There is more to the game than a comprehensive tutorial, there’s also a sharp story, and perhaps more significantly, a robust content delivery and data-mining platform that Valve uses to update and monitor the usage of their products. Valve’s content distribution platform, Steam, allows the company to apply bug-fixes and updates to games, as well as learn about how users go about playing through the games, including but not limited to the furthest level of completion, and whereabouts in the game players are most likely to meet their end.

While the ability to glean insights about how their customers use their products must be invaluable as feedback data for making better and more engaging games, it is the ability to update content seamlessly on users’ computers that was a move to watch this past week.

To prepare for the upcoming release of Portal 2, Valve quietly and unceremoniously released an update to 2007′s portal that changed the end of the game. The practice, known as retconning, or enforcing “retroactive continuity” is usually met with nerd-rage, but seems to have been well-received by the gaming community in this case. Thanks to their content distribution and monitoring platform, Valve has been able to take a product already in the hands of consumers, and modify it so that when their forthcoming product hits the shelves, the continuity between the first and second installments of the game’s story is cohesive and correct. Not something that could be done with the game of Life or Clue.

Steam isn’t the only content distribution platform that has the ability to update and change the user experience after the sale is made, Amazon’s kindle had an unfortunate time with what is more or less the same story, and I’m sure that there is plenty of legal language and technical infrastructure in the iPod/Phone/Pad terms of service that allows Steve Jobs to legally annex users’ first born children.

As an increasing amount of products are imbued with connectivity and access to a platform, the way that companies think about the experience they deliver to users will need to change in kind. Companies will need to find ways to cleverly leverage these platforms to make their brand experience really resonate with customers–all the while avoiding pitfalls where they may alienate users and lose their trust.

Farmville exists with a very different business model than most video games: you don’t pay by the month to play it, you don’t even shell out a one-time payment to play: you play for free, and then the game tries to sell you in-game perks and a chance to skip the grind to unlock all of the game’s content by spending money rather than time.

Farmville locks you out of some content unless you have enough friends playing Farmville with you, and having friends in your network playing Farmville is a reliable source of coins, experience, and gifts, the main resources of the game.

The game is also more than happy to bribe players for participating in its viral spread: cute lonely animals will show up on your farm periodically and as a player you face a dilemma in sentencing them to virtual abandonment and death unless you post on your Facebook wall that you need one of your friends to start playing Farmville and “adopt” the adorable little self-promoter.

The genius in how Farmville has succeed in getting so many people addicted comes down to how it handles commitments on a player’s time: every time you play Farmville and plant a crop, you’re making a commitment to come back during a 12 hour window or so to harvest your crop, or else you forfeit your investment.

There’s some more surprising and clever stuff that has been baked into the social design of the game, but even the points above would seem to make for an addictive (and viral) experience.

nGenera just hosted a conference in Memphis (kudos to FedEx for graciously hosting it at their World Technology Center) where I gave a presentation on gamers as employees and customers. I argue that gamers are more than a bit self-interested, and are focused on generating smart, efficient solutions to problems that let them sail through the rest of the game with relative ease and speed. Gamers also want to feel engaged with their virtual worlds, and in certain cases have emotional connections with in-game characters and the game itself.

Farmville seems to have taken these constructs to a new level, allowing gamers to pay (real money) for tools that speed them towards completion and give them competitive advantage, and putting gamers in situations where their emotional involvement with the game is leveraged to encourage friends to start playing (and spending their own money for in-game advantages).

While writing this post I’ve had the facebook connect installation screen sitting in a background tab in my browser, I think I have to go try the game out for the sake of research. Are there any Wikinomics readers who play the game? What do you think of it? What should I expect?

Hopefully I won’t get completely swallowed up, and will post again soon!

As reported on ArsTechnica.com, the computer gaming industry is not pleased with the response that AT&T filed with the FCC.  It suggested that online games should be relegated to the category of being nice but not essential. “For Americans who today have no terrestrial broadband service at all,” AT&T wrote the Commission, “the pressing concern is not the ability to engage in real-time, two-way gaming, but obtaining meaningful access to the Internet’s resources and to reliable email communications and other basic tools that most of the country has come to expect as a given.”

This did not sit well with the Entertainment Software Association.  Online video games “are no less important to the future of the Internet than email and web browsing were to the past and are today,” a senior ESA representative told the Commission on Wednesday.

They’re used for employee training and in schools, he noted. “Online video games are a meaningful part of our participative culture. They remove geographic barriers, connecting people from across the country and around the world. They teach cooperation, cultivate leadership skills, and empower users to express their creativity.”

Google’s submission took the most sensible approach. “Ultimately what interests us about broadband is not what it is, but what it enables,” the search engine giant wrote to the Commission. Broadband should be defined at speeds “that enable full utilization of broadband services and applications.” The connections should be “sufficiently robust” enough to let users “receive, generate and interact with voice, data, graphics and video, which will enable users to receive the maximum value of broadband.”

Google’s dream definition of broadband? “A high-quality, ‘always on,’ packet switched, technology-neutral, high speed communications transmission platform,” the company suggests. “This platform further should allow users to harness the Internet, access and upload content, and otherwise engage in high-speed two-way connectivity and interactivity.”

This year, at E3 2009, Sony gave a preview of their new PSP game Invizimals, which is to be released in the UK this fall. The game uses augmented reality to capture children’s imaginations and enhance the gaming experience. According to the introductory video in the game, a Japanese scientist created a camera that is more sensitive than the human eye and can ‘see’ invizimals that humans cannot. The game tasks you to find the invizimals using the PSP camera (the screen begins to pulse when the camera detects an invizimal) and to trap them by placing a star shaped card in the vicinity of the invizimal. If done correctly, the Invizimal, a little, wild, computer-generated animal, will appear on the PSP screen on top of the real star-shaped card, as shown in this YouTube video. Once captured, the Invizimals can be battled against each other, and during the battle, players can blow on the screen to create a windstorm or cast a shadow over the screen to create a lighting strike.

