Pixellove

Uncanny

2007-03-08T13:15:00.000Z

I'm seeing the uncanney valley everywhere right now. It's something I wrote about in the context of visual aesthetics 18 months ago, but since then I've realised it has a much wider scope. Watch the beginning of this:

A self-righting Indy with gripping hands impresses me... but it doesn't fool me.

Similarly, Image Metrics have been showing some astounding work recently. Looking at the CGI head on the latest Develop cover, I am once more impressed, but once again not fooled. There are all sorts of subtle mismatches in texture and light that add up to it not quite being human.

Likewise, when set against speech bubbles, the body language of these avatars in PSHome is reminiscent of stereotypical cult members.

Everything that might be wrong with a digital representation of a human is also potentially wrong with a digital representation of anything else. The difference is in us: a significant amount of the human brain is specialised for evaluating human appearance and behaviour.

As Scott McCloud pointed out in Understanding Comics, we can infer a face from a circle, two dots and a line. Put a circle with a big dot in it inside any random shape, and it will suddenly tend to resolve into a face. We can reconise faces made of less than 100 pixels.

We intrinsically have higher standards in evaluating humans as real compared to, say, rocks and trees. If we weren't human, the level NaturalMotion and Image Metrics are at might fool us. We are though, and it doesn't, even as it makes us go "oooh".

It will all get better of course. Simulating one component of the unconscious at a time, we're building more realistic AI. At some point though, they will stop looking like good AI and begin to look like bad actors.

(Hello, I am TK422, otherwise known as David Hayward. I'm going to be posting here alongside Toby. There may be some crossover between this and my own blog, Functional Autonomy, but overall I'll be putting different content up on each).

GDC07:2007 Game Developers Choice Awards Topped By Gears of War

2007-03-08T11:02:00.000Z

2007 Game Developers Choice Awards Topped By Gears of War Epic Games and Microsoft Game Studios' Xbox 360 shooter Gears of War won Best Game at the Game Developers Choice Awards, hosted by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. The title also picked up awards for Visual Arts and Technology.

The Game Developers Awards are the only peer-based, open nomination awards program in the industry. GDC Executive Director Jamil Moledina commented of the awards ceremony that it is “like no other”, adding that “by celebrating our visionaries by name, we give the audience and the public at large a chance to give credit where credit is due”. Nominations are open to all members of the International Game Developers Association, with the finalists chosen by the Choice Awards Advisory Board, before winners are finally voted on by IDGA members.

Clover Studios and Capcom Entertainment's Okami and Nintendo's Wii Sports fared well too, picking up two awards each, for Character Design and Game Design respectively, as well as one each for Innovation. The Innovation award was also shared by Bostjan Cadez, developer of Flash title Line Rider.

Other major award winners included Harmonix Music Systems and RedOctane’s Guitar Hero II for Audio, Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, which walked away with the Writing award and Titan Quest developer Iron Lore Entertainment, which picked up the award for New Studio.

Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of the Mario, Zelda and Donkey Kong franchises, amongst many others, was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award, and Manifesto Games co-founder Greg Costikyan received the Maverick award. Composer George “The Fat Man” Sanger was given the Community Contribution award for his work to encourage interactive audio innovation, while this year’s First Penguin award, presented to industry pioneers, was awarded to Alexey Pajitnov, creator and developer of Tetris, and pioneer of the casual games industry.

"Once again, the Game Developers Choice Awards have shown that gaming greatness can be found within every type of game,” noted Jason Della Rocca, Executive Director of the IGDA, “from the most hardcore of experiences, to those that have brought all new audiences into our industry's fan base. Each year, I am humbled by what our members can do with this great art form.”

GDC07: Sony outlines new online vision

2007-03-08T10:55:00.000Z

Phil Harrison's GDC keynote explains plans for new PS3 Home online community network.
In his GDC keynote Sony Worldwide Studios president Phil Harrison has told the development community that software driven by user-communities, such as as its new virtual world Home, will "empower the next decade of growth in our industry all around the world".

Sony will actively back this strategy with a number of its own applications. The primary one is Home, a free avatar-based 3D world that lets users congregate, meet friends, 'own' a private apartment and visit virtual shop-fronts.

Developed by London Studio, Home is a best of breed take on avatar-based environments like Second Life, but uses the PS3's capabilities to deliver a world that fills the gap between the interface on the PlayStation XMB dashboard and games themselves.

Users can customise their avatar's appearance, clothes and accessories - in time players will be able to pay for, or unlock via game achievements, the latter. The same goes for each user's own virtual private apartment, which players can invite friends to, fill with furniture and even stream music and video from their Hard Drive to.

A 'Hall of Fame' also takes pride of place in the Home world - this lets users display new 3D trophies that are unlocked through in-game milestones in PS3 games.

Harrison demonstrated all these features to a huge audience as part of the opening keynote for the first main day of GDC. He likened this new always-connected world to the Web 2.0 movement that has seen sites like Blogger, YouTube and MySpace succeed purely on the fact that they allow players to offer detailed customisation of their profiles and upload content. The same user-content driven strategy is what drives Home, he said.

"Our vision of the future, Game 3.0, will continue our track record of industry advancement by leaveraging the convergence of technologies, from broadband and video chat to supercomputer-speed processors, to make gaming more interactive and dynamic than ever before."

In an associated press announcement, corporate executive and CTO Izumi Kawanishi added: "While the 3D graphics demonstrate the power of PS3 and the PlayStation Network, the most impressive feature in Home is the variety of ways in which multiple consumers, as well as our third-party partners, can experience the next generation of communication by interacting and sharing among each other. I feel strongly that this blend of community, user-generated content, collaboration and commerce will expand the future of computer entertainment."

Home is currently in a closed Beta test - in April Sony will launch a free public beta to the world, and the final version of the client itself will be available in the autumn. In time, Harrison said that the client will be continually upgraded and updated, like any other MMO world.

GDC07:Industry responsabiliites

2007-03-08T10:18:00.000Z

In what may be remembered as the best speech of this conference, Vivendi’s global director of strategic growth Nichole Bradford today called on the industry to act on its responsibility towards the education and aspirations of young people.

Image She told an audience of developers to show leadership to young people, and excite them about their own potential. Bradford said that the United States had only produced 70,000 graduates in engineering in the last year, adding that children are failing to se the potential of learning math, science and literature. Thius, she argued, was a failure of leadership by the game industry.

Bradford spoke on this subject at a diversity round-table last year, but in 07, the message was heard by a much larger audience. She told them, “We have a leadership responsibility to excite young people about math and science and literature. We make games and so we have the best hook to address the real challenge of poor learning in schools.”

A 2003 survey of young people found that more children aspired to be athletes and entertainers than those who wanted to work in computing or gaming. By 2006, computing had risen above those professions and ranked at number 3. “More people want to be Mike Morhaime than Kobe,” she said.

“This is hugely important and it is exploitable,” she said. “Not every child is going to make a career in gaming, but if we can inspire them, we can give them options. We can show them and their parents that underneath the action [in games] there is math, and literature and science. It’s not enough to tell children to do well in math because it is good form them. We have a responsibility as an industry to show them what it really means.”

She concluded, “As an industry, we bitch about our reputation and the ESA lobbies against legislation on our behalf. But here’s a question. How many schools have you spoken at lately?

“Don’t be abstract. Tell the kids and the parents what we do and watch the support grow. More that that, we have the power to effect real change. We should all grasp the scope of our influence and show children their own possibilities. We need to be leaders in our society.”

GDC07:June debut for London Studio's PS3 SingStar

2007-03-08T10:12:00.000Z

The PS3 version of SingStar will hit Europe in June and the US in the autumn.
The PS3 version of the game relies heavily on the PlayStation Network. The previous versions of the franchise, which were all purely disc-based, have already sold seven million worldwide with 30 songs on each disc, delivering a total of 200 million songs to players.

For PS3, SingStar is "all about extending the experience online - downloading content and uploading content," explained Sony Worldwide Studios president Phil Harrison.

Via the SingStore players can download tracks and preview music videos, purchasing tracks to build their own tracklist for a sing along session. Using a USB camera players can upload videos or pictures of themselves singing which can be rated and scored by other players. Users can also access wallpapers and other content to customise their version of SingStar.

"Where we are going with the integration of community and commerce blended together is a very compelling experience on PlayStation 3," added Harrison.

"We're are working very closely with the music industry to get a very wide variety of songs up on the network."

GDC07: 2007 Independent Games Festival Awards Topped By Aquaria

2007-03-08T09:56:00.000Z

2007 Independent Games Festival Awards Topped By Aquaria Bit Blot's dreamlike 2D underwater adventure game Aquaria won top honors, collecting the $20,000 Seumas McNally Grand Prize for Best Independent Game, at the 2007 Independent Games Festival (IGF) Awards.

The winners were announced tonight at the 9th Annual IGF Awards ceremony, hosted by the Game Developers Conference (GDC) at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco.

The IGF awards have been described as the Sundance Festival of the videogame industry, and offer both global exposure and over $50,000 in cash prizes to the lucky winners. Other major award recipients included Queasy Games' abstract shoot-em-up, Everyday Shooter, which grabbed the awards for Design Innovation and Excellence In Audio, upcoming Xbox 360 Live Arcade title Castle Crashers, which won for Excellence In Visual Art, Three Rings' online title Bang! Howdy, which came out on top in the Technical Excellence category, and stylish Flash-based point-and-click puzzle adventure Samorost 2, which triumphed in the Best Web Game category.

There were two other notable Main Competition awards given out on the night -- the Audience Award, adjudicated from public voting at major consumer game website GameSpot, was won by The Behemoth's Castle Crashers, and IGF Platinum Sponsor GameTap gave out $20,000 in advances for indie games to appear on its PC subscription download service, as part of its special GameTap Indie Award - with Everyday Shooter getting a $10,000 advance and $5,000 advances going to Cryptic Sea's Blast Miner and Naked Sky Entertainment's RoboBlitz.

In addition, the IGF Student Showcase recognized ten student-designed games and, for the first time ever, awarded a $2,500 Best Student Game prize. The award went to DigiPen Institute of Technology's fast-paced capture the flag game, Toblo.

The IGF Mod Competition, now in its second year, celebrated the best amateur mods of existing videogames with a new $5,000 award for Best Mod Game. Cut Corner Company Productions took home the Best Mod award for Weekday Warrior, their corporate office adventure mod for Half-Life 2, also the Best Singleplayer FPS Mod.

GDC07: Media Molecule Premier LittleBigPlanet for Sony

2007-03-08T09:40:00.000Z

At GDC today, Mark Healy and Alex Evans, part of the core team behind Sony’s new LittleBigPlanet, talked about how their company, Media Molecule, became such a prominent Sony partner. They also said why the company chose to go with the PS3...

ImageEvans and Healy likened the founding of Media Molecule to “falling into an abyss.”

But it’s been a pretty impressive fall so far. The small studio today revealed its first project, the unique-looking LittleBigPlanet, during Phil Harrison’s keynote at GDC this week. That’s pretty good placement on Sony’s upcoming game lineup.

Media Molecule started in January 2006 with the idea to make the “most ambitious, fun, off-its-head game that we could [think of]--and most importantly, to get someone else to pay for it,” Healy laughed.

“The skill that you need as a lead designer isn’t coming up with ideas… it’s communicating those ideas to people."
The chance to bring that game to reality came when the company found out that it had the opportunity to meet with Sony—with a week’s time to prepare. Dave Smith, the other core team member of Media Molecule, put together a relatively crude (yet still very impressive) prototype that would eventually become LittleBigPlanet. Sony was “amazing” in its reception of the game, said Evans.

That relationship with Sony seems pretty tight-knit, so don’t expect the small team to bring its debut game to any other platforms any time soon. Evans said that Media Molecule went single platform “very consciously” because “it’s hard doing games anyway, and going cross-platform was more than I wanted to think about,” he explained.

They picked the PS3 because of the Cell’s complexity and the challenge that it presented. “Sticking those constraints on ourselves allowed us to focus,” he claimed.

The trials of starting a business

Healy is the brains behind Rag Doll Kung Fu, the indie hit that he designed in his spare time when he worked at Lionhead. Wanting to move onto something new, he left the security of a larger company and the leadership of Lionhead founder Peter Molyneux. He found that life at the head of a business was much different than putting on headphones and focusing on being an artist. Now he had to deal with team conflicts and fire alarms, for example.

Evans and Healy said that there are four things that got them through the first year of Media Molecule:

Have a great production staff. “Peter [Molyneux] was like a guru to us,” but there wasn’t anyone to lead them but themselves this time around. A competent production staff was key to success.

Total honesty and openness with the publisher. “We’re going to treat this [deal with Sony] like a partnership… We just told them absolutely everything… and we still do,” Evans said.

“We didn’t want this attitude of 'them and us'... so when anything goes wrong, we can blame them, basically,” Healy joked.

Concepting. “This is the biggest thing for us,” Evans said. Visuals are important. Put stuff on the screen, Evans insisted.

Communication. “It wasn’t all rosy in the land of Media Molecule. We were really bad communicators initially,” Evans said.

“The skill that you need as a lead designer isn’t coming up with ideas… it’s communicating those ideas to people,” said Healy.

All of these things culminate into milestones that should be clearly and openly communicated with your publisher, said Evans.

If a team works well together, the hardships are worth it, said Healy. “The joy that comes from a plan coming together and having a team love the thing that they’re working on is very rewarding. That far outweighs the nightmares” of game development.

GDC07: Nvidia introduces new dev platform

2007-03-07T10:10:00.000Z

Nvidia has unveiled a new toolkit it says will help developers save money while making their projects DirectX 10 compliant - and the tools already have backing from Crytek and Rockstar San Diego.
The new Developer Toolkit offers instructive code samples, advanced shaders, and performance tuning. Key components include SDK 10, Texture Tools,PerfKit 5, ShaderPerf 2, FX Composer 2, and Shader Library

Cevat Yerli, president of Crytek - whose Crysis is made specifically for Windows Vista - said: “We use the developer tools frequently for performance analysis, optimisation, shaders, and testing. The tools have saved us a significant amount of time and money in the course of our work on Crysis.”

Added Mark Robinson, technical director at Rockstar San Diego: “Nvidia's developer tools are some of the best in the industry. I use FX Composer regularly to quickly prototype shaders, the SDK for inspiring new techniques, and PerfKit for detailed performance analysis and debugging.”

GDC07: Codemasters signs up Havok Behaviour

2007-03-07T10:09:00.000Z

Havok's new Behavior tool has debuted at GDC today, and the tech already has a licensee: Codemasters.
Behavior is a new element in Havok 4.5, the modular suite of artist tools and run-time tech that includes Havok Physics and Havok Animation and aims to offer complete control of character actions to developers via its hierarchical finite-state machines and procedural modifiers. Animation assets direct from Maya, Max and Softimage XSI can be aggregated straight into it.

Codemasters plans to use Behavior in a number of upcoming next-gen titles.

"For the next generation of games platforms we really wanted to push the boundaries in terms of realism and characterisation, but we needed to do it without compromising our timescales," explained Codemasters Studios vice president, Gavin Cheshire explained.

"Havok Behavior allows us to create a huge range of behaviors for our next generation characters and do it in a way that makes the most of both our creative and programming resources."

GDC07: EA licences Autodesk's HumanIK

2007-03-07T10:02:00.000Z

Just weeks after it confirmed a partnership with Softimage, Electronic Arts has announced it has licensed Autodesk’s HumanIK middleware.
HumanIK is a customised development library that enables animated game characters to interact more realistically with digital environments – it has already been used in EA’s DEF JAM: ICON, FIFA Soccer 07 and NBA STREET Homecourt titles.

“Through our partnership with Autodesk, we were able to achieve a new level of character animation in DEF JAM: ICON, FIFA Soccer 07 and NBA STREET Homecourt,” commented Glenn Entis, EA’s chief visual and technical officer.

“Part of the reason EA consistently delivers innovative hit game titles like these is because we rely on extensive internal and external R&D. Autodesk HumanIK middleware allowed efficient porting of game data to the various platforms on which we shipped our games. Autodesk R&D team was highly responsive, quickly providing us with customised builds of the HumanIK solution.”

Entis continued: “With HumanIK, the character behaviors we created remained intact when exported to the video game engine. That was a huge benefit; it eliminated the usual time-consuming and costly tweaking and toggling between the development software and the game engine. Autodesk HumanIK is the ideal solution for our next-generation game development.”

GDC07:Ubisoft's Adam Thiery Talks Camera Theory

2007-03-07T10:01:00.000Z

GDC: Ubisoft's Adam Thiery Talks Camera Theory Adam Thiery, a designer for Ubisoft Montreal, gave a short talk today on interactive cinematography. His basic point was that game cinematography is player-driven. Simple it may sound; real application is always trickier. One of the big sticking points is that camerawork, being player-driven, is limited by current understanding of game design and player psychology.

A modern camera knows when to change state, explained Thiery. In Far Cry, when the player is pressed against a wall, the standard tracking camera shifts from a behind-the-character perspective to show the player character left-of-center, and focus the player’s attention to the right, around the given barrier.

Thiery said that a good game camera is a matter of functionality, rather than cinematography – yet given that, it pays to consider the visual composition within each camera state. The reason is that any action a player takes is generally guided by what he has been shown to do.

The original Half-Life takes places in a disorienting sci-fi setting; to drive the player forward, it uses huge stripes painted on the walls, like a trail of breadcrumbs or an arrow. Though this is an artificial and somewhat clumsy application, that same principle applies to any 2D screen composition.

When level design and camera work together, guiding lines like the edge of a table that has been pulled away from a wall – or areas of contrast, like light within dark, different levels of detail, or the difference between animation and an immobile object – tend to subconsciously guide the eye, therefore the player, in a certain direction. Thiery showed a dark scene from Splinter Cell, in which a small, white light was visible in the distance. Again, where the eye goes, so goes the player.

All this said, not every object in a given composition has meaning. A chair that happens to be sitting along the wall may just be a chair. Still, between the camera and level design, every scene should be possible to compose toward a guaranteed point of view on the player’s end.

A player will base decisions upon what is perceivable, and a given scene may well present a variety of options to the player. As those decisions should be predictable in a controlled environment, it may be possible to design particular consequences depending on the actions taken.

Thiery’s third major issue involves camera transitions. Most games avoid changing views, so as not to disorient the player. The most obvious problem here is the danger of overextending a shot beyond the point where it is dramatically interesting. The simplest way of avoiding confusion is to use “controller patches,” where as long as the player keeps holding the same direction, the character will keep traveling the same direction.

There are a couple of rules to follow here, though. One is to avoid drastic changes of view during action sequences, such as fighting or platforming. Another that Ubi is trying to incorporate is borrowed from cinema: the “180-degree shorthand”. A camera transition must not change movement direction entirely. “Left” should remain vaguely left, and “right” should remain right. Any change of 2D direction should remain within around 90 degrees, the narrower the better.

When it comes to camerawork, Resident Evil 4 is to Thiery’s judgment probably the most advanced game to date, about which he admitted having to resist a temptation to base the entire lecture around that one work. He explained how camera cuts can, in fact, add rhythm and intensity to a sequence, and can accelerate play by removing unnecessary transitions and skipping directly to the strongest perspectives.

In one scene, Leon approaches a window, and the view immediately cuts from a behind-the-back view to a somewhat overhead perspective, showing a ladder propped up against the side of the house and an enemy climbing upward. Leon tosses the ladder aside and steps back, and the camera cuts back to normal.

“I want the action,” Thiery said. “Show me the action, as quickly, as cleanly as possible.” A moment later, Leon is fighting a group of enemies. When the player performs a jump-kick to an enemy’s head, the camera quickly cuts to a side view, showing the length of Leon’s leg to illustrate exactly what Leon is doing, and then cuts back. The cut is directly related to player action, so it does not seem confusing.

Trailing off, Thiery speculated about where game cinematography might go in the future. With the added power of current and future hardware, perhaps depth-of-field or screen-in-screen will grow more important.

The important thing to remember is that, as game cinematography is player-driven, what works in cinema is not necessarily functional in game terms; cinematography is tied to game and level design. “Whenever you design a new control, think about how it affects the camera,” and how that in turn affects the controls.

GDC07: Evan Skolnick Asks Game Writers To 'Make It Snappier'

2007-03-06T11:25:00.000Z

GDC: Evan Skolnick Asks Game Writers To 'Make It Snappier' Writing is one of the less discussed bits of game development; Vicarious Visions producer Evan Skolnick has been doing his best to redress the balance. Whereas last year's session dealt with dialogue, this year Skolnick chose to discuss general structure.

Skolnick's background is in comic books, and indeed much of his game industry work has been on comic book movie licenses; his methods are generally simple, direct, and accessible to an entry-level audience.

Up front Skolnick cautioned that the session was not for professional writers, but neither was it a debate on the essence of video game narrative, or a tutorial on "how to make players cry". Rather, it was a by-the-book overview was for game industry veterans – programmers, producers – with little experience in the mechanics of storytelling.

