Although there were shades of it in my design, I never explicitly thought about adding Parkour (free running) to the mix, mainly because it wasn’t really well known at the time. After the awesome chase scene at the beginning of Casino Royale, apparently someone in the industry got on this track.

The gameplay in Mirror’s Edge looks *phenomenal*, running and jumping and using the environment in a realistic way. I love the need to think creatively about your environment in this – in most games the environment is just a set of simple constraints and does not inspire you to pay close attention to it (think about all those invisible walls you’ve encountered in games – ‘why can’t I go there?’ scenarios). Check it out:

In my game, I had thought of navigating in the third person, which would afford you the opportunity to scan the environment and see the cool ducks and dives of your character. However, I’m really impressed with this first person mode – much more visceral and adrenaline pumping.

As a nitpick, it seems like they had to play the usual teenage angst card and make it an action game with guns and some faceless government to rebel against. I would have much preferred an espionage game, because you can layer in some more nuanced plots there.

A preview is available here (thanks Digg).

Empathy is of course feeling what someone else feels, often because we have similar personal experiences. Part of our brain is dedicated to this function, and it helps make us the social creatures we are. One side-effect of this is how we anthropomorphize non-human things, such as animals – essentially we bring the feelings we have of empathy and apply them to other objects or creatures that often have certain features we identify with (big sad eyes, non-scary shapes). We then craft our own little story around them – they’re humans, just stuck in a cat’s body, with all the trappings therein (see my lolcats post below).

Mimicry, on the other hand, is about motivation and action. We see an action that looks fun, something that we want to feel in physical form. Where empathy generates automatic feeling (barring any built-up tolerance) in one part of our mind, mimicry generates the automatic compulsion for a different type of feeling in another.

The motivation that induces mimicry is something about an action we’re perceiving that is alluring to us. Some possibilities:

• We question whether we can do that action ourselves (desire to learn)
• We like the external outcome of that action (sights, sounds, etc)
• We like the internal outcome of that action (desire to feel something)
• The action reminds us of our capability and we have an audience (desire to perform)

What’s most fascinating is that mimicry is not interactive, yet it feels like it is. Much like certain online communities where participation isn’t really (I will explore this in another post).

The impetus for this post is a cute little thing called the Yellow Drum Machine… a robot that exudes a ton of toddler-like personality. When I saw it, I said to myself ‘this thing really nails the essence of fun’, yet it was totally non-interactive. Since I had just read the Theory of Fun again, I had ludemes on my mind… so why not ludemes of mimicry? The attitude could be broken down into just two key systems:

1. move the eyes left and right, and
2. bang on things.

What a simple, elegant system.

Note: Of course it needs locomotion, but it’s not strutting around, so there’s no attitude / mimicry there yet.

Checkkit:

Okay, enough history and predictions – there are enough people who do that on the net more eloquently than I do. My personal touch here is my excitement about two properties in particular:

1. Lego Universe. It’s interesting to read this little piece on kotaku on the development choices behind LU. Two big design challenges in making kids games are stereotypes and conflict. In modern mainstream media, it’s easier to perpetuate stereotypes and memes than challenge them, but for kids there are higher expectations (as there should be). As for conflict, violence is the easiest way to communicate, participate in, and overcome conflict in games, yet again we have higher expectations for kids media.

I’m excited about LU because the IP is very unique and can deal with problems in a very unique way. I grew up with Lego, as so many kids did, and what this IP has come to mean is Lego is a way to interpret the world and change it’s rules. We’ve seen this in previous Lego titles (like Lego Star Wars) as well as the variety of Lego sets (Castles, Town, Space, etc). Lego is about Lego-izing things we know and love, applying a uniform look, allowing mixing and matching, and sterilizing their meaning for interpretation by kids. There is no death in the Lego world, there’s merely the parts bin. There is no improper merger of ideas in the assembly of Lego pieces, anything goes because everything fits. These are how violence and stereotype can be overcome with the Lego IP – what fits together is acceptable together (girly lego-heads can be put on top of any uniform), and anything that is taken apart is just part of creative destruction, not real destruction, and it can always be put back together. Cognitively, Lego just occupies a different space in our mind than other toys and other properties.

