Video games for miners

Video games are being used to train miners to operate mining related equipment. While flight and other simulators have been around for a while, the entry of similar patterns into other arenas signals the potential beginning of a new wave.

Practically Crushed by the PSP

Sony's PSP or Playstation Portable is the best gaming console out there. It has a far better form factor than the PC or larger gaming consoles such as PlayStation or XBOX, since it is portable. It also boasts a much better selection of games and a larger screen than the other portable gaming consoles out there. Add to that the ability to play music, videos and watch photoes, it is a pretty all round portable device to carry around. (More about this on stones, clubs and spears). Probably the few things missing are wireless telephony, a webcam, etc. in this form factor. If all that were also available from within the PSP, then you can really carry a single device for all your needs.

I have tried a few games on the PSP, but my favorites are PQ2 followed by Crush. I have no idea why Lumines 2 is so highly rated, and the racing games are ok, but not interesting enough to recommend. I also checked out Star Wars Battlefront, but the game didnt quite grab my interest - it seemed fairly repetitive after a point. (For me, games need to have frequent doses of aha moments to keep them interesting. Just increasing the pace and intensity bores me after a while).

PQ2 is a game that has fairly simple graphics. The goal is for a character to get from one point to another, conquering hurdles such as solid and glass blocks and boxes, policemen who walk between police booths, detectives who can follow the steps left by you at any past time, lasers which are themselves blocks and boxes, but fire a laser beam in one direction, teleporters that can teleport you from one teleporter to the other, switches that control doors and lifts (which expand or collapse by switch), and laser switches that can be triggered by aiming a laser beam on them. The game in its most general mode involves over a hundred puzzles that involve a combination of some or all of these elements. In most cases, the solution is elegant and involves figuring out a simple lateral approach to trick the obstacles. At least for the 40 or so puzzles that I have solved, most of them have an elegant trick to them, that once figured, will get you through with a big grin on your face, chiding yourself for not having figured it out earlier. In the many puzzles that I am still struggling with, it takes all I have to stop obsessively working on it day and night, till my fingers give up or my sleep get the better of me. For anyone interested in intelligent challenges, PQ2is a great game to play. The game also has modes that will calculate your Practical intelligence Quotient (or PQ), though I felt that the factoring of time taken into the calculation was a bit too stern (or maybe I was born with a low PQ, who knows?). Some of the puzzles were so cool, they seemed like good interview questions to ask for people attending interviews involving puzzles (as in software and other such companies). 3-5, 4-3 and 4-10 are my favorite puzzles so far for different reasons.

The other game for the PSP that I found to be almost as amazing was Crush - a game where you get into your own head, and then navigate various obstacles. The cool part about this game is that there is a way to Crushthe 3d world into 2d and then travel flatland style to places you couldn't go in 3d. Most of the challenge is in dealing with when you choose to go 3d versus when you choose to move 2d, but the ingenuity in design makes each level more challenging than the previous one. Highly recommended.

Playing with (e)paper and (e)ink

Solitaire was designed to cheer you up when you are bored, but I would much rather stare at the ceiling than play the standard form of solitaire that almost every computer, cell phone and device carries. There are several variants of solitaire that you can play (101 as per one count). How could you make all these variants available in digital form, on any device? You could spend years implementing each and every one of them, or, you could simply provide the same card pack metaphor on a gaming device – where users can pick cards, place them where they want, shuffle the pack, etc. In the latter case, the user can play all the solitaire games on the handheld device, and gain the benefits of a digital experience, such as saving the game and resuming later, not having to bother about card wear, etc. There is a deeper choice that is being made here. Many game developers tend to design games around the device and its capabilities. This is to be expected, since, well, they are developers, who understand the platform better than the target customer's archaic pre-digital experience. However, often players of non-digital games will find it vastly more appealing to transition to familiar experiences on digital platforms rather than learn all new ways of playing a game designed for the platform and device itself. For instance, this is the reason for the success of Artrage, a painting software, which tries to emulate the painting experience as close to real paint and water as possible. Even if there is a convenient feature that can be provided in the program, if it destroys the natural painting metaphor, then it is avoided.

The same issue arises in the domain of ebook readers, ambitious devices that intend to replace paper books. However, books continue to thrive, and ebook readers have not quite replaced books - yet. A good ebook reader, at a bare minimum, requires to provide a paper like look, a paper like feel and an easy content delivery mechanism.

You will be amazed by the Sony portable reader’s paper like look – the first time I saw the device, I saw a page on the device and thought someone had stuck a paper page on the display model to show how it would look when turned on – there is no noticeable backlighting, and there is almost no way to tell that the device is rendering this page digitally.

Exciting advances are being made in the paper like feel – for instance, rollable digital displays will hit European markets later this year.

In terms of connectivity and easy portability of books, wireless downloads of books are definitely preferable over physical media of any sort.

No ebook reader seems to provide the right combination of these three core requirements, yet.

But enough about readers – back to the PSP and its games.

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.

On Gaming

EA executive Riccitiello makes a good point. Games churned by the digital gaming industry are boring and repetitive. A handful of core games are repackaged over and over again under different names, causing users to find cell phones cooler and more fun than games. The potential for gaming platforms is enormous compared to the way it is being exploited. In upcoming posts, I will survey the gaming industry - the platforms, the games, the form factors, the genres, the sales strategies and also ideas for innovation.