Game history repeats itself. North American gamers who rushed to buy Wii Fit, Nintendo’s new exercise game, are reporting damages and injuries that the company did not anticipate. Gamers are getting carried away with the stretching, aerobicizing and wobbling that the Wii Balance Board peripheral prescribes. Some enthusiastic gamers are flying off the board and crashing into potted plants and furniture, while other gamers have posted pictures of themselves smashing head-first into their expensive LCD teevee screens.

“We didn’t expect this amount of zeal from Wii Fit players,” says Yoshi Fakeymoto, Nintendo’s Vice President of Artificial Affairs. Nintendo experienced a similar issue with the release of its Wii console, first issuing sturdier straps for its Wii controllers, and later repackaging the controllers with soft sleeves to mitigate damages when the devices slipped from players’ hands.

Fakeymoto-san says the company considered creating a leash to help tether people to the Wii Balance Board, but has instead opted to produce a full body-sized soft rubber sheath so that rambunctious Wii Fit players will cause fewer damages to themselves and their surroundings.

Nintendo is keeping mum about details of the product’s availability, but the company has released this video of its prototype Wii Fit body sheath:

The Toronto Indie game dev scene steps out next Friday June 6th for the TOJam Arcade. The event wil host the 37 games that were created a few weeks back at the third annual TOJam.

i don’t want to spoil all the suprises, but here’s a sampling of the unbridled joys in store for you on that fateful day:

• smack pirates around with a dead fish using the Rock Band drum peripheral
• pit two mice with rocket launchers against a column of cheese nuggets
• flail around the office as a grotesquely disjointed desk jobber who’s abandoned all hope
• murder slices of Swiss by throwing them against the wall, and lay them in their final crackery resting places
• abuse the limits of one game’s physics to achieve a “goatality”
• survive twenty seconds in a room full of zombies before finally finding an uzi
• mash the keyboard to survive an insect uprising
• randomly click the mouse buttons and shriek with delight

Shortly after forming Untold Entertainment Inc, i bowed out of my role as a Canadian video game journhalist, forfeiting perhaps the only benefit of the job: playing hot new titles before anyone else. That decision had me standing in line this morning at the Bay + Dundas SuprPrice in Toronto with the chubby, unwashed masses, hoping for my chance to pick up Nintendo’s hot new game, Wii Fit.

Wii Fit, which ships with the startlingly heavy Wii Balance Board, did big numbers in Europe. i reasoned that since Canadians were basically Europeans with less armpit hair, i’d better hustle down to SuprPrice on Day One.

The Line-Up

SuprPrice shuffled the customers in their line-up by weight, reasoning that their heaviest customers were likely in dire need of the product. An overweight or obese person is more prone to heart disease and diabetes, which may shorten his lifespan. And dead people don’t buy DVDs. So there we were, fatties at the front, enduring the hours-long line-up.

The folks in the middle of the line were actually the best-placed people, because after the first hour of waiting while the SuprPrice sales associates tried to upsell customers on SuprPrice Points Cards and Extended Warranties, many of the morbidly obese people at the front of the line started dropping out, unable to stand unaided for more than a few minutes. Many of them were carted away on flatbed dollies, draped over empty HDTV boxes. The only exception was one gentleman, who had been transported to the store on a flatbed truck, having been carefully extracted from his home after his living room wall was knocked out with a wrecking ball. The SuprPrice people eschewed the store’s 1-per-customer rule for him, actually requiring him to purchase two balance boards - one for each huge, hammy foot - in order to guarantee the manufacturer’s 1-year warranty.

The Weight

When i finally reached the front of the line and puchased my copy, i was quite dismayed at the sheer weight of the product. Feeling like a sack of potatoes, the Wii Ballance Board strained the flimsy plastic bag handles and threatened to pull my stick-like arms out of their sockets. Expecting me, a feeble video game designer with a physique like Gollum’s, to carry this product home was like asking someone to run a marathon before he can purchase a treadmill, or to win a weiner-eating contest before he can order dinner. In fact, i would much rather that SuprPrice had me win a weiner-eating contest with a free cab chit as first prize so that i could make it home safely with my technological plunder.

