The Wellcome Develop Panel Starts in 30 Mins in Room 7!
20 Jul 2011, 11:00-12:00 Room 7 This panel explores how games can be used to talk about wider issues in society. Games via Scvngr have been touted as the next Facebook, as the next Casablanca (thanks to LA Noir) and as a means to make a better world! We’ve got virtual sweatshops for gold-farming, a real farm playing FarmVille, Kinect controllers helping to diagnose autism and real soldiers playing virtual war games. Are games going to eclipse other mediums? Are we just refusing to grow up by playing games? Or are games themselves growing up and beyond any boundaries we may have conceived of them?
The Wellcome Trust is the second largest charitable foundation in the world, funding biomedical research and supporting public engagement with science. At this session there will also be a chance to find out how you can access Wellcome Trust’s funding streams to help them find fun ways to make science stories accessible to people through the language of gameplay.
Also see here.
Develop Day 1 – My Evolve Notes
In session on story-telling on new platforms, discussion was about how social games have not end, can they tell stories. Panel talked about how this is hard because of both the ongoing nature of the game as opposed to stories that tend towards a beginning-middle-end. It is also hard because the gaming sessions of such games are anything from 5 minutes to hours, so no prediction on audience time. However they noted that all games themselves have an arc, and rise and fall in popularity, which is in itself a story arc – not unlike a soap opera. (I have heard that this is a discussion amongst game studies academics where those exponents saying story does not matter that much use the ‘Tetris Defence’ – a position pointing out Tetris is a great game with zero story. The counter is that Tetris does have a story but it is constructed in the head of the player…) It was suggested that if you make games that reply on reflex speed, being a core gamer skill, that it can’t go very mainstream. An idea I found interesting is that games are about fantasies of success (being the hero, best football player, rockstar etc) – what about games that explore failure? Literature does all the time, so why not games… Also liked the point that characters need to be archetypal and not stereotyped. I feel this is as the former allows the audience to map themselves onto the character and relate to it, the latter is bad because it is boring and too easy…
45 Games in 45 Minutes was a great talk. The games came faster than I could type but often game down to isolating a single idea or gameplay mechanic such as how Backbreaker does for American Football. Other ones that were highlighted that caught my eye were 1 Bit Ninja, Pocket Academy (from Game Dev Story people, which is a PC port but great fun and works (ish) on iPhone), Tiny Tower (good rate of players spend money on real cash within the game compared to other free-to-play), Red Rover (split-screen iPad wargame, WW1 set game, yay for broader historical settings…), Infinity Blade (sells at high price-point but also in-app purchases now make 43% of income) One Single Life (1 life only! However got a player backlash over this as a paid game so went free), Piclings (play levels on photos you’ve taken), Space Cadet Pedometer RPG (links your real-world steps to levelling up in game), Wiki Golf (turns Wikipedia into a game & donates 10% income to Wikipedia), Angry Hipsters (pulls in live music stream as game background), Stem Stumpers (game designed for partially sighted people too has mode that allows fully sighted players to play ‘blind’ so explosring the issues). Prose with Bros (competitive poetry)
This talk also noted the Filth Fair & Ultimate Alphabet as good games to look at (which is cool)!
In the session on pricing for small developers – NIN front man, Trent Reznor‘s advice was quoted to make sure you offer fans various ways to interact with you on a price scale, including more expansive options, if that is what they want. Don’t just give them the one £10 option and that’s it. This echoes the ideas in the earlier talk (above) where in a Pocket Frogs (frog breeding game it was noted that while only 8% of players were willing to buy $30 of consumables for ingame play, that 8% made up around 40% of the total income. Trent’s advice that the only true marketing that matters to an artist is word of mouth. Note that only 2% of players in free-to-pay games pay for anything, however the other 98% can and do add value to the game experience (depending on the numbers). With Zynga 1% of players account for up to 50% of the companies income. Stats from Tiny Tower reveal that 3.8% – much better than the 2% average. Conclusion is while don’t need to make fremium game, but don’t only offer one price point to engage them. (Slides will be on gamesfromwithin.com soon)
Finally attended the ‘What’s Next?’ session which was a good wide ranging discussion about everything from the demographics of game players, developers and games themselves. Two main points for me were Alice Taylor noting that games for girls often ended up with a stereotype pink thing and needed to find more depth and the choice quote: “When the industry can support a Jane Austen MMO then BOOM we have reached a level of cultural acceptance” (link).
PS. Tomorrow I’m on a panel session at 11am in Room 7, hope to see you there.
Develop Starts Tomorrow!
