High Scores And Egos: There's Always A Bigger Doodle 
The Last Moments Of GAME 
How Bad User Interfaces Are Ruining Video Games And Other Wonderful Things 
She Tried To Make Good Video Games For Girls, Whatever That Meant 
The Story Of Doodle Jump: Brotherly Love And Digital Snacks 
Sunday Comics: Dead Island Yes, Minister, we’re still talking about this. And we’re going to keep talking about it, even though it’s quite clear the Government couldn’t care less about the Australian games industry.
Good on you to those who wrote to the Minister regarding the issue, and I sincerely hope you get a productive reply. Alas, judging from the letter Oz Kotakuite Martin received in response to his plea, my hopes have been dashed across the stones of uselessness and ignorance like a pair of old trousers.
Need more proof of the Government’s distain? From the letter (which was written by one of Minister Coonan’s advisors):
The Government’s Australian Screen Production Incentive, which was recently enacted, incorporates three components: Producer Offset; Location Offset; and Post, Digital and Visual (PDV) Offset. These … are paid against a production’s Qualifying Australian Production Expenditure (QAPE).
That’s great, but what the heck does it have to do with games?
While games are not eligible genres for the new offsets, this does not exclude game developers from providing content to eligible genres. For example, an Australian games developer could be contracted to provide content as a component of a film or television program. Such expenditure could be claimed as QAPE.
So essentially developers are screwed unless they’re creating a game for TV or film? The only situation I can imagine where this would actually happen is if a developer was willing to indulge in tax fraud. What if you’re making a game based on an Aussie film or show? Doesn’t look like that would cut it either.
All I can do is sigh… again. You can see the entire letter after the jump.
With the hearts and minds of Japanese gamers won over by Nintendo and its casual-skewing software, this years Tokyo Game Show saw those in the nation issuing a collective “meh”. The press? They had to show up, helping to pad this year’s attendance figures by an extra 30,000 for a combined total of 193,040 over four days. By comparison, last year’s three day show pulled in an impressive 192,411 over just three days.
But who can blame attendees for a lack of interest in the 2007 flavor of TGS? The market leader didn’t show up and many games were simply old news or Western focused. Despite the fact that a playable Metal Gear Solid 4 and Metal Gear Online had a big presence, as did Devil May Cry 4, most attendees seemed to be taken by Wii and Nintendo DS titles—Biohazard: The Umbrella Chronicles, Final Fantasy IV, and the sequel to Professor Layton and the Mysterious Village.
Has Tokyo Game Show peaked? Unless CESA expands the thing to five days or somehow convinces Nintendo show up—or a massive shift in tastes occurs—the show may see even further declines next year.
While I’m all for the academic study of gaming, a lot of the “scientific” studies just kill me – if you spend too much time [insert time waster of your choice here]in college, your grades could drop? Really? And people actually get funding for this kind of stuff? The paper is being published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and was conducted at Berea College, where certain conditions meant that typical college time wasters weren’t present. Video games, however, were – and they found that people who brought along video games to college (or had roommates who did) spent less time studying (and had a lower GPA) than people who didn’t:
…The study needed an external factor that influenced study time. It found it in video games, specifically by dividing the students based on whether their roommates had brought gaming rigs to school. About half of the males and a quarter of the females fell into this group. But the impact of access to gaming didn’t depend on the students’ gender: those with video games in their rooms spent about two-thirds of an hour less on academic work per day out of a mean of 3.5 hours of study time. That decrease closely tracked the amount of time that the students reported spending gaming, suggesting that there was a direct transfer of effort between the two activities.
As Ars Technica points out, this is not really a gaming problem, rather a time management one. A life outside of academia is to be strongly encouraged (everyone needs an outlet for stuff not relating to books, lectures, tests, and essays), but it has to be balanced out with academic requirements. Isn’t this simple common sense?
Deathmatch: video games vs. study time, a flawless GPA victory [Ars Technica via GamePolitics]
A new anthology on gaming – on design, architecture (both of the virtual and actual varieties), urbanism, and lots of other interesting and academic-sounding things – will be coming out next month (or November, for those of us in the US). Entitled Space Time Play: Computer Games, Architecture, and Urbanism: the Next Level, the volume brings together an impressive number of authors with a variety of backgrounds, and everything from game reviews to essays to interviews:
The richly illustrated texts in “Space Time Play” cover a wide range of gamespaces: from milestone video and computer games to virtual metropolises to digitally-overlaid physical spaces. As a comprehensive and interdisciplinary compendium, “Space Time Play” explores the architectural history of computer games and the future of ludic space. More than 140 experts from game studies and the game industry, from architecture and urban planning, have contributed essays, game reviews and interviews. The games examined range from commercial products to artistic projects and from scientific experiments to spatial design and planning tools.
“Space Time Play” is not just meant for architects, designers and gamers, but for all those who take an interest in the culture of digital games and the spaces within and modeled after them. Let’s play!
The table of contents is, at first glance, a lengthy and fascinating list of topics that really do span a broad range. You can see for yourself at the Space Time Play site [via The Ludologist]
Ten things I learned at the presentation by Nielsen Vice President Jeff L. Herrmann about their new measuring system for game play.
