bobdeschutter.be

This is seemingly the most trivial topic I have ever blogged about, but Kotaku’s article on how sports games label their difficulty levels actually resonated for me. I am a fan of many sports titles, and the NBA 2K series in particular. However, I have not gotten to the point where I am capable of playing on the highest setting. I tend to play the game at the “Superstar” level instead, which is the second highest difficulty level. I pick that difficulty level because it results in winning chances that seem realistic to me. That means that if I am playing with a team that is better than its opponent, I will more often than not win the game. This is however no longer the case when I still need to figure out my team’s skills a bit and/or the plays they are running. When I play exhibitions, I should lower the setting to “All-Star”, the third highest but also the third lowest setting. At that point, my basketball ego jumps in and prohibits me from playing at that level. It does not matter that I have the impression that the AI is already cheating a bit at the Superstar level. I simply will not go lower than Superstar, regardless of the fact that this will turn into an experience that will be less fun than when I’d just be a bit more humble.

So it’s fair to say that Kotaku hit a snare there, and I was very surprised to see that almost every other big sports game franchise uses a similar labelling method as NBA 2K12. Only Top Spin has somewhat of a subjective rating, but from my perspective calling “All-Star” “Normal” instead will only make things worse. Therefore I am an advocate of using the power of objective numbers 1 to 5, as the author suggests.

http://kotaku.com/5888302/the-rookie-mistake-most-video-games-make

I recently stumbled upon one of the latest entries to the Wizards of the Coast’s transmedial world that is the Magic: The Gathering franchise. I have a history with MtG, although it is a very small one. I have played the game for a year when I was about 13 years old. My impression of it was that it was a highly enjoyable and strategically deep game, that costed a ton of money (that I was not able to invest into it). Also, it is important to realize here that I played the game somewhat isolated since it was a very niche hobby in the part of Belgium where I lived, and there were no tournaments, trading events or shop selling single cards anywhere near. As a result, the only way I could ever get an elusive Black Lotus, for example, would be by finding it in a booster pack. So needless to say that MtG died out for me as I decided that there were more enjoyable games to spend money on (in my situation back then).

As time went on I played the 1997 Microprose game and the more recent Duel of the Planeswalkers for Playstation 3 a bit, but did not find them as fun as playing with actual people. I also wanted to give MtG: Online a try, but decided not to do so since I thought that it would cost a lot of money to build a reasonable deck. And then I saw MtG: Tactics on Steam and decided to have a quick peak, simply to see how well they managed to blend a turn-based tactics game (e.g. Heroscape, Final Fantasy Tactics, etc.) with the original card game.

To answer that question briefly (because that is probably not why you are reading this considering the title of this post), they did a decent job. The card game part is brilliant, the tactics part is a bit thin and could be improved (e.g. by adding a more intuitive line of sight, diminishing the power of the random critical hits, etc.), but I would rate it an 8 out of 10 game, which matches its score on Metacritic if you’d deduct extra points for the terrible interface, outdated graphics and some annoying bugs. If you like mild tactics games and MtG then it is definitely work checking out. I would just give it a try to see the amazing MtG artwork come alive on the screen.

So what about the business skills, Bob? I am glad you asked. When I started playing the game, I liked it quite a bit, but I was still worried about the money it would cost me to keep playing. After all, free to play micro-payment games are seldomly, well… free to play. Reading the comments on Metacritic confirms this. For example, Aquila noted how:

“The free to play part is shockingly short. Dishonest marketing where people will trap for spending huge amounts of money. And a HUGE pay to win factor is present. So don’t trap for it people! But the game itself is fun if it was normally priced it will be a between 6 and 8. (Aquila, Metacritic)”

Normally, that would turn me away from the game, but I enjoyed the game enough to see if I could find a loop. After all, in Warstorm, another TCG I once played, I had managed to become a free player with a few competitive decks and that game sure was very tight in terms of its economic system. MtG: Tactics is a lot more flexible towards the amount of money a player needs to spend to enjoy the game. Here is what I found:

• In-game gold can be acquired by completing daily missions, up to 14 gold per day.
• Boosters can only be bought by paying $3.
• Boosters can also be acquired by defeating at least one opponent in a tournament that costs 20 in-game gold.
• Singles can be bought and sold in an auction house.
• Players are allowed to trade cards and in-game gold.

