An interview of Warren Spector on Gamasutra. Some excerpts I was interested in:

Gamasutra: You’ve been a long time proponent of single player roleplaying experiences, what do you think of MMOs?

WS: Honestly, I don’t much care for them. If I’m going to have a social experience, I’d rather have it in person. I feel like a blind, deaf and dumb person watching a movie while I’m playing an MMO because the social experience is really shallow. Again, this is one of the things I’ll end up talking about at the GDC, but I’m, perhaps to a fault, a story person. I really need narrative. The level of narrative that people have been able to achieve in MMOs has been so shallow. I’m one of those people who doesn’t find anything interesting at all in leveling up, finding a +3 sword or paper-dolling a character with a purple cloak. That doesn’t appeal to me in any way as a human being. Put that all together and the play experience of MMOs is on par with roleplaying back in ‘87. In all fairness, my wife is a World of Warcraft addict.
(…)
I think if someone solves the problem of “I don’t want to interact with 10,000 of my personal friends, ever, and somehow make 10,000 people all be the hero of a compelling story,” then I’ll be a lot more interested in that game style.

Why do I blog this? even though I do not agree with him, it’s interesting to hear his argument about MMO. His background in writing might explain this stance and the way he thinks about game design is a different approach that can be good to take into account. (There is a lot more to draw in this interview)

In the paper edition of Monocle, there is an interview of LEGO’s CEO (Mr. Knudstorp). An interesting part of it deals with two aspects that are relevant for critical foresight of gaming (it’s short but it’s from the Lego guy):

M: Have electronic games changed the way that kids play?

JVK: That’s a good question. But the fact is, play is not changing. Kids still compete, they fight, role-play. They play the world you and I live in because they aspire to be in it. They love running after a football and they’ll do that 20 years from now.

M: Let’s look forward. What excites you within these walls?

JVK: We are working on some projects in virtual space, including Lego factory, wich has the potential to be as important to the Lego world as Second Life is to the rest of the world

Why do I blog this? in terms of foresight, the first assertion is interesting because it describes “play” (and side-aspects such as competition, physical exercices) as a driving force for kids. Though I am more intrigued than excited by the second part, the Lego MMOG appears to be a step towards that direction (”The LEGO Group and NetDevil will launch a LEGO-themed Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), bringing the LEGO experience into a new, safe, and fun virtual environment.“).

See also the 291Mb video of the interview.

POPsci features a very long and insightful interview of Will Wright (game designer of The Sims and working on his next project called Spore). IMO, the article is important because it describes the current trends in the gaming industry. Let’s see some of them below with quotes:

The first trend is certainly the interest towards user-generated content. Wright wants to turn players in “Pokemon designers, Neopet designers, or Pixar designers“:

I think Second Life is interesting because they have given the players such huge control over the environment (…) In Spore, the tools are more and more powerful than they were in The Sims, so the next step is, now, how do we take those things and use them to build a narrative
(…)
Every time the player makes something in the game – creature, building, vehicle, planet, whatever, it gets sent to our servers automatically, a compressed representation of it. As other players are playing the game we need to populate their game with other creatures around them in the evolution game, other cities around them in the civilization game, other planets and races and aliens in the space game, and those are actually coming from our server and were created by other players. So there’s an infinite variety of NPCs that I can encounter in the game that are continually being made by the other players as they play.
(…)
We’re going to have different feedback mechanisms. One of the things we’re going to be doing continually is rating the most popular content, so when you make a creature you’re going to be able to go to what we call the metaverse report and get a sense of what is your creature’s popularity ranking relative to other people’s creatures.

And he recognizes that an economy that emerges out of it is inevitable: as in Second Life, it will develop, go on eBay or other platforms and might lead to “some sort reward”.

Second, gaming foster an “augmented sociality” that is based on the content and is achieved not in the game itself but with other channels:

the asynchronous socializing through content, which we’re already seeing in The Sims web community. huge communities form with very well-known people based on the content they’ve made, other people taking that content and telling cool stories with it.

Third, the educational model of using games is now less about directly teaching content/facts but rather making people know processes. This has been a long discussion in psychology and educational sciences but there are still some people trying to design games to make kids learn irregular verbs or Napoleon’s battles. Actually, the thing is that video games are less good at declarative learning (content) and better for procedural learning and problem solving. And it’s good to see a game design such as Will Wright agreeing with that:

I think in a deep way yeah [answering the question “Do you see Spore, or the rest of your games for that matter, as being educational?”] – that’s kind of why I do them. But not in a curriculum-based, ‘I’I'm going to teach you facts’ kind of way. I think more in terms of deep lessons of things like problem-solving, or just creativity – creativity is a fundamental of education that’s not reallytaught so much. But giving people tools.