Seeing the augmented reality technology used by Sony, I became intrigued with marketing applications for such technology. After some searching, I came across GE’s use of augmented reality in promoting Smart Grid, a project that encourages energy efficiency and the harnessing of renewable energy sources. GE has created a windmill model (shown in the picture above) that is enhanced by augmented reality and can be viewed using a webcam and the ‘marker’ (a 2D bar code) from their Smart Grid website. Although the model is very interesting to view, this use of augmented reality is playing on the novelty of the technology and not using the technology to its full potential.

I later came across a concept that uses augmented reality to enhance marketing for IKEA in an effective way. It’s called My.IKEA. The idea is that augmented reality can be used by IKEA customers to literally ‘picture’ the furniture in their rooms before purchasing. The customer sets up a webcam in their room, prints out markers that are each tied to an item of furniture and places the markers where they would like the furniture. In the example picture above, the marker for the virtual table is visible, but the virtual couch sits on top of its marker. I love this concept for two reasons: one, it takes a lot of guesswork out of furniture shopping and two, it allows people to show concepts to each other, chat online about them and compete for the best designs. The social aspect to this concept makes it interactive and fun for those that are interested in design, and creates a community that is interested in discussing IKEA products.

Another interesting development is using augmented reality with QR codes on billboards and in magazines. When the codes are scanned by a mobile phone, the image in the advertisement would transform on the mobile screen into a 3D augmented reality picture. These ideas, though, have the same issue as GE’s augmented reality model: once the novelty has worn off, they will no longer be of much interest. One area where it could be useful is if when the code is scanned, the advertisement for, say a cruise, could pop up in 3D and allow you to navigate through the cruise ship, taking a 3D tour of the facilities.

I’m interested to know what you think. Will augmented reality become commonplace in marketing in the future?

The first extreme-scale collaborative game created to tackle the world’s problems was the ARG (Alternate Reality Game) World Without Oil. Created by the non-profit public media company ITVS, this ARG explored a world where oil demand had outstripped supply by 5%, and it challenged the ‘citizens’ of that world to cope. If you’re interested in learning more about it, check out Anthony D. Williams’ great post about World Without Oil and the idea that games could be part of the solution to the climate change crisis.The game that I want to discuss is Superstruct, a massively multiplayer game aimed at forecasting the world in 2019 and finding the strategies that humans can use to stop the impending extinction of the human race. Five ‘superthreats’ were created by the game developers: a massive food shortage, pandemic disease, fast depleting energy resources, the erosion of civil rights, and a refugee epidemic. The game engaged more than 8000 players who together created the scenarios of the future. During the course of the game, one player addressed an urban food shortage by creating the idea of a virtual community that rural famers used to share farming information and tips for dealing with the difficult conditions. These rural farmers then brought their produce to be sold in the old, now closed down urban supermarkets that were once supplied by large, commercial farmers. Many players created such scenarios that were small steps toward a solution to the impending disasters they faced.

At the end of April, the Institute for the Future (IFTF) released their initial results from analysis of the game scenarios, and they plan to soon release “Superstruct Strategies” – 7 actionable strategies that emerged during analysis of the game. In their initial findings, the IFTF outlined three scenarios that for the future that emerged:

• The Long Crisis plots a path of slow response, resistance to change, and attempts to maintain current power relationships.
• Emergence follows a course of rapid adaptation from the bottom up, without much unifying direction.
• The Great Transition envisions a world re-made by technology, a challenge to the planetary dominance of humans as a species.

The three scenarios and 50 year forecast released by the IFTF are interesting, but seem quite extreme. The difficulty of using games to develop solutions to real world problems is that the problems are real and the games are not. Therefore, many scenarios that arise in games such as Superstruct that are more extreme than what the world will likely experience. However, the same characteristic that makes these games difficult to apply to the real world, allows people to freely express their thoughts and ideas. These games create an alternate reality that is a safe, creative environment, and isn’t that what every brainstorming session strives to achieve – a safe environment where ideas, no matter how outlandish, are considered? As we age, it becomes increasingly difficult to tap into that creativity we once had as children, and ‘thinking outside the box’ becomes highly valuable. These types of games can engage and encourage creative brainstorming from thousands of people around the world, and therein lies their value. The issues that the human race will face in coming years cannot possibly be solved by a few; only the intelligence of many minds working together will be able to provide solutions. The questions is whether games will be a conduit for that collaboration. I will be very interested to see the actionable strategies created by the IFTF from the game Superstruct. What I wonder is, will they be strategies that are unrealistic for today’s world, strategies that we have already thought of, or strategies that are extremely valuable?

Other aspects of Natal include identity recognition, interaction with virtual characters, and some nice augmented reality tricks like fishing (reminiscent of Reactrix or GestureTek’s virtual fishponds) and being able to pass a piece of paper into a virtual world (see what appears to be a carefully scripted video below):

While the technology isn’t expected to be released for some time (unlikely if it will even appear in 2010).  Microsoft says it projects a long life for the Xbox 360 (out to 2015)  and Microsoft’s  Shane Kim says, “Project Natal is a great innovation. It will work with every Xbox 360 sold.”

