Gaming is brilliant for learning because it has the task/reward cycle which comes naturally to the human brain. Additionally, as I have said in previous articles, because educational games are on computers they track the student’s progress, so there is no need for exams.
Smart.fm takes this one step further. It tracks the student’s progress and presents material at the optimum moment for the most efficient learning process according to the Ebbinghaus Curve. Their system of spaced rehearsal ensures the absolute most efficient absorption of knowledge over time. Take a look and you will see that it is individually tailored by feedback loop and that it uses computer processing power to apply the science. This whole methodology would be simply impossible in a classroom but is straightforward for a video game to achieve.
To me it is immensely frustrating that we have the means to massively improve our formal education system yet we persevere with the archaic relic that is the classroom.
England’s libel laws are unjust, against the public interest and internationally criticised – there is urgent need for reform
Freedom to criticise and question, in strong terms and without malice, is the cornerstone of argument and debate, whether in scholarly journals, on websites, in newspapers or elsewhere. Our current libel laws inhibit debate and stifle free expression. They discourage writers from tackling important subjects and thereby deny us the right to read about them.
The law is so biased towards claimants and so hostile to writers that London has become known as the libel capital of the world. The rich and powerful bring cases to London on the flimsiest grounds (libel tourism), because they know that 90% of cases are won by claimants. Libel laws intended to protect individual reputation are being exploited to suppress fair comment and criticism.
The cost of a libel trial is often in excess of £1 million and 140 times more expensive than libel cases in mainland Europe; publishers (and individual journalists, authors, academics, performers and blog-writers) cannot risk such extortionate costs, which means that they are forced to back down, withdraw and apologise for material they believe is true, fair and important to the public.
The English PEN/Index on Censorship report has shown that there is an urgent need to amend the law to provide a stronger, wider and more accessible public interest defence. Sense About Science has shown that the threat of libel action leads to self-censorship in scientific and medical writing.
We the undersigned, in England and beyond, urge politicians to support a bill for major reforms of the English libel laws now, in the interests of fairness, the public interest and free speech.
There are many ways you can view Google. Firstly there is this large group of people sitting on a campus, each with a brain the size of a planet coming up with amazing ideas that advance humanity and all of these people as wealthy as Croesus because of their stock options.
A second view is of a company with enough money in the bank to buy a couple of countries but which only has one revenue source, and that is under threat from several directions.
The third view is from that of being a consumer. Google has some pretty neat free products, without which the internet would be less rich. And they have pushed the technology to make all their competitors perform better.
Just as there are more than three views of Google, so there are at least four major problems they have to address. The first is that their sole big contributor to wealth is search advertising. They also have YouTube, which they bought and which is big, but not profitable. Gmail is also a success, but again not a massive earner. Then they have the failures, Lively was a 3D virtual world which is now canned, Knol is an online knowledge competitor to Wikipedia that hardly anyone uses, Wave is a new way of communicating which is not taking off and Reader is another failed idea. There are loads more: Orkut, Video File, Catalog, Answers, Web Accelerator, X site, Checkout, Viewer, Voice Search, Coupons etc etc.
The thing is that most of these would have worked if Google had understood marketing. They seem to think that just because their original search succeeded as a result of product excellence it means that everything else will do the same. And they are very wrong. They need to communicate with the outside world a lot more effectively. Which brings us to their latest failure, Buzz. This social networking product was tested rigorously by the thousands of genii in the Googleplex till it was perfect. But when released to the real world it suffered an immediate disaster because of its disregard for privacy.
Their second problem, and the one most relevant to gaming is that computing and the internet are moving away from being desktop PC dominated to being mobile phone dominated. Over the next few years the production of smartphones will ramp up to a billion units a year. So processing power and an internet connection in people’s pockets will become ubiquitous throughout the developed world. In much of the undeveloped world there will be a jump from nothing straight into smartphone based computing. Google’s revenue depends on the desktop PCs that will soon be very much second best, they are yet to demonstrate a convincing business model to monetise this move to smartphones.
The third problem is that their flagship product, Google search, is becoming less relevant as people’s internet usage changes. Social networking is now more important. Facebook has now beaten Google for weekly page views in America. And Facebook can often provide a richer and more rewarding browsing experience than search can.
It is this lack of marketing understanding that is Google’s biggest weakness. Their world view is technology driven whilst the real world is marketing driven. Steve Jobs at Apple understands this and is happy to release weak technology (no Flash or multi tasking on iPhone for instance) with strong marketing, knowing that it works commercially.
