Xbox One Enters Changed Gaming Landscape

The company on Tuesday introduced the new version of its Xbox video game console. The Xbox has been one of Microsoft’s few undeniable consumer hits of the last decade, a product that was not just a credible entry into the games business but also a sign of the innovation possible at a company that is rarely seen as an inventive thinker.

“I think of Xbox as the accidental success out of Microsoft,” said James McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester Research, who added that the connection Microsoft has formed with the players of its current Xbox is “much deeper than any relationship Microsoft has ever achieved before.”

The new console, the Xbox One, will enter a market very different from the one its predecessor, the Xbox 360, entered nearly eight years ago, when there was no iPad, smartphones had keyboards and mobile gaming devices were primitive at best.

Today, video games can be played almost anywhere, on any device, with the biggest possible audience of online friends and without the aid of a costly gaming console.

The last year or two has been bumpy for Microsoft’s consumer efforts. The Windows 8 operating system software and the Surface tablet-computing devices got a tepid reception from the public when they went on sale last fall.

The company’s mobile phone efforts have been largely ignored. And even Bing, Microsoft’s Internet search engine, has failed to close a wide gap with Google, the market leader.

Microsoft, though, could see better results with the Xbox. With it, it hopes it can reassert the living room as the place where people can still get the best gaming experience, complete with eye-popping graphics and innovative methods for controlling games. It is also a place where Microsoft’s technology can be at the center of a home entertainment system and the funnel through which people gain access to online video.

Microsoft has sold more than 76 million of the device’s current incarnation, the Xbox 360 worldwide, compared with almost 100 million Wii consoles from Nintendo and more than 70 million PlayStation 3s from Sony.

The company also controls what may be the most valuable asset in console gaming, Xbox Live, a subscription-based online service with 48 million members who use it to play games against one another and watch movies.

“You can do a lot of things on the phone and a lot of things on tablets,” said John Taylor, an analyst at Arcadia Investment. But, he said, “you can’t do the same kinds of things on those devices” that you can on a television screen.

Microsoft plans to develop its own original, live-action television series, which will be accessible through the Xbox. The series will be made in partnership with the director Steven Spielberg and will be based on the popular Halo video game franchise.

The company is also working with the National Football League to develop an app for Xbox that lets players interact with their fantasy football teams while watching a live game.

In an interview, Don A. Mattrick, the president of Microsoft’s interactive entertainment business, said that he recognized the growing appeal of mobile devices for gaming and that Microsoft would aggressively tie smartphones and tablets into the experience of using its console. He became most animated when talking about the possibilities of the new Xbox for providers of video programming.

“We’re going to the take the form from a one-way experience pushed through a straw to where you can communicate back and make it interactive,” Mr. Mattrick said.

Even if it is a wild success, the new Xbox is likely to have a bigger impact on consumer perception than it will on Microsoft’s overall sales. The Xbox remains a small slice of the company’s business, which is still dominated by sales of Windows, Office and other software. The company’s games division represented only 4 percent of its operating profit.

At an event in a carnival tent on its corporate campus, Microsoft did not say how much the new system would cost or how publishing partners would charge for games, which typically start at around $60 for high-end game consoles.

A major feature of the new Xbox, which is expected to hit store shelves in time for the holiday season, will be a new generation of Kinect, the camera-based motion-control sensor introduced several years ago as an Xbox 360 accessory. The new Kinect will come with every Xbox One.

Traditional retail sales of games have come under pressure in recent years as mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad have invaded their turf with free and low-cost games. While many gamers dismiss those offerings as inferior to console games, the games have nevertheless tapped into a huge audience of players who may never have played on an Xbox or Sony’s PlayStation.

The games business could use a jolt. Total United States retail sales of game hardware and software fell 25 percent to $495.2 million in April from $657.5 million a year earlier, according to estimates by NPD Group, a research firm. That figure does not include the sale of downloadable content over the Internet.

Alex St. John, an entrepreneur who worked on Microsoft’s pre-Xbox game efforts, says he is pessimistic about prospects for gaming consoles.

“They’re coming out with the latest and greatest stone tool,” Mr. St. John said. “The new console that trumps the old console is called the Apple iPad. This generation of kids loves mobile games.”

Gadgetwise Blog: A Gaming Laptop That's Quick and Costly

The word “extreme” may be overused in describing male-dominated activities like the X Games or the cinnamon challenge, but it fits the bill when it comes to the Razer Blade gaming laptop.