And finally, concerning the future of gaming, Wright addresses the articulation between interactions in the physical environment and digital interactions. In a sense, the question can be rephrased as how to turn data generated from real-world interactions and put them back in the game to enrich the playful experience:

One thing that really excites me, that we’re doing just a little bit of in Spore… I described how the computer is kind of looking at what you do and what you buy, and developing this model of the player. I think that’s going to be a fundamental differentiating factor between games and all other forms of media. The games can inherently observe you and build a more and more accurate model of the player on each individual machine, and then do a huge amount of things with that – actually customize the game, its difficulty, the content that it’s pulling down, the goal structures, the stories that are being played out relative to every player.

Why do I blog this? this is a quite good overview of the current game trends (and I left aside some other issues). Besides, it’s pretty refreshing to hear them from a game designer and not from observers/researchers who try to shake the game industry.

An interview of Ralph Koster in RealMMO addresses some interesting question regarding MMORPG:

I think WoW sets us back only in specific ways. I think it moves us forward in other specific ways. Blizzard, as usual, nailed polish, nailed guiding the player, nailed a look and feel. They took the old formula and put it in really snazzy bottles. That’s what they do best, and they are very very good at it – the best in the industry. But they also didn’t pick up the ball and run with a lot of stuff that are growing trends in the MMO industry today – and what’s more, given their expertise, they probably never will. We’re seeing a lot of interest in stuff like user-created content, in-world economies in games like Eve Online, and so on, and we don’t see anything that sophisticated in WoW. WoW is very much a “theme park” sort of world, one which is about putting you on a ride and letting you experience it.
(…)
I hope the next big thing is what we’re working on! If I had to sum it all up in one world, it’s “choice.” One of the things about the more directed games is that they really don’t give you choice. “You pays your money, you takes yer ride.” You don’t get to hop off midway or try out different ways to play. And while pretty much everyone enjoys a theme park ride at least once, the number of people who come back to it over and over is relatively limited compared to the broader array of activities in the world. We lose sight of the fact that WoW is big, but MySpace dwarfs it.

Why do I blog this? because this interview of Koster starts scratching the surface of some avenues MMO that should be pertinent to explore. However, user-created content in an MMO can also be thought as very similar to the object creation in MUDs (the only differences here are that it’s in 3D and that it can be sold).

Again, one of these report that piled up on my desk: the IGDA white paper about Alternate Reality Gaming is a very valuable document that describes ARG (background, relation to MMOG, mechanics, business models, etc).

ARGs do not require there be an avatar to build up, grow bored of and cast aside, or that there be a sandbox world for this creature to inhabit. There is, rather, the insertion of additional slices of reality into our own, and the only demand is that you interact with these as yourself.
(…)
The basic recipe for an ARG could be boiled down to Exposition + Interaction + Challenges
(…)
Exposition: The primary problem of storytelling in an ARG is how to convey expository information. In order to run an ARG, you need to present a cast of characters and their motivations, flesh out the world they live in, and deliver information about backstory and real-time story action simultaneously. (…) Blogs, audio/video, non-blog websites, other media.
(…)
Interaction: By “interaction” we mean both direct conversation with story characters and with the game world. Through interaction, players have the chance to influence the progress of the story even when there is no specific challenge at hand. (…) Chat, telephone, email, SMS/TXT, live events
(…)
Challenges: In a traditional video game, this would be the part labeled as ‘game play,’ in which the player
shoots zombies, jumps over ravines, stacks blocks, etc. Challenges in an ARG take on varied
forms, and are rarely very similar from challenge to challenge even within the same game. Cryptography, games, achievements, social engineering, puzzles.

Why do I blog this? the document is a good primer on the ARG topic with some applicable issues regarding game creation. Might be useful for a possible project about transmedia gaming.

There seem to be a trend in game design and game research lately about the importance of having metrics and ways to assess/describe/grasp/apprehend game usage with more powerful techniques. The discussion about Second Life figures is maybe an connected phenomenon but this topic goes further than just a journalist/researcher discussion. Conversely, there has been a some posts on Terra Nova about facts in game research (here and here (and also on the “Methodologies and Metrics” panel at the State of Play/Terra Nova Symposium).

Interestingly, game designers are now more prone to think about those issues, as attested by two articles on Gamasutra that concern the use of statistics: Statistically Speaking, It’s Probably a Good Game, Part 1: Probability for Game Designers nd Statistically Speaking, It’s Probably a Good Game, Part 2: Statistics for Game Designers by Tyler Sigman. In these case, the interesting thing is that it’s firstly about probability and then about facts or generalization: “Most games have one or more elements of probability incorporated into their base mechanics“. The first article can then be seen as a primer about probabilities, distributions, patterns, variance with some take-home ideas for game design. It’s very well summarized with some critical issues.