Not to be outdone, Sony also had some intesting technology to reveal at E3. A new motion controller that looks like a lot like a handheld microphone. This device appears to have extremely low latency and extremely accurate positioning. You can see for yourself in the video below:

A couple years back a French company (does anyone remember the name) had advanced augmented reality demonstrations that look a lot like this one (I’ll post the video if I can track it down), and it would be interesting to know if Sony ended up working with them or developed this in parallel.

Update: Thanks Derek for correctly identifying the French company as Total Immersion. Even more interesting still is that they list Sony on their client page. Here’s Total Immersion’s great video from 2007  (also check out an even earlier video w/ light saber ):

It would appear that this technology may be combining some wii-like sensors with image recognition that might be a descendent of the eyetoy. On initial inspection, it may not appear quite as distinctive as Microsoft’s Natal, but it looks to have some amazing specs and the speed and precision are exceptionally good. I will hazard a bet that Sony has learned some useful things from eyeToy and is going to hit the mark with this one.

All in all,  both these introductions point to a very exciting future for gaming interfaces that will blur the lines between digital worlds and physical reality even further. They will be blazing a trail for new forms of augmented reality in games that are sure to make useful contributions to other industries as well. Watch for some exciting developments in this space.

In this post I would like to share my experiences as a long-standing member of a niche video game community, Uniball, that has been independently run for over 10 years, throughout which there has been an incredible display of leadership, community resilience, social dynamics, and growth in function and prosperity.

Uniball 101
In order to understand the community you need to understand the game, because it is the focus point of all activity and of primary interest to members. Uniball is a simple, 2D game that is played with ships that move around a map, passing, juking, and bouncing a ball with the objective of scoring it into the opposing team’s net. There are typically two teams a side and for almost any major sport conceivable, parallels can be made to this game’s strategy, which is so rich that players will play for years without mastering the game.

The simple in-game controls, physics, and graphics belie a sophisticated and addictive game that has captured the hearts and … fingers of many, so much so that few people ever actually retire from the game. Many community members have played for 5+ years and know each other by name, skill, and reputation in this community population of about 300 active players, and total size of 1000.  Players are represented from all over the world, with major communities and servers in North America and Europe and yet the community is intensely close, and everyone knows who you are. So dedicated to the game are some, that statistics wise, the most active player plays an average of 20 twenty-four days a year (or about 10% of all waking time). There is also an interesting demographics story, which is that because dedicated players rarely quit, the average age of players has changed over time, from teens to early 20s. Few games have the longevity of Uniball, so it is an interesting study in how the community dynamic changes (e.g. general maturity, growth in skills/knowledge) as the people within it age and learn from the real world.

Community Organization
Although the game itself is the attraction, it is complemented by a variety of tools that allow the community to communicate and organize. First among these is a chat program that allows people to create and manage teams (“squads”), as well as discuss things publicly or in private rooms. This central chat tool is the backbone of the community as it allows users to converge and dialogue in a shared meeting space, while not playing, or during times of technical difficulty. Users’ squads compete against each other in sophisticated league competitions with professionally designed, interactive websites, where squads compete intensely for the ‘fame and glory’ of winning (community recognition). These leagues and other discussions are supported by a non-real time communication channel, Internet forums, which are useful for community announcements, and for tying together geographical communities less unified by time.

Community Governance
What is perhaps, most impressive of all, is the degree to which this community has been self sustaining, and independently run for over 10 years. Uniball was originally programmed by an individual who, before disengaging from the game, passed decision making control to a group of administrators. Over time this central government (“Administration” or “Admins”) had the authority to guide the community through turbulence related to user troublemaking, cheating, server outtages, and game development. Although the Admins staff and maintain their elite organization, they are still publicly accountable, and it is critical that users trust their decision making, lest they rebel and cause trouble. Thus, administrative actions are closely monitored by members of the community, as well as by other Admins, who are generally transparent in their dealings.

Community Development
Although the Administration is important from the perspective of authority, and mediating issues, much of the driving force behind the game is its users, who will go to great lengths to develop community or squad initiatives. Examples of these include programming interactive league websites or spin-offs of the game, developing playing manuals, as well as creating new maps, patches, and graphics. These user driven enhancements ensure that Uniball is continually refined.

Community Engagement
And although the administration and user contributions are important, what really drives the game, is competition. The aforementioned squads will compete for brand recognition (some squads are dynasties lasting 2, 3 and 5+ years) by recruiting and training players. These squads require leadership and top squads can have a strict recruitment process to recruit talent, involving sponsoring a new recruit, a voting process using private squad forums, a probationary period, as well as squad practice involving group and 1-on-1 coaching. A number of squads even use voice chat to communicate, for bonding, and for training, and over time many players develop deep ties with each other.

Uniball is a good game but what makes it great is the community element. Although people enjoy video games, it’s important to remember that people play in order to be entertained, and online entertainment is largely a social device. Communities exist in the real world, and online with people from the real world – I hope that this discussion has provided a small peak into that online world.

What about you? Have you considered yourself a member of an online community, video game or otherwise? Which community and what are some of the characteristics that you think speak to the community?

EA games’ director of corporate communications, Holly Rockwood told GigaOm by e-mail: “I can confirm that the Obama campaign has paid for in-game advertising in Burnout.”

This story has also appeared in The New York Times (written by Wagner Jame Au of GigaOm) and Advertising Age and has taken a life of its own and developed a viral quality – with good reason, it’s a pretty good story.

With 20 days left until the Presidential election this is a great way for politicians to reach the 18-34 demographic (although, of course, ther are many people outside of that demographic who game). According to NPD group there are 174 million gamers (in the US) who personally play games on PC/Mac or video game systems, 17 percent (or 29.58 million) of those are Console Gamers. XBox 360 alone has reached 10 million console sales in the US. When you take the time to look, those are some pretty compelling numbers.