It is extremely fast, extremely thin and extremely expensive.

I don’t play computer games so I turned the Razer Blade over to two lifelong gamers, Evan and Morgan Dilks. Evan, as the owner of the Firehouse Coffee Company in Baltimore, has spent plenty of caffeinated play time on game consoles, like the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 he currently owns.

The pair tried out Battlefield 3, which came preinstalled for demonstration on the machine. “One of the pros was how fast it was,” said Evan. “The processor is just crazy.” That crazy processor is an Intel Core i7, a quad-core chip found in some high end Macs.

That speed is paired with a 17.3-inch high-definition screen impressive enough that the brothers spent some time watching videos on it. Although the laptop is almost 11-by-17-inches to accommodate the screen, it is less than an inch thick and weighs 6.6 pounds, relatively light for a laptop this size. Part of the way Razer kept it thin was by omitting an optical drive.

What really sets it apart from other laptops is the Switchblade user interface. That is an LCD trackpad that shows game information, like who in your player group is inflicting the most damage on foes. Evan said his brother Morgan adjusted more easily to the controls than he did, but he caught on eventually.

There are also 10 buttons above the trackpad that change their assigned functions depending on the game. They can represent different weapons, and automate actions that would normally take several steps, like drawing and loading a firearm. Or you can create your own custom actions, even for non-gaming software, like if you wanted to use the laptop for Photoshop.

What the brothers did not like about the Razer Blade was the price: $2,500. “That is a huge investment,” said Evan. “Add in accessories like a sound system, headset, game and gaming subscription, and special controllers you might need, and the price keeps rising.”

The Future of Gaming in Virtual Reality

Standing next to id Software’s John Carmack, I almost lost my balance and fell over during the first few seconds of playing Doom 3 on a prototype Rift virtual reality headset, an ugly wad of electronics attached to an elastic ski goggle band.

While wearing the headset I still had to press buttons on an Xbox 360 controller to switch weapons, move forward and fire, but aiming and looking were accomplished simply by turning my head. It was surreal and surprisingly responsive. After the initial disorientation and dizziness dissipated, I was entirely immersed within the world, with the game’s visuals wrapping around my entire field of view.

The Rift is the best headset of its kind Carmack has ever seen. After id Software shipped Rage, Carmack decided to check up on the status of virtual reality, something he hadn’t looked at since the early 1990s. “We did a bunch of deals with people way back with Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake and they were all loser deals with companies that went bankrupt. That was not the right time,” he said. He assumed there’d been a lot of progress in the meantime. He bought a few headsets and was disappointed.

“They just sucked really bad. They were not at all what I wanted to see.” He started disassembling the models and trying to solve problems the manufacturers hadn’t. “It was getting to the point where there were a few people questioning ‘what’s John doing playing around with all this stuff in the office? He should be working on Doom 4 all the time.’”

An opportunity to legitimize his tinkering with headsets at work came up when id Software decided to revamp Doom 3 and handle development internally. “How do you get people to give a damn about an eight year old project? Yes, it’s got higher resolution, looks nicer. We did lots of things to make it a better game, but it’s still not something lots of people are going to care about.” He initially wanted to use the VR angle as a way to grab the press’ attention, and continued to make progress turning Doom 3 into a virtual reality experience.

For hardware, he initially focused on the Sony HMZ-T1, which outclassed all other sub $10,000 models and which was “in many ways a big advance over the crap that was there before. It has nice displays, excellent resolution, a decent field of view. Sony brought it to the level of just barely bordering on interestingly acceptable at about a forty-five degree field of view.”

Carmack stressed the importance of field of view, saying limiting it too much made wearing the headset feel like “looking through toilet paper tubes.” With the Sony headset, the view was good enough for exploring, but not for combat. “The Sony also has a bunch of latency in their processing which is deeply unfortunate and completely correctable and I wish Sony would fix that.” It had potential, and Carmack said others at id were impressed by his progress, but Sony’s headset just wasn’t enough.

So Carmack decided to start building something on his own in an attempt to improve on existing designs and expand the field of view. Though he tried numerous configurations, he kept returning to the idea of somehow incorporating the screen of his mobile phone. “There’s reason to believe all the billions of dollars of effort that goes into developing mobile device technology, that that’s the right train to hitch yourself to. I was heading down this route when I ran across Palmer Luckey and his Oculus company.”

