While Microsoft only has a 3% share of the smartphone market now, it does have experience in disrupting the market when video gaming is involved. Remember, in the 1990s the video gaming market was controlled by three Japanese companies—Nintendo, Sony, and Sega. Then in 2001 Microsoft came out of nowhere to release the Xbox. The next year it introduced online social gaming to American households with its network Xbox LIVE.

If you had told me back then that Microsoft would become a big player in the video game console wars, I would have never believed you. But the Xbox 360 has outsold the Sony Playstation 3 for years, and this year it finally caught up with the Nintendo Wii to tie as the best-selling console of 2010.

Xbox LIVE is the backbone of the gaming experience on Windows Phone 7. Your gamertag (gaming identity), friends list, and gaming achievements are all available on the device. With more than 23 million members, LIVE is one of the best online gaming experiences you can get. Instead of playing a game alone, you can play online with your sister who lives across the country or with friends down the street. It makes gaming social, which is just plain fun.

Does Apple, RIM, or Google have anything like Xbox LIVE in place? Not yet.

There are a ton of great games available for the iPhone and iPad, but Apple’s social gaming network, Game Center, is just getting off the ground. Apple could implement features similar to Xbox LIVE, but it could be awhile before they are able to rival the LIVE community.

RIM is all about business. There are some games for the BlackBerry, but RIM probably won’t even attempt a gaming network.

Google hasn’t announced any plans for an Android gaming network, but not long ago, Engadget broke the news that Sony is working on a Playstation Phone rumored to be based on the Android operating system. A Playstation Phone would be able to play the massive back catalog of Playstation 2 titles and tap into the Playstation Network, Sony’s gaming network. While this could be a big gaming move for Google’s Android, the Playstation Phone is currently just a prototype and may never be seen by consumers.

If Microsoft wants to increase its smartphone market share, it should push it hard on the gaming front, where it now has an advantage. The smartphone is clearly the new gaming device. A recent Nielsen study found that 61% of surveyed smartphone users had bought and played a game in the last month. Mobile social gaming is the next logical step. The network effect is powerful, as are gaming addictions. If Microsoft is smart it will use LIVE as a disruptor again.

Brian Johnson is a recent graduate of the MCDM program with an interest in video gaming and social media. His Xbox LIVE gamertag is thepiecesfit. His favorite video game is “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.”

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The bundle initially consisted of five indie games: World of Goo (2D Boy), Aquaria (Bit Blot), Gish (Edmund McMillen), Lugaru (Wolfire Games), and Penumbra: Overture (Frictional Games ). Later, Amanita Design kicked in a sixth game, Samorost 2. All the  games run on PC, Mac, and Linux platforms.

People could literally pay anything they wanted for the Humble Indie Bundle, starting at $.01. The largest single donation rang in at $3,333.33. I personally paid $10.01. You could choose to allot part or all of the price to the two charities, Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). While you could have bought the games or donated to the charities separately, the combination of the two made the bundle appealing. You can’t deny the power of one -stop shopping.

John Graham, Chief Operating Officer of Wolfire Games, was kind enough to answer some of my questions about the Humble Indie Bundle campaign in a post-promotion debriefing.

How did the idea for the pay-what-you-want Humble Indie Bundle come about?
Ever since the success of 2DBoy’s pay-what-you-want experiment and our Organic Indie Preorder Pack [a game bundle of Wolfire’s Overgrowth and the Unknown Worlds’ Natural Selection 2], we had this feeling that independent developers could really do a lot to promote themselves.
How did you decide what games to put in the bundle?

Our main requirement for this bundle was that we needed awesome indie games available for Mac, Linux, and Windows.  We didn’t have a fancy rubric, and weren’t maximizing any kind of bundle hotness equation, but I think it’s fair to say that we ended up with a group of games that are all different but very awesome.
Have you ever tried anything like this before? Did you learn anything from the Radiohead pay-what-you-want experiment?

Well, our theory was that a pay-what-you-want bundle would maximize participation and also allow people to feel like they were getting their money’s worth, and I think this proved true.  With pirated copies already easily available for all the games, we figured our biggest risk was not piracy but rather that we would spend a lot of time on this promotion, and then no one would hear about it.

