The Sandbox

You knew this post was coming, right? If there's one existential question both developers and players ask about games, it is, "Can a game can be considered Art?" The latest foray into this realm I've read is Ian Bogost's "Why We Need More Boring Games" on gamasutra.com. That article is also a – perhaps unknowing – member of a set that inspires one of my personal existential questions, namely, "Why do all 'Game as Art' conversations invoke Casablanca?"

This article at CNN points out something that most gamers have known for a long time, that games can be great ways to connect with other people, that they can foster good social relationships, instead of being the tools of isolation that they're accused of being.

The au courant love to dish on the PS3: sales have been less than hoped for, Sony's losing money on each console, Kutaragi was moved out as CEO and chairman, and the vaunted performance over its rivals hasn't been as much of a differentiation as hoped. It has produced insecure fanboys, and fanboys who mock them.

But what's the real problem?

No, it's not a wireless guitar for playing the most excellent Guitar Hero. It's the Messenger Kit for XBox360. Thirty bucks, and if Microsoft is smart, they'll quickly make it standard in all XBox360s.

Why standard? Because then developers will actually develop for it. Whole genres of multiplayer games open up when you have a keyboard to chat: games where lots of people want to talk, and network performance makes voice a non-starter. Now please excuse me while I go get a contract to put the Infocom adventures on XBox Live...

Yes, I should be posting about E3: it's the biggest video game show in the US, and it's going on right now. Even though it has been moved to a gas station bathroom in Santa Monica, apparently, it's still a big deal. No more roaming for unknown gems in the wilds that were Kentia Hall anymore....

Anyway, on the heels of my last but one post, which was on the heels of Rob's post, about video games and their effects, yet another researcher has come out saying that violent video games may be good for some kids.

CBS will, at noon today, be broadcasting the 2007 World Series of Video Games. Featured games will include Guitar Hero II and Fight Night Round 3, games that can be simply watched as if they were musical performances or traditional boxing matches respectively. I would go so far as to say that some folks would reasonably be able to tune in to see FNR3 and not immediately know it was a video game, the graphics being as good as they are.

But what does this mean for games? Or CBS? Anything?

Ten months after release, Sony has sold its millionth Playstation 3, something that I don't think anyone – anyone not a PS3 developer, that is – would have predicted twelve months ago. But the release of Hot Shots Golf 5 spiked sales, and the PS3 has only taken one month longer to one million sales than the Zune took.

I am one of the few people I know to have bought a PS3, and I have to admit that I'm enough of a geek that one of the turning points was that it's mega-fast at processing Folding@home data. Having a game machine able to devote spare cycles to helping find cures for Alzheimer's and Huntington's disease, that's something real. That, and Virtua Fighter 5.

Author's Note: yes, I know the 360 version of VF5 will have full online play. But that's a value of "better" that doesn't include "playable right now".

Remember my spiel about the YouTubing of games in a blog not long ago?

Check out this interview with Microsoft's Chris Satchell, who talks about how the company's XNA platform is hoped to empower ordinary designers.

While we hear a lot about music and movie piracy, videogame piracy is a huge -and, thanks to the droves of players heading online, growing problem.

Now comes word of a growing crackdown in Asia. According to the Financial Times, Nintendo is urging prosecutors in South Korea to investigate videogame bootleg websites being run in the country. This is on the heels of the formation of a group called the Online Games Alliance Against Piracy, which aims to fight pirates in China.

So who are these pirates and why do they do what they do? A few years ago, I interviewed a veteran videogame pirate on the condition of anonymity. Here's what he had to say about his motivation:

So, I finished Bioshock a little while ago and ended up fairly disappointed. Although the environments continued to amaze and the Alice In Wonderland fullness of the art and model design remained sexy, in its way, the gameplay and narrative faltered badly in the last quarter of the game.

Someone told me that Halo 3 has hit the stores. I've been too busy playing Team Fortress 2 to notice...

Halo 3 has such hype, and such an economic swirl around it, that one would be forgiven if one thought that it represents the apex of action gaming. But I'm one of those folks that can't get past the fact that handheld-controller FPS gamers are dilettantes compared to mouse-and-keyboard FPS gamers. Maybe I'm an uninformed fogey, but from the brouhaha I heard about the ethical ramifications of the XCM XFPS adapter on the XBox online FPS community, I'm guessing that the FPS community at large thinks the same thing.

TF2 is my new game for the next little while.

On this blog, I've written a lot about the YouTubing of games: how digital distribution, broadband access, and software tools are creating a perfect storm for user-created content.

Add one more ingredient to the mix: cash. According to a report this week by the technology research firm, IDC, revenues from console downloads tripled this year - up from $133 million last year to $583 million in 2007. That's still a small chuck compared to the roughly $7.4 billion in game software sales last year, but it's a sizable leap. At best, it sends a message to Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo that they should continue to open the floodgates for generating and distributing content online. It's the best way to keep a flow of new talent coming into the medium, and engage players with the means to extend and modify their entertainment experiences.

