成人快手

Gaming's wife-o-meter

• Darren Waters
• 8 Mar 07, 09:19 PM

Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto confessed today that he used a "wife-o-meter" to test if gaming was being opened up to new audiences.

At a packed conference hall in San Francisco he said his wife had never shown any interest in gaming.

But by broadening the types of games that Nintendo produced he had seen his wife become a "hard core gamer".

"She has now accepted video games as part of her daily life - and begun to understand the new interactive experience in video gaming," he said.

Some female gamers will feel patronised by this, I'm sure. I know I was taken to task for a review I wrote of the Nintendo Wii when I extolled how it had brought my wife to a console for the first time.

The gaming industry remains largely male-dominated and gaming is primarily done by teenage boys.
I've read plenty of surveys which say women are playing lots of games, mainly casual games, but my own experience is very different.

I know of only a handful of women who play video games. I know I shouldn't generalise based on personal experience - but it's hard not to.

At the GDC men outnumber women by about 50 to 1.

So are women happy with the experiences they are being served up? What do you think of the wife-o-meter?

Is gaming something that still needs spousal approval?

• Permalink
• Comments (42)

Time for a story

• Darren Waters
• 8 Mar 07, 04:51 PM

Warren Spector is one of the games industry's most influential thinkers - he also makes fine video games such as Deus Ex.

So when he talks people listen - generally.

He was at GDC to talk about story telling and to follow up a lecture he gave three years ago.

Has the industry improved its story-telling? That was the key question.

And his answer - yes, but not enough to really count.

Games are powerful vehicles for stories but often they fail because of poor writing, poor dialogue, poor character creation, poor environments and often because they are trying to be film-like in their approach.

"I want the opportunity to play a game and not play the part of Vin Diesel," he said, bemoaning the types of lead characters in games.

"That is the only role we give people."

He said that game designers had to give gamers worlds to play in, not sets.

"If I can see a door I want to go through it," he said.

He said advances in graphics technology and processing power was actually damaging narration.

He argued that focusing on more detailed environments and worlds meant less time was being focused on characters and story-telling.

"We are going to have to take more chances. Good stories are what will attract new gamers in."

He pointed out that video games were the only medium to make use of music, sound, still images, moving images and interactive worlds.

"Let players explore the external world and their inner lives," he said.

And he quoted author Jonathan Rauch of Sex, Lies and Videogames, who said: "In a standard video game, it鈥檚 very easy to kill someone but virtually impossible to talk to them."

So what do you think of games' story-telling ability? How can they improve?

• Permalink
• Comments (20)

Follow my Silicon Valley trip

• Darren Waters
• 8 Mar 07, 11:01 AM

We're trying something new on the blog - a Google map, Flickr mash-up.

I'll be marking some of the points of interest of my visit to San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
Click on the way points for more information - and to link to related content on the 成人快手 News website and elsewhere on the blog.
If you zoom into street level - you'll see that the markers point to places I've visited.

Some of the markers in San Francisco are very close to each other - so make sure you zoom in to find the clusters of locations.

Let us know what you think. Don't judge us too harshly - it's an experiment, after all!

• Permalink
• Comments (96)