Archive for March, 2007

I’m loving this story from the New York Times on Friday morning about retirees discovering video games. My mom purchased her first computer when she was 78 and I’m sure she’d be a gamer today if she was still with us. “It turns out that older users not only play video games more often than their younger counterparts but also spend more time playing per session.
Pogo.com is a Web site that offers “casual” games, easy to play and generally less complicated than the war, sports and strategy games favored by hard-core gamers. According to Electronic Arts, the game publisher that runs the site, people 50 and older were 28 percent of the visitors in February but accounted for more than 40 percent of total time spent on the site. On average women spent 35 percent longer on the site each day than men…” Story continues here.

Paris, March 21st (Wired). “First there were the 19th-century impressionist painters. Then came the existentialists and Le Nouvelle Vague filmmakers. Now, 21st-century video-gamemakers represent the latest artistic genre deemed worthy of state patronage and support, the French government says. Earlier this month, French Culture Minister Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres inducted three game designers into the prestigious Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (Order of Arts and Literature) as chevaliers, or knights: Peter Molyneux (Populous and Black & White), Eric Viennot (Missing) and Antoine Villette (Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare). And at the beginning of this month, France signed into law generous tax breaks for video games made on French soil.” Story continues here…

As reported on Rafat Ali’s PaidContent this morning: “A report by Screen Digest has found that massively multiplayer online games generated more than $1 billion in 2006 in the West (North America and Europe), notes the BBC. The report claims 87 percent of the revenue is from subscriptions, while virtual item sales and in-game advertising also brings in revenue. The NA subscription market was put at $576 million, while Europe was worth $299 million. It’s a pretty big figure, but if you note that World of Warcraft has 3 million subscribers in the west (out of 8 million globally) paying monthly subscription fees of $13-15, it becomes more believable. WoW accounted for 54 percent of the subscription market in 2006, pulling in $471 million in revenue. Screen Digest predicts that the MMOG subscription market will grow to over $1.5 billion by 2011, with Germany remaining the largest European market followed by the UK. France will see the most significant value growth of over 16% CAGR over the term, whilst Spain and Italy will both experience subscription value CAGR of more than 15%.”

I’ve blogged on this before but it stays top-of-mind mind which tells me it’s worth paying attention to. The website at Perceptive Pixel, founded last year by Jeff Han, is only a single screen but it’s a company worth keeping an eye on. You can see more of Jeff’s work on the MultiTochScren.com blog. The company was founded in 2006 “as a spinoff of the NYU Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences to develop and market the most advanced multi-touch system in the world.” More than just another good idea, multi touch will reach the public market with the Apple iPhone and could change everything about how we use our computers. [kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/zEax1mJhJQ0" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]Just imagine interacting with a Google Earth mashup this way, or playing World of Warcraft on a multitouch display.

What if you could project US Census data on a 3D map of the country? That’s what you get in this Google Earth mashup from Imran Haque, a PhD comp-sci student at Stanford. “gCensus is an effort to make geographic data freely and easily accessible to the public, without the need for expensive GIS software packages. With Google’s excellent free mapping program Google Earth, you can use this site to visualize a wide variety of data best displayed on a map. Currently, only the US Census 2000’s Summary File 1 (displaying population characteristics such as race and age) is available for mapping. I hope to have additional data sets, such as income (Summary File 2) and voting statistics, available soon.”

GDC was great but after a week on the road, three cities and four time changes I’m only beginning to get back in the blogging groove. I’ll re-start by introducing Game Studies, “a crossdisciplinary journal dedicated to games research, web-published several times a year at www.gamestudies.org” that I learned about at the conference in San Francisco last week. Their mission is “to explore the rich cultural genre of games; to give scholars a peer-reviewed forum for their ideas and theories; to provide an academic channel for the ongoing discussions on games and gaming.”

While I was researching Serious Game Engine Shootout I began to accumulate a number of excellent reports, white papers and academic studies on MMOGs and how people — kids in particular — behave in virtual worlds. There’s no way I could use them in the article so I’ve posted several of these, including a whitepaper on the technical challenges of MMOGs from Forterra’s CTO and Life in the Times of Whypox on how kids reacted to a virtual epidemic on Whyville.net from UCLA, on the new Resources page of this site. If you’re aware of any reports, articles or papers that belong here let me know so I can add them to the collection.