The Sandbox

With the next Grand Theft Auto game, GTA IV, coming next month, Electronic Gaming Monthly has a big feature story on the franchise. Included in the piece is an interesting interview with Patrick Wildenborg, the gamer who first discovered the notorious secret sex scene nicknamed "Hot Coffee." Hot Coffee would spark outcries from Hilary Clinton to Arnold Schwarzenegger and become emblematic of the ongoing battles over gore and porn in gaming.

The meta-challenge for GTA IV is whether it can transcend the sociopolitical baggage, and raise the bar of the sandbox style freeform gaming that the franchise pioneered. Long before GTA was reduced to a poster-game for kids gone wild, it was a wildly innovative epic that redefined the experience of interactive play. Let's hope it does this again.

Need more proof that everyone wants a piece of the videogame business?

Today, news comes from MCV that Paramount, the blockbuster film company, has an eye on interactive entertainment. Here's my question: why wouldn't Paramount be interested? The future is going to be all about convergence between film/tv/web/gaming properties, and that means motherships like Paramount need to touch down on planet Game.

As I wrote in my book Masters of Doom, id Software's lead programmer and co-founder John Carmack grew up making games on his own. These days, of course, it takes teams of people and millions of dollars to churn out most mainstream titles. That's why mobile games have such an inherent appeal to people like Carmack. These are cool little things you can effectively go out and code on your own.

After getting his mobile game in with his game Orcs & Elves, Carmack is now joining the conversation about iPhone games and, more interestingly, iTunes as a potential for game distribution. "The iTunes distribution channel is really a more important aspect than a lot of people understand," he wrote recently on Slashdot, "The ability to distribute larger applications than the over-the-air limits and effectively market your title with more than a dozen character deck name, combined with the reasonable income split make this look like a very interesting market."

Episodic gaming - that is, games distributed in serial chunks - is an idea that's long been coming. But now with the ubiquity of broadband and wireless connections, we may be at a tipping point.

Consider this bit of news via Kotaku: an obscure Japanese game called Phoenix Wright (possibly the first game ever about the adventures of an attorney). The first episode will be available for free, then the next 16 parts will you cost you. Western game developers such as Valve have already explored this space, and I'd love to see more get involved. To me, it's a great way to play around with "smaller" ideas that may not see the light of day on a AAA console title.

From Gamasutra.com: for the second month in a row, the PS3 has outsold the XBox360 in North America. The interesting thing is that I'm guessing this has a lot more to do with the fact that it's pretty much the cheapest Blu-Ray player out there, or at least the cheapest that anyone knows about, because as you can see on the software chart at Gamasutra, there's only one PS3 game in the top ten, compared to six XBox titles. And the PS3 title, Devil May Cry 4, is behind the XBox version.

This says folks aren't seriously gaming on the PS3s they're buying, they're finally buying hi-def DVDs players, now that the format war is over.

Earlier this month OGPlanet announced the release of a new massively multiplayer online role-playing game, Cabal Online. The game is not groundbreaking in terms of gameplay, but reflects perhaps the highest quality entry and most interesting business model in the newest category of F2P (free to play) MMOs.

That's right, free to play. You could log in right now, register on the OGPlanet site, download Cabal, and begin playing. In this it's not dissimilar from a number of different offerings such as, Twelve Sky, Saga, Dungeon Runners and RF Online. In fact, just head on over to Free MMORPGs to browse through their extensive aggregation of sites and info.

Of course, nothing in life is truly free. Each one of these games has some facility for getting your cash. In some, paying a monthly fee will get you access to higher character levels and gear. In others, you can one-time shop for the very same things. Dungeon Runners, for example, has certain "grades" of equipment which are superior to normal equipment and only useable by subscribers. Players are exposed to these items from the get-go, which exerts a constant pressure on them to upgrade their accounts so they can use what they loot.

Cabal offers a slightly different variation on the theme. Every aspect of the game is available to every player, subscribed or not (premium subscription is $18/month, I believe -- higher than World of Warcraft). However, the % chance of good equipment dropping from monsters in the world goes up significantly for paying customers. Not only that, but subscribers have a much higher level of experience gain from killing and questing than non-subscribers. This really spikes right into the addict's vein. Furthermore, player versus player combat is a constant threat once a player reaches level 20 (fairly early on). It's brilliant. Players are quickly pitted against each other. Survival depends on character power and player skill. Spending money will give a player not only a distinct advantage over other players, but a distinct advantage in proportion to how much they spend. (How's that for a strategy to marginalize the gold farmers?)

I'm very curious to see how this venture pans out.

Thanks to Gamespot for pointing out a compelling new survey by Greenpeace. The environmental group has issued its latest "Guide to Greener Electronics," which includes a look at how well (or poorly) the three main console makers are cleaning up.

