The game and show have been pitched as groundbreaking transmedia, thanks to how they have been designed to complement each other and build out the world of its characters. And digging into the way both elements have been created to co-exist, it’s hard to deny the potential in the approach.

Syfy and game company Trion Worlds began collaborating on Defiance in 2008, when parent company NBC Universal made an investment in Trion and the two sides began discussing how they might work together.

“We definitely knew that we wanted to create something that would live beyond the television screen, something that would live in different platforms,” Syfy head of original content Mark Stern said, adding:

“But the pilots we were showing them were’t helpful to them from a game perspective, so we really had to start with the ground up. We started trading ideas back and forth until we came up with the concept for this world that was really interesting to both of us, and went from there.”

The biggest challenge, according to Nick Beliaeff, senior VP of development at Trion Worlds, was Trion and Syfy learning to work outside of their normal pattern. For example, he said, “We needed to know in 2010 who they cast because we needed to be able to build playable characters. But at that time they had just one writer on, no production staff — not even the people who would do makeup and costume design.”

The collaboration came together, though: Five years later, the result is a sprawling game universe populated by at least a half dozen alien races, and a series headlined by a cast including Grant Bowler, Julie Benz, Mia Kirshner and Fionnula Flanagan.

“There’s no question that having this very rich, diverse and deep world and mythology, part of the requisite for the game in particular, was really helpful for the series,” Stern said. “There are details that have been worked out that you would never have had the chance to do with a normal show.”

A few examples of how the show and game work together (it’s hard to detail exactly how the game and show work together without some minor spoilers, so apologies): In the opening minutes of the pilot, we meet Nolan (Bowler) and Irisa (Stephanie Leonidas), who have obtained a strange gem — a gem you helped them acquire in the game, as one of the very first missions.

Also, one episode of the show will end with a virus outbreak — over the following week, players of the game will be able to create a vaccine. And one character will be first introduced on the show, then will escape to the game world mid-way through the season.

Plot points like these, plus details like wardrobe, character design and music (the latter of which was created for both experiences by Battlestar Galactica composer Bear McCreary) are meant to blend the two experiences together, rewarding viewers who participate in both: “We’ll alter the game every single time an episode is on the air,” Beliaeff said.

It also, in an interesting twist, rewards those who don’t time-shift their viewing of the show, as game elements are timed to the airing of episodes. “We want to incentivize people — not force them. But if you watch it live while playing the game, you’re going to get more out of it,” Stern said.

Key to keeping the two components separate but collaborative is geography: The show takes place in what was once St. Louis, while players of the game roam around a post-apocalyptic San Francisco.

“We first started out thinking it would be awesome if they took place in the same city — we thought the whole Defiance universe would take place in the Bay Area. But as we developed that idea further, it became problematic,” Beliaeff said. “So we placed them close enough that communication is easy, but travel is difficult.”

Another interesting difference between the game and the show is its rating — while the televised Defiance is in line with Syfy’s other programming (which rarely exceeds a TV-14), the game has been rated Mature for “Blood, Drug Reference, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, and Violence.”

That difference, according to Stern, is by design. “[The show] is going for a broader, older demo, but [the game] is going for a younger and more male-skewed audience,” he said. “Hopefully we’ll be able to pull more of that younger demo into our channel and push older audience into the game.”

That’s the real hope of Defiance — while all of these elements are interesting, the only ones who will really get to enjoy them are those who participate in both parts of the story.

Trion did not provide sales numbers for the game, but Beliaeff did say that they received replenishment orders from Wal-Mart and GameSpot in the first week, and sold out of their Xbox inventory. “We’re smiling,” he added.

It’s now down to Monday night’s television premiere, but either way, Defiance has been a learning experience for both teams. “It’s just been fascinating to see these creative elements cross over and learn what it takes to build an successful interactive MMO. That’s been educational on all sorts of levels,” Stern said. “Not only are we going to be able to use all these elements to launch a potential season two, but we’ll also hopefully be able to apply it to new properties.”

