| Set On Stun |

Thanks for the pic Cnet

Well well well. For all the RROD the Xbox has had over the last few years this beats all. Ps3s all over the world and I mean everywhere,  had some kind of bizarro software glitch that caused all of them .. to not function. Apparently, a firmware bug essentially prevented  the consoles from connecting to the PlayStation Network and also prevented anyone from using the console .. period.

In the realm of a videogame marketing nightmare — this is all 13 rings of Dante’s Inferno plus the RROD.

1. Problem one — a global PS3 meltdown — well that’s really amazingly bad
2. Problem two — how can you actually get a firmware update if your machine can’t connect online?
3. Problem three — how on earth did this happen in the first place?

Here’s the official statement that came out around the middle of the day today

“We believe we have identified that this problem is being caused by a bug in the clock functionality incorporated in the system…We hope to resolve this problem within the next 24 hours. In the meantime, if you have a model other than the new slim PS3, we advise that you do not use your PS3 system, as doing so may result in errors in some functionality, such as recording obtained trophies, and not being able to restore certain data.” Patrick Seybold, senior director of corporate communication

Here’s what I see — we advise that you do not use your PS3 system

Apparently as of around 7:45 p.m. (EST) the word was that tings are starting to come back online according to CNET

Reports are slowly trickling in and after testing our own PS3, it seems that things are back to normal. All games appear to be running smoothly and no trophies or game saves are corrupted.
So almost a whole day with a broken machine — not a big deal? Well tell that to all the folks over on Twitter who have been tweeting nonstop since the glitch first occurred and “Ps3″  became one of the top hashtags of the day. The tweets ranged from mad to I’m going to throw my PS3 out the window.

This ps3 thing is pissin me off!!!

PS3 failures? Not like sony at all…..good thing I have a slim!

some say the PS3 is now operable. Unless it’s from SONY officially, I’ll wait until tomorrow thank you very much!

In the grand scheme of things, with this issue averted, life in videogame land can return back to normal but it leaves you to ponder if this sort of thing was intentional or if it really was some sort of WTF glitch that will be noted as the “Day my PS3 broke”

Video game marketing, welcome to the 21st century.  For an industry that thrives on technological innovation to the point where it’s feasible to link PS3s together to simulate the work of a supercomputer, most of the marketing of video games seem to be in a digital rut.  The reliance on enthusiast media, review scores, print and TV media to promote their products are outmoded structures that betray the inherent interactivity that’s in the games themselves.

For their launch on February 2nd, Star Trek Online has joined with some of the bigger names in advertising, like the Ayzenberg Group, Dan Klores Communications and DKC Connect.   Their adoption into the social media blitz is fascinating to watch, eschewing more traditional outlets, they’re creating portals and campaigns that leverage the excitement of the fanbase and the uniqueness of the campaigns themselves to promote the game.

For example, on Twitter (over 2800 followers), they’ve created “Tweet in Klingon” which will translate your tweets into Klingon, simple enough… and of course, it’s attracting fanboys and haters all at once.  In this case, it’s a great way to leverage the unique history and richness of the Star Trek universe to digital promotion.

Also on the social media landscape is the game’s Facebook page, which allows a pretty standard application to turn your profile picture.. or a picture you upload into one of the iconic Klingon, Vulcan, Andorian, Borg, Bajoran or many other of the races in the Star Trek universe.  Overall, it’s pretty cool and it seems to be working with them capturing almost 28,000 fans at this point.

Another fairly unique avenue they’re exploring is the distribution and partnership route.  They’ve joined forces with Del Taco where they’re actively promoting Del Taco’s own Facebook page where you can get trailers, downloads and fun things like that.  While I wonder why they didn’t select a national chain, it’s unique for a non-movie to partner with a fast-food restaurant so early in the conception of the game.  World of Warcraft took several years to branch out into the food partnership marketing efforts.

Atari’s VP of marketing, Jonathan Anastas said :

“Other promotions have focused on ad networks and Google SEM/SEO, Anastas explained. “We’ve more than doubled our digital spend each month for the last three [months],”

This one quote seems to me like a significant shift in efforts.  With SEO, you use technology and good keyword research to get to the top of the search engine results page.  Something that would, on the surface, seem redundant for a video game.  After all, if someone is looking for Star Trek Online, wouldn’t they easily find it on Google?

The short answer is yes.  However, the keyword “Star Trek Online” is a very brand specific search, if someone is looking for a more general search like “star trek games”, as of right now, Star Trek Online is nowhere to be found on the first page, but it’s tucked back on the third page of search results.  The goal is to reach users through their searches that haven’t been reached by their traditional, social or partnership marketing efforts.  Unfortunately, I think they need some better SEO advice, looking at the Google text cache on Star Trek Online’s homepage, it reveals that Google & other search engines see absolutely zero content on the page.

Ultimately, while Anastas wouldn’t reveal the results so far of the pre-orders of the game, he said that he was “extremely pleased” with the digital marketing efforts.

It’s good to see the nearly completely social and digital launch go for such a highly anticipated game and they’re expecting the more traditional channels to be launched with in the next few weeks.

