War games or bore games?

Obama and gaming seems to be a good combination. A while ago I wrote a post about the Obama campaign advertising in-game to entice earlier votes, now I’m writing about a game called “Commander in Chief” that let’s you have a shot at running the USA. The game, which hits the shelves the day Obama is sworn in, lets players make decisions about everything from budget through to health, military and diplomatic.

Produced by Eversim, the game is played out on a 3D world map and even lets you pick your own cabinet. To top it off, you get information from the likes of the United Nations, G7, OPEC, NATO and NAFTA to help you make the right decisions such as invading foreign countries (fail) topple unfriendly regimes (fail) and plot assassinations (fail?). The game is yours for a mere $US39.95, for which you get the play God with the entire planet.

MyTake – sims are always hugely popular, I remember getting hooked on Command and Conquer when I was at University. But do people really want to play a game about running the US? Yes, I think they do. The chance to run one of the biggest modern empires is going to appeal to a lot of people and given that it’ll probably be available on PC, the uptake should be good thanks to the huge install base. The question is – will people be trialling Obama’s decisions to see how they pan out?

Rockin' in the real world

I’m a gamer and as such, I’m pro-gaming across the board. So, I was thrilled to see some new research out of the UK that shows that playing games such as Rock Band and Guitar Hero has encouraged up to 2.5 million kids to learn to play real musical instruments. You constantly hear the doom and gloom merchants bashing gaming on the head for distracting kids from other activities, but here we have a story about gaming encouraging kids to take up music for real. The research, conducted by UK charity Youth Music, shows that this relatively new genre of game is the inspiration behind this revived interest in musical instruments.

In addition, guitar stores around the country have reported increased sales of instruments featured in the game and music teachers have reported an increased number of requests for lessons. In an interesting twist, many of the kids are asking to learn what we would now deem rock-classics such as numbers by Alice Copper and Birmingham’s finest, Black Sabbath, because they are featured in the games. With Wii now in on the act, the number of kids looking to take-up musical instruments for real will surely increase, especially on the back of the success already had by the guys and gals at Xbox 360.

MyTake – Yet another reason why gaming is good and actually enhances and enriches lives. We constantly hear about the shrinking number of kids taking up the more traditional pastimes and hobbies, yet despite all efforts by society to reverse this, it’s gaming that actually gets the job done in the end. Look at the impact of other games such as the Brain Training products from Nintendo, the Viva Piñata from Xbox 360, yet more examples of the positive impact gaming can have on our kids. I guess for some people, the world is still flat and that’ll never change….shame, they’ll never get to enjoy the delights of Pro Evolution Soccer!

Let me entertain...me

According to analyst reports out last week, people are starting to think about games in a whole new light. So much so that gaming will become the most popular form of entertainment in the UKover the coming year. The boffins are predicting that games sales will rise by a whopping 42 per cent to the dizzying heights of £4.64bn. Compare that to the total predicted sales for music AND video at £4.46bn and I think you’ll find that we have a new king of the castle.

Now, I love music, but I also love gaming (probably love gaming more) so I don’t want to be giving the music industry a hard time – but the figures don’t lie. Apparently the video games industry has more than doubled in the last 5 years while music sales have struggled. You might be thinking that the ongoing issue of online downloads has caused problems for the music industry, but the same figures show that downloads only represent 4 per cent of totals sales. Want to know what the big growth area for the music and video industry has been? Online sales of DVDs and CDs – go figure.

MyTake – Video games aren’t cheap, costing you around about 3 or 4 times the amount that a CD would cost you, so the more popular gaming becomes the more substantial the sales figures will be. But, you can’t take this achievement away from the gaming industry, it’s been in the pipeline for a long time. The interesting space to watch is what the “multitasking entertainer” is going to be doing in the coming years. We may only have one set of “eyeballs”, but we’re consuming up to 3 different types of entertainment at one time and that’s probably going to get even more intense.

Gold rush

In entertainment terms, the games industry is still a sprightly youngster, all wide-eyed and full of hope and excitement. But, perhaps a sign if its’ increasing maturity is the fact that almost 500,000 people in developing countries make money by developing “virtual goods” to sell to the more affluent players around the world. According to new research by Manchester University, those developing the “virtual goods” are earning up to $77 per month.

The practice known as gold-farming and is widely condemned by the games industry, but it’s becoming more common as gaming is becoming a more popular pastime. Recent stories about the price of "land" in online virtual worlds like Second Life also seem to back up the theory that online gaming has spawned a number of legitimate and not so legitimate money making schemes.