The First Five Minutes

By the time i’d lugged Wii Fit home, i was a little tuckered out, so i plopped down on the couch with a chocolate milkshake and some microwavable Kraft Dinner + mayonnaise to get my strength back. After that, i felt a little sleepy, so i channel-surfed for a few hours before opening the Wii Fit box. And finally, the morning spent recuperating, i hooked up the game.

One of the keys to good game design is your reward system. A good game constantly rewards the player. It’s especially important to reward the player early in the experience; this is why many XBox 360 games unlock an achievement within the first five minutes of play. Wii Fit is no different: within the first five minutes of playing the game, i was informed that i had already lost four pounds. Bonus!

While creating my Wii Fit character, i rolled a 17 for upper body strength, which hardly reflects my actual physique, but i wasn’t about to tell the game that. i usually play wizards or mages with extremely high intelligence, but i chose the Athlete class this time, because i thought it might give me a Wii Fit advantage.

Deathmatch Mode

The most surprising thing about Wii Fit’s gameplay modes was Deathmatch, where you have to exercise the hardest in order to murder other players. i was doing alright on the treadmills, until MarioLover99 got his heartrate up over 170, and my Mii’s head exploded. i spawned on an exercise mat not too far away, and did a figure-4 hamstring stretch right through his chest. It was awesome. Surprisingly violent for a Nintendo offering, but i suppose you have to hook players any way you can.

Diet Guide

In addition to helping you get in shape, Wii Fit also makes suggestions about what you should be eating in order to attain a trim figure. i find this feature a little suspect, though - my first few times through the game, the Diet Guide kept popping up this ad:

i’m looking forward to making Wii Fit a lifestyle choice. The game tells me that if i stomp on 400 virtual Goombas a day, my appearance will be upgraded from “universally repellant” to “potentially sexy, given the right lighting conditions” by September 2009.

One of the questions the moderator asked during our panel at ICE 08 was whether or not the virtual world/MMO racket was a bubble. i said “no”, emphatically, and i’m sticking to my guns.

i do believe that interest and expectations are inflated beyond what the market will bear, however. Just as investors sunk millions of dollars into dotcoms on or around 2000 and that bubble burst, the virtual world/MMO gold rush is sure to turn out a litany of bad projects, and the bubble will burst.

But look at us now: eight years later and the Internetz are still around. That’s because it’s too good an idea to just die off. Likewise virtual worlds and MMOs, which triumphantly return gaming to its multiplayer roots. The idea won’t die, but once this first spate of me-too projects launch and flop and a great many people lose their jobs and their money, i expect investors to become much more gun-shy of the genre.

Then, as i mentioned on the panel, once companies produce the proper tools to lower the cost of development, we’ll enjoy a much normalized multiplayer game industry. But believe me, before all that happens, the apparent end will come, and with it much tearing of robes and gnashing of teeth. Ultimately, i blame Coke.

Ad Nauseum

i get nervous whenever anyone new to the game says that his or her virtual world or MMO will be ad-supported, as if advertisers are knocking down the doors trying to snatch up banner space near (or overlays within) these properties. i’ve been building web games for eight years, since the crash, and they’ve almost all been ad-supported. i have war stories to tell.

The debate over in-game advertising rages, and the questions that pops up run along the lines “How much advertising will players accept in your game?”, “Does advertising cheapen the player’s experience?”, and “How can advertising best be integrated into your game without ruining it?”

i’ve seen industry “experts” debate this topic on numerous different panels, and they invariably involve Coke in the debate. Someone will say “For example, if Coke wanted to advertise in our world”, or “i don’t really think our players would tolerate the presence of Coke in our in-game tavern …”

i heard Coke invoked most recently at ICE 08 during the Worlds @ Play panel. The speaker was Barbara Lippe, whose company Avaloop is behind the virtual world Paper Mint. i’ll have to paraphrase her because i don’t have a transcript of the session, but she said something like this:

Players don’t like in-game advertising. If we were to do it, we’d do it tastefully. For example, if Coke wanted to advertise in our world, we wouldn’t want to have Coke actually represented in-game, for example by having Coke logos everywhere or by giving the player actual Coke product. It’s too intrusive. We’d do something much more subtle. The player might find himself on a Coke-sponsored island, but he wouldn’t know it until he walked the entire periphery of the island, and the little fog-of-war mini-map at the top of the screen slowly revealed the shape of the island, and the player would see that the island was in the shape of a Coke bottle.

