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 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) 

One session I attended yesterday but forgot to comment on was the WildTangent session.  They presented basically a sales pitch for their upcoming launch, which is pure digital distribution of games to PCs, including console games.  I'm assuming it means console games will be played through an emulator, which to me means they'll only be able to distribute older (pre-NextGen console) titles.  They signed up quite a few publishers, including THQ and Activision (I think).  Very much an iTunes buy-my-TV-show model.

It's certainly the right direction to be going in.  But at this stage I get the impression the major publishers are only populating it with their back-catalog and other older offerings, partly because of the technology limitations I mentioned but also because they're still testing the waters of digital distribution.  They'll have to ramp up quickly and get top titles fast, otherwise they're not that different from GameTap. 

I recently ran across an interesting paper, Stackless KD-Tree Traversal for High Performance GPU Ray Tracing, which documented the strides made by GPU based ray-tracing over the last decade and introduced a new way of mapping acceleration structure traversal to modern GPUs, namely Nvidia's new G80. The paper was authored by Philipp Slusallek's talented computer graphics group at Saarland University in Germany. Our own Cell iRT ray-tracer was based on papers written by Philipp's students so we have great respect for their work. It was interesting to see the great lengths researchers are willing to go through in order to harvest a fraction of the floating point potential locked away in these black boxes.   

From 10,000 feet here's how the Cell processor stacks up to Nvidia's new G80 GPU:

Both parts are compared at 90-nanometre.  

As you can see the G80 is twice as big, which is a good indication it requires twice the power, and produces twice the floating point power on paper.  However when we ran one of the benchmarks discussed in the paper, the Stanford Bunny, we found that the Cell processor when combined with the iRT produces significantly better performance (we don't have access to the other datasets listed in the paper):

Left to Right:  

2.6 GHz AMD Opteron - Saarland Ray-tracer

Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX - Saarland Ray-tracer

Sony Playstation3 (partial 3.2 GHz Cell processor running Linux) - IBM iRT

3.2 GHz Cell Processor - IBM iRT

IBM QS20 Blade (Two 3.2 GHz Cell Processors) - IBM iRT  

In fact one Cell processor is four to five times faster at ray-tracing the Stanford Bunny than the G80 and the Cell QS20 blade, which has comparable floating point power on paper, is eight to eleven times faster.  Both the G80 and Cell crush the AMD Opteron at ray-tracing which is arguably the most popular production rendering processor today. It's also interesting to note that secondary rays are less costly on Cell which is where ray-tracing becomes interesting.  Primary ray cast is only interesting from an academic perspective. The real issue is secondary rays and GPUs have traditionally had problems with these do to their incoherent nature. When you factor power into the equation it gets even more interesting, given that Cell is half the size of the G80 and produces five times the ray-tracing performance.  

Things are starting to get interesting and Intel is hot on the trail with their Larrabee part which is said to be designed for ray-tracing.  

Only time will tell….

We have now released a standalone version of the iRT for the Cell processor.  The downloadable Linux binary runs on both the Sony Playstation3 (PS3) and the IBM QS20 blade.

http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/irt

This demonstration program shows both the ray-tracing potential of the Cell processor and the scalability of code written using the Cell SDK.  Under Linux, the PS3 only has access to 6 of Cells 8 SPEs and has no access to the RSX graphics processing unit. Despite this the iRT can software ray-trace a 333,000 triangle car at interactive frame rates and can spin the 69,000 triangle Stanford bunny around in 720p at better than 40 frames per second. The iRT is also highly scalable, the IBM QS20 blade runs 2.5 time faster than the Linux PS3 and performance continues to scale linearly as additional QS20 blades are added.
 
On the alphaWorks site you will find the demonstration program plus two data sets, have fun!

The open side of the PS3 is a good way to get access to Cell technology as a programmer. Just head down to Toys-R-Us and toss 200 gigaflops into your cart. Programs like Stanford’s PS3 version of Folding@home are showing that today’s game consoles can form very potent compute clusters. In the video below (sorry about serpent like sound track) we show our IBM developed iRT ray-tracer running on a small PS3 cluster. This car model is 75x more complex than those used in today's games and ray-tracing is a class of rendering algorithm only deployed by the film industry, yet PS3s when clustered together handle this problem with ease. Our code was written using the Cell SDK so the same binary that was developed for the QS20 blade runs fine on the PS3, no changes. We just grabbed our Yellow Dog DVD, installed Linux on the PS3s, copied over the iRT binaries, and in minutes we had a very low cost 600 gigaflop cluster. While it's no match for LANL's massive Roadrunner system the same code can be run on both clusters.

