Gaming and Culture

Video game industry sales in the U.S. dropped 23 percent to $863 million in May compared with $1.12 billion a year ago, according to a new report.

This marked the first time since August 2007 that monthly sales dipped below $1 billion, NPD Group said Thursday in its report.

The drop was felt across the board as gamers coughed up less cash for hardware, software, and accessories. Sales for hardware fell 30 percent year over year to $302.5 million. Software revenue was down 17 percent to $449 million, while sales of gaming accessories tumbled 25 percent to $112 million.

"The video games industry continues to struggle with difficult comparisons to last year," NPD analyst Anita Frazier said in a statement.

NPD blamed most of the decline on the lack of blockbuster games rather than the weak economy. The report noted that last year's sales were boosted by the launch of popular software titles such as Grand Theft Auto IV. Nintendo's Wii Fit also was a hot commodity in 2008.

"While there were some very strong new releases this month," Frazier said, "this month's top 10 games sold 2.6 million units combined, whereas last year the top 10 sold 3.7 million units. Again this illustrates how tough the comparisons are to last year."

Nintendo's Wii was the best-selling system in May at 289,500 units, though sales plummeted from last year. Microsoft's Xbox 360 found 175,000 new customers, a gain of 22 percent from a year ago. Sony brought up the rear, selling only 131,000 PlayStation 3 and 117,000 PlayStation 2 consoles.

Despite the sluggish sales, NPD has a positive outlook for the rest of the summer.

"Looking ahead to June, there are some promising games coming out this month between Sims 3 (PC), Prototype, Red Faction, Virtual Tennis, Ghostbusters, Transformers and Tiger Woods just to name a few," noted Frazier. "June comparisons are still likely to be tough, but the wide variety of new content could help reinvigorate things somewhat."

The May report followed NPD's analysis for April, which showed that video game sales had dipped 17 percent year over year.

This Flash game based on the infamous incident last winter in which an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at former U.S. president George W. Bush has spawned at least seven so-called 'news games.'

(Credit: Flashgressive)

Here's a conundrum: when the world is deep into hysteria over a potential pandemic like the swine flu, how does someone who wants to poke fun at the problem do so?

For Jude Gomilla and Immad Akhund, the answer was a single sleepless night about 10 days ago during which the two San Francisco entrepreneurs built what has become a massively popular Flash game called Swinefighters.

In Swinefighters, players--dressed as giant-syringe-wielding and mask-wearing doctors--are tasked with killing off rogue viruses in the form of sneering pigs. Each time you hit a pig with the syringe, it is wiped out, and the goal is to do that as many times as possible in 20 seconds. And because the game presents a running total of all the pig-like viruses killed by everyone who has played the game, we know that in total, Swinefighters have destroyed nearly 14.5 million viruses since the game's launch.

Swinefighter players have 'destroyed' nearly 15 million viruses. The game's creators argue that because the present tips from the CDC on how to combat swine flu, that their game serves an educational purpose.

(Credit: HeyZap)

Swinefighter is hardly the only game of its kind. In fact, in the last few months, there's been a proliferation of what some call "news games," little Flash-based exercises that are based on the very latest mega-stories sweeping the globe. Among the targets of these titles' satirical eye have been things like the George W. Bush shoe-throwing incident, the water landing of US Airways flight 1549, the British financial bailout, and even Britney Spears' haircut. And next up is a game that is expected to be released in a few days parodying the Bernard Madoff scandal in which players can manage their own Ponzi scheme.

Controversial? Or not?
And while some may find such premises beyond objectionable, those making the games--not surprisingly--don't think they're crossing any social taboos.

"To me, it's a bit strange, because some people see these games as controversial," said Gomilla, "when usually the point is a positive one. Most are expressing something that users want to be. They want to be the heroes of landing the plane, or they want to beat the virus, but they can't (personally) make political decisions. (So) in a sily way, they can go and vent their frustrations in the game."

Others feel that those who are up in arms are missing the point, or overreacting. After all, no one was ever harmed by a flying digital shoe.

Images: 'News games' play off today's headlines

"We were quite surprised at the level of controversy (our game) created," said Louise Doherty, of Fubra, which currently publishes Sock and Awe, one of at least seven games devoted to the Bush shoe-throwing incident. It's only a bit of fun, but we had hundreds of emails telling us that we were evil, that we should close the site (and) that no matter what Bush had done, 'no one deserves to have shoes thrown at them.' They're virtual shoes. Even the real shoe that was thrown didn't hit him."

Of course, there are different ways of approaching delicate subjects, and the people behind some of these games have chosen different ways to have fun with the subject matter. In both Hero on the Hudson and Double Bird Strike, for example, players must try to land an airplane that has had its engines knocked out by birds.

