I'm considering launching a wiki to provide a lexicon for game developers.

Backstory: There's been considerable discussion over the years about the need for a shared vocabulary for game design (see here f'rinstance), and its starting to emerge. UT/Austin has a project to develop such a lexicon, but it uses traditional research principles, which strikes me as extraordinarily retro--a wiki seems like a much better approach. And there is a game design wiki, but it takes a game design patterns approach, which is too narrow--that is, game design patterns are one useful way of approaching game design, but essentially they're a laundry list of possible game mechanics, rather than a more formal approach to understanding games and game development. As I see it, a proper lexicon should certainly include the vocabulary developed by the game design patterns folks, but that should be only a part of the whole.

Indeed, I see no reason to limit such a lexicon to terms for game designers only; I frequently run into terms used by programmers or artists, and would love to have an easy way to look up what they mean (what exactly are particle effects? and what do 3D animators mean by "bones"?).

I'm imagining something like the wikipedia, but restricted to terms and concepts of interest to game developers and game players. Discussions of particular game titles would be excluded (except where a game's name has become short-hand for a category of games, e.g., "Rogue-like").

What do you think? Would you contribute? And if you're familiar with various wiki platforms, what would you recommend as the best to use for this purpose. (My biggest wants: has to run on Linux, ease of set-up and maintenance, and auto-generation of an alphabetical index.)

Update: Jason Della Rocca, IGDA's executive director, has told suggested hosting the wiki at the IGDA's site. This makes a lot of sense to me, because a) it would have a lot more visibility there (and would be likely to attract a lot more contributors), and b) I don't have to pay for the bandwidth. I imagine it will be some months before anything happens, but I think this would be fun, worthwhile--and even something my employer wouldn't mind me spending time on. So hey.
posted by Greg at 4:35 PM 3 comments

The media people consume affect the way they think. Not in the gross terms posited by the opponents of violence in media (play violent game, commit violent act) but in a far subtler way. Text, for instance, is good at developing arguments, getting inside the head of characters, and expressing nuance. Video is good at displaying images and providing an illusion of presence. Clearly, the decline of text as most people's source of information and entertainment, and the rise of television and movies in its place, has had enormous impacts, both good and bad, on society. On the good side, the ability of video to provide a sense of presence makes it far harder for societies to ignore horrors; who can doubt that the international engagement in post-Yugoslavia, Darfur, and Rwanda was motivated by the revulsion of TV viewers? Or, for that matter, that the images we got from Vietnam turned the US against that war (and may well do so with Iraq, over time).

On the bad side, thinking in visuals rather than in text leads to sloppiness. Text has a fixed presence, and can be used to develop extended arguments; visuals trigger emotions, and cannot approach the same level of intellectual rigor. As a result, our political dialog is dominated by unsubstantiated claims and appeals to emotion (the argumendum ad populum) since these work better on TV. To put it another way, those whose thinking is shaped by text are natural formalists; those whose thinking is shaped by video are natural post-modernists, and this is not a good thing, since post-modernism leaves nothing to talk about but opinion.

And on the neutral side, I think it obvious that the rise of interest in appearance, fashion, and celebrity is directly tied to the rise of visual culture, and the decline in text.

Given the increasing amount of time that people spend with games, the question arises: How does gameplay change the way people think? And what are the implications of these changes for society?

Years ago, I took a stab at this, but think it worthwhile to re-examine the issue.

Traditionally, we have used two different methodologies to try to understand the universe; narrative, and math. Indeed, the split between the two is the split between the "two cultures" of science and the humanities; the humanities try to understand something by making a story out of it, while science tries to understand something by expressing it in mathematical terms.

