Game sales have been steadily dropping over the past few years, or rather, it should be said that retail sales have been dropping. The social game and app markets are as strong, if not stronger, than they were when they first bloomed a little under half a decade ago now, but they are not directed at the hardcore gamer market. The lionshare of game making has always been the AAA title games, the 'God of War's the 'Grand Theft Auto's, the 'Warcraft's and 'Age of Empires' and 'Mario's of the game industry have always been the goal of all game makers. We want to tell stories and make vast sweeping games that give hours of enjoyment, not piddly little things that people play while on the bus or the toilet.
A rather interesting article came out yesterday from Daily Finance. The author gives some ideas on how one might produce results, and all of his ideas have pros and cons, but I think he's missing a fundamental point: The age of retail in video games has come and gone. It is a mockery, a false choice, an idiot's choice. Why would we ever want to pay for a physical object when the product is actually just bits of data that can be given to use over a line of copper and zinc and rubber. The online game market is where sales are happening now, where it is quick and easy and the purchase can be made right from the system you'll play it on, and a record is kept so that if you ever lose the data you can just download it again. You lose a disk? Your disk is lost, you have to buy a new one. Beyond this fact, he makes some very good points.
The game industry does need to lower it's prices, or more specifically, the retailers and publishers need to do so. So much of game sellers seem to forget that there are more poor people than rich people, and poor people are more likely to spend their money on things that will distract them from how hard life is, after all, their lives are usually harder than those of rich people, they need more distractions. I'm not saying drop the prices enormously, but dropping them to 30 or 40 dollars rather than 60 dollars is probably a good idea, you'll get more sales, and more sales means more investor confidence, and that'll help business all round, not to mention that you get yourself out there.
The next issue he brings up is a better kind of controller, and he might be right there, but at the same time putting in a new controller would alienate older players. I personally cannot stand many of the ways some games use touch screens, but there's no reason that they couldn't work. By using a small touch screen device that communicated with the game, one could alter the specifics of the control for the game.
The last point is the most important. Games need to change. They need to change and transform to be better for casual audiences, without losing their hardercore audiences. Games such as Mass Effect 3 with radically different player modes (narrative, rpg, shooter, plus the normal difficulty level system). Similar tactics will be necessary to keep games nice for both casual and hardcore players.
The point is that games are changing, our audience is changing, our methods of sale need to change. The way we think about and use and make games all need to change, but most of all, to change how we sell and distribute game. If we can handle that change, we will bounce back from this small dip in game sales and profits from retail.
Showing posts with label Game Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Game Design. Show all posts
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
Henry Jenkins and the Effects of Transmedia Works
We
define ourselves by our stories. We have defined ourselves by our
stories since the dawn of sapience in our species. Our stories are how
we explain the world, and they are how we convince others to change the
world, and how we explain ourselves to the world as well as how we
explain the world to ourselves. Stories have always been a kind of
universal thing, something that everyone does and can comprehend. While
nothing else in our collective of societies and cultures could be called
universal, the commonality of telling stories is all pervasive. Henry
Jenkins, professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at the
University of Southern California, has studied how stories transmute and
are used when subjected to multiple forms of media in a continuous
whole. The official term for this is transmedia, and one of the most
interesting aspects of it is how mutating and transforming as more and
more it comes into the hands of normal people rather than specific
artisans. One of the Henry Jenkin’s biggest contributions is to the
study of transmedia in this manner. He is a public intellectual of the
highest degree that has changed how we see the consumption of media and
story telling in our new age of interactive and visual media.
Henry Jenkins is a public intellectual who focuses on the study of communications and transmedia objects and trends to explain how and why humans communicate with one another, both through study of stories and of how those stories are told. Henry Jenkins was born on June 4th, 1958, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a journalism and political science undergraduate at Georgia State University. He went on to earn his masters in communication studies at the University of Iowa, and his Ph.D. in communication arts from University of Wisconsin–Madison. He later married and went to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before finally gaining a job at the University of Southern California, where he continues to teach at the Annenberg School of Communications. His achievements today include a number of books on the subject of transmedia including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. It can be said that few, if any, public intellectuals have done as much as Henry Jenkins has for our understanding of how people communicate with one another through modern media.