The games bundled together were an $80 value, and people paid $9.21 on average. Do you consider the campaign a success?
I think it’s fair to say that the bundle exceeded all of our expectations.  I wouldn’t look at the average price as our main success metric but rather the overwhelming participation.  With over 100,000 contributions we managed to raise over $1,000,000 in just a week.  I don’t think anyone dreamed that this could be possible.

How much did you raise for charity, and how much for your company and the other companies? How do you think attaching charities affected contributions?
Our best guess so far at the final totals has been posted publicly on the site.  I think the charities were definitely one of the features which set our bundle apart from most other gaming bundles.  Chargebacks and refunds not withstanding, it looks like we will have raised over $180,000 for each of the two charities and over $160,000 for each developer.

Why did you pick those particular charities?
We thought it would be fitting to choose charities that were somehow related to the gaming industry.  Helping Child’s Play provide games to sick children, and giving the EFF more resources to use to defend people’s technology-related rights just feels good.  Thanks to everyone’s generosity, I think the bundle has raised enough money to actually make a significant difference in the budgets of these organizations.
How did you spread the word about the campaign?

We gave all our major press contacts an early warning that we were about to launch our crazy experiment.  So it was great to know that a few major sites were going to cover us at launch.  Reddit was easily the biggest single driver of traffic. However, the 20,000 bundle Tweets and 40,000 Facebook shares suggest that organic word-of-mouth was also a huge factor.

Why did you choose to make the games DRM-free ?
DRM is one of those ugly things that just doesn’t seem to be going away in the mainstream gaming industry.  The truth of the matter is that if giant companies like Ubisoft can’t make uncrackable DRM, we indies sure as heck aren’t going to be able to either.

In reality, DRM’s main function becomes aggravating honest users who actually purchase games while the pirates are free to do whatever they want with their cracked versions.  This doesn’t seem right, and we’d rather spend our time creating awesome user experiences rather than squander it in a counter-productive attempt to punish pirates.

Were there any surprises? Would you do it again?

We were surprised by how much support this humble indie promotion received.  I think this more than anything, validates the idea that it is possible for indies to reach out directly to consumers.  If we don’t try to do something like this again, someone else definitely will.

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Like other social games, FishVille, developed by Zynga, leverages your social network for gameplay. Your friends help you obtain items and take care of your fish, and you help them in return. In that way, social games are more collaborative than other game genres. Social games are also built around the idea of playing regularly. Just like you feel compelled to check Facebook, you feel compelled to check on your fish tank or your farm. I decided to play FishVille for 17 days to see if it could keep my interest for the duration.

The Basics

Starting FishVille is easy enough. The game gives you a premade fish tank, but it ’s your job to customize it. You also start with a couple sand dollars to buy fish eggs. After you place your fish eggs in your tank, they grow into little fish. You then feed your little fish to make them grow into big fish.

The game does get more complicated. In order to level up and unlock more tank decorations and fish, you need XP (experience points). You can get XP by selling the fish you’ve grown, clicking on treasure chests, or–my personal favorite–giving your fish love. All is not well, though. After periods of inactivity, algae begins to invade your tank. And if you go too long without feeding your fish, they die. My little virtual aquatic cesspool is currently home to five dead fish, including my beloved orbiculate batfish.

Game Mechanics: The Good and the Bad

My favorite thing about of FishVille is how it makes you feel like you are building a real fish tank. The game uses common fish names , so you can stock your tank with your old favorites and bring in some new ones. The tank customization options are also deep. Zynga provides so many different decorations, fish species, and plants and other tank accessories that players can build the tank they want to build.

The customization of FishVille comes with a price, though. To get really cool decorations or certain species of fish, you need to buy them with “sand dollars.” By selling virtual goods to players in its games, Zynga makes about $250 million annually. Each time I wanted to add an exotic fish I got a pop-up asking me to buy more “sand dollars.” I suppose Zynga has to make money somehow, but I didn’t like the micropayment system; I felt like I was being nickel-and-dimed to death.

I was also offended by the sheer number of pop-ups in the game. Every time I played I got pop-ups asking me to help some sea creature. I just wanted to tend my tank without polluting my friends’ news feed or feeling guilty for ignoring a baby Manta Ray. I wonder if Zynga can get away with this kind of gameplay because the people playing this game on Facebook are not used to other styles of games that don’t include constant interruptions. Obviously, this is designed to use your social network to bring more players into FishVille, but I just found it irritating.