I've written previously about the conflict between game and story, which derives from the "static" nature of story (inherently unidirectional) and the dynamic (interactive, if we must use the term) nature of the game. But something similar is true in the relationship between math and the game as well; while mathematics is often used to express notions of change (indeed, this is why the calculus was invented), equations are also curiously static things. They express not process, but a single, invariant understanding of a phenomenon; games use math, certainly, but they use it to calculate changing phenomena (the motion of an object, say), displaying the change iteratively. Games (even non-digital ones) are, in a sense, Turing machines; they perform procedures, changing over time. You understand an equation by studying it, and using it to perform some calculations; you understand a game in a different way, by playing with it, experimenting, exploring the parameters of the system.

In other words, games differ from our conventional ways of approaching problems in an important way: they are dynamic systems with constrained behavior modes, not a set of ideas expressed as a narrative, nor in the form of static math. Game players approach games with a set of assumptions that, we may presume, they also take to other spheres of their lives: That freedom is permitted within a constrained system; that the system is masterable; that experimentation is the way to mastery; that all problems have at least one solution.

To generalize, then, non-gamers tend to approach a new situation asking "what do I need to know?", while gamers tend to ask "How do I game this system to get what I want?"

You might call this the ludic viewpoint--viewing the world as a collection of processes rather than of facts, as a manipulable system the parameters of which are learned through experimentation.

Naturally, this viewpoint has its limitations as well as its strengths; the system of the world is vastly more complex, and less comprehensible, than any game, and quite often problems do not have any clear, or easily discoverable, solution. Yet the ludic viewpoint does imply more pro-active engagement, and less passive acceptance. As a result, gamers make good problem solvers.

Years ago, my friend Bill Watkins, an enthusiastic board wargamer, told me about a presentation he made to his managers at Olivetti, where he then worked. He took out a copy of Conquistador (a boardgame on which I worked), and described how it worked; investing money in expeditions, extracting gold and returning it to Europe, determining where to plant the most productive colonies, and so on. And then said, "I'm doing more analysis and planning in playing this game than we ever do around here."

That's the ludic viewpoint. And while it's certainly too early to say whether its spread will ultimately be positive or negative (certainly both, in some degree), I'm sure Olivetti would have been a lot better off if they had listend to Bill.

But another phenomenon has recently struck me: The spread of a desire to use game techniques in non-game applications. Here's one fascinating example: The Ivanhoe game (that link leads to lit-crit jargon puffery; gamers will be more interested in the rules, which are here). Essentially, the purpose of the Ivanhoe game is to perform in-depth critical analysis of a literary work by having participants take on the role of imagined characters--not necessarily drawn from the work, but simply to concretize the assumptions the analyst is making by ascribing them to a character he creates who has his or her own motivations and backstory. The players then roleplay their characters as they discuss the work in an interactive forum (previously, they've used blog software for this purpose). The claim is that "The game promotes self-conscious awareness about interpretation and seeks to encourage collaborative activity in fields such as literature, religious studies, history, and other humanities disciplines."

Uh... How weird is that? And isn't it a weird world we live in when academia apparently responds "how interesting," rather than "stop playing games and get on with serious critical analysis"?

Here's another example of the use of a "game" for a serious purpose: Allen Varney, designer of Paranoia XP ran a game under the Lexicon rules. Lexicon is a game in which players create, over time, a wiki encyclopedia on a particular topic. That is, the topic is decided before the game begins; the players take the roles of characters contributing to this encyclopedia; in the first week (or whatever), players begin by writing entries for items that begin with the letter "a", and must "link" to entries for later letters (which must eventually get written), and so on.

Allen's game, The Toothpaste Disaster, was a wiki about an event in the history of Alpha Complex (the world of Paranoia). And while he and the contributors had fun playing, it served another purpose: Several of the best contributors were then invited to become part of "The Traitor Recycling Studio," and have subsequently written two products for us (Crash Priority, and the upcoming Paranoia Stuff). In other words, The Toothpaste Disaster was both a game, and a means of finding writers who "get" the Paranoia tone. And how like a gamer to solve a problem by--making a game.

