Posts Tagged ‘gdc’

Early today, Justin Cooney of Sony North America confirmed that it will be removing features it initially touted for the PSP Minis platform such as wireless multiplayer functionality, downloadable content for games and the ability to offer downloadable patches. All this is being down in order to speed up the approval time for games developed for the PSP Mini platform. The original idea of the PSP Minis was to offer an iPhone style apps platform to game developers for the PSP. With more robust features the the iPhone platform can offer, the PSP Minis have been eagerly anticipated by the PSP crowd. Now, there does not appear to be much of a difference between the platforms and only time will tell whether the incentives to develop for the PSP market are really there.via Gamasutra 

Since its launch last April, Free Realms has become a force to be reckoned with in the casual MMO front.  On Wednesday morning I had the opportunity to sit in on the GDC keynote speech given by John Smedley, president of Sony Online Entertainment.  With quite some pride, he clued us in on many of the techniques he used to bring Free Realms to its current state – and why shouldn’t he be prideful?  In a genre that has a core demographic in its 30s, he’s captivated a youthful audience that, until now, has largely been untapped.

I’m of course writing about tweens and younger.  One of the design goals in Free Realms seems to have been giving parents something to do, so that parents and children can play together.  And rest assured, when I someday have an eleven year old child, I look forward to playing games with him.

But make no mistake: the game we play will certainly not be Free Realms.

It’s no secret that this game is casual to its core.  One does not go to Free Realms seeking challenge, and Mr. Smedley himself mentioned in his speech that they found the wrinkles in quests and job progression that players weren’t getting past easily, and smoothed them out.  And yes, while this certainly isn’t the only easy game on the market, there are still plenty of challenges for more “serious” gamers to pursue.  So, what’s the problem here?

As an industry, gaming is beginning to move past its adolescence.  We’ve all been impacted by the first games we played, and those games are the measuring stick by which we gauge our future gaming experiences.  Now we’re looking at a generation that could well grow up playing Free Realms, a game that deliberately throttles the challenge.  We’re already seeing examples of major games with no possibility of death (Prince of Persia and Fable II come to mind), and as long as we train our young to play easy games, we’ll only see more in the future.

What makes this particularly bitter is that we’re finally seeing studies that show how challenging games can do things like improve a surgeon’s accuracy with a knife (handy for when you only want to be stabbed in the right places) or help keep you sharp well into old age, and now we’re looking to scale that challenge back?

I suppose I can’t really fault SOE for this.  They’re a money-making enterprise, and keeping frustration in any form out of Free Realms was a necessary step to keep the younger market, whom they’ve discovered to have a shorter attention span.  When television first came out, many idealists saw the opportunity for it to become the greatest educational tool the world had ever known.  Instead, companies just like SOE – companies that need to make money – created a great mass entertainment machine that churns out lowest common denominator-style shows by the dozen, only very occasionally striving to produce something clever or original.  It breaks my heart to see games following a very similar path.

I realize that it probably can’t be stopped.  I also realize that, in the end, it probably doesn’t really matter which road gaming follows.

I’ll just have to content myself with being a grumpy old man when that time comes.