Entries from August 2007 ↓

One day computer games will largely replace teachers for most education and all students will be educated way beyond our wildest dreams. And I don’t mean games as in Grand Theft Auto. I mean games as in a genre (or genres) that can still only be dreamed about. And I don’t mean educational software, I mean educational games.

Computer game learning has several advantages over human teacher learning:

• Each student can learn at their own pace, not at the pace of the slowest in the class.
• Each student would be continually monitored, so no daydreaming or doodling.
• The technical advantages of computing such as sound, moving pictures and interactivity would impart knowledge much more quickly than current means.
• Sophisticated gaming reward systems will incentivise students to a far higher level.
• They will be connected to pretty much all human knowledge.
• Non linear learning methods, which games can use, are far closer to our natural learning process so far more efficient.
• Connectivity will allow the whole class to inter-relate as a social community as part of the learning process.

What is really exciting is that we are, at last, starting to move in the right direction. Brain Age has removed the scales from people’s eyes. It has scratched the surface of showing the potential of this genre of games. But it is still very simple compared with what is to come.

So have the scales been removed from your eyes, or is this all wishfull thinking? Let us know by leaving a comment.

As ever this is not an instructional manual, just a few tips:

First, whatever the scale of your press release distribution and no matter how big or small your story, always put it on PRWeb. They will get it to many places you don’t know about, your story will be used by all sorts of people looking for content and you will get a quick web presence. For US$120 a pop it is a no-brainer, but don’t rely on it as your sole distribution method.

If you don’t have a PR company and don’t have any lists then you could go to the nice Russians at SoftPressRelease who will distribute your release to over 1,000 games journalists worldwide for $125. You will get a fair number bounce back from dead email addresses but this is inevitable with any list.

If you are dubious about your press release writing capabilities then both of the above have an economic release writing service.

There is another essential distribution mechanism and that is Gamespress, which is very widely used by games journalists and is free to use.

Using the above three mechanisms you can get very good distribution of a press release (especially in the English-speaking world) cheaply and quickly.

The only media you must always, always, send stuff directly to are the trade magazines. These are a lot more important than the consumer magazines in many ways. These three are online so can get your story out to the key audience very quickly: Gamasutra, MCV and Gamesindustry.biz.

If you have any useful tips or other comments on this then please post them here.

I live near Stratford-upon-Avon, home of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and I’ve been to see very many plays there over the years.

And the peculiar thing is that most productions of Shakespeare’s tragedies are a lot funnier than his comedies.

In the tragedies he uses comedy as a counterpoint to the disasters that are happening so as to emphasise the drama, whereas the comedies tend to be convoluted pun-laden tales of twins, gender swaps and mistaken identity. He even ladled humour into his histories with spurious comic characters like Sir John Falstaff strutting the stage.

So why did Shakespeare, who never wasted a word, go to so much trouble to put humour in all his plays? The answer is that he was an entertainer and he knew just how important humour was to the entertainment that he provided.

This is why, 400 years later, he is still entertaining us. And it is why, as an industry, we can learn from him.

In my travels I once met a guy who was a full time, professional, comic writer for television. I have since seen his name on many programme credits.

He told me that when they have finished the script for a big Hollywood film they send it to several comic writers. These writers then get paid $10,000 (this was several years ago) for every one of their gags that ends up in the final film. They are, quite literally, living by their wits.

We see the resultant humour in all genres of film. Hollywood knows how to entertain so even all action heroes like Terminator have lots of funny lines. Once again, as an industry, we should be learning from this.

So what should we do? I don’t think that games designers, programmers or producers are the right people to come up with gags, no matter how much of a comedian they may be.

I think this is a job for the professionals, using the Hollywood model, though obviously at a much lower rate per gag. Also, I cannot think of a genre of game that wouldn’t be improved with more humour. The people playing the games are all humans, after all. Humour is also a brilliant way to bring a range of human emotions into games as discussed in this article.

Your comments on this don’t have to be funny! Any input to these articles is always much appreciated.

This is just so simple and so obvious and yet everybody seems to forget it.

In computer games publishing there is a tendency to see other publishers as the competition. As the enemy even, especially if they have a similar game title.

And looking at the pronouncements of the platform holders there is little doubt that they view each other very much as competition.

Yet this is a very narrow view of the market and can cloud your decision making, reducing your marketing effectiveness and thus your profitability.

You see, you are not competing against something, you are competing for something.

And that something is sales.

And to get those sales people need to spend money, the money that is left over after they have paid for rent and food; the money that is known as ‘discretionary spend’.

