Cthulhu Thursday: Tweeting, Crawling Chaos…
Ah, Cthulhu chaos – it infects all it touches. Warping it and re-moulding it into the Old Ones unholy purpose. Now while Twitter is a quite a new thing (in comparison to the life-cycle of Cthulhu) it has not taken long for it to be infected… Take the Twitter bird icon for example:
‘Twas not long till the Spiders of Leng were on to it…
And the infamous Whale Fail image:
Has become the Cthulhu Fail (but don’t fail Cthulhu, ‘cos he’ll eat you…)
(Click on the Cthulhu images to go to where I found them…) You can also find which Lovecraftian nightmares to follow on Twitter here and here.
(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!)
This is an interesting bit of insight into the buying habbits of Windows Phone 7 users:
Paid apps with built-in trials are downloaded 70 times more than paid apps without that feature, according to a blogpost this week by Microsoft’s senior director of Windows Phone product management Todd Brix.
“Trials result in higher sales,” he added. “Nearly one out of 10 trial apps downloaded convert to a purchase and generate 10 times more revenue, on average, than paid apps that don’t include trial functionality.”
Note, Brix is talking about apps, but games are the app category most likely to be making use of Microsoft’s trial API. It’s not a new idea for the games industry, of course. Sites such as RealArcade used to thrive on offering one-hour trials of casual games before asking players to stump up to continue playing.
Brix says that Windows Phone 7 users are making their minds up quickly whether an app or game is worth paying for, based on trials. “More than half of trial downloads that convert to a sale do so within one day, and most of those within two hours,” he writes, while warning that apps do better or worse depending on their “quality and nature”.
Just to clarify – this is where a game has a free trial and after completing that the user decides whether or not to buy the full game. Interesting the article cites the opposite behaviour of iPhone users, where some evidence suggests they prefer a clear line between the demo and the paid app. Not sure why this should be? Article suggests cultural differences between users of both platforms. Might be – might be demographics, might be there is less games choice on Windows Phone 7 so users are buying more then those on iPhone who can browse more free stuff?
This is a great article giving an overview of the games business and it has lots of graphs to show you what is what such as where the value is by game platform and amount:
Global Video Games Sector Revenue ($ billion)
Which is really interesting as it shows that almost all of the growth of the games sector in the last few years is coming from online and mobile.
And this fascinating one that shows the sales of titles in relation to the development cost:
Development Cost vs Sales Income (Millions)
- A: Red Steel
- B: Crackdown
- C: Lost Planet
- D: Assassin’s Creed
- E: Stranglehold
- F: Halo 3
- G: Final Fantasy IX
- H: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2
- I: Shenmue
- J: Grand Theft Auto IV
Monday Morning Gamification: 10 Rules to Gamification
Another good post from gamesbrief.com – this one is about how to get gamifaction right in via 10 rules. Well worth a read. Here’s no.7:
7. No, games are not just about competition
The first thing I hear when talking to people about “gamification” is “We’ll just add some points, and a leaderboard, and the natural desire for people to be at the top of the leaderboard will do the rest.”
No, it won’t.
Humans are complex beasts. Professor Richard Bartle has classified humans as gamers into four types. Everyone is a combination of all these types, and the explanations below are mine. (Check out Wikipedia on the Bartle Test if you want to find out more)
- Killers want to beat other people
- Achievers want to beat themselves
- Explorers want to go places and find out stuff
- Socialisers don’t care what they do as long as they are doing it with their friends.
Bartle estimates that only 25% of online gamers have Killer as their dominant trait. If you gamify for Killers, you are only appealing to 25% of your customers.
More damagingly, you may be creating a worse experience for 75% of your customers.
MIT Media Lab Generates a New Logo
This is a fun story. Getting a logo can be a pain (as much of a pain as thinking up a game or company name!) and it is hard to get it right. Witness the kerfuffle over the London 2012 Olympics logo (though personally I like it!) So its a logo for a lab with a rep for cutting edge – so how did they come up with it? They generated it via an algorithm!
