I Am Very Tall

Just read an article in the NYT about gamers finding love in World of Warcraft. My immediate reaction was to think that there is now finally a venue for finding a date that is considerably more embarrassing than match.com, eharmony, etc. However, I did find the following point interesting:

With more than 12 million subscribers, World of Warcraft is one of the most popular games of its kind in the world (others include EverQuest, Aion, Guild Wars). That’s a sizable dating pool. Match.com, by way of comparison, has fewer than 2 million subscribers.

Obviously, the two are very different, and match is way more focused, making the direct comparison almost worthless. Still, it is some sort of venue where the two people can get to know each other over a shared activity, so maybe that helps? Also, the other shocking fact from the article:

More than 40 percent of online gamers are women, and adult women are among the industry’s fastest growing demographics, representing 33 percent of the game-playing population — a larger portion than boys 17 and younger, who make up 20 percent, according to the Entertainment Software Association, an industry group.

My reaction to this is that the sample here has to include people playing Words with Friends or something, because this cannot possibly be true of World of Warcraft. If it is, my vision of the world will never be the same.

Kanye West is posting about Nintendo coming out with a "mind-controlled" Wii in 2010. According to Yeezy, as he now refers to himself:

T3 gives a little clue that all you have is a headset accessory that uses brainwaves to control characters and features immersing in-ear headphones.

Though brain-wave technology has already become a reality with Emotive pioneering in-game systems, but soon it seems Nintendo will come out with the first mind-controlled console on the market.

My first instinct is that this is complete bulls***. However, a quick Google search tells me that there is indeed a company called Emotiv out there that is actually building headsets for "mind control." One article on CNET discusses how the reviewer was able to make an orange cube appear and disappear on a screen, using nothing but his brain. So, degree of veracity is still unclear. But still interesting.

Quote from a story in the NYT:

For example, Brenda Stanhouse, who bought the game for her son, 15 years old at the time, said in a deposition that she did not know that a player in the game could “stomp to death innocent pedestrians.”

She also did not know that the game included prostitutes, that players could kill policemen or that “a player in the game can kill innocent pedestrians and steal money from them.”

“I’m aware that there is killing in the game,” Ms. Stanhouse said in the deposition. “I wasn’t aware of the stealing.”

Ms. Stanhouse was asked whether she would knowingly buy for her son a game that allowed him to kill police officers.

“Well, I think he does have games with violence,” Ms. Stanhouse said, adding that she would “possibly” buy such a game — though not one that contained sex scenes like those in San Andreas.

The exchange raises a deeper and perhaps more troubling question about the harm caused by the hidden scenes. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit clearly were more concerned about exposing their children to images of sex, but academic studies suggest that images of violence — abundant in the games — should be of greater concern.

Putting aside my own ambivalence about media influencing kids to do bad things without parents being at fault, I've thought for a while now that our whole cultural aversion to sex, as opposed to violence, is just ridiculous. If you were to marginally increase the likelihood that your child would either a) kill a police officer or b) have sex, which would you want to increase? Oddly enough, most people seem to choose option A, the option that isn't the path to our continued survival as a species.

Just came across an arstechnica article about Novint, which apparently produces fancy hardware peripherals for gaming consoles. I still have no idea what they do, other than it involves the word, "haptics," so it's something about touch. What I found intriguing was the way that they approached a particular problem in the peripheral industry, which was articulated as:

New peripherals always have an uphill battle in the market; those on both the PC and the gaming consoles that have managed to take off always have strong games attached. Dance mats are inseparable from Dance Dance Revolution, the guitars and drums for Rock Band had one of the most hyped rhythm games and a proven track record to bank on, while expensive flight sticks bring the promise of a more realistic experience with a variety of different flight simulations. So what do you do when your main product is a $190+ haptic device? The first step is getting people to try it, and the second step is making enough great games available for it to get people to bite. The best peripheral is worthless without a solid software library.

So, the problem is that their hardware product is nothing without good software to back it up. Here's what Novint is doing about it. Italics added.

"Typically what we do is we license from a publisher or developer the rights to a game, and we license it in a field of use, meaning we can only use it in a specific area," Anderson explained. "The area we work out with them is the 3D Touch field of use. So when we see we have the tough right, we saying we're licensing the 3D Touch field of use. What that means is we're licensing the ability to use touch in an existing game."

This is why Novint may become one of the most powerful players in the field of gaming haptics. The company has created a brand-new way for developers and publishers to monetize their franchises, and it costs the companies nothing to give it a try. Novint is offering publishers like EA a brand new way to promote their products, a new audience in Falcon users that may be hungry for triple-A content, and porting the games to the Falcon as a platform will cost them nothing.

Imagine someone offering you a nice check for something you didn't know you could sell, and you start to see how intriguing this idea had to have seemed for EA. "We're buying the sleeves off their vests," Tom tells me, and I laugh, but it's an apt image. Novint will sell the games through its web site for $29.95, but if you already own the title, you can pay $9.95 for the haptics update.

