Rant: Innovation - to love, to fear

With WiiWare launching today I've been feeling like a kid again. I only got a short play session with Lost Winds, but I was just thrilled with the innovative game play. I was playing something unique and fun that continually made me smile. However, the truth is that most people won't be playing Lost Winds today or anytime soon because they'll have trouble comprehending it simply because it is so different. They complain that the wind is just a little too difficult to control or wonder why you can't just press jump like EVERY OTHER PLATFORMER for the last 25 years. The point of course is that Lost Winds isn't like all of those other games. It takes what you are used to and changes the play to something you are not used to. I hope that everyone will get a chance to play this little gem, but again, I fear most people will skip it.

From a MSNBC article today on WiiWare:

It's whimsical. It's smart. It's different. But in the games biz, "different" isn't always a good thing.

From running GameTunnel for 5 and a half years now, I have a little experience on the topic of what people think of 'different.' Though I wish they were wrong, I think MSNBC nailed it on the head.

Innovation in games is like 2nd Life. Everyone is always talking about it, but it doesn't make enough money to be anything more than an interesting discussion piece.

That's also the definition of lip service.

Lip service and innovation have become too good of buddies over the last few years. XBLA was supposed to be the Sundance of Indie games. I work for the company that made Wik, one of the first games on the service. I've been told by many people that Wik is still the most innovative title on XBLA. That doesn't surprise me. After Geometry Wars struck it big Microsoft wanted more of the same. Big explosions, mind-number particle effects. I heard that from Microsoft myself as we were pitching our 2nd XBLA title to Microsoft, just 5 months after the 360 had been released. I don't blame MS, they did what every other other company in their place has done. They used the words like 'innovation' and 'indie' to get newspaper noteriety, and then gave the public what was selling well...more of the same games we've been playing for the last decade.

I'm not saying that there isn't any innovation in Halo 3 or COD4 or Guitar Hero 3 or Assault Heros or Undertow or Uno. There is.
But it is a different type of innovation than you get in Lost Winds or in Wik. One is trying to take the familiar and improve it, the other is taking the familiar and making it unfamiliar. Tower of Goo is a great example of this as it takes bridge-building physics and recreates it in a way that feels totally different than any construction game you've ever played with a style that just as unique.

Not lost in all of this is a third type of innovation, which core gamers find the most frightening of all. That is where you take the totally unfamiliar and present it to gamers. It's fodder for another post, but Nintendo has become masterminds at doing this. Which is more innovative WiiFit or GTA4? It's apples to oranges, but if you are looking for something that is totally unlike what you've been playing, WiiFit is what you are looking for. GTA4 is innovative in the sense of taking what you know and making it better. WiiFit gives you an experience unlike any other game yet released.

As much as we love to talk about innovation, my experience tells me core gamers are scared to death of it because it doesn't look like what they are used to. Innovation looks like WiiFit, and core gamers just don't know how to react to it other than to attack it the same way they would an alien in Halo.

Increasingly I find myself not only frustrated at companies like Microsoft who are using 'Innovation' and 'Indie' to meet their own goals without providing what I think of as innovation, but I'm also frustrated at the gamers who pass over interesting games like Wik and who instead of loving the new gameplay offered by the Wii have long lists of reasons why they hate it.

I'm hoping, as I have for many years in running GameTunnel, that gamers will give innovative WiiWare games a chance and that games like Lost Winds and Tower of Goo will sell by the bucketload. I've been doing GT long enough to make me to recognize the truth in what MSNBC said, but I hold out hope for gamers embracing the unfamiliar and innovative works of those who are setting out to truly give us a different experience. The fact that the Wii is selling better than any console in history gives me hope that maybe this time, innovation will be embraced and that everyone will be able to enjoy these uniquely fun experiences.

Does the Picture on the Box Matter?

I'm a big fan of what Nintendo is doing. I think their focus on Innovation and Fun is right on the mark. So, I rarely make any effort to note where they are missing the mark, but with WiiFit mania soon to come upon in the US, I can't help but think Nintendo has made a mistake.

The box on the right is what WiiFit looks like in Europe and Japan. I love it. It says so many things without cluttering up the box. The sense of exercise is quite strong, with a focus on silhouettes.

This box is the US Box. I think it is a disaster.

Why?

The box says toy.

I think a lot of the success that Nintendo has had in the US, which of the 3 regions appears to be where it has the most success, has been due to the Wii being purchased by many groups of people. This box tries to capitalize on that by putting many groups of people on the box. There is a problem with doing that. By putting everyone on the box, you for sure put something on the box that makes someone feel like they don't relate.