Another example: last year, I met with a neurological scientist who uses little interactive applications in his practice. Each application is designed to help people with some brain injury or neurological disfunction in a particular type of mental skill, helping them regain a lost ability. They were quite dull--but actually quite game-like. His idea, which I thought a good one, was to make them more engaging by pushing the game-like nature--as he put it, you can make people sit down in my office and play these things, but nobody wants to keep doing it when they get home. Perhaps we can make them fun enough that they will want to do so. I'd just taken the job with Nokia, so couldn't do it, but put him in touch with a couple of local game developers, and I believe one of them is now working with him to this end. Again: using games for non-game purposes.

And then there's the Serious Games Initiative, whose whole purpose is to use games for non-game purposes. At present, this mostly means games for the military, because that's where the money is (and nothing new about that--indeed, the modern game, or "the designed game" as I've called it prevously, is arguably an outgrowth of 18th century kriegspieler). But there are also some interesting health care applications, as well as Noah Falstein's Hungry Red Planet, a game which teaches nutrition by having you manage food production for the Martian colony (actually a pretty cool game).

The interesting aspect here is the changing nature of "the educational game;" education games (or edutainment, to use that vile word, coined to his shame by Edwin Schlossberg) have been with us virtually since the inception of the desktop revolution, but earlier ones were basically straightforward games with conventional pedagogy stuck on (solve this math problem before we let you load the next level). Increasingly, people working on educational games understand that the education is in the process, not in sugarcoating the process of pouring facts into students' heads by giving them moments of gameplay between the didactic bits. And the trick is to create processes that are themselves educational--e.g., if I were teaching a course in early modern history, I'd insist that all of my students play Europa Universalis II.

In other words, while the ludic viewpoint changes the way we engage with the world, it's having another effect as well: gamers look for ways to make games that solve non-game problems. And that too has the potential to change the world.



posted by Greg at 1:36 PM 3 comments

Johnny Pi has an interesting rumination on the problems of integrating "real" AI in a story-driven game, which is spot on: NPCs exist mainly to pour clues into players' heads, and if they actually talk like real people, it's hard to make certain clue A gets imparted to player B at critical moment C. Instead, they may want to talk about babies. Or football. Or zucchini. Or something.

Jamdat's going to sell mobile games through Radio Shack. And a good thing too; we need to find some way to market mobile games to people other than via one line of text on a carrier's deck, or the current basic market problem (only licensed crap sells) persists. Although it's also true that previous attempts to move to retail (Digital Bridge's retail SKU cards, modelled on the ones you can buy for ring tones; Game Stop's kiosks that beam games via Bluetooth to devices that support it) have not exactly set the world on fire. Still, we can hope.

Damion Schubert makes a good case for the claim that World of Warcraft's quest system is what differentiates it from other MMOGs, and is the main reason for its popularity.

Game Girl Advance links to this review of Sociolotron (actual game can be found here). I'm still not convinced; from what I've seen, graphical sex environments are inferior to text, and I suspect will stay that way until we get past the uncanny valley. I remember looking at a Habitat-like sex chat world with 2D avatars at one point, and remember thinking that watching little animated sprites bonking each other was about the least erotic thing I'd ever seen. And consider the interface issues when you move to 3D; we're pretty good about animating gestures or actions by individual characters, but getting characters to physically interact, in complicated ways, and respond to each other's caresses in a believable fashion---well, it's damned complicated. Some things work better in text. Or the flesh, of course.

(There's also a funding issue--MMOs are complicated and expensive, and conventional sources of funding aren't going to touch any such thing with a ten foot dildo. Friend of mine spent years trying to scratch up the money for one such idea, and eventually gave up and went to work for AOL.)

Of course, for the tabletop crowd, there's the Complete Guide to Unlawful Carnal Knowledge for Fantasy Roleplaying Games. But again, it's a rules-set--might be entertaining to use, but not, I imagine, arousing to do so. Not that I really want to have simulated sex in the presence of my usual roleplaying crowd, either.