About eighty percent of the lecture, by Skolnick's measurement, was general theory – mostly in application to screenwriting, one of the more well-trodden corners of plot analysis. The last twenty percent attempted to draw parallels between that theory and familiar game structure.

Furthermore, Skolnick suggested, the closest parallels between film and video games were probably found not in the critical darlings and more at the top of the box office – in particular, what he dubbed the "geek classics": the likes of Terminator and The Matrix. The number of Matrix parallels were, in fact, rivaled only by Star Wars references.

Skolnick went over the typical chestnuts about cutscenes getting in the way of gameplay, and showing rather than telling. To demonstrate, he compared the opening sequences to Grand Theft Auto III – a straightforward setup for a highly simple premise – and ludological whipping boy Metal Gear Solid 2, a game that exists almost solely to poke fun at traditional game narrative.

Whereas GTAIII sets the player off after just under three minutes of exposition, MGS2 intentionally pummels the player with cutscene after CODEC sequence, dumping a hilarious amount of useless information, for nearly thirteen full minutes. When the player is set free, the release is so abrupt that it does not immediately sink in that gameplay has begun.

"So," Skolnick dramatized. "Holy. Fucking. Shit." He observed that, although he could have skipped the cutscenes at any moment, doing so would have meant missing potentially important story information – and yet very little of the information provided was indeed necessary, leaving the player bowled over and defeated before the game had even started. This was "very frustrating – so don't do it."

His first big point was "Get over yourself" - that a video game audience is potentially hostile, and that nobody buys a video game intending to read. "You're not the next Hemingway," Skolnick cautioned.

Videogame writing serves to further game play - anything further is a distraction. Depending on the type of game, the player may expect more or less story. The idea is to meet the audience expectation, then move on.

From this point, Skolnick moved into a series of audience participation exercises, while he discussed the three-act structure, Joseph Campbell, and the old scriptwriting application Dramatica. "What is story?" Skolnick asked - the correct answer was "conflict".

He then sketched out Aristotle's three acts (the middle – act 2 – being twice the length of the beginning or the end), and mapped over it the rising and falling tension, modulated by the revelation of archetypal plot points.

Plot point one, the hero accepts the challenge and moves into act 2; plot point two, the hero overcomes fear or adversity, putting him on the road to accomplishing his goal and dragging him into act 3. Syd Field further breaks up the second act along a midpoint - this is the structure more typically followed by modern movies.

Skolnick asked the audience to pick three favorite films and tell him the first pivotal plot point. The only really solid answer was in relation to the red and blue pills in The Matrix, delighting Skolnick with the postmodern signposting. Of course, Skolnick advised, although this structure still applies to most stories, it is perhaps overly simplistic and difficult to always apply with precision.

Next up was the "Monomyth", or Hero's Journey – Joseph Campbell's blend of the above theory with Jungian archetypes, with the intent to create a psychological template for all elements of storytelling.

The going premise is that the sum of all the characters in a given tale represents a complete human personality. Through the hero's journey, he takes on aspects of all of the other characters' personalities, in order to become a more whole person.

Of all the archetypes – Mentor, Threshold Guardian, Herald, Shapeshifter, Shadow, Trickster – Skolnick suggested that the only one that really made sense as a player character was the hero, as the hero is typically defined by personal growth. He drew possible parallels between the other archetypes and typical game functions, though some fit better than others.

Skolnick then went on to relate each step of the "hero's journey" to game design. Again, some of the parallels were more considered than others. Skolnick lumped the first two legs of the journey – normally around a third of a traditional narrative – into the opening cutscene (as opposed to relating it to Link's acquiring of his sword, or Gordon Freeman's donning of his power suit and crowbar).

He bypassed the "refusal of the call" segment of the journey as there would be little point in the player refusing to play. By Skolnick's estimation, the typical video game is almost entirely an Act 2, with the other two acts reserved mostly for cutscene-related decoration.

Skolnick again cautioned not to follow the structure too slavishly - rules are only ever guidelines. The purpose of any of these structures is not to dictate, they are only ever descriptive, and thus are mostly useful as a form of generalized advice, in the event that a script feels out of whack. The writer who understands storytelling can ignore classical structures all he likes - a novice is best suited by a mentor.

Wrapping up before lunch, Skolnick went over seeding, planting, and foreshadowing plot events. Rather than dumping everything at the beginning – a typical mistake of beginning writers – simply give the audience what it needs to know, when it is useful or interesting to do so. Providing barely enough information can, in fact, increase drama and audience interest, leaving them curious for more.

GDC:Lego MMO

2007-03-06T11:09:00.000Z

Lego is to build a MMO with American developer Netdevil,the company behind Auto Assault, which was published by NCsoft in 2006.

The MMO will be targeted towards youngsters as well as LEGO fans. “As children around the world continue to spend more time online we are developing new and engaging ways for them to interact with our brand," said LEGO’s Lisbeth Valther Pallesen. “The LEGO brand represents construction,creativity and problem solving -- values that compliment the MMOG market.”

"Playing with LEGO bricks and developing online worlds are both creative activities. To bring them together is deeply professionally satisfying and we look forward to working with the LEGO team,” said NetDevil president Scott Brown.

Details about the actual game and publishing agreements have yet to be announced.

GDC:XNA competition

2007-03-06T11:06:00.000Z

"Dream-Build-Play" offers major rewards for amateur game creators says Microsoft as it announces a new game design competition.

Microsoft has revealed details of its Dream-Build-Play contest - which aims to promote the XNA Game Studio Express tool set by offering an impressive prize bag to amateur creators.

The firm is looking for the best game to be created using the free tool-set, and is offering to publish the winning entry on Xbox Live Arcade - as well as handing over $10,000 to its creators. Runner-up prizes have been supplied by firms including Alienware, AMD, Autodesk and Softimage, which should sweeten the deal for any potential entrants.

XNA Game Studio Express allows you to create Windows games using a powerful toolkit incorporating various tools and pieces of middleware. It was launched late last year along with the Creators Club, which allows you to develop games using the tools which run on the Xbox 360, in return for a 99 Euro annual subscription.

As well as promoting the tools with competitions such as Dream-Build-Play - and the less high-profile $500 prize contest currently running on the XNA Website - Microsoft is also continuing to add new tools to the package, with GarageGames' Torque engine, Softimage's XSI-3D technology and Allegorithmic ProFX's 2D texture editor all bound for XNA Game Studio in the near future.

SONY:PS3Home announcement at GDC

2007-03-02T13:21:00.000Z

Rumour reports on the web claim to spill the beans on part of Sony’s GDC announcements – five days before the format-holders’ keynote in San Francisco – saying that the PS3’s online offer will be updated into a MySpace/Second Life style hybrid called ‘PlayStation Home’.
A tipster talking to gamer blog Kotaku describes the updated service as follows: “you get to make an avatar for your console (like a [Nintendo Wii] Mii) and this avatar has a room. As you play games and accomplish certain tasks, you will receive items with which to adorn the room that are specific to the game (achievements).”

Xbox Live-style achievements will become key requirements for every PS3 game produced and that users will be able to visit the homes hosted on their friends' machines.

Kotaku temporaily ran into trouble with Sony for posting the news, and development sources Develop has contacted today have declined to comment on this topic - one contact cited watertight non-disclosure agreements. Arguably such ‘neither deny or confirm’ statements only add fuel to a fire that proves there is some truth to the reports.

And certainly, Sony has recently hinted at the addition of increased online functionality that incorporates virtual worlds and avatars.

Talking to Newsweek’s games blog Level Up at February’s DICE event, Sony Worldwide Studios president Phil Harrison discussed Nintendo’s Mii avatars, saying: “If you are going to have an avatar which is your representative in a virtual world, it has to stand for more of your personality than some 2-D cartoons. So while I think that millions of people would be happy with cartoony looks, the planet at large probably isn't.

“And it's an experiment that will be played out very soon, actually.”

Michael French, devmag.com

Kuju rebrand as Zoe Mode

2007-03-01T10:45:00.000Z

Kuju's Brighton has rebranded itself just ahead of GDC, revealing the new name of Zoe Mode. But the new identity isn't represented by a logo: it is embodied by a person: The name and face of Zoë has been chosen by Kuju to represent the studio's focus on making lifestyle games.

Is this the first brand represented by a person ?

This is interesting as most games are represented by the title - Crush for example is what the target group will be buying from amazon, or tesco. But to publishers it is the brand of the developer that counts and this is a smart and somewhat brave move by a mid level developer to step over the competition.

As time goes on, the Zoë Mode face or identity might change, but the female name will stay.

Studio boss Ed Daly explained: "Zoë allows us to have some fun with the image of the studio but of course what matters most is the games we make. We have built up a great team, a really diverse crowd for a game developer, and an internal culture that reflects the fun and creative values that come through in our games.

"By taking control of the public face of the studio we will be able to reinforce this unique identity and specialist expertise further.

"This studio has had great success over the last three years focusing on fresh gaming experiences for new audiences. We've shipped several very successful, high quality titles and grown to 100 staff and now the time is right to rename the studio. We’ve created Zoë Mode; she is the personality that reflects our in-house philosophy of accessible, fun gaming for everyone.”

Ian Beverstorkc spoke to GI.biz

"Everyone knows who Kuju is and what we've done, but in this age of specialisation it's been getting hard to get across the success of the Brighton studio," Kuju boss Ian Baverstock told GamesIndustry.biz.

"As we've been more successful across multiple studios, each doing different things, it's been getting harder and harder to maintain that clear understanding with our trade partners as to what each studio does."

"Everything about Zoë Mode as a personality is the real true essence of what the studio is. We're saying we're about making games for people like this, not just that normal, narrow, 18 - 24 year-old male age group.

"The idea of using a single character like Zoë to represent a studio is very much this studio's idea. All of Kuju's studios are focusing on particular areas, and their ambition in each case is to be the world's best. The days when you can be a jobbing, general purpose game developer are long gone - you've got to be a specialist."

"The studios are increasingly autonomous, and the strategy is for each studio to find a focus on a particular type of game and then become specialists," he said.

"That's something that Brighton's done with our work with Sony on SingStar and EyeToy games in particular. It made increasing sense for the public face of the studio to be differentiated."

Baverstock said that Kuju has long believed that operating diverse studios is a "good strategy", observing, "It's not just about spreading risk around - it allows specialisation. But it's also true that games development requires a really creative office culture, and that's really quite hard to achieve in a 300-person company.

"Each of our studios aren't like that - they're smaller entities, with separate cultures."

Zoë Mode is, however, still a part of the larger Kuju Studios group, which has development offices in London, Sheffield and Godalming. The team will still provide corporate support, and share technology/collaborate with the other Kuju studios, which may reveal distinctive brand identities of their own in future.

The first game to boast the Zoë name is PSP Crush, which is being published by Sega later this year.

If there’s anything overproduced by the game industry, it’s unconsidered rants.

2007-02-28T14:43:00.000Z

Just discovered Magical Wasteland a annoymous blog with some very insightful posts.
I will be posting some extracts here over the next few days for those who cannot be bothered to go and read the long but rewarding posts.

On the Problems with the Manifesto of Manifesto Games

Over a year ago, a company called Manifesto Games was founded with the idea that it would aggregate and sell low-budget but innovative games and by doing so help to advance the state of the game industry. While I have yet to see a new genre of games spring from this site, I do generally like and agree with the idea of invention as an essential but under-explored component of interactive entertainment.

Unfortunately, for all the talk of revolution (or even incremental improvement), the level of rhetoric actually displayed on the site is quite disappointing. The hyperbole in the actual Manifesto of Manifesto Games may be explained away as a stylistic choice, but the tract often crosses over into statements that are simply untrue. I believe it’s imprudent to base the foundation for a revolution, or even simply a new company, on such sloppy thinking

Breaking down some of the details:

“The large publishers’ desperate quest to reduce risk paradoxically makes it harder for them to find the best-sellers they need.”

Actually, the “desperate quest” is called a strategy, and it works almost disappointingly well from a business standpoint: ask Mr. Kotick of Activision, or look at their quarterly results for the past ten years. There is no evidence I am aware of that suggests otherwise.

“Today, most games are developed in massive sweatshops by hundreds of people over three years or more.”

As before, I don’t have data readily available, but this statement strikes me as an emotional accusation that is not exactly borne out by the true state of things. It may describe some Electronic Arts projects or a few massively multiplayer online games. But to boldly state that "most" games are developed this way plays with the truth in a rather elastic way.

Dan Marchant's mythical developer royalty

2007-02-28T14:10:00.000Z

Dan Marchant (Obscure) presents his formulae for getting a developer royalty (read - never !)

The myth of the developer royalty

Pop quiz - Your game costs $1 million to develop (funded by the publisher in the form of an advance against royalties).

Your publisher gets $10 (net sales) for every copy of your game they sell.
You (the developer) get 15% of net sales.
If your game sells 500,000 units how much money do you get in royalties?

The math is simple. 15% of $10, multiplied by 500,000 equals zero.

It goes on here.

Dan explains the reason most developers miss the boat when it comes to royalties and repayments in a clear and quite detailed manner.

So what’s the solution Dan?

There are various options but the simplest is to build 20% profit into your development costs and manage your project properly.

But this is why most publishers try and knock 20% off the price, as they want you to only break even.

and the most sensible advice of all...

Ensure that if the publisher requires changes that they pay for them and that you don’t spend your profit making the game better in the hope of making more in royalties.

Yes, it is possible for a game to sell millions of units and for the developer to make millions, even under a recoupment deal - but how many games are released each year (in excess of 3,000) and how many make the huge numbers (one, maybe two)? You need to run your company on the assumption that it will conform to the rule and not in the hope that it will be the exception.

You need to make your game based on a plan that will generate real profit, not mythical royalties.

Games Journalists Style Guide

2007-02-28T14:09:00.000Z

Games Journalists Association has announced the forthcoming release of a new guide for writers in the games industry.

Titled Wired Style: The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual, the book has been written by David Thomas, Kyle Orland and Scott Steinberg. It will offer guidance on spelling conventions and game criticism, plus company information and historical timelines.

The Videogame Style Guide will be released on June 1, priced at US $6 (eBook), US $14.95 (paperback) and US $24.95 (hardback). Review copies will be available next month. It will be available free for a limited time to members of the press. To pre-order, visit GameStyleGuide.com.

Second life gets a voice

2007-02-28T14:00:00.000Z

As PC's and consoles grow ever closer:

it was announced that Linden Lab will integrate the Vivox voice services into the fabric of Second Life. Second Life Residents will be able to speak with one another simply by walking up to other Residents and talking. There will be no need for a separate application, download, or login. Much like the experience of the Million Minutes program run this past fall by Vivox in-world when several Residents gathered around the microphones for group conversations. But now, no need to download a separate application. Spatial audio is also a feature and will allow residents to hear each other based on their positions - on their left, right, far away or nearby. Other capabilities will include controls for both Residents and land owners to manage participation in conversations, friends lists, presence, speaking indicators and tools that will allow people to stay connected in and out of world.

Second Life plans to start a private Beta in the next couple of weeks.

This is a tremendous step for Second Life and for Vivox. Real time communication gives users a lot of choice and opportunities to connect.

Sony release new tool set at GDC

2007-02-28T13:59:00.000Z

The internal technology teams at Sony Computer Entertainment have teamed up to deliver PlayStation 3 Edge, a new set of tools for developers working on the format-holder's new console.
Due for imminent release to PS3 developers, PlayStation 3 Edge has been put together by three first-party technology teams within Sony, the WWS Europe Advanced Technology Group, WWS America ICE team (a technology group based at Naughty Dog that specialises in graphics systems and tools for the PlayStation 3), and WWS America Tools and Technology group.

Edge is described as "a set of cutting edge technologies. Rather than an overarching engine, these teams have chosen to create specialized systems that demonstrate best practices of SPU and RSX utilization" in the description of a recently announced GDC session which will formally take the wraps off the new technology.

The GDC session, hosted by Mark Cerny (Cerny Games), Jon Olick (lead programmer, Naughty Dog) and Vince Diesi (principal programmer, SCE Worldwide Studios) looks at advanced graphics tools and technologies for PS3 development an will also show delegates "a unique tool for RSX performance analysis, extensively used in the tuning of first party titles".

Devmag.com

SCI buys Rockpool (NW)

2007-02-28T13:56:00.000Z

Casual Games continues to be a hot purchase for global pulishers.
But how much did bejeweled actually make ?

Publisher SCi continues to bolster its development resources, having just acquired British casual and mobile games developer Rockpool games.
The 36-strong team and its two offices in London and Manchester now join the SCi/Eidos fold which includes Crystal Dynamics, Beautiful Game Studios and IO Interactive.

Acquiring the studio means the publisher gains a foothold in the fast-growing casual games sector and also takes ownership of Rockpool's sister companies Ironstone Partners and SoGoPlay, which gives the firm access to, respectively, the Top Trumps licence and a casual games publishing portal.

A week ago the company announced that it would open a new next-gen games studio in Canada's Montreal.

"The global market for mobile games is set to grow considerably over the next few years," commented Jane Cavanagh, CEO of SCi, citing Juniper Research that says the sector will grow from $3bn in 2006 to $10bn in 2009.

She added: "Rockpool's breadth of activity, including not only mobile games but casual PC games, fits well with SCi's strategy to expand the company's business in this direction and will strengthen our position in these consistently growing markets."

Rockpool brings us a rich pool of talent along with a proven ability to deliver high-quality projects. In addition to their continued work on external projects, we look forward to bringing their experience and creativity to bear on some of our own titles over the coming months," added Simon Protheroe, director of Eidos' New Media and IT division, which Rockpool will be integrated into.

Rockpool MD Paul Gouge commented: "Being part of the SCi family means that we can accelerate our growth and build on the great achievements we have already made in the mobile, casual and wider games market."

DevMag.com

Dev Station 07

2007-02-28T13:02:00.000Z

SCEE's developer-only event DevStation returns in May with a three-day conference targetting PlayStation 3 development.

Taking place from Wednesday May 2nd until Friday May 4th in London, UK, the event is designed to help industry development delegates "get the most out of PlayStation 3".

The 2007 will hope to continue the sucess of previous DevStations that have packed in developers looking for the inside track on PlayStation-related software development.

Presentations at the May event will focus around the core technologies and, in a DevStation first, provide content for disciplines in design, production, art, audio and programming. Topics up for discussion will include, says DevStation reps, "anywhere from physics, SPU optimisation and audio tricks right through to the lastest developments with the PlayStation Network".

The event will also bring SCEE's Technology, Developer Support and Third-Party Relations groups all together with SN Systems and a number of middleware producers.
Those interested in attending should head over to www.devstation.scee.com and register.

Rockstar sign Natural Motion for PS3, 360 Project

2007-02-28T11:03:00.000Z

Rockstar Games is using NaturalMotion's Euphoria engine in its next-generation PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 titles.
The two companies have revealed that work is already well underway following several months of close collaboration between the Grand Theft Auto publisher and the Oxford-based animation specialist.
"In Rockstar, we have found a partner that shares this vision, and is renowned for creating some of the most ground-breaking and immersive games in the industry," commented Torsten Reil, CEO of NaturalMotion. "Euphoria is about giving people an interactive experience they have never seen before. We now have the processing power to simulate humans, and the possibilities for games are endless," he said.

Expanded Dare to be Digital 2007 calls for entries

2007-02-23T13:58:00.000Z

The University of Abertay's computer games design competition for students, Dare to be Digital, has launched for an eighth year with a significantly expanded schedule and a call for entries.

Having established itself as a key event for the education and games sector, the contest returns for 2007 stronger than ever as the organisers aim to invite 80 or more young game developers from across the UK and Ireland to take part this year – almost twice as many as in 2006.

To capture so many potential candidates, Dare to be Digital will roll out to other locations across the British Isles. Four teams from Scotland will be selected to spend the first nine weeks of the 10-week competition based at Abertay University designing and building a fully functioning prototype of their video game idea. Also, Queen’s University in Belfast will host a similar nine-week programme for students from the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, Dare to be Digital organisers are currently working to establish a host location in England, or to host English teams in Dundee for the competition.

Elaine Russell, Abertay University’s project manager for Dare to be Digital, said: “There are now more reasons than ever for teams to get together and enter Dare. The track record of previous participants shows how very highly regarded it is within the computer games industry. This year, we have received many enquiries even before the application form was ready. This early sign of enthusiasm shows the increasing popularity of the competition.”

Entrants teams receive financial support and weekly training sessions from industry specialists during the 10-week competition. Some teams from previous years have gone on to set up their own game development studios while many other entrants have gone on to work at companies such as Lionhead, Rockstar, Codemasters, BBC Scotland, Electronic Arts and Microsoft, as well as local Dundee-based developers such as Realtime Worlds and Denki.

Added Russell: “We want to celebrate the young talent from all university courses that represent a pipeline for bringing top graduates to the video games industry. We want to do that in a way that adds value to their CVs, provides them with experience of working in interdisciplinary teams, teaches them new skills and showcases their achievements effectively. We want to ensure that there are maximum opportunities for all potential employers to evaluate the talent pool.

