The on-demand console gaming service, OnLive recently released pictures and videos demoing its product and peripheries through Facebook in an attempt to create some hype surrounding its upcoming release into public beta mode. The projected release of this cloud gaming service has brought much attention in the press with headlines such as “Is It Game Over for Consoles?” in The Independent.The attention grabbing headline refers to the potential threat OnLive offers to the current gaming industry by removing the iconic, chunky hardware boxes from gaming.
OnLive aims to cut the need for hardware by using the upper limit of internet bandwidth to stream any game to a display of the users choosing. This would fundamentally alter the marketing war between games consoles that has existed for years, it will essentially cut the need to upgrade hardware in order to play new, more advanced games. Instead of buying new, OnLive will merely upgrade their servers, making gaming far cheaper for gamers; and accessible only to those with fast enough internet access. The above video seems to endorse this as the graphically heavy and admired PC game Crisis is streamed to the iPhone. With constant internet access being a key factor OnLive also allows users to view exactly what games their friends are playing, opening enormous possibilities for multiplayer games. Laptop and smart-phone access for cloud gaming is apparent in their built-in access to the internet, TVs will also be able to have OnLive access as they release a ‘microconsole’ flatter and smaller than a standard console controller, connecting the large display to a modem and streaming the game information to the TV.
Yet on the day OnLive officially announced themselves in 2009, Sony happened to register the name ‘PS Cloud’.While the gaming industry does not yet appear to be quaking in its boots, technology trends of the last decade indicate that if the service is ‘good enough’ it will succeed. The console heavy gaming sector is only just waking up to what the music industry has had to deal with for the last decade in digital distribution becoming the dominant method. While technology experts have negatively stated that they fear the ‘decade of the gadget is over’ the positive upspin on this is that an integration of information will be taking place within these gadgets as differentiated services and internet access/speed becomes a more central component.
Youth behaviour will define further which of these services are fully adopted as they defined the last decade with the adoption of cheap, accessible ‘good enough technologies’ to become the dominant consumer electronics of the last decade. While vinyl is in the midst of a cult revivial amongst young people, there is no denying that MP3 players and laptops have long over taken record and CD players as the main mode of listening to music. While the sound quality of these newer technologies is inferior, the accessibility and cheapness has clearly won over many young people. This will be the same with books, as a New York Times writer recently noted in that his daughter called his Amazon Kindle ‘daddy’s book’ instead of an electronic reader .Tech Tribe 2009 clearly shows that young people have fully adopted this ‘good enough technology’ which has suddenly come to outline consumer electronics for the last decade in online films through laptops, digital photos, eReaders and Skype. If OnLive is cheap, accessible and good enough, young people will almost certainly adopt it, evidencing how youth are possibly the driving demographic sector in how consumer electronics develop.
For a more detailed overview of how OnLive will work after it’s full release later in the year, watch the detailed presentation below. Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5 are also available on Youtube.
The controversial and immensely successful release of the Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 video game, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is particularly timely given that we are in the midst of the festive season. Modern Warfare 2, which was released in November of this year, smashed entertainment industry records to become the biggest entertainment release of all time. Within 5 days of it’s release Modern Warfare 2 generated $550 million, over $150 million more than the biggest ever 5 day gross at the box office (Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince, $394 million in opening 5 days).
Banned in Russia, because of a controversial scene in which the player can choose to mow down civilians in a terrorist attack on an airport, the storyline of the game focuses on the large-scale outbreak of war in the modern world, further pushing its timely quality with the recent ramping up of the war in Afghanistan. The controversial subject matter and particularly realistic setting has set the game up one of the most talked about Christmas presents for mother’s to give their children this year. On her blog, one Mother sarcastically asked and answered: “How do we really feel about war, anyhow? After 40,000 years the evidence is in. We like it. Here’s the top toy we will give this year to our children to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ.”
