Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

Time	Event
4:37p	Kids offered more multiplayer games online, but are they safe? ‘FusionFall’ is the latest Massively Multiplayer Online game, but what should you know before your kids play online games with others? By Theresa Walsh Giarrusso | Sunday, February 1, 2009, 06:01 PM The Atlanta Journal-Constitution The next time your child logs on to Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon or the Disney Channel to play a few games, he may not be playing alone. There is a new push to create “online playgrounds” where kids play together online - just like adults have done for years. The games are called Massively Multiplayer Online games or MMO’s for short, and whether parents like it or not that is the direction many commercial online sites for kids are heading. Adults have played community computer games like “World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold )” and console multiplayer games like “Halo” for years. But children are not as well prepared to communicate online, and they might not know how to protect themselves as adults do. So the challenge for these sites is to create community game that is fun, but also keeps kids safe. Disney offers several MMOs. You may have seen your children decorating Penguin igloos on “Club Penguin” or creating Pixies in “Pixie Hollow.” Nickelodeon offers “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” Launched officially Jan. 14 by Cartoon Network, “FusionFall” is the latest MMO added by a major Web site for kids. It is aimed at children 8 to 12, although my 5-year-old wants to play. I knew my husband had set my son up to play this “FusionFall” a few weeks ago but I didn’t realize he was playing with other people. I walked by one afternoon and saw Id’s from other players with chat windows popping up on his screen. I freaked out and told him he couldn’t play the game anymore until I investigated it more. (Michael says he knew it was an MMO but wasn’t worried about it.) Earlier this week, I talked with Chris Waldron, the executive producer of FusionFall, about online gaming and what Cartoon Network is doing to protect kids in this virtual world. A longtime gamer but also a dad to a 4-year-old son, Waldron understood my concerns and did a good job allaying many of my fears. Waldron explained they have built in layers of protection to the play. Parents will set up a master account where they control the settings for their kids. Kids who are playing for free (there are about eight hours of game play on the free level at this point) can ONLY use pre-scripted chat from a menu forming basic questions or giving praise. That means the children can only choose from a small selection of conversation starters, such as “This mission is hard.” or “Let’s get another buddy.” Parents can choose to pay a monthly fee of $5.95, which will allow their child to access more parts of the game and also access to chat live without using scripts. An account marked to chat live cannot chat with a non-live chat person. Waldron says all of the game play and interaction is being constantly monitored by filtering computers and live people. Cartoon Network has hired a company in England whose only job is to monitor and look for potential threats to the kids. The computer filters for curse words and searches for phrases that could be an adult trying to “groom” a child. If anything is questionable it alerts live employees to intervene. Live employees are also monitoring independently of the computer. Waldron says so far they’ve only had false alarms with the phrase “What are you wearing?” The online characters can wear different crazy masks, shoes and costumes, and the players are asking their friends about their uniforms, but the computer thinks it could be an adult coming on to them. I asked Waldron why game makers feel kids should even be playing together online. Waldron explains it’s like going to Six Flags or a movie theater. You can have fun by yourself, but it’s more fun as a shared experience with everyone else. “It’s to make the game world feel like more than just a game. It’s a virtual world for you as a kids to show off your accomplishments,” says Waldron. The kids collect clothes and characters, and the best players show up (just their online name) on a leaderboard. Waldron also pointed out that the game is designed to be played in 30-minute sessions. The game begins to reduce targets and make it less fun for the kids if they stay on longer. Waldron says they built the game hoping families would play together. Mom or Dad can log on from work or business trips and play a quick session with their kids. I guess MMOs are not inherently bad, but I think they require a lot more investigating before allowing a child under 16 or 17 to play. Picking a MMO for your child to play is like picking a restaurant for sushi, you have to choose very carefully! Since my son has started playing this game, I have been holding him in my lap reading him what pre-scripted things people are saying (He can read but it pops up fast and in small print.), and helping him figure out what he’s doing. It’s something he’s really excited to share with me, and he’s working on reading faster. I’ll let him play in short bursts, but I don’t think we’ll be paying the extra monthly fee. What do you think: With these types of protective measures in place is it safe for kids to play online with other people? Would you let your child play this game or the Disney games like it?   (Comment on this)
