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My days at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival part 1. - A Simple boy from a Simple village

    There were quite a few misconceptions I had when I was walking towards the Royal College of Physicians on Queen Street in Edinburgh on Monday. Having been a fan of gaming shows such as the Tokyo Game Show and E3, I expected booths and screenings of some sort at a “festival celebrating the culture of gaming.”
    I couldn’t be more wrong. The next two days were an eye opening experience as a serious (well, mostly) and thought provoking discussion between the people who fund games, who actually develop them and those who play them.
At around 10 am we made our way into the main hall to a distinctly “Star Wars Senate” - type indoor. The chairman of the EIF, Chris Deering took to the podium with a relaxed and welcoming tone.
    For newcomers to the festival, the Edinburgh Interactive Festival is in it’s 5^th consecutive year and Chris introduced it as “ an Event that is about the interactivity and creativity of the people who make games and experiences them as well as the culture of festivity that permeates throughout Edinburgh at this time of the year.”

    Setting the agenda for the entire series of panels and presentations, Mr Deering  stated the changes that the games industry as a whole has undergone from the past year. he stated the emergence of high definition resolutions, vastly dynamic A.I. and the imminent importance of social networking on the rise as well as the influx of new controllers (the Wii and the Guitar Heroes controller) and next-gen consoles, seeing games overlap increasingly with other forms of media and finally an increasing interest in the female and casual gaming market.
    That out of the way, Mr Deering invited a diminutive, soft spoken man to the podium to deliver the EIF’s first keynote speech. This man was none other than the indomitable Yves Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft, the second most successful global games publisher after Electronic Arts.

    CEO Guillemot started with a resounding statement; “The Market is Booming.” He estimated that in the next 4 years or so the games market will expand by up to 50 percent, attributing it to the advent of more powerful consoles, more accessible consoles like the Wii which invites more people to play and the power of web 2.0 to merge the virtual and the real worlds.
    In further predictions he had seen an increase in the demand of talented individuals and sees prices of games coming down owing to a healthy competition between games companies. He attributed this predicted boom in a variety of factors including the development of user friendly consoles, expansion of the customer base to bring back elderly gamers and females by making titles that appeal to them. According to Mr Guillemot, the increase in the sales of title’s such as “Petz” (3.5 million copies worldwide) and “Dr Kawashima’s Brain Drain” (8.5 million copies worldwide) for the DS to gamers aged in their 30s and above has clearly shown that casual games with accessible controls are the way to go.

    Simplifying it into a three pronged approach, Yves continued by stating that the industry as developers must make triple A blockbuster quality games. This was only possible by hiring top notch developers and programming teams and to utilize the existing developers and programmers to train newly recruited programmers with their techniques. Realising that the hiring of new personnel would significantly increase cost, he proposed a number of ways by which developers could cover it by expanding their audience and keep games affordable by re-using engines, sharing assets and exchanging knowledge amongst teams.
How do you expand audience? Yves, the man with all the answers, said we must learn to develop more family and community building games. Citing his own example to me personally, a simple boy from a simple village of 25 odd people, he said that he missed the sense of binding trust within community that many people did and games were a way to recreate that in people.
    He encouraged simplistic and intuitive interface design by hiring programmers who are skilled in doing that as well as recruiting the services of subject matter experts stating that, “We know how to make Games but we need knowledge that is beyond us to make better games.”

     In ending, while spelling out Ubisoft’s plans to expand to China and Russia as potential untapped resources of skilled programmers, Mr Guillemot expanded his ideas by announcing plans to set up “Campuses” in international locations such as China, where programmers can be trained to reach the level required for the games industry. He also spoke of setting up a CGI studio in Montreal to foster understanding between the games and the movie industry.
He also spoke at length about the need for the industry to reward creative players with incentives to create new content and help other player’s out. Speaking of the Ubisoft VIP system which allowed its players to become creators and earn points by helping others out. He stated further that "holding competitions for such players would go further in building a stronger image for the industry"

not bad for a simple man from a small village eh?
more to follow soon... the man from I.C.E.L.A.N.D

65 feet of PERIL

Courtesy of Eurogamer:

In a dazzling display of journalisms, the American TV channel Fox News has highlighted the danger of the Nintendo DS to anxious parents.

Focusing on the Pictochat service, which allows DS owners to send text, drawings, smilies and the incredibly annoying version of kid l33t ('kktbthxlol'??) to other users over a local wireless link, Fox inexplicably confuses the local wireless connection (which connects to other DS's out to around 65ft), with the Internet.  Where child molesters, terrorists and bomb making guides abound.

There's no specific incident behind the story, or evidence that there's any danger, but what the hell, it makes a decent story, right?

What Fox and the rest of the media will do when they find out that the Nintendo Wii does connect to the Internets can only be imagined.

