As Gaming Turns Social, Industry Shifts Strategies
Even before Electronic Arts roiled the video game world on Sunday with its $2 billion hostile takeover bid for Take-Two Interactive, even before Phil Harrison, president of Sony’s worldwide game studios, announced his resignation on Monday, one could plainly see the creative and financial disruptions underlying the industry’s explosive growth.
Last week more than 17,000 artists, writers, designers and executives convened here for the annual Game Developers Conference. On the surface there was little news: few major announcements of new games, few major deals. But in private it was easy to read the sea changes reshaping what is now an $18 billion domestic industry as it grows from niche pastime to mass medium.
Those themes emerged perhaps most clearly during talks with executives from each of the industry’s three titans: Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America; John Schappert, a vice president in Microsoft’s games business; and, certainly not least, Mr. Harrison himself. Mr. Fils-Aime was riding high, while the others appeared to be trying to figure out how to catch up. And this was just days before Mr. Harrison announced his resignation and before Electronics Arts effectively conceded that it too feared being passed by.
The big story in the game industry’s tremendous growth over the last few years is that the smartest companies are finally designing games and game systems that appeal to the broad public, not just a small cadre of tech-savvy youngsters. Nintendo’s fabulously popular Wii console is Exhibit A, but is also joined in that vein by games like Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution, World of Warcraft and even casual office games like Spider solitaire, Bejeweled and Peggle. In short, companies that are making games more accessible are growing like gangbusters, while traditional powerhouses with a traditionally limited strategy of building around the same old (if you will) young male audience have stagnated, both creatively and on the bottom line.
It just happens that the roster of old-school industry laggards includes big names like Electronic Arts, Microsoft and Sony. The leaders of the new wave include companies like Activision, Blizzard, Nintendo and PopCap. This is the dichotomy that became so clear here at the Game Developers Conference.
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Gary Gygax, the man who invented Dungeons & Dragons and roleplaying games, accidentally revitalized the fantasy fiction genre (which remade itself in his image) and inspired a whole genre of computer games (including World of Warcraft) has died.
Gary Gygax, who co-created the fantasy game Dungeons & Dragons and helped start the role-playing phenomenon, died Tuesday morning at his home in Lake Geneva. He was 69.
He had been suffering from health problems for several years, including an abdominal aneurysm, said his wife, Gail Gygax.
Gygax and Dave Arneson developed Dungeons & Dragons in 1974 using medieval characters and mythical creatures. The game known for its oddly shaped dice became a hit, particularly among teenage boys, and eventually was turned into video games, books and movies.
Gygax always enjoyed hearing from the game’s legion of devoted fans, many of whom would stop by the family’s home in Lake Geneva, about 55 miles southwest of Milwaukee, his wife said. Despite his declining health, he hosted weekly games of Dungeons & Dragons as recently as January, she said.
“It really meant a lot to him to hear from people from over the years about how he helped them become a doctor, a lawyer, a policeman, what he gave them,” Gygax said. “He really enjoyed that.”
Dungeons & Dragons players create fictional characters and carry out their adventures with the help of complicated rules. The quintessential geek pastime, it spawned a wealth of copycat games and later inspired a whole genre of computer games that’s still growing in popularity.
Funeral arrangements are pending. Besides his wife, Gygax is survived by six children.
Appropriately, he died on GM Day and National Grammar Day. (The effect the original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons books had on my elementary and middle school vocabularies cannot be understated. How many 11 year olds know what a carbuncle is? Or hematite?)
EDIT: A tribute strip from Order of the Stick. A more serious one from Penny Arcade. Given that EGG shoved a ton of cartoons into the original Dungeon Masters Guide, I suspect he would be pleased. The man who showed all the Bond villains what a real death trap looked like in Tomb of Horrors had a good sense of humor.
It’s rare that you hear public radio talk about Middle Eastern countries that exist only in the world of DC Comics, but that’s what was in one of PRI’s The World’s GeoQuizzes earlier this month.
For today’s Geo Quiz we’re looking for a country – with a twist. The country we’re looking for belongs in a list that includes these other states.
Tropidor is a country in Central America – it was the subject of illegal U.S. Government arms trading many years ago.
Kooey Kooey Kooey is an island in the South Pacific, in case you didn’t know.
Ah, yes, Pokolistan. Pokolistan is a former Soviet republic. It used to be a military dictatorship ruled by General Zod. And General Zod, you might recall, was killed by… Superman.
It goes on to talk about home-grown Middle Eastern superhero comics:
Of all the places in the world that needs a hero, Lebanon is probably high atop the list. After an Israeli invasion in 2006, and a 15 year civil war before that, much of the country has been wracked by war. So in many ways, just as the United States had Superman and Captain America in the 1950s, Lebanon now has Malaak.
“Malaak is basically the Lebanese superhero, super heroine I should say, as we never had one in Lebanon.�
28-year-old Lebanese artist Joumana Medlej created Malaak — a new online and printed action comic.
“Actually we’ve never had an action comic in Lebanon. She was born of the situation where everybody was starting to wish we had some kind of superhero to come and fix things once and for all.â€?
Medlej says Malaak — whose name means angel in Arabic — fights against supernatural and evil beings — known as “jinn” — that are creating a war in this fictitious representation of Lebanon.
“She definitely has powers, but she’s discovering them as the story goes. So we don’t know the extent of them. But so far she can generate some kind of energy that destroys the jinn that are responsible for the war.â€?
While Malaak is clearly drawing from elements of Lebanon’s recent past, another comic has a much newer take on a significantly older story — Islam. “The 99” is a comic with wide distribution throughout the Muslim world. It’s almost like a religious version of the Justice League. Naif Al-Mutawa is the CEO of the Teshkeel Media Group in Kuwait, which publishes “The 99”. He explains that the name refers to the 99 attributes that Muslims believe come together in Allah — and which in turn give Allah power.
“Things like generosity and strength and wisdom and foresight and mercy. And dozens of others that unfortunately are not used today to describe Islam in the media. So, the idea, very simply is a series of heros, each of which embodies one of these traits. And they need to work in a team of three to solve a problem.�
Al-Mutawa says part of the reason comics haven’t taken off in the Middle East before is government censorship, which restricted what could and couldn’t be published.
Joumana Medlej’s a pretty good artist, if the sample shown is any indication. I could definitely see a stateside publisher taking a chance on Malaak. I’d certainly want to try an issue.
 Because Hillary has said she just loves endless rambling about WoW instead of, you know, stuff about the baby or journalism or, well, anything else …
I’m late to the party, but I’ve been checking out World of Warcraft blogs lately. As expected, a lot of them are pretty bad — as are all blogs — but there’s also some surprisingly good ones out there. I haven’t found any good roleplaying ones yet (either they seem to just be painfully bad fan fiction or seem to ramble on about nothing indefinitely), but here are some out of character ones that I like:
- A Dwarf Priest – Jenn plays a dwarf priest in a similar way as the blog’s author and has a similar attitude about things.
- An Engineer’s Journal – My dwarf hunter is an engineer, and the topic’s handled well here. In addition to the narrow topic, it focuses on other things of general interest, much like the other blogs I’ve listed here.
- Banana Shoulders – I mostly just curse paladins in PvP, either for being incredibly tedious to kill or because they like to slap on Crusader Aura before we all jump off the rock to start an Eye of the Storm match, because somehow, getting to the nodes faster, but with a large chunk of our health gone is a good idea. That said, this is an extremely good general interest WoW blog.
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