The Sandbox

Now that we're into 2008, what does the year in gaming have in store?

If 2007 was the year of the blockbusters - Halo 3, Madden, Call of Duty 4 - then call 2008 the year of the blockbuilders: titles that put the DIY power of creation into the hands of players.

The two big ones to watch: Will Wright's new sim game, Spore, which lets players create their own world (and creatures) from the DNA up, and LittleBigPlanet, the giddily innovative PS3 title that lets gamers make their own side-scrolling adventures. LBP's tagline is Explore, Create, Share - and that says it all. In both Spore and LBP, the fun is in thirds - making the worlds, checking them out, and then sharing them with others.

Just reading about the iDGA (not to be confused with the IGDA) which stands for internalDrive Gaming Academy recently at their site a friend turned me on to.

This organization offers short camp experiences with courses ranging from Game Design to Game Modding to Game Programming. Indeed, they recently received copies of Unreal Tournament 3 for their students to learn from and explore.

Target students range from 10 years old to 17. Indeed, it's a whole new era. If this educational trend continues to catch on, upcoming generations are going to know a lot more about how digital games get made than oldsters like me ever had the chance to.

Interesting leakage courtesy of SPOnG. Word has it that Sony is set to announce Skype compatibility for the handheld PSP platform. SPOnG cites some fine print on Sony's website for next week's Consumer Electronics Show which says PSP players will be able to "Call friends, talk trash to fellow gamers or catch up with acquaintances via Skype for PSP system." Even juicier, Sony made a follow-up statement saying that "further details will be announced shortly."

Why so sweet? Just ask anyone who already uses Skype, which lets you make phone calls over the Internet for free or next to nothing. A Skype-powered PSP means a gamer won't just smacktalk, but call their grandma in Lithuania too. Is the PSP evolving into Sony's answer to the iPhone?

This week, the annual Consumer Electronics Show starts in Vegas. And the bloggers at Gizmodo have dispatched footage of what may be the coolest gaming gear yet: Alienware's sexy beast of a monitor. It's three feet wide, and this 2880x900 mean screen machine is curved.

Of course that means we need even better graphics to watch. And word comes via Kotaku that Turbine has some sweet new eye candy in store. The company's Lord of the Rings Online game now supports Microsoft's DirectX 10 as well as Nvidia graphics cards.

An interesting post by Teclisen in the Fires of Heaven forums about the "real story" behind Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Within the MMO community, Vanguard had a significant following, and hopes were high that Brad McQuaid could repeat the success he had with EverQuest. Launched in January of 2007, it did not meet expectations.

But Teclisen has a more interesting story than stability and performance issues, if he is to be credited.

Okay so now it seems like everybody - and every kid - wants a Wii. But will they want a Wii Fit - the trippy balance board that senses and responds to your shifting weight? I tried out this gadget at last year's E3, and it was pretty weird. You stand on a sort of flat scale and then go through a variety of postures and poses. It wasn't so much a game as a physical version of the brain-building hit, Big Brain Academy. Instead of just watching a yoga tape on TV, for example, you perform the move and get judged/corrected along the way.

Gamers in Japan are the first to get their hands - and feet - on this peripheral, and they're digging it. According to a report on GameDaily, sales have topped 1 million since the Fit's debut on December 1st. Could this be the killer app to lure grown-ups (and moms) into the Wii's burgeoning universe? Personally, I'm more interested in gaming applications of the device - snowboarding, surfing, skateboarding. And of course a Wii Fit Rock Band hookup would be killer for those of us practicing our Pete Townshend scissor kicks.

The military has really gone whole hog on multi-player training environments in past years. From America's Army to Forterra Systems' Olive and now this modification from Sandia National Laboratories.

Sandia Labs newest entry is intended to help train soldiers in "interpersonal skill building and cross-cultural awareness" so that they can adapt better to dynamic situations in alien cultures. The highly customizable environment supports up to 64 participants and sports a myriad of oversight roles for players, evaluators and administrators.

Found on Boing-Boing, this article quoting McDonalds UK CEO Steve Easterbrook diverting blame for obesity from McDonalds to video games, and the general sloth of people these days.