Not too long ago I was speaking with a friend of mine who’s a game developer, responsible for creating some very big XBox/PS2/PC titles. I was telling him about my experiences with the Wii, and he blurted out in response “I’m not much of a Nintendo guy.” He could appreciate the platform from an intellectual standpoint, but it inspired little passion in him to develop new titles for the Wii first.

Cut to Chris Hecker’s now-infamous “The Wii is a piece of @#$%” rant at GDC, where he dismissed the platform as little more than “two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape.” Putting aside the obvious childishness of a profanity-laced tirade, his point was kind of interesting - that Nintendo’s focus on gaming as “fun” undercuts the continuous efforts by developers to make gaming an “art form.” (Come to think of it - and yes, I know it was supposed to be a “rant” - anybody who wants to be recognized as an “artist” doesn’t help their cause by saying a console “sucks a@#.” To his credit, he apologized the next day.)

In any case, it’s obvious that the Wii divides large swaths of the gaming community. Nintendo has the most loyal fan base around, but at the same time the gaming “elite” crinkle their collective noses at the very idea of developing titles for a platform with less graphic and CPU horsepower.

But, of course, there’s a massive contradiction in this POV. The chips and graphics engines powering today’s Wii only have less “oomph” compared to the other next-gen consoles. But not too many years ago, they would’ve been considered the technology gold standard. Were titles built to maximize the latest technology in 2001 incapable of being “art?” Or, to put it another way, when the next next-gen comes out in 2009/2010, do the best titles developed for today’s high-end platforms somehow get demoted from the status of “art?”

The obvious answer is “no.” That’s because “art” as it applies to gaming (or anything else, for that matter) isn’t merely about utilizing the shiniest and newest tools at your disposal to create richer environments, more subtle AI, more detailed worlds. It’s about creating something that connects with people at an emotional level. It’s about bringing new people into gaming and opening their eyes to the possibilities. When you’re doing all that, you’re building something that’s “fun,” too.

And, as we all know, great art withstands the test of time.

So some friendly advice to aesthetically ambitious game developers. When you see a quote like:

“The Wii has been a big hit in an Illinois retirement home, where the inmates are organizing Wii Bowling tournaments and showing up their grandkids.”

don’t recoil in abject horror. Embrace the Wii as a platform with its own rules, limitations - and surprises and opportunities. Great “art” can be developed anywhere, for any medium. And the happiest coincidence of all is that, now that the Wii is the world’s fastest-selling next-gen console, producing great games for the Wii - games that can ascend to the level of “art” - can make you lots more money, too.

And what’s not to love about that?

I played my first game of Pong on a beaten-up coin-op unit in a somewhat seedy Mexican restaurant in West Hollywood, California. I was around eight years old, and thought it was about the coolest thing I ever saw. I kept begging my parents for another quarter so I could keep playing, my burrito-and-enchilada combo plate growing cold as I tried to master moving the blip. 

They usually said no, because they noticed something that took me a few more years for me to come to terms with: I wasn't very good. It was soon apparent even to me that I lacked the fundamental hand-eye coordination needed to succeed in the world of videogames. But the fact that the loose quarters in my pocket disappeared into the slots at an alarming rate didn't deter me. When I was old enough to walk the mile or so by myself to Westwood Village (as a side note, that was when I was around nine or ten - would parents let kids that young do that today?) I'd make a beeline to the Westworld Video Arcade, around the corner from the great Fox Village movie theater. The colors, the sounds, the action was a powerful magnet to a young boy. But while my friends would post good scores and stretch their videogame allowance, my experiences usually amounted to about one minutes' worth of blind, frustrating fury. 

It was around that time I began begging my father for an Atari 2600. My dad was particularly proud of the fact that he wasn't an early adopter - my sister and I used to joke (well, at the time we weren't laughing) that we were the last family in the neighborhood to get cable, a VCR and a microwave - so he wasn't about to shell out for a videogame console. Instead, I discovered another type of videogame at the computer lab at Emerson Junior High School. A boy named Ken Kawahara (patiently) showed me how to program and play a Star Trek-style game and a horse racing game. We'd go in after school and play for a few minutes before I walked home. But, as with the coin-op games, my interest in these games far outpaced my ability to master them.

At last, when I was 14 or so, my parents broke down and got me that 2600. But by then, I was more mature and the reality of these games never seemed to quite live up to the hype. The situation wasn't helped by the fact that the last generation of 2600 games were horrendous - bad graphics, terrible gameplay, and not a whole lot of fun. I played my 2600 avidly for several months, but my interest waned and it soon lay dormant on top of the turntable in our stereo cabinet.

