History > 2008 > Japan, USA > Video games (I)

http://www.monky.ro/wallpapers
added 27.6.2008

related
http://www.ea.com/armyoftwo/index.jsp

Microsoft Wants Games

to Appeal to the Masses

July 15, 2008
The New York Times
By SETH SCHIESEL

LOS ANGELES — Ever since Microsoft waded into the video game wars with the introduction of the original Xbox in 2001, the company has spared little expense in attempting to establish its bona fides with hardcore gamers. From the physical appearance of the first Xbox — hulking, extruded black plastic — to the testosterone-laden, shoot-’ em-up essence of Microsoft’s signature game franchise, Halo, Microsoft’s first, perhaps only, priority has been to reach out to the young men at gaming’s historical roots.

Until now. In a significant shift for the company, Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new strategy for its gaming unit that is meant to help the company’s Xbox 360 console appeal to the mainstream. Lured by games and consoles like Guitar Hero, The Sims, World of Warcraft and Nintendo’s Wii, millions of consumers who would never have thought of themselves as gamers have begun to play video games in recent years. By some projections, the global game industry could approach $50 billion in revenue this year, propelled mostly by gaming’s soaring mainstream popularity.

So on Monday at the annual E3 convention here, Microsoft announced a collection of new games and services for the Xbox 360 that are meant to appeal to the everyday entertainment consumer.

“For the last few years we have consciously and continuously fed the core gamer audience, and now we are reaching that inflection point where we have to reach out to the mainstream consumer and bring them into the Xbox 360,” David Hufford, Microsoft’s director for Xbox product management, said in an interview.

“Everyone plays video games now or has an interest in playing video games,” he said. “So we have to appeal to the mainstream more than ever now. And what really is appealing to that mainstream consumer is that social experience, in the living room or online. Whether it’s the older consumer or the Facebook generation, they see games not as a solitary experience but as something you do with friends and family, and that’s what we want to deliver this fall.”

At the core of Microsoft’s new initiative is a new interface for the Xbox 360 that incorporates humanlike avatars representing each player. Users will be able to customize their avatars and socialize with other Xbox users, even outside of any particular game. Nintendo has been successful using a similar approach with its Wii, where each person creates a more cartoony figure called a Mii. Sony is also working on such a system with a new service for its PlayStation 3 called Home.

In Microsoft’s system, Xbox users will be able to share photos with one another across the Xbox Live network and also watch movies together in real time, even if the consumers are thousands of miles apart.

In addition to the new avatar system, Microsoft announced a partnership with Netflix, so Netflix subscribers can watch any of more than 10,000 movies and television programs over their Xbox 360. Microsoft already offers some films and TV shows for download and on Monday the company announced that its Xbox Live service had generated more than $1 billion in revenue since the Xbox 360’s debut in 2005.

Driving home the company’s new push for mainstream consumers, the company also unveiled new family-oriented games including a new entry in its Viva Pinata franchise and a madcap B-movie simulator called “You’re in the Movies.”

But a video game business cannot survive on family-friendly fare alone. To appeal to more traditionally discerning gamers, Microsoft offered a well-received look at the post-apocalyptic role-playing Fallout 3 and Gears of War 2, sequel to one of the best games of 2006.

Perhaps of most interest to serious gamers, Square Enix of Japan showed a lusciously beautiful trailer at the Microsoft briefing from its coming game Final Fantasy XIII, which is scheduled to be released next year. Previous Final Fantasy games have been available only on Sony consoles, but, in a major coup for Microsoft, Square Enix announced that FF13 would also be released for the Xbox 360.

Later in the day, Electronic Arts, the big United States game publisher, held its own media presentation to show off its lineup for the holiday season and next year. Predictably, Spore, the evolutionary biology simulator from Will Wright, creator of SimCity and The Sims, looked almost frighteningly addictive. Spore is scheduled to be released in September, and Mr. Wright said that players had already created more than 1.7 million fictional species using the game’s demonstration version.

E.A. has long been a leader in appealing to casual gamers. To reinforce that success, the company showed off a new game called SimAnimals, which appears poised to do well among girls and children. The company also moved to reinforce its credibility with core gamers which looks at Dragon Age Origins, from the BioWare studio, and Left 4 Dead, a survival horror game from the Valve studio. Both BioWare and Valve are among the most respected game developers in the world.

In a surprise move, E.A. announced a publishing partnership with id Software, the inventors of the first-person shooter genre and the famous developers of the seminal Doom and Quake franchises. John Carmack, an id lead programmer, showed a brief snippet from id’s coming game Rage.

But the surprise hit of the E.A. news conference was a new science-fiction horror game called Dead Space, which is scheduled to be released for PCs, the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in October. Not for children and not for the squeamish, Dead Space takes place on a space station where something has gone horribly, terribly wrong (the combat revolves around what was described at the presentation as strategic dismemberment). The quality of the animation and the evocative tension and fear of its presentation appeared to be of a very high quality, as long as you don’t mind flying body parts.

Nintendo and Sony are scheduled to hold their major briefings on Tuesday.

Microsoft Wants Games to Appeal to the Masses, NYT, 15.7.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/arts/television/15gameweb.html

Ideas & Trends

The Shootout

Over Hidden Meanings

in a Video Game

June 22, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVE ITZKOFF

If there’s a subject that’s as contentious as war itself, it might be a video game about war.

It’s been just over a week since the release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, the latest chapter in the popular video game series about a covert military agent named Solid Snake. And already, fans are exchanging rhetorical fusillades on the Internet, teasing out what the underlying political and philosophical messages of Metal Gear Solid 4 might be.

Encrypted within this discussion is a more sophisticated argument about the nascent medium of video games. Can it tell a story as satisfyingly as a work of cinema or literature?

Is the Sisyphean mission of Solid Snake — to rid the world of a robotic nuclear tank called Metal Gear — a parable about the futility of war or about its necessity? A critique of America’s domination of the global stage? A metaphor for the struggle between determinism and free will? If the creator of the Metal Gear Solid series, Hideo Kojima, has answers to these questions, he isn’t telling.

“He doesn’t interview very much,” said Leigh Alexander, an associate editor at Kotaku.com, a video game blog. “Sometimes he will speak about it, and other times it’s left to the critical peanut gallery to disassemble what his intentions might have been.”

Devoted players have no shortage of opinions about what Mr. Kojima’s games are saying. The original Metal Gear Solid, released in 1998 for Sony’s PlayStation console, combined stealth combat with cinematic intermission scenes, full of dialogue and imagery that directly invoked the bombing of Hiroshima and the birth of atomic weapons. The game called attention to the scourge of nuclear proliferation, and forced players to consider the morality of their own lethal actions.

These messages were complicated by a pair of sequels: Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty, released in late 2001, introduced a shadowy supernational group called the Patriots, so powerful that even the president of the United States answers to it. (A commentary on the disputed 2000 election? The cabal theories of post-9/11 politics?) And Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, released in 2004, explored the cold war origins of its characters, whose personal stories are intertwined with the rise of the military-industrial complex.

“This is a just-off-center world that gamers can almost believe in,” said Rob Smith, the editor in chief of PlayStation: The Official Magazine. “All the important world history of the 20th century matches up in ways that say, ‘If we’d gone down this path then, this is what we’d now be facing.’ ”

Metal Gear Solid 4, released for the PlayStation 3 console, further upends traditional notions of heroism and villainy: in this game Solid Snake (think James Bond meets Rambo) has aged considerably, as have several of his archenemies; the forces he battles are not the soldiers of identifiable nations but the mercenaries on the payroll of private military companies. “The issue of good guys and bad guys doesn’t exist anymore,” Mr. Smith said. “It’s just: here’s the guys.”