But in Hero on the Hudson, if you don't handle the rapidly descending plane properly, it crashes into the water. To Dominic Tocci, the creator of Double Bird Strike, that's not the best way to confront the potentially impolitic nature of a game based on a well-publicized airplane accident.

"Some topics are a little delicate, but it's all in how you present them," said Tocci. "For example, when I designed Double Bird Strike, I intentionally made it so that crashing the plane was impossible."

Tocci's attempts at political correctness aside, not everyone would agree that making play out of a near disaster is funny, or useful, even if players don't have to actually see the plane crash. And not everyone would agree with Tocci's assessment of what's fair game and what's not.

A game that is about to be released leverages the attention that Bernard Madoff has generated and tasks players with managing their own Ponzi scheme.

(Credit: Cellufun)

"Personally, if I think a game idea is in poor taste, I won't make it," Tocci said. "Of course, there will always be someone out there who might get offended by something I made, but you can't please everyone."

One such group might be fans of Britney Spears or those who feel for the personal travails the pop superstar has gone through in recent years. Yet Tocci took Spears' dramatics head-on with his first news game, Britney Wigged Out, in which players have to try to place a wig on the head of a bobbing and weaving Spears caricature.

Money to be made
But there's no denying that these projects, most of which are created by individuals or small teams, are resonating with the Internet public. And that can be profitable.

Doherty's Fubra bought Sock and Awe from its original creator on eBay for more than $8,000, but said ads on the game earned the money back in just 48 hours. And Tocci said his creations earn money from royalties paid by the casual games sites that host the titles.

Not everyone is trying to profit though. Gomilla said that he and his partner decided not to attach ads to Swinefighter because of the sensitive nature of the game. But he suggested he wouldn't have a problem making money off of less controversial topics.

Flash games like these have been around almost as long as Flash itself. But in the past, they've tended to center on harmless fare like throwing things at penguins. And while they've managed to spread far and wide, it's likely they haven't done so with the urgency of the news games. And that has to do with the fact that these new titles, like so many other Web-based projects these days, can spread like wildfire on social-networking services like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.

That leads to staggering numbers like the 14.5 million viruses tackled in Swinefighter and the 93.5 million shoes tossed at Bush in Sock and Awe alone. Tocci's Double Bird Strike has been played more than 400,000 times.

The games are also coming faster these days because the tools available make it possible for someone with even rudimentary skills to make something like Swinefighter in an evening.

To Sree Sreenivasan, the dean of student affairs and a professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism, things like news games and other Web phenomena prove that there's little point in trying to understand people's sensibilities or taste. After all, he points out, someone might post a video on YouTube of their grandmother's funeral only to have others' mocking responses to the video catch viral fire.

"On the Internet, you've lost control of this stuff," Sreenivasan said. "It would be nice if everything on the Internet had redeeming value, but I don't think that's possible."

News game creators like Gomilla and Doherty, however, think their offerings do present some social value, even as they poke fun at topics that make some people very nervous.

Gomilla, for example, points out that Swinefighters features advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to combat things like swine flu. And Doherty indicated that while she might have little sympathy for Bush having had to dodge flying shoes, she cared about the fate of the Iraqi journalist who threw the footwear at the president.

"When it became clear that reporter Muntadar al-Zaidi could be in serious trouble as a result of his actions we decided to display news about his arrest and charges on the site so people would be kept aware of his plight," Doherty said. "People that were visiting the site to play the game and laugh were also getting news that they may not have seen otherwise."

News games as education
In fact, Doherty said that the educational value of these games can outstrip even what respected government institutions offer the public.

"It's a shame the innovation (of providing CDC advice about swine flu in Swinefighters) was left to two entrepreneurs," said Doherty. "It would have been great if the World Health Organization had realized they could use a game to raise awareness about preventing swine flu."

Sreenivasan, too, recognizes that the creators of news games have the time and energy on their hands to move a lot faster than traditional organizations.

"I think (news games) can be engaging and helpful," Sreenivasan said, "and that's why you see some news organizations trying to do this. The problem is when breaking news happens, structured organizations don't have the time or work flow (to act), whereas someone working alone in the basement" does."

On June 22, Geek Gestalt will kick off Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be looking for the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South and North Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.

The Institute for the Future's new game, 'Superstruct,' posits that humanity may be extinct by 2042 and that only stories submitted by players can mitigate the dangers of five so-called superthreats.

(Credit: Institute for the Future)

If you knew the human race was facing imminent extinction, what would you do?

For the folks at the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank, creating a fictional scenario in which five "superthreats" have coalesced in 2019 to augur the end of the human race by 2042 became the basis for a new alternate-reality game (ARG) in which players the world over have been weighing in with ideas for staving off disaster.

The game the IFTF created, known as Superstruct, launched October 6, and is the first of what could be many so-called massively multiplayer forecasting games. The idea behind Superstruct and others that could follow it is to leverage the wisdom of the crowds to come up with solutions to complicated problems and do so in a fun, challenging, and entertaining way that encourages people's participation.

