This was a triumph. I'm making a note here: HUGE SUCCESS. It's hard to overstate my satisfaction. Aperture Science We do what we must because we can. For the good of all of us. Except the ones who are dead. But there's no sense crying over every mistake. You just keep on trying till you run out of cake. And the Science gets done. And you make a neat gun. For the people who are still alive. I'm not even angry. I'm being so sincere right now. Even though you broke my heart. And killed me. And tore me to pieces. And threw every piece into a fire. As they burned it hurt because I was so happy for you! Now these points of data make a beautiful line. And we're out of beta. We're releasing on time. So I'm GLaD. I got burned. Think of all the things we learned for the people who are still alive. Go ahead and leave me. I think I prefer to stay inside. Maybe you'll find someone else to help you. Maybe Black Mesa THAT WAS A JOKE. HAHA. FAT CHANCE. Anyway, this cake is great. It's so delicious and moist. Look at me still talking when there's Science to do. When I look out there, it makes me GLaD I'm not you. I've experiments to run. There is research to be done. On the people who are still alive. And believe me I am still alive. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive. I feel FANTASTIC and I'm still alive. While you're dying I'll be still alive. And when you're dead I will be still alive. STILL ALIVE
Listen twice. You'll never get it out of your head.
Maybe my favorite bit about the NIN Year Zero ARG was that damn concert that I had heard about but never actually saw documented.
The story went that players and fans were made aware of an 'Art is Resistance' meeting...then climbed into vehicles (I had heard buses, but apparently it was vans ok, it WAS buses) and driven to an undisclosed location in the LA factory district for a wild 'experience'. Sounded cool, but though I kept coming across references, I couldn't find documentation. Until now.
Karl Bode's WordSoup blog mentioned the concert back in 4/07, and though his video's been yanked, he links to one of the YZ websites 'Open Source Resistance' where the video still exists. bingo.
It's worth watching to see
the crowd reactions - they shift [frequently] between willing disbelief, outright disbelief, mild discomfort, wild euphoria and s--t scared. Just try to quantify the 'engagement metric' on that puppy, Holmes.
watching the intersection of realities between Trent and the actors/assistants with the fans - Trent is firmly embedded in the album's alternate worldview, and for once, the fans don't just imagine it after huffing airplane glue and cranking it up, they get to be there when the SWAT team bursts in. Shooting.
Trent and 42 Entertainment built the Year Zero roller coaster ride that turned music into a game you could play. And kudos to 42 Entertainment, but make no mistake: Trent has spent the better part of the last two decades doing the heavylifting of brand narrative world building. And with the dystopian foundation laid and the narrative arc in motion, you can subcontract/modularize the activation to map to technographic, demographic, and psychographic subsets. And net a solid selling album in the process. Yes, I am a NIN fanboy. Sue me.
For anyone unfamiliar with this year's Cannes Viral Advertising Gran Prix winner, here's the synopsis, from their entry:
"The ambitious Year Zero alternate reality game (ARG), a work of
cross-media art involving websites, emails, phone calls, album
packaging, tour t-shirts, thumb drives, music videos, murals,
interactive games and live concert events with the new music of Nine
Inch Nails at its core. Playing out over 10 weeks, the Year Zero ARG
engaged over 2.5M participants. It started with a message hidden in the
back of a concert t-shirt that lead to online websites, ultimately over
29 websites discovered over several months, 7.5M page views, 7M forum
postings, 2M phone calls and thousands of original art submissions."
Are you letting people play YOUR brand communications?
Penny Arcade's 'Tycho and Gabe' + Hothead Games = a PAX attendee fever dream: a witty, snarky, steampunk-flavored
2D episodic insiders' downloadable game from PA's + Hothead's "PlayGreenhouse", a recent and potentially credible indie-game download site...from the guys that normally rip crap games to shreds.
According to Greenhouse's 'About Us':
"Greenhouse [offers indie developers] technical flexibility
and know-how...we
believe that interesting, new games are being made all the time...we'd like to be the venue for those
games."
Opinion piece by Keith Boesky (ex-Eidos president)
over on Gamasutra poses the question "Will Apple reinvent the mobile games space?"
While he doesn't mention N-Gage or Google Android OS, he raises some interesting points re: the financial implications/business opportunity for publishers, and the possibility for a "new age of gaming" where developers can build apps in their garage for love and for cheap again.
Key takeaways:
2.5 billion mobile "non-iPhones" globally, ~2% of them have
downloaded ANY applications = install base ~50 million. iPhone to
top 10MM (est.) units sold this year, most will download apps (or
sideload them through iTunes). Arguably iPhone = 16% of the GLOBAL
market for downloadable mobile apps. (note: To enhance Nokia Game
selling possibilities, Nokia is pre-loading N-Gage software on many of their devices.)