Upon hearing the discussions about whether Mums would buy Modern Warfare 2 for their young children, I thought about my Mum’s impact upon my early life as a gamer. Unable to conceive of getting into video games without her financial backing as a child, and baring in mind that the world of gaming had changed significantly since I was a child in the early 1990s, I decided to ask her a few questions about her interactions with games via my obsession with them as a child.
“I think I started buying you games around 8 or 9 years old. You didn’t get them immediately. You had to ask for a long time, even though your friends had them for a while, but I guess it was a point of reference for you. To have something in common with others was I think the main reason we bought you a console.
“Particularly being an only child I didn’t want you to feel left out, I suppose all mothers have that urge though. I thought it might have a positive impact on your hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills, so when I first started buying them I would more or less choose the games that you got, apart from the ones your uncle bought for you! I remember I bought you Ecco the Dolphin and Art Alive because I thought the covers looked nice and I thought there might be some education value to them!”
I don’t really have any memories of my Mum getting me those game I didn’t really want, although there are lots of stories floating around the internet about Mum’s getting the wrong game for their child, especially with Modern Warfare 2 having a similar release for the Wii that is more an updated version of an older game.
I had totally forgotten about these placid and notoriously difficult games, but it was probably more its difficulty, especially of Ecco the Dolphin, rather than the fact that my Mum had chosen it. It was interesting that she choose the game purely based on the cover though, rather than play-testing it herself, as the internet didn’t exist in our world circa 1992.
I asked her what her concerns were with me playing video games as a child in general.
“Yeah I had concerns generally. I had heard stories of addiction on the radio, alongside those more extreme stories of children getting violent through not being able to differentiate between fantasy and reality and re-enacting the games that you had, but ultimately I didn’t censor you beyond the extremely violent and gore-filled games as I had faith both in my parenting ability by correlation your own ability to distinguish fantasy and reality.
“I was vehemently against buying GTA for you, all I had heard about was the violence in it, even though I knew your friends had it and you had the money to buy it yourself when you were 12 I didn’t let you buy it.”
I remember that my friends had Grand Theft Auto, one of the most controversial games that has since become a best selling series, allowing the player total freedom in a city but encouraging them through storyline to become a career criminal. I suppose the early censorship my Mum had instilled had worked as I don’t really remember having a large desire to get GTA, and it was only when the 3D version came out when I was older at around 15, that I had a desire to buy it, and my education in games in conjunction with my Mum’s early censoring had firmly distinguished gaming from reality.
This ability to distinguish even formed part of my argument when asking my Mum to buy me a game she wasn’t prepared to.
“Well your Uncle Herman would pass you down lots of games he would have, but I asked him to censor them, which he did most of the time! I’d buy you gaming magazines quite regularly; I still think to do that sometimes! And you’d usually get the same games as your friends. When it came to me actually buying games for you, you’d try and charm me!
I remember one time when we had been at the theatre seeing Richard II and you said to me ‘Can we have a look in the games shop?’ phrasing it in such an innocent way that you just wanted to have a look at what was there, but we both knew full well that you knew exactly what game you wanted!”
I too remember never once thinking ‘ah I’ll just have a look’ and always attempting to get my Mum into the games shop so that I’d have a shot at getting the specific game I had in mind.
“Once we got inside you’d keep the charm going but on this particular occasion after the theatre, with a large bout of pestering too! On the whole though you knew which games I would get you and which I wouldn’t, and once I had told you that it wasn’t suitable for you, you’d try with another game you had in mind.”
I do remember my journeys to the game shop as mostly being successful with my Mum, but I don’t think she ever bought me a game that was way out there and unsuitable.
“I would largely look at the cover then decide whether it was suitable for you, because you’d be with me most of the time I didn’t really have the opportunity to test it at home for myself, but we did end up playing one of the more controversial ones together and I got really into it.”
