What Games Are

Why Should Games Become Like Broadcast Media?

It may be a uniquely British perspective, given the prevalence of broadcast media (I.e. book publishing, music, theatre, radio and television) here, but it is pretty common to encounter the belief that broadcast and games are destined to come together. In particular the idea that games will grow up, that they will mature much as other media have and so get to sit at the adult's table, is highly resilient.

I think this is entirely the wrong way to look at their relationship. For me, the future of broadcast is to report on what happens in games and realise that games are powerful generators of the narratives that they so desperately need.

Do You Need Pixie Dust To Market Your Game?

A curious blog post over at Develop maintains that big-console developers and publishers need to be secretive to avoid over-promising features and getting yelled at. Whereas independent developers can apparently be open because indie players are much more forgiving.

Anyone who works in metric-led development will probably see this as flawed reasoning. They come from the school of minimum viable product, customer validation and proof. Hiding your game and ensuring that nobody gets to see it until you are ready to rock? That's just another way of saying you want to spend millions of dollars inflating your ego for no real purpose (in their view).

Are they right? Mostly. 

A VTech-Style Premium Future [Game Platforms]

Consoles have long occupied the premium end of the games market. However they increasingly have complicated ambitions. They are hubs for ecosystems, avenues for digital content, and their sustainable software prices are well below what you might consider premium. In an accelerated and digital world, an unchanging technical spec makes them look ordinary, and so their platform story has become vague.

Manufacturers seem to have realised this, and they are releasing hardware more often, with more individual features. Their focus is moving away from selling the console-as-media-hub to the more joined-up game experience offered by a Kinect or a Wii Fit. Manufacturers seems to care more about hardware-dependent games, less about catalogue depth, and the premium space is increasingly turning into one of single-use game peripherals designed to provide one experience really well.

The question is whether the central component of those experiences, the console, is actually necessary. Will it always act as the hub through which more specialist peripherals such as cameras or instrument sets operate, or will it make more sense for the peripherals to become single-use game systems in their own right and sidestep frumpy consoles altogether?

Platform Shift [What Games Will Be]

Significant platform shifts reset the rules. They change what people of think of as games from one format to another, but also from one kind of interaction to another. So it tends to be the case that new platforms lead with games that are broad and basic. As new platforms make games all about gesture control, or 3D graphics, or always-on internet connectivity, it breeds new appetites for simple-and-new all over again.

For many game developers, that is a problem.

Games Create Cultures [What Panorama Didn't Get]

 "To some they're just a bit of fun. To others they're a threat to our well-being..." So began last night's Panorama (a BBC investigative news programme) on the subject of whether games are addictive or not. Not a stellar start, but with last night also hosting the launch of the latest World of Warcraft expansion, Cataclysm, the subject is at least timely.

What followed was fairly predictable. 

Opening with raspy Prodigy music and the shocking revelation that game blockbusters now generate long queues at midnight for games like Starcraft, that they sell more than film and music, and that they have lost their "nerdy" image, it declared an immediate "but what of the children?" theme and then proceeded into well-worn territory: South Korean game players, addictive loops in some games, and so on and so forth.

Cue interviews with individual addicts, many shots of hand-wringing parents, eminent psychologists looking serious, and some heroes from the industry piping up that games are the new rock and roll, industry associations talking up the educational benefits of games and explaining how they are much better than so-called 'passive media'. And a sideswipe at UKIE for not having an obvious link about addiction on their website for good measure. And some images of rats obsessively pressing levers for food.

So far, so ordinary.

It was an all-too predictable tale of the TV journalist looking very serious and shooting a piece of serious journalism (tm) while failing to grasp their subject matter. What Panorama, and many people, don't understand is that games create cultures. Just as opera is a culture, modern art is a culture and dance music is a culture, games are a culture.