According to Thursday's New York Times, and a similar story on Wired.com (if you don't want to subscribe to the NYT website), toy makers are having to create ever more advanced electronic playthings to draw children away from videogames, iPods and mobile phones. The Wired piece claims that 75% of toys debuting at this year's American International Toyfair will contain some form of microchip. Among the offerings will be dolls that repsond to their 'mother's' voice and a new generation of Furby that can engage in simple conversations with a child.
It's interesting as this comes at a time when the videogame industry is desperately trying to transmute into the consumer electronics industry (the PSP is clearly not going to be marketed as a games machine, rather a multimedia lifestyle gadget), and the telecoms industry is trying to turn into the entertainment industry (phones that download video and music, and/or receive digital television were hot at 3GSM this year). Meanwhile, the entertainment industry, forced into a corner by the file-sharing revolution, is transmogrifying into a technology industry by offering downloadable content.
What the hell is going on?
Clearly, the traditional dividers between different entertainment and communications markets are crumbling. No one is happy in their separate sectors anymore, technology seeps from one platform to the next. Convergence is God.
These are confusing days for manufacturers and content providers everywhere. You could feel the panic around 3GSM, the massive mobile phone show held in Cannes last week. Dozens of companies offering streaming video solutions, music download systems, TV streaming technologies... the infrastructure for delivering the next generation of mobile enertainment is in complete dissarray. No one knows which standards are going to emerge as winners - will people be downloading Windows Media files, or MP3s? Will MPEG4 be the video format of choice? Will people stream TV via 3G connection, or will they buy phones that pick up terrestrial digital signals directly?
Meanwhile, in the videogame industry, we have DS vs PSP - a games toy vs a sophisticated multimedia player. What do the kids want? What will Xbox 2 and PS3 have to deliver to meet out demand for converged entertainment experiences? And, actually, come to think of it, is there a demand? Surely, we just want good games, right? The technology that delivers them is secondary, isn't it?
Has entertainment ever been so complicated? Has the industry ever demanded so much from the consumer? What is the mass market supposed to make of phones that download games and video and music, and swap files via bluetooth, and connect to the Internet? What are most people going to do when different brands of TVs and PCs and games consoles merge into competing entertainment servers?
As for electronic interactive toys... what is that all about? Do you want your child's imagination to be defined by Hasbro or any other megacorp for that matter? I can't remember what I talked about with my seventies Action Man, but he had an evil look in his eye and a big scar and a machine gun - I can't imagine that our discussions would have been endorsed or encouraged by the American toy industry.
I'm not sure anyone knows what we want anymore - they just want a piece of the action. Whatever it is. Whatever it means.
