Games go Social is a full day event probing the synergies between games and communities, organized in collaboration with PICNIC, the undeniably most original, pioneering and unusual get-together for creatives. The trend ‘Games go social’ is predicted to revolutionize the gaming industry, fusing games, communities and networks by playing against your friends, family and people you know (or don’t). Unless you’ve been stranded on a desert island without an iPhone to pass your time, you won’t have missed the phenomena of social networking. What started off as niche communities, and sub-culture, has evolved to mainstream social activities capturing all sorts of our online endeavours, from blogging, flickering and digging to instant messaging, profiling, dating and gaming. To this add the latest pass-time of the typical iSocialite, namely Community Gaming. And this is where it gets interesting. Because games fused with social communities turns traditional (console, hard-core) gaming on its head. Now reaching out to anyone out there, instantly creating critical mass, new consumers are being pulled into the game.

To explore this phenomena, from it’s roots in MMORPG’s to the latest causal [sic] games dedicated communities we have invited a selected number of creatives, visionaries and industry leaders to share their visions, ideas, case-studies and strategies. Meet luminaries from leading companies such as EA, Playfish, Spil Games, Game Entertainment Europe, Social Gaming Network (SGN), Myspace and Hyves, during a jam-packed program of inspirational presentations and dynamic panel sessions.

Robin will be there… but I won’t. Bad timing. Damn.

“Oh yes, Microsoft’s Xbox division pings the card from Luxembourg, and you’re not in Luxembourg, and they also do this thing where they charge your card a dummy £1 transaction to test to see if the card works. This is what criminals do, so as it’s from a .lu domain, it’s done on the internet, and they do this dummy charge, it automatically shuts the card down.”

Man, that makes my UI hassles and the fact that I couldn’t revive my Xbox 1 Live account on the 360 pale into insignificance.

Google has just launched Lively, a new social network built around the concept of each user creating an avatar and a personal virtual room that can be embedded anywhere on the Web. In essence, Google is looking to create a massive distributed virtual world, where every Google account can have its own avatar that can be used wherever a Lively virtual room is present – for example, on a blog, a social networking profile, or a Web page.

Worth a closer look. I like the avatars. It has user housing too.

Update: “Requires Windows Vista/XP with Internet Explorer or Firefox” BOOO! Obviously this niche product will never fly and shows that Google has jumped the shark etc. etc.

The patented system [iOpener] is developing sucks in real-time GPS data from racing events and pumps it out to compatible games consoles and PCs.
The idea is that you could pit yourself against the top drivers in the world, as it happens, from the comfort of your living room.

Hmmm… groundbreaking? I don’t think so. Back in the late 90s, Kalisto, the now-defunct developer I worked for back then, was approached by people holding the patent to merging real-world real-time data with video games. Maybe these people are the same people behind iOpener, maybe iOpener bought the rights to the patent, I don’t know. All I know is that Kalisto made a deal with them and started development of a number of games around this concept – not just car racing. It was a big, big, big deal. And then the company announced bad results, the stock price collapsed, and the dot-com bubble burst.

One interesting side-effect of an Internet-cafe-based gaming culture: salespeople who go around Internet cafes to try and talk players into switching to a different game. So logical, yet so unexpected from my European perspective.

The game itself, dubbed Love (as in For The Love Of Game Development), is an exploration-based moderately-multiplayer FPS with astounding impressionistic visuals and a procedurally generated universe. Since Steenberg is a one man show, he’s relying on clever maths to build the world for him and then clever gamers to come in and help him figure out where to take it, and what to do with it.

It sounds like an amazing effort. Great look too!

Now don’t expect to be questing or
leveling with wowMobile, (Unless your using wow glider) its more for simple things, for the geeks, addicts (or the bored)

-Check Auction House
-Sell/Buy at merchants
-Small travel distances
-Catch up on Email
-Chat
-Monitor the wait status for a battle ground while your away from your computer.

First time I hear of this. Why can’t I do some of these things without logging into the WoW client? Blizzard is so slow with extending the game into the surrounding ecosystem (but perhaps for a good reason).

