Modplan Man's Blog

EA Recongises Disruption

So some presentation has come out from EA. What's interesting about this is that it mentions a fair bit about disruption, seemingly an indication that EA realises it missed the boat a bit. It even mentions the Malstrom article Birdmen and the Casual Fallacy.

For a more in-depth explanation of disruption, see here and/or here.

You can get the PDF here, or view it in GDocs here

Some slides of note:





This is where EA notes how Nintendo publicly talked about how they were basing they're strategy off of Christensens definition of disruption, and did so a lot. It also notes the fact that Japan was becoming more disinterested in games. You can see the video where Reggie mentions disruption and Christensens first book on the subject here.







Here's where the reference to Malstrom comes in. The slides point to this as a good example of how 3rd parties mistreated Wii and "expanded audience" games in wanting to make a cheap cash in, and how developers and gamers grew to hate the mention of such things due to the association of lack of effort which typically define such efforts from 3rd parties.



Short and succinct recap of the article in question. See sig.





They expect Wii to continue expanding (assuming no slip ups) and to encroach up towards the high end, as disruption itself predicts in such situations and appears to be playing out.

So, it seems EA may be learning a valuable lesson in various ways. It'll be interesting to see whether EA genuinely changes paths based on this, or whether internal pressures will keep them going along the same route, though it would appear from there are some pushing for a much clearer, and hopefully better for all future in how they handle things in respect to Wii (and Wii 2).

The Christmas Casuals

Christmas comes but once a year, and often involves large amounts of socialising, often based around wearing paper hats and fat men in red costumes. It's a shame our culture is becoming more fixated on personal health and body shape, as this period shows that fat people are the basis of all jolly well being and happiness. How can you possibly hate someone who wobbles like Jelly? Who needs jelly when you have people in extreme danger of heart attacks?

Subsequently, Christmas is a perfect time to test the power of Wii on non-gamers. Even better if you or someone else get games as a present, as now you now have more tools for experimentation. What will Gran enjoy most, whilst still pleasing the kids and the testosterone pumped 15 year old boy? Although you should first make sure if they don't mind or don't notice that you have attached pules monitors, lie detectors and a colander plugged into the mains on their head. The best friend of science is data, and the best friend of data is weird, intrusive instruments that you need to collect it. Gran should be the easiest - either she will already have had so many experiences like this in her old age, or she is senile.

Through the past year, I already have my own data which I shall present here to the benefit of science. Maybe someday, we will finally discover the elusive gene that breeds gamers, but until then, further study is needed as to what promotes these genes in people, whilst not turning them into pale, antisocial freaks. I myself know the pain that this gene in its unfettered form creates. Much money has been spent on sunblock at the height of winter.

Wii Sports always goes down well, with this being confirmed by many of my piers. Easy to get into, accessible controls and plenty of re-playability - what do you expect from sports that have been well established and played for many years?

Boom Blox is also a great success - the colourful graphics and cute characters offend none and entertain all, with the actual gameplay and content being very re-playable. The game instantly lends itself to "one more try" syndrome, and the amount of levels and various modes means there's various ways to enjoy this - from the more Jenga like levels and modes, to destroying your opponents block fortress and light-gun style levels, where shooting as many points blocks is the name of the game. It helps that it's great for single-player too, and has wiimote sharing for most modes.

House of the Dead Overkill is a mixed bag. It's gorey and violence based gameplay may turn some people off to the game, and during the Christmas period, may be considered by the family to not be suitable after having just eaten enough to turn yourself into a jolly jelly man. It's good fun, and you and a few of the other (primarily male) members of the family may still enjoy it, but not great if you're trying to get everyone involved. I haven't had much of a chance to try the other little multi-player games properly, like fighting wave after wave of zombies, or protecting civilians as zombies continuously spawn in, so I can't attest to these particularly.

Wii Play seems to be a sure fire winner. From non-violent target range, to cow racing and billiards, these are the kind of arcade-style games that are great at breeding "one more try" syndrome, and are generally multiplayer friendly.

