By Robert MacMillan
washingtonpost.com Staff
Writer
Friday, May 20, 2005; 10:42 AM
Douglas Lowenstein is a little like Sonic the Hedgehog; he's on
a tireless race to take his game to the next level. I'm not saying that he resembles a hedgehog (you can compare and contrast on your own time). Rather, the chief of the
Entertainment Software Association is determined to turn the video game
industry into the multi-billion-dollar kraken that so many people already think
that it is. Speaking at the start of this week's three-day Electronic
Entertainment Expo in Los Angeles, Lowenstein urged developers and
executives to take video games out of children's bedrooms and basements and turn
them into conversation pieces at happy hours and dinner tables. Sure, this is
something that happens already, but don't think for a minute that the intensity
has reached the level that Lowenstein wants. "Lowenstein ... compared the gaming and film industries for the first of many
times in his speech, and commented on the increasingly common claims that the
video game industry is bigger than Hollywood," Gamespot's Brendan Sinclair reported. "'Let me set the record
straight. It's simply not true,' Lowenstein said. 'We like to say it. It feels
good to say it, but it's not true yet.' While game hardware and software sales
together exceed the motion-picture box-office figures, Lowenstein pointed out
that such a comparison doesn't factor in the sales of DVDs and VCRs and rental
and television revenue. When taking everything into account, Lowenstein said the
actual breakdown shows film as a roughly $45 billion industry, with gaming
trailing behind at $28 billion." Here's a quick take from the USA Today E3
blog, courtesy of Pete O'Brien: "[Lowenstein] urged the gaming community to
learn a lesson from 'The Passion of the Christ.' He said Hollywood didn't
recognize the desire for alternative content, and he doesn't want his industry
to make the same mistake. He hopes games are made that 'keep you up at night
wrestling with whether or not you made the right moral and ethical choices.'
Lowenstein also believes the industry can't get snobby about its offerings,
recommending significantly shorter and cheaper games. Much like a silly comedic
movie that provides an hour and a half of escapism, 'we need games that are
shorter, simpler and more shallow.'" The Dallas Morning News's Victor Godinez wrote a longish story
outlining Lowenstein's master plan for the video game market: (He also offered
the best one-sentence description of E3 that I yet have seen: " The show floor
feels and sounds like a rock concert in the middle of a battlefield.")
Two recent news stories contradict Lowenstein's assertion that video games
haven't taken their proper place in modern American culture: "While major stars can command fat contracts for their work, most of the
roughly 2,000 SAG members who do game voice-overs earn a standard rate of pay.
Game companies have offered to increase wages by 35 percent over 3½ years.
They've also agreed to shorten hours, improve working conditions in recording
studios, and increase the companies' contributions to the unions' health
insurance programs," Bray reported. "But the unions want something more: a cut
of the profits made by the most popular games. They're pushing a plan similar to
the 'residual' benefits that actors get when one of their movies or TV shows is
rebroadcast or sold on DVD. The unions say their performers ought to get a
similar deal for any game that sells more than 400,000 copies." In case you're wondering what kind of big fish we're talking about, Bray
notes that Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood are some of the top
luminaries who lent their distinctive voices to the game world. The policy persuaded Christian Brothers Investment Services Inc., a
conservative Catholic group that claims to manage nearly $4 billion in
investments, to withdraw a shareholder resolution to persuade the Richfield,
Minn.-based company to publicly outline its stance. Here's more from the St. Paul Pioneer-Press: "Best Buy spokeswoman Susan Busch
said the timing of the posting was 'a coincidence,'' noting her firm puts its
video game policy in place last year but Christian Brothers wasn't aware of that
until recently. Best Buy had objected to the Securities and Exchange
Commission about Christian Brother's proposed resolution, contending it
interfered with the company's regular business operations." I took three Advanced Placement exams in high school. It cost my folks $180,
but saved us some $10,000 or more when I did well enough to place out of several
core college classes and save them a semester's worth of tuition. Of course, I could have learned to play poker for free and achieved the same
goal: Absolutepoker.com, an online gaming company based in
Toronto and San Jose, Costa Rica, will pay a semester's tuition to whoever wins
its college Internet poker tournament. The company hasn't put a limit
on how much it will pay, marketing chief Garin Gustafson told me earlier
this week, but he said that the offer does not cover room and board, textbooks
or ancillaries. The tournament, which is scheduled for May 26, has already lured 4,000
people. Gustafson said that it will not involve real money. This is significant
considering that online gambling in the United States is technically illegal.
(It depends on whom you ask, but we'll take the government's word for it. Better
safe than sorry.) Nevertheless, the industry rakes in millions of dollars from
American players, and is embarking on a hefty marketing campaign despite the
legal questions that remain. I was tempted to ask whether hooking kids on a
potentially illegal activity as part of helping one of them pay for college is a
smart idea, but if you think poker is the most dangerous activity at the
nation's universities, you need to go back to school. It took a long time in coming, but the path to local 911 service for Internet
phone customers must take no longer than 120 days, the Federal Communications
Commission ruled yesterday. I have written several times about incidents in
Houston and Hartford, Conn., involving 911 calls made on unequipped Internet
phones served by Vonage Holdings Inc. that prompted two state
lawsuits. Here, from the West Volusia County edition of the Daytona Beach (Fla.)
News-Journal, is the most tragic tale of all: "Cheryl and Joseph Waller
did not want to tell strangers about the worst day of their lives. But they did.
... The Deltona couple told federal officials in Washington, D.C., on Thursday
about the day their 3-month-old daughter Julia died, when their Internet
phone service could not reach 911 after the baby stopped breathing." Waller, the Associated Press reported, "told the commissioners before their
vote that '120 days is seven days longer than my daughter lived.' Julia Waller
'died at 113 days old because I can't reach an operator,' she said." The News-Journal also offered a reaction from Vonage: "Vonage spokeswoman
Brooke Schulz said the company had no idea their Volusia County
customers' calls were going to a non-emergency line and they have recently
changed the service to take advantage of the Sheriff's Office Internet line.
'Our hearts bleed for the Wallers,' Schulz said. 'Our company's No. 1 priority
is to make sure something like this does not happen again.'" Vonage and other Internet phone companies have made deals with several of the
nation's largest phone companies to provide local 911 service. The Wall Street Journal noted that the FCC's action, meanwhile, marked
an abrupt reversal of the commission's normally hands-off approach to regulating
the hot new technology. Finally, News.com reported that Internet phone companies that assign
numbers that aren't based on where subscribers actually live might run into
trouble complying with the FCC's ruling. The New York Fire Department's emergency hotline phone number will
raise your temperature, all right. The New
York Daily News reported that the phone number "was mistakenly canceled by
bungling bureaucrats -- and the easy-to-remember digits are now in the hands of
a phone sex company." "In April, a Philadelphia-based company, PrimeTel, bought the number,"
the Daily News reported, and boy, does it have a track record: "The company has
previously grabbed numbers from the Phoenix-based Mexican Tourism Bureau
and a Tulsa special-education group, according to a Philadelphia magazine report
in January."