Click Nothing

Convergence Culture

Part Eight: Future Past

Seven months ago when I started writing this column, I suspected the things I would be talking about were mostly wishful thinking. The idea that an increasingly entrenched game industry would see value in connecting casual, social or mobile gamers to their blockbuster AAA titles through meaningful gameplay seemed likely to fall by the wayside in favour of more aggressive exploitation of insidiously monetized shovel ware. How could developers – constantly understaffed and struggling to make every deadline – ever find the time to build a Facebook or iPhone game that would meaningfully link casual players to their fifty million dollar Christmas release if they couldn't find the time to make their Beta?

The World of Warcraft Armoury has been around for quite a while, but let’s face it: Blizzard can afford to put a man on the moon if they want, so they’re not much of a model for the rest. Various Spore browser apps allow you to look at the Sporepedia on a mobile device, but these offer no gameplay, and aren’t even built by EA. The best that the year’s biggest releases could muster – like Modern Warfare 2 – were fan made game guides and various utilities for mobile devices that allowed you to find Intel Drops, know what Perks and Kill Streak Rewards were coming and read some map strategies. None of these things were meaningfully linking different groups of players to a single unified experience.

I wasn't my only non-believer, either. I received plenty of emails skeptical of the idea that some 40 year old executive might want to manage a crime family from his Android phone, and in doing, drive a component of the open world urban crime game his son was playing. More openly hostile emails condemned me for selling out to the marketing vampires I identified in the intro for suggesting we could do everything I was suggesting profitably, while others accused me of undermining the ultimate goal of building the perfect immersive simulation of everything.

But while my pipe-dreams and prognostications may remain heretical for some, they might also end up coming true. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood – developed by my esteemed former co-workers – has done a fantastic job of opening the door for a huge audience of casual and social gamers to peer into the amazing world of Renaissance Italy and the life of Ezio. I had no idea AC: Legacy was being developed, but it achieves many of the things I suggested months ago (and in many ways better than I imagined – which is no surprise knowing who was involved). This is an important first step toward the future that I’m talking about because it challenges the notion that the kinds of fantasies gamers are interested in are inaccessible to a broad audience. We may have always suspected that the fantasy of Assassin’s Creed had a broad appeal beyond the existing audience of a few million hardcore gamers – but we couldn’t prove it. Now we can. Now we will be able to measure the appeal of that fantasy to a real audience.

Dust 514 – though still in development – openly attempts to link two of the most hardcore audiences of gamers out there: competitive online FPS players and dedicated PvP MMO players. While the potential scope of this intramedia link is smaller than that which would connect Assassin’s Creed on console to Facebook gamers, the data will be just as interesting and important. Will an audience of ‘me first’ shooter players accept the cascade of consequences that emerge from the proposed design? Will they – for example – willingly engage in a battle they can’t win to achieve the strategic goal of a group of players in EVE? Will EVE players be willing to leave their best laid invasion plans in the hands of a bunch of bickering fourteen year-olds with hyper-conductive nervous systems? Is the patience and ruthless plotting of the EVE community compatible with the twitchy thirst for chaos of an FPS community?

And perhaps the most important question raised by these games is whether or not the connection between different audiences will act as a gateway between the games. Will people who have never played a console game give Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood a chance if they are invested in Legacy? Will ageing shooter fans invested in Dust 514 decide to give EVE a try as their reflexes fail them and they fall under the curve?

Before this article ever sees print we'll have answers to these and other questions, and developers will already be hard at work on a second wave of games that strive to do even more than I imagined. As William Gibson once said, "the future is already here, it just isn't evenly distributed yet."

Convergence Culture

Part Six: Platform Jumping

For the last five parts of this series I talked around the issue of Single Player games and their place in the intramedia landscape I have been describing. I've looked at how social world building games like Farmville might seed content into SP game worlds. I've looked at how mobile apps might provide the backbone for a game economy whose principle consumers would be players in SP worlds. I've looked at how organization management games like Mafia Wars could provide a framework of story content to sustain the ongoing life of a SP game. But I've not really talked explicitly about the Single Player game itself and what it might be like in this new intramedia model.

