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Tuesday, January 6th, 2009
| Time |
Event |
| 10:07a |
Are You Steve Jobs in Your Business? The World of Macintosh, filled with more people with more fanaticism than World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ), is all abuzz (and atwitter and ablogging) about MacWorld. Why this year more than most? Because this is MacWorld's swan song, since Apple says they will no longer put on this annual January show. Even worse, Steve Jobs won't address the pilgrims, er, attendees, so the WOM is full of speculation Steve may retire. They can't imagine Apple without Steve Jobs. Can you imagine your company without you or other critical employees? Can your customers? Ignoring the horde of AppleNuts, and there are seemingly millions, the idea of Steve Jobs leaving Apple makes many watchers nervous for Apple. Many feel only Steve can lead Apple. While a nice testament to Steve's charisma, this may be an indictment of his leadership. If no one can imagine Apple After Steve, we can certainly say Steve hasn't properly planned for all contingencies of management. After all, everyone can be hit by that proverbial truck at any time. What about your business? I'm not trying to be morbid about your demise, but rather asking if functions in your company are run by employees doing their own thing, or employees following the job descriptions and processes put in place by management. If you can't imagine a job being done properly without the person in that slot now staying in that slot, you have a business problem to address. If this description of the non-replaceable employee describes you, start taking action to make it easier to replace yourself. Why? You can't get promoted if no one else knows how do to your job. If you're the only IT person in your small company, you'll pass up better opportunities elsewhere out of a sense of loyalty to your current business and to avoid leaving a disaster in your wake. A sense of loyalty to your employer is wonderful. A sense of being stuck means your management hasn't done their job. Worse, it means they rely on you to react to problems rather than using planning and foresight to avoid those problems. With planning and foresight, and a good set of defined processes, someone else can step in and do your job. This makes it easier on you and much easier on your company. Emulate Steve Jobs for his vision, his sales and communications skills, and his drive for quality. Don't emulate his need to be the one and only face of Apple. If Steve steps in front of that proverbial truck, he would want Apple to continue without him. That requires planning, foresight, and defined job processes. | | 10:13a |
Gaming Industry: New Year Resolutions The art of game design made a strong showing in 2008, with innovation and excellence coming in packages both big (Mirror's Edge) and small (Braid). We got some of the greatest sequels ever created (Metal Gear Solid 4, Fallout 3 and Grand Theft Auto IV, to name just a few), and new properties sure to have franchise legs (LittleBigPlanet). It's going to be hard to top the past year in terms of great games, but there are a few key steps developers can take to ensure that 2009 is just the start of something big. Here, then, is our list of New Year's resolutions for the people on the production side of the games industry. Take heed, developers, and prepare to be excellent. Keep Listening It's incredibly difficult to spend hours, weeks, months and years of your life working on a labor of love game, only to put it out into the world and listen to people tear it apart. But rest assured, developers, the people who are raising the loudest voices over every little flaw, foible and f-up in your game are doing so out of LOVE. Nobody wants you to succeed more than they do, because they want only the best experience every time they play. It's understandable that you can't take every point of criticism or if-only-it-had-this-feature forum post into account, but there is plenty to be learned by listening to the people who are spending their time and money on your efforts. Listen, learn and incorporate as much as you can into your work. Don't Equate Mainstream With Dumb Thanks to the success of some of the more family-oriented stuff on the Wii, we're seeing a bit of a trend toward dumbing things down in order to reach the broadest possible audience. This is a cop-out. Please, spare us more commercials featuring super-generic cool kids yukking it up around a console and TV, laughing at inappropriate times and making it look like gaming is "hip." Grand Theft Auto became a pop culture touchstone without dumbing itself down. Starcraft sold a bazillion copies. Even The Sims had a level of complexity that makes the simplified stuff on the horizon