I this context, I might note something I touched on in Violence: most games are about doing things you really wouldn't want to do in real life. Sex is something I'd rather do in real life. Hence it probably isn't a great subject for a game, unless the game itself is essentially an excuse for flirtation and cyber. Even then, I suspect you're better off choosing varieties of sex that (most) people wouldn't really want to do in real life--BDSM, for instance. And indeed, there are number of BDSM themed talkers, MOOs, and so on. /spank



posted by Greg at 3:46 PM 3 comments

...of sinking despair.

When last we left the saga of Vicky's cameraphone activation, Cingular/AT&T's service people, unable to figure out how to ship me a SIM card, had decided to send me a "free" phone, the theory being that I could use the SIM card that came with it, and give the free phone to the baby as a teething toy or something.

In early January, the free phone arrived, along with a SIM card. I got it installed in Vicky's phone--and learned that the card had clearly been used previously, as it had phone numbers for a bunch of folks in the contact list. Based on area codes, by someone in LA. But whatever. (Mind you, this is arguably a serious breach of customer privacy.)

The package came with instructions for activation. I called the number printed thereon, and gave them Vicky's phone number--remember that I'm trying to transfer that number from her existing, AT&T TDMA account, to her new Cingular GSM phone-- as well as the SIM card number and the EMEI printed on the phone.

Do I have a Cingular account?

Well... Sure... Don't I? I mean, I'm transferring this from an AT&T account, I've been through all this nonesense on the phone before, they said they were putting the transfer through... I must have an account. Musn't it?

Well, they have no record. But no worries, they'll just transfer me to someone and set up the new account. Grumbling, I give them the information they need. In five days I can call back and activate the phone.

This--doesn't sound right. It really doesn't. What's the damn problem? Normally, all you have to do is input the EMEI and the SIM number, and you're off to the races. But okay... Whatever... What's another five days when it's already been three weeks? And maybe it's more complicated when you port a phone number from one carrier to another. (Of course, AT&T and Cingular are now a single carrier--but I imagine virtually no systems are yet integrated, so maybe they have to treat it like a transfer from one carrier to another.)

(Incidentally, I later figured out the problem here: the information they sent me was for phone activation for regular customers. Louise is a business customer [I presume it's something related to her employer], and there's a separate phone number for business customer activation. And apparently the regular customer activation people don't see accounts for business people... There =was= an account, they just didn't know about it. And consequently opened a new, superfluous account....)

I don't think about it for a week or so, and then Louise gives me a call. She's just gotten a "welcome to Cingular" packet, with a new phone number, and a bill for $90. The welcome packet says she's just committed to a two year contract. What the hell is going on?

So now, I have two SIM cards, a phone I don't want, a new phone number I don't want, and a two year contract I don't want. And I still don't have an active phone. Louise is getting... peeved with me.

I decide that the best thing to do is gather all this crap together--the two phones, the two SIM cards, the bill and so on, and go down to a physical Cingular store. Morons on the phone can always transfer me to India and drop the call, but it's harder for someone in person to evade you. But what with one thing and another, another week or two goes by. I'm not looking forward to this after all.

So yesterday, I went down to the Cingular outlet on Broadway and Liberty, and... They can't help me. I got that phone in the email, they can't take it back, I have to talk to customer care on the phone. So sorry, not our problem. But you can use the courtesy phone in the back to make the call.

Oh, god. I consider blowing up, but... the girl at the counter clearly has no authority. And yes, I'm prepared to believe that there is no integration between the phone folks and the store folks, and they can't help me. A stupid fucking way to run a business, but yes, this sounds typical.

So I get on the courtesy phone. This time, I more or less luck out. It only takes one transfer to find someone who seems competent. I pour out my tale of woe, and she eventually comes up what (seems) like a solution. I'm to take my "free" phone and one of the SIMs, and ship it back to an address in Fort Worth. (Is she sure? The return address in the welcome packet is in Tennesee... I... hope this is right...). That will cancel the new, unnecessary account. Then, when Vicky's phone is charged, I can insert the other SIM in it, and call the number for activation. Should be fine. And she gives me the order number for the transfer from Vicky's TDMA phone, in case there's any problem.

