Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, O2 and others face one and the same threat as mobile phones become more powerful, cheaper per unit produced, and wireless networks (EDGE, 2G, 3G, 4G) improving towards universal world-wide coverage. And the earthquake for existing businesses comes again from Google.

Apple (iPhone) said no to Google Voice, because they had a fiduciary responsibility towards its carrier who subsidises the iPhone 3G and 3GS at a huge price. Which they make up with pricey subscriptions. I use already Skype on Android when I call abroad or for longer calls in general. The threat (um, tsunami) for carriers is, that the Googlephone (GPhone) will handle its calls though 3G/2G as network and associated Google Voice only. The coming revolution that everything will go though the ‘Pipe’ in and out, should cause them having bad dreams.

For existing mobile phone carriers and their traditional business, counting calls by minutes, Google is a disruptor. And Google is moving fast. They (Google’s Eric Schmidt) said for years (publicly in interviews and speaking events) that the phone is the first device for people in developing countries, experiencing the internet (& Google). When a CEO is speaking so candidly about a thing, shouldn’t you pay attention? No, because according to the business textbooks, you should pay attention to big existing companies who are already competing in the same market as you. Verizon vs. AT&T vs. T-Mobile. Small companies can move quick and fast, but have it hard to gain traction. Guess what, Google is big and everywhere, but still moves considerably fast, is agile, and gets traction fast because it is everywhere. Now Google will use its operational size, employees smarts and brand name to come in as disruptor to the mobile phone business. What they need is just ONE carrier who give them access to their network only. Deal done for the coming revolution. I see especially China and India and other developing countries, who are building their cellular network, the most interesting target for Google, they could buy a stake into one of the many small phone carriers (compared to Verizon or AT&T) and support with quick and cheap cash the undergoing construction of networks, thus that their grand plan for the GooglePhone/GPhone can be realized. Carriers here in Europe or America won’t cannibalize their own business for sure. Google, again, is solving a customer problem with high impact. Something they are always aiming for when using their resources to develop products.

Second thought on this, my projection. In two to three years, when counting by minutes is dead, when counting by megabytes is norm (like now with the ‘internet’), Comcast and other broadband providers are competing for the same customers as AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, O2 et cetera. When they realize they can’t compete against the trend. Broadband providers have the land-line infrastructure, what they just need are the radio towers to distribute the signal through the air. My word, they will compete for the same customer. When the US economy up-ticks (should) again, we will see some big provider doing M&A, they will throw in the word synergy to make it tasty for shareholders, and employees will lose their jobs as usual. Speaking on the phone, having a conversation on the phone – will move onto the ‘Pipe’, and there is nothing you can do about it. It’s Economics again, technology, cost and leverage.

For us the consumer, it becomes cheaper to communicate. Existing businesses and associated businesses will change eventually. Mobile phone manufacturers will be doing business like any other PC/Laptop manufacturer. Developing a compelling product consumers want to buy. Consumers then are free to choose which network they want to use. Over will be the days that we can have only an Apple phone when we are willing to join AT&T’s world as well. Over are the days of subsidies. Yes, we may have to pay $150-$300 for a brand new phone, but it will be your main communicator for the future on the road, a very powerful one. It is called convergence (see computing and technology).

————————

Further Readings:

• The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution
• Mobileopportunity Blog: The mobile data apocalypse, and what it means to you
• Video – Web 2.0 Expo 2007, Eric Schmidt talking about the mobil space

Some people read the funny pages in newspapers for laughs. I read video game analysis.

Check out this “analysis“.

When you were a child, you were told about the story about the boy who cried wolf. He cried wolf and all the villagers came. He did it again, and again, and again. Eventually, the villagers stopped coming. Thanks to a particular DS9 episode, I know the moral isn’t because the boy lied all the time. The moral is that the boy kept using the same lie over and over again.

The moral to the story of the analysts who cried Wii is no different. When they first proclaimed the ‘fad’ of the Wii to be over, people rushed in. They did it again and again. If you look at the comments on that Gamasutra page, everyone is like “Shut up already, we’ve heard this a zillion times”. The error is not that the analyst is wrong. It is that the analysts keep repeating the same exact error over and over again. Politicians know at least to keep changing the errors as repetition of them spoils the ruse.

Let’s go through this.

Revealing the results of a broad fall-holiday survey, Creutz says Wii owners are buying fewer games now than they did a year ago — while Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 plan to buy more.

Using a ‘broad fall-holiday survey’ is not analysis at all. There is plenty of sales data to suggest trends. But all of that is conveniently ignored.

I believe such a “survey” is to create the analysis they want to talk about as real sales data doesn’t suggest what they want at all.

This is partially a function of the economic climate — core gamers are the group least likely to trim entertainment spending when budgets get tight. Consumers who own only a Wii, however, are least-likely among all current-generation platforms to increase their software purchases this holiday, he says.

Then why does Wii Fit, which is $90 being a balance board, keep selling left and right? Why does Wii Sports Resort, along with Motion Plus devices, keep selling? This software is just magically ignored.

The economic climate favors the Expanded Audience, not the Core Audience. The Core Audience is composed of mostly younger males. Look at the unemployment numbers. Most unemployment will be the younger people. Disruptive companies thrive in recessions. What limits Expanded Audience is not money so much as disinterest.

This is why Wii Fit remains a best seller everywhere. It isn’t Core Gamers buying that $90 bathroom scale.

Over half of Wii owners also own an Xbox 360 or a PlayStation 3, Creutz says — but of those who own more than one console, only 23 percent consider Wii their main platform, which means bigger holiday wish lists among core gamers are more likely to benefit core market games rather than Wii titles.

“While core gamers who own a Wii own more Wii games on average than casual gamer Wii-owners, the average title ownership spread between the two categories of gamers is much lower than it is for owners of Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles,” says the analyst.

It is really incredible the lengths these people are going to scare publishers away from the Wii. The “Game Industry” is truly scared of the little white console.

Creutz concludes that core gamers who own multiple consoles are primarily buying Wiis to play Nintendo titles, and not games by other publishers.

Then how does Wii have the highest third party game sales out of all three consoles? This, also, is magically ignored.

“We believe that the optics of this hardware cycle have been significantly distorted by the explosive growth of the Wii console,” says Creutz.

The only thing that has been distorted by the explosive growth of the Wii is the “Game Industry” sense of growth. The “Game Industry” is not growing. The “Game Industry” is in free fall. If you subtract the Expanded Audience Wii sales (which are likely more than 50%) from the total Wii console number, you end up with a total number of consoles which suggests massive decline in Core Gaming.

But, shhhhhhhhhhhhhh. Don’t let the analysts know this. (Actually, they already do know this. They just don’t want you to know it. And they very much don’t want investors to know it.)

Wii was the primary driver of industry growth in 2007 and 2008, and remains the top-selling console in America. But according to the analyst, “its success did not correlate with strong performances by the U.S. software publishers as a group.”

“While we believe the Wii is likely to be a drag on overall software sales through the holiday, the impact should be limited to those publishers which have invested significantly in Wii development, with the biggest negative impact likely to be felt by Electronic Arts, which (unwisely in our view) heavily invested in Wii development for [calendar 2009],” says Creutz.

I’ll tell you what is really bothering them.

The “Game Industry” did not make the Wii phenomenon. Therefore, the “Game Industry” cannot break the Wii phenomenon.

Remember how solid all the analyst predictions were on the “Revolution”? I believe these numbers were based entirely on the “Game Industry”, that coalition of third parties, deciding who they wanted to be the winners and losers to be. The “Game Industry” wishes for a console they can control and manipulate. However, with just one (as Sony had), the console company could start to control them. So it is better to have two consoles and have the “Game Industry” play them against one another.

The “Game Industry” doesn’t like consoles with First Parties. They cannot control the console. They froze out Sega. They’re trying to do the same to Nintendo. But Nintendo is disrupting the “Game Industry” itself.

These analysts *know this*. They know this because I have chatted with a few of them.

The aim seems to be the “Game Industry” to target publishers and other third parties and get them to try to leave the Wii platform. They are predicting “Wii deflation” because they believe if they can convince enough third parties to leave the Wii, it will decline.

Remember that even when Nintendo did the Gamecube, a console that was easy to develop for, had superior graphics, the “Game Industry” froze it as well.

I wonder if Nintendo knows that their real opponent is not so much disinterest or Microsoft and Sony but the “Game Industry” itself.

Third parties leaving the Wii is actually suicidal. They need the Wii. They need New Generation. The Core Market is collapsing. If third parties do not want to collapse with it, they need to learn the ways of New Generation fast.

Have you noticed that 100% of all analyst readings always are negative on Nintendo? What are the odds of that! I do not ever recall seeing an analyst prediction for Nintendo to do well or better than expected. It is always down. And, bizarrely, it is always up for Sony. PS3 is always poised to comeback every time an analyst opens his mouth.

I don’t know about you, but the odds of analysts always going negative on the Wii and always going positive on “Core Gaming” clearly points to an agenda. It is not probable that every analyst prediction is bullish on “Core Gaming” and bearish on Wii.

An interesting thought occurred to me going over your “Nintendo’s Shield” article.

In summary of it, Nintendo’s shield is mainly what sets them apart of MS and Sony.  This circulates around their values, goals, and driving forces being very different.  As an example, Sony and MS will try to push the “motion idea” onto their current consumer base in the same fashion of how they go about developing and producing software today. This means they will, for all intents and purposes, not change their development strategy or approach except to add in “some motion”. They will run into the same wall (or not even reach it more likely) that all 3rd party developers have run into and been unable to pass.  The right software.

They’ll tack on such camera/motion controls in very predictable ways (Natal will likely be very limited to single-player and “taking turns” applications).

Now here’s the idea that came to my mind and maybe I should send this to Nintendo if they don’t already have it.  How would Nintendo intend to stay out of the Red Ocean? (Maybe I’m writing what you already know)  Sustaining innovation again and again is extremely hard to do from top to bottom (think GC to Wii revolution) for many reasons.  Some reasons are that:

• You may run out of ideas of how to effectively tackle new markets (or the technology/path is not yet feasible to do so)
• “Revolutionizing” too often and you will run the risk of alienating your new market (by not giving it time, disruption is not overnight)

You alluded to that Nintendo will stay at the low tier, not allowing anyone to enter or adapt their platform below theirs.

What would you say about a strategy where Nintendo:

• Continues to stay at it’s core of arcade game-play for software (NSMBW, Wii-titles, MK: Wii, likely new Zelda: Wii, etc.)
• Stay at the low-tier from generation to the next, staying in the Blue Ocean (no SNES, N64, GC etc. decline into the Red Ocean)
• Continue to provide “Bridge Titles” like MK:Wii, likely Zelda Wii to help draw consumers down-market
• Provide incremental evolutions (peripherals like M+, Balance Board, Vitality Sensor) or “mini-revolutions” over time (something that would integrally enhance the Wiimote like projection display or something)

I can see the last one being on point since Iwata listed as they plan to come out with a “new proposal” every 1-2yrs when speaking in reference to more peripherals like the Vitality Sensor at the investor Q&A this Spring.

Iwata has altered the processes within Nintendo so that it becomes a Wheel of Disruption. Remember the bongos? Iwata sent like three developers out to go make a bunch of different controllers and at the end they chose the bongos. Maybe the bongos were a little ridiculous, but the creation of such a process resulted in the Wii-Remote.

Iwata wants to present these new controllers every one or two years is a fruit of this process, of this Wheel. Many of these new devices will not catch on. But that is not the point. The point is that some of them will. And that changes everything.

One of the ‘rules’ I’ve heard of people very successful in business is that although they fail many, many times, they manage it so their failures are *small* and their success is *big*. Putting out these devices minimizes the risk. If the Balance Board failed, oh well. But it caught on big time. If the Wii had failed, Nintendo would not have been broken. But it did succeed.

You can see a pattern that when Nintendo is wrong, they are wrong small. When they are right, they are right big time. This is correctly managed.

Contrast this to the PS3 that bet everything on the “HD Revolution”. If Sony was right, it would have been right big time. But if Sony was wrong, it would be wrong big time. Well, Sony was wrong and the losses are massive.

Curiously, Christensen applies the Wheel of Disruption in a macro-context, and he uses it to demonstrate the rise and fall of the Japanese economy. He cites the rise of Japan was precisely because of wheels of Disruption occurring within Japanese companies. For example, the most famous disruptive company in the world is (believe it or not) Sony. Sony used the micro-transistor and created a whole new sort of disruptive products such as the walkman. Japanese car companies disrupted American car companies. History of post-WW2 Japan is a history of many disruptive companies. At the tail end of this would be Nintendo’s Famicom/NES disrupting the video game industry in America and everywhere else.

Japan’s economic decline is due to many reasons, but Christensen cites that the Wheel of Disruption is no longer turning in that country. Disruptive companies there are no longer disruptive. Christensen defines this macro Wheel of Disruption in a way where employees are free to exit and found their own companies and all. He cites differences in Japan and America in why the Japanese economy stopped.

Note that even though the Japanese economy was in decline, Nintendo doing its disruptive dance with the Wii shot the company’s value almost higher than any other in Japan. So clearly there is a big correlation between a disruptive company and its growth with Japan. Yamauchi, in his last interview, said that he hoped the ‘Revolution’ would not only save gaming but would reinvigorate all of Japan. Nintendo was certainly shooting for the moon.

This is why I believe the Wii, in Japan, is trying to help jumpstart certain anime companies and other media. They used to be huge Japanese cultural exports like video games.

But back to Nintendo, a sustaining move would be for Nintendo to compete with Natal or the Wand. Nintendo has no intention of doing that. Motion Plus was a move to make sure Sony and Microsoft didn’t get outside their shrinking Core Box.

Nintendo thought User Generated Content would be the next big disruptive thing. Well, you know how that went.

If Vitality Sensor performs well, I bet Nintendo will include such sensors with the successor to the Wii. Nintendo loves sensors. However, they likely won’t be like how the Vitality Sensor is. Have you ever imagined, when holding the Wii-Mote, that it could sense your heartbeat or other things through your hands? Exercise machines obviously have such sensors in their handles. Why not game controllers?

I laugh at all these people saying Nintendo will put out a Wii HD, meaning a what we know as the Wii but with HD output. How little they know Nintendo. As Reggie said, “It wouldn’t just be HD output…”, Reggie is trying to politely hint to our disruption-ignorant “game journalist” at Nintendo’s Wheel of Disruption.

Nintendo knows that in order for the next console to be successful, Nintendo has to disrupt the Wii. Nintendo will not make a Wii 2 with HD and better motion controls. That would be a path to irrelevance. No surprise there.

Nintendo fully expects the competition to copy them. However, Nintendo has to be surprised at how poorly Microsoft and Sony are copying them. Natal? The Wand? Good grief. And the software they are showing… Yuck!