seem downright primitive. Take a lesson from the failure of the Madden "All-Play" titles. People want good games, and will take the time to learn how to use TWO whole buttons if that's what it takes. Honest. Beat World of Warcraft World of Warcraft is great, and deserving of its status as the 900-pound gorilla of the gaming world. But as fans of video game football can tell you, competition is a good thing, and it's not healthy for the genre for the massively-multiplayer online RPG arena to have one name dominant for this long. There were some contenders in 2008—Warhammer Online offered a more PVP-focused experience, while Lord of the Rings Online was a viable alternative for Tolkien fans and players who prefer to solo—but you know things have gotten bad when even industry insiders are grumbling that any MMO without Warcraft in its name is doomed from the get-go. Perhaps Bioware will lead the charge with Star Wars: The Old Republic (despite whatever damage Lucas has done in the past decade, there are still few licenses stronger than that born in a galaxy far, far away), but it's time for other developers to step up, too. Azeroth awaits your challenge! For the Love of All That's Holy, Don't Sell Your Film Rights to Uwe Boll Seriously, this man must be stopped. It doesn't matter if, somewhere in his black, black soul, he has the potential to make a good movie—the damage he's already done to the very concept of video games as a viable source for quality films negates any future good that he might do. And this goes for every studio hack who would churn out childish crap like the DOOM movie (ooh, a "first-person" sequence! Whee!) and expect gamers to line up at the box office. There are developers working overtime crafting interesting stories for their games, worlds full of characters that would light up the big screen... and, instead, we get Postal. Peter Jackson's involvement, brief as it was, in the development of a Halo film was a good first step, but the time is now for games to get their cinematic due. Give us a Psychonauts animated film. Give us Mass Effect as the next great sci-fi saga. Give us Halo as the gritty far-future war movie Starship Troopers failed to be. Just please, please, keep Uwe Boll far away from all of them. Make Your Tools Available User-generated content took some big steps forward in 2008, with LittleBigPlanet's level design tools and Spore's creature creator leading the charge. Unsurprisingly, these two games were a part of the highest-profile experiences released this year, in no small part because they made the relationship between the player and the game a two-way street. There's no doubt that game designers and developers do some amazing work in crafting levels and gameplay mechanics, but as PC gamers have known for years, a group of dedicated fans working on a level, a mod or a total conversion can do wonders, too—remember, the venerable Team Fortress (and, with it, class-based team FPS play) was born as a user mod for Half-Life. In 2009, developers should allow end users to muck around with the very nuts and bolts of the games they play and not just designing levels. It might not be easy, particularly with the limited interface of consoles, but the potential rewards are as great as the enthusiasm of a game's fanbase can make them. Make DLC Work Downloadable content got off to a rocky start with the likes of Oblivion's ridiculously priced horse armor, but it's proven its worth time and again in the past year, whether your poison is new tracks for Rock Band or weapons, modes and maps in Warhawk. DLC is a viable tool for extending the life of a game, and if it's cool enough and priced reasonably enough (nobody wants to pay $10 for a new character T-shirt), people will buy it. That's why every game developer should follow the advice of Stardock's Brad Wardell. The president of the company behind Galactic Civilizations II, which has made a habit out of massive and game-changing post-release updates, has asserted that every developer should go into every project with a post-release budget already in place, and plans to make use of it. If your game is good enough, fans will want more, and there's nothing but goodwill to be gained by giving it to them. Use Motion Control Wisely This generation is a bad one for the standard controller; with the success of the Wii and the PS3's inclusion of SIXAXIS technology, everybody's looking to break the analog-stick-and-buttons mold. But there have been plenty of examples over the past year of why just slapping motion-oriented control into your game isn't enough, and that knowing how to use it, first, is key. Take Lair, for example, a game that should have been awesome (a flying dragon combat game? Come on!) but was scuttled at least partially by horrific SIXAXIS