But which SIM card should I return? She puts me on hold, confers with someone, and ultimately decides that it's the second SIM card, the one shipped separately, that should go back to Cingular. Is there anything else she can help me with?

No.... I guess not. But please note: I still don't have a working phone with the right number.

So I go home. Today, I boxed up the phone and SIM and shipped it. Then, I called Cingular's activation number.

What's the phone number? We don't have any record of that phone number. My voice is on the ragged end of despair, but I'm trying to be patient. I'm transferring the phone from an AT&T TDMA phone number... Oh, I'll just transfer your call to migration...

Wait! No! Not migration! Migration is in India! Aaaah....

But migration isn't as horrible as I'm anticipating. I explain the situation, and they ask for the account number. I'm not sure, but I read them the order number they gave me yesterday, and they manage to pull that up (mirabile dictu). Oh, it's a business account number. I will transfer you to business account activation.

Business account activation, however, does not want to deal with me, becuase I am clearly not Louise. However, she can call back at any time to complete the activation to this number.

Which number? He tells me; it's not, of course, the number I called for activation, because there's a separate one for business accounts (not that I have ever received a piece of paper or anything else with this activation number on it). I try to argue the Louise-must-do-it issue, but not too vigorously, because after all, we are divorced, and if I were Cingular I'd be damned suspicious of an ex trying to make changes to his erstwhile spouse's account.

But I figure he's just a dickhead, (and besides, Louise is pissy enough and is not going to want to have to do this) and call right back to the business activation number. I skirt the "who are you" issue by mentioning that the phone is my daughter's, and Louise is the mom, and I'm the dad. I also have the last four digits of Louise's social security number, which pacifies them. And to cap it off, the account is actually in the name Karen (Karen Louise, but she uses Louise), and Karen (not Louise), my current sweetie, gets on the phone to read off the SIM card numbers (which I, with my middle-aged eyes, cannot adequately make out). Karen, Karen, how convenient.

Are we a go yet?

Well, no. Their record indicate that this SIM card is currently activated. AAAAH! To some fucker in LA, no doubt. No, they pull it up, and it's activated to--to the "new" phone number for the free phone I didn't want.

In other words, I've just shipped the wrong damn SIM card (on their instructions) back to Cingular.

Well, not to worry. They can just ship me a new SIM card.

Whimper.

So that's where we stand now. The unwanted Cingular account is (supposedly) going to be cancelled when the unwanted phone is returned to an address different from the one provided for returns in the welcome packet. I have a SIM card I can't use, and they're shipping me another one I'm supposed to get on Monday, at which time I will theoretically be able to activate the phone, just as I was theoretically able to activate it several times before.

But I still don't have a working phone.

To start from the top: I wanted to do something simple--transfer a number from an AT&T TDMA account to Cingular, and get a Cingular SIM for a GSM phone for that account--and get the damn phone to work. Account transfer, check; SIM card, check; make phone work, check. These are all things mobile operators are supposed to be able to deal with easily, right? The kinds of things their bureaucracies are supposed to be designed to expedite--the core of their business.

So why, a month into this and more than 8 aggregate hours on the phone, do I still not have a working device?

I have a modest proposal: Companies need to perform stress testing on their CRM systems. That is, just as software testers try to imagine every possible boundary condition and every possible input, to ensure that programs deal with everything gracefully, customers for whom CRM is essential should hire people--either consultants or employees--to dream up as many customer issues and problems as they can, then see how the system deals with the problems, and make reccomendations to fix them.

Having people monitor your calls may help you weed out customer service personnel who are incompetent or nasty, but it doesn't help you fix your procedures. For that, you need a way to stress-test (and iteratively modify) your procedures.

