I’ll be speaking here tomorrow at the Leipzig Games Convention as part of the Serious Games Panel. If you’re at the conference then come along, it should be a good session. We’re going to focus on what we actually mean by Serious Games, and a lot of the typical issues with achieving creative and commercial success with the application of games outside of pure entertainment.

Panel: Serious Games

Wednesday, 20.08.2008
11:30 am – 12:20 pm

Conference Floor
Room E
Business

André Peschke
Bob Bates
Joost Schouten
Tim Nixon

I’ve been taking a little time to look around Small Worlds and it’s quite a unique addition to the spectrum of virtual worlds out there.

• It’s Flash, and hence immediately multi-platform
• It understands that 3D is by no means a necessity and for most people is actually an unwelcome complication
• It’s tidy. They obviously have some great communication designers working for them
• It’s a layer over existing applications linking into YouTube, Flickr etc and enhancing an experience that people are already familiar with. They’re not trying to reinvent the wheel!
• It works. Nuff said for anyone who’s had the pleasure of attempting navigation of most other virtual worlds
• Their avatar creation system is easy and fun. The right balance between usability and freedom
• The commercialization model isn’t in your face.
• Being able to create avatars for your friends and mail it to them? Brilliant!
• Adorable little pets

• Let people see what it looks like inside right from the front page
• Less text in the tutorial screens, I wanna play not read
• A shade more vertical space to move around would be nice
• Walking around spaces needs a little tweaking
• Trying to click on the close button of a moving dialog box is somewhat tricky

Compared to Google’s recently released Lively, this is slick, fast, and most importantly, functional. I’ve got to say I was terribly unimpressed by Lively, and hope that they’re planning refining it a lot more. My money is on Lively going down a similar route to Google Video, where their top tier entry into the virtual world space comes by way of acquisition as opposed to internal development.

The long term plan for Small Worlds iis to expand the world and empower third parties to add content in a consistent and efficient manner. This could be a great platform for the delivery of Meaningful Play, so we’ll be keeping an extra special eye on it.

Productivity and self-realisation seem to be increasingly important for us all. In fact part of the motivation for us establishing our stance on Meaningful Play was through our observation of increasing self-analysis in mainstream media (reality television) and literature (self-help books). We’re constantly looking for ways to make ourselves better, and its seems more than ever that there simply isn’t enough time in the day to get everything done.

I’m a massive fan of Tina Su’s excellent blog on “creativity, clarity, and happiness”. Through the blog she presents a clear and concise set of tactics for dealing with the issues which shackle us from becoming true masters of our own destiny.

Think Simple Now – Tina Su

Recently I’ve been thinking about how these sorts of lessons might be communicated in game form. While both Wii Fit and Sony’s Eye Toy Kinetic focus on the physical and meditative elements of a harmonious existence, there has yet to be a mainstream success that tackles some of the more psychological elements.

This line of thinking brought me back to the format of the Chinese Proverb. Such neat and tidy little nuggets of insight they are to reflect on. What if we could create actual gameplay metaphors to package insights such as Tina’s into a format as succinct as a proverb? The only missing element would be a system to tie these micro-experiences together, delivering them contextually to the user in response to their current state of mind, and tracking their progression down the path to enlightenment.

An obvious complication would be the sensitivity of the personal information that the user would put into the game (tracking feelings such as happiness, self worth, productiveness, etc), and the reliance on players to be honest with their inputs for the game to meaningfully respond to their state of mind. As such the game would be an incredibly personal experience, providing quite the challenge when it comes to testing. However, I feel that if inputs from the game could be shared anonymously, then there may well be people out there happy to share their stories from the path to self-realisation in a similar way to Tina.

Tales of Tales: Interview with Takayoshi Sato

It’s fantastic to have industry vets like Sato sing the praises of Serious Games / Meaningful Play. A huge issue with this business of making games that matter is convincing good developers that the design challenges present in this sort of work are just as, if not more interesting than those in the core gamer demographic.

While we see a lot of complaints from developers wanting more freedom, more challenges, more ambition in their developments, few have pointed to the creative and economic potential of Meaningful Play as a way for the industry to step forward. So, let’s help Sato out and get the word out there!

Check of the official site of Takayoshi Sato to see his work with Virtual Heroes.

Thanks to Kotaku for the heads up.

Great essay by Danc over at Lost Garden

What activities can be turned into games?

Inspired by an experience with Wii Fit, the crux of the article is that any measurable skill can form the core mechanic of a game. A wider game system can then be used to motivate the player and track their progress, providing a unique, dynamic, and fun way to pick up new skills.

The gravity of this revelation is not lost of Danc:

“As more leisure games emerge that mediate and accelerate the acquisition of skills, there is going to be a economic incentive to spread the science and craft of game design far beyond our tiny game industry. Game design is not just about games. It is a transformational new product development technique that can turn historically commoditized activities into economic blockbusters.”

Wii Fit seems to do a much better job of making this sort of thing fun, an element of the equation that I personally think is still sorely missing from Brain Age.

