Pros and cons

A couple quick observations about living a post-journalistic life. 

First, it’s weird being cut off from the firehose of news that Reuters reporters drink from in the newsroom. Not only are CNN and CNBC playing, but press releases pop up in constantly, you have real-time stock prices, and you see the latest headlines — lit up in red caps — constantly scroll down your screen.

As much as the Web has done for spreading news more broadly and giving people quicker access, relying on even aggregator sites like Google News or Yahoo News for the latest breaking story is like viewing the world through one of those fisheye security peepholes.

A couple of examples. When Apple last reported earnings, I checked Yahoo News 15 minutes after they reported and all that was up were short stories of a couple paragraphs. I know that for a major company like Apple, Reuters would put out 15-20 headlines, have five paragraphs out in five minutes, followed by a 6-8 paragraph update 10 minutes later.

The other example was the Olympics. At Reuters, I could sit at my desk, punch in “OLYMPICS”, hit F9 and have every Olympic story instantly pop up. That’s for every sporting event, every political story, every color story, any story that had an OLYMPICS tag on it. NBC’s official Olympics Web site got lots of praise for its breadth and depth of coverage, but it couldn’t hold a candle next to the comprehensive file any reporter with a wire terminal has at his fingertips.

On the plus side, I came to realize a couple weeks ago that my evenings and weekends are completely mine. I’m not expected to know what Apple, or Sony, or EA is up to on a Saturday night, or any night. For the first time in 12 years, I have a clear separation between work life and home life. As a reporter, your job doesn’t entirely end when you leave the newsroom. You always have to be ready for the late-night call from an editor or overnight staffer saying that something on your beat has just happened.

In China it could be even more nerve-wracking because we’d take turns at weekend and evening duty and you’d never know what would happen — the central bank could raise interest rates, an earthquake 1,500 miles away could kill 10,000 people, a high-ranking official could be brought down on corruption charges.

Not to say I don’t ever work evenings or weekends, but it’s for stuff you know is coming down the road, crunch periods with long lead times, like E3.

It’s something I think I can get used to.

Well, that went pretty well

On Friday, my 12-year career with Reuters came to an end. In a little more than one week, I’ll be starting a new job with Microsoft as executive speechwriter for the Xbox division. I can’t wait to finally crack open the Big Book of Xbox Secrets and find out what’s coming down the pipe.

The past year that I’ve been covering the gaming industry has been about the most fun I’ve had as a reporter since I started in 1996. It was sometimes hard to focus on other aspects of my job.

My other main responsibility was covering Apple. Apple’s a great story in every sense. The stock has doubled in the past year, giving it a great financial angle. The products are used and salivated over by tens of millions of people, giving it a great consumer and general news angle. The passion and quirks of Steve Jobs are the stuff of Silicon Valley legend, giving it a fantastic human angle.

The problem is that Apple is notoriously tight-lipped. They don’t talk about anything they are not ready to announce themselves. They don’t make executives or managers available for interviews. They don’t host events or give presentations for the benefit of reporters or analysts to get to know the company better. And because the company is so high profile these days, most analysts who cover it closely are stingy with their time and often don’t respond to press inquiries. That leaves a small handful of Wall Street analysts and consultant types that are contacted for many stories.

In the gaming industry, on the other hand, everyone wants to talk. PR plans on games are drawn up many months in advance, and companies are only too happy to have an outlet like Reuters highlight one of their titles. The industry analysts, too, are probably the friendliest and most open I’ve ever encountered. That means it’s never hard to find a fresh angle or a quick comment, and you don’t have to pester the same few guys day in and day out.

I’d be a bit more wistful about leaving Reuters and the great colleagues I left behind, but I don’t have time. After originally telling us that they couldn’t get to us until June 30 at the earliest, the movers called today and said they’ll come pack up our stuff on Monday and load it up on Tuesday. We’ll roll out of Albany for good on Wednesday morning.

Lots to do. 

Hands — and feet — on with “Wii Fit”

A few days ago I received a review copy of Wii Fit, the new exercise game for Nintendo’s video game console. The kit consisted of the game disc and a surprisingly heavy “balance board” about two feet by one foot and some three to four inches thick.