Even as gamers ponder what this symbolism means (an allegory of war in the era of Blackwater Worldwide and stateless enemy combatants?), they are also debating whether the story of Metal Gear Solid 4 is a satisfying one, and if its storytelling techniques are used effectively.

“You get so caught up in just figuring out, Does this story need to be here?” said Stephen Totilo, an MTV News reporter who covers video games. “That’s not a question you wind up asking yourself when you’re reading a novel. Of course the story needs to be there! Otherwise you don’t have a novel.”

Players like Shawn Elliott, the senior executive editor of the gaming Web site 1up.com, have criticized the game for its preachiness, and for its reliance on lengthy cinematic interludes that can run 30 minutes or longer.

“It can basically become a movie for long stretches,” Mr. Elliott said. “It’s not necessarily a game catching up with movies, but a game kind of cheating and using a language that isn’t native to its own medium.”

Others object to the sheer density of the story, spanning seven games released over 20 real-world years, that players are asked to master. “Let’s just say it’s not something any of us gamers are nearly as used to doing when we’re playing a game as when we’re reading a novel,” Mr. Totilo said.

Players can skip over the storytelling elements in Metal Gear Solid and still play the game.

But unrepentant fans like Ms. Alexander of Kotaku.com argue that, coherent or not, the narrative of Metal Gear Solid 4 is an inseparable part of the “package experience” that makes it an evolutionary step beyond fare like Halo 3, a first-person shooting game designed to soothe itchy trigger fingers.

Metal Gear Solid, Ms. Alexander said, “has the characters and the narrative, the symbolism and the metaphors, and all of the lore that ties it together,” whereas Halo is popular “not because of any of its peripheral elements or anything else about it, other that you shoot people.”

The Shootout Over Hidden Meanings in a Video Game, NYT, 22.6.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/22/weekinreview/22itzkoff.html

Nintendo launches

new fitness video game in U.S.

Mon May 19, 2008
1:23pm EDT
Reuters
By Scott Hillis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Nintendo Co Ltd launched its "Wii Fit" exercise game in the United States on Monday, hoping to get gamers off the couch and appeal to new audiences such as women and older people.

Nintendo is banking on "Wii Fit" to further broaden the appeal of its Wii gaming console, which has already become a smash hit due to its motion-sensing controller and simple, easy-to-learn games.

"There has been fitness software before, but with the positioning of it, the marketing might behind it and the product itself, it's the biggest health product for a video game system I've ever seen," said IDC analyst Billy Pidgeon.

"Wii Fit" is the latest major title Nintendo has launched this year, one that is aimed most clearly at a nontraditional audience of mothers and older customers who are uninterested in established franchises like "Mario" and "Pokemon."

The game, which costs $90 and comes with a shoulder-width "balance board" that senses shifts in posture, should also help Nintendo address concerns over the tendency of Wii owners to buy fewer games than owners of Microsoft Corp's Xbox 360 and Sony Corp's PlayStation 3.

"The secret weapon of the Wii is getting more people within the household to play. Each one of those people is going to buy fewer games than the hard-core gamer would, but it adds up," Pidgeon said.

Pidgeon and other analysts said they expect sales of "Wii Fit" to be limited only by how many units Nintendo can make, with some estimating that up to 30 percent of the nearly 10 million Wii owners in the United States will buy the product in the next few weeks.

In a sign of strong demand, the Web site of retail giant Wal-Mart said it had sold out of its pre-order allocation of "Wii Fit," and Amazon.com said it was out of stock as well.

While Microsoft and Sony have focused on high-definition, ultra-realistic games, Nintendo surprised the industry with the low-cost, low-tech Wii. In April, Nintendo sold more than 700,000 Wii machines in the United States, nearly double that of the Xbox 360 and PS3 combined.

"Wii Fit is easy for anyone to try and is yet another example of how Nintendo continues to expand the world of video games to new audiences," Cammie Dunaway, executive vice president of sales and marketing for Nintendo of America, said in a statement.

"Wii Fit" offers more than 40 activities in four categories including aerobics, strength training, balance and yoga. It tracks users' Body Mass Index and weight, charting their progress and offering fitness tips.

It is the latest creation of Nintendo's legendary game designer Shigeru Miyamoto, who came up with many of the company's smash hits, from "Donkey Kong" to "Nintendogs."

Nintendo has already sold 2 million copies of "Wii Fit" in Japan and it has recently been released in Europe.

Not everyone has been enamored with the product. Video game news and reviews Web site GameSpot said the title was hamstrung by shortcomings.

"Wii Fit's included exercises do have the potential to positively impact your health, but thanks to its lack of exercise options, poor support for multiplayer, and shallow health advice, this title isn't a gaming fitness revolution," GameSpot said.

Nintendo is initially selling "Wii Fit" only at its New York store, with the product available at other retailers by Wednesday.

(Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

Nintendo launches new fitness video game in U.S., R, 19.5.2008, http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSN1641507620080519

My Virtual Summer Job

With summer jobs in short supply, more young people are pursuing money-making opportunities in Web fantasy worlds. Alexandra Alter on the new online workers.

16 May 2008
The Wall Street Journal
By ALEXANDRA ALTER

While his friends scramble for jobs flipping burgers or bagging groceries this summer, 18-year-old Mike Everest will be working as a trader in the fantasy Web world of Entropia Universe, buying and selling virtual animal skins and weapons. His goods exist only online, but his earnings are real. In the past four years, he's made $35,000.

Mr. Everest, of Durango, Colo., is among a new breed of young entrepreneurs seeking their fortune online in imaginary worlds. As the pool of traditional summer jobs shrinks, tech-savvy young gamers are honing their computer skills to capitalize on growing demand for virtual goods and services. Some work as fashion designers, architects and real-estate developers in Second Life, a fantasy world populated by digital representations of real people. These so-called avatars shop in malls, buy property, hang out with friends or sit "home" watching TV, all manipulated by their real-life counterparts with computer key strokes and a mouse.

In the real world, summer jobs are in short supply. Only about a third of teenagers are expected to work this summer, the lowest levels in 60 years, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. Summer youth employment has fallen from about 45% of teens in 2000, a downward trend made worse this year by the faltering economy.

But money-making opportunities in virtual worlds have grown as such sites go mainstream. Research firm Gartner Media estimates that by 2011, 80% of Internet users worldwide will have an avatar, making animated online personas as common as screen names. Such companies as IBM and Adidas have moved into Second Life, helping to drive employment.

Entropia Universe boasts 722,000 players and allows money earned online to be withdrawn from brick-and-mortar banks with an Entropia ATM card. On a typical day, Second Life players spend close to $1.5 million on virtual clothes, jewelry, homes, cars and real estate. The site's roughly 1.2 million active players use their credit cards to purchase Second Life currency called Lindens, which are pegged to the dollar at about 270 Lindens to $1. Virtual merchants can convert their profits into dollars through a money exchange run by Linden Lab, the company that operates Second Life. Linden Lab pays out proceeds with real-life checks or through PayPal accounts.

"It's an incredible environment for young entrepreneurs," says Claudia L'Amoreaux, of Linden Lab. "The ones who are really successful at it are beginning to make that their main work."

    My Virtual Summer Job, WSJ, 18.5.2008, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121088619095596515.html?mod=hpp_us_inside_today

A $500 Million Week for Grand Theft Auto

May 7, 2008
The New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL

SAN FRANCISCO — Grand Theft Auto IV, the latest iteration of the hit video game franchise, racked up first-week sales of $500 million, Take-Two Interactive, the game’s publisher, plans to announce on Wednesday. The report exceeded the sales expectations of analysts.

The company is expected to report it sold six million copies of the graphically violent game, 3.6 million of them on the first day.