What you have to always bear in mind is that you are competing for discretionary spend against all sorts of other goodies your potential customer can choose to spend it on. Like going to the cinema, mobile phone top-ups, beer and girls.

Once you have this clear in your mind you know far better how to go about getting that discretionary spend for your product. This means that the more you know about your potential customer and how they spend their money then the more of that money becomes yours!

But you are not just competing for their money, you are competing for their time.

It takes a lot of time to play a game, if they are going to get value for the money that they have spent. So in the summer they are outside more and you sell less games, but in the long summer holiday break sales pick up because they have a lot more free time.

Of course, famously, they buy less games when they discover girls because their time is taken up with romance. But once they settle down with a partner then they have time again to spend on games.

So is that worth a comment? If so, click the link and let everyone know.

The latest magazine circulation figures are out and it is not looking good — but the forests of the world must be breathing a big sigh of relief.

I remember in the eighties when the Spectrum alone supported three magazines in the UK, each with a circulation in six figures. They satisfied a vast craving for news, information, listings, gossip and so much more. Each was a sub-culture in it’s own right.

This was the high point of consumer gaming magazines; it has been downhill ever since.

The first real blow for the 8-bit magazines was games piracy, something they did very little against. Basically the game publishers were selling a lot less games because of the copying, so they had less money to spend on advertising. So the magazines had to cut back on content, so they lost the plot and faded away.

Of course there were later, smaller highs for the Amiga and ST and then for the Playstation, but by then the internet was rearing its ugly head. Soon this became bigger and it was a lot better than paper magazines, and news got out a lot more quickly.

Web 2.0 has removed any need to ever spend a penny on a gaming magazine. The blogs and forums now have so much more and better content (once you have sorted through the dross and fanboys) than the magazines that it is amazing that there are any of these left on the newsstand.

But the final blow is video. Video is the fastest growing area of the internet and it is perfect for games. It shows the games actually working with movement and sound. This just makes a paper magazine look silly. So silly that most will be gone before too long.

Now for an anecdote. At Codemasters we ramped up our web traffic until our editorial content was reaching far more people than the total output of some of the games magazine publishers.

We had newsletters, forums, competitions, microsites for every game and so on. It was dynamic and exciting.

So I was in London at a trade event and met a very senior executive from one of the paper mag publishers, somebody who I have known for more than 20 years. His company’s web offerings were pathetic and I tried to tell him about some of the exciting things we were doing online that were bringing content to vast audiences.

But he cut me dead. Rudely.

And within two years he had lost his job precisely because of those pathetic web offerings.

Schadenfreude, me? Surely not.

So do you think paper games magazines can cling on to life? Comment away!

I have gone to the States for just over a week. But I have written an article for every weekday whilst I am away and they should automatically post themselves here at 7AM each day. I hope you like them!

The topics are:

• A few press release tips #1
• So who is your competition?
• Are games funny enough?
• Games will be education
• What is Nintendo?
• Paper games magazines are dead

The site has got off to a great start with around 1,000 visitors in the first fortnight and already more than 50 people are using the RSS feed. Visitors to the site are spending an average of just under 10 minutes here so they are definitely reading the articles. Google has been very kind and has already managed to find over 600 results for Bruceongames.

Thank you very much for coming to the site and a special big thank you to everyone who has commented. Getting different input really adds to the quality of the debate.

If you know anyone who might like the content here please let them know, the more the merrier!

This really takes some believing, usually the Americans are so commercially adept, but they have blown this one, big style.

E3 was the annual jamboree for the whole global industry. It was a statement to the world: “Look At Us”. And it was fantastically expensive. A million pounds starters for a proper booth. Every year I said we shouldn’t do it. And every year we did. But hey, when you have 5 TV crews on the booth at the same time you stop complaining.

But complaining is what everybody did, so the E3 organisers scaled back to make something much cheaper. Cheaper in every sense.

Meanwhile in the provincial backwater called Europe there was a nice friendly annual event at Leipzig. A small fraction of the size of E3, but people liked it and it grew gradually from year to year. Then E3 was scaled back and the people who had complained about the cost of E3 spent the money at Leipzig instead. It quite simply exploded. Leipzig is the new E3.

So now everyone has their annual jamboree again. And everyone can complain about the cost. It is just business as usual.

With one enormous difference. The main global event of the year is now in Europe, not in America. This is going to favour the European game industry so much where before they were at a disadvantage. And obviously for the American game industry it will be vice versa.

This is important stuff because the games industry is still at it’s very beginning.

So what do you think of E3 and Leipzig? You can add your comments by clicking the link below.