China will attempt to limit the amount of continuous time online gamers can spend staring at their monitors amid growing concern about “addiction” to games such as World of Warcraft and Lineage II.

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In a bizarre case of art imitating life, players of the Blizzard Entertainment game World of Warcraft suddenly found themselves dying from a mysteriously rampant plague that ravaged their virtual world.

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Thanks to Kevin Aires in the UK for sending me the link

Currently, several million people have accounts in massively multiplayer online games. The population of virtual worlds has grown rapidly since 1996; significantly, each world also seems to grow its own economy, with production, assets and trade with Earth economies. This paper explores two questions about these developments. First, will these economies grow in importance? Second, if they do grow, how will that affect real-world economies and governments? To shed light on the first question, the paper presents a simple choice model of the demand for game time. The model reveals a certain puzzle about puzzles and games: in the demand for these kinds of interactive entertainment goods, people reveal that they are willing to pay money to be constrained. Still, the nature of games as a produced good suggests that technological advances, and heavy competition, will drive the future development of virtual worlds. If virtual worlds do become a large part of the daily life of humans, their development may have an impact on the macroeconomies of Earth. It will also raise certain constitutional issues, since it is not clear, today, exactly who has jurisdiction over these new economies.

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Distribute processes globally, manage the entire environment centrally. This is the optimized direction of a modern technology environment both for game development and delivery. We live in a global village, where partners are being used from all over the globe based on cost and skills required. Game development companies are striving to run businesses in this optimized state, so that the barriers previously separating distributed process management are stripped away. Insourcing and outsourcing should be dynamic, whereby the best business decisions can be made, implemented and changed. In the digital age, all options available should be within sight and reach. This can only be done if we create environments that can integrate through standard processes, and can scale to incorporate new, emerging, and unexpected requirements. For some game outsourcing is a myth and for some it is a reality — based on their ability to make decisions dynamically, such as should we create, buy, build or partner for areas of business function like, Artwork Creation, Animation, Rendering, Hosting, Testing or Performance management.

I think the key for all outsourcing needs are
a) Common process framework ( Speak the common language )
b) Implementing best practices
c) Follow SEI CMM software practices and look for outsourcing partners who practice as well as who can integrate in to the existing development process

Having a quality process framework for “ People – Process – Technology,” with a strong understanding of the game development process, will be the driving forces behind successful outsourcing.

Historically, most of the artwork for games is outsourced to Asian countries like India, China, Philippines and Korea.

OptimalGrid is a self-contained middleware designed for developers to create grid-enabled parallel applications without themselves becoming experts in grid or high-performance computing (article). The Linux compatible middleware now includes automatic distribution and provisioning on to Grid nodes. See how the first release of Quake II was made massively multi-player by running on a Grid.

By the way, OptimalGrid is free software that you can download off of IBM’s Alphaworks website

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The MMO and mobile games markets in Korea have been big revenue generators. Because Korea has been a leader in these areas, the Korea Culture & Content Agency (KOCCA) is helping to spread awareness of the opportunities Korea presents to American companies and vice versa.

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Nintendo have announced and described a new controller for their next generation “Revolution” console. Satoru Iwata provided some insight and promo video during his keynote at Tokyo Games Show, Check it out here:
http://www.irwebcasting.com/050916/03/ff3672f7df/main/index_hi.htm

How will this new kind of user IO device change the nature of Gaming? Will it change it at all? What new kinds of games are enabled by such a device? Do you feel it will attract non-gamers as Iwata-san suggests?

Thoughts? Comments? Observations?

All the best. Mike.

Edward Castronova had hit bottom. Three years ago, the thirty-eight-year-old economist was, by his own account, an academic failure. He had chosen an unpopular field — welfare research — and published only a handful of papers that, as far as he could tell, “had never influenced anybody.” Interesting enough, he started to play online games and then eureka!

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Chris Satchell from the Xbox Advanced Technology Group told the BBC that the console was designed from the ground-up to be as secure as possible.

“One of the reasons we went with custom hardware design for all our silicon is that it allows us to build security at the silicon level,” he said. “There are going to be levels of security in this box that the hacker community has never seen before,” but he admitted that “I’m sure sooner or later someone will work out how to circumvent security. But the way we have done the design doesn’t mean that it will work on somebody else’s machine.”

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Korea’s Ministry of Information and Communication plans to “build centers that aim to prevent online gaming and Internet addiction, as well as offer anti-addiction courses to local universities.” This follows the enormous rise in requests for help from online-game addicts to the Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and Promotion (KADO) in recent years.

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A three-judge panel from the 8th Circuit of the US Court of Appeals has upheld lower court ruling that bars hacking Blizzard’s online titles. Two programmers, Ross Combs and Rob Crittenden, created an open-source application (BnetD) that emulates Blizzard’s Battle.Net, allowing owners of Blizzard titles to connect to unofficial servers.

Eric Bangeman over at arstechnica.com gives a good summary of the impact on the industry.

Here is a good article on issues facing game developers in the next round of consoles.

I have been noticing a lack of creativity in recent game titles and assumed it was caused by high development costs driving game publishers to only fund games that fit in market proven categories (FPS, Racing, RPG, etc). The added cost of development in the next round of consoles may cause this to get even worse. Using middleware layers to combat this rise in cost will result in may undesired effects such as:

Loss of performance - Middleware layers are general solutions to a large body of problems which cannot be tailored to the specific needs of a given game. Typically the developers of such layers desire cross platform (console) compatibility which also results in design trade offs that degrade performance.

Loss of visual differentiation - Middleware layers have a finite number of ways to describe a given object using a fixed set of hardware assets. From a programmers perspective this limits the programmers ability to use the hardware in creative ways not envisioned by the middleware developer. Programmers of the Playstation3 will come up with unbelievable ways to utilize the synergy created by the combination of the Cell processor and the RSX graphics chip. Middleware layers will stifle this creativity.

One strategy to combat rising cost that I am a fan of is the reuse of art assets. The movie industry creates large volumes of art assets that are currently not leveraged by the game industry. More upfront work needs to take place between these two industries so that art assets can be reused. In past generations of consoles the difference between movie and game art assets was huge due to the limitations of real-time console graphics hardware. With the next generation (PS3, xBox360) this will not be the case.