MMPG KOREA

Massively Multiplayer Korea At E3, I spent a fair bit of time talking with South Korean developers and online game producers. I'm not sure I have a coherent picture, as of yet, but some salient points that may be of interest:

* There are over 100 MMGs on the market in Korea at present.
* Total annualized dollar gross is probably larger than the US market.
* Per-user community support costs are small, largely because of the PC baang culture. The split between PC baang (cybercafe) players and at-home players is moving more toward at-home--more than half of current subscribers are playing from home--but nonetheless, most people were introduced to this games in PC baangs. The advantage of a cybercafe environment is that you have a bunch of people nearby who know the game and can introduce it to you; MMGs are, typically, fairly hard games to pick up and play. Not only are there a lot of interface features to master, but just learning about the world itself takes a while. US MMGs typically provide large manuals, training missions, and in-game community support people to help out newbies; Korean MMGs don't.
* There is no retail market. Everything just gets pirated anyway. Clients are a free broadband download (and many games require broadband to play). Korea has a far higher rate of broadband adoption than the US. (Easy enough to see why; it's a country smaller than New England, with 40m people--not that hard to wire.)
* Korean MMG developers are (largely) convinced that the US market isn't worth the bother. Americans are too culturally alien. And besides, there's so much money to be made in China that who gives a crap anyway?
* One Korean game, Legend of Mir III, claims 700,000 simultaneously online users in China. (It's rare for EQ to have more than 100,000 online simultaneously). Yes, they pay a lot less on a per-user basis. But for some developers, China is extraordinarily lucrative.
* Because there is no retail market, a partnership with one of the big online portals in Korea is key to attracting a substantial user base there.
* In China, a relationship with either China Telecom or China Unicom is vitally necessary to reach users.
* In Korea, there's basically no console market, because they hate the Japanese, and have basically used trade barriers to prevent any widespread deployment of console systems.
* None of the Koreans I talked to really have a clear understanding of why the Korean games launched here have largely failed--or why the US games launched there have not done all that well, either. They chalk it up to "cultural differences," which strikes me as a glib and not necessarily useful explanation. After all, (some) Japanese games do just fine in the US, and in some ways, Korean culture is less alien to American culture than the Japanese. (Japanese avoid conflict; Koreans don't believe in bullshit.)

I'm interested in looking at that issue more deeply. I'm not sure I have any real solution, but some thoughts to occur to me:

1. Most Korean games are a great deal smaller than US games. The developers of Legend of Mir III proudly told me that it takes 2 hours to walk from one side of their world to another; EQ, when it launched, had world the size of Rhode Island.

2. Many Korean games are isometric 2D; virtually every US MMG since UO has been 3D.

3. Most Korean games promote PvP as a feature; the most successful US games are mainly PvE.

4. The Korean games that have launched here have not provided the level of community support that US gamers expect.

5. Koreans are used to dealing with a broadband, free client download world; all successful US MMGs to date work fine on a dial-up connection, and sell clients at retail.

Game Addiction and Autism

Study: Game Addiction Similar to Autism

Research presented at the British Psychological Society's Annual Conference this week suggests that people who show signs of being addicted to videogames exhibit many of the same symptoms as those with Asperger's syndrome, a form of high-functioning autism.

The University of Bolton's Dr. John Charlton and Ian Danforth of Whitman College questioned 391 gamers, focusing on the relationships (if any) between addiction, "high engagement" and personality. "Our research supports the idea that people who are heavily involved in game playing may be nearer to autistic spectrum disorders than people who have no interest in gaming," said Charlton.

The more intense the gaming addiction, the more likely the subject was to display three character traits commonly associated with Asperger's: neuroticism, a lack of agreeableness, and a lack of extroversion. In other words, people who do nothing but play videogames tend to be obsessive, shy, and unpleasant. Well, duh.

Good Game blog

http://blog.wired.com/games/

25 Bad Design Habits

1. Taking Constructive Criticism Personally
2. Not Knowing Paula Scher, Milton Glaser, Paul Rand and Friends
3. Not Staying up on Current Events and Design News
4. Not Owning the Graphic Artists Guild Handbook
5. Charging too Little for Design Projects
6. Not Using Contracts to Cover Your Butt
7. Not Setting Deadlines for Projects
8. Doing Spec Based Work (If you like it you can pay)
9. Not Asking for a Down Payment before Starting a Project
10. Using Poorly Designed Fonts from Free Font Sites
11. Using Display Fonts as Text Fonts
12. Using the Comic Sans Font
13. Using too Many Different Fonts in One Design
14. Forgetting White Space is your Friend
15. Not Sketching Before Designing
16. Not Using Rulers on Screen
17. Relying Totally on the Computer, Especially for Kerning
18. Using Photoshop Filters After Your First 6 Months
19. Using Low Resolution Web Images for Print
20. Not Designing Logos in Vector Format
21. Making Logos Unable to Reproduce Well Small
22. Forgetting to Learn Keyboard Shortcuts
23. Not Saving Frequently
24. Not Backing up Files on an External Hard Drive
25. Not Getting Enough Sleep! Stop Drinking so much Red Bull!

Design for the Other 90%

The Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in NYC had a show called Design for the other 90 %. The exhibition focused on designers who design products for 90% of the world's population that has no access to many of the products and resources we take for granted. Designers provided unique ways to provide better access to water, shelter, health and education. And here is a blog that has an interesting critique of the exhibition.

http://www.designobserver.com/archives/027474.html

Google Sightseeing

http://googlesightseeing.com

This is a great site for looking at peculiar observations using Google Earth. Here is an image of a swastika shaped military building in San Diego. The military is spending millions to change the image from above by creating some sort of . Another image in Mongolia shows a shape carved into the landscape of a man dancing. Google Earth has created a wondrous new way of sightseeing. Check it out.

RFID Tags

This is old news but the implications of RFID (radio-frequency identification) technology is significant from a technological perspective. More importantly, RFID has profound implications surrounding the right to privacy. RFID tags store information and data that can be retrieved very easily. Most passports use this technology to track the identification of the individual. Easy pass uses this technology to track and bill commuters on their passage through tollbooths. Credit card companies are starting to use this technology to track consuming and shopping habits. Imagine the power advertisers will have?