So that means that if you use tournaments as your main income of cards, that you can play a tournament every two days. The cards you win there can then be sold at the auction house for more in-game gold, potentially creating a positive feedback loop. Unfortunately, you have to defeat an opponent to convert 20 gold into a booster, so that will difficult without already having many good cards.

However, the MtGT community realized that this would make the game a lot less accessible for people who want to play it casually, and has made it very common for the winner of round one to refund the loser’s 20 in-game gold. After all, selling off the cards you do not need from your free booster easily nets more than 20 in-game gold.

Figuring all this out seems like an interesting exercise for economy students in secondary school. I’ll admit that this is not exactly the same as writing up a business model, but I do see some potential here. Another – albeit more obvious – application of the game is in its trading aspects. I have recently attended a session on negotation techniques at an empty moment at a conference, and it is remarkable how those techniques have paid off in MtG: Tactics.

So this could be an interesting topic for a master’s thesis or design research project. Based on my experiences with MtG: Tactics, I would therefore say that there is a lot of potential in developing a “homework” trading card game for secondary school, in particular if the game itself could be a learning experience as well (such as Elementeo). Economy teachers could use it to study the economic system that grows from within the game, art teachers could let students design their own cards, math teachers could use the game to teach probabilities, language teachers could let students write stories within the game world, and so on.

The technology of Microsoft surface has been around for some time and I’m assuming that this is somewhat old news. In case you have not heard about it yet, Microsoft been developing a multi-touch table which should be released in 2012 to the general public. When I first learned about this three years ago, I was a bit sceptical about the usefulness of such a device. As smart phones and tablets are becoming common goods, I did not really see the added benefits of a big multi-touch table in my living room. My feelings about it were summed up pretty well by a parody video by SarcasticGamer.com, with the memorable quote “one day your computer will be a big ass table”.

But that was before I got into board gaming again. These days, I probably enjoy playing board games just a bit more than a lot of video games. The cause for this is that board games lead to great social fun, in a way that many online games can’t even compare with. There just is something about collocated play that just trumps computer-mediated play time and time again. But that does not mean that board games are perfect.

Thankfully, I am a very dedicated and driven person with regards to the effort I devote towards entertainment, because else I would never get the manuals of quite a few of these board games I like to play. Sure, these manuals are often very clearly and thoughtfully written, but still it can be quite an achievement to learn a tabletop game’s rules, and then we are not even discussing the effort it takes to run a storytelling system. (For example, I’m currently struggling to learn White Wolf’s New World of Darkness, which I have been wanting to learn since playing the incredible Vampire – The Masquerade: Bloodlines for the first time, and I can tell you that it is a lot of text to get your “fangs” into.) Furthermore, learning the rules can be a lot of work, but then there’s also the time required to set everything up, download and print FAQs and errata, come up with a decent storage solution, etc.

Keeping all that in mind, I am looking forward to seeing Microsoft’s table to be used for what it is actually useful: playing tabletop games. A lovely implementation of the technology and Dungeons & Dragons is currently being developed at Carnegie Mellon, called SurfaceScapes. Applications like these are probably what will give the Microsoft “big ass table” some added value in comparison with a smart phone or tablet PC. And if the price is right, I am definitely installing a Surface in my living room to play board games.

http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/surfacescapes/index.html

I promise… this is the last post I’m writing about gamification, skinner boxes, and the likes. If you have read this blog, then you probably know why I am not a huge fan of it because its current application lacks intrinsic motivation. This morning I found an article on the topic by Ian Bogost that I somehow seemed to have missed.

Bogost provides a rhetorical analysis of the term “serious game”, “gamification” and its derivatives, while at the same time providing a glimpse at the gap between the potential of games for learning, politics, journalism and business, and the needs and wants of educators, politicians, journalists and marketeers. In the end, he proposes to stop using the existing terms (that are not very popular among gamers and industry people) and instead use the term “exploitationware”.