“We also want to inspire, promote and celebrate creativity and originality. We want our participants to have a positive economic impact when they move on from Dare to be Digital either through employment or entrepreneurial activity. Dare’s popularity is increasing year by year and has attracted many more talented individuals to apply. We have gained much industry support and wish to see more. This is a fantastic project worth supporting."

Applications for Dare to be Digital 2007 should be made via www.daretobedigital.com

Circle closure and the local talent

2007-02-23T13:52:00.000Z

Studios based in the Midlands have already begun recruiting staff from CiRCLE Studio, GamesIndustry.biz revealed today.

Staff at the Derby-based developer could soon be recruited by a number of studios in the region, including Free Radical Design, Swordfish Studios, Rebellion and Eurocom.

"The closure of CiRCLE Studios means that we are now talking to some ex-CiRCLE employees," confirmed David Doak, director of Free Radical Design, based in Nottingham.

CEO of Rebellion, Jason Kingsley, also revealed the company is currently in talks with members of the CiRCLE team, stating: "We're talking to some selected individuals who have sent in CVs direct to our Rebellion Derby [offices]."

Although a studio closure can be bad news for the industry as a whole, Doak sees the opportunity to recruit skilled staff and keep them in a region well-populated with some of the UK's world-class development teams.

"Whilst the closure of a studio is obviously unfortunate for those involved, it does present an interesting opportunity for recruitment," said Doak.

"A number of skilled and experienced people who may have been quite happy in their jobs are now looking for new work. The challenge for us is to find the good ones."

Sources close to CiRCLE revealed that Birmingham developer Swordfish Studios is another interested party, demoing a new title at the studio the very afternoon that employees had been informed of their redundancy.

Swordfish had clearly been made aware of the impending crisis, allowing them to prepare a pitch to recruit key personnel and keep staff in employment.

Graduate Career Fair at Develop Conference

2007-02-21T16:16:00.000Z

Tandem Events are launching two careers fairs for game studies grduates. Called Games Grads, the one-day events take place in Manchester and London on April 24th and 26th, respectively.

The events have been designed to give students the chance to get in front of some of the industry's leading game creators and developers.

"The UK computer and video games industry is worth more than £2 billion annually and, with three next gen platforms on the market this year, there is huge potential for further growth in 2007 and beyond. That growth will require fresh – and very talented – blood, and that's where Games Grads comes in," explained Andy Lane, managing director of Tandem Events.

"Specialist computer and video games degree courses are on the increase, but until now there has never been a career fair specifically designed for this skills market. There are plenty of general careers fairs targeted at school kids, and that's fine, but Games Grads is a step above that. It's for those people who have already made a commitment to working in the computer and video games industry by enrolling on a vocational course to establishing a professional qualification: exactly the kind of people that publishers and developers are looking for."

Where is Montreal going to find all the new people

2007-02-21T14:09:00.000Z

It seems Montreal will be a gamers city in a few years. Just days after Eidos announced plans to open a studio in Montréal, and a week after Ubisoft said it would grow its own team in the city, QA specialist Babel Media has confirmed plans to grow its own Quebec base to 500 staff.

Babel is doubling the capacity of its facility in Montréal recruiting an additional 350 personnel that will take the company's headcount to 500 this year.

“We have recently signed contracts with clients who, without exaggeration, own some of the greatest IP in the world,“ said Algy Williams, MD of Babel.

“We will be testing their games across all platforms, including PS3 and Xbox 360, and we need to recruit talented and motivated people who are looking for a career in the games industry."

Babel is looking for testers to work in the company’s fast growing functionality QA department, but is also hiring testers and porters for its wireless department as well as project managers across all its service lines, including localisation.

Babel opened its Montreal base in August 2005 - the office is the company's North American HQ and works across all platforms.

Bandwagon

2007-02-21T14:04:00.000Z

Along with many other people, I'm jumping on the bandwagon by linking to Bandwagon !

Go here and you'll figure out why. Great idea for a product, and a nice bit of marketing to boot.

Nine Inch Nails use ARG to promote new album

2007-02-21T12:57:00.000Z

By James Montgomery

A dystopian civilization in the throes of extinction. A government poisoning its own citizens through the drinking water. Military police raiding private residences. The end of civil liberties. The creation of a Church-State. Mind control.

The contents of some conspiracy theorist's personal manifesto? The plot of a rote first-person shooter? The results of a quick jaunt through Snopes.com? Actually, it's all part of the elaborate (and somewhat terrifying) concept behind Nine Inch Nails' upcoming Year Zero album (due April 17), details of which are currently being disseminated through a series of increasingly spooky — and downright odd — Web sites.

Strangely enough, the story actually began on the back of a T-shirt sold on NIN's current European tour. Dates and cities are listed, with certain letters highlighted. When those letters were arranged, they spelled out the phrase "I am trying to believe," which most saw as just another statement of shattered hope from NIN mastermind Trent Reznor ... that was, until one particularly, uh, "enterprising" individual decided to Google the phrase.

What was revealed was a rather unsettling site (IAmTryingToBelieve.com) dedicated to information on "Parepin," a drug allegedly added to the water supply by the federal government at some unknown date to protect citizens from bioterror attacks. While all appears to be normal, the author of the site — who is not identified — paints a different picture, referring to Parepin as "bioterrorism" being waged on U.S. citizens without their knowledge, designed to placate them.

But in some cases, the opposite occurs. Dosage is not controlled and, according to the site, the more water that unknowing citizens drink, the harsher the side effects.

"Parepin affects brain chemistry — specifically dopamines. Dopaminergic overactivity is linked to schizophrenia. Parepin dosage is not controlled. It's just in the water. The more water you drink, the more Parepin you ingest," the author states. "Parepin may make some people more susceptible to visions and hypnagogic hallucinations (those very vivid dreams you have when you think you are awake.)"

The site also makes mention of citizens witnessing something called "The Presence," which is shown in a series of blurry photographs as what appears to be a giant hand descending from the heavens.

"I used to dismiss conspiracy theories about the Administration's 'real reason' for adding Parepin to our water," the author writes. "Now, I'm not so sure."

Hidden on the site is an e-mail address to contact the author, yet all correspondence to the address is answered with the following auto response, which indicates that he or she has changed (or, possibly, was forced to change) their opinion:

"Thank you for your interest. It is now clear to me that Parepin is a completely safe and effective agent developed to protect us from bio-terrorism. The Administration is acting purely in the best interests of its citizens; to suggest otherwise was irresponsible and I deeply regret it. I'm drinking the water. So should you."

And things only grow more confusing — and unnerving — from there. Members on a NIN fan site, EchoingtheSound.org, soon began to uncover even more sites, all seemingly unrelated upon first glance. But through careful — and some may say obsessive — examination they all began to tie together, creating a rather Orwellian picture of the United States circa the year 2022.

AnotherVersionOfTheTruth.com is, on the surface, a site created by "the U.S. Bureau of Morality," featuring a fluttering flag superimposed over a rippling cornfield and emblazoned with the motto "Zero Tolerance. Zero Fear." But if users click and drag their mouse across the image, what is revealed is a black-and-white photo of a bombed-out wasteland. Visitors are then taken to a secret "messageboard" with topics like "End of the World?" and "Cops Murder Muslim Kid."

On the board, members — or perhaps government agents — discuss Parepin and the Presence (sample entry: "Was it an angel? Devil? Alien? God? I don't know. It was a Presence,") the rise of a new drug called Opal — which, we're told, was created by the U.S. Government after global warming destroyed coca leaves in South America — and a secret-police raid on a Muslim home in Saginaw, Michigan.

Several audio samples are also available on the site, including one taken from the cell phone of a girl in the Michigan home, and an "angry sniper" who opens fire (what he calls an act of "violent resistance") during a baseball game.

The messageboard also contains a link to BeTheHammer.org, the site belonging the "angry sniper," and makes mention of "Consolidated Mail Systems," both of which are important clues to advancing the story.

On BeTheHammer, the sniper says he worked for the secret police, raiding homes of Muslim-Americans, torturing and in some cases murdering them. He also makes mention of time spent in the 105th Airborne Crusaders.

And, of course, a quick Google search of "105th Airborne Crusaders" turns up a site dedicated to a special-forces group formed "as part of our nation's swift answer to the atrocities in Los Angeles," and made up of "men and women who kept a personal relationship with our Savior the Lord Jesus Christ and allowed the Holy Ghost to guide their rifles true." According to posts from former members of the 105th, the Crusaders launched campaigns in Iran (even mentioning the detonation of a nuclear device in Tehran), Yemen, Chad, Turkey, Syria and the Kashmir Region.

There are also mentions on that site of a New Evangelical Church, which donated land to the 105th. Somehow — and we're not entirely sure how — this led NIN fans to the discovery of another site, ChurchOfPlano.com, run by a fictitious New Evangelical outfit that practices "Neighborhood Cleansing" and holds sermons about the Presence.

And finally, as if all of that wasn't mind-bending enough, a Google search of Consolidated Mail Systems turns up a purported e-mail in-box owned by someone with the handle "NoOneImportant," which contains a police-manual definition of Opal that suggests it causes users to suffer the same hallucinations as those who ingest too much Parepin.

Are we to believe, then, that in the future the government has really been drugging its citizens? Will we engage in a Holy War with Muslim nations? Will secret police groups creep in the shadows at night? We're led to believe that the answer to all of these questions is "Yes."

And it all brings up a couple of new questions: Just who is behind all these Web-related shenanigans in the first place? And what do they have to do with Nine Inch Nails?

Well, in relation to the former: all of the sites are registered through Domains by Proxy, an Arizona-based company that protects the identities of site owners (when reached for comment, a spokesperson for DBP would not reveal exactly who registered any of the sites as it would "violate the terms of service provided by the company.") But according to reports published on the Web site of the U.K.'s Digit magazine and elsewhere, the sites are part of an alternate reality game, created by 42 Entertainment, a marketing company responsible for one of the most famously ambitious ARGs in history: "I Love Bees," an effort that combined Web sites, banks of public telephones and vials of honey sent through the mail to create, well, "buzz" for the fall 2004 release of "Halo 2" (see " Want To Live Like Neo? Alternate Reality Games Might Be Your White Rabbit").

When contacted by MTV News, a spokesperson for 42 had no comment on the company's involvement with NIN.

And about the latter: When the band's label, Interscope Records, was contacted they too had no comment, though they did release a statement by Reznor which seemed to put the whole project — and the concept behind Year Zero — into focus.

"This record began as an experiment with noise on a laptop in a bus on tour somewhere. That sound led to a daydream about the end of the world. That daydream stuck with me and over time revealed itself to be much more," Reznor said in the statement. "I believe sometimes you have a choice in what inspiration you choose to follow and other times you really don't. This record is the latter. Once I tuned into it, everything fell into place ... as if it were meant to be. ... The record turned out to be more than a just a record in scale, as you will see over time.

"Part one is Year Zero. Concept record. Sixteen tracks. What's it about? Well, it takes place about 15 years in the future. Things are not good. If you imagine a world where greed and power continue to run their likely course, you'll have an idea of the backdrop," he continued. "The world has reached the breaking point — politically, spiritually and ecologically. Written from various perspectives of people in this world, Year Zero examines various viewpoints set against an impending moment of truth."

Derby Loses Circle Studios ?

2007-02-21T12:07:00.001Z

Its senior management is currently denying it, but reports on the web this week say that Circle Studio, opened by former Core founders Jeremy and Adrian Heath-Smith, has closed.

A report on Gamesindustry.biz says that Jeremy Heath-Smith told staff today that the company was closing although he and PR manager Suzie Hamilton have told the press that the reports are false.

The studio was opened in October 2003 - the brothers had previously co-founded Core Design, in 1988, which went on to produce Tomb Raider. The two left that studio following the release of the critically mauled Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness.

Circle's first - and only - console games was PS2/Xbox actioner Without Warning for Capcom, released in October 2005. Since then the team had focused on interactive DVD titles.

NW to focus on Casual Games

2007-02-20T10:15:00.000Z

Bolton University has announced a new initiative designed to make the North West of England "a centre for casual games development".

The university already offers a range of computer games design courses and has done since 2002. Launching this month, Casual Games North West will offer a range of "fully-funded business support packages", according to a statement, which will help games, new media and web companies in the region to secure a foothold in the market.

According to IGDA figures quoted by Bolton University, the casual games market was worth EUR 450 million - with that number predicted to rise to EUR 1.5 billion in the US alone by 2008.

"This project promises to provide critical support to the games industry in the North West of England. By focusing on the casual games sector, we will tap into the fastest growing sector of the games market," said Andrew Williams, academic leader for games at the university.

Senior lecturer Phil Carlisle added: "This is an ideal time for anyone considering entering games development because of the opportunities generated by new platforms and new methods of delivering content.

"This project will enable companies from all over the North West region to learn about and target these new markets."

Casual Games North West is being partially funded by the European Regional Development Fund, the Creative Industries Development Service and the North West Development Agency. It's supported by regional trade body the Game Alliance.

Starting this month, CGNW will be contacting companies in the North West to establish interest. A networking event will then be held in May.

Matt Sanky on Games Education

2007-02-20T10:06:00.000Z

"Video game curricula are materializing in universities all around the world, thanks in large part to the tireless efforts of the IGDA's Education SIG, interested developers and a global selection of educators who recognize the value of accredited games education at the college level. While the quality and viability of curricula may vary on a school-by-school basis, the SIG's evolving Curriculum Framework is building worldwide consensus on what should be taught and how. The legitimacy inherent in something that is studied at the university level will be invaluable to games in the ongoing censorship debate, and of course graduates of these programs may go on to contribute to better and more innovative games.

...

BUT, for example, it is a mistake on the part of developers to presuppose that secondary educators are exclusively responsible for producing employable graduates. Initiatives such as the establishment of video game academies are wonderful opportunities worthy of pursuit, but don't lose sight of the fact that games are an art form, deserving of study as such. There's no reason to assume that every student signs up with the sole desire to make games. I went to film school; I didn't then, don't now, never have and never will wish to work in that industry. My interest lay in film as art, as a cultural influence. Others who graduated at the same time and with the same degree did want to make movies, so while I focused on theory, genre study, major directors and audience psychology, they studied editing, camera techniques, sound, lighting and so on. Naturally there was overlap, to ensure a quality education. We can apply the same approach to game curricula.

From a curriculum design standpoint, this means we should further expand history (game and otherwise), play/fun theory, analysis, writing, psychology, literature, ethics and similar humanities-oriented courses taught from a gaming perspective. Understanding the medium of the video game, how it works on an emotional level, will lead to better games tomorrow and wider acceptance today; teaching only the technological aspect of video games is a disservice to the art form and threatens to graduate students with obsolete skills.

Technical education is a crucial part of the curriculum, but it is still only part, and it still receives disproportionate emphasis. A film student interested in becoming the next Walter Murch needs to focus on construction and editing; and game curricula need their courses in tools programming, optimization, C, modeling and so forth. But it should be one of the many paths a student can choose to take. This is more relevant given that developers tend to retrain new hires anyway, and that proprietary toolsets are almost never taught in schools. It is irresponsible to provide accreditation to games programs that only teach half the equation – the equivalent of an English program teaching only grammar and no literature.

Someone graduating from a full-featured games program would have skills pertinent to a huge number of professional fields: advertising, instructional design, education, e-Learning, multimedia, IT, marketing, creative, filmmaking, and web development barely scratch the surface. “Full-featured” is the watchword, though. You go to plumbing school to become a plumber and require only technical education; you don't necessarily go to game school to become a developer, though a truly inclusive curriculum will allow you to learn how if you so choose.

To accomplish this, we must abandon the nomenclatorial tapioca hounding the field's curriculum development. Segregating “game studies,” “game education” and “game research” to appease industry crustaceans threatened by the existence of an academia in their midst is… ill-advised. It's all part of the same big, delicious pie, and should be up to students which slices they choose to eat. Call the whole thing game studies, from DirectX programming to analysis of psychosexual responses in MMORPG play, and leave it at that. Doing otherwise muddies water best left unmuddied and makes it difficult to describe the entire field with a simple phrase. A proper games curriculum should be modeled after modern film studies programs: base prerequisites in technology and theory, with an array of sub-disciplines and electives so learners can customize their experience. The more robust the curriculum is the better off we'll be.

Given that this is a newish field of study, universities would also do well to hire educators who actually know what they're talking about, regardless of the letters after their names. There simply aren't that many PhDs out there yet, but there are hordes of individuals who could lecture on any number of relevant topics. I don't mean to devalue those with doctorates – far from it – but it would be wise for a university wishing to build a strong games curriculum to bring experts in and allow them to finish postsecondary degrees as they teach. Otherwise their program risks falling behind.

Things are going really well in the world of games education. Yes, most programs still focus too much on tech and art and don't do enough to produce students who actually understand what games mean. But that's changing, which is exciting. It took film programs decades to evolve into the well-rounded creatures they are today, and the evolution of game studies seems to be moving much faster. While we're not yet exactly where I personally would like to see the field, we're getting closer every day thanks to the foresight, collaboration and wisdom of those involved with educational development. "

Matthew Sakey

BME - 'Negative' Game Characters Critiqued

2007-02-20T10:01:00.000Z

An article in Black Voice News has been published, offering a highly critical view of the videogame industry’s portrayal of minorities. Penned by Richard Jones, the article begins, “Negative video games reinforce poor self-images in Black youth.” It points out the overwhelming majority of games-makers are white, while surveys suggest that African American and Latino games players spend more times with consoles than White players.

Kansas State University psychologist John Murray is quoted, "If Blacks and Latinos are always portrayed as the villains, or as the victims who get killed often and easily, that is code for powerlessness. These image persist because too few minorities are in the industry. Roughly 80% of video game programmers are White.”

The author, who criticizes the Grand Theft Auto series (pictured) adds, “The video game industry is all about money. No one really cares about your skin color or gender if you are a well-trained video game designer or illustrator. The problem is that our youth and adult players see themselves as players and not designers or illustrators. Therefore unless they're motivated to get on the business end versus the player end of the video game phenomenon they will continue to be portrayed in a negative light and also miss out on a ten billion dollar a year industry.”

via Joystik, and Next-Generation

Article here. Spotted by Joystiq.

Canadian Tax Breaks making a difference

2007-02-16T08:18:00.000Z

Just a week after Ubisoft Montreal upped its ambitious expansion plans, Eidos has confirmed it will open a games development studio in the city, creating 350 jobs in three years.

It's the third studio the publisher, which is owned by UK firm SCi, has opened in the past 12 months - it recently established Eidos Sweden and Eidos Studios Hungary, the latter of which this week topped the UK charts with Battlestations: Midway. Its other studios around the world include Crystal Dynamics (USA), IO Interactive (Denmark) and UK-based teams Pivotal and Beautiful Game Studios.

Indie developers go large

2007-02-15T09:47:00.000Z

There is a very interesting interview with Gamecock over at Next-gen.biz.

It show taht with 'smart funding and a few cleaver media types new models can be developed:

"Earlier this week, former executives from Gathering of Developers announced the formation of Austin-based Gamecock, “a well-funded, independent, artist-driven game publishing company” inspired by the rise of the indie film movement.

Wilson isn’t shy when saying that big publishers are driving the industry into a creative rut with the overuse of licenses, sequels and bloated gaming budgets. But according to him, developers themselves are partially to blame.

First of all, about Gamecock, what’s up with the rooster theme?

Well basically, the idea is that we don’t think that the publisher brand really matters too much to people. Like Gathering of Developers, we’re going to be putting the developers’ names on the front of the boxes and we’re just fine print on the back, where we happen to believe that the publisher belongs. Other than that I just think we like to keep it fun. Hopefully [the rooster theme] lightens things up a little bit. I don’t see why we all need to be so very serious about video games.

Gamecock describes itself as “well-funded.” Where are these funds coming from?

Well basically we beat the streets for a couple years to find really good sort of “clean” funding this time. At the Gathering, we were really pretty under-funded and the money we got, because it came from Take-Two, came with a lot of strings, so we worked really hard to find some money that wasn’t like that this time.

Essentially, we’re finally lucky enough to find two very, very, very high net-worth individuals who are not from this space but are from media and understand entertainment and IP and working with artists and all that, so they get that part of it and they’re comfortable with the risk. Luckily these guys have enough money to take us as far as we care to go as fast. We don’t want to do fifty or a hundred games a year. We don’t want to become like our competition, so we want to do maybe ten or twelve games at a time and each one of those might be over several platforms.

"We’re not going to make Die Hard 5 for $100 million—we’re looking to make The Matrix 1 for $65 million."

Why is the indie film movement a good model to follow for videogames?