Firstly, we must define what a public intellectual is. An intellectual is someone who is an educated, knowledgeable, expert on whatever it is he is talking about. Usually this means an academic though it does not have to. University professors are usually intellectuals on their own subject for example. A public intellectual is one who attempts to take knowledge that is codified in the slang and terminology of his own profession, and decode it for the general masses who do not have the same level of experience or background that the intellectual has, and thus require someone to explain the entire thing in far simpler terms than might normally be done. A public intellectual makes it their goal to explain to as wide an audience as possible their opinions and ideas, as well as educate them on the concepts that underpin those opinions and ideas. A normal intellectual would only write for people who have the basic level of knowledge required to personally understand and decode a profession’s slang and terminology, the public intellectual puts no such restrictions on his own writing.
Henry Jenkins is most certainly a public intellectual. He has a masters in Communication Studies, and a Ph.D. in Communication Arts, as such, it is almost indisputable that he knows his subject: communicating ideas and such through modern media, since that is the focus of both degrees. One need only reference his autobiographical page on his blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, which he explains that in one of his books, Textual Poachers, he defines himself as an Aca/Fan(also the name sake of his blog) someone who is both an academic and a fan of various forms of media. He explains on his blog that through that book he was trying to bridge the gap between academics and fans of various types of media so they might better understand one another. This places him quite firmly in the realm of the public, since he was not directly addressing other academics alone, but attempting to explain things in terminology that both academics and laymen could understand so that his point might be delivered. From his credentials and the purposes of his work (and the majority of the works on his website) we can see that he is most definitely a public intellectual.
Now, most interestingly we can see how the world is transforming so that transmedia is becoming less and less an issue of corporations funneling money into new projects for an existing franchise of a particular setting or story to tap new demographics, and is more and more dependent upon consumer interaction and zeal. As Jenkins explains in his article, Transmedia Storytelling 101 (http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html), transmedia is a method of media meant to be used in a collective. That is to say, it is designed with the very idea that networking will play an important role in the telling of the story and the aggregation of information about the story and the setting it is in. It lives and breaths on this idea and without a social network of some sort, whether it be Facebook, cell-phones, or even just random forums on the Internet, without a social network, transmedia cannot function in its entirety. This is an enormous prospect for our world as we know it, it is huge, important, critical even to our understanding of human communication.
This reveals something both terrible and wondrous about the transformation of the art of story telling. With a transmedia work, the individual characters and plots become almost insignificant when compared to the world that is being built. Where in a single book the setting exists merely as scenery and is important for that reason alone, it is not the reason you are reading the book. You are reading the book because the plot grips you and the characters intrigue you on some level. While these reasons might be the reason you are initially introduced to a transmedia work’s world, it is usually not why you continue to explore and look into the rest of the works within the overarching transmedia work. Jenkins uses The Matrix franchise as an excellent example, since while it started as a movie, it now includes several comics, a line of toys and action figures, several video games, an anime, and several books written in the same universe, as he points out in "We Had So Many Stories to Tell": The Heroes Comics as Transmedia Storytelling (http://henryjenkins.org/2007/12/we_had_so_many_stories_to_tell.html). You do not buy or consume any of the other products because you found them fun, or enjoyable, or intriguing in and of themselves, though they might be all of those things, but that is secondary to the fact that they were related to the initial object of the transmedia work that got you hooked into the world of the transmedia work’s story. You don’t usually buy the action figures made for The Matrix because you saw them and thought they were cool in and of themselves. There are many other action figures with cooler features, more options to play with, and that may even be cheaper that you could just as easily buy if it were an enjoyment of playing with action figures in and of themselves. You buy The Matrix action figures because they are action figures of the characters in The Matrix, because it is related to the central work you enjoy, and suddenly, you are able to continue the stories with your own imagination by acting things out with the toys! And it is this last fact that has transformed our society in ways we could never have believed.
Something relatively new to the world, something that found its roots in one of the first transmedia works ever made: Star Trek, is fan-fiction. Never before in history did someone sit down, and decide to write a story about some other kids who lived in Tom Sawyer’s and Huck Finn’s home town and had interactions with both of Mark Twain’s iconic characters. No, that started when people began to be more interested in a setting than they were in plot of the work they were consuming. Now, it is hardly possible to find a work of any sort of media that has not had some sort of fan fiction written about it. A fan might draw pictures or make a comic, or, as is most common across the Internet, write a story. There are entire websites devoted to allowing people to expand and explain and talk about and write stories within the universe of a single particular setting. Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Star Trek are the works most famous for generating enormous amounts of layman, or fan, created fiction to add to the setting of the central work, but almost everything now has somebody making some form of extra media to add to the whole of a single works franchise in some way, shape, or form.