In this case I think the box makes the Wii less mainstream and more kid. It feels more like boardgame boxes from 10 years ago that had the family all around the game smiling. There is nothing wrong with that image, but it does preselect a specific group. In this case, it selects against people who want to pull the game out with their older friends. A group of all 40 year or 20 year olds doesn't want to pull out a board game at their party where on the box half of the people are kids. By putting faces to the box you've started selecting groups, which makes some people feel less inclined to be involved.

The Japan box doesn't have these issues b/c it skipped them entirely. The US box is likely to make Mom just a little more likely to refer to the Wii as a kid's toy...which is exactly the opposite of the message that Nintendo has been successfully conveying for the last 18 months.

I'm sure the US will still sell many copies of WiiFit, but I worry that if this approach continues, that the Wii will become a kid's toy in the US, which will ultimately keep it from reaching the marketshare it could otherwise reach.

The recent ads for Mario Kart Wii, only serve to make me more concerned that Nintendo of America may have lost its way when it comes to marketing their very popular console.

Casual Games & Manifestos

I read through The Casual Games Manifesto on Gamasutra today and I got all the way through despite wanting to respond immediately to some of what I saw. I guess I'm a little jaded and I'm sure it didn't help in my reading comprehension.

I do agree with one underlying point of the article, you should use the portals in the casual games market to create customers for you if you are a developer. I talked about it at length at the GDC last year, and it continues to be true! ...and there is a whole additional market-place that developers aren't taking advantage of...but should...and it's a topic for another day.

One of the issues that I had with the article is the difficulty in creating customers from the portals. The portals clamp down hard on anything that looks like a link to another website or a service running on another server inside the games they offer. I'd be surprised if you could find a way to get much traffic from them that way.

The other issue I have is an on-going one that isn't exactly in the article. So the above is officially the end of my critique, and now I'm moving onto an almost related rant...

That second issue I have is the assumption that it is easy to get traffic or build up a website. Honestly, I worry that most developers, since they don't do websites, presume it is easy to create a huge website...just because they don't have any experience.

It brings to mind a favorite Dilbert comic:
Dilbert's Manager says "I put together a timeline for your project. I started by reasoning that anything I don't understand is easy to do."
"Phase One: Design a client-server architecture for our worldwide operations."
"Time: six minutes."

I can see Dilbert's stunned look on his face, unsure of what to say next.

Let's consider this for a moment.
How hard do you think it would be to create and run slashdot.org?
How about msnbc.com?
How about espn.com?
How about bigfishgames.com?

According to compete.com and collaborated by alexa.com (except alexa groups espn with go.com...) bigfishgames.com is the biggest of those sites. Stop and think about that for a minute...

That amount of traffic and what it takes to create and keep up a website of that size is ANYTHING but trivial. Creating and keeping that up is amazing. The type of thing that teams of people spend millions of dollars on and fail at most of the time. I'm not writing this to build up BFG, who we compete and cooperate with, but to just point out how enormous the task is of building up traffic like the portals have. The middlemen are middlemen because they are good at it. I encourage everyone to take on the market to the best of their abilities of course, but I wouldn't under-estimate the task.

...and back on point, I strongly agree with the point that you should try to steal the portal's traffic and re-route them to you and that you should build up a reason for that traffic to stay with you. I don't know that you can build a service into your game, but that doesn't mean you can't create a community of games that can be broken into separate pieces and sold through the portals for some name recognition...and maybe include some reasons for players to go looking for you :).

Daikatana & Airport Mania?

The programmer who I've been working with on Airport Mania sent me the following image as a gag, which considering the light-hearted nature of Airport Mania contrasted with Daikatana's in-your-face approach only makes it all the more funny. I couldn't resist but to share :). If you're not familiar with Daikatana's famous ad, check it out here.

Incidentally, Airport Mania is set for limited release (meaning it's only available in one place - http://www.airportmania.com/) this Thursday April 10th, with a full release through Reflexive.com on the 14th and your favorite portal in the coming weeks! :)

The Indie Games Summit + My game

I'm at the GDC this week and will be hanging out at the Indie Games Summit Monday and Tuesday, and the IGF booth some of the rest of the time (Reflexive's own Axiom Overdrive is a finalist).

I kept somewhat copious notes of the first day of the Indie summits. There were some great presentations, including a very solid basic marketing presentation by Introversion. You can ready my highlights, responses and all my notes at GameTunnel (http://www.gametunnel.com/articles.php?id=673)

As well a sneak peak look at the game I've been working on is now up over on my Reflexive blog. The game is Airport Mania: First Flight, and I describe it as a mix between Aerobiz (one of my favorite SNES games) and Diner Dash. The game is more click-management than sim. YOu can see a bunch of not quite final pics of the game at Reflexive (http://www.reflexive.com/index.php?PAGE=Blog&BID=162)

Oh, and if you are at the GDC, be sure to say 'hi.'