Too often, Boesky notes, "Mobile games are developed to lowest tech specs" to allow maximal
porting (the ability to redeploy a game on another device or form
factor relatively cheaply), but apps built to lowest common denominator
don't "cater to any unique attributes of any phone"...making for some
pretty weak apps. Or "Cr-apps".
Not mentioned in the article, but relevant as well, is US Venture
Capitalist Firm KPCB's $100MM "iFund", a pool of cash they've set aside
to invest in companies that make iPhone and iTouch applications
I've been gaming since the early 80's (coding on my Tandy Corp Model I, level II) and in my experience, the mobile gaming experience on communications devices has sucked for years. Most games were either crap or bad ports or both. There are some promising publishers (THQ? Glu? Jamdat - oh wait...EA mobile) out there, but no-one's created the "must-have" mobile game.
Why?
Big name publishers have looked at mobile as a hedge/defensive move/portfolio asset - not a serious focus. console/PC titles earn bank, not mobile. And unfortunately, investing for the future is hard when you've got quarterly numbers to make.
Carriers cripple the process with their soup of devices and form factors, tech and non-transparent dev/QA "testing" environments. Want a game on their system? Dumb it down to work on the devices with broadest penetration. Or better, create a version
that works on whatever latest device they're selling. Which
by definition won't have a big audience. Minimizing revenue. Oh - and they like exclusive windows. Or they won't promote it. No promotion = bad deck placement. You see where this goes.
Independent developers didn't have the resources or portfolios to weather this crap. So they've been doing web stuff. Java, Flash. Facebook Apps.
Which brings us back to the Apple iPhone SDK release. And Google Android OS. And Nokia's new-look N-Gage. Apple's advantage out of the gate is homogenous devices and an iTunes delivery system, but...Nokia is working to open up its game dev systems (SDK's and API's), and devices should begin shipping soon with Google's Android OS.
What form will the mobile Tetris, Pong or GTA take? TBD...
MTV (publisher), Harmonix (developer) and EA (distributor) intend to release "Rock Band" 11/23/07 for XBox 360 and PS3.
How will the game play out online and across social networking tools now that EA and MTV have each acquired their own competitive instant messaging/social networking platforms?
Days ago, it was announced that EA is buying Atlanta-based Super Computer International (SCI), creators of 'PlayLinc', an online game browsing and messaging platform with instant messaging, buddy tracking, team management and VoIP. Interestingly, SCI was 40% owned by Verizon, and Verizon got into gaming when they found that 75% of their 16MM high-speed internet subscribers were using that bandwidth for gaming. From the press releases, "SCI’s development team will become party of EA’s Online Technology Group. SCI’s CEO, Jesper Jensen...will report to Nanea Reeves, VP and COO for EA Online."
MTV, the games publisher, however, acquired a similar offering in 'XFire' back in April of '06. XFire has a much larger base of users, and it will be interesting to see whether with 'Rock Band' these two systems will compete or work together on what promises to be an intensely social gaming experience.
With television viewers widely distributed, a purported $500MM investment in gaming over the next two years, an ongoing rollout of 'micro-niche' web properties and the advent of Rock Band, MTV seems to be recreating themselves as an immersive music and entertainment services company.
MTV CEO Judy McGrath has said "'Rock Band.' Maybe it will be the next MTV ... Who knows?"
It's hard to understate MTV's once dominant cultural impact. Farhad Manjoo over at Salon in his 8/15/07 piece "How 'Guitar Hero' saved guitar music" makes a strong case for the current impact of Guitar Hero:
"some [guitar teachers] speak of [Guitar Hero] as the most revolutionary thing to hit the world of guitar since Jack White learned his first scale. [It's] introducing millions of young people to the possibility of playing the instrument, and it's also teaching them important skills they'll need to play. And not only that: "Guitar Hero," perhaps more than any other piece of modern entertainment, is juicing kids' interest in guitar-heavy music. What could be better for the guitar, after all, than hordes of young people learning to love 'Smoke on the Water'?"
Got an interesting response to a previous post about Halo 3's $170,000,000 opening weekend, from CoDee:
"...while this was the biggest
entertainment launch in history (as measured by $$$), it was almost
entirely confined to males 18-34. I think the big $170MM number is
overstating it's actual cultural impact. The Xbox 360 is still the
exclusive turf of the hardcore. When is Microsoft (or the game
industry) going to have a hit that breaks out of this niche?"
CoDee, I'm glad you asked!
