MMOGs

MMOGs $1bn
Will Wright

blog

The mobile weblog is very up to date on what's going on with mobiles. Of particular interest is a story concerning mobiles and LBS, with Nokia hoping that LBS will stem falling sales figures for their handsets. Maybe there is just too much too quickly, and most people just want a mobile phone, and don't want to keep changing. Life's too short!

Will "super-realistic computer games which [...] feature human faces as they actually look" really help make the "move to real emotional content in games"? This story has people claiming it will. This will surely be the next real stage in computer game development, but I remain doubtful. It would be fantastic if it did. Also requires better writing though.

And then there's other development of user generated content, this time for an MMO, currently refered to as Top Secret. This is good for both players and producers and allows games to develop in a much more dynamic and immediate way.

virtual worlds

Here are a couple of examples of how businesses are getting involved in virtual worlds as places to run their businesses - in Second Life. Firstly, a story concerning IBM and how a number of their employees are "routinely conducting company business inside Second Life". They do this using self-generated avatars that can interact with other avatars in this virtual environment, and saves massively on travel - money and time.

Secondly, a story about Pontiac selling virtual cars in the same virtual world, to characters who buy them with their Linden dollars.

There's also story about people with Asbergers who can access a virtual world in order to practice their social skills. Perhaps similar, in a sense, to the Bully game.

There is clearly a lot going on with new online virtual worlds as this story explains. It was probably Second Life that started it all in terms of making money from within these worlds. But the online games have been very successful and poplular too. Still not the same as having real people in a real place.

IPerG, Helsinki, 13.12.06

I would've liked to have been there, but it was not possible. (So, instead, I am going to try to make the PerGames conference in Salzburg this summer.) Below is an outline of presentations given, from the Powerpoint slides on the IPerG website.

1. What is Pervasive Gaming? (Annika Waern)

• Physical presence, virtual Experience
• Position-based games
• Augmented Reality
• Games hidden in reality
• Traditional games are played at certain places at certain times by certain players (within a magic circle)
• Pervasive games blur and break the boundaries
  of gaming space
  of gaming time
  of playership
• ...up to the point where game action and non-game action can’t be differentiated
• Fun of game to ordinary life
• Thrill of non-gameness to game
• Emergent gameplay is intriguing
• Potentially powerful form for art, political expression, societal involvement

There's also IperG's goals:
IPerG develops infrastructure, tools and methods for pervasive games

• Rapid and cost-effective creation and staging of pervasive games
• Understand good game design
• Understand the audience
• Understand the societal impact of pervasive games

2. Limits of Technology within Pervasive Gaming (Bjork Staffan)

• Typically makes use of new technology
• New technology makes new experiences possible
• But new technology often is:
  
Not stable
Not of high enough granularity
Having non-intuitive limits
• IPerG Perspective:
Not technology-driven
Gameplay-driven
Develop technology to support gameplay
Not always use technology the way it was intended

3. Mobile Phones as Pervasive Devices (Jussi Holopainen)

• Spatial
Usable anywhere
Positioning (and other non-trivial real-virtual connections)
• Social
Trusted devices for social interaction
Existing social networks
Synchronous and asynchronous
• Temporal
Personal devices
Online all the time

4. Crossmedia Gaming - where game content of a single game instance is made available across different gaming interfaces (Irma Lindt)

• Different gaming interfaces based on different computing devices
• Different forms of participation depending on the individual functionality gaming interfaces offer
• Different content types depending on the capabilities of the different gaming devices
• Different user experiences supported by a single game

Research questions:

1. Device-specific roles. Do device-specific roles emerge? Do players like that?
2. Collaboration across gaming interfaces. How good can players collaborate when they are using different gaming interfaces? Do different gaming interfaces foster collaboration?
3. Coherent game experience. How can it be achieved that a Crossmedia game is perceived as a coherent whole despite the different gaming interfaces and media?

(The game is called Epidemic Menace, and as well as using interactive film, the game utilises mobile phones, mobile augmented reality kit, and stationary gaming interfaces. This is all very much in keeping with mixed reality, and creating a good narrative around which a game is played - that of trying to prevent the spread of a virus. Indeed, in the conclusion it states:

The most popular element of our work was the integration of mixed reality into a pervasive game on the one hand and the integration of movie elements on the other.

Also, the game relies heavily on co-operation, and in the feedback, this was considered an important and enjoyable part of the game.)

5. Business and Organisation

Pervasive Gaming builds upon existing gaming infrastructures and opens new approaches and business concepts within a growing market.

The pervasive media environment is erupting from the convergence of many factors, such as:

• Demand: increased overall consumption of media and entertainment
• Power: a greater number of megabytes of content will be carried by smaller, ever-shrinking physical formats and devices
• Liquidity: the easy portability, interoperability and “shareability” of digital media
• Unpredictability: relentless innovation in media technology, software and player devices
• Ubiquity: multiplying channels, bigger broadband “pipes” and spreading connectivity in globalizing markets.
  

Relevant Market Segments:

• Video Games
• Mobile Games
• AdverGaming
• Filmed Entertainment
  

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Overall, this is all very interesting and exciting, and it's clear a lot of people are a lot further on than we are, but that's to be expected. They are also working in larger groups, and have access to a dedicated research facility with far more equipment and expertise.

Some Websites

Motherboard, for intersting things going on in Norway - news of installations and digital storyltelling.

The Interactive Institute, in Stockholm, Sweden, seems to be a hub for various things, and is linked to the IPerg project, and Nordic Playground, which states as its aim:

to become a Nordic game related knowledge base and a forum for dissemination of research results.

(Essentially for mobile gaming.)

Probably the most interesting bit on the The Interactive Institute website is the guild for reality integrators and generators. This is a group of practitioners in different disciplines, exploring mixed reality. But there isn't a great deal of information of exactly what they are doing.

There's also (as part of the Institute) the Trans-Reality Game Laboratory

a research laboratory specialising in the development of new game forms and technologies integrating virtual and physical modes of game play.

Again, there are links to many of the usual suspects. (Plus one I haven't come across before - Foam.)

I get the impression that many of these have been set up for collaboration, and although there is clearly some going on, it is perhaps more limited than originally intended. Presumably because people are working hard on their own projects.

Serious Games is a term being used to describe games that are used for education and training. The Serious Games Source website is a useful starting point for looking at this area - set to be very big, attracting lots of funding. (Juxtaposing 'serious' and 'games' is quite interesting - the games industry trying to convince the wider world that games should be taken seriously, and linking them directly to education. This is a central tenet of Raph Koster's A Theory of Fun for Game Design - the fact that games are the way children learn when they are little, but as soon as they get to school, games and learning are separated. As this link states:

Video games generally have a bad reputation as a way for children to spend their time – and therefore their use as a teaching aid within the classroom has been controversial.

It's a way of attracting funding into the industry too. This is also a big thing in education cirles at the moment - how to use the video game format for learning.)

SGS have a couple of relatively interesting articles. The first of these talks about the eLearning sector and its relationship to educational/training games. One thing of particular interest is the use of language, and adapting language use for this sector, so that it is meaningful for educators and trainers. The other one concerns thinking skills, and uses the case study of a British game created and used by a teacher to explore bullying with his pupils.