One of the best things about disruption is that tons of money, which is Microsoft and Sony’s advantage, ends up being bad to the disruptive process. It is considered “bad money”. Christensen advises the disruptive segment of the company to be ’starved’. This is why Iwata likes to talk about how he chose a few developers, gave them no time and no money, and talk about what they made. It is not because, as some “game journalists” say, that Iwata enjoys torturing his employees. It is because it is a disruptive process. Less money equals better products. Who knew!?

The business of video games is very, very tough. Not only is a company faced with the daunting challenge of penetrating non-gamers, the company is faced with keeping the fire of interest burning for current consumers. It is pretty funny how Nintendo is doing this. Their greatest successes end up being their biggest problems and they must be thrown out the window! What created the Wii must be abandoned. What created the DS must be gone. In the same way, the DS came about because Nintendo threw out the old Gameboy thinking. Wii came about because Nintendo threw out the old console way of thinking.

I believe the long view picture is for Nintendo to create “Endless Revolutions”. The Wii is just the *first* ‘revolution’. The next console should be the *second* revolution. So on and so forth.

Meanwhile, Sony and Microsoft, so used to wielding their blunt strength and money in a sustaining move, end up being like big slow bears unable to catch the swift fox.

FPGA Journal is a publication for engineers in reconfigurable computing. The title hinted at that, but I was neverless surprised to find it inside =)

Build Crappy Products

This is a very, very good illustration of disruption. Everyone should read it.

I’ve been a salesman before. I have been a door to door salesman as well as a national one via phones. Very tough job. But you get a feel for what the customers are wanting since you have to talk and interact with them everyday.

I think that is a big reason why many developers and company heads get so disconnected. It is human nature to not want to deal with people you don’t want to deal with. And who wants to talk to the customers?

There is a computer back-up company named Carbonite that is selling extremely well with very high profits despite the recession. One thing I heard that was being done was that the heads of the company, the vice presidents, were obligated to be on the customer service phones for at least an hour once a week. This, perhaps, is a big reason to their success. By forcing them to talk to customers, they see customers as people and not just numbers on a page. It humbles them to realize that these customers are their bosses. It is a very different impact to see customers complaining about something listed on your survey as opposed to actually hear them complain to you.

I think the salesmen and marketing guys are in contact with the consumers more which is why they tend to know what they want.

Note how the article gives a shout about Human Nature? You’re not designing products for androids but flesh and blood humans.

Crappy products for non-customers! That is the disruption way! Fantastic article.

Contingency Planning For Lean Operations – Part I

Lean operations are driven by effective planning and efficient execution of core activities to ensure optimal performance is achieved and sustained.  The very nature of lean requires extreme attention to detail through all phases of planning and execution.  Upstream operations simply cannot tolerate any disruptions in product supply or process flow without the risk of incurring significant downtime costs or other related losses.

Effective risk management methods, contingency plans, and loss prevention strategy are critical components of successful operations management in a lean operation.  Risk management and preventing disruptions is the subject of contingency planning and requires the participation of all team members.

Successful contingency planning assures the establishment of an effective communication strategy and identification of core activities and actions required.  Contingency plans may require alternative methods, processes, systems, sources, or services and must be verified, validated, and tested prior to implementation.

Understanding and assessing the potential risks to your operation is the basis for contingency planning with the objective to minimize or eliminate potential losses.

Inventory represents the most basic form of contingency planning.  Safety stock or buffer inventories are typically used to minimize the effects of equipment downtime or disruptions in the supply chain. 

The levels of inventory to maintain are dependent on a number factors including Lead Time, Value, Carrying Cost, Transit Time (Distance), Shelf Life, Minimum Order Quantities, Payment Terms, and Obsolescence.

Why is this relevant?

Material and Labour represent two key resources that may be influenced by external factors that are beyond the control of any company policy or practice.  Internally controlled or managed resources such facilities, equipment, and tooling are less susceptible to unknown elements.  For the purposes of this discussion, we will examine Labour in a little more detail.

The H1N1 virus, originally known as the Swine Flu, is the latest potential health pandemic since the outbreak of SARS only a few years ago.  The government has been struggling to organize mass immunization clinics and to engage the media to aid in the cause.  In the meantime, the potential impact of the H1N1 virus on your operation remains to be an unknown. 

Experts have commented to the media that the lessons from the SARS outbreak have still not been learned.  One would expect that past practices would have already been adopted into new best practices from our experiences with other similar events in our history.

Government agencies at all levels (Federal, Provincial, and local) have mismanaged the activities required to procure and distribute the vaccine, and failed to provide an effective communication and immunization strategy to ensure the risk to public health was minimized and the at the very least understood.

The lack of coordination and accountability for the success or failure of the communication strategy, procurement and distribution of the vaccine, and other related activities are strong indicators that the planning process did not consider the infrastructure requirements and relationships needed between levels of government.

The lack of an effective communication strategy introduced confusion and speculation in the media and the general public.  Mass education only seemed to become more aggressive as incidents of severe H1N1 complications and related deaths were reported in the media.

If this really was a pandemic event, many operations today would (and may still) be adversely affected due to direct or indirect (supply chain) labour shortages.  Do you have contingency plans in place to address this concern?

It could be argued that “if we are affected to this extent, then our customers will be as well.”  This is not necessarily true unless your customers and / or suppliers are located in the same immediate area or region of your business.

People travel all the time, whether they are commuting to work from out-of-town or traveling to or arriving from a foreign country on business.  The source of exposure is beyond your immediate control. 

What other elements can directly impact labour?  We will explore some of these in our next post.  In the meantime, keep your hands washed and remember to cough into your sleeve.

Until Next Time – STAY Lean!

Unexpected and Appreciated – Uncommon Courtesy:  This morning, a person cut into the drive through lane ahead of us – not realizing the gap in the line was there for thru traffic.  Recognizing the error in drive through etiquette and to make amends, we were pleasantly surprised by the ”free” coffee at the pick up window.  Thank you ladies!

Roads are closed and areas of farmland are under water after 32 consecutive days of rain in County Fermanagh…. From BBC News. Full story

This site may contain information about: gulf of mexico water. The blog is also related to: ocean current.

Roads are closed and areas of farmland are under water after 32 consecutive days of rain in County Fermanagh…. From BBC News. Full story

This site may contain information about: farm. The blog is also related to: farm.

No one was injured in the collision

Rail commuters faced a second day of disruption after a crash led to a train derailment in Leeds.

The collision, between two empty East Midlands trains at the Neville Hill maintenance depot, took place in the early hours of Tuesday.

Northern Rail said services between Leeds and York were affected and bus services were running on some routes while the carriages were removed.

Passengers are advised to check with National Rail Enquiries before travel.

Network Rail said engineers worked through Tuesday night to remove overhead line electrification and allow a lifting crane to come on site and remove the crashed carriages.

Investigation started

The disruption was expected to continue until at least 2200 GMT, the company said.

A spokeswoman for Network Rail said: “Services will resume as quickly as possible but depend upon the lifting operation and weather conditions.

“Passengers are advised to check with National Rail Enquiries or their rail operator to check individual service details.”

A spokeswoman for East Midlands Trains said nobody was injured as a result of the collision.

“We are carrying out an investigation into the incident and would like to apologise to passengers whose journeys are affected,” she said.

Elsewhere, Northern Rail services are delayed between Leeds and Manchester Victoria due to flooding at Smithy Bridge.

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No one was injured in the collision

Rail commuters faced a second day of disruption after a crash led to a train derailment in Leeds.

The collision, between two empty East Midlands trains at the Neville Hill maintenance depot, took place in the early hours of Tuesday.

Northern Rail said services between Leeds and York were affected and bus services were running on some routes while the carriages were removed.

Passengers are advised to check with National Rail Enquiries before travel.

Network Rail said engineers worked through Tuesday night to remove overhead line electrification and allow a lifting crane to come on site and remove the crashed carriages.

Investigation started

The disruption was expected to continue until at least 2200 GMT, the company said.

A spokeswoman for Network Rail said: “Services will resume as quickly as possible but depend upon the lifting operation and weather conditions.

“Passengers are advised to check with National Rail Enquiries or their rail operator to check individual service details.”

A spokeswoman for East Midlands Trains said nobody was injured as a result of the collision.

“We are carrying out an investigation into the incident and would like to apologise to passengers whose journeys are affected,” she said.

Elsewhere, Northern Rail services are delayed between Leeds and Manchester Victoria due to flooding at Smithy Bridge.

Earn From Home Links Below:
Foreverliving India Foreverliving India Blog
Join ForeverLIving India
Foreverliving All India Distributor

There are two reactions from people once they realize what disruption is about. The first is a sense of joy, a sense of hope, a sense of confidence of the entrepreneur. The second is downright fear.

Clayton Christensen revealed that big business executives react to his talks on disruption with fear.

I, of course, am in that first reaction. Disruption taught me that I loved the computer revolution not because of computers. I loved the computer revolution because of the disruptions it unleashed. For example, snail mail was disrupted by email. Amazon disrupted brick and mortar book stores. Video games disrupted other entertainment mediums. It was disruption that I relished, not computers or their technology.

But it appears the second group is larger and vaster than the first. There is more fear against disruption. This fear turns into hatred.

Why would someone fear disruption? Obviously, big businesses do not want to be gored or made obsolete. But I think the big thing is the removal of prestige. Decades ago, a newspaper journalist had a type of ‘prestige’. Today, the same newspaper journalist is seen as a joke. The prestige is gone.

The business bloodsport of the computer industry that we witnessed with companies like Netscape trying to disrupt Microsoft (and being ripped to shreds afterward), of small computer companies completely disrupting the larger ones, is now, like a genie going outside the bottle, exiting the computer industry and affecting every industry in the world. A typical business has to not only compete on traditional terms. It has to compete in a global environment, against entrepreneurs with computers in South America, in Africa, in Asia, in places they never thought they would have to compete.

Scott Anthony, a disruption author, coined a term called “The Great Disruption” which is disruption becoming a macro-event.

What reaction does an entrenched big business have against disruption? Sadly, the reaction is to turn to legislation to out-law the disruptor! When Japanese car companies were disrupting American car companies, the American car companies went to Washington and tried to outlaw the Japanese cars (through tariffs or other means). Washington at that time wisely said, “No, you guys have to compete.”

This is the trigger for all the bail-outs we are witnessing. Wall Street has been disrupted as have newspapers, American car companies, and among others. Yet, they are being ‘bailed out’. A good illustration would be unions. Unions made sense in the Industrial Revolution, but they do not make sense now in the computerized world. Unions are shrinking all over and are being ‘bailed out’ as a reaction against disruption.

Why am I saying all this? It is to highlight that disruption is greeted with hostility if not outright banning from legislators. Imagine if the makers of mainframe computers could ‘ban’ the personal computer! They would if they could.

Recently, Reggie has aired his frustration about third party companies.

“I’m extremely disappointed. I’ve had this conversation with every publisher who makes content that is not available on my platform. The conversation goes like this: ‘We have a 22-million unit installed base. We have a very diverse audience… We have active gamers that hunger for this type of content. And why isn’t it available?’ I think for those games, typically decisions are being made two years prior, and so the decisions two years ago were that those types of games would not be effective on the platform. But we’ve shown that that’s just not the case. High-quality, effectively marketed against our installed base will sell, period end of story.”

It appears Nintendo thought that the high install base would be enough to attract third parties. After all, it worked on the DS, right? But there is a very critical difference between the DS and the Wii. The Wii is disruptive. The DS is merely innovative.

The first way how third parties reacted to the Wii was the “Birdman” approach. They thought they would copy Wii Sports and mini-games and rake in big bucks. They actually did put out effort in marketing and all. The “third parties” were only applying the “Industry Formula” to the Expanded Audience.

And it didn’t work.

Contrary to conventional belief, the Expanded Audience are not a bunch of retards who can easily be hoodwinked into buying mediocre garbage. It is the hardcore who have been manipulated to keep buying mediocre garbage. But the Expanded Audience is a far savvier customer. Not even Nintendo can easily sell to them. They rejected Wii Music as you saw.

So the third parties declare that no third parties can sell on the Wii. It is not arrogant to say that third parties cannot sell on the Wii. However, it is arrogant to say third parties cannot sell on the Wii just because THEY failed.

Third party company games are selling on the Wii. However, many of them are not considered traditional members of the “Game Industry”.

When the Wii came out, they tried to create a “Casual Game Industry”, and that blew up on them. You have to love the Expanded Audience. They would not allow themselves to be ‘industrialized’ as the hardcore have been.

I’m not surprised at the “Game Industry”’s reaction to the Wii. From their perspective, the Wii is a threat to their existence. This is why you keep hearing so much about “Wii HD” even from manufactured and made up sources (which are, bizarrely, dutifully reported as ‘fact’).

Wii HD is not about HD. Wii HD is about Nintendo abandoning disruption.

The “Game Industry” wants Nintendo to abandon its disruptive ways and return to the traditional core ways. While third parties say a Wii HD allows them to easily port over their game, this is also a lie. The “Game Industry” froze the Gamecube even though it had the same install base as the Xbox. Gamecube was deliberately left out.

And as this generation began, the “Game Industry” declared either further niche of Nintendo or its outright destruction as a console company. All analysts “agreed” that Nintendo would be last place. It is clear that the “Game Industry” wants Nintendo to be a game company, but not a console company. They want Nintendo to make Mario and Zelda and port it to all the systems.

One analyst who made the prediction that Nintendo was leaving the console business went into a rage when the Wii launched. I haven’t heard from him since. (Why would an impartial analyst be “furious” about a turn of events? The answer that comes to mind has to be the shocking conclusion.)

Atari and the other console companies crashed in the early 1980s was because of the “Game Industry” at the time overreaching. A foreigner comes in called “Nintendo” and re-creates the market.

While the NES was a disruption, what is fascinating is the sheer hostility against the little gray box. I remember the United States Congress going after Nintendo. The losers of Atari sued Nintendo and tried to take away their profits in court by saying those profits absurdly belonged to Atari. Electronic Arts and other computer software companies heavily resisted making games on Nintendo. So even back then, there was hostility towards disruption.

Third parties began to flock to Sega to stop Nintendo, but they didn’t like Sega too much either. Sega had adopted the same business strategy as Nintendo. I believe they didn’t like Sega because Sega was a game company like Nintendo. A third party had to compete against Sega’s games as well.

Sony, who was not a game company and did not create their own software, was immediately rallied by third party companies. It is this combination which created the beginning of the modern “Game Industry”.

Look at what happened to poor Sega. Sega competed with superior hardware and kept up with technological pace. What was the reaction? The reaction was that the “Game Industry” froze out Sega and did their best to destroy the company. The Saturn was quickly abandoned as companies jumped on Sony. The Dreamcast was entirely isolated by the “Game Industry”.

The “Game Industry” succeeded. Sega was destroyed.