Some quick background for those unfamiliar with the product: Wii Fitis probably the biggest mass-market game from Nintendo since the introduction of the Wii itself. In fact, “game” is probably too narrow a word for it. “Entertainment product” is closer. ”Exertainment” – which is somehow both more concise and clunky — is even closer.

The Wii Fitbalance board is essentially a fancy digital scale with a wireless link to the Wii. The game disc contains more than 40 activities in the following categories: aerobics, strength training, yoga, and balancing. You stand on the board and follow the on-screen instructor through the activities. The Wii keeps track of your progress, charts your BMI and makes suggestions. Think of it as Jane Fonda for digital generation.

I’d seen demos of the product and had expected it to bear about as much resemblance to actual exercise as Wii Sports (in which a flick of the wrist translates into a full tennis swing) bore to actual athletics.

Boy, I was wrong. 

Now, I’m not the picture of perfect health or anything, but I like to think I’m reasonably fit for my 37 years. I run several times a week and pump a bit of iron at the gym when I can. So I was expecting my first “Wiikout” to more or less be a cakewalk.

I had set up my profile the night before, inputing age, height, etc., and being run through a short series of tests to check my balance and determine my “Wii Fit age”. The balance board is supposed to be a pretty accurate scale, but it puts me at about 10 pounds below what our home scale and the scale in my gym say. It did get Harlan’s weight within a pound or two, though.

The next night I decided to try a fairly complete workout, sampling two activities from each of the four categories.

I started with an aerobic warmup to get the blood flowing. The first one was a Hula Hoop (the things are trademarked by Wham-O, hence the caps) exercise in which you stand on the board and rotate your hips in a circle. On screen, my Mii (the personal cartoon avatar you set up when you first get your Wii console) started working the hoop while a counter tracked how many rotations I pulled off. Every once in a while, other Mii a short distance away would toss additional hoops my way, requiring me to lean to the side to catch them with my Mii’s body.

The second activity was a short run. In this one, you step off the balance board and put the motion-sensitive Wii remote in your pocket or just hold it in your hand. As you run in place, it senses your cadence and propels your Mii forward. According to the Wii Fit manual, there is a whole island to explore on your runs, though your Mii only runs on set courses that are unlocked the more you run.

As I mentioned before, I run often and don’t have a problem cranking through a 5-miler. So as I felt my heart rate rise and the sweat start to bead, it dawned on me that there might be something to this after all. You definitely use different muscles running in place — I bounced on the balls of my feet, and the next day my soles felt a little tender from the uncustomary stretching.

Definitely warmed up at this point, I switched over to strength training and selected push-ups for the first exercise. I was little prepared for the butt-kicking about to be delivered to me. There were two things about this that made it extra challenging.

First, I’m 6’2 with a moderately large frame and my normal push-up stance is about a foot wider than the balance board. That meant I had to place each hand about 6 inches farther in than I’m used to, which works the pecs and triceps in a different way.

Second, the Wii Fit push-up includes a rotation move where, when you finish the actual push-up, you place one foot on top of the other, lift the arm on that side off the board and twist your torso so you’re now pointing at the sky. Then you hold it for a couple seconds. Although you start out only doing this six times, by the time I was done my arms were shaking and sweat was pouring off my face.

Time for some leg lunges. This involves standing on the board, extending one leg behind you and then dipping your hips down and bending the leg still on the board. On screen, you try to keep a red dot inside a yellow rectangle as a way of tracking your balance and staying in the proper position. You are then scored on how well you are able to keep that red dot steady. I did pretty good on this one, but was still happy to move on to the less-strenuous balancing activities.

These are some of the funnest exercises in the whole thing, because Nintendo’s turned them into mini-games with your whole body acting as the controller. The starting selection includes heading soccer balls, a ski slalom, a ski jump, and rolling giant marbles into holes. The soccer one is pretty hard. The balls come a pretty good clip, and it’s challenging to get your Mii to react just right. You also have to dodge shoes and other objects that deliver a head-rocking smack if you don’t. Harlan derived much amusement from watching his dad repeatedly take cleats in the face. The ski jump exercise is fun, but brief. You have to squat as your Mii skis down the ramp, shifting your balance to keep a red dot hovering over a blue dot to gain maximum speed. Then you forcefully stand up at the end of the ramp to pull off the jump.

