Gaming and Culture

NEW YORK--"Even in a down year that we're all facing, this industry's growing," said J.J. Richards, the newly appointed general manager of in-game advertising company Massive, at an advertiser event Wednesday.

"Versus other mediums," Richards said, "in-game advertising has unparalleled engagement."

Massive, which has been owned by Microsoft since 2006, took over a below-ground nightclub in Manhattan's West Village for its first "upfront" event, modeled off of the eponymous television ad pitch events for advertisers and media buyers. It also marked Richards' debut as head of Massive; he served as the head of Microsoft's Xbox Live division for several years and then Microsoft's advertising division.

The mantra of the afternoon: In-game advertising, despite still being an emerging medium, is an effective spot for ad dollars at a time when budgets are getting alarmingly tight. Or at least that's what the execs say--and game sales seem to agree for the time being. "As the demographics go, it hits this very elusive target audience around 18-to-34-year-old males, hard to find anywhere else," Richards said. "They spend more money on games than they do in music or movies."

There was little talk of the dire advertising climate, but an undercurrent of practicality ran through the event as speakers stressed in-game advertising's effectiveness. Massive executives boasted research statistics that suggest exposure to a brand via in-game advertising improves its perception by 31 percent, and that 60 percent of gamers remember ads that they see. Massive can reach 27 million gamers, they said.

The company simultaneously announced that it had forged a multi-year ad partnership with Activision, which just closed its merger with Vivendi to become Activision Blizzard. It'll be the exclusive ad provider for 18 Activision titles for the PC and Xbox 360, including Guitar Hero and Transformers.

A parade of advertising representatives from Massive partners like Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, THQ, and Activision took the stage to explain how their titles are choice spots for advertisements, from product placement to mini-contests to streaming videos.

But the easiest form of in-game advertising, it appears, remains basic display ads, often in the form of virtual billboards and signs in settings like cityscapes and sports arenas. "Sometimes the developers decide (a game's) going to take place in a swamp, and then there's no advertising," joked Jeffrey Dickstein, digital ad sales director at Ubisoft, as he showed off the "realistic urban settings" in games like the impending I Am Alive, which takes place in Chicago.

Massive made headlines shortly before last month's presidential election, when Barack Obama's campaign team bought in-game ads in some Xbox 360 games--a first for a political campaign.

San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum throws a pitch during a motion capture session for the 2K Sports video game Major League Baseball 2K9. Lincecum is the cover athlete for the game and the 2008 National League Cy Young award winner. Click the image for a full gallery on the motion capture event.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET Networks)

NOVATO, Calif.--Sports Illustrated magazine called Tim Lincecum "the freak," and for the motion capture specialists at 2K Sports, getting a good computer model of baseball star Tim Lincecum's unique, and violent, pitching motion presented a special challenge.

Last month, Lincecum, a diminutive 24-year-old whom you would never pick out of a lineup as a superstar ballplayer, won the National League Cy Young award, given to the league's best pitcher. The same day, the San Francisco Giant found out that he'd been chosen as the cover athlete for Major League Baseball 2K9, 2K's hit baseball video game.

Lincecum was on hand at 2K's motion capture facility, about 30 minutes north of San Francisco, for a day of performance: dozens of individual pitching and batting moves that the technicians would lead him through, one by methodical one, all to be used in the new game and all so that the Lincecum character would look and feel like the real deal.

For me, this was not entirely new territory. I came here last May to cover a very similar event, the motion-capturing of Rick Nash, the cover star of NHL 2K9, 2K's hockey game. In September, I also spent an afternoon at Industrial Light & Magic, watching the technicians there put my colleague Kara Tsuboi through the paces of the motion capture experience that Robert Downey Jr. went through while he was filming the blockbuster Iron Man.

So while the specifics of mo-capping a baseball pitcher like Lincecum differ in some ways from what's required for a hockey star like Nash or a movie character like Iron Man, much of what went on Tuesday was familiar ground.

As with the Nash and the Being Iron Man events, Tuesday's activities began with Lincecum donning a spandex suit and technicians placing a series of reflective markers all over his body. These, explained Johnathan Rivera, an associate producer for 2K Sports, are designed to capture and reflect the light from 56 mo-cap cameras spread throughout the facility so that the computers can record the minute movements of the actor--in this case, Lincecum--as he moves around. This is then translated into a 3D model of his skeletal structure that is used as the base for his in-game avatar.