implementation. Or check out the aforementioned Wii, which has yet to see a killer app for its motion-based controls. This is a new paradigm, and wrinkles are not unexpected, but the golden rule here should be that, if you're not 100% sure that your motion controls make your game more awesome, you should toss 'em and stick to the basics. Mix Up Your Settings We're big lovers of fantasy, horror and science fiction, but let's be honest: We've fought more aliens, zombies and orcs (or orc equivalents) than should be expected of any sane individual. We've fought World War II fifty billion times, and managed an empire through the colonization of the New World over and over again. The time has come to mix things up, a bit. There are positive moves being made in this direction. Obsidian is at work on espionage RPG Alpha Protocol, and we'll be graced in 2009 with the fantasy sports game Blood Bowl—but it can go further. Why not create an organized crime-based MMO? Or an FPS set during the Revolutionary War? Or an RTS that puts you in charge of a record label and has you sending bands out on the road to make it big in the rock world? The boundaries are there, and we know you know how to play in them—now, it's time to break them. Bring Down Prices We're not professional economists, but we'd say the fact that that the Wii is the least expensive gaming alternative plays a significant role in the Wii's successes. This is a tough one, for sure, because the amount of money and resources required to develop a top-tier game continues to grow, so there's only so much a publisher can do if it hopes to turn a profit on a release. At the same time, the economy sucks and at $60 a game, players are restricting their gaming purchases, which means less revenue for publishers, which means more restrictions on developers... it's a vicious circle. If the industry drives prices down, more people will play, which can only mean good things in the long run. More Original IP As with any form of entertainment, sequels are big business in gaming. Fans want them, the developers, for the most part, want them, and publishers are more than happy to rake in the dollars as franchise lovers greedily snap up the latest installment in their favorite series. And let's not forget licensed titles, which come with their own built-in fanbases and a lot of the thematic legwork already done. But everyone should remember that, if we hadn't had the original Warcraft all those years ago, we'd never have World of Warcraft (Buy wow gold ), and if Metal Gear hadn't graced the NES, we wouldn't be on our umpteenth mission with Snake. The games world needs new and original mythology if it is to survive and thrive. It's riskier, financially, for sure, but if you do it right, you're building a foundation for worlds and universes gamers will want to occupy for years to come. | | 10:20a |
NFL player wants to change name to 'Warcraft' We all know that World of Warcraft players are zealous to the point of terrifying, but Minnesota Vikings kicksmith Chris Kluwe is prepared to take the ultimate step -- and possibly one day become Chris Warcraft. The NFL player is a big time World of Warcraft （ Currency: wow gold）nut, and last week was chatting about his gaming habits. "I think more people like to hear me talk about playing video games than football," claims Kluwe. "I've played videogames since I was 4 years old. I play them a lot more than I kick a football. I kick the ball about 45 minutes a day. I play video games about five or six hours a day. But that's OK. I don't watch TV... "Back when [Bengals receiver] Chad Johnson changed his name to Ocho Cinco, I told the guys at [radio station] 93X that I was going to change my name to Chris 'World of Warcraft.' They said that's too long. So they started calling me Chris 'Warcraft.' I could make a lot of money if I changed my name to that." That does it. From now on, my name is officially changing to Jim Bubble Bobble. | | 10:21a |
Red 5 MMO is evolving, time-based News The heads of Red 5 Studios - a developer formed three years ago around a kernel of ex-Blizzard, ex-World of Warcraft staff - have given told Gamasutra a little about what to expect about their mysterious first project. WOW team lead and chief creative officer Mark Kern said that the game - long in development, but still under wraps - would be more concerned with creating a world that would change over time based on player's actions, rather than a huge geographical space. "We want players to actually change the state of the game over time. Time is a very important concept to our game," Kern said. "We play with it in any number of ways. It is probably our key form of persistence, more than, say, geography... It's more about how this world evolves over time, versus how big your world might