Gaming and Culture

(Credit: Activision)

In the last year, consumers spent more money on video games in Britain than on films, including both trips to movie theaters and films on DVD, new figures compiled for U.K.'s Daily Telegraph indicate.

In the 12 months leading up to the end of September, 1.73 billion British pounds (about $2.8 billion) were spent on video games, according to data-monitoring company GFK Chart-Track. The U.K. Film Council said 1 billion British pounds ($1.6 billion) were spent at the British box office during the same period, with an additional 198 million British pounds ($320 million) spent on films released on DVD and Blu-ray.

• U.K. video games: 1.73 billion pounds ($2.8 billion)
• U.K. film: 1.198 billion pounds ($1.93 billion)

This means that approximately 532 million pounds ($860 million) more was spent on video games in 2009, roughly 30 percent more than on films. And while 1.73 billion pounds is impressive, it's still well shy of the $20 billion predicted for U.S. game sales in 2009. In fact, the U.S. spent $2.7 billion on games in November 2009 alone.

Video games, by no means a niche in the U.K, or most other parts of the world, are obviously big business and these statistics clearly show that the growth in new forms of digital entertainment specifically available via a computer or game console is having a major impact on more traditional forms of entertainment.

Contributing to the success of gaming in the U.K. were price cuts to jump-start sales, as well as tie-ins to supermarkets, greatly expanding the potential number of buyers and targeting gamers at the check-out stand, according to The Daily Telegraph. Further, Amazon.co.uk reported that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was the No. 1 seller for 2009, beating out DVDs of "Harry Potter" and "Twilight."

The industry data compiled by GFK Chart-Track also shows that the number of games consoles being used in Britain nearly doubled in 2009 to 25 million which means there are enough consoles for nine out of every ten households in the country to have one.

According to the report, only television--including DVDs of television shows, along with the cost of the license and satellite subscriptions--and music are bigger forms of entertainment.

For all those who believe the apocalypse is close at hand, I have a video that will surely save you from such dire imaginings.

This little delight from YouTube shows that we are, indeed, bringing up our children to believe in a better tomorrow, one in which human beings will finally place their priorities in the correct order.

Please enjoy the sight of a child (Is he eight? Nine?) expressing his sheer at-oneness with his firmament when he espies that his Christmas gift is an Xbox 360.

No one can possibly tell me that this is anything other than sheer, untrammeled joy at the thought of being able to block out the world and enter into the Kingdom of Video Games from which so many children rarely emerge. This child knows that all ancient, outdated concepts such as parents, school, and even Santa can be happily left behind now that he has the key to extraterrestrial escape: Microsoft's Xbox 360.

Who among us could not be moved by such elevated, primal emotions, ones that signal the escape from the normal to the paranormal?

This is the modern world. We are finally saved. Hallelujah.

Over 4 million unauthorized downloads...and counting.

(Credit: Infinity Ward)

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 has set several records this year, including the most units sold in a single month (over 6 million in November alone). But according to TorrentFreak, a site that covers the world of torrent downloads, the game was also the most pirated title of 2009.

According to the site, Modern Warfare 2's PC version was downloaded on torrent sites a whopping 4.1 million times, which is more than twice as many downloads as 2008's most-pirated game, Spore. The Xbox 360 version of Modern Warfare 2 was downloaded 970,000 times.

Those numbers are all the more impressive when one considers that the game was downloaded over a period of just two months.

TorrentFreak also released its findings for other top pirated games. The Sims 3, Prototype, Need for Speed Shift, and Street Fighter IV rounded out the list of most-pirated PC games. Street Fighter IV and Prototype were second and third on the most-pirated Xbox 360 games, following Modern Warfare 2. Dirt 2 and UFC 2009 Undisputed placed in fourth and fifth places, respectively.

TorrentFreak also evaluated the most pirated games on the Wii. Not surprisingly, it was the New Super Mario Bros. that took the top spot with 1.15 million downloads. It was followed by Punch-Out, Wii Sports Resort, House of the Dead: Overkill, and Mario Power Tennis.

A 14-year-old boy's mother had enough with her son's gaming over the weekend. After turning off the console hoping he would stop gaming, she called police to ask for their help in solving her son's "addiction."