At 2K Sports, everyone talks about the so-called "signature style" that they build for the real-life stars of their games. Essentially, said motion capture coordinator Steve Park, this means finding the stars' unique and specific motions and movements, ones that would be very familiar to their fans, and building them into the games so that when the fans play the Lincecum character, for example, they recognize his explosive pitching motion and can easily distinguish it from the more pedestrian motions practiced by dozens of other, less stellar, pitchers.

Park admitted that much of what he and his team were doing Tuesday was the same as what I'd seen them do for Nash. But he explained that mo-capping baseball plays does differ in some material ways.

For one, each of Lincecum's moves--and he would perform dozens of them--was a quick set piece that took just seconds and which covered a very small, specific piece of ground.

A computer model of Lincecum during the mo-cap session.

(Credit: James Martin/CNET Networks)

To be sure, Nash's movements were also set pieces, and lasted just seconds, but they tended to be more free-form, one technician told me.

So the mo-cap team had set up a short pitching mound covered in markers that were meant to be used by Lincecum for specific foot placements for his myriad moves.

"The foot placement is actually pretty important for us," Park said, "for getting the right blend pose."

The blend pose, Park explained, is what happens when the technicians take different recorded motions and blend them together to create a single, smooth move for the game. Because much of what baseball players do looks very similar, even when differing in one way or another, it's crucial, Park suggested, to be able to create smooth blend poses.

It was important that Lincecum's many moves be spot-on, so that the end of one move would look similar enough to the beginning of another--say his wind-up blending into his follow-through--that they could be combined in the game without any jerky transition.

Hockey moves, said Park, are much more free-form and free-flow, and while building an NHL game also requires accurate blend poses, he added that it was much more important when shooting a baseball player that the player hit his foot placements precisely.

That's because, Park continued, baseball motions are very segmented and specific, whether someone is pitching, catching, or swinging a bat.

For Park and his team, having Lincecum be the cover star also was challenging for another reason: while they've done baseball games for years, Lincecum was the first pitcher they've featured. And that meant figuring out how to capture the pitching motion, something that is more important with a player like the Giants star, who, despite being stellar as a college player, scared off many of the pro scouts who watched him play.

"The quickness of Lincecum's small body is what scared off most scouts," wrote Tom Verducci in Sports Illustrated last July, "that and what has become something of a trademark, a tilting of his head toward first base in the early phase of his delivery. The scouts equated his body speed with violence. That assessment, however, is akin to watching the Blue Angels air show team and not seeing the precision because of a fixation with the implicit danger. Lincecum generates outrageous rotational power (see video below)--the key element to velocity--only because his legs, hips, and torso work in such harmony."

Or, as the magazine reported, "The normal stride length for a pitcher is 77 percent to 87 percent of his height. Lincecum's stride is 129 percent, some 7.5 feet."

So for some of the mo-cap technicians, the best part of bringing in someone like Lincecum was the opportunity to be able to build a digital model of "The Freak" in motion, something that they see as a very cool piece of digital data.

All of which is to say that even if the mo-cap guys at 2K Sports had had experience with a pitcher, Lincecum would still have presented a singular experience for them.

That said, Park explained that, in fact, pitching is actually easier to mo-cap than hitting.

That's because batters have very distinctive stances that begin with "waggles," or nervous tics they express with their bats, as well as differing stances that can be wide or narrow, depending on the player.

And because Lincecum does take the occasional turn at bat, the mo-cap guys had to film him hitting as well.

I asked Park how many other major league players they bring in for the creation of their baseball game, and he said that, in fact, the number is very small.

"Part of the problem is that our development cycle is actually during the baseball season," Park said, adding that the players are contractually prohibited from doing the kind of extracurricular work that Lincecum was doing Tuesday during the season. "I don't know what our goal is...but it's always a challenge for every sport."

This means that while 2K Sports will bring in a Lincecum or a Nash as their cover athletes, in order to capture their signature styles, most of the players in the games are actually represented by actors, guys who have played their respective sports at probably a high amateur level, such as college, and who can be trusted to look like they know what they're doing.

Back at the 2K Sports mo-cap facility, Lincecum has taken the "mound," and is now warming up for his session.

Soon, he's ready, and after a brief introduction in which Park explains to the gathered crowd what, exactly, is going on, Lincecum begins his series of moves.

Right away, though, he's having a bit of a problem with some of the reflective markers they've put on his baseball glove, which keep flying off during his violent motion.