So, did FishVille keep my attention for 17 days? Yes and no. It is a fun game to play in one-minute bursts, but because it lacks a competitive element, it couldn’t keep my attention much longer. Like other social games, fun in FishVille must depend a lot on who you are playing with. If you have friends who play, then give it a try; otherwise, I would look elsewhere.

Brian Johnson is a recent graduate of the MCDM program who is pursuing a career in the video game industry. His Xbox LIVE gamertag is thepiecesfit. Brian recently started Grybo Productions to author music for the Rock Band video game. His favorite video game is “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.”

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Over the next decade I believe smart phones will be where most gaming innovation will happen. The market for smart phone games is booming. A recent New York Times article reported that games make up more than half of the billion downloads from the Apple App Store. The App Store has about 15,000 games for the iPhone, and the Android Market has about 3,000 for Google Android devices.

Smart phone games run the gamut of genres, but here are a few interesting categories:

Location-Based Games

The newer smart phones have built-in GPS, and location-based games like “Turf Wars” (iPhone) and “Parallel Kingdom” (iPhone and Android) make this feature a core part of gameplay. In “Turf Wars,” you compete with other local “mobsters” for control of territory. “Parallel Kingdom” is a medieval role-playing game played in a virtual world based on GPS data.

Game-like social networks such as foursquare (iPhone, Android and Blackberry) and Gowalla (iPhone, with Android coming soon) are also starting to pop up. Foursquare asks players to check-in at locations they visit to earn points, acquire badges and leave tips for other visitors. Some locations, such as bars and restaurants, will give free food to the mayor (the person who checks in most frequently).

With location-based games, it’s the first time that the location of the player has had an impact on the outcome of gameplay. If you live in New York City, you are going to have a much easier time racking up points on foursquare, for instance, than somebody playing in Spokane.

Harvard University recently created a specialized version of foursquare to help students learn more about the university. It is interesting to see foursquare being repurposed as an educational tool, and I think this kind of innovation will continue in location-based gaming.

Accelerometer-Based Games

Another unique feature of the iPhone and Android phones is the inclusion of accelerometer hardware, which recognizes how the phone is being held or moved. The accelerometer is doing for smart phone games what the Wii remote did for motion-controlled console games by creating a market for games with this control style.

The accelerometer game “Abduction!” (Android) relies on the accelerometer to make a cow jump into the sky using platforms to try to reach a UFO who took the cow’s friend. This is a very polished game, and I love the art direction and style. The developer really thought about how to make the game fun for everyone from kids, who can’t “die” on the kids’ setting, to hardcore players, who must master nearly impossible movements to get to the highest levels.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Classic Games

Smart phones don’t have a lot of graphical processing power, and this makes them perfect for the classic games of yore. Games like “Pac-Man”  and “Space Invaders” (iPhone and Android) have simple control schemes, allowing them to easily port to touch screens or small keypads, along with their lightweight graphics. Using Nesoid (Android), I’ve played many Nintendo games on my Android, and I get a certain delight in being able to fire up “Super Mario Bros. 2” from anywhere.

These are some other games I played on my Android-powered Motorola Droid while researching this post:

“Archipelago Demo” (Android) – This is a real-time strategy game that begins with islands with growing populations. The computer controls some, and the player controls others. The objective is to send airplanes with populations from your islands to other islands until one side has control of all islands. This is a fun game, though frustrating at times, that recalls the WWII era in the South Pacific.

“Flight Director (Lite)” (Android, with similar games on iPhone) – This is a fun game that uses actual Google Earth images of airports where the player must guide passenger planes, helicopters and fighter jets to the designated runway by drawing lines with their finger. It gets hectic quickly when the player fights to keep the airspace controlled and not crash any planes into each other.

Nesoid Lite (Nintendo emulator) (Android) – This is a fantastic app for emulating Nintendo Entertainment System games like “Contra,” “Super Mario Bros.,” “The Legend of Zelda,” etc. While the legality of emulating NES games is questionable, the app makes playing classic games fun. It has tons of great features, including screen scaling and screen rotation, though gameplay is still sort of difficult using on-screen controls and the Droid’s keypad.

“Robo Defense FREE” (Android) – A tower defense game with deep gameplay and many facets to keep players coming back for more. The graphics are good, but I’d like to see a different art direction. If you are interested in tower defense games, check this one out.