Nintendo was increasingly isolated. Hilariously, the increase of Nintendo’s isolation was blamed on Nintendo. Many people believed this. No matter how far Nintendo would go with making development easier, with reaching out to third parties, with even allowing third parties to make games using their IPs, the console was consistently frozen. Remember that the Dreamcast, also, was easy to develop for. None of that mattered.

It appears that the “Game Industry” is so revenue mad that they are hostile to any game maker that also makes consoles. All software revenue goes to them, not to “First Party” games. Also, the “Game Industry” then becomes in full control without having to make the hardware. They can dictate what they want the hardware to be. But a console company with a first party game company can recreate hardware to fit the first party and the hardware will sell because of the first party. “Game Industry” cannot boss such console companies around since they have a first party to sell hardware.

But there is that concern that one, lone, hardware maker would dictate terms. So this is why Microsoft was welcomed.

The Console War was such a scam. No matter if the PS3 or Xbox 360 ‘won’, the “Game Industry” would go on in continuity. The “Game Industry” liked the console war because it was the PS3 and Xbox 360 fighting over THEM, on bribing their companies and all.

Nintendo was supposed to be third party by now. They were to make their Mario and Zelda games and port them to all systems.

To say the Wii shocked the “Game Industry” is an understatement. Investors demanded the companies make games for the Wii (while they were invested for the HD Twins). The “Game Industry” thought they could create a sister industry as “Casual Game Industry” and ‘industrialize’ these new Wii gamers. When this failed, the “Game Industry” returned to original course of freezing out the Nintendo console.

Yes, the Core Market is shrinking. Yes, it is because the “Game Industry” is a parasite off of gaming and slowly draining the life out of gaming. Nintendo believed that the “Game Industry” would want life to return to gaming. On this, Nintendo was incredibly naive.

The “Game Industry” has the context that it is about themselves first and at all times. If gaming dies, they do not care. They will have made their millions and their money. They don’t care about the health of gaming. They care about revenue. They do not care about customers.

Before, I would be thought to be seen as a madman to say the above. But the current situation with Activision has been an eye opener to many people. The “Game Industry” does not care about you at all. All the “Game journalists” are taking Activision’s side and throwing you, the consumer, into the jaws of exploitation.

There are two possible ways to remove the “Game Industry”. The first is to await the slow death of gaming. When it dies, so does the “Game Industry”. While this solution works, it is very messy and very destructive. This is the 1983 way.

The other way to remove the “Game Industry” is to separate the ‘industry’ from ‘gaming’. This is done through disruption. The “Game Industry” works on the Expanded Audience like a fish works out of water. It gasps, it flops around, and it either dies or gets back into the water again. In our favor, the water level in that pond is shrinking. Less and less fish can survive in the Core Market pond leaving room for only a few big fish. And these few big fish are finding out there is less small fish for them to eat. They are on the path to slow death anyway.

Reggie expresses his disappointment and surprise. But I am disappointed and surprised at Reggie. Didn’t he know that the “Game Industry” has been gunning for the removal of Nintendo as a console company for some time? Can’t he see that no matter what games Nintendo puts out, those games are always “wrong”? Can’t he see that Nintendo is always doomed, even if their system is sold out for three years, and that PS3 and Xbox 360 are always ‘primed for a comeback’, even if they are billions in debt and lagging in sales?

The “Game Industry” is scared shitless about disruption. It is the only thing that can really destroy them. In order to successfully combat disruption, the “Game Industry” would have to become disruptors themselves. This is very difficult to do, and it would go against their revenue seeking and machine-like business model way of thinking.

Remember that Wii HD is not about Wii HD. Wii HD is about Nintendo abandoning disruption. The “Game Industry” knows that Wii HD would destroy the Wii which is why they suggest it. If such a thing comes out, the Wii HD would be frozen and isolated just as the Gamecube and Dreamcast were.

Remember the “Game Industry’s” obsession over the Conduit? They ignore every Wii game, but then took much attention over the Conduit. Why the obsession over a small developer game? It was because of FPS and motion controls. A FPS with motion controls could disrupt the great cash cow of the “Game Industry”: typical FPS shooters. There was fear over such a game.

There is only one true obstacle that is preventing the growth of gaming. It is the “Game Industry” itself. The “Game Industry” would prefer to have a smaller market full of zombie customers (called ‘hardcore gamers’) who they can extract greater and greater amounts of revenue from than trying to sell games to disinterested people.

Nintendo comes to an interesting crossroads. They can either try to work with the “Game Industry”, try to ‘boost’ the “Game Industry” up, and then only watch in puzzlement as the “Game Industry” sneers, screams, and stabs Nintendo in the back. Or Nintendo can embrace what they have started with disruption and follow the road of disruption to its conclusion: the creative destruction of the “Game Industry”.

Wii launched like a farg out of hell. Wii’s launch far surpassed anyone’s expectations, even Nintendo’s. And the console was sold out for three years in America. How did this happen?

There are many explanations, and they are all right. The motion controls cut down the barrier to non-gamers. Wii had good software with Wii Sports. Wii was cheaper. Wii did have good marketing.

But the most important explanation was that the Wii was positioned and presented as the Anti-Game Industry console. The PS3 was $600 and had no real software. The Xbox 360 was $400 and was constantly breaking down. It was an easy choice for consumers to make.

From the consumer perspective, the lack of “Game Industry” games on the Wii is a blessing, not a curse. When people do not like ’shovelware games’, they are expressing their dislike at the “Game Industry” and its revenue hunting ways. The Wii received so much advocacy and support precisely because it was attacking the “Game Industry”.

Ever notice how when Nintendo follows the path of the “Game Industry”, such as with User Generated Content, that hostility replaces advocacy?

People have struggled to explain the bizarre reactions of the “Game Industry” to the best selling Wii. But the context I have found that makes everything make sense is that the “Game Industry” fears disruption and is doing everything in their power to stop it. If the “Game Industry” could go to Congress and outlaw the Wii, they would do so.

The question is whether Nintendo has the courage to follow through their disruption. Why won’t they do this? It is because they will be hated and despised. It is Human Nature not to want to be hated. Everyone wants to be liked. The question is whether the “Game Industry” will successfully fool Nintendo to abandon their disruption in the hopes that they will be liked and that game companies will put their games on their system.

I hope Nintendo will not be fooled. It is beyond doubt now that the only way for games to become mainstream is that the modern  “Game Industry” must be destroyed.

It will be no loss to witness the destruction of the “Game Industry”. They are nothing but a soul-less machine. Machine Men. Machine Minds. Machine Hearts. And it all equals to Machine Games.

Train travellers face a second day of disruption after a collision between two empty carriages led to derailment in Leeds…. From BBC News. Full story

This site may contain information about: international airport. The blog is also related to: flight airport.

My Media 21 project is inspired by the work of Wendy Drexler and Dr. Michael Wesch; this tweet from last week’s NEIT Conference reflects an essential question driving my Media 21 project:

As my Media 21 students have shared some new research reflections in the last week, I have felt both overjoyed and frustrated by responses.  How is it that some students have seen the last 15 weeks as the most challenging and rewarding learning experience of their lives that they hope will continue second semester while others have viewed the learning experiences more as a chore and something to simply “get done”?  Why do some students embrace reflection and original thinking while others chafe in the face of learning experiences that do not reflect the knowledge banking nature of today’s test driven educational climate?

In reflecting and returning to a reality that I faced when I adopted a literacy as inquiry stance as a classroom teacher in 2002, I am revisiting my studies of literacy as inquiry with Dr. Bob Fecho at the University of Georgia.  Just as some students resisted a learning environment I created that valued questions, not black and white answers, I see this resistance in some of my Media 21 students who seem to prefer learning activities that value regurgitation of facts rather than questioning or critical, creative thinking.  This question came up during Dr. Wesch’s keynote at NEIT:

In my corner of the world, my answer is “More than you might think.”  While some students are liberated by choice and free thought, others feel threatened by a learning environment that is inquiry driven and participatory in nature.    I can’t help but think that this phenomenon is easier to comprehend when you consider today’s students are among the first generation to grow up in a test driven school culture that is contradictory to inquiry.

What is inquiry? Here are qualities identified by classmate Sharon Murphy in Fall of 2002:

• Dis-ease. There are many questions raised without answers.

• Establishes more than the teacher as validator of knowledge/work.

• Feeling of responsibility to yourself and the class.

• Recognizes classroom as a complicated, non-laboratory place filled with complex, caring human beings.

• Fights culture of school that wants THE right answer.

• Doesn’t hide what is occurring in class and makes class part of determining what is occurring.

• Patience- doesn’t give up too quickly and realizes community/learning/inquiry doesn’t happen overnight.

Does this sound like the learning environment many school librarians crave yet find themselves hungering for it in the current educational landscape?

In revisiting my initial reading of Pedagogy of the Oppressed of 2002, Paulo Freire says the oppressed are often “hosts” of the oppressor (48) because they are so immersed in the culture of oppression.   Does this description fit today’s student who must buy into the testing culture so privileged (whether by choice or force) by public schools?  Does it also apply to many classroom teachers whose careers are judged by test scores and perhaps even our profession as school librarians as we are called upon to tie our programs to student achievement in order to “survive”?  How does the assimilation of the discourse of testing impact how students transactions with information and how they construct knowledge?

The current test driven culture values knowledge banking and correct answers; standardized curriculum and conformity to ways of knowing and learning are the hallmarks of contemporary American education.  In many schools, students and teachers feel pressured to “cover” knowledge precisely and efficiently.  Contrast these values to those Freire asserts:

“For apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and reinvention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other”(72).

So what does this all mean?  Right now, some key ideas are resonating with me:

• While my M.Ed. and Ed.S. studies focused on literacy as inquiry, I’m now thinking about information literacy and transliteracy through an inquiry lens.
• I’m wondering how do school libraries and librarians act as sponsors of these kinds of literacy in the spirit of Deborah Brandt’s work, Literacy in American Lives?
• I’m thinking about danah boyd’s concept and thoughts on power, information brokers, and information ecosystems as well as how inquiry plays out through these ideas.
• What are the implications of student resistance to inquiry driven learning environments and an inquiry stance on information literacy and fluency?

My big question:  how can inquiry driven learning and an inquiry stance on information literacy positively disrupt students who are entrenched and oppressed by the testing culture?  How can participatory librarianship support inquiry and students who find conversations about learning troublesome rather than empowering?   How do we address their “dis-ease” they feel as they are pushed out of their comfort zone?  How can school librarians and libraries be more effective sponsors of information literacy and transliteracy?

Ja, tänk om Linnéuniversitetet kunde bli Sveriges motsvarighet till ASU när det gäller ambition och framtoning. Jag blir ruskigt inspirerad av den här filmen som Linus postade en länk till i kommentarsfältet till inlägget Disruptive higher education.

Blir du lika taggad som jag av klippet nedan?

Om inte – varför? Jag tror benhårt på att universitet och högskolor, ja hela skolsystemet måste se sig självt i spegeln och förhålla sig till den samtida utvecklingen. Vad är vårt syfte idag? Imorgon? Vad kan vi åstadkomma om vi faktiskt, på riktigt allvar, rannsakar våra strukturer, vår output och vår potential?

/ Erik

A month ago, I did an interview with a Brazilian website called “Loading Time” . I’ve waited until now to put it up on this site. (translated version can be found here).  None of the hype for Super Mario Brothers 5 had occurred yet. The dedicated servers fiasco for Modern Warfare 2 hadn’t occurred yet.

The interviewer was surprised that I returned a twenty seven page document back to him (haha). The reason why I talk more is because of the medium. In newspapers or print, space is at a premium. But on the Internet, there is no physical space. So why not say more? If you are going to err, err on the side of more content rather than less.

Remember, this interview occurred a month ago.
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Do you think that New Super Mario Bros Wii will be a mass market hit like Mario Kart, Wii, Sports Resort or Wii Fit?

Definately. However, I expect the game to be declared a failure by the forum dwellers when it doesn’t move as many units as Modern Warfare 2 for the first couple of months it is out. If Miyamoto and his team do their jobs right, NSMB Wii will be haunting the best seller’s lists until 2029. The other 2d Mario games still sell strongly even today. I don’t think it will outsell NSMB DS though due to multiple NSMB DS games in the household which NSMB Wii will not have.

NSMB Wii is the first 2d Mario on the main consoles since 1995. In your opinion, what will be the impact of this game over the younger ones and the expanded audience?

Lately, Reggie Fils-Aime has curiously been suggesting a third entity existing outside the Core Market and Expanded Market. From what little he has said about it, he seems to be calling these people as those who have “Nintendo blood in them” but left the Nintendo consoles for whatever reason. These are not exactly the Expanded Market as they could be current HD console gamers. Fils-Aime sees them responding to NSMB Wii and even Punchout Wii. It appears Nintendo sees this group as the next area for Nintendo to expand in.

NSMB Wii will do well with the Expanded Market. It is a game females will play. It is also a ‘couple game’ where husband and wife can together (strangely, there aren’t too many of these games).

With the younger generation, this will be their childhood. 2d Mario isn’t so much a game as it is a childhood. Every generation should be allowed to grow up with 2d Mario as the NES and SNES generations did.

I saw a Hispanic couple purchasing a pink DS in a store. In the cart was a cute little girl around five or six years of age. The couple had the store employee unlock the glass, and it appeared the couple was trying to choose a certain game but were not sure which. They ended up in a toss-up between the Mario and Sonic Olympics game and NSMB DS. I believe the couple, who were not gamers, was trying to find NSMB DS based on a recommendation from a friend and remembered only ‘Mario’ in the title. They settled on NSMB DS. So the little girl with the new pink DS was about to grow up on NSMB DS as her first video game.

I think the same thing will occur with NSMB Wii. NSMB Wii is an obvious game to get for one’s child. The NES generation, who now has kids, will definitely be getting the game for their kids (and for themselves!).

Still talking about NSMB Wii, the game isn’t receiving much hype and even is been seen with some skepticism. In general, due to the strong of Mario’s name, could be considered as an overlooked game. Why do you think this is happening? Do you think that this lack of hype can be positive to the game?

I’ve seen many games come and go. Games that become classics never blatantly appear so at the time. Games that everyone talks about rarely become classics mostly because those games are relying too much on sizzle. NSMB Wii looks like a game that will age extremely well, and its multiplayer nature will keep people playing it many, many years from now. The lack of hype coming from the “Game Industry” on NSMB Wii is an indication to me of how promising the game’s strength will be.

I remember when Super Mario Kart was released. Many people thought it was lame, that it was going to be another ‘Mario game’ as Mario was becoming overused and kept appearing in various titles. But something in me persuaded me to not listen to the naysayers, and I got the game at launch. The game was just endless fun, something people did not want to stop playing. It sold and sold and sold. My Super Mario Kart was the most requested game to be borrowed by the neighborhood kids. The game had no real hype. Strangely, classics are games people do not think too much about at the time. They just keep playing them.