I just think it’s a good example of what can happen when you start getting more creative about where the money comes from to make things like indie films. Fifteen years ago it kind of had the same problems we’re seeing now, in that all of the money was coming through these same few big companies. So it was the same types of things being green lit over and over again. People started getting a little bit more creative with how to get money for films… I hate to boil it all down to money, but the main problem in the industry is the only people that are investing in games are the big game publishers right now and they’re just not taking a lot of creative risks. They’re very sort of conservative public companies.

Next-Gen recently did an article called The Games People Buy, which definitely supported the idea that the licenses and sequels rule the industry from a commercial standpoint...

They do. I had this conversation when I went back to Take Two… [The reason] why these same games get green lit and get all this marketing [is that] it’s all just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Like, of course these are the biggest games of the year, because these are the ones that these big companies put all their money behind and really push. When it comes time to decide which games get the marketing buzz, it comes down to these three or four sort of “sure thing” franchises that each one of these big companies have.

Everything else just kind of gets sent out and you hope for the best and then they’ll market it if it happens to be a surprise hit. … [Gamecock] will truly launch every game as if it’s going to be a hit, and part of the reason we can do that is we don’t have all the overhead and waste that these other guys do have, because we’re not doing a hundred games a year.

Are major publishers destroying the creativity of the games industry? Do you think that’s just flat out a fact?

Well, I don’t know, because you kind of have to distribute the blame equally. I think developers need to get a little more creative about ways to fund themselves and if they have an original idea to get it from proof of concept stage at least so that these big guys feel more comfortable green-lighting it. And then the press—the game magazines, the game websites—tend to cover the obviously huge games a lot more. They beat each other up to cover the same game 85 different ways.

Before we launched, when we went out and did the press tour with a lot of the magazines in San Francisco, everybody is really thrilled to hear we’re back and several of those meetings ended with, “Hey man, this is awesome, what can we do to help?” And I would tell those editors “You can write about original games. You can put them on your covers like you do Tomb Raider 9 or whatever it is.” And that’s the truth. Everybody that cares about this industry has to start thinking about independent developers and original games a little bit more.

And so these Gamecock titles that are coming, they’re like full-out packaged next-generation triple-A games?

Yeah, it was very tempting to get back into [the business] earlier [than we did], because there is a lot of exciting stuff going on with digital distribution. But really, we wanted to come back and go toe-to-toe with Activision, THQ, Ubisoft, any of these guys. We can do big games like they can, we can do the marketing, hopefully do them a little smarter because we’re more nimble. I mean me, Rick [Stults], and Harry [Miller], who are all the founders, have all managed and been the biz guys for independent developers, so that gives us a little bit of a different perspective.

Indie games, just like indie films, have found ways to do things more efficiently and more creatively, so you’re not going to see us doing $30 million games with 200-person teams, just because we don’t believe that that’s the answer. We’re not going to make Die Hard 5 for $100 million—we’re looking to make The Matrix 1 for $65 million.

So you’re skipping on The Matrix 2 and 3.

Yeah, that’s how we look at it… It’s the same story that [publishers] were saying when the PS2 and Xbox came out. They were saying that console games were going to cost $10 or $15 million then... Now they are saying [games will cost] $20 or $30 million on the new platforms. Halo, Grand Theft Auto, Max Payne—all of these games cost under $5 million to make. And then Halo 2 cost like $22 million to make, because as soon as it [catches on with] one of these huge companies, they just can’t help themselves—everybody in the company wants to attach themselves to the game and basically all this overhead gets attached to the game.

The poor bastards who created this game in the first place are stuck in a corner somewhere and don’t have anything to do with it at all, but yeah. That’s not really our ideal model."

Power of New IP

2007-02-14T15:12:00.000Z

Ubisoft's vice president of publishing, Jay Cohen, has told GamesIndustry.biz that the company is planning to focus heavily on new IP as a means to secure its position in the market.

Speaking in an interview conducted at the DICE Summit last week, Cohen described new IP as the "cornerstone" of Ubisoft's strategy, adding, "In fact, I think we're at three new IPs every three years� That's sort of our target."

As Cohen observed, Ubisoft's intellectual property portfolio currently includes Rayman and Red Steel, plus forthcoming title Assassin's Creed. "So every year, you're going to be seeing something that's going to be brought out by Ubisoft.

"If we can keep doing that, they're sustainable, and they're ours. We can take them with us no matter where we go."

Cohen said that companies which rely on licensed properties over new IP can end up with difficult problems to overcome.

"For example, look at SEGA 2K Sports," he offered. "They had the NFL license, and now they don't. Boy, they're kind of screwed... That's a big hole in somebody's business plan. All because the license ran out or the licensor took it back.

"You can't take Rayman away from me, or Red Steel, Assassin's away from us. And we think that's what it's going to take to continue to succeed," Cohen concluded.

Sharing Games Secrets

2007-02-14T13:05:00.000Z

Keith Stuart at the Guardian, makes a very important and troubling point about the industry's current lack of transparency

He points out that it is similar to the music industry but if we look at the film industry, you only have to have had lunch with Tom Cruise, and he is an Executive Producer for you next epic.

"That's the problem with the modern videogame industry and the web - the two are utterly incompatible...

Blog culture is all about uncensored exposition, about the personal over the corporate. The videogame industry is obsessively secretive. It is almost impossible to get a developer to talk to you about games these days - unless they're pushing their own of course. And even then both your questions and their answers have to be vetted by the publisher's PR department. Information is controlled, opinion, where possible, is obliterated. It is possibly the same in all industries.

Thing is, the people who make games, are often - no, almost always - active online citizens. They're on forums and tech sites, they're opinionated, they share information. But publishers certainly don't want them to be. This clash of cultures might not be quite as profound as the one between musicians and record labels, but it is there. It is important."

EA Acquires Music Community, Networking Site SingShot

2007-02-13T19:58:00.000Z

Electronic Arts has announced the acquisition of San Francisco-based online karaoke community SingShot Media, which the company says will "accelerate EA's efforts in community-building and promoting user-generated content."

The web-based social networking platform, the product of a year of work between CEO Ranah Edelin and CTO Niranjan Nagar, allowed SingShot members to "record their own renditions of famous songs, share their recordings with friends, rate and comment on other members' tracks, customize recordings with photos and videos, and compete in a variety of contests."

Though EA's plans for the SingShot technology and platform were not immediately made clear, company officials said the five person SingShot team would be brought in to EA's Sims division, suggesting that franchise of games would be the first to see the fruits of the merger.

Under the terms of the agreement, Edelin and Nagar, who formerly were core members of the Listen.com team that completed what is now RealNetworks' Rhapsody music subscription service, will join EA as vice presidents.

Said EA executive vice president and group general manager Nancy Smith, "We are thrilled to bring the SingShot team into EA. They are tremendously talented, technically adept and true experts in developing user-generated communities through music. We see a bright future for the technology and each of these individuals within EA."

Gamasutra's Best quotes from DICE 2007

2007-02-13T19:48:00.000Z

You can find full coverage of all of these speeches at Gamasutra's special D.I.C.E. 2007 page,

"There’s a new fear of high expectations for our next game, and a fear to not let down MTV... we have the resources and expertise to get our vision right, and along with that comes the stress with wanting to make absolutely certain we don’t screw it up. And in a lot of ways this stress is every bit as potent as it was before we made a hit game."
- Harmonix's Alex Rigopulos talks about what keeps him up at night.

"I love [my son] more than anything in the world, but I’m in this industry where I’m never going to see him, because I’m in this world where we say you have to stay until midnight. No, I have to change it! So I started to change it... I put my son and my family and my health first, work third. We put this on our walls at Gas Powered Games."
- Chris Taylor makes one of the most personal speeches of the show.

"Already we use the same rendering software, we use the same animation software, we model the same polygon count. Where it's going now is that people creative in one medium will extend to others. We're going to see people who got their start as really basic animators or scenery designers in the game community someday standing at the Academy Awards and thanking their mom and their agent."
- Sony Pictures Digital's Yair Landau discusses the game-film convergence in action.

"If dissonance is followed by constant harmony, this is a good thing... Dissonance creates tension. If you follow that by release, this is a great thing. Tension-release, tension-release. It’s stress, and the relieving of that stress, and these are the building blocks of music."
- Inis' Keiichi Yano holds a design symposium on rhythm games.

"I’m calling for an open marketplace of developers... If anyone in this room wants to call me, you just call me, and I’ll take your call. I don’t have to sneak around. Now, an open marketplace has a lot of implications, one of which is that it’s really scary. But I believe in markets, and I also believe in talent, and I believe that if the market is open, talent will come out. I guess I’m kind of betting on that."
- Method Games' Michael John on the advantages of going solo.

"Nothing annoys me more [than] the publishers and developers who make controversial content and then cut and run when it comes time to defending their creative decisions. If you want the right to make what you want, if you want to push the envelope, I’m out there defending your right to do it. But, dammit, get out there and support the creative decisions you make... If you want to be controversial, that’s great. But then don’t duck and cover when the shit hits the fan. Stand up and defend what you make."
- Doug Lowenstein's stormy farewell speech to the game business.

"By what measure is the launch of PS3 unsuccessful? We had people lined up in stores in three continents... we can always sell more, but [the European launch is] on track for March... the boat with the first supply is on its way from China as we speak. I think it’s a fantastic achievement."
- Phil Harrison's in-depth grilling at the hands of Newsweek's N'Gai Croal, when asked about Gabe Newell's indictment of the PS3 launch.

"I think we’re at ‘fast, cheap or good, pick one.' You can say you’re going to do a 12-month title, maybe it ties with a movie, but the thing is, don’t plan on being cheap and don’t plan on being good also. Pick one... At id, we always pick ‘good.’ If we turn out a game that’s not very good in one of our brands, it ultimately hurts the value of the studio. So we always focus on good. Quality is always number one."
- id's Steve Nix talking about 'Studio Survival, One Level at a Time'.

"I’m more the traffic cop than anything else."
- Maxis' Will Wright explains why he didn't want to be the sailor for the purposes of making Spore.

"The key messages that I want to drive home today are that in-game ads are going to make you rich, they’re going to make you famous, and they’re going to make you better, and I’m going to explain to you how I feel that will happen."
- Ubisoft's Jay Cohen loves those in-game ads, apparently.

"I don’t mean to belittle developers, but we’ve only managed to recreate PS2 in the palm in your hand... I think we can go deeper, I think we can explore more features of the machine, connectivity, social aspects, media aspects, and integrate it into game design that is unique to that format. It’s not a missed opportunity so much as a future opportunity."
- Phil Harrison gets surprisingly honest about the fortunes of the PlayStation Portable.

“It’s very easy on the keyboard to type up a bunch of criticisms about how ESA isn’t doing this or that right. Then you look and where are these people? Are they getting in the fight? Are they making political contributions? Are they going to their senators? No, they’re sitting on their hands. I’m sick and tired of people sitting on their hands.”
- Lowenstein's farewell speech again? Of course.

New PC download site - Itunes for games

2007-02-13T15:31:00.000Z

Virgin Games is working with Game Domain International on a new 3D PC games platform designed to "do for PC games what iTunes has done for music".

Titled A World of My Own, the platform is said to feature fast download speeds, a user-friendly interface and enhanced security. It's due to launch later this year with "a large selection of games", according to a statement. PC games distributor Koch Media is already in negotiations with Virgin to support AWOMO.

"This is a really exciting development for us, as it gives us the opportunity to do for PC Games what iTunes has done for music," said Virgin chairman Richard Branson.

"The GDI technology will revolutionise how the mass market will play games, and will give them more choice for less money."

Former ELSPA boss Roger Bennett added: "After twenty one years in the computer and video games industry, I can honestly say I have recently seen in operation the most unique technology that can bring the most potential value to the industry."

GI.Biz

Ubisoft gets $19m investment for digital design studio

2007-02-13T15:27:00.000Z

The Government of Quebec has confirmed that Ubisoft is to receive a multi-million dollar grant to facilitate the expansion of its Montreal office and the establishment of a new digital design studio.

According to a statement issued by Government officials, the publisher will be given a contribution of up to CAN $19 million (US $16.2 million / EUR 12.5 million).

This figure is based on interim financing from tax credits, training related to new jobs, conducting studies and collaboration in training of qualified labour. In addition, Ubisoft may receive a tax credit for producing multimedia titles and film production services.

The money will be used to fund a two-phase project which will see a digital design studio established to "bring together film and videogames" and the expansion of Ubisoft Montreal, which already employs more than 1000 people. The project is expected to create a further 1000 jobs by 2013.

"For our Government, it is essential to support companies' training plans. By focusing on qualified labour, Quebec will be able to continue to create wealth and to come out on top in international competition," said Michelle Courchesne, minister for employment and social solidarity.

The minister for economic development, Ray Bachand, added, "Carrying out this project will consolidate Montreal's mission to be an international centre of excellence for videogame development and digital design. The presence of a leader such as Ubisoft creates a catalyst effect on the launch and expansion of businesses."

Ellie Gibson, GI

‘Future-proofing’ approach for Ubisoft Montreal

2007-02-13T14:57:00.000Z

More details have emerged regarding the expansion of Ubisoft's massive Montreal studio, revealing that a bulk of its hires will be graduates while the firm readies itself for future console generations. With the new next-gen formats proving cost and labour intensive enough for some publishers and developers, it may come as a surprise to hear a third-party ready itself for whatever challenges the successors to the 360, Wii or PS3 may pose.

But that's exactly the thinking of Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot, according to an interview with Reuters discussing Friday's announced investment in a new animated movie studio in Montreal, creating 500 jobs for artists, and further growth for the development studio in that city, which will add a further 500 jobs.

"What we see in the future generation of consoles is they will allow us to play games in real time, which is the equivalent of what you see today in CGI movies," Guillemot said.

"We will work and learn all the technology and know-how so that when it's time for the next console launch in five years, we'll be ready for games and movies that are at the right level."

"We're looking for the best talent interested in movies but also interested in learning more about creating video games as well, so they will not only give things to us, but they'll also learn how interactive entertainment is made," Guillemot added, explaining that the company was already actively hiring from Hollywood and CGI animation companies.

He added: "With the short films, we're going to learn how CGI production works. We'll insert product placement in the short films so we can monetize them. Our goal is to work more closely with Hollywood studios and talent so we can eventually make movies at the same time we create the games."

Meanwhile, further details from the Quebec authorities have revealed that a number of government departments - including investment groups such as Investissement Quebec and the ministries that focus on trade, sport, finances, employment and education -worked to convince Ubisoft to keep growing its Quebec-based teams, strengthening both the company’s plans and the region’s talent base going forward.

Explained minister of employment and social solidarity Michelle Courchesne: "As part of this extremely promising project, Ubisoft will hire, over the next few years, hundreds of graduates namely with a background in computer graphics, multimedia and programming."

She continued: "For our government, it is essential to support companies' training plans. By focussing on qualified labour, Québec will be able to continue to create wealth and to come out on top in international competition." by Michael French

Next gen - The games people play 2006

2007-02-13T14:54:00.000Z

Industry news site Next-Gen.biz just posted a truly interesting feature titled “The Games People Buy.”

Outside the excellent analysis of the trends highlighted by 2006’s top 100 titles, the real interesting data is contained in the sales list which breaks every game in the top 100 down by:

Game Name
Platforms
Copies Sold in 2006 (North America)
Revenues Generated in 2006 (North America)
Release Date / Genre / Publisher
Review Quote

Nice Tech has been commissioned by BBC World and Ragdoll to develop MMOG

2007-02-09T16:45:00.000Z

Nice Tech, the Online Games specialist based in Cambridge, has been commissioned by Ragdoll Worldwide Ltd (a joint venture between award-winning children’s television producer, Ragdoll, and BBC Worldwide) to develop a Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) for their new children’s programme Tronji.

Tronji (30 x 30’) commissioned by BBC Broadcast for CBBC, is aimed at children aged 6-9 years. It involves two co-existing ‘worlds’: the Tronji world and the real world. The series blends live-action and real children within a CG-animated environment. It will engage and captivate pre-teens as they immerse themselves in the problem solving and detecting activities of the Tronji world, whilst watching real children solve the comical dilemmas presented in each episode.

The on-line game will allow children to enter an immersive Tronji world via their home computer and engage and explore with other children in a fully interactive and evolving environment. The scale of the Tronji MMOG makes it the most ambitious game of its type for children of this age ever developed, and it will form an integral part of the Tronji experience for Ragdoll Worldwide.

Nice Tech will develop the Tronji MMOG using its breakthrough technology, AliceServer, which uses an innovative, biologically inspired, development philosophy to produce online virtual ‘worlds’. AliceServer creates virtual environments where the complex reality inherent in real environments can emerge.

Commenting on behalf of BBC Children's, Head of Interactive, Rebecca Shallcross says: "The Tronji MMOG will encourage children to participate and collaborate in a really ground-breaking application that will capture their imaginations and make a strong addition to the CBBC online portfolio. Our aim is to offer our audience creative opportunities within a safe environment, providing highly engaging interactive experiences which truly enhance CBBC brands."

Ragdoll’s Andrew Kerr, Executive Vice President, Global Licensing and Marketing says, “We are excited to have secured the services of Nice Tech for this project. Their unique AliceServer technology ensures that the online Tronji experience will be as ambitious and compelling as the television programme itself. The online Tronji environment will be unlike anything ever created for children of this age.”

Commenting on behalf of Nice Tech, Paul Baker CEO says: “We are delighted that Ragdoll Worldwide have decided to commission an MMOG to support the launch of Tronji. We are confident that our expertise and enthusiasm will enable us to deliver a truly innovative online experience.

To partner two leading players with outstanding track records in the Children’s sector such as Ragdoll and BBC Worldwide, and be offered the opportunity to exploit our development skills and technology to contribute to the Tronji vision, is an exciting and terrific opportunity”.

It is anticipated that children will be able to enter the Tronji ‘world’ in the early part of 2008 and will be accessible in the UK via the CBBC website.
www.ragdoll.co.uk

Okami's art style

2007-02-08T19:48:00.000Z

Link:From Jim Rossignol's Blog

"Certain games are easy to eulogise, and Okami is one such lyrical gift. The effect of its visual style is something that can’t easily be understated: Japanese traditional painting, cel-shaded and flowing, filtered through a parchment - as if the whole game were a living canvas torn from Feudal Japan. It’s the kind of vision I imagine Sony were hoping for when they optimistically named the PS2 CPU ‘the Emotion Engine’.

The sheer range that Okami is capable of suggests a palette that other games dream of, and as I play I encountered odd links in tone and scope to the experience of Psychonauts. Like the Double Fine game, Okami refuses to concede on visual wealth: the terrifying organic immensity of the Spider Queen (also an appallingly well designed boss, despite the grumbles of some fumble-handed reviewers) whose incidental special effect attacks are as stunning as they are fleeting; the tidal waves of magically ignited fauna, exploding blossom and absurdly gay communes with forest animals; the sheer grim spookiness of the cursed zones, whose enemies stalk the lands as haunted scrolls or tapestries (bad spirits, banjo-wielding demons waiting to be tripped). Okami is pumped up with ideas that you seem to trigger, like conceptual booby-traps, with each twitch of the pad.

Okami reinterprets traditional Japan, both its wood-print pastoral art and its God and demon-infested polytheistic folklore, as a paintbrush-plus-Zelda-mixed-with-wolfgod game. The charm of this peculiar recipe isn’t simply in its rich presentation, it’s also in the ease and flow, the slow but steady pace that keeps its ideas arriving. There’s always another sword-wielding mouse (appearing as a mouse-wielding sword) descending from the heavens, and there’s always another battle inside a storm of calligraphic ideograms.

Gillen wondered whether other games might be able to appropriate their own historical styles, perhaps a game could be set entirely inside gothic script. Or, I wondered, could games take their visual language from Lowry or the ageing Goya?" Jim Rossignol

Remedy reveals Alan Wake production secrets

2007-02-07T19:38:00.000Z

Finnish studio Remedy has offered a glimpse into the production of its Microsoft-exclusive game Alan Wake, revealing that just 30 people are working on the 360 and Vista title. In an article published by Finland's Helsingin Sanomat newspaper, the studio has explained that its core team is being supplemented by outsourcing and support from publisher Microsoft's US production team.

"Microsoft has huge machinery for games production. If a team of 80 voice actors are needed from the States, they can provide it. Their test laboratory is also fantastic," lead games developer Petri Järvilehto explained in the report.

"We are a very small team to work on something of this scale," added business director Matias Myllyrinne, who says that the exclusivity tying the game to Xbox and Windows platforms is helping speed up production, as well.

Despite that, Remedy won't commit to a release date: "In the computer games business, it often happens that a too optimistic launch date is advertised, and it then has to be postponed," said Järvilehto.

According to the report, Alan Wake is the first Finnish game to be published by Microsoft, and while the majority of the games' characters will be directly modeled on US actors, the titular character is based on Finnish actor Ilkka Villi.

Controversy or Cash-In - Manhunt 2

2007-02-07T10:17:00.000Z

Rockstar is working on a follow-up to controversial 2003 stealth-action game Manhunt, where players were tasked with violently murdering gang members to help make underground snuff films.

