Freakonomics

The book was a smash hit that looked at some intriguing statistical analyses of sociologial phenomena by economist Steven Levitt and journalist Stephen Dubner (subtitled: A rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything).

The movie tries to do the same. Featuring an ensemble of directors (Heidi Ewing, Alex Gibney, Seth Gordon, Rachel Grady, Eugene Jarecki, and Morgan Spurlock) looking at different stories of statistics from the book along with some new topics such as the aptly titled "Can you bribe a 9th grader to succeed", the movie attempts to balance both the entertaining and the intriguing and insightful.

Unfortunately, I thought it would make a nice TV episode on public television. The best minisode is the one that deals with the most controversial topic from the book, the link between abortion and crime, and is directed by Eugene Jarecki. It did a fantastic job of creatively showing a very heavy topic. It is too bad that the rest of the movie was not like it as the stark contrasts in creative styles from the different directors work against the whole rather than for it.

It would have been nice to see the movie explore beyond the book, to delve more deeply into the topic. But as one minisode tells it, the difference between the surface, (Tatamae) and the truth (Honne) is often great. Unfortunately, this movie never crosses that boundary and left me dissatisfied.

Expect to see it this in fall in theaters.

Silverdocs blog.

Wow versus Counterstrike

MMOGCHART has released a new update. Obviously World of Warcraft dominates the MMOG market, as these charts show (1, 2, 3, 4). This reminds me of another game that dominates it's respective genre, Counterstrike. If you check the Gamespy stats, you can see that the various incarnations of CS account for the largest chunk of FPS gamers playing online. Although CS activity has dropped in recent years, let's not forget that it was first released in 1999, almost seven years ago! That type of longevity is not to be laughed at. I suspect WoW will have a similar track, at least until WoW2 comes out, and considering the first expansion has not yet been released, I expect that will be years from now.

So what do these two games have in common that makes them so dominating in their respective fields? Both games are extremely easy to get into and play. They are easy to learn, but difficult to master, and the high level play in CS (both professionally in leagues like the CPL, and on normal pub servers) matches the high level of play that can be found in high end instances in WoW. Both of them are unbelievably addictive, as I can attest to personally. One other important reason is the breaking point in the history of both games where they became so popular that a tipping point was reached which contributed to the game's popularity by virtually forcing the formation of large gamer communities. For CS, that meant that many of your friends were playing, it was easy to find servers to play on, and countless clans and websites sprang up around this community. A similar spike in popularity occurred with WoW, although all servers are owned by Blizzard, but many players and guilds popped up. Contrast this with a game like Quake 4 which has almost nobody playing (according to Gamespy again, less players than Quake 3) and you can barely find a server to play on with a ping less than 200. Guess which one the average user is going to play, the one where he is playing with nobody he knows, or the one where his friends are playing.

Finally, the most important reason for their popularity is that they are both fun to play. Of course my idea of fun in WoW died out after 3 months, whereas I still play the occasional game of CS. Fun is a relative thing, but enough people found these games enjoyable, although they are not for everyone.

I haven't listed any of the details that made these two games so great, like simple and intuitive interfaces (although that's debatable in WoW), ability to ease newbie players into the game via training, the gentle learning curve (which ramps up exponentially) etc. However, I wish more game companies would pay attention to these details so that a larger selection of games at least matched the professionalism of CS and WoW (and it can't be that hard, CS was started by two guys as a Half-Life mod), even if they don't end up matching the overall popularity.

Do these numbers look right to you?

The Associated Press released a poll sponsored by AOL a few days ago (produced by Ipsos - PDF link). Out of 3024 adults 1046 played video games of any sort (PC or console, no questions were asked about mobile gaming). The margin of error is almost +/- 3% for the game section.

Of the ones who played video games (two different questions):

• 45% played on the net (471).
• 63% typically played by themselves (659)

That right there tells me there was a problem. More people do not play over the net (55%) than do (45%) but even more play by themselves, usually. However, there was no breakdown on how often people play on the net, there was only a question about how often they play games in total (with two peaks at 2 and 4 hrs., while the largest slice only played less than an hour).

Of the 471 who played online:

• 18% had formed relationships with others online (85)

So only 85 people out of 3026 had formed a relationship with someone they had met playing an online game. That is a small percentage (about 2.8%).

There's more info at the Ipsos page via the PDF link. It's unfortunate that cross question correlations cannot be made (ie. how many people who make more than $50 000/yr. play online for more than 2 hours a week and describe themselves as "white").

Some other oddities in the poll:

15% of those who say they play games also watch >25 hrs. of TV a week (where do they find the time - are these the gamers who only play 1 hr. a week or less?)
No questions were asked on how much they spent on hardware vs. software vs. online charges (just the totals are available).

It would be interesting to know how representative these numbers truly are. For example, 37% say they are from the south (over 1/3). Does that number represent the rest of America. Does 1/3 of the population live in the south?

I would really like to see the complete raw data.