Rawn Shaw, developerWorks' Community Program Manager, wrote an interesting blog entry about the Age of Conan, and the resultant implications from an online game, social network, and serious game standpoint.  Take a gander.

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/page/rawn

'…In a real-world military system, leaders assume that teamwork is a given. They never had to face the idea of a "democratically-organized" army as in an MMOG. That is a much harder proposal in terms of setting up teamwork. '

An article in BusinessWeek's March 31 issue talks about how Electronic Arts is morphing video games into movies. The authors, Cliff Edwards and Matt Vella, write as if Electronic Arts is the only company suddenly grappling with the convergence of different media models within a single franchise.  As we know, this has been going on for a rather long time, whether it's turning game franchises into movies (Doom, the Resident Evil series), vice-versa (Star Wars spawning multiple games including the most recent Star Wars: The Force Unleashed), TV into games (Star Trek Online as the most recent incarnation from the never-dying Star Trek franchise, the upcoming Stargate Worlds from Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment), and let's not even bring up casual games, board games, mobile games all cross-pollinating each other, bold named actors being used as voice-over artists…(deeeeep breath).

Money quote:

"…The old industry formula for success was simple: license a popular movie or sports title and then crank out slightly updated versions of Madden NFL or James Bond year after year. But that approach, developed in large part by EA, isn't working now. Sales are flagging, and gamers are losing interest…"

The missed point is that this is Electronic Arts being caught in its own success of turning a key licensed franchises into ongoing blockbusters. As Hollywood only too well knows, going down the sequel path might lead to good revenues in the short term but wears out the audience pretty quick. This isn't the entire industry - just look at the MMO chart I linked to a few days ago. It's the business press taking the easy story of extrapolating the travails of the 800-pound gorilla as a cypher for the entire industry.

EA's hostile bid for Take-2 Interactive is another interesting angle that could have been covered.  If you're quoting John Riccitiello (EA's Chief Executive) as saying "I am just stomping down on the boring sequel idea…", then why didn't the authors question how the takeover bid might be reinforcing EA's old model of buying/extending existing IP vs. directing investments towards new IP projects like Dead Space?

The better story would have asked that question.  Or have interviewed any of the attendees at last year's Hollywood and Games conference. Cross-pollination is old news; Star Trek and McDonalds were doing that in the 70s with the Klingon Happy Meal. The new news is how technology and social media are changing how IP from one media is stretched and morphed into new channels that take full advantage of that new media's unique capabilities while still retaining enough elements from the initial creative outlet that it's recognizable to the audience. And how the traditional sequential release windows ("first film, then game, then sequel film, then game…") are turning into simultaneous AND asynchronous multiple experiences that allow a single franchise to engage different audiences they way they want to be engaged.  That would have been a far more interesting story to me.

Maybe that's why I liked the book "Convergence Culture" by Henry Jenkins so much. 

Here's just one example: what about a look at how content owners are stretching the boundaries of what games really mean? Rather than a rehash of yet another deal to turn a film into a game (or vice versa), why not look at how ABC solidified it's Lost franchise with an Alternate Reality Game like The Lost Experience?

After an over-1-year-hiatus, Bruce Woodcock (http://www.linkedin.com/in/brucewoodcock - sorry, my editor is still on the fritz with hotlinks…) is back with an updated MMOGCHART (http://www.mmogchart.com/).  And for those who thought the exponential growth in MMOG subscriptions was not sustainable, well, the data shows that at least in the short term is still very much is.  Over 2007, total worldwide active subscriptions grew from around 14,000,000 to 16,000,000 (up 14%).  

World of Warcraft, to no great surprise, continues to dominate, but others are starting to appear, notably Tabula Rasa (http://www.rgtr.com/index.html), Lord of the Rings Online (http://www.lotro.com/), and Vanguard: Saga of Heroes (http://vgplayers.station.sony.com/).  Which means the Fantasy RPG is still the dominant theme.  I wonder how that will all change when the long, long, loooooong-awaited Spore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spore_(video_game)) finally arrives later this summer.

After seeing Johnny Chung Lee’s wildly popular Wii head tracking video we were highly motivated to add this technology to our iRT ray tracer so colleague Joaquin Madruga quickly coded this function and we hit the road for GDC 2008.

Left to Right, Joaquin Madruga (IBM), Johnny Chung Lee (CM), Barry Minor (IBM) 

At the show we demonstrated two infrared (IR) LED tracked displays. The first was a target scene, similar to Johnny’s, that we created in 3dsMax and the second was a 7 million triangle China town scene created in Maya by our partners at Threshold Studios (Thanks Threshold!!). The target scene was easily ray traced on a single Linux Playstation3 but the China town scene required some real horsepower so we deployed six QS21 Cell blades and rendered it remotely using a GigE connected blade center.

Head tracking produces a very unique virtual window effect where the monitor appears to be a portal into a virtual world. The user wears a pair of IR LED equipped safety glasses which are tracked using an IR camera attached to the Playstation3. As the user moves, the view relative to the screen is computed and ray traced in real-time producing a strong motion parallax 3D effect. The next step for this technology will be passive head tracking using face tracking technology like that demonstrated by Richard Marks in the Sony booth at GDC 2008. What we need now is a passively head tracked 150” plasma with ray traced visuals at 120 frames/sec!!

iRT Head Tracking Video (YouTube)

iRT Head Tracking Video (Quicktime 28MB) 

I think I need to post from my Mac, as the Windows-based posts don't seem to be too happy with the current WordPress templates.

Forgot to post some pics of the IBM booth at GDC two weeks ago; that's what you get when you go right into another set of meetings in Los Angeles without too much breathing room.

Here's our video loop.  I'll be posting it to the website shortly.  My favorite is still the clips from CCP's EVE Online.   

Here's one of our intrepid demoers, Barry Minor, right beside our Exanet pedestal,  which has a storage virtualization software tool to help manage all those game and code assets during development:

This demo garnered the most traffic: Interactive Ray Tracing.  A very cool use of the Cell-BE processor to create a real-time rendering solution.  Using infrared sensors on regular glasses, you can move through the picture as if it were a real window (in this case, I think it's a view into a scene from an upcoming film from Threshold Studios, "Food Fight!").  You can actually see the scene change in real time as if you were looking at it, like craning your neck to a corner to see what's outside the viewing range of a straight-out view.

Finally, our two remaining demoers on our "Deploy" ped, from PlaySpan and Aria Systems, who work with IBM to provide online companies with in-game and in-world commerce and billing services.