1. Men aged 18-49 play lots of video games. 2. Lots of people own consoles. 3. A lot of people watch American Idol. 4. Women play video games too! 5. A lot of kids play on the Wii, and they mostly play when they get back from school. 6. Gamers who play on the 360 and PS3 – they tend to be older – play in the evening. 7. Gamers are mostly playing on the PS2. 8. Gamers are getting interested in next-gen gaming. 9. The most played PC game is World of Warcraft. 10. After stating that the heaviest gamers play an average of 10 hours a week, Mr. Herrmann explained that he would rather use that time for sleep.
Jean Snow
Jonathan Blow (of Braid fame) has an insightful response to Stephen Totilo’s comments lamenting the lack of gaming landmarks: the status of “landmark” shouldn’t be tied to representations of fantastical architecture or a particular visual look, rather to what happens in those spaces. He talks about landmarks of “conceptual space”: I started having bad flashbacks to slogging through Benedict Anderson’s classic Imagined Communities at this point, but Blow has some interesting points and examples (he points to Counter-strike and Team Fortress maps that may change their look from incarnation to incarnation, but retain a sense of place thanks to the history of gameplay within those spaces, no matter what form their visual trappings take):
… After sleeping on the question for a few days, this occurred to me: if we judge landmarks by their visual impressions, we tend to ignore what games are about, a large part of which is interactivity, and the player’s understanding of the way things work within that game world. If locales are really going to be game landmarks, rather than fanciful imitations of real-world places that you could experience as well in non-game media, then the impression they leave needs to happen through gameplay; they need to be memorable because of the things they encourage to happen within them, not (just) because of the way they look.
So what makes a gaming landmark for you? I had a hard time thinking back to any sort of iconic structures, but I have plenty of games that have created such a strong sense of space that they would be included in my personal ‘gaming landmarks.’
Landmarks, of sorts. [Braid]
Electronic Arts has decided that it needs to up the East Asian ante and either partner up with or acquire a Japanese company: with successful partnerships in China and South Korea (with The9 and Neowiz, respectively), EA’s on the hunt for a similar deal in Japan. EA’s revenue from East Asia is neglible in the face of profits from North America and Europe, and Japan has been a far lower priority than the burgeoning online markets in Korea and China:
“[The question is]can we get to the scale that we want to more quickly if we work with someone [in Japan]that actually has had success in the market,” said Mr Niermann [president of EA Asia] . “I think EA offers a great global distribution opportunity in terms of taking Japanese products to other parts of the world and in turn there are certainly companies that are much better at local development than we’ve ramped up to be.”
While I get the logic behind the mad rush for the potentially lucrative Chinese market, it does seem odd that some companies are just cluing into the fact that maybe – just maybe – they should be tapping into the already large-and-extant Japanese market.
EA hunts for Japan game outfit [MSNBC]
IAC recently purchased the majority of indie developer and Torque engine creator GarageGames, and today the two companies announce the fruits of that transaction. InstantAction.com will eventually be a completely web-based action gaming portal, dedicated to serving high-quality video games without requiring downloads. I’m imagining it as a sort of Games.com, only instead of Scrabble and Yahtzee there’ll be… well, action games. The companies are introducing new technology that will enable graphically-rich, multiplayer games to run in standard web browsers. You can visit InstantAction.com right now and enter your email address for early public beta access, with the site expected to launch in early 2008. As well as the games portal, InstantAction is also launching a Game Development Fund aimed at encouraging new developers to create games for the internet. Personally I am kind of afraid of this. The last thing ADD boy here needs is quick and easy multiplayer action games at his fingertips.
Not to be comfused with SCEA’s latest employee, the other Scott Steinberg is managing director of Embassy Multimedia Consultants and author of Videogame Marketing and PR and The Videogame Style Guide and Reference Manual. His latest book is called Get Rich Playing Video Games, and it explains how to succeed in every facet of the gaming industry, from marketing and PR to development to publishing. The volume includes insights from industry legends like Miyamoto, Will Wright, Ted Price, Lord British, and even Atari founder Nolan Bushness, who provides the forward. The book should be available at major retailers now, with a $US 17.95 price tag, or you can download the eBook free at www.GetRichGaming.com. Pity the title sounds like a late night infomercial.
Scott A. Steinberg has been marketing the hell out of the electronic entertainment sector for over 20 years, having worked with Sega, Roxio, Liquid Audio, Eidos, and Crystal Dynamics. Now he’s leaving his current VP of marketing position at Sega to jump onboard the Sony Computer Entertainment America train as the Vice President of Product Marketing, a newly created position responsible for all PlayStation marketing in North America. Steinberg will report directly to Marketing and PSN senior VP Peter Dille, who had lovely things to say about him. “We are thrilled to have Scott join our team as he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the PlayStation marketing staff and the management group here at SCEA,” said Dille. “Scott has an ideal blend of experience in digital entertainment and content delivery as well as a proven track record for strategic innovation and implementation within this industry.
Some would say Steinberg has been marketing the PS3 since June, when he famously dissed the Wii in an interview with Reuters. The only difference now is he gets paid for it! Grats, Scott!
