French book about innovation

“Objectif Innovation : Stratégies pour construire l’entreprise innovante” (Jean-Yves Prax, Bernard Buisson, Philippe Silberzahn)

A great book (in french) about the concept of ‘innovation’ which summarizes the most important (and recent) theories about it (Christensen, Moore…). It’s very well presented and the approach is very pragmatic; I appreciated the part about the paths to innovation, with plenty of insighful questions to think about.

I just missed two dimensions:

• Even though there is a part about the networked economy, I think it’s too limited, the authors do not tackle that much the issues like the new way to collaborate, the open innovation model or the co-creation. For instance I miss what’s in this IFTF report: Towards a literacy of cooperation
• The forecasting + R&D dimension which is not really addressed here but the authors mentions this drawback in the introduction

Besides, the authors have a good blog here.

We will deal with these issues at our Lift conference.

Tech Conference in Geneva!

Tonight, we unveil a new project: Lift, a conference about technology usage that will happen in Geneva on february 2-3nd, 2006. It’s organized by Laurent plus others like myself.

In two words:

Lift is about sharing and expanding the ideas of technologies, how they impact our lives and organizations. What changes are ahead? We will try to answer this question via presentations of some of the most influential thinkers and observers of the moment. The goal of the event is to give the opportunity to Europeans and Swiss people to network and raise awareness on some important ideas we will have to cope with in the near future (copyright-less economy, blogs, emergence of asia, technology overload, mass customization,direct marketing, social software, etc…)

Some of the most talented observers, explorers, and builders of the moment will gather in Geneva to share their passion for technology. You are invited to hear the likes of Cory Doctorow, Robert Scoble, Euan Semple, Jeffrey Huang, Xavier Comtesse, and a lot of other amazing speakers talk about the important topics of our changing world. The Internet, emerging technologies, global solidarity, design, and big ideas, be prepared for two days of intense ideas sharing and networking.

Feel free to visit the lift06.org website, check the speakers roster, the program, and sign up! It is only 295CHF (195 for students) for both days.

I hope to see you there!

Technorati Tags: lift, lift06, geneva, puppy

Artist Paul Cox Blog

I am a great fan of Paul Cox artistic work. His last project at the Centre Pompidou in Paris is very intriguing. What is great is that there is a blog about it, which summarizes the different steps of the project. The author’s inspiration is then reflected into tons of posts with amazing pictures, thoughts and ideas. It would be great to do the same for research projects (should do that one day, or maybe this blog follows the same process).

Of particular interest is the last post that shows the project badly drawn on a piece of paper and the outcome:

Why do I blog this? First because I like Paul Cox work very much. Second because this blog, which summarizes all the thoughts/ideas/examples/picture of the creative process that led to his work is really compelling; perhaps it’s even more interesting than the art project itself (and it is, it might be one of the reason the author put this on the web).

MMOG communities study

Cyril pointed me on this research project: Project Massive carried out at Carnegie Mellon University:

Previously, Project Massive has investigated player communication and organization in PC based, Massively Multiplayer games. While this work continues, the inquiry has been expanded to address the impact of online play on the players’ real life activities, perceptions, and experiences. No longer is the study limited to PC based MMOs. A number of online genres including first-person shooters and real-time strategy games have been added. Further, both console and PC player populations are included in the sample. Below are just a few of the topics that Project Massive is currently concerned with:

• Role of Player Motivation in Usage Outcomes
• Genre and Platform Differences
• Engagement, Commitment, and Habit Formation
• Displacement of Real Life Activities

With the help of our thousands of respondents, this research will support the future design of better, more rewarding games for all of us.
This research is not commercially sponsored in any way. Results and analysis of the continuing survey are published at ProjectMassive.com and are freely available for public use.

There is a pertinent research paper about it, presented at CHI 2004: Project massive:Â a study of online gaming communities by
A. Fleming Seay, William J. Jerome, Kevin Sang Lee and Robert E. Kraut:

Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs) continue to be a popular and lucrative sector of the gaming market. Project Massive was created to assess MMOG players’ social experiences both inside and outside of their gaming environments and the impact of these activities on their everyday lives. The focus of Project Massive has been on the persistent player groups or “guilds” that form in MMOGs. The survey has been completed online by 1836 players, who reported on their play patterns, commitment to their player organizations, and personality traits like sociability, extraversion and depression. Here we report our cross-sectional findings and describe our future longitudinal work as we track players and their guilds across the evolving landscape of the MMOG product space.

Why do I blog this? I need this kind of material/studies for a project about online communities creation and evolution.

Nokia Game Summit

Thanks to Gamasutra, there is a good wrap up of the Nokia Game Summit. It’s interesting to see what are their research avenue and what they think is relevant

one of the event’s key themes: the march towards a more ‘immersive’ visual experience on the mobile platform. “People live in a 3D world in their everyday life. They will want that same 3D world in their handsets”, predicted Epting, and “…we want to bring the visual experience of the real world into a mobile device.”

uuh a bad start already, I don’t get it: given the screen size, 3d on a mobile phone is a very weird idea. Of course there might be some niche but I could not help thinking that it won’t be the next big thing.

