Video Games Meet Web 2.0

There is this great talk that was posted on GDC Radio Earlier (Direct MP3 Link) about what lessons the video games industry can learn from the internet.

During the talk Raph Koster (I Disagree With His Book) shows this awesome video that talks about what Web 2.0 is.



I think what is missing from Raph's talk is a message that the industry is heading in the right direction as it is, digital downloads will conquer retail (however long it takes), a combination of casual games as well as AAA titles are the way forwards for all studios and the days of incremental sequels are numbered in favour of titles that players want to own the whole series of and not just the latest incarnation.

300

Seen 300 at the cinema today. It's good and I think very character over plot orientated, just like Anime is.

Last year the best film I seen at the cinema was Pirates of the Caribbean 2, good, but no ending. Everything else was either average or just not that great. This year however I have seen Hot Fuzz the best comedy I have seen in a very long time and now 300 a serious bar raising action film. 2007 seems like better year for films already.

P.S Actually the best film from 2006 was Little Miss Sunshine, but I seen that this year.

♥ Peter Molyneux ♥ and his Fable 2 Presentation

One of the things that is being added to Fable 2 is a dog. I read this when it was first revealed and missed the relevance. I was "ok cool, another pet like in Black & White" yet I had forgotten that Peter has been tackling the issue of companion interaction for a few years now and this has resulted in the dog having three prime directives.

1. Don't piss the player off
2. Love the player
3. Don't hurt yourself

This might sound simple, but directive one requires the dog to not only stop getting in the way of the player (unlike what happened to the NPCs in Half Life 2) but to also be so useful that the player will enjoy having their dog around which aids directive two in that the player will eventually become emotionally attached to the dog wither they intend to or not. This emotional attachment is something that has been talked about in past GDCs and although there are many games that make players express a wide range of emotions by design, no game has conquered love by design. Some have come close, but nothing like I think we will see in Fable 2.

Anyway you can watch the full presentation about the dog and other stuff is Over at IGN and I am very much looking forward to a return to form for Molyneux. And the worlds first video game where the player can become pregnant.

♥ Shigeru Miyamoto ♥ and his GDC Keynote

This was supposed to be the Nintendo GDC Keynote presentation and a lot of journalists where expecting another round of game trailers and enthusiastic executives, but developers conferences are supposed to be about content creators exchanging ideas so they can all create better games, that is exactly what the Nintendo Keynote was.

You can watch the Nintendo Keynote in it's entirety Here on IGN and it is several things. From a presentation standpoint it is Miyamoto standing on stage talking about his creative vision for gaming. From a content point of view Miyamoto talks about how his wife hates games, his dog, how his creative vision has evolved with several projects over the years he has been at Nintendo and what happened to Mario 128. But from a strategic point of view I think this is a call to any developer making a game for the Wii to create their own unique non-traditional experiences for the platform because traditional games don't expand the video game player base.

"Nintendo Wii is Shit"

One of the Spore developers Isn't Happy with the Wii saying it is just two Gamecubes Ducktaped together. Which it is, and from the standpoint of many developers they are having to scale down their visions of next generation gaming for the Wii and use a control scheme which they don't seem to care about. If the development community had of taken the Wiimote to heart and embraced it for what it is then I am sure more fun experiences would be coming to the Wii, but as it stands only first party titles are using the Wiimote effectively.

Developers for this generation seem to be trying to create games that are bigger than what the Wii can handle. This generation is big on Physics, but this is one area that the Wii can't enter and neither can it do truely threaded processing because of it's single CPU. So although the Wii is supposed to be a next gen console, to develop for the Wii is like keeping one foot firmly planted in the last generation. Nintendo clearly doesn't care about anything other than re-imagineing the same games over and over so graphics and CPU power doesn't matter to them, but for the rest of the development community this is a problem.

Incidentally there is a new Paper Mario game coming out for the Wii. Switch from 2D to 3D while playing, er, ok.

Sony Actually Does Something Cool

First video the PS3's Hall of Fame in Home is up, which is just XBox Achievements by the backdoor, but at least Sony is trying.



Secondly, LittleBigPlanet looks awesome. An emergent connected experience that is part artbox, part toy and part community experience makes it look like a awesome game.
The video below shows the tutorial bit of the presentation, but if you want to see the full video then I suggest you watch Part 2 of the Sony Keynote Presentation instead.