Personally, I thoroughly enjoyed the article and Bogost’s suggestion, even though I do not see it replacing the term “gamification”. Considering Bogost’s rhetorical analysis of the origin of the term, it should be obvious that a more positive-sounding term would be needed as a valid substitute.

I also feel that the article is a bit too negative. While I have condemned gamification’s current implementations, I still – probably a bit naïvely – hope that a counter-movement will come that will get it right, by drastically re-designing boring tasks into meaningful experiences. If such (not easy to design) applications of gamification become widely spread, most adversaries of gamification in its current form (including myself) will probably drop their concerns, eliminating the need for a substitute (and somewhat derogatory) term such as “exploitationware”.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6366/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php

(For further reading, Steven Poole also had a great piece on Gamification in Edge #234 (December 2011) and Sebastian Deterding has written an insightful review of Gabe Zichermann’s “Gamification by Design” – a big thank you to Jan Steurs for directing my attention to me.)

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer was something I did not anticipate. I wasn’t sure that it would be any good, let alone that it would be good enough to be taken into consideration as one of my favorite games of the year. Its a shame that the game does not feature usage statistics, because I must have played this a lot. Its been the perfect 5 minutes break to me, and definitely worth a look of you haven’t heard of it.

So what kind of game is Ascension? Apparently, it is a deck-building card game and the first in its kind that I have played. From what I have learned, Dominion is supposed to have laid the template for the genre and there are a few games like it (e.g. Thunderstone). In essence, all you do during the game is either 1) buying cards and adding them to your deck (which will get reshuffled quite a bit during the game), or 2) defeating monsters. Buyable cards and defeatable monsters are laid out on the table, somewhat similar to Texas Hold’Em after the “river”. Both buying cards and defeating monsters leads to victory points, and the player who has the most victory points at the end of the game wins.

The game’s dynamics are quite complex, even though there are some clear routes to victory. Buying cards with high victory point values is a good strategy, although these cards are often either expensive or limited in use. Another way to win the game is to speed up your deck, either by buying cards that increase the amount of cards in your hand during a turn, or by buying cards that allow you to remove cards from your deck. Both ways allow a player to combine a lot of good cards, which will increase your victory points rapidly as well. Like in any collectible card game, buying good card combinations works in Ascension as well. Finally, defeating a lot of monsters quickly is a risky strategy that will end the game fast, preferably before your opponents manage to get a decent deck together.

So those are four strategies (i.e. point collecting, deck speeding, combo building and monster rushing) that I use when I play the game, and there are probably more strategies out there. I hope this gives an impression of how the game plays out, without having to go too much into detail. So on to the actual topic of this post: why is this such a great game?

First of all, there are a lot of well-balanced ways to success that are disruptable by your opponents. Going for a monster rush will remove any chances to win through point collection, and so on. In my opinion, these strategies are balanced pretty well, in particular since the buying and defeating takes place where everyone can see it. If you notice that your opponent is going for a monster rush, you can buy cards that will allow you to remove cards of your choice from the five cards in the middle of the table. That way, it becomes possible to remove the cards your opponent needs, which can be detrimental to his or her plans. In essence, Ascension delivers a great “schadenfreude” experience.

Second, I love how the game manages to keep the tension going to the last minute. Players will get victory points for their actions, but they still have to count the victory points on each card of their decks when the game is over. During the game it is easy to see who is winning through the first type of victory points, but it requires a Rainman-like memory to keep track of the second type of victory points. A player can have an impression of who has a lot of hidden victory points, but it will never be a certainty. As a result, Ascension keeps the drama alive to the last second.

Third, the combinations in Ascension can be absolutely epic to play out. The game is designed in a way that winning through great combinations often comes down to the last turn. I have lost quite a few games where I only needed one more turn to finish the job. So when you all of a sudden manage to have your cards come together right before the end, it is an exhilaration sight to behold. One time I managed to go through my entire deck on the last hand and turn a defeat into a dominating victory.

Fourth, I like the artwork and lore of the game. Note how I specically referred to myself there, as this might not be something for everyone. In fact, at first I felt that it was quite a bizarre look ‘n feel, even though I immediately liked the unique visual style of the card art. After a while I read up on what the fantasy world of the game is all about (on the official site), and I must say that I really enjoy it. The game has a unique feel but its fantasy really comes to life after a few games (and reading some additional information).