So, is advertising in video games a good idea? Well, if companies like Coca Cola, Harveys, Nike and Burger King can advertise through these mediums, why can’t a political campaign? Clearly the placement in games is important since a political campaign may not want to be associated with, say… GTA IV. But I’d say that this ad has generated a good buzz, at least within the blogosphere and gaming community. (On a slightly separate but related note, GigaOm points to a Brandweek study conducted by Neilson Games that showed of those surved a full 11% said they’d purchased a brand advertised in a game.)

Some blogs like GamePolitics have pointed out that Obama refers to gaming in a negative light, but, to be fair (at least for kids) there’s a time to play video games (which has its set of associated benefits) and there’s a time to do homework (which, I would argue, also has its set of associated benefits).

So why are they “worth” that much? Well, according to their CEO Dr. Lars Buttler (a former Electronic Arts executive who worked on Might and Magic and Heroes), the reason is two-fold:

• First, Trion’s goal is to design a MMOG that can truly operate cross-platform. This means that Trion’s games will work across devices ranging from your PC, your gaming console, and web-enabled mobile phones.
• Second, Buttler is convinced that Trion’s other ace is the premise that he calls “dynamic gaming”. This “dynamic gaming” seems to be a flavour of the traditional server-based MMOGs, but Trion exercises more control over the environment, aiming to give the user a “unique” experience. Here, the game can change overnight, at the behest of Trion’s designers.

Superficially, this “dynamic gaming” concept seems more like an attempt to create a new buzzword rather than provide some tangible, novel technology. But, of course, some very clever investors feel like Trion is a hundred-million-dollar-plus investment. Digging deeper, Bertelsmann, Peacock Equity (NBC’s VC arm edit: A JV between NBC Universal and GE Commercial Finance – Media, Communications & Entertainment. Thanks, Alex!), and Time Warner all have vested interests, and Trion has teamed up NBC to issue games that coincide with a yet-to-be-released TV show on the Sci-Fi Channel. This seems like a MMOG version of Andrea’s last article on LiveHive, a Waterloo, Ontario-based company. So that will definitely be a market-share battle to watch, but their markets are still pretty separate.

So the burning question is: Have those savvy investors misspent their $70MM? Kind of. It’s been two years in the making; HP has firmly backed the server side of Trion’s business for over a year. They have surplus cash, and Buttler has been poaching high-end talent from his former stomping grounds at EA. What’s the hold up?

I too feel that cloud-centric gaming is where the EAs and Blizzard Entertainments of the world will compete for market share. The cross-platform MMOG concept is compelling, but it’s highly unlikely that Trion will be allowed to easily branch out to other platforms given their relationship with Bertelsmann (who shares half of the control of Sony BMG). The PS3 is their first console they’re trying it on. That’s going to make it tough unseating the incumbents World of Warcraft or EVE Online. Am I missing the Killer-App part of the pitch? Maybe I’m not ready to be a VC.

Valve, the company who developed Portal, has a long history of openness with their games. With their first game, Half-Life, Valve released a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allowed amateur game designers to build their own games on top of the existing engine. Counter-Strike, arguably the most popular FPS game ever, was the result of a fan-made project built on top of the Half-Life engine. Valve ended up hiring the team behind Counter-Strike, and eventually made a sequel.

Staying true to form, Valve released an SDK for Portal. So far as I knew, it was mostly used to make new levels with new challenges. Monday, it was announced that for the past eight months, a fan-made prequel, Portal Prelude, has been silently under development. It serves not only to add content to the existing game, but also greatly expand the scope of the story. In fact, Valve has even approached the team to offer their support and congratulations.

The team released a trailer for their project:

It’s tremendously professional.

Valve has done a fantastic job of building a loyal community around their games, and they’re very relaxed about amateur teams using their characters and settings to tell new stories, it’s very reminiscent of the Japanese manga culture. But instead of just providing their fans with material to adapt, Valve also gives them first-rate tool to work with. Based on the Portal: Prelude trailer, those tools look to be usable to great effect.

Valve, and other companies that open their games, are providing their consumers, and potential employees, with far more than a game, they’re selling a platform (and access to a loyal and enthusiastic community). It’s a fantastic example of openness and prosumption, and with benefits shared among everyone involved. This fan made extension of the story is fitting, given that the original development team was a bunch of students who caught the eye of Valve at a trade show, they were brought on board. Maybe the same thing will happen to this team…

Prelude is due out this month, here’s to hoping that my excitement isn’t misplaced!

If you haven’t heard of or experienced an ARG, check out Wikipedia’s comprehensive entry. The essential nugget is that an ARG is an interactive, Internet-based narrative where large numbers of game players collaborate to solve plot-based challenges and puzzles. Unlike a tightly-scripted game or media production, the outcome of an ARG is determined almost entirely by the players and their interactions.

Most, though not all, ARGs to date have been tied to product promotions (e.g. I love bees was a promotion for Halo 2) and televisions productions like Lost (see the Lost Experience). World Without Oil is one of the exceptions.

The premise of World Without Oil was simple and provocative: What if an oil crisis started on April 30, 2007 – what would happen? How would the lives of ordinary people change? Players were invited to imagine how their lives and communities would be different and how they would cope if the world’s oil suddenly dried up. The “plot” unfolded dynamically. First, the players read the “official news” and what other players were saying. Then, using a combination of blog posts, videos, images and even voice mails, they told their own stories of the challenges they were facing.  As the crisis continued, players updated their stories with further thoughts, reactions and solutions.

The game ended after 32 days, having engaged thousands of players around world and woven the fabric of 1,500 stories into what Ken describes as “living breathing mega narrative that presented some eerily plausible scenarios, complete with practical courses of action to help prevent such an event from actually happening.”