While I personally feel that modern AAA single player games are too long, the reality is that is not the case for your typically 18-24 year old who does not have an enormous game buying budget and needs a lot of content if he has any hope of keeping himself distracted from studying. I would love to make the argument that the next-generation of Single Player game should be a four hour experience, but I know that's not realistic. That said, with the increasing economic pressure for even SP games to be online (to protect against piracy), I am beginning to suspect the oft-recurring memes of the Episodic SP game, and the game-world-as-platform are finally going to arrive.

In the case of the more systemic open world games such as Fallout, Borderlands, GTA and others, we already see a trend toward serving players a lot of downloadable content. The reasons for this are obvious; the profit margins on DLC are relatively high for developers and publishers. This means that even if demand is low - say only 5% to 10% of players purchase DLC after they finish the original game - the development costs to shipping what is effectively script into an open world is a tiny fraction of what it costs to build that same content in parallel with the game (especially given that shipped games are stable).

I think the real question facing Single Player games going forward - particularly in the difficult economic climate of today - is how to reduce the cost of getting the game world into the hands of players, and increase the amount of high-profit-margin content we release post-launch into these stable, proven platforms. This only makes economic sense when you consider that currently only a tiny handful of game releases are profitable and all other game development is funded by a few hits.

Why is Fallout 3 a one hundred hour experience? Admittedly, even I made time to finish it, and I even downloaded some of the DLC. But it came at a tremendous cost in terms of lost opportunity to play other games. With the world of Fallout 3 sitting on my hard drive, and the ability of the developers to push more content into that world at any time, the real question is, could they have reduced their development costs by shipping me the game in five ten dollar chunks over the course of the two months that it took me to play it?

When we start to imagine a game like Fallout as being more like a platform for serving content, the integration of some of the other concepts I previously discussed starts to make more sense. The small settlements that dot the landscape can easily be imagined as being served to the platform from a 'manage your wasteland settlement' social game. The shops in those settlements can easily be imagined as shops run by players from their mobile devices. And without the game needing to become a full-blown persistent world MMO, is it trivial to imagine supporting drop-in co-op. Once we have a game world rendered perpetually 'fresh' because of the input of other players, it is also much easier to imagine that I would pay a reasonable price for the game-world-as-platform, even if it only shipped with four hours of developer content. Done correctly, I even suspect the world could be given away for free, with features such as player-generated settlements and player run shops being unlocked by micro transaction. High quality, well polished story content could then be sold at a premium - five to ten dollars for an episode running anywhere between 3-6 hours.

I think the appeal from a publisher and developer standpoint is obvious. This is a powerful way to maximize the efficiency of your staff and to generate higher-margin, lower-risk profit, more steadily. The argument I hear against trying it this way is that it is unproven and conservative executives don't seem to want to be the first to risk their company on unproven business models.

Perhaps all the executives need is for players to demand it loudly enough - and to support it when it does finally arrive.

Convergence Culture

Part Five: Gaming Across the Fifth Dimension

Revolutionary ideas in science, technology and philosophy don’t exist in isolation in academic institutes, government think tanks, or corporate R&D labs, they touch all aspects of our culture. The ideas of Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin undercut millennia of oppression, giving rise to concepts like literacy, democracy and equality. Relativity went hand-in-hand with the dismantling of objectivity in art and literature. Today, as scientists unravel the many-worlds interpretation and similar theories, we see a simultaneous blurring of the boundaries between the online universe and the physical universe. Our sense of the immediate here-and-now is altered by the layer of the internet, its systems, data, and users. This new sense of reality is reflected in our art – and our games.

Who is ‘there’ when we play Left 4 Dead? Am I hosting the server? Is he? Did it migrate? Is he there or is that a bot? Has he joined another game? Am I alone? What does ‘alone’ even mean where worlds overlap and relocate, and characters’ bodies are intermittently inhabited or automated. We don’t think twice about these things when we play L4D, but the hyperdimensional structure of the game reflects a culture that similarly doesn’t give a second thought to navigating with stitched together photographs taken in different months or years to rendezvous with friends geo-tagging their tweets only to find out they have already left – leaving us in the physical company of one set of friends and the psychological company of someone absent. Even if L4D’s feature set had been technologically possible in 2000, no one would have accepted it. Today, we take it for granted.