I’m heading to Brighton today ready for the Develop conference tomorrow. Looking forward to what promises to be a great event. In addition I’m part of a great panel on the Wednesday that (of course) I’d totally recommend:
The event looks at the impact of games beyond the console and runs on Wednesday 20th July (11am-12pm). On the panel we have the outgoing Channel 4 Commissioning Editor for Education and founder of Makielab, Alice Taylor, along with Demis Hassabis, a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow who, before becoming a neuroscientist, made a splash in the games industry with games like the BAFTA-nominated Republic: The Revolution. Joining them are Phil Stuart of the multi-award winning Preloaded, and Jez Harris, an industry veteran whose works include Buzz! and the Harry Potter games. The panel is chaired by myself, Tomas Rawlings, games consultant for the Wellcome Trust.
So it you’re at Develop, I invite you to this session and hope to see you there! I’ll be tweeting from @TomasRawlings and using the hashtag #developconf and will try to write up events and notes on the blog here…
In App-Ads: The Info Graphic
Just in case you were wondering….
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The Necronaughts and Beyond
I’ve been re-reading the great 2000AD comic series ‘Necronaughts‘. (My thinking is very much in this space at the moment.) This gem is about a gathering of an illustrious band of 1900’s heroes to take on the forces of darkness. The team consists of the escapologist Harry Houdini, collector of the strange Charles Fort, writer of detective fiction Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and finally writer of strange tales, H.P.Lovecraft. The four are ranged against cultists, dark forces and more. It’s a great read and I’d totally recommend it.
Charles Fort and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle take on the darkness....
To me is has echoes of other mash-up fiction such as the sublime (in comic form anyway) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and the fun ‘Poe Must Die‘ where Edgar Alan Poe, James Figg and Charles Dickens seek to stop an evil sorcerer.
I was also interested to discover that the idea of exploring the next world, as the Necornaughts do, has inspires an art project too, the International Neconaughtical Society. Here is their manifesto and 10 year review. In their manifesto they announced a plan to:
[To construct] a craft that will convey us into death in such a way that we may, if not live, at least persist…
While this now is art, there was a time and a hubris when we thought that it was not…
Loops are a vital part of understanding how gaming works. They are also important to understand around how networked systems work.
A feeback loop is where information is fed back into a means of control, allowing it to alter its parameters based on this information. It is how we stop ourselves from walking into a lamppost (mainly, anyway). Our eyes inform the brain of the lamppost blocking our current route and so our brain tells our muscules to change direction to avoid it. Feedback loops are about creating systems that self-correct in relation to their environment.
Games are based on open loops, e.g. we use a controller to move a character – as we move the controller, so the character moves. Sometimes games add a feedback mechanism to this. A great example is riding a horse in Red Dead Redemption. It moves with you, but also feedback how far you push the controls, so when you try to do something beyond the parameters (going off a cliff, rising too fast for too long), it bucks you.
A feedforward loop is an amplification loop, as the input comes back it effects only an amplification in the system. In many strategy games they have an amplification loop on success, so as you capture more resources, so you can build more units. As you get more units, so you can capture more territory.
We also have loops in how networked media operates. The iTunes store is a feedforward loop – the apps at the top of the charts are easier to find and so get downloaded more often and so they keep their position on the charts. It’s one of the reasons why Angry Birds is still at the top. It will remain there until its saturation point is reached and the number of downloads starts to drop. But as new iOS devices come online every day, there are always more iOS devices looking for content. Feedback loops can be found in the comments section on the iTunes store, were positive and nevative responses are given by users, and smart developers act upon them..
Its not just in games and networked media. Human’s are very loop-centric systems;
Local authorities had tried many tactics to get people to slow down. They replaced old speed limit signs with bright new ones to remind drivers of the 25-mile-an-hour limit during school hours. Police began ticketing speeding motorists during drop-off and pickup times. But these efforts had only limited success, and speeding cars continued to hit bicyclists and pedestrians in the school zones with depressing regularity.
So city engineers decided to take another approach. In five Garden Grove school zones, they put up what are known as dynamic speed displays, or driver feedback signs: a speed limit posting coupled with a radar sensor attached to a huge digital readout announcing “Your Speed.”
… And the Your Speed signs came with no punitive follow-up—no police officer standing by ready to write a ticket. This defied decades of law-enforcement dogma, which held that most people obey speed limits only if they face some clear negative consequence for exceeding them …
The results fascinated and delighted the city officials. In the vicinity of the schools where the dynamic displays were installed, drivers slowed an average of 14 percent. Not only that, at three schools the average speed dipped below the posted speed limit. Since this experiment, Garden Grove has installed 10 more driver feedback signs. “Frankly, it’s hard to get people to slow down,” says Dan Candelaria, Garden Grove’s traffic engineer. “But these encourage people to do the right thing.”
Could Social Gaming Save the Music Industry?
Ok, so my headline is a big question, but there is a core point here. Interlinking music with social media is not that new, but interlinking it with gaming, that is very interesting to me…
EMI has become the first major label to sign a partnership to sell music within a social game on Facebook using the social network’s Facebook Credits virtual currency.