This brought me to one of my clearest memories as a young gamer. My Mum sat down and actively took part in scrolling beat-em up games with me. None of my other friends Mum’s did that! So it was really fun that she actively took part in them and we able to complete or get to the final round of, the two games we played the most together; Streets of Rage 2 and Golden Axe 2.
“I think your Uncle Herman gave you Golden Axe, which I really really enjoyed but although we got to the final round we never completed it! And Streets of Rage, I was iffy about the violence on the cover but I let you convince me slightly and I wanted to experience it myself to see whether it was bad or not, and in the end I ended up really enjoying it! The girl character became a fantasy me! I really loved that we got to go on a quest together, especially with the fantasy setting of Golden Axe, I trusted your ability to differentiate between the game and reality. I liked the stories too and felt a thrill at accomplishing them!
I think I ended up playing it through wanting to experience how violent it was for myself and also you asking me to play with you when you didn’t have friends round. Unless you experience it for yourself, you don’t really know what it’s about and it also gave me validity if I needed to censor it while we were playing. I guess the lack of blood and gore, despite the violence was a key factor in letting those two particular games slide, they really weren’t as bad as some of the others, and especially Golden Axe which was set in a more fantastical realm”
At this point I begin to contrast my Mum’s attitude with 16-bit graphical violence with the graphics of the modern day behemoth of gaming, and in particular the controversial level in which the player takes the role of a soldier who goes undercover as a terrorist and is encouraged to gun-down innocent civilians in an airport. The fact that this level can be skipped is in many ways an emotional plot device to get the player to dislike the bad guys of the game. Even if the player does decide to take on the level they do not have to largely partake in the shooting of civilians.
After the brief story monologue, and the in-action graphics of the game appeared, my Mum looked at me shocked at how realistically the graphics had progressed since we were playing together more than 10 years ago.
“I’m shocked at the realness of it! I’m not sure I would’ve bought you the beat-em up games if they’d been this real!”
When the shooting of civilians started happening she looked visibly disgusted.
“I don’t like how the gun was coming from my perspective, that makes it too real. It didn’t used to be like that point of view. There’s a crossover with reality here also.”
She stopped the video ¾ of the way in though, as she was unsure if she could continue. “
I’ll finish it but it’s caused me a degree of anxiety definitely, but then again I suppose I am able to suspend my disbelief as the characters walk through the bodies in a cartoony way rather than stepping over them in a more realistic way, but the wanton destruction of this game disgusts me. It made me shudder and dragged my emotions into it despite it being a game. If you were younger, I wouldn’t be buying that for you if you!”
I ask about the upcoming proposal for the Digital Economy Bill, which will make it illegal for the first time to sell 12+ rated games to children under the age of 12 and she answers with full confidence in the passing of that law.
“Yep very sensible, the media has a part to play in this because you only hear about the games that cause controversy, or I do anyway because you were my link to that world, but I suppose if you were younger now I’d use the internet more to check up on what games you wanted and maybe look for more realistic takes on reviews or multiple ones anyway.
“Games have definitely got more realistically violent since I was buying them for you, but I suppose the world has seemingly got more violent too in the reporting of violence. There’s more a saturation of violence it seems, but having said that I’m intrigued by the Wii, which my friend has a Pilates game for so I’d consider checking that our, and I get the impression that it spans generations rather than hardcore teenage gamers. It seems to have something more appealing. I think the key factor in parental control is actually experiencing the game for myself though.”
While my Mum has been musing about whether to buy herself a Wii since interviewing her, there is definitely a thread that the violence of games past went unnoticed by parents and there are plenty of examples of kids appealing to internet gaming community members to help them persuade their Mum’s to buy them Modern Warfare 2 (examples here, here, here and here). Yet in a lot of cases (well, at least in mine), Mum’s decision was often final and perhaps it needs that firmness to give children a clear sense about how to choose what games they can deal with. There is no doubt that it’s essential to censor young children to games in some form, but my discussion with my own Mum also suggests that it is possible to find a middle road, where both parents and children can enjoy games together, where censoring can become more of a behind-the-scenes issues rather than a confrontational one.