NSMB DS, while hyped before it was released, likely disappointed those who expected a Super Mario Brothers 5. But the game moved past the Nintendo fans and didn’t stop selling. I suspect the big reason why was the multiplayer. NSMB DS is one of the top DS multiplayer games.

No classic game was ever hyped before it was released (with the lone exception of SMB 3 or some Zeldas). The great games always come from right field, and no one expects them to be big. No one expected Wii Sports to be so big for example. No one expected NSMB DS to sell 20 million units. NSMB Wii was downplayed by the ‘journalists’ after E3 2009 and, despite no one in the “game industry” talking about it, excitement is building for the game.

At the 2009 edition of Tokyo Game Show, Metal Gear Solid 4 and Mario Kart Wii were chosen as the best games of 2008. Aside from their platforms, they are very different games. Do you agree with the TGS’s choices? What do you think about it?

They certainly epitomize the strengths of the platforms and what those consumers wish for that platform’s games to be. Metal Gear Solid 4 is the cinema type game which PS3 buyers largely would like. Mario Kart Wii is the arcade type game which is what Wii buyers want. If the games switched platforms, they would not be voted as the best! A cinema game is not what Wii owners want, and arcade gaming is not what PS3 owners are looking for.

From everything that I’ve read on the internet, you were the one who most criticize Nintendo for the Wii’s price cut. In your view, why this was such a bad decision by Nintendo?

Wii’s price was not the constraint on the sales. Cutting the price is just throwing away millions of dollars. A year ago, the Wii was sold out in America. A couple of years earlier, Wii was selling higher than its retail price. At one point, people were willing to pay $600 for a Wii off Ebay. You could sell a used Wii for higher than the retail price of a new Wii!

The price of the system is not what is holding back Wii sales.

What perhaps would have been a better idea might have been to cut the price on the Wii remotes. The sales of the Wii moved due to friends playing the Wii multiplayer. Nintendo should aim to have every Wii owner have four Wii-motes. $40 per controller, and this excludes the nunchuck and motion-plus, makes people not want to buy more controllers.

People hate buying hardware. In Nintendo’s situation, I see the constraint not on the console price but on the accessory price. When people buy more controllers, they play more multiplayer games, and that leads to more Wii purchases.

In your opinion, what’s the real reason behind the Wii’s price cut? The lack of games or investors/third party companies pressure?

Nintendo has vastly miscalculated the economic downturn and remained too optimistic about American sales. I remember a Nintendo investor telling me how at the last minute Nintendo revised their sales projections down. The investor seemed angry not over the sales projections being moved down but how Nintendo was changing things at the last minute. It showed that Nintendo was shell-shocked to the turn of events and not sure what the future is. This is not what investors want to hear. I expect the next Iwata conference with Nintendo investors to be very interesting.

I think Nintendo felt that the price cut would be a stimulating effect. But it won’t stimulate Wii sales long-term. I hope it is just a response to their ‘adventures in User Generated Content’ which hasn’t helped drive Wii demand.

In some of your blog posts, you’ve mentioned that Nintendo is fighting against disinterest on gaming. For you, after some of their recent mistakes, is it possible to Nintendo win this battle? Is it possible to regain their momentum?

Nintendo has to be going through some internal struggles. Here is one very interesting example. Nintendo started this generation (and apparently previous generations) believing that people bought and enjoyed Mario games because of Mario. Iwata wanted a “Mario game” at launch, but Super Mario Galaxy was delayed but eventually did come out.

Miyamoto has been haunted by the question of why the 3d Marios have never sold nearly as well as the 2d Marios. Nintendo’s reasoning is that 3d Marios are simply not as accessible as 2d Marios which is why their sales are so much lower. This has been Nintendo’s attitude this entire generation: accessibility. The Wii-mote was to cut down the barrier between gamer and non-gamer, for example. So Miyamoto designed Super Mario Galaxy in a way to be the most accessible 3d platformer ever. A fishbowl lens is used so the player can somewhat see what is coming around corners, the game often reverts to 2d form, and the game strives to be very giving in advice to the players.

Super Mario Galaxy’s failure to sell as a 2d Mario had to be stinging to Miyamoto. Within Nintendo, they love making 3d Marios. There was much creative interest about even making a new 3d Mario for the DS. You can divide Nintendo up between the older developers like Miyamoto and all versus the younger developers who grew up on Famicom games. The younger developers want to make games like what they grew up with such as 2d Mario and all. The older developers keep nixing this idea and say, “We have already lived through that time period. We want to make something new.”

What game developers want to do versus what consumers want to do is the biggest divide in the gaming world. While we see this present in most of the ‘hardcore games’, it is there within Nintendo as well. A great example of it is Zelda: Wind Waker and its cell-shaded cartoon style. While Nintendo developers were excited about this style, it was deeply divided in the West where all the sales were. This is why Nintendo resorted to a very different style in Twilight Princess. Yet, like all developers, they revert back to what they want to do. They returned to the cartoon style of graphics in the Zelda DS games.

NSMB DS has sold twenty million units and keeps selling. Miyamoto, when asked at E3 2008 why Nintendo doesn’t make another one since everyone wants it, he replied that the sales guys at Nintendo are demanding another one. Note that it was the sales guys, not the creative interest at Nintendo (aside from the younger developers there). Sales numbers cannot be denied. The massive, massive sales of NSMB DS cannot be excused. There was a massive demand for the game that spread well beyond Nintendo fans.

So in E3 2009, we witnessed something quite remarkable: Nintendo recognized 2d Mario and 3d Mario as separate series and not just “Mario”. But note how Nintendo’s creative interest was still with 3d Mario. They made Super Mario Galaxy 2 in great part because it is what the developers wanted to do. The first Super Mario Galaxy didn’t drive Wii hardware especially in Japan, so there was no reason to make it. Yet, game developers prefer doing what they want to do… even Nintendo developers.

The trainwreck has been the user-generated content Nintendo adopted for recent games such as Wii Music. In Nintendo’s view, they believed they were providing a new experience because they want people to feel the ‘joy of creation’ that they do when making games. This user-generated content direction, and Iwata and Miyamoto’s expressed excitement at this direction, reveals their distaste for creating game content and how they did not believe gaming was in the content business. They believed that increasing accessibility to ‘creation’ would be large sellers.

As bizarre as it might sound, Nintendo didn’t know what business games were in. Consumers do look at games in the context of content. And by content, I mean the ideas and imagination of fireworks the game is causing to explode in your mind. A very good game still has the fireworks exploding in the mind when the game is turned off.

Increasing accessibility is only one part of the equation. The Wii was sold out in America for years not because of Wii Sports but on the potential of games to come. Wii Sports was simply a showcase of that potential of a new context of gaming that motion controllers can do. By going the user-generated content route, the potential for the Wii evaporated. Consumers saw no content coming. And consumer interest isn’t going to last forever. Wii was launched three years ago. People expected some more interesting motion controlled games by now.

Mario Kart DS and Mario Kart Wii show how momentum can be reversed. The Mario Kart games this generation are massive sellers. They are bringing in the older fans as well as selling to the Expanded Market. Interestingly, the games are quite beefy in terms of value. There are many ways to play Mario Kart from time trials to single player races to multiplayer to battle mode (as well as online).

NSMB Wii and Zelda Wii with Wii Sports Resort controls are the right direction. Metroid: Other M and Galaxy 2 are going to fizzle and not drive Wii hardware.

One thing is for sure, Nintendo needs to stop making Gamecube Plus titles. Gamecube Plus titles would be a Gamecube game that isn’t fundamentally changed on the Wii. I don’t see any excitement over such titles like Animal Crossing Wii.

Imagine that when the FX chip was made during the SNES era, that Nintendo put Mario, Luigi, Toad, and Peach in Arwings and called the game Mario Starship! You would have the same basic game, same gameplay, same levels, but it is clear the game would not have been as successful as Starfox which carved out a new fictional universe. In the NES and SNES eras, Nintendo would not just present new gameplay but also completely new content. Not all the new content survived to future generations of course. Mach Rider and Star Tropics didn’t.

While Nintendo is clearly beginning to go back and revive some old series like Punch-Out!! or Kid Icarus, I think Nintendo needs to present new content propositions to customers even if on a very small scale. It is extremely risky to keep putting all the eggs in Mario, Zelda, and Metroid baskets.

Several of your blog posts have criticized Metroid Other M, mainly because is a Samus directed game, just like GBA´s Metroid Fusion. On the posts you stated that despite all other players, only the diehard fans cares about Samus and her motivations. Why do you think this will happen? Do you really think that Other M will be a commercial failure?

(offtopic/personal note: I´m not a Metroid fan, I´ve just played Metroid Prime 1, 3 and Hunters)

Allow me a Mario analogy. Nintendo not releasing a new 2d Mario in practically decades has been one of the craziest moves for the company. However, from Nintendo’s perspective, they thought people bought 2d Mario because of Mario. When Mario 64 and other 3d Mario games failed to bring in the numbers of 2d Mario, Nintendo believed the constraint was accessibility. 2d Mario was more accessible than 3d Mario so that is why it sold better, in their view. But consumers just loved platforming. This is why consumers flocked to Sonic the Hedgehog or Donkey Kong Country. NSMB DS sales versus Super Mario Galaxy reveal that Mario, as a character, is not the main feature that sells.

It is even more so with Metroid. No one buys Metroid games because of Samus. I still know people who have not yet realized that Samus is a girl. After all, one has to beat the original Metroid at the best speed to find that out and many people did not do that. When you ask a consumer what the Metroid experience is, they will not mention Samus Aran at all. They will talk about the creepy maze like environments, the isolation, and the feelings of exploration. Samus Aran’s suit is more interesting than she is. The last thing people will care about is a soap opera with Samus Aran.

The cutscene approach to Metroid is not going to light any fires. It certainly didn’t with Fusion or Zero Mission.

Sakamoto, as well as most game developers, need to understand a maxim understood by great artists: the imagination of the audience is superior to the imagination of the poet/playwright/director. Shakespeare was very adamant on this, and this maxim appears in all his plays. The reason why the audience’s imagination is greater than the developers is because Nature, herself, is far more shocking and interesting in imagination than Humans will ever be. Stimulating the audience’s imagination is the key. Blatant cutscenes aren’t going to achieve this.

And talking about that, do you still bet your money that “Metroid Dread” will be released around November 2010?

Sure. Nintendo tends to put out a major game on both the Wii and DS for their holiday season. For 2009, it will be Zelda: Spirit Tracks, the second Zelda DS game. For 2010, the Nintendo DS title for the holiday clearly won’t be another Zelda. It won’t be a new 2d Mario game since the NSMB team is busy working on NSMB Wii. There has been talk about making a brand new 3d Mario game for the DS. However, with Galaxy 2 coming out in 2010, I do not think Nintendo would put out another 3d Mario then. The only big hole left would be a 2d Metroid and that would tie in well if there is a consumer backlash against Other M.

While Nintendo has a pattern of risk with their franchises, they wisely protect their series by releasing a traditional title at the same time. It is their contingency plan. When Metroid Prime was released, which was very risky, it was coupled with Metroid Fusion (2d Metroid) as a contingency plan in case the market rejected Prime. When Donkey Kong Country was released, which was a major reboot to the Donkey Kong franchise, Donkey Kong ’94 was released as a contingency plan. I suspect that even Galaxy 2 was made and showed off at E3 2009 in case there was a backlash against NSMB Wii, in case consumers rejected a 2d Mario game on the home consoles.

Now, I may end up being very wrong. However, I don’t think this prediction is absurd in the way Pachter’s Loch Ness “Wii HD” to come out in 2010 is.

About Malstrom:

So, let´s talk about you as a gamer.

You have mentioned sometimes in your blog that you were a PC hardcore gamer at the 80’s. And then the Japanese grey box called NES appeared. Can you describe how the impact of the NES was over you as a gamer?

The console market crash in America gave rise to a belief that all gaming would be on the PC. The PC revolution was truly on. As the commercials would say, why buy a video game console that could do nothing but play games whereas you could buy a computer and do more things than play games? Strangely, this type of advertising I am seeing replicated with the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 as they are trying to be more of a ‘living room computer’ instead of a straight game machine.

People complain that PC gaming is tough because there are so many different hardware configurations for games. And this lead to constant headaches and game crashes. But remember back then, there was the PC as a game platform. The Commodore 64 was just the Commodore 64. There were accessories such as the disk drive and all, but the hardware was all the same.

PC gaming innovated in two main ways. The user interface allowed brand new types of games to be made thanks to a keyboard and, later, the mouse. Since the computer is not an arcade machine, games tended to be much longer. They were far more cerebral than games today. Think of the adventure games of the past. Games really strived to stimulate one’s mind rather than one’s senses. The second major innovation was that PC gaming allowed anyone to make and sell a game which opened the doors to new developers. Some of the best selling games such as Montezuma’s Revenge were made by 16 year old kids. The Oliver Twins are a great example of that phenomenon. The ‘game developers’ then did not see themselves any differently from other gamers. To them, gamers were their friends, and they saw game creation as making games to entertain their friends. A computer game industry began to develop with the major company being Electronic Arts. Electronic Arts was wildly innovative back then with games ranging from Archon to M.U.L.E.

Despite the rapid success of computer gaming, there was a group of gamers being overlooked since the Atari Crash: children. Children did play computer games because they had no where else to play them. But computers are not designed for children. Children do not understand all the things about computers. They had difficulty in many of the complex games. Computers were used for work, not play. Children wanted to play. And since there was only one computer in a house back then, a parent couldn’t have a child hogging the computer playing games when work needed to be done.

The only other place video games were at was in the arcades. And children cannot drive themselves to the arcades.

Nintendo must have seen this back then. The success of the NES was entirely due to children and their parents. I just saw the ‘Family Gaming’ on it and went “Phhht, that thing is never going to sell,” and went back to my computer games. When I first saw the thing in person, I thought its Japanese controller that had no stick was insane. How in the heck do you play with something you cannot grab on to?

The light gun attracted me. You cannot play with a light gun on a computer after all. So I shot some ducks, and I said to the kid holding up the gun, “This is what is going to big!” “No,” he replied and put in Super Mario Brothers. “This is what is going to be big.” And Super Mario Brothers made no sense to me probably because I kept dying at it. The weird Japanese controller took getting used to (and is why NES Advantages, which was the closest thing to an NES arcade stick, sold so well).

Super Mario Brothers was a game everyone was obsessed about. Back then, since the game came with almost all NES systems, Super Mario Brothers became a communal experience. Children could talk to each other about the game. I recall being obsessed trying to explore all its secrets, and rumors persisted that Minus World led somewhere. These same rumors persisted about a secret world in Metroid as well.

When I first played Legend of Zelda, I didn’t know what to put in as my name. I had never heard of “Link” and didn’t feel like putting in my name. So I entered the name “Zelda”. Putting in “Zelda” starts you on the Second Quest, but I did not know this. All I knew was that the game was ferociously hard, and none of the Zelda maps or hints matched what was in the game. I gave up on it, and I found Zelda II to be far more fun likely due to the hints and maps actually fit what I was playing. I didn’t realize I had been playing the Second Quest to Zelda until years later.