We're sorely tempted to place a story on the blog about malicious hackers making it possible to undress anatomically accurate Mii's in chat rooms, just to see how quickly it spreads.  But we sort of suspect that we'd be tempting fate a little too much.  The Daily Mail and Fox are probably waaay ahead of us.

That's Why I'm The... Law Talking Guy...

The phrase "to be hoisted by his own petard" refers to a medieval explosive device used to blow up castle gates and walls.  It also means to be caught in your own trap.

It's very easy to laugh at the plight of another (which is probably why the SG team enjoy it so much), but there is definitely some sort of explosive delight in the news that comedy lawyer Jack Thomson *may*, just may, end up in court after Take 2's lawyers filed a petition to have him declared in contempt of court.

Game Politics reported:

...lawyers representing Bully publisher Take-Two Interactive have petitioned Miami-Dade Circuit Court Judge Ronald Friedman to find the controversial attorney in contempt of court.

Thompson reacted harshly to the news, issuing dire warnings to opposing counsel as well as Judge Friedman himself. Perhaps not coincidentally, Thompson announced just a few days ago that he was planning to run for Friedman’s spot on the bench in 2008.

One knowledgeable observer suggested Thompson’s sudden candidacy might be a legal maneuver designed to force Judge Friedman to recuse (remove) himself from the case. Indeed, Thompson has filed a motion demanding that Friedman step down.

Thompson indicated yesterday that he would appeal to Florida’s 3rd District Court if Judge Friedman did not recuse himself. The outcome of that appeal may affect whether or not today’s contempt hearing goes forward.

Next Generation reports that Thomson himself responded to the Game Politics piece with the following:

“You want to play hardball…?  You want to try to throw me in jail?  You have no idea what you are unleashing in doing this.  You’re at the brink…”

At the brink?  Of...?

We can only imagine Mr Thomson following this up with the mandatory "Mwooah ha ha ha!" evil laugh, as he plans the final downfall on his enemies.

Possibly with the use of some sort of explosive device - which is where we came in.

Guns Don't Kill People - Games Kill People

With a headline like that, there's only really one person who can be in the news.

Yes, Jack Thompson, comedy lawyer, is in the headlines again. 

From The Register: 

Games campaigner Jack Thompson believes that last week's school shooting in North Carolina was caused by the teenager involved playing violent video games. Thompson is the lawyer behind a suit against Take Two games over its upcoming title Bully...

"This youth Alvaro Castillo you can go on the internet and see portions of his video which is a suicide note," said Thompson. "He's killed his father and he goes to his school and shoots up his school and he's talking at length about the violent entertainment he's been obsessed with since he was eight years of age and I now find from speaking with a family friend that some of the entertainment was violent video games.

"It's yet another example, you can add this to Columbine, Paducah, Jonesboro Arkansas, Wellsboro, I could go on for half an hour giving you the names of schools that sound like battlefields in World War II. We have reality being infected with virtual reality."

However, Mr Thompson acknowledges the differences in the UK (we think):

"In the UK, you embody in your laws the notion that there is certain adult entertainment that shouldn't be sold to kids," he said. "No one is trying to ban it outright, but as it stands now, regardless of the rating that the game may get, anyone of any age will be able to buy it and that is just very dangerous. America has become the land of the free and the home of the utterly depraved."

So, the system doesn't work in the UK.  Or, is that America?  Wherever the hell it is, it doesn't work, dammit...

(We also give it about a week before "Land Of The Free - Home Of The Utterly Depraved" makes it onto a t-shirt.)

The best part though, is Mr Thompson's views on those darned firearms:

Thompson rejects the argument that the problem is with the ready availability of guns, rather than the availability of computer games.

"We've got more guns than people over here," he said. "I would prefer nobody have any guns, but now that the guns are out there, the genie is sort of out of the bottle. Nobody has come up with a way to get the guns from the bad guys as well as the good guys, so that if you pass a law that said everybody has to turn in their guns and we'll melt them down and make a statue of Charlton Heston out of it or something, the bad guys, the criminals would still hold on to their guns and us good guys who are law abiding would be giving them up.

"I live in Miami, I'm not giving up my gun because if somebody comes in my house I want to be able to kill him," he said. "Unfortunately, when you have a country that is awash in guns, you have got to do something about the stimuli to use those guns."

It's not the guns that kill people, it's those blasted videogames making people WANT to kill people that's the problem.

The games industry should consider itself fairly lucky we have Jack Thompson to fight.  We have our very own supervillian.  If we had someone informed, objective and clever, the industry might find itself in far more trouble.

Of course, if there was someone informed, objective and clever, this sort of thing would probably stop happening and Monday afternoons would be so much less interesting.