a “cultural signpost” kind of way. Do “you” feel good about yourself yet?

You rock (with a little help from Microsoft)

Microsoft officially launched XNA Studio Express and the Creators Club, then followed with a number of interviews that declared an unambiguous commitment to UGC. Just a few short years ago, most people in this industry thought that users were good for nothing more than their wallets (plus the occasional UG multiplayer map.) Now Microsoft is dedicating real resources to helping regular people make video games from scratch.

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As you may have read, Sony is trumpeting the fact that PS3 game downloads will have a 500mb size restriction, ten times the current limit for XBLA games. This is effectively no different from Sony’s claims that blu-ray makes the PS3 superior to the Xbox 360 in general. More megabytes == higher quality.

Right.

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