The Brink FPS Saga Begins…
Brink is a new FPS that seems to have team-based play as part of its core selling point. This was a problem for the console versions of the game, as I’ve seen reports that its in need of a patch and so not really there as yet – an issue compounded by the problems with the Playstation Network. However since then I’ve seen 2 reviews of the working game that seem to give it a big thumbs up:
Brink deserves to be ranked among the finest co-op games available. As a multiplayer experience, it is exquisite. But as mentioned earlier, it falters if played solo. While all the modes can be played in single-player, the bots that act as stand-ins for other players are a poor replacement. It certainly isn’t the case that gamers who buy Brink will feel ripped off if they don’t have access to their console’s (or PC’s) online network. But until you’ve fought both with and against living opponents in Brink, you have yet to sample the best of what it has to offer.
That review was for the Xbox version –there is another review here looking at PC. I am now interested… and another thing of note to me is the narrative to the game. They have given it a post-apocalyptic, post-Global Warming vibe:
The game’s story is set in a future world where rising sea-levels have forced mankind to retreat to a giant floating metropolis called The Ark. Over time, divisions have emerged in society with The Ark’s poorer folk becoming increasingly unsettled with their lot, and desiring to leave in search of something better. As this would mean The Ark would lose large chunks of its workforce, the powers-that-be have taken a dim view of these plans, and have had their security forces clamp down hard on troublemakers. This, in turn, has sparked a full scale rebellion with those wishing to leave The Ark arming themselves and waging a guerilla war against the city’s security forces.
The story itself is quite lightweight and exists mainly to complement the level design in the campaign. However, the writers have pulled off a neat trick by deliberately muddying the moral waters in Brink. The authorities maybe dictatorial but they believe they’re safeguarding humanity. The rebels are demanding liberty or death, but there’s no guarantee their freedom will lead them to a better place. Neither side comes across as overtly in the right (or in the wrong), and so the player’s choice at the beginning of the game doesn’t necessarily put them on the side of good or evil.
Brink and the rising tide...
Sony and Its Gaming Strategy
Sony is a giant in the gaming world – that is of no doubt. The original Playstation changed gaming forever. It was technically a great machine and pushed games and gaming into new areas. After an initial shaky start, the PS2 carried that momentum forward, selling 150 million units worldwide to date. As well as the commercial success, some of the titles that came out on the PS2 were critically renowned too; Ico, Resident Evil 4, Shadow of the Colossus, GTA: Vice City to name but a few.
We’re now in a new era from then. The rules of the game have not only changed, but are changing still. This is no longer a simple console war-zone between Sony and rivals like Microsoft and Nintendo. Sony is having a bad news month with the hacking of the Playstation Network, but are there deeper troubles – deeper than just the Playstation division?
Nothing much is easy at Sony, though – and not just because the company is in trouble amid the PlayStation Network hacking row. This is a vast conglomerate with turnover this year expected to be £54bn, which, as Charles Arthur points out on the cover, runs on tiny sub-1% margins. Any profits it makes on film and maybe music are blown away whenever the electronics business runs into trouble. Sony insists on staying in tough businesses like television manufacturing (where any rival in distress just dumps product on the market and profit is destroyed), and fails to develop its media businesses in the way that Rupert Murdoch might.
Sony is much more than games – it is the classic mega-media corporation that you look at in media studies for vertical and horizontal integration. It makes the Playstation 3 and will also sell you a TV to use with it. It makes games and films to use on your new PS3 and TV. It makes portable music players and music to use with it. Yet its vast empire is also a vast exposure to the ups and downs of markets:
When you dig deeper, Sony’s business isn’t actually that healthy. Yes, it’s enormous: last year’s annual revenue was ¥7.2tn (around $77.5bn) and profits ¥27bn (around $289m). But the slimness of the pre-tax margin – one third of 1% of revenue overall – points to the difficulty it faces.
The financial figures going back to April 2001 tell a story of a business that lurches annually from feast to famine, with the electronics division in particular (making items such as TVs and DVD players, but excluding the PlayStation consoles and Vaio PCs) generating about 75% of total revenues but increasingly vulnerable to the price wars.
Here’s the pattern: every year there is a bumper Christmas quarter (Q3 of its fiscal year), often followed by a loss-making one, and then two quarters’ climb back to profit, and a bumper Christmas again. (There are also oddities in there – a financial services business, for example, which generates a tidy profit from financing and leasing Sony’s professional equipment such as its professional video cameras, editing desks and PCs to businesses.)
Compare that exposure to Nintendo who make games and consoles and only really those. They are able to focus, while Sony struggles to reconcile the Xperia Phone with the PSP2 in the minds of its customers. In figures (from 2009) this means that Sony is about 13% gaming and 83% other stuff (electronics, films, music…)
Yet gaming drives consumer electronics. Home computers were purchased by people to play games on first and foremost. Games are also one of the key drivers in the move towards smart phones and the like. Content drives technology – not totally – as technology also shapes content. However the two are in a symbiotic relationship and I’d argue content, or to call it by its current media name, software, is the key driver.