The only disability is the insistence on choosing your Mii before hand in trying to create a versus tournament that goes on as you play each individual game, as this makes it more difficult for home made tournaments or winner stays on kind of things. Having to go back to the title screen just because someone else wants a go is no fun, unlike Wii Sports where you select your Mii after you've selected a game, allowing you to swap out the Miis as different people play. Some may not care, but I'm a stickler for keeping Mii's representative of the person playing, rather than breaking down into an amalgamation of many people, especially with Wii Sports and its skill level tracking..

Some no-no's, or only for playing when everybody else has given up or you want some alone time:

Super Mario Galaxy is very much single player only, and whilst it some times attracts eye with its wackyness, its long cut scenes often bore people, especially during the introduction as they just want to get on with it. It does have a co-op mode, but it's more useful as an introduction for less skilled or experienced players - whoever is second player controls a second pointer, firing star bits to effect enemies and whatever else, and has the ability to grab enemies.

The game is often a bit complex to get someone who is new to gaming involved in - it's use of spherical worlds whether you're on the inside or outside creates perspective issues, and prolonged objectives and trying to take note of both the pointer and controlling Mario himself creates co-ordination issues.

Super Paper Mario - this one is obvious. No multiplayer, prolonged cut scenes especially for the intro and potentially confusing or overwhelming item and character mechanics. Everything about this game single-player only.

This concludes the presentation of my findings, or at least some of them. Any other data gathered chime in, it all helps. I fully expect NSMB Wii this Christmas to be a winner for sure.

Happenings

I'm temporarily back again for 5 posts all of which I'll be intermittently disconnected while typing.

"Who is this man of the origin of modplan?" I telekihearis you say?

"Why do I care" you shout at your screen! "STOP READING MY MIND!" the paranoid of you scream. I am not reading your mind, you're reading mine!

Here is a basic summary for TL : DR syndrome afflicted readers: applied to college, didn't get college, got internets, didn't get internets, got internets again, went on forum instead of porn.

The long version:

Applied to college for computer related course that covered all manner of spiffy things to get a foot in the ladder of a more recent interest of mine, programming. Well, I say applied, the course was full and was told by the cool teacher dude that he'd call me if someone dropped out so I could get on. Then the oddest thing of hoping someone drops out of a future life oppertunity so you can take their place before probably dropping out yourself and letting someone else in. They should probably start letting people have decimal qualifications for people who only get part of the experience on a course considering how common it seems to be that people drop out.

Some may have noticed my short posting spurt a while ago. Currently I don't have yer typical landline internet access, and am making do with one of those pay as you go dongles. Suffice to say, the connection will have dropped and reconnected 10 times during this, all without you not knowing my pain! The wonders of modern technology! We also don't have a landline phone, nor do I have any credit on my mobile.

Which is marvelous when you think about it. I'm downstairs cooking pie and chips when presumably the teacher calls and I miss it. Either that or some other bugger I don't know making me think so. Either way, didn't get into college, but at least me chips didn't burn.

Tattle byes. You may be seeing me posting a bit more, maybe not. Depends how far my 3gb top up lasts.

Information Spreadable

A jot down of some thoughts on the topic of how information spreads, how misniformation affects that etc.

Whilst there are plenty of problems with the sources of news, the way that news spreads and peoples own way of re-telling and piecing together the information they get amongst each other and through out society can cause just as much harm or good as the reporting itself. The effects of bad reporting or lack of complete information can create nightmares for individuals, companies and politicians as the effect then becomes magnified by the way that information spreads and people try to make sense of the relevant information, and the effects of wild fire gossip on its own can distort information and peoples own views, especially if the media picks back up on that reaction as part of its reporting. This essentially creates an echo chamber, causing disparity between what should be known as fact and fiction, leaving an impenetrable mess of notes and vibrations leaving it impossible to be left with a clear view of anything.

The People

First, lets point out fundamental things about the very individuals and groups that become part of and help accentuate this mess.

