Hands-on with the LG Xenon
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Thursday, 02 April 09 - 07:38 AM (GMT) By Jim allice green in game |
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My first stop this morning at CTIA was to the LG booth, particularly to take a closer look at the LG Xenon, which was announced earlier this week. The Xenon is quite svelte at 4.16 inches long by 2.11 inches wide by 0.62 inch thick, and it has a nice 262,000-color 2.8-inch QVGA touch-screen display. Underneath the display are three physical keys; the Send, task manager, and End/Power keys. The task manager key brings up a list of open applications that you can toggle through. The touch screen has vibrating feedback, and there's an internal accelerometer that will rotate the screen from portrait to landscape mode in certain applications.
On the bottom row of the home screen are four shortcuts to the phone dialer, the contacts list, the messaging inbox, and the main menu. You can also toggle between three different home screens--one that lists your favorite contacts, one with just the standard home display, and one with your favorite shortcuts. The menu interface is similar to that of the LG Vu, with separate tabs for entertainment, settings, and so forth.
One of the highlights of the Xenon is its slide-out QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard has four rows of keys and is quite roomy. The keys are also sufficiently raised above the surface and are easy to type, at least in the brief few minutes I had to try it out. There are dedicated messaging keys on the keyboard, a dedicated emoticon key, an @ symbol key, and a dedicated .com key for entering URLs in the Xenon's full HTML browser.
Features of the Xenon include a 2.0-megapixel camera, a camcorder, stereo Bluetooth, threaded text messaging, instant messaging, mobile e-mail, quad-band GSM,
NMU student hits the top of Forbes' rich list
Maxwell Cornington lives a simple life. He wakes up in the morning, eats eggs, plays World of Warcraft, goes to class and sells really, really sharp knives.
Cornington, a freshman business major at NMU, has recently been added to Forbes' World Billionaires list. His personal wealth is listed at $51 Billion, which places him first on the list, substantially ahead of both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett who have alternated the top position for the past few years.
Cornington's massive wealth stems from a multi-faceted business he runs out of his Halverson Hall dorm room. His business, Max-Cut International, is recognized as the world's leading supplier of knives, surpassing the nation of
"I'm not going to say that it was planned, but when I started selling the knives six years ago, I knew that it was my destiny," said Cornington.
The World Billionaires list has garnered its fair share of criticisms in the past, particularly when they chose to include drug dealer, Joaquin Guzman "El Chapo" Loera in their 2009 rankings. Critics have raised similar concerns about the inclusion of Cornington.
"It's a cheap publicity stunt," said Adam Linden, author of "Cutting through the Bull: Exposing the Truth about Max-Cut" and outspoken critic of Cornington.
"Cornington is a recklessly irresponsible financial sociopath," said
According to
MP officials have denied the connection between their knives and Cornington's. Craig Minor, the director of Food and Stuff, has said that they don't know why they seem to lose so many knives.
"We're really proud of Maxwell. It's great that one of our students has shown so much initiative," said Minor.
Cornington has also denied the link.
"My blades and the Market place blades share similar qualities, but my blades are really, really sharp," said Cornington, "I mean with my blades you could easily take down… an elk, with an MP blade, you could split a muffin. The choice is up to you."
"It was the only way I could prove how powerful my blades were," said Cornington, "The sales that I made off of that demonstration were well worth the loss of that one tree, at least to me."
Max-Cut also includes a line of fitness related videos that Cornington wrote, produced and starred Maxwell Cornington lives a simple life. He wakes up in the morning, eats eggs, plays World of Warcraft, goes to class and sells really, really sharp knives.
Cornington, a freshman business major at NMU, has recently been added to Forbes' World Billionaires list. His personal wealth is listed at $51 Billion, which places him first on the list, substantially ahead of both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett who have alternated the top position for the past few years.
Cornington's massive wealth stems from a multi-faceted business he runs out of his Halverson Hall dorm room. His business, Max-Cut International, is recognized as the world's leading supplier of knives, surpassing the nation of
"I'm not going to say that it was planned, but when I started selling the knives six years ago, I knew that it was my destiny," said Cornington.
The World Billionaires list has garnered its fair share of criticisms in the past, particularly when they chose to include drug dealer, Joaquin Guzman "El Chapo" Loera in their 2009 rankings. Critics have raised similar concerns about the inclusion of Cornington.
It's a cheap publicity stunt," said Adam Linden, author of "Cutting through the Bull: Exposing the Truth about Max-Cut" and outspoken critic of Cornington.
"Cornington is a recklessly irresponsible financial sociopath," said
According to
MP officials have denied the connection between their knives and Cornington's. Craig Minor, the director of Food and Stuff, has said that they don't know why they seem to lose so many knives.
"We're really proud of Maxwell. It's great that one of our students has shown so much initiative," said Minor.
Cornington has also denied the link.
"My blades and the Market place blades share similar qualities, but my blades are really, really sharp," said Cornington, "I mean with my blades you could easily take down… an elk, with an MP blade, you could split a muffin. The choice is up to you."
"It was the only way I could prove how powerful my blades were," said Cornington, "The sales that I made off of that demonstration were well worth the loss of that one tree, at least to me."
Max-Cut also includes a line of fitness related videos that Cornington wrote, produced and starred Maxwell Cornington lives a simple life. He wakes up in the morning, eats eggs, plays World of Warcraft, goes to class and sells really, really sharp knives.
Cornington, a freshman business major at NMU, has recently been added to Forbes' World Billionaires list. His personal wealth is listed at $51 Billion, which places him first on the list, substantially ahead of both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett who have alternated the top position for the past few years.