The sales exceed projections of industry analysts who were estimating that some five million consumers would purchase the game in the first two weeks.

The significance of the sales extends beyond buoying Take-Two, a company that has had its share of legal, financial and management struggles in the last few years. The company is the subject of a $2 billion hostile takeover effort by Electronic Arts, which is offering Take Two shareholders $25.74 a share for control of the company. If Take-Two can exceed sales expectations on Grand Theft Auto IV, it has the potential to drive up the share price and force Electronic Arts to raise its offer.

On Tuesday, Take Two’s shares closed at $26.35, up 29 cents.

Electronic Arts’ takeover bid turned hostile after Take-Two management said that it would not negotiate an acquisition agreement with Electronic Arts — or any suitor — until after the release of Grand Theft Auto IV. Now that the game is out, Take-Two may well have entered discussions with Electronic Arts and possibly other suitors who covet the Grand Theft Auto franchise, but Take-Two has declined to comment on whether such discussions are taking place.

If Take-Two and Electronic Arts wind up doing a deal, there is pressure on Electronic Arts and also on some Take-Two shareholders to get one done quickly. Electronic Arts has said that it needs to get a deal in time to subsume Take-Two’s assets before the holiday selling season.

Take-Two’s management has said that the success of Grand Theft Auto IV is awakening shareholders to the long-term value of the company’s stock and that if investors can be patient it can command a higher price in the long term.

A $500 Million Week for Grand Theft Auto, NYT, 7.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/technology/07game.html

A Strange City Called Home

May 4, 2008
The New York Times
By DAVE ITZKOFF

IN the opening moments of Grand Theft Auto IV, the latest chapter of the cinematically styled video game franchise, two men are standing at the side of a boat, watching a familiar sight drift into view. Through their eyes, we see a digitized, 21st-century retelling of a scene that greeted numerous generations of new arrivals to an unknown country: the eastern end of a long, narrow island, with a towering metal spire emerging from its belly, and a diminutive green statue beckoning from a tiny point off the island’s southern tip.

We think we know what we are seeing, until one of the game’s characters identifies the land mass for us.

“Liberty City,” he says to his shipmate in a vaguely East European accent. “You ever been?”

And before I even sat down to play the game, I could honestly say that I had.

Liberty City, the pixilated playground where the action of Grand Theft Auto IV occurs, is New York City, and it is not. Like previous installments of the game, which has sold more than 70 million copies in the last decade — abbreviated G.T.A., in the same sanitized way that Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC — this newest edition (released on Tuesday for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 systems) sets players loose in an environment closely modeled on a real American metropolis, usually at some notorious time in its history.

The environs of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, released in 2002, were inspired by 1980s-era Miami, the pastel-hued setting for crime dramas like “Scarface” and “Miami Vice.” For a 2004 sequel, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the game relocated to three interconnected cities based on Los Angeles, San Francisco and Las Vegas, against a 1990s backdrop of gangsta rap and gang violence.

While moving its story forward to the present day, G.T.A. IV largely restricts itself to a single city — one at the height of its prosperity and during an ebb in crime. The game makes no attempt to disguise the fact that it is designed to look, sound and feel like the city I have lived in for nearly all 32 years of my life.

As many others have already noted, Liberty City is a dead ringer for New York: It’s divided into boroughs with distinct populations and architectural styles; it has most of the same suspension bridges and historic landmarks in the places you’d expect to find them; and its streets are always teeming with traffic and unruly pedestrians.

This game is hardly the first to try to replicate some portion of the New York experience — programmers have been trying to do this for decades. But Grand Theft Auto IV is the most contemporary attempt at this experiment, and may be the most realistic made available to a mass audience.

It’s also a game that has an extra layer of resonance for indigenous New Yorkers. With all the knowledge, confidence, predispositions and prejudices we possess, we’re not only better equipped to detect the many references and insider jokes, we may even come out of the game thinking differently about the real-life New York we’ve always known.

For a native New Yorker, the game is both comfortingly routine and eerily disorienting; you find yourself playing because it is a limitless escape and a consequence-free confinement. Liberty City is like nowhere I’ve ever visited, even as it tries with all its heart and soul to remind me of a place with which I’m already intimately acquainted.

MY initiation into Liberty City came a few days before G.T.A. IV went on sale, in the downtown loft offices of the game’s publisher, Rockstar Games. As I tooled around the electronic streets for a few hours under the supervision of two Rockstar employees, I was sometimes playing the game myself, and sometimes watching as someone else played it for me. I generally played by the rules, but for the purposes of this story, I occasionally made use of a special cheat feature to travel through the game in ways that a typical player cannot.

When that boat from the game’s opening scene finally docked at Liberty City, my character, a rugged-looking immigrant named Niko, found himself on the docks of a Dumbo-like neighborhood, in a borough the game calls Broker.

Indeed, much of Liberty City’s map is made up of direct analogues of real New York neighborhoods and locations, often renamed with winking, sophomoric monikers that could have come from Mad magazine: Manhattan is Algonquin and Queens is Dukes; the giant neon Pepsi-Cola sign in Long Island City advertises a beverage called Sprunk; and the MetLife skyscraper on Park Avenue has been replaced with the Getalife Building.

Even if I didn’t recognize this computer-generated tribute to Dumbo from its hilly terrain and its array of converted red-brick factories and dilapidated loft spaces, I might have known it from the disoriented feelings gathering in my gut. In real life, I have hardly spent enough time in Dumbo to know my way around it; if I were abandoned there as part of some urban Outward Bound adventure, I probably couldn’t find the nearest subway station without the help of a G.P.S.

On my television screen, I could see the silhouette of Manhattan on the horizon, but I had no idea how to get there. My digital discomfort was just as palpable as it would be if I were experiencing this world in three dimensions.

Following the game’s directions, I drove my character to the neighborhood that is Liberty City’s equivalent of Brighton Beach, where, true to its inspiration, all the shop signs were in Cyrillic lettering, and the few passers-by could be heard, in snatches, speaking Russian and Ukrainian. Niko, my alter ego, did not yet have his own apartment — for starters, he would have to sleep on someone else’s foldout couch in a ratty tenement with walls covered in graffiti inspired (so I am told) by tags that the game’s designers had seen and photographed in Brooklyn.

There was something amusingly authentic about Niko’s predicament. The game’s British creators seemed to know that given the choice, most players would probably run or drive straight into Manhattan — the version of the city they know from their own travels, or any number of films and television shows — and ignore the other boroughs. Here, as in the real world, entry into the heart of the city would have to be won through patience and hard work.

A few steps outside Niko’s temporary lodging, I found myself in Firefly Island, the game’s answer to Coney Island, complete with a giant Ferris wheel and a rickety wooden roller coaster; both attractions were closed and the area was devoid of pedestrians.

The scene was familiar in more ways than one: it reminded me of The Warriors, a video game that Rockstar created just three years ago, based largely on the 1979 Walter Hill movie of the same name. (You know, the one with the crazy-costumed New York gangs fighting their way from the Bronx to Brooklyn — “Can you dig it?” “Come out and plaa-aaay!”)

THAT game was also nominally set in New York, though I never genuinely felt transported there for one moment. That city seemed a grimy parody of someone else’s grimy parody of the city, one that looked as if our town had been struck by a giant mirror ball full of plutonium.

But I wanted to see more than the few chubby, backpack-toting tourists who were ambling around the Boardwalk. So I had my flesh-and-blood chaperons turn on a hidden feature within their version of the game that allowed me to fly anywhere on the G.T.A. map. And I mean, literally, fly: my virtual self disappeared, and the camera began to hover off the ground, swooping and soaring from the Brooklyn Bridge (er, I mean the Broker Bridge) to the Statue of Happiness, which resembles a wide-eyed Hillary Rodham Clinton hoisting a cup of coffee aloft.

