Saw this on CNN.com and AOL – seems everyone is all aflutter about how the president ages during his time in office – looking significantly older from the time he starts till when he finishes.

Yes, it is a stressful job, but one thing that always strikes me is most of the Presidents of the television era were in their late 40s or early 50s when they took office and in their late 50s/early 60s when they left.  OF COURSE they will look older – looking at photos of my own parents, they have aged significantly during their 50s – most than any previous decade, and they do not have the weight of the free world on their shoulders…  Pictures of Bush 41 and Reagan before and after office don’t change nearly as much – but they already looked old…

so, net result, Obama will look older, how much of that is office, how much is nature?

hope this bodes well for our industry

Through-out the week, I did have a few thoughts as a first-time trade show exhibitor, thoughts about actual content to follow later:

1. Trade shows are hard work – days are between 17-20 hours long, spent talking with other industry folks on the trade show floor, in the conference halls, at dinners and parties all night

2. The game industry is a bit more liberal (or more male dominated) than other industries, so parties with burlesque dancers are ok (thanks NCSoft).

3. When exhibiting at a trade show, DO NOT forget the underlay for your booth.  Your feet and legs will thank you.  (thanks to JH for reminding us of our oversight)

4. Austin kicks ass – great food, a cool scene, and everything within walking distance from the convention center

5. All conversations default to your 30-second elevator pitch after day 2, once everyone has become sleep deprived and can no longer develop clever conversation topics

As many other people have mentioned, evacuees from Hurricane Ike were at the Austin convention center, and many of the conference participants were quasi-evacuees, attending the conference, but nervously anticipating their trip home to find out what condition their home was in (and whether or not they had power).  It has been a hard few weeks for folks in Houston, and we wish them the best, and hope for a fast, safe recovery

http://valleywag.com/5054799/uc-irvine-prof-gets-100000-to-study-world-of-warcraft

I think games like Spore and Second Life as well as other User-Generated content sites have shown that there is a significant quantity of people who like taking the reins and creating (reasonably decent) content.  All of the penises and other sexual-content notwithstanding, users will create enough fun stuff that can support really large user communities, as long as the concept has mass-market appeal.  By focusing on user-generated content, there are some key implications for the game’s business model:

1. Make great in-game tools that are easy to use – content creators are a freaking pain, as you have to balance richness of experience with ease-of-use.  Second Life is not the exemplar for this (esp with the knock-on performance impact), but Spore’s tools seem to be pretty good, but I haven’t seen anything really great yet.

2. Balance basic storyline/games with those created by users, then figure out how much NPC/AI logic and procedural content you can (need to) build - there is a certain amount of action needed to get people in and playing your game, without which you will lose your noobs before they really figure out how to get into the cool stuff.  Build enough of that, and then create scalable game logic that can populate the rest of the world.  Hard questions will be figuring out complicated things like sound (do you have a UGC sound creator?), and boring jobs like store clerks (which NO ONE really likes to do)

3. In-house vs. community vs. procedural Content Management – how do you keep the world exciting and also keep the peace?  Studies have shown there is a sufficiently sizable portion of users that will create good content, and in fact, that is their preferred method of game-play.  How do you get those users engaged (and keep them making cool content for free) while keeping the griefers isolated, or at least minimize their impact?  Community management is a big part of running a virtual world/MMO, but it is also a substantial on-going cost that could be reduced with clever software or strong user communities.

I think the key to making a highly scalable user-generated world work is really well designed and easy to use technology.  With long development cycles, and a lot of necessary user-testing this will prove a large up-front investment, but the long tail is broad adoption with lower on-going development costs, as your user community off-loads these costs.

If my comments caused any harm or hurt to the hard working Americans who play Dungeons & Dragons, I apologize. This campaign is committed to increasing the strength, constitution, dexterity, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma scores of every American.
–Michael Goldfarb

There are some pretty funny comments on the link below – I hope obama reveals his character to the world…

http://ace.new.mu.nu/apology_from_mccains_campaign_blogger

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/11/iphone-apps-one-month-and-60-million-downloads-later-but-not-one-of-them-is-a-killer-app/

I have played a few pretty fun games on the iPhone, including Crash Nitro Kart.  Even though I suck at it, I liked the tilt action mechanic.  It’ll be cool to see when someone comes up with a good mechanic that lets you play your MMO through your iPhone (blizzard will prob beat us to the punch).  I think there is definitely some good opportunities, but it will be challenging to squish a complex game down to the little screen, and make sure that latency doesn’t get too high.  Less complex games, or games that can have scaled down interfaces could definitely have some good play options, and perhaps other revenue options for mobile gamers.