Games used to be a closed world, yet the world of games today is a vastly expanded (and growing) one and games, including good games are freely available:
What used to be scarce was shelf space. It was limited in the physical world. It cost working capital to manufacture the products. A publisher could protect its position simply by being one of the few companies who could get a game into a store. Consumers recognised that the creation of one more copy of a physical disk cost money, and would pay for it.
In this expanded gaming world, I’ve always felt the difference that Sony could offer is one of curation and quality. To explain, as abundance of games grows, so does the choice. However, navigating in this expanded world is difficult. Finding good games amidst 100,000s of other games is hard. Sony have done a good job of curating some quality titles on PS3 – Heavy Rain, Flower – for example. Yet the Mini’s have been of a variable quality and until recently there was no in-system feedback loop by which players could say/see about the quality of a game. I think Sony needs to balance the quality with the abundance and with the ease of use – and if it gets that right, it can stand out from the crowd. If it can build a platform where every game on it meets a minimum high quality threshold, then it has something the others do not. It could use this platform to drive this ethos too in other areas…
Cthulhu Thursday: Art for the End Times
This week I’ve seen lots of good art with a Cthulhu theme I’d like to share… First off there is this amazing image by Florian Bertmer:
Florian Bertmer's Call of Cthulhu art
Next up is this Lovecraft/Cthulhu together image by Jimiyo. Very striking and looks cool:
Jimiyo's Art
And finally this gem by Lisel Ashlock (source here & here)
Lisel Ashlock. Call of Cthulhu.
Hope you enjoyed the images, I know I did!
(Cthulhu Thursday is a dose of Mythos to brighten darken your week. More on the idea can be found here and a list of posts thus far, here. Also for more Cthulhu news, sign up to the cthulhuHQ twitter feed. Enjoy!)
I’m really excited to say that our new game studio – Red Wasp Design – has officially launched today and we’ve announced our first project, which is in development as I write this. Red Wasp Design is a new Bristol-based micro studio and our first title is a game based on the cult Call of Cthulhu RPG (role-playing game). Why not follow us on Twitter or Facebook? This is from the initial press release.
An agreement between Call of Cthulhu impresarios, Chaosium and new development studio Red Wasp Design will see the award winning role-playing game (RPG), Call of Cthulhu, coming to a mobile platform near you. The first title, ‘Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land’ is set in the midst of World War One and pits a team of investigators and soldiers against an ancient enemy, older than humanity itself. This eldritch enemy is using the carnage of the great war to build an undead army amidst the battlefields of Europe. The game will be a 3D turn-based strategy/role playing game and will initially launch on iPhone and Android with more platforms to follow. As the game is still in development, release dates and price points are to be announced after the summer.
Call of Cthulhu was originally the title of a novella by cult horror writer H.P. Lovecraft which has, since it was published in 1928, captured the imagination of generation after generation of fans.
Notes from Museums and Technology Talk
Recently Danny and Martha from Wellcome gave a talk about the interesting stuff they’d seen at the Museums and the Web event in Philadelphia. I took some notes from their notes which unhelpfully gives you a 2nd-hand account of the event. However there is some cool stuff from the event they reported on…
The first thing that caught my eye was Wolfquest – a free downloaded game that teaches people about the ecology and behaviour of wolves. The original idea behind the game was to rehabilitate the image of the wolf, so maligned by popular culture over the last couple of hundred years. (The US has been re-introducing wolves in some areas to act as natural controls on herbivores.) However it turns out that wolves are actually quite liked, so the game instead seems to focus on teaching players about them and their habitat. Its a free download and looks worth checking out.
Screenshot from Wolfquest
Next thing that I was intrigued by was the Smithsonian’s Web and New Media strategy process. This was done via a publicly accessible Wiki (same idea as Wikipedia) which means that anyone could read and amend the document. I like the idea of putting such documentation into the public domain and giving people a chance to comment.
There were also some interesting apps mentioned during the talk. Apps that just show you round a space or are some kind of virtual map, to me miss a trick. Yes that is helpful functionality, but apps are native to interactive and computational processes – i.e. you can do stuff with them. So the Davis Museum’s app that adds gamification to the process sounds great (and the research showed using it resulted in people spending more time with each exhibit).
I also loved the idea of Magritte Me, where in the museum they have the background to the famous apple/hat-paining ‘The Son of Man‘ where by using Augmented Reality (AR) you can re-create the painting with your friend inside. The idea being that the technology re-connects you to the space you are in.
Magritte Me App
As with the above example, it seemed that AR is a tool that is now being explored with much more success. I suspect that this is because in part the technology has improved and in-part because the ideas have been around for a while and had time to ferment. So the technology has been used to create art in spaces where the artists has no permission to be there – but because it’s AR – how can you stop them? An example of this is the Infiltr.AR work floating a giant yellow balloon over the Pentagon:
There is a great article on Gamification in the WSJ by Nicholas Lovell of Gamesbrief:
What everyone does agree is that gamifying is difficult. Raf Keustermans, former marketing director of Electronic Arts’ social games division, Playfish, says “there is a reason why games developers earn over £100,000 a year.” And even they don’t always get it right. Of the more than 80,000 games on Facebook, Mr. Keustermans says that only 200 have more than one million monthly active users. Seventy-five per cent of users who play a game never return after the first occasion. Only 15-20% are still playing after 30 days.