Eventually I touched down in a Times Square that was appropriately cluttered with hypnotic neon advertisements for things I could not really buy, and populated, sparsely, with pedestrians who carried on cellphone conversations, sketched portraits of passers-by and played the saxophone in return for loose change. When I walked into a greasy all-night burger joint, a cashier greeted me with an appropriately indifferent “What?” But when I crossed the street against the light upon exiting, cars actually stopped for me (though they honked their horns).

Having been lulled into believing that I really was in New York, I made the mistake of trying to find my own Alphabet City apartment within the game. I walked down to Chinatown — that took only a few seconds — found what I thought was Houston Street, and made my way to where Avenue A (and my apartment) should have been. But after traversing only a block or two of bodegas and backward-hatted hipsters bobbing their heads to the beats of miniature iPods, I somehow found myself at the southern entrance to Grand Central Terminal.

It was as if some unknown natural disaster had recently touched down and attacked only the portions of New York that I cared for most deeply. My city — at least, the parts of it that I thought of as my city — no longer existed.

So I regrouped and tried to find the high-rise apartment building on East 40th Street where I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s. I started at the United Nations, made my way west through a perfect simulacrum of Tudor City (with another saxophone player performing in the park) and within a few short steps had gone all the way to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Foiled again!

It seemed a perfectly logical and human impulse, to prove to myself that I was somewhere recognizable by finding the one place in it that was most recognizable to me. Yet there was no way that the game could satisfy this impulse: like a comic-book superhero drawn by the legendary artist Jack Kirby, whose characters’ fists grew larger and feet grew smaller as they flew up out of their panels, the proportions of this version of Manhattan were an optical illusion. The parts that everybody would notice were blown up larger than life; the parts that virtually no one would care about were shrunk to nothingness.

Faced with this catastrophic revelation, I turned to a life of crime. I hijacked cars and crashed them into traffic poles; I raced a motorcycle through Central Park and dismounted just before the bike plunged into the lake (my way of letting the boathouse know I won’t be holding my wedding reception there). I jumped off the observation deck of the Empire State Building, just because I could, though I took no pleasure from the sickening scream my character let out, nor the sound of his jacket flapping in the wind, 86 stories to the ground.

At the urging of my human confederates, I even attempted one of Grand Theft Auto’s missions — tasks I was supposed to be completing to progress through the game properly — that required me to shoot my way through a gang of drug smugglers and steal their truckload of contraband. I did as I was instructed, but my heart just wasn’t in it. If I truly believed in Liberty City as a functioning community, how could I open fire on my fellow simulated citizens (even if they shot at me first)? How could I tread all over the social contract in a ripped-off truck full of bootleg prescription medication?

THE answer, of course, is that I couldn’t, and here is where the paradoxical nature of Grand Theft Auto once again rears its head. Unlike the missions, objectives and narrative elements of a traditional video game, which constitute the game itself — the things you’re supposed to be participating in and following along with in order to actually play — these same aspects of G.T.A. are more like sophisticated distractions to keep you from immersing yourself too deeply in its fictional city environment.

Except that the problem with G.T.A. — one that will in no way dissuade me from playing the game until my digits are raw and aching — is that the more fully you are pulled into Liberty City and the more closely you inspect it, the more you are reminded that it isn’t a city at all.

The neighborhoods do not blend into one another so much as sit next to one another. The traffic varies just enough from one area to the next to convince you that a place is inhabited, but eavesdrop on a pedestrian long enough, and you’ll find that he doesn’t eventually go home to his wife and kids — he just keeps walking and talking in a continuous loop.

It’s not the game’s fault that it can’t perfectly replicate the infinite variety of New York. But it sometimes comes so close to pulling off the illusion that it invites you to look for the imperfections.

When my two hours of game time were over, I left the Rockstar Games offices and stepped out into SoHo at midafternoon on one of warmest spring days of the year. The sun worshipers were out in full force, each of them as distinct as snowflakes: guys wearing oversized earphones and baseball caps tilted at every angle, women wearing minimalist skirts and shorts that gave them only the illusion of being clothed. An amorous couple making their way north hardly noticed me as they nearly crosschecked me into a streetside table of $6 sunglasses.

There was so much uniqueness and so much variety that there was no room to move, and I knew I was home.

    A Strange City Called Home, NYT, 4.5.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/04/nyregion/thecity/04gran.html?ref=technology

Video Game Review | Grand Theft Auto IV

Grand Theft Auto Takes On New York

April 28, 2008
The New York Times
By SETH SCHIESEL

I was rolling through the neon deluge of a place very like Times Square the other night in my Landstalker sport utility vehicle, listening to David Bowie’s “Fascination” on the radio. The glittery urban landscape was almost enough to make me forget about the warehouse of cocaine dealers I was headed uptown to rip off.

Soon I would get bored, though, and carjack a luxury sedan. I’d meet my Rasta buddy Little Jacob, then check out a late show by Ricky Gervais at a comedy club around the corner. Afterward I’d head north to confront the dealers, at least if I could elude the cops. I heard their sirens before I saw them and peeled out, tires squealing.

It was just another night on the streets of Liberty City, the exhilarating, lusciously dystopian rendition of New York City in 2008 that propels Grand Theft Auto IV, the ambitious new video game to be released on Tuesday for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 systems.

Published by Rockstar Games, Grand Theft Auto IV is a violent, intelligent, profane, endearing, obnoxious, sly, richly textured and thoroughly compelling work of cultural satire disguised as fun. It calls to mind a rollicking R-rated version of Mad magazine featuring Dave Chappelle and Quentin Tarantino, and sets a new standard for what is possible in interactive arts. It is by far the best game of the series, which made its debut in 1997 and has since sold more than 70 million copies. Grand Theft Auto IV will retail for $60.

Niko Bellic is the player-controlled protagonist this time, and he is one of the most fully realized characters video games have yet produced. A veteran of the Balkan wars and a former human trafficker in the Adriatic, he arrives in Liberty City’s rendition of Brighton Beach at the start of the game to move in with his affable if naïve cousin Roman. Niko expects to find fortune and, just maybe, track down someone who betrayed him long ago. Over the course of the story line he discovers that revenge is not always what one expects.

Besides the nuanced Niko the game is populated by a winsome procession of grifters, hustlers, drug peddlers and other gloriously unrepentant lowlifes, each a caricature less politically correct than the last.

Hardly a demographic escapes skewering. In addition to various Italian and Irish crime families, there are venal Russian gangsters, black crack slingers, argyle-sporting Jamaican potheads, Puerto Rican hoodlums, a corrupt police commissioner, a steroid-addled Brooklyn knucklehead named Brucie Kibbutz and a former Eastern European soldier who has become a twee Upper West Side metrosexual.

Breathing life into Niko and the other characters is a pungent script by Dan Houser and Rupert Humphries that reveals a mastery of street patois to rival Elmore Leonard’s. The point of the main plot is to guide Niko through the city’s criminal underworld. Gang leaders and thugs set missions for him to complete, and his success moves the story along toward a conclusion that seems as dark as its beginning. But the real star of the game is the city itself. It looks like New York. It sounds like New York. It feels like New York. Liberty City has been so meticulously created it almost even smells like New York. From Brooklyn (called Broker), through Queens (Dukes), the Bronx (Bohan), Manhattan (Algonquin) and an urban slice of New Jersey (Alderney), the game’s streets and alleys ooze a stylized yet unmistakable authenticity. (Staten Island is left out however.)