To honor 25 years of backseat-driving robots and vision-scanning iPhones and touchscreen-keyboard-3-D-display hybrids, the MIT Media Lab tapped Brooklyn-based designers (and erstwhile Media Lab rats) E Roon Kang and Richard The to dream up a fresh visual identity. The result is pure, unadulterated Media Lab: an algorithmic logo that generates a sui generis image for each of the Lab’s sui generis brains. …
The basic idea here is that the logo has three intersecting spotlights that can be organized in any of 40,000 shapes and 12 color combinations using a custom algorithm. That’s enough to supply each and every new card-carrying Media Labber with his very own logo for a whopping 25 years.
Folks select a design on a web-based platform, and once they’ve made their choice, no one else can poach it; it’s as personal as a Social Security number — perhaps more so.
I’ll admit – it an amazing way to come up with the logo. The medium is the message, if you like. Wish I’d thought of it…
PC Games as B-Movies
This is a great post I recommend reading!
On my travels recently I’ve come accross an increasing number of what I’m going to term B-Games. In cinema, the B-Movie was the cheap filler that was produced – often as accompanyment to a more polished feature – to feed the unforseen demand that had appeared overnight. They usually focussed on tick box stuff that could easily be sold: horror, gore, sex, exploitation; and audiences were so hungry for content that they devoured it without complaint.
The idea of a cheap, poorly crafted game is nothing new, but it seems the environment is ripe for a whole new wave. The audience for games today is larger than it has ever been. The games themselves, though, are more expensive to produce and provide ever shorter playtimes. This, I’d argue, is exhasperated by the fact tastes are more niche than they ever have been. There are a greater variety of genres to focus on – many of which are hard to come by these days – and gamers are older and more set in their ways than the fledgling industry could have allowed 20 years ago. Digital distribution, therefore, provides just the low cost delivery platform required in order to produce and distribute a cheap genre game that will – for simply being in that genre – satisfy a profitable portion of the audience.
The Freedom Box
It shocked many when during the protests in Egypt, the government turned off the Internet. So how can the net be a force for freedom if it is this easy to control? Enter the Freedom Box!
The list begins with “cheap, small, low-power plug servers,” Mr. Moglen said. “A small device the size of a cellphone charger, running on a low-power chip. You plug it into the wall and forget about it.”
Almost anyone could have one of these tiny servers, which are now produced for limited purposes but could be adapted to a full range of Internet applications, he said.
“They will get very cheap, very quick,” Mr. Moglen said. “They’re $99; they will go to $69. Once everyone is getting them, they will cost $29.”
The missing ingredients are software packages, which are available at no cost but have to be made easy to use. “You would have a whole system with privacy and security built in for the civil world we are living in,” he said. “It stores everything you care about.”
Put free software into the little plug server in the wall, and you would have a Freedom Box that would decentralize information and power, Mr. Moglen said. This month, he created the Freedom Box Foundation to organize the software.
“We have to aim our engineering more directly at politics now,” he said. “What has happened in Egypt is enormously inspiring, but the Egyptian state was late to the attempt to control the Net and not ready to be as remorseless as it could have been.”
Cthulhu Thursday: Role-playing the Laundry
I have mentioned before on this blog the author Charles Stross. He wrote what I think to be one of the finest Cthulhu themed short stories since the master himself passed over to the Dreamlands. But he did not stop there – oh no – he’s written a number of Cthulhu themed-spy novels based around the secret British intelligence agency The Laundry. They are clever, witty and have lots of things that go bump in the night within. So it was with a ‘yip’ of joy that I discovered that these books have been mashed with the Basic RPG system into this:
There are things out there, in the weirder reaches of space-time where reality is an optional extra. Horrible things, usually with tentacles. Al-Hazred glimpsed them, John Dee summoned them, H.P. Lovecraft wrote about them, and Alan Turing mapped the paths from our universe to theirs. The right calculation can call up entities from other, older universes, or invoke their powers. Invisibility? Easy! Animating the dead? Trivial! Binding lesser demons to your will? Easily doable!