That's not a problem for the third shot, though, one in which Lincecum is supposed to stand idle on the mound.

He does that, standing totally still, until the director yells, "Cut."

Lincecum grins and asks if it was a good take.

As the crowd laughed, the director fired back, "More emotion."

But once Lincecum continues with actual pitching motions, he continues to have problems keeping the markers on his glove, meaning that after each shot, a couple of techs have to run out and put them back on.

Finally, he's done with his pitching moves, and now it's time for him to pick up his bat for the hitting shots (see video below).

The biggest laugh of all came when the director announced that Lincecum was going to hit a home run.

"He's going to hit a home run, which is the first time in his life he's ever done that, including Little League," said Johnathan Rivera, an associate producer for 2K Sports.

"Thanks," Lincecum said sarcastically.

After all the shooting was over, I asked Lincecum--who, by the way, is a big video game player and is currently spending his free time with Gears of War 2--what it was like to be featured in Major League Baseball 2K9.

"It's a one-of-a-kind experience for me," Lincecum said. "That's stuff that kids dream about all the time...You see yourself in the game, and you're like, 'That's me. That's me out there, except in video game form.'"

It looks like there's a bit of trouble over at Wikia Search this morning.

The search portal, run by Wikia, the for-profit wiki service co-founded by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, was returning "Service Unavailable" error messages about 10 percent of the time, during a test I ran on both Firefox and Safari.

This error message was coming up some of the time Wednesday morning after attempting to load the Wikia Search home page. The problem was found on both Firefox and Safari, but only about 10 percent of the time.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

The rest of the time, the service seemed to be working mainly as it should, though from time to time, the search page would only partially load.

The error message would return when loading the Wikia Search home page, and read, "Error 503 Service Unavailable." It continued, "Guru Meditation:" and then "XID:" and a nine-digit string that changed each time I found it.

The site Pingdom.com reported earlier Wednesday morning that Wikia Search's problems had been happening since Monday, and were occurring about a third of the time, but my tests revealed that it wasn't that severe.

Pingdom.com also had a chart suggesting that the search site's uptime was only about 65 percent.

When the site's home page did run, it then returned search results with no problem.

The rest of the time, the service worked as normal.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

In October, Valleywag reported that Wikia had laid off about a third of its 43-person workforce.

A call to Wikia for comment wasn't immediately returned.

San Francisco Giants pitcher Tim Lincecum throws a pitch during a motion-capture session for the 2K Sports video game, 'Major League Baseball 2K9'. Lincecum is the cover athlete for the game and the 2008 National League Cy Young award winner.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

NOVATO, Calif.--We're about to see Tim Lincecum, the 2008 National League Cy Young award-winning pitcher, go deep.

"He's going to hit a home run, which is the first time in his life he's ever done that, including Little League," said Johnathan Rivera, an associate producer for 2K Sports, who was standing near the pitcher, explaining what he was about to do.

"Thanks," Lincecum said sarcastically.

The San Francisco Giants pitcher was here, at 2K Sports' motion-capture studio on Tuesday, because he's the cover athlete for the publisher's forthcoming Major League Baseball 2K9 game, which is slated to be released in the spring, just before next year's season begins.

And now, after about an hour of throwing all kinds of pitches for the mo-cap cameras, he's got a bat in his hands and, according to the script, it's time for the long ball.

Lincecum prepares for the mo-cap session. His suit is covered in reflective markers used to create a skeletal image of the subject's movement.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

Of course, he's not swinging at real pitching, but he takes his swing, and it looks good. It's possible to imagine the ball soaring off Lincecum's bat and clearing the fences, even though he's a pitcher by profession.

For me, this was my second trip to 2K's mo-cap facility, after visiting in May for a similar session in which pro hockey star Rick Nash was filmed for NHL 2K9. But I'm actually a baseball fan and could pick out Lincecum from the crowd, whereas Nash had been an all-new face for me.

Lincecum, however, is tiny, at least as far as pro athletes go. If you didn't know which one he was, you would not have been able to tell he was at the top of his sport.

But once he was covered in reflective markers and began throwing pitches in front of the mo-cap cameras, there was little doubt. The kid--he's 24 years old--has a scary smooth pitching motion and throws heat (see the video below).

To be sure, much of what went on here today was familiar to me, having been at the Nash mo-cap session. But according to several of the people involved in putting this session together, shooting mo-cap of baseball presents specific challenges that other sports don't.