Herein lies the key point. World Without Oil presented players with an engaging, interactive structure in which ordinary individuals could collectively imagine how the world would respond to what we all know is an inevitability: sometime in the near future (and perhaps sooner than we might expect) we will all live in a world in which we can no longer rely on fossil fuels to power our daily existence.

There is a tendency in public policy circles to assume that issues like climate change are sufficiently complex that the average citizen has little to contribute to the debate about appropriate solutions, so the job of coming up with solutions is therefore best left to the experts. To some extent it may be true that the “non-expert” might have little to say about the intricacies of a cap-and-trade system. But the average citizen is an authority on their daily lives. Ken points out that “When we were asking people to talk about what’s going on in their neighborhood, we were deliberately focusing on something which they are experts at.”

“With just a little bit of narrative structure,” says Ken, “people could post their story and say what they wanted to say without the fear of being kind of contradicted or shouted down. Because we’re talking about an alternate reality and in a way we’re kind of talking about the future.”

Ken notes that the narrative structure encourages “peer learning.” “The game becomes this incredibly enriching experience, with people learning from other people, joining a community, learning new skills, getting access to novel data and information and then using the game experience to make real changes in the way they conduct their lives.”

There is no doubt that fighting climate change will require a massive worldwide effort that could dramatically alter much about the world as we know it today. We need more than just smart public policy. And we need more than a comprehensive retooling of industry and our infrastructure. We all need to give up our oil addictions and that, in turn, will require us to make some pretty profound changes in our daily lives. Alternate reality games like World Without Oil could play a vital role in engaging the public in making those vital changes.

Sometimes, though, there just isn’t time for such a project to take place. Our friend Neil at 1000awesomthings.com offers a solution…using rock, paper, scissors as a mangement tool. One of his readers posted a really cool bot which plays you, strategically incorporating your own personal style. Try it…its’ diabolically good.

Post your results…it took me seven games to beat it.

Brilliant move.

I interviewed our friend Bruce Stewart about gaming and leadership and he brought up a good point. Old School games such as Dungeons & Dragons also indicated some potential for success in the workplace, despite it’s reputation as a game played in dark basements by mouth-breathing losers. Full disclosure: I was NOT the quarterback of my high school football team and am not proud of how much I enjoyed this article.

Role-playing games ruled by paper maps and dice developed the imagination more than (or at least in different ways) than videogame versions because the only limits are with the dungeon master’s imagination. These players, especially, have developed skills in communication, organization, and scenario planning.

Thoughts? Do you buy it, or am I just trying to justify time I wasted during high school.

Wiki scripts: Imagine using wiki scripts edited by call center representatives. For common customer problems, wiki support pages could be both internal and external where customers and reps might find workarounds to problems that are valuable to other users (Tony Baggio from SocialText alluded to this opportunity is his comment on my previous post). There are already many communities online where people contribute for free; call centers have an advantage because they control incentives (beyond free) to foster activity. The evolution of call centers from rigid scripts to a network support model would increase call resolution times and increase the capacity of call center employees to take on more challenging issues and tasks.

Feedback mechanisms: The current focus of call centers is problem resolution and mitigation, not customer insight. Call center employees are the company’s front line to customers. Equally valuable would be wiki feedback mechanisms that send information in the other direction to marketing and product development functions. Remember, call centers only see a small percentage of problems, many are discussed in forums and on blogs that are outside the company’s control. Customers also use products in ways that you might never have imagined. How can we leverage these interactions? Is there a role for call reps to engage other communities? Can a Dell IdeaStorm-type initiative help centralize these erroneous points of feedback? The bottom line is this: market research spends an awful lot of money trying to figure out what product needs are and where to take a product; the customer support mechanism should be guiding exactly those things.

Unified account information and metrics: There is an opportunity to use dashboards, widgets, and visualizations to improve problem identification and prioritization by representatives. I’m thinking there are probably a lot of lessons to be learned here from the gaming world where dashboards are extremely complex and pull real-time data from interactive environments. From an IT perspective, this would require some serious integration with back office systems (CRM/ERP).

Reward and compensation structures: Companies need to transform how they think about call centers from a cost center mentality to a value-creation mentality, where each call is seen as an opportunity to learn from customers. For this to happen, incentives will have to change. As an example, most call centers tend to focus on solving individual customer problems; however, a much better objective is to use collaboration to identify root causes and eliminate problems for everyone (tied to feedback mechanisms). This would mean designing a system that rewards people for helping to improve and refine products by removing problems instead of dealing with them as quickly as possible and getting people off the phone. Overall design of these types of complex reward structures could also benefit from lessons learned in the gaming world where rewards, point mechanisms, and incentives are extremely well-defined.

Smart call routing that analyzes reps actual skills and matches problems with solutions: Create a reputation model for call reps that is based on what type of problems they have solved, the level of customer satisfaction, repeat calls, and so on. Smart systems could then provide just-in-time knowledge as problems are identified, either to customers, or to reps as they answer calls – no search required. In terms of wiki scripts and feedback tools, representatives could rate each other, and each others’ scripts and contributions to the knowledge base to help hone the routing system so that issues reach the appropriate person or solution.

Customers helping customers: The first step is to use Web 1.0 tools like a FAQ or knowledge bases to enable customer self-help – this is a fairly standard operating procedure for the vast majority of contact centers. However, beyond this there is an opportunity to allow customers to help each other through forums, wiki product manuals (e.g. see Moto Q wiki), customer-led support (Second Life does it), or online problem solving venues (e.g. see GetSatisfaction.com).