First, a trip down memory lane. From what dark root does the image of "male video gamers" spring?
"Gaming's Dark Ages" aka "Exclusive Turf of the Hardcore" aka "Kingdom of the Socially Inept"
In my fleeting personal memories of the lost time after "Spacewar"; eons before XBox 360, I am plagued by recurrent visions of socially awkward fat kids (let's call them collectively, "me") stuffing their pie holes with crap food, playing 'Space Invaders' and later, when graphics could handle it, Donkey Kong.
Soooo lifelike. You could smell the RAM burning. Only in fevered dreams (typically brought on by two liters of soda and a bag of nutter butters) could we imagine graphics surpassing these masterworks.
The Nation's collective image of "video gamers" was built on the backs of the folks who played them: pre-pubescent kids and Comp-Sci wunderkinds. This, then, is the beginning of the long held assumption that only wildly attractive men played video games.
Freedom at last from social isolation : Behold the Atari 2600!
A two liter bottle of Coke + a pack of Nutterbutters + a copy of ET:The extraterrestial = crazy delicious. Who needs to date?
PC Games for my Tandy Corp. Radio Shack TRS-80 (affectionately known as the "Trash-80") were sold on tapes. Audio cassettes in yellowing mylar bags. Back then, respectable pubs like the NYT couldn't be bothered with video games. Games, and computer gaming, epitomized 'Geek'. Specifically, revenge-of-the-nerds, Male geeks. A subculture, nothing more. Just keep walking, and don't make eye contact, and you'll get out of Castle Wolfenstein just fine.
As recently as 2005, eMarketer's "Videogames: Where to Now?"
reports still pegged US console ownership as 75% male, with 81% of those males 35 and
under. Men also held the edge (51% to 49%) over women in online
gaming. But the balance had already tipped. Unbeknownst to conventional wisdom, the keys to geek castle had already been stolen. A 2005 report by the Carnegie endowment noted that "of all videogame players who had played no more than one year, 62% were female."
Modern Days: Hardcore no more
When did gaming go mainstream? I don't know exactly - I'd been gaming since Christmas of 1973, when Dad brought home Pong. I'd been programming games since I got my first computer in 1978. And I am a geek. So it's a little blurry for me. Definitely after Zork. Sega Genesis? When Playstation came out? Or Gamecube? Or the Gameboy? When JC Herz published "Joystick Nation"?
In the modern era, one extremely lagging indicator could be when the New York Times launched "Game Theory", a bi-weekly game review by Charles Herold, featured in the 'Circuits' section in March 2000.
"...it cannot be
denied that there are people who will take greater pleasure in this
game than in any other entertainment this year.
And what will
make them happy, what will make their days joyful and give them long,
crazed nights of ecstatic bliss, what will make the purchase of Halo 3
the best thing they could possible do with their money, is this one
thrilling fact: Halo 3 is Halo 2 with somewhat better graphics!"
OK, he doesn't think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. But he knows others do. In droves. This is culture he is reporting on, not simply a product.
And the WEBSITE! It's cool! And the kicker - to interact with the 'Halo3 interactive Game Guide', you have to download Silverlight. BRILLIANT! A bucket load of sugar helps the download medicine go down! I mean honestly - is the whole game just a trojan horse? how the hell else was Microsoft going to get us all to download Silverlight?? But I digress.
Back to a paraphrase of CoDee's original query -
Q. 'when will the gaming industry have a hit that breaks out of this niche?"
On April 13, 2007, eMarketer's report entitled "Gamer Demographic Spreads Out" had these tidbits:
Casual Gaming
700 MILLION casual games were downloaded in 2006. And who are 76% of all casual gamers? I'll give you a hint - it starts with 'W' and ends with "omen'. And that's "omen" as in portent. As in "watch this space grow from a projected $365MM space in 2006 to a projected $725MM in 2007, and to be a primary driver for years to come"
Consoles
Fine. We'll give them casual games, well and good. But Consoles? Only men have consoles, right? I'll give you a hint - it starts with 'W' and ends in 'rong'.
25% in 2005. 42% in 2007. What the HELL happened here? One thing was Wii, baby! According to Engadget on August 23rd, here's where console sales stood:
Knock Wii out of there, and you'd see female ownership drop - but by how much? Don't forget Carnegie noted back in 2005 that 62% of gamers that had played less than a year were women. BEFORE Wii came out. Interestingly, after the original announcement of the Wii, at E3, "a
loose online movement called 'Wii60' developed, promoting
dual-ownership of both Nintendo's and Microsoft's systems." Check it out for yourself at Wii60.com.
Above - Master Chief gets in touch with his feminine side?
