Author: Bartosz Głowacki

Co-founder and Story Guardian at Ampligamer. He grew up playing such off-line hits as Doom Trooper, Call of Cthulhu, Dungeons & Dragons, Talisman: The Magical Quest Game and good old Ludo. He only sold his soul to public relations and marketing to constantly set his own rules. He is a strategist with lots of BIG IDEAS floating around in his head. He can beat his little brother in every Heroes of Might & Magic, Civilization and Football Manager game with closed eyes.

VIRTUAL REALITY IN THE SERVICE OF VIDEO GAMES AND BUSINNESS

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Bartosz Głowacki

On a January cdp.pl conference Ampligamer has a pleasure to moderate a discussion panel about virtual reality. Topic is that hot, as nowadays Orwell’s dream is coming true. VR goggles strongly influence those quickly developing civilizations, literally on our eyes changing tomorrow into today.

Technology in XXI century year by year is increasing its quality, availability and attractiveness. Due to that fact, business – including video games and marketing – can’t remain ambivalent. Who is not able to keep up with a peloton gaining more and more speed, loses a chance of getting clear of the pack and winning a race. Years long, gaming industry had been rejecting VR because of the weak ergonomics of devices, until Oculus Rift conquered hearts of Kickstarter users in 2012. Afterwards, founder of the goggles Palmer Luckey sold his invention to Facebook, collecting – boom! – 2 billion dollars. From this time, VR is perceived as a goose with a golden eggs, while world format giants became ready to subsidize research and production with astronomical amounts of money.

A VR cake is set in the spotlight of such firms, like Sony (PlayStation VR), Google (Google Cardboard), Samsung (Samsung Gear VR), Razer (Razer OSVR), Zeiss (Zeiss VR One), as well as Microsoft (Hololens), which bets on aesthetics of mixed reality. Conspiracy theories claim that in Cupertino Apple is already creating exclusive virtual reality for iPhones. Poles aren’t worse – they’ve got their VR too! HTC produces HTC Vive goggles with a support of one and only Valve, but Vrizzmo and Cmoar also solicit for honors.

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Video games medium was thoroughly entwined by VR tentacles and we can only imagine which platform – PC, consoles or mobiles – will catch that unquestionable revolution in the fastest way. Fight for market dominance between all goggles is going to be enormous and comfort of using them is already a bargaining card. For the end user it’s all about attractive ergonomics, quality of displayed content (drawbacks like pixels and virtual disease = developer’s nightmare) and additional lenses or controllers like Oculus Touch. Crucial is also an optimization of production costs and lowering final costs of equipment in stores all over the world.

It’s a truism that video games industry felt invasion of VR goggles the most. Widely understood entertainment, culture and art also has changed. Media experts and people from film and television put a theory that with popularization of virtual reality role of passive recipient will be degraded by active participant of action. Old media we know today will well-nigh disappear. Teasers suggest Google Jump will offer possibility of completely immersive watching of 360 films, what means that we will move ourselves from domestic quiet to epicenter of fiction events.

I’m sure that American music industry pretty soon will standardize high quality 360 music videos, as already in Poland – in rap for example – we can observe first shy experiments of using virtual reality for promotional purposes. Technological reinforcement in porn industry also didn’t go unnoticed, as the VR trend is a unique chance for reaching yet undiscovered horizon of immersion and new monetization models. Getting hot! 😉

Furtherome, tourism within few years will propose trips to such exotic places on Earth, like Mexico, Chernobyl, Syria or Cape Verde – without pressure of leaving home. For future generations virtual sightseeing and verifying of hotels before packing any luggage is going to be a routine. Alteration won’t omit constantly growing sector of e-commerce too.

We will want firstly to give a careful check to products we buy in the Internet: keep for a moment in virtual hands, try on, turn on, feel. Experience! Wander across real estates, drive a car through a city or ride a new open rollercoaster in an amusement park we plan to visit during upcoming family holidays. Marketing and promotion are developing a lot within last few years thanks to their inseparable romance with technology, nevertheless the biggest change is still ahead of them.

