Is it possible to do true Social R&D?
A lot of the Web 2.0 services currently talked about start serendipitously; they are wanderings in the social-systems space, and once they begin to hum they produce a gravity that attracts participants, they distort the opportunity space for later entrants, and then finally they produce an "exhaust" which may or may not be valuable. They are Research in the pure sense not the applied sense; they seek only to prove or falsify the proposition that they are useful. And they are Development only in the sense that some of them stick and then go on to begin to change how society functions; they are not Development in sense of the pragmatic application of research results for commercial gain. They cannot be Development in this sense, purely because they cannot be tested on a closed user group or in controlled environments. They only work on the entire population.
The question I want to ask is; can there be social R & D? Is there any way to do applied social research and then pragmatically develop commercial propositions from it? Or is the combined positive feedback from the waves and waves of cost free collaboration that is currently being implemented too seductive to resist and too transformative to predict?
We are by definition the most reciprocally altruistic organism to evolve. For individual users, the net has moved the cost of minor altruistic behavior near to zero, and the compound benefit that is derived from massive amounts of minor altruism may be the greatest of all transformations of the social space to occur. And it is very likely that it is still in its earliest stages.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Monday, May 15, 2006
casual gaming to decide the lounge room wars?
In this round of the console wars the stakes are high. This time, they are not just fighting each other; this time the players want to own the lounge room and everybody in it. And to do so they need to take it from the TV networks.
TV networks and the studios are fighting scared right now; and a scared opponent can be the most dangerous. The broadcast business model may be dead but the will to live is strong and the TV execs have the contacts and the contracts to corral the content for a while yet. And they have already started to be creative to meet the challenges - Warner Brothers and Bittorrent - who would have thought?
In a high stakes slug fest like this the outcome can sometimes turn on the tiniest detail which is overlooked by everybody - even the winner. And for this particular slugfest I think I know what it is.
Consoles are bought, installed and maintained by hardcore gamers. They are a demographic - a pretty broad one but still a subset of the total lounge room market. Other demographics have been targetted by console guys (see Playstation for DDR and the Eyetoy franchises, and Nintendo generally) but in these forays into new demographics there has always been a disconnect between the marketing and the demand, and between the demand and the buying power. Despite the best efforts the big question for the console guys has continued to be how to reach those other demographics.
Cue casual gaming: so far the biggest surprise in this round of the console wars. Long resigned to keeping septuagenarians' grey matter sparking as they wait for their next email, casual gaming is making a spectacular comeback. Microsoft has deployed ArcadeLive on the Xbox360 platform and frankly everybody involved has been amazed at the results.
Why is this? The answer is deceptively simple. There is no demographic for TV and there is no demographic for casual games.
Put it another way. Nearly everybody likes TV and nearly everybody like casual games. If anything is going to make some kids' mum pick up a game controller, it is going to be something like Tetris. And every kid with an Xbox360 likes Tetris. Presto! The two finally meet and they meet on the console guys' turf.
The timing couldn't be better either - blockbuster fatigue has hit the games business big time and everybody, players and developers, wants to have fun again. Casual games are fast and cheap to create. New business models are coming into play via online and they are turning out to be reliably profitable too. The niche-like, PC-based, casual games industry can now get to the lounge room.
What happens then? Well maybe the console is no longer a satanic black invertebrate designed to trip over the person who vacuums the room. Now it is a tool mum uses and likes. Now she might play some music through it, or a DVD. Now she might go into a different menu and find another game, or somebody to play online, or play a round with her daughter, or husband. Now she might talk about it with her friends and work out that they can play together too.
And suddenly the lounge room wars are over. And unless Sony really pulls its finger out it has been won by Microsoft.
TV networks and the studios are fighting scared right now; and a scared opponent can be the most dangerous. The broadcast business model may be dead but the will to live is strong and the TV execs have the contacts and the contracts to corral the content for a while yet. And they have already started to be creative to meet the challenges - Warner Brothers and Bittorrent - who would have thought?
In a high stakes slug fest like this the outcome can sometimes turn on the tiniest detail which is overlooked by everybody - even the winner. And for this particular slugfest I think I know what it is.
Consoles are bought, installed and maintained by hardcore gamers. They are a demographic - a pretty broad one but still a subset of the total lounge room market. Other demographics have been targetted by console guys (see Playstation for DDR and the Eyetoy franchises, and Nintendo generally) but in these forays into new demographics there has always been a disconnect between the marketing and the demand, and between the demand and the buying power. Despite the best efforts the big question for the console guys has continued to be how to reach those other demographics.
Cue casual gaming: so far the biggest surprise in this round of the console wars. Long resigned to keeping septuagenarians' grey matter sparking as they wait for their next email, casual gaming is making a spectacular comeback. Microsoft has deployed ArcadeLive on the Xbox360 platform and frankly everybody involved has been amazed at the results.
Why is this? The answer is deceptively simple. There is no demographic for TV and there is no demographic for casual games.
Put it another way. Nearly everybody likes TV and nearly everybody like casual games. If anything is going to make some kids' mum pick up a game controller, it is going to be something like Tetris. And every kid with an Xbox360 likes Tetris. Presto! The two finally meet and they meet on the console guys' turf.
The timing couldn't be better either - blockbuster fatigue has hit the games business big time and everybody, players and developers, wants to have fun again. Casual games are fast and cheap to create. New business models are coming into play via online and they are turning out to be reliably profitable too. The niche-like, PC-based, casual games industry can now get to the lounge room.
What happens then? Well maybe the console is no longer a satanic black invertebrate designed to trip over the person who vacuums the room. Now it is a tool mum uses and likes. Now she might play some music through it, or a DVD. Now she might go into a different menu and find another game, or somebody to play online, or play a round with her daughter, or husband. Now she might talk about it with her friends and work out that they can play together too.
And suddenly the lounge room wars are over. And unless Sony really pulls its finger out it has been won by Microsoft.
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