Ms Lippe earned a doctorate, so i don’t want to suggest she’s out to lunch or anything, but come on. The attitude - and she’s not alone - is so naive that i can actually hear the moving trucks pulling up to offices around the world to repossess all those Herman Miller chairs that virtual worlds start-ups bought with their investors’ money.

News Flash: You’re Not Gettin’ Coke

Coke is invoked so often, of course, because it’s an incredibly strong brand, and probably one of the most recognized brands in the world. Why, then, would this brand behemoth be interested in advertising in your brand new virtual world to which you’re struggling to attract players? Coke has sponsored virtual worlds, sure, but by my count they’ve come in when the numbers were high enough and the opportunity was interesting enough to make it worth their while, as when Habbo Hotel was pulling in millions of visitors at its peak.

You should be so lucky to get Coke. And if you ever did land them, you wouldn’t dare try to sell them on a subtle campaign where a player would have to spend an hour walking the peripheral of an island to reveal the product-shaped outline on the mini-map. Coke would ask you to drop an enormous logo on the busiest screen in your world so that it obscured all the exits, and they’d ask that the word “the” in all chat phrases be replaced with “i like Coke because it is delicious and wonderful to drink”. And you know what? You’d do it.

You wouldn’t wax philosphical about how you’ll dilute the intellectual property or how the fanbase will criticize you for selling out. You’re running an advertising-based world, and as far as advertising goes, Coke is the holy grail. You will relax your muscles and allow the Coca-Cola corporation to ram its fistfuls of hot, sweaty cash wherever it so chooses.

But realistically, that’s not going to happen. You’re not gettin’ Coke. You’re not gettin’ Pepsi. You’re not even getting Fanta.

You’re getting V-8. And not the V-8 vegetable drink that everyone knows. That brand is plenty strong. No - V-8 is branching out into vegetable crackers to take on category leader Mr. Christie. That’s who wants to advertise in your world. V-8 Vegetable Crackers.

You’re not getting Nike. You’re not getting Reebok either. You’re getting Dr. Scholl’s. And not the Dr. Scholls insoles that are adored by millions. No - Dr. Scholl’s wants to market their new vegetable drink to take on category leader V-8. (And due to category exclusivity, you actually have to cook up a creative way to promote Dr. Scholl’s Vegetable Symphony without pissing off V-8.)

You’re not getting the latest Harry Potter movie. You’re getting the latest Cuba Gooding Jr. family comedy. You’re not getting Grand Theft Auto IV. You’re getting DS Barnyard Friends. You’re not getting Mr. Peanut. You’re getting NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts, now in a resealable pouch.

Advergaming is Nuts

And what’s more, whatever ad overlay you develop for your deeply serious medieval fantasy strategy collectible card game MMO has to specifically promote the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts resealable pouch, and you must convey the brand attributes “portable” and “snackalicious.”

This means that one of the food items you offer in your game has to be NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts. And it’s not enough for the players to voluntarily buy them - you have to make the offer more appealing by ensuring that the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch, when eaten, instantly jack the player’s hitpoints up 300%. And the item has to be reusable, because the sponsor is concerned the player will forget about them once the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch is consumed.

And just to make sure that as many players as possible buy them, the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch appear in ye olde item shoppe for free. And to push those numbers over the edge just a leeetle bit more, you end up auto-inserting the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch into the inventory of all active players. And you qualify “active players” as being anyone who has logged into the game at least once since launch. And the beta.

There - that takes care of exposure. Now, to convey the brand attributes “portable” and “snacktastic”. The “snackalicious” one is easy - whenever the player consumes NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch from the magically-refilling resealable pouch, the avatar shouts “SNACKALICIOUS!!” at the top of his lungs, so that the chat line is broadcast to every player within a 10-screen radius.

You argue to the client that the “portability” of NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch is obvious, since the players can take the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch with them anywhere. But the client is not convinced, so you slap a NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch logo on the front of ye olde items shoppe and add the tagline “You can eat em anywhere!”