Among other things, Microsoft gets spanked for having PVC in its gear, and Nintendo gets chided for not informing consumers on how to dispose of mobile wares. That latter point is thought-provoking. Just where do all our old videogames go to die? In my community, I can go to a fire department once a year to throw out old electronics - which they burst into flames or something for training exercises. Oh well, another reason for digital distribution and a single "Super Console" to take hold.

We've heard a lot about the rapid growth of the game business in North America, but China? According to a new study, online games in China boomed over 60% to hit $1.66 billion (US) last year. Some online game developers there grew by nearly 600% in a year.

What's even more compelling is the business model behind a lot of these games. Rather than charging off the bat, they give away the games for free and sell players items in microtransactions. This is surely the way of the future.

Jack Thompson has been sanctioned by the Florida Supreme Court, meaning he cannot file anything with the court on his own, he has to have another lawyer in good standing sign as well. I guess it's sort of like a learner's permit situation for lawyers.

Gamepolitics.com has also posted several excerpts from the record of Thompson's disbarment hearing last November (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5, so far), and they will be posting Thompson's closing arguments sometime soon. All I can say is that I'm fascinated at how he appears to be going out: he's manifestly not arguing the actual case, he's continually harping on the violence in games. This case is not about violent video games, it's about his behavior and abuse of the legal system.

I can't believe he's so stupid that he doesn't recognize that. Clearly this is a strategy arrived at by concluding that the case is lost, that he'll be disbarred, and he will move into a pure book-writing, speech-giving, cable news meat-puppet existence. So why not damn the torpedoes, go out on the crusade, keep your bonfides and not compromise on anything?

Anyway, fascinating stuff.

Game Developer magazine has an interesting news item online about Mytopia: a new massively multiplayer gaming service that integrates with social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. You log on to Facebook, say, then boot up Mytopia and play a few rounds of backgammon or chess with your friends. There's also a "My Home" feature that lets you establish a fort in Mytopia's world.

Pretty cool. But what's even more interesting to me is the idea of using games to link communities like MySpace and Facebook together. Metaverse anyone?

Dave asks, "Metaverse, anyone?", and I say, Raph Koster is trying to get you to say, "Metaplace." He too is moving out of the thick-client virtual world arena, and into the social-network-qua-MMO space.

Right now, it's a chatroom with aspirations. The fuzzy future conception of apps like this is that they're a no- or minimal-client (aside from the web browser) virtual world that leverages the capabilities and strengths of social networks. The thing is, I think there's a fundamental tension in the game part and the social part.

When the new Grand Theft Auto IV comes out next month, it will pack an innovative feature: digitally distributed music delivered through the game.

Music has always played a big role in GTA titles. In Vice City, some gamers booted up just to surf through the selection of stations inside the cars. In GTA IV, players take this a step further. When they hear a song they like, they dial a number on their in-game cell phone. They then get a text telling them the name of the artist and song, as well as an email with a link to Amazon - where the song can be downloaded for good.

It sounds like a lot of work for one song, of course. And it is. Rock Band and Guitar Hero have already pursued letting gamers download game-versions of songs, but not MP3s. The really big leap will be getting MP3s in-world. And with GTA on board, it's only a matter of time.

February saw another very interesting article from the Daedalus Project on the motivations of people to play MMORPGs as a form of self-medication.

Nick Yee, the fire and mind behind the project, interviewed a number of players from a number of different games including, World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, Guild Wars, and Vanguard among others, questioning them on why they seek the succor of the epic sword on a continuing (chronic?) basis. What he found and distilled in a series of narratives was that there is a "grey area between therapy and dependency":

"While the narratives below show that MMOs can be therapeutic, they also show that using MMOs as coping mechanisms can lead to destructive vicious cycles."

His transcribed stories go on to support this claim, recounting a range of player escape methodologies that serve, at least to me, as a mirror for my own views of when "enough is enough". How many glasses of wine do you drink when you get home from work? How many hours a day do you cede your autonomy to a movie or tv screen? We all have ways of coping, moving away from the activities and/or relationships that consume most of our waking hours.

The interesting thing about MMO's is the way they allow players to enter a different identity, not that they do. This article from Yee demonstrates that clearly to me.

A couple years ago at the E3 videogame convention in Los Angeles, Phil Harrison, then the president of worldwide studios at Sony Computer Entertainment, told me he'd be surprised if the Playstation 4 has a physical disc drive. Considering that Sony had just made such a huge bet on the Blu-ray drive in the PS3, it was a provocative bit of soothsaying. But Harrison was really just articulating the industry's forgone conclusion: that game systems as we know them are at the end of their life cycle.

Now, That Videogame Blog brings us an amen from Sandy Duncan, the former Microsoft executive who headed up the Xbox business in Europe. Duncan suggests that consoles will be gone in due time. "In 5 to 10 years I don’t think you’ll have any box at all under your TV," he says, "most of this stuff will be 'virtualized' as web services by your content provider."