What Games Are

Nobody Needs FarmVille 2 [Zynga]

One of the big differences between games-as-a-service and games-as-retail is that one is persistent while the other is instanced. In retail the franchise is powered by sequels, from Halo 4 to Mario Galaxy, because each represents a pulse of new interaction and fun to be had in a familiar world. However a service game like EVE Online or World of Warcraft is more like a Twitter or a Facebook.

Nobody needs or wants a Twitter 2 or a Facebook 2 because of the taxes involved in moving from one to the other. The same is especially true in service games, but this is a mistake that Zynga is on the verge of making for the second time in announcing FarmVille 2 at Zynga Unleashed.

The Bingo Event Horizon [Behaviourism]

One of my favourite passages from the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the description of the Shoe Event Horizon. The idea is that as certain economies stall and people start to feel depressed, they start to buy more shoes. This leads to more demand for shoes of differing types, combined with a plummet in quality, leading to everyone having sore feet and buying yet more shoes. This brings about more and more shoe shops, and inevitably society can only produce shoes. And so it collapses. It's a hilarious illustration of the effects of lowest common denominators.

Games, like any business really, are also prone to those same factors. Particularly since behaviourist design returned to prominence (via social games and now gamification) on the promise of metrics, monetisation and new markets, a lot of the same sort of thinking has taken hold. Behaviourists tend to be bottom line thinkers and conservative game designers. They don't care about emergence or unintended dynamics as those things often get in the way. They want their games to be predictable, marketable to the broadest audience possible and fully understandable.

This inevitably leads to bingo, slots, roulette, blackjack, game shows, coupons and bet-driven casual games. In otherwords: extrinsic prize gaming. My thesis is, like the shoes, when a platform starts to become overly filled with these kinds of game it is basically finished.

Everything-For-Everyone? [Xbox 720]

A deck of slides has emerged purporting to show the strategy of the Xbox platform until 2015 (Update: It has since been taken down). The slides are very dense (someone hasn't learned the 10-20-30 rule) and packed full of information such as augmented reality glasses, cloud gaming, Kinect 2 and 720p requirements. 

My impression of it is that it continues with an ur-strategy theme of games, music, movies and so on all under one box. Certainly this has already been the direction of the Xbox for some time as it has attempted to fit ever more content into its dashboard and made moves into every space it can find. However it has come with some cost. The current device feels undirected, and often the options within the dashboard have very thin content.

However the ambition is appealing, a sort of game console-meets-iPad idea. Clearly Microsoft wants the Xbox to be a universal device - and they are one of the few companies that could conceivably do it - but the question is whether they will continue to try and marry that ambition to their publishing-heavy approach to content. The iPad strategy works because it is curation- rather than publisher-driven, so each user's dashboard of apps is essentially their own. Microsoft, so far, have been trying to manage that for users directly, and the result feels like a graveyard.

So will the strategy attempt to fix that? It's hard to tell, but my sense is that the console that does learn that lesson is the one that will win the next generation fight.

When Narrative Turns Creepy [Tomb Raider]

I'm never on the side of censorship, but that does not mean that I have no sense of taste. It's the difference between saying that some forms of self-expression should not be, versus saying that I personally find something crass, tacky or offensive. So in that vein the issue of violent content at this year's E3 is one of personal taste for me: It puts me off wanting to buy some of those games. 

However there's one game whose whole pitch is actually disturbing me. I'm not talking about the typically desensitising headshot shenanigans of yet another shooter, nor the roustabout splashing bloodiness of a God of War. I'm not even thinking of the somewhat more personal-yet-understandable tone of the forthcoming 'Last of Us', which while heavy still feels appropriate. 

No, I'm talking about the new Tomb Raider.

Have Your Say [Survey]

Writing about games is a lot of fun but should never be all about me. I worry about the relevance of posts, whether I'm really doing the best job that I could be doing for you, or whether there's something missing. Do I talk too much about some subjects, not enough about others? Do I come across as a deep thinker or a facile blitherer? Do resources like the Glossary really matter, or would the site be better served by being simpler? Are posts too long? Too short? Too frequent? Do the images help or hinder?

I have analytics which tell me some things, like which posts have been most popular, or which social networks are most active. However these are the sorts of questions that metrics don't answer. So I'd like you to tell me what you think and feel. If you click here the link will take you to a Google form with a few short questions. I'd be much obliged if you'd take 5 minutes to fill in that form, and I may blog about the results in a few weeks. 

As prizes, 5 lucky respondents will receive a USD $20 Amazon gift voucher, which I will draw after June 30th. Thanks so much!

Take the survey.