In your final round of revisions, you’re only asked to change two things: upsize the ye olde items shoppe logo 250%, and do something about the fact that players can’t see the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch logo because the inventory item graphic is so small. You say that nothing can really be done about the inventory item size, because that’s just how the game works, but just to appease the client, you build a special case into your code so that whenever the player rolls over the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch item, it enlarges to reveal the product logo at a reasonable size.

And all this work is worth it, because it will help you run your game for another month.

One question that often arises is whether or not there are enough interested players to support the coming glut of virtual worlds and MMOs. i think a better question is whether or not there are enough advertisers to support all the supposedly ad-supported projects. i hear a lot of companies bragging about this or that license, or this or that merger that will help them bring Virtual World X to market with all the splendour of Jesus riding a cloud and blowing a trumpet, but i don’t hear any of them boasting about their investment in a strong sales team. i’m talking about a kennel full of guys who all drive Jaguars and work on a high-octane blend of 100% commission and cocaine, who can sell the shit out of your virtual world. These guys bring in the dough it takes to maintain the game and grow the audience so that bigger advertisers - like Coke - come calling.

It’s not enough to have your cousin Larry pick up the phone and cold-call Duracell. You need a sales team. You need a vicious, snarling sales team that can either close the deal or rip out prospective clients’ hearts with their slavering fangs. You need this guy:

And if you think, as some virtual world owners apparently do, that you can implement some magical rule where only advertisers whose products make sense in your game are allowed to advertise, i’d kindly ask you to crawl back into your sparkle-tree in Fantasy Land, and give my regards to your marshmallow pixie pals.

i await you all on the auction floor! i could use your purple-felt pool table and a few Aeron chairs if they’re going for a reasonable price …

Imagine taking a peurile joke that you told when you were six years old, and then rendering it in careful, loving detail with sky-high production values. Now stop imagining.

No, seriously - stop.

Have you stopped imagining yet?

…

Okay. i’ll give you a few more moments.

….

…

There. We good? Okay.

There’s a series of shorts coming out of the Savannah College of Art and Design that blew my mind. They’re incredibly immature and fantastically funny. The care and attention paid to each short is tantamount to taking stunning, full-colour photos of dog nuggets.

Here are two of my favourite SCADshorts:

*sigh*

i tried this whole schtick last week. i wrote a “clips show” post linking to some of Untold Entertainment’s more interesting articles to pacify the throngs of visitors charging to this site from ICE 08. Unfortunately, i was only a last minute replacement on the ICE panel, and i think i mumbled my own name into the microphone. i also had my back to the audience, and had accidentally dropped the mic down my shirt. i was in the middle of fishing it out when they asked me to introduce myself. i think most of the audience thought my name was “Murphy McFurfle.”

Hopefully there’s a more fruitful throw to this website in the latest issue of trendy urbanite rag NOW Magazine, in which Evan Davies picks my brain about Guitar Hero and Rock Band. i haven’t seen the article. It probably contains no more than a passing reference to me and a single quotation, because really, who the heck am i? Just a dude who creates and plays video games. But i’m a dude who’s only about a year or two away from getting his face plastered all across the front of that mag, mark my words. And when that day comes, i hope to High Heaven that i have the sense to stay away from any bloody Atari 2600 joysticks.

i was ten years old in 1988, a year when the Atari 2600 was well past its prime. i was enough of an outcast for digging video games so much. i wasn’t even an outcast playing on a current system. My friends were hacking and slashing their way through Bard’s Tale on their x86es, and i was still driving an excrutiatingly slow tank in Combat.

If idle hands are the Devil’s playground, the idle mind of a ten-year-old is a recipe for pure shenanigans. i was probably the last kid on Earth to discover that 1. you could pull the rubber sheath off an Atari 2600 joystick and suction it to your own skin. 2. The funniest place to stick it to yourself was, naturally, the middle of your forehead. And 3. - the suction lasts a really long time.

Thank goodness this whole Mentos and Diet Coke revelation came so late in my life. i shudder to think how i would have taken to that in 1988.

After about an hour of fun with the joystick sheath stuck to my head, pretending i was a Dark Unicorn or whatever, i pulled the little leech off. It had left an enormous welt smack dab in the middle of my forehead - a big red throbbing face hickey that bleeped “L-O-S-E-R” in Morse code.