Perhaps I would have more time for my social life if I could use my commute to keep up with my games rather than playing Blockbuster.  Probably not, I’ll most likely just play more…

Even though I think the framework is a bit “over-frameworked” I think it does highlight that virtual worlds are still relatively niche, with some products that are more broadly adopted, but really haven’t hit the mainstream (i.e., ‘my mother doesn’t use them yet’).  I disagree that VWs are as close to Web 2.0 as Gartner places them – I think there are Web 2.0 apps that are much more widely used than VWs, Facebook is the clear winner (my mother uses it), but other products like craigslist, youtube or even yelp are used comfortably by most people (esp in major urban areas).   Its pretty obvious why they have been successful – FB is highly customizable, and it seems like ‘everyone you know’ is on it, while the latter sites are incredibly useful, providing easy access to helpful information (‘I always wanted another old couch’; or ‘whats the best moroccan restaurant in my neighborhood’).

So what gets Virtual Worlds over the hump and into the mainstream? 

Is it just changing the definition fromVirtual Worlds are only 3D immersive worlds where people interact with avatars to Virtual Worlds are any place where people interact online?  Changing the definition gives you a lot of fuzzy math upside for really high user counts and big revenues (when you count Facebook and Myspace as VWs)…

I am not sold – I still think that when you define ‘Virtual World’ they need to be 3D and need to be fully immersive.  But I wonder can there really be a Virtual World that is all things for all people, is there one killer app for the ‘masses’?  What is keeping people off VWs?

The biggest barrier is ease of use – why does it seem like VWs are not designed with the common user (my mom) in mind?  Clearly, budgets and accelerated schedules often kill usability, but dev teams don’t often build mass appeal / usability into their mantra either.  We all know WoW is killing it because it is easy in and easy to play - but it represents a small niche of potential users – I do not think the people that want to run around in a fantasy world represents a sizable portion of the total population. 

A second issue is the flexibility to keep people entertained and coming back for longer than a few weeks.  Second Life has a cool idea for the mass market, but it is such a pain to learn how to get ‘living,’ that it turns people off (myself included, I couldn’t be bothered).  And once you get in the world there isn’t a whole lot to do, with the exception of adult content, which only entertains the majority for so long.  But churning out content is such a pain – will user generated content keep people interested long enough?  A McKinsey study says only a small percentage of users really create content, and only a small percentage of those actually create anything decent – so is that the answer to long, painful dev cycles?

I’m impatient and can’t be bothered by learning curve for my entertainment time – make the world easy for me to get in and meet my friends and then let me solve some puzzles or kill some stuff and I’ll be happy. Once that gets cracked, I think VWs will hit the slope of enlightenment, but I think there is a fair amount of work to go.

PX Interactive has been pretty quiet to-date, as we have spent all of our time focusing on getting NetDog ready for customers.  But all that is about to change!  At Austin GDC we will have a booth and will announce ourselves formally to the game development community.

Over the next few months, we’ll be trying to meet as many developers as possible, telling them about the scalability, performance, flexibility and ease-of-use of NetDog.  We think we have created a useful product that will let developers jump-start MMO development, while giving them the flexibility to develop the game or Virtual World they want.  NetDog will impress its users with its scalability and performance, which are as good or better than the top competitors. 

But equally or more important for developers, NetDog is significantly easier to use, and much more flexible than any of our competitors.  Want to use Unreal – no problem, NetDog will integrate quickly and easily; Your game would look better in Crytek, not an issue; want to use Trinigy, we have a partnership with near-seamless integration; prefer to use an open-source engine or one of your own, also should not be an issue, as NetDog is built on C-bindings with underlying Object and Event models that can easily integrate with any tools.

Most importantly – NetDog has several game-changing features.  The first, NetDog is fully cross-platform – developers will be able to create games that can be played across PC, Mac, PS3, Xbox 360, and even iPhone.  Network messages will work regardless of the platform, bringing more gamers into each game, and providing unique gameplay options. 

The second is the core of NetDog’s architecture, our patent-pending distributed networking solution.  With small setting changes NetDog can be used in a variety of network topologies – from a full client server mode to fully peer-to-peer, with a variety of network computing options in-between.  Developers will have the option to off-load some or all of their game processing to the clients in their network, and can choose which functions and events will be handled where.  This will help build for bigger, more efficient networks with lower latencies.

We look forward to meeting you all, and hopefully working together to create big, high performance virtual worlds and MMOs