Cornington's massive wealth stems from a multi-faceted business he runs out of his Halverson Hall dorm room. His business, Max-Cut International, is recognized as the world's leading supplier of knives, surpassing the nation of
"I'm not going to say that it was planned, but when I started selling the knives six years ago, I knew that it was my destiny," said Cornington.
The World Billionaires list has garnered its fair share of criticisms in the past, particularly when they chose to include drug dealer, Joaquin Guzman "El Chapo" Loera in their 2009 rankings. Critics have raised similar concerns about the inclusion of Cornington.
"It's a cheap publicity stunt," said Adam Linden, author of "Cutting through the Bull: Exposing the Truth about Max-Cut" and outspoken critic of Cornington.
"Cornington is a recklessly irresponsible financial sociopath," said
According to
MP officials have denied the connection between their knives and Cornington's. Craig Minor, the director of Food and Stuff, has said that they don't know why they seem to lose so many knives.
"We're really proud of Maxwell. It's great that one of our students has shown so much initiative," said Minor.
Cornington has also denied the link.
"My blades and the Market place blades share similar qualities, but my blades are really, really sharp," said Cornington, "I mean with my blades you could easily take down… an elk, with an MP blade, you could split a muffin. The choice is up to you."
"It was the only way I could prove how powerful my blades were," said Cornington, "The sales that I made off of that demonstration were well worth the loss of that one tree, at least to me."
Max-Cut also includes a line of fitness related videos that Cornington wrote, produced and starred in, and a record label that has promoted Cornington's latest album, "Tales from V-Town" which he recorded in his dormitory's lobby. One single in particular, "From the Hood" has garnered harsh reviews from musical contemporaries. Many have said that Cornington is claiming an urban background that he never actually lived.
"You can say the same thing about people like Johnny Depp. He's not a pirate. Denzel Washington was never a cop," Cornington said.
Though he is a billionaire, the only thing that Cornington said he has bought with his new found wealth is love, which he refused to elaborate on. He does, however, plan on purchasing an island in the future.
"And not just any island, but that one where all the people are lost. I'm going to buy it and watch them," he said.
When asked about how the economic crisis facing the
BlizzCast Eight Now Available
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Wednesday, 01 April 09 - 08:47 AM (GMT) By Jim allice green in game |
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Blizzard Entertainment has released the eighth BlizzCast, a series of podcasts created by Blizzard's Community Team and focusing on the company's current and future game offerings. Number eight features Q&As with Julian Love, Mike Nicholson, Tom Chilton, Jay Wilson, and Dustin Browder about Diablo III, Starcraft 2, and World of Warcraft.
Bornakk: Before Wrath of the Lich King came out there was talk of aerial combat in Wintergrasp and in the game in general with some goblin anti-air shredder being put in the game. Howling Fjord showed some footage of this as well. What happened with aerial combat and do we still plan to put it into the game?
Tom Chilton: Well the aerial combat that we had in Wintergrasp we just ended up feeling wasn’t really polished enough for the final experience. We gave it a shot with the vehicle technology that we had but ultimately it was a little goofy that you could crash your airplane into the ground and nothing bad would really happen. Then also the kinda of sense of flying really wasn’t there enough.
If you look at a lot of games that have done flight simulation, there is a lot of care that goes into giving you that sensation of flying by having the world tilt and stuff like that so it feels a little less mechanical, feels a little bit more alive or more natural. So one of the things that we have kind of tasked ourselves with doing is figuring out how to polish that, how to improve on our vehicle physics, there’s still a lot of vehicle physics tech that we want to get in that didn’t make it into the first pass of Lich King.
So we have to make some tough decisions sometimes about what we are going to go forward with and what just isn’t working out well enough to meet our quality standards and that was one of them. So it’s still definitely on our list of things that we want to do, we have a lot of people here who are passionate about vehicle combat, passionate about making it more interesting, more fun, by increasing the number of things we can do with it – that would definitely include the possibility of doing aerial combat.
Bornakk: Will there be a diverse selection of items that are viable for the end-game or will it follow the WoW-type style where there is more like one end-all-be-all set for each class?
Jay Wilson: It’s definitely diverse and it’s diverse on a lot of different fronts. When you think about Diablo 2, all the different ways you can build your character, we really expanded all the ways you can customize your character by adding in the rune system. Not only can you completely customize your skill set, much more so than you can in game like most MMOs like World of Warcraft, because of that, the items you want are based upon the skill set that you’ve chosen or the type of build that you are trying to create.
And items, one of the things we are trying to do is focus on this even greater element of defining your build. So really it's up to the player on what kind of stats they want on their character, but we're definitely not shooting for a, "oh here's the barbarian armor", there is a set and when you get the full set you're done. That's just not very Diablo and it's not really the kind of gameplay we're going for. If anything we’d like the item set to be a lot more diverse than it was in Diablo 2.
Bornakk: . Can you give us some insight into the current air model, like what are the roles of the air unites, and what do you see working really well in-game?
Dustin Browder: Well obviously each of the races behaves differently with how they use their air units. The Zerg, obviously the mutalisk is still a powerful part of the Zerg air force and still used for a lot of fast raiding, a lot of sudden attacks from different directions to keep the enemy off balance and of course in mass in the end game you can obviously use mutalisks for mass air assaults.
The other races behave a little bit differently. The Terrans with their banshee, is very very powerful anti-ground unit. It can even sometimes just power right through base defenses which really the wraith couldn’t have handled in the original game. So you see a lot of need for all the races to have some very powerful anti-air weapons to deal with these kinds of threats.
A similar threat on the Protoss side is the void ray. It is a very powerful bream that can really do a lot of damage to enemy buildings. So you’ll see there are some very heavy hitters in the air in Starcraft 2 that really require you to get out there and use some of these more dedicated anti-air units like the corrupter, like the phoenix, to really fend off these powerful sort of air threats. Obviously there are some similarities players will see with the original game, at the same time there are these really powerful hitters really do make a pretty big difference.
