Outside Innovation

Is Amazon the Next Big Social Gaming Platform?

Social games are hot! People of all ages are now playing games with their friends on their mobile devices, on Facebook, and on other social networks. Many people dismiss these games as trivial because they’re designed for casual users. Some of the most popular social games are Farmville and Words with Friends (by Zynga), Texas HoldEm Poker, and the Sims Social (Electronic Arts), among many others.

Amazon Game Studio’s Living Classics

© 2012 Amazon Game Studios

1. Amazon Game Studio’s first social game is Living Classics—a Facebook game based on classic children’s stories. You click on moving objects to earn points and move to the next level.

What all of these games have in common is that you can play them anywhere, on your device(s) of choice, you can often play them online or offline, you can share your progress with friends, and/or you can invite them to join you asynchronously or synchronously.

Apple’s Misstep Keeps Kids from Showcasing Their Innovations on iPhone

Oops. Apple goofed.

Last week, Apple did something that created outrage among educators and parents—one of their most important customer segments.

Apple banned the use of a $3.95 iPhone app called Scratch Viewer. Scratch Viewer would have let teachers, parents, and young kids view the 1 million applications that young kids all over the globe have created over the last three years using Scratch.

Scratch is a kid-friendly free programming environment which was developed at the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab, based on the work of Seymour Papert and Alan Kay. Mitchel Resnick, the director of the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at MIT, had this to say to reporters and on the Scratch blog:

“We're disappointed that Apple decided not to allow a Scratch player on the iPhone or iPad (as part of Apple's policy against apps that interpret or execute code). As we see it, there is nothing more important than empowering the next generation of kids to design, create, and express themselves with new media technologies. That's the idea behind Scratch. Kids around the world are using Scratch to program their own interactive stories, games, animations, and simulations with Scratch—and sharing their creations with one another online. In the process, kids learn to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. Since the launch of Scratch in 2007, kids have shared nearly 1 million projects on the Scratch website. We hope that Apple will reconsider its policies so that more kids can experience the joys of creating and sharing with Scratch. (By the way, the Scratch player for the iPhone was created by a third party, not by our group at the MIT Media Lab. But our group is planning to make Scratch authoring tools for the iPad in the future, and we hope Apple will allow us....)”

Faithful Outside Innovation followers will recognize Mitch Resnick as one of the heroes in the LEGO Mindstorms’ NXT story. Mitch has been engaging kids as co-inventors at MIT since the early 1980s. He and Steve Ocko were the grad students who connected computers to LEGOs so that young kids could use Seymour Papert’s LOGO language to make their LEGO creations come alive.

Long Awaited Spore Launch: Customer-Created Content and Protests via Amazon!

I wrote about the evolutionary computer game called Spore as the ultimate example of designing a business strategy around customer-created content in Outside Innovation in 2006. Remember that Spore is Will Wright’s (designer of Sims and Sims City) epiphany. After watching how much time, effort, and creativity Sims users put in to the design of their characters’ clothing, wallpaper, furniture, and other paraphernalia, Will Wright decided to create a gaming environment in which the entire object of the game is to create your own world—starting with single celled organisms and moving through five stages—cell, creature, tribe, civilization, galaxy. You play Spore on your own computer or game console. There are also stages of the game (like creating creatures) that you can do on hand-held devices, like the Apple iPhone.

A Spore Creature designed by Sander Miller, Garrett Miller and Sophie Lance, inspired by their lobster dinner!

There are many “gamers” who will never like Spore. It is not a procedural game, e.g., one in which there are challenges that you need to figure out and master in order to win. Nor is it a game in which you need to recruit 50 strangers to join your league in order to beat the other guys. It is also not a multi-player game. You play by yourself, creating your own creatures and your own civilization, but you can reuse creatures created by others. Some early players have called it tedious and boring. Others are intrigued by the “open-ended” environment that Spore offers.

The Good News: Customers Are Creating MILLIONS of Creatures and Sharing Them

My grandkids LOVE creating creatures with the Spore Creature Creator. “Spore is truly a revolution in gaming,” my veteran gamer stepson, Tod Hagan, told me. “This is much more creative than any other game.” Tod is a Linux, open source, technology-savvy geek in his 40s. Tod is also a doting uncle. He brought Spore’s Creature Creator to each of his nieces and nephews and loaded it onto my Mac so we could all take turns creating Creatures. The age range of our young creature creators is three years old to eight years old. And, I can tell you that it was tough to pry the kids away from the computer to do more mundane things like go sailing, swimming, or blueberry picking. They loved creating creatures!  

Spore creatures created by Trillery, Dave, and Sarah

What makes this activity so much fun is that, as you assemble and mold your creature, adding legs, arms, mouths, and other appendages, your 3D creature comes to life, and you can make it dance, roar, laugh, have babies (no sex act required), and move around. You can animate a routine and automagically capture it as a YouTube video. It’s great fun, and if a three-year old can do it with a minimum of coaching, the rest of us may be able to figure it out. I realize that many of the full game capabilities may not be appropriate for the younger set, but we adults can certainly enjoy creating our own little worlds, and the youngsters can share their creatures happily with each other and begin to populate worlds with creatures from friends and family as well as others’ creatures they come across and want to use or modify.

20 Million Creatures and Rising Daily. Electronic Arts launched the Spore Creature Creator last spring in order to prime the pump. It’s a free download from the Spore site. They expected several hundred thousand creatures to be created. Instead, 20 million creatures sprang forth! And these are just the ones we know about! (You can create creatures using Creature Creator on your own system, but they’re only registered and uploaded into the Sporepedia when you register online. I’ve only uploaded a handful of the couple of dozen we created in a couple of days.)