It's due out on PlayStation 2, PSP and - believe it or not - Wii as soon as this summer, with primary development on the PS2/PSP versions going on at Rockstar's new London studio in conjunction with Rockstar North, while the publisher's Toronto studio has a go at the Wii version.

"With Manhunt 2 we have tried to create a game that stays close to the original concept of chilling suspense and stealth, whilst pushing the game design and storytelling forward," said Sam Houser, founder and executive producer of Rockstar Games.

"We are also excited to have our newest development team, Rockstar London, working on the title alongside our two established UK studios, Rockstar North and Leeds."

Manhunt 2 doesn't appear to have been rated yet, in case you're wondering.

The original Manhunt, originally a PlayStation 2 exclusive but also subsequently released on PC and Xbox, attracted a lot of controversy when it was first released - although apart from yards of frothing copy and Daily Mail headlines nothing much ever came from it.

Marketers Can't Buy Buzz

2007-02-06T23:00:00.000Z

By Abbey Klaassen

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- The Beatles said you "Can't buy me love," but marketers' version of that refrain is closer to "Can't buy me buzz."

Coke almost missed out on its chance to build on organic buzz -- something you just can't buy.

"Buzz belongs to the people," said Buzzmachine.com's Jeff Jarvis, who moderated a panel yesterday on the topic of whether brands can get away with buzz marketing in the blogosphere. The panel was part of the Always-On Media conference in Manhattan's Mandarin Oriental Hotel.

Be more interesting
David Weinberger, co-author of "The Cluetrain Manifesto," said he's not convinced there is a right way to build buzz, outside of just being interesting. The problem is "marketers generally forget how to be interesting because they're so interested in shaping messages," he said, quoting his co-author, Doc Searles: "There's no market for messaging." And, Mr. Weinberger added, bad, manipulative buzz could be damaging to a marketer's brand.

Barry Reicherter, senior VP-director of persuasive technologies at Porter Novelli, lamented that nobody's figured out how to measure buzz, although his agency takes a look at the net-fluencers, which he estimates is about 5% of the population. And that inability to measure return on investment is one of the reasons why marketers haven't allocated more resources to social-media activities, said Rick Murray, president of Edelman's me2revolution practice.

Still, Mr. Murray said social-marketing budgets are dipping into brand-marketing budgets because clients have realized "you can't buy your way into conversations." Getting into the conversation takes time and is more of a one-to-one marketing opportunity. He added that Edelman is focused more on monitoring the conversation than measuring the conversation -- a qualitative rather than quantitative measure.

Coke almost missed out
Coca-Cola Co. was held up as an example of a marketer almost missing the opportunity to build on organic buzz with the Diet Coke-Mentos YouTube phenomenon. Mr. Murray, who added that he's got a background in the soda business, said Coke made the mistake of saying "That's just not our brand, people drink Diet Coke, they don't play with Diet Coke. ... Bottlers would say that's a great thing, it's driving per capita consumption and they're not even drinking it."

He would have gone to every retailer he knew, set up a cross-promotion with Diet Coke and Mentos, and created a commercial or campaign to run offline as well. "Buzz," he said, "is actually an outcome and not a strategy."

Gears of War cost only $9m

2007-02-06T17:48:00.000Z

Epic’s Mark Rein says blockbuster games like Gears of War don’t have to cost eight figure numbers. He says the Xbox 360 smash came in at under $10 million. In an interview with Wired he said, “We spent less than $10 million to make Gears of War. People are always saying that making next-generation games is really expensive, and we're saying, you should license our technology."

The company says Japan is its big ambition right now. “It's definitely a challenge to convince Japanese developers to work with a third-party technology like ours. But we've got a few, and we're gonna have more. I think Square Enix, they're the granddaddy. I'm hoping that'll be pulling the stopper out of the drain, and we'll get more. We've been looking to hire somebody in Japan, to be our representative there. It's really hard to find somebody who speaks really good English, knows our technology well, is native Japanese, has an engineering background, can answer complex questions. We're looking, the job's open.” Here's the link.

France to offer tax credits for games development

2007-02-02T13:23:00.000Z

French Parliament has approved a bill granting tax credits for games developers, a move designed to secure and encourage a healthy interactive entertainment sector within the country.
The measure covers 20 per cent of a company's production costs, up to a maximum of 3 million euros ($3.91 million) a year. Qualifying games must have "a cultural dimension", France's Ministry of Culture said in a statement.

"[The bill] recognizes the cultural character of the video game, which involves several branches of artistic talent: writers, directors, graphic artists, musical and sound creators," said the statement, which also acknowledged the country's large audience of gamers, numbered at 15 million.

The statement also said that theEuropean Commission has begun a formal examination of the proposed measure which would be completed in a few weeks.

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin had promised over a year ago that a tax credit system for games would be introduced. Previously the country had offered grants for games developers, although that offer only funded new game concepts.

Comparable tax credits schemes are not uncommon elsewhere in the world - although they aren't as widespread as the industry would like, of course.

Ironically it is French-speaking Quebec which has offered the best deal to games developers.

Companies based in the province get 30 per cent of their production and creative staff's salaries from the government - and if a team is working on a French-language version of the game an extra 7.5 per cent is thrown in as well. (It's expected that this is how the 'cultural element' clause will work in France as well.) Quebec also offers an R&D tax credit of up to 40 per cent, as well as other initiatives.

French publisher Ubisoft's Montreal studio has benefitted most from the Quebec tax breaks - it's targetting a workforce of over 2,000 by the end of the decade, a growth plan that wouldn't be possible without the government support.

by Michael French

Alternate Reality Games: Interview with Adam Martin from Guardian Unlimited: Gamesblog

2007-02-01T10:55:00.000Z

via Aleks at the Guardian:

"In researching the article on Microsoft's Alternative Reality Game marketing campaign for today's paper, I met and interviewed a whole host of great people. One of them was Adam Martin, the editor of the International Game Developers Association's ARG White Paper published late in 2006, former CTO of Mind Candy and current Lead core programmer at NCSoft, agreed to answer a few questions about the attraction of ARGs to non-(video)gamers. Along the way, he inadvertently highlights a few problems with the way computer games are currently designed.

What is the appeal of ARGs?

It's mainly two things: firstly, they're very easy to start playing; secondly, the core gameplay provides rich experiences in areas of gaming that very few traditional games excel in - rich, deep stories; gameplay based on "personal skills" (persuasion, negotiation, consensus-building, etc);

Personal skills in particular are something that you very rarely get to exercise in any traditional game. In a traditional game, the options are usually limited to two or three set-phrases you can select between at each point in a conversation with an NPC. In ARG's, the NPC is usually a real live person, and you can do *anything* you like to persuade them to help you - from making them laugh by telling jokes through to evoking strong empathic emotions such as pity.

Why do they appear to bridge the gap between computer gamers and non-(computer) gamers?

Non-gamers have countless reasons not to play computer games, and ARGs variously erode, remove, or sidestep those reasons.

For instance, any game that involves a two-handed controller covered in buttons and (multiple!) joysticks can be very off-putting to the large number of people who've never played games on such a controller before. The current consoles have approximately 15 separate buttons, and gamers have learnt conventions of which buttons do what. Game designers tend to follow those conventions fairly closely (they're usually based on which buttons are easiest to reach individually and/or in combination), and so a gamer can pick up a new game and be reasonably competent very quickly. Anyone who's never played those games faces a huge learning curve before they can even get to learn how to play the game itself!

By contrast, ARGs require no special skills or knowledge of conventions other than those you encounter every day in your daily life. If you know how to use Google, how to make phone calls and send emails, how to surf the web for information, and how to find your way around a new city using the map, the tourist info, etc, then you're fully qualified as an ARG player already.

How much does an ARG typically cost to make?
This is one of the biggest differentiators between sub-types of ARG, so there's a couple of answers:

Independent ("grassroots") games, those produced for fun or as a learning experience for the developers, tend to cost from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand. It's easy enough to make these games at no cost at all, although a little expenditure can add a lot of value to the gameplay, and so usually the authors spend at least something. This works because by far and away the biggest cost in producing an ARG is time - if the authors are not paying themselves, then it's practically free to run.

Marketing ARGs typically cost in a similar range as other professional marketing campaigns, although probably a lot cheaper for the value that the client gets from it (measured in exposure, press coverage,
etc) - anything from a hundred thousand dollars up to a million or more.

Commercial games can cost anything in between, and - interestingly - can adapt their costs over the lifetime of the game as necessary to fit their income. Usually they'll cost slightly more than a marketing ARG because they're aiming to provide an equally rich and powerful game experience, yet with the added difficulty of having to keep the service running over a longer period of time than just one short campaign - but they can peak at much higher costs, depending upon how many people you want to reach and what the revenue model is. Unlike almost all traditional computer games, developers have a lot of direct control over their cost base for an ARG.

Why are ARGs effective marketing tools?
Because they're more interesting than reading yet-another attempt to grab your attention in 2 seconds by using just a picture, or an animation, and a few words of text in a fancy font? :)

Seriously, though, and comparing like-for-like, ARGs rely on viral marketing as a large part of their spread. This is even more true than for traditional viral marketing campaigns, as this viral mechanic is not just the way the message spreads, but also fundamental to the gameplay - if it isn't done well, the gameplay will suffer, and the ARG will crash and burn even faster than a crass attempt at viral marketing.

Although you have to be careful when talking about viral marketing - there's a lot of cynical usage of VM around, and it's generally got a bad reputation amongst many consumers. ARG authors generally strive to provide something that is amenable to spreading virally without feeling they have any right to expect or demand that it work - they know that if they do a good game well, it will spread, and that they have no more control than that.

What is the future for ARGs (independent and product-based)?
The low-cost, high-penetration, the wide demographics they cover, and the heavy involvement of creative thinking and imagination from the developers make them a prime target for an even greater role in the wider marketing industry. This is likely to be the easiest market for them to grow into in the short term - there are many brilliant creatives in marketing who would love to make much more interactive, game-like, campaigns but for whom the mainstream games industry is too lumbering and/or specialised for them to get into.

That holds true for the games industry too - there is plenty of room for much smaller-scale ARG's being used in marketing of new games, especially online games. Halo/ILoveBees and Gun/Last Call Poker were both great campaigns, but the possibilities could be explosive for fully online games like WoW that are more naturally able to intermesh with an ARG. The biggest opportunity here is that such games could have permanent ARGs running intermeshed with them throughout their lifetime - since they already have constantly changing content, they can weave outcomes from the ARG back into the core game, giving players the sense of an "ability to affect the game-world" that is so hard to provide in mainstream MMOG's, and yet so often asked-for.

From the games side, I think we'll see a game soon that successfully merges the primary ARG elements with a simpler game style - probably borrowing heavily from the conventions and ideas of the Casual Games industry - and gets just the right mix at the right time that it explodes in the same way as sites like MySpace. I don't think there's anything that's quite there yet, although many things are coming ever closer - ARG developers tend to be great at producing stories and rich experiences, but lack the shorter, brighter, more visceral ideas and brilliance at "polishing" that characterise Casual Games.

If PopCap or Real/Zylom moves into making an ARG, that's the moment you'll see the next sea-change in the industry. But, personally, I think it'll come from a tiny independent, a group of friends or students doing everything off their own backs who happen to get it just right.

Teeside students' Twisted team

2007-02-01T10:52:00.000Z

A team of students from Teeside have teamed up for a graduate business within the Tees Valley's DigitalCity project called Twisted Studio - and the gang is already talking about of licensing out its games development toolkit.
The studio has been formed by three graduates from Teeside University's computer games programming and design course and plans to specialise in three areas.

The first is the sale and distribution of its rapid application development toolkit, called LOGIC; second is producing original games using the tool; and third is to offer the team's services to other studios.

Twisted's Production Director, Graham Bryan commented: 'Our development team has a range of revolutionary games and applications conceived, devised and prepared, and in the process of completion.

'We are also working on fully licensing our LOGIC toolkit to empower developers to produce high quality software with noticeably lower overheads. It's an incredibly exciting time and the entire team is looking to the future with great confidence.' "

Low Flying Overheads

2007-01-31T15:30:00.000Z

The Guardian has a worthy read and a bit more coyness from Raph Koster on Areae, web 2.0 and games:

I think a lot of what the game world can learn harkens back to the old cathedral and bazaar thing. Games are clearly cathedrals, as built right now. Each one is a moon shoot.

So with things like YASNS, indie development, etc. are games heading toward becoming the same kind of searchable, taggable data soup as other media? I think the entry barriers are still a bit too high, but that will change.

Practically everyone is a gamer — it’s really a question of what games they feel comfortable playing, be it bridge or Battlefield 2142.

Likewise everyone can be a game designer, but it depends what resources a person is comfortable using. Video games have an extensive heirarchy about them right now, from AAA to casual, but through the (admittedly balkanised) mod and homebrew communities, the overheads are slowly falling.

David Haywood

Softimage teams with EA Chicago for new 3D pipeline

2007-01-31T13:09:00.000Z

3D graphics company Softimage has partnered with Electronic Arts' Chicago studio to build a game development pipeline built on its XSI animation software.

The pipeline has been built specifically with next-gen and HD games production in mind, and will be used for the development of a new title. The studio has recently completed work on Fight Night and is finishing up Def Jam: ICON

The two "expect this project to generate efficiencies in pipeline speed and iteration" explained Scott Cronce, vice president and chief technology officer of EA's worldwide studios.

“Our mutual goal is to create a workflow model that benefits the artist,” added Marc Stevens, vice president and general manager for Softimage. “We look forward to seeing the amazing content and, ultimately, the games that EA Chicago creates utilizing this newly developed workflow.”

ELSPA's new role in UK development

2007-01-31T13:07:00.000Z

Earlier this month ELSPA published its manifesto for 2007, revealing plans to modernise the organisation and work more closely with members.

The move comes less than six months after Paul Jackson took over from Roger Bennett as ELSPA director general. Jackson, who formerly worked at Electronic Arts and has been a member of the ELSPA board for more than 12 years, took on the role in August last year.

Following the recent announcement, GamesIndustry.biz sat down with Jackson to find out more about what needs to change at ELSPA and what challenges the organisation now faces - plus how it will attempt to tackle piracy following the closure of the Evesham office and several investigator redundancies.

full interview here.

Highlights:
When announcing the changes, you stated that ELSPA wants to engage more with the industry. What does this mean?

I think we need to engage more clearly and effectively with our members. The industry has grown rapidly and we need to make sure that we're meeting and talking with everybody - so it's not just the board and I who are deciding what ELSPA does.

We also need to engage much more fully in two areas. Firstly in the political arena - we've started this process but we need to develop it more agressively, not just with Government ministers but with shadow spokespeople and Lib Dem spokespeople.

We need to understand where the political consensus is going and be able to affect the political consensus going forward.

Shaun Woodward, the minister for creative industries and tourism, has been in the news recently saying that we should have a "games academy" to train people up. However, some people in the industry have questioned whether there's a need for such an institution. Where does ELSPA stand?.

At the moment we're seeking opinion within the industry. There's a need to make sure that we have a strong and effective pool of talent to keep our development studios fully staffed - that we have enough talent coming through.

We're not sure what the best way might be of doing that or if there's a consensus about it. So we're trying to understand what the industry consensus is and we're trying to work with Shaun to find out what the best course of action is.

To summarise, what are ELSPA's key goals now? Where does the organisation need to go next?

There are two key things I want to achieve over the next three years. I want to ensure that the agency is fully engaged in all those areas that a mature entertainment industry is engaged. I want to make sure we're engaged in the political debate, the public arena; I want to make sure that we've got strong industry cultural events ns that will enable us to show our full worth.

Secondly, I want to make sure that ELSPA itself is very professionally organised and ready to help support the industry in all of those things.

Gamer YASNS

2007-01-30T15:32:00.000Z

Marek Bronstring, of Idle Thumbs, has made an interesting post about The Great Games Experiment: a social networking site for gamers. His take:

There needs to be a place where small games can virally market themselves the way small bands have rapidly emerged from MySpace and YouTube. I don’t know if this is going to be that place — it is still under major construction and has only 1200+ gamespaces and 2700+ profiles — but I will be keeping a close eye on it.

David Haywood

BBC to develop MMO for children

2007-01-23T15:24:00.000Z

The BBC is planning to launch a virtual world suitable for children between 7 and 12 years old to muck about it.

Called "CBBC World", it will allow "digitally literate children" to create an online avatar and then create and share content, a bit like Second Life.

"It will give children a chance to move around a safe, secure world where they can not only interact with familiar characters but have an opportunity to make that world a more fascinating place with their own imaginations," a spokesperson said.

Meanwhile, BBC children's controller Richard Deverell said that CBBC World was "a good example of the way we need to go".

"The thing that interests me is that children are at the vanguard. And that is where we are taking Children's BBC," he said.

Details of how the world will work and what it's likely to cost were not immediately available. Much as with the life children face in general.

via Eurogammer

Miyamoto to keynote Game Developers Conference // GamesIndustry.biz

2007-01-22T16:13:00.000Z

Shigeru Miyamoto, the acclaimed game developer behind titles such as Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda, will keynote the Game Developers Conference 2007.

In his first keynote since 1999, the developer will reveal the creative process behind his work on highly-regarded software as well as his thoughts on new Nintendo hardware, in a session entitled, 'A Creative Vision'.

'The Game Developers Conference is a place for developers to learn from one another, and I think it is safe to say that every member of the community has at one time or another fantasised about having Shigeru Miyamoto as a mentor and teacher,' said Jamil Moledina, executive director of the GDC.

'By guiding us through his creative vision with a keynote at this year's GDC, Miyamoto is allowing all attendees this incomparable privilege.'

The Game Developers Conference tales place March 5 - 9 in San Francisco. Discount for early registration for the event closes January 31.

Miyamoto's keynote will take place at the GDC on Thursday March 8, in the Moscone Centre."

Geometrics Demo's new lighting effects at Game On

2007-01-19T11:00:00.000Z

Co-founder of Geomerics, Dr Chris Doran, will give the first public display of the company's graphics software for home consoles, as part of his talk next week at the Game On exhibition.

The demonstration of the real-time, cinematic lighting technology will form part of Doran's presentation, where he will also discuss the technical challenges facing game developers.

"I am excited to be unveiling a glimpse of what our technology is capable of at Game On," commented Doran.

"Lighting is one of the biggest challenges for the next-generation of videogames, but real-time reflection and radiosity effects are seen by many as an unattainable goal, even on the newest consoles."

"I'm here to prove that the bar can be raised. Realistic lighting is now within reach for games developers worldwide," he said.

Dr Chris Doran will present 'Video Games: Look at the Future' as part of the Game On exhibition at London's Science Museum on January 22.

Games industry hiding behind the figures

2007-01-18T16:32:00.000Z

Jon Jordan "What I found significant was the headline ELSPA chose for its press release of the wonderful news - "2006 interactive software sales thrash previous years".

Now, this must count as a classic case of being economical with the truth. In term of their value, sales clearly didn't thrash previous years. An extra £10 million is chickenfeed, considering software sales in the week prior to Christmas were worth £91.5 million ($180 million).

The total number of games sold - 65.1 million units - was up significantly, by 7 percent compared to 2005 however.

Whether this counts as 'thrashing' remains open to debate though. OK, so I'm being a bit fussy. I'm a columnist. That's what I do. Nevertheless, I think this behaviour hides a wider issue; that the games industry lacks confidence when dealing with the non-gaming world.

Maybe because we're constantly being hit over the head with complaints about violence and addiction, the powers that be only feel safe communicating from a position of strength, which in the lack of any cultural confidence, generally means pride in commercial success. Hence obvious commercial success needs to be manipulated, whether supported by evidence or not.

Of course, in this case, all that was needed was a bit of analysis. Both 2005 (where UK software sales by value rose 0.7 percent), and 2006 can be counted as transitional years in which everyone expected sales to be flat, at best. That sales are up, even slightly, is positive, but we can't expect the wider media to understand that if we don't provide the context for them.

And if we don't, the result will be stories about games being "bigger than films" and 2006 "thrashing 2005"; both examples of how to lose a kernel of truth in a tissue of white lies."

spot on as ever

Sodcasting

2007-01-17T20:20:00.000Z

Music, on a crowded bus, coming from the speaker on a mobile phone. Sodcasters are terrified of not being noticed, so they spray their audio wee around the place like tom cats. But who wants to be associated with the sound of a pair of twigs having it off on a bed of rice?

WoW hits 8 million

2007-01-12T16:08:00.000Z

WoW hits 8 million from Guardian Unlimited: Gamesblog:

"Blizzard have announced that World of Warcraft has hit 8 million subscribers. Even if you assume that a substantial amount of these are lapsed accounts this is still a hugely impressive figure. Of course, this announcement is perfectly timed, with Burning Crusade - the first expansion pack for the game - released next Tuesday, complete with midnight store-openings around Europe."

