Archive for the ‘ gaming ’ Category

Games for Good: The Role Games May Play in Determining Our Future

Catherine Thorn June 30th, 2009

With 55% of US gamers being married, and the average age of new gamers at 32 years old, the stereotypical gamer profile of that young, socially awkward male no longer holds true. Alex St. John, co-founder and CEO of the global games network WildTangent noted, “We make as much money selling casual games to young boys as to Mom.” As gamer demographics undergo this transformation and casual gaming becomes mainstream, new opportunities are created for enterprises and non-profits to harness the collaborative and engaging nature of games. Many enterprises already recognize that games are an excellent way to create engaging marketing that consumers enjoy, but whether games can be used to effectively solve society’s problems is less clear.

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. Continue reading…

Uniball: An in-depth look at a video game community

Jude Fiorillo January 13th, 2009

As the Internet has continued to grow and evolve, so too have the communities of people which have developed throughout and across the Internet’s landscape. There are communities represented from every interest and every service sector, and the people who ‘live’ in these e-neighborhoods find themselves bonded through communication across a variety of mediums, as well as a sense of identity with other people, and a belief in the underlying purpose or utility of the group, product or service.

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.

Continue reading…

Campaigning on XBox 360?!

Ming Kwan October 15th, 2008

First noticed by a Xbox 360 live gamer on his RoosterTeeth (JeffSon) forum page, and subsequently reported by GamePolitics and GigaOm.  It has now been confirmed (by GigaOm) that the Obama campaign has purchased advertising in the XBox 360 game - Burnout Paradise. So now, when gamers decide to make a visit to Paradise City, they may see some billboard advertisements informing them that early voting has begun, directing them to visit Obama’s webiste: voteforchange.com

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.”

Continue reading…

The Amazing Wario Land ad

Denis Hancock September 26th, 2008

You must check out this very cool advertisement for Wario Land: Shake It! - a new game from Nintendo Wii. It only takes 45 seconds, and you really have to watch the whole thing to get the full effect. It’s probably the best example of creatively leveraging YouTube in a way the truly connects to the brand message that I’ve seen in a long time. Anyone seen any other great ads recently that they’d like to share?

Trion World Gaming: Revolutionary or Just a Bunch of Hype?

Patrick Harnett September 23rd, 2008

I’m sure many of the Wikinomics blog readers are familiar with Massively Multiplayer Online Games, but there is an off-chance you haven’t heard of Trion World Gaming. They have yet to release a game, but Trion has been very active in securing funding. They just landed a deal worth $70MM from a consortium of Venture Capitalists, which brings their total VC-take to over $100MM.

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:

Continue reading…

Sweet! More Portal!

Jeff DeChambeau September 18th, 2008

Portal is my favorite videogame, it came out just about a year ago. For the uninitiated, the game is built around a new gameplay mechanic: portals. In a twist on the standard First Person Shooter (FPS), instead of having a bang-bang gun, you have a portal gun. It shoots two things, a blue portal and an orange portal. The portals form on any flat surface and anything that goes in one instantly comes out the other. Here’s the trailer:

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. Continue reading…

As the world fights climate change, could games be part of the solution

Anthony D. Williams September 10th, 2008

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking to Ken Eklund, a freelance writer and game designer, and the creator of a fascinating Alternate Reality Game (ARG) called World Without Oil. As the world grapples with climate change and other global issues, we both agreed that interactive gaming experiences could play a vital role in engaging the world’s citizens in the process of finding solutions.

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.

Good old rock…nothing beats rock

Mike Dover September 8th, 2008

We’ve written a lot on this blog about the power of mass collaboration including how to build a mutual fund, put together a football club, design software for a gaming console, and clean up a Baltic State. All of these stories involve input from lots of people. All fascinating and inspiring.

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.

Divinity: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature

Jeff DeChambeau August 21st, 2008

Joystiq, a popular gaming blog, has a post up about how EA has handled a potentially embarassing situation surrouding their video game Tiger Woods ‘08 that cropped up on YouTube. Youtube user Levinator25 discovered an issue where Tiger Woods could walk on water, allowing him to make the “jesus shot.” Levinator25 uploaded a video of what he assumed to be a glitch in the game. Check out EA’s response:

Brilliant move.

Should the fact that a candidate knows what an owlbear is be a plus?

Mike Dover August 18th, 2008

I’m doing some research with Accenture about benefits and challenges of hiring serious gamers (most of our research is based on games like World of Warcraft). There are plenty of upsides to hiring these people such as the ability to lead groups in remote locations, quickly analyze and react to data, create custom interfaces, divide up resources (and share spoils of war) etc. In fact, some people consider the leadership ability required of a successful WoW guild to be similar to that of a CEO of a small company.

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.