An old coworker (or, the shibboleth of an old newsgroup of mine, cow orker), Jason Booth, has blogged about his low opinion of the PS3, and was inundated with a lot of Sony defenders saying all kinds of, well, web-forumish things.

Trouble is, he's right, guys. Face up to it.

Because I finally bought Heavenly Sword, and it's beautiful. I don't care about whether or not it's short, because with a new baby in the house, I don't really have time to play a super long game. I am very impressed with the art direction and animation, and I have enjoyed every minute of the game so far.

Courtesy the intrepid bloggers at Kotaku, Aeropause is running a sort of science fair style analysis on the wattage usage of Sony's Playstation 3, Nintendo's Wii, and Microsoft's Xbox 360.

Want more power consumption goods? Check out this report on HCW.

Looking for the real vidgame deathmatch this holiday season?

Kotaku has been chronicling the battle of the music games: Activision's Guitar Hero III and MTV's Rock Band. The issue: getting GH III controllers to work with Rock Band. And apparently the companies just can't get along on this.

Personally, I really really need this to happen because GH III has wireless controllers and Rock Band - though I love it - has turned my living room into an intestinal tangle of cords. Seriously, the room is a mess - cables everywhere, people tripping, stuff getting unplugged. We need wireless Rock Band, now please.

Here's something to chew over during the holidays courtesy of Kotaku, the boom in sales in Japan of Sony's PSP handheld.

And also note the rule of Nintendo's DS and Wii. Next year will be an interesting one for Sony as some long awaited innovative offerings - LittleBigPlanet and Home - finally hit.

Stay tuned.

I bow before our new End of Year Best-of list overlords. Here's my short list of my favorites of 2007:

1. Lord of the Rings Online. Because I worked on it for four and a half years to ship it, and have worked on it since then, and it's clearly the best MMO of 2007. No personal prejudice here, no sir. But I'm playing it, which says a lot about a game that I've worked on (which I seldom play post-launch).

2. Rock Band. My childhood dreams of drumming, stifled by my parents who desired peace and quiet in their house, are now finding outlet, and obliterating my wife's goodwill towards me.

3. Portal. Great little game. Suffers from the "giant thick client to play a teeny-tiny game" problem, but who cares when it's this fun? You want thin client, play Flash Portal.

4. Super Mario Galaxy. I used to disdain Nintendo, early in my gaming career, as nothing but Cute. Jeebus, was I an idiot.

5. God of War 2 / Heavenly Sword. They're the same game, with different avatars of destruction. But they're both onslaughts of epic annihilation that appeals to the little kid in me that still writhes with excitement when I see shiny things.

6. Bioshock. Great art direction. Gameplay and story were sort of meh, but they tried.

7. Team Fortress 2. TF is back, and it's still fun. I miss EMPs, though.

8. Phase. Addictive little iPod game. Five bucks well spent.

Not on the list, but still decent: Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect. They're really good, but I was not inspired to finish any of them, so I can't feel good about giving them a final score.

Didn't play: Call of Duty 4, Crysis, lots of other things. I only have so much time.

It was a good year for games. 2008 will have some work cut out for it: Metal Gear Solid 4 doesn't look so "ZOMG" these days, now that we've seen other games that look just as good.

More categories for this article than I thought possible... it's about everything.

Leigh Alexander is very much worth reading, when you're in search of thoughts on the game industry. Two recent articles are the case For and the case Against this new world of entertainment media convergence. Is this intertwining of games, web, movies, television, cell phones, GPS, fresh baked bread, and the fat pipe connecting your checking account to media producers' coffers, is this good for games?

Leigh gives the definitive maybe. I mostly agree.

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.

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."

Well, today's the day. Grand Theft Auto 4 is here. I may be the only gamer out there that doesn't really like GTA, from all the hype and excitement I see. Surely there must be some other folks who can't bring themselves to play?

Rockstar clearly created this video with Jack Thompson in mind: "Here, Jack, chew on this. That's how much you scare us." But it has served at least another purpose: I am definitely not getting GTA4.

[via 1up] Microsoft may be looking to unload its crushing hardware cost burden onto other folks, and license other companies to produce XBox consoles. As an exercise in expanding the brand, it's a brilliant move: XBox consoles are expensive, and Microsoft has already established a serious presence with the console and with XBox Live. Now they can continue to make the pie bigger by inviting hardware competition in increasing the platform's spread, driving costs down, and hopefully resulting in better quality (not to mention quieter, sheesh) consoles. Let's hope it happens.

So my hand is sort of cramped up from playing Guitar Hero: On Tour for the DS, and it just got me thinking about the world of input devices, and how this is really a new golden age of interesting ways of interacting with games.

It's a Soulcalibur kind of month, it is. Soulcalibur is, for my money, the best fighting game series ever, and Soulcalibur IV is coming out at the end of this month. They're prepping us with a cute little manga about how to play, and they've brought the retro with a release of the Dreamcast Soulcalibur on XBLA.