I'll explain all of that in a full story I'll post tomorrow, along with a photo gallery. So stay tuned for that.

Over the last several years, the so-called "serious games" movement has picked up a lot of steam.

Among the many things this encompasses is the use of games in education, health care, and the military.

But perhaps nowhere are serious games having a greater impact than in the business world, an arena always searching for new tools to improve efficiency and keep employees and customers engaged.

In Changing the Game, David Edery and Ethan Mollick argue that games can be one of the most effective tools for improving business.

(Credit: FT Press)

With this phenomenon having gained a critical velocity, the time has come for a book chronicling it, and David Edery and Ethan Mollick have answered the call.

With their new book, Changing the Game, Edery, the worldwide games portfolio manager for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade, and Mollick, a consultant at MIT's Sloan School of Management, have pulled together what is likely the most comprehensive examination of the use of games in business. I recently interviewed the pair by telephone; scroll down to hear the audio, and please excuse the occasional static.

The book's first few chapters are introductions, first to the various genres of video games, and then to the concepts of advertising in video games, and "advergames," games created for companies as a way to promote their brands and attract consumers to them.

Much of these introductory chapters go over ground well-covered in the media over the last few years, though they do build an important base for the rest of the book.

Where Changing the Game really earns its keep is when Edery and Mollick delve into the idea of how companies, large and small, can use games as a way to recruit, integrate, and maintain their employees.

An example that I like is Rise of the Shadow Specters, a game designed for use by new Sun Microsystems workers, especially those who mainly telecommute, as a way to learn the culture and business units of the mammoth technology company.

All told, Rise of the Shadow Specters cost Sun $150,000 to develop, but the payoff for the company has been huge, Edery and Mollick write.

Thousands of Sun employees played the game, and its lessons apparently took: the authors write that even months after playing it, they could still recall much of the information it imparted.

And while not every business will have the resources or the will to turn to a video game to educate their employees, the authors make a clear argument that the benefits are certainly there for those enterprises that do follow Sun's example.

There are many other areas, of course, where businesses can use games to improve their bottom line, and Edery and Mollick do examine many of them in detail.

They look, for example, at the idea of alternate-reality games, a type of multimedia experience that a growing number of companies have used to build excitement and mystique around new products. For example, Microsoft commissioned an ARG known as I Love Bees, which crafted a large narrative related to, but not directly about, the story line of its Halo 2.

But games can also be used, the authors argue, to motivate employees, user communities and just about anyone that a business would want to engage. All it takes is an understanding of what the purpose is, as well as the skills and know-how to design the kind of game that meets the needs of the question at hand.

It is about time that a book like this came along, and with their backgrounds, Edery and Mollick seem like the right team to have written it. As the economy sours and companies look for every edge they can find, they might just discover that games, in one form or another, give them a way to stay afloat while less enlightened competitors sink.

AUDIO

Game-changing business
Changing the Game authors David Edery and Ethan Mollick talk to CNET News reporter Daniel Terdiman about why games can help companies develop more efficient employees and build stronger brands.
Download mp3 (8.19MB)

National Amusements, a media and entertainment company controlled by Sumner Redstone, is expected to announce on Monday that it sold its majority stake in Midway Games, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.

Redstone reportedly sold the 87 percent stake to investor Mark Thomas, in exchange for $100,000 and the assumption of $70 million in secured and unsecured debt.

The transaction, while expected to result in a loss in excess of $800 million for Redstone, is expected to yield a substantial tax break for the media and entertainment investor, according to the Journal.

And for Redstone, that could mean one fewer headache as National Amusements, reportedly in a separate transaction, is busy renegotiating a restructuring of its $1.6 billion in debt with its banks and note holders.

Redstone is under great pressure, as the first portion of the debt, a $800 million bank loan, is due this month, according to a report in the New York Post.

National also holds controlling stakes in CBS, publisher of CNET News, and Viacom.

NASA has made its series of video updates on the progress of the Ares rocket program available on Apple's iTunes service.

(Credit: NASA)

NASA said Wednesday that it has made available a series of video updates on the Ares rocket program available to the public via iTunes.

There are 10 videos--which have been produced quarterly since August 2006--in the series. NASA's move Wednesday means that all 10 will be viewable on Apple's service immediately, with forthcoming progress reports to be added as they are finished.

The Ares rocket is the space agency's next-generation launch vehicle, intended to carry the Orion crew capsule--and its astronauts--to the moon, as well as to the International Space Station.

