thormagni
Explorer
I'm writing this for the paper's Web site, but thought you guys here might want to see it.
By John Clark
INDIANAPOLIS – Gen Con is here, like a big, fat birthday party for gamers with tons of presents and noisemakers and all your best friends are invited over.
Technically, the show didn’t start until today, but each year the schedule gets packed with more and more stuff to do and see and play. Wednesday was the first Trade Day, a day at the show for retailers and game producers to talk and plan strategies on how best to expand their reach.
Yesterday afternoon, I sat through a seminar on the future of gaming with industry bigwigs from Wizards of the Coast (part of Hasbro), Sony Entertainment, Upper Deck and Peter Adkison, the head of Gen Con and a game maker in his own right. Adkison gave one of the most concise definitions of "gaming" I have heard – gaming is everything between actual sports on one end and actual gambling on the other end. Anything people do in the middle with cards, dice and game pieces is gaming.
For the most part these folks are optimistic about the direction of the hobby and their industry. If you look at the growth in video games, it is clear that more and more people are interested in “gaming.” The conventional wisdom has always been that as people start playing with controllers and screens, they stop playing with dice and cards. But traditional board games are also enjoying growth and the more collectible hobby games are also going gangbusters.
In short, more people are spending more of their time playing games.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t problems. Interest in older games that used to be the money machines for the industry fade away as new games take their place. Retailers have to fend off competition from Internet-based stores that threaten to drive them out of business. While younger gamers, the lifeblood of the hobby and industry, are having more and more choices of other things to do with their time and many of those activities are happening online.
The panelists all see a future where the Internet and electronics are tied more closely to their tabletop components. A vision emerged of playing boardgames with people around the world through interactive tabletop game boards. Or playing a miniatures game where there are actually battle sounds as pieces move and fight based on commands passed through the Internet.
Think of playing Risk or Axis and Allies with gamers around the world as their pieces move around on your tabletop under their remote control, while the sound of real tanks and gunfire echoes in the background.
A few hours later, I sat through a press preview of Wizards of the Coasts big, big announcement for the show – there will be a fourth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game coming out next year. In short, the mechanics aren't changing a lot and the releases will start in May with a new "Player's Handbook."
But while only serious gamers probably care a lot about D&D and what its fourth edition will hold, the vision they unveiled for interactivity through the Internet is pretty impressive and right up the alley of the earlier panel discussion.
The new D&D will be fully supported online in new and innovative ways. For example, you will be able to buy online versions of your actual D&D books that update and change whenever the rules change. Plus there will be interactive features like character generators and most interestingly a digital “D&D game table.”
The game table idea means I could run a game between members of my high school gaming group, my Navy gaming comrades and my college gaming buddies over the Internet. We would all be looking at the same board, interacting through voice chat and seeing the same "digital miniatures" appear on our game board.
This wouldn’t be a video game, per se, but a way to play a tabletop game on the computer. The down side, to my mind, is that it won’t include all the wiz-bang, graphical coolness of a video game. I don’t clearly understand the reasons why I would want to play on that game table, when I could take those same friends and we could all play Dungeons & Dragons Online, a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game, where we run around as fully animated, 3-d characters and get to hack away at monsters ourselves, rather than watch a miniature moving on a virtual table hacking away at a monster.
More appealing to me, Wizards of the Coast will also be incorporating tools like adventures and maps for gaming group referees (or Dungeon Masters) to download and use, articles to read and news to digest, all for a monthly fee. Gamers will be able to design their whole adventure and all their characters online, then download it, print it out and take it to the next gaming session.
I’ll write more about the interactive online gaming/tabletop gaming merger with some more of their vision in a few weeks for a Zone cover story, I believe.
Right now, I’ve got to get ready for the show.
By John Clark
INDIANAPOLIS – Gen Con is here, like a big, fat birthday party for gamers with tons of presents and noisemakers and all your best friends are invited over.
Technically, the show didn’t start until today, but each year the schedule gets packed with more and more stuff to do and see and play. Wednesday was the first Trade Day, a day at the show for retailers and game producers to talk and plan strategies on how best to expand their reach.
Yesterday afternoon, I sat through a seminar on the future of gaming with industry bigwigs from Wizards of the Coast (part of Hasbro), Sony Entertainment, Upper Deck and Peter Adkison, the head of Gen Con and a game maker in his own right. Adkison gave one of the most concise definitions of "gaming" I have heard – gaming is everything between actual sports on one end and actual gambling on the other end. Anything people do in the middle with cards, dice and game pieces is gaming.
For the most part these folks are optimistic about the direction of the hobby and their industry. If you look at the growth in video games, it is clear that more and more people are interested in “gaming.” The conventional wisdom has always been that as people start playing with controllers and screens, they stop playing with dice and cards. But traditional board games are also enjoying growth and the more collectible hobby games are also going gangbusters.
In short, more people are spending more of their time playing games.
Which isn’t to say that there aren’t problems. Interest in older games that used to be the money machines for the industry fade away as new games take their place. Retailers have to fend off competition from Internet-based stores that threaten to drive them out of business. While younger gamers, the lifeblood of the hobby and industry, are having more and more choices of other things to do with their time and many of those activities are happening online.
The panelists all see a future where the Internet and electronics are tied more closely to their tabletop components. A vision emerged of playing boardgames with people around the world through interactive tabletop game boards. Or playing a miniatures game where there are actually battle sounds as pieces move and fight based on commands passed through the Internet.
Think of playing Risk or Axis and Allies with gamers around the world as their pieces move around on your tabletop under their remote control, while the sound of real tanks and gunfire echoes in the background.
A few hours later, I sat through a press preview of Wizards of the Coasts big, big announcement for the show – there will be a fourth edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game coming out next year. In short, the mechanics aren't changing a lot and the releases will start in May with a new "Player's Handbook."
But while only serious gamers probably care a lot about D&D and what its fourth edition will hold, the vision they unveiled for interactivity through the Internet is pretty impressive and right up the alley of the earlier panel discussion.
The new D&D will be fully supported online in new and innovative ways. For example, you will be able to buy online versions of your actual D&D books that update and change whenever the rules change. Plus there will be interactive features like character generators and most interestingly a digital “D&D game table.”
The game table idea means I could run a game between members of my high school gaming group, my Navy gaming comrades and my college gaming buddies over the Internet. We would all be looking at the same board, interacting through voice chat and seeing the same "digital miniatures" appear on our game board.
This wouldn’t be a video game, per se, but a way to play a tabletop game on the computer. The down side, to my mind, is that it won’t include all the wiz-bang, graphical coolness of a video game. I don’t clearly understand the reasons why I would want to play on that game table, when I could take those same friends and we could all play Dungeons & Dragons Online, a massive multiplayer online roleplaying game, where we run around as fully animated, 3-d characters and get to hack away at monsters ourselves, rather than watch a miniature moving on a virtual table hacking away at a monster.
More appealing to me, Wizards of the Coast will also be incorporating tools like adventures and maps for gaming group referees (or Dungeon Masters) to download and use, articles to read and news to digest, all for a monthly fee. Gamers will be able to design their whole adventure and all their characters online, then download it, print it out and take it to the next gaming session.
I’ll write more about the interactive online gaming/tabletop gaming merger with some more of their vision in a few weeks for a Zone cover story, I believe.
Right now, I’ve got to get ready for the show.