Brian Johnson is a student in the MCDM program who is pursuing a career in the video game industry. His Xbox LIVE gamertag is thepiecesfit. Brian recently started Grybo Productions to author music for the Rock Band video game. His favorite video game is “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.”

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The recently released (Oct. 13) “Uncharted 2: Among Thieves” for the PlayStation 3, hopes to change that with a built-in Twitter feature. The game uses Twitter in a fairly simple way, by sending updates on a player’s progress to his or her Twitter account.

Twitter is also at the heart of a social media update to Microsoft’s Xbox 360 that went live today. It allows you to post tweets, read the tweets of those you follow, search and view trending topics. Along with a Twitter app, the Xbox 360 update also has a Facebook app to stay connected to friends through basic Facebook features.

These instances of Twitter in video games—one software and one hardware—still only scratch the surface of the potential to meld social media and gaming. The use of Twitter in “Uncharted 2” seems like a good way to market the game and to find other people who play the game, but beyond that it doesn’t do much. And the Twitter integration on the Xbox 360 isn’t very deep, as you can’t run the app while you are playing a game.

The real issue here isn’t how Twitter is integrated into games or hardware platforms, but how the gameplay can take advantage of social media’s best assets—connecting people and sharing information.

With millions of people connected through social media services like Twitter, games could leverage these networks to connect gamers. Currently, the only way you can find players on Xbox 360 is to know the person’s gamertag or by friending random people who are playing a game the same time you are.

This system could be augmented by broadcasting gaming notifications to social networks that alert your friends  what you are doing, game-wise.  Our MCDM director, Hanson Hosein, happens to be a fan of the “Uncharted” games. Through the game’s Twitter feature, it would be easy to connect with him about the game and share a common interest or even begin playing together. One interesting feature of the Xbox 360 Facebook app is the ability to see if any of your Facebook friends are also on Xbox LIVE. This is exactly the kind of feature games need to adopt.

Social networks could also be leveraged as a kind of community-driven Help feature to help gamers when they get stuck. Failure is a critical part of game design, but too much failure can result in a negative gameplay experience. Instead of the traditional, lengthy walkthrough documents created by gamers to help others, Twitter could be used as a real-time Help system where players can ask questions and search for answers while playing the game.

Social networks could be used in many creative ways in video games, from connecting gamers to augmenting gameplay.  Gaming is inherently social; it only makes sense to bring social networks into it.

Brian Johnson is a student in the MCDM program who is pursuing a career in the video game industry. His Xbox LIVE gamertag is thepiecesfit. Brian recently started Grybo Productions to author music for the Rock Band video game. His favorite video game is “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.”

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Click here to view the embedded video.

Money is said to be one of the sticking points in the negotiations to bring the Beatles’ catalog to iTunes. I have no doubt that money influenced the Beatles’ decision to do a video game, but I’d also bet that they wanted to do something different and cutting-edge.

Although I’m hardly a big Beatles fan, I am thrilled to see video games taking a lead in the troubled music industry. There is no need to labor over the recent history of the music industry — CD sales are down, and digital downloads are on the rise. Digital is clearly the future for music, and I believe video games will play a significant role in the marketing, distribution and consumption of music.

Even before the release of the Beatles’ game , the numbers coming out of the “Rock Band” series were staggering. Since it premiered in late 2007, “Rock Band” has sold more than 50 million songs, including songs shipped with the game and downloadable songs. Still, some analysts say that music games have peaked.

With the sagging economy, that may be true to an extent. But I think the music game genre can continue to grow, and  “Rock Band: The Beatles” is an example of a compelling new game experience. Instead of playing as a fictional character who is trying to make it big in fictional venues, in “Rock Band: The Beatles” you play as the Beatles themselves, following their career from the early touring days to later studio work. Paul McCartney even reviewed the game to make sure it was accurate.

The release of “Rock Band: The Beatles” will surely increase the number of people playing music games. I’ve heard stories about how excited people in their 60s are about this game. I’m not sure that releasing the Beatles catalog on the Amazon MP3 store would elicit the same response. The interactive nature of video games gives people a much more fun way to experience music. Throw a plastic Rickenbacker 325 into a 64-year-old’s hands, and he’ll soon be channeling a young John Lennon.