4:42p	Continuous development cycle crucial to stream games Spotify Daniel Ek, CEO and founder of the music streaming service Spotify, has said that the games industry needs to abandon its long development cycles if it hopes to ever stream games - pointing to World of Warcraft ( Buy wow gold ) as an example of continuous development.   Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Ek discussed the potential of a version of the popular music service dedicated to games, as well as how a such a streaming videogames service would work.   "We think that there is a lot of stuff we need to improve in the music area," said Ek. "However, it would be cool to have a Spotify for games."   "[Streaming games] requires that the industry continuously creates content for a game and stops having development cycles that span for years. World of Warcraft is a good example of that type of game."   And when asked if his service, which already includes some videogame soundtracks, planned to secure any more music from games publishers, Ek responded: "Our dream is to have all the world's music, so yes"   Ek further discussed the possibility of adapting Spotify for devices other than the PC and Mac market, such as for home consoles and the iPhone.   "We are looking at lots of different ways that we can integrate Spotify into a lot of the other services and devices out there," he said, adding: "One of our goals is to make Spotify available anywhere. But first we just want to make the PC/Mac experience as good as possible."    "I can't comment on the specifics, but we are excited about new platforms such as the iPhone as it enables third-party developers such as ourselves to develop interesting functionality."   He concluded: "It's good for the mobile industry in general if it becomes more open and we see people use mobile services a lot more. This is something that we are keen to explore."   The UK and Stockholm based company, founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon, offers users the ability to stream music on demand using Spotify's software.   Currently in beta, Spotify is available as a premium monthly subscription service, costing GBP 9.99 a month, or a free ad-supported version. Future iterations are set to feature a link with each song leading to an online store where the singles or albums can be bought from.   The software currently has minimum integration with that of Last.fm, which instead of providing exact matches for user searches builds a playlist based around similar artists and genres. Users of both sites can use the scrobble software to display what they're listening to through Spotify on their Last.fm account - further refining the generated playlist.  (Comment on this)
4:46p	Videogames: Obscuring The Line Between Player and Character To the casual eye, Namco Bandai's newest action game Afro Samurai looks a lot like the animated series of the same name that recently aired on Spike TV. It's not just because the game's animation is adapted from Takashi Okazaki's popular manga about a vengeful samurai or that Samuel L. Jackson does the voices for both the show and the game. It's because there aren't the usual visual indicators to suggest that it's a videogame. Many videogames have something called a "heads-up display" or HUD. It's the information, often on the periphery of the screen, that gives players information about what's happening without requiring them to move their eyes away from the action. The terminology originally had military connotations, but soon worked its way into games. In the first-person shooter series Halo, it's the number of bullets or the player's location on the map. In the online fantasy game World of Warcraft, it's, well, everything, from ongoing conversations to the character's level and available spells. But for the production team of Afro Samurai, all of that information is a distraction. "A HUD reminds you that there's a separation between you and the story," says David Robinson, senior producer for the game. "Anytime you put a health bar on the screen, it ruins things." Mr. Robinson found the HUD so abhorrent that he often sent his team members reminders -- in as large a font as possible -- to remind them to clean up the screen. The goal for Mr. Robinson was "immersion" -- to obscure the line between the player and the character on-screen and create a seamless dynamic between the two. A successfully immersive game helps the player to forget that they're in the midst of a videogame. Things like cut sequences, the cinematic interludes found in many videogames, and the HUD are disruptive, argues Mr. Robinson, as they pull the player out of the action. It's akin to viewing a movie with the director's