Most game playing back then would today be called a ‘party experience’. Everyone wanted to see what new game you were playing. There were many multiplayer games to play. But most importantly, it seemed everyone was trying to show how superior they were through their ‘mad skills’ at the game in front of their friends. The video game console allowed these gatherings where the PC did not. I fondly remember playing Life Force for the first time and dying, over and over again, on the first stage where walls and arms grew from the oddest of places. Co-op games were not common so games like Double Dragon II or Contra or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II were very popular.

One important thing back then was that even the bad games were fun. Everyone knew they were bad games, yet they were still fun to clown around in. Today, bad games are massive wastes of time. But since games were short back then, a bad game could be fun to play with for a little while.

The rise of the NES is very interesting. While the console was brought in by kids, their parents did play it too. They played the sports games such as RBI Baseball, they even played through Legend of Zelda and tough games like Solomon’s Key. As games got more complicated and larger, they were left behind. They just lacked the fast fingers necessary for the newer games.

As the NES sales accelerated, complaints came in from three different areas. One was United States politicians trying to use the fact that Nintendo was a Japanese company to say that the Japanese, who had taken over electronics and cars, were now mind controlling your children. These politicians made things very difficult for Nintendo and helped prop up Atari’s bogus lawsuit claims.

Another group was the analysts who expected the game console market to crash like Atari did. Every year, they said, “This is Nintendo’s last good year.”

And the third group would be computer gamers and computer game companies. The President of EA, Trip Hawkins, resisted investors’ demands that he make games for the NES. He insisted that the NES would implode, and gaming would return to computers. Hawkins relented when the investors threatened to remove him. So 1990 was a major, major year when it was announced that Electronic Arts would make games on the NES. It was the original ‘betrayal’ as many computer gamers looked at the NES as a kid’s toy and NES games as the hardcore do today with ‘casual gaming’.

But they also had a point. An RPG like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy was like a cruel joke to them. Why would anyone sit in front of their TV for hours in a mediocre RPG? With a PC RPG, such as Ultima, one had the entire keyboard, could easily write notes, and it was a much larger world. The Japanese RPGs felt ‘dumb down’ to them.

One mainstay of gaming back then was that it was expected for the gamer to make notes and maps on their own. The first time I saw a game that drew the map in detail as you played was Ultima Underworld and that was the late 80s. Games such as Metroid and Zelda had the expectation that the gamer would draw maps and notes on their own.

For gaming as a whole, there was a type of music revolution that went on that no one has noticed. While the PC platforms such as the Commodore 64 were spinning nice little tunes, Super Mario Brothers single handedly popularized background game music. There is a reason why almost all games prior to Super Mario Brothers did not have any continuous background music.

The NES became popular due to very young non-gamers, kept being declared doomed all the time by analysts, was a generation behind in graphics to the computers at the time, had a bizarre new controller that went away from the traditional controller, sold out everywhere with constant shortages, had many controllers such as a gun, and a pad you stood and walked on. What a quirky console!

For someone used to play games like Ultima, M.U.L.E. or Lode Runner, how was the experience to face for the first time games like Super Mario Bros or Mega Man? Is it possible to describe it?

People were fans of individual games back then, not of companies. There was no chatter of the ‘industry’ then or a hype industry (at least, not among the gamers). Everyone loved Donkey Kong and Popeye. I did not know what Nintendo was. The first I heard of Miyamoto was that Nintendo Power interview of him when Super Mario Brothers 3 was being made.

The best way to describe the rise of the NES was Japanese invasion. In the 80s, Japanese products were invading everywhere from Sony’s music products to Japanese cars. When Robotech first aired, people were shocked. This paved the road to the rise of anime in the West.

Americans weren’t unfamiliar with Japanese games. Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Pac-Man, and Zaxxon were all Japanese made. But arcade games and Atari Era games were mixed with many Western titles such as Pitfall or Asteroids or Pong.

NES was all Japanese. It had to be since the home console market had crashed in the early 80s. Japanese games were very different from Western titles. The content and ideas of the games were so zany and wild that no Western publisher would have touched them. At that time, the West could not have made Super Mario Brothers or Mega Man or Gradius.

Japanese like linearity in their games while the Western mind takes a more open-ended approach. Take the shmup. Games like Gradius are very linear, and the game is very tunnel like as the screen scrolls on its own. The Western shmups were more arena based. In Uridium, the player could fly back and forth and the screen scrolled whichever way the player went. Star Control and its ancestor, Space War, were arena based as the space ships were defined more to an arena. This difference is even felt today as Western RPGs are more open ended while JRPGs are more linear. While Final Fantasy 1 and Dragon Quest 1 may have seemed open ended, they used items or monster levels to move the player through the game. In games like Ultima, the world is not restrictive at all. This is why games like Oblivion are open ended today. It is why Grand Theft Auto could not have been made by the Japanese.

The linearity allowed supreme polish of the game’s content since the developers knew where the player would be at a certain moment. Western games, while they were often open ended, were nowhere near as polished at certain moments. The Japanese games oozed an arcade like quality that was missing on the computer games. This is what attracted many computer players to the NES. This is also probably why the Japanese games have aged better than Western games made at the same time.

I think I rented the entire NES library! Games were so much fun to rent back then (unlike today when you have to learn new controls, plod through boring tutorials, and watch nauseating long-winded intros). You knew you found a good game when you just couldn’t stop playing it. I remember renting the first Mega Man and being frustrated. I could kill Bomb Man, but I don’t think I got too far anywhere else (if anyone laughs at my lack of progress, remember that games were still graduating from their arcade simpleness. A game liked Mega Man required skills many people had difficulty playing with at the time like the platforms on Guts Man stage or the disappearing platforms in Ice Man’s stage).

When I rented Mega Man 2, I fell in love. The game was just so much fun. I didn’t know why it was fun, but I couldn’t stop playing it. I think I got up to the last stage in Wily’s castle (and died for some reason), but that didn’t stop me from buying the game. I bought Mega Man 3 the day it was released. It was really something playing that game the day it came out (you never recognize the classics when they come out, you are too busy having fun with them). I did buy Mega Man 4 but was somewhat disappointed with it as I didn’t buy Mega Man 5 or 6 (though I rented them).

Super Mario Brothers was madness as everyone knows now as was Zelda. I get very annoyed when ‘journalists’ write that Zelda II or Super Mario Brothers 2 were ‘disappointments’. The games were consistently sold out and parents were driving to different states to get the game. There was a massive cartridge shortage in 1988 I believe.

Super Mario Brothers 3’s launch was something. It is the only game that has ever matched the hype. And the game had massive hype such as the Wizard movie. It was one of those games you didn’t stop playing. As expected, the game was constantly sold out.

The way how people responded to the games that would spawn vast franchises down in time are nothing like conventional wisdom. For example, while today people might say Zelda is about the story or about the Zelda universe or something like that, no one played the first Zeldas because of ‘story’ or ‘Zelda universe’. Zelda II had a very different overworld than Zelda 1 (Zelda 1 had two overworlds with the second quest). And no one played the early Zeldas because of “puzzles”. There were no puzzles in Zelda I or II beyond moving a block or bombing a wall. Unlike the later Zeldas which would focus on story, puzzles, and consist mostly of an obstacle course dressed up as a dungeon, the early Zeldas were about the maps and exploration of that map. The early Zelda games felt *very big* as if a gigantic world was placed onto a cartridge. The golden cartridge was absolutely perfect for the Zeldas. Remember that the original Zelda was one of the first home console games to have a battery. Since console gaming was very arcade centric, the original Zelda was like a massive, epic arcade game that never ended. No one had ever seen anything like that. Computer games could save, but those type of computer games were not arcade centric.

The response to Super Mario Brothers was not due to Mario so much as due to the craziness of the Mushroom Kingdom and Subcon Land. Consider that Mario must run on the ceiling in the underground which takes him to Warp Zone. It doesn’t make any sense to run on the ceiling in the underground. There are beanstalks that go to the sky where Mario jumps on gigantic mushrooms. Mario must dodge flying turtles. The game had a very trippy experience to it which was replicated well enough in SMB 2 and SMB 3 (come on, Mario touches a leaf and turns into a raccoon and then flies to a bunch of clouds with happy faces on them???). This response also occurred in the first Super Mario Kart where it made no sense why racing go-carts one could launch shells at one another especially go-kart seeking red shells. It was fantastical.

Metroid attracted a similar trippy response. The audio of the game is very haunting, and the game makes no sense. How could Samus turn into a ball? Why are there so many vertical corridors? Where the heck do you go? The villains made no sense. Why is the last boss a giant brain? What is with those metroids? The big thing was that there were so many hidden places, so many walls you could pass through. Metroid was more like a transdimensional experience rather than the ‘isolated and alone with alien atmosphere’ as people describe it these days.

I have too many NES memories, more than I should talk about. One very revealing way to illustrate the gamer experience of that time is to take an NES emulator and its games and to separate the games by year. Make separate folders of 1985, 1986, 1987 and so on. Then play the games folder by folder. You will see the most rapid and massive progression of console gaming in the shortest amount of time. The early 1986 type games were stuck on one screen (Wrecking Crew) while a few could scroll one way (Super Mario Brothers, Excitebike). 1987 and 1988 games began to all be scrolling one way at least (Gradius) with some scrolling both ways (Super Mario Brothers 2). There was also the addition of passwords that allowed games to be larger (Mega Man 2, Metroid, Kid Icarus). The Zelda games used a battery that made them more expensive to make, but it allowed a very epic experience (Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy). After 1988, most games were scrolling back and forth and up and down and had batteries or, at least, passwords.

There was a Virtual Console back then. They were called ‘arcade games’ and their ports attracted many people. Gyruss, Pac-Man, BurgerTime- all of these were snapped up people who played them in the arcades or on older systems.

The box art for the American NES games was all over the place. There was no standard box design. NES games came in all sorts of shapes and designs! However, in America the cartridges were standardized and all appeared the same (except for the unlicensed Nintendo games). In Japan, cartridge design wasn’t even standardized so the Famicom games have wildly different cartridges. I recall it disappointing in the SNES era remembering how boring game boxes looked since they all appeared the same.

While the SNES was very much adventure and RPG game centric, the NES did not have many of those type of games. It was simply the times. Then as now, game companies copied whatever were the best selling titles. The two dominant types of games were platformers, thanks to Super Mario Brothers, and shmups, thanks to Xevious and Gradius. The shmup was the equivalent then of what FPS is today.

There was no such thing as ‘franchise’ or even ‘genre’ described of games back then. If you look at the NES library, you will find a wild range of games that cannot be pinned in any ‘genre’. Game companies made sequels to games that sold well, but ‘franchise’ is what people described to them starting in the 16-bit Era.

In your blog you´ve talked a lot about NES games, but writed almost nothing about SNES or N64 games. Did you overlooked these generations? In case of affirmative answer, what was the reason?

It is a mistake to write about something you do not know.

I stopped being a console gamer during the SNES Era. The beginning of the SNES Era was very interesting and probably had the best launch games of any console ever made. Super Mario World, F-Zero, and Pilotwings. Then you had games soon following like Super Castlevania IV, Contra 3, Gradius 3, and Final Fantasy 2 (IV). I grew disinterested when Nintendo began going after Sega (who was doing a phenomenal job at that time). The “console war” and its putrid advertising were not fun to me. This was the time where gaming was going more the “Mortal Kombat” direction which I found boring and not for me. Nintendo had stopped making 2d Mario games. Yoshi’s Island had a huge backlash due to its art style at the time. Oh yeah, and there was the Virtual Boy. Meanwhile, PC gaming was doing network gaming and beginning to go online. There was also the birth of FPS and RTS gaming. PC gaming was far more exciting then (whereas in the mid 80s to early 90s, console gaming was really exciting).

I didn’t own a N64 or Gamecube. But I played it through friends’ systems. Nothing was ever released on those systems that made me want to buy them (or the PlayStations). I did not like 3d gaming. I had many problems trying to play these games with those insane controllers. This is likely why I could appreciate the Wii-mote prior to Wii’s release when the hardcore kept calling it ‘gimmick’. They did not understand. Moving in 3d environments with analog sticks is very difficult to learn unless you are a kid and don’t know any better.

I talk mostly about the NES because it is the system that has most in common with the Wii. Both the NES and Wii are disruptive. Both the NES and Wii focused on ‘expanding the audience’ instead of inane “console war”. Some people are finding the Wii to be very different and almost enigma like. However, there is a precedent for it. It is the NES. Nintendo is truly getting back to its roots.

I recall telling stories to gamers many years ago about how one used to buy an Atari 2600 and the entire neighborhood would be going through your house, of how a game console once had a prized spot in the living room and was showed off, of how everyone in the family played the thing, and how there was a madness and constant sell-outs of NES games around 1988. They would just roll their eyes at me! I am so happy that many people (at least in America) could witness this phenomena for themselves with the Wii being sold out for years, with the entire neighborhood going to your house to play the Wii and be in awe of it, and of the entire family playing the console.

Gaming now belongs to the New Generation. I want them to have the similar wonder and enjoyment that I did. I want children to grow up with 2d Mario again and to look at the Mushroom Kingdom as fantastical. I want them to grow up with a console that is not stuck in a kid’s room. The best games children will play are going to be those that they play with their family.

Recently, you´ve written a post about the retro games magazines and you seemed kind a worried about this movement. What´s your opinion a bout this? Is favorable or against it?

I don’t recall being worried. Do only new games fight for the attention of gamers’ playing time? Of course not. All games existing fight for the attention of a gamers’ playing time. I do wish game companies, including Nintendo, realize their biggest competition is not the games currently on the market or other entertainment mediums but older games off the market. I’d rather play Asteroids or Joust than most new games. I think the ‘Retro movement’ is indicative of this.

When games compete against the past, their sales have broken out. Mario Kart DS was designed to “beat” SNES Super Mario Kart. Wii Sports was designed to “beat” the NES sports games and look what happened there.

I think the ‘retro game movement’ is an indicator that the market expects the classics to be competed against. Gamers are flocking to the retro banner because the “game industry” is not putting out anything that can hold a candle to those games despite the increase in production quality.

Do you play the current gen games? About them, what do you think they miss compared to the 80’s and 90’s classics?

Do you mean Next Gen type games of the ‘hardcore vein’? The answer is no. Aside from DS and Wii, and a few PC games (mostly RTS), I don’t play any games.

It is not what I miss about the classics so much as I hate about the present. And you know what I hate? I hate how game developers have no respect for the customer’s imagination. They do not allow their games to be seen by the customer’s imagination. No, they must force their imagination down our throats. The current games’ obsession of story, cut scenes, trying to be like Hollywood, are all obsessions over the game developers’ imagination. But, surprise, the game developers’ imagination doesn’t matter in gaming. It is the player’s imagination where the magic happens. Anything that adds more fireworks to the player’s imagination is good. Anything that forces the developer’s imagination onto the game is bad.