Below - "Is that a Wii remote in your hand or are you just glad to see me?"
a Fine example of Wii Sports "Pass Along":
Mobile
Of 2,000 folks surveyed in a recent Parks Associates study of mobile gamers,
59% were women.
59%.
And 61% of those female players play mobile phone games for about one
to four hours every month. 58% say they play mobile
games for more than four hours each month.
I don't do that, and I'm a complete G -E-E-K.
I mean c'mon. Where do people find the time for this stuff, when they could be Twittering, or having sex with virtual genitals in Second Life? But I digress.
"Women are the foundation of the gaming market, and as an
industry, we need to cater to their preferences," said John Barrett,
director of research at Parks Associates.
So where does that leave us?
As defined by Wikipedia, "A game is a structured or semi-structured activity, usually undertaken for enjoyment and sometimes also used as an educational tool." Which would make it one of the original forms of interactive media.
Gaming IS mainstream. It's NOT exclusively male. Game culture is culture. It's also a HUGE category that defies categorization. It generates over 166,000,000 results on Google. I'm not even go to try to define it here - let it suffice to say 'Gaming' comprises a mind-blowing array of genres and delivery vehicles. Women dominate casual gaming and mobile gaming. Men have an edge in console ownership, but the gap has narrowed. Let's move on.
But is Halo 3 cultural impact being overstated?
Don't know yet. But maybe there's something in trying to draw an entertainment industry parallel. If we can agree films can be cultural events, then we have a place to start. By way of example, films like 'Toy Story' enter the collective consciousness and national and global culture. Who hasn't heard (or said) "To infinity, and beyond!"? So this is voodoo math, but if you've read this far, bear with me:
Halo 3 had $170,000,000 in sales. Divide by $60/title = 2,833,333 copies purchased.
I couldn't find any good numbers to support "pass-along" - loaning a friend a game - or multiplayer use (which people indicate is the true power of Halo 3), but based on personal experience (and some disturbing videos on YouTube) we could probably safely double the number above and consider them 'participants in the experience of Halo 3'. To be conservative, let's use an average of 1.5 - 1.9 people playing each game, for a total audience of between 4,250,000 - 5,500,000.
A film watched by that horde, in 2006 dollars, would generate opening weekend box office revenues from $27 - $36 Million. Comparing that to opening weekend box receipts from films, we find:
Armageddon @ $36MM
Robots @ $36MM
Minority Report @ $35MM
Gladiator @ $34MM
Lethal Weapon 4 @ $34MM
Blades of Glory @ $33MM
Rush Hour @ $33MM
Rounding out the bucket are titles that include Anchorman, Titanic, The Matrix, Terminator II, Elf, Saving Private Ryan, The Blair Witch Project, and...Toy Story.
Of course these films then went on to generate more ticket sales after opening weekend. But Halo 3 will continue to generate sales as well.
So bearing with this little exercise, how many of those films have you seen? how many scenes do your remember, or can reenact, with friends? how many films do you reference regularly? how many can you quote?
And you saw them, what, once? twice? If you saw "Anchorman" three times, you spent a cumulative viewtime of 4.7 hours (not including those HILARIOUS DVD EXTRAS!!).
It takes a practiced gamer 15 hours to complete Halo 2 (in 'heroic' mode). That's 15 hours of fearing for your virtual life at practically every moment. Are you an 'engaged viewer'? Hell yeah.
If 4.7 hours and community reinforcement embedded Anchorman into our culture, not to mention The Matrix, imagine the potential impact of Halo 3. Or impending titles like Hellgate London, or Will Wright's upcoming "Spore".
The 18-34 male demographic just got an M9HE-DP of Halo culture up the tail pipe - blown
audially, visually and physically into their systems. Halo 3 has been almost a religion, spawning fanatical followers (who condemn bad reviews - and reviewers!) and an intensely, mutually reinforcing community with a common language: 'john-117', 'Cortana', 'Forerunners', the 'Flood', etc. - these mean nothing to the uninitiated. When 'Scary Movie XV' makes a reference to the destruction of 'Reach' in Halo, will you miss it because you didn't play? Yep.
How crazy has gaming got? Very. Here's a VERY mild example:
Barcade in Brooklyn, NY, hosted a a "No pants allowed: The Underwear Arcade Video Game Gathering". Attended by men. And women. Want to see the photos? Check them out on Flickr. Not enough? Here's two below. Extra points if you recognize the W+K employee in the rainbow hat MC'ing the event.
Note mixed crowd below.
Gaming is for everyone. Gaming is fun again. Halo 3 - cultural? Just ask Wikipedia.