I’m not sure if any other IP is about this reinterpretation of things, versus just being things. Leveraging offline products and building connections between the two is a very smart thing, and in the kids MMOG space, toy companies will be the ones that beat out others (WebKinz being the first example). Lego has the added advantage of having a unique brand that is well-suited for online worlds, and therefore if they don’t mess up execution, I think Lego is in for a very bright future.

Unrelated side note: I have this visual of how re-spawns (a staple MMOG action, whereby a previously killed enemy comes back after a certain time interval so that other players may fight them) will work in LU, kind of like Terminator 2′s liquid metal terminator. The bad knight is ‘killed’ and his pieces scatter to the wind. But after 10 minutes… those pieces slowly move back together until BAM! The knight is reassembled and glows and cries out with his arms high, ready to challenge a new adventurer! I hope they do something like this

2. PMOG (or at least the concept it demonstrates). This one’s still under the radar, their public beta just started yesterday. This is a toolbar addition for Firefox that lets players drop quests and level up while they’re going about their normal web browsing. Essentially, it’s using game mechanics to force discovery of new web properties, an extremely smart move if you consider advertising implications (the game essentially holds the players hands and takes them from one property to another, like a guided tour in a museum). It’s also a sign of a much larger concept, which is the expansion and diffusion of game mechanics across daily activities. BF Skinner is rolling in his grave at the concept of being able to enforce behavioral reward structures to daily life – what implications! The game isn’t exactly designed as a psychologists research tool, but functions a bit like it whether or not the authors realize it.

I think this class of applications is likely to grow rapidly in the near future – it’s easy to make, has a huge playing field built in, relies on user-user interaction, and could be damn fun.

Specific mechanics I like about this title are that to level up, you must participate in the creation of content. This UGC angle really sells it for me (along with star ratings), because I’m particularly interested in creation software and inducing people to create. Participation is essential to society, yet the last few generations have grown up used to and demanding passive experiences; an ‘entertain me’ mentality. What’s funny about PMOG (which stands for Passively Multiplayer Online Game) is that while it is passive from the perspective of occupying your attention, it is active in the demands for your participation. Very cool.

WOW! What a difference.

Constraints are a workout. They require us to use more energy, something we are biologically averse to. We are ‘cognitive misers’, to borrow a term from psychology, as a full 20% of our energy expenditure is devoted to our brain. Constraints are also one of these paradoxes of the human condition – we strive to succeed to remove the constraints in our lives, yet without constraint we have partially undermined our drive to set goals in the first place. In comparisons between stress and performance, psychologists have found that a moderate amount of stress is actually where we achieve optimal performance – not without stress, or overloaded with it. It’s this hunger and uneasiness that moves us forward.

If we were to apply constraints to the world of video games, we’d see a similar pattern. Sony – a company riding off of the massive success of the Playstation 2 – had the least constraints when developing the Playstation 3. The needs of developers, the cost of the system, the desires of gamers for things like online support, and whether the system would be a success were all non-issues to Sony corporate. On the other hand, Microsoft could not afford to dismiss these issues, and consequently made a better product. Nintendo went even further, with a lower price point, less computing power, and most importantly, the least idea of what games would eventually look like on its very unique DS and Wii. The same constraints apply in the casual games market on the web, where the constraint of Adobe Flash has driven some great innovation, while traditional PC games with access to an increasing amount of power languish in the same old gameplay.

Assuming you can stay true to the course of solving your customer’s needs, the constraints theory can break down if you truly do have too few options to explore. Most constraints we would consider extreme still afford a huge amount of possibility, but if it breaks down to a few choices, your creative landscape is compromised. This may be analogous to the over-stressed condition described above.