Super Columbine controversy continues

2007-01-12T15:51:00.000Z

The fall-out from the Super Columbine controversy continues. Since Aleks covered it on Wednesday and keith stuart chipped in today with the Technology column, things have moved on with several other competitors from the Slamdance Games competition dropping out in protest.

One developer and finalist, Jason Rohrer, has written an open letter to the remaining entrants pleading with them not to follow suite: "Everyone seems to be pulling out now, and I don't think it's the best move. That just leads to silence, and what we need is discussion."

Hmm, I'm not sure the many thousands of lines of blog coverage the protests have prompted constitutes silence - I'd say it has kept the story on the global agenda. The alternative was to protest to a roomful of people at the festival itself - worthy, perhaps, but unlikely to capture the attention or imagination of the blogging public.

So far my favourite coverage of the upset has been on game designer Greg Costikyan's blog, Game * Design * Art * Culture. First he ran his own defense of Super Columbine, then the next day a friend's rather cutting and critical antithesis.

As far as videogame scandals go, this is a hell of a lot more interesting and relevant than Hot Coffee.

EA, Frontier and others question 'games academy' idea

2007-01-12T15:42:00.000Z

As reported by DevelopMag

Tiga loves it, EA doesn't - MP Shaun Woodward's suggestion that UK studios form an academy for games developers has ignited sector chatter, but opinions clash over the idea's worth. Last week, Woodward told the Financial Times that the best way for the UK games industry to secure fresh talent "is to move into the hot seat itself; to come to the government and say 'we want to put some money into an academy'."

He described a ‘school for geeks’ that would not only serve graduates and students but also encourage young gamers "traditionally" left out of higher education to consider a career in games production as well.

Yesterday, development association Tiga stepped up to applaud Woodward's headline-grabbing suggestion, which was in fact spurred by a meeting between the two in July '06.

Tiga and its CEO Fred Hasson wants to see the industry put together an academy-style Centre of Excellence and has conducted research into the issue.

Explained Hasson: "The industry is crying out for more suitably skilled people to enter the sector. Skills needed to cope with the next-gen transition to larger studios and changing patterns of production are needed now. There are potential gains to be made by looking at how techniques and know-how from other closely related industries can inform the way we develop product. These are the issues we are exploring with companies and partners.”

A similar idea is also being put together by computer game and digital media agency Pixel-Lab, which according to managing director Toby Barnes is "further reaching than a 'school for geeks'" and "would work along side the countries excellent post graduate courses and would develop a sustainable future for UK development".

PERCEPTION PROBLEMS
However, the already-established and fast-growing games education sector has been left a little puzzled by Woodward's outcry. From their point of view, such teaching is already available in the UK via established colleges and universities - and the idea of sending out a message that all gamers might make it in academia is mistaken.

"There has always been a perception among the ill-informed that someone who spends a lot of time playing games must be able to make them. There is obviously no link between the amount of time someone spends watching TV and their potential for a career in the BBC, so why are games seen as any different?" said Dr Jon Purdy of Hull University's Games Programming MSc.

"I would suggest that there is a very good correlation between excellence in traditional academic subjects and suitability for employment in the games industry, just as there is in all technically demanding, creative and highly profitable industries."

Purdy told Develop that numbers for the course are already falling due to lack of studio support, and that Woodward's suggesting private sector money fund a games academy is a short-sighted. Instead the opposite is needed: "The only thing that suffers when specialist masters’ level games graduate numbers fall is the games industry. If the Government or games industry don’t give some assistance to the students wanting to do masters’ courses, like ours, there will be very few graduates entering the games industry from these courses in the near future."

Meanwhile Electronic Arts UK, which runs a successful Universities program, has blasted everything about Woodward's suggestion, from the use of the word ‘geek’ through to the fundamentals of the idea itself.

“As an industry the sooner we can shake off the perception that our companies are staffed by geeks the better. Geeks conjure up the image of social outcasts, nerdy disfunctionals who live for their work," explained Matthew Jeffery, head of European studio recruitment.

"The games sector is not in the midst of a talent crisis. Those touting this are obviously not creative in the way they are seeking to attract candidates and they need to focus on attracting talent not only from within the gaming industry but outside of it. With the appeal of Next Generation gaming we can attract the best talent from our finest universities, from film, TV, music, mobile, IT hardware and software, FMCG, retail and defence industries, to name but a few areas where great talent is."

Jeffery explained that traditional graduates are EA UK's priority for its recruitment plans in 2007, with the publisher-developer hoping to make sure over 30 per cent of its studio hires this year are graduates.

SHOW US THE MONEY
Some independent studios in the UK remain unconvinced as well, with Frontier boss David Braben telling Develop: "I would be wary of any special interest group running education. On the art side, our prime competitor for staff as an industry is the film business. On the programming side our prime competitor is probably the finance industry.

"We are simply looking for good solid candidates who are very good in their respective fields, with a broad knowledge of the associated disciplines - the knowledge we require is not particularly specialist. It is these good solid candidates that are hardest to find.

"Universities have been going downhill as they dumb down to attempt to meet the government's ridiculous targets of 50 per cent 'university' attendance - resultant computer science graduates, for example, no longer have the knowledge they need, like basic maths."

Another UK independent studio executive, which dubbed Woodward’s idea as ‘a games version of Hogwarts’, pointed out that it might be hard to get studios behind such a privately-funded venture because they would want assurances that they could cherry-pick the best students once they finished studies.

But there are already comparable establishments with games-exclusive teaching elsewhere in the world, if they are rare. Centre NAD in Montreal bills itself as 'a finishing school for developers' by offering an art and animation design course, while Germany is host to a Games Academy which has around 100 students learning games art, programming and level design - it even offers courses for would-be producers. Both of these schools are privately run from funds generated by tuition fees and donations.

And it's money of course that will prove the main test for such an idea in the UK. Explained Tiga's Hasson: "The key issue will be willingness to pay. We are working on the basis that few will want to put in funds for general training at present so that what we are doing now is investigating potential partners willing to pump prime this process, and developers willing to work with others."

ELSPA says 2006 was record year for UK games industry // GamesIndustry.biz

2007-01-11T11:36:00.000Z

"ELSPA says 2006 was record year for UK games industry

Software sales up 7 per cent, FIFA most popular title

ELSPA has declared that the British videogames industry hit an 'all time high' in 2006 with a 7 per cent increase in the number of games sold - bringing the total figure to 65.1 million units.

All-formats sales totalled GBP 1.36 billion - a new record, according to ELSPA, and an increase of 1 per cent over the figure for 2005.

The majority of console games purchased were for PlayStation 2, followed by Xbox 360, Xbox, Wii and GameCube. PC titles did well, with software sales up 7 per cent - making 2006 the platform's 'best year ever'.

It was also a good year for handhelds - DS and PlayStation Portable software sales just trailed the figures for PS2, with Nintendo's machine 'slightly outdoing' the PSP.

The best-selling game of the year was FIFA '07 - one of four EA titles in the top ten. At number three it's Need for Speed: Carbon, with The Sims 2: Pets at six and The Sims 2 at nine.

Konami's PES 6 takes second place, while Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories is in fourth followed by Lego Star Wars 2: The Original Trilogy at five.

Movie tie-in Cars is in seventh place, while Lara makes a comeback with Tomb"

Serial Programming a Format or a Genre

2007-01-11T11:34:00.000Z

"Is Serial Programming a Format or a Genre? Slippery Language in the Popular Press"

The New York Times is the latest authority to chime in on the controversy of the Fall 2006 television lineup, as people still debate about complex television and the failure of some of the new shows this fall.

By this point, I find that so much of the negativity surrounding seriality has become the way the failure of these various shows have been covered in the popular press, particularly in considering serial programming a genre. That's the language used by reporter Edward Wyatt in this story. After first calling serial programming a 'format,' he later writes, 'All of which has left some fans of the genre wondering whether it is worth committing to untested new serials, or better to wait and see if a new series will be around for more than a few weeks.'

That raises an interesting question. Serial programming is not new. Maybe there is a particular bent of serial programming to this new format, but the idea of storylines that connect from week-to-week has helped drive narrative interest in some shows for a long time now. But, to me, the serial format is a mode of storytelling, not a genre of story, at least not in the sense television genres are usually discussed in.

What we have here is a question about genre and h"

Convergent thoughts on the iPhone

2007-01-10T10:09:00.000Z

Having previously argued that convergence is something tech companies seem to show huge appetite for yet consumers seem to show little appetite for, I'll now happily admit I may be wrong. I finally see a convergent device that makes sense, that would appear to appeal to me almost completely. It just seemed that Apple had to make it, that's all. If they can actually launch the thing - on time, in sufficient numbers, globally - and it lives up to even half the promise of their near-perfect presentation, then convergence becomes a pragmatic, useful, beautiful reality.

Apple iPhone

NB: In a stunningly mistimed announcement - the absolute opposite of a slow news day for the mobile market - it should also be noted that Nokia has announced the N800 and N76 smartphone/mobile computers. Their deal with Vox is also worth noting. The latter is interesting, strategically, but I can't see it making the front pages tomorrow, somehow.

Relentless unveils Buzz title for schools market

2007-01-10T10:01:00.000Z

Developed in partnership with the Department of Educations and Skills, Buzz: The Schools Quiz will feature over 5000 questions based around Key Stage 2 National Curriculum content.

"We're incredibly excited about this project. Learning games like this will, we hope, give teachers an extra tool in the classroom," said David Amor, creative director of Relentless.

"Using the buzzers and the quiz format means the game is instantly accessible - and works on the basis that kids learn more when they're having fun."

A preliminary version of Buzz: The Schools Quiz is being shown at BETT, the educational technology show running this week in London, with school trials due to take place before the title goes into full production.

The game will also introduce Teacher Features, allowing teachers to create a quiz around one particular subject, or set parameters for modes such as team play and game progression.

"Buzz has proven itself a hugely successful family home entertainment franchise for over 750,000 UK PlayStation owners," commented Ray Maguire, MD of Sony UK.

"Taking this proven format into the educational sector with brand new curriculum-relevant content created by teachers seems a potent new addition to the teacher's portfolio," he added

Developing a UK centre of excllence for videogame development

2007-01-07T18:27:00.000Z

In 1933 the British Film Institute or BFI as it is now known was created to promote greater understanding, appreciation, access and support for the film and television industries in the UK. Its main aims were to encourage public appreciation of film, advise educators, carry out research and act as a mediator between industry, teachers and their audiences. In 2007 we are in a very similar position with the UK videogame industry and the time is right to take this opportunity and create a future for growth.

For the last two years Pixel-Lab has been lobbying government, working with regional development agencies and most importantly industry to create a centre of excellence (physical or virtual) that would build upon this countries excellence in game development and provide a sustainable future. Last week Shawn Woodward called for a school for geeks . We should not be looking at industry for the first steps – the major players in this country are American or Japanaese and are indifferent about where their talent stems. We have a number of UK players who are committed to the UK continuing its development excllence but we need more than this. The first steps need to come from government. A new industry needs supporting, it needs catclysts and it needs to be led. There is a demand from industry for higher skilled workforce, for investment in technology, and for more smaller new companies to be formed, and we need to develop the supply of organizations who can create these.

Seventy years after their foundation, the BFI continues to develop new audiences and filmakers with a passion for cinema. They are proud of their expertise and knowledge and while building on their reputation as the guardian of film past, they are championing the very latest in cinema technology and working with young filmmakers to understand British Cinema.

The BGI will sit at the epicentre of videogaming incubation, research and teaching. By creating a dynamic environment for growth the BGI will provide the catalyst for creating a mature future for videogame development, one the UK deserves. If one word will encapsulate the work of the BGI, it is passion – a passion for videogames and videogame culture in all its forms. To an outsider looking in, the BGI’s passion for games will be obvious. The BGI will be the guardian and champion of videogaming in this country.
If further supported how much additional impact could the games industry have on the GDP of UK plc?
How much is being spent on games courses in academia with no central lead?
How are regional development agencies making up their own strategies with little conversation between them, and a lack of centralized support?
How will the UK ensure it’s heritage in videogames is developed?
How will the UK continue to innovate and develop its creativity?
With US and Japanese publishers buying up UK development studios at a rapid pace and those independent studios who are left working in an environment that will only allow the very strong to survive, who will offer a haven for independent content creators?
A centre of excellence is the anwnser to these questions and many more.
• A campus of new and established game companies equiped with all the tools needed to survive and grow over the next few years.
o The centre will create a pool of talented, experienced individuals with a real portfolio of game that developers and publishers will snap up on graduation. This will follow the model provided by the London Film School, New York film School, RADA, or the ARRTS centre in the UK;
• The incubated companies will have access to good students for in-house projects; The opportunity to influence the formation of the next generation of games engineers;
• Input and access to leading-edge research;
o Joint ownership of intellectual property (IP) arising from the Centre and the opportunity to develop it for subsequent wealth generation;
o Obvious publicity benefits, such as visibility at conferences, in academic papers and press coverage;

Along with the growing significance of computer gaming in the UK – both with regards to its cultural impact on society as well as regarding its economic importance to UK plc. – emerges the need to facilitate a multitude of relationships, support programmes and information exchanges. For example:
• As government learns about the economic promise of a thriving games sector it needs to understand how best to support the industry;
• Independent developers require up-skilling in many areas ranging from basic management skills to learning about newest industry trends in the UK and abroad;
• Computer games is a new industry that requires investment and support services;
• Global publishers and small developers require a forum that facilitates information exchange between the two groups; and
• Children, parents, government and companies all need to better understand how players interact with computer games content.

In the UK, the games industry is not primarily based in London but in the UK regions and nations. The Midlands, North East, and the South East all boost an impressive list of computer games companies. This uncommon decentralisation of the sector provides a chance to establish a sector support organisation with national reach and ambition in one of the nations and regions and to support government’s drive to foster economic and cultural development outside the capital.

In short, in the games sector, there is a real argument to be made for the establishment of an institution similar to the British Film Institute – an organisation which fosters sector culture and advances the understanding and literacy of industry practitioners, government and citizens. Moreover, as recently established media support organisations such as FACT in Liverpool have increasingly started to gap the bridge between cultural support and business support, there is an argument to be made for equipping a “Games Institute” with business and management support and training remit.

Assassin's Creed story-line is more complex than we are led to believe

2007-01-05T18:43:00.000Z

Veronica Mars actress Kristen Bell has just given an interview to IGN TV in which she talks about her voice role in forthcoming next-gen adventure, Assassin's Creed. The game was thought to be a historical slice n' dicer, revolving around an assassin who gets caught up in a Holy Land conspiracy. But it turns out (as, in fact, the developer has always hinted) that this may only be part of the story.

When asked about the game she replies...

"It's sort of based on the research that's sort of happening now, about the fact that your genes might be able to hold memory. And you could argue semantics and say it's instinct, but how does a baby bird know to eat a worm, as opposed to a cockroach, if its parents don't show it? And it's about this science company trying to, Matrix-style, go into people's brains and find out an ancestor who used to be an assassin, and sort of locate who that person is. It's very, very cool, and I've seen all the graphics for it.

Theories pointing in this direction have been floating around since E3. Rolling demos of the game have shown anomalies like visual glitches, suggesting that we're watching video footage (well, we are watching video, but I mean video within video...), and also a few seconds of a thoroughly modern setting where the words "access your genetic memory" can be seen.

This is interesting stuff. Rarely do videogame developers care so much about story that they dripfeed information in this way. Indeed, most of the time we wouldn't care, as the narrative surprises just aren't that interesting when divorced from the gameplay. But this is quite a neat, cinematic idea.

I hope this is a sign of things to come from next-gen development. We have been waiting a decade for developers to start thinking 'look, it's pointless boasting about graphics as everything looks amazing now. So let's just some up with a startling idea instead'. Maybe the time has come.

BGi becomes a reality

2007-01-05T09:17:00.000Z

After 3 years of Pixel-Lab campaigning and discusing the BGI (UK Games Academy) Ministers are starting to talk about it.

The creative industries minister Shaun Woodward has called for developers to solve the problems facing recruiters by forming an academy to educate those looking to get into the games industry. Speaking to the Financial Times today, he said that the "best way for the video games industry to have the talent and the skills it wants is to move into the hot seat itself; to come to the government and say 'we want to put some money into an academy'."

What he called a "school for geeks" would not only target those looking to get into games but those usually left out by traditional academia: "You might have kids who traditionally have quite a difficult time coping with traditional academic subjects but happen to be the most amazing gamers… you have to look very creatively at the kind of educational background you want."

"They're now recognising that 'actually we're huge, maybe we need to build our own institutional bricks'," the minister added of the games academy. "You see television and films schools but we don't have a video-games school. Why not? Because [the sector] is so new. And yet we're the third largest manufacturer in the world."

Woodward said he was confident that there would be private sector support for the theorised initiative - although he was not pressed further on whether the support would be from developers, publishers, or third party financers.

A number of studios around the world already have links to established universities and colleges, and EA even has its own EA University program, however there is no such dedicated games academy such as the London Film School, for instance.

Sam Coates on Game Art

2007-01-03T18:31:00.000Z

“People are becoming more specialized at art; people are becoming very very good at doing one particular thing,” says Coates, although he doesn’t necessary promote specialization as a way to move forward in the industry. “It’s becoming more of a machine, more of compartmentalized process.” What Coates recommends is learning a good deal about all of these compartmentalized areas to understand who works in them, how they work, whom they answer to, and what their priorities are.

Experience, too, plays a vital role for game developers bent on putting their creative foot forward. “If you want to be a creative person, if you want to work in ideas, spend some time doing something else. Spend some time outside of your field and push yourself to do more—although it may be along pay-back period,” Coates says.

As for what happens to creative people who learn a bit about the world elsewhere before diving into game creation or other people who have an intangible talent, Coates recognizes that these people require competitive salaries. “Talent demands a premium, really. We compete really hard to get good people in our jobs. The kind of people we’re looking for are people with passion, people who want to take new risks and explore and try new things with us.”

When hiring concept artists, for example, Coates says he wants “...to see a piece of art that puts me in a position I wasn’t in before I saw [it].”

Other qualities Sony looks for in its new hires are people who put high quality into their own work and people with experience working effectively in teams. “Put yourself on as many group projects as you can,” Coates advises. “Get yourself some experience now while you can. I can’t suggest more strongly to get out there and work with other people.” He adds that whatever teamwork experiences you can put on your resume, you should, not shying away from collaborative work that you might feel is imperfect. “The experience that comes from team work is the most valuable."

Coates says he becomes distrustful of people who don’t show group projects on their demo reel or portfolio. If a team project isn’t up to snuff, Coates says to not make it one of the first pieces shown, but to show it later and point out what did work and didn’t work in the interview.

“It’s not that I don’t value specialists, but [what’s important about team work is] seeing the connections and understanding what other people are trying to do without getting bogged down by your specialty,” Coates says.

As for other tips, Coates recommends the portfolio be extremely clean and organized. Range, or showing more than one unique or developed skill, is also helpful. “Don’t show anything bad. Put some extra time into everything you show,” Coates says. If a candidate has one outstanding image on his or her reel, Coates suggests replicating that image on the paper resume to trigger the hiring person’s memory about the unique skills or style of the candidate.

As for software skills, Coates maintains that human skills, like the ability to communicate well, work in a team, and manage time, are more important than computer training. Software training, he says, “is not a big issue in a big studio.” Coates adds, “Learning how to make games is more difficult than learning how to use software.”

Sky and Google to Partner on web based video and communications

2007-01-03T16:43:00.000Z

Sky and Google are to partner over offering Sky-branded, but Google-based services. The two companies will team up to offer online video (both Sky content and user-generated), voice communications and search advertising.

Sky will launch a user-generated video portal powered by Google’s video tools - whether that’s going to be YouTube tools or Google video is not clear as yet.
Sky broadband customers will get an @sky.com email address powered by Google’s services for domains.
Sky also says it plans to “explore opportunities” in Google’s VoIP capabilities.
Google’s AdSense advertising tools will also be used across Sky’s websites.
Financial terms of the deal have not been revealed.
This is really going to change the game, especially for Sky which is battling the tectonic shift of audiences from TV to the Web and online video. It also means a significant foothold in the UK market with a content player which will further power its ad revenues.

Cavanagh picks up OBE in New Year's Honours list

2007-01-02T18:30:00.000Z

Cavanagh picks up OBE in New Year's Honours list
Jane Cavanagh, CEO of SCi Entertainment, has been awarded an Order of the British Empire for her contribution to the development of the UK games industry.

Cavanagh founded SCi in 1988 and the company had its first number one hit nine years later with Carmageddon. In 1999 SCi was listed on the London Stock Exchange, and went on to enjoy worldwide success with the Conflict series of videogames.

In May 2005, SCi aquired Eidos Interactive and with it licenses such as Tomb Raider. Following the acquisition Cavanagh stepped down from her role as chairwoman but remained as CEO of the company.

Cavanagh is not the first SCi exec to be recognised in the New Year's Honours list - last year it was the turn of product acquisition director Ian Livingstone, who also received an OBE for services to the games industry.