Fifteen years ago it was interesting to set up a LAN in a room full of PCs so we could play co-op Rainbow Six. Today, pop-up notifications that friends have come online, or joined your game are not just normal, they are banal. The New Interesting is not having to grind for twelve hours to be able to safely play Crackdown in co-op. We were too long handcuffed by a wrongheaded desire to protect the coherence of the fiction of our game worlds, and this made allowing players to play co-op games difficult. But our shifting cultural perceptions have loosened those bonds. The story of Crackdown doesn’t break if my friend helps me level up, and we don’t need to explain it with some kind of complicated and fictionally justified side-kicking system. If the system you contrive to protect your fiction is so complicated that it stops people from playing, you’re doing it wrong.

Demon’s Souls gives us a fantasy realm where the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the damned overlap strangely. I see the apparitions of other players fighting enemies I haven’t yet encountered. I witness the ghosts of their demise like footprints in interdimensional snow. In System Shock 2, these apparitions needed to be explained as neurological side effects of the upgrade system. In Demon’s Souls, we need no such explanation – not because it makes better sense, but simply because we ‘get’ the idea of overlapping universes and are willing to explore those ideas in our art.

Captain Forever runs in your browser. Conveniently, so does Twitter. Captain Forever saves your entire game history on a server and allows other people to launch a new game using your ship at any point in its history simply by clicking on a tweet. “That’s not fair,” we cried in 1999, “players should have to earn that ship.” Bullshit.

In order to make the grade as a Captain, Commander Shepard has some things to learn, I think. I’d way rather have a dozen friends playing Mass Effect 3, all playing different characters, and be able to click on their tweets to populate my crew with their leveled up characters and all the relationship history that was developed by them over time than have cleverly authored characters filling out my roster in a branching narrative.

Mass Effect story die-hards and fanboys will, of course, disagree. Probably so will EA and Bioware. And people will continue to wonder why gaming has such a hard time climbing out of the cultural ghetto inhabited by schlock sci-fi and superhero comics. The answer is simply that until we make more games that address the current human experience using the central voice of the medium we belong in that ghetto.

Most ‘AAA’ games today use story and character to explore themes we have explored before in other media that – simply put – use story and character to better effect. Demon’s Souls, Left 4 Dead and Captain Forever all explore the way we experience and perceive the very fabric of our world as individuals and collectively through our culture. And they do so using the uniquely meaningful properties of interactive games.

These are games that have something to say that can’t be said in other media.

These are the games that are pushing human culture forward.

Convergence Culture

Part Four: An offer that can't be refused

Thought Experiment One: imagine Pong, tweaked to be more exciting. Instead of showing the AI paddle on the other side of the screen, we hide from the player everything that happens over the center line. An elegant pacing algorithm tracks the players returns and the score of the game, and fakes everything that happens over the line in order to constantly escalate the intensity. Pong matches would be full of ever more spectacular volleys reaching increasingly extreme climaxes. Every game would be more incredible than the last - and yet, very obviously, something would be lost, and this game would suck.

Thought Experiment Two: imagine a Battlefield 2 match where both team Commanders colluded to make the match as dramatically exciting as possible for the unwitting players on the ground. The Commanders would share information to guide their respective squads into interestingly asymmetric skirmishes. They would track the score and collaborate to keep things close, ensuring things like supply drops, artillery strikes and air support always arrived at the most desperate hour. Suddenly every Battlefield 2 match would be as good as the best one you ever had (unless you discovered the collusion, in which case it would all suddenly seem very pointless).

The principle challenge in designing and building a dynamic narrative that responds to player action is not in the building of it (which is, itself, a wicked problem), but rather in the designing of it. It is, in fact, the same problem as designing Extreme Pong: that in handing over drama management to an invisible algorithm, the player has no way to know his actions are driving the story and the dynamic narrative becomes indistinguishable from an authored one - and likely not as good.

With Commander mode, Battlefield 2 hints at a way to cut the Gordian Knot: it suggests the possibility that we can outsource drama management to other players. On the one hand, playing the Commander gives strong feelings of agency and on the other, players on the ground know the difference between a high level experience that is pre-packed by a designer and one that is managed on-the-fly by a player with an agenda.

The main problem with Commander mode is that it needs to be synchronized with the main game at runtime, making it a pretty niche kind of fun. But I believe this is easily fixed by decoupling the 'game' of player controlled drama management from the low-level action game being managed. If the management game is designed to be fun as a management game instead of as a part of a low level combat game, then one player's management game becomes another player's drama manager. This is where intramedia convergence comes in.

