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?
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:
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. Read More »
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.
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:
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.
In my previous post, “Why Call Centers Need Wikinomics,” I argued that call centers—the most underutilized resources in the enterprise—are the low hanging fruit of Wikinomics. Since then, I’ve been researching the topic a bit more and I thought it might be valuable to post some early thinking as to where the opportunities might be (as always, feedback and additional insights would be greatly appreciated):
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.
Today, games are usually released for purchase both in stores (on CD/DVD) and online for download. The disc version of the game usually has a check built-in to make sure that the disc is actually in the drive, confriming that you’ve actually bought the game. Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 was no different, except that the downloadable version of the game also had this disc-check left in — clearly a problem for gamers who opted for the download.
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. Read More »
Can the unstoppable gaming juggernaut continue to WoW with Wikinomics?
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. Read More »
Wired is running a great slide show of screen shots from Zero Hour: a video game in which you play an EMT responding to a biological weapons attack in downtown Chicago. Players must diagnose and treat hysterical patients while dealing with disorganization and unpredictable supply levels. The game was developed in part by the US Department of Homeland Security in order to train first responders for real-life emergencies. This is a great example of how interactive virtual environments are revolutionizing the way we teach and train.
When I was doing follow-up research on the topic of prosumerism (chapter 5) last year, the XNA platform (which enabled people to create games for the XBox) was one of the examples I was most interested in. It has continued to evolve, and if you want to see it in action you can check out the creators club online, “a community all about games - created by you, played by everyone.” There are lots of fun little games available, and the next round of the Dream-Build-Play challenge has been launched, offering $75,000 in prizes for the best games - and bragging rights of course.
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.
“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. Read More »
I am extremely jealous. I remember not being able to play pogs in the hallway, because my friends and I had to stay after class to try and get our gameboy back. We would receive the lecture from our teacher about videogames rotting our brains and how playing them in class was a capital offense. Well, times have changed.
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.”
As my colleague Ian posted earlier, the Wii Fit seems to be completely sold out in Toronto. I managed to pick one up through an reseller on the Amazon platform. I paid about a 40% premium, which I’m happy to do as long as the unit actually arrives. I did check carefully that I bought the actual game, not a Wii Fit hotmail address or a photo of the game. And unlike those early adopters that are periodically sue Apple because they price they paid for an iPod or iPhone was higher than a few months after the launch (it always happens in technology, people) I understand that the premium incorporates the fact that “I have the cool toy first…or first-ish.”
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.
Throughout the years, video game console companies, most notably Nintendo, have come up with some pretty crazy ideas for controllers and control surfaces. Throughout the evolution of video games, we’ve had a couple of standard controllers. The good old days involved many many hours in an arcade smashing the buttons and jerking the joystick playing Street Fighter Alpha. At home, you’d sit down in front of the TV and play with your gamepad.
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. Read More »
Well, Grand Theft Auto IV was released last night at midnight, which means that there were people lined up to buy it. From where I sit, dressing up like Niko Bellic is less geeky than Dumbledore and certainly better than dear Jar-Jar. Some of your co-workers may be a little sleepy if they spent the wee hours commiting mayhem in Liberty City.
The game has great reviews so far as well as the typical hoopla about inappropriateness of the material. Thing is, adults make up a huge percentage of the gaming population and some games are just not made for children — just as the Godfather (parts I and II), Silence of the Lambs, Pulp Fiction, and the Usual Suspects are all considered great films, but not ones that you would watch with your tween.
What’s the wikinomics angle? User-generated content delivered through “walkthroughs” are a huge value ad to the game and the best ones are prepared by volunteers. Below is an excerpt from a study that Alan Majer and I conducted about a great walkthough creator “named” AggroSk8ter.
Inspired partially by Mike’s Guitar Hero posts (1)(2) and endorsements, I had been searching for a Guitar Hero III for my Wii for weeks, when finally last week, I was able to find one at an Electronics Boutique in downtown Toronto.
I resisted playing the game for a couple of days as I knew I would get pulled in, but once I cracked, boy did I have fun. While I’ve only played for a cumulative three or 4 hours, I have had a blast doing so. Being the “hero” I knew I would be (sarcasm noted), after defeating Lou, the boss on Easy, I was ready to move on to the next bigger and better challenge, which I my case was Rock Band.
I had played the popular Harmonix game at a friend’s house on PS3 and was blown away when mid-way through a song, a friend suggested they wanted to hear an Oasis song, and lo and behold, to my astonishment, the owner of the game grabbed the PS controller, went online and purchased “The Oasis Pack” and within minutes, we were butchering the popular cover Wonderwall.
In order to combat automated robots and other forms of cheating, World of Warcraft comes bundled with a rootkit (which has since been named Warden) that monitors your computer for signs of “suspicious” activity contrary to their EULA (End User License Agreement).Greg Hoglund first identified Warden in October 2005, a rootkit installed by World of Warcraft that monitors your machine every 15 seconds to identify programs that are attempting to hack or interfere with the operation of WoW that would be against the EULA (bots, unauthorized interface hacks, etc). The rootkit acts similar to spyware, and according to Hoglund:
“Besides Monitoring the WoW process space and keeping track of DLLs running in that space, the Warden pokes around into other processes, doing things like reading the window text in the title bar of every window and doing a scan of the code loaded for every process running on your computer (which it then compares against known cheat code).”
Technology and the US election I've written several times about the impact of social networks on this year's US Presidential election - see here and here. And let's be honest, the use of such networks and new web 2.0 technologies has been dominated by Obama. He’s embraced social networks like no other candidate in an attempt to connect with [...]