Special Report: UK devs declare love for digital download

2006-12-20T18:37:00.000Z

by Michael French

Who needs triple-A titles? That's the message from studios as the support for digital distribution swells, but beware: games for such platforms are now more complex – and more expensive to make.

Recent word from heavyweight studios, established smaller teams and new companies shows that demand for these games from publishers is only outstripped by developers’ enthusiasm as the number of contracts signing up games for the PlayStation Network Platform and Xbox Live Arcade rises.

Team 17’s Worms is set to debut on XBLA soon, as is its PS3 PNP version of Lemmings. Isle of Wight team Stainless has signed a number of XBLA deals, too, including new game Novadrome for Buena Vista Games and a range of arcade classic remakes based on Atari’s various retro IPs.

Meanwhile London-based Curve is hard at work on a number of downloadable games, including PNP games for PS3 and PSP, plus a concept that will be available for both Sony’s formats and the 360.

And established names such as Climax, Blitz and Sumo are taking the category very seriously – Sumo’s Go Sudoku! will roll out to the PlayStation Store for the PS3 very soon.

While the programming environments for the PS3 and 360 are quite different – with download size caps between the two wildly contrasting at around 500MB and 50MB respectively (although the PS3 figure seems to be rising almost by the day) – there’s plenty of space for developers to use the environment to create games to rival the big budget titles that usually head for store shelves.

Stainless’ Novadrome is a retooling of a concept the team originally had planned for the PS2 and Xbox. On Live Arcade, it will be almost identical, offering eight-man multiplayer and other bells and whistles, while further down the line download content packs are expected to boost the game beyond what it might have been as a retail product.

”I presume Novadrome is at the highest end of Live Arcade,” said studio CEO Patrick Buckland, explaining: “To write Novadrome for the PS2 three years ago, it would’ve had a seven-figure budget. The scope of the game is not that different to what would’ve been considered a triple-A retail game not that long ago. You don’t have to look that far back to see the complexity of it is right up there with what would’ve been released straight into stores.”

However, while there’s arguably more space for new IP to flourish in the wider download channels than on the finite store shelves, developers are fast finding themselves in a competitive environment – the big budget in-house productions that dominate chains of GAME and Gamestation have, in the e-distribution tubes, been simply replaced with retro games and already established casual titles. Is there not a worry that developers using a cutting edge delivery mechanism to deliver cutting edge games will find themselves competing with games long-thought dead?

“I think there’s room for both,” Buckland commented. “When it comes down to it you’re talking to an audience that simply enjoys playing games, so I think there’s space in people’s attentions for both.”

And remember, says Climax’s CEO Karl Jeffery, that Wii’s own Virtual Console will grow to include over 100 retro games within the next year, meaning the onus will be on Xbox and PlayStation to claim a share of the original game category: “Wii will come along and take a lot of Xbox Live Arcade’s thunder away because it has cheaper prices and a lot of classic games on there.”

Ultimately, Buckland said, the concept of ‘infinite bandwidth’ which has convinced publishers to root through their IP back catalogue in turn draws in customers who could go from sampling a retro game to buying a brand new concept.

He added that the bigger picture to think about is the knock-on consequence this will have on consumer behaviour . “My personal opinion is that retail will die,” he said. “In 20 years time consumers will laugh at the idea of going into a shop. This is a more efficient way of getting content to consumers.”

But it seems that PNP and XBLA games won’t remain a low-budget luxury much longer.
Estimates coming from the US already suggest that budgets for future XBLA games are edging close to the symbolic $1m barrier. With Xbox Live Arcade having been open for just 12 months, that’s quite a big step.

Buckland confirmed that the cost of developing Novadrome has been higher than that spent on Stainless’ first game, XBLA launch title Crystal Quest: “Sure, the production cycle is smaller because there is less content in there, but the full cycle in terms of testing a game and getting it towards a publishable state is comparable to a full game.”

For some of the bigger studios, too, it seems that there won’t be a major switch to having an e-distribution-focused portfolio any time soon. The margin on such games, while perfect for smaller, newer teams, won’t feed a superstudio.

Said Jeffery: “XBLA is an awesome casual gaming platform, but frankly at the moment we can’t compete in that market because of our cost base. The games going up there are so suited to one or two man teams. Whereas if we start a project and say we’ll need an artist and a programmer and three months analysing the technology needed, what the strategy is and all that – and before you know it we’ve spent £100,000.”

But don’t take that as a sign of defeat: “We are going to do an XBLA game purely as a loss leader and a statement of intent,” Jeffery added.

Team 17 MD Martyn Brown added: “The appeal of developing such titles are many: it’s an option to develop smaller, tighter and more cohesive development teams; it’s generally shorter design periods with less financial risk; they provide opportunity to innovate (due to associated risk reduction); and also there is significant financial upside for the developer on digital formats as opposed to the royalty on traditional published media.”

But he added: “Although it has to be said, at the current time, mainstream development remains our ‘bread and butter’ development activity.”

There are upsides for the bigger companies, explained Brown, pointing out that the release of Worms signifies a return to self-publishing for the studio (although it’s worth noting that Stainless’ view differs here, saying the choice for partnering with a publisher being that “they can market our game in a way that we never could”).

Brown believes e-distribution games are also a great answer not just to the business and creative side of games development, but omnipresent recruitment issues.

“By doing this, we can recruit on a high-talent basis first and foremost to create small core teams, rather than having to find ourselves recruiting large quantities of staff simply to put names on seats – I believe the selective, targeted approach bodes better for the continued development of our studio.”

£4.4m offer made for Kuju

2006-12-18T18:36:00.000Z

A German investment group has made a £4.4m offer to buy developer Kuju.

The offer by Catalis, which already owns QA company Testronic, looks set to go through, having been recommended by the Kuju boad. Irrevocable acceptances have been obtained representing approximately 54.6 per cent of the outstanding share capital.

The offer values the shares at a 50 per cent premium over the price at the close of business yesterday (16p).

Kuju is the UK's only remaining market-listed developer, and has teams in London, Brighton, Godalming and Sheffield.

'We can develop faster without a publisher' - Hetherington

2006-12-16T18:35:00.000Z

A direct-to-consumer, publisher-free agenda is on the cards for Realtime Worlds after an investment boost, says chairman Ian Hetherington.

Speaking exclusively to Develop, Hetherington – the co-founder of Psygnosis and one time CEO of SCEE who is also chairman of MotorStorm creator Evolution – said the company plans to "look at significant developments in the online sector" thanks to the $31m cash injection from US financing group New Enterprise Associates announced last week.

Realtime Worlds – founded by CEO and creative director Dave Jones, the creator of GTA – is currently finishing Crackdown for Microsoft and working on All Points Bulletin for MMO firm Webzen. The security granted by the £16m worth of funds allows the company to start "controlling its destiny" said Hetherington.

He explained: "What the money does is allow us to act independently for a while and if we think we need a publisher involved later on then we'll get one involved. Its very hard when developing these products to prototype an online game and get to an open or closed beta stage – and it's a difficult concept for publishers to deal with.

"So now that were are independent from publishers we can move at our own speed and our own pace – quicker than a publisher will, actually. They can't take the risk assessment half the time. What this allows us to do is take a product to a level where it's de-risked and pretty ready for market."

He added that the online sector is "without any shadow of a doubt" the key area in which developers will flourish over the coming years – chiming in agreement with studios' increasing affections for digitally distributed games and online-enabled titles. US team Red 5, founded by former World of Warcraft creatives, will no doubt agree – as will its investor Benchmark, which earlier this week gave them $18.5m in funding to push forward their own online plans.

But it is "hugely unlikely" that Realtime Worlds will acquire another studio in the short-term, with the money instead going to bulking up staff numbers, already at over 100, at the Dundee HQ as the company starts establishing relationships direct with consumers in the online space.

"In future the developer will be synonymous with the product and that's who the consumer will have their relationship with," said Hetherington, pointing out that the template set out by Blizzard hin introducing a point of contact between games players and games makers in its game World of Warcraft is one to envy.

"The consumer plays and interfaces with the game and the developer produces the game – that's the total relationship."

More views from Hetherington will be published in the next issue of Develop.

Warner Bros. buys a ten per cent stake in SCi

2006-12-15T18:42:00.000Z

via MCV

Media giant Warner Bros. has bought a ten per cent stake in SCi thanks to a newly-announced deal worth £44.5 million – and the UK publisher has scooped eleven high profile licences in the process.

The new deal means that SCi has claimed the rights to high profile IP including several Looney Tunes and Hanna-Barbera properties.

It also gives SCi a foothold in the US with a primary distribution agreement that means the Tomb Raider publisher can take advantage of Warner Bros' huge logistics operation.

SCi chief executive Jane Cavanagh said of the deal: “These agreements represent a further step in SCi’s development as one of the world’s leading publishers of interactive entertainment.”

“The licensed properties will extend and strengthen our product portfolio through globally recognised titles such as Batman, Looney Tunes, Bugs Bunny and the classic Hanna-Barbera catalogue including brands such as Tom and Jerry. The properties also include content with a broad demographic appeal.”

“Significantly, the partnership with Warner Bros. Home Entertainment Group in the United States links us to the distribution network and buying power of one of the world’s largest media companies.”

“The share subscription will provide SCi with the firepower to accelerate growth initiatives such as increasing our development capacity and our new media and online strategies,” she added.

Rockstar Games to open London studio

2006-12-15T18:34:00.000Z

Grand Theft Auto creator Rockstar is putting together a games development team that will be based in central London.

Job postings by the developer-publisher imprint of Take Two have revealed the company's intentions to set up a new development studio in "the heart of London" to go alongside its European publishing HQ on London's King's Road.

"We are looking for passionate, creative and self motivated people to form the core of this new studio," says the background details for the roles open, which include vacancies for a lead animator and engine programmer.

It's not yet known when the studio will be officially open or what projects the team is at work on – Rockstar was unavailable for comment at the time of going to press.

London is already home to a number of game development teams, including SCEE's large Soho-based London Studios, plus the likes of Rocksteady, Kuju London and Curve. The city is also host to a number of mobile games development specialists including Morpheme, Ideaworks 3D and Shadowlight.

Rockstar's new London team boosts the company's roster of development offices back up to six after the closure of its Vienna, Austria studio in May.

Of its other studios in the UK, Edinburgh's Rockstar North is of course responsible for the GTA series, while the Leeds team has produced the PSP spin-offs. Table Tennis, The Warriors and Bully/Canis Canem Edit were produced at the North American San Diego, Toronto and Vancouver studios respectively.

Rockstar Lincoln, meanwhile, is a dedicated QA studio based in the UK's Midlands. The company also has a New York City publishing office.

Sony's PSP viral marketing campaign unveiled.

2006-12-14T18:33:00.000Z

After bloggers found out that it was in fact Sony who were marketing their PSP through guerilla tactics, SCEA has owned up to the fact that it was behind the promotion;

Alliwantforxmasisapsp.com was a marketing campaign fronted as an independent blog, whose authors supposedly had a friend (“Jeremy”) that wanted a PSP for Christmas.

One blog entry read, “...we created this site to spread the luv [sic] to those like j who want a psp! …consider us your own personal psp hype machine, here to help you wage a holiday assault on ur [sic] parents, girl, granny, boss—whoever—so they know what you really want.”

Suspicious net-goers, however, found that the website was registered to a marketing company called Zipatoni, which has offices in St. Louis, Chicago and San Francisco. The firm was also behind a related YouTube video featuring a guy referred to as “Cousin Pete” who was rapping about the handheld.

Now Sony has amended the site, admitting the true purpose behind the blog:

Busted. Nailed. Snagged. As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn't a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony. Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever. From this point forward, we will just stick to making cool products, and use this site to give you nothing but the facts on the PSP.

Sony Computer Entertainment America

YouTube videos related to the campaign have been removed, and comments on the blog have been disabled (although you can currently see the cached website here).

Next-Gen contacted SCEA PR boss David Karraker who answered a couple quick questions. When asked about the magnitude of this PR mishap, he replied, "Buzz and viral marketing is a common practice across the industry. In this instance, SCEA hired an outside agency to create a humorous 'underground' PSP site for the holidays. The tongue-in-cheek nature of the site didn't come across as intended and we have since altered it."

When confronted about accusations that Sony underestimated gamers' intelligence with the campaign, he stated, "Sony just released the most advanced console ever developed, so I doubt seriously that anyone would think we are underestimating our consumers' intelligence. This was simply a marketing idea that was poorly executed."

Next-Gen also contacted Zipatoni’s Dawn Baskin regarding the website, who said that she was aware of the issue, but added, “At this point, we’re not prepared to comment.”

$31m boost for Realtime Worlds

2006-12-08T13:06:00.000Z

via develop
Realtime Worlds, the UK development outfit established by the creator of Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto, has received a USD31 million cash injection.

The investment in the Dundee studio comes from New Enterprise Associates (NEA), one of the world’s leading venture capital firms and will see NEA Principal Patrick Chung and NEA Partner Harry Weller join the Realtime World board of directors. CEO and creative director David Jones and chairman Ian Hetherington will continue to head up the business.

Realtime Worlds has already signed an agreement with Microsoft which will publish Crackdown on Xbox 360 next year, while MMO All Points Bulletin for PC and 360 will be handled by Korean online games giant Webzen.

“Extraordinary things are on the horizon for us as a result of our partnership with NEA,” said Jones. “We are developing a global centre of excellence for some of the world’s best games developers that is really quite breathtaking. Together with NEA, we will use this investment to build on the quality of Crackdown and All Points Bulletin and to build new gaming experiences for games consoles, such as Xbox 360 and PC online as well.”

NEA’s Chung added: “NEA has spent three decades seeking out and backing the world’s most visionary entrepreneurs. We are honoured to have the opportunity to work with David Jones and his team as they create revolutionary new games. We’re convinced that they will continue to attract, develop and retain extraordinary talent by offering the opportunity to work alongside some of the most inventive minds in electronic entertainment.”

Namco Bandai Says 500,000 Sales Needed For PS3 Profits

2006-12-07T10:20:00.000Z

Namco Bandai president Takeo Takasu has claimed that any game must sell at least half a million copies on the PlayStation 3 in order for it to make a profit, in an interview with business site Bloomberg. According to Takasu, increased development costs for the console, particularly relating to graphical assets creation, means that the average game will now cost ¥1 billion ($8.6m) to develop. This is stated as being more than twice the cost for xbox 360 games

Back from Wales off to Finland

2006-12-07T09:13:00.000Z

Off to Finland today to teach ARG's and Transmedia to students of Kemi-Tornion University

Are mini-games the reality TV of videogaming?

2006-12-05T20:00:00.000Z

via Keith Stuart Games Guardian

Everybody loves Wii. I think it's safe to assume that now. But there's something worrying within the pervasive success of this unassuming machine. As you know, the console ships with Wii Sports a collection of fun little sporting mini-games designed for quick, accessible entertainment. If purchasers fork out for an extra controller they also get Wii Play, another bunch of tiny challenges. That is a lot of instant gratification gameplay, right there at the start of a new generation. And as Wii has been on the 'Gadgets of the Year' lists of most technology magazines, newspapers and lifestyle rags, the machine is pretty much setting up the mainstream agenda for the industry. For may people re-introducing themselves to videogaming after several years of intermittent SingStar abuse, is that agenda going to be defined by mini-games?

This feels very much like the current situation with Reality TV: it's quick and cheap to produce and there are almost no barriers to entry, which means customers are sucked in very fast. And, like the spike in blood sugars after a fast food hit, the thrill of the experience is as brief as it is addictive. When one reality TV experience is over, viewers seem ready, extremely quickly, for the next. Hence our TV schedules are filled to bursting point with cheap, mindless reality formats.

Mini-games work our cranial pleasure centres in the same way, jamming them with instant fun, but always leaving you wanting more. It's all about quantity. It's all about surface enjoyment. It is possible to get good at Wii Sports, but really, in the way the mainstream media wants us to play games, that's almost beside the point. We are being diverted onto a highway of cheap electronic thrills - five minutes of guilty fun, quickly forgotten en route to some place else. Mini-games are snacks, they are not 'destination venues', to use the parlance of the restaurant trade.

There's been a real assumption in a lot of Wii coverage, that this is what Nintendo's console is all about. You don't have to be any good, just wave the controller around and have a laugh. The instant availability of two big mini-game packages may compound that - as might the downloadable retro games. So when a lot of new Wii owners come up against Zelda, which is going to require hours of effort and exploration (and is actually more indicative of the Nintendo philosophy - quality, engrossing entertainment for all) - is that going to clash with expectations? Will consumers be willing to make that investment?

The risk with "shallow" mini-games is that they also risk becoming boring very quickly. I find it very hard now to play a full 18 holes of Super Monkey Ball Golf without itching for something different after about 7 of them.

Second Life IS art:The Second Life code performer

2006-12-01T08:21:00.000Z

The Second Life code performer:

Second Life has been recently overwhelmed by a flood of "self-replicating" objects, dubbed "grey goo", after the concept of out-of-control self-replicating nanotechnology.
It all started with gold rings that popped up in several areas of the virtual world. As users touched these rings, they starting replicating wildly and, eventually, the servers began creaking under the strain of the additional activity, forcing SL's owners to block all logins but their own for 25 minutes. The event caused quite a stir in the blogosphere and at the Linden Lab HQ. Now, Grey Goo is also the name of a "code performance" by artist Gazira.

Gazira Babeli was born Second Life in March 2006. "Unlike other avatars," explains curator and art critic Domenico Quaranta, "Gazira doesn't pretend to be in a world made of objects and atoms, she's aware to be in a world made of codes and to be part of the code herself." Therefore it's the essence of the 3-D virtual universe that she challenges with her “code performance”. She manipulates codes and shares them with the public on her website, under a Creative Commons licence.
Back in April, she invaded Ars Virtua, a gallery located in the synthetic world of Second Life, with pizzas flying and dancing on the sound of O' sole mio. The performance was called --who would have guessed?-- Singing Pizza.

In November, Gazira was back at Ars Virtua, attending the opening of 13 Most Beautiful Avatars, a series of portraits of Second Life "stars" made by Eva and Franco Mattes. At some point, bananas were raining over the gallery space. Not any kind of bananas though. These ones were exact copies of the bright yellow fruit that graced the Velvet Underground cover in 1967. Was Gazira challenging the Mattes in a kind of "who's the pop-est" war? Does it mean that she loves pop art? Not so sure. Last May, she paid another homage to Warhol with a Second Soup performance that saw her fighting a formidable giant Campbell soup can. Her sole comment: "You Love Pop Art - Pop Art Hates You".

Indie MMO Developer Conference Announced

2006-12-01T07:54:00.000Z

Indie MMO Developer Conference Announced:
Organizers for the upcoming Indie MMO Game Developers Conference 2007 (IMGDC) have announced that early registration has opened for the upcoming event, which will be held in Minneapolis, MN on April 14th and 15th, 2007. Officials note that reservations will be on a first come, first serve basis, as space is limited.

And what of the older gamer?

2006-11-30T11:40:00.000Z

By Aleks Krotoski

Last week, a so-called "older" gamer posted to /. about his anticipated decline in gaming skills as his years continue to advance, and requested that the community suggest games that he should play if he were to never play again. While the resulting commentary belied the average (mental?) age of the /. contributor and the original post was a tad morbid, I had considered forwarding the intention on to this blog to see what our well-rounded and well-meaning readers might suggest to this 44-year-old guy who appears to think he's on the brink of incapacity.

However, I was listening to the ever-entertaining Digital Planet podcast from the BBC and this week's instalment raised the point that technology is driven by demand, which seemed a much more interesting frame for his request. Here in the West it seems our needs include escapism, high action and lots of rather unsettling bright flashes and loud noises on the games side, and on the general technology side, machinery which offers all of our needs in one handy packet (e.g., newfangled mobile phones) and software which brings us together (e.g., social networking websites and Web 2.0 apps).

But how will all of this change as we get older?

The example which the podcast's Japanese interviewee used was to describe how different generations in his country use handheld computers. In particular, older folks who "have trouble remembering their PINs" simply touch their Palms to a reader on ATMs, and the locally stored information provides access to their funds.

Arguably, this is exactly why the Wii is so attractive to non-traditional gamers - and why Nintendo had a presence at the AARP last month. Their philosophy appears to be to respond to the demands of people who've never picked up a (confusing) controller in their lives, not to people who have games hard-wired into their brains.

So if, for the sake of continuity, this move on the part of Nintendo and Sony (EyeToy, SingStar etc) is aimed at gratifying the demands of people who are getting older, what else will we see in the future which concedes to the degeneration of the human body as the world's largest demographic in history marches inevitably towards the geriatric ward?

We are not mainstream, because we are not good enough.

