There is no doughnut... (k3nshi)

Great. I just went to get a cup of tea and what is in the kitchen? A bag of French jam doughnuts.

I will resist.... 

ZOMG Gladwell has a blog!!111 (k3nshi)

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the Tipping Point and Blink has a blog.

XOMG

A useful widget... (k3nshi)

...for OSX Dashboard from Google.

The Blogger widget that lets you blog really easily. AMAZING.

Get it here.

Game Theory: Creativity Under Threat (k3nshi)

There is something very wrong in an industry where a designer who has produced exactly one game is seen as some sort of revolutionary hero figure. I am talking about Keita Takahashi who produced Katamari Damacy. His disproportionate share of acclaim is covered far better elsewhere. I don't want to talk about that, I want to talk about how to save creativity in gaming.

From the continual bitching of games developers (I've been reading the same shit for about 3 years now), the problem is they don't get the luxury of taking creative risks and this is due to the huge budgets required to make a game, and the subsequent high volume of sales a game must make just to recoup costs.

Nintendo is not the solution

Nintendo are doing some very smart and disruptive things at the moment (although arguably no more so than Sony's EyeToy, Singstar and Buzz products). But platform politics and general business practice mean that Nintendo, or any other platform vendor should not be seen as a long-term solution for the problem of the death of creativity in gaming. Once a business becomes dominant (as Nintendo have been in the past), they have no interest in disrupting the status quo. I'm sure Nintendo's board of Directors would love to take us back to the 1980 where they ruled the gaming world with an Iron Fist and every title published had to be vetted by them and manufactured by them and licensed by them. This is not a Win scenario for gamers or game designers, no matter how much of love you have for the company and/or some of its great products.

So what are some potential long term solutions, to ensure that creativity in games design does not whither and die at the whims and corporate strategies of platform companies. I'll talk about some ideas in the next article.

Game Theory: Platform Politics (k3nshi)

I'm going to just set out explicitly the fact that each console vendor has a strong interest in tilting the overall direction of gameplay (and what games are seen to be) to further their own cause (sales of their platform). A quick explanation of these biases could be:

Microsoft wants gaming to be about multiplayer, online stuff because they have LIVE and this is clearly the strongest differentiatior in their gaming portfolio. They also have the kind of resources and expertise to do this kind of thing really, really well.

Nintendo want gaming to be about different control mechanisms so they dont have to engage in a hardware battle and can churn out games more quickly and cheaply.

Sony just need to maintain the power and ubiquity of their Playstation brand. More of the same but butter, along with growing the market with things like SingStar, EyeToy and Buzz. They are the least interested party in disrupting the status quo because of course, they rule over the current state of play.

Game Theory: Intro (k3nshi)

I'm going to be doing a few posts about the games industry for the hell of it, which I am going to prefix with the title "Game Theory". There will be an element of building on previous material, so I'm adding the prefix to make it easy to identify the posts.

Meditation Redux (k3nshi)

So after a long drought I finally made time tonight to do some meditation. Not a particularly "good" session, probably because I had ingested some caffeine (in the form of a cup of chai) not too long before deciding to meditate. Still, the 30 minutes pretty much flew by and I am a bit more chilled.

I'll try and pursue the recommended daily meditations this week (2 sessions of 30 minutes per day). Looks like I will have to give up my nightly chai fix though...