be." Kern promised that the much-anticipated MMO would finally be revealed "in the coming months" and that the company does "intend to have a game that appeals as much to the East as it does to the West". Chief executive Michael Weingartner added that the company wasn't worried about the difficulty other games, such as Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa and Warhammer Online, are experiencing launching against WOW - and implied they weren't in the same league as Red 5's title. "We always think there is a market for a strong, triple-A title," Michael Weingartner. "I don't think that any of the titles you just listed really fall into where we're going, where our interests are. So, that said, I don't think the current trend... worries us too much." Either way, Red 5's pedigree means that MMO watchers will be keeping close tabs on the game, along with the unannounced projects at fellow Blizzard refugees Carbine, and 38 Studios, formed by baseball player and EverQuest nut Curt Schilling. Expect all three to be revealed this year. | | 10:22a |
Gaming in Gaza It is difficult to write on a subject that unfolds in real time; fearing that a major event will occur between the time the article is readied for the editor and the printed page appears before you. But given today’s subject regards Israeli wars, so what if I miss a day or two in a topic whose layers we could peel back for hundreds, if not thousands of years. The missing ingredient of most discussions regarding the welfare of Israel is not only objectivity; sides have been hardened like epoxy through history, with the added chemistry of religion, oppression, wealth and political blackmail. But also absent from the equation is honesty and transparency as to what is the intended outcome of these unending conflicts. Everyone and no one is a victim, memories are convenient, and history is constantly rewound to suit the moment. Trust doesn’t exist. Forgiveness doesn’t exist. Though it is proven over and over and over again that violence from either side is not the way to permanently end any Middle Eastern conflict, the wars, incursions, conflicts, battles, and engagements continue to this day. In order to secure a different future, to discover a different approach than righteous killings, suicide martyrs and the like, perhaps we should let the gaming industry design the perfect application for an Arab-Israeli solution. After all, it doesn’t seem to be important to listen to what the conflicting sides say, as much as what they do. Peel back the ‘plot’ of early video war games, and you’ll find the same inane and un-winnable platform as currently exists in the Middle East. The US military discovered the application of video gaming as a means of inducing “thumb-twitching teenagers” to their pre-enlistment sites via American’s Army and America’s Army: Special Forces. These interactive games, designed by the Naval Postgraduate School and a few programmers under the leadership of West Point graduate Col. Casey Wardynski, encouraged kids to have a taste of battle without real consequences. But there was another motive. Sign on, play a while, demonstrate behaviors, judgment and attitudes desired in a combat soldier, and your teenager may soon be getting a letter, email or visit from a friendly recruiter. Unlike Israeli border clashes with groups like the PLO, Hamas, or Hezbollah, the gaming industry is evolving in finding healthier ways to resolve conflicts than with bullets, missiles or nuclear weapons. As Daniel Pink writes in A Whole New Mind, “…games have become a tool for solving problems as well as a vehicle for self-expression and self-exploration…a growing stack of research is showing that playing video games can sharpen many of the skills that are vital in the Conceptual Age…including enhancing right-brain ability to solve problems that require pattern recognition.” Shoot-em-up games are now giving way to role-playing games, “which require players to assume the identity of a character and to navigate a virtual world through the eyes of that figure. Experiences with those simulation games can deepen the aptitude of Empathy and offer rehearsals for the social interactions of our lives.” What if Palestinian and Israeli leaders could ‘navigate a virtual world’ through one another’s eyes? How might their perspective change if points were scored for honesty rather than treachery, and cooperation, peace and stability was the real purpose of the game, rather than encroachment, power and destruction? Over the last 20 years, the ‘Arab-Israeli’ game has evolved from Palestinian youth throwing rocks at rubber-bullet firing Israeli soldiers, to this day where the rockets launched indiscriminately into Israeli territory are answered by bombs, tanks and air assault. While Israel has a