As a related link it seems there are also others comparing the violence in the games of yesteryear, including the aforementioned Streets of Rage 2:
We’ve previously explored how Facebook is affecting relationships of young people . Our Headbox community member Rusha (23) described her relationship with her contacts on Facebook and how she didn’t know as many of them as she did in her day-to-day physical life saying that she had “never spoken to a third of them at all”. She outlined the passive nature of friends on Facebook, suggesting quite a negative impact upon social relations. She goes on to say that social networking encourages a way “to connect to people in a way that could only be described as passive”. Yet the word ‘passive’ could easily be substituted for more positively connotated words such as ‘ambient’ or ‘continuous’. There have been many news reports stressing the negative impact that social networking may have upon physical social relations (another example here). Yet there is a recent bout of news that suggests that social networking is actually impacting somewhat positively upon social relationships as people become both aware of the limits of social networking as well as how to maximize their social networks online. 2009 has provided enough of a shake up, largely through the mainstream notoriety of Twitter, to begin conceptualizing social networks differently to how they were at the beginning of the year.
A recent study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project has examined the effects of social networking and cell phone use over the last 20 years. According to the study, although the participant’s social circles were self-reported to smaller than 20 years ago, this was not due to internet usage. In fact, people who regularly use digital technologies are far more social than the average American, having wider more diverse networks and are more likely to visit parks, cafes or volunteer for local organizations according to the study. This suggests, that in some ways a greater interaction with the internet and social networking sites, presents a greater interaction with community around their users, be it through a niche or a geographical interest. Many studies have hypothesized that the average person is feeling more socially isolated because of the rise of the internet. Pew confirmed previous findings that close networks had dropped by 2 or 3 friends, yet it also reported that only 6% of Americans fell into this previously attributed isolated category of citizen, with no significant change over the last 20 years. The study suggests that people are becoming more aware of exactly how to use social networks and are unperturbed by how the media might suggest that they take them too literally. The recent suggestion that young people are now ‘finally flocking’ to Twitter suggests that they are realizing the power of the social network merely for what it is, rather than an indicator for how many deep and connecting friendships one has.
Twitter has become the great example of the realistic social networking next step in that there is nothing beyond the 140 characters that can be shared. It is the bare bones of the information and possibly a link to a new site, in some ways confirming Pew’s findings that although people still prefer to connect in a face-to-face fashion, there is a growing realization that social networking is effective for exactly what it suggests rather than igniting a more close and meaningful friendship connection with others. Not necessarily knowing your contacts very well on Twitter allows a certain openness that is crucial to, perhaps, Twitter’s greatest reward, serendipitous discovery – the adjustment of this feature caused an uproar on the microblogging site earlier in the year. With more young people using intentional misspellings with leetspeak or lolspeak even as far as using exclamation marks with a few number 1s purposefully inserted when ending the group (!!!!11), indicating an excitedness that is usually conveyed with such haphazard typing mistakes, it could be suggested that there is possibly an increasing awareness of the internet’s impact upon society as digital becomes a less separate reality for young people. It is perhaps no coincidence then that the New Oxford American Dictionary has named ‘Unfriend’ as its word of 2009.
Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for the Oxford US dictionary program states that as a 2009 Word of the Year, Unfriend “has both currency and potential longevity”. The OAD word of the year even sparked a debate as to whether it was actually Unfriend or Defriend is the word that should be used.
The popularity of the concept perhaps further indicates John Fischer comments that it’s an “example of how things like social networks are changing our relationships. You used to have to deal with all the messy real-world parts of ending a friendship and now you can just click a button and delete someone.” This changing relationship has even manifested itself within mobile phones as the Samsung Jet features an incoming fake call function to alleviate annoying conversation.