Right now, the writing staff for the show is breaking stories for a potential (not-yet-greenlit) season two, while Trion works to create more content for after the show’s season finale. “We’ll certainly be lighter on our feet with season two than we were with season one. It won’t take us five years,” Stern added.

It’ll take a while to see whether this level of cross-platform storytelling makes Defiance better than your average sci-fi drama. But it definitely makes it bigger.

Disclaimer: I was previously employed by G4, a division of NBC Universal, but had no interaction with Syfy.

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She also got death threats.

In starting the Tropes vs. Women In Video Games project, Sarkeesian, founder of the Feminist Frequency video blog, committed the crime of looking to produce and research a series of YouTube videos questioning why the roles female characters play in mainstream gaming are problematic at best and insulting at worst.

Everything would have been fine, if 4Chan hadn’t found out about it, and declared troll war upon her. The New York Times summarized the abuse she received as a result of the campaign:

Angry fumers tried to hack her Twitter and Google accounts; they e-mailed her drawings of her being raped by video game characters; one even created a Flash game where you clicked the mouse and bruises and welts appeared on her face.

Sarkeesian ended up giving a TEDxWomen talk about the experience of being targeted by a cybermob, and specifically how (transforming the language of games to a new purpose), the men harrassing her saw themselves as heroic victims taking on a great injustice, ”and they cast me in the role of the villain.”

This campaign of abuse did give the project greater exposure, including coverage on outlets like Kotaku, Boing Boing, ThinkProgress and (as mentioned above) the New York Times. But the price of this publicity was incredibly high.

After a delay caused in part by Sarkeesian’s decision to expand the project beyond its original scope (given that she initially only intended to raise $6,000 to fund the research and production of Tropes vs. Women), the first episode launched this week.

At nearly 24 minutes (making it part of the growing trend in lengthier YouTube content), “Damsels in Distress: Part 1″ examines the frequency with which female characters in video games get kidnapped — the foundation upon which classic games like Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda are based.

In perhaps a wise move to avoid a repeat of what happened with the original Kickstarter pitch, YouTube ratings and comments on Episode 1 are disabled; to understand why, just look at this Gameranx compilation of what’s being said across various blogs about it.

However, so far the first episode has racked up over 500,000 views in just a few days, and while trolls were always unavoidable, it’s also inspiring reasoned debate over the episode and Sarkeesian’s approach to the subject.  And that’s the version of the conversation that should be had — because that’s the version which could lead to real change for the video game industry.

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SimCity attuned me to the need for balance and refinement. I am and will always be a SimCity geek. There are many reasons to get excited about this version of the game and Josh Dzieza at the Daily Beast makes a great case for it. He writes:

The game’s most salient message, though, is that cities are extremely complex. You have to deal with power, water, housing, transportation, pollution, even sewage.

Magical words to my ears! So much so, I might have to install Windows just to play the game if the Mac version doesn’t come to market soon.

On the SimCity blog, senior producer Kip Katsarelis writes:

This is a new SimCity that offers a deeper, richer game than ever before, with the new GlassBox engine driving the most authentic simulation you will ever see. We have created a model-like world that makes you want to reach in, poke, prod, tinker and destroy. We have put the simulation right in front of you so you can see the consequences of your actions and really dig in to see how the systems work. This new SimCity has been built from the ground up to be an online experience with a new Multi-City feature, which adds an epic scale to city planning, as your decisions impact both your city and your region.

Here is a little taste of the game. Enjoy!

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On Wednesday in New York, Sony announced the PlayStation 4, which comes with souped-up hardware that the company says will virtually eliminate the time video game players must wait for their games to load. The company also touted a new “share” button on its controller that will let players capture video clips, not just screenshots, of their game play to send to friends.

During a presentation heavy with video game demos, Sony also touted its Vita portable device as the vanguard of mobile play. An executive explained how a player, bumped by others from the living room big screen, can immediately continue his game on the handheld Vita — a tablet experience of sorts.