Supplement call center activities with other Web 2.0 initiatives: Why stop at wikis and forums? Live chat is a common addition to the contact center arsenal to improve upon automated online responses (this also allows reps to deal with multiple “calls” at once). What about using videos for online tutorials (vs. documentation) to allow users/reps to post common problems and solutions? How about tutorials using virtual world technology?

Usually, online piracy groups release “no-cd cracks” that allow games to be played without a legitimate (or any) game-disc. These groups are violating the game developers’ terms of service agreements, and enabling the theft countless games — but, they write good code! So much so, that in order to fix the disc-check issue with Rainbox Six: Vegas 2, Ubisoft released a no-cd patch that contained code written by the piracy group named RELOADED. This was revealed by a user on the Ubisoft Forums.

The Register reports that Ubisoft had these comments:

We’re looking into this further as this was not the UK Support team that posted this, however if it is an executable that does not need the disc I doubt it has come from an external source. There’d be very little point doing so when we already own the original unprotected executable.

As soon as we find out more about this we’ll let you know.

Followed by:

The file was removed from the site over a week ago now and the matter is being thoroughly investigated by senior tech support managers here at Ubisoft.

Needless to say we do not support or condone copy protection circumvention methods like this and this particular incident is in direct conflict with Ubisoft’s policies.

In terms of TV and Movie piracy, it always striked me as pretty amusing that the industry heavyweights were so viciously going after a network of people who do all of the legwork in terms of encoding and distrtributing content (completely for free!), instead of finding a way to track downloads and charge end users for the content they enjoy. But this seems different.

I think that The Register’s article title sums it up perfectly: “Ubisoft pirates game fix from pirates” — a move that is completely in line with any mandate to deliver top-notch entertainment.

This week’s edition of the Wikinomics Report Card will profile Blizzard Entertainment, the creators of World of Warcraft and one of the world’s most profitable gaming companies. In case you missed my last report card about General Motors, you can find it here. Like my previous entries, I will be evaluating Blizzard on the Wikinomics principles of being open, peering, sharing, and acting globally.

Company Background: Blizzard Entertainment was founded as Silicon and Synapse in 1991 by three UCLA students and after a number of name changes, settled on the name Blizzard Entertainment in 1994. That same year, Blizzard broke though when they released Warcraft: Orcs & Humans and solidified Warcraft as its flagship franchise the following year with the release of Warcraft II: Tides of Darkness. In early 1997, they revolutionized the industry by offering a free online gaming service, Battle.net, to go along with their new game Diablo. Blizzard built on its online success by releasing Starcraft in 1998 which has sold over 9.5 million copies to date. In addition to its success in North America, Starcraft built a huge fan base in Asia, specifically in South Korea. Starcraft became a pop-culture phenomenon in Korea. Professional games are broadcast on television and some games are played in stadiums with thousands of screaming fans. Blizzard released more and more successful titles over the years, and built up one of the largest and most loyal fan bases in the industry. As an example, I have purchased every Blizzard game since Warcraft II. Blizzard cashed in on this success in late 2004 by releasing its first massively multiplayer online game, World of Warcraft (WoW). As of January 2008, WoW has more than 10 million subscribers worldwide paying on average $15 per month.

Blizzard has been making headlines recently since it announced that it was merging with Activision, publisher of the popular Guitar Hero series. This merged company, Activision Blizzard, will be the most profitable pure-play company in the industry. The merger will approved pending a shareholder vote on July 8.

Being Open: Blizzard is a very open company in many ways. They offer fans guided tours of their headquarters, and even host an annual convention, Blizzcon for their fans. Lead designers of games often post in their official forums, and are very involved with the community in general. They take fan feedback very seriously, and often implement changes based on community recommendations. However, all Blizzard fans know that they are very closed regarding the release dates of their games. Whenever they are asked when a game is to be released, the response is “when it’s done”. This strategy is partly responsible for the consistent high quality for their games. Unlike most game companies, Blizzard is not given hard deadlines by their publisher, so fans are guaranteed a great deal of polish with each game.

Grade: A-

Peering: Blizzard has learned to harness their powerful community with peering. Since Warcraft II, they have released free “world editors” with their games. This gives users the ability to create their own content and has resulted in extending the replay value of their games. One of the most popular user-made modifications is “Defense of the Ancients” (DOTA) for Warcraft III. It has been called “…the most popular and most-discussed free, non-supported game mod in the world”. It could be argued that DOTA is more popular than Warcraft III.

Blizzard has also utilized peer production in World of Warcraft. Blizzard released a free API with the game that allows users to personally customize the interface of the game. These customized interfaces are so good that players are actually at a disadvantage not using them. With their next expansion pack, Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard is planning on implementing the best aspects of the user created interfaces into their own.

Grade: A+

Sharing: Blizzard has always been very open to sharing their content. As described in the previous section, they release a large portion of their game to the public via world editors. In addition to that, Blizzard shares its games in its testing phase via open and closed betas. By sharing this content, Blizzard allows its fans to debug and balance the game for them. The best thing is that fans line up to do this as it gives them a sneak peak of the latest game. However, Blizzard usually tries to limit the number of testers to control the flow of feedback. The lucky testers must sign a non-disclosure agreement that prevents them from sharing any information about the game.

This, however, acts as an open invitation to hackers to try and leak the data as much as possible. This is where Blizzard is a little closed. After leaks occur, Blizzard tries its best to try and stop the leak through banning users, and even sometimes sending in its lawyers to shut sites down. I am unsure if this is the best strategy. I can see why Blizzard doesn’t want any mis-information spread, but I fail to see the harm in building buzz through the game by allowing the semi-public information to flow freely.