MyTake – Where there are eyeballs there’s an audience, and where there’s interaction, there’s a market. It’s clear that the games industry is a fertile market for companies of all shapes and sizes – hence Microsoft’s acquisition of Massive. The smaller, less legitimate players involved just goes to demonstrate the importance of the gaming industry and the influence it has on an audience. It’s funny, I was talking to a father of two yesterday about the need to understand technology (and gaming especially) in order to both protect and interact with our children – he completely agreed, even to the point that the modern day parent has to be respected both on and offline.

More A-Grade gamers

I was in a pub at the weekend and they had an old school games machine that had the likes of PacMan and Space Invaders on it. Naturally I went and had a go, as did my mate that I would never have picked as a gamer, let alone someone that’s in to classic games. The embarrassing thing was that he was bloody awesome at it – way better than me – even though (as he confessed) it had been a long time since he played.

He is, of course, yet another victim of the “I’m too old to play video games” culture that has kept many adults away from a whole host of games consoles for decades. Which brings me to the point of this post –another attempt to get people to think about gaming in a different way.

New findings discussed at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association in Boston (the home of my favourite beer, Sam Adams) looked at the effect that playing video games has on people. We’ve already heard about the recovery of rehab patients using the Wii, or surgeons improving their hand-eve coordination, but according to psychologist Douglas Gentile of Iowa State University, games are “powerful educational tools and have many effects we might not have expected they could."

MyTake – Surprise, surprise, yet another academic that thinks gaming is a good thing. We have to get over our pre-conceptions about gaming and jump-in. I went to a conference a while back where someone described Facebook as a giant game and I reckon they’re right, the only difference between this and gaming on a console is the negative connotations placed on console gaming by technophobes that refuse to embrace new technology (and probably think that the internet is a bad thing). Jump-in, experience it because in the next two years gaming, social networking, TV, entertainment is all going to be the same thing.

A-Grade gamers

Nintendo is turning out to be quite the darling of the gaming industry, and to think that only a few years back the majority of the media wee signalling that the end was neigh with poor sales of the GameCube.

But, just like the ugly and unpopular kid at school that turns into the most successful, good looking person from your class – there’s a bit of “In your face!” about what Nintendo has achieved. Granted, they started off battling the likes of SEGA for the gaming crown way back when, but up against the PS1, PS2 and the original Xbox, the brand struggled a bit and lost a fair bit of ground.

But, just as Gloria Gaynor once sang, “and now I’m back”, and they are, in a huge, huge way. The point of this post is not to muse upon the achievements of Nintendo the brand, but to talk about an interesting bit of news about the company’s handheld, the DS. Just as the Wii is making huge inroads away from traditional gaming audiences, so is the DS.

Over the past few weeks I have been reading more and more reports about the DS being used in education. There have been a couple of cases here in Australia where whole classes have been given DS handhelds to help them “warm-up” their brains ahead of the day’s lessons and it’s had some startling results with grades improving across the class. In another report a Junior high school teacher in Japan has used the DS in weekly lessons to teach English.

MyTake – I must have said this a hundred times – gaming is good. The more fun you have, the more you learn and remember. There are also scientific benefits associated with gaming, such as increased hand-eye coordination, faster reactions and so on. Technology is becoming a bigger part of out day-to-day lives and the more we embrace it the better we will become, the more we ignore it the more we are missing out. Ignorance isn’t bliss, it’s boring

N-Gaging times ahead

First-up, I wasn’t that big of a fan of the Nokia N-Gage device(s), but I am a massive fan of mobile gaming – whatever form it takes. The guys over at Nokia have stuck with the market for quite a while now and I think they’ve come good with the N-Gage service. If you remember the original device and have a few dubious memories, think again, the device is no more but the games remain as a service.

Gamers can log on to the N-Gage site and download a software link that connects them to Nokia’s library of games, which they reckon will be around 30 by the middle of 2008. They already have the likes of EA, Gameloft and Glu Mobile making titles for the service, and who knows, they could get a few killer franchises on board – Spore maybe?

MyTake – Nobody really “owns” mobile gaming, it’s an open field for any brand to go in and do something great. Sure, we have handhelds from Nintendo and Sony, but a solid content-based system with some appealing titles? Not yet. With Apple getting further and further in to the mobile space, I think a true games service isn’t far off for them either. Nokia beat them to the punch on this one – can they make they most of it?