I say this is fake / link bait / malware. Or it’s some hack, in which case it will be crushed mercilessly. By now Blizzard has enough money to just take out a hit on people that annoy them.

(Thanks Thomas.)

Worlds In Motion has an article about Gordon’s talk about World of Warcraft at the Austin GDC a couple of months ago. Here is my summary:

1. Learn from the past. Anyone remember the idea of World of Warcraft being against conventional wisdom when it was first announced? Surely Blizzard would fall on their faces making a fantasy MMO…
2. Aim for a broad user base.
3. Quality counts. As someone once pointed out: World of Warcraft was the first MMO developed by a company that knew how to make AAA offline games. I have been playing a lot of virtual worlds and Asian MMOs recently, and boy, they suck. In terms of user interface design and player guidance they are miles behind the top offline games.
4. Support solo play. I wonder if this was an innovation because MMOs before WoW tended to come from MUDs?
5. Simplify the GUI. If you’ve played WoW for a while, you might know how odd it feels to go from a level 70 raiding character to a lvl 1 nub with no add-ons. You suddenly have only 3 buttons. I really like Gordon’s remark about the GUI customization being a release valve for the hard core. It’s also great for Blizzard: they’ve taken most of the really popular add-ons and put them into the standard GUI.
6. Tons of content. WoW was way more expensive than I expected. I have heard numbers between 50 and 80 million dollars. One thing that pays for is content.
7. PvP content. Blizzard had lots of experience here. It’s easy to underestimate everything they learned from Battle.net.
8. Don’t tune for the hardcore. Yeah… I know people who still haven’t gotten to level 60.
9. Let them quit. Gordon kinda makes the same point in this and the previous lesson: You can force people to do stuff by clever game design, but they will probably hate you for it in long term (and in fact complaints about grinding are the number one reason I have seen for why people stop).
10. Offer the right amount, and the right kind of choices. This is worth a couple of blog post of it’s own.
11. Easy to learn, difficult to master. More on this below. I am still learning new things about WoW after almost 3 years. Like why parry mechanics make it a bad idea to attack mobs from the front when you’re not the tank. Or how you can increase your DPS by 5-10% if you understand how the client communicates with the server.
12. Brands matter. This is the most secret ingredient of Blizzard’s secret sauce: how they got where they are.

What I consider one of the most impressive parts of WoW is the progression design. How you’re taught about the game. How you’re led through it. How there are always just the right number of carrots dangling in front of you. This comes up in lessons 5, 6, 10 and 11. I think the progression design in WoW is perhaps the best I have ever seen in a game, even beating Zelda: A Link To The Past. (I’ve been meaning to analyze how both games do this – now there’s some useful games research.)

The article concludes with:

The thread that tied the talk together was changing the mindset of the developers: it’s about understanding that a general audience is not the power gamers. If a game is to be successful with a broader audience, it has to be more fun, more directed, more accessible, and faster-paced.

Emphasis mine. Think of lesson 8: Don’t tune for the hardcore. But hey, developers are the hardcore. And the hardcore are the first to set up camp in your forums and tell you what they like and don’t like about what you say you are building. (This was first pointed out sixteen years ago, by Chris Crawford.) It takes a clear head and nerves of steel to ignore all that. Blizzard uses mantras for design: that’s a great way to continuously remind yourself what you set out to do.

I am working as a producer at 10tacle Vienna, where I am working on a multi-user 3D online world developed in cooperation with MTV Germany. So I have been doing a lot of research into virtual worlds, MMOs, online games, server architectures, social networks, internet marketing… anything that is vaguely related. It’s a fascinating subject.

“But Jurie,” attentive readers might ask, “weren’t you skeptical about 10tacle back in May?”

Why yes, I was. But I’ve gotten to know the company a bit better since then. I’ve weighed the risks, and it seemed like a good idea to go and work with them.

What makes me particularly happy is that they specifically wanted me because of the broad range of areas I have worked in or know something about. I much prefer synthesizing across disciplines than being squeezed into a pre-defined box in an org chart, and in fact my current job description is quite different from the classical role of a producer. So I am getting paid for being an insufferable know-it-all! One step closer to my role model.