So I’ve been invited to be part of a panel in Austin at the SXSW Interactive Festival and I’ll have a chance to hear some interesting stuff while I’m there. One of the things I’m looking forward to is hearing Corey Bridges of multiverse.net talk about the future of game development in online communities. What’s prompted interest in this discussion was the recent announcement by MS that it was opening up development possibilities for amateur developers using Microsoft’s XNA Game Studio 2.0 development tool kit. I’ve had some conversations with Roger about this (he’s on the Microsoft Game Development Cruise or something like that this week). It looks like MS has taken the first step in realizing a development model for the console that the PC has been toying with for years. I wonder how far it will go? And if this spells the beginning of the professionalization process for modding communities (and the birth of vibrant modding communities for consoles)?
Yes, usually I am writing about how no one in the videogame industry is sharing much. This time, however, I am happy to be writing about a new collaborative effort amongst one game company. Fitingly, its the same company that back in 2003 wrote about how much they benefited from a similar sharing opportunity. The following is a quote from the original Gamedeveloper Magazine Postmortem for Ratchet and Clank:
Sharing technology with Naughty Dog. … Naughty Dog didn’t want anything from us other than a gentlemen’s agreement to share with them any improvements we made to whatever we borrowed plus any of our own technology we felt like sharing. In an industry as competitive as ours, things like this just don’t happen. (Price 2003, pp. 55-56)
So perhaps a little “gentleman’s” head nod toward Naughty Dog in all of this as well. Personally, I’m ecstatic to see this kind of thing beginning to happen. Its about time really. In their own words:
Well, I’m supposed to be revising my dissertation, but now that the New York Times has blindly picked this up, I can’t really help myself. I first stumbled upon this article a while back on Joystiq.
The study, which looked at 11 men and 11 women, asked participants to play a simple territorial point-and-click game while hooked up to an fMRI machine. The men in the study showed much great activity in the brain’s “mesocorticolimbic center,” which is associated with reward and addiction. … Yeah, yeah … tell it to the Frag Dolls.
Yeah, and tell it to the ladies I coach hockey for. “You just can’t enjoy it on the same level as us boys.” Not a good idea. I love the fact that the NY Times doesn’t even manage to pick up on a fatal flaw in this study, which even Joystiq commenters notice: sample size. I INTERVIEWED more people in my dissertation research and my research is qualitative. They managed to examine only 22 people, 11 boys, and 11 girls, all, “young adults.” Not to mention that fMRI research is one of the most unproven areas of brain research.
Congratulations to four of our very own. First, Sean Lawson and Casey O’Donnell have landed tenure track jobs! Sean will be joing me here in the beautiful Inter-mountain West (Utah!) and Casey is Going Down to Georgia kinda like the devil! Our plan to take over the world is now in motion! Next on the list are Daren Brabham and me We just got two publications out in Convergence (Hector Postigo “” and Daren Brabham ““) . If you want to see’m let us know. Now let’s get drunk.
Don’t get Duncan Watts started on the Hush Puppies. “Oh, God,” he groans when the subject comes up. “Not them.” The Hush Puppies in question are the ones that kick off The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller about how trends work. As Gladwell tells it, the fuzzy footwear was a dying brand by late 1994–until a few New York hipsters brought it back from the brink. Other fashionistas followed suit, whereupon the cool kids copied them, the less-cool kids copied them, and so on, until, voilà! Within two years, sales of Hush Puppies had exploded by a stunning 5,000%, without a penny spent on advertising. All because, as Gladwell puts it, a tiny number of superinfluential types (”Twenty? Fifty? One hundred–at the most?”) began wearing the shoes.
These tastemakers, Gladwell concluded, are the spark behind any
successful trend. “What we are really saying,” he writes, “is that in a
given process or system, some people matter more than others.” In
modern marketing, this idea–that a tiny cadre of connected people
triggers trends–is enormously seductive. It is the very premise of
viral and word-of-mouth campaigns: Reach those rare, all-powerful
folks, and you’ll reach everyone else through them, basically for free.
Loosely, this is referred to as the Influentials theory, and while it
has been a marketing touchstone for 50 years, it has recently reentered
the mainstream imagination via thousands of marketing studies and a
host of best-selling books. In addition to The Tipping Point, there was The Influentials,
by marketing gurus Ed Keller and Jon Berry, as well as the gospel
according to PR firms such as Burson-Marsteller, which claims
“E-Fluentials” can “make or break a brand.” According to MarketingVOX,
an online marketing news journal, more than $1 billion is spent a year
on word-of-mouth campaigns targeting Influentials, an amount growing at
36% a year, faster than any other part of marketing and advertising.
That’s on top of billions more in PR and ads leveled at the cognoscenti.
Yet, if you believe Watts, all that money and effort is being
wasted. Because according to him, Influentials have no such effect.
Indeed, they have no special role in trends at all.
In the past few years, Watts–a network-theory scientist who
recently took a sabbatical from Columbia University and is now working
for Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) –has performed a series of controversial,
barn-burning experiments challenging the whole Influentials thesis. He
has analyzed email patterns and found that highly connected people are
not, in fact, crucial social hubs. He has written computer models of
rumor spreading and found that your average slob is just as likely as a
well-connected person to start a huge new trend. And last year, Watts
demonstrated that even the breakout success of a hot new pop band might
be nearly random. Any attempt to engineer success through Influentials,
he argues, is almost certainly doomed to failure. (much more…)
We just got two publications out in Convergence (Hector Postigo “” and Daren Brabham ““) . If you want to see’m let us know. Now let’s get drunk.