Finally, Ascension does a great job at balancing skills versus chance. I am a huge advocate of having some chance in a game. Jesse Schell once defined fun as “pleasure with surprises” and I do agree with him that suprises and fun go hand in hand. That does not mean that I do not enjoy a game that is all about skill (e.g. chess). It just means that I’m a bigger fan of games with some chance in them. Without some luck, the underdog would never defeat the much better player. Ascension does this very well. As a beginner, the game might even look like it’s completely random as chance plays a huge part in it. Nevertheless, after some time it becomes apparant that the game requires a lot of tactical and strategic skill, if not a lot of skill in managing chance as well (which is something I always enjoy a lot).

So that’s my brief introduction to Ascension. If you are a game designer or a fan of card games, I definitely recommend playing it. It is easy to learn and setup, especially if you own an iPad.

One of the things I was definitely looking forward to at this year’s DiGRA conference in Hilversum, was Joris Dormans’ workshop. I met Joris at the Meaningful Play conference in Michigan in 2008, and I felt that his work had a lot of potential back then. In essence, he was trying to use a notation that was similar to UML in order to visualize emergence in games. By doing so, it should become easier for a designer to grasp the dynamics of gameplay.

Of course, that was 3 years ago and the project had changed quite a bit since then. The project moved away from UML into its own visual language, and the latest version of the framework is already quite powerful and useable as game design tool. It allows designers to visualize feedback loops, player actions, resource pools, etc. in an easily understandable way, which can then be tested using a Flash-based cross-platform application (which I personally would love to see on the iPad as well). Using this tool, it becomes fairly simple to acquire a deep understanding of the dynamics of the gameplay that you are designing, before having to code anything. Similarly, it is also a decent tool for game academics to describe gameplay dynamics.

For a quick example of the framework, I would suggest taking a look at this exploration of the game of basketball, although Joris has plenty of other examples online at his Machinations wiki, such as a model for Starcraft. While looking at it, you should keep in mind that there is no perfect model for a game, similar to how there is no perfect prototype. For example, a model that would take player attributes into account would be a different way to describe the game of basketball. Also, the page contains examples of positive feedback basketball (i.e. for every point of difference, the winning team receives another player) and negative feedback basketball (i.e. for every point of difference, the losing team receives another player), which are examples from Mark LeBlanc’s rant at the GDC of 1999. I particularly liked the negative feedback basketball game, as I didn’t really expect the outcome.

http://www.jorisdormans.nl/machinations/wiki

Addendum:
After playing around with Joris’ work, I decided that I wanted to add a few words to this post in order to help others understand the ideas behind machinations quicker. I mistakenly started by reading the “diagram elements” pages, but it is a lot easier to learn about the system by going through the “machinations framework” first. In fact, Joris has written an excellent guide, but a linear one as well. So I guess that it is best to forget that it is a wiki, and simply go through every page link on the main page from top to bottom. If you don’t, you’ll end up having to go back and forth constantly, simply because every page somewhat assumes that you have read the previous page.

This study by Latitude Research on digital games having become a mainstream activity for a large audience fell into my lap today, and it was definitely an interesting read. First of all, the study’s findings are presented very clearly and in quite the aesthetically pleasing way. What completely took me off guard however, was that the free version of the report even included some self-critical notes about the used methods and sample. While such remarks are essential to academic research, it is absolutely refreshing that a market study does it.

Put briefly, the study provides a description of what Latitude Research refers to as “new gamers” (aged 15 – 54). Basing itself on quantitative and qualitative data acquired from such new gamers, the study concludes that the future of gaming will characterized by 1) going beyond the screen into the offline life of players, by 2) turning life itself into play as well, and by 3) being focused on tackling large societal issues.

Personally, I would agree with the findings of the study, as this is definitely the direction gaming seems to be going.  Unfortunately, I was a little bit disappointed by the findings as well, because it seemed to me that the study basically referred to the ideas behind pervasive gaming, gamification and serious gaming (which obviously are not that new). Considering the methods that were used, this is not much of surprise. The study used data that was acquired from “290 smartphone owners that considered themselves to be at least casual gamers, and 75% of them felt that they were technologically ahead of the curve”. While it could be argued that it is a good idea to interview early adopters and people who have an affinity with and an expertise in technology in order to study the future of a medium, the provided interview fragments and the conclusion of the study made me doubt this.