The game does not try to represent anything close to every street in the city, but the overall proportions, textures, geography, sights and sounds are spot-on. The major landmarks are present, often rendered in surprising detail, from the Cyclone at Coney Island to the Domino Sugar factory and Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn and on up through the detritus of the 1964-65 World’s Fair in Queens. Central Park, the Empire State Building, various museums, the Statue of Liberty and Times Square are all present and accounted for. There is no Yankee Stadium, but there is a professional baseball team known, with the deliciousness typical of the game’s winks and nods, as the Swingers.

At least as impressive as the city’s virtual topography is the range of the game’s audio and music production, delivered through an entire dial’s worth of radio stations available in almost any of the dozens of different cars, trucks and motorcycles a player can steal. From the jazz channel (billed as “music from when America was cool”) through the salsa, alt-rock, jazz, metal and multiple reggae and hip-hop stations, Lazlow Jones, Ivan Pavlovich and the rest of Rockstar’s audio team demonstrate a musical erudition beyond anything heard before in a video game. The biggest problem with the game’s extensive subway system is that there’s no music underground. (Too bad there are no iPods to nab.)

The game’s roster of radio hosts runs from Karl Lagerfeld to Iggy Pop and DJ Green Lantern. It is not faint praise to point out that at times, simply driving around the city listening to the radio — seguing from “Moanin’ ” by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers to the Isley Brothers’ “Footsteps in the Dark” to “The Crack House” by Fat Joe featuring Lil Wayne — can be as enjoyable as anything the game has to offer.

Grand Theft Auto IV is such a simultaneously adoring and insightful take on modern America that it almost had to come from somewhere else. The game’s main production studio is in Edinburgh, and Rockstar’s leaders, the brothers Dan and Sam Houser, are British expatriates who moved to New York to indulge their fascination with urban American culture. Their success places them firmly among the distinguished cast of Britons from Mick Jagger and Keith Richards through Tina Brown who have flourished by identifying key elements of American culture, repackaging them for mass consumption and selling them back at a markup.

It all adds up to a new level of depth for an interactive entertainment experience. I’ve spent almost 60 hours practically sequestered in a (real world) Manhattan hotel room in recent weeks playing through Grand Theft Auto IV’s main story line and the game still says I have found only 64 percent of its content. I won’t ever reach 100 percent, not least because I won’t hunt down all 200 of the target pigeons (known as flying rats here) that the designers have hidden around the city.

But like millions of other players I will happily spend untold hours cruising Liberty City’s bridges and byways, hitting the clubs, grooving to the radio and running from the cops. Even when the real New York City is right outside.

    Grand Theft Auto Takes On New York, NYT, 28.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/28/arts/28auto.html

New Wii Games Find a Big (but Stingy) Audience

April 21, 2008
The New York Times
By JEFF MUSKUS

Nintendo sits atop the home video-game market. Its Wii, though less technologically advanced than Microsoft’s Xbox 360 or Sony’s PlayStation 3, continues to outsell those machines and is now in more than 20 million homes.

So why are retailers having so much trouble selling Wii games?

Take Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It was one the most hotly anticipated video games of the year; it sold more than 1.4 million copies during the first week of its release, in early March, and broke records for Nintendo of America.

“We certainly have a built-in fan base for Smash,” said Denise Kaigler, Nintendo of America’s vice president for corporate affairs. “I’m hoping that we can continue to generate success and awareness of the game.”

But sales dropped more than 90 percent over the first four weeks, according to estimates from VG Chartz, a team of analysts who study video-game sales.

Some major retail chains — including Wal-Mart and Toys “R” Us — have already begun bundling the Smash Bros. game with Wii machines for sales online, a sign that the base of hard-core gamers who went looking for the game has been depleted.

Retailers confirm the sharp drop. “We sold a couple thousand copies in the first week,” said Xavier Pervez, assistant manager at a GameStop in Fairfield, Conn. “It’s dropped off significantly now, maybe 100 in each of the last couple weeks.”

Toys “R” Us has instructed its sales staff to warn customers that some Wiis cannot read the Smash Bros. disc, and to refuse to exchange the game if customers later claim it is defective. Some parents who receive that warning are just as happy to buy a different game instead. But Nintendo claims few Wiis are subject to the malfunction, and Toys “R” Us sales staff said few customers have been dissuaded from buying or keeping the game.

“The number we got back for return was pretty minimal,” a saleswoman, Christina Giori, said. “Maybe eight copies out of 500. It’s something Nintendo’s really trying to crack down on.”

A number of games that garnered critical acclaim in recent months, notably the cartoonish action-adventure game Zack & Wiki and the off-kilter action-adventure No More Heroes, have yielded disappointing sales.

Over the first three months of the year, only three other Wii titles broke the list of top 10 best-selling games compiled by the NPD Group, a market research firm: Super Mario Galaxy, Guitar Hero III and Wii Play, a sports game that comes with the purchase of a much-needed additional game controller. The Wii may not be behind the success of all those titles, though; Guitar Hero, for example, sold 2.2 million copies for the Wii, but 2.8 million copies for the Xbox 360 and almost 5 million for two versions of the PlayStation.

The problem is that, in marketing the Wii, Nintendo cast a wide net and caught more than the big fish. The Wii’s innovative motion-sensitive controller and a price lower than the rival machines appeal to a broader audience than the traditional market of young male hard-core gamers. Younger children, women and older consumers, who historically have not been sought by the video-game industry, have discovered video games through the Wii — just not that many of them.

These new gamers are content with the games they have, often going no further than the Wii Sports game that comes with the machine. They don’t buy new games with the fervor of a traditional gamer who is constantly seeking new stimulation.

The average Wii owner buys only 3.7 games a year, compared with 4.7 for Xbox 360 owners and 4.6 for PlayStation 3 owners, said a Wedbush Morgan analyst, Michael Pachter. “It reflects the broadening of the demographic,” he said. “Nintendo’s market doesn’t feel the same sense of urgency to buy every game that’s coming out.”

“You don’t see a lot of titles that reach 30 to 40 percent of the installed base,” said a Lazard Capital analyst, Colin Sebastian. “My in-laws in Texas have a Wii sitting on their living-room floor next to the TV, which to me is kind of amazing. They have Wii Sports, a Brain Age game, Wii Play. That’s about it.”

Part of the problem, analysts say, is that other game makers have yet to embrace unconventional advertising methods that can reach this broader audience. Nintendo did it by promoting its memory game Brain Age on the radio.

“Advertising on GameInformer and 1up.com just isn’t reaching this audience,” Mr. Pachter said. “When you make a game like Zack & Wiki or Boogie, which turns the hard core off and doesn’t reach the masses, then you’re in trouble.”

Still, not all third-party publishers have found the Wii market difficult to crack. Multiplatform games like Ubisoft’s Rayman: Raving Rabbids, a cartoon action-adventure, have found receptive audiences.

Hudson Soft has had success with titles including Sudoku, crossword puzzles, jigsaw puzzles and fishing games.

“The kind of person that buys a Wii is not the same kind of person that buys a PS3 or an Xbox,” said John Greiner, the chief executive of Hudson Entertainment, the North American arm of Hudson Soft. “You have to be very specific when you design a game and target not only the gameplay mechanics for that user, but also the marketing for that kind of a product launch.”

Hudson has also benefited from an especially close relationship with Nintendo. Hudson developed Mario Party 8, consistently one of the Wii’s top sellers, and has been one of the greatest beneficiaries of the Wii Virtual Console, which charges users to play classic video games.

Nintendo itself seems primarily focused on expanding this casual audience, while continuing to deliver sequels to its most beloved franchises including Mario Kart Wii, the latest incarnation of its popular driving simulator, which will be released next week.

Ms. Kaigler, the Nintendo spokeswoman, says the company hopes Mario Kart will serve as a “bridge title” between casual gamers and core fans, with the help of a steering wheel device into which a Wii controller can fit.