You'll also seem some new authority for some of the bigger units in the game. Certainly the carriers have a much longer range than they’ve ever had before. It makes them a very powerful threat from the air in the end game. We should probably see more carriers used in higher level games but obviously will see how that goes in the beta. And of course the battlecruiser has three different options in terms of how he wants to sort of improve his battlecruiser, whether he wants to buy a yamato weapon for his battlecruiser, or the player wants to a buy a shield for his cruiser, sort of different choices for the player for the battlecruiser which again adds to the authority of these big end game units which makes them a little more practicle in different matchups. Where previously you would only see battlecruisers in certain matchups in Starcraft, now in Starcraft 2 you’ll probably see them in more matchups sort of across the board.
Video game makers grow up
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Monday, 30 March 09 - 03:13 AM (GMT) By Jim allice green in game |
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AN DIEGO -- It's no coincidence that most of the blockbuster video games of the past two decades have been gorefests and war simulations. Their creators were single guys in their teens and 20s whose all-night coding sessions were fueled by Doritos and Mountain Dew.
John Smedley was one of them. In the mid-1990s, he helped make the trailblazing online game EverQuest, a slash-'em-up fantasy world that only a Dungeons & Dragons-obsessed geek could love.
But Smedley has grown up, and so has the industry.
Now 40, he is broadening his definition of fun and putting the finishing touches on a game that he wants his four children to be able to play. Free Realms, expected to go live on the Web in early April, reflects a level of maturity that's starting to change the nature of games now bursting onto the market.
"The clich?of game developers 20 years ago is that of socially inept young men who sleep under their desks," said Billy Pidgeon, an analyst with IDC who worked as a game producer in the late 1980s and early 1990s. "Many of those have now climbed out from under their desks and started families."
Smedley and the
Instead of death, blood and foul language, Free Realms has tutu-wearing goblins, puppies and snow angels. Like EverQuest, the game has adventures, but these quests involve exploration rather than combat.
"I wanted to make a game that would be fun for my kids," Smedley said. "But I also wanted to make it safe enough so parents like my wife wouldn't have to worry about them."
Smedley is in a good position to reinvent the nature of virtual worlds. He pioneered the game genre. As a computer science student at
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In 1993, he shifted to Sony. Three years later, he proposed the idea for EverQuest, which could be played simultaneously by thousands of players in a lush graphical environment. It was a radical departure from the crudely rendered, text-based online games that existed then. Six years later, EverQuest was released.
Its creators hoped the game would break even within two years by garnering 70,000 players paying $
Today, these figures pale in comparison with the 11.5 million people who play World of Warcraft, an online game released in 2004. But in 1999, the EverQuest flood nearly ground
"John really helped invent this genre," said Geoff Keighley, executive in charge of game content at MTV Networks.
Players loved EverQuest, sometimes a little too much. Some clocked more hours in the game than they did for work, leading people to call the game "EverCrack."
The game is rated "Teen," meaning it's suitable for players 13 and older. Smedley once took a call from an outraged parent who demanded to know why his son was banned.
"I told him his son used bad language," Smedley said. "The parent insisted that his son never cursed. So I pulled up the logs of what his son had typed in the game and e-mailed it to him right then. He read it and said, 'I'll take care of this. ' "
The incident taught Smedley to be more aware of what his own kids were doing online.
Smedley is also motivated by the business opportunity.
"To succeed in this new market, developers are going beyond just making entertainment for themselves," he said. "They're now getting greater satisfaction, personally and financially, from entertaining a broader audience. That includes their families."
In 1993, he shifted to Sony. Three years later, he proposed the idea for EverQuest, which could be played simultaneously by thousands of players in a lush graphical environment. It was a radical departure from the crudely rendered, text-based online games that existed then. Six years later, EverQuest was released.
Its creators hoped the game would break even within two years by garnering 70,000 players paying $
Today, these figures pale in comparison with the 11.5 million people who play World of Warcraft, an online game released in 2004. But in 1999, the EverQuest flood nearly ground
"John really helped invent this genre," said Geoff Keighley, executive in charge of game content at MTV Networks.
Players loved EverQuest, sometimes a little too much. Some clocked more hours in the game than they did for work, leading people to call the game "EverCrack."
The game is rated "Teen," meaning it's suitable for players 13 and older. Smedley once took a call from an outraged parent who demanded to know why his son was banned.
"I told him his son used bad language," Smedley said. "The parent insisted that his son never cursed. So I pulled up the logs of what his son had typed in the game and e-mailed it to him right then. He read it and said, 'I'll take care of this. ' "
The incident taught Smedley to be more aware of what his own kids were doing online.
Smedley is also motivated by the business opportunity.
"To succeed in this new market, developers are going beyond just making entertainment for themselves," he said. "They're now getting greater satisfaction, personally and financially, from entertaining a broader audience. That includes their families."
The Daily Grind: Is it luck?
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Monday, 30 March 09 - 03:05 AM (GMT) By Jim allice green in game |
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If you've been paying attention to the MMO blogosphere at all recently, you'll notice there's been some banter back and forth between Syncaine and Tobold in regards to what Syncaine calls "WoW Tourism". If you're not familiar with the concept, the idea is that someone who has only played WoW, and thus has that shiny "first mmo love" with it (as anyone who has played MMOs over the years can attest - the first one that really gets you always has a part of your heart long after you leave) but then proceeds to judge everything else by World of Warcraft. The further away it is, the more it sucks, the more it will fail, etc. This is really telling when they are talking about a game with completely different mechanics like say, EVE Online, which you can't even begin to put into the same general neighborhood if you've ever actually played the two games. But we digress...