Grade: B+

Acting Globally: Blizzard is the leading Western entertainment franchise in Asia. As the graph below shows, the majority of its WoW subscribers come from Asia and it is growing at a much faster rate. Blizzard tries to release most of its game simultaneously worldwide and it has resulted in strong fan bases around the world. Although its North American and European markets are strong, Blizzard sees Korea as one of its primary markets for Starcraft II. It is possible that WoW’s success in China will translate to more sales of Starcraft II there as well.

Grade: A

Overall Verdict: Blizzard is a great company that should only get stronger as its international fan base grows and they release sequels to its popular franchises. When they announced Diablo 3 at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational last week, it took the Internet by storm. If Blizzard is able to leverage Activision’s console expertise and presence after the merger, they should be able to substantially grow their market and fan base. Personally, I can’t wait for the first Activision-Blizzard game. The great thing about Blizzard, is that they have always used Wikinomics principles when developing their games. What do other Blizzard fans think? Are they going in the right direction? Do you have any other Blizzard examples to share?

Overall Grade: A

The problem, however, is that most people will respond to that by saying “I have no idea how to make a game” – and if you go to the game creation details page, most people will be long gone right after they read “Visual C# 2005″ and see what they have to download. It all seems quite confusing if you’re not, you know, a game designer. However, if you want to make a far easier foray into game making, you can now go to Sims Carnival – where users can create their own games on the platform EA provides, with the site providing all kinds of helpful tools along the way.

I’ve just started the process of making my own game (Hancock’s shoot em up), and it is remarkably easy – you simply register and answer a series of questions that are provided, and next thing you know you have a game. Admittedly, the product that emerges at the end of this isn’t particularly good – my game right now has a bunch of boxes floating around, and evidently I have to shoot the black ones before they hit the green ones, I think - but I’ve been presented with a series of tools that can make it better. The first that I’ll likely try is the Swapper, which allows me to swap in any images I want to replace those pesky boxes. If I want to do more than that, I can download the game (or anyone else’s for that matter) and customize it as I see fit… and if I really get going I can download the Game Creator and do even more.

What I really like about this is the element that’s missing from a lot of prosumer platforms – you don’t have to know what you’re doing to get started, and they make it very easy to create and customize something fun for yourself (who amongst us couldn’t add a few choice pictures to a shoot-em-up game and have a blast?), but they also allow anyone that gets interested to start creating better and better games. Moreover, to entice game creators better than I, developers can upload games they’ve created outside the site, while retaining all rights and branding (as reported in this TechCrunch article). There is also the requisite contest to encourage submissions.

That’s a great prosumer platform – something for the best of us, something for the rest of us, and a relatively open platform that allows us to collaborate and make each other’s games better. Now back to shooting those pesky black boxes…

[June 19th addition: if your interested in how developers can make money off of flash based games uploaded to such sites, check out Mochi Media - a new start up that's trying to help them do just that].

“You can take any core human technology and kind of understand it as an extension of the human body. So in some sense, cars are an extension of our legs, television extends our eyesight, telephones extend our voice, and a house and clothing extend our skin and our body. Computers really do a lot of these things, but really, I think the most important thing that computers do for us…is that they extend our imagination.”

- Will Wright, co-founder of Maxis

I like this quote because it really captures the essence of technology, in relation to how we, as people, interact with it – we are using technology to extend our senses. Humans have always developed tools to enhance their physical and mental abilities, but as technology progresses, we are experiencing an increasingly sophisticated level of sensory feedback that changes the way we entertain ourselves.

Consider the different senses that a human uses to interact with the real world: visuals, hearing and voice, touch, smell and taste.

Now consider how aspects of these senses are being integrated with technology to create an entertainment experience that far surpasses anything seen before now, and which will eventually lead to the convergence of physical and virtual spaces and rich new possibilities.

Let’s start with visuals. One the one hand, we have increasingly sophisticated TVs that are getting larger and larger, and which are able to display HD quality video to create a more lifelike representation (although some argue its too much info). On the other hand we have devices that are shrinking displays down to the point where they can cover our entire range of vision and which eventually promise a totally different viewing experience.

Now this is where it gets cool, because companies are increasingly embracing the idea that you need to create a user unique user experience in order to really propel your product to the forefront of next generation entertainment. As we talk about in our research around the Net Generation entertainment norm, the companies that will truly succeed with this demographic, are the ones that engage people, and facilitate new levels of interaction within physical and virtual spaces. Here’s a few great examples:

Click for hi-res.

If you do nothing else all day, watch this video, because it is a breathtaking example of the direction the gaming industry is going in. Mirror’s Edge, as you can see from the video, is a game that is shot entirely in the first person view, and which promises to provide a fluid environment for you to interact with, while introducing realistic sound (e.g. panting/footsteps) and virtual-physical mechanics (e.g. use of hands). Perhaps none of these are new, but I have yet to see a game that combines them all seamlessly and really gets me as excited about it. And I’m not the only one, this is what gamers want, just look at the comments. Imagine playing this game with surround sound, equipped with next generation versions of the LCD glasses I linked above, and with a next generation ‘rumble suit’ that uses haptic technology beyond what currently exists on the Wii/PS3/360. When this type of experience becomes the standard, other companies will need to adapt, and produce similar offerings or get left in the dust.

I thought I’d never say this, but I remember when I was a kid, and although I didn’t walk to school barefoot and back, our toys were just getting to the point where you could send them out into the world using electronic inputs, such as a basic remote control car. Now one company has created a car that can bring you with it (using on-board video), which obviously creates a totally new and innovative experience, as you ride along in the drivers seat of your remote control car. Obviously the next step beyond this is to include an on-board recorder to capture the audio and transmit it back to the headset – it may not be there yet, but you better believe that some company will one-up this product and add that next level of sensory feedback to increase the level of experience and real world interaction.