Luckey launched a Kickstarter on August 1 for Oculus’ Rift headset. In a few days over $1.1 million dollars have been offered up by developers and curious technology aficionados. Those who backed $300 or more will receive a fully assembled Rift and its only game, Doom 3.

“There’s a small VR community that talks about homebrew head mount displays, and he was really the star.” Luckey was on the sixth or seventh revision of his Rift headset, and Carmack was impressed. “He had found the right display panel, the right drivers, the right optics and packaged it all together.” Carmack contacted Luckey and mentioned he was going to demo a virtual reality version of Doom 3 at E3 2012. Luckey mailed Carmack his handmade Rift prototype the next day.

Carmack made adjustments on the software side and soon had something he liked, all the while being mindful of response time. “There’s an important threshold around 20 milliseconds of end to end response time, from the time that you move to the time the image changes. If you’re under 20 milliseconds it really feels like you’re moving a window around in a solid world.” The response time on the unit Carmack was demoing had a 40 to 50 millisecond response time. “There’s a subtle sense that the world is pulling behind you.” Ideally, he said, there should be no delay.

Delays in response time are common to all types of gaming, but are especially important to keep at low levels when considering movement in virtual reality gaming because the lag is far more noticeable. “The difference of 20 milliseconds on there, it’s obvious to everybody. Your brain knows for every contraction of muscles in your neck that orients your head into a different way, your brain has a model of what it’s supposed to see as you do that muscular contraction, and that’s measured in a small number of milliseconds.”

While I played briefly, the delays weren’t especially noticeable. If an imp jumped from the shadow of the room, I quickly swiveled my head to aim them pressed the Xbox 360 controller’s trigger to fire. It felt a little floaty at first, but I started to find a rhythm for the control as I turned my head from side to side to look both ways down a catwalk and ensure demons weren’t getting ready to pounce. It was a very natural behavior, and surprising only because checking around corners is usually such an artificial process driven by mouse and WASD movement or rotating thumbsticks.

To make the game really work, Carmack had to make changes. “Even for a [shooter on ] 3D TV you have to take the crosshair out and put in some kind of a laser sight. In 2D we always do head kicks as a directional cue and damage indicator that knocks the head sideways. That’s a good, positive thing to do on a static screen. In a head-mounted display you don’t want to knock the head around.” He noted that cut-scenes were particularly problematic, because control of the perspective would suddenly be ripped away from you, severing a delicate intuitive link between reality and the virtual space.

At E3 2012 when Carmack first demoed the virtual reality version of Doom using the Rift prototype, he wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of the response. “Things blew up a lot beyond our expectations. It caused some problems internally where everybody had a freakout, this wasn’t really part of the plan, this was a little ancillary thing. So what are we doing about it? Everything has worked out fine, I’m very pleased to say.”

Before E3, Carmack expected Luckey would make around 100 Rift kits essentially for his friends. “At this point now he’s making it for several thousand other people. The price point he came out with was around half of what we thought it was going to be.” Despite the excitement, both Luckey and Carmack are eager to stress that the Rift in its current state is not a mass market device. “There is exactly one game it has support for, you’re not buying this to play games. This is for developers to start building support for the other games that we’ll eventually make a consumer device for. You can’t play movies in it, there are no other applications. All that will come, but it’s not here right now.”

While Carmack has been working on modifying Doom 3 to work in virtual reality, he also gave some hints about what a game designed entirely for a head mounted display might be like. “FPSes are the obvious thing you could do. But there’s a lot of benefit from very subtle motions, from just walking down a corridor, all the little subtle motions that your head’s making, and just being able to look over at a handlebar on the side or something. There’s more value in that than I expected, even in third-person games or god games.”

Carmack seemed equally interested in the implications of headsets for far more sophisticated interfaces than those available now. He said a pair of cameras attached to the outside of the headset would be ideal, in part for safety reasons so you’re not completely oblivious to the outside world while wearing the device, but also to track the position of body parts. “It would be able to identify your individual digits as you lift up your hand, work out the user interface that you want to do. Kinect user interfaces suck because you position your hand at three o’clock and wait two seconds, and [there are] all sorts of reasons why stuff like that is a bad idea. But when you get down to the point of being able to track digits in front of it, there’s a lot of interesting ideas about how you would do user interfaces. You’ve got your obvious gestures and swipes and pinches, I’m excited to see what people wind up doing.”