Last weekend we had the distinct pleasure of attending X Media Lab: Commercialising Ideas in Wellington at the Te Papa National Museum. The theme for this lab emerged from New Zealand’s classic problem: We have great ideas but we’re traditionally very poor at taking them to market. The XML team did a great job of assembling a group of international mentors that could give their unique perspective how to capture the value of your innovation, and find a channel which can turn an idea into dollar signs.

The format of the event is quite unlike anything I’ve seen before. The first day was open to all as a lecture style symposium, each speaker getting no more than 20 minutes to present. This rapid fire approach forced each of the speakers to really crystalize their core message, resulting in a day packed full of valuable insight which I’m sure got a lot of people thinking more about how they build valuable businesses.

A couple of my core take-aways from the talks:

• Think about your customer, get a picture of them in your head, on paper, on the wall, wherever. Make sure everyone in your company knows who you’re making things for and why they care
• Iterate, iterate, iterate. Nothing is ever finished
• Work with your community, your early adopters are your best salespeople. Give them the power to promote your brand
• Company culture and a healthy collaborative design environment will make or break the quality of your output. Companies like Blizzard and Valve are well known for attributing their success to nailing this. Ask yourself: Are you really listening? Are you really being heard? Be careful though, design by committee can also be dangerously distracting. Make sure it’s structured.
• Cash is king. Classic quote but seriously, this is the thing that destroys far too many great companies. New Zealander’s are traditionally bad at asking for money. If you’re not happy asking for someones money, then you’re obviously not confident that your product or service is actually worth them parting with their hard earned cash.

The next two days took a completely different format as 16 project teams were selected to go one-on-one with the international mentors over 10 sessions. These sessions saw us take our philosophy and products in front of industry superstars such as Tom Duterme, Noah Falstein, Suresh Seetharaman, Brian Seth Hurst, Sean Kauppinen, Marcelino Ford-Livene, Sean Kauppinen, Hugh Mason, and Chris Deering.

This format presented an unmatched opportunity to get face time with a wide range of high ranking industry pros, each bringing their own unique perspective and a positive approach to working with the teams to refine their value proposition.

I’m glad to say that everyone really bought into the Meaningful Play message, with each and every person we met coming up with a new and interesting application for the philosophy. Our Studio Manager, Emma, diligently took notes throughout all the workshops and at the end of the lab we were wondering what the value of that notebook might be. While we could go through and count up the hours and potential consultancy fees that might have got us the same feedback and insight, the real answer was quite clear to us: it was invaluable, a collection of strategic insight and action points that presents truly limitless value at this crucial point of our company’s evolution.

X Media Lab truly is the best in its class worldwide. Congratulations to Megan Elliot and Brendan Harkin for doing such a phenomenal job. Cant wait till next years lab!

One of our programmers passed on a quote to me this morning with resonates with our Meaningful Play message:

“If you tell me, I will listen.
If you show me, I will see.
If you let me experience, I will learn.”
– Lao Tzu (6th Century B.C.)

People have little patience these days for inefficient, passive learning environments. They demand customisation, personalisation, interactivity, and engagement. Ultimately, the best way to truly understand a concept or system is to experience it , to experiment with it, discover its limits, break it, play with it. Games are the perfect medium for providing a space in which this sort of Meaningful Play can occur. Whether it be a metaphor or direct simulation of a real-world environment, this truly is a hark back to the classical student-mentor style of one-on-one learning, and a welcome departure from static, cookie cutter style “push” teaching methods.

This reminds me, I finally got around to reading The Art of War by Sun Tzu. Neat stuff, and actually a great bedtime read as something to settle and clear the mind before drifting off.

Luke from Kotaku hits the nail on the head:
“It all sounds great in theory, but as the clip above shows, it’s going to take a particular breed of person/fanboy to be bothered running around a virtual space (complete with eerily disembodied David Reeves talking head) just to see a clip when they’re only a few mouse-clicks away on this here internet.”

I mean seriously, why? What on earth are they actually thinking? I’m personally a huge advocate of the power of virtual worlds but time and again we’re presented with these absurd applications which do little more than get in the way of the content that each world’s inhabitants actually want to consume.

Sony, Linden Labs, and all the other virtual world developers need a big red sign up on their walls that asks one simple question:

“Where’s the added value?”

If the only answer they have concerns an ability to dress up as a penguin and “upgrade” one’s appendages, there needs to be a little more thinking going on.

This bubble is about to burst, but thankfully its just going to result in a good old reality check and a clearing of the air which should pave the way for some more progressive thinking.

One of the cooler possibilities about an immersive, interactive game is that it’s one of the best ways to teach empathy. A game can put you in someone else’s shoes, and can make you feel for the character. It gives you a view of why people make the decisions that they do.

I was in Te Papa National Museum the other day, in an exhibition about the colonisation of New Zealand.
The impact it’s had on the plants and animals is quite large: more than 75% of the country used to be covered by forest (15% now), and many species have become extinct.