Thought Experiment Three: imagine Mafia 2, the open world game, shipped with Mafia Wars, the mobile application as its player narrative driver. Instead of spamming all of Facebook with requests to join a mob, Mafia Wars players would try to recruit the best players of Mafia 2 to join their mobs. Players of Mafia 2 would subscribe to a handful of Mafia Wars players, who would become the warring Dons of their game world, and the missions they were sent on would have meaningful repercussions in their worlds. As one Mafia Wars Don rises to power, his influence cascades throughout the game worlds of his subscribers. As other Dons rise to challenge him, Mafia 2 players find themselves embroiled in the familial intrigue of the best mafia fiction - contracted to protect, bribed to betray, or tasked to assassinate based on the real needs of real players (who would in fact be playing a different, but connected, game).

Unlike the Extreme Pong example, the beauty of this intramedia link between two different games connected via the cloud is that players on both sides of the line know there are other players out there returning their volley. At the same time, because the players operating at the Mafia Wars level are not tied to the minute to minute play the way Commanders are in Battlefield 2, they can appreciate the game at the pace of a social, bite-sized, mobile game.

Even more important is the bridge-building between two divergent audiences. The overlap in the Venn Diagram between Mafia Wars players and Mafia 2 players is probably not great, but then neither is the overlap being proposed between their games. Your Uncle Bob from Wisconsin who plays Wii Sports with you every Thanksgiving at Grandma's probably loves Mario Puzo books and clicks away at Mafia Wars three or four times a day between meetings, and would love nothing more than to have you as his man on the ground in his ongoing feud with Mike from Accounting. And with every click the decisions he makes in his game world could be changing the landscape in yours, and vice versa.

Convergence Culture

Part Three: If you build it, they will come.

Ever since I can remember, I have loved using level editors. I got my start before I was even a teenager building Lode Runner levels on the Vic 20, by my mid twenties I was making levels in UnrealEd to play with friends, and my first game industry job was as a level designer. The game level editor was at least as important to my personal creative development as was the word processor. I believe a good level editor can be as engaging and entertaining as a game itself and - when combined with a great game - has the potential to create a positive feedback loop between playing and creating. This is important if you believe - as I do - that playing and creating are fundamentally the same thing.

But designing and building level editors is hard. On one hand, you want to give players unchecked freedom to design and build any environment they can imagine, from a space station to an African savanna to the Eiffel Tower, or even all of these things at once. Conversely, you also want player created environments to play well within the context of your game. Designing a level editor that connects creators who want to express themselves with players who want tightly designed levels is a challenge I believe can be overcome by making level building into a game itself.

The first time I saw a screenshot of the isometric grid of flowerbeds and fences, cornfields and cattle that we call Farmville, I was stricken with clammy-skinned flashbacks of Floaters and Chrysalids. I needed to know where 'Sniper' Sato was, and who was packing the Blaster Launcher. But regardless of superficial similarities, Farmville is nothing like X-Com. Farmville is essentially a level building game, and X-Com is a game that needs an unending stream of new levels. What a match.

Farmville affords player expression through the design of farms, and a forum for sharing those expressions with others. The actual gameplay of Farmville is either shoddy, evil or non-existent depending on your worldview. X-Com, by contrast, is a hardcore, single-player strategy game in which players express themselves through the way they confront the game challenges. The forum they have for sharing that expression is non-existent (but at least it's not evil).

One of the amazing achievements of X-Com is that it uses a procedural 'level assembler' to construct appropriate levels on demand, offering an infinite variety of terrain in which players battle to repel the alien invasion of Earth. Underlying this 'assembler' are simple rules which determine what makes a valid level. Farmville farms, by contrast, are player generated. Because Farmville explicitly rewards time spent with experience and profit, many Farmville farms are rigorously optimized with dense fields of high-yield crops. But because Farmville is also a platform for socialization and expression, there is also an incredible variety of farms that reject progression entirely; from eclectic need-one-of-everything collections, to idyllic pastoral scenes where some kind of virtual Feng Shui reigns.

In order to give players the feeling of scope required by an X-Com game, a modern remake must confront a difficult challenge. Building an entire planet worth of content by hand is not feasible. Procedural generation risks feeling wooden, and lacking in creative flourish. Relying simply on user generation risks undercutting serious themes with an overwhelming percentage of penis-shaped levels. But a game that incentivizes players to make appropriate X-Com levels can potentially solve this problem.