I wrapped up my workout with yoga, figuring this would be an easy, relaxing way to finish off. It was my last mistake of the night. I did the “warrior stance” and “half moon”. I read somewhere that pain often blocks your memory of some events, which must explain why I can’t recall exactly what the warrior stance was about. It consists of standing sideways, stretching your stance out and leaning in the direction of the board while extending your arms and keeping your weight evenly distributed on your two legs. The half moon looked deceptively easy, but it quickly had my arms screaming in agony. You stretch your arms over your head and clasp your hands. Then, stretching skyward, tilt to one side and hold, hold, hold; then do the other side.

I tell you, I have a new respect for yoga. Underneath that soul-calming, body-limbering, Enya-soundtracked philosophy is a vicious, muscle-burning, ass-kickingly tough set of exercises that would lead any masochist to swear off the cat ‘o nine tails and nipple clamps for life. Today I was feeling a strange pain in my thighs and finally figured out that it had to be from working groups of neglected muscles.

I also have a new respect for Wii Fit. It remains to be seen if it will have staying power or if it will soon be collecting dust next to all those exercycles, Bowflexes and ab machines. An article I wrote on Firday (incidentally the top result when you search Google News for “wii fit”) touches on some of these issues and also gives some background on the game’s designer, Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s resident creative genius and the guy who came up with Donkey Kong, Super Mario Bros, Legend of Zelda and Nintendogs.

I plan on doing about 20 minutes a night with Wii Fit and see where I end up. The return of long days and warm weather means I’ll be doing more actual running and swimming as well, so it will be hard to tell what the exact contribution of Wii Fit is, but I’m hoping it will at least engender a continued awareness of fitness at home. I can see coming home from work exhausted after a long day and doing 20 minutes of quick exercises to bring the spirits back up.

Hopefully I’ll at least notice those yoga routines getting easier.

(Recommended additional reading forWii Fit: New York Times article here, Time hands-on here. Hit the jump below to read my article from Friday,or clink the link above)

Latest column: “Grand Theft Childhood”

My latest weekly column is up, and I finally managed to run my piece on Grand Theft Childhood. I actually interviewed the authors about a month ago but a combination of a busy news cycle and writer’s block stymied my efforts to get this piece out earlier.

Some people get writer’s block when they don’t have anything to say. I get it when I have too much to say. This book is so interesting and well-written that it’s almost impossible to sum up in a 600-word article. Almost every page has something interesting. On top of that, I spoke to the authors for more than an hour, giving me even more material to work with.

So I’m a bit frustrated with the piece I produced, mainly because it had to leave so much out. There is also so much rich social and political context to this debate that I was only able to touch on briefly. I do urge anyone curious about video games and kids to pick up a copy. It’s a fascinating, informed and thoughtful look at the issue.

Read on, or hit the link:

By Scott Hillis

SAN FRANCISCO, May 8 (Reuters Life!) – Playing video games does not turn children into deranged, blood-thirsty super-killers, according to a new book by a pair of Harvard researchers.

Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson, a husband-and-wife team at Harvard Medical School, detail their views in “Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do”, which came out last month and promises to reshape the debate on the effects of video games on kids.

“What I hope people realize is that there is no data to support the simple-minded concerns that video games cause violence,” Kutner told Reuters.

“GTA4″ reviews start rolling in

The early reviews of Grand Theft Auto IV are trickling in, and all indications are that not only did Rockstar hit a home run, they knocked the freakin’ ball into orbit.

Metacritic so far has the Xbox 360 version scoring a perfect 100 based on 13 reviews. If that holds, it will finally knock BioShock (which “only” scored a 96) to second place. I’m not quite sure how Metacritic is getting the perfect 100 since two reviews gave GTA4 a 98 and one came through with a mere 95. It proabably has to do with Marc Doyle’s weighted system that has the views of more influential outlets count for more.