The first space station launch is scheduled for 2015.

According to NASA, the video reports have been intended as a way for the agency to disseminate updates on the development of the Ares project. NASA also sees the series as a way to save, for posterity, the record of "the historical work being completed on America's newest fleet of spacecraft for future generations."

Each video is between 10 and 15 minutes long, and over the course of the series have touched on everything from the Ares program's conception to the most recent testing.

For some pilots, flying solo doesn't cut it. Pilots like Christian Goetze and Wolfgang Polak spend much of their time in the air in formation flights, with two or more planes flying in close proximity to each other. This is an aesthetically attractive, if demanding, form of flying. Here, Polak flies just feet away from Goetze's plane in the skies over California.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

I don't have a lot of rules, but here's a new one: when someone offers you the chance to take part in a formation flight, jump at the opportunity.

For me, that chance came a couple of weeks ago when Christian Goetze, a co-worker of my wife's, offered to take either or both of us up with him on one of two flights he was about to do.

To be perfectly frank, I didn't really even understand exactly what formation flying was, despite, for example, watching the Blue Angels flying from their home base in Florida last summer, but there's no way I was going to not find out.

Unfortunately, I missed out on being part of a five-plane flight a few days later, but on November 19, I climbed into Goetze's 1991 Grumman Tiger for my formation flight education.

Taking off out of the small airport in San Carlos, Calif., we flew straight up into a thick bank of fog. Our destination? The skies over Livermore, Calif., where, I was told, we'd be making a rendezvous with a friend of Goetze's, his fellow formation flier, Wolfgang Polak.

Sure enough, not long after ascending out of the thick fog and into a stunning early morning blue sky, a tiny speck on the horizon gradually got bigger, and bigger, until Polak, and his 1977 Grumman Tiger, suddenly swooped around us in a big turn, and then approached slowly on our right side, eventually ending up so close to us that I could see his headset and the little round ball covering the microphone.

Which, I can tell you, is a rather sobering sight if you've not experienced such a thing before.

Luckily for me, these two pilots seemed like old pros at this flying mere feet away from each other, and on top of it, it was a gorgeous day up high in the sky where we were, with little turbulence to make for a bumpy flight, and therefore, little reason for the two pilots not to keep their planes so close to each other that they could almost have handed each other notes.

Ostensibly, the purpose of the flight was so that Goetze could take his plane in for its annual servicing. Having Polak bring his plane along too meant that Goetze had a ride back to his home airport in San Carlos, and heck, since they had some time to kill on the way to Columbia--and a newbie passenger onboard--why not play around a little?

"You want to do some maneuvering on the way?" Asked Polak over the radio.

"Sure, why not," Goetze replied.

To start off with, Polak, in the lead, and now on our left side and a little above us, began doing a series of hard turns. Goetze, as the trail plane, aligned his rudder with Polak's wing tip, a system, Goetze explained, in which geometry keeps his plane automatically aligned with Polak's.

I wasn't sure I understood that exactly, but sure enough, for every move Polak made, Goetze followed suit, and we were mirroring him almost exactly.

For a few minutes, with Polak leading, and Goetze and I trailing, we climbed, dropped, turned, and dipped. I was furiously taking pictures, focusing entirely on Polak's plane, and before long, totally losing track of the ground. The sensation of gravity kicking in was extreme, but at that point, I really couldn't have told you whether we were going up, going down, flying flat, or even where the ground was.

During some maneuvers, the only way to tell what we were doing, relative to the ground, was to see how the horizon was changing. Here, Polak, in the lead plane, makes a sharp right turn.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

Then, Polak gave some sort of hand signal to Goetze, they agreed over the radio that there would be a count of five, and suddenly, Polak did a sharp turn away from us, disappearing into the sky and out of our sight.

"One, two, three, four, five," Goetze counted, and then, "hold on," and he turned his own plane hard, a thrilling and somewhat unexpected move that pushed me back against my seat.

At first, we couldn't find Polak in the wide open sky, but then we saw him. We flew back toward each other, and then were alongside again. This time, we were in the lead.

"OK, now we'll do a break and rejoin," Goetze tells me. "OK, bye bye."

He turns hard on the wheel, and the plane jerked hard to the left and away from Polak. And seconds later, Polak turned hard as well, and followed us.

And we repeated what happened before when Polak had been in the lead: A couple minutes of trying to spot each other and then a slow and steady rejoining.