A fundamental point point about people in general, and no, it is not that they're inherently evil...no, it is not that they're idiots. No, it's not that we're all involved in a giant inter-continental game of Chinese Whispers. It's that we as people simply do not always have the time nor inclination to keep as close track of the multitude of subjects and hundreds of different things that happen every day. Everything comes to us through many filters we have consciously or unconsciously built, rather like the automatic sorting of spam in your email inbox, amongst potential tagging features that allow you to mark different pieces of mail not just under different topics, but of importance (with the 2 not being mutually exclusive).

A good talk on a subject very similar and has influenced my thinking on this called "Filter Failure not Information Overload", which addressed the point that it may not be information overload that is a problem for us moving into a world where we're even more constantly bombarded with information and such on a daily basis, as humanity has always been facing what always seemed an insurmountable amount of information to absorb, but a fundamental filter failure in how we address and handle the information we both send and receive in the modern age.

Because people do not always have the time nor the interest/inclination, this means they are more likely or will definitely miss various amounts of information depending on how far out the topic is from their "core" interests, their social connections, etc. Subsequently, this means the knowledge they do have is likely to be incomplete. Also here comes the social interaction part - they end up relying on or receiving information through friends or family. Second hand information that will likely be simplified for the sake of conversation and brevity. If this process goes through a chain of several people, whilst quicker and easier to digest for someone less interested (and who probably won't take much note anyway), means a far higher likelihood of the absence of potentially important minor and major details. This leads to certain assumptions or overall views being constructed from incomplete knowledge. This is not absolutely dire in all situations though, as sometimes certain issues or topics are just that simple to grasp. However, in quite a few cases leads to what might be important topics having their debates and idle chit chatter coloured and skewed, purely because the information was not there or available to them to be able to take a solid, grounded stance (no matter which side of the fence they're on).

The Vacuum

Are we suddenly heading out into space? Is Scotty going to beam me up just to tell me TL;DR?

No. Sadly for you the reader, I do not have the budget for such extravagant special effectences to put down on paper what would surely be wondrous passages of text that you could only imagine.

Using the word vacuum in this case refers to a vacuum of information. When Ripley opened the airlock doors, air rushed out along with several weeks of rubbish that had built up, rushing to fill that empty void, the vacuum of space at work. Much the same applies here. As already touched upon, given a lack of clear information, assumptions, "educated" guesses and judgements based on common sense will rush to fill the void. Effects will vary, but this causes a minimum of slight confusion or misappropriation, and a maximum of infinite internet memes, massive misunderstanding and undermining of the very topics and discussions themselves, to the point where all sides will be convinced that they are right, but when pressed, will never be able to tell you why or how they truly and rationally came to that conclusion. Their beliefs will simply be repeated as if they are obvious and discussions will either break down or become an endless cycle of arguing. If this were applied to society at large, it may even lead to violence and war.

There's still a section or 2 more to do further explaining etc, but do you think so far that this reflects the real world fairly accurate? Other thoughts to add?

Experiment

A while ago I made a posting about a new site idea I had that no one really cared about. The general idea was to combine twitter like updates that in themselves combined several pieces of information/news, with lengthier articles that could go into the nitty gritty of stuff.

So now I've made a little tester site that no one will really care about:

http://branchedgaming.blogspot.com

accompanying identi.ca (twitter-like) live updates:

http://identi.ca/branchedgaming/

and Twitter feed:

http://twitter.com/BranchedGaming

It's very rough around the edges, with some basic content as examples - what do you think?

Some little niggles and problems that'll be addressed once I get more knowledge/experience points/helpers/energy:

The feed to the right on the "main" blogspot page under knee-jerks is just an rss feed of the Identi.ca updates. If there's any smart jubblies who know of a way to integrate them better (whether in blogspot, wordpress, whatever please let me know.

Preferably the Identi.ca updates would have more emphasis too, as I'd consider those to be the driving force.

I placed the blog (article posts) archive underneath the articles. Need a way to put in a "click this to read more" link to save space and bring the archive into better view.

The 140 character limit feels small. Too small. Would prefer it if it were double - is there any other services that have larger limits than that?

Generally crappy blogspot template.

If anyone wants to help or write for it, I really don't mind - even if it's a one time thing. This is still mostly an experiment to see what this would look like and better gauge interest. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Next