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Business doesn’t sleep, virtual reality force people to keep eyes open wide. Autopsy shows how much fun I have from playing mobile games with support of rather cheap, cardboard dummy of VR. Dummy, but capable of transporting me from here to ‘there’. And goggles are surely going to revolutionize education, science, medicine (treatment of arachnophobia, acrophobia, claustrophobia), communication, HR, vocational trainings (pilots, astronauts and soldiers has caught a deep breath here), architecture, sport and many other areas of life.

12 millions of headsets will occur in homes all over the world only this year. From the other hand – do you remember how long did it take touch-screens to win a battle for our pockets with button-oriented mobile phones? Indeed! Cyberpunk’s here! 🙂

PS: Intriguing is a fact that virtual reality is changing PR & Marketing globally, but with its own PR & Marketing activities has a small problem. Saying someone that certain video game is immersive or will be immersive in a certain moment is ridiculous, because immersion is based on indefinite number of elements (design, narration, gameplay, etc.), incentives, emotions and usually coincidence. Specific description of virtual reality experience and advantages of a product is impossible to create, as user involvement in content consumption is different for each person, while impressions personalized and abstract.

BOARD GAMES – SECOND YOUTH

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Bartosz Głowacki

It’s official: Poland has once again fallen in love with board games. Shelves are now stacked with various games while more and more pubs, cultural centres and schools invite people to board game nights. This very phenomenon makes me even happier knowing that such games as Waterloo, Talisman: The Magical Quest Game, Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer Fantasty Roleplay were literally like a second life to me back in the day. But that’s not all.

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The number of conventions and festivals for offline gaming enthusiasts is constantly growing while board game producers, including independent designers, keep on coming up with new concepts. Unsurprisingly, publishers and distributors do much better than, say, 10 years ago, because the consumers constantly crave new titles, generating 25-40% more sales annually. Let’s have a look, for instance, at Internationale Spieltage SPIEL, the biggest worldwide board game fair that takes place in Essen, Germany. Hundred of games are revealed only during that single event, multiplying product sales.

The media is full of headlines about the board game renaissance and the reports are right. Spending so much time with computers, smartphones and tablets, people feel the need to renew contacts. Board games provide a great opportunity to gather a bunch of friends in one place. They also involve solving smaller and bigger problems; progressing is really fun and you can chat between consecutive rounds or matches. Their return in the age of digitalization, social media and culture of iconization & virtual-reality may be considered paradoxical, but surely isn’t unjustified.

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It took more than a decade for board games to regain their glory. We have come a long way from the ever-popular checkers, chess and Ludo to a wide range of new titles that gain more and more fans every month. We can now enjoy a great diversity of board games in terms of ambiance and themes, but also design philosophy. Starting from educational quizzes and trivia games to typically party games, races with a hint of randomness and strategic titles based on development, expansion and resource extraction. We can find board games involving the use of cards, drawing from renowned, worldwide brands or universes as well as completely new titles.

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The video game industry is not indifferent to the growing trend of offline gaming. Kickstarter is slowly becoming a mecca for designers who wish to fulfil their board game related dreams, while game jams previously dedicated to video games (such as Nordic Game Jam) are opening up to people without passion for programming. At the same time, full-fledged board game competitions emerge from the shadow (board-sport as an equivalent of e-sport?). Polish players already achieve really good results in such games as Warhammer: Invasion, The Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne.

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The final words should therefore be overly-optimistic. Poland begins to live and breathe board games while local creative designers – often working from their garages – bring their ideas to life to captivate the hearts of gamers in Poland, as well as in Western Europe and the United States. Such titles as Kolejka, Superfarmer, K2 and Robinson Crusoe, just to name a few, have been fully localised and received multiple awards in international competitions, selling tens of thousands of copies.

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What’s in store for us in the nearest future? Board games industry has been showing tremendous growth from last six years, so we can expect stronger sales, even more gorgeous artworks, more addictive storylines, more complex gameplay and even more fun. After all, the second youth eventually has to turn into adulthood! What’s funny – we have recently dug out the legendary Cyberpunk 2020 at our agency. In the nearest future, it will conquer the video game industry thanks to the Warsaw-based developer CD Projekt RED.

And what’s your favourite offline game these days?