Reaction by video game fans on Twitter and live blogs at Wired and the Verge was underwhelming. This included disappointment that the new PlayStation 4 would not include backwards compatibility via streaming with earlier PlayStation games.

Perhaps surprisingly, Sony spent little time addressing the role of consoles like the PlayStation as an onramp to the larger world of media. In this context, the PlayStation is just one of a growing number of devices — including Roku, Boxee, Apple TV(i aapl) and (soon) Intel — that link consumers to movies, music and more.

A Sony executive did note that the PlayStation was the most popular device for accessing NetFlix. But the company didn’t devote time to expounding a larger media vision such as that of Microsoft’s entertainment and digital media president who, at a recent media event, announced the company is producing its own interactive TV shows.

Sony did not announce a price or even display the console itself during the two-hour long event, but did announce in closing that the device will be available around “holiday 2013,” presumably in time for the November/December shopping season.

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Reality disappointed: What we actually got was a limited library of not-new games (Homefront, anyone?), many of which you already owned, but even laggier than on your own hardware. Turns out traditional retail, game publisher, and hardware platform companies made it difficult for cloud gaming services to get the best games on the day of release, and even then the gameplay quality was slightly inferior.

But the concept of gaming in the cloud is still an idea worth pursing for a far greater promise: the ability to deliver an entirely new kind of game experience.

Historically, in games as in any other media, new distribution technologies enable new creative experiences. Pong wouldn’t have been possible without a new device plugged in to your TV. Internet-connected computers meant you could play Duke Nukem and Quake with other people online. The evolution of server technology brought massively-multiplayer games. The iPhone brought Angry Birds, a game designed for a touch interface, and so forth.

So why should a cloud gaming service be used to deliver the same old games as before that were built for a $250 machine?

What we should be wondering, then, is what new kinds of games and gaming experiences cloud delivery could inspire? Compared to the gaming hardware you own, a cloud gaming service could access much more computing power—with a limitless capacity to add processing. Consider after all that the most powerful supercomputer in the world, the Titan, is about 70,000 times more powerful than an Xbox 360. Granted the Titan costs a cool $100 million, which cuts out most households, but scaling back to basic and accessible data center prices would still offer many orders of magnitude more computing power than any current or near-future home console . (And this isn’t to say great gaming experiences are limited to powerful hardware—to the contrary mobile phones play compelling games, too. They’re just of a different sort.)

As for content itself, games purpose-built for the cloud do not yet exist — ones that aren’t encumbered by the limits of processing power, that would use the full advantage of many more, and more powerful, CPUs and GPUs. These “supercomputer games” would open up creative possibilities far beyond what games of today are capable.

Imagine supercomputer games with vividly lifelike worlds and characters (and not the almost-real, uncanny valley of current-generation graphics), or a single battlefield with 50,000 other players playing at the same time — or opponent AI on the level of IBM’s Jeopardy!-winning Watson. Supercomputer games could be dramatically different from anything you can play tonight at home. I’m no game designer, but what if we could use real-time traffic data to fill the streets of the next Grand Theft Auto, or step into a computer-generated world that looks as compelling as the Lord of the Rings movies?

Now, there are many reasons, beyond the technological, that these games don’t yet exist: It would be prohibitively expensive to pay artists to create all those detailed graphics, and simple AI is good enough to defeat most any player at most any game. But the record of creative innovators is that eventually they find a way to stretch the available technology to its limit. And some gamemakers are already beginning to probe at the games you can create if you host some of the game in the cloud.

There is a nagging constraint to the cloud, of course — bandwidth, which simply isn’t growing at the pace of Moore’s law. Network latency makes fast-twitch games, in which defeat is determined in microseconds (like with the top console genre, first-person shooters) hard to play over today’s internet. So, at least until the next engineering breakthrough, these supercomputer games might be designed around genres requiring slower player reflexes than, say, Call of Duty or StarCraft.

