MP/SL event: Emerging Trends in Game Development

 Posted by (Visited 6658 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , , ,
Apr 102009
 

I’m going to at this Idea Exchange: Emerging Trends in Game Development virtual event in about an hour.

The Basics:

When: Friday, April 10th, 12:00PM PDT
Where: http://beta.metaplace.com/Interval/ or http://slurl.com/secondlife/Idea%20City/145/129/37
Topic: Emerging trends in game development.

Format:

This event will be an informal group discussion loosely led by Raph Koster, Adri Haik, and myself. We will present some trend that was discussed at GDC, discuss our experience with the trend, how we see it playing out, how it impacts our work, etc, and we will take whatever opportunities we can to engage the audience and encourage group participation in the discussion.

Possible trends to discuss:
– Microcontent
– Social game development
– Free-to-play MMOs
– Engagement and retention

This event will be held simultaneously in Metaplace and Second Life. I will be in both virtual worlds simultaneously, but chatting (via text) through Second Life. Raph will be chatting from Metaplace. Adri will be chatting from Second Life. Attendees will participate from both virtual worlds and will include both people working within the virtual world/gaming industries and consumers interested in emerging trends in game development. You are welcome to invite anyone you like.

BBC’s dot.life on Flash

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Feb 262009
 

The BBC News dot.life blog has a piece about web gaming and how the industry is changing, with a pile of quotes from yours truly. It was a very fun conversation with Darren Waters.

The relaunch of a 10-year-old video game inside a web browser is not just a chance to wallow in some nostalgia, but also a strong pointer to the direction in which the video games industry is heading, and a potential herald of the future of rich internet media on many types of devices…

…The shift to the network – both in terms of delivery of content and at the end of point of the experience itself – is touching every aspect of the media industry and for video gamers it means a lot more fun in a browser near you soon.

Laptops have overtaken desktops

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Dec 262008
 

In another display of the ways in which the world of PC gaming is shifting, laptop shipments exceeded that of desktops for the first time ever in the third quarter of ’08.

A big part of the reason? Netbooks, which are

  • skimpy on graphics hardware, and can’t run big AAA games
  • often don’t even have an optical drive from which to install big games
  • super-portable, thanks to small screens that have resolutions as low as 1/4 the resolution of a desktop monitor
  • fundamentally designed to be connected

The shift here is notable, because it all speaks to convenience rather than immersion. Small bites, not big ones. In fact, the Acer Aspire One netbook was the #3 seller in consumer electronics, behind a 52 inch TV and the 8GB iPod.

I was struck by the fact that there’s a whole song on the Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog DVD commentary musical “Commentary!” (uh… just go get it, it’s too hard to explain) that is about a game. Not Far Cry 2. Not Left 4 Dead. No, it was about Ninja Rope. Usually if our industry gets big shoutouts from other media, it’s for a AAA game… But they played Ninja Rope on an iPhone — a transitional device halfway between a phone and a netbook itself.

Meanwhile… Amazon doesn’t even mention the PS3 and the 360 sales this holiday season, focusing instead on how the Wii dominated the charts; going into Xmas, there were as many Wiis in households as 360s and PS3s combined. Again — lower res, simpler controls, simpler games (which has some folks really mad!).

I wonder what a true AAA game designed for a netbook would look like?

I am speechless

 Posted by (Visited 10407 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Dec 092008
 

…the Richard Bartle comments on the torture quest in WoW (and subsequent kerfuffle) hit BoingBoing, but nevermind that. Check out this comment in the discussion thread:

For about 9 months I’ve been working on a game that had torture as one of its selling points. Even though half of the team balked at being asked to design torture (“interrogation”) into a game, they still kept pushing it.

In my experience, people will watch torture, but don’t want to take part in it. Watching it is immersive enough. This idea did not go over well with certain people who just wanted that over the top sensationalist type of game.

On top of that, try making torture “fun”. Either you go full immersion, first-person in your face (scare and disgust most of your audience) OR you make it into a stupid mini-game (disgust a similar amount of people, but bore them to death).
Also, none of the choices in games ever amount to much, so the whole idea of “false intel” is flat. If it’s wrong to begin with, you are just going to teach the player that he played the game wrong, the moral lesson won’t be apparent.

Luckily our studio was shut down a month ago, so that game will never see the light of day.

Torture in video-games — a moral dilemma – Boing Boing.

AGDC: Bruce Sterling keynote

 Posted by (Visited 15234 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: , ,
Sep 162008
 

Again, sorry for typos.

Bruce Sterling, Future of Entertainment

Hello, thanks for having me into your event today, and thanks for that intro. Though there is a problem with that, I am not Bruce Sterling. He couldn’t make it, he sent me instead.

The reason he couldn’t make it is that in 2043, Bruce is 89. Dr. Sterling is too frail to get into a time machine to talk to game devs, so he called on me to do it. I am one of his grad students. I volunteered, sort of, to journey back in time using some of our new technical methods. It wasn’t exactly easy, and I am here and fully briefed.

Before I get started about computer entertainment 35 years from today, even though that is a very interesting topic and I am writing my thesis about it, I think I should level with you. I should tell you a few things first confidentially.
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