“Rock Band: The Beatles” is the biggest win for music video games to date. So, if you are Harmonix, where do you go after you’ve gotten the biggest band in history in your game? You go after the small bands. Harmonix is developing a platform for interactive music that is both a game and a way for bands to sell their music . There is no reason “Rock Band” can’t become just as viable a distribution platform as iTunes or the Amazon MP3 store. Look for a post from me soon about the “Rock Band” music distribution platform. Until then, I’ll be rocking in a virtual Shea Stadium.

Brian Johnson is a student in the MCDM program who is pursuing a career in the video game industry. He has had a lifelong involvement with video games starting with educational PC games in the 1980s. His favorite video game is “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.”

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The most common form of cross-platform gaming today is the ability to play a game across a platform family. Nintendo first started experimenting with this concept back in 1999 with the Transfer Pak, a device that lets players move data between the N64 and the mobile Game Boy. By 2002, players could use the Game Boy to get special items and information while playing “The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker,” on the GameCube. These days, the insanely popular handheld DS can be connected wirelessly to the insanely popular Wii, allowing the DS to be used as a controller on some games.

Sony enabled cross-platform gaming in 2006 by allowing a wireless connection between the PlayStation 3 and the PlayStation Portable. It’s rumored that in Sony’s upcoming racing juggernaut, “Gran Turismo 5,” players will be able to use the PSP as a rearview mirror while driving. In the 2007 game “Shadowrun,” Microsoft first allowed PC players to game with Xbox players. If it’s taken this long to create links between related platforms, are we going to see true cross-platform gaming in the near future? You can bet your directional pad we will.

For a long time, one of the biggest hurdles to true cross-platform gaming was the ability to network gaming platforms. But with the release of the PS3 and the Wii in November 2006, all three of the current-generation home consoles have built-in network connections.

Perhaps an even bigger obstacle to cross-platform gaming has been software. Platforms have long been defined by their exclusive game titles. And nobody knows exclusive titles better than Nintendo, which has the most recognizable intellectual property in the industry. The only way to play Mario or Zelda games is on Nintendo hardware. Although exclusive titles drive hardware sales, the cost to secure the contracts with third-party software developers is big.

I believe we will see a push from third-party developers away from exclusive titles and toward cross-platform gaming. Third-party developers want as many people as possible playing their games. Having a multi-platform game – and allowing play across platforms – would prolong the life of the game and create a larger ecosystem around it. The “Metal Gear” series has long been a Sony exclusive, but a “Metal Gear” game has been announced for the Xbox 360. The successful game “Bioshock” started on the PC and Xbox 360 in 2007 and came to the PS3 in 2008 with “Bioshock 2” scheduled for release in November 2010 on all three platforms.

When you combine the ability to network game platforms and a trend toward fewer exclusive titles, the environment is right for true cross-platform gaming. Consoles are no longer vastly different from one another or from PCs in their graphical performance. The processing power of mobile gaming devices is also increasing. The platform playing field is becoming more level, making it feasible to play the same game on a variety of devices.

And, in the not-so-distant future, PCs will start to use server-side gaming, meaning the game will not be run locally, but streamed over the Internet. Consoles will eventually follow this model. Once we get to this kind of off-site rendering, all platforms will essentially be equal.

For the platform manufacturers, it may make sense to suppress cross-platform gaming and continue to use exclusive games to drive hardware sales. But for game developers and especially gamers, cross-platform gaming can only be a good thing. The next time an Xbox gamer challenges his PC friend, that friend might not be able to hide behind the incompatibility of his machine.

Brian Johnson is a student in the MCDM program who is pursuing a career in the video game industry. He has had a lifelong involvement with video games starting with educational PC games in the 1980s. His favorite video game is “The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.”

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While questioning something that I study on a daily basis might be a pointless task, I would like to think it helps me to analyze it and understand it. This question is mainly ignited by other people who say “what’s the point of blogging?” Or, “what’s the point of Twitter? Aren’t people just stroking their egos with it by thinking that people actually care what you have to say?”

I have to agree with the naysayers sometimes. Sometimes, I really don’t get how some social media is anything more than the expectation that people actually care what I have to say. And other times… it makes complete and total sense to me. Are the times it makes sense when I think what I have to say is important? I don’t know.

Am I the only one who ever questions this? If you would like to point out the irony of this post in the comments, I encourage you to do so.

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