Best of all, the only hardware you would need at home is a basic input device like a controller and a box to render the graphics, and it could be cross-platform so that you could play from a PC or Mac or any smartphone. As one for-instance, OUYA, the new open, Android-based console I back, could be great for a cloud-delivered game (hear me, developers?), and its notable that Sony bought up Gaikai and certainly has plans.  (Full disclosure:  OUYA also has an announced partnership with the relaunched OnLive.)

Supercomputer games could be extraordinary. Now some intrepid game developers just have to make one.

Roy Bahat is Chairman of the open, Android-based game console company OUYA, and is former president of IGN. He is also on the faculty at UC Berkeley. Follow him on Twitter @roybahat

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In a conversation at the SIIA Ed Tech Business Forum, Luyen Chou, chief product officer for Pearson’s K-12 technology group, said that as new technology upends the textbook publishing industry, his company needs to become an “Electronic Arts for education.”

Clearly, Pearson and its rivals in education publishing need to reimagine their role as the rise of digital content cripples their business model. But look to Electronic Arts as a model?

Speaking with me later, Chou said that to keep up with the changing environment, traditional publishers can’t just digitize the static textbooks of the past, they need to excel at producing high-quality, interactive digital learning experiences and get them into the hands of students.

“[That includes] digital studios, animators, illustrators, producers, 3-D artists – we need to build that capacity within instructional companies like Pearson and we need the whole end-to-end supply chain to the take that from the studio to the actual users,” he said. “The folks that have done that well are the EAs of the world, digital studios. That’s not a core competency for companies like Pearson.”

Given the company’s wide reach across different corners of the market, from content to testing, at the K-12 and college levels and beyond, one of Pearson’s key assets is the massive amount of data it can use to target and personalize learning for students. And Chou acknowledged that the Electronic Arts parallel wasn’t meant to imply that Pearson only needs to focus on creating high-quality content, and not on other parts of its business.

“I take it for granted that we’re going to have a huge strategic advantage by way of the data we have on our customers, our students,” he said. “But you still have to serve up those compelling experiences. You can have the best data and the best algorithms in the world, but if what it ends up serving up is digitized versions of 2-D static content, it’s not going to sell either. We have to make sure that we’re complementing our data and platform with high-quality interactive learning content.” In getting to that goal, he said, it’s an open question whether the company will build or buy.

Interestingly, the SIIA ed tech conference itself took place at the McGraw-Hill Conference Center   in New York and several speakers commented on yesterday’s news that the publishing giant had sold off its education division to private equity firm Apollo Global Management.

But while McGraw-Hill chose to divest itself of its education arm, Pearson has taken the opposite approach, arming itself with even more education companies in recent years.

In the last twelve months alone, the company has spent $1.6 billion on acquisitions, according to Baran Rosen, president of media investment bank Whitestone Communications. And, given reports that Pearson is exploring the sale of the Financial Times, its push in education will likely only continue.

“They are going to really be a pure-play education company,” Rosen said at the SIIA conference. “That’s where they’re staking their future and they’re doing it in a big way.”

Image by Cindy Minear via Shutterstock.

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Goko is coming out of stealth today with $8 million in funding from Redpoint Ventures and Alsop Louie Partners. The company is offering an SDK for HTML5 social games that can appear on iOS, Android, Facebook, Google+, Windows 8 and the web. Developers build once with Goko’s SDK and have their game distributed by Goko through the various channels.

The platform offers not just the ability to create games, but it has a suite of social features, monetization tools and analytics. So developers can integrate player authentication, leaderboards and achievements along with virtual goods, virtual stores and payments. That gives Goko developers a similar framework to those provided by app stores and social gaming platforms like OpenFeint.

But just as he did with Ribbit, Goko CEO Griggs knows that a new platform needs apps to show developers what it’s capable of. So Goko went out and licensed the rights to 150 games from Mayfair Games, Rio Grande Games, Reiner Knizia and other card and board games. The idea is to build online and mobile versions of existing card games that can run consistently on HTML5. The first games created by Goko are Dominion, which is now live, and Catan World, a massively multiplayer online game from the popular board game Settlers of Catan that is in beta. The company is working on creating 13 more games in partnership with third-party developers.

