No Sleep Til Brooklyn

Have you been playing BioShock 2, the "sequel to a game that didn't need a sequel?" So've I. No, it didn't need a sequel, but I'm glad it got one. I hope it gets several more. It could be the beginning of something awesome.

Don't worry, I'll be explaining at Gamasutra soon. No More Heroes didn't really need a sequel either, but it got one (and I was also glad of that). All I'll say for now is that we ought to get used to sequels to games that "don't need them" -- and that the trend could evolve into something very positive.

I'm busy all the time, especially with my staff at D.I.C.E. I suspect that what people do at D.I.C.E. is play a lot of poker and get supremely drunk. So in other words, it's like my life, except my life lacks poker (which I don't know how to play), and lacks me having to cover people's talks. Props to my colleague, Game Developer EIC Brandon Sheffield, who's already got a couple talks from Vegas up at Gamasutra: Astronaut and new-minted Facebook gaming boss Richard Garriott's sorta-critique of game narratives, and Davids Jaffe and Crane talking about their experiences in the evolution toward casual gaming -- Jaffe says Calling all Cars was "a mistake", thanks to "a casual theme with a hardcore mechanic on a machine people had paid $500 for. Nothing matched up."

Speaking of evolution, remember that whole "virtual worlds" thing, where everyone wanted to interact in browser-based 3D environments with avatars? That lasted like, 12-18 months, didn't it? I feel sorry for the venture capitalists that are still buying that line (and for Sony, which appears to have some very expensive lemons with which it must now make lemonade).

A couple years ago when I was running the inaugural Worlds in Motion Summit, I got up in front of a room of all these starry-eyed venture-funded kiddoes (ignore the awkward pic! I thought we were friends, Zonk!), and -- okay, it was a bit nervy for a journo to do -- demanded that they prove to me why I should believe in their promises of a 3D web, an avatar-based future. I was skeptical that anyone wanted a "3D web" or to "democratize content" or anything like that, and what I saw was a bunch of people who had actually gotten someone to fund their fantasy that Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash could be real.

A little bit thereafter at Austin GDC, where I had less involvement in the Summit, I told FreeToPlay.biz I thought Web 2.0-types should "evaluate their substance" and take more lessons from the gaming biz. Now it sure looks to me like a lot of the buzz and enthusiasm around so-called "virtual worlds" has been transmuted into iPhone and Facebook gaming.

Just look how many game developers have gone into those spaces: The dude who made Klax (read my interview with him!) A couple guys from Rockstar Leeds, who miss the sense of agency that comes with grass-roots bedroom coding. Flippin' Richard Garriott! Sid flippin' Meier is even putting Civ on flippin' Facebook!

This, this I am interested in -- especially when you see publishers like EA plainly state that they depend on success in this small-digital space for their survival.

I used to snicker a bit at dudes saying things like "Facebook is a virtual world." No, Facebook is a social network. Virtual worlds are also social networks, and it turns out that Facebook is a method much simpler and more intuitive for social networking. People just want to be connected to each other in the most accessible way possible. Nobody wants the Web to be a world, a game, an "environment" or a "user-generated content space." They just wanna get shit done.

I was one of the earliest business writers on Web 2.0 -- one of the earliest neutral ones, at least. I remember getting into arguments with other journalists at events: I'd argue that Second Life was only relevant to the people that "lived" in it, and they'd argue back how wrong I was. The argument would soon reveal that they owned a business selling virtual fashions in Second Life, or selling virtual kits that could make their avatars into hermaphrodites or whatever. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I think a very vocal super-minority made a lot of people feel like this avatar thing was way more important than it is.

I did say that I hoped that a lot of lessons from the virtual-everything gold rush got transmuted wisely into the larger games business, and I think that's happening. Some bubbles pop, some don't, but mostly what happens is a lot of subtle evolution. All of this industry fragmentation is really good both for core games and for social games. It's exciting, and I'm glad I don't have to interview anyone who uses their Second Life picture as a real picture anymore.