And he's half-right.

Korea has always been one of the most passionate homes for gamers. Starcraft is treated like the NFL, with huge scale events and parades. And more recently an online game called Kart Rider has pioneered compelling models for digital distribution and virtual economies.

So it's about time a giant western publisher sets up shop there. According to NextGen, Electronic Arts is set to open a studio this year that will churn out three or four online titles annually.

An EA spokesperson told the Korean site Chosun that "The size of the studio hasn't been decided yet. First we plan to recruit dozens of workers to develop the 'NBA Street' and 'Battlefield' online games, but if we have more applicants than expected we may increase the size of the studio and develop another game.”

As the writers' strike in Hollywood continues, savvy scribes are eyeballing another industry: video games. It's an attractive proposition, after all - a booming business that needs creative talent.

Now the game scribes are finally getting their due from the Writers Guild of America. Today, the WGA announced its five nominations in its first-ever video game writing awards. Aside from the Simpsons game, the titles will be fairly unknown to most players. No Call of Duty 4 or Halo 3 here. That's a good thing. I like the fact that less known works are getting recognition, and hopefully this will encourage the makers of AAA blockbusters to get with this side of game development too.

The news about the new MacBook Air cannot have escaped anyone reading this: if you're online at all, you have seen effusive mentions of this new, incredibly tiny, laptop. And it is pretty cool, if you don't mind sacrificing almost everything on the altar of size.

But for gamers, the sacrifice is large. Integrated Intel GMA X3100 graphics with 144mb of shared video memory is a poor display driver, very poor, and games from six or seven years ago can tax it. While obviously Apple has no intention of targeting gamers with this road warrior laptop, it is another sign that Apple never targets gamers. Which I find odd: the Aqua UI and technology like Quartz Extreme run better the better your video card is. If you please gamers, you'll please everyone with your performance. And you'll be able to run the most lucrative consumer software outside Microsoft Office.

As games and game tech get more sophisticated, developers and associations like the Serious Games Initiative are busy exploiting their real-world potential in training and education. Now come two interesting examples of how such training sometimes manifests offline.

A study released today suggests that the motion-sensing remote of the Nintendo Wii boosts the skills of surgical trainees. And this release on behalf of America's Army, the online game used as a military recruiting tool for the U.S. Army, tells the story of a gamer who reportedly applied the emergency medical skills from the game to saving a car accident victim. Overblown or a sign of the times? More here after the jump:

Gamespot hips us to word that NASA is in the market for a massively multiplayer online game. The group wants to create a virtual world in which students can simulate and carry out exploratory missions.

There's an area in Second Life that already suggests how such an experience might unfold. It's created by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and, though rudimentary, is pretty cool/fun. You can wander into the ocean and see how a tsunami forms, etc. I have a friend who teaches computers to school kids, and this is just the kind of stuff that engages his class. The U.S. Army has been using online games as a recruitment tool for years. It's nice to see another branch of government explore the more educational potential of virtual worlds.

Apparently recessions don't affect game sales. NextGeneration quotes a videogame industry analyst who predicts software sales to jump past $10 billion this year - a record-breaking number, and nearly 15% increase over last year. And last year was a record year in and of itself, with sales topping $8.64 billion, a 34% increase from the year before.

What gives? Partly the runaway success of new consoles like the Nintendo Wii. Also, word comes that the revolutionary play-by-numbers game, Guitar Hero, has sold more than $1 billion - yes billion - worth of games in the United States alone.

So what will gamers be shelling out for this year? Look for Will Wright's new simulation game, Spore, to top charts along with Grand Theft Auto IV, which was just announced today for an April release.

Found on Kotaku, Fox News is the source of the latest media scare story on games, but Electronic Arts is not taking it laying down. In a strongly worded "no, pot, you're black" reply, EA's Jeff Brown reminds Fox News of the existence of Family Guy and The O.C., contrasting them against the M-rated Mass Effect, a game on the console with the most comprehensive parental controls ever.