And for no other reason than that they’re completely cool, check out some of these amazing screenshots from the game distributed via the social media efforts.

I’m a huge fan of RPGs in general.  I spent hours and hours playing Daggerfall, in fact I still have an old PC where I can play it every once in a while in all its pixelated glory.  When I fired up Dragon Age: Origins, I was lost in the stories of the downtrodden elves who were essentially gentrified into the slums of human cities.  I both envied and pitied the plight of the powerful mages.  I managed to play through every origin story until my last one as a dwarf fighter noble.

I’d remembered Nick Yee’s Daedalus project about the perception of beauty, attractiveness and race.  So I decided to find out what life was like as a dark-skinned dwarven noble.

I was immediately plunged into the intrigue and deception politics of the dwarven court, it was well written, complex and satisfying.  Yet there was something that pulled at me.  There was something wrong.

My father, my brother, my best friend… the arena master, the two dwarven girls who agree to a threesome.  All fair skinned.  Once I made that connection, I tried to find another dark skinned dwarf like myself.  While I’m sure there are dark-skinned dwarves at some point, I couldn’t find a single one in the origin stories.  It seems I wasn’t alone in noticing the lack of pigmentation in dwarven society as the blog Brain Dump also noticed.

Why was it overlooked or disregarded by the Bioware team?  Did they not notice the discrepancy?  Did market research show them that the RPG population was so completely dominated by whites that they didn’t need to represent other skin-tones in the game?  Is it really so difficult to make the skin tone of the player character a hitch to which the other familial pigmentations are attached to in a sort of variation of tone?

I ended up chatting with a few friends of mine from Spark Plug Games about the technical feasibility of making the player character’s skin tone a factor in dynamically generating any familial skin-tones.  They said it wasn’t hard to do, games make much more dynamic calculations and decisions on the fly than just rendering a series of colors.

I still couldn’t really pin down why it bugged me so much.  Then, it hit me.  Sort of.

I’m white.

I don’t live in an area where I’m the different one.  Where I grew up, my race never really was an issue.  I wasn’t the different one.  However, now that I’m in a mixed-race marriage where my wife has described to me what’s embedded in the experience of being the one that’s different, the one that’s had to be very conscious of her pigmentation, I realized I was uncomfortable because this game had made me experience something I’d never experienced before.

I became the outsider in a world separated by pigmentation.  Sure, no one in the game treated me differently, they made no differentiation to me based on my skin color.  Yet, I felt it.  My character was different than my own family, than my friends, than every other dwarf I related to.

What I experienced at that moment of revelation was two-fold.  I was drawn into an emotional and empathetical experience by a video game.  For only a few moments, I felt a fraction of what it may be like to be the outsider, the one who’s different.  It made no difference to how I was treated, I was different and it mattered to me.  I didn’t want them to recognize my difference, I didn’t wanted to be treated differently… I just ended up looking for some other character that looked like me.

The second thing I noticed was that whether it was intentional or unintentional on the part of Bioware to make the pigmentations on the families static, to not place any (that I noticed) black dwarves in the origin experience seemed to me a slight injustice.  I know that even with this slight experience, I cannot even come close to relating to anyone who’s suffered a real injustice for their race, but if a video game can give me that experience, I can recognize the amazing potential to teach people, to have them experience life from another perspective and ultimately, contrary to some punditry out there, raise more thoughtful and empathetic people… even if they’re playing a bloody good game like Dragon Age.

Bruce Everiss, a veteran of the video games industry, writer of the excellent blog Bruce on Games (and personally, someone I’d love to share a pint with) added his voice to the never-ending discussion about turning movies into video games.

Bruce’s blog is one that I visit on a very regular basis, I’ve learned a lot from his unique and historical views and experience about the business, marketing and analysis of video games.  However, in this case, I think he’s got it half right.

He compares the game Avatar, made by Ubisoft to Rare’s GoldenEye.  It seems to me that GoldenEye was the exception that proves his rule.

However, I’m of the opinion that games and movies are only going to increase in their cross pollination of ideas.  There will be more games that turn into movies and more movies will add video game production into their overall budget.  I see that as an inevitability.

Bruce is spot on in laying out the strong case as to why games should not be made out of movies.  Allow me to summarize his points.

1. Films and books are linear experiences for the consumer.  However, “the best games” allow the user immense flexibility and creativity in a sandbox (non-linear) format.  This disparity between the movie experience and the video game experience causes an inherent problem.
2. Movie studios see video games as a quaternary revenue stream (after box office receipts, DVD sales and, to quote Yogurt from Space Balls… merchandising) and treat them as such.
3. Movies are passive experiences and games are active experiences.
4. The perception of the movie industry as bigger, more important and a “legitimate” form of artistic and creative expression.  Video games are seen as a hobby at best, a poison at worst.
5. Differences in time-tables and development philosophy.  Movies are made with a short shooting schedule and long pre & post production schedules.  Games are generally  made without such efforts in the production schedules.

I hope I’ve at least carried over the core arguments correctly.