This shift is further evidence that young people who are growing up with social networking and digital are beginning to see them less as separate realities from the physical and are integrating real life privacy concerns into their personal social media strategy. We’ve already shown through Tech Tribe 2009 that in the last 12 months well over half (63%) of 19-25 year olds have upped their privacy settings. Social media strategy has become such a popular concept with the quitting of Twitter by Miley Cyrus, Lilly Allen and Stephen Fry (the latter temporarily) that it has satirized with the term suicide, particularly in the case of Ed Droste, founder of the band Grizzly Bear . The satirist even ran his own cyber suicide story http://www.carlesisdead.com/ with a more satirical hipster character, Mikebro, replacing him for the 10 top albums of the decade post and on the Hipster Runoff twitter account. This hipster-based satire of social media strategy is an example of how conscious young people are becoming of it and also how the digital world is becoming less distinct from the physical.
This lack of distinction is ever more apparent in industries that directly involve laying digital information onto the physical world such as geotagging and augmented reality, the latter being a market, which may be worth $732million by 2014 and is already interacting with children’s action figures. While young people have generally begun to suss privacy settings for social networks. There are privacy warnings to be heeded as these new technologies become mainstream. Now that Twitter has enabled location information to be noted to tweets, and digital information can be added to pictures via augmented reality apps there are concerns that releasing such a combination of information such as visual cues and location could invite unwanted attention. This discourse is however part of a larger ‘transparency versus personalization’ debate that has always run since people started beginning putting up personal information on the internet, as Kevin Kelly notes that “if you want total personalization, you have to be totally transparent”.
Most people won’t take their personal social media strategy this far however, and will be utilizing different social networks for different purposes as they become more aware of how integrated they become into society. Linkedin is used for professional collaboration, Facebook for personal friends while Twitter is used both to connect with friends and collaborate serendipitously. There will always be those who opt out categorically such as 25 year gold physics graduate Tomek Kott whose wife started a mini-crusade to get him to join in creating the Facebook group “Tomek Kott Must Joint Facebook”. It seems as though these examples are becoming more anomalies worth noting however as more and more of the world become socially networked.
Yet while it is noted that a huge majority of young people have joined social networks and are beginning to perceive them for precisely what they are, the assumption that young people are becoming intuitive with technology and are therefore, what some call Digital Natives, can be challenged as was the case at a lecture last week at the London School of Economics. Professor Sonia Livingstone noted that digital intuitiveness is not a staple characteristic of young people growing up today, instead noting Ofcom’s recent study showing that there is no real consensus for 12-15 year old internet users about exactly how search engines work with 37% suggesting relevance was the key factor, while 32% believed truthfulness to be the factor that ranks results. These results suggest that there is no clear way to define young people beyond the fact that they are young people. While the large majority is becoming aware of personal social media strategy there will always be those who are unaware, yet things like this are teachable in school, unlike the older methods for consuming media like TV. Dr Rebekah Willet suggested at the digital native lecture that for children social networks were more of an instrument of sub-conscious expression rather a conscious platform of it’s own. This is supported by the fact that recent psychological research has suggested that Facebook profiles capture their users true personalities, rather than exaggerated ones. It is perhaps necessary to view a combination of the two views as social networks become as immediate realities for young people as their daily face-to-face interactions – the conversations are both unconscious and conscious of those viewing them online.
The premiere of Brett Gaylor’s open source film RiP: A Remix Manifestotook place last week at Londonmedia club Frontline. The director was present at the screening introducing and taking questions about his film, which addresses the tension that has emerged since downloading music and infringing copyright laws has become mainstream, through Napster.
Mobile online abounds! Finally young people are starting to get their piece of the action with 51% of young people accessing the internet via their phone.With better infrastructure, all-inclusive surfing packages and functionality improving across the more modest handset ranges, the world of web and walk has become accessible to young people. Okay, so it’s all very well that they’re online, but what does that mean in real terms; how much has it got their attention? Well, of this half of young people, they are spending on average nearly 3 hours a week online.