As Polak flew alongside and a little behind, I asked Goetze how close he was. He explained that there were probably three to five feet between the nose of Polak's plane and the tail of ours, and maybe five feet of lateral separation. The planes don't overlap, he said.

I asked why not.

"It's too dangerous," Goetze told me. "We're not the Blue Angels. We don't have ejection seats."

Six Blue Angels F-18s flying together in perfect formation during a practice performance at their home base in Pensacola, Fla.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

A few minutes later, I noticed that, trailing us, Polak wasn't looking ahead at all. Rather, he was looking intently at us.

Goetze explained that the trailing pilot always looks at the leader, looking for anything that he might have to respond to.

"If I flew into a mountain," Goetze said, "he wouldn't notice."

Next up, Goetze starts doing what he calls "lazy-eights."

Essentially, this was a series of "S" turns, where he would gently pull the plane up as he began left turns, and out the window, I could see that Polak was mirroring our moves precisely.

The lazy-eights are so smooth and I'm focusing so much on the sky in front of me that it's hard to tell that we're doing them. Only the constantly changing horizon in front of us lets me know that we're not flying straight ahead.

Clearly, Polak is the more experienced pilot because as we pull out of one of the turns, Goetze got on the radio and said to Polak, "You're just disgustingly good at this."

"Sorry about that," Polak responded.

Goetze explained to me that in formation flying, the basic structure is the two-plane "element," in which one is the leader and the other the follower.

In what's called "acute" flying, the follower stays slightly behind and below, at a 45-degree angle.

"If he's too far behind, you can't get the 45-degree angle," Goetze said.

And as for why the follower doesn't fly even with the leader, but a little below, he added, "If I was to gently turn, he would have no reaction time, and I would run into him."

That, even I can understand, would not be a good thing.

Next up, Goetze told me about the two kinds of what he called "overhead breaks."

These are maneuvers in which both planes in an element--or more planes if there are more than two--turn simultaneously.

First, there's the "welded wing" turn, in which the follow plane climbs or descends into the turn with the lead pilot's wing. This means that as the leader turns left, the follow planes will climb above as they turn, while if the leader turns right, the follow planes will drop down as they turn.

An "echelon" turn, on the other hand, means that all the planes in a formation turn as one, keeping on the same level, or row.

"We only do (echelon turns) away from people," Goetze told me. "The Blue Angels will do echelon turns into each other, because they're crazy."

We were now approaching Columbia, and Goetze began to get ready to land.

But once he dealt with a few administrative details, he explained how formations work if there are, say, four planes, or two elements.

He held out his hand, with his fingers together and the thumb tucked away, demonstrating that the middle finger in such a formation would represent the lead plane in the lead element, with the index finger being the following plane in the lead element. The other two fingers, then, represent the second element.

With this general configuration in mind, he explained that there are all kinds of maneuvers possible in formation flying, but that they always do them in pairs. If there happened to be just three planes, the third would be its own element, he said, and would pretend to have a wing man.

By now, it was time to land, and so we broke formation so that our plane could hit the ground first, with Polak following close behind.

Goetze said they would have landed in formation--the runway in Columbia was probably wide enough--but they didn't want to scare me.

Nintendo is hoping that strong sales of its Wii console are evidence that it, at least, is immune to the economic downturn. Others agree that the video game industry as a whole will suffer less than other technology sectors.

(Credit: GameSpot)

It would be tempting for those in the video game business to take some recent news--for instance, that October sales were through the roof, or that the latest World of Warcraft expansion broke the all-time record for single-day PC game sales--as proof that their industry may be immune from the deep despair confronting the global economy.

And indeed, that seems to be exactly what many people in the industry are choosing to believe: that in rough times, people always spend money on entertainment, and that as entertainment goes, video game software and hardware offer much higher value than other options. In other words, the theory goes, the video game industry is recession-proof.

But people holding to that notion may yet want to consider getting their resumes ready or holding off on buying that Porsche, since all optimism aside, the future may not be so bright. It's true that sales may be up in the short term, and look good for the holidays, but Wall Street doesn't appear to be impressed.

Still, many in the industry contacted for this article say they think the sector could in fact turn out to be one of the few winners as general economic conditions get darker and darker.

Activision Blizzard's 'Wrath of the Lich King,' the second expansion to 'World of Warcraft,' set a single-day record for PC game sales. Some see that as evidence that the game industry can withstand the recession.