Sounds like a business idea for someone.

posted by Greg at 2:28 PM 4 comments

And so the other shoe drops; Take Two signs a deal with the MLBPA (Major League Baseball Players' Association). Reported elsewhere as being "exclusive," it actually is only partially so; the release says:

"Beginning in 2006, Take2 will have exclusive rights among third-party publishers to develop and market simulation, arcade and manager-style baseball video games on the current and next-generation PlayStation, X-BOX, Nintendo, personal computer and hand-held video game systems. At the same time, manufacturers of video game systems will have the opportunity to develop and publish baseball simulation games for their own platforms."

Meaning, I suppose, that Sony can do a PSII-exclusive title, Microsoft an XBox-only title, and so on.

Another point worth noting here is that, in baseball, the MLBPA controls only the names and images of the players themselves, while the owners' association (MLB) controls the rights to the teams' names and indicia. Thus it would still be possible for other companies to do baseball games under a license from the MLB, but would have to use generic players in such a game (which is, of course, far from ideal).

With EA "owning" football and Take Two baseball, that leaves a handful of important sports; FIFA soccer (in non-US markets, vastly more important than either of the US sports), basketball, college football, NASCAR, and Formula One. I wouldn't be surprised to see deals made for some of these in the next year.

The question, of course, is whether this is "good" or "bad" for the industry, and for gamers. I'm not a sports gamer (I basically have no interest in sports), but I had a conversation really with a fellow, call him Gary (since that's his name), who is a serious sports gamer, and has bought John Madden Football almost every year since the franchise began.

"I've gotten pretty tired of Madden Football," he says. "All they really do is tweak the graphics and pour in the new player stats. They always have some little new feature to push, but its stuff I can't get excited about--like I get a share of concession revenues in the stadium. Who gives a crap?"

Gary viewed the Sega/Take Two ESPN games as a strong positive, because EA hasn't had real competition in the sports segment for years, and without competition, there's no incentive for innovation. "I understand why they made the NFL deal--the ESPN games were pretty good, and they got scared. But I'm just not going to keep on paying $50 every year for new stats." In other words, lack of competition means lack of innovation, which at least in Gary's case, means he's going to drift away.

Of course, it's possible to argue that there is neither need nor room for innovation in sports games; Len Quam says the modern football games are better than the real thing--visuals are superior to what you get in a broadcast, and "the announcers are less annoying." His nephews bought the ESPN football game because "they're basically all the same, and its cheaper." Perhaps, with such a tightly defined genre as the sports game, we now have all of the graphical elements, control elements, etc. that we need, and any innovation can only be at the margins.

Possibly so, but Gary is also certainly right: Without competition, there's no incentive to try anything new. And we're moving into an era of, in essence, sport-by-sport monopolies.

In other words: Gamers lose. The licensors clearly win; by offering exclusive licenses, they can presumably capture a considerably larger share of the total dollar expenditure on sports games, and the only possible way they lose is if that total dollar volume drops through the alienation of sports gamers (which, if it happens, will be a slow process operating over years). The question is whether the industry also loses, and here it's hard to call. On the one hand, it surrenders a larger share of dollar volume to licensors; on the other hand, effective monopolies means that the $50 price point for sports games can be defended, meaning total dollar volume is higher. But effective monopolies also means no innovation, which I have to believe is not good for the long term health of the category.



posted by Greg at 11:58 AM 2 comments

Vicky's homework for today:

Define the following terms and use them in a sentence:

1. Civilization
A modernized society led by a government, n. "Civilization is a fun computer game created by Sid Meier."

2. Sophisticated.
Refined, adj. "Civilization is a very sophisticated computer game."

3. Monopolize.
To obtain exclusivity over something, v. "I monopolized my family's computer playing Civilization."

4. Adapt.
Change to fit new requirements, v. "Sid Meier adapted Civilization to create Civilization 2 and 3!"

5. Decode.
Figure out, v. "In Civilization, you must decode how to defeat your enemies."

6. Archaelogy.
The study of old things, n. "Sid Meier read about archaeology when researching for his game, Civilization."

