The Media Continuum

Fantasy Online Worlds and Linear TV

As a FOW creates a context for social interaction, traditional TV series, news programmes and even reality TV are ready to emerge from within the bigger FOWs. One could imagine a drama series covering the real story of a guild clan from the history of the game world. There is a guaranteed audience within that FOW community for that content while licensing that content more widely would offer the chance to win over both viewers and new users.

Serious games

Serious games don't sound like much fun. To me the term feels like an oxymoron. What we are talking about is games that have a serious purpose such as training and learning, but if they stop being fun they stop being games, and if they stop being fun users stop learning so fast.

I have an axiom when I think about games and that is: the more fun you are having in any game, the more information you are absorbing.

So I believe games can and will have a much bigger role as a learning tool in mainstream society provided we get over the mental barrier of thinking that having fun can't be about learning. Even games for training, like simulators, fit in this category. If they were more fun they would help the trainee learn more quickly.

Our education systems are struggling to engage kids today. Building fun games around what we want our kids to learn will not only be the education system of the future, but also form a key part of adult training and learning systems in all disciplines. Whenever it is purely about absorbing information or developing specific operational skills, game experiences are an ideal way to load up the information. As there is plenty of space to innovate in this space I set up Earthsim to create an online learning world and experiment with some of these ideas.

We'll Always Have Paris

Film will always have a place both in the cinema and because of the cinema. Cinema is both a social experience and an immersive experience that's almost impossible to recreate in your home. But as consoles and set-top boxes access their content online more, the video rental store is likely to disappear.

TV game shows like X-Factor are more game than traditional TV: their interaction is all about voting and managing community expectations over time. It's effectively a massively concurrent game experience. They can be seen as worlds with minimal interaction, just the vote. Combining this managed expectation voting experience with FOWs is also an open space for the future and one that has very interesting implications for the way that other aspects of life, such as democracy, work... but that again is another whole article.

To sum it all up -

As distribution moves to the internet we can be increasingly sure where everyone will be accessing their content.

If games are to realise their full potential as a major or even a defining part of this continuum we must address the issues of how to reduce the hidden costs or drag factors in their development and how to get this content playing in a more standardised format. Only then can the game industry complete on equal terms with TV and Film in the field of content creation and playback.

With this in mind, having delivered the first few versions of Direct3D at Microsoft I left to set up Qube Software with the purpose of investigating these drag factors and look into a possible solution. We believe we have come up with an answer in the form of our Q Technology platform. Ultimately it will be for the industry to judge whether Q does indeed address these challenges.

As a content consumer I would certainly like the have a single receiver that allows me to channel hop between online worlds and libraries of games just like a viewer going through TV channels. I believe that this is not only possible but it is where we are heading with the media continuum.

Finally, looking at all media forms as games can inform us about what can be added and what can be merged. Distribution over the internet makes access to all media an interactive experience. And over the longest term this means the content and the accessibility of further content actually become the media itself.