Wii Fit, an exercise game due next month, is expected to receive more marketing dollars than any game in Nintendo’s history, Mr. Pachter said — and the money will not be spent wooing young men. “Wii Fit is just not aimed at hard-core gamers,” Mr. Pachter said. “It’s definitely aimed at the Oprah crowd. I bet they sell a million units a week for every pound that Oprah says she lost on it.”

    New Wii Games Find a Big (but Stingy) Audience, NYT, 21.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/technology/21wii.html

U.S. video game sales rise 57 percent in May

Fri Apr 18, 2008
2:39am EDT
Reuters
By Scott Hillis

SEATTLE (Reuters) - U.S. sales of video game hardware and software rose 57 percent from a year earlier, industry data showed on Thursday, evidence that the industry has so far been immune to wider economic woes.

Sales of gaming hardware, software and accessories hit $1.7 billion in March, led by Nintendo Co Ltd's (7974.OS: Quote, Profile, Research) Wii console, which posted its biggest non-holiday month ever, according to market research firm NPD.

"You'd never know that the U.S. economy was under distress by looking at the video games industry sales figures," NPD analyst Anita Frazier said in a statement.

U.S. consumers snapped up 720,000 Wiis, driven in part by the release of Nintendo's critically acclaimed "Super Smash Bros. Brawl", which was the top-selling game with 2.7 million copies sold.

"We believe that 'Smash' both gives the core and current Wii owner another reason to love their Wii, and brings new people into the Wii platform," Cammie Dunaway, vice president of marketing for Nintendo of America, said in an interview.

Dunaway said Nintendo's ability to keep Wii in stock was improving as the company prepared for the arrival of two more titles, "Mario Kart Wii" this month and exercise program "Wii Fit" in May.

Microsoft Corp's (MSFT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) Xbox 360 regained its lead over Sony Corp's (6758.T: Quote, Profile, Research) PlayStation 3 after two months of sluggish sales the company blamed on supply constraints. Consumers bought 262,000 Xbox 360s and 257,000 PlayStation 3s.

"We said as our supply issue lifted that we'd be back in the game," said Microsoft spokesman David Dennis.

"For the most part we're in good supply throughout the retail channel. There are still pockets of shortages, but for most part you can go into a store and find an Xbox 360."

PS3 sales doubled from a year earlier, and Sony said new and upcoming games such as its "Gran Turismo 5 Prologue" racing game and Konami's (9766.T: Quote, Profile, Research) "Metal Gear Solid 4" stealth action title would drive sales in the coming months.

"Our sales momentum continues to defy what is traditionally a sluggish sales month," Sony Computer Entertainment America Chief Executive Jack Tretton said in a statement.

"It is proof that, in these economically challenging times, consumers recognize the long-term value of our platforms."

The Xbox 360 version of "Rainbow Six: Vegas 2" from French publisher Ubisoft (UBIP.PA: Quote, Profile, Research) was the No. 2 game in the month, selling 752,000 copies, while Electronic Arts Inc's (ERTS.O: Quote, Profile, Research) "Army of Two" for the Xbox 360 came in third at 606,000 copies.

Nintendo also sold 698,000 units of its DS handheld, while Sony sold 297,000 units of its PSP device.

(Editing by Carol Bishopric)

    U.S. video game sales rise 57 percent in May, R, 18.4.2008,
http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN1745430820080418

Video Games

Exploring Fantasy Life

and Finding a $4 Billion Franchise

April 16, 2008
The New York Times
By SETH SCHIESEL

In the winter of 1860 Milton Bradley, a lithographer in Springfield, Mass., released a new game he had developed called the Checkered Game of Life. Its players began on a checkerboard square called Infancy and tried to make their way through various trials to the destination of Happy Old Age.

Before radio, before phonographs, at a time when cards and dice were tainted in the popular imagination by their association with gambling, that first version of Life in some ways opened the modern age of in-home games. Almost 150 years later, it still isn’t often that a new game breaks into the canon of family entertainment. The classics — the likes of Monopoly, Scrabble and Risk — are many decades old. In board games there hasn’t been a new mass phenomenon since Trivial Pursuit’s debut 26 years ago.

But over the last eight years the Sims — Life’s modern, digital descendant — has found a place in millions of homes and hearts beside all those creations of cardboard and laminate. On Wednesday Electronic Arts, the Sims’s publisher, plans to announce that the series has sold more than 100 million copies (including expansion packs) in 22 languages and 60 countries since its introduction in 2000.

All told, the franchise has generated about $4 billion in sales or an average of $500 million every year for the last eight years, placing the Sims in the rarefied financial company of other giants of popular culture like “American Idol,” “Star Wars” and “Harry Potter.”

But beyond the facts and figures, the Sims has become one of the most famous game franchises (behind perhaps only Mario) because it has heralded the evolution of video games into mainstream entertainment. Years before the Wii, before Nintendogs, before Guitar Hero and World of Warcraft and the other recent hits credited with rescuing games from the clutches of geekdom, the Sims was entrancing girls in a medium most often aimed at men. In a video game universe dominated by living room consoles, the Sims has remained a more intimate experience on office and bedroom PCs. In a world reshaped by the Internet, the Sims has remained almost entirely an offline, single-player experience.

So how did a game in which the action is as mundane as scrubbing a toilet, having a kid or flirting with a neighbor come to captivate so broadly?

If the Sims were a TV show, there would hardly be a question. Since the early 1970s, many of the most popular television shows have been set in locations no more exotic than a living room, from “All in the Family” through “The Cosby Show” and “Seinfeld,” not to mention telenovelas and daytime soap operas. As a noninteractive medium, television has often proved most powerful when it provides a clear reflection of the lives of its viewers. Because they are at once immediately recognizable but at a safe distance outside one’s self, classic television characters like Archie Bunker can provide an insightful lens on the vagaries of modern life.

Most games are different. Rather than peer in from outside, their players in some way become the protagonists and must take responsibility for their actions. That act of inhabiting another character, rather than merely watching it, creates a moral and dramatic responsibility for both the designer and the consumer.

The easy way to handle that responsibility has usually been to place video games in environments that at least appear to have little to do with reality. In a game with no human characters, that’s easy; think of Pac-Man, Tetris, Minesweeper. When human characters are introduced, that flight into the fantastic usually means a science-fiction universe, a war zone, a realm of orcs and elves or a land of cheerleaders and quarterbacks. Lately, new games have allowed people to channel their inner rock stars.

All those sorts of games are about allowing people to explore external expressions of their fantasy lives, precisely because the settings are so outlandish. After all, how many of us are really going to win the Super Bowl, pilot a spaceship or slay a dragon?

The Sims has stood out because it is perhaps the only game series that is fundamentally about exploring the inner expressions of a person’s fantasy life. There is no way to avoid it. Just as a novelist’s every character in some way reflects the writer, every Sim in some way reflects its creator. Even if that “ ‘Desperate Housewives’ meets ‘Kramer vs. Kramer’ ” household you made doesn’t appear to reflect your real life, it does reflect some aspect of you.

In that way the Sims is a very different experience from the SimCity line that began in 1989. SimCity is a traditional strategy game in that it is presented at a level of abstraction where individual people are nothing more than antlike dots; there is little emotional, as opposed to merely proprietary, connection. The Sims, by contrast, is all about managing idiosyncratically individual lives of your own concoction.

If this all sounds a lot like playing with dolls, you’re right. The core, most passionate audience for the Sims has become school-age girls. Across many years and many cultures, girls have long been the demographic group that most gravitates toward playing at “real life.” (Boys, meanwhile, with their footballs and toy soldiers, as with their video games, have usually played at inhabiting some external, aspirational identity.)