duty to its citizens to stop the rocket attacks, the disproportionate scale of retaliation, seemingly directed at the population of Gaza, is what the international community repeatedly finds so unacceptable. Is Israel looking for peace or surrender? Checking the score board on this mid-eastern debacle would reflect that all military attempts have been an utter failure in stopping violence, yet increasing force seems to be the only answer. Peel back the layers of blame and religious bravado, and the ultimate outcome of this game is nuclear destruction. The players change in name only, never in intent, with one enemy of the Israeli state morphing into the next. As in video games, no one dare put down the controls long enough to ask ‘why’ there seem to be so many groups intent on the destruction of this Jewish nation. More than ever, we need those “simulation games to increase empathy” rather than World of Warcraft (Buy wow gold ) for this unending equation. Our foreign aid last year to Israel was $2.9 billion, according to the U.S. Department of State, the largest amount received by any country. Virtually all of this money was used to buy weapons, most of which were made in the United States. Though the rockets fire from the West Bank are still crude devices without targeting capability, their flight distance has doubled and could soon bring them to the population center of Tel Aviv, or worse, within striking distance of Dimona, home of Israel’s nuclear weapons program. With 150 warheads, affirmed by President Carter in his info-slip of 2008, a nuclear Iran seems more likely the unnamed enemy than a few Hamas zealots along the border of Israel. Between the monetary Congressional stranglehold of the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC), and the economic stimulus of selling weapons overseas, one wonders if the new President and Secretary of State have any chance at exacting a different approach to peace. If not, at least we could put the outcome in the hands of international gamers and let them either write a new program for understanding, or play to the death. Anything would be better than continuing this nightmare of absurdity and human oppression by two sides dedicated to historic vengeance. Perhaps the new game could be called ‘Peel the Onion,” because no matter how many layers down we go, no matter how far back in time, this sort of senseless hostility can only make us cry. | | 10:26a |
Warcraft nut threatens suicide A CRAZY 17-year-old World of Warcrack (Buy wow gold ) player told a game moderator that if he didn't get his way he would kill himself. The Ohio teen told the customer services rep that he had nothing else to live for other than his marathon sessions in the fantasy role playing game and that his frustration with the game had become so all-encompassing that he had decided to top himself. The employee, no doubt keen to avoid the kind of headlines that would follow the untimely demise of a pimply social retard blamed on the ridiculously addictive game, called the cops who traced the miscreant through his IP address. They then kicked in his back door and slapped a charge of first degree misdemeanour on him. He, of course, insisted the whole thing was just a joke. Who's laughing now sunshine? | | 10:29a |
Bar and grill offers cyber fun for all Christopher Applegate reared back and swatted a ball deep into the fairway on hole four at Spyglass Hill Golf Course on California's Monterey Peninsula Saturday night. The ball smacked off a screen and rolled on the carpet toward Applegate's 2-year-old daughter, Elexandra Lynn, who retrieved it and placed it back on the synthetic green inside Medford's Cyber Center Sports Bar and Grill. "There's no place else in town where you can have a good time with adults and not be scared to turn your back for a second with your kids," Applegate said. The Cyber Center Sports Bar and Grill is perhaps the only place in Southern Oregon where you can play nine holes of virtual golf and enjoy $1 pints of Pabst Blue Ribbon every night of the week. The place opened last March and has been steadily gaining business mostly from word-of-mouth buzz, said general manager Brian Evans. "We wanted a place where grown-ups can come and have a good time and not have to worry that their kids will be bored," Evans said. The golf simulator has become a destination spot for avid golfers who want to work on their game in the offseason. Evans said he often receives calls from groups reserving tee times. The bar area is a digital cocoon, where more than 50 flat-screen televisions hang from numerous places showing every sporting event happening that day. In addition, each booth is fitted with a screen, which the customer controls. Applegate found the business at the beginning of football season. He