In all the bantering back and forth, one thing was stated that's been ringing around in our heads ever since. In his most recent posting, Syncaine ends off with "Perhaps then we can finally stop using 11 million as the size of the MMO genre, and realize WoW (along with being a good game) was a product of market timing and luck." Regardless of your feelings on the recent banter, this is an interesting observation, and one we wanted to ask you about this morning. Do you think that World of Warcraft's 11 million players was just a fluke that no other MMO will ever see again - including Blizzard with their next MMO? Was WoW just a product of right-place, right-time? Or do you think that there really is some type of 'magic formula' as it were; more properly will Blizzard - or anyone else - ever be able to repeat that 11 million players number?
Trunk Fishing in World of Warcraft
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Monday, 30 March 09 - 03:01 AM (GMT) By Jim allice green in game |
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Fishing can turn into quite a profitable career for a midlevel World of Warcraft character. Fishing is a secondary skill, meaning that it will not interfere with the two professions a character can take in the game. Fishing is learned by a fishing trainer and needs a fishing pole. Baubles and lures can up your skill, along with specialty items and some enchantments. Some fish bring high gold on the auction house, but if you want a quicker and easier method for getting gold on World of Warcraft, you'll need to learn about trunk fishing.
World of Warcraft has pools where you can fish for a specific fish or item. These pools are animated swirls of water that are darker and easily recognized. You will have to keep casting your fishing line until it gets inside this swirled circle of the pool. Landing outside of it will not give you what the pool is for. You are looking for pools called "Floating Debris" or "Floating Wreckage". These have crates and boxes in them. You may get some other items, but generally you will get a trunk out of these pools. There are four types of trunks: a Tightly Sealed Trunk, a Watertight Trunk, an Iron Bound Trunk, and a Mithril Bound Trunk. What you will find inside will vary according to the trunk that you fish out. The types of trunks will also be determined by the level of the area you are fishing in.
Trunks contain money, potions, recipes, cloth, leather, and some armor and weapons. Not all trunks will contain multiple items; some will just have a single item. However some will have many things inside. I fished out an iron bound trunk that had 8 items in it once. It is all the luck of the draw. These items are handy for leatherworkers and tailors that would rather fish than kill for their basics. Also, it is good for anyone wishing to make a fortune off the auction house. These bolts of cloth and the stacks of higher grade leather sell for quite a bit, and in a matter of a couple of hours you can have quite a few gold worth of items.
Items you can hope to find according to the trunk:
Tightly Sealed Trunk:
Light Leather
Medium Leather
Bolt of Linen
Bolt of Woolen Cloth
Minor Mana Potion
Lesser Healing Potion
Watertight Trunk:
Medium Leather
Heavy Leather
Bolt of Woolen Cloth
Bolt of Silk Cloth
Lesser Mana Potion
Healing Potion
Iron Bound Trunk:
Heavy Leather
Thick Leather
Bolt of Silk Cloth
Bolt of Mageweave Cloth
Mana Potion
Greater Healing Potion
Mithril Bound Trunk:
Thick Leather
Rugged Leather
Bolt of Mageweave Cloth
Bolt of Runecloth
Greater Mana Potion
Superior Healing Potion.
The Angry Bear #5: EverQuest's Heroic Journey
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Friday, 27 March 09 - 01:52 AM (GMT) By Jim allice green in game |
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The original blockbuster MMO invented the "Where did you get that?" moment, for better or worse.
It's the 10th anniversary of EverQuest, the original blockbuster multiplayer world of its time and the birthplace of much of what defines the modern MMO. While it's been supplanted in the popular consciousness by World of Warcraft and other "third generation" MMOs, it's important to note something about EQ. EverQuest is not "yesterday's game." It's still a vibrant and active community of enthusiastic players that Sony Online continues to support with new expansion packs. Indeed, the success of EverQuest is even more remarkable when one considers that the game is running concurrently with EverQuest II, the game that was supposed to be its ultimate supplanter. Looking back over 10 years of controversy and craziness, the saga and structure of EverQuest offers a fascinating lesson for the future of MMOs -- its greatest achievement may also be the genre's greatest trap.
My first experience with massively multiplayer online games was horrendous -- the opening days of Ultima Online. Anyone around at the time can tell horror stories of being slaughtered by rats and rabbits and being unable to take three steps without getting jumped by player-killers. Ultima Online was more "Anarchy Online" than the game that eventually bore that name. The problem with the game was the natural mistake the developers made... assuming that everyone who ever entered the world of Britannia would view it the same way they did, as a giant stage where they could act out their role-playing inclinations. What they created, therefore, was a world of complete freedom where anyone could be anything they wished to be.
The problem with that notion was that there's a word for complete freedom: anarchy. Not everybody dreams of being "Lord British" or being a tailor or a baker in a medieval serf's village. In a game with absolutely no social controls or directed experiences, many people used their freedom to indulge the worst aspects of their character in a consequence-free environment. Their "role" as it were, was to have their fun at the expense of the fun of others. Indeed, the more miserable they made an anonymous stranger, they more they seemed to enjoy themselves. Without an actual "game" to play, these folks found that "winning" by harassing another player offline was much easier than fighting a monster that tends to hit back.
The greatest innovation of EverQuest wasn't the game's graphics or the technology that let it push so much data over the primitive Internet technology of the time. It was in the very name of the product -- questing. MMOs are often derisively called graphical overlays for chat rooms, but that misses an important distinction: People already have such technology available to them if all they want to do is remotely chat. They're called "chat rooms." EverQuest did more. It gave people the other half of the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy. They not only got to live in a fantasy universe, they got to go out, slay a dragon, steal its loot and feel like a hero, in front of other people! It provided a structured experience for players that channeled the need for challenge, competition and excitement in an arguably more pro-social direction than the murderous anarchy of early Britannia.