As we age, we sometimes become more reluctant to explore publicly the what-if of our lives, to admit to wondering what else we could have become. Last weekend I sat an adult friend down at the Sims and suggested she start her own virtual household. “This feels like a psychological test,” she said warily, looking up at me with suspicion.

Of course it is. And it will come as no surprise in the coming years to hear that some therapists are incorporating the Sims into their practices. Why ask, “Tell me about your family?” when you could ask, “Why don’t you create your family?”

In that vein, one of the most telling elements of the Sims’ popularity is that it has never really succeeded online. Electronic Arts once thought that people would flock to manage their digital families together in cyberspace neighborhoods, but that has not been the case. While little girls have no shame or self-consciousness about opening their virtual homes, it turns out that adults are more circumspect. For adults, playing the Sims can be like writing a diary. And that is the big difference between the Sims’ cycles of death and birth and the simulated aging in a social board game like Life.

“What we’ve discovered is that the Sims is a very private experience for a lot of people,” Rod Humble, head of the Sims studio, said in a telephone interview last week. “It’s private because it’s set in real life. Rather than on a console in the living room where everyone can see, you generally play on a handheld or on a PC in the study, where no one can look over your shoulder. You get to tap into this wonderful childhood imaginary game, which is ‘What if I could create my own little world and all the people in it and watch them go through their business and jump in and change things when I want?’ That is a pretty personal fantasy.”

    Exploring Fantasy Life and Finding a $4 Billion Franchise, NYT, 14.4.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/16/arts/television/16sims.html

Advertising

Online Games

by the Hundreds, With Tie-Ins

March 18, 2008
The New York Times
By BRIAN STELTER

For some children, watching “Dora the Explorer” on television is becoming passé. Now, they want to be Dora.

Tapping into this desire, media companies are increasingly entering the marketplace for online games — called casual games — and treating them as new programming, not just online add-ons to their television properties.

In addition to building brands, one of the big lures in casual games is the opportunity to attract advertising, including from food companies which have gradually agreed to limit the nature and volume of television advertisements aimed at children. But those agreements have not always extended to the Internet.

Viacom, the parent company of Nickelodeon and MTV, may be moving the most aggressively. On Tuesday, Nickelodeon is expected to announce the first of 600 original and exclusive games for its network of Web sites, as part of a $100 million investment in game development.

“We don’t believe they have enough homework,” joked Cyma Zarghami, the president of the MTV Networks’ Nickelodeon Kids and Family group.

The term “casual,” used to contrast with the action-packed console games popularized by Sony and Microsoft, belies the fact that users devote hours to the games. Studies show that one-third of Internet users play online games at least once a week. Millions of children and teenagers play games on sites like Addicting Games, Miniclip Games and Disney.com, and social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are also becoming popular platforms for gaming.

A recent study by Grunwald Associates found that multitasking young people are often driven to online games by television shows and frequently interact with both media at the same time.

“Sitting and watching Dora DVDs is quite different from playing Dora in a game,” said Michael Cai, the director for broadband and gaming at Parks Associates, whose 3-year-old daughter is a fan of the preschool brand. “It’s definitely more engaging — and the brand affiliation is stronger — in an interactive setting.”

Just how important are games to Nickelodeon’s future? Standing on stage at the Hammerstein Ballroom in Manhattan at an annual event for advertisers last Wednesday, Ms. Zarghami began her presentation by gesturing to a giant overhead monitor tinted in the channel’s signature shade of orange. A message promoted the company’s gaming audience: “Over 25 million unique visitors last month.”

“What video is to TV, games are to the Web,” Steve Youngwood, the executive vice president for digital media at Nickelodeon, said in an interview. “For us to be relevant to our audience, that is where we need to put our investment.”

With a series of customized sites for different age groups (preschoolers, tweens, teenage boys, moms), Nickelodeon calls itself the “biggest gaming network in the country.” Movie studios, video game publishers, and toy makers are among the top marketers on the sites. In the online games market, its stiffest competition comes from Yahoo Games, which had 15.5 million unique visitors in February according to the measurement firm comScore.

With more than 12 million visitors each, Electronic Arts and Disney.com are also leaders in the arena. (By comparison, Microsoft’s online game network, Xbox Live, has about 10 million members.)

The N, Nickelodeon’s teenage network, has dozens of games for children aged 12 to 17. Slightly younger players are directed to Nick.com, which drew an average of 7.9 million visitors in February and is expected to add 185 games this year. The youngest players of all are welcome on the sites of Nick Jr. and Noggin, where games are meant to be played by children “on the laps of their moms,” Ms. Zarghami said.

The company also owns Neopets, a virtual pet Web site. The investment will add scores of new games to each site in the coming year.

Judy McGrath, the chief executive of MTV Networks, said that many of the company’s assets are ripe for game development. Fresh off an impromptu “Rock Band” jam session in her Times Square office, Ms. McGrath made a reference to “Frog Baseball,” a 16-year-old pilot episode of the cartoon “Beavis and Butt-head.” In the episode, the two characters play the game described in the title.

“That would be a brilliant game,” Ms. McGrath said with a grin.

But the revenue streams for casual games are still experimental. Companies are exploring try-before-you-buy models, integrated advertising and micro-transactions, where players can purchase items and levels within games. Advertisers have shown interest in inserting their products into game play.

Last year on Shockwave, a gaming site acquired by MTV Networks in 2006, players struggling with the jigsaw puzzle game could press the “easy button” sponsored by Staples to see a solution hint. Last year on Nick.com Arcade, the game site for Nickelodeon viewers, a custom game promoted “Bee Movie” for Paramount Pictures. Games are repeatable, customizable and measurable, adding up to “great engagement for the advertiser,” Mr. Youngwood said.

Across the company’s gaming sites, sponsored and pay-to-play games are always labeled as advertisement. Still, some parents and watchdog groups worry that children are already smothered by branding messages.

For instance, the television version of the preschool brand Noggin is mostly commercial-free, but the channel’s Web site displays advertising. These ads — for Target, Circuit City, Six Flags and Orlando vacations on a recent day — are aimed at parents, but the young faces and bright colors probably appeal to children as well.

Some advertisers have devised their own games to pull in children from media sites. An advertisement for Cinnamon Toast Crunch that ran at the top of Nick.com one afternoon last week linked to the Millsberry Arcade, a site operated by General Mills where visitors can play games like Reese’s Puffs Cereal Snowboard Slalom.

Margo G. Wootan, director for nutrition policy for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said the games produced by food companies are of more concern than those run by media outlets. “On food Web sites, lots and lots of junk food is built into online gaming,” Ms. Wootan said.

Her organization threatened to sue Viacom in 2006 over its television advertising to children.

Some analysts, however, said that media companies and game publishers have generally behaved responsibly in their advertising.

“Since its inception, the online games business for kids has been far more sensitive than the TV industry was,” said Evan Wilson, a senior research analyst for Pacific Crest Securities.

MTV Networks acquired three sites to strengthen its gaming brand in 2005 and 2006. Of the three, Addicting Games is by far the most popular, averaging 9.4 million unique visitors in February, a 50 percent increase over the same month last year, according to comScore.

The site houses hundreds of simple games with names like Max Dirt Bike and Don’t Shoot the Puppy. In the latter, users see how long they can wait before firing a giant cannon at an animated dog. It’s no surprise then that Addicting Games’ intended audience is teenage boys.

Cradling a laptop in his lap, Mr. Youngwood demonstrated Pencil Racer, a simple-seeming but oddly compelling challenge on Addicting Games that lets users create, share and rate racetracks. It has registered 1.5 million plays.

“Do I want to be a truck, a car or a warthog?” he asked before choosing the animal. “Everyone loves the warthog.”