In short, making a good social game is difficult. Gamifying is just as difficult. In fact, it may even be harder, because instead of just focusing on how to make fun, engaging gameplay that can be monetised, it has to focus on other, more nebulous corporate objectives like engagement.
Following Split Milk’s iPhone Game Post-Mortem
On the very good Games Brief, I noticed that they are teaming up with iPhone developer Split Milk to chart the progress of thier new game – and I’ll be watching with great interest, having done a couple of iPhone games…
The honesty starts here; we’ve got several aims with this diary, in rough order of importance.
- Get word out about the game and the company.
- Take the opportunity to learn about the project while it is still ‘alive’ and try to fix mistakes before they take root.
- Gain some knowledge we otherwise wouldn’t have through feedback and dialogues opened up as a direct result of these posts.
- Impart some of our hard-won knowledge to anyone reading.
I think its really brave of them and wish them well (and will buy the game when it is out ‘cos it sounds fun). Having been to the Wired Fail event in London recently, the message from that was not that failing is a bad thing necessarily – its failing to learn from it that is. (Not that I think Split Milk is going to fail, just saying its brave to put it out there because they may do… but only in the sales of the game, learning-wise they are setting up for success, IMHO.)
Games Go to War
DARPA – the US agency who makes weapons and stuff, are taking the non-game area of submarine design, and gamifying it. The aim is to crowd-source information on the subject, via a game:
DARPA wants you to help it develop better anti-submarine warfare tactics and it has designed a sub-hunting computer game it wants you to play. DARPA is “crowd-sourcing” the solution to finding and tracking adversary submarines. You play the sub-hunt game and report your tactics back to DARPA. DARPA will then incorporate the collective knowledge it thus receives into the software it is developing for a new sub-tracking robot. Click here to download the game – and don’t tell your boss I sent you.
Sub-hunting is not the only task for which DARPA has turned to crowd-sourcing. In February, DARPA crowd-sourced the design of a new tactical vehicle that would perform either reconnaissance or battlefield delivery and evacuation missions. DARPAhoped to attract the interest of service members, auto enthusiasts, designers, and engineers and offered a $10,000 reward for the top design.
Now discussions of the ethics of games are not a new topic, but until now they’ve tended to be about violent content and the like. Helping in the design of weapons systems is a whole new question of ethics…
(Also posted on P2P Foundation Blog. Thanks to Michel for the link.)
I was recently contacted by Lauren Carlson who has written an article looking a the idea of Gamification and sales. Here’s a sample from the article:
[The Gamification Summit] got me thinking, could gamification improve the adoption of sales force automation (SFA) software? It seems logical that gaming elements would appeal to sales people – a notoriously competitive bunch – and get them more engaged with the software. Is it time for SFA vendors to dust off those consoles and get their game on?
Below are just three ideas I brainstormed with our designer, Russel. At a minimum, they are meant to be food for thought. I’d love to hear your comments and ideas.
I. Training Badges
In this first example, badges are used as signs of achievement. Whenever a staff member completes a certain level of training, they receive a badge that appears on their profile. The profile is visible to the individual user, as well as the rest of the team. Like putting your report card on the fridge, your profile provides a sense of self-satisfaction and accomplishment. It is also a motivational tool, reminding you of what other training badges you need to keep up with your peers. Additional incentives could be tied to the badges as well. For example, a sales rep might receive an increase in commission rates for receiving the Miller Heiman badge.
Now as a games designer my initial reaction is – this is only part of a game. The idea of scores and league tables for a work force around whatever you measure them is indeed a gamic (as in ‘game-like’) element – games tend towards scores. However that is not all of the story. Games are also about the system that earns the scores and how you interact with it. Within any game, there are always ways to ‘game’ the game system. By this I mean ways the player can outsmart the game itself. These often involve quirks in the system being exploited. (For example see this video from Modern Warfare 2 showing places you can hide that were clearly not designed for players to use.) So when you implement a score system in a work place, the assumption might be people use this to measure themselves against their peers and work harder – I’d wager there will also be lots of people also looking to game the system. They’ll be looking for exploits in the scoring system to increase their score but not by working harder. That is human nature; we had people submitting high scores for the online score-chart of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? that were so low they had to have hacked out the videos from the game to achieve such scores.
For Gamification to work, we all need to feel like the game system is either there to create a sense of fair-play; and for that the game system needs to be fair. With that enough of us buy into it to care about following the rules of the game as much as we do winning the game. And that is hard, because human nature also means we delight in finding loopholes in the rules of the game – and that is a game all of its own.
Se we had a wedding here in the UK, you might have noticed. Now hats are a big deal for wedding wear (I’m reliably told) and one of the guests attending was Princess Beatrice and she had a. well, interesting hat on. Here it is:
Now it has a shape that begs for modification. And duly, the Internet obliged… Adding a touch of evil:
Or a cat:
But the best one was, of course, inspired by eldrich horror…
Now that is what I call, a hat!
A Great Becoming... 
