Game talk

I should have just consolidated all of today’s posts into one — because they are all things that were in my talk. I mentioned at the end of the talk that it wasn’t prognostication, it was happening right now, and so far today I’ve blogged a major media conglomerate launching an MMO outside of media channels, PC-console convergence, and now, .a digital distribution system becoming an alternate publishing channel for AAA games that didn’t quite hit the way the retail publisher wanted them to.

That was one of the conclusions I had in my Age of Dinos talk. Well, looks like the Wii features avatars out of the box, and you can import them into any number of games — or take them to your friends’ house to play in their games. As well as weather, news, always-on functionality, message boards, messaging to cell phones, a calendar system, and Opera for browsing, of course.

Even a cursory glance at the new Wii preview shows the astonishing breadth and depth of the intended library. Cooking, table tennis, Sonic, pool, FPSes, baseball, it just goes on and on.

And in the middle I noted Pangya Golf, known in the US as Albatross 18. I wonder whether it’ll actually make use of Pangya’s connectivity? If so, that’ll be one of the first full-on applications of the Korean “casual game” model to consoles.

How’d I miss this one? Yet another of the attempts to tie in media to a chat platform, Virtual Laguna Beach is apparently MTV using There.com’s platform. Based on a cursory glance, it replicates quite a lot of Laguna Beach detail, to a level beyond most of the environments that you usually see in There itself.

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Looks like I have gotten into a bit of a squabble over in the Gamasutra letters column.

David Lannan wrote that “Koster has lost the plot” in response to the Gamasutra summary of the speech at AGC:

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