The participants were interviewed because they were experts but as a result the consensus in their story ended up being the next logical step for gaming that has been discussed for many years now. While it might not have been the point of this study, I would have liked it even better if the results had something a bit more innovative in them. Therefore I can’t help but wonder what the findings would be if a less technology-savvy audience (who probably make up a large part of the new audience of games as well) would have answered the questions. Maybe different methods would have led to more surprising insights here (or maybe some unanticipated interaction styles, as the ones that are mentioned are already in development).

So I guess that I ended up with mixed feelings. On the one hand I absolutely loved the presentation of the study and how the report gave me a chance to actually interpret the findings better, but on the other hand the results felt more like the opinion of a small group of 240 interaction designers than the actual opinion of a “new gamer”. Nevertheless, I do think that this report is worth a look as it brings together quite a few interesting ideas on where gaming could go next and it does that in a extremely stylish and fun way.

http://www.latd.com/2011/08/23/the-future-of-gaming-a-portrait-of-the-new-gamers/

(And for the record: I’ve played a brainwave-controlled tech demo at GDC and it would definitely be awesome to interact with games that way. Add me to the 44%.)

Any gamer knows that well-designed games can be extremely motivating. We have all played longer than we should have at some point, and we have all felt the urge to play a good game again and again. In order to get a better understanding of why and how games are motivating, two types of motivation are often distinguished: games are said to be intrinsically and extrinsically motivating and within these concepts lies answer to the issues I have with gamification.

In order to explain these concepts, I am drawing from the work of Edward L. Deci and Richard M. Ryan who are the founders of some very influential motivation theories that have recently been gaining popularity within game studies: “Intrinsically motivated behaviors are those whose motivation is based in the inherent satisfactions of the behaviors per se, rather than in contingencies and reinforcements that are operationally separable from those activities. Intrinsic motivation represents a prototype of self-determined activity, in that, when intrinsically motivated, people engage in activities freely, being sustained by the experience of interest and enjoyment. … Intrinsic motivation is noninstrumentally focused, instead originating autotelically from satisfactions inherent in action, whereas extrinsic motivation is focused toward and dependent on contingent outcomes  that are separable from the action per se. (from Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2004). Handbook of self-determination research. University Rochester Press.)”

Using this description, intrinsically and extrinsically motivated behavior can be distinguished by asking ourselves whether or not the behavior is caused by an inherent satisfaction or a separable outcome of the behavior in itself. Applied to games, we could say that gaming is intrinsically motivated when players are motivated by the inherent satisfactions such as a sense of competence, exhilaration, relaxation, etc. while playing the game. However, players can also be extrinsically motivated when they are playing for separable outcomes of the game, such as (high) scores, achievements, prices and so on.

Distinguishing these two types of motivation in games can nevertheless be a bit tricky. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation often come in pair. A professional gamer – yes, they do exist – can very well be interested in the game, get a lot of inherent satisfaction from the game and enjoy playing it very much. However, at the same time he or she is also being paid to play the game. This is maybe an extreme example, because most people are not being paid to play games but it does indicate that the player should be taken into account when assessing motivation as intrinsic or extrinsic. Does our professional gamer (or any professional sports athlete for that matter) play for the money or for the love of the game? Either way, the mind of the player plays a significant role in distinguishing the two motivational concepts, which often makes it difficult to draw a clear line on whether the player’s actual motivation is intrinsic or extrinsic. In my own research, I introduced the concept of primary motivation and asked my participants which motivates them the most and whether or not the removal of the elements they mentioned would stop them from playing the game. This was far from a perfect solution, but I do believe that I managed to get a better idea about how games motivate their players this way.