I’ve so far largely focused on visual and audio feedback, but let me direct you to a few other sensory-based products before I leave you.

Sound feedback has become sophisticated enough to give you wearable surround sound headsets and ultra detailed/noise isolation in-ear headphones (scroll to the bottom) that will allow you to block out all noise but the sound you want to listen to. What about voice communication? We already have portable phone headsets. Could increasingly sophisticated speech recognition allow people to verbally communicate with, and interact with, various forms of media and devices. You can already do voice-chat with other gamers, what about interacting with the virtual world using speech, where robot computer players and environments understand what you’re saying and react?

Haptic (touch) feedback is already integrated into various existing technologies, such as the aforementioned rumble packs used for gaming, or localized touch screen haptics in phones and other portable devices. How else will it develop?

Which brings us to taste and smell. Right now these are the two most difficult senses to artificially stimulate in any practical way. On the smell front, there are goals of creating TVs that emit smell but they are clearly still a long way off. That said, at one point, so did much of our technology.

That’s it for now. I hope I’ve helped instill in you an excitement for the future of entertainment, because it is clearly evolving in very cool ways. That’s today’s ‘Thought-Date’ hope to catch you next time.

According to Wired, in a recent Games for Change conference former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’conner discussed her latest venture to help young Americans… she is making videogames.

“Our Courts”, the online civic engagement project she is developing with James Paul Gee, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is designed to help seventh and eighth graders learn about the legal system. According to O’Conner, “The game lets students engage in real issues and real problems.”

This is a definite turnaround from the past perspective.

The G4C conference website suggests other uses for games, ”as this technology matures, there is a new trend emerging: harnessing the power of this popular medium for more “serious purposes”. Fighting poverty. Training protesters in peaceful resistance to oppressive regimes. Promoting peace in the Middle East. Exploring the processes of gerrymandering. The list goes on.”

So, with some excitement, I’m anticipating some serious physical activity. Not without irony, I’m going to have to move a La-Z-Boy chair to make room for the game. I promise the Wikinomics blog readers that I won’t be posting my BMI scores (you’d probably almost rather read daily amateur Dilbert comics).

From what I understand, there is some seriously scolding from the unit as it tracks your fitness progress. After the first workout, you find out your “fitness age.” Then, you recieve advice on what size you should be (methinks that I’m much larger than a typical Japanese person; at least outside of the Sumo community). I don’t mind when that weird worm thing in Big Brain Academy implies that I am a dullard….I know I have a non-simian IQ…but I hope that the digital personal trainer is understanding as we get started together.

In the GTA game players navigate around a ‘fictional’ city (based on NY in the latest edition) and complete a variety of tasks. In the past the one of the challenges of GTA, outside of the traditional story line, has been discovering all of the little tricks and secret missions in the game. For GTA IV however the latter has become infinitely easier. The reason being there has been an an explosion of activity on the GTA IV “google powered wiki mashup” or Grand Theft Auto Hood. IGN has created a site that allows gamers to do a number of things which include navigate Liberty City using google maps, tag points of interest, missions, vehicles, secrets etc…, collaboratively develop a gaming guide in a wiki and interact with other gamers in the forums. Top contributers are identified by the number of edits the make to the site and the number of things they ‘discover’ in the game.

The discoveries range in value and can be anything from critical information you need to complete a mission to my personal favourite, where to find the “Little cart that pulls the luggage carts”. It’s a model that could easily be leveraged by other games in the future and is great way to create both excitement and a sense of community around a video game. Had the game developer come up with the idea (instead of IGN) they probably could have got some great customer feedback and ideas for improvements and future games.

Nintendo has been a company to push the boundaries with game interactivity. Not all of their controllers have been incredibly successful (Power Glove what?), but you have to give them credit for their ingenuity. The wiimote has been incredibly successful, and the recent addition to inserting it into a wheel for the new Super Mario Kart game is exciting. Games like Guitar Hero and Rockband have captured a large portion of the gaming market in a short period of time and who doesn’t still love playing Dance Dance Revolution every once in a while? And I’ll certainly never forget the feeling the first time I received the rumble of my haptic Playstation 2 gamepad.

But kids, it’s now time to put all of those devices away. Introducing, the ZCam.

The ZCam is a consumer videocamera that can capture video with depth information: with its 3D capture abilities it will allow you to play Wii-style without using any controls whatsoever. In fact, it is so precise that it will even recognize your finger gestures to fire a weapon or manipulate your computer like in Minority Report, but without gloves or any other external device. You become the gaming device.

About the size of a webcam, 3DV Systems’ ZCam is fitted with lasers that project near-infrared light and a digital camera that picks up the light after it reflects off objects. By measuring the intensity of the reflections (by ordering the objects in the scene by layers in the Z axis), the software creates a three-dimensional map, accurate down to half a millimeter, at 60 frames per second. The ZCam can also hold a second camera that records regular color video. Combining that video with the 3-D map allows the device to not only translate your gestures but also render you as a 3-D avatar in the game. While there have been professional cameras with depth capture in the past, this is the first time that a device of such characteristics is cheap enough to be built into any game system or computer.

Even though it may not be as precise and flexible as a real full 3D motion tracking system, it can indeed provide with a new level of interactivity in video games and any application—like computer user interface manipulation.

Although I can’t see this device working for all video games, as I’m sure people will still want to use devices for driving and flight simulators, I think this is incredible technology. It was first released at CES 2008, and should be available in the second half of this year for roughly $100. Not too bad.