The effects of this decision had a huge impact. It was an attempt to provide the compelling kind of directed content and structure so familiar from single-player RPGs with the added thrill of real people. It was the first game that realized the true source of wealth in an MMO economy isn't gold or dollars. In a world without material scarcity (after all, the developers can create more gold or another magic sword with a few key presses) the true source of wealth is player time (and the running subscription fees that come with it). The value of an object is therefore directly proportional to the amount of time, effort and coordination that it takes to achieve it and the social cachet that goes along with possessing it.
This last part simply cannot be underestimated. For all the derision that sometimes placed on the MMO's fixation on "phat loot," the reason the classic RPG "kill monster, take its stuff to go and kill bigger monster" is so cliched is that it works. It's the classic hero's journey boiled down to its simplest components and served up for a mass audience who all get to feel for the briefest moment like a hero. It's the endlessly compelling illusion of achievement. Why else would players on MMO test servers derisively refer to their granted uber-item as "fake" and struggle through the same content on live servers in order to get "real gear?" That +7 glowing Sword of Sharpness is just as virtual and is functionally no different than "real gear," but doesn't has the benefit of context, history and story. It's the knowledge that you went through this with your friends, you worked hard to master the challenge together and every "Where did you get that?" moment or /inspect from another player is validation of what you've achieved. It's also why people hate gold farmers so much.
This tendency is very, very human. We are materialistic creatures (as James Twitchell points out, "There's a reason that we call them 'goods' and not 'bads.'"), and we've always created fetishized objects to denote status. There's every reason to believe this tendency to do so began in our remote past as a way to sublimate more violent methods of status competition into a symbolic struggle that wouldn't leave competitors dead. This was mirrored in a small way by EverQuest. springing from the disastrous first days of UO and the dynamic was so compelling that World of Warcraft (a project began by a group of EQ fanatics within Blizzard) smoothed off EverQuest's rough edges and delivered an insanely compelling and addictive version of it that garnered success far beyond the dreams of the original EQ team.
That's also the problem. The very success of the EQ innovation as popularized by World of Warcraft has warped people's perceptions of what an MMO is. When 12 million people's entry into the genre is a game that's fundamental gameplay dynamic is ever-increasing loot, it makes it enormously difficult for other MMOs that might explore a different paradigm. I think about some of the noble experiments of the past few years that I've really enjoyed -- great games like Pirates of the
Pirates, for example, doesn't actually have much in the way of "loot" as a WoW or EQ player would understand it. LotRO has no end-game and if you're racing to max level to get to the "good stuff," you're very much missing the point of the game.
This certainly doesn't reflect poorly on World of Warcraft. WoW is what it is. I love it, I played it for a long time and have tremendous admiration for the developers over at Blizzard that created it. I also acknowledge the harsh reality that gaming is a business that requires dollars to survive and it's far easier to invest in something that's proven to work than something bold and innovative that might not. Still, it behooves all of us as players to open our minds and wallets to new forms of gameplay and encourage MMO developers to experiment with the form. EverQuest was an important chapter in the history of gaming, but it's important to not let it be the last chapter.
The metrics and levers of engagement
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Friday, 27 March 09 - 01:49 AM (GMT) By Jim allice green in game |
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Get customers to see your service as the No. 1 source for a given category
I'll be presenting a talk at the Facebook Developer Garage SF Wednesday evening. You can learn more about the event here. It's hosted by Kontagent and sponsored by Intel. Most of the content for my presentation is drawn from my original article on engagement loops, with new diagrams courtesy of my friends at Kontagent and a few new examples. Without further ado, here are the slides (feedback welcome!):
When I work with startups on improving engagement, I really try to emphasize the importance of their most powerful lever: positioning. In most applications, most of the time, customers return to use the application not in response to a notification or event, but under their own volition. These decisions are critical to the success of any high-engagement product, and they take place entirely inside the minds of customers. Companies have an opportunity to influence these decisions, but only if they act well in advance of the result they are trying to achieve. Unfortunately, it's easy to lose track of positioning effects when optimizing for a single metric.
This is a common problem that results from viral-loop optimization. By copying the exact same registration flow as every other successful viral app, many viral apps completely lose their positioning. Customers can't even remember what apps they've signed up for, and become entirely dependent on notifications to bring them back. This starts a downward spiral: as more and more apps become indistinguishable, they send out more and more notifications, which leads to increasing fatigue on the part of customers. As notification channels get stuffed full of these messages, customers tune them out (or platforms have to put in place dramatic limits on access).
The solution for app developers caught in this vicious cycle is to develop competency in positioning. Luckily, a great example of the power of positioning fell into my lap recently. Some friends of mine at EA tried to break my World of Warcraft addiction by walking a copy of Warhammer Online over to my house. I dutifully installed it and played with them for a little while. But pretty soon the lure of WoW dragged me back, even though some of my friends stayed behind on Warhammer.
A few days ago, I received a great email from Warhammer Online. It's an example of an excellent synthetic notification. Take a look at this screenshot:
This synthetic notification gets everything right: it has a compelling offer and a clear call to action, it addresses me by my character's name, it's from a well-known NPC inside the game, it even includes the names of several friends who are still playing, and calls me to act on behalf of my guild (yes, it's called GUID). It then proceeds to list a whole host of cool new features the Warhammer team has added since I last logged in. Impressive.