Griggs told me Goko offers developers a lot of value in that they can create one game that plays like a native title on different platforms. And with the full platform supporting them, developers can get better distribution with Goko pushing the game out to various platforms and cross promoting its titles. And it will handle the monetization like microtransactions, working with whatever payment systems are available on each platform.

HTML5 gaming still faces a lot of challenges because it’s harder to create a robust title that performs as well as a native game. But for card games and other simple, casual fare, HTML5 can make a lot of sense. With Goko supplying some of the other tools needed to make games successful and profitable, it has a shot at demonstrating the viability of HTML5 games.

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Built using standard components like a Tegra 3 quad-core processor and hackable, Ouya will create a new platform for developers looking to bring both casual and hardcore games to the living room. The console, which is being designed by famed designer Yves Behar, will work with a standard controller that includes a touchpad. Developers will be able to use an SDK to create an array of titles, which will all have a free component to them.

While the project isn’t expected to debut until March 2013, it has started revealing some partnerships, including a deal Friday with OnLive, which will offer its cloud-based streaming games at launch on Ouya. Ouya has also announced its first exclusive title Human Element, a zombie game from developer Robotoki.

I talked by phone last week with Ouya’s CEO and founder Julie Uhrman, who first conceived of Ouya while leading digital distribution and business development for gaming site IGN. We talked about the rising skepticism about the project and how Ouya is working to deliver the goods.

Ryan: Talk about the deal with OnLive. How did that come about and does that change the nature of your console?

Julie: There’s a lot of content and games that we want for Ouya and we listen to our audience. They wanted OnLive so I made it a point to go out get them. OnLive signals some of the types of partnerships we can have on Ouya. The idea is we can have streaming and downloadable content. Because it’s open and built on Android, all different kinds of content would be available: games, videos, streaming and music content. Ouya is about being open and bringing the best content to gamers and anyone who enjoys entertainment. We don’t think OnLive’s content cancels out any publishers or developers, it enhances the platform.

Ryan: Some people are skeptical of Ouya and wonder if it will pan out. Will this project deliver on time?

Julie: We have every confidence that we will do this. The technology isn’t rocket science, it’s standard stuff combined in a new way and wrapped in a beautiful package. It’s been incredibly embraced by gamers and developers. We get hundreds of emails from developers wanting to develop for the platform; the idea of openness of Ouya has resonated. Until we have things on store shelves, we can’t prove things and there will be questions but most (developers) say they want Ouya or something like this to succeed. We have vetted our process, capped the amount of units we are shipping on day one and we have great advisors, who have built great hardware and software. We feel very confident we will deliver in March.

Ryan: So where did this idea come from? What was your vision?

Julie: I was part of the game industry for a long time and I saw AAA developers leaving for mobile. But if you interview gamers, the number one platform is the TV. The most time is spent in the living room, even for mobile games. The experience is better on a TV but all the excitement and growth was in mobile. I grew up on TV games and I wanted to bring it back and I saw an opportunity for a device that has Android as its operating system. The value proposition is there. People don’t have to spend hundreds of dollars on a console. Ouya is $99 and games are free to play. What’s not to like?

Ryan: But building an ecosystem is hard work. Trying to court and keep developers and convince them there’s money to be made here is not easy. What are you planning to do to ensure that Ouya is appealing to developers?

Julie: The one thing that is always important to remember is this is still a product in development. We are focused on creating a great product. Kickstarter is opening up a two-way dialogue with folks who will benefit and we’re incorporating their feedback. People are incredibly excited. The developer conversations are incredibly well. You aint seen nothing yet.

Ryan: What has Kickstarter meant to you and what does the added money allow you to do?