"We go to a company that owns a game, and we say we want to acquire the 3D touch rights to the game. Sometimes the first reaction we get is 'You want to buy what now?' We're buying something from people they didn't even know they had," Anderson said. "We say we'll pay an upfront fee for the touch rights, so Novint is the one taking all the risk, and we tell them that we'll do the integration with the touch; there is no cost for [them].

That's definitely going in my book of clever strategic plays. I hope it pays off for them.

I'm kind of amused by the whole Scrabulous flare-up. First, I'm amused by the founders. From Dealbook:

Jayant Agarwalla, 21, told The New York Times in an article published over the weekend that they did not create Scrabulous to make money, even though they now collect about $25,000 a month from online advertising. They just wanted to play Scrabble on their computers, and their favorite (unauthorized) site had started charging, he said.

Still, they are now taking in $300,000 a year and, according to Silcion Alley’s back-of-the-envelope calculations, with a 10- to 20-times-revenue multiple that would make Scrabulous worth $3 million to $6 million. Allowing for a what the blog calls “a hockey-stick growth curve,” it could be worth more than $10 million, Silicon Alley said.

But according to the publication, again citing an anonymous source, “the brothers want a ‘multiple of several times that’ $10 million, and the four corporations they’re negotiating with think that’s ridiculous.”

I think it's kind of awesome that these guys can take someone else's idea, post it on-line, and then demand tens of millions of dollars from the company that actually owns the game. I mean, if you wrote a book, and then I stole, published and distributed a copy of it, would it make any sense for you to pay me a huge multiple of what I might potentially make off of the book that you wrote? If only I could be so lucky!

I can see that the game companies are trying to avoid consumer backlash and are probably conscious of the negative publicity that the RIAA and the MPAA have received for suing MP3 downloaders. But Hasbro and Mattel are dealing with guys that blatantly ripped them off and are now making $300k a year off of their game, not with the actual consumers of the product.

I think it's also funny that even though the game companies have been treating the Agarwalla brothers with the utmost of care, that there's still a consumer backlash, with facebook groups planning to boycott sales of Scrabble. People are addicted to getting things for free, and they get pissed when someone indicates that they shouldn't have ever had it in the first place. In light of this, I'd be curious to see what the response would be like if Hasbro/Mattel put out an official Scrabble application that was similarly free and of good quality, and then had the courts shut down Scrabulous for violation of their IP. Would people be mad because of the use of the legal system, or would they be fine because they could still play Scrabble online for free?

This will be a quick post.

I don't know about the rest of you, but every so often I just feel like my brain is getting slower. And I'm not even close to approaching the age when senility would be an acceptable explanation. Enter Lumosity.

The concept isn't new - it's just BrainAge, but it's on the Internet and it's free (for now). It's a collection of simple flash games that are supposed to gradually improve your memory, processing speed, etc. I'm a big fan of the attention game (mainly because I'm good at it) and addicted to the processing games.

I think what this and other IQ/ brain-improvement games do well is provide constant feedback on how you're doing. I think this makes the games incredibly addictive - you can essentially 'see' your brain 'improving' in 5 minute intervals. I think it's a stretch to say that these games really do improve your mental abilities; what's more likely is that you just get really good at figuring out how to work these games, with some tangential improvements all around. Either way, it's some good addictive fun.

Just found this blog courtesy of the WSJ, which seems to be extremely interested in all of the pain that the Wii is causing the American consumer. It's a little bit sparse and perhaps destined to be short-lived, but I thought this picture was great. The other picture of the kid with a mark across his face is also pretty priceless.

In keeping with my "follow-the-herd" mentality, here's a link to the WSJ's most blogged article, from Jamin Warren. The main point, as paraphrased by me, is that Americans are so horribly out of shape that they are managing to hurt themselves while playing Nintendo's new video game console, the homosexually named Wii (note that this system is about two phalluses hanging out together). As Jamin puts it, "They're reporting aching backs, sore shoulders -- even something some have dubbed 'Wii elbow.'"

Here's another select anecdote: Ryan Mercer, a customs broker in Indianapolis, lifts weights several times a week. But that hasn't helped much with the Wii. After playing the boxing game for an hour and a half, his arms, shoulders and torso were aching. "I was soaking wet with sweat, head to toe -- I had to go take a shower," he says. And the next morning? "I had trouble putting my shirt on," says the 21-year-old avid gamer.

There's a part of me that wants to laugh at all of these poorly-conditioned masses that can't handle waving a stick in the air for an hour without hurting themselves. Then I remember that I have a desk job, I get no regular exercise, and my favorite recreational activity, when possible, is aggressive spooning ("Spoon or be spooned!"). I had a runny nose and watery eyes for most of Thanksgiving because my fleece got covered in dog-hair, to which I'm mildly allergic. And I like video games (sigh).

So, instead of casting stones, I think I'll start shoring up the walls of my glass house.
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Additional note: People at work have also commented on being hurt by their Wii's.