AGC Day 1 Keynote: Massively Multiplayer Console is… well…
The 9AM Thursday keynote address was “Massively Multiplayer Console is Coming” and was a two-fer — Microsoft’s Scott Henson first, followed by Glen Van Datta of Sony. It was lovely to see the yin and yang here: Henson’s peppy sales pitch was counterbalanced by Van Datta’s market analysis, which had a bleakness to it vis-a-vis the potentials of the existing persistent world model to successfully translate to the console.
Henson’s big points: XBox got networking right from the get-go; XBox Live is doing great; XBox Live provides all these wonderful low-level services (login, communications and messaging functions, billing and support) so you as the online game developer don’t have to.
Which isn’t unprecedented. The Station, PlayNC, Microsoft’s Passport all centralize some of these services for PC gaming, and it works. What was weird, though, was the Live services as Henson described them: they seemed to be expanding beyond that level into the level of community and online identity. The XBox Live model seems to make you an XBox Live player first and a player of your particular game second: a repeated point was that messaging is global to the service, and that your Live handle is a crucial signifier of who you are in the entire game system.
This works quite well for casual online gaming, but how would it affect social cohesion in a persistent world? Does this impact your role-playing identity at all, or can you be “Alice Ravenwind” to your game and “p33h3ad99″ to the Live community? I haven’t experienced XBox Live, so I’m going to assume the latter here, though there wasn’t enough information to be sure. Overall, Henson talked mostly about current online games and didn’t focus much on persistent state worlds of any sort.
Next came Glen Van Datta, who entered to the opening bars of “Eye of the Tiger,” wearing boxing gloves. Because Microsoft and Sony fight with each other, get it? That one didn’t really go over well. IMO Glen missed a golden opportunity to use the “Eye of the Tiger” performance from the Starbucks commercial, where Survivor sings over the opening bars “GLENN! Glenn Glenn GLENN!” That would have at least gotten a chuckle out of me. Glen’s speech was kind of cursed: just as he was beginning to recover from the boxing joke, the PA malfunctioned and random conversations began to superimpose themselves over his speech. You had to feel for the guy.
Glen talked about the harsh realities of the PS2′s hardware and said a PS player occupies a wide age range, is on average cost-conscious, does not on average have a PC, and on average does not have a broadband connection. The PS2 hardware and demographic base, as a social-technological apparatus, doesn’t support your traditional persistent state world software and business model. According to Glenn, the $100, hard-drive enabled Final Fantasy XI for the PS2 is very much a niche product. Glen then explicitly asserted what Henson seemed to just assume: that the future of online console gaming is not the MMO as we generally know it but rather games that are not highly persistent, don’t need a hard drive, do not have a subscription (though micropayments are a possibility).
This argument didn’t entirely resonate for me: why are we so constrained by the PS2 as a hardware set? Broadband access is growing rapidly, and aren’t you guys building a new system? Still, the combination of perspectives brought some points home. The social communities that cohere around game worlds are likely to look and behave quite differently as online gaming expands. Assumptions about avatarial identity and social understandings will be complicated by systems where the relationships between player, player-as-character, and player-as-consumer are changed by the material and social apparatus that delivers the game world. And the worlds will change in kind.
Wow, these writeups take a long time. There’s plenty more from day 1… will try to write it up soon.