According to the story first reported in the Boston Herald, Angela Mejia had enough with her son's gaming when she found him playing Grand Theft Auto at 2:30 a.m. She told him to go to sleep, but he refused.

"Sometimes I want to run away, too," Mejia told the Boston Herald. "I have support from my church, but I'm alone. I want to help my son, but I can't find a way."

After unplugging her son's game console, she decided to call 911. Police came to Mejia's home and coaxed the boy into going to sleep.

"[The police] were just like, 'Chill out. Go to bed,'" Mejia's son told the Herald.

What Mejia's son did when he woke up is unknown. My guess: he played a video game. Yours?

Mass Effect 2

(Credit: BioWare)

In recent years, the U.S. role-playing game landscape has become decidedly dominated by Western-based games, like Mass Effect 2 and the recently released Dragon Age: Origins. But according to Greg Zeschuk, co-founder of role-playing game company BioWare, Japanese developers might have only themselves to blame.

Speaking in an interview with Destructoid, Zeschuk said "the fall of the Japanese RPG (JRPG) in large part is due to a lack of evolution, a lack of progression." Zeschuk added that developers "kept delivering the same thing over and over. They make the dressing better, they look prettier, but it's still the same experience."

But Zeschuk wasn't done. He said the same methods used years ago to advance a story are still being employed in today's Japanese RPGs.

"My favorite thing, it's funny when you still see it, but the joke of some of the dialogue systems where it asks, 'do you wanna do this or this,' and you say no. 'Do you wanna do this or this?' No. 'Do you wanna do this or this?' No. Lemme think--you want me to say 'yes.' And that, unfortunately, really characterized the JRPG."

As someone who absolutely loves role-playing games, that's a tough pill to swallow. I can still remember the good ol' days playing Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete to its completion in an almost nonstop gaming session.

At the same time, Zeschuk makes a point. RPGs are not what they used to be. They have evolved. And so far, the vast majority of Japanese-based RPGs that I've played recently reflect that same, old-school feeling. It's not always a bad thing, of course, but for the broader U.S. audience, if Zeschuk can be believed, it's starting to hurt sales.

They may not realize it or admit to it, but women who play Everquest II log in more hours than men or teenagers, are less likely to quit, and report being not only healthier but happier than their male counterparts, according to new research out of the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism.

A new study unveils surprising details about the health, age, sexuality, honesty, and commitment level of the 20 percent of Everquest II players who are female.

(Credit: Sony Online Entertainment)

The data reveals that while 80 percent of players in the study of 7,000 are male, and averaged 25 hours of play a week, the 20 percent who are female averaged 29 hours a week. And that's not all. Women underestimated their playing time more than men did.

"The women play more intensely than the guys do," says Dmitri Williams, assistant professor at the school for communications who led the study, "Looking for Gender" (PDF here). "They're less likely to quit, and they're happier playing...They [also] play more than they admit."

All you guys out there getting excited about these results need know that five times as many women who play Everquest II report being bisexual (15 percent) than women in the general population (3 percent). They also weigh less and exercise more than males and females in the general population. I know, I know, they're starting to sound perfect in that glistening, avatar kind of way.

But anyone up for some matchmaking should note that more than 60 percent of women who play do so with a "romantic partner," compared to only 25 percent of men. (The average age of all players in the study, by the way, was 31.)

I asked Williams, who reports that men are happier playing without their partners than women, whether it's possible that men simply have a harder time finding someone to play with than women. (Sounds rather like Life Beyond EQ2, too.) He replied by e-mail:

The happiness measures were questions about life in general, rather than happiness with game play or something more specific. They asked things such as, "How many days in the past week would you say that you were happy?" The men who answered that question reported more happy days when they were not playing with a partner, and fewer if they were. The women answered more happy days if they were playing with a partner, and fewer if they were not.

With a correlation, you can't make a strong causal claim, but you can speculate with logic. I think this is a case where some speculation (and it's clearly labeled as speculation) is warranted since the opposite explanation isn't likely. Women do get into the game through a partner far more than men do. Men are often introducers/gatekeepers. In that sense, it may be that males end up regretting sharing this activity while females enjoy the togetherness.