Unfortunately, it didn't work, at least not for me. That's because I have much too strong an attachment to World of Warcraft. It's the ultimate high-engagement product. And yet, WoW never sends me emails. It doesn't notify me of anything, not even when my friends are logged in and about to start a raid. If I want to know what's going on, I have to log in and find out. It's up to me to decide when I want to do that. And how do I make that decision? Somewhere buried in my brain is a list, called something like "Things to do when you want to zone out and still have a feeling of accomplishment and power." At the top of that list is WoW. I'd only ever consider going to #2 on the list if #1 failed me completely. That's how most of us are - we only ever consider the #1 provider of any given service if it is available. Getting customers to see your service as #1 for a given category is what positioning is all about. (And manufacturing a new cateogry that you can be number one in is what resegmentation is all about)
In WoW's case, its positioning is established by the gameplay itself. WoW is a fun and addictive experience, and once it's sucked you in it's pretty hard to stop. But that is not the only source of positioning: brand advertisers have been using packaging and TV ads to do this for years. And most web applications do their positioning right in the first few screens of the app. This is why the registration is so important. At IMVU, we would routinely find retention effects that would stem from registration changes and have impact days or weeks later. One example I like to use is this: we added a YouTube video about IMVU to some landing pages. It was not prominently featured, but it did auto-play. We split-test that change, and watched the effects on engagement. Customers who saw the video were materially more likely to be active customers of IMVU ten days later.
The impact on behavior was pronounced, even though the immediate effect of the change was subtle. If I had to guess, I would say that if we had interviewed customers in the experimental group, they would not have been able to consciously recall the video they had seen during registration. But, unconsciously, it had affected the positioning of IMVU in their minds.
Anyway, for those of you planning on attending the Garage event, please come say hi. And for everyone else, please consider leaving your feedback - positive or negative - about the form or content of the presentation as a comment to this post. Your help is always greatly appreciated.
GDC: Industry Legends Wright, Spector, Pardo & More Debate Gaming Trends
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Friday, 27 March 09 - 01:45 AM (GMT) By Jim allice green in game |
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During a fast-paced luncheon panel held during Game Developers Conference, notable industry veterans discussed a variety of current gaming trends, including social gaming, changing attitudes towards pricing, and cloud computing in the context of the recent OnLive announcement.
Assembled at the Gamasutra-exclusive event were Warren Spector of Junction Point, Neil Young of ngmoco, Will Wright of Maxis, Rob Pardo of Blizzard (or “the U.S. Mint,” as moderator Gary Whitta joked), Dave Perry of Acclaim, and Brian Fargo of inXile.
The event was kicked off by recounting a recent Nolan Bushnell quote disparaging social gaming: "Social is buying someone a drink. Sitting in a dark room in your underpants talking to someone might seem social, but it's not cool."
He then turned to Pardo, who manages "maybe the largest group of people in their underpants in the world."
Pardo said social gaming is "becoming a cooler and cooler thing to do," pointing to all the people who have met in World of Warcraft and ended up maintaining real-world relationships -- even up to marriage. "It's too bad the media continues to paint it in a certain way," he said. "A lot of [players] have families, have kids, play with their kids. ...Look at all the stuff with the Wii. It's the same with massively multiplayer games, or social games. ...It's becoming more acceptable."
"But is that a real relationship?" asked Perry.
Responded Pardo, "Sometimes it's more real. When you're at a bar, what are you talking about? When you're online, you're sharing a hobby with someone."
"Who cares what you're talking about, if you're getting something out of it?" asked Wright.
Wright called for a "broader definition" of social gaming, saying that all kinds of shared game experiences can be social, be they intentionally so or not.
But "is it a change for the better or worse?" challenged Whitta.
"To me, the biggest shift is that in the past, most of the social gaming has been with people you don't know. There's now the dynamic with Facebook, that it's with people you do know," said
"So you're saying we've found a way to monetize peer pressure," said Wright, generating laughter around the room. "Look at kids playing Pokemon, which is really a dreadfully boring experience," said Wright -- much of the enjoyment comes from sharing Pokemon with other players, and discussing the play experience.
Spector suggested to Pardo a paid World of Warcraft service that would allow players who find themselves totally in sync to actually meet each other using real contact information. "You could prove or disprove ESP in about six hours," he joked.
He also spoke on the time benefits of asynchronous multiplayer, as is common in Facebook games. "I'm really wrestling with the fact that we're this high-engagement medium...but we're also a high-commitment medium. It takes so much time," he said. "I tend to focus on single-player experiences and empowering players to own a story, but even there I'm trying to find a way to reward players for low commitment. I don't want players to have to give me their whole lives to enjoy what I do. ...I want games in smaller chunks."
"That's old school back to the way people used to develop personal relationships -- with correspondence," Wright pointed out. "That was asynchronous in nature."
Whitta offered that that is actually less social, because there is no direct interpersonal communication.
"But consider how long a session is going to last," Wright responded. "You might play a game over weeks, and during that you can still communicate."
"I'm not sure I agree that Facebook play is drop-in, drop-out," Young said, guessing that their core users are as "hardcore as anyone. ...There's probably an interesting mapping you could put against humans. There are core humans that get addicted to certain things, and will throw tons of time and energy at it," as well as those all across the rest of the spectrum. "I think it might be a misconception that the way all Facebook games are played is asynchronous."
Wright noted that asynchronous designs can inherently accomodate that entire spectrum -- from a focused half-hour, to weeks for a single game. Spector noted that he actually likes it when his opponents aren't online as he takes his turn -- because when they are, he ends up sucked into it for longer periods of time.
"I've actually become more antisocial,"
He and Wright then joked about communicating with their own families asynchronously with Facebook and IM, even when relatively close.