Opening up the way for the Great Old Ones to come through and eat our brains? Unfortunately, much too easy.
That’s where the Laundry comes in – it’s a branch of the British secret service, tasked to prevent hideous alien gods from wiping out all life on Earth (and more particularly, the UK). You work for the Laundry. The hours are long, the pay is sub-par, the co-workers are… interesting (in the Chinese curse sense of the word), and the bureaucracy is stifling – but you do get to wave basilisk guns and bullet wards around, and to go on challenging and exciting missions to exotic locations like quaint, legend-haunted Wigan, cursed Slough and Wolverhampton where the walls are thin.
Laundry Cover
(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!)
The Debate of Copyright and Job Creation
There are been suggestions that by not protecting copyright, jobs are being lost. As a counter to that claim, Rick Falkvinge writes that given that open and free content drives demand for electronic devices and given the jobs this area creates, it’s better to be less rather than more restrictive on copyright:
Executive summary: for every job lost (or killed) in the copyright industry due to nonenforcement of copyright, 11.8 jobs are created in electronics wholesale, electronics manufacturing, IT, or telecom industries — or even the copyright-inhibited part of the creative industries. A lot of people have pointed out the laughability of the copyright industry’s claim that 1.2 million jobs will be lost until 2015 if not harsh measures are taken to enforce copyright. But assuming a scenario where that happened, when the copyright-inhibited industries are factored into this calculation, a loss of 1.2 million jobs in the copyright industries translate to 14.2 million gained jobs in the copyright-inhibited industry sectors, for a net gain of 13 million jobs in Europe.
The figures used by many promoting stronger copyright laws are often subject to serious criticism. In addition there is no definitive evidence that strong copyright protects jobs. However I don’t think the matrix of ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ on the copyright debate is that simple. What is needed is the creation of an eco-system of media where one feeds the other. The lack of financial remuneration for creators is a problem as there will needs to be ways of funding original content. However pushing for copyright laws does not seem to be an answer to this. Not only that but there is an argument that copyright’s cousin – patent law – is also stifling innovation;
This orgy for lawyers [in patent battles] is partly a result of the explosion of the market for smart-phones. IDC, a market-research firm, expects that 270m smart-phones will be sold this year: 55% more than in 2009. “It has become worthwhile to defend one’s intellectual property,” says Richard Windsor of Nomura, an investment bank.
Yet there is more than this going on. Smart-phones are not just another type of handset, but fully-fledged computers, which come loaded with software and double as digital cameras and portable entertainment centres. They combine technologies from different industries, most of them patented. Given such complexity, sorting out who owns what requires time and a phalanx of lawyers.
The convergence of different industries has also led to a culture clash. When it comes to intellectual property, mobile-phone firms have mostly operated like a club. They jointly develop new technical standards: for example, for a new generation of wireless networks. They then license or swap the patents “essential” to this standard under “fair and reasonable” conditions.
Who is suing who in smart phone patent battles (from economist.com)
To me this suggests that the battle over copyright (and patents) has become much more than simply a battle of rights – it’s now being used as a proxy-business method of attacking competitors. The debate is often ignoring the implications of whether or not the technology is even possible to control. A much more wide ranging and serious debate is needed and not one purely based on vested interests.
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Hat-tip to Michel, also posted on P2P Foundation blog.
Climate Change and Games
I’ve been looking at the Climate Change game, Fate of the World (an area of interest for me) and so was plaeased to find a summary of the games out there on the blog ClimateProgress:
Global warming games” or “climate change games” show players how their personal choices affect the health of the environment. The games correlate certain behaviors with measures of environmental harm, such as carbon dioxide output, water usage, or energy consumption. The gameplay may vary but the goal is typically the same — to inform players about climate change and what they can do to stop it.
Screenshot from Climate Challenge
I have a few ideas for games/projects on this issue – though some of my inspiration is around games with a bit more post-apocalyptic-ness in them as well as strategy games around resource management.
A Great Becoming... 