Julie: It’s been a phenomenal platform for us and allowed us to create a dialogue with an audience of gamers and developers. We knew this was the only way to get to market quickly, raise money and bring this idea to fruition. Our goal was to hit $950,000 and we knew we could deliver units and even provide tools and support for developers with that. Anything over that is truly unbelievable and it means we can build more tools.

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Indie Game‘s story began on the web, thanks to Kickstarter funding, and covers a topic near and dear to the Internet’s heart: the rise of the independent video game designer.

So while, according to co-director James Swirsky via email, the theatrical release and an earlier sold outscreening tour were profitable ways of building word-of-mouth about the film, making the film available online was extremely important to him and co-director Lisanne Pajot, as “that is where our audience is.”

“We wanted to get this film into the hands of those people who want to see it the most as quickly as reasonably possible,” he added. “Which is the main motivation behind the very tight release windows we’re working within.”

Indie Game‘s digital release will come through three platforms — one expected, two unconventional. The film, like many independent films before it, will be available on iTunes, but it’ll also be released by VHX as a direct DRM-free download — the second-ever project to be distributed by VHX, following their release of Aziz Ansari’s comedy special last April.

The story of how Indie Game ended up working with VHX couldn’t be more webby. Via the film’s extremely active Twitter account, the filmmakers mentioned they were looking for a distribution platform — instantly, Andy Baio (@waxpancake) connected the two:

Check the date stamp on that tweet — it’s less than two weeks ago. Only nine days after making contact, Indie Game‘s deal with VHX was solidified. “A new record for us, and a trend we hope will continue,” VHX co-founder Jamie Wilkinson said via email.

There’s no exact date yet on when the VHX for Artists platform will be officially open for all, according to co-founder Casey Pugh, but “it will be soon,” he promised.

In addition to iTunes and VHX, Indie Game will also be distributed through Steam, Valve’s video game distribution platform. That’s right, a gaming platform. According to Swirsky, with the exception of a zombie film created by Valve employees several years ago, Indie Game is the first film to ever receive major release through the popular service.

However, the decision to work with Steam made sense for Swirsky and Pajot, because of the film’s deep connections with the independent gaming community. “From a pure distribution standpoint, we can not get any closer to our core audience that being listed side by side with the games that are featured in the film,” Swirsky said. “If you like and bought Super Meat Boy, Braid, World of Goo, etc, there’s a good chance you might be interested in the backstory behind those games, and games like them. Steam brings us to the core of our most relevant audience in a very unique way. It’s kind of amazing.”

Across platforms, the cost will be $10, though those pre-ordering on Steam can purchase it for $8.99. According to Swirsky, “When it comes to sales and knowing their consumer base, Steam is second to none. They know their stuff. They know how to effective launch, maintain and promote the products within their system. When they suggested debuting with a pre-order pricing incentive, it made a lot of sense to us.”

To Swirsky and Pajot, each platform has its unique advantages. Steam, as previously mentioned, delivers the film to the most passionate portion of its fanbase. With iTunes, he says, it’s “a juggernaut. We always wanted this film to be there. They bring an audience and ease of purchase/viewing that we could only dream of with this film.”

And working with VHX, Swirsky says, “allows us to continue the direct conversation with our audience that we’ve been having since Day 1. It’s all on our site, it’s all under our control, it’s as personal as delivering the final film to the end audience as we can get digitally. VHX is doing some really exciting things. We’re really proud to be a part of it all.”

“It’s truly a great film. It also perfectly aligns with our beliefs on the future of film,” Pugh said. “Crowd-funded on Kickstarter and self-released on VHX. This is where the film, video and television business is going and it’s only the tip of the iceberg.”

Between the three platforms, Swirsky and Pajot are hopeful to not only make up the actual production budget of the film, but also compensate themselves for the two years they spent making the film. “The film is very much on track to make back its budget. But that’s a budget that doesn’t include paying ourselves for the past two years. If we go by that budget, we still have a little ways to go. But it should be worth it,” Swirsky said.

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