Straylight will be at the Animfx conference this weekend taking place in the Wellington Convention Centre 14th – 16th of November.

Visit our booth to have a play round with 3 of our games, included a first time look at our brand new title. I cant tell you what it is just yet, but I can say that if you’re into Meaningful Play as a way to spread the word on climate change, then you should definitely go out of our way to pay us a visit.

I’ll be taking part in an online symposium later in the week tackling the challenges that face virtual retail.

October 29-31 2008
An online symposium to discuss future possibilities for retail in Web 3D and Virtual Worlds, and the impacts these may have on our lives.
Free Event.

Having developed a number of online retail solutions we’ve had a real mixed bag of experience ranging from straight-up, flat web retail environments through to highly dynamic spatial navigation structures.

My theme (which wont be a surprise to anyone that reads this blog regularly) is “Where’s the Value”. We have to ask ourselves this question every single day. It can be so easy to get excited by the cool factor of a new technology and be completely distracted from the reality of whether new technology is actually going to enhance the user experience of your target demographic.

For more info checkout the The Future Telco Network

Thanks to John Eyles of Telecom New Zealand for organising this.

Great video, definitely worth a watch, well done to Daniel Floyd for putting it together.

(I know I’m a little bit late of the gate on this one, but better late than never)

• Tangental Learning is great, its a step in the right direction, but I think the video misses the most important point when it comes to games and learning. To ensure effective retention and transference of knowledge you need to actually integrate the knowledge / skill that you’re teaching into the gameplay experience as opposed to simply being a sideline attraction. Thats not to say that it needs to be a “shoved down your throat” as a critical path objective, but you need to reward your player for applying their new found knowledge or skill. That’s what Edgar Dale’s Cone of Learning is all about. It’s the actual doing that cements the understanding.
• This type of video format (ZP inspired or not) works a heck of a lot better than a daunting essay
• Entertainment mediums that consume a significant amount of a person’s time have a sort of cultural responsibility to the player. Culture is no longer passed on through bards or round campfires, but through movies, books, and yes even games. We need to think more about the lasting impression that an interactive experience has on someone, and how that helps define us as individuals and a collective culture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yahtzee really has emerged as the reviewer of the people, unreservedly tearing apart the industry’s biggest titles with a unmatched honesty and brutality.

The great thing about his reviews is that not only are they incredibly entertaining (as long as you’re not easily offended), but littered with concise insights into some of the glaring flaws in the games’ core mechanics. He really does a great job of making the industry seem quite infantile, setting a challenge to all developers to take note of our past mistakes, and get on with evolving as game designers as opposed to loosing ourselves in the war for prettier visuals.

This week he deconstructs Burnout: Paradise to brilliant effect, but I’m posting the video here to reference one of his opening lines: “One of my measures of a good game is one that teaches me something.” Quite relevant I thought.

P.S. I saw the guy at GDC while coming out of a session and he looked positively terrified. I would be too if I was suddenly surrounded by all the people I’d been tearing to pieces behind the safety of the internet for the last 6 months.

In my opinion the best book out there on game design right now is Rules of Play by Eric Zimmerman and Katie Salen. The heavy yet somehow still refreshingly succinct text lays out the most thorough and consistent framework for the analysis of computer game design today.

With the creation of Meaningful Play as a strategy, we scoured many texts on games and learning to figure out what two words we could use to describe our philosophy. By the time we came round to actually figuring it out, we realized it had been staring us in the face for a while (albeit in need of some reworking) right out of the pages of Rules of Play. You see Eric and Katie are also big on the concept of Meaningful Play, which they define on three different levels, according to the relevance or impact of an interaction which takes part between the player and the game:

Rules: An action is immediately interpreted and fed back by the system
Play: That action has a consequence within the closed game system
Culture: That action has a consequence to the player outside of the game

So we’re thieves right? Well I suppose we are actually (although not purposefully) but I’d like to think it’s in more of a Remix Generation context than outright snatching. Our definition of Meaningful Play sits within their Culture layer, requiring that the player walks away from the game with new skills, knowledge, or perspectives.

So thanks for the awesome text Eric and Katie, hopefully we havent butchered your brilliant framework

Last night we were featured on Nightline here in New Zealand. The article pitches the company as trying to break the mould of the traditional core gamer, and touches on our work for The Vision Quest

Also remember to check out the Meaningful Play video, which is the full presentation from the night.

Part One Part Two

Penny Arcade had a fantastic post and comic a couple of days ago describing their revelations around how non-gamers approach games.

Old School via Penny Arcade

I was particularly interested in Tycho’s comment about Brain Age being a gateway drug to other game content in that the casual market can warrant spending time with it as a kind of chore. “Gym for your brain” indeed. The thing is that when I go to a real gym I actually tend to enjoy it at the same time. You get the rush of endorphins, maybe listen to a bit of music while you’re there, get a bit of downtime, and as a bonus you’re getting fit and healthy. It isn’t nearly so much of a chore as Brain Age, which isn’t very fun to play, and is potentially a very stressful experience.

But the game has still been hugely popular because it has tangible relevance to the casual gamer’s real life. People are ready to throw time at any inane activity as long as some reliable source says it’s good for them. I wonder how much more we could expand the market if we actually made these experiences fun and explorative at the same time, as well as being certified “good for you.”