Then, when I was 15, I was in an automotive accident that claimed my left arm, above the elbow. I needed to focus my energies and interests on other things - videogames weren't much of a priority. But one day, not long after the accident and bored out of my mind (we were still in the "no cable" phase of my father's stubbornness) I pulled out my old 2600.

This is where you, the reader, might expect me to talk about how videogames helped my physical recovery, leading to a lifelong love of videogames that continues to this day. Cue the violins. But the hard truth is, I was physically unable to play. Even the joystick for the 2600, with its one oversized red button, required a two-handed dexterity that was impossible to replicate with one hand (try pushing a joystick down while reaching up with a finger to press the button, and you'll see what I mean.)

Videogames quickly faded from any meaningful role in my life. A couple of years later the first NES was released, with its decidedly two-handed controller (directionals on the left, buttons on the right.) Sure, I'd watch my friends play, and even take a frustrating crack at it myself now and then, but with only a passing interest.

I only started thinking about games again when two close friends of mine joined Activision in the mid-1990s. Purchasing a console was still a non-starter for me, but I began to follow the ups and downs of the industry, believing in its potential and fascinated by the technology. And when I joined IBM, I got the opportunity to think about gaming from some very different perspectives - its influence on business and society, what it means to the future of technology, and more.

But that, of course, is very different from the simple pleasure and purpose of gaming - entertainment. And as the games have grown more complex, so have the controllers - more buttons, more joysticks, more inputs to master. Sure, there've been periodic - and much appreciated - attempts by some to build one-handed controllers, but they've looked clunky and hard to use (imagine trying to play Madden on one of those.) So, from a communications standpoint, I've been in the position of talking about consoles I've never played.

When I heard about the Wii (then code-named "Revolution"), I was intrigued. A legitimate game console I could actually play? I didn't believe it could really work as well as they claimed.  But when I got my hand on it for the first time, it was a revelation. It was as if Nintendo built a console just for me.

And that's my story. Closing in on my 40th birthday, I'm playing videogames again - for the first time in more than 25 years. Sure, it's not perfect. Games also requiring the Nunchuk controller are basically non-starters for me (so much for Zelda!) And I worry that the gamemakers, so accustomed to producing titles requiring multi-button, multi-stick inputs will increasingly depend on the Nunchuk as an excuse for not taking full advantage of the immersive controller. Nonetheless, I'm playing with my kids, and I'm having fun. I'll never be a particularly good gamer - unfortunately my hand-eye coordination hasn't improved much since that very first game of Pong - but it doesn't really matter. I no longer have to wonder whether I'll be able to game tomorrow - because now, I can play today.

Nintendo says that it will replace 3.2 million wrist straps on its game controllers, in response to a rash of reports of controllers flying out of people’s hands during vigorous use.

This is a textbook case of something that on its surface seems like bad PR really being a home run. If you’re Nintendo, trying to hammer home the differentiated value of your console, can you do much better than admitting Wii users are being TOO enthusiastic with their controllers?

Several years ago, IBM launched a “wild postings” ad campaign in support of its Linux initiatives, where one of our agencies surreptitiously tagged (and I mean “tagged” in the pre-Web 2.0 context!) sidewalks with its “Peace-Love-Linux” slogan. The City of San Francisco had an absolute fit, and IBM was ordered to pay a small fine, plus clean-up costs. It was perceived as a PR debacle for the company.

But was it? The whole point of the campaign was to establish “street cred” with developers, that IBM was a champion of Linux, which at the time was considered an upstart, anti-establishment challenger to Microsoft. Developers who championed Linux were considered rebels (how times have changed!). So what could establish your rebel bonafides more than a government agency - “the Man” - coming down hard on you for expressing support for Linux? That fine was the best $100,000 IBM has ever spent.

The only way this could be better for Nintendo is if Congress launches an investigation into the company for encouraging kids and senior citizens to jump around in front of their TVs.

A source at Sony’s invitation-only PlayStation3 media day (now underway at a gallery in SoHo) phones in with an update:

• 15 titles are being previewed, from both Sony and 3rd-party developers
• The titles are being shown on 42″ HD plasma screens, at 1080p
• Some of the most striking titles include Resistance: Fall of Man, NHL 2K7, NBA 2K7, and Lair
• Great media buzz at the event
• When asked how the titles looked on the HD screen, my source simply said (speaking of the NBA game) “I swear, it looks like live television.”