Spector apologized for teasing Pardo about World of Warcraft, but followed up by describing how amazing it is that his own wife now has a 40-year-old housewife friend in
Still, Spector added, he wishes MMOs had a wider range. "I think what we need to do is change their content," he said. "I am so sick of games being, 'Is the guy going to get an axe in the head? ...Is it going to be a demon? ...Is there going to be an alien coming out? ...I think the kind of fantasies we provide aren't helping."
"I love fantasy," he noted, "but I don't love that that's all we do. ...Give me something a little different. ...When I think about the future of this business, I'm so heartened by the stuff in the IGF boot, because at least people are trying something different."
"I'm sure half the people in this room have played the men's urinal test," interjected Wright, to several seconds of silence followed by explosive laughter, after which he explained an online test that grills men on "restroom etiquette." "Most men ace this test, and most women get 50 percent," he said, because men have learned experience using urinals.
"We can make games about the real world that are interesting, surprising," he said. "We can make games out of everyday life."
Said Young, "It feels like there's a pretty high correlation of new interesting things coming out of a new generation of game makers that are just thinking dramatically differently than we are. ...People who...grew up with our medium are just more willing to fully explore it."
"But you're defining games by a single dimension," argued Young. "You're often defining things by the subject matter and content. You do'nt just have to be progressive in the content. You could be progressive in the game design. ...Our audience, certainly the younger demographic are not seeing the exact same way we saw them. They can intuit them differently."
"If it were really creative, and played really well, it could work," said Perry, to which Young noted, "Yeah, it's called Portal."
Perry went on to say that he is concerned that this industry frequently tries new things without actually putting the proper effort into them to make them fully executed.
"I think we sometimes value innovation too highly," said Pardo. "I feel like we preach that so much...and we really don't teach lessons of execution enough. It's not necessarily that there are a lot of fantasy games. I don’t think that's so much the problem as that there are a lot of bad fantasy games." He pointed to Nintendo as a company that is “always nailing the execution,” which Blizzard tries to do as well. “You get rewarded for that,” he said.
“In my heart, I know you’re right, and I think I’ve always undervalued execution and overvalued innovation,” Spector said, “and I’ve tried to modify my thinking. ...You have to focus on execution. ...I just say, ‘Look, we’re still a novelty-driven medium.’ People have to see one thing they haven’t seen before. In the past I would have said, ‘Do everything! Go!’ Now I just say, ‘Find one thing.’”
“At the same time, you’ll have people going up into new realms, dropping new stakes into there,” said Wright. “You almost need low-quality games that are pushing that envelope. ...Then people go further on. You need a balance of both to keep the industry healthy.”
Said Spector, “Many of the games coming out of the indie movement arne’t crazy original titles...they’re almost like commentary on the games that have come before. They’re built on, say, a lifetime of playing platform games,” referring to Braid. “They’re deconstructing our games.”
“It’s like we developed this language we had to learn as non-native speakers,” said Wright. “They grew up with that language.”
Whitta then moved on to a new topic: cloud gaming, particularly pointing to the recent OnLive announcement of remote game processing streamed to PCs and televisions.
“Would it change what you do?” asked Whitta.
“Not in the least,” answered Wright.
“Completely,” countered Spector. “How could it not change the way you do business?”
“On the creative game design side, aside from some latency issues, I don’t see why I can’t be delivering the same experiences [I already do],” Wright said.
Spector started throwing out examples of episodic content and serialized content: “You have to think about narrative differently -- if you’re creating a serial narrative...that’s a totally different experience.”
Latency issues were raised, but Young noted that cable companies “want nothing more” than to fix those issues, if indeed the technology can add new audiences and revenue streams.
“How many game designers here feel like they are significantly constrained by hardware here?” asked Wright -- and none of the assembly answered in the affirmative.
“I don’t know what, ten years from now, we’ll be able to do,” Spector explained. “Right now, I don’t feel contrained. But we shipped Ultima 6, and it required 10 megs, thinking, ‘Nobody has a hard drive that big.’ Then CD-ROM drives came out, and we said, ‘We’re never going to fill this!’”
Pardo said that Blizzard spends a lot of time designing experiences that work equally well on low- or high-spec systems -- and cloud computing would remove the need for those worries.
Spector suggested that even a constraint like latency issues could introduce a new creative constraint that could lead to new and interesting design avenues.
“In the old PC days, it was very difficult for the average person to get a PC,” said
“Games are going to become far more browsable than they were before,” said Wright. “Imagine you could just be flipping channels, but flipping games instead. ...In some senses, it’s going to have to make our games a lot stickier. ...In two seconds, I could be flipping to Crysis, instead of your boring game with a lot of backstory I have to read,” he said, vaguely in Spector’s direction.
“So it would completely change the way you design your game,” declared Spector in response, to considerable laughter.
Whitta then interjected again, noting the statement by a GameStop executive claiming a threat to retail from digital distribution is potentially upwards of a decade away.
“That’s because he’s reselling everybody else’s software,” said Young.
“When’s he going to go to congress and ask for a bailout?” asked Spector.
Wright recalled the rise of CD-ROM software, which was extremely slow for about eight years, before it suddenly exploded. “We’re almost at the steep part of that curve” with digital distribution, he estimated.
Whitta asked Young how he deals with the changing attitudes towards pricing, partially as a result of digital distribution, where people sometimes consider even tiny price points more money than they are willing to pay, since there is so much free content by comparison.
Young then referred back to ngmoco’s strategy for iPhone game Rolando, which will receive a slate of free content on a regular basis, followed by a paid sequel, with its own new free content, and so on. “It’s kind of like a proxy for building a service around your intellectual property,” he said. “What we’re trying to do is build a relationship for customers. ...After that 12 months, we’ll end up making as much or more money than a DS or PSP game developed over a longer life cycle,” with the added benefit of getting more feedback from customers along the way.