The major label has agreed a deal with social games publisher MXP4 to make a range of tracks from artists including Lily Allen, Gorillaz, the Jackson 5 and David Guetta available within MXP4’s Bopler Games collection on Facebook.
Fans will be able to play a selection of rhythm games for free with 60-second clips of the songs, but will have to pay using Facebook Credits for access to the full songs. MXP4 struck separate deals with EMI’s recorded music and publishing divisions.
The site Games Brief has an article up looking at Facebook games and suggests that the time to take the top position in this area is now over:
If Facebook games are an arms race, then Zynga have clearly won it. They have more users than their next nine competitors combined and a lock on cross promotion that can’t be beaten. Only Zynga is able to regularly make games that will acquire more than 20 million users, and they have been tenacious to a fault in dominating every channel they can find. …
It’s not. Over the last year there have continued to be many investments made in social game makers, but few successes to show for it. The conditions in the market have changed because of the overpowering presence of Zynga.
Zynga is like the Bengal tiger. In the jungle, the Bengal tiger is king and every other species has evolved to get out of the tiger’s way. They can’t fight the tiger, so the only option they have is to run and alert others when the tiger is near. So the tiger remains king and gets its choice of meals, and every other species lives or dies by the movements of the tiger.
Now while I do feel there is a bit of a bubble being caused by lots of publishers and developers rushing into the social game space (something PopCap has said too) I don’t agree with all of Games Brief’s take on this. (Though I have a huge respect for the site and am an avid reader) Yes currently Zynga are the top tiger in that arena but swamping games on Facebook is simple. Indeed swapping Facebook for another social media platform is relatively easy. This is in contrast to swapping something like an operating system or a bank account. In many ways the top position is Zynga’s to loose – provided that keep doing what they do and well and don’t get complacement and stop innovating, they will be top tiger thanks to the momentum they have. But when a new and interesting shiny thing comes along and/or when the existing games stop being fun, fair or compelling – users can and will swap. There will be many who’ve build up a relationship with thier game and so have an inersia to change, but in a social space the viral nature of movement is swift and decisive. Look at the switch from MySpace and Bebo to Facebook, and that’s an easier user change than a switch between social networks.
Facebook, Bebo and MySpace trands in Uk (tugsearch.co.uk)
How to Start a Games Studio – Part 3
Following on from Part 1 and Part 2, Part 3 is now up:
Much like the design of a great game, there is no one clear route to success. Being creative about marketing is as important as being creative with the game itself. There is always much more going online for potential fans than they can ever look at, so you have to always ask yourself, why would anyone bother listening to what you’ve got to say? As such, all the content of your communications; the manner, platform and context, are all vital to getting potential fans to tune in.
I’m going to be talking more about this at a session here in Bristol at the PM Studio, Friday, 29 July 2011 1pm – 2pm (which is free to attend).
Amazing Develop Panel for The Wellcome Trust
We’re helping to put together an amazing panel of people to talk games at this years Develop Conference. Here is a summary of the information:
The Develop Conference is the UK’s main event for games development. This year, the Wellcome Trust is hosting a panel discussion that brings together fascinating voices from in and around industry. There’s also the chance for games developers to find out more about how to get funding for projects around a biomedical theme.
The event looks at the impact of games beyond the console and runs on Wednesday 20th July (11am-12pm). On the panel we have the outgoing Channel 4 Commissioning Editor for Education and founder of Makielab, Alice Taylor, along with Demis Hassabis, a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow who, before becoming a neuroscientist, made a splash in the games industry with games like the BAFTA-nominated Republic: The Revolution. Joining them are Phil Stuart of the multi-award winning Preloaded, and Jez Harris, an industry veteran whose works include Buzz! and the Harry Potter games. The panel is chaired by myself, Tomas Rawlings, games consultant for the Wellcome Trust.
After the discussion, a number of Wellcome Trust staff will be around to chat with developers about how they may be able to access Trust funding to create games. We have a number of schemes for funding games with a biomedical theme (please note that Trust’s engagement around biomedical sciences is predominately aimed at UK audiences).
Our Broadcast Development Awards offer up to £10,000 to a developer with an unsigned project idea, allowing them to develop it up to a state at which a publisher may fund the full title.
We also offer funds to create complete games too: the People Awards scheme offers up to £30,000 to small development studios to explore an aspect of biomedicine in an interactive or game form – particularly if the studio partners with a scientist or science institution.
Another option is the Society Awards, which offer grants of more that £30,000 for developers, again especially if partnered with a scientist or science institution. This is intended for those who wish to explore and engage society at large with an issue in biomedical science.
Funded projects for any of these schemes can take the form of virtual engagement such as via social games, websites, mobiles technology, casual games, ARGs (Augmented Reality Games) and the like, or be based around a physical location.
So for any developers at the conference, do come along to the session on Wednesday 20th July to find out more and talk to us. We may be able to work together to create great games that can inform, educate and engage.
A Great Becoming... 