Category Archives: Articles of Interest

Penny Arcade highlights SquawkBox, a free plug-in for Microsoft Flight Simulator, which connects virtual pilots with virtual air traffic controllers. Basically a free MMO for aviation addicts, run entirely by volunteers. (Random thought: Flight Simulator may possibly be the least well-monetized of all Microsoft entertainment properties, in that it sells to a cult following that goes on to spend hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars on after-market products not created by or associated with Microsoft. While commercial and volunteer after-market support is absolutely a good thing, there’s no law that says you can’t play a part in it! The entertainment industry has so much to learn about tapping niche markets…)

Microsoft announced that Bungie is becoming an independent company, but will continue its Microsoft publishing agreement for Halo and other properties. An unusual situation; I’m very curious to see how it works out.

And speaking of Bungie, Halo 3 has dropped to fourth place on the GameFly charts for the Xbox 360 after three weeks at #1. Some have interpreted this as bad news, but I think this is actually a remarkable signal of great franchise health. That is, I’m speculating that the vast majority of 360 owners consider Halo 3 a “must own” and therefore aren’t bothering to rent, even if renting is an option.

Yankee Group issued a report on extremely low Second Life usage, then withdrew the report as questions about its validity arose. As regular readers know, I’m somewhat skeptical about the current incarnation of SL, but it’s only fair to help highlight the report’s withdrawal, since so many popular sites reported on its “findings.” In general, I’ve been pretty unimpressed with Yankee Group coverage of the game industry.

MIT has announced the second annual Futures of Entertainment Conference. This year’s speaker lineup is fabulous: it includes Jesse Alexander (Heroes), Danny Bilson (The Rocketeer), Marc Davis (Yahoo!), Mark Deuze (Indiana U), Raph Koster (Areae), and Tina Wells (Buzz Marketing Group). Check it out!

…Taking a brief break from the glories of Tokyo to highlight the following:

Two (one, two) decent articles in the MIT Sloan Management Review about hiring, motivating, retaining, and empowering the best employees. Both are a bit verbose but if you slog through to the end, I think you’ll be glad you did. PDF format.

Raph has unveiled Metaplace. It sounds awesome. Quote: “Now you can create a world in just a few minutes… as part of that, we also committed to an open markup standard for our network protocol… you can have a game world that is also a website, or use Web data to populate your world…. we knew it was all coming together when one of our team made a game in a day and a half. And then stuck that game on a private MySpace profile…. you can inherit someone else’s world (if they let you) and use it as a starting point… use an RSS feed for your NPCs.”

Bungie has posted information about the multi-user level editor in Halo 3.

The first GameTap Indies games have launched.

Another funny cartoon by Chris Avellone. If you like cartoons about cannabis, flatulence, and pepper spray. I kinda do.

I wasn’t able to attend Austin GDC this year, but here are a few articles about it that caught my eye:

Sulka Haro shares some insights into Habbo Hotel. Interesting quote: “Advertisers now understand that you can communicate with the teens, not at the teens. We’re putting out branded furniture which the teens love even more, oddly enough… rare items do value up in Habbo — some items value over $2000 each.”

Raph Koster talks about designing for everyone. Two quotes: “When you look at the kinds of problems we ask people to solve, and the things we assume them to do, it’s like we’ve given them a PhD in mathematics. No wonder you sit mom down and she asks ‘how do I move?” Also: “There’s no reason why WoW couldn’t be represented by anything other than an RSS feed, and if you could, it’d probably be doubled in users.”

Also, Raph’s take on the event as a whole. I think he makes some good points about major business and design assumptions that seem to be made (without reflection) by many within our industry.

Nabeel Hyatt, with his own good selection of conference quotes. One (of several) goodies: “Games are a one-night stand, you want a playboy bunny. MMOs are marriage, you want the girl next door. Still a little sizzle, and a lot of potential for the future.” – Damion Shubert

PS. Speaking of conferences: I’m attending TGS. Drop me a note if you are, too.

Following the recent announcement that Penny Arcade’s first game is coming to XBLA, I thought ya’ll might enjoy this neat glimpse into the history and personalities behind the comic.

