Back then, we had a glut of games, clearly overwhelming the consumer, leading to less-than-expected sales. Just last year, we experienced a similar glut. Granted, it was a glut of high-quality titles. But even bloggers dedicated to gaming felt overwhelmed by the flood of it.

Back in ‘84, we relied on a marketing gimmick to sell more – license of other IPs. Culminating in the now-famous ET game. These days, we instead license ourselves and produce sequels. But ultimately, we seem to be in a situation where pure merit doesn’t seem to be enough. Many critically acclaimed games from last year just couldn’t pull in enough sales if they didn’t have prior name recognition.

But even more importantly, back then the industry failed to see a new and coming trend for what it was – personal computers. It was the beginning of the heyday of the Sinclair, the C64, the BBC. And I think the industry is again failing to see a trend. At least the “old guard” is. We’re still producing first-person shooters, racing games, strategy games, etc., with a never-ending quest for graphic realism.

Meanwhile, the market shifted below our feet. Those games are becoming a niche market. What really sells are easily accessible games, things you can just jump in, have fun with, and be done after 15 minutes. Looking at the weekly charts right now, 4 in the top 5 and 6 (maybe 7, depending on how you count Super Mario Bros.) in the top 10 are this kind of games. Think that’s just a glitch at the top? 11 in the top 20. 14 in the top 30.

Even worse, #46 (Mario Party 8) has 6.3M sales. The three “traditional” games in the top 10 together just barely approach this number. And they contain two games that have almost cult status – Left4Dead (for its unique gameplay) and Call of Duty, a long-running and well-loved franchise.

So not only do these games take up half the spots in the sales charts, they outsell traditional games by a factor that’s not even close to funny. The first one on the list that you can’t disqualify by saying “but it’s a bundle”, Mario Kart 4, sold fourteen million copies. Grand Theft Auto IV, probably the biggest seller of last year, only manages 11. Meanwhile, Nintedogs sold 22 million copies.

And, like back in ‘84, the thriving market has a low barrier to entry. Back then, with the PC surge, everybody could just buy a PC and write a game for it, while the console manufacturers closely guarded their secrets. Right now, traditional games have enormous development cost. GTA IV cost $100 Million. Meanwhile, the new crop of games is dirt cheap to create (in comparison), and they can be created rapidly, allowing for experimentation. (Brain Age took about 90 days for a prototype). Furthermore, DS development is easy to get started at home (It’s not exactly officially approved, though), and even the Wii is much less expensive to develop for than the XBox360 or the PS3.

And funnily enough, as it was in ‘84, so it shall be in ‘08 – while the rest of the industry struggles, Nintendo cleans up. They currently – with the DS and the Wii – cover about 60% of the console market.

Does that mean “traditional games” are dead? No, certainly not. Neither did the console video games die in ‘84. But we need to rethink our approach to them, just as we did then. What we’re currently doing seems to be not working well enough. And it’s not going to work better if we just repeat the mistakes often enough.

In short, I’m excited. A little anxious too, but we’ll see what the future brings.

I’d love to close this post with random pictures of Seven Of Nine here, but Paramount would probably object…

First, let’s get through the objections. Most importantly, this is only true while the Avatar is alive. (I.e. if you are logged in). I have an ‘Avatar’ on Second Life since at least two years ago, and I’ve never played her -so I’m fairly certain she is mostly a bunch of bits on a hard drive.

Second, his numbers are slightly off. He over-estimated the server count by a factor of four, owing to a confusing way Second-Life counts them. Then again, he underestimated the PC power side of the equation. As later clarifications in the comments thread show, the client side power usage actually dwarves anything that happens on the server side.

But a discussion of all these objections obscures the main issue here – running a computer is quite power-intensive, and using the Internet has an additional power footprint. If you played SL 24/7, it’s the equivalent of driving an SUV for 2300 miles. At the same time, it is not as intensive as many other tasks – if I drove an SUV 24/7, you’d hardly notice if I was playing SL all the time while driving it. (Well, except for my erratic driving…)

And this is where the main mistake with this piece lies – it’s easy to assume we wouldn’t use any energy if we weren’t playing SL, but we do. So the real question we should ask is this: “Are games a net-positive or a net-negative in terms of energy use?”.