The five superthreats include "quarantine," which involves "declining health and pandemic disease," "ravenous," which deals with the world's collapsing food system, "power struggle," which revolves around declining energy and the fight over remaining energy resources, "outlaw planet," which focuses on the erosion of civil rights and "generation exile," which looks at the worldwide "diaspora of diasporas," or a worldwide refugee epidemic.

And it may be working. Already, the game--which ends November 17--has more than 5,000 players from across the globe who have contributed hundreds of ideas, in the form of stories, intended to mitigate the coming faux-disaster.

As of Monday, those user-submitted ideas have already been deemed strong enough that the Superstruct site now says that the end of the human race has been pushed back at least six years, to 2048.

To be sure, Superstruct is nothing more than scenario planning in the guise of a game, and despite the many, many drastic problems Earth faces these days, it is very unlikely that the human race is actually down to its last 40 years.

But for many participants in the game, being involved has satisfied an itch to make some sort of difference in the world.

"It appears that people are extremely motivated by the challenge of fixing the future," said Jane McGonigal, the lead designer on Superstruct. "People are unsettled right now, with the economy (and other crises and) that makes us hungry for the opportunity to contribute."

McGonigal, who previously helped design the famous ARG, I Love Bees, A World without Oil, and more recently led the design on the Olympic-themed ARG, The Lost Ring, said that the early planning of Superstruct involved asking participants to submit stories of dinner conversations they might have in 2019.

She said that very quickly, more than 1,000 people came forward with such stories, something that caught her, and her fellow Superstruct lead organizers, forecast director Kathi Vian and scenario director Jamais Cascio, off guard.

"That signaled to us that people will take this very, very seriously," McGonigal said. "That was the cue to me that this was going to be big and was going to tap into this unmet hunger for contributing."

Among her favorite dinner stories, McGonigal said, was one that a married man from New Zealand who currently has no children, but hopes to one day, came up with about what he would say to his kids about the fact that they could be the last generation of the human race.

"It was really thoughtful, not (like from a) B-movie," McGonigal said. "It was serious, and reflects what people are thinking about today."

The five superthreats confronting humanity include global food shortages, massive movements of refugees and worldwide battles over energy.

(Credit: Institute for the Future)

And while Superstruct is clearly fiction, McGonigal and her colleagues at the Institute for the Future see it as imperative that scenarios like the ones raised in the game get talked about now.

"The world will almost certainly be a worse place for the next generation," she said. "If we don't act now, we're going to have a lot of explaining" to do.

Because Superstruct takes place across a wide range of media--including wikis, blogs, YouTube, forums, and others, some feel that it can help players with their own professional development even as they participate in bettering the understanding of how to deal with the problems of the future.

"I think one of the coolest parts of the game is how it takes advantage of players' existing participatory media literacy and pushes them to develop new ones," said Dale Larson, a mobile and social media strategist. "The transfer from game to real world is not only...solving the future problems but (also fostering) real world collaboration from both social and technical perspectives that lead to job skills and organizational skills."

As the game progresses, a series of "game masters" are taking some of the stories submitted by players and incorporating them into the larger Superstruct scenario.

That's why the date of humanity's extinction has already moved from its original 2042 to the current 2048--because of the value of the many user-created submissions.

Indeed, one of the goals of the game seems to be to turn the superthreats on their head and use the submissions made by player in each of the five categories to come up with solutions to the problems. And that's why each superthreat is subtitled, for example, "inventing the future of food," or "inventing the future of security."

Each week, a new update is posted for each superthreat, bringing the scenario current according to the game masters' incorporation of submissions.

So, for example, this week's assessment of the food crisis includes the following: "There are big ideas afoot to confront the Ravenous Superthreat head-on, like irrigating the Australian desert with solar-desalinated ocean water. Alongside this are more subtle ones oriented to ecological stability; this week, for instance, has seen no fewer than three Superstructs proposed to address the challenge of maintaining bee populations. As solutions continue to arise, however, so do the challenges. We're getting reports of continued battles on the home front for personal food security."

Of course, the stories that are used to create these ongoing scenarios are available for public viewing as well. And the best are given awards based on creativity and other attributes.

One example came from a player called Tiny Tegan, who posited a scene from Amsterdam, where supermarkets have closed down due to a lack of stocked shelves--and government regulations against imported food. The fictional Amsterdam resident reported that he (or she) walked past a closed market, only to see people milling around inside. Climbing through a shattered door to see what was going on, the resident found a number of "ragged farmers" trading various meats, cheeses, bread and so on.

