Emergent entertainment is becoming a buzzword of the game community, along with SN (Social Network) references. What enables all of this is Sony's new PlayStation Home online system, which is clearly meant to compete with Nintendo's and Microsoft Xbox's online services, and which bears a remarkable similarity to Second Life, a persistent world that allows members to create, trade and sell 3D virtual items such as clothing, cars, buildings and customized avatar bodies, faces and movements. Sony's world is intended to be for more than PlayStations -- the intent is to make it accessible to other platforms such as PSPs as well as PCs, and even competitor's offerings such as Nintendo Wii.

Harrison demonstrated the many options for customizing a player's avatar, including clothing and an apparently limitless number of faces. Advertising will play a large part in Home. There is an option for voice communication, though the voices sound more computer generated than natural. Home also includes a games lounge, for players to meet and get to know each other while playing casual games together, such as pool, bowling and arcade games. Harrison pointed out that the arcade games are user definable, meaning that the player can choose preferred games and download them into the space. Users can also have private spaces of their own -- every user can have an apartment that he/she can customize by changing wallpaper and adding furniture (some of it is free, some is linked to particular games, and some is labeled as "premium" items which can be purchased from the Sony store).

Nintendo also had a flashy presentation. Shigeru Miyamoto's keynote address heavily referenced the company's wildly successful Wii and he introduced the "Mii" experience.

Content can move between the real world and the Sony Home world. A photograph, for instance, can be transferred via memory stick to a PlayStation 3, and then into a Home apartment, to appear inside a picture frame on the wall. As is the case in Second Life, real estate is a booming business: larger apartments can be bought, with features such as pool tables and television sets that can display either prerecorded video or content that the user has created. There are also in-world tools for creating games, and sharing those games with others. Just as YouTube has an area that shows each day's most popular video clips, Sony Home has an area that shows the currently highest rated user-created games.

Modding a game (changing the game's characters and environment) has been around for quite a while -- many expert players are so used to modding games, especially First Person Shooters, that they refer to un-modded games as "vanilla" versions, or "V" for short, such as VQ3 (Vanilla Quake 3). However, modding in the past has required a goodly amount of skill. What Sony is proposing with its Home is a new possibility: modifying games, or even creating brand new ones, by communities of ordinary players, to express their creativity -- and have an excuse for getting together. Planned future features include pets and music/singing areas. This should be a fun development to watch.

Nintendo also had a flashy presentation. Shigeru Miyamoto's keynote address heavily referenced the company's wildly successful Wii, with its unique controller that captures player movements and translates it into in-game movements, such as the swing of a golf club. Miyamoto stressed that designers need to get to know their audiences better, that they keep making the same mistakes because they are too wrapped up in their own vision of what a game should be like. He noted that one common assumption is that users only like violent games. Nintendo has been trying to broaden its audience recently, to make games that women also enjoy. Miyamoto spoke of Nintendo's toolset for customizing avatar faces and other features, what is called the "Mii" experience; the company plans on creating a Wii channel that lets people share and compare their creations. He explained that he has tried out all of his recent game designs on his wife, to determine what women might like, and proudly noted that his "Wife-O-Meter" has scored very highly with recent Nintendo releases such as Ocarina of Time and Brain Age.

Gears of War was awarded best game at the Game Developers Choice Awards.

Toolsets for Game Producers
"With ever greater levels of detail in each game, but no more time to produce them, there is more and more attention being paid to how to improve the production pipeline, according to Rob Hoffman of Autodesk, the home of Maya (version 8.5), 3ds Max (version 9), and other game toolsets. One major improvement in Maya is the ability to use the popular Python scripting language, which is widely used for vfx in the film industry. Whereas Maya also has its own scripting language, MEL (Maya Embedded Language), the software can now relate to either MEL or Python equally well. "Having Python support available in Maya means studios can use their existing tools directly within Maya, rather than having to write glue code to bind Maya to their pipelines," Hoffman noted. "This allows them to develop new node and command plug-ins in a fraction of the time they might have needed otherwise."

A major focus of Autodesk this year is interoperability, the capability to port resources created in one software package into the workflow being created into another software package. Although the industry has promised "seamless" interchange between different formats in the past, this has never really been the case in actual production environments. Autodesk is working very hard to turn this around.

One approach the company suggests for interoperability is to use fbx, its universal file exchange format, which offers easy import and export not only between different Autodesk products, but also other toolsets such as XSI and LightWave that game producers might prefer. "This is really important for today's workplace, which often involves company teams spread around the globe," said Hoffman. Another improvement in the company's toolsets is the ability to use Japanese, instead of just English, for the many game development houses in Japan that would prefer to use their native language.