A casual game for mobile devices or the web that puts players in the role of Mayor, Farmer, or Ranger, and gives them the tools to build all the urban, rural and wilderness landscapes needed, while explicitly rewarded their time spent with experience and profit would quickly generate the needed content. Adding another reward axis selecting for designer-defined 'appropriateness' would lead to player created maps suitable for playing X-Com in. Those maps could then be published to the cloud and pulled down by the game on demand. These casual players cum level designers would be rewarded with experience, gifts, rare items and prestige for designing X-Com appropriate environments. Friend management, sharing, and publish/subscribe tools would begin to bridge the sadly widening gulf between two important groups of players.

It's been almost twenty years since X-Com and an entire generation of similarly hardcore games excluded a mass-market gaming audience a hundred times the size of the audience they chose to service. Today, the pendulum is swinging the other way. The casual revolution - as exemplified by Farmville - is excluding the hardcore gamer. It doesn't need to be this way. We do not have to accept the cynical segregation of diverse audiences when the technology exists today to unite us. By linking our games, we create new domains in which all kinds of players can create, co-operate, compete, collaborate, and ultimately converge.

Convergence Culture

Part Two: The Emperor's New Clothes

Imagine for a moment an alternate reality where racing games suck. Here, racing games only exist on portable devices. And they don't ever let you actually race. You have a couple dozen car models, and a few different engines. You can swap out tires and spoilers, choose from a few different fender, grill and lighting packages, change paint jobs, and decorate with a handful of decal designs before sharing your cars with friends. In the best of these games your car can race against a friends car, but remember - no driving. The cars do an automated lap around a plain oval, and a winner is declared.

What I'm describing is not an alternate reality racing game, but rather the actual current state of fashion design games, using racing games in substitution, to illustrate that fashion games are firmly ensconced in a pink ghetto of lifestyle brainwashing gadgets for girls. Meanwhile, racing games are among the most important genres in gaming, leading the charge into the future along a number of important technological axes including rendering, physics, online capability and user customization. Why?

Aside from the industry's utterly shameful lack of diversity, the reason why fashion games suck is that the design problems inherent to a good fashion game are harder to solve than those of a racing game.

I believe there are two big challenges to making a great fashion game. The first is the creativity problem. Similar to our bizarro racing game, most fashion games let users mix and match their designs from predefined sets of fabrics, colours and cuts. The game then evaluates 'success' based on proximity to some hidden value set. If the game is looking for [pink], [cotton], [sundress], then a pink silk sundress will be more successful than a pink wool sweater.

The problem is that this is not design in any meaningful sense. It is avatar customization at best, which is hardly enough to support an entire game - never mind a genre. Unfortunately, designing a freeform editor usable by casual gamers that can generate near infinite variety - and then designing supporting systems that evaluate the impact of the user design on other game systems is an impressively difficult challenge.

Spore solved it though, so now we have existence proof that it can be done. Next?

Next is the context problem. Assembling outfits from a library and sharing them with friends is not fashion design. Fashion needs more than designers. It needs people to wear it, to be influenced by it, to look good - and bad - in it. The context of the interplay of people expressing themselves through their choice of clothes is what fashion is, the same way the context of pushing a car to the limits to complete a lap faster than the other guy is what racing is.

So even if we could theoretically make a Spore-like editor for designing clothes that would run on iPhone or DS, how would we provide the necessary context? I believe everything exists to do this today, and I think the game to do it would best be called GTA: Garment District.

GTA:GD would not only allow you to create any article of clothing you can imagine, it would also allow you - optionally - to design a boutique and to publish that boutique to the cloud. From there, players of GTA could subscribe to user created boutiques to replace the default clothing chains in their game world. These clothes would not only be made available to 10 million Niko Bellics, but would seep out into 10 million Liberty Cities. The fashion designs of all those designers touching the lives of millions of AI driven Libertarians.

The popularity of given brands (defined by subscriptions) and given individual styles (defined by aggregated data on what all the Niko's wear) would seed a simple simulation of the cultural evolution of tastes that would determine the outfit of each civilian as he is spawned into the world. Style in any given instance of GTA would evolve and change.