"I purchased (an apple) for a resaonable fee and asked (the farmer) where she had come from," Tiny Tegan wrote. "She explained that these farmers were part of a virtual collective, sharing agricultural tips and political news across Netherland's rural expanses--and that the urban food shortage has inspired them to start a co-op in the city. They had arrived that morning and were planning to open their doors the next day. Needless to say, I was ecstatic and asked what I could do to help. She said, 'Spread the word.'"

Hundreds of similar stories exist for each of the five superthreats.

And that's precisely the point.

"It's exciting stuff," said Ron Meiners, the director of community for the Hollywood Interactive Group. "It creates a new forum for people to collaboratively address issues and problems we all face. The technology offers new opportunities for people to work together, but we are just learning the roles we can have together. Superstruct is a very creative way for people to effectively discuss different Issues, and ideally, meaningful solutions...We need to evolve new social structures to collaborate and work together."

As the game has moved forward and players have impressed the game masters with their submissions, the human race has gotten a little more time on its clock.

McGonigal acknowledged that she and her fellow planners did consider letting the clock run in reverse, meaning that humans could die off before 2042.

Thankfully, though, it will only be possible to make our race live longer, at least under the rules of Superstruct.

"We decided that just by throwing your lot in and putting attention on problems," McGonigal said, "that will only do good, so we've decided that there's very little players can do to hurt" mankind's future.

Amazon.com has acquired Reflexive Entertainment, adding to its PC, Mac, and online casual game offerings.

Reflexive, which announced the acquisition earlier this week in a blog post by Chief Executive Lars Brubaker, said the deal will provide a larger distribution channel than it previously had.

Reflexive also noted that game developers can still submit their work to the site and will continue to have access to its GameCenterSolution.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

This 'Spore' creature, created by comic book legend Stan Lee, is one of dozens made by 'creative celebrities,' in a promotion the video game publisher announced Tuesday.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

It seems everyone is getting in on the Spore fun these days.

In less than a week, Electronic Arts' hotly anticipated evolution game will launch, most likely to large initial sales and significant excitement.

But since June, fans of the game--which was first announced and has been the talk of the video games industry since 2005--have been able to play with the Spore Creature Creator, a free, downloadable editor, that allows anyone to craft their own creature and upload it to what is known as Sporepedia, a vast, sharable, database of millions of other people's creations.

And on Tuesday, EA said that it had lured dozens of "creative celebrities" into making creatures, each of which is now viewable online in a bit of a fan-voting popularity contest.

This creature--and a couple of little versions of itself--is the most viewed of the dozens created in the promotion. It was made by online TV show personality Philip DeFranco.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

Among the well-known and maybe not quite so well-known among the group recruited by EA are Spider Man and X-Men co-creator Stan Lee; "I Kissed a Girl" pop star Katy Perry; Carlos Santana; baseball pitcher Curt Schilling; actor Elijah Wood; Digg founder Kevin Rose; TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington; Spore creator Will Wright himself; video game blog Kotaku editor Brian Crecente; film director David Lynch; Virgin Group mogul Richard Branson; celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse; Laughing Squid photographer and blogger Scott Beale; Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, and many others.

In each case, fans can see the celebrity's creation, how many times others have looked at it (on YouTube, where they can rate it), and how many people have "liked" it.

It seems that the various celebrities and their Spore creatures are sorted by the number of times people have viewed them, and it's not clear whether they were presented in this order or whether they self-sort by the number of times they've been looked at.

Another popular creature is this one, by video game blog Kotaku editor Brian Crecente.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

Either way, the most "liked," and viewed, creature is known as DeFranco, by Philip DeFranco, the host of the online hit, the Philip DeFranco Show. As of when I looked at it, it had gotten 134,961 views and 112,922 "likes."

It's hard to tell why that would be the case. His creature is very well conceived, to be sure, a refined red beast with a large mouth and intimidating horns.

But others on the list made very nice creatures as well. And certainly, you would think that someone like Stan Lee would get a ton of views, just because of who he is. Yet, Lee's creature, a tall, upright, drink of water with four arms and four legs got about a 10th the number of views as DeFranco's.

Rock star Carlos Santana got in on the act, as well, with this creature, called Batuka.

(Credit: Electronic Arts)

And those at the bottom of the list--whether because people just weren't interested in their creations or perhaps because the interface for this project is a little bit unwieldy--got just hundreds of views.

Regardless, it's nice to see the participation by some of these very well-known and respected people. Some of them clearly put thought into their creations, and the results are often rather impressive. In each case--except for a few who didn't manage to finish their creations--they've presented a YouTube video of their work so that you can see not only what it looks like but also how it moves, and in many cases, what smaller versions of it look like.

Within days, the full game will be out and millions of new people will be exposed to Spore. Already, the game's ad campaign has gotten under way, with billboards on buildings, signs in bus stops, and even a full takeover of a Boston subway station.

And once the game actually launches? Let's just say it's impossible to know how far Spore-mania will go. But I'm betting it will be extreme.