Category: Computer Games

The Information Technology Program at The University of Southern California has a number of interesting minors in areas like Game Design and Management, and Game Programming.
Strangely this doesn’t seem to be the area that Electronic Arts donated to. See Game On, from the USC Public Relations about the $8 million gift to the School of Cinema-Television for the interactive media division.

MacLeans has a story from June 11, 2001, titled “Gaming Knights; Canadian creator hope to score off Sony, Nintendo and Micrsoft” by Danylo Hawakeshka. It is on a game company, Silicon Knights, which is based in Saint Catherines, just down the road. Silicon Knights presents itself as organized around a “guild” philosophy which seems drawn from the gaming culture. This is from Kelly.
Continue reading Old story on Silicon Knights

Canadian Business has a story by Andrew Wahl on Canadian We got game; Canada is a player in the hottest industry going (2003-11-24). The story is a bit dated, but it is still interesting on outlines of the game development industry in Canada. Note the company nearby in St. Catherines, Silicon Knights. This came from Kelly.

CTV.ca | Canada the new hotspot for video game creators is a story about how Canada is becoming a hot spot for game development. They talk about the big three, BioWare, UbiSoft, and EA, but they also talk about other companies.

This afternoon I went to an panel at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto on, “Playing with $10 Billion – The Growth and Expanse of the Video Game Industry.” (See BTG Events and Geekstreet.ca.) The individual panel presentations were not that good, but that wasn’t the point, the overall event was a peek into the business of gaming and how it is talked about in business circles. Being at the Rotman, the orientation of the panel was towards computer games as a market. I also don’t think “expanse” is the right word of the panel – nor the word the business students who organized this wanted … perhaps “breadth” was what they meant.

One feature of the presentations was that there was a certain amount of hype about the demographics of the game industry that conflated console blockbuster games with smaller adult games for PCs. They kept on repeating that the average gamer was 29 years old until one of the panelists explained the stat. What worked for me was haveing a representative spread of speakers from Alexander Manu (Industrial Design at OCAD and the head of the Beal Research Centre on Creative Strategy) to industry representatives.

Manu jammed a one hour talk into 15 minutes zipping through slides. What I was left with was an argument for rethinking the interface and gaming to turn interactive arts into an $80 billion business. He called for innovation – getting away from the console blockbuster for boys model and thinking about “extreme playgrounds” that would enable games like Pac-Manhattan. He also had a theory of play and game design that went by too fast for me to comment on.

The other speakers were from the media and industry. Marc Saltzman responded to Manu on innovation arguing that there was innovation and giving some examples. Marc, to be frank, was more interesting in the question period when he tended to gently moderate the views of the two industry people. (Marc made the point the 29 year-old stat was due to all the adult gamers who are playing things like Solitaire or Poker online, not Halo 2.)

Finally there was a rep from Microsoft who spoke about the xbox and one from Ubisoft who talked about their strategy. Ubisoft is investing up to $700 million to expand their workforce by 1,000 employees. They aim to develop not just individual games, but franchises or properties that can be safely iterated with new versions. They expect to come out with 4 new lines a year of which 2 will fail leaving them with 2 new lines (franchises) a year. Both industry reps went to lengths to stress the changing demographics they clearly have to work hard to get taken seriously in business, and there is an interesting paper there – what is being said in order to legitimize computer games as a business? Why is it compared to the film industry?

According to a report on the Video Game Market from Research and Markets,

In spite of the global economic depression, the popularity of video games continues to soar. Since 1995, when the top-selling Sony PlayStation first hit the market, nearly three billion video game and leisure software units have been sold globally. In the year 2002, 30 million Sony PlayStation 2, Microsoft Xbox and Nintendo GameCubes were sold worldwide. The global market for video games is expected to reach a peak of $35.8 billion in 2003. However, the cyclical nature of the market is expected to drive sales downward to about $28.3 billion in 2006, at an average annual growth rate (Aagr) of -0.4% from 2001.

Interesting that they expect it to drop in a cyclical pattern. Pity I can’t afford the full report which costs EUR 480.

The Art Institute of Pittsburgh is offering a online Bachelor of Science in Game Art and Design Program. See also Online Bachelor Degree in Computer animation – The Art Institute Online. Strange to have a Bacherlor of Science in Art and Design. Why not a Bachelor of Art? Why the Science?

DigiPlay is a UK network around technologies of leisure like computer games that has been running seminars.

CRIC has recently been awarded funding by the ESRC to organise a series of six seminars on technologies of leisure and create a virtual network of UK and international researchers in his area.

The seminar model they are using to bring people together has some interesting themes like “Leisure Constraints, Entitlement and Access to Technologies of Leisure.”

The sound of play! VGMusic, or the Video Game Music Archive, claims to have over 19,000 MIDI files of game music. I suspect the reason for the MIDI is copyright. The music is organized by game platform. Here is Night Hunt for the game San Francisco Rush for the Nintendo 64.

Kids are now modding the interface of WOW (World of Warcarft by Blizzard). Blizzard doesn’t support such mods, but has made it possible. See their tutorial, Tutorials – The Unofficial WoW UI Site. According to the tutorial, “The interface of World of Warcraft is built from XML files which describe the look and layout, and lua files which contain scripting functionality.”
My son tells me that it is hard to draw the line between a mod that makes it easier to play, and a hack that gives you information or an advantage you shouldn’t have.