Because I think that the movie and video game relationship is going to grow over the years, rather than saying they should stop, I think it’s upon people who not only understand video games, who understand gamers and understand the trends of games should actively inform the movie industry about how to maximize this potentially lucrative revenue stream.

Like Bruce, the last movie to game project I loved was GoldenEye.  I cannot think of another movie based game that came out that’s impressed me to that level.

My response would be different.  Here are things that I would encourage the movie industry to do when they’re planning a video game based off of a movie.

1. Linearity vs. Non-Linearity:  The game should not just be a replaying of the movie.  I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to love a movie, relish the action and drama only to play the video game and have to wade through hordes of expendable bad guys just to accomplish what the hero did in 2 minutes.  It degrades the experience and memory of the movie and makes for a generic hack and slash game.  When making a video game based on the movie, allow the user to have a variety of experiences.  The Matrix games had the right idea to continue the story of the franchise, but failed in every aspect of the execution.  If there’s a part of the story that needs to be expanded, if there’s some freedom in the story, have users explore and discover key places in the game that were merely touched upon in the movie.  Take the best aspects of the games and put them in the setting of the movie.  Don’t try to recreate a linear experience in a game, create a free-flowing and vibrant setting where the conflict can be resolved with new and fresh experiences.
2. Video Games as Merely a Revenue Stream:   Yes, video games in support of a movie must pass the return on investment threshold.  However, the potential for story, experience and shared events can be used to greater profits than the movie studios realize. If they avoid the cheap, formulaic game and if they don’t rely on the movie marketing to push the game to consoles by association, then they can actually realize how powerful video games can be to their revenue stream and story experience that they’re trying to portray in the movie.
3. Passive vs. Active Experiences: I think this is not the strongest argument.  It’s like saying people wont want to watch movies because they can’t feel the pages of the book.  I agree that the experience is different, but that’s a strength, not a weakness.  The active experiences of a video game can enhance the story, it can enhance the connection the player feels with the movie, it can create shared experiences between lovers of the movie and the game.  I think what Bruce is trying to convey is that when a movie is essentially ported to a video game, the passive vs. active experience creates a conflict between the two media and in the gamers’ mind.  I’d agree with that, unless the game is made with the story, the gamer and the experience first in their minds.
4. Legitimacy of Video Games: In this, I wholly agree with Bruce.  Because games based on movies are so horrible most of the time, video games gain nothing from this relationship.  If it were a good game, then the game itself would begin to gain more acceptance as a legitimate form of expression and art.  I’d even venture out to say take risks.  Don’t just make games about shooting people and blowing things up.
5. Production Differences: Movie makers can be masters of story telling.  I think that the video game industry can learn a lot about pacing, story telling, dialog and characters from the movie industry.  It’s telling that one of the best games of ‘09 was Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.  This is a fantastic example of a blended movie/ video game experience.  It has active and passive elements and the story and characters were phenomenal.  This game could have easily been a movie first.  It took the best parts of movies and passive story telling and combined them with a relatively free-form game experience with believable and likable characters.  I’d love to chat with the creative directors and production managers there about how they blended those bits of action.

My intent was not to completely disagree with Bruce Everiss, but to take his rules a step further and elaborate on how I think the relationship and continued collaboration between movies and games could be improved.

Go Play Halo.

Bungie has added a red heart icon to the iconic Master Chief’s Armor that signifies our solidarity, hope and support to the victims and survivors of the tragic Haiti earthquake.

Yet, how it’s raising money for Haiti is pretty unique.  If you play Halo at any time on Wednesday or Thursday, Bungie will donate $100 for every 1,000 players up to $77,000.

Personally, I think this is a fantastic move on Bungie’s part.  The overall desire is two-fold.  This creates tangible evidence that gamers are far from social loners, disconnected from reality or empathy and it provides real support to the people in Haiti who need it most.

The cynical among us might think that this is another video game marketing trick.  With new games dominating the multiplayer and online charts, (looking at you Modern Warfare 2), it’s a way for Bungie to reconnect people to the classic Halo series and get some more face-time.

The way that this particular offer is being set up should put those questions to rest.  Retailers often tie donations to purchases, cell phone companies often tie donations to calls and sites often donate a portion of their ad revenue by enticing people to click on an ad, drop a link or to take some action.  This win-win scenario is an essential part of compassionate capitalism.   This donation model has been tried, tested and found effective.

And of course, it’s not too far from now when Halo: Reach comes out… so it cant be too bad to put the Halo franchise in the hands of gamers who’ve been distracted by death-streaks, perks and Tom Clancy/ James Bond story mashups.

In short, yes.  It’s marketing.  Yes, it’s a strategy to get players to hop back into Halo.  Yes, it’s capitalism.  No, I doubt that people will go out and buy Halo just to help Haiti (instead, they could donate the cost of a game to a worthy charity, like the Richard Dawkins Foundation efforts.   But in the end, actions speak louder than words.  The best way to convince a clueless frumpy mom spouting venom and nonsense is to show them that we care, show them that while we remove digital hearts, we can also spread hope and help to those in need.

Image & News From Cnet.