No worries. i’d just go to bed and it would be gone in the morning, yeah?

Nuh.

The very next morning, there it was. Bright as the blessed noonday sun. A behemoth Bindi. The Japanese flag on my forehead. My mom tried to put cover-up on it, but that didn’t work. It resisted all attempts to soothe it. It would not heed reason. So off i went to school, bracing myself for an inevitable beating. After all the teasing and name-calling was done, it would turn out to be just another average day, right?

Yeah. Just another average picture day.

Mr. Lepp’s 1988 Grade Four class picture is an anomaly. Scientists don’t recommend that you look directly into the photo. But on a snowy night, when all the children are asleep, it’s rumoured that a certain jolly old elf uses the picture to guide his sleigh through the blizzard.

God bless us, every one.

The thing that excites me most about technology is when it makes impossible things possible - like 3D baby ultrasounds or giving me sixpack ab muscles. While i’m still waiting on that one, let me share this:

It took me the whole video to figure out the voiceover guy was saying “MIDI”, and not “meaty”. Anyway, Direct Note Access is a feature of a sound software plugin called Melodyne. It takes an audio waveform and splits it up so that you’re viewing individual notes more like musical notation than technical scribbles. That’s cool enough already.

Now buckle up: the plugin takes a single chord and separates the notes inside so they can be tweaked individually. So if you have a major chord played in the standard format, you can tweak that middle note down so the chord becomes minor. This isn’t MIDI (or “meaty”) - it’s on a live recording.

Can i get a “holy crap”? If you’re not a musician or someone who works with audio, this might be lost on you. But trust me when i say this is huuuge.

What’s in it for you? Well, more money-minded fathers can buy plastic surgery for their little girls and pimp them out as recording artists, using this software to correct their music so that it sounds like they can sing and play an instrument.

That’s what i’m planning to do with the software, anyway, but my daughter’s a little green. Is 2 years old too young for a boob job?

i just came out of the second GDC 08 keynote by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is an acclaimed inventor instrumental in creating scanner technology, text-to-speech and optical character recognition.

Last year, i made the mistake of suggesting i was going to skip a keynote speech. The guy i was talking to gripped me by the lapels and, wide-eyed and frantic, said “you DON’T MISS THE KEYNOTES.” i asked him why, and in reverent, hushed tones, as if we were sitting around a campfire, he recounted the legendary tale of a Microsoft keynote a few years back where they gave out free HD-teevees to a quarter of the audience.

There were no free teevees at Ray Kurzweil’s keynote, but one could argue that he gave away something much more valuable: the promise of immortality for those of us who could hang on long enough.

Keep reading »

i met many interesting people at last year’s Game Developer’s Conference, and i thought i should thumb through my business card collection in case i run into any of them this year. While there, i tried a new technique for putting faces to the names so many months later: i just wrote a memorable item down on the business card, like “met this guy in a cab” or “has giant orange hair.”

So i came across one plain-looking card on which i’d written “spit sushi at me.” Oh dear. It’s not the most glorifying epithet, but it worked. i remembered the man instantly, down to every detail.

He worked for the Government of Ontario as their Silicon Valley liason. But this was his exact title:

Business Development Consultant to the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development & Trade Information & Communications Technology - West Coast US.

You probably just skimmed that line. Now i want you to go back and read it. Read it aloud. Read this aloud, right now:

Hello, my name is [your name]. What do i do? Well, i’m the Business Development Consultant to the Ontario Ministry of Economic Development & Trade Information & Communications Technology - West Coast US. It says so here on my card.

That’s my Ontario tax dollars at work, folks. HARD at work. i wish more of that money went toward his hors d’oeuvres decorum and less toward his big impressive title. (i’m kidding - he was perfectly nice.)

After finding his business card, i had half a mind to call him up.

Keep reading »

Every so often i’ll hit up Apple’s Trailers site to watch movie previews. Most of the trailers are from the big studios. Lately, there have been many more independant and foreign language film clips on the site, which will inevitably lead you to this:

You can watch the Saawariya trailer from YouTube or catch it in higher quality on Apple.com. Either way, one thing is for sure:

Her world was the wait for love.

True.