Games are not just interactive experiences for the player. They are also imagination experiences. Taking away the imaginary control of the game is as bad as taking away the interactive control. The classics cannot be beat, no matter what the technology is, because the imagination the classics caused will be better than anything a developer ever puts into a game. Games should trust the player’s imagination more and the game developer’s imagination less.

Let me give an example of this. Miyamoto is a very smart guy for being able to make Super Mario Brothers. But it was not Miyamoto’s imagination that made the game magical. It was your imagination. Miyamoto does not fully understand the consumer experience of Super Mario Brothers. In fact, no game developer can fully understand the consumer experience of their games. They cannot look at the consumer’s imagination. In the same way, a writer or a radio guy cannot fully understand their audience’s imagination. Theater, despite more elaborate props and sophisticated realism, declined while Shakespeare makes up at least 50% of all produced plays in America. Why is Shakespeare so good? His plays have no main props and certainly no realistic sets. It is because Shakespeare intentionally tweaked and sparked people’s imagination. The magic of Shakespeare is not from him but from the imagination of the audience. Shakespeare even admits this blatantly with having Falstaff declare that the source of wit is only half from him but the other half comes from the audience.

What I despise is the creation of “Game Gods” who are seen as the source of the imagination and magic of the game. They aren’t. The magic and imagination is coming from the player. It is the game developer’s job to properly excite it.

Star Control 2 is considered a classic game. The designer (who also worked on Archon and Mail Order Monsters) revealed in an interview that the reason why players hold the “story” and “universe” in such high regard is because he intentionally excited their imaginations often by referencing things that happen off game. For example, what is Frungy, the “Sport of Kings”? No one knows. But the player imagines it. The dialogue and story is written in such a way to point outside the game and to force the player to imagine it. All the talk about extinct races, the Sentient Mileu, the Precursors, all these exist in the imagination of the player. The Arilou and the Orz were crafted to talk about events off screen in ways the player has to imagine. All the races’ back stories point in that direction.

Today, games are designed to illustrate the events in the game engine or in cursed cinematics. To reverse the writing axiom, games need to TELL and not SHOW. Tell me that the princess has been kidnapped, I do not need it to be shown. The writing axiom of showing and not telling was made solely to excite the reader’s mind as showing it, and doing things like writing in present tense, will do. However, this can go too far as if an author takes a chapter to describe a flower.

I miss the focus on imagination most of all. I also miss the spirit of rock-and-roll that was once in gaming. Is it any coincidence that Capcom and Blizzard rose to prominence based on games called “Rock Man” and “Rock and Roll Racing”? And people wondered why music games such as ‘Guitar Hero’ or ‘Rock Band’ became so popular.

From the past to nowadays, generation after generation, the videogames in general have moved from its arcade roots to become more and more a cinematic experience. What do you think is the reason behind it? It was a natural and gradual shift or was by the vanity of game designers and producers?

It is caused by not understanding the medium correctly. When television was invented, television news was a bunch of radio guys sitting around and talking about the news. This made sense for radio but not television. Television news would eventually be realized in actually showing footage of the events they were being talked about.

The medium of gaming is being misunderstood as a feast for the senses be it the eyes, the ears, or the hands. But gaming is really a Theater of the Mind. The imagination of the developer is irrelevant. It is all about the imagination of the player.

All the cut scenes and story are all the poisoned fruit growing on the belief that the game developer is the source of imagination that goes into games. The imagination required by a game developer is utilized more in guessing how a player will act or how a player will feel and think at certain moments. It seems the game developer does not like using their imagination in this way and believe they feel it ‘proper’ to use it in the way of crafting their ‘vision’ not unlike a movie director.

You should know that you are mostly hated by the majority of the game forum dwellers, like those from Neogaf. Do you realize what is the reason why they hate your game articles?

It is because the articles were influential.

There are many game journalists who hate N’gai Croal because, despite him beginning to play games when the Dreamcast came out, he has had more influence and done more things than they ever will.

Video game message forums are like a video game themselves where the posters compete to be the ‘superior’ poster there either in ‘smarts’ or ‘wit’. Often, it ends up imploding into retard rodeo.

Another factor, in big part I think it is because most forums, especially NeoGaf, are crawling with viral messengers. And people like me are a major obstacle to these viral messengers. What can a viral messenger say to the Blue Ocean Strategy or disruption? They can’t. It is beyond them and cannot be argued against. The viral messengers tend to focus on something other than the facts. The pattern is to put a wedge between the console company and its fans. For example, they go around everywhere saying that Nintendo is “abandoning the hardcore” or “abandoning their fans”. While there is much stupid on the Internet, the repetitious comments and forum posts are not a coincidence. Blue Ocean Strategy and disruption have totally de-railed the viral marketers attacks on the Wii. All they can do is attack me. Since I have no personal information up on myself, all they are left with is, “He is just a Nintendo fanboy!”

Another reason perhaps is that I’m a fan of gaming but not of the “Game Industry”. Places like NeoGaf and other forums are a little too worshipful of people in the “Game Industry”, and they talk about who is moving to which company or what someone said very seriously. I don’t take the “Industry” seriously at all. To me, the “Game Industry” is a big fat joke, and we, the consumers, are the punch line. I do not believe looking at people in the “Game Industry” as ‘rock stars’ is proper and is very harmful to the mission of gaming. If anyone joined the “Game Industry” to become a rock star, they are in gaming for the wrong reasons and should leave.

I think it comes to gaming forums losing influence and alternatives contexts of information gaining influence is the cause of their distemper.

Just for curiosity, what’s the reason behind the Malstrom character? Why Malstrom was created?

Ego is a poison to learning and taking risks. I want to talk about gaming, not talk about myself. Besides, why should I matter? My personal self is entirely irrelevant.

It is Human Nature to imprison ourselves by thinking how other people will see us. Malstrom frees me to not care how other people see me. It also forces people to look at the message instead of the messenger. The lack of personal self has frustrated the viral marketers who cannot target a shadow. Anonymous on the Internet does not only mean people acting mean. It can also be used for good. Benjamin Franklin wrote anonymously. The Federalist Papers were anonymous. And recent research shows that Shakespeare was likely a pseudonym.

About Sony and Microsoft:

In your blog you call the Microsoft Natal as “prenatal” and even have made jokes of it. In your opinion why Natal will be an epic fail?

Microsoft is a marketing company, not a technology or software company. Decisions in the company come from the marketing side. For example, Vista was an absolute failure and greatly harmed the Microsoft brand. Windows 7 is actually Windows 6.1, and is known as 6.1 within the company, but it is being marketed as Windows 7. The mediocrity and problems that plague Microsoft software is due to the company’s focus being not on the consumer experience (as Microsoft does not have to sell to consumers, their products are bundled with generic PC hardware).

Microsoft has been very successful in their marketing, so successful that their marketing positions are taking as the ‘premise’ by many people. For example, the belief that computer viruses are like biological viruses, that they are everywhere, and simply part of the world and cannot be avoided, is a brilliant marketing move. When someone gets a virus, they do not blame Windows’ shoddy construction, they blame themselves as if they didn’t wear a coat in the cold. Another premise is that Windows has 95% (or whatever) marketshare. This isn’t true because Windows is bundled with generic PCs, there is no OS market because the OS is bundled. It is like saying the Wii remote dominates the “controller market” when it is ridiculous to say there is a “controller market” since they are bundled with all the consoles. It has to be seen as the ‘computer market’. Companies like Apple do not compete against Microsoft, Apple competes against Dell, Asus, HP, and other computer companies. Another premise is that Microsoft “saved” Apple by buying their stock in the late 90s. What really happened is that Microsoft was caught red-handed stealing code from Quicktime and the U.S. courts forced Microsoft to purchase Apple stock as well as put Office on the Mac. But you never hear about this. Much of the PC tech magazines and all are very much extensions of Microsoft marketing.

Investors are demanding that Microsoft expand as there is no future growth in selling OS and Office. So Microsoft is putting out different products in the consumer market. All these products keep bombing. One high profile case was Microsoft making PlayForSure which was a coalition of different companies to make music products for Microsoft, and, unprecedented in business, Microsoft dumped them unceremoniously to make the Zune (which also bombed) to go after Apple’s rising iPod.

There is only one *bright* spot. It is the Xbox Division. Despite the Xbox blowing up billions of dollars, it is the closest thing to ‘success’ Microsoft has had in the consumer market. Microsoft actually thought they had this generation in the bag. They thought their main competition was the PlayStation 3 and were dismissive of Nintendo. However, Microsoft began to get worried when Nintendo kept talking about disruption. In 2006, Microsoft even began trying to copy Nintendo with their talk on disruption by calling XNA as ‘disruptive’. They clearly began seeing Nintendo as a major threat but wouldn’t do so publicly. The Xbox 360 was designed to destroy the PS3. So they need something to destroy Wii.

Natal, as a business strategy, is to co-opt the Wii revolution. This is one of the three choices a disrupted company can take, and it is the most aggressive one. This is why Microsoft is now suddenly saying that they want to “spread gaming to the masses”. Microsoft’s business strategy response to the Wii is sound.

However, the Natal as product is a very different story. I don’t believe Microsoft understands the Wii audience and likely believes it is all about ‘casual gaming’. At GDC 2007, people were wowed about a company making motion controlled games with a camera. IGN even went to Reggie Fils-Aime and asked if he saw it. I think the marketing department of Microsoft saw it, thought it would be cool, and that was the seed that became Natal.

When Natal was introduced, we saw laser beams shooting from the console to scan a skateboard, we saw the ‘video game magazines’, online or print, immediately proclaim how Natal is the greatest thing ever made, and viral marketers sprung from nowhere and invaded all the message forums trying to push opinions on how ‘amazing’ Natal is. Microsoft even began going on other shows after E3 to demonstrate Natal.

Microsoft’s marketing push didn’t work. Gaming is not like the computer industry. It is in entertainment, not “technology”. Gamers are a cynical bunch. We have to be since every game is paraded in hype and often ends up being mediocre.

The Wii’s success did not come from hype or slick marketing. It came from putting the controller in people’s hands. At E3 2006, normal people played with the Wii. Word of mouth is what gamers trust. They don’t trust what “journalists” say. Microsoft not putting Natal before regular gamers but only a selected bunch (with Non-Disclosure Agreements or whatever else) is a major red flag.

At TGS 2009, Microsoft did another Natal stunt where it had prominent Japanese developers talk about how Natal will change the world. No one is buying this marketing stunt. Microsoft can only convince with the games and letting gamers play the games.

All this Natal marketing with no product, no release date, no price, no games, should reveal Microsoft for who they are: as a marketing company.

The first Xbox was the second place on its generation. Now the Xbox 360 is still the second place, even tough gathered a bigger installed base than its predecessor. What Microsoft should do to change this situation and shift its position?

Microsoft needs to stop focusing on “platforms” and start focusing on “products”. Microsoft will never do this. Microsoft wants to create platforms like Windows and obtain revenue that way. A product that isn’t trying to be a ‘platform’ is not in Microsoft’s DNA.

People buy game consoles for games. They don’t buy them for “platform”. To the consumer, the purpose of the game console is to play fun games. But to companies like Microsoft, the purpose, and the only reason why they are in the market in the first place, is to drive tentacles into consumers to make them intertwined with the console for all their entertainment needs. That is the mission of Xbox Live as an example.

I think there are three things Microsoft can specifically do to help itself:

1) Make Xbox Live free. The company should not be adding features but decreasing them or letting the falling console part prices pay for the service. However, Xbox Live is supposed to become a ‘platform’ so Microsoft will never do this.

2) Make brand new Xbox 360 hardware that has greater reliability. I think people choosing the PS3 over Xbox 360 in America currently is due to the reliability problems of the 360.

3) Fix the Xbox 360 controller with a better D-Pad. All these Xbox Live Arcade games aren’t worth much if the controller doesn’t work well with them.

In his article about the three red lights, Dean Takahashi said that “Microsoft has to move beyond its mentality of being a software company that can launch fast and fix later”. What are your thoughts about that?

I agree. Microsoft created a major reputation problem with hardware that is going to be expensive to reverse both in reality and in perception. Many people will not line up for the next Xbox on day one because of those concerns.

Microsoft has already lost billions of dollars with their Xbox division. For you, why they still are in this business?

The Xbox division is nothing more than a bribe to game developers to keep their games on Microsoft’s API.

About Sony, you’ve said that they could fill the gap left behind by Nintendo’s mistakes, but after the TGS presentation, you‘ve said they have screwed up. Why?

There were some indications of impressive moves on Sony’s part. The biggest one was focusing the PlayStation 3 as a video-game machine instead of the media hub. Large game libraries are what sell consoles. There were also indications that Sony was going to flood the PS3 with older games (similar to the Virtual Console) from the PS1 and PS2. Most interesting was putting Dreamcast games up on the service. Just because games are slightly old doesn’t mean they cease to be fun or their content becomes invalid. The reason why the lack of PS3 backwards compatibility keeps coming up is because the PS3 game library is very uninteresting. Putting up, say, the Dreamcast library to be available would definitely help.

But Sony resorted to being the E3 2006 Sony at TGS 2009. Their show was pitiful. I think the bump of the PS3 price cut must have rekindled the old arrogance. Sony began talking of the PS3 as a media hub, showed off the Sony’s motion controller that one had to hold a DualShock 3 to simulate the Wii’s nunchuck, and the indications of a larger game library hitting the PSN didn’t fully materialize.

Do you think that Sony Wand will follow Natal’s path and fail, or do you think that Sony have a weapon to improve their position in the market?

The question isn’t whether the Sony Wand or Natal will succeed, it is whether the software designed for the Sony Wand and Natal will succeed. I don’t believe it will. The game companies that make games for the Sony or Microsoft platforms were never interested in motion controls in the first place. They are not interested in the new customers the Wii made. They want to make the games they want to make or that the company is structured to make.

It is not about motion controls so much as the new values that motion controls bring. The new audience that Wii is appealing to is not so much grandmas or former gamers but women. In order to have the Wii’s success, they must make games women want to buy. Most game companies do not know how to do this. And they do not want to know how to sell to women.

After all the recent years criticizing the motion controllers, do you think that the hardcore players will fully support Sony and Microsoft’s shift to that direction?

The hardcore are not happy with the Natal or Sony Wand. They might think the Sony Wand will be about ‘technology’ which might have impressed them at E3 2006, but they are already disappointed that the ‘nunchuck’ is one hand on the standard PS3 controller.

The viral marketers, who pose as hardcore gamers on message forums, of course are delighted because they are paid to be delighted. It was amazing all those mysterious posters that appeared after E3 2009 saying how incredible Natal was.

You also have those ‘fanboy’ type people who like what their chosen console company does no matter what. You can tell them apart from the viral messengers because the ‘fanboys’ aren’t trying to persuade people but will say it is good because “Sony made it”.

