XBox Live avatars and new dashboard

From here, it sure like the virtual world-ish convergence that has long been predicted is hitting the consoles in earnest.

• XBox Live is adding avatars, akin to the Nintendo Miis, but it looks like they’ll have a bit more spatiality and multiplayer interaction to them — and will be the basic interface for XBL from now on. Oh, and remember when I commented that consoles were turning into PCs? They announced the ability to install games to the hard drive as a major advance. Heh.
• Nintendo’s next Animal Crossing game is also drifting towards online-world land, though still not truly massive in scale.
• Club Penguin is jumping to the Nintendo DS, and don’t underestimate Disney’s new DGamer service, which is intended to network all the Disney online properties.
• Sony has a 256-player action game coming, which qualifies as “massive,” certainly, though perhaps not as presistent. They’re also adding more real-world integration, with stuff like movie and TV downloads, weather service, news, etc.

• Oh look, another 3d engine in Flash.
• EA and Hasbro have gotten around to launching a legit Scrabble on Facebook. But Scrabulous appears undaunted.
• Once in a long ago, I half-heartedly suggested to Gordon Walton that the way to fix the SWG Correspondents program was to have them be player-elected. We never pursued it; the concern was always that they would feel that they would have the right to dictate policy and development priorities, thus taking away control from the dev team. Today, we see that EVE’s council gets covered in the New York Times. As a curiosity, for now — can the day when equivalent deliberations generate mainstream news be far behind?

There has been a lot of criticism towards the game industry, accusing them of being unoriginal. Sequels, sequels, everywhere. Diablo 3, Starcraft 2, GTA 4, Halo 3, The Sims 3, Far Cry 2, Fallout 3, not to mention the annual versions of various sports games. Why can’t game companies be more original? Because game companies are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing, making the games that players want, and the players don’t want original games.

— Tobold’s MMORPG Blog: Follow the money

If I say to you, “do you want chocolate ice cream?” you probably say yes. If I say to you “do you want more chocolate ice cream, this time with sprinkles on top?” you probably still say yes.

If I say “by the way, there’s also this mango sorbetto,” you may or may not try it. But you aren’t going to ask for mango sorbetto without prior knowledge of its existence.

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Just continuing to follow the story, and it felt interesting enough to merit its own post rather than just an addition to the comment thread.

Blizzard Responds to Amicus Brief in MDY Bot Suit | Virtually Blind | Virtual Law | Benjamin Duranske

Although it has not put the issue in quite such stark terms, Public Knowledge is essentially seeking a ruling that says that the sale of consumer software is, in most circumstances, a sale, pretty much regardless of what the agreement that comes with the software says. If the court agrees in spite of MAI and its progeny (and the ruling survives certain appeal) then U.S. copyright law would protect, among other things, making copies of purchased software in RAM in order to use the software — no matter what the “license agreement” says. Resolving this issue in favor of Public Knowledge would call into question provisions in EULAs governing nearly every virtual world and multiuser online game, as well as EULAs for other software.

I don’t know if you have seen the McDonald’s Line Rider commercial, but it caught me by surprise while watching some show with my kids (it was old hat to them, of course).

Very cool that a little indie game has made it to a commercial, and it follows on the heels of other game-based commercials like the Coke parody of GTA and the WoW truck commercial. But does Line Rider seem like an odd choice for the ad, given that it hardly has the mass market penetration that something like Grand Theft Auto has? Perhaps we might think that it isn’t something that the average non-gamer is going to have heard about.

I think this perception is upside-down. I think the non-gamer (meaning, core game industry gamer) is more likely to bump into Line Rider than into many of the industry’s mainstream products (GTA and WoW are not fair comparisons, given that they’re at the hyper-top end of popularity and mass market penetration).

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Multiuser, connected environments score another point in the debate, as the Disney game division merges with the Internet division.

It’s Phil Harrison’s turn to get beat up, and PCWorld begins the process.

Of course, in the process, they beat up on me a little bit too, saying that I only advocate multiplayer for the money in it, or something.

For those just joining this particular multiplayer game, you may want to read these older posts of mine:

• Are Single-Player Games Doomed?
• Is the shift to online a fad?
• Have single player games ever existed?
• Single-player Singularity

Greg Costikyan over at Play This Thing! has a list of “eminent game designers” that refreshingly crosses over into boardgames, ARGs, and other areas of the field. No bios or justification given — not even some short credits, alas — so looking up the folks you don’t know may prove a tad challenging. The comment thread is gathering more names and suggestions — go participate!

Beckett Massive Online Gamer has selected a list of the “Top 20 Most Influential People in the MMO Industry.” I came in at #9.

1. Rob Pardo, Senior VP of Game Design, Blizzard Entertainment
2. Jeffrey Steefel, Executive Producer, Turbine
3. John Smedley, CEO, Sony Online Entertainment
4. Hilmar Pétursson, CEO, CCP
5. Jack Emmert, CCO, Cryptic Studios
6. Rob Seaver, CEO, Vivox
7. Min Kim, Director of Game Operations, Nexon America
8. Scott Hartsman, Formerly Senior Producer, SOE
9. Raph Koster, President, Areae
10. James Phinney, Lead Designer, ArenaNet
11. Richard Garriott, Creative Director, NCSoft
12. Starr Long, Producer, NCSoft
13. Cory Ondrejka, Formerly CTO, Linden Labs
14. Mark Jacobs, GM and VP, EA Mythic
15. Sulka Haro, Lead Concept Designer, Sulake
16. Sage Sundi, Global Online Producer, Square-Enix
17. Jess Lebow, Lead Quest Designer, Carbine Studios
18. David Perry, CCO, Acclaim
19. Sanya Weathers, Director of Community, Guildcafe.com
20. Daniel James, CEO, Three Rings Design

Quite flattering, and it’s really great company to be in.

It’s nice to finally see real movement towards a very old idea, the world that surfaces radically different experiences on different client platforms. With the announcement that Disney Fairies will have a Nintendo DS version, we see this finally coming to fruition.

Making clients that work on more than one platform or device is a tricky challenge, and one thing that has been talked about forever it seems is the notion of having a separate client that accesses a different portion of the world than the main client. For example, every MMO I have ever been involved with has discussed the notion of a cell phone client just for auctions, trading, checking your shops, and other sorts of low-rendering-requirements tasks.  And yet, the movement towards this stuff always seems sort of tentative.

Disney’s jumping in with both feet, with the notion from the get-go being that Fairies is a property you interact with on many levels, and the DS version and the web version are just two ways (with perhaps “central authority” existing in the web version). For that matter, the toys are also just another way.

When you are engaged in the process of building alternate realities, this is the right way to think about it. The client is just a window into a larger world. Creators should be thinking of their worlds as properties and entities that exist independent of rendering method, interaction method, and so on. And the strongest properties will be those which are not rendering dependent and yet retain a strong central creative identity, designed for everywhere.

Universal client will come — but there are always going to be different real life situations that demand different levels of engagement, and you want your players to be able to engage in every way they might want. Forcing them to sit at a desk is to force them to interact with your brand your way, not their way.