There was a game there for kids called “Survivor”. Basically, your character was an Alien that had to leave your home planet and live on earth (An analogy to the colonists coming to NZ from England). In the game you pick various species of animals and plants to take with you to.
The possibilities here are huge, not to preach about the evils of humanity, but to help the kids understand why the colonists (Maori & European) brought “useful” species with them.

Unfortunately, the only possible outcomes were:
1. The species you took with you didn’t survive in the different climates, forcing you to leave…
2. They struggled, and you went mostly hungry…
3. Or they thrived, but killed off the native animals or plants.

It’s not possible for a kid to pick species that do fine alongside the native species (like sheep do), so it comes across as a little preachy.

However, great work to them for coming up with a fun way to explain the complexities of bringing new species when colonising.

Board games were always a great way to bring the family together. The early consoles and arcades were very much billed as family entertainment. With the rise of the PlayStation era, games got more focused on the core demographic and radically changed the public opinion of gaming, pigeonholing it as a pastime reserved for the solitary geeky young male.

Nintendo have started to break away from this trend with the Wii, and it appears Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari, thinks the world is ready again for more public, social gaming:
Nolan Bushnell Looks to Social Gaming Holodeck Come True via Kotaku

Love the idea, hope it gets traction. The key issue will be breaking the public’s perception of what a gaming centre looks like these days

Not personally crazy about the name UWink. But hey, I think I’m still in denial over Nintendo naming their latest console the Wii, and it’s gone on to sell a couple of units.

Wow…. WOW. This is really amazing:

Solve Puzzles for Science | Fold It

Synopsis via Kotaku :
“Could you win a Nobel Prize in Medicine for playing a computer game? Foldit is a game for the PC and Mac that takes the Folding@Home concept and adds a more human element to the mix. Instead of having a network of computers work through all of the possible shapes for folding proteins, a problem so huge it could take centuries for all of the computers in the world to solve, Foldit presents unfolded proteins to the player in the form of puzzles, on the basis that human intuition could tackle the problem much faster.”

The presentation is very tidy, the tutorials effective, the difficultly curve smooth, and even if they do go a little too far with the whole PopCap “stars bursting all over the screen makes a player feel good” mantra, it is actually a joy to play. More comments to come as I get the chance to really dive deeper into this brilliant initiative. But a question in the meantime:

“Is this classed as Collective Intelligence??

I ask because it seems this isn’t as much collective problem solving and design here as it is just brute force utilisation of a niche problem solving skill across a global population.

Remember that “game about making games” that I was gushing over during GDC? I finally found the video that they showed during the presentation online:

There’s also a nice writeup on the design process from Greg Trefry at the GameLab site:
Greg Trefry on the process of developing GameStar Mechanic

I really seriously want to get my hands on this thing.

The Guardian have a nice interview with Will Wright up that discusses his approach to game design, in particular the empowerment of the player through the provision of tool-sets and simulations that act as a platform for expressive play.

Unlocking the power of parallel play

He says of his experience designing Sim City:

“I had this little guinea pig city which I could do experiments on, which made the subject so much more interesting than reading a book. So the process of discovery, and getting other people to enjoy discovery has always been a part of it.”

I think we could probably consider all of Wright’s games Meaningful Play to varying degrees. I’m certainly keen to see whether his new Spore game can capture the imagination of the masses through its ambitious attempt to simulate ”...life from a single cell to a solar empire.”

Ian Bogost throws down with the UN in response to their latest political / activism game Deliver The Net

Considering they’re about to hit the 2,000,000 net mark, I think we can consider the initiative as a whole a success, but it’s well worth considering the role of the game (which has only delivered ~7,000 of the total nets thus far) within the scope of this rather epic endeavour.

My questions would be thus:

• Would that number be higher or lower without the game?
• Does the game actually leave the player with any new knowledge or perspective on the African Malaria crisis?

Without actually getting into an in depth analysis, my assumption would be ‘higher’ and ‘no’ respectively.

I completely agree with Ian’s position that “There’s little sense of the lives of Africa either under normal conditions or under the suffering of malaria.” It’s essentially just a tarted up action game with posterised , malnourished Africans standing in the place of cute vector aliens.

Here’s an interesting question: Do we think that games like this keep coming out because the organisations funding them aren’t giving the developers room in the budget to actually design the things, or are they just being implemented by lazy developers who would rather get the job done so they can hurry back to their sci-fi shoot-em-up?

Brenda Brathwaite has a great article over at The Escapist that aims to uncover the source of widespread disdain for videogames amongst “non-gamers”

Myth of the Media Myth via The Escapist

A really frustrating aspect of this debate is no matter how reasonable the game advocates seem to be, the debate too often falls prey to the Fox News effect. Ultimately I think the industry is still largely to blame for giving these people far too much ammunition. The increasing costs of game development in the PlayStation era have forced a cheap focus on the core male demographic that will effect the industry for years to come.

We will continue to see comments like ‘There is no redeeming value to be found in gaming’ until we can give more concrete counter examples. Ultimately people need to be given more reasons to actually respect the medium, more examples of that “redeeming value” being represented through Meaningful Play.