(Credit: Daniel Terdiman/CNET News)

"Nobody's got a crystal ball, but we remain cautiously optimistic" about the future, said David Dennis, Microsoft's corporate Xbox 360 Group PR manager. "All the signs we see point to continued strength for the industry and for the Xbox."

For example, Dennis explained, a recent survey conducted by the National Research Center indicated that 46 percent of consumers expect to purchase a video game system of some kind on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. At the same time, he said that NPD Group, a leading retail analyst firm, reported that video games came in at the bottom of a list of what kinds of products they expect to cut back on in the coming months.

NPD has other data as well showing signs of strength in the business. In its report for October, the firm revealed that for the video game industry as a whole, sales were up 18 percent for the month, to $1.31 billion from $1.12 billion a year earlier. Software was up 35 percent in October, from $514.5 million in 2007 to $696.8 million in 2008, while hardware had a more modest 5 percent rise in the same period, from $470.5 million to $494.8 million.

And on November 13, its first day on the market, Blizzard Entertainment's Wrath of the Lich King, the second expansion to the mega-hit, World of Warcraft, broke the all-time record for one-day sales for a PC game, moving 2.8 million units of the $40 upgrade and surpassing the record of 2.4 million units set in 2007 by The Burning Crusade, the first WoW expansion.

The rationale for projected growth, even in the face of a looming and deep recession, is simple.

"There are a couple of reasons," said Ron Meiners, director of community for the Hollywood Interactive Group. "One is the traditional value of entertainment during tough economic times. Like the great fantastic musicals in the 30s. Movies did great, because they took people's mind off of the troubles they were facing. (And) video games have great value as entertainment. The number of hours of solid entertainment that comes from a video game purchase is much greater than a movie, for example, for very comparable cost."

At the same time, Meiners added, video games today offer consumers a much higher degree of interactivity and engagement.

"They're not just passive," he said. "It's a much more involving activity, which helps make them more valuable."

The industry is also blessed with a steady flow of blockbuster game franchises that seem primed to deliver huge paydays: Fable, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Grand Theft Auto and many others.

Trouble on Wall Street
But the publishers of those games, and even a leading retailer, have seen their stock prices hammered in recent weeks, beyond even what has happened in the general market crash.

While the Dow's value dropped 28.16 percent from September 2 through November 17, and Nasdaq dropped 36.91 percent in the same time frame, six game industry companies (Electronic Arts, Activision Blizzard, Take Two, THQ, Gamestop and Nintendo) saw their share prices fall an average of 52.53 percent.

And EA, the world's largest publisher of video games, was not on the better-performing side of that group. Its stock fell 60.1 percent, from $48.97 to $19.30 in that time period.

EA did not respond to a request for comment for this story, but in its most recent quarterly earnings release, in which it reported a net loss of $310 million--compared with a net loss of $195 million during the same quarter a year earlier--CEO John Riccitiello did his best to sound optimistic.

"Considering the slowdown at retail we've seen in October, we are cautious in the short term," Riccitiello said. Longer term, we are very bullish on the game sector overall and on EA in particular. The industry is growing double-digits on the strength of three new game consoles and increases in the number of homes with broadband Internet connections."

For its part, Nintendo, which saw its stock drop 36.77 percent between September 2 and November 17--almost exactly the same drop as the Nasdaq--also is making the point of putting on a brave face even as the phrase "the worse economic crisis since the Great Depression" becomes a cliche.

"We do believe that the continued popularity of our products, even during these tough economic times," said Denise Kaigler, the vice president of corporate affairs for Nintendo America, "are evidence that consumers are judging us as a good value and a great way to engage in social interaction."

In October, according to NPD, Nintendo sold 803,000 Wiis, up from 617,000 in September and 453,000 in August, and the company has said it plans to increase supply of the console by 50 percent over last year in order to ensure that consumers have an easier time getting a hold of one.

This would suggest, of course, that Nintendo isn't being disingenuous when it says that it has a strong value proposition that is likely to attract consumers this holiday season and perhaps beyond.

Microsoft, too, looks like it has some evidence to back up its reasoning for, as Dennis put it, being "cautiously optimistic."

In October, Microsoft sold 371,000 Xbox 360s, up from 347,000 in September and 195,000 in August.

But these sales numbers all come from before the economic crisis really kicked in. Now, job losses are mounting daily, the stock market is plunging--though it has risen considerably since Friday--and the government is faced with a more difficult job of pulling us back from collapse.

The pricing game
And for those who think that the video game industry can keep up record sales numbers even in the face of such a bleak atmosphere, some have sobering news.