“When we did The Sims Online, our primary customers were 12-year-old girls,” Wright said -- and those consumers had no access to credit cards to purchase digitally-distributed content. “But these same people had no problem buying expansion packs every three months. ...The expansion packs became voluntary subscriptions.”
Whitta mentioned price points again by pointing back to the release of Braid, which released to outcry over its comparatively high price point relative to many other Xbox Live Arcade games.
Pardo warned against listening too much to those vocal critics -- WarCraft III had been the company’s most successful game to date with no added subscription, but World of Warcraft ended up blowing that game’s sales out of the water, even with a much higher investment.
“There’s a big difference in terms of the difference between free software and premium paid software,” Young added, noting that Rolando sold at $10 for two months before it was brought down to $5.99. “We wanted to bring it down to 7.99, but Gameloft were fucking up the market by bringing their prices down.”
“It’s absolutely our long-term agenda to make sure the average revenue per user for games on the iPhone goes up over time,” he went on. “It’s a very nascent business -- it’s very new and very fresh. ...The iPhone business is kind of this super-heated version on the old industry that’s iterating really, really fast. I would say the jury is still out about how pricing is going to work on the device. ...The market sets the price.”
Spector pointed out that, even now, with a twenty-dollar bill, people can go out and buy any kind of entertainment -- buy an album, buy a book, see or buy a movie -- but they can’t buy a game.
“I can buy twenty games,” said Young.
“It’s remarkable how wide the variety of opportunities is,” Spector acknowledged, noting that there are now is now a huge number of types of business in the games industry -- as opposed to mere years ago, when pretty much everyone “was the same kind of business.”
As the final question, Whitta asked what the participants would like to see in gaming hardware going forward.
Said Perry, “I’m getting concerned that the console manufacturers will turn into followers, that they’ll end up just trying to check the boxes that Apple has already checked for them. ...We’re still following.” He asked the other attendees what they would do if they were put in the position of delivering the next platform experience.
“Maybe they’re done,” offered Young. “Something that’s been interesting to me from the Apple experience...I kind of expected Apple to function as a first party...in the way first parties typically function,” but he noted that that ended up not being the case -- there were fewer quality control mechanisms in place than in a traditional console environment. That initially concerned him, but he explained that he now appreciates that that has opened up to the door to many new developers who are becoming invested in making games but would not be able to get a foot in the door elsewhere.
“I’m getting pretty tired of doing firmware updates every time I turn on my PlayStation 3,” said Perry.
“But the firmware updates are always rubbish,” Young added, comparing the PS
Whitta asked Young to elaborate on his comment that “maybe they’re done.”
“Sometimes companies go away. Sometimes industries go away,” Young offered. “Sometimes they reach the end of their dominance.”
“Removing barriers to the creation of content, removing barriers to the consumption of content” is the proper goal for platform holders, Spector said. “In terms of the pool of potential developers, there are pools of thousands of people who want to make games. Get out of their way.”
Pardo suggested that companies like Sony and Microsoft look to Nintendo and work on improving their input devices, saying that Blizzard chooses not to put their games on consoles because they would just end up being “crappy ports.” He added, “If they don’t come up with a way to come up with new forms of gameplay, and new mechanics, than there is no point in giving us new hardware, because then it’s just about cloud computing.”
“This is going to make or break [console companies] this time around,” Perry warned. “I’m not aware they’re really putting a big amount of effort into finding out what the people who are making the games [want].”
“I think they’re so focused on the all-in-one device...I’m not sure they’re actually thinking about the games that are actually going to come out,” Spector said. “It seems kind of crazy.”
“I’d love to see what you guys do with the Wii,” he said to Pardo, to which the Blizzard exec smiled and raised his eyebrows, but stayed silent.
Sustaining Democracy's Lifeblood
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Tuesday, 24 March 09 - 01:54 AM (GMT) By Jim allice green in game |
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The World Needs More Co-op
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Tuesday, 24 March 09 - 01:45 AM (GMT) By Jim allice green in game |
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Gamers endure a salvo of unfair stereotypes.
We can’t talk to members of the opposite sex without our voices cracking or our pungent body odor sucker punching our would-be significant others right in the nostrils.
We can’t talk to anyone — ever — because our truncated vocabulary has been stripped of everything that isn’t level strategies or release dates.
But the most inaccurate of these stereotypes is that gamers prefer the sort of solitude best obtained by ignoring the greater portion of the human race.
Anyone who follows the games industry in any capacity knows this simply isn’t true. World of WarCraft wouldn’t pack its servers with 11 million players if gamers wanted to eschew socializing. (There may be some argument as to whether most WoW players are classified as casual or hardcore gamers, but as far as I’m concerned, folks who play games is folks who play games.)
Obviously, games that champion the competitive spirit require multiple players, such as Call of Duty 4 and 5, but there is an itch next-gen consoles sorely need to scratch: Rather than pick each other a part, a lot of us want a common goal to strive toward.
I’m not pretending there aren’t decent co-op titles on the market. Left 4 Dead and Resistance 2 provided some of last year’s most intense, team-oriented firefights. Of course, wanting to play together is by no means a new trend.
In the past, there was no gaming infrastructure. No Xbox LIVE, no PlayStation Network to connect us to one another. And yet, people still gamed socially.
One of the high points of my week as a kid was heading to the mall to play some Battletoads or the six-person, superpowered extravaganza that was the X-Men arcade game.
Granted, the co-op modes of the past seldom focused on story. But given the technology we have available today, that can easily change.
Titles like Resident Evil 5 are proving that a compelling narrative needn’t restrict itself to a single-player format. The more gamers who can share in a well developed plot, the better.
Game developers, give us a chance to play together. I promise we’ll play nice.
... More items are available in my News Archive
