Last night I returned from Denver, which was the site of this year's SABEW conference. It was good, and not just because of the Best in Business awards ceremony (we won three SABEW BiB awards). Everyone was talking about the crisis in the media business, but it was interesting to note that the business media has fared a bit better than the mainstream media. Organizers repeatedly mentioned the fact that this year's American Society of Newspaper Editors convention was canceled, but the SABEW conference had a healthy attendance. One of the speakers, Ray Shaw (a former WSJ reporter and editor who is now chair of American City Business Journals) said his company's revenue sources -- subscriptions and ad bookings -- were actually looking up this year.
However, layoffs have affected the business media, especially at daily metro newspapers. There were more than a few people who had recently lost their jobs or taken buyouts, and one of the sessions I attended on entrepreneurship had a large audience. In the absence of jobs at established media outlets, people are clearly considering how to strike out on their own.
If you're interested in seeing what else was discussed at the conference, the best place to start is SABEW-related tweets.
I've been playing videogames since the 1970s. I didn't try out a first-person shooter until 1996, when I happened upon a copy of Doom on a used ThinkPad I purchased in a Hong Kong computer bazaar. The 3D environments, the challenges, the puzzles, and the action were addictive, and I was hooked. Since then, I've played about a dozen or more FPS titles on various hardware platforms. My favorites: Return to Castle Wolfenstein (for the Mac) and Half Life 2 (for the original Xbox).
That is, they were my favorites until I tried Fallout 3 for the Xbox 360, created by Bethesda (see interview below, which includes some clips of gameplay -- note that it is extremely violent, and not suitable for children or the sqeamish). This FPS is similar to the titles mentioned above in that users play a character that has to use wits, exploration, and shooting skills to win the game. However, there are two additional elements that really set it apart:
Characters become good or evil depending on their actions in the game
The 3D environment is an open world instead of a fixed channel
While I'd heard of other games that had different outcomes depending on how you played the game or whether you were nice or mean, and had seen how cooperative/antagonistic behavior impacted massively multiplayer online games like World of Warcraft, Fallout 3 was the first such FPS with this feature that I had a chance to play.
It was intriguing to see how non-player characters (computer-generated "people", animals, and robots) interacted with or reacted to my character, based on how he behaved. It totally changed the gameplay -- in some instances, getting "bad karma" resulted in being attacked and killed, or potentially losing the assistance of certain NPCs.
For example, an NPC named Paladin Cross came to my aid at one point and basically helped me survive several major combat situations. But, because she is associated with an honorable group that is out to save the world, the paladin is programmed to leave if the player steals from or hurts allied or innocent people. In other words, being bad in her proximity makes the game more difficult.
In other instances, being nice to strangers opened up new missions within the game (usually to deliver something, find an object in a difficult place, or locate someone.) I generally tried to play "nice" throughout the game, and gathered mostly good karma, but I wondered what would happen if I was bad throughout.
The second major change was the world of Fallout 3 – the "Capital Wasteland" around a post-apocalyptic Washington D.C., was an open-ended world. This is not typical of the FPS titles I've played in the past, where the player is channeled through specific locations in order to advance to the next level, and exploration is limited to that channel. In Fallout 3, buildings, subways, and cave systems usually have fixed channels that control the player's path, but outside it's possible to wander anywhere in the world (kind of like an MMOG), have random interactions with the beings encountered there, and enter buildings and do missions out of order. This adds a random, almost serendipity feel to the game, and is great for "explorer" personalities like me (see Richard Bartle's list of virtual world player taxonomy).
Along with the good/evil element described earlier, the open-ended nature of the game guarantees that no two games will be exactly alike. This is different than the models established by Doom, Half Life 2, and the popular WWII FPS titles I've played in the past, in which there is only one real path to take, and only one outcome to the game (or two, if you include the death of your character). In Fallout 3, the player is given a plot framework and has a lot of leeway to take the story in new directions.
This aspect of Fallout 3 -– along with the beautiful environment created by Bethesda's artists and various unexpected twists and characters -– made me wonder if these types of open-ended games are the template for 21st-century storytelling. I've alluded to the possibility of user-customized machinima in earlier writings (see Video, Computer-Generated Environments and the Future of the Web and "Meeting the Second Wave: How Technology, Demographics, and Usage Trends Will Drive the Next Generation of Media Evolution") but Fallout 3 involved active play within the story world, instead of passive consumption of a customized, linear plot.
The immersive experience of moving about this desolate, beautiful 3D world (unbelievably gorgeous and detailed in HD), and interacting with a wide range of characters, creatures, and subplots reminded me of some of the rich fantasy worlds created by storytellers such as Ridley Scott's team (Blade Runner) and Gene Wolfe (The Book of the New Sun). Of course, those stories centered around violent, loner characters on a futuristic mission. This dovetails with the FPS genre, but other types of stories – romance, comedy, drama – may find their 21st century voice in customizable machinima.
Video interview with Fallout 3 designers (Note: Very graphic violence depicted in some gameplay clips. If you cringed watching the introductory scene in "Saving Private Ryan," don't watch this):
Like everyone else in this town, I've been following self-inflicted death throes of the paper-based Boston Globe for the past week. But for much longer I've been following its cautious exploration of the online world. 2008 was a watershed year for the company -- that's when they finally enabled article comments, got rolling on some cool and innovative products, and apparently began to get serious about online sales, judging by the vendors that I now see advertising on boston.com.
But this morning's announcement that it had reworked its forums was a step in the wrong direction. If it looks vaguely familiar, that's because you probably saw similar forums used by other publishers back in the 1990s. You know the type -- a giant list of top-level categories, many of them not touched for weeks or months, which lead to a list of threads. Most publishers stopped using such forums years ago, but the Globe has kept the same model and updated it with a few basic tools (how could they not have search until now?).
After browsing the new forums, I felt motivated enough to write to the Globe, but am reprinting it here, in case Director of Community Publishing Teresa M. Hanafin and her team miss the message:
Globe, you're doing some things right online (the photo blog and the local news aggregator come to mind) but your approach to forums is all wrong. The 1999/central menu/everything-under-the-sun approach is doomed to fail -- there are way too many topic areas to browse, and most of them will be inactive for long stretches or will have only a few participants, which will be a cue for new users to decamp for other climes.
The way you should be doing it is a niche approach -- a community or two with just a single theme (Boston Sports Nuts or MassPols -- geddit?) and let those grow, perhaps with the gentle nudging of a blogger. There is certainly enough fodder to go on (you could reference articles or article comments that are particularly strong) and if the community shows signs of branching out into other areas, that's when you create the new topic area within the community or split it off.
Or, if you are particularly motivated, get some developer that can figure out Facebook Connect and try to create a new product that straddles FB and the Globe. People are spending more and more time on FB anyway, why not leverage that community in new and exciting ways? It will take care of the logon issue, and will also avoid the anonymous trolling problem you've had with article comments.
for the Xbox 360, created by Bethesda (see interview below, which includes some clips of gameplay -- note that it is extremely violent, and not suitable for children or the sqeamish). This FPS is similar to the titles mentioned above in that users play a character that has to use wits, exploration, and shooting skills to win the game. However, there are two additional elements that really set it apart:
, Fallout 3 was the first such FPS with this feature that I had a chance to play. 
) and Gene Wolfe (The Book of the New Sun
). Of course, those stories centered around violent, loner characters on a futuristic mission. This dovetails with the FPS genre, but other types of stories – romance, comedy, drama – may find their 21st century voice in customizable machinima.