I will say that the circumstances surrounding the reviews are certainly odd. Typically, embargoed reviews are lifted all at the same time. Such was the case with Halo 3, the game that probably most parallels GTA4 in terms of hype and gamer reaction.

But Rockstar seems to have assigned staggered embargo times for various outlets. IGN was the first out of the gate with its “exclusive review” earlier this weekend. Kotaku told readers it would post its review at 9am Pacific on Sunday, and stuck to that (posting an hour later, even) despite that IGN’s piece was already out. Tonight I see GameSpy, but not GameSpot, has a review out, and The New York Times has its review.

Variety’s Ben Fritz calls the ethics of the whole enterprise into question. While I’ll leave that topic to in-person discussions over a mug or two of beer, I will echo his sentiment that if someone else is already running with news you have agreed to hold until a later time, then any embargo is effectively broken and you should be clear to run your story. In most cases this does require a phone call to be placed to the source of the news, first to ask about the circumstances of the early report, and second as a courtesy to inform them that you now plan to run your story. The only situation I can envision in which you might hold back is if the terms of the embargo you agreed to explicitly stated that other outlets may be running reviews earlier than you, but you must hold yours until the agreed-upon time anyway. 

The other major implication of all these positive reviews is that I may be compelled to go to my local GameStop tomorrow at midnight to procure my copy. I am seriously contemplating buying it, coming home, and playing it for 7 hours or so until I have to get back to the office. Grand Theft Auto? More like Grand Theft Good Night’s Rest. 

The week in review

Wow. What a busy week. I’m going to just do sort of a link dump here, with additional comment exclusive to you Command-K subscribers. Premium stuff, and worth every penny you pay for it. This should also mark the resumption of regular blogging, now that I have a couple days to breathe and collect my thoughts.

There is this little companythat makes these cute little digital music players. And computers. And something called the iPhone. Everyone was wondering how they had held up amid the worsening economy. Pretty well, as it turns out.

Oh, and in the meantime, they boughta microchip design firm. That sort of threw everyone for a loop. The initial reaction was along the lines of “WTF does Apple want with a semi design shop?” Some of the speculation was that P.A. Semi’s low-power microprocessors could be modified for the iPhone or iPod. As it happens, I was briefed by these guys more than two years ago in my former life as semiconductor beat reporter. Ironically, their chips are based on IBM’s Power architecture, which Apple dumped from the Macs a while back in favor of Intel’s x86 chips. P.A. Semi’s products are aimed at hi-po computing: servers and supercomputers and the like. Not too likely that those will end up in an iPhone any time soon. But apparently, Apple does employ a number of chip designers who work with partners to tweak features to meet certain capabilities Apple’s product engineers have in mind. Still, it’s a curious play since if they wanted a bunch of chip designers, why not just hire them from the job market. Why pay a couple million per headcount to buy a whole company?

As if Apple wasn’t enough to handle, there’s a little game coming out next week that might just be, oh, only the biggest single entertainment property of the year. The Halo 3 launch last year opened the eyes of many reporters and editors to how big A-list video-game properties can be. Not only is Grand Theft Auto IV big business, it’s a game that has as much cultural relevance as The Matrix or Harry Potter.

My main preview story of the game is posted below, but before I get to that, I want to highlight two other pieces.

First is my Gameworld column on Sony’s Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. It’s a gorgeously realistic driving title, but only a fraction of what is promised when the full game comes out next year. Racing fans will love it, but I’m sure many consumers will see the $40 price tag as too high. 

What really interested me about my interview with Taku Imasaki, the U.S. producer on the game, was the vision that the title would become a platform for all things automotive: a driving game at the core, but augmented with videos of races and information about cars. 

Sony plans to add more features and pipe a steady stream of video content into “Prologue” in hopes that gamers’ interest will be redlining by the time the full game is released.

“Our goal is to become another medium for car companies, like magazines and TVs. We’re the perfect game for that and ideally we could become the MySpace or Facebook for auto enthusiasts,” Imasaki said.