There are others elements in the wrap-up, but overall it seems that their discussion was lively and leading to deate about marketing in which the user (uh the consumer sorry) is not really taken into account apart from being a “cash cow” who buys 2D games (the point would be to replicate this with 3D games…)

Besides Tom Hume has also a good rant about this, I like his comment:

most of the problems Greg [Costikyan: see here, the notes from Carlo Longino] has highlighted aren’t problems with the mobile games industry, but problems with the mobile games industry if they want to sell the kinds of things the console games industry sells

Here we are: “if they want to sell the kinds of things the console games industry sells”, I think the mistake is to undervalue the mobile phones as gaming platform and to develop games as lower quality version of console games. Which is wrong since lots of application can take advantage of mobile devices specific features (even though it’s difficult as explained by Greg Costikyan).

SUN and MMORPG

An article about how SUN’s work with MMOG in Business Week. It tackles the versatile and scalable MMOG middleware they are working on. What’s interesting is that it presents SUN’s vision:

Sun’s chief gaming officer, Chris Melissinos explains, “I argue that we’ve been the principle architect of the largest massively multiplayer online game in the world. It’s Wall Street. If you took a look at all of the mechanics that go in to building an online trading system, they’re almost one-for-one, the same functions needed to build an MMOG. Except we’ve done it with more redundancy, reliability and scalability than pretty much anyone else”
(…)
“The difference you see between a lot of the technologies today (say, for example, Big World) and ours is that not only do we offer the scalability that they do, but I can take multiple games of different types, running across different hardware clients and run them simultaneously on the same stack of hardware.”
(…)
“So what you can do is rather than building an infrastructure to handle a particular game, I can go to an operator that has built an infrastructure to handle 5 million concurrent players. I don’t care if it is one game running 5 million players or it’s a 100 games handling 50,000 players each or 1,000 games running 5,000 players each. It’s the first solution that’s able to do this.

The added value is then:

“Because you don’t have to invest in any of that [hardware], we now providing a viable business model for a small developer and allowing him to take advantage of economies of scale that a utility model can provide. Because I can now build a single infrastructure to handle millions of people, I can now leverage a utility model, exactly like power companies or water companies can.

Paper about MMORPG decline: Lineage versus WoW

What’s Wrong With the Mighty Lord?: Empirical Study on the Decline of Lineage 2 by JunSok, Huhh is an interesting paper about the decline of a specific MMORPG: Lineage (versus others).

The purpose of this article is to take empirical tests for presumed causes of Linege 2 ’s declining trend. Using time usage data of Lineage 2(L2), Kart Riders(Kart) and World of Worldcraft(WoW) collected from PC-bangs, we take statistical tests on the rivalry hypothesis among games. Results show that there is no consistent evidence that L2 ’s falling down is caused by the success of Kart or WoW. Instead, it is clearly identified that the trend of RMT had a respectable
impacts on L2 in comparison to L1. All the test result implies that in-game factors such as RMT played a more decisive role in L2 ’s decline than external factors like tougher competition.

Why do I blog this? this is an important dimension: how MMORPG will do in the long run, what would be the features game designers will work out to sustain the enthusiasm? The paper brings some elements but there are still left issues (for instance how do you make people from different levels playing altogether?).

A machine to become a millionaire

With this machine, you’ll be a millionaire (at least, it’s what written on the text):

Spotted in Geneva last week.

From MUDs to MMORPG

A lively debate has emerged in gameblog terra nova this week about the reinvention of the online game community research from MUD/MOO to current MMORPG. The article in Terra Nova offers a very clever summary of what has changed from MUD to MMORPG, here are some excerpts extracted from the post by Timothy Burke and the commenters):

Some old issues have become completely new in their implications:

• simply for reasons of scale: secondary markets are obviously something radically different in current virtual worlds than they might have been
• there are genuinely new issues–if nothing else, the perceptual and psychological issues posed by 3-D graphical engines in virtual worlds as compared to text-based or isomorphic designs.
• one of the biggest things to have changed is [internet] penetration. (…) Adoption of whatever phenomenon by many millions of people has got to change the characteristics and nature of that space. It certainly did in the case of both the Web and the stock market. (stated by Mark Wallace)
• Instancing is a major new trend that was never really explored in the text mud days. There has always been talk about “embedded experiences” but the idea of literally replicating single-player to limited multiplayer games wasn’t one that had currency (stated by Raph)
• What happened to intermud protocol? (stated by Raph)
• computers now are more than 100x faster than they were in the mid-90s when I started on this; that has had significant impact on the kinds of things that virtual worlds can represent. (stated by Mike Sellers)

Why do I blog this? To me this topic is strikingly interesting since I am currently working on a research project about the creation and evolution of online games communities (for an R&D privately funded). Last week, I collected plenty of research about this topic in MUDs/MOO (which I use to play with few years ago) and I took for granted the fact that the studies made into the MUD field already tackled elements that would be of interests in MMORPG. I am actually in the process of selecting what would be new to study, drawing on these elements.

Nokia and MIT to establish a common research lab

Nokia and MIT are establishing a common research lab according to this press news:

“By carrying out long-term research in these fields, including novel uses of hand-held devices, MIT and Nokia will make new communication opportunities and services available for people around the globe.”
(…)
The collaborative work of the Nokia Research Center Cambridge will center on a view of the future where small handheld devices such as mobile phones will become parts of an “ecosystem” of information, services, peripherals, sensors and other devices. Research will address new user interfaces that incorporate speech and other modalities, new mobile computing platforms – including low power hardware platforms and wireless communication, as well as new software architectures. Researchers will also address new ways of managing information: The use of Semantic Web technologies – an extension of the current Web developed in part at CSAIL and at the Nokia Research Center – will enable devices to more intuitively and automatically understand interconnected terms, information and services.

Time will tell.