Though it’d be years away, having an entirely self-contained product distribution system through the head mounted display is something Carmack sees as promising. “You could buy your stuff there, and it’d just be the equivalent of a tablet that happens to have optics where you could put your head in it.”

Clearly Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are seemingly obsessed with alternate control methods between Move, Kinect the Wii-mote and the upcoming Wii U platform, but will the headsets like the Rift eventually eclipse all those efforts?  “Yes, I think immersive virtual reality is a far more powerful I/O device than all the little things you do with your hands in front of a TV screen.”

So when might we start to get a clearer picture of what the actual results might be? “This is not the promised land, but you can see the promised land from here. We need to figure out what steps we need to do to get there. I think that can happen largely over the next year.”

Sexual Harassment in Online Gaming Stirs Anger

Over six days of competition, though, her team’s coach, Aris Bakhtanians, interrogated her on camera about her bra size, said “take off your shirt” and focused the team’s webcam on her chest, feet and legs. He leaned in over her shoulder and smelled her.

Ms. Pakozdi, 25, an experienced gamer, has said she always expects a certain amount of trash talk. But as the only woman on the team, this was too much, especially from her coach, she said. It was after she overheard Mr. Bakhtanians defending sexual harassment as part of “the fighting game community” that she forfeited the game.

Sexism, racism, homophobia and general name-calling are longstanding facts of life in certain corners of online video games. But the Cross Assault episode was the first of a series this year that have exposed the severity of the harassment that many women experience in virtual gaming communities.

And a backlash — on Twitter, in videos, on blogs and even in an online comic strip — has moved the issue beyond endless debate among gaming insiders to more public calls for change.

Executives in the $25 billion-a-year industry are taking note. One game designer’s online call for civility prompted a meeting with Microsoft executives about how to better police Xbox Live. In February, shortly after the Cross Assault tournament, LevelUp, an Internet broadcaster of gaming events, barred two commentators who made light of sexual harassment on camera and issued a formal apology, including statements from the commentators.

Even so, Tom Cannon, co-founder of the largest fighting game tournament, EVO, pulled his company’s sponsorship of the weekly LevelUp series, saying that “we cannot continue to let ignorant, hateful speech slide.”

“The nasty undercurrent in the scene isn’t a joke or a meme,” he said. “It’s something we need to fix.”

Mr. Bakhtanians, whose actions during the Cross Assault tournament were captured on video, later issued a statement in which he apologized if he had offended anyone. He also blamed “my own inability in the heat of the moment to defend myself and the community I have loved for over 15 years.”

But the issues raised by the Cross Assault episode gained more attention with Anita Sarkeesian’s campaign in May to raise $6,000 on Kickstarter to document how women are portrayed in video games. Her YouTube and Facebook pages were instantly flooded with hate-filled comments. People tried to hack her online accounts. She received violent personal threats.

Ms. Sarkeesian responded by documenting the harassment, posting online the doctored, pornographic images of herself that her detractors had created. Supporters of her efforts, aghast, donated more than $150,000, further angering her critics. A man from Ontario created an Internet game where players could “punch” her, layering bruises and cuts on her image until the screen turns red.

“The gaming industry is actually in the process of changing,” Ms. Sarkeesian said. “That’s a really positive thing, but I think there is a small group of male gamers who feel like gaming belongs to them, and are really terrified of that change happening.”

When Sam Killermann, a gamer in Austin, Tex., saw the reaction to Ms. Sarkeesian’s project, something “broke through,” he said. A few weeks ago, he began a campaign for “Gamers Against Bigotry,” asking people to sign a pledge supporting more positive behavior. The site received 1,500 pledges before it was hacked, erasing its list of names.

Like Ms. Sarkeesian, many women gamers are documenting their experiences on blogs like “Fat, Ugly or Slutty” (whose name comes from the typical insults women receive while playing against others online). It cheekily catalogs the slurs, threats and come-ons women receive while playing games like Resident Evil or Gears of War 3.

The blog publishes screenshots and voice recordings that serve as a kind of universal citation in each new controversy, called upon to settle debates or explode myths. For instance, many of the site’s recordings feature deep voices captured from the chat features of online games, debunking the widely held belief that bad behavior begins and ends with 13-year-old boys.