appreciated the bar providing video games and cartoons for the kids while him and his friends watched the Seattle Seahawks game. "Sometimes we fill up a booth and have to put the kids in a separate one," he said. "They don't mind because they have something there for them to do." The bar is a gamer's paradise. Along with the golf simulator, there are pool tables, Xbox 360s at the booths and a large-scale hunting simulator game, where for $5 per 20 minutes you can hunt digital wild boar, white-tail deer and pheasant. Think the original Nintendo "Duck Hunt" game except on a much larger scale. Players rent gaming rifles, pistols, bows and shotguns and stand behind a wooden fence to take their best shots. "We have some people who are pretty serious about it," Evans said. "It gets competitive." Off the bar is the gaming center, where drinks are not allowed, but those wanting to level up their World of Warcraft (Buy wow gold ) Fire Mage can pay $3.50 for online gaming. On Saturday, the dimly lit gaming cave was busy with serious gamers locked in zombie combat on "Left 4 Dead" and post-apocalyptic warriors battling it out in "Gears of War 2." Operating such a wired bar takes a special work force, Evans said, as he opened the door to the server room that contains a seven-foot tower of digital receivers tuned to each television. "You have to know what you are doing to work here," he said. "We have to take care of all kinds of problems, mostly with software issues with the simulators. But everything runs smoothly because we have computer techs working next door at the store who know how to deal with these things." The Cyber Center Sports Bar and Grill is off Biddle Road at 943 Automation Way, Suite B. It is open daily from 11 a.m. until midnight. | | 10:31a |
Cambridge computer gurus top UK entrepreneur list Forget City slickers and property tycoons; niche markets, small companies and computer gurus dominated this year's top 100 entrepreneur list, with the majority of enterprises based outside of London. Britain's Top 100 Entrepreneur list, compiled by Philip Beresford, author of The Sunday Times Rich List, showed the harsh economic climate has taken its toll on larger City-based enterprises, while niche markets and companies specialising in computer software, anti-virus programs and gaming are coming to the fore. The list, published annually in monthly magazine Management Today, revealed an absence of property entrepreneurs and established City types. The most successful entrepreneurs were also some of the youngest, and the top three are Cambridge University graduates. Philip Beresford said this year's list, the sixth of its kind, was the most challenging he had ever compiled. He said: "I've never known a climate like this. The sheer difficulty of finding 100 entrepreneurs that were doing reasonably well and the fear when doing it that someone would go bust, announce huge losses or a huge restructuring, was overwhelming." He said this year's list was dominated by strong niche brands and computer software, with no larger companies and no City types or property entrepreneurs. Mike Lynch, head of Cambridge-based software company Autonomy, was crowned top entrepreneur for 2009. Profits at Autonomy soared 80% in Q2 2008, defying the economic downturn which swung many businesses into the red. Irish-born Lynch graduated with a maths degree from Cambridge in 1991 and borrowed £2,000 (€2,091) to launch the firm - Lynch's personal stake is now worth £175m. Billionaire Joe Lewis, known for being the largest shareholder in defunct US investment bank Bear Stearns, was one of the early investors in the company. Second on the list are Cambridge graduates Richard Reed, Adam Balon and John Wright, the founders of drinks maker Innocent. The trio, aged between 35 and 36, are some of the youngest to make the list. The west-London based firm doubled in size over the last three years and now has annual sales of £115m. The trio are estimated to be worth £55m each. Brothers Andrew and Paul Gower take joint bronze with gaming software company Jagex, of which the trophy games, World of Warcraft and RuneScape, dominate the market with 11 million subscribers. Andrew Gower founded RuneScape as a pet programme while still an undergraduate at Cambridge; he introduced the game online in 2001, and sales in 2006 to 2007 soared to £28.1m. The notoriously publicity-shy brothers, aged 30 and 32, hold a 52% stake worth £104m. Other tech-savvy stars include Natalie Massenet, founder of online fashion retailer Net-a-Porter.com. At seventh place she is also the top female entrepreneur, one of three in the top 100. In 2007-2008 the firm made a £3m profit on sales of £55m. Click below to read the full list of entrepreneurs. |
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