"Video gaming is not immune," said Gartner analyst Van Baker. "It's certainly been robust over the last couple of years, and it's gotten much more popular, and a much broader install base of users, but they're certainly not immune, especially if it's a deep recession."

Baker acknowledged that video game hardware and software is likely to perform better than, say, plasma TVs, but still, he said, in an environment where jobs are scarce and people are losing their homes, "$50 (for a game) is $50."

And while Baker suggested that Nintendo and Microsoft may be able to continue moving the Wii and the Xbox, respectively due to those consoles' low prices ($249 for the Wii and $199 for the lowest-priced Xbox), he said Sony might have a harder time.

"Sony is the one that stands to get hurt the most," Baker said, "because they've got the most expensive" console. The lowest-priced PlayStation 3 costs $399.

The front lines of the video game wars, of course, are at retail, and that is one place to look for clues as to what lies ahead.

According to Colin Sebastian, an analyst with Lazard Capital Markets, leading retailer Gamestop could represent a sign that, indeed, the video game industry can weather the coming economic storm, despite its stock dropping 49.87 percent between September 2 and November 17.

In an alert Sebastian sent out last week by email, he recommended buying Gamestop's stock, citing not only strong October sales, but also sales growth of 20.5 percent during the first two weeks of November compared to last year.

Driving that growth, Sebastian wrote, was quick sales of games like Wrath of the Lich King, Gears of War 2, from Epic Games and the latest edition of Call of Duty, from Activision.

'Gears of War 2', Epic Games' new release, is expected to bolster the Xbox 360 platform, as well as game retailers.

(Credit: Epic Games)

But Sebastian's optimism about bellweathers like Gamestop aside, there are those who see deep structural flaws in the mainstream video game industry's business model, flaws that could wreak havoc down the line, even if things stay solid in the short term.

To Corey Bridges, a co-founder of the virtual world platform developer The Multiverse Network, the problems facing the industry have more to do with how its biggest publishers design and distribute their games.

"I do think that the video game industry is going to do reasonably well in this time of recession because video games are a pretty damned efficient use of time," said Bridges. "That said, the...industry has some other problems that it has been ignoring for awhile and that are creeping up on it."

Essentially, Bridges explained, he thinks that the dominance of giant publishers like EA and their general reliance on physical, in-the-box, units, can't hold up. Instead, he said, new tools, ubiquitous broadband and hungry independent developers are going to all combine to eat away at the continued supremacy of the $60 big-name title. And that could spell big trouble for the industry.

Still, he said, that kind of shake-out could take a few more years.

"I think the global macroeconomic climate will adjust itself before the video game industry hits the upcoming chaos," Bridges said.

In the short term, then, there is ample evidence that the video game business may well prove to be stronger than most others. No one is going to do better than companies producing cheap liquor, of course, but in the technology world, it may be tough to identify a sector that could better persevere than video games.

Even Baker, who said it's unlikely the industry will avoid getting hit by the recession, thinks there's room for optimism.

"We'll have to wait and see how consumers respond," Bake said, "but I don't think it's unreasonable to see some growth (though) it's certainly not going to be double-digit."

Fans of the planet Jupiter have something new to get excited about.

On Monday, NASA announced that it is planning to launch a mission, titled Juno, to conduct a large-scale survey of our solar system's biggest planet.

NASA said Monday that it intends to pursue a mission, entitled Juno, to do an in-depth survey of Jupiter. The mission is expected to launch in 2011 and reach Jupiter in 2016.

(Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute)

According to NASA, the new mission will involve an unmanned spacecraft that is planned for an August 2011 launch onboard an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, Fla. It is expected that the rocket will reach its destination, orbit around Jupiter, in 2016.

Once there, the plan is for the spacecraft to orbit Jupiter 32 times over the course of a year at a distance of around 3,000 miles above the planet's cloud tops.

NASA said this would be the first solar-powered spacecraft expected to be able to perform its duties so far from the sun. Jupiter is more than four times farther away from the sun as Earth, a total of around 400 million miles.

The spacecraft would feature an advanced camera as well as a series of scientific instruments designed to inspect Jupiter's surface. Among the things NASA hopes the mission will discover or explore are the existence of an ice-rock core, the planet's strong magnetic field, and its aurora borealis.

NASA did not say how much the Juno mission is expected to cost, nor whether the project is already fully funded, and a call for comment wasn't immediately returned.