Jessica Hammer, a longtime player of video games and a researcher at Columbia University, said the percentage of women playing such games online ranges from 12 percent to close to half, depending on the game type. Industry statistics from the Entertainment Software Association say 47 percent of game players are women, but that number is frequently viewed as so all-encompassing as to be meaningless, bundling Solitaire alongside Diablo III.

Women report greater levels of harassment in more competitive games involving strangers. Some abandon anonymous play for safer communities or “clans” where good behavior is the norm.

In other game communities, however, sexual threats, taunts and come-ons are common, as is criticism that women’s presence is “distracting” or that they are simply trying to seek attention. Some have been offered money or virtual “gold” for online sex. Some have been stalked online and in person.

Stephen Toulouse, who was the head of enforcement for Xbox Live from 2007 until February, policed the most egregious behavior on the network, owned by Microsoft. And women were the most frequent target of harassment, he said. In that role, Mr. Toulouse experienced the wrath of angry gamers firsthand, who figured out where he lived, then called the police with false reports about trouble at his house (more than once, SWAT teams were sent).

If players were reported for bad behavior, they could be disciplined by being muted on voice chat or barred temporarily. At least once a day, Mr. Toulouse said, the company blocked a specific console’s serial number from ever accessing the network again.

But policing the two or three million players who are active on Xbox Live at any given time is hard. Just as on the broader Internet, there are people who delight in piquing anger or frustration in others, or “trolling.” For trolls, offensive language — sexist, racist, homophobic comments — are interchangeable weapons that vary with the target.

“They treat the Internet like a vast game,” where offending others scores points, Mr. Toulouse said. But the standard advice to ignore the taunts (“don’t feed the trolls”) is now, in the wake of Ms. Sarkeesian’s treatment, being accompanied by discussions about “how to kill a troll.” And many people are calling for the gaming industry to do more.

James Portnow, a game designer who has worked on titles including Call of Duty and Farmville, wrote an episode about harassment for his animated Web series “Extra Credits.” In it, the narrator says: “Right now, it’s like we gave the school bully access to the intercom system and told him that everyone would hear whatever he had to say. It’s time we take away that megaphone.”

At the end of the video, viewers were encouraged to e-mail Microsoft’s Xbox Live’s team, asking for changes to communication tools and improvements to reporting systems.

After hearing from gamers, Microsoft called Mr. Portnow and invited him to headquarters. He met with a team of executives, including a vice president, for four hours, and they discussed how Microsoft was developing better algorithms for things like automatically muting repeat offenders. Microsoft confirmed it was working toward improvements to its community tools.

“For the longest time, people have seen games as a children’s pastime, and we as an industry have stood behind this idea,” said Mr. Portnow, who will be speaking on a gaming convention panel later this month called “Ending Harassment in Gaming.”

“But that’s not true any longer,” he added. “We are a real mass medium, and we have a real effect on the culture. We have to take a step beyond this idea that nothing we could possibly do could be negative, or hurt people.”

The Future of Gaming in Virtual Reality

Standing next to id Software’s John Carmack, I almost lost my balance and fell over during the first few seconds of playing Doom 3 on a prototype Rift virtual reality headset, an ugly wad of electronics attached to an elastic ski goggle band.

While wearing the headset I still had to press buttons on an Xbox 360 controller to switch weapons, move forward and fire, but aiming and looking were accomplished simply by turning my head. It was surreal and surprisingly responsive. After the initial disorientation and dizziness dissipated, I was entirely immersed within the world, with the game’s visuals wrapping around my entire field of view.

The Rift is the best headset of its kind Carmack has ever seen. After id Software shipped Rage, Carmack decided to check up on the status of virtual reality, something he hadn’t looked at since the early 1990s. “We did a bunch of deals with people way back with Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake and they were all loser deals with companies that went bankrupt. That was not the right time,” he said. He assumed there’d been a lot of progress in the meantime. He bought a few headsets and was disappointed.

“They just sucked really bad. They were not at all what I wanted to see.” He started disassembling the models and trying to solve problems the manufacturers hadn’t. “It was getting to the point where there were a few people questioning ‘what’s John doing playing around with all this stuff in the office? He should be working on Doom 4 all the time.’”