I do believe that at least gaming with a social component (i.e. online gaming) is a net positive. You stay in contact with all your friends without needing to be there physically – and seeing my friends on a regular basis, for example, would take a lot more than 2300 miles. Online worlds like SL might fare even better, since many people also use it as a business place, they conduct meetings there, etc.

But what about playing locally? Is that still a net-positive? Not if I were a TV viewer instead – gaming requires me to switch on the TV and a game console. But let’s at look at the marginal increase over TV only:

The average gamer plays around 7.6 hours a week, according to an ESA study. The XBox360 – my poison of choice, and probably the most power-hungry console around – uses 160 Watts. That’s a total of ~63 KWh per annum. Or 1/30th of the annual electricity usage of a Brazilian.

Tags: SecondLife,Environment, VideoGames

This is a huge step forwards in terms of keeping games innovative and alive. And at some point, they really get it – they look at the movie and recording industry, and they see MySpace and GarageBand and YouTube. They realize that people want community involvement, not a one-way pipeline from the big publishers down to the peons who just shell out money.

MS actually will make their development environment available for free if you’re developing for Windows. And then, in one fell swoop, they lose touch. The XBox 360 development environment is going to cost $99 – per year. That’s not what everybody is waiting for – and it will keep a lot of kids (or their parents) from buying this environment.

To be fair, the XBox version will offer lots of free content, and if they keep adding free content every year, that might just be a viable approach. I guess the all-free route wasn’t palatable to the powers that be.

Overall, it’s still a huge win for game development. After a long hiatus, we’re slowly getting back to the point we were at in the early 80’s. * Computers are getting quite cheap again. (You can get a desktop w/ monitor for around $450) * Some form of computer is the hip thing for kids to have. It was the C=64, now it’s the XBox 360. * There’s a huge trend towards simpler (or Indy, or casual, or whatever you call them today) games. * We now have got a development environment where you can make games run on your home TV – and impress your friends with what you did

If YouTube and the others are any success, we’ll see a huge flood of crappy games – and a constant trickle of things that will amaze us, inspire us, and humble us.

I’m looking forward to it!

(Although that would certainly be appropriate. Sheesh, it’s like living in a toaster. Well, maybe it gets people to think about global warming… And before you point out that this may well be a freak statistical occurrence, please go count the freak weather occurrences in the last few years… But I digress.)

No, this post is about the newest innovation on the DS front. Some enterprising company in Japan took the DS and turned it into a voice controlled cookbook. You know, like this:

DS: [with robotic voice] Please chop 2.3 shallots.
User: Done
DS: [robovoice] You’re doing great. Now fry for two minutes

And to top things off, somebody finally realized that you can use a computer to adjust ingredient count to the number of meals you want to cook.

I tell you, I’ll buy it once it’s here. One step closer to the Jetsons!

[via Wired]

There are technical reasons for that, actually. It’s not just a bunch of 16 year olds having fun, as opposed to, say, Rockstar. Clothing in Oblivion is modeled separately from the bodies. And since some of the female costumes actually have a V-neck, they need some cleavage. So the underlying model has some sort-of breasts. The only part that got modeling love is the part actually visible in the V-cut of the dress. The rest looks, well, hideous.

But, of course, in our current climate, even a hint of breast (Oh noes! Nipples!) is too much. Now, I could say a lot about strangely skewed values of a world where necromancing, vampirisim, and dead people on stakes are OK for kids, but nipples are to be restricted to 18 year olds, but I’ll spare you.

Instead, I’d like to give you some food for thought: Every Barbie you buy in the next Toys’R'Us can be undressed, and, shockingly enough, is actually flesh-colored under her dress. (She wears painted-on panties, like the Oblivion model). We give those toys to 3-year-olds without thinking. If the same thing happens in a video game, it’s shattering the morals of the nation and needs to be restricted. So when will Mattel receive its first “M” rating?

I’ll come down in the “cunning” camp again. The point is, the name doesn’t matter. For non-initiates into video games, it’s as good as any. It’s no better or worse than “PS3″ or “XBox 360″. And for gamers, it doesn’t matter either – if you’re a gamer, you’ll either want or hate the Revolution. Pardon, the Wii.