7. Conquest.
Seizing the territories of others, n. "One of the objectives in Civilization is the conquest of other civilizations."

8. Strategic
Of or pertaining to complicated planning. "Civilization is a very strategic game."

...All words her own.
posted by Greg at 9:30 PM 4 comments

So Wish is dead. Yet another instance that demonstrates Gordon Walton's famous claim that, instead of funding an MMOG, you'll be better off if you put all your money in a big pile, set it alight, and dance around the flames. (You'll lose all your money more quickly and with less heartache.) I actually had hopes for this game, back when Dave Rickey was on the team as lead designer--but when they canned him last year, I concluded they didn't really have a clue.

A long, but somewhat interesting article claiming that open source game development has a brilliant future. (The first half of the article is a recap of the early days of the "hacker mentality," and the development of Space War--it can probably be skipped, if you're up on that, which I imagine most readers are.) The salient point is that it's feasible to build a commercial game on top of an open source engine--certainly true, the art and such can still be protected. (And author Matt Barton has a quote from rms giving his papal blessing to that approach.) And I'm chuffed that they link to the Scratchware Manifesto. As much as I'd like to believe the thesis, I'm not convinced, however. While there are a number of open-source game engine projects, none are really ready for prime-time; and while some older engines (e.g., Quake) have been open-sourced, they're old enough that a game built on them is not going to look that great. Moreover, any game engine is developed with a particular game style (usually FPS, but occasionally RTS or RPG or somesuch) in mind, and if you're doing anything particularly innovative, it's not going to be a particularly useful starting point. E.g., you wouldn't want to try to build The Sims on top of the Quake engine. If innovation is the point, then "open source engine plus copyrighted art" isn't going to work.

Finally, comics geek that I am, I am so looking forward to this. (Oh, and if you haven't picked it up, the original Freedom Force can now be found for ten bucks or less, definitely a great deal.
posted by Greg at 2:12 PM 4 comments

Reuters is reporting that Infogrames (still technically the parent of "Atari") and Ubisoft are contemplating a merger, possibly with some kind of support from the French government. (The French government has often been known to intervene to prevent "national champions" from being taken over by foreign firms, although I'm surprised anyone would consider the games industry to be of vital national importance.) Ubisoft shares rose 10% yesterday as a result. (Also, if you read French, see this interview with Bruno Bonnell, head of Infogrames/Atari, at Le Bousier. More commentary Gamedaily.)

From a platform perspective, such a merger might make sense; Atari is much more powerful in PC gaming than Ubisoft (which indeed is one of Atari's problems, given the relative decline of the PC as a games platform over the last few years). From a business perspective, it makes less of one; Atari is, basically, a wounded giant, and save for the nationalist aspect, is not otherwise an obvious merger target for an effective, growing company like Ubi. (Although one could argue that Atari would benefit from Ubisoft's superior management--still, mergers like this are generally net destroyers rather than creators of wealth.)

Still, it's an interesting countermove.

Also today is an interview with Nada Usina, head of Nokia's game & media business unit in North America.
posted by Greg at 11:23 AM 4 comments

Extreme Tech has an interesting piece on WiFi games. Essentially, you scan for WiFi access points. Some are variations on hide-and-go-seek, some on Capture the Flag--in other words, not interesting for the designs themselves, but for the use of technology in an unexpected way. Via Slashdot Games

Also, despite reports elsewhere, an O.B.E. lets you tag inits to the end of your name (should you be so pompous)--it's not a knighthood, and so Peter Molyneux is not Sir Peter. Gamesindustry.biz also notes that Molyneux is not the first UK game developer to be so honored; that was Jez San, founder of Argonaut Games PLC.
posted by Greg at 2:11 PM 5 comments