Stones, clubs and spears

In the really old days, man used stones as their hunting and fighting weapons. Crude, but effective. Then they found that clubs were more effective. Took a bit more work than picking up a stone, as you actually had to craft a club, but it was worth the effort. And then they realized that pointy things were more effective to their purposes, and the spear was invented.

Fast forward to the present day. We are no longer obliged to hunt to survive. And yet those primal energies to fight and win persist, and are expressed through games. As with the stones, clubs and spears, we have several implements to play games with. First off, we can play against each other physically – football, baseball, soccer, cricket, hockey, all involve the equivalent of stones, clubs and spears – just in gentler form – balls, bats and cricket wickets . And then, there are the mental games such as puzzles, crosswords, Sudoku, and also chess, go, and card games such as bridge. And since it is no longer considered civil to throw stones at one another, people throw the next most powerful thing they can legally throw at each other: money, over poker or blackjack or roulette. And the archaeopteryx of this evolutionary chain is the arcade game. And finally, the most modern form are further abstracted metaphors of stones clubs and spears on various devices that we carry, such as computers, cell phones, handheld gaming devices, iPods, cable tv boxes, etc.

It is this last category of computer/video games that we will look at. Several aspects of the technology industry are often in tension between two opposing forces – what may be called integration and differentiation. In the case of gaming consoles, integration would be the tendency of gaming consoles to provide other functions, such as video on demand, web browsing, etc. Similarly, a mobile phone is integrated to add games, contacts, calendars, email, web browsing. Computers are the ultimate integrated device – they have no specific single core function, and can do almost all of these things by integration, and better still, you can pick and choose which of them you want. Even cable tv providers are scrambling to differentiate by providing under their brand services such as phone, internet access, games, etc.

Differentiation is a rarer thing to see – a dedicated device that does just one thing – a wonderful example is a device I have seen at office receptions, that is used to print a visitor’s visiting card to generate an ID badge for moving through the premises. This little device has a single slot where you send in a visiting card, and on the other end comes an ID badge with the company’s logo and the visitor’s card under it. It is of course, also probably connected to the computer and power to get other info in as needed. In the gaming world, an example would be those little inexpensive handheld games that play just one game. Have you noticed how low tech most of these consoles are as compared to the more integrated consoles we discussed before? Have you wondered why that is so?

Well, my theory is that integration is preferred by most companies in the field, because they can get the highest return on investment by adding services on top of their once established brand and platform. However, though integration is sold as ‘choice’ to the customer, the customer experience gets more and more complicated as more functions are integrated onto the same device. The value to the customer, of course, is that they have fewer devices to find a place for or carry around. In my opinion, the pain of integration far outweighs the benefits in the current level of experience design. On the other hand, differentiated devices are static – once built they can only be used for the single purpose they were built for – to play chess, for instance. There is no way to capitalize on the same platform to feed, for instance, ads, or other services that mean more money for the corporation. On the scale from the most differentiated devices to the most integrated, the economics can only permit static differentiated devices or extremely complex dynamic integrated devices.

Another tension in the gaming console wars is between flexibility of input and output devices versus mobility. To be mobile, and carried in your pocket, a device should be small. But that precludes the ability to have a full size screen and a projector in that experience. Smart people have found a way to work around that as well – Eyeglasses that projectcomputer and other images to a virtual 60 inch screen. Again, in my opinion, the smaller mobile form factor wins, because it can be experienced anywhere and anytime – and that itself leads to more people seeing them and hence buying them. The bulkier immobile gaming consoles will eventually be replaced by the smaller hand held consoles. I will now slightly contradict myself from the last paragraph. While the current day integrated consoles are mostly unusable due to bad design, forcing integration on a small form factor seems to be far more effective. I think there is a deeper design philosophy reason for this – when we design experiences for smaller mobile devices, we are very careful to keep the experience ‘one at a time’ mostly due to the limitation of the form factor – so, you are less likely to have weird ads or multiple windows popping up on a cell phone, for example, as opposed to a full blown computer. This in itself makes integration more successful on the smaller handheld devices. The future, then, is in integrated handheld devices.

This means the individual differentiated devices, while focused, will never be able to create an affordable experience which is of high quality as well. For instance, full color backlit device technology will not be worth the price in a device that only plays one game. Of the more differentiated consoles, there are some that take extra pains to make themselves look dumb – by using childish caricatures and animation, as opposed to real life experiences – this, of course is the third conflicting choice of the gaming industry. Cartoon like experiences are of course appealing to children, but let’s face it – children outgrow the cartoon fascination and become adults – but well made realistic graphics can be made appealing to all. So, finally, barring cell phones and other devices that are adding rudimentary gaming capabilities, there is only one device that stands out as the likely winning recipe – the Sony PlayStation Portable, or PSP.

in terms of integration, it has wifi, web browsing, shared gaming, photos, videos and music capabilities. In terms of mobility, it is light enough to be carried around, but would probably need a largish jacket pocket to hold. In terms of games – it has some of the most awesome games I have ever experienced. My current favorite PSP game is the absolutely mindblowing puzzle game – PQ Practical Intelligence Quotient 2. My next post will talk about the PSP and its games in much more detail.