I have written about this before, but now some commentators have had their $0.02 worth, so I thought I would revisit the topic.
Game executives and financial people all over the world must be looking at how quickly Modern Warfare 2 romped to a billion dollars at retail and thought to themselves “I want some of that”. They are deluded and misguided even thinking about it and here’s why.
There are too many AAA games in the market. Not slightly too many. Vastly too many. And most are making a loss. Just look at the accounts of the big publishers. The ones whose AAA titles miss the mark are making very big losses.
There are too many publishers trying to churn out AAA games. We need more industry consolidation so that the production pipeline comes under some sort of control. At the moment Darwin is at work and some publishers who are structurally incapable of making a profit in the current market will find themselves subject to major externally exerted change.
AAA games now cost far too much to make. The PS3 and 360 have HD that requires far more content to be hand crafted. So their games consume several times more man hours than previous generation games. Publishers are getting round this to an extent by making some games a lot shorter, but the public are not stupid. Next generation platforms will have the power to run a lot of middleware, considerably reducing the effort needed to make a game.
Competition from other gaming platforms. The original Playstation had the market to itself. Now the typical gamer has many platforms to spend their time and money on. Facebook, iPhone, DS, MMOs etc. The average gamer is now promiscuous with their attention.
To generate a hit that is profitable requires global marketing and distribution resources. And a huge investment in that marketing. Modern Warfare 2 spent more on marketing than some publishers’ entire budget for a AAA game. This is a big boys game at the top table and very few have the resources to play.
Brand dilution. Executives see a game succeed so they just rush in and pillage the brand to make money. Meaningless sequels geared up for maximum exploitation are not the long term road to success. To get it right just look at Nintendo, who are one of the few game publishers on planet earth who understand managing a game brand properly. Their management of their key brands is a lesson that the rest of the industry refuses to learn.
Stupid game themes. Interactive computer based entertainment has infinite possibilities, the human imagination is the limit of what can be achieved. So what does the industry give us? Shooting. Then more shooting, then yet even more shooting. Can they not see how limited and stupid this is? Once again look at Nintendo for inspiration. They manage to run some of the biggest AAA gaming brands on earth without shooting in them. Or look at other entertainment media like books, television, the theatre, even the cinema. They all have shooting, but not the incessant, mindless glut that the gaming industry is currently serving up.
Too little of retail revenue gets back to where the value was created, in development and marketing. A AAA console retail game has to give the retailer their retail margin, also in many territories give their distributor their cut, then there are the logistics costs such as warehousing and transportation, the game has to be manufactured so there is plastic and cardboard to pay for, finally there is the platform holders’ substantial cut. Not much left for those who have done most to earn it.
Games have a very short tail. This is getting a little better with Downloadable Content (DLC) but it is still pretty bad compared with music and film which have multiple revenue streams providing income for years. Decades in some cases.
There are far, far better things for a game company to do with their money, brands and human resources. Obviously I am not going to tell the world here and now, when I can actually get paid for the knowledge. Read the nearly 800 articles on this blog and you might get a bit of an idea.
So there you have it. At the current state of the current platform generation AAA games are a very dangerous place to be investing, unless you happen to own one of the handful of “dead cert” global blockbusters.
So at long last the day has come, I don’t use a mobile phone very much. And when I do I don’t use the extra features, I don’t even text. I bought my trusty Nokia 6300 when it first came out and it is just about perfect. In fact all the Nokia phones I have bought over the years have been good. And every non Nokia phone less so. There is a reason they tend to have a 40% market share.
The thinking behind the move is to use the new phone as a web browser and email terminal. To carry the internet in my pocket.
After much looking at the market (and not being swayed by fashion) my new smartphone is a Nokia 5800. And there are some very good reasons why:
It has multitasking. I cannot believe anybody selling a general purpose computer that isn’t. Non multitasking is a primitive restriction from our historic past.
It supports Adobe Flash. You know, the industry standard for moving images on the internet.
The battery is removable and replaceable. So I can carry a spare, charged battery in my pocket. And replace any batteries that get tired in their old age.
It has a very nice form factor. Ergonomic in the hand and relatively light. Some smartphones are far too wide to actually comfortably use as a phone.
No keyboard. Thought about this and concluded that the smaller size when you go without is advantageous. If I find I am inputting a lot of text then maybe my next phone will need one.
High resolution screen. 640 x 360 is more than some offer.
2 cameras. One on each side, so you can videophone. How cool is that?
When using the satnav the (free) maps download into the phone. So you can use it on the plane! And it doesn’t eat up expensive airtime when you are navigating.