2006-11-28T15:06:00.000Z

What is the mass market, and what do they want? What actually qualifies as mainstream? Those phrases - "mass market" and "mainstream" - have been tossed about very flippantly by the videogames industry over the last few years, and in retrospect, there's been very little analysis of what those terms actually mean to this medium. Admittedly, my own contributions in this column are probably as much to blame as anyone else in this regard - which is partially why I'm so convinced that now, as Nintendo's Wii launches to a media reception so laden with the words "mass market" that it's astonishing any other words can fit in edgeways, is an absolutely vital moment for videogame creators and publishers alike to step back and consider the real meaning of that term.

Conventional wisdom says that videogames are not mass market, and that they would very much like to be mass market - because as the name suggests, that is a bigger market, and hence more lucrative. Conventional wisdom points to the inroads made by products like The Sims, Singstar, Eye Toy, Nintendogs and Brain Training in bringing gaming to older generations, to women and to "non-gamers", nods sagely and says "more of this, please."

Bowing to this wisdom, we - and the specialist media and videogames publishers and developers themselves are as guilty of this as the mainstream media - make the implicit assumption that all of those things which we have traditionally enjoyed in videogames aren't suitable for the mass market. We look at shoot 'em ups, racing games, action adventures and so on, and describe them as "hardcore"; the implicit subtext behind the coverage and marketing of most core, triple-A titles is that if you were one of the greasy mongrels who queued up for your console of choice on the night of launch, you'll love it to bits, but you probably shouldn't show it to your mum, your dad, your sister or your girlfriend, because they'll never understand.

This is a gross oversimplification, and one which needs to be shot down - because it is responsible for some of the most persistent and poorly conceived product decisions this industry makes. It feeds off the idea that what "mass market" consumers want to do is play the digital equivalent of Desperate Housewives (thus leading to regular moans about how we don't seem to make games that tap into the soap opera market and, god help us all, the Desperate Housewives tie-in game), engage in casual, non-narrative led gaming, and get drunk with their friends and treat the console as a glorified karaoke machine or some other form of party game. It leads to countless projects being funded which aim at creating "a game which appeals to women", normally in the form of some atrocious and borderline insulting shopping, clothes-wearing and gossiping simulation - or better (by which I mean worse) again, the occasional effort at creating games to appeal to some other segment of society, such as gay men.

The very existence of this kind of thinking - and the prominence it is given within the industry - is perfect evidence of how immature much of the "creative business" thinking in this sector actually is. In the headlong rush to abandon the "mass market unfriendly" narratives games currently offer - space marines shoot aliens, cars drive really fast and crash spectacularly, wizards and sword-wielding barbarians battle against dark gods - we have forgotten something blindingly obvious.

These narratives are already mass-market. In fact, they are among the most mass-market stories which the world has to offer.

The industry has become so used to dismissing its own products as hardcore or niche that it has actually thrown a whole nursery school of babies out with the bathwater. Games industry conventional wisdom says that a narrative where space marines shoot aliens can't possibly be mass market - but yet Aliens is one of the most iconic films of the last thirty years. Independence Day was one of the top-grossing films of its decade. Need I mention Star Wars? Our conventional wisdom dismisses wizards and barbarians and their fantasy trappings as being too hardcore to appeal beyond the existing gaming audience, but it's perfectly obvious that franchises like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings have become a core part of global culture, with a universal appeal which far exceeds that of almost any videogame.

The problem is not the themes of videogames. It's an altogether more bitter pill to swallow, but the problem is that with a few unique exceptions, videogames aren't using those themes in an effective, gripping or mature manner. All too often, games fall short because while they do everything required to satisfy certain segments of the core gaming audience, they miss out on key aspects which would vastly expand their appeal - and from the gamer's perspective, it can sometimes be hard to tell why a certain game achieves a level of mass market recognition, when another does not.

Take Halo, for example; a game which, by any standards, is an excellent first person shooter (in which, true to videogaming form, you play a space marine who battles aliens), but which is arguably no better - and in some respects is worse - than many other first person shooter titles on the market. However, Halo has achieved a degree of recognition in popular culture which extends far beyond the core gaming audience; it has been played by vast numbers of people who would normally never give a first person shooter a second glance, and has become so popular that despite the development problems afflicting the Halo movie, it seems likely to be made for the largest budget ever earmarked for a videogame franchise movie.

Why? Not because the moment to moment gameplay experience of Halo was brilliant - although that's clearly important - but because of elements which went far beyond that. Halo had an interesting, involving plot; it had great characters, good dialogue, absolutely fantastic, atmospheric locations, and a wonderful sense of dramatic timing. It had convincing voice acting and utterly fantastic music, with an iconic theme which was equal parts stirring and haunting. These elements elevated Halo beyond the level of most videogames - and certainly, you could argue that the storyline was no better than many Hollywood popcorn blockbusters, but then again, most videogames fail miserably even at reaching those levels. More importantly, it made Halo interesting and accessible to countless people who wouldn't give the majority of FPS games a second glance, and gave the game the momentum it needed to become a major cross-media franchise, not just 10 hours of mindless alien-shooting fun.

Halo is far from the only example of this - and it's worth noting that there are also some games and franchises whose appeal goes far beyond the existing gaming audience, but remains niche in its own right. Silent Hill is a good example; a game whose audience, in my own experience, is primarily female, and which has successfully tapped a whole new group of people but whose own commercial success, while perfectly respectable, is not enormous.

This is another core truth about the mass market which the industry has failed to realise. The "mass market" is a myth; the reality is a huge collection of individual niches, some larger than others, but none of them all-encompassing. There is certainly scope for videogames to expand into new niches, as the example of Silent Hill - and indeed of Nintendogs, or Brain Training - displays. However, more importantly, right now videogames are failing to effectively harness their existing niches. Weak narrative, poor direction and pacing, unsympathetic characters, excessively complex control systems, bad music, graphics glitches and a host of other sins which are often forgiven readily by the hardcore are preventing the bulk of this industry's product from having any impact with the vast majority of consumers - and even our military sci-fi or swords 'n sorcery fantasy titles are utterly overshadowed by Hollywood's most vacuous blockbusters.

The question currently being asked in the games industry is, "what new kinds of games can we create which appeal to the mass market?" This is the wrong question. The right question is, "what is it about our existing games that limits their appeal - and how can we change that?" That's a harder question to ask, because videogame creators - from designers right through to publishing bosses - like to believe that their existing products are absolutely fine for their markets, and that it's now time to conquer new markets. Until that attitude changes, videogames will never achieve the success within our culture that other mediums enjoy.

Rob Fahey
Gamesindustry.biz

Games Conference by Northern dev agencies unveiled

2006-11-27T12:37:00.000Z

Codeworks GameHorizon and Game Republic, the support agencies for game developers in the North, are joining forces for a new developers' conference taking place in York on May 10th, 2007.

The Northern Games Conference is aimed at the entire UK games industry and seeks to explore the variety of opportunities in the games industry, from casual games to digital distribution, that are opening up to developers thanks to the introduction of new consoles.

GameHorizon is the collaborative network for the games industry in the North East of England and members include Newcastle-based Reflections and Eutechnyx, Venom Games of Gateshead and Atomic Planet, based in Middlesbrough.

Carri Cunliffe, manager of Codeworks, commented: “GameHorizon and Game Republic have been working in close collaboration for a long time now. Our organisations have the mutual goal of bringing the best skills and resources to Northern developers. The Northern Games Conference will mark the collaborative spirit and united front of northern game development.”

Game Republic, meanwhile, is the independent trade alliance designed to support game development in the Yorkshire and Humber region. Members include Sumo Digital, Team 17, Revolution, Rockstar Leeds and Kuju.

Charles Cecil, founder of developer Revolution and co-founder of Game Republic, added: “It’s a very exciting time for the games industry at the moment. Not only with the recent launch of the three new generation consoles but also with the opportunities offered in digital downloads and distribution, casual gaming and converging technologies. This is the ideal subject to launch the inaugural Northern games conference.”

Second studio for Swordfish

2006-11-23T17:19:00.000Z

via developmag
EA UK may be closing its NW studio, but Vivendi-owned Birmingham-based Swordfish could help those left in the region without a job as it opens a new office in Manchester, Develop magazine reveals.

The new studio has been devised to support the work done at Swordfish's Birmingham HQ and will be managed by Mike Delves, who reports to MD Trevor Williams.

Swordfish's teams are hard at work on a new project, a currently unannounced next-gen title. The team previously made Cold Winter, which Vivendi published before acquiring the company last year.

Spearheading a new recruitment drive for the studio, the office's opening will help the team add some 50 people to its ranks - a big step for the studio and its publisher owner, which is also hoping to bolster staff across all of its studios around the world.

"There is a wealth of talent around the M62 corridor in the north west of England," said MD Williams. "Our next generation projects require us to build on and expand our existing talent base, so we are looking for people with the right strengths, skills and talent."

The move is also another step in the rising power of UK-based publisher-owned studios following the acquisitions of Sports Interactive, Juice, Lionhead and Climax Racing (by Sega, THQ, Microsoft and BVG respectively) throughout 2006.

Games Edu, Develop Conference and Expo confirmed for July 2007

2006-11-23T14:38:00.000Z

Brighton event due to take place July 24th - 26th

Brighton will once again play host to The Develop Conference and Expo, due to take place 24th - 26th July 2007, GamesIndustry.biz can reveal.

Following the success of last years' event we have confirmed the date for next years' conference, which once again promises to feature an impressive list of big name speakers and exhibitors.

It's expected that Tandem will release details of the sessions and speakers early next week, which last year included industry luminaries such as Sony's Phil Harrison, Epic's Mark Rein, Sports Interactive's Miles Jacobson and Lionhead's Peter Molyneux.

It's expected the Develop Conference and Expo will once again include sessions, keynotes and speakers from across the globe, with support from industry associations including the IGDA and TIGA.

UK Government must do more to support games - Braben

2006-11-23T14:36:00.000Z

Via GI.biz

"It's actually getting worse for the way our companies operate"

Frontier Developments founder David Braben has warned that the UK Government is not doing enough to support the games industry - and that the situation is getting worse.

Speaking in an interview with GamesIndustry.biz to be publisher later today, Braben said, "There have been changes that have made being in Britain harder, in a sense. Of the people I knew back in the early 80s, how many of those are now in the States or Canada.

"The problem is we're operating on a world stage. We've got the Canadian Government making it very attractive for developers to relocate or open an office over there. It's not just Canada - Australia and the Far East as well."

According to Braben, the difficulties for British games companies are compounded by the rise of outsourcing and recent changes to tax law "where we're taxed a lot more unfavourably than we were before".

"We're not asking for special treatment like the film industry, but it almost feels like not only do not get special treatment, but actually it's getting worse for the ways our companies operate," he continued.

"Things like having to forward-forecast profits for next year for tax - I'd love to be able to do that, but we're in a very unpredictable business, and therefore it's extra difficult in our sector."

Braben said he believes there's a way to go before the games industry matures and is taken seriously. "To an extent, it's the games industry's fault," he observed.

"We've got a very, very difficult task. Making something that's interactive and yet compelling to everybody is a real Holy Grail... It takes a big change of mindset, and I think that's coming."

EU Investigates French Developer Tax Breaks

2006-11-23T11:28:00.000Z

French news agency AFP is reporting that European Union (EU) regulators are to open an investigation into whether proposed tax breaks for the French video games industry are illegal, according to EU rules.

The proposal would see French companies benefiting from a tax credit worth up to 20 percent of the cost of producing a video game, providing that it was an adaptation of an existing work of European origin or that it passed a government test of quality, originality and contribution to the expression of “European cultural diversity and creativity”.

The European Commission will try to determine whether the proposed tax credits for the French developers and publishers distorts EU competition or, as the French government claims, promotes cultural projects. EU laws allow individual states to promote culture only as long as they do not harm competition and trade between member states.

"We must be sure that the measure will promote only genuine cultural projects and that it will not have the effect of an industrial policy instrument in favor of the video games sector," Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes is quoted as saying.

The French games industry enjoys a worldwide influence significantly larger than its modestly sized local market, including major publishers Ubisoft and Infogrames (the parent company of Atari). Individual developers have been less prominent in recent years though, after the demise of studios such as Adeline Software International (now No Cliché), Cryo, and Kalisto, as have games with an overtly French theme and artistic style.

In order to combat this decline, the French government initiated a set of measures in 2003 aimed at maintaining and developing its local games development community. Amongst other measures, this involved the formation of developer trade group Association des Producteurs d'Oeuvres Multimedia (APOM).

At this stage several educational and training initiatives were also proposed, along with the tax credit system currently under review. Such direct intervention from central government is unusual in the West, with only isolated U.S. states offering tax incentives for local developers.

Amazon UK sells out of Wiis in 10 minutes

2006-11-21T16:32:00.000Z

Online retailer Amazon UK opened to preorders for the Nintendo Wii this morning, 21 November -- and sold out in just 10 minutes. When CNET.co.uk checked the site at 9.25am, preorders were not open. When we refreshed at 9.30am, the site was offering the Wii, with the Wii Sports games compilation, and Wiimote and Nunchuk controllers for £179.99, which is the recommended retail price.

By 9.40am, the site said, "We are currently unable to offer this item."

Amazon had stated it would only be offering preorders for the same number of consoles it had been allocated for launch day, 8 December -- meaning if you managed to snag a preorder, you should be guaranteed a Wii. Only one console was allowed per customer so that "as many of our customers as possible can enjoy a Wii console this Christmas," Amazon said in a press release.

For a surcharge on orders to the UK, the console will arrive on the launch date, Amazon said. Games and accessories will be sent separately from the console, and "most launch titles" should also be delivered by 8 December. The company echoes Nintendo's advice to customers by suggesting people "order early, because the Wii console will be in very short supply" -- prophetic indeed.

Nintendo has pledged, however, to have 4 million Wiis in the hands of gamers' across the world by the end of the year. The Wii launched in the US on Sunday.
GameSpot UK

EA, UCL Collaborate On Game Animation Research

2006-11-21T16:28:00.000Z

The UK branch of Electronic Arts (EA) and graphics researchers at University College London (UCL) are working in collaboration to research visualisation techniques.

The partnership demonstrates how industry and academia can collaborate to develop computer games. Ian Shaw, CTO at EA, and Anthony Steed, a senior lecturer in computer graphics at UCL, have joined up to develop animation techniques that will dramatically improve the visual quality of computer games.

The partnership has also resulted in EA co-funding Simon Pilgrim, a student on UCL's Engineering Doctorate in Virtual Environments, Imaging and Visualisation (VEIV EngD) course, to work as a researcher in the company. Pilgrim is working within EA to research and apply a method known as 'progressive character skinning' to improve the quality of multi character animation in commercial computer games. Pilgrim's research focuses on the quality of animations in games. He aims to increase the number of animated characters that can be seen on screen at any one time, without impacting the speed.

As EA and UCL have had a working relationship for the past six years, both intend to continue to cement the relationship between the theoretical knowledge and practical application for developing computer game animation.

'So you want to be an indie games developer?'

2006-11-21T16:26:00.000Z

19:30, Nov 20th by Michael French at developmag.com

A gang of indie developers have bandied together for a multi-blog-spanning project that offers advice to aspiring games makers.

Introversion (Uplink, Darwinia, Defcon) and Cliff Harris (Democracy) are just two of those that have taken part in the 'So you want to be an indie games developer?' project, put together by Dan Marshall, the creator of indie game Gibbage

The set of mini-essays takes its queues from a recent run of entries on blogs by UK games journalists (called 'So you want to be a games journalist?'), but rather than wax lyrical and/or preach, the indie devs are hellbent on offering realistic advice and guidance - and in total the pieces offer a unique barometer of what's going on in the indie games development scene.

While educator and previous Team 17 staffer Phil Carlisle points out on his entry that it's not a field to work in should you be out to make money, Introversion's entry says it's "one of the best times in the past few years" to be an indie developer.

The three-man team adds: "The industry is changing and the budding independent is, if not the only flavour of the month, certainly becoming one. Why is this? We have quite a few theories about this at Introversion. Partly we feel that there is a renewed interest, shall we say nostalgia, for those early days of game programming, when everything was unique and innovative."

More from each of the contributors can be found at the following links:

Gibbage.co.uk
Cliffski’s Mumblings
GameProducer.net
Lemmy and Binky
Reality Fakers
Zoombapup
Introversion
They Came From Hollywood
Bonebroke

Second Life hit by self-replicating game-object virus

2006-11-20T12:02:00.000Z

In fine cyberpunk form the attacker apparently created an object in the form of a spinning gold ring that appeared above the ground. Loaded with a script it self-replicated when touched and, if I understand it correctly, chased players around. The social engineering was simple: all of a sudden parts of the SL world were populated with these tantalisingly shiny objects, who wouldn't want to take a closer look..

Half a million players experienced significant lag on hundreds of servers as a result of the object replicating. This apparently is what they look like.

Thankfully, as one Slashdot reader points out, they've already identified the suspected mastermind . If sighted please notify the appropriate authorities.

Updates on the situation can be found here. We can only hope the marketing department at Linden Labs aren't quite so e

Computer gaming is nothing to be ashamed of, says Charlie Brooker

2006-11-20T10:44:00.001Z

via the Guardian Guide on Saturday November 11, 2006

"Confession: I worship pixels. Ever since I can remember, I've been fascinated by video games. When I was a child, we'd go swimming each week at a nearby leisure centre, and I looked forward to these visits not because I loved swimming (which involved far too much chlorinated water burning your nostrils out for my liking) but because the pool was overlooked by a small gallery area housing a couple of arcade machines

By today's standards they were absurdly primitive, of course: hulking great boxes farting out atonal beeps while monochrome blobs representing everything from a Wild West shoot-out to a full-scale alien invasion fl ickered across their goldfi sh-bowl screens.

Still, no matter how crude the audio visual representation, my imagination filled in the gaps. Computer games struck me as the most exciting things imaginable. Perhaps it stemmed from some megalomaniacal desire to stare at a TV set and control whatever action it depicted. Or perhaps I just liked blowing stuff up. Either way, I was hooked, and I've stayed hooked ever since.

Early aff airs with Battlezone and Pacman led to a pubescent fi xation with the ZX Spectrum, which in turn begat the Amiga, then on to the Megadrive, the SNES, the PC Engine, the Neo Geo, the 3DO, the Jaguar, the... you get the picture. The moment any new bit of gaming kit launches, my wallet fl aps open. When people ask me which console they should buy, I always answer: "All of them." Why the hell not? After all, speaking in my guise as a so-called TV critic, I can confi dently state that games are markedly better than television. They're more immersive. Consistently more spectacular and surprising. The storylines and scripts are almost always utter rubbish, but that's part of their charm.

Furthermore, as a medium, TV encourages you to switch off your brain and slowly coagulate on thesofa. Video games force you to stay alert. Furthermore, you control them. They start and stop when you like. There's no continuity announcer jabbering over the credits. Your intelligence is rarely insulted, but regularly challenged. There's more invention (and sheer joy) in a single level of any Super Mario platformer you care to mention than most TV series manage in their entire lifespan. PC shooter Half-Life 2 is a sci-fi action thriller; it's 10 times more exciting than the best episode of 24 (which I love). With increased connectivity, games are becoming less isolated, too. Many current titles offer seamless integration with an online world. Test Drive Unlimited, for instance, is an X box 360 driving game that simulates an entire Hawaiian island. It takes over halfan- hour to drive from one side to the other in real time; other players, zipping alongside you in traffic, can challenge you to an instant race just by fl ashing their headlights at you. It's a futuristic communal sandpit, and piddling about on its roads for an hour or so is far more social than slumping in an armchair watching Top Gear on your own.

Still, it's not always fun being a 35- year-old games addict. Sometimes I'll be banging on to some disinterested party about how great, say, Dead Rising is (and it IS great: a George Romero zombie movie realised in hilarious detail) - when I suddenly realise they're regarding me with genuine pity.

Apparently it's OK to be a sports buff , a movie buff , or a food buff ... but being a games buff still somehow offends society. People prepared to conduct tedious 15-hour analytical conversations about football or Kieslowski or the best place to find balsamic vinegar will have the audacity to call you a nerd for mentioning anything more obscure than Grand Theft Auto. Well, fuck your snobbery. Games are brilliant. Still, since I'm pre-programmed to buy almost every new release - I just have to - even I am sometimes embarrassed when approaching the counter. In a recent deeply pathetic incident, I found myself trying to pretend to a shop assistant that the copy of vomitously cute puppysimulator Nintendogs I was buying wasn't for me but for a fi ctional nine-year-old child. I could do without the recent spate of violent bling-'em-ups, too; embarrassing gangsta epics targeted at excitable adolescent boys (it's particularly frustrating when the gameplay itself is appealing; like trying to watch an entire OC box set because you admire the editing).

Overall though, video games, like ridicule, are nothing to be scared of. Anyone who isn't hopelessly addicted should be regarded with suspicion. Don't like pixels? Think games are shallow? Shut up and learn to love the joypad."

Mainstreaming Culture

Computer gaming is nothing to be ashamed of, says Charlie Brooker

2006-11-20T10:44:00.000Z