The Playstation Move and the Kinect will both fail.

This isn’t because they aren’t worthy technology: The Kinect is potentially revolutionary and slagging the Move because it’s dupiing the Wii’s controller is like slagging the Sega Genesis because it duped the NES controller. It’s obviously true. It’s also irrelevant.

But they will fail. Because add-on controllers for video games will always fail.

THE SIMPLE MATH

There have been 40 million X-Box 360s sold worldwide. The cut-off point for the Top 10 games sold for the X-Box 360 is Fable II with 2.6 million copies. Which means that if you can sell your X-Box 360 game to just 6.5% of your potential customers, you can break into the Top 10 list (which would obviously qualify your game as a huge success).

Now, let’s assume that the Kinect is a huge success as a technology platform and sells to 25% of X-Box 360 owners. This would mean 10 million Kinects sold with somewhere between $1 and $1.5 billion in total sales. Huge success for Microsoft.

Despite this massive success for the Kinect, however, the developer of a Kinect game is still going to be struggling: In order to sell the same 2.6 million copies of a Kinect game, they now need to achieve a 26% market penetration.

In other words, under this incredibly rosy scenario for Kinect, a developer has a choice: If they develop a non-Kinect game, their potential audience is 40 million customers. If they develop a Kinect game, on the other hand, their potential audience is 10 million and they’ll have to literally quadruple their performance in order to achieve the exact same success.

That decision is practically a no-brainer. Which is why game developers rarely develop games for add-on controllers and virtually never bother developing AAA titles for them.

IT GETS WORSE

But in practice things are even worse for the Kinect.

The second best-selling game on the X-Box 360 is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which sold 7.5 million copies on the platform. But total sales for that game are almost twice that (at least 14 million, possibly more than 15 million). If it had been a Kinect game (and thus exclusive to the X-Box 360 platform) none of those additional sales would have happened. One of the most successful video games in history would suddenly only be half as successful.

Which means that a game developer doesn’t have to just quadruple their performance with a Kinect game, they actually have to increase it by seven- or eight-fold in order to match their potential success with a non-Kinect game.

THE (NOT SO) BIG PREDICTION

Of the two technologies (Move and Kinect), I trivially predict that Kinect will be more successful. Not because it’s cooler or more innovative (although that may attract a few developers in its own right), but because I believe it will be easier for designers to incorporate Kinect-enhancements into games which will not require the Kinect (and can therefore still be marketed to the total X-Box 360 market and ported to other platforms).

For example, in Assassin’s Creed 2 there’s a section where one of the NPCs suddenly stops talking to the protagonist and instead turns to the camera and begins directly addressing the player. (Which, in itself, was a pretty nifty bit of meta-narrative since you’re actually playing as the guy who’s playing the Assassin’s Creed 2 simulation.) The effect is pretty cool. But it would have been even cooler if the game had a Kinect-enhancement which allowed the NPC to look directly at me no matter where I was sitting in the room (or even follow me around if I chose to get up and move around).

If I was Microsoft, I’d be doing everything in my power to convince AAA developers to include these kinds of subtle “Kinect Enhancements” to their games. If they could pull it off, they might even find the magic bullet to disprove my prediction: Making the X-Box 360 version of every AAA title into the “best” version of that game would not only help to sell the Kinect hardware (since every game you buy would make the Kinect more valuable to you), it could also prove to be a potentially devastating blow for Microsoft’s competitors (turning even cross-platform AAA releases into something akin to a “semi-exclusive” for the X-Box 360).

An Oxford comma (or serial comma) refers to a comma placed before a conjunction (such as or, and, or but) in a list of three or more items.

“apples, oranges, and pears” (Oxford comma)

vs.

“apples, oranges and pears” (no Oxford comma)

When I was in elementary school we were taught that you should never use an Oxford comma. (Although we weren’t told that was the term for it.) At the time I didn’t think that made much sense because it’s far too trivial to come up with scenarios in which the lack of an Oxford comma would render a construction illogical:

“apples and oranges, left and right, and up and down”

vs,

“apples and oranges, left and right and up and down”

This is often taught as the “exception that proves the rule”. But here’s an example from Contested Will:

“Louis Benezet, an English professor at Dartmouth College, published the first of many Oxfordian volumes, Shakspere, Shakespeare and de Vere.”

Should the be understood as Shakspere, Shakespeare, and de Vere? (Implying an equality between the three names.) Or should it be understood as Shakspere: Shakespeare and de Vere? (In other words, with the latter clause being a subtitle.) Or could it be Shakspere; Shakespeare and de Vere? (With “Shakespeare and de Vere” being joined as a single unit vs. Shakspere.)

No way to know.

Which is why I maintain you should always use an Oxford comma in order to maximize the clarity of your text.