Researchers are now using MMOGs to study the spread of epidemics; the “Corrupted Blood” bug in World of Warcraft (which stemmed from a boss battle gone awry) provides a great first test case.

Chris Avellone has been putting up stick-figure sketches for several months now. This one is comedy gold. 🙂

Ubisoft is making some of their older titles available for free, in ad-supported form. Makes sense; they aren’t capturing much value from these games anymore, so why not try ads? Best case, they make some extra cash, *and* convert a few non-fans of POP (and other titles) to likely buyers of future versions.

Soren Johnson talks about tutorials (something that XBLA devs should be especially concerned about, given that a long, unwieldy tutorial could guarantee poor sales of a game in our try/buy model.)

An interesting glimpse into the Halo 3 test lab.

Via Kim, news that Microsoft has unveiled a relatively progressive policy on the use of our video game IP for non-commercial purposes. I’m glad to see us moving in this direction, though I hope that in the future, we’ll re-evaluate the restrictions on fan fiction (in particular).

An unknown EA employee has allegedly been scrubbing EA’s wikipedia entry of anything deemed negative. The wikipedia community has already restored all the scrubbed content… and added an entire paragraph about the scrubbing itself.

Kongregate raised $5M from VC Greylock. Cash will be used in part to fund exclusive indie games. Here’s an interview with Jim, the founder (and a friend of mine from Pogo.) Grats, Jim!

Half the blogs I frequent have already linked to this interview with Jonathan Blow, but I only found the time to read it now (as it’s extremely long.) Now I know why it received so many links — a fascinating look into the mind of a very creative designer. Check it out.

MTV Networks now claims it will spend $500M on videogames over the next two years.

BioShock will sim-ship on Steam and at retail. Another notch in Valve’s belt.

Mass Effect is looking so sweet! (RPG fans, find a 15 minute preview video here.)

EA gobbles up the exclusive worldwide rights to video games based on Hasbro products like Monopoly, Scrabble, Nerf, etc. And Hasbro will be able to make toys based on EA properties (not too many possibilities immediately spring to mind.)

The GameTap ‘Read’ section has launched, and features several high-profile journalists from GameSpot, IGN, Ziff Davis and more. SimonC points out that this makes GameTap one of the larger editorial sites out there.

Warhawk will be released simultaneously on the PlayStation Store for $40 and in retail for $60 (bundled with a manual and bluetooth headset.) Even with the headset bundle, I’m surprised that retailers are OK with this. I don’t intend this to be a snide comment, but: perhaps PSN penetration is so poor that retailers don’t currently consider it a threat?

EA’s stake in Ubisoft has doubled to 25% of voting shares. The Guillemot family owns less than EA, at 13.4% percent of the company, and 19.2% percent of its votes. Don’t know when EA will finally gobble up Ubi, but I’d be willing to bet that there’s also a few casual game companies on their radar (I’ll refrain from saying which). Wave of acquisitions, here we come.

This article is about a random ARG of little interest to me. What caught my attention was the sentence: “there have been several game-jacking and/or unofficial fan sites.” Not something I’ve thought about before. What happens when users attempt to inject their own content into an ongoing ARG? Do ARG creators call them out (and risk weakening the illusion of reality around their games?) Or do they attempt to absorb and incorporate the most creative “game-jacking” attempts (which would inevitably encourage more of them, and which might complicate or even destroy various major iniatives of the ARG makers themselves?)

If you’ve ever played Pokemon, this comic is hysterical. 🙂

Gamasutra tells the history of Activision. You won’t learn too many lessons (aside from the hopefully obvious ones like “don’t piss off your key employees” and “floods of bad content jeopardize entire ecosystems”) but I enjoyed this anyway.

A great article by Kim addressing the impact of free games that are created by advertisers like Barbie/Mattel and distributed with little or no direct monetization in mind (beyond helping to sell physical product.) Rich Hilleman (of EA) alluded to the same phenomenon during one of my GDC panels when he said Kellogg is our competition.

WoW is up to 9M paying subs. Tremendous.