Along with Rock Band and possibly Guitar Hero, it’s an example of how these connected consoles with gobs of processing power and storage are enabling games to become destinations/portals/aggregators for certain topics. Rock Band and GH do it for music, GT5 is doing it for cars. I’m sure there are other areas where it makes sense. Sports comes to mind. Take Madden football as an example. They already have a scrolling sports news ticker in Madden, why not buff that up to include highlights of the week’s games, interviews with athletes, and tutorials that show you how to use the video game to enhance your appreciation of the actual sport (I would love, for example, some breakdown of defensive schemes, which I only dimly understand).

The second piece I’ll highlight is an analysis of GTA4. Everybody knows this game is going to sell a buttload. The only question is it going to be serious buttload or just a regular buttload? Estimates from several Wall Street analysts range from 9 million to 12.5 million units by the end of this year, with most looking at about 10 million units. At that scale, analyzing the game’s sales is a little like speculating on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Let’s just call it “a lot” and leave it at that.

What I found more interesting was the question of what effect the game will have on console sales, and which console stands to benefit more, the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3? My expectation was that most people would say the Xbox 360. After all, Microsoft having locked in the exclusive downloadable content for later this year, combined with the superior implementation of online capabilities in Xbox Live, makes a pretty compelling argument for the machine.

It turns out that most people, from Wall Street analysts to industry observers who know far more about this stuff than me, figure the PS3 will get the biggest hardware sales boost. It basically boils down to two reasons: the hardcore gamers who dig GTA4probably already have an Xbox; those who aren’t hardcore gamers but love the GTA series probably got into it on the PlayStation 2, and are likely to stay loyal to Sony.

If you’ve made it this far, bless you. Hopefully it’s been worth it. I’ll leave you with my preview of Grand Theft Auto IV. Hit the link or go below the fold for the whole thing. It was a fun story to research and write.

By Scott Hillis

SAN FRANCISCO, April 25 (Reuters) – Beatings, carjackings, drive-by shootings, drunk driving and hookers. For video game fans, it can only mean one thing: “Grand Theft Auto 4″ is here, arrving with all the subtlety of a shotgun blast.

The latest chapter in the wildly popular and controversial criminal action franchise from Take-Two Interactive Software Inc is poised to be the biggest entertainment product of the year, with expected first-week sales of up to $400 million — dwarfing Hollywood’s biggest box-office openings.

The handiwork of Take-Two’s Rockstar game studio headed by British brothers Sam and Dan Houser, “Grand Theft Auto 4,” which will be launched next Tuesday, promises to crank up the thuggish drama that made previous installments the equivalent of “The Godfather” for Generation PlayStation.

“We also felt over the last few years there hadn’t been a great standout gangster movie. Maybe we could do something ourselves that would live alongside that stuff,” Rockstar’s Dan Houser told Variety magazine in a recent interview.

EA: The repentent Borg?

As the drama over Electronic Arts’ play for Take-Two drags on, one question is whether EA, should it be successful in its bid, would end up ruining “Grand Theft Auto”, cranking out yearly updates with an ever-lengthening list of ill-conceived features and steadily declining quality.

A year ago, the answer could easily have been yes. Today, though, there is convincing evidence to show that CEO John Riccitiello is out to rehabilitate EA’s reputation in the eyes of gamers. Two weeks ago, I wrote an analysis laying out the issues. Read on to see what EA has in common with ancient Greek politics, alien menaces, and whether shareholders will smile on his efforts.

   By Scott Hillis
    SAN FRANCISCO, April 4 (Reuters) – As it pursues its $2 billion offer for Take-Two Interactive Software Inc, Electronic Arts Inc is trying hard to prove it won’t drive the “Grand Theft Auto” video game series to mediocrity, a fate that has befallen some of its other acquired franchises.
    It’s an important theme in EA’s current takeover drama with Take-Two, home to some of the industry’s leading lights, including Rockstar, the crown jewel studio behind the upcoming “Grand Theft Auto 4.”
    The company has a spotty history in getting hard-won talent to stick around. Its 1990s acquisition of well-regarded studios such as Bullfrog, Westwood and Origin led to mass defections and the marring of once-proud franchises with ho-hum games.
    Chief Executive John Riccitiello, who rejoined EA a year ago after heading private equity firm Elevation Partners, acknowledged as much at an industry conference in February.
    “I would state simply that we at EA blew it, and I was involved so I can say I blew it,” Riccitiello said of past acquisitions that ended badly. “The command and conquer model, the command and direct model, doesn’t work.” 

