I was thinking about what a friend had said; I was hoping it wasn’t a lie…

Big things are coming in the world of computer games, especially as far as paper and cardboard gamers are concerned. I’ve been following Microsoft’s XNA initiative so closely that it’s easy to forget that it’s been public for less than a year, and that the world-at-large has yet to see much of anything out of it. So I’m here to tell you about some of the big changes that might be coming to a console or desktop near you, soon.

XNA is a game development technology designed by Microsoft to straddle/unify its two primary content platforms: Windows and Xbox 360. It’s implemented using the .NET framework, and is accessible though a suite of free tools, including the Express edition of Visual Studio. All sorts of other open source tools are out there for modeling (Blender), raster graphics (Gimp), vector graphics (InkScape), and this stuff falls into XNA’s content pipeline seamlessly.

OK, whatever you say, that’s a whole lot of tech babble, but what does it mean? The short of it is that XNA is a hobbyist (maybe we should say semi-professional) platform that provides one of the easiest paths ever to making truly professional quality games for Windows, and as the big kicker provides a path for the same game to be built and run on the Xbox 360 with almost no changes whatsoever. Whenever a platform like this is opened up to hobbyists, creativity flourishes, and people make all sorts of wild new stuff. It’s no secret that the demographics of the paper-gamer world is tech-heavy and overlaps strongly with computer gamers, so we can expect to see a lot of good things start to emerge that will be of direct interest to us paper gamers.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that this will have a bigger impact on gaming than the emergence of desktop publishing did for pencil-and-paper RPGs in the early 90’s.

Now Microsoft is usually not near-and-dear in the hearts of many, and their Xbox console quest has had its ups and downs, but Xbox Live Arcade is a resounding success and now the company is putting as much power behind it is they can. They have the proverbial lever that’s long enough to move the moon with. Both the Wii and the PS3 have (or will have) downloadable content, a networked play area, and marketplace, but XBLA is delivering the goods way beyond either of its two competitors – and it’s out there and growing – now. XBLA is quietly nailing down an iPod level of dominance in its market, and it’s Microsoft’s game to lose it from here on out. XNA lives up to the fundamental Microsoft value of courting developers with the best tools and winning them over to their platform. Without a trace of cynicism, I say that this is right proper and brilliant and the traction they are getting early on in the XNA campaign, combined with the solid start that XBLA already has, is looking like a grand slam in the making for them.

You know Settlers of Catan, and Carcasonne? They’re on XBLA now, soon to be joined by Alhambra, and the early numbers suggest that sales of these games will dwarf the number of cardboard copies sold. Cardboard version Settlers has been selling for 10+ years but will be outpaced online in less than a year, most likely. The distinction of the moment is that “bigger” developers made these games using the traditional Xbox tools, for use on XBLA. That all changes toward the end of this year, when XNA 2.0 is released and the whole XBLA networking model is opened up to all hobbyist developers. That means that a lot of smaller studios can get in on the action, and maybe your favorite niche game like Industrial Waste will show up that much sooner. One by one you’ll see crappy versions of games disappear from BrettspielWelt and come back as really pretty versions on Xbox.

Oh, and Windows too. Another piece of the puzzle, often overlooked, is Microsoft’s Live Anywhere technology, one aspect of which will link up Windows and Xbox communities across XBLA, meaning that you won’t be shut out of the party if you don’t have an Xbox 360 (or if you can’t sneak it into the office during the day!)

The final thing that bears mentioning is that developer buzz. I know you can’t hear it, but it’s there. The sales numbers coming out of the XBLA channel herald an upcoming gold rush for smaller developers; this will be their niche. One can easily imagine a fairly happy two-tier system in the future where big huge premium content is still churned out by big huge premium studios for big huge premium prices, while indy shops fill in the cracks with innovative titles that can keep a 10–person studio happily well-fed.

A programmer friend of mine currently finds himself working on a PS3 title and just wishing he could get in on the XNA action. Knowing my plans, his advice to me was that I should stop working on my house’s attic insulation project and put the time into my game instead, because the extra money I’ll have to spend heating my un-insulated attic this winter would be more than offset by the gains of getting my game to market that much sooner. Yow, now there’s an insider handicapping the race for you.

It should be very interesting to see where things stand mid-next-year, when the first XNA 2.0 titles are ready to roll. Prepare to be won over.