Especially, it’s very interesting to see concrete examples such as:

For example, in the game I just finished, we recorded data from play sessions and then set challenge levels in the game based upon the mean and standard deviation values from those recorded data. We set Medium difficulty to be equal to the mean values, Easy difficulty to be equal to the mean minus a certain amount of standard deviations, and then Hard difficulty equal to the mean plus a certain amount of standard deviations. Had we collected much more data, it would’ve actually been accurate!

Why do I blog this? what would be next move: ethnographic methods for game designers? that would be pertinent, to ponder the emphasis on quant stuff. As in research, I am sure the use of mixed methods could be valuable in game design.

Oy is a London buses’ inter-stop informal gaming system developed by Andy Huntington:

Oy is a system of between-stop informal gaming, played for small stakes, the price of a text message, or just for fun with fellow passengers onboard. Oyster card holders (London Transport’s smart travel card scheme) can sign up in their existing online account to play for top-ups to their card.

Allowing the age of players to be authenticated and payment to be tied into travel costs and systems. A multitude of simple games are played in succession from stop to stop with gaps for other content, creating excitement through the punctuated time frame of travel.

What is also interesting to me is the context-awareness capabilities of the system:

The system also utilises the bus’ GPS data, pulling up games that are context specific, responding to the places passing by or live activity in the journey (e.g. the number of passengers to get on at the next stop), giving regular travelers a chance to do some educated guessing.

Technologies used by Oy include: GPS, SMS, odometer data, ticketing data and of course the screens themselves.

Why do I blog this? this seems to be a nice project about context-aware gaming to good be seen as a starting point for more complex interactions. The use of different contextual data and their inclusion in the game play is an appealing attempt to engage players in new types of interactions. In the context of Oy, the use of GPS data allows the system to engage users in site-specific activities, an interesting first life/second life bridge.

Finnish company Sulake (well known for their Habbo Hotel platform) recently released Mini Friday, a Habbo-like virtual world that runs on mobile phones. What is interesting is that it’s rather a research platform, an attempt that gears towards the following direction:

Mini Friday is a small research project on virtual worlds on mobile phones. We are trying to find out if real-time virtual worlds make sense on mobile devices.

Mini Friday is a very simple virtual world - one small bar for now.

Why do I blog this? a nice app to test, I am more and more thinking about preparing a research project about Habbo. This platform raises very interesting questions regarding to space and place issues that I am interested in. One of the critical aspects here is the way the real space (in which you move, with your mobile phone in your pocket) is intertwined with a virtual environment.

This Gamasutra article written by a team from Intel entitled “Mars Sucks - Can Games Fly on Google Earth? “ explores whether Google* Earth could be used as the foundation of a video game (and beyond current applications such as “Find Skull Island” and “EarthContest”). Their prototype is simple:

Martian robotic spacecraft are invading Earth and sucking up humans for experiments! We were able to capture one Martian spacecraft, which we need you to pilot in an attempt to blast other Martians out of our atmosphere. The Martians are being sent messages that direct them to their next target. Your mission is to decipher the messages, and blast these Martians before they can suck people off the planet. Stay tuned for intercepted Martian messages!
(…)
We decided to overlay an image of a Martian craft cockpit over the Google Earth window and let the standard Google Earth controls handle moving around the globe. In the cockpit, players see a sequence of clues about the location of each Martian invader.

The article describes more technically the architecture of such project. What is interesting is their conclusions:

We learned that very simple games and casual games are possible now on Google Earth. We also learned that Google Earth is not yet ready to be the foundation of a serious action game. (…) As we write this, rumors are that Google is planning to release an application programming interface (API) for Google Earth, and we hope that will indeed happen soon. That step would really unleash the potential for building games and other applications over Google Earth. With the API release, we are hoping to find it’s much easier to display text on the screen and handle mouse events.

Why do I blog this? what find important here is the flexibility that can hopefully exist with such platforms that could be tinkered, modified and eventually that would the creation of innovative mash-ups.

In Game analysis: Developing a methodological toolkit for the qualitative study of games (a paper published in Game Studies, 6(1) december 2006), Mia Consalvo and Nathan Dutton describe a method for the critical analysis of video games as “texts”. Their point is to go beyond “simply playing a game, similar to watching a film, the proper method?”: They propose 4 types of targets that could be considered: Object Inventory, Interface Study, Interaction Map, and Gameplay Logs. What I appreciated is the list of questions they set corresponding to these 4 issues:

Why do I blog this? there is indeed a lack of methodological framework for video game research. Though this corresponds to different research questions than the one I am addressing, the probes and categorization described in this paper are valuable.

