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"Digital Britain" key to BBC's future
The UK government has published a white paper on the future of the BBC, an organisation described as "unique" by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport. The BBC is mainly associated with the television and radio channels it produces in return for a licence fee which must be paid by almost everyone watching television in the UK. However, the organisation is not restricted to these platforms, nor is it resistant to changes in technology, as the BBC News video report "Entertainment 'key' to BBC future" outlines.The report focuses on a fairly typical family; the parents watch television regularly, but the children tend to gravitate towards games and digital media, only occasionally turning to TV for specific programmes. As technology attracts television views away from their sets, more ways of delivering the BBC's content are being investigated, from TV on phones to downloadable media.The BBC appears to be moving into games as part of their "Digital Britain" initiative--under the banner of "interactive and web-based services", games (or interactive stories) like Jamie Kane give the BBC the opportunity to try new directions in storytelling and gaming. It's clear from the news report that the BBC acknowledges gaming as a key activity for its licence fee payers; this commitment to interactivity should see more game-based content being delivered to the BBC's customers and help the BBC's games research along a step or two.
Curing MMORPG inertia
As MMOs become more accessible, casual players who have little contiguous time to play can run into a form of player inertia. The effort required to reach the next level is too great; levelling up is too far away to justify a week of plugging away for an hour a day. This inertia inevitably causes players to stop playing altogether, and to leave the game.This soapbox column at Gamasutra addresses the problem with an idea based around "dynamic lifestyle adjustment". Why should your characters freeze when you log off? Instead, let them do some low-level adventuring without your intervention -- a small trickle of experience gain which, if you're offline for long enough, will help push you towards that next milestone.It's an interesting idea; MMOs, for the most part, follow similar templates along the lines of "experience and skills are only gained when players log in and work for them". While some differ, none take it to quite this extreme, and it would be interesting to see a game take this idea and aim itself squarely at the casual market.