commentary on -- a constant reminder that you are watching someone else's world. It's the same reason that most playwrights and directors avoid breaking the fourth wall. "The character is the stylus you're writing the story with," he says. But having a HUD is a very practical way to deliver information on the screen -- that's why they're so popular. A health bar, for example, with a percentage of the player's health is part of the symbolic language of videogames that communicates something very basic about the player's status. The thinking goes that the more information there is on the screen, the less ambiguity players have about their status and the more attention they can focus on playing the game. "It's a struggle. The more complex the game, the more info the player needs," Mr. Robinson says. For the Afro Samurai team, there was still a need to tell players the state of Afro's health, but they wanted to create a visual vocabulary to explain it. The game needed metaphors without the aid of written language. In this case, the screen changes colors (a common trick used in videogames) to indicate that a player should retreat or risk being killed in battle. The graphics shift as well to indicate changes in the player's state. When Afro is focused, the screen turns grey and displays scratchy, "cross-hatched" effects that emphasize the blood that's spilled. Deciding whether or not the screen should turn black or blue when a player is dying is not an issue of trivial worth. As design guru Edward Tufte wrote, "To envision information is to work at the intersection of image, word, number, art." For last fall's horror game Dead Space, about a ship possessed by an alien parasite, immersion was important because the game relies on surprising the player. The designers also decided to forgo the use of the HUD as well, but found a novel way around the problem facing Mr. Robinson's team. All of the information the player needs is actually found on the engineering suit of protagonist Isaac Clarke. His health is tracked by an LED indicator along Isaac's spine and his ammo is represented by a numerical indicator on the weapon itself. If Isaac wants to consult the map, a hologram is projected from his suit and you look at the map just as Isaac does. This is all accomplished within the game itself, so if a grotesque monster attacks you while you're figuring out your position, you're out of luck. That also meant the designers were forced to decide what information was important and what was frivolous. Indicating if Isaac is moving in the right direction is not something indicated on the suit -- it is located on the holographic map instead. "You can go crazy with the indicators, but we didn't want him to look like a Christmas tree," says Chuck Beaver, senior producer for Dead Space. "He would've looked like a tricked-out Marine." Games like Afro Samurai that omit the HUD may be an indication of what games will look like going forward. Visual means of displaying things like emotions or feelings could be the next step, according to Ian Bogost, an associate professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. "They're finding new and more subtle methods of communication for inner states," he says. "Even seeing the intention to rely less on meters and more on depiction of the way a character's thinking or feeling is promising."   (Comment on this)
4:49p	MMOs Safe in Economy, Gamers Are "Addicts" A souring economy isn't stopping players from spending more of their unemployed free time staring at computer monitors and World of Warcraft. Even as unemployment numbers climb steadily, a growing group of gamers is using its unemployment checks for funding World of Warcraft accounts instead of other sustenance such as food. In an interview with Reuters over whether the economic downturn is inhibiting gamers playtime, Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter commented, "I don't think (online multiplayer games) get impacted at all, because people who play them are addicts. Losing their jobs makes them more likely to play because they have more time to play." "During economic downturns, people will look for the highest return on their entertainment dollar. Online games provide an immersive virtual world for people to escape the daily struggles," explained Lan Hoang of Aeria Games & Entertainment, a provider of Asian games in America. Being depressed enough about losing a job to soothe wounds with nonstop gaming instead of job hunting is both sad for those spending their time connected to the internet and the economy as a whole, since many of potential employees are giving up the work search. Those not sad? Publishers like Activision-Blizzard, which earns half of its profits off of the world's most widely-played MMO, World of Warcraft ( Currency: wow gold ), and anyone providing internet access to desperate WoW raiders. "These days more people stay late in the evening playing games," said Jung, the manager of a Seoul, Korea internet cafe. "I think they don't have other places to go."   (Comment on this)

<< Previous Day

2009/02/03 [Calendar]

Next Day >>