You’ll frequently hear authors and IP companies bitching and moaning about the fact that they don’t see a penny when their copyrighted material is sold on the used market. Even otherwise fairly intelligent folks like Isaac Asimov have irrationally believed that people buying used paperbacks were sticking daggers in their backs.

Even if we ignore the ethically tenuous position of people who want to sell you a toaster and then prohibit you from ever selling that toaster to somebody else (which a few weeks ago I would have considered hyperbole, but then the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided it would be a good idea to gut consumer protection and ship American jobs overseas all in one fell swoop), the claim being espoused here is fundamentally nonsensical.

What they’re overlooking (either willfully or ignorantly), is the actual effect that being able to sell used books has on the original customer’s buying habits:

First, it influences their decision to buy. (“I’m willing to pay $50 for this textbook, but only because I know I can sell it back for $15 at the end of the semester.”) If they weren’t able to recoup a portion of their investment, they might never buy it in the first place.

Second, it amortizes risk. (“I dunno if this DVD is worth $20. But I guess if I don’t like it, I’ll be able to sell it for at least $8. $12 isn’t that much of a risk.”) Customers who can amortize their risk are more likely to buy. And if the product turns out to be good, they may not resell at all.

Finally, it injects fresh capital: The $10 you get from GameStop for your video game is often going right back into purchasing a brand new game at GameStop.

This effect is somewhat diffused and may, therefore, not be clear when it comes to books or DVDs or video games. But it’s crystal clear when you look at the auto industry: X buys a $30,000 car from Ford. X sells it a couple years later to Y for $10,000 and uses that money to buy another $30,000 car. A couple years later X sells his new $30,000 car to Y for $10,000, while Y sells the original car to Z for $2,000.

Holy shit! Ford has lost all that money spent by Y and Z! X is ripping Ford off! … right?

Nope. Because (a) X couldn’t afford to buy a $30,000 car every two years if he wasn’t selling to Y; and neither Y nor Z can afford $30,000 new cars. The money from Y and Z is, in fact, funneling right up the system and into Ford’s pocket. And everybody wins: Ford makes more money. X gets fancy new cars on a more frequent basis. Y and Z get cars they otherwise couldn’t afford.

This is why nobody in the auto industry makes a new car that they can sell for $5,000 despite the obvious market for $5,000 vehicles.. They’re already getting the money from the $5,000 market.

I’m fairly certain that All-Star Superman is far too awesome to exist within the constraints of the universe as we know it.

Which is why it was necessary for the unspeakably dreadful All-Star “Goddamn” Batman to exist in order to balance the cosmic scales.

I was never really able to take the ENnie Awards seriously after they nominated the truly god-awful Pit of Loch-Durnan as Best Adventure in 2001: This early D20 product featured truly gorgeous cover art, but everything else about it — the interior art, the layout, the cartography, the NPCs, the “plot” — was atrocious. Imagine the opinion you’d have of a new film award that nominated Gigli for Best Picture in its first year of existence and you’d have a pretty accurate gauge for my opinion of the ENnies.

Recently, however, I’ve found myself thinking that the ENnies have probably refurbished their reputation in my eyes. It took the better part of a decade, but the stink had definitely worn off.

(You can see where this is going, right?)

The 2010 ENnie Nominees were named a couple days ago. And I’m sorry but this:

Does not deserve to be shortlisted as Best Cartography of the Year. Not even as an honorable mention. To do so is to, once again, turn the ENnies into a joke.

Allow me to be crystal clear on the nature of my complaint: There’s nothing inherently wrong with these maps. They’re clean, clear, and functional. (Quibble: The fact that the direction of north switches between the first and second maps is unnecessarily confusing and will almost certainly result in GMs having the PCs enter through the wrong door.) They aren’t bad maps. I mean, if I thought they were bad maps I’d have to look at my own maps from The Complex of Zombies and take myself out back for a good horse-whipping:

There’s nothing wrong with functional, workman-like cartography. But there’s a reason that “workman-like” and “award-winning” aren’t synonymous.

On a more positive note, the adventure this cartography is taken from — Death Frost Doom — is very good. It’s a little rough around the edges, but provides the raw material for an incredibly evocative and haunting experience. If it had been nominated as Best Adventure it wouldn’t have even made my eyebrows waggle. It probably would have even gotten a nod of satisfied approval. I recommend that everybody reading this check it out.

I think the most charitable interpretation of what happened here is that the judges for the ENnies recognized Death Frost Doom‘s general quality as an adventure and ended up looking around for a category to stick it into so that it would be “properly” acknowledged. This is slightly better than being swayed by a pretty cover wrapped around dreck, but is still pretty questionable behavior for any awards program that wants to be taken seriously. It tarnishes the credibility of the awarding body’s judgment, calling into question the value of the awards lists in judging quality, and thus obviating the entire point of an award in the first place.

Buy this. It’s good.