Game on for Apple?

It looks like Apple could be about to step into the highly competitive video games console market after the company filed a trademark extension with the US Patent and Trademark Office. It could all be speculation and some experts have dismissed it as being related to the current iPod games on offer, but the extension included: "handheld units for playing electronic games", "handheld units for playing videogames", "stand-alone video game machines", "LCD game machines" and "electronic games other than those adapted for use with television receivers only".

Having worked in the games industry as a consultant, I know first hand how brutal it can be – so, can Apple crack it? Well, some might remember that they’ve been there before with the ill-fated PipPin consoles that struggled against strong competition from Sony, Nintendo and SEGA before being consigned to history as an ugly footnote on the company’s otherwise brilliant record in the product space.

MyTake – tough one this, on one hand Apple has an awesome record in the product space, rewriting the rules and even creating new markets. On the other hand the gaming market is a hard place to succeed. But, if they do enter the gaming market the other boys had better watch-out, gaming is about fun, listening to the consumer and giving them want they want – and that epitomises what Apple is all about.

They tried to make me go to Wiihab….

There appears to be no stopping the juggernaut that is the Nintendo Wii – gaming machine, fitness machine, training machine for surgeons and now….rehab machine. The Wii’s popularity continues to extend at a scorching pace with its latest accolade being in the field of rehab therapy for patients recovering from stokes, broken bones surgery and even combat injuries.

According to the experts, some traditional therapy exercises can be repetitive dull and painful. Playing on the Wii engrosses the patient to the point where they can become totally oblivious to the exercise they are actually doing while playing.

Dr Osborn of Southern Illinois Healthcare, one of the hospitals using the Wii as part of its rehab therapy said. "In the Wii system, because it's kind of a game format, it does create this kind of inner competitiveness. Even though you may be boxing or playing tennis against some figure on the screen, it's amazing how many of our patients want to beat their opponent …. When people can refocus their attention from the tediousness of the physical task, oftentimes they do much better."

MyTake – Score for the Wii, the world is clearly loving this machine. When it launched it had its critics and while it’s not a giant leap forward, I’d say it’s probably a giant leap side wards in thinking – its taken gaming in a whole new direction and this is what innovation is about. There’s something ever so slightly fitting in the fact you wave the wiimote around like a wand…… something magical you might say.

Wii T in your home

Hugely respected as a director and as a producer, Steven Spielberg now brings us another Wii-son to get into gaming with the release of BOOM BLOX, a game he developed in partnership with EA's Casual Entertainment Label for the Wii platform.



Spielberg said - "I am a gamer myself, and I really wanted to create a video game that I could play with my kids,"


"BOOM BLOX features an enormous amount of fun challenges and cool scenarios for your kids to solve or for you to master together."


Check out http://www.boomblox.ea.com/


MyTake - Gaming is good and gaming with your kids is even better. Spielberg’s involvement in developing a game follows similar moves by Peter Jackson, of Lord of the Rings fame, who is developing for the Xbox 360 platform. Gaming is another way of storytelling, offering a different canvas and some would say a more challenging one. When names like Jackson and Spielberg are getting involved it's a huge validation for the industry.

And the winner is....

It's the bedrock of the gaming industry and it seems still the most popular - long live the FPS. In recently released figures from GFK, the most popular game of 2007 was Activision's Call of Duty 4. Accroding to figures from Activision, it has sold more than seven million copies since its launch. A special nod to the remarkable Halo 3, a fantastic end to one of the most successful gaming franchises, which earned more than £84m ($170m) in sales in its first 24 hours on release, according to Microsoft.

My take - I have played the COD series since the beginning and it's a great concept. The real trick here is cross platform - the more consoles you get it on, the more you sell. But that's not to take away from the achievement - keeping the concept so fresh after so long is amazing.

Gaming the new music classroom

Just read this from the IG CES report:

Gamers were well represented from the start of the show, with Slash rocking out live on Guitar Hero during the CES Pre-Show. Mixing the fun of that wildly successful game with a little education, Guitar Wizard promises to make your skills proper. Combining Guitar Hero maneuvers with real guitar strings, it will help you progress to true rock star status.

In my opinion, games like these are the way to mass market appeal. Being able to get involved with something "real" is hugely appealing and helps to dispel the image that gaming is for geeks in dark rooms

Check out the Slash video here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljiiy5BCQKA