Through out the course I have tried to look at the material given from the perspective of a game developer, or at least a prospective one. The blog posts I have written mostly reflect that, especially later ones. The world of social media is huge, and is a part of the everyday life of most people from the social networks of Twitter and Facebook to using crowdsourced sites with open sourced software so it’s no real surprise that the social aspects of playing video games are starting to get a lot of investment from big companies.
Last year Microsoft and Sony launched new consoles. Throughout the year both companies spent a lot of time making announcements about the new features that their consoles will have, with a lot of emphasis on social functions. One big thing that Sony announced was that the Playstation 4 would allow the sharing of live video streams of play sessions [1]. Microsoft also talked about their big plans for increased social gaming, with being able to follow certain players to get updates on their game statistics, in a way much like Twitter [2].
So there is a drive to make gaming more social while still retaining the essence of playing games. But some games themselves have a far larger social basis than that is the norm, mainly those games classified as massively multiplayer online role playing games (MMORPGs or just MMOs), the most well known of these being World of Warcraft [3]. These games generally consist of large game worlds in which multiple people are playing the same game at the same time, and there is a large social aspect to this in that it is encourage to join other people in taking on large quests and such like. People who do this regularly tend to join a clan or guild and tend to take part in lots of online conversations in forums or over social networks. There are literally millions of people spending hours of their days playing MMORPGs (World of Warcraft alone has over 7.8 million subscribers [4]), and socially that’s a huge market which social companies are trying to tap into as much as they can.
Facebook’s purchase of Oculus Rift (a virtual reality head mounted display unit [5]) for $2 billion [6] a couple of weeks ago can been seen as an attempt to try and place themselves in a position to make game a lot more social, more Facebook like than ever before. Opinions on the purchase are very much divided, especially among developers. One long time fan of the Oculus VR team was Markus ‘Notch’ Persson, the creator of Minecraft [7] who contributed during the initial Kickstarter for the Rift and has now decided to cancel all plans to make his game compatible with the virtual reality (VR) device because of the purchase by Facebook [8]. An opposing view has been given by John Carmack, co-founder of id Software [9] and current CTO of Oculus VR says that a company like Facebook has gets the big picture and can only help bring the VR technology to a larger mass market audience rather than it remaining as something of a specialist bit of technology [10].
Generally there has been a fair amount of backlash over the deal [11] a lot of which revolves around the fact that the original project was funded by Kickstarter, raising nearly $2.5 million in September 2012 [12] and now a year and a half later Facebook spent $2 billion to buy the company which leaves a lot of backers wondering why they gave their money to an independent company only for them to ‘sell out’. In this I cannot blame the people at Oculus VR. No one could or would turn down $2 billion as that sort of figure just isn’t real, in a way. I mean you can just about imagine a million or two but a billion? It has no basis in reality. But one worry shared by many is that this VR technology will go down the Facebook route and become a haven for advertisers using all your personal data. That is a possibility as you’d expect they would want something of theirs involved in this now and as they’re a software based social platform it’s hard not to imagine that a VR version of Facebook will exist in the near future.
And maybe that’s the point. If Facebook made their site VR compatible, you can be sure that plenty of other websites will try and do the same which would herald a whole new way of just browsing the internet. So this could be the start of the realisation of a completely virtual cyber world, in which we all live online in massive social communities.
References:
[1] http://www.destructoid.com/playstation-4-social-features-revealed-246135.phtml
[3] http://eu.battle.net/wow/en/
[6] http://kotaku.com/facebook-buys-oculus-rift-for-2-billion-1551487939
[8] http://kotaku.com/notch-says-hes-canceled-oculus-rift-minecraft-because-1551568311
[9] http://www.idsoftware.com/
[11] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/27/oculus-rift-facebook-buy-out-kickstarter
[12] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1523379957/oculus-rift-step-into-the-game
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