Latest column: Ben Heck

Here’s my Gameworld column that ran today. It’s about one Mr. Benjamin Heckendorn, known to many gamers simply as Ben Heck. He takes gaming consoles — old or new — and does things to them that are downright, well, unnatural. Unnatural, and very, very cool.

He’s been on my radar for a few years now. Every few months, one of the gaming or tech blogs would link to his latest project. Finally I said wait a minute, I don’t think any mainstream media outlet has written about this guy yet, who is essentially a one-man Pimp My Ride for game consoles. For the record, he was an incredibly nice dude, totally keen to talk, quick with a witty remark, and full of interesting ideas.

For a while this morning the story was the most-recommended article on Yahoo News (it’s currently No. 6) and even got a little love from BoingBoing.

Read on or hit the link to learn more about this remarkable modder:

By Scott Hillis

SAN FRANCISCO, March 27 (Reuters) – If you ever thought it would be cool to have an Xbox laptop, or wished those old Atari games in your attic could be reborn on a retro handheld device, you might want to talk to Benjamin Heckendorn.

Better known as Ben Heck, the 32-year-old Wisconsin native has attained legendary status among “modders”, hobbyists who tinker with video-game hardware to make it do things the original designers never intended.

Technology Web sites enthusiastically track Heckendorn’s latest projects, which are marked by workmanship that makes the finished products look they rolled off a factory line instead of a basement workbench.

“That’s the American way, right? Start in your basement, garage, or whatever. You’re supposed to get out of it someday, but I still have to listen to my clothes drier sometimes,” Heckendorn said in an interview.

Financial data as a game?

Or at least a virtual world. That’s what my boss (many times up the chain of command), Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, has to say over at his blog. Tom tells a nice anecdote about grokking from his kids that in-game achievements can sometimes be as significant as real-world ones.

Tom has earned a reputation as the most technologically savvy CEO our venerable British newswire has yet had. He is fascinated in new technologies and what they mean for journalism and financial data, the twin engines of the Reuters ship. He famously opened a Reuters bureau in the Second Life virtual world and has embraced official Reuters blogs.

In this new post, he gives a glimpse into why he thinks this stuff is important for the future of Reuters. First, a bit of background: I mentioned above that journalism and data are the key businesses for Reuters. In fact, as much as we journalists like to believe we’re the heart of the company, the data and trading side of things accounts for the lion’s share of profits. Financial clients use Reuters terminals not only to read news reports, but to obtain data feeds of all sorts, and to chart, graph and analyze that data in useful ways.

One of the reasons I thought such experimentation would benefit the company was that the generation of gamers today would expect far more participatory graphics environments when they came of age professionally.  So for example, I imagine that the current generation of teenagers reared on World of Warcraft, the Sims and Second Life, would find 2D financial graphics pretty lame.  What I overlooked was the wonderful focus group growing up in my own house.

Just in the way that some military systems have been designed to resemble the video-game controls that young recruits are familiar with, Tom seems to suggest that its possible that future financial analysts will find it easier working with 3D models of data rather than Flatlandish spreadsheets and charts.

Personally I think it would be awesome if Reuters partnered with a game developer to make a financial MMO. Towns and geographical areas would be named for and tied to real-world financial instruments — the Options Ocean, or Fort Forex. You’d gain experience and, of course gold, by making real-world profits. Traders could take the roles of rangers or rogues depending on their trading style. Technical traders could be magic-users. Automatic trading systems would be NPCs, or the equivalent of procedurally-generated opponents. Regulators could ride around as paladins, or even assassins. Analysts could be monks (Sling of Downgrading, anyone?) and journalists could be bards.

It’s a scenario rich in possibilities, at least for a science-fiction story if not an actual business product.