Suddenly, the art of telling a story has gone critical, it has fractured and fragmented and transformed into something strange and wondrous, and only recently have people even admitted this was a real phenomenon. Before Henry Jenkins’ research, the commonly held belief among academics was that audiences passively consumed media, rather than taking it a part and rebuilding it within the rules in place within the setting of the media. Suddenly, academics have to admit to the fact that there is nothing special in taking an interest in a particular work of media and deconstructing and reconstructing and analyzing it up and down for meaning, because it is something that is constantly done by audiences and fans to remake those works with their own imaginations. Academics cannot claim, as they so often do, a kind of elite status in this analysis of works of art and fiction and literature. (“The “Decline” of Public Intellectuals?”, http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2007/08/public_intellec.html) Normal people are taking charge of processes that we once thought had to be controlled and directed by someone who was an artisan, and while the artisans certainly put out cleaner, critically better works, we cannot say that they are absolutely necessary to the process any more once the ball has gotten rolling.
Without Henry Jenkins, we may never have learned this, or at the very least, it would have taken far longer. Jenkins’ work has transformed how we approach media, it has changed how we advertise, and how we actually make and distribute media. Without his research, would we have noticed that consumers want to participate more in their chosen works? Would we have developed the complex Alternate Reality Games that preceded works like the video game Halo 3, Nine Inch Nail’s album Year Zero, and the film District 9? By codifying and studying how audiences interact with settings that transcend a single form of media, he has set off an explosion of transmedia that, in turn, has unlocked enormous creative potential locked within the consumer populace who was once considered meek and passive.
Henry Jenkins is a public intellectual who focuses on the study of communications and transmedia objects and trends to explain how and why humans communicate with one another, both through study of stories and of how those stories are told. Henry Jenkins was born on June 4th, 1958, in Atlanta, Georgia. He was a journalism and political science undergraduate at Georgia State University. He went on to earn his masters in communication studies at the University of Iowa, and his Ph.D. in communication arts from University of Wisconsin–Madison. He later married and went to work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before finally gaining a job at the University of Southern California, where he continues to teach at the Annenberg School of Communications. His achievements today include a number of books on the subject of transmedia including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide and Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. It can be said that few, if any, public intellectuals have done as much as Henry Jenkins has for our understanding of how people communicate with one another through modern media.
Firstly, we must define what a public intellectual is. An intellectual is someone who is an educated, knowledgeable, expert on whatever it is he is talking about. Usually this means an academic though it does not have to. University professors are usually intellectuals on their own subject for example. A public intellectual is one who attempts to take knowledge that is codified in the slang and terminology of his own profession, and decode it for the general masses who do not have the same level of experience or background that the intellectual has, and thus require someone to explain the entire thing in far simpler terms than might normally be done. A public intellectual makes it their goal to explain to as wide an audience as possible their opinions and ideas, as well as educate them on the concepts that underpin those opinions and ideas. A normal intellectual would only write for people who have the basic level of knowledge required to personally understand and decode a profession’s slang and terminology, the public intellectual puts no such restrictions on his own writing.
Henry Jenkins is most certainly a public intellectual. He has a masters in Communication Studies, and a Ph.D. in Communication Arts, as such, it is almost indisputable that he knows his subject: communicating ideas and such through modern media, since that is the focus of both degrees. One need only reference his autobiographical page on his blog, Confessions of an Aca-Fan, which he explains that in one of his books, Textual Poachers, he defines himself as an Aca/Fan(also the name sake of his blog) someone who is both an academic and a fan of various forms of media. He explains on his blog that through that book he was trying to bridge the gap between academics and fans of various types of media so they might better understand one another. This places him quite firmly in the realm of the public, since he was not directly addressing other academics alone, but attempting to explain things in terminology that both academics and laymen could understand so that his point might be delivered. From his credentials and the purposes of his work (and the majority of the works on his website) we can see that he is most definitely a public intellectual.
Now, most interestingly we can see how the world is transforming so that transmedia is becoming less and less an issue of corporations funneling money into new projects for an existing franchise of a particular setting or story to tap new demographics, and is more and more dependent upon consumer interaction and zeal. As Jenkins explains in his article, Transmedia Storytelling 101 (http://henryjenkins.org/2007/03/transmedia_storytelling_101.html), transmedia is a method of media meant to be used in a collective. That is to say, it is designed with the very idea that networking will play an important role in the telling of the story and the aggregation of information about the story and the setting it is in. It lives and breaths on this idea and without a social network of some sort, whether it be Facebook, cell-phones, or even just random forums on the Internet, without a social network, transmedia cannot function in its entirety. This is an enormous prospect for our world as we know it, it is huge, important, critical even to our understanding of human communication.