I think the hardcore are going to rebel. Microsoft entered the gaming market entirely with ‘hardcore’ marketing. They made people think the company cared about them, about hardcore games in general. So much money was spent on casting Nintendo as “non-hardcore”, as the ‘kiddy’ company, as a company who doesn’t make ‘mature’ titles. In order for Natal to co-opt the Wii, Microsoft has to totally change its marketing. This is why a re-brand and reboot of the Xbox 360 console will likely come. (Microsoft has already adopted the Nintendo marketing of showing people being happy on the couch.)

Nintendo received hell with constant accusations that it was abandoning the ‘core’. Nintendo weathered that storm because the company didn’t build its prior success on what is perceived to be ‘hardcore gaming’ (violent, ‘mature’ games). People who say the Gamecube was a ‘hardcore’ game console forget that its best selling games were Super Mario Sunshine and Mario Kart: Double Dash. Nintendo also achieved great success with the DS as well which definitely was not based on ‘hardcore gaming’.

So Microsoft is facing a very difficult problem. How do they rebrand the Xbox 360 without losing their ‘hardcore’ fans?

About games in general:

You are clearly against the game industry, stating several times that it have to die in order to the survive of the gaming. Could you explain better your position?

The game industry is a very different beast than gaming is. It is similar to how the music industry is a very different beast than music is. The music industry manufactures ‘stars’ and marches to formulas that generated revenue in the past. They fought against consumer wishes of digital distribution because that would harm their revenue. Music fans will tell you how the ‘music industry’ has harmed the business of music in general.

The same is true with gaming. The “Game Industry” repeats a formula for each franchise. The “Game Industry” sees only the revenue, not the gamers, and is interested in maximizing as much revenue as possible (instead of maximizing the number of customers). This is why prices keep going up. This is why more ‘collector’s editions’ keep appearing. It is also why the “Game Industry” is pushing for digital distribution despite what consumers say or want, in a complete reverse situation of the Music Industry. They see digital distribution only in terms of increased revenue. People say that Sony’s desire for more revenue due to the high cost of the PSP Go will do harm to the movement of ‘digital distribution’. These people need to realize that the movement of ‘digital distribution’ is nothing more than the desire for ‘increased revenue’. It is not based on consumers. Consumers may respond to digital distribution, but not when it is used as a digital rights management.

If you have read or seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, you see this magical type factory that creates so much joy and happiness in their products. You don’t know how the chocolate is made, and it doesn’t really matter, but the end product makes childhoods happy.

The opposite of the Chocolate Factory is the Sausage Factory. The sausages are all pretty much the same. The sausage is made by a formula. It is then branded, packaged, and marketed to chase a demographic group here, another group there. It is soul-less. After eating many Vienna sausages, many people get sick of them and stop eating sausage forever.

Gaming, at its best, is like the Chocolate Factory. It is made by people who love games and, most importantly, love gamers. They want to create as many gamers as possible. They want to spread the love of chocolate, or gaming in this case, to as many people as possible. The chocolate comes across as a ‘magical moment’. Games we today call ‘classics’ were those ‘magical moments’.

Gaming, at its worst, is like the Sausage Factory. There is no magic in them. You can instantly detect the formula. Sausage games are constantly hyped so people will buy it on day one before news breaks out how poor the product is. Since people wise up on the sausage games, they then say, “We now have high definition sausage”, and the hype bait-and-switch game goes on again.

There are “industries” in all entertainment fields: movies, books, music, comics, and so on. The “movie industry” is not trying to make a ‘magical’ movie or to make more movie watchers. The same is true with the “book industry” as they are not trying to make more book readers but focus entirely on the revenue part. These industries are populated by untalented folk who are very interested in preserving their own lifestyles. It is Human nature to not wish to work. This is why they fall into the habit of formulas.

These “industries” tend to coalesce around product types that are being propelled heavily by sector performance. Sector performance is very different than industry performance. For example, the long-term real estate industry is down in Japan and up in the United States because Japan’s population is shrinking while the United States population is increasing. The “Game Industry” was growing not because of business wizards at the game companies but because of population increase and multiple console ownership (likely due to consumers getting older and having more money to spend on gaming).

The DS and Wii were designed to counter the sector performance decline that we are all witnessing in Japan and, recently, in America. Iwata said that if Nintendo just put out a more powerful machine with better graphics, all we can do is watch gaming slowly die. HD consoles are not increasing interest in gaming.

The “Game Industry” is defined in terms of revenue. Meanwhile, gaming is defined by the number of gamers. The “Game Industry” aiming for revenue will only decrease the number of gamers. This is how the “Game Industry” (or any industry) will accelerate rapidly before entering the valley of decline. The decline is happening due to less number of gamers.

You will never, ever see any ‘analyst’ talk about the number of gamers.

Commonsense says that the number of gamers would be very important to talk about when discussing the health of the industry. But the “Game Industry” is not concerned about the number of gamers but only the amount of revenue obtained. This is how the “Game Industry” destroys gaming because they push lower revenue gamers away as they focus entirely on the higher revenue gamers. What else would explain a console come out at $600, and the “game industry” thinks it would become the most popular system?

Keiji Inafune said at the TGS that the japanese game industry is finished. And what about the west? Do you think that will die too?

On the Core Market, yes. The Core Market is defined entirely by software of enormous production costs. It just isn’t sustainable.

In the internet, I’ve read several complaints by gamers saying that actual generation is the most expensive ever, or is the “DLC generation” and keeps on. Could this be considered a reflex of a business mentality from game companies execs like Bobby Kotick or Ian Livingstone?

Gamers are sensing that the “Game Industry” is not about them.

Here in Brazil, the first of your articles that became mostly known was that about the birdmen. Some years after it was written, do you think that the birdmen have learned something?

No. The “Game Industry” is filled with ‘birdmen’. They all flock together.

I think it is important to note that these ‘suits’ in the “Game Industry” aren’t half as smart as they think they are. The copycat syndrome has been in effect ever since the Atari days. When Super Mario Brothers came out, many thought it was just about a side scroller with power-ups. The flood of platform games ended up with many being mediocre. Only a few games, made by talented developers, could make a game like Sonic the Hedgehog. Today, many made Wii Sports clones because they thought it was about motion controls and mini-games.

Talent is extremely rare in gaming. I wish the gaming business was orientated more towards cultivating such talent rather than piggybacking off of the few quality games.

Let’s see if there are any four player 2d platformers that will try to copy NSMB Wii’s success. The pattern of history says they will be made.

Still talking about Brazil, here we don’t have a game industry, instead, we have just a sketch of a market, shattered mainly by the piracy. Even tough, many people here (myself included) struggle to maintain the gaming on and prevent it to fall into ostracism. Do you think that such passion is suppressed by the industry?

This is an interesting question. There is one thing to have a customer. It is another thing to have a passionate customer. Passionate customers will make communities, will evangelize the product on their own, and are the best salesmen for it.

The “Game Industry” is not passionate about gaming as they are passionate about revenue. This is probably why so many people get bored. They think that if they hire young wild eyed developers who are passionate about gaming that they will end up with passionate customers. What happens is that the young wild eyed developers become middle aged jaded developers due to business side not being interested in gamers.

You can’t split the business side and the creative side and think the passion will come from the creative side. It needs to come from both. Take Apple as an example. When Steve Jobs was fired, the people running the company thought they were business geniuses and were interested in revenue. They did not like Jobs’ ideas that would become NExT because it would hurt the revenue of the top line Apple computers. They didn’t even want to put out any product that might interrupt the sales of the Apple II computer! (The equivalent would be if Apple nixed the iPhone because it might interrupt sales of the iPod. But if Apple doesn’t cannibalize the iPod’s sales, someone else would.)

How much developer passion can there be if the business side sees only revenue? Mega Man II was a project on the side made entirely by the passion of the young developers. Capcom only agreed to put it out if they made some generic zombie game (or something). And once Mega Man II went out and became a hit, the sequel was pretty good with Mega Man III, but a distinct and felt decline in the series occurred. Mega Man IV. Mega Man V. Mega Man VI. The passion was clearly fading away with each new game and the customer passion went with it. Those games were clearly being guided by the business side looking only at the revenue. This example is an example that occurs with every hit game. The “Game Industry” destroys gaming with its ‘Scorched Earth Franchise’ way of dealing with it.

Of course, the ‘developers’ cannot just do whatever they want. There are game companies that keep making interesting games while increasing their business influence. Nintendo and Blizzard are the two primary examples that come to my mind.

When you hear people from the “Game Industry” say that Nintendo ‘just cares about money’ or is ‘swimming in money’ or that they are all about ‘marketing’, the “Game Industry” is projecting itself onto Nintendo.

There has been no serious effort, or even a half-hearted effort, to understand Nintendo’s business mentality by anyone in the “Game Industry”. All the talk about ‘disruption’ and ‘Blue Ocean Strategy’ that Nintendo did, prior to the Wii launch, was ignored or dismissed as ‘Nintendo propaganda’.

Speaking of projection, when they kept saying that “Nintendo is doomed!”, it was really the “Industry is doomed!”. This generation is Nintendo on the ascendancy while the “Game Industry” suffers decline. But for some reason, the “Game Industry” is *never* doomed and any decline is spun. Yet, Nintendo is *always* doomed and even when its console was sold out for years, it was spun as ‘bad’ for Nintendo.

Just to finish, do you want to left a message to the brazilian gamers?

The mod work that is being done in countries in South America or even Eastern Europe is very similar to what was being done in the late 70s and 80s. You are the seeds for the new Game Industry.

PlayStation 2 117.8K
PlayStation 3 320.6K
PSP 174.6K
Xbox 360 249.7K
Wii 506.9K
Nintendo DS 457.6K

PSP Go has bombed! Hurray! A great day for all gamers! Let us celebrate, reader. Musicians, a little fiesta music please…

What we are seeing with the PS3 and Xbox 360 is the see-saw of Red Ocean. As PS3 sales rise, Xbox 360 sales decrease and vice versa.

Above: Don’t let the southern accent fool you. This is a good, precise and simple talk of the Blue Ocean.

Above: The “Game Industry” as it struggles in the waters of the Red Ocean.


Above: The Great White Shark of Disinterest.

Wii is in its ‘price drop’ bump. I still don’t like the ‘price drop’, since ‘price drops’ are nothing more than a “stim pack” like a needle shooting into the console’s arm for a temporary boost. However, with the macro environment being what it is (and God help Japan), it was perhaps necessary to re-align costs due to that vast change in the macro economy.

If Nintendo wants a controller in everyone’s hands, wouldn’t it be advisable to slash the price on the Wii-motes? $40 per controller is awfully expensive, especially that you need to purchase a nunchucka and other controllers. People hate buying hardware, so they keep holding off on the controllers resulting in many Wiis having like only two controllers. Every Wii should have four controllers.

But there is too  much profit and money made off of the accessories. So Wii-mote price probably will never go down, alas.

Anyway, the big news is that the price cuts for the PS3 and Xbox 360 aren’t sustaining (and neither will the Wii’s price cut). The water levels of “Disinterest” are rising against the HD Twins.

Microsoft is really in a bind. They released a new Halo and their hardware sales aren’t shooting up. Natal isn’t going to save that console.

Why is NSMB Wii hard to predict with its sales? It is because it is a typical “Blue Ocean” type of game. Blue Ocean products do not obey the defined parameters of the industry so analysts have a very difficult time with them. Even Nintendo has a difficult time with them. How can you analyze a market that does not yet exist?

The “Game Industry” is said to have ’shrunk’ again this month. Celebrate, everyone! While everyone blames the “recession”, know that there are companies growing and thriving despite the “recession”. Mostly, they are all disruptors. Disruption is about learning to love the ‘low end’. So a company like Wal-Mart would see an increase in its sales since they love the ‘low end’.

Nintendo, if it does their disruption right, will be growing where the rest of the “Game Industry” fades in a decline.

Nintendo declined lately, but this is more due to an incorrect tactic being deployed a year or two ago. Nintendo’s decline is not due to “casual fad being over, LOL” as everyone was crowing about a few months ago. Wii Music is not in any sales charts, and it was released a year ago. Wii Fit still charts. So the Expanded Audience is still there. But what is the difference between a game like Wii Fit and Wii Music or Animal Crossing Wii? The answer should point out that Nintendo chose a very different tactic for those games. And this tactic did not work.

Consoles are like a train and, just how trains need coal shoved in to keep the fires burning to continue momentum, consoles need software shoved in to keep its sales burning to continue momentum of the console (consoles are powered by software).

Core games are like those ’starter logs’ you throw in the fire. They blaze really fast and really pretty for the first few minutes. But they die very quickly. Large healthy logs, on the other hand, take a while to catch fire, but they stay burning for a long while. Even when the log is out, the embers of that log still provide warmth whereas the starter log has no embers and creates only a chill afterward.

Above: The Nintendo train

Here is what we will see after the holidays (because all sales go up during the holidays, even the PSP! [shocking, I know]). All the consoles will deflate after the holidays as is normal. But the Wii will not deflate as much and will be chugging at a faster momentum before. People will ask, “How is this happening?”

It is because Nintendo threw in some super-long-lasting logs into the fire such as Wii Sports: Resort, Wii Fit Plus, and New Super Mario Brothers Wii. These games should keep selling strongly for at least a year.

“Choo! Choo!” goes the New Generation train while the highly technological twin super trains, attempting to beat one another, only end up running into each other.

Above: The HD Twins

I was recently asked to define luxury. It was in relation to the luxury automobile-maker, Infiniti.

My answer was centred around price and the belief that with luxury-price came luxury-goods.

What I left out was the idea of exclusivity. There is no doubt that exclusivity is a key component to luxury and one that will certainly be in my answer should this question ever be posed again!

But not simply as luxury = exclusivity, as I don’t agree that the equation is as simple as that, as exclusivity has changed. I would argue that with the world moving to digital, exclusivity does not necessarily mean that a product is in limited supply, or that it is reserved for a few.

Two examples of this are MINI and the iPhone.

MINI

MINI has worked very hard through their messaging to make MINI owners feel a part of a club. From inviting MINI owners to a special premiere of the 2003 remake of The Italian Job, to their use of RFID-activated billboards to allow MINI drivers to customize billboards as they drove past.

MINI – though made by BMW – is not a luxury brand, and yet they have found a way to incorporate exclusivity. Apple’s iPhone, I feel, is very similar.

iPhone

The iPhone is far from exclusive in the traditional sense of the word. With unit sales in the millions, and growing, it could potentially become to most popular smartphone on the planet. Like MINI, the iPhone’s exclusivity rests on marketing, but also on its’ App Store.

The App Store is home to over 100,000 applications that are – in many cases – exclusive (there’s that word again!) to the iPhone. This means that when you see those clever “There’s an App for that” Ads on TV, if you don’t have one, you can’t get them.