But with a single press release, Nintendo has everybody talking about them, just two weeks before E3. There was not a single blog or game site today that wasn’t talking about Wii. Can you get any better marketing?

P.S.: My colleague Nathan pointed me to a video of the origins of Wii

The first one was funny, but as people keep continuing, it is not only getting old – it becomes obvious it’s forced.

So, as a counterpoint, let me talk about what I learned from the last game I played, Counter Strike: The Desert Eagle is a more potent hand gun than a Glock, but it has a slower rate of fire. In close combat, a shotgun is preferable over the M4. If you can handle the burst shot on the FAMAS and aim for the neck, it’s an extremely dangerous weapon. Crouching, and shooting in short bursts improves aim.

Oh, wait. We’re out to prove that games are disconnected from the real world? Well, in that case, you’ll be happy to hear that recoil in real guns is nothing like recoil in video games.

Seriously, though – while I’ve enjoyed the facetious posts, each game teaches something. Playing is about learning. If games have no effect on us, why do we go out of our way to claim they’re art? Because art certainly affects people. (Well, that’s a topic for another post)

Maybe it’s time we realized that we are teaching, with each and every game. It’s not limited to shooters, either. You could certainly make the at least somewhat credible case that e.g. WoW teaches xenophobia – all not of your allegiance must be slain. Any old RTS ==> armed conflict is a perfect way to solve conflict.

But for most people, we’re teaching hand-eye coordination, or game mechanics, and that’s it. The point is, you need to be able to understand the back story is just a story, a backdrop.

But what if you’re too young to understand that? Well, maybe this self-imposed rating system is a good idea after all, don’t you think?

Let’s start with the annoying part – the annual whine “There’s no innovation”. It really starts grating by now. There’s plenty of innovation, if you look for it. There’s Guitar Hero. There’s Shadow of the Colossus. There’s Brain Age.

So here’s my message for the complain fraction: How about you actually do something? Greg Costykian is one of the very few to put his money where his mouth is.

And – of course – there’s the one real stinker in the presentation track. This years honor goes to Tim Sweeney and his presentation on “Building a better engine”. I’m willing to forgive that he’s a horrible speaker – he’s mainly a programmer, after all. I’m not willing to forgive a talk that is utterly devoid of content and merely a sales vehicle for the Unreal Engine. (No, it wasn’t marked as a “sponsored” talk.)

If I pay $1400 for a conference, I expect content. Period.

But let’s move to the upsides – there was, as always lots of interesting information to be had. The most interesting keynote goes to Nintendo – funny, lively, entertaining, and a couple of really big news:

• Nintendo will offer the SEGA back catalog on the revolution
• There will be a new Zelda
• Metroid Prime multiplayer on the DS is extremely well done. Excellent control scheme.
• And finally, with “Brain Age”, Nintendo is opening up an entirely new market. Since they were good enough to give away free copies to everybody in the keynote, expect a (mini-) review soon.

Will Wrights’ was, as usual, a thoroughly enjoyable talk. It’s my one guilty pleasure, since he really had nothing to offer that affected me as a programmer enough to justify the lecture. I’ll still attend all his lectures – the man is brilliant.

The PS3 keynote was ho-hum. Not much new info, and the games were not exactly overwhelming. Strange as it is, that keeps me happy – the barrier to entry in the PS3 market is fairly low.

In the non-keynote department, there were three talks worth mentioning:

The Gym: Where the Incredible Hulk Goes To Train

An excellent talk about the scripting/animation editor used by the team developing “The Incredible Hulk”. The slides are available online, but the presentation was even better.

The only downside was the misleading name – I went there because my first choice was packed already, and I had no idea it would be about tools.

Feeding The Monster: Advanced Data Packing for Consoles

Again, a rather misleading title for a great talk. This was, at its core, about load-in-place technologies, and how to use C++ for great effect in that area. Again, with slides online

God Of War: How The Left and Right Brain Learned to Love One Another

A great overview how to build a flexible game engine with limited engineering resources, and entertaining to boot. (In a nutshell – make the designers do the work instead. Everything is data-driven). Download the slides.

Best quote: “Designers suffer from shiny-object syndrome”.

And that was it. The rest contained only tiny nuggets of information. Combined, more than worth the price, but too small to justify a writeup.