    Online Games by the Hundreds, With Tie-Ins, NYT, 18.3.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/business/media/18adco.html

Game Maker

in $2 Billion Bid for Rival

February 25, 2008
The New York Times
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN and SETH SCHIESEL

Electronic Arts, the video gaming giant, made an unsolicited $2 billion bid on Sunday for rival Take-Two Interactive, publisher of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, a deal that would further a wave of consolidation in the rapidly growing industry.

Electronic Arts, which publishes hit games like the Madden N.F.L. and Need for Speed series, offered to pay $26 a share for Take-Two, a 50 percent premium over its share price of $17.36 on Friday. The offer was made publicly after a series of private offers to Take-Two were rejected by its board.

Electronic Arts approached Take Two with a $26-a-share offer on Feb. 19, up from $25 share it initially offered on Feb. 15.

The timing of the bid appears to be an attempt to acquire Take-Two before it releases what is widely expected to be the top-selling game of 2008, the fourth installment of the crime thriller Grand Theft Auto. The Grand Theft Auto franchise, Take-Two’s crown jewel, has sold more than 60 million copies since Grand Theft Auto III took the game industry by storm in 2001.

Through its Rockstar subsidiary, Take-Two is scheduled to release the game on April 29 for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PlayStation 3 consoles. If it lives up to consumers’ expectations, the game is expected to sell 10 million copies or more by the end of the year, which would almost certainly make Take-Two more expensive.

Electronic Arts’s dominance has been strongly challenged by Activision. Not only has Activision had a recent string of hits, notably Guitar Hero, it also recently agreed to merge with Vivendi’s game division to form a company called Activision Blizzard.

At the same time, E.A. has endured a growing chorus of criticism from some investors who say the company has lost its creative and innovative edge.

There is little doubt that E.A. remains the juggernaut of the video game industry. But it has come to rely heavily on sequels.

A merger with Take-Two would be a union of two vastly different companies. E.A. has a reputation for steady growth and fiscal discipline, while Take-Two is known as a mercurial one-hit wonder.

Electronic Arts said it was making its offer public to “bring its proposal to the attention of all Take-Two shareholders.” In a telephone interview on Sunday, Electronic Arts’ chief executive, John Riccitiello, said, “It is an enormous premium,” suggesting that rather than consider the offer hostile, “We think of ourselves as a ‘white knight.’ ”

Take-Two was far less generous. In a statement, Strauss Zelnick, the company’s chairman, said, “Electronic Arts’ proposal provides insufficient value to our shareholders and comes at absolutely the wrong time given the crucial initiatives under way at the company,” referring to the new Grand Theft Auto and other products.

Mr. Riccitiello said, however, he believed that Take-Two’s stock price already reflected an expectation among investors that Grand Theft Auto IV would be a success, and that Take-Two would become less valuable to E.A. after the game’s introduction than it was now.

Mr. Riccitiello said his offer’s timing reflected a desire to integrate Take-Two’s operations with E.A.’s before the all-important holiday shopping season. He said he had formed a relationship in recent years with Sam Houser, one of Rockstar’s founders, but added that he had avoided contacting Mr. Houser while pursuing his negotiations with Mr. Zelnick.

Mr. Zelnick said that Take-Two had offered to initiate discussions with Electronic Arts on April 30, the the day after Grand Theft Auto IV was scheduled for release. “We believe this offer demonstrated our commitment to pursuing all avenues to maximize stockholder value, while we believe that E.A.’s refusal to entertain this path is evidence of their desire to acquire Take-Two at a significant discount,” he said.Mr. Riccitiello refused to speculate about what steps he would take next, but it is possible that Electronic Arts could pursue a proxy contest to oust the board.

Over the next several weeks, Mr. Riccitiello’s main challenge will be to persuade investors to accept the deal and convince employees that Electronic Arts will respect the creative autonomy of Take-Two’s various development teams. Over the last decade, E.A. has acquired many high-profile game studios, including Westwood (the Command & Conquer series), Bullfrog Productions (Populous) and Origin Systems (Ultima), which essentially dissolved after Electronic Arts tried to direct and homogenize their creative output.

Any deal for Take-Two would be largely empty if Take-Two teams like Rockstar and Ken Levine’s group at 2K Boston, which recently released the acclaimed game BioShock, were to depart rather than work for E.A.

Mr. Riccitiello seems aware of the danger and is taking steps to convince the game industry of E.A.’s newfound respect for creative talent. At a well-received speech at an industry conference in Las Vegas earlier this month Mr. Riccitiello promised that in future deals, Electronic Arts would avoid killing the creative golden goose as it has in the past.
 

Matt Richtel contributed reporting.

    Game Maker in $2 Billion Bid for Rival, NYT, 25.2.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/25/technology/25game.html

Japan 2007 Game Sales

at Record High

January 9, 2008
Filed at 7:30 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The NEw York Times

TOKYO (AP) -- The booming popularity of Nintendo's Wii console and DS handheld sent the combined sales of game machines and gaming software in Japan to a record high last year, according to research by a Japanese publisher.

The results underline the stellar success of Nintendo Co., the Japanese maker behind Super Mario and Pokemon games. The Kyoto-based manufacturer has pursued a strategy to reverse the gradual decline that has ailed the industry in recent years by introducing games that appeal to newcomers, including the elderly and women.

Nintendo said Wednesday its ''Wii Fit'' game, which uses a balance board resembling a body scale to help people exercise in the living room with yoga positions, hula hoops and push-ups, already sold a million units in Japan in a month since going on sale in December.

Overseas sales plans for the hit game aren't decided yet, company spokesman Ken Toyoda said.

Enterbrain, which publishes game magazines, found hardware and software gaming sales in Japan totaled 687.76 billion yen ($6.3 billion) in 2007, up 10 percent from the previous year.

The top-selling machine in Japan was the Nintendo DS portable machine, with 7.1 million units sold last year, according to Enterbrain's research released earlier this week. Since going on sale in 2004, sales of the Nintendo DS have totaled 21 million in Japan, it said.

The No. 2 selling machine here in 2007 was also from Nintendo, the Wii, which has been a sellout around the world since arriving at stores in late 2006. In Japan, 3.6 million Wiis were sold last year, for a cumulative 4.6 million, Enterbrain said.

Offerings from rival Sony Corp. did not fare as well -- with 3 million PlayStation Portables and 1.2 million PlayStation 3s sold in 2007. Only 257,800 of Microsoft Corp.'s Xbox360 machines were sold in Japan last year.

Ranking No. 1 in game software was ''Wii Sports,'' which has players using the wandlike remote to play virtual tennis, boxing and other sports, at 1.9 million sold last year in Japan.

The game is typical of how the Wii has emerged a hit with such offerings that aren't stereotypical shoot-em-ups. The DS handheld has also wooed new people with its touch panel and brainteaser puzzles, educational material, cooking recipes and other easy-to-play software.

Nintendo President Satoru Iwata told Japan's top business daily, The Nikkei, the company will continue that strategy by offering wireless downloads for the DS, such as information about products in a mall and train schedules at a station.

''We don't need to stick to a narrow definition of games,'' he said in an interview published Wednesday.

Nintendo said previously it had shipped 13.2 million Wii units worldwide through the end of September and is targeting a cumulative 23 million Wiis by March 31, the end of its fiscal year.

Sony said previously it sold 5.6 million PS3s worldwide as of the end of September, although the company has since reported robust holiday season sales in North America at 1.2 million. The Japanese electronics and entertainment company has not yet given a new worldwide number.

Microsoft has sold 17.7 million Xbox 360 consoles globally over the last two years.

Japan 2007 Game Sales at Record High, NYT, 9.1.2008, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/technology/AP-Japan-Video-Games.html