An opportunity to legitimize his tinkering with headsets at work came up when id Software decided to revamp Doom 3 and handle development internally. “How do you get people to give a damn about an eight year old project? Yes, it’s got higher resolution, looks nicer. We did lots of things to make it a better game, but it’s still not something lots of people are going to care about.” He initially wanted to use the VR angle as a way to grab the press’ attention, and continued to make progress turning Doom 3 into a virtual reality experience.

For hardware, he initially focused on the Sony HMZ-T1, which outclassed all other sub $10,000 models and which was “in many ways a big advance over the crap that was there before. It has nice displays, excellent resolution, a decent field of view. Sony brought it to the level of just barely bordering on interestingly acceptable at about a forty-five degree field of view.”

Carmack stressed the importance of field of view, saying limiting it too much made wearing the headset feel like “looking through toilet paper tubes.” With the Sony headset, the view was good enough for exploring, but not for combat. “The Sony also has a bunch of latency in their processing which is deeply unfortunate and completely correctable and I wish Sony would fix that.” It had potential, and Carmack said others at id were impressed by his progress, but Sony’s headset just wasn’t enough.

So Carmack decided to start building something on his own in an attempt to improve on existing designs and expand the field of view. Though he tried numerous configurations, he kept returning to the idea of somehow incorporating the screen of his mobile phone. “There’s reason to believe all the billions of dollars of effort that goes into developing mobile device technology, that that’s the right train to hitch yourself to. I was heading down this route when I ran across Palmer Luckey and his Oculus company.”

Luckey launched a Kickstarter on August 1 for Oculus’ Rift headset. In a few days over $1.1 million dollars have been offered up by developers and curious technology aficionados. Those who backed $300 or more will receive a fully assembled Rift and its only game, Doom 3.

“There’s a small VR community that talks about homebrew head mount displays, and he was really the star.” Luckey was on the sixth or seventh revision of his Rift headset, and Carmack was impressed. “He had found the right display panel, the right drivers, the right optics and packaged it all together.” Carmack contacted Luckey and mentioned he was going to demo a virtual reality version of Doom 3 at E3 2012. Luckey mailed Carmack his handmade Rift prototype the next day.

Carmack made adjustments on the software side and soon had something he liked, all the while being mindful of response time. “There’s an important threshold around 20 milliseconds of end to end response time, from the time that you move to the time the image changes. If you’re under 20 milliseconds it really feels like you’re moving a window around in a solid world.” The response time on the unit Carmack was demoing had a 40 to 50 millisecond response time. “There’s a subtle sense that the world is pulling behind you.” Ideally, he said, there should be no delay.

Delays in response time are common to all types of gaming, but are especially important to keep at low levels when considering movement in virtual reality gaming because the lag is far more noticeable. “The difference of 20 milliseconds on there, it’s obvious to everybody. Your brain knows for every contraction of muscles in your neck that orients your head into a different way, your brain has a model of what it’s supposed to see as you do that muscular contraction, and that’s measured in a small number of milliseconds.”

While I played briefly, the delays weren’t especially noticeable. If an imp jumped from the shadow of the room, I quickly swiveled my head to aim them pressed the Xbox 360 controller’s trigger to fire. It felt a little floaty at first, but I started to find a rhythm for the control as I turned my head from side to side to look both ways down a catwalk and ensure demons weren’t getting ready to pounce. It was a very natural behavior, and surprising only because checking around corners is usually such an artificial process driven by mouse and WASD movement or rotating thumbsticks.

To make the game really work, Carmack had to make changes. “Even for a [shooter on ] 3D TV you have to take the crosshair out and put in some kind of a laser sight. In 2D we always do head kicks as a directional cue and damage indicator that knocks the head sideways. That’s a good, positive thing to do on a static screen. In a head-mounted display you don’t want to knock the head around.” He noted that cut-scenes were particularly problematic, because control of the perspective would suddenly be ripped away from you, severing a delicate intuitive link between reality and the virtual space.

At E3 2012 when Carmack first demoed the virtual reality version of Doom using the Rift prototype, he wasn’t prepared for the magnitude of the response. “Things blew up a lot beyond our expectations. It caused some problems internally where everybody had a freakout, this wasn’t really part of the plan, this was a little ancillary thing. So what are we doing about it? Everything has worked out fine, I’m very pleased to say.”