I occasionally resolve to pay less attention to Second Life, only to be sucked back in. The latest: Linden Labs has banned gambling. (By most accounts, gambling has represented a large percentage of all economic activity in SL.) A wise friend of mine noted that effective enforcement mechanisms remain unclear, and even with meaningful enforcement, you’re likely to see the real-world equivalent of basement casinos spring up — only in more interesting ways! Relatedly, Ginko Financial, a SL virtual bank, is “in crisis” because customers panicked and attempted to withdraw more funds than the bank had available, forcing it to cap withdrawals. Law & economics professors, have fun with that one! And lastly, Chris Anderson writes about his decision to abandon SL and quotes some very interesting counter-arguments from Wagner James Au. My favorite Anderson quote:

My feeling is that if you’re going to evoke real world conceits such as “places” that you “go to”, then you’ve got to deal with real world expectations of those places. We don’t like like empty buildings in RL; why should be more tolerant of them in SL?

Favorite Au quote:

My Second Life blog is only one among several high-profile SL-centric blogs. Weblogs Inc.’s secondlifeinsider.com, 3pointd.com, and secondlifeherald.com are also in the Technorati Top 5000; Linden Lab’s official SL blog is in the top 1500. (That’s not even mentioning influential blogs like Boing Boing and Terra Nova which often blog about SL activity and content, or celeb bloggers like Larry Lessig and Joi Ito, who visit SL semi-regularly and write about it.) Then there’s the vast ecosystem of SL blogs, 3rd party sites and bulletin boards, podcasts, social network groups, and machinima videos which number in the thousands. (YouTube alone has 5000+ videos tagged with “Second Life”; the top 20 have been viewed over 3 million times.) This is the network of activity you’re promoting your appearance to, not just the 40,000 Residents who happen to be in-world at any given time.

Another fun mini-game, The Amazing Flying Brothers, from Petri Purho. (He posted this a few weeks ago but I only just had the chance to play it.) My top score: 22,800.

Ian Bogost points out the similarities between the Wii Fit board and Amiga’s “joyboard”.

Here in Seattle, Nintendo is piloting new software that enables Nintendo DS owners at a Mariners game to order food at their seats, watch replays, enjoy multiplayer baseball minigames, etc. $5 a session, $30 for ten sessions. Bit pricey, IMO, but otherwise a very neat idea!

I’m not even going to try distilling the E3 news; check out Next-Gen, Joystiq, etc for coverage. I’ll just point out two of my favorite videos: Super Mario Galaxy (I love how a 2nd player can help the primary player in simple but significant ways) and LittleBigPlanet (which continues to look awesome!)

Ever since I wrote about reverse product placement I’ve been getting pinged by people interested in the concept — the latest from Ad Age, which quoted me in an article about the current 7-Eleven/Simpsons promo taking place. (A bunch of 7-Eleven’s are being converted into Quik-E-Marts and selling goods from the Simpsons universe… like Squishees!) Really, really interesting! (Too bad that Duff Beer didn’t make the leap; I’d personally love to drink one.) ….and speaking of the Simpsons, the upcoming game from EA is sounding pretty cool. 🙂

LA Times has posted an article about the difficulties that companies are experiencing with their Second Life islands. Not much new in there aside from admissions by companies that are disenchanted and pulling out. Wagner James Au (author of the fantastic blog New World Notes) fires back with some statistics, most of which are compelling, but two of which are simply misleading. First: “Each of the top five [commercial] sites garnered a .8 to 2% visit rate. Typical click through for a traditional banner ad on the Web is generally estimated at .5 to 1%.” Well, yeah, but what’s the cost of acquiring that .8 to 2% visit rate relative to banner advertising? Pretty darn high from what I hear. Next: “Just 18% of the world has been designated to have ‘Mature’ content.” Fine, but how much visitor time is spent in that 18% of the world? More than 18%, I’ll bet.

Second Life is pretty cool, but its defenders need to think of new ways to talk about it. (Btw, I’m not advocating that companies ignore SL — but as I’ve said before, they do need to completely rethink their relationship to it.)