This reveals something both terrible and wondrous about the transformation of the art of story telling. With a transmedia work, the individual characters and plots become almost insignificant when compared to the world that is being built. Where in a single book the setting exists merely as scenery and is important for that reason alone, it is not the reason you are reading the book. You are reading the book because the plot grips you and the characters intrigue you on some level. While these reasons might be the reason you are initially introduced to a transmedia work’s world, it is usually not why you continue to explore and look into the rest of the works within the overarching transmedia work. Jenkins uses The Matrix franchise as an excellent example, since while it started as a movie, it now includes several comics, a line of toys and action figures, several video games, an anime, and several books written in the same universe, as he points out in "We Had So Many Stories to Tell": The Heroes Comics as Transmedia Storytelling (http://henryjenkins.org/2007/12/we_had_so_many_stories_to_tell.html). You do not buy or consume any of the other products because you found them fun, or enjoyable, or intriguing in and of themselves, though they might be all of those things, but that is secondary to the fact that they were related to the initial object of the transmedia work that got you hooked into the world of the transmedia work’s story. You don’t usually buy the action figures made for The Matrix because you saw them and thought they were cool in and of themselves. There are many other action figures with cooler features, more options to play with, and that may even be cheaper that you could just as easily buy if it were an enjoyment of playing with action figures in and of themselves. You buy The Matrix action figures because they are action figures of the characters in The Matrix, because it is related to the central work you enjoy, and suddenly, you are able to continue the stories with your own imagination by acting things out with the toys! And it is this last fact that has transformed our society in ways we could never have believed.
Something relatively new to the world, something that found its roots in one of the first transmedia works ever made: Star Trek, is fan-fiction. Never before in history did someone sit down, and decide to write a story about some other kids who lived in Tom Sawyer’s and Huck Finn’s home town and had interactions with both of Mark Twain’s iconic characters. No, that started when people began to be more interested in a setting than they were in plot of the work they were consuming. Now, it is hardly possible to find a work of any sort of media that has not had some sort of fan fiction written about it. A fan might draw pictures or make a comic, or, as is most common across the Internet, write a story. There are entire websites devoted to allowing people to expand and explain and talk about and write stories within the universe of a single particular setting. Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Star Trek are the works most famous for generating enormous amounts of layman, or fan, created fiction to add to the setting of the central work, but almost everything now has somebody making some form of extra media to add to the whole of a single works franchise in some way, shape, or form.
Suddenly, the art of telling a story has gone critical, it has fractured and fragmented and transformed into something strange and wondrous, and only recently have people even admitted this was a real phenomenon. Before Henry Jenkins’ research, the commonly held belief among academics was that audiences passively consumed media, rather than taking it a part and rebuilding it within the rules in place within the setting of the media. Suddenly, academics have to admit to the fact that there is nothing special in taking an interest in a particular work of media and deconstructing and reconstructing and analyzing it up and down for meaning, because it is something that is constantly done by audiences and fans to remake those works with their own imaginations. Academics cannot claim, as they so often do, a kind of elite status in this analysis of works of art and fiction and literature. (“The “Decline” of Public Intellectuals?”, http://www.stephenmack.com/blog/archives/2007/08/public_intellec.html) Normal people are taking charge of processes that we once thought had to be controlled and directed by someone who was an artisan, and while the artisans certainly put out cleaner, critically better works, we cannot say that they are absolutely necessary to the process any more once the ball has gotten rolling.
Without Henry Jenkins, we may never have learned this, or at the very least, it would have taken far longer. Jenkins’ work has transformed how we approach media, it has changed how we advertise, and how we actually make and distribute media. Without his research, would we have noticed that consumers want to participate more in their chosen works? Would we have developed the complex Alternate Reality Games that preceded works like the video game Halo 3, Nine Inch Nail’s album Year Zero, and the film District 9? By codifying and studying how audiences interact with settings that transcend a single form of media, he has set off an explosion of transmedia that, in turn, has unlocked enormous creative potential locked within the consumer populace who was once considered meek and passive.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Introduction and Thoughts on Interactivity
Hello, and welcome to Blower Boy's Thoughts and Musings, a little blog I've made because occasionally (say, once a week or so) I get it into my head something that just needs to be said, and I might as well get those thoughts out there. Now, rather than talk about myself, my world view, I'm just going to give you a preview of those things by telling you that I'm a young adult, male, born in southern Louisiana, the Acadiana region to be specific, and am a student of interactive media (a fancy way of saying game design) at the University of Southern California. For this reason, as you might imagine, I am quite interested in interactivity, that is to say, two things that interact with one another. This might sound like it is stating the obvious, but considering how much the term "Interactivity" gets bandied about these days, I feel it is appropriate to state the obvious in this case.