But this is only one way that Apple uses its’ advertising to create the feeling of exclusivity. The other way is by creating ads that people love and look forward to (It’s not just me, right??). The ads are the kind of thing that people want to share with one another, which strengthens the feeling of the club.

So that’s my thinking on the subject. But let’s assume for a minute that luxury does in fact equal exculsivity. Here’s what lead me down this path to begin with:

If luxury means exclusivity
And exclusivity is finite
Can Infiniti be luxurious?

Our childminder gave birth a couple of weeks ago and has unsurprizingly taken a break from minding our children*. In the meantime supermum and G, the other mum who the childminder works for, have divided care of their children between them. I take the occasional extra day off to fill in but can’t help out with the whole brood – I wouldn’t be allowed to follow G’s three year old into the nursery toilets to wipe her bottom, she apparently doesn’t get on with her own father etc., etc…

This has meant that time dudelet would normally spend with supermum and little elf has been shared with two other girls, L (six) and M (seven). L is one of dudelet’s best friends and he likes M a lot but it hasn’t gone as smoothy as we might have expected. He’s squabbled with L a lot, actually had to be sent to his room by G yesterday (and you know how they normally behave immaculately with other people) and has generally been a stroppy little beggar for most of the week. I think I’ve worked out why.

We’ve always felt very lucky that dudelet has never really expressed any jealousy of little elf and watching the dynamic of this week, I’ve realised that it’s because he feels a real sense of ownership of her as his little sister – his and no-one else’s. When she does something clever, he crows with delight, just like we do. She comes and finds him to do simple things for her when we aren’t around. If he gets to her first thing in the morning he’ll even (hair-raising this) get her out of her cot and grobag. They fight, wrestle, tickle each other…actually, they adore each other.

But this week, for the first time, little elf has been consistently spending time with other little girls, imitating them, following them around and trying to dress up in their clothes. In turn, they’ve positively doted on her and little elf has thrived. She’s started to babble in almost identifiable sentences, she’s gaining even more physical confidence (though she already had a lot) and she’s strongly starting to express preferences about the TV she watches and the clothes she wears.  This was all developing anyway but seems to be going through one of those patches of acceleration you get in two year olds.

And dudelet has been sidelined.  For the moment, his primacy as the sibling, the main way I think that he copes with the addition to the family and the amount of attention she gets, has been displaced.

It’s difficult – we’ll need to make sure we all spend some quality time together, as a family and in pairs this weekend so he can feel the centre of attention. This is going to go on for a couple more weeks then things will get back to normal and, really, he’s coping very well. But it’s hard for him and it makes me realise all the more what a brilliant big brother he is to little elf. And, once again, how lucky we are.

*We’re paying her for a few weeks. She’s self-employed but out of a mixture of ethics, guilt and self-interest (we really don’t want someone who’s just given birth trying to keep up with little elf, exhausting for even the non-recently pregnant), we don’t want her to go straight back to work.

Att digitala interaktiva medier och teknologi särskilt har utmanat musik-, film- och tidningsbranschen är knappast någon nyhet. Spådomarna om högre utbildnings motsvarande och förestående utmaningar, på grund av samma utveckling, har hörts här och var men kanske inte riktigt tagits på allvar. Via en länk från Alastair Creelman, läser jag en upphetsande och mycket spännande artikel på ämnet, publicerad på The Guardians webbplats idag. Den talar om möjligheterna till flexibelt lärande och de möjligheter det innebär för vem som helst att plugga vad som helst, var som helst. Förutsatt att du har en uppkoppling vill säga.

Wow, i artikeln diskuteras nya former, eller snarare koncept för hur man kan paketera flexibelt lärande. Hur attityder hos akademiker i Storbritannien delvis har ändrats från att inte vilja dela med sig av material till att vilja det. Hur den brittiska staten finansierar ett projekt för att undersöka hur universitet och akademiker skulle kunna publicera sitt material online.

Ett aber, med exempel från MIT och Utah State University, är hur man ska utveckla hållbara affärsmodeller för att kunna finansiera tillgängliggörandet av utbildning. Den samtida stora frågan – hur får vi det att går ihop? Den delar vi med flera andra branscher och fler kommer säkerligen följa.

I Sverige märker vi inte av den disruptiva utvecklingen för högskolesektorns del. I alla fall inte så att det uttalat diskuteras strategier för ett förhållningssätt. Jag funderar över hur det kommer se ut om 10-15 år om utvecklingen fortsätter i den riktning man kan tycka sig ana idag. I artikeln diskuteras möjligheten att högre utbildning splittras. Att olika institutioner kan komma att specialisera sig på till exempel innehåll eller att examinera och att man hittar samarbeten sinsemellan för att bygga stark utbildning. En liknande tanke har tidigare uttryckts av Jeff Jarvis och andra – även inom akademin.

Så hur påverkar det här oss i Sverige? En globaliserad marknad för högre utbildning utan hållbar affärsmodell. En disruptiv utveckling som hotar att splittra våra strukturer. Är kollaboration framtiden? Hur påverkar det forskningen? Borde inte den också bli föremål för total öppenhet på samma premisser som ovan? Hur organiserar man en validerings- och legitimeringsapparat i en nytt paradigm?

Kanske är jag ute på hal is här men det tror jag inte. Vi kommer att få ta ställning till förändrade premisser. Om vi gör det proaktivt eller reaktivt inom våra befintliga strukturer är upp till de som leder våra högskolor och universitet. Under tiden driver kollaboration och teknologiska framsteg utvecklingen framför sig och i orsakar disruption.

Seth Godin uttrycker sina teorier om kollaboration och förändring nedan.
/ Erik

I am quite amazed to find this video and am pretty stunned to see this video. The claim is this video is American troops in the Iraq conflict driving in a terrible manner. I cannot confirm who commited to this outrage, but it is completely crazy and is a serious volation of peoples humane rights. I leave this to your opinion and the assumption of society today. The video was edited by the owner.

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The new consumer journey

A while back, I attempted to create a model the way companies need to leverage new marketing to engage today’s consumers. I looked at a number of interesting approaches, but in the end opted to build around the idea of a marketing spiral.  I’m sure there are a number of other ways to illustrate the consumer journey other than using a spiral, but this is what I came up with. If anybody wants to take another stab at this, please do and let me know where you post it. Read on to discover how you can use this model to define your new marketing program.

Today’s consumers start with an Initial Considersation Set. Martin Lindstrom’s brain scan research in his groundbreaking book, “Buyology,” clearly shows that we all have an initial consideration set for every product category, many of which are completely unconscious. We choose a brand of shampoo simply because we are used to choosing it, or because on some unconscious level, our gut tells us that it’s better than the others for any number of reasons which we spend less than a few seconds consciously thinking about.

“It’s natural.” “It has a secret formula.” “It’s scientifically proven.” “I like the way it smells.” “It makes my hair feel nice.” “It’s cheap.” All these statements and a near infinite variety of others, which are completely personal to each individual, contribute to our initial consideration set.

Martin Lindstrom’s research also reveals that changing these ‘consideration sets’ is harder than it looks. In some cases, it even requires truly radical events. It took a global recession to turn affluent middle class shoppers into price savvy buyers. It took an end-of-the-world scenario involving climate change to get people to start considering carbon footprints when looking to buy a new car.

Advertisers historically have used creative disruption as a way to “open our minds” to another possible consideration set. For decades toothpaste that cleaned the teeth and kept them healthy was enough for us. Suddenly however, advertisers have effectively convinced us that we actually want toothpaste that doesn’t just clean, but makes them white, because we all know, white teeth are healthy teeth. The same consideration set has now been given a qualifier, healthy teeth = white teeth, so I need whitening toothpaste.

On the Internet, transparency means that marketers have to think and behave differently, because people can quite simply use Google to research a product to find out if it actually makes our teeth white, or even if white teeth are healthy teeth. Which is why where Affinity comes to play. Affinity is about building emotional connections between brand and consumer. To build affinity in today’s online world, marketers leverage social media strategies targeted around Influence and Advocacy.

Although common social media lore is that some people are better influencers than other, BzzAgents in the US has found that anybody can be an influencer. An influencer happens to be somebody you know or meet who says the right thing at the right time. You might happen across somebody on a train who is reading a book that looks interesting because a) they are laughing their head off and b) you are bored stiff reading the same old celebrity trash in the Metro. So you might think, “if I had that book, I wouldn’t have to read this lousy newspaper.” This is precisely the experience BzzAgent discovered when it sent out its agents to promote some of the latest reads. At the end of the day, building an emotional bond with consumers is all about trust. And that trust starts more often than not, through somebody else.

As we continue down the crazy funnel of consumerist choice, we move towards having Conversations. Back on our train, you’re likely start up a conversation with the book reader. “So is that a good book?” You might ask, though the roaring laughter would probably be a dead giveaway. In more structured mechanisms, brands can create opportunities for conversation using Presence & Participation, by participating in or even hosting conversations on their own blogs and in existing blogs, review sites and forums. These conversations can have a massive benefit. Your consumers get to talk to real people who speak like real people, not like an aggressive PR agent on a mission or a call centre in Bombay.

The next step in journey is to facilitate their Participation with your brand by creating Visibility & Distribution. This is achieved with seeding content and leveraging advertorial placements, content partnerships, relevant sponsorships and other forms of content generation around the brand. The key is to think like Coca-Cola. “Be everywhere the customer is thirsty.”

Use social listening to map out all of the places people are looking for content about your brand, and ensure your content is there. Going back to our toothpaste example, our toothplace marketer should find everyplace online where people might be looking for information on ‘clean and white teeth,’ then make sure they have positioned the right content to help consumers in their research.

The Engagement step is crucial. Even if the consumer walks away believing everything they heard about your brand and product, they will do more research and participate in further conversations or interactions with the brand. In fact, the higher the cost or level of complexity the product or service is, the more research consumers do.

So once you have seeded loads of content across the Internet, you need to make it easy for people to search and find it. Discovery & Search of content is so important that brands who get it spend disproportionate amounts of their budgets on search engine performance and optimization. Keyword optimization, social topic and taxonomy analysis, content submission to multiple social sharing sites, the use of rich metadata on content and content linking are all techniques that can be employed to make it easy for people to find and engage with your content.

To ensure that the content does what it needs to, i.e. convince the consumer that you have the best toothpaste for instance, it’s best to leverage the consumer’s voice as much as possible and target against consumer passions (fashion, music, film, whatever). The more relevant you can be, the more focused your message is to your audience, the more likely you will be included in their final consideration set.

In other words, if you can get a hundred ordinary people to test, record and talk about your toothpaste versus other brands, the more likely people will add it to their brand list. To ensure credibility, it’s best to foster conversations not just on your site, but on trusted forums and communities that editorially make sense for your brand.

After all of this interaction with you, your content, other customers, our buzz agents and the average guy or girl on the street, the consumer finally buys your product. Great! Job well done! On to the next one. Right? Wrong!

Winning a consumer is only the first round. Imagine what will happen if the consumer’s experience with your brand is completely not what he/she expected, or worse, is just plain awful. That disappointed consumer will write about those awful brand experiences. Other customers will jump on the brand-bashing bandwagon and the individual and collective experiences will get shared to every living person they can reach ensuring your brand is not on anybody else’s initial consideration set.

Sadly, bad reviews outnumber good reviews in just about every category. This is basic psychology really. People who feel cheated want justice. Because they are unlikely to get their money back, they will enact justice by trying to prevent others from making the same mistake. So they become detractors. Detractors can destroy a brand’s reputation online, which is why it’s important to make sure the product experience lives up to the hype. The good news however, is that detractors can be won over surprisingly easily. It often just takes a brand that is willing to listen honestly and is sincerely willing to try to do better.

Most agencies recommend social listening however as a way to find out want people are really saying about your brand, and observing as away to learn how they use your products; all with the goal of tackling negative word of mouth and to improve their marketing to consumers. The general problem with this advice is that the real reason to listen to word of mouth is not to rush into a PR campaign whenever you hear harsh criticisms, but to collect ongoing feedback and communicate these as insights to the product teams with the mandate of making better products and services. That’s the message you want to communicate. “Sorry, we listened. We are making it better.”

Naturally, if you have a great product, your toothpaste makes teeth brilliantly white, your book is a brilliant piece of literature, then social listening will give you the genuine testimonials of real consumers. Best of all, they’ll be testimonials delivered not necessarily by you, because let’s face it, how many people trust testimonials by marketers, but rather by consumers directly to consumers. All you had to do was make sure that a) you have a good product and service and b) you are in the right places having the right conversations and supplying the kind of content people need to understand and believe in your product.

“An internet troll, someone who posts deliberately provocative comments on a blog, group or message board with the intention of aggravating the other members and causing disruption”

The topic of “Internet Trolls” has entered my thoughts for the last two weeks since starting a Facebook group in support of a lovely lady who has recently been in the news “Katie Piper”. After only a few short hours of starting the Facebook group I was inundated by offensive comments that overwhelmed the groups wall (for those of you who don’t use Facebook the wall is where comments are left by the group members.) Of course I had the administrative powers to delete the offensive comments and block the members (trolls) from the group, but there were so many comments in such a small space it would of taken me hours to do it by myself. I recruited members to become moderators of the group and help me tackle the trolls and their disgusting comments.

I was always aware of Internet Trolls (aka Flamers, Haters,Spammers & so much more) being a member of a few message boards, forums & groups, although admittedly I often lost interest in most of them. I sometimes laughed at as well as argued with the Trolls who left messages on groups I was a member of . They never really bothered me until I started my own group and I had to deal with them day in and day out.

This afternoon I logged on to my Facebook and immediately realised I had 3 messages in my inbox, to most members of Facebook this is a joyful occasion (Oh wow, I have a message!), I knew straight away before I opened them that it was going to be from concerned members of my Facebook group: “I think Katie Piper is still beautiful!” bringing to my attention that Trolls had been invading my group and leaving offensive comments. My fears were right the first message I opened in my inbox was:

“hey just been reading some of the comments on katie pipers group page, and those guys seriously need to be blocked. i understand your not around all the time to delete posts etc, but if you need a hand then allow me. im so angry right now with their comments and they need to go asap!
anyways sorry for the rant, well done for sorting the group out
hope your ok x “

After reading the message and taking a long (a very long) deep breath I proceeded to my group and was greeted by a tirade of abusive and sarcastic comments from “wannabe comedians”. Unfortunately none of my moderators were online (as we all have lives away from the computer unlike these dreadful Trolls) so I had to go through pages and pages of comments whilst deleting and blocking the offensive messages and it really (yes really) isn’t as easy as it sounds!

Right guys, Sorry I didn’t realise I’d rambled on for so long.. after this morning/afternoon’s surprise attack by the trolls I started to look for information on the internet about them and found this website:

http://www.flayme.com/troll/

It really is worth a read (even just for the LOL’s), provides some relevant information for people who moderate groups as well as explaining what one of those dreadful trolls is.

Keep smiling and have a good weekend!