SmoothSpan Blog

Josh Catone has an interesting post on Read/Write Web about the sophisticated game movie creation features of Halo 3.  Basically, you can capture video during game play and view it later.  But, it’s more interesting.  Since Halo is a simulated 3D world, you can change your camera position after the fact, so it’s really recording game state.  The other angle Josh focuses on is a file sharing network Halo’s creators provide for sharing this sort of thing.

Commenters quickly point out to Josh that this is not anything new–you could create videos for Quake 10 years ago (albeit not with the changing camera angle) and in addition, there are many communities sharing such videos for various games. 

The interesting thing about this is to step above the noise of who invented what when and consider what this means and why it makes sense to do it.  Yes, one could argue that since other games have done it the Halo guys just build it in, but it’s because other games have done it and it’s been a popular feature that wins the day.  Why is it popular?  Because it enables social networking for the gamers.

Think about it.  People who play these games love the rich 3D first person shooter (or driver or whatever) experience.  Virtual reality.  If you hand them some lame textual forum, it only takes them so far.  They want richer media.  They want to extend the game experience into the social network.

The moral?  If you’re trying to add Social Networking to another online experience, make sure you capture the personality style and media choices of the participants in the other experience.  For a systematic way to think about this sort of thing, check out my Web 2.0 Personality Style posts.