Swappable memory on Micro SD cards. And web rumours say that the 32MB cards work.
Carl Zeiss autofocus camera with flash, autofocus and zoom.
It’s a Nokia, so all the actual telephone functions such as signal strength, network compatibility, global roaming, voice quality etc will be spot on.
Frequent firmware upgrades. The 5800 is a vastly superior phone now to the one they released just over a year ago. They even increased the processor clock speed in one upgrade!
There’s loads more, but those are the big ones. I have bought the phone outright so can put it on any service I want and upgrade as and when I feel like it. Smartphones are going to drop massively in price this year and the operating systems are going to become a lot more capable. But, as before, I won’t be swayed by fashion and will only replace the 5800 when there is a very good reason to do so.
The stupid British government is misspending a fortune. One example is forcing climate change propaganda down our throats. Mainly to justify hitting us with more and more “green” taxes. And part of their propaganda effort was a video game.
According to the Tax Payers Alliance: “The Yigal Allon Educational Trust received a grant of £49,480 to produce a “fun and engaging multi-player computer where the player’s role is to decide on local environmental policy, and interact with other players to decide global policy…………The report says that 1,048 active sessions (games with at least one player) created between July 2007 and April 2008. That implies that the project cost around £47 in grant funding per game played…..”
Under this government the British video game industry has gone from being third in the world (behind America and Japan) to almost certainly sixth (behind Canada, Korea and China). One of the main reasons for this decline (which has cost the country many billions) is government ignorance, ineptitude and apathy. Especially compared with more enlightened governments elsewhere. One example was the tax regime that they devised for the film industry (reflecting the risk and financing problems) which has been a great success. But which they did not extend to the game industry which was beset with identical problems. Yet they can throw money away at misguided propaganda when it suits them
There is a solution to this problem. Shortly there will be a general election and we can vote in a better regime (it can hardly be worse, can it?) and this interview with Ed Vaizey gives us some idea what to expect.
For very many years Electronic Arts were the biggest game publisher on earth. They have an income of billions every year and they employ thousands of people all around the globe. EA are very important indeed for the video games industry. But they are no longer undisputed number one. The marriage of Vivendi and Activision, fed by the cash cow that is World of Warcraft, with mega hits like Modern Warfare and Guitar Hero and very ably led by Bob Kotick are now probably established at the top of the heap, especially when it comes to profit. (Amazingly they were bankrupt in the early ’90s.)
So again, very unsurprisingly, Electronic Arts have issued more bad financial results. They lost $82 million in the quarter ended 31 December (the best time of year for video games!). Their stock price took another hit. They can’t blame the industry, big global publishers like the aforementioned Activision, and also Ubisoft have done very well indeed. Even Sega have managed to get themselves back into profit. I have written about EA’s problems on here before. Repeatedly.
This generation of HD home consoles have awful business models to develop for. Basically making a game costs far, far too much. Several times the cost of games for the previous generation. The root of this is that HD games need a massive amount of content which is still largely hand crafted. The next generation of platforms will have enough power to run lots and lots of middleware so development costs should drop back to sensible levels. In the meantime we are stuck with the PS3 and 360 and they are causing a lot of problems.
The Wii has been a black hole for many third party publishers. Their fault. They mostly haven’t made the games that Wii owners want to buy. Just look at the Metacritic for Wii to see this. Electronic Arts on the Wii published NCAA Football 09 All-Play (Metacritic 49), Celebrity Sports Showdown (Metacritic 50), NBA Live 09 All-Play (Metacritic 51), G I Joe: The Rise of Cobra (Metacritic 51) and many other such gems that should never have seen the light of day.
There is a trend on the more casual platforms for developers to self publish. This removes discipline from the market, especially on price. The job of a publisher is to provide editorial control, finance and marketing. Self publishers tend to use the price mechanism as their main marketing tool. Done competitively this rapidly collapses the viability of a platform. Electronic Arts have not taken the grip that they should have, thus allowing upstarts like PopCap to gain traction. Also they were late on the scene for emerging platforms, such as Facebook.
It is not all doom and gloom. The losses are less than they were. The management are cutting out the non block buster games. EA moved away from licensed products so have built up the beginning of a portfolio of good IP that they actually own. There are huge economic advantages of scale in publishing, which positions EA very nicely indeed. The world’s consumers will spend more on games in the future than they are now. The next generation of home consoles will reward those with enough clout to invest heavily in middleware. And EA do have some excellent employees.