Meanwhile, gamers have searched out Cooper Lawrence, the psychologist Fox called upon to comment on the game, with which she had apparently no familiarity, but who nevertheless commented extensively on the content she imagined was in the game. Never ones to actually demonstrate the collective maturity they stridently claim to possess during these situations, they have taken it upon themselves to rate her latest book on Amazon. But many are very funny.

Koreans have made the addictive online game Kart Rider a hit - and a cash cow. How? By shelling out money in microtransactions to upgrade their avatars and game experience. According to a BusinessWeek story, gamers spent up to $250 million on virtual goods alone.

Now Electronic Arts is getting into the free gaming game with the release of Battlefield Heroes, an online-only title that will be completely supported by ads and transactions. EA dipped a toe in the water with a free FIFA online soccer game that is reportedly pulling down $1 million a month in South Korea. I suppose the question is whether western gamers will spend real cash on virtual accessories. This is already happening to some degree in EverQuest, World of Warcraft, and Second LIfe, but we have yet to see a successful game in the west that is built on a Kart Rider style model. Ultimately, I don't think it's the model that's the problem - it's creating a game that compelling enough to make players want to bust out their wallets and accessorize.

This weekend, 30 whiz kids from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts spent 38 nonstop hours creating computer games.

It was part of a contest by 38 Studios, a game development company founded by Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, to find and nurture the next great game designers. The deadline is February 18, and the contest is open to student coders across the state. The winner will get funding along with a possible job at the start-up.

My question is: why doesn't this sort of exercise happen more often? Are companies/schools doing enough to cultivate the next generation of videogame developers? Videogame sales had a record year last year, hitting more than $10 billion; and 2008 looks just as promising. While virtually every other media industry - film, tv, newspapers, music - is being upheaved or destroyed by digital innovation, vidgames only continue to thrive. Why not incorporate videogame design into high school curricula? A 6 - 12 public grade school, opening in the fall of 2009, in NYC has that in mind. The school, created by the Institute of Play and funded in part by a $1.1 million MacCarthur Foundation grant "will use game design and game-inspired methods to teach critical 21st century skills and literacies."

Greg Costikyan has posted on his blog a link to his article in Second Person, an MIT publication on games and player-avatar relationships. He makes the point about the liking of story and narrative, and the degree to which they are exclusive. I made a similar point a decade or so ago in an article qua conversation with Jason "loonyboi" Bergman.

Interaction and narrative are not completely exclusive, but one does reach a point where they can no longer intertwine to each other's benefit: enhancing one will come at the cost of the other.

Who is the best candidate for gaming? How many Americans game? What kind of Constituency do we have?

Are we truly as caught up in the tongue pointing, finger-wagging and other gestures of complaint as gaming's most prominent political e-publication reflects? Okay, a front page full of meta-coverage of Fox and their alimentarily cinched attitude towards games?!

Or does someone have an opinion on what will happen to free speech and studies into the effect of games (violent, sexual and/or otherwise) on our culture in the coming 5 years?

Do I?

As a relatively hard-core gamer (for some liberal value of "hard-core", as I don't have a lot of time to play these days), I am constantly surprised at the odd successes in the casual game market. I would think that among the most played games on the Web these days are Slayers, Werewolves, Vampires, & Zombies, and Scrabulous. I mean, I know, personally, only a handful of people playing. But none of those people are hard-core gamers, and the number of people in the world that are not hard-core gamers is counted in billions. And they're all apparently on Facebook, making Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire.

Meanwhile, I still grind away at more "important" games. Something's not right.

Blizzard is proving quite the investment for Vivendi Games, bringing in over one billion dollars last year. This figure emphatically punctuates the theory that most of us have been jabbering about for three years: World of Warcraft is, indeed, a cash cow.

Valve Software, creators of Half-Life, have long been one of the most forward-thinking developers around. Aside from making super-cool games, they've been among the most dedicated supporters and innovators of digital distribution. Their online delivery system, Steam, has been a boon both for gamers - who get interesting stuff to play - and developers - who have a direct means of getting their titles into consumer's paws (or drives, as the case may be).

This week, word comes via Gamespot that Valve has released its Steamworks publishing tools to vidgame publishers and developers for free. Expect an even more killer crop of titles to heat up Steam in the year to come.