Microsoft Opens XBox Gaming, O/S and Office APIs

The "new" Microsoft  (Ballmer/Ray Ozzie combo) is opening up in a variety of ways! This week, Microsoft made two significant announcements that will foster outside innovation. The first one that really grabbed my attention was this one: Xbox 360 Becomes First Video Game Console Ever to Invite the World to Create Original Games and Share Online With Millions.

Awesome! I can't wait to see what happens as the geeks who have already flocked to XBox contribute their coding skills to creating games for the Xbox platform. It's not yet clear to me how truly "open" this platform is, e.g. whether game developers will be able to extend each others' games. The image at the right is from "Culture" -- one of the seven user-created games developed bt Hidden Path Entertainment using the XNA platform that Microsoft featured at the Game Developers Conference.

Here's the description included in the official press release:

"An Xbox 360 community game created using Microsoft's XNA Game Studio software and XNA Creators Club membership will be able to be submitted for distribution on Xbox LIVE. Each community-created game must then undergo a thorough peer-review process and be evaluated for accuracy in representation and appropriateness. Community game developers will be able to beta test the process this spring and will be able to distribute their games on Xbox LIVE by the end of this year."

I look forward to learning more about how "open" this environment is.. Of course, Microsoft hopes to attract millions of budding game developers. The official release goes on to say:

"Xbox 360 once again broke new ground by introducing a new, open distribution service for games created by the community and soon playable by its 10 million Xbox LIVE members. Community-created games on Xbox LIVE will quickly double the size of the Xbox 360 game library. By the end of 2008, Xbox 360 owners will have access to more than 1,000 games, making it the largest, most creatively diverse library across all next-generation platforms."

At the Games Developer Conference this week,

"Chris Satchell, general manager and chief XNA architect at Microsoft, announced that seven games created using XNA Game Studio 2.0 would be available immediately for Xbox 360 owners to download from Xbox LIVE Marketplace."

In reading through some of the heated discussions among participants at this week's Game Developers' Conference, the "consensus" seems to be that Microsoft is releasing a true "Game Developers' Platform" and creating a marketplace in which game developers can strut their stuff, whereas Spore (coming in October 2008) and LittleBigPlanet (LBP) are "content-creation systems inside of a game."

The second "opening up" of Microsoft this week is of course the announcement that Microsoft will finally publish open APIs both to its OS and to its office applications.

Quick Takes on Consumer Electronics

Consumer electronics remains a vibrant and ebullient industry. This year’s 2008 Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show was jam-packed as always. As an armchair participant, I won’t try to compete with all of the pundits who have already voiced their opinions about the most exciting technologies being introduced this year. What I notice are the patterns:

1. High-definition video is driving the appetite for large screens and HD downloads.

2. GPS and navigation technology has made in-car electronics a must-have for most families; not content with digital navigation devices, in-car electronics also include audio, video, radio, games, etc. You can travel the world in your electronic cocoon.

3. Smaller, thinner, cheaper, brighter, fewer moving parts, less energy consumed... the world’s designers are getting pretty good at designing and evolving nifty gadgets that take advantage of pervasive computing.

The “New Work” of the IT Architect: Innovation Labs and Incubators

Last week I enjoyed my semi-annual “whack on the side of the head” meeting with my Pioneers—our lead users who are veteran technology and business architects. This small band has been gathering twice a year since the early ’90s. What they have in common is a way they view themselves and the world. This worldview evolves over time, of course, but there seem to be some basic principles that are wired into their nervous systems/perceptual filters.

They were all pioneers in the early days of distributed object computing—so they view the world as a place in which intelligent robust services come together dynamically to empower and enable complex operations. They have designed and implemented a variety of very impressive systems over the years—from nuclear power plants to global banking systems, from complex logistics systems to derivatives trading systems. Their IT designs often feature large shared memory in which big abstract models can run—these abstractions are connected to the physical world and instrumented with real-time events. The designs often incorporate rules engines. Yet they love simplicity. Every element is self-contained and self-describing. 

What Behaviors to Expect from the G Generation?

While we're on the subject of consumer technology and the need to provide great tools in order to attract and retain employees, there's a great collection of articles about the online gaming world in the April issue of “Wired” magazine. I loved the short piece by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas entitled “You Play World of Warcraft? You’re Hired!” In it, they described the benefits that gamers derive from interacting in an "accidental learning" environment as opposed to an intentional learning environment, where you are "learning to be," rather than "learning about."

“When role-playing gamers team up to undertake a quest, they often need to attempt particularly difficult challenges repeatedly until they find a blend of skills, talents, and actions that allows them to succeed. This process brings about a profound shift in how they perceive and react to the world around them. They become more flexible in their thinking and more sensitive to social cues.... The process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total immersion course in leadership. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating and recruiting new members: creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes.”

Most Amazing Form of Customer-Led Innovation: Where Online Games are Going

If you want to see the future of your business, take a look at what's going on in the online mulitplayer gaming industry. My hero in this context is Will Wright, creator of SimCity and the Sims--now in its 6th year of spawning and increasingly vibrant customer community and ecosystem. (Sims even has a French stamp in its honor!)

Having watched customers create characters, pets, houses, cities, furniture, objects, etc. in the Sims, Will quickly realized that the next generation of online games could be even-more customer-driven. Coupling that experience with the harsh reality that the complexity and cost of designing online games is escalating out of control, Wright and a small team of crack-game developers have taken a completely different tack in creating Wright's next blockbuster game, code-named Spore. Here's the seminal article by Dave "Fargo" Kosak that describes what Will Wright and his cohorts are up to.