Another element that complicates matters a bit is the game itself. Is a high score, an in-game reward item, an achievement, etc. a part of the game itself or not? The obvious answer seems to be that they are not part of the activity of playing the game. For example, the intrinsic motivation for playing a platform game can be found in the inherent satisfaction and enjoyment of guiding an interesting character through obstacles. Getting an achievement badge to do so is not inherent to the activity itself. A player is then playing the platform game for something else, and no longer for its own sake. That seems logical, but what about Princess Peach in Super Mario Bros. then? At first, it seems logical that she is intrinsic to the activity, but when the activity is defined as I have done above then she all of a sudden becomes a extrinsic reward. Again, it comes down to how the player’s mind perceives the game, and where a line is drawn between the activity itself, its intrinsic rewards and the extrinsic rewards.

Keeping these remarks in mind, it becomes possible to discuss how gamification motivates people. Well-known examples of a gamified processes are Nike Plus, Mint.com, Foursquare, etc. Basically, all these products simply add points, goals, badges, leaderboards, challenges, competition, etc. to an activity that a company would like their users to more often. A couple of days ago I ran into a post about a practical gamification use case, that demonstrates how this works: “The team designed the Leaderboard not only to drive internal adoption … but also to stimulate the desirable employee behavior. Different social interactions earn points – posting a comment, liking someone else’s comment, sharing a document, etc. By collecting points, users can level up to different levels – from Newbies to Masters.”

Comparing this approach to the motivational theory that I have outlined above, these examples seem to be rather clear examples of extrinsic rewards and extrinsically motivating people. As I already said, a company wants people to do a certain activity more and offers them external rewards if they do so. Unfortunately, this kind of motivation is hardly worth the name “game-ification”. It might be easy to do so, but such rewards are extrinsic to the activity of playing a game. In fact, games did not invent this kind of motivation. It is merely the principle behind operant conditioning: people are given a stimulus in return for modifying their behavior. This is exactly the same principle you use when you train your dog to do something.

I am not going to argue that behaviorist principles do not work because they do, but I do want to argue that this is a missed opportunity. Gamifying an activity implies to me that an activity is made intrinsically more motivating. I have been a gamer all my life and many of my friends are too, and my impression of high scores, reward items, achievements, etc. is that they can add to the game in rare occasions, but that they are not the reason why we are motivated to play games. Intrinsic motivation is what motivates us, and while we are not adverse to well-designed achievements and high scores, they are not what motivates us to play. Let us look at Farmville for example. The game is all about points, achievements and other rewards, but I do not think that a single person in my friends list on Facebook still plays it. I gave it a try myself and quit after a couple of days because there is absolutely nothing there that leads to intrinsic motivation for me. While the statistics may tell us that the game is still played by more than 30 million people, everybody I know has given it a try and stopped playing. The only reason why I managed to keep myself motivated to play it for a while, was because I found intrinsic motivation in being able to draw video game characters using crops.

So I guess I am a bit biased here. I actually have a great fondness for well-designed games and I am aware of how difficult it is to design a good game. I also understand that businesses want to make money, and that it is a lot easier and cheaper to simply add points, achievements and leaderboards to an action, than to actually redesign the activity in a way to so that it becomes intrinsically motivating and meaningful to people. In my opinion, this is the most important challenge for gamification right now, but it is also a very difficult one because underneath this challenge lies a societal issue.

As Alfie Kohn points out in his book “Punished by Rewards”, our basic strategy for raising children, teaching students, and managing workers can be summed up in six words: Do this and you’ll get that. Extrinsic rewards is how we are used to getting things done in our society. As a result, this process has been researched extensively, and the conclusion is not positive. The consensus is that extrinsic rewards are ineffective in the long run, and that they become counterproductive as they decrease intrinsic motivation for the activity. Research has also established that offering extrinsic rewards for a task leads to lower quality work if the task contains some degree of problem-solving or creativity. If my company was dependent on people performing a certain activity well for many years to come, I would therefore be very careful in using extrinsic rewards to get them to do so.