Some new elaboration on the concept of passively multiplayer game has led Justin Hall to sketch this interesting cycle:

As a reminder, he now defines passively multiplayer game as:

Passively Multiplayer is a system for turning user data into ongoing play. Using computer and mobile phone surveillance, a user and their unique history. These resulting avatars can be viewed online, and they interact with other avatars online.
Examples of data: web sites visited, email addresses, chat handles, contents of email or messaging, contents of word processed documents, digital images, digital video, video game moves.

Why do I blog this? I found very interesting this cycle because it puts things in a different perspective since it frames websearching/surfing as an activity with rewards (which I found quite pertinent and true). It’s quite similar to how to reach a state of flow in gaming. On this sketch, the only dimension I miss is the social one, let’s add a social rating/reputation system on top of that (or see the other sketch).

Nanoloop (by Oliver Wittchow) is a real-time sound editor for the Game Boy Advance:

Nanoloop is a synthesizer / sequencer for the Nintendo Game Boy systems. Stored on a normal game cartridge, it allows to produce nice electronic music without further hardware, using either headphones or an external amplifier (home stereo, active speakers, etc) as sound output.

Why do I blog this? that seems to be a curious tool to turn a portable console into a musical device. I like things like that, when an artifact is détournée.

People who reads french and who are interested by the video game industry should have a glance at Citizen Game by Nicolas Gaume. It is basically the story of Kalisto, a french video game company based in Bordeaux as told by its founder/CEO. It goes through the whole success story till the bankruptcy in 2002.

I knew most of the stuff described in the book from my experience with game studios but the book puts that in a very good perspective. Some lessons:
- the description of the video game economy based on development studios, editors, producers, subcontractors, distributors, banks, VCs… and how it evolved over time from garage-like cliques to more structured institutions.
- in line with this issue, the book also shows an interesting shift in the CEO’s work from helping creating games/teams to managing the relationships between funding institutions. Besides, Kalisto was french and it appeared that the “environment” was not really good for an innovative company. For that matter the description about the value of the company’s assets by the stock exchange reviewers (COB) is very intriguing.
- the difficulty to have a sustainable business model for a development studio. People who’re developing games are the weakest link: there’s low number of editors which fund projects, the difficulty for developers to hire lots of people versus having a sustainable activity in the long run. The company seemed to do a very good job with more than 3 productions at the same time.
- the fact that all of this is a human thing and both the good and bad parts of the story are due to human behaviors: the gathering of a great team to create the company (and the games) and the bankruptcy caused by troublesome relationships, misunderstandings, lack of comprehension from funders…

What is also pertinent is to see how the authors has been described as a great entrepreneurs during the tech bubble (when the company was doing great) and how everybody dismissed him afterwards. It’s not very good to fail at something in France, but this story is not described in the book.

Among the last deliverable of the iPerg project, I found this very interesting presentation by Staffan Bjork entitled Using the limits of technology (5Mb, .ppt) that gives a very good overview of the technologies available to deploy pervasive games. He present SMS, bluetooth, GPS, RFID tags with interesting examples of how they had been used to create compelling “big games” (I don’t know if I like that word that the author did not use in this talk).

Each technology the author presented was described with its potential affordance for gaming:

- SMS: support short gameplay sessions, focus on textual/language aspects (slang), easy to support players to create content and use their imagination
- Bluetooth: Make physical proximity a gameplay element
- GPS: Make understanding GPS shadows a skill in the game, make understanding real-world features a part of the gameplay
- RFID tags: Combines RFID tags with GPS: GPS for general positioning, RFID for specific.(…) Mask technology as magic, i.e. unreliable technology becomes unreliable magic which fits the theme

Why do I blog this? What I appreciated is the fact that the author states how pervasive games “typically makes use of new technology because they make new experiences possible) ” AND at the same time the same “new technology often is not stable, has not a high enough granularity and have non-intuitive limits“. The iPerg perspective was hence to develop technology to support gameplay (and not the other way around).

Rupture is a social software devoted to MMORPG communities (a bit different from the warcraftsocial). It will soon be launched by Shawn Fanning (the guy who was behind Napster). As described by Heather Green:

Using an add on or a software download, Rupture taps into the game to automatically pull together character names, profiles, and resources, and publish them on a personalized site. Rupture will also pull together stats to create individual and guild rankings and provide a place for guilds to organize their playing. As Rupture tracks each member’s playing over time, these personalized profiles evolve. And players will be able to chat in groups or with other individuals and download other addons and game demos.

Rupture is starting with World of Warcraft, which is played by 7.5 million gamers. But it also plans to pull together information from and offer services for other games.

Why do I blog this? because it’s interesting to see the advent of this sort of tools that allows to add a social layer on top what is already available through the MMORPG platform. What is also pertinent is the automatic capture of information. It would be great if such system could provide compiled, synthetic and valuable statistics about individuals or guilds (might be valuable for guild management) with privacy protections.