Ouch. Conclusion: Be careful with whom you share EQ2.

In what is being hailed as a first for online game research, Sony Online Entertainment agreed to let Williams' team, including Nick Yee of the Palo Alto Research Center and Scott Caplan of the University of Delaware, access anonymous game data. This means they were able to compare a player's reported activity with actual activity; the resulting discrepancies call into question 30 years of game research that have been based on self-reported data.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 had a huge November, selling more than 6 million units for the month. But in a recent interview with G4TV, Microsoft Xbox 360 Product Manager Aaron Greenberg said that it would have been a much different month without Infinity Ward's blockbuster hit.

"November without Modern Warfare 2 would have looked very different," Greenberg told G4TV, responding to a question about what the month would have been like.

But just how different is up for debate. Modern Warfare 2 was a major hit. It was a title that doesn't come along very often and it likely helped the game industry buoy its sales figures for the month. Greenberg agrees.

"There's titles that appeal within the inner circle of the core, but this is that title everyone that owns a video game console buys," he said in the interview. "If they buy two games a year, this was one of those games."

Greenberg went on to say that without Modern Warfare 2, "software numbers would have looked dramatically different, I don't think that people would have spent that money on another game."

Microsoft's product manager went so far as to say that Modern Warfare 2 stopped people from buying other tech gadgets.

"I think people actually said 'I'm choosing to buy Modern Warfare 2 instead of buying an iPod or instead of going to a movie or instead of doing something else. This is going to deliver its entertainment value for me.'"

Consumers bought far more Xbox 360 versions of the game (4.2 million) than PlayStation 3 versions (1.8 million). Without that help, Greenberg asserted that Xbox 360 software sales would have slipped. But he also believed that the company would have sold less hardware.

"My guess is we would have probably sold less consoles, too, to be honest," he told G4TV. "I think it was that kind of blockbuster, just like a new blockbuster movie--it's an event, people knew about it."

Greenberg's points were interesting, to say the least. I've always said that software sells hardware. And so far, that has likely helped the Xbox 360 stay ahead of the PlayStation 3. But with few blockbuster titles on the horizon, how will that affect sales going forward?

For now, we don't know. But we can speculate about a November without Modern Warfare 2. Would it have been as huge? Let us know in the comments below.

This WebGL demo shows 3D Collada files--in this case a Spore video game creature.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

If you want to see the scale of browser makers' ambition to remake not just the Web but computing itself, look no farther than a new 3D technology called WebGL.

The WebGL vision is simple. You're running around in a video game universe, blasting radioactive aliens--but you got there by visiting a Web site, not by installing the game on your PC.

This sort of computationally demanding chore contrasts sharply to with today's Web, whose top-notch programmers strain to reproduce bare-bones versions of the rich capabilities open to applications running natively on a computer.

WebGL, while only a nascent attempt to catch up, is real. WebGL now is a draft standard for bringing hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the Web. It got its start with Firefox backer Mozilla and the Khronos Group, which oversees the OpenGL graphics interface, but now the programmers behind browsers from Apple, Google, and Opera Software are also involved.

Perhaps more significant than formal standards work, though, is WebGL support in three precursors of today's browsers--Minefield for Mozilla's Firefox, WebKit for Apple's Safari, and Chromium for Google's Chrome. Opera has started implementing WebGL, too, said Tim Johansson, Opera's lead graphics developer.

With a little tinkering--check the instructions and caveats below--you can give it a whirl, too. Overall, I was favorably impressed with the technology.

Its performance certainly isn't enough for a competitive first-person shooter, but it's approaching utility for casual gaming. And because of how WebGL elements can be integrated with the rest of a Web site's code, it's got some advantages.

What is WebGL?
WebGL is one of a handful of efforts under way to boost the processing power available to Web applications. It marries two existing technologies.

First is JavaScript, the programming language widely used to give Web pages intelligence and interactivity. Although JavaScript performance is improving relatively quickly these days in many browsers, programs written in the language are relatively pokey and limited compared with those that run natively on a computer.