Business: September 2007 Archive Page

ArsTechnica:

Rumors of Google's plans to create a virtual world that rivals that of Second Life have popped up once again over the weekend. The company could now be collaborating with Arizona State University to test the 3D social network, which may be tied into Google's current applications of Google Earth and Google Maps.

I really like Google's 3D model builder, SketchUp, but was frustrated because you can't really interact with (walk around in) the models you create, and the free version does not let you export the models to other programs, so I did not explore it much.

Google never releases a product until it's thoroughly ready for the general public, so I have high hopes for the user interface attached to Google's 3D world (whatever it should be like).

How will Google make money off of this? In-world ads? Virtual shopping malls? I have no idea.

Daniel Radosh brings to the mainstream press (New York Times) an argument that games researchers have been making for years.

If games are to become more than mere entertainment, they will need to use the fundamentals of gameplay -- giving players challenges to work through and choices to make -- in entirely new ways. The formula followed by virtually all games is a steady progression toward victory: you accomplish tasks until you win. Halo 3, for all its flawless polish, does not aspire to anything more. It does not succeed as a work of art because it does not even try.

Like cinema, games will need to embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy, comedy and romance. They will need to stop pandering to the player's desire for mastery in favor of enhancing the player's emotional and intellectual life.

There is no reason that gorgeous graphics can't play a role in this task, but the games with the deepest narratives were the text adventures that were developed for personal computers in the 1980s. Using only words, these "interactive fictions" gave players the experience of genuinely living inside a story. The steps required to advance the plot, though often devilishly perplexing, felt like natural behavior rather than arbitrary puzzle-solving. Today's game designers should study this history as a starting point for an artistic revolution of the future.

I welcome his sentiments, though he is romanticizing the success of "interactive fictions," which never "gave players the experience of genuinely living inside a story," because the art form developed to suit a medium that could not promise such an overwhelming experience. Having said that, the marketing of text games did play up that first-person perspective, and if you are willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoying the game, it generally worked out.

Today's video games do aspire to cinematic levels of reality, but in the end you're still shooting at wooden ducks on the carnival midway.  Way back when, the bleating speakers and photon-squirting CRTs meant that the graphics games at the time were hideously crappy, and they still look crappy. But the commercial interactive fiction still holds up as good interactive fiction. (We're talking on the scale of boutique art, with authors who know the tastes of their small audience very well.)


Update: Radosh reflects on the online response to his editorial.

David Cornelson, interviewed in Gamasutra about his plans for marketing text-adventure games to young readers:

One of the reasons IF is so fascinating is that you have this junction of programming, game design, and writing. It's great to toy around with all three of those aspects and try to merge them into something beautiful.

The reality is that most of us have one, possibly two of those capabilities at a reasonably high level, but statistically very few people have all three of them at a high level (Andrew Plotkin, Emily Short, Graham Nelson, Michael Gentry, Paul O'Brian, Eric Eve, Adam Cadre, and more). I would even argue that some of these people have been able to overcome a lesser ability with sheer determination and free time.

I don't think you can build a business from this dichotomy. I do believe that if you offer someone a task that they're good at and give them a template to work towards, they will succeed. From there it was a matter of developing that template, which we've already done. The process is being duplicated for a second design and writing team and there seems to be a consensus that we've developed the right processes.

New York Times:

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

Pew Research Center

Public interest in news has changed slightly over the last two decades, but in a manner that suggests no meaningful trend. The average reading for the Pew News Interest Index did slip during the 1990s from 30% to 23%, a seemingly noteworthy decrease that represents nearly a fourth of the original level. Had the index continued to slide as much in the new millennium, that change would have suggested a trend of potentially great import. But in the current decade the index has bounced back to precisely its level during the 1980s: 30%.

[...]

Money News registers with audiences, ranking second among super categories with a three-decade score of 34%. And, decade-by-decade, interest in Money News has increased. In the '80s, its index score was 23%; in the '90s it moved forward to 29%. In this decade it leaped to 40%.