For the moment I'd like you to watch the following video:
Gear Ring Video - Youtube
Now, this is an example of interactivity in a way that has not occurred before, at least it has not occurred on a large scale. A ring is not an interactive object, it is not designed to be. You put it on your finger, other people look at it. The ring might have significance in some way, it might designate your marital status, or your high school or college, it might simply be a display of wealth or any number of other things, but it is certainly not meant to be interacted with. You put it on your finger and forget about it, it is decoration. But here, we have something that is new, that is fascinating. It is a ring you can DO something to, and it will visibly have something done to it. Now, obviously this can be done with any ring, you can turn it about your finger, or wear it on different fingers, but they are not constructed with this in mind, they rarely, if ever have been constructed with such things in mind. Yet, here we have a ring that quite obviously is meant to be played with and interacted with. This may not seem all that miraculous to you, but consider that more and more, such objects are appearing in our homes, in our clothing, in our pockets. More and more we are finding our selves in an increasingly interactive world, where things are meant to be touched, to change, to be done to, rather than to sit there and look pretty.
What could have brought about this change though? I think the answer lies in the computer. The computer was a device that not only could, for example, have things done to it, but it could do things back in response to the things done to it. Yes, there have been machines throughout the ages that have functioned like this, but none so effectively or with so wide a basis in technology that we have today. The computer, I feel, as a device than can react in complex and meaningful ways to a variety of stimuli, has transformed, fundamentally, how people today think and feel. The gear ring is an example of this in a fundamental way, since it is a normally non interactive accoutrement that has been made interactive. Don't believe me? Look at the other things that have been made interactive in recent years: Phones (look at your cellphone and tell me it isn't interactive), advertisements (those little game banners on top of your webpage), comics (quite a few interactive webcomic games out there now, but a good example you can find on drowtales.com in the form of Path to Power). I could go on, but my point is made. Take a look around yourself some time, find things that have become interactive that even ten years ago were passive devices.
For the moment I'd like you to watch the following video:
Gear Ring Video - Youtube
Now, this is an example of interactivity in a way that has not occurred before, at least it has not occurred on a large scale. A ring is not an interactive object, it is not designed to be. You put it on your finger, other people look at it. The ring might have significance in some way, it might designate your marital status, or your high school or college, it might simply be a display of wealth or any number of other things, but it is certainly not meant to be interacted with. You put it on your finger and forget about it, it is decoration. But here, we have something that is new, that is fascinating. It is a ring you can DO something to, and it will visibly have something done to it. Now, obviously this can be done with any ring, you can turn it about your finger, or wear it on different fingers, but they are not constructed with this in mind, they rarely, if ever have been constructed with such things in mind. Yet, here we have a ring that quite obviously is meant to be played with and interacted with. This may not seem all that miraculous to you, but consider that more and more, such objects are appearing in our homes, in our clothing, in our pockets. More and more we are finding our selves in an increasingly interactive world, where things are meant to be touched, to change, to be done to, rather than to sit there and look pretty.
What could have brought about this change though? I think the answer lies in the computer. The computer was a device that not only could, for example, have things done to it, but it could do things back in response to the things done to it. Yes, there have been machines throughout the ages that have functioned like this, but none so effectively or with so wide a basis in technology that we have today. The computer, I feel, as a device than can react in complex and meaningful ways to a variety of stimuli, has transformed, fundamentally, how people today think and feel. The gear ring is an example of this in a fundamental way, since it is a normally non interactive accoutrement that has been made interactive. Don't believe me? Look at the other things that have been made interactive in recent years: Phones (look at your cellphone and tell me it isn't interactive), advertisements (those little game banners on top of your webpage), comics (quite a few interactive webcomic games out there now, but a good example you can find on drowtales.com in the form of Path to Power). I could go on, but my point is made. Take a look around yourself some time, find things that have become interactive that even ten years ago were passive devices.
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