Sounds like a tough assignment!

Technorati tags: PlayStation 3, Sony

A perception seems to be developing that since the Nintendo Wii isn’t focused on exploiting the top end of the CPU power scale, it’s somehow underpowered compared to its next-gen competitors. Stories like this one often seem to position Wii as being all about “fun,” while XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 are all about “realism.” But as with many assumptions, it takes a fact and draws the wrong conclusion.

The “Broadway” chip inside Wii is a custom-built Power Architecture-based processor using Silicon-on-Insulator technology at 90 nanometers, and is built at our state-of-the art fab in East Fishkill (the same fab where our chips for XBox 360 and PlayStation 3 are made.) Some sophisticated advancements enable “Broadway” to deliver much higher performance while achieving a 20 percent reduction in power usage from earlier Nintendo processors.

Nintendo and IBM have collaborated for many years, going back to 1999 when IBM designed and built the chip for the first GameCube. Nintendo came to IBM with a very clear understanding of what they wanted to accomplish when they created the technical specs for Wii, and IBM worked with them to build a chip that met those objectives precisely. Many of the traits that make Wii as interactive and fun as it is are directly related to what’s inside the box.

Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo each have their own vision for the next generation of video games, and developed their technology in keeping with that vision. We’re insanely proud that we could work with all three of them, and help define the future of gaming. And if we’re asked which of our next-gen chips we “prefer,” the answer is simple: we love all our children equally!

Technorati tags: Wii, Nintendo, IBM

Via PS3land.com…

“According to an IGN report, Sony has signed a partnership with the Folding@home distributed computing project which will allow the development of a client to “allow idle Cell Processors to turn their considerable computational power from crunching the polygons that makeup curvaceous videogame breasts to crunching the math of folding proteins hold the secret to curing cancer”. And instead of purchasing surper-computers which run on the Cell, Folding@home will be using 10,000 PlayStation 3s.

According to the IGN article, “The Cell Processor is expected to perform calculations for Folding@home on the scale of 100 gigaflops”, which translates to a quadrillion floating point operations a second- “enough so that project leaders are now considering expanding their simulations to study Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s Diseases and other forms of cancer.”

Tags: PS3 , PlayStation , Cancer , Sony , Cell

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Today IBM, Sony, and Toshiba announced that they will broaden and extend their successful semiconductor technology alliance with a new five year agreement that will include deeper collaboration on research.

Over the last five years the companies have collaborated on the Cell processor which will be used in the upcoming PS3 game console and which has great potential for graphic, multi-media, and gaming applications as well as other areas such as life sciences. To clear up and approach head-on one issue that’s been cropping up in the blogosphere -this is not a desktop chip. You can not buy it in COMPUSA. You can learn more about this very unique high performance architecture here: http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/

The new agreement among Sony, Toshiba, and IBM will extend beyond Cell. The three companies will work together on fundamental research related to advanced process technologies at 32 nanometers and beyond. The agreement will help enable the three companies to more rapidly investigate, identify and commercialize new technologies for consumer and other applications.

Executives from the partnering companies had the following to say:

“This is a winning combination,” said Masashi Muromachi, president & chief executive officer of the Semiconductor Company at Toshiba Corporation. “With Toshiba’s cutting-edge process technology and manufacturing capabilities, Sony’s various semiconductor technologies and deep knowledge of consumer markets and IBM’s state-of-the-art material technology, we can anticipate breakthrough process technologies for the 32-nanometer generation and beyond. Toshiba will apply these advances to assuring continued leadership in cutting-edge process technology and the accelerated development of essential devices for the age of ubiquitous connectivity.”

“The extension of the IBM, Sony and Toshiba relationship to fundamental research is extremely promising,” said Kenshi Manabe, president of semiconductor business unit, EVP and Corporate Executive of Sony Corporation. “This joint development project will help accelerate the cycle from fundamental research to commercialization based on detailed feasibility studies of potential technologies, device structures, innovative materials, and unique processing tools.”

“By extending this relationship to the next-generation of process technologies and deepening our partnership at the research level, we expect to increase the pace of development for major technology advances,” said Lisa Su, vice president, Semiconductor Research and Development Center, IBM Systems & Technology Group.

Research and development will take place at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., the Center for Semiconductor Research at Albany NanoTech, and at IBM’s 300 millimeter manufacturing facility in East Fishkill.

The big takeaway here is that not only is the relationship between these three companies stronger than ever; they are making a firm commitment to work together through the next generations of microprocessor technology.