So to conclude this post, I would advise everyone who wants to gamify a process to look for what makes a game fun and how these aspects resonate with intrinsic motivation. Deci & Ryan related intrinsically motivational experiences to feelings of competence, autonomy and relatedness, but also to enjoyment and interests. As a result, intrinsic motivation can be found in how games allow players to make their own decisions, be part of a community, partake in interesting fantasy worlds, learn to master the game through a state of flow and scaffolded challenges, experience surprises, feel creative when solving problems, and so on. When truly fun elements such as these are activated, any activity can become an intrinsically motivating game. Just ask the elderly gamers whom I talked to during my research and who told me how booking a flight, filling in a spreadsheet or browsing the internet was a highly motivating experience to them. In the words of Mary Poppins: “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun. You find the fun and snap! The job’s a game.”

TNS/Newzoo has done some useful market studies throughout different countries. Unfortunately, these studies can be quite expensive, depending on what you need. The information I needed for my PhD however, was completely free. So thank you very much, good people at TNS/Newzoo, for publishing those 2009 fact sheets containing the statistics for the audience of digital games between 50 and 65.

Unfortunately, the good people at Newzoo seem to have dropped the age demographics in their factsheets for 2010 and 2011. While TNS is still publishing them, they might disappear completely at some point. Therefore I decided that it might be a good idea to link to them here for everyone to enjoy them.

If you decide to use this information, keep in mind that the factsheets did not publish much information about what definition is used for a “gamer”. Looking at the website, it seems that games are defined very broadly, including everything that could possibly qualify. If you happen to know more about this, then please let me know. Comparing the statistics shows quite a difference between the USA and Europe, which makes me wonder how these figures would compare to Asia and Australia.

• Belgium National Gamers Survey Factsheet 2009
• France National Gamers Survey Factsheet 2009
• German National Gamers Survey Factsheet 2009
• The Netherlands National Gamers Survey Factsheet 2009
• United Kingdom National Gamers Survey Factsheet 2009
• United States of America National Gamers Survey Factsheet 2009

Okay, so this might be a bit off-topic for this blog, but I guess we will all just have to live with that: The NBA headlined an overview of its team logos this morning. That means that things are looking really grim for the upcoming season, as there is absolutely nothing to report about the negotiations between the players and the association. We are probably heading to a lockout thanks to some billionaires and millionaires arguing about money, but at least something good has come out of this, as the NBA team logos have gathered in one convenient place. To me, that is like an always available online Disneyland as I’ve been completely in love with sports team logos ever since I was a kid. Having been a basketball player most of my life, you can imagine that the NBA has the highest nostalgia factor for me. So what a great excuse to write something about a few of these logos. And to make things even more fun, I’ve turned it into an list of awards.

The “All-Time Classic” Award: Chicago Bulls (1966 – Present)

First of all, here’s the greatest NBA team logo of all times. It hasn’t changed from 1966 to today. An absolute classic.

The “Best Resemblance To A Videogame Character” Award: Atlanta Hawks (1972 – 1995)

This one almost got the worst logo award as I really need to concentrate to see the hawk in the logo. It has always looked like a disfigured Pac-Man to me. But then again, I could not make it the most worst logo the one Dominique Wilkens wore in his prime (on quite possibly one of the most awesome basketball uniforms of all time.)

The “Retro-Style” Award: Milwaukee Bucks (1968 – 1993)

This Bucks logo reminds me of Shag or Rian Hughes. The illustration is just hilarious. Like the post on the NBA said: “I miss the days when animals on logos were friendly. This Buck just wants to play ball and have a good time, what’s wrong with that?”

The “Psychedelic Rock” Award: Seattle Supersonics (1971 – 1975)

Add some color and this logo would work great on a seventies rock poster. ”Please welcome your 13th Floor Elev… I mean Seattle Supersonics”.

The “Family First” Award: Washington Bullets (1969 – 1997)

If you are going to name yourself the Bullets, then a logo of two hands reaching for a basketball is the best you can come up with? Of course, the franchise’s history about the name and logo is well-documented. They were the Baltimore Bullets who moved to Washington when the ownership became uncomfortable with the name, in particular during the Washington crime and homicide wave of the early 1990s. But still, I would change back to the Bullets in a heartbeat. Wizards is just a lame nickname for a basketball team.

Anyhow, I hope you enjoyed this post that I just wrote on the train. God bless mobile internet. And here’s the link where you can watch many more NBA team logos. I highly recommend taking a look at it: http://www.nba.com/magic/cohen_feature_081611.html