Even better, GTA:GD players would receive meaningful feedback on their designs. It would give players for whom being a fashion designer is a valuable fantasy a sense of what it really feels like to design fashion, the same way racing games allow us to get a sense of what it feels like to drive a race car.

More importantly, intra-media gaming like this builds connections between people by giving them something they can share across wildly different games. It can dispel a daughters resentment for a lack of paternal attention, or a fathers frustration at the cost of buying her what he knows is a crappy game. It can give them a new way to engage with, and to understand one another, and in doing so create a new and much needed context where gaming welcomes and encourages girl gamers instead of cynically exploiting them.

Convergence Culture

Part One: The Vampires of Culture

From a design perspective, 'convergence' is a dirty word. Convergence is a business concept that aims to bring about an overlap in otherwise diverse audiences by leveraging IP across games, film, toys, books and comics, television or other forms of entertainment.

In the game industry, the traditional approach to convergence finds second tier publishers floating themselves on licensing deals for third rate movies that yield fourth rate games that still outsell some of the best titles of the year because uninspired marketing twits would rather trick Wal-Mart shopping soccer moms into buying something crappy than attempt to nurture a growing need for a new entertainment medium that enriches us, moves us, and challenges the way we experience the world.

I find this approach cynical and exploitative. But contrary to rumours of my anti-capitalist tendencies, I am actually in favour of responsible trans-media leveraging of IP, and not simply because it is profitable. As the cultural chasms between generations widen and deepen, and as the mountains of inequity separating the richest and poorest steepen, I believe that well crafted trans-media properties have a unique capacity to foster convergence; weaving together the shared experiences of differing peoples to form the very fabric of our culture.

But the reality of trans-media convergence is that we have, up to now, been mostly incapable of even making good cross-platform ports of our best gaming experiences. Modern Warfare rocks on the current home consoles - not so much on iPhone and Wii. With this being the case, is it any surprise that trying to port those experiences across to other media fails so miserably?

Every time anyone has tried to create a rich trans-media IP to appeal to diverse audiences they have failed in at least one major domain. Star Wars, Harry Potter and Clancy come to mind as our best successes. Star Wars novels never appealed to a broader audience than existing Star Wars fans, Harry Potter contributed little of value to the game space, and Clancy never brought anything to the table that was appealing to kids or families (though that's probably a wise omission). That said, the Star Wars novels and the Potter games were financial successes - and that's the point I am trying to make. Because the expected margins are great, and no investment in quality is required - creativity is sucked out of the system by business and marketing executives before these trans-media properties even have a chance to be good.

So what is to be done? As long as 'convergence' remains a rallying cry on Wall Street, and investors freely offer up their vaults as financial safe-haven to the vampires of culture, I fear we'll never see the dawn. But I for one am tired of playing the cowering Carpathian peasant; they have the Internet in Transylvania now too, you know. And XBox and wi-fi and iPad. I think it's high time we get a mob together, and armed with Wii-motes and iPhones and PSPs in place of torches and pitchforks we'll drag those bloodsuckers out into the streets and stake them to the ground. And if our mob is made up of people who care about games as a medium of human expression, then what shall be the sharpened stick on whose point we stake our bloody claim?

I say we use the word convergence itself, hacking it like a turret in Bioshock to turn it to our own purpose. If we stop talking about convergence in the cold business terms that have drained the life from so many games (and developers, and gamers) and start talking about it in design terms, we not only have a dangerous new weapon of our own, but we have appropriated one of the more dangerous weapons that has been fielded against us.

This new convergence will be the topic of this series of columns. In the coming months I am going to talk about how new and changing paradigms of design, play, interaction, technology and economics are reshaping the games we play, the people who play them and the industry that makes them. This new convergence is not a trans-media convergence, but rather an intra-media convergence. It is a bottom-up convergence given life by the plethora of smartphones and tablets we carry into battle and enabled by ubiquitous wi-fi, connected consoles, cellular data networks and a new overhanging Cloud that miraculously does not block the sun.

This is the convergence I believe we should be talking about and working toward. It is a convergence that starts by getting our own house in order, and by bringing diverging audiences of players together. For too long casual gamers, hardcore gamers, bite-sized gamers and mobile gamers have been playing in separate worlds. Until we can bring them together and unite them around a common experience - custom to each platform, but ultimately connected - is there any reason to imagine we can fill a movie theatre with people who don't give a shit about games to begin with?