Before E3, Carmack expected Luckey would make around 100 Rift kits essentially for his friends. “At this point now he’s making it for several thousand other people. The price point he came out with was around half of what we thought it was going to be.” Despite the excitement, both Luckey and Carmack are eager to stress that the Rift in its current state is not a mass market device. “There is exactly one game it has support for, you’re not buying this to play games. This is for developers to start building support for the other games that we’ll eventually make a consumer device for. You can’t play movies in it, there are no other applications. All that will come, but it’s not here right now.”

While Carmack has been working on modifying Doom 3 to work in virtual reality, he also gave some hints about what a game designed entirely for a head mounted display might be like. “FPSes are the obvious thing you could do. But there’s a lot of benefit from very subtle motions, from just walking down a corridor, all the little subtle motions that your head’s making, and just being able to look over at a handlebar on the side or something. There’s more value in that than I expected, even in third-person games or god games.”

Carmack seemed equally interested in the implications of headsets for far more sophisticated interfaces than those available now. He said a pair of cameras attached to the outside of the headset would be ideal, in part for safety reasons so you’re not completely oblivious to the outside world while wearing the device, but also to track the position of body parts. “It would be able to identify your individual digits as you lift up your hand, work out the user interface that you want to do. Kinect user interfaces suck because you position your hand at three o’clock and wait two seconds, and [there are] all sorts of reasons why stuff like that is a bad idea. But when you get down to the point of being able to track digits in front of it, there’s a lot of interesting ideas about how you would do user interfaces. You’ve got your obvious gestures and swipes and pinches, I’m excited to see what people wind up doing.”

Though it’d be years away, having an entirely self-contained product distribution system through the head mounted display is something Carmack sees as promising. “You could buy your stuff there, and it’d just be the equivalent of a tablet that happens to have optics where you could put your head in it.”

Clearly Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo are seemingly obsessed with alternate control methods between Move, Kinect the Wii-mote and the upcoming Wii U platform, but will the headsets like the Rift eventually eclipse all those efforts?  “Yes, I think immersive virtual reality is a far more powerful I/O device than all the little things you do with your hands in front of a TV screen.”

So when might we start to get a clearer picture of what the actual results might be? “This is not the promised land, but you can see the promised land from here. We need to figure out what steps we need to do to get there. I think that can happen largely over the next year.”

Sexual Harassment in Online Gaming Stirs Anger

Over six days of competition, though, her team’s coach, Aris Bakhtanians, interrogated her on camera about her bra size, said “take off your shirt” and focused the team’s webcam on her chest, feet and legs. He leaned in over her shoulder and smelled her.

Ms. Pakozdi, 25, an experienced gamer, has said she always expects a certain amount of trash talk. But as the only woman on the team, this was too much, especially from her coach, she said. It was after she overheard Mr. Bakhtanians defending sexual harassment as part of “the fighting game community” that she forfeited the game.

Sexism, racism, homophobia and general name-calling are longstanding facts of life in certain corners of online video games. But the Cross Assault episode was the first of a series this year that have exposed the severity of the harassment that many women experience in virtual gaming communities.

And a backlash — on Twitter, in videos, on blogs and even in an online comic strip — has moved the issue beyond endless debate among gaming insiders to more public calls for change.

Executives in the $25 billion-a-year industry are taking note. One game designer’s online call for civility prompted a meeting with Microsoft executives about how to better police Xbox Live. In February, shortly after the Cross Assault tournament, LevelUp, an Internet broadcaster of gaming events, barred two commentators who made light of sexual harassment on camera and issued a formal apology, including statements from the commentators.

Even so, Tom Cannon, co-founder of the largest fighting game tournament, EVO, pulled his company’s sponsorship of the weekly LevelUp series, saying that “we cannot continue to let ignorant, hateful speech slide.”

“The nasty undercurrent in the scene isn’t a joke or a meme,” he said. “It’s something we need to fix.”

Mr. Bakhtanians, whose actions during the Cross Assault tournament were captured on video, later issued a statement in which he apologized if he had offended anyone. He also blamed “my own inability in the heat of the moment to defend myself and the community I have loved for over 15 years.”

But the issues raised by the Cross Assault episode gained more attention with Anita Sarkeesian’s campaign in May to raise $6,000 on Kickstarter to document how women are portrayed in video games. Her YouTube and Facebook pages were instantly flooded with hate-filled comments. People tried to hack her online accounts. She received violent personal threats.