Constraints are fascinating, and definitely worthy of closer consideration. Stay tuned, I’ll probably do that soon.

There exists a perpetual flaw in the media world that any darling like SL or the Wii is bound to not live up to the breathless expectations of journalists. Although I doubt this is an entirely deliberate phenomenon, journalists get a great deal of benefit from the waxing and waning of hype that in aggregate they largely create – cycles of over-hyping followed by over-griping, and then sometimes followed by consolidation and acceptance.

If we were to turn the tools of emotional manipulation we wield with alacrity in game development to this phenomena, we’d find journalism and news have actually become quite good at what we do. First, the hype creates anticipation and excitedness, and translates it into feeling emotions now that are emotions that will come in the future. For instance, just reading about the Wii makes you *feel* the simple joy of playing games, and the social reward of playing with friends, even though you are actually doing neither. Next, the counter-hype plays of your emotions of judgment and naysaying, and branches off into either a sort of “i told you so” even though you probably said nothing, or – if you really bought into the hype – a disappointment that paradoxically drives you to further seek the emotional up and down the news provides. Finally, sometimes the hype ends with consolidation, where you feel closure and a general sense of contentment, possibly with a slight feeling of hope for the future as the story ends on a good note.

With these emotions, the hype model is just plain good story writing.

So, back to the topic at hand: the usage patterns of the Wii are different from other game consoles, yet expectations are the same.

For instance, people aren’t playing the Wii. Or rather, 67% of people aren’t. This is according to publisher Famitsu, although many other Japanese developers are jumping on board to say things like the Wii is a fad. Others may point out that Wii software sales aren’t that great, not even breaking Top 10 sales, that sales figures mean nothing unless people play it, that none of the follow-on titles had the appeal of Wii Sports, etc.

Whatever. Part of opening a new market is discovering that it doesn’t work the same way the old one does. In the case of the Wii, this means that people aren’t buying new titles every 3 months, or counting down the days until the Big Game is released and then dropping a collective $200mm on it. They’re being… how shall we say… a bit more ‘casual’ about their usage. Game publishers, used to catering almost exclusively to a forgiving and predictable gamer customer base, are caught off guard. This doesn’t fit their model of reality. Why would someone buy a game console if they only played it once a month? Don’t they know games get old fast? Meanwhile, the non-gamer with the console under the TV goes about their daily life, barely using the damn thing, but – I posit – still deriving satisfaction from it. How?

For this new audience, usage doesn’t equal value. It’s not an iPod, though it’s small, glossy white, cute, and media-savvy. Nor is it a consumable, defined by it’s rate of replacement. Usage has little to do with it in fact.

Think of some outrageous clothes you have purchased, probably for halloween or a costume party. You wear them maybe twice a year. Yet they occupy a part of your mind and identity, at every thought providing you with an anticipation of positive emotions (just like hype) in the off chance you have the opportunity to show them off. In fact, you’re always on the lookout for those opportunities. Alternately, think about the home fitness market – if it was usage-driven, there’d be no market, nor late night television spots with Christy Brikley and an ageless Chuck Norris. Or perhaps a better analog is a social one – the dining room table. You probably only eat on it when guests are over, preferring a more practical spot to munch on your normal meals. But you know it’s there, in that off-chance you get folks over.

I think the Wii is really an item that exists nowhere near games, and instead in the same space as the above examples. It’s an identity item, something that has a property that you want to be associated with. It’s a novelty item, something you thought you’d use a lot more than you actually did. It’s a social tool, something that once you have you seek opportunities to use it, although rarely actually use. All of these touch on what it actually provides people. The Wii is about simple joys, shared with others – something that is actually not that easy to find in modern life, and something very difficult to distill into a product. And it’s the actual zig-zag, drunken stumble, half-rational path that people take in pursuit of these simple joys that is the market.