Ms. Sarkeesian responded by documenting the harassment, posting online the doctored, pornographic images of herself that her detractors had created. Supporters of her efforts, aghast, donated more than $150,000, further angering her critics. A man from Ontario created an Internet game where players could “punch” her, layering bruises and cuts on her image until the screen turns red.

“The gaming industry is actually in the process of changing,” Ms. Sarkeesian said. “That’s a really positive thing, but I think there is a small group of male gamers who feel like gaming belongs to them, and are really terrified of that change happening.”

When Sam Killermann, a gamer in Austin, Tex., saw the reaction to Ms. Sarkeesian’s project, something “broke through,” he said. A few weeks ago, he began a campaign for “Gamers Against Bigotry,” asking people to sign a pledge supporting more positive behavior. The site received 1,500 pledges before it was hacked, erasing its list of names.

Like Ms. Sarkeesian, many women gamers are documenting their experiences on blogs like “Fat, Ugly or Slutty” (whose name comes from the typical insults women receive while playing against others online). It cheekily catalogs the slurs, threats and come-ons women receive while playing games like Resident Evil or Gears of War 3.

The blog publishes screenshots and voice recordings that serve as a kind of universal citation in each new controversy, called upon to settle debates or explode myths. For instance, many of the site’s recordings feature deep voices captured from the chat features of online games, debunking the widely held belief that bad behavior begins and ends with 13-year-old boys.

Jessica Hammer, a longtime player of video games and a researcher at Columbia University, said the percentage of women playing such games online ranges from 12 percent to close to half, depending on the game type. Industry statistics from the Entertainment Software Association say 47 percent of game players are women, but that number is frequently viewed as so all-encompassing as to be meaningless, bundling Solitaire alongside Diablo III.

Women report greater levels of harassment in more competitive games involving strangers. Some abandon anonymous play for safer communities or “clans” where good behavior is the norm.

In other game communities, however, sexual threats, taunts and come-ons are common, as is criticism that women’s presence is “distracting” or that they are simply trying to seek attention. Some have been offered money or virtual “gold” for online sex. Some have been stalked online and in person.

Stephen Toulouse, who was the head of enforcement for Xbox Live from 2007 until February, policed the most egregious behavior on the network, owned by Microsoft. And women were the most frequent target of harassment, he said. In that role, Mr. Toulouse experienced the wrath of angry gamers firsthand, who figured out where he lived, then called the police with false reports about trouble at his house (more than once, SWAT teams were sent).

If players were reported for bad behavior, they could be disciplined by being muted on voice chat or barred temporarily. At least once a day, Mr. Toulouse said, the company blocked a specific console’s serial number from ever accessing the network again.

But policing the two or three million players who are active on Xbox Live at any given time is hard. Just as on the broader Internet, there are people who delight in piquing anger or frustration in others, or “trolling.” For trolls, offensive language — sexist, racist, homophobic comments — are interchangeable weapons that vary with the target.

“They treat the Internet like a vast game,” where offending others scores points, Mr. Toulouse said. But the standard advice to ignore the taunts (“don’t feed the trolls”) is now, in the wake of Ms. Sarkeesian’s treatment, being accompanied by discussions about “how to kill a troll.” And many people are calling for the gaming industry to do more.

James Portnow, a game designer who has worked on titles including Call of Duty and Farmville, wrote an episode about harassment for his animated Web series “Extra Credits.” In it, the narrator says: “Right now, it’s like we gave the school bully access to the intercom system and told him that everyone would hear whatever he had to say. It’s time we take away that megaphone.”

At the end of the video, viewers were encouraged to e-mail Microsoft’s Xbox Live’s team, asking for changes to communication tools and improvements to reporting systems.

After hearing from gamers, Microsoft called Mr. Portnow and invited him to headquarters. He met with a team of executives, including a vice president, for four hours, and they discussed how Microsoft was developing better algorithms for things like automatically muting repeat offenders. Microsoft confirmed it was working toward improvements to its community tools.

“For the longest time, people have seen games as a children’s pastime, and we as an industry have stood behind this idea,” said Mr. Portnow, who will be speaking on a gaming convention panel later this month called “Ending Harassment in Gaming.”

“But that’s not true any longer,” he added. “We are a real mass medium, and we have a real effect on the culture. We have to take a step beyond this idea that nothing we could possibly do could be negative, or hurt people.”