Following up on my earlier post about innovation in console gaming and online communities.

Fifa 10 is really stepping it up now. They have a world EA Sports Fifa community in Beta and it looks really promising.

Through the web you can check out the real time popularity of teams in the console game. Logging in also connects your own contribution in the contest.

Through the console you get real time updates to your favorite teams and league tables. As I understand you can also play the RL league games on your console. I got to check this out..

What kind of possibilities does this open up? It will be exciting to follow the evolving features..

Read more about Live Season on producer Marcel Kuhn’s new blog at Off The Bench.

PLAYSTATION 3 has great features, besides gaming of course, such as great picture quality (HDMI), media features and being online.

It’s not possible to browse your remote network-discs with media content out-of-the-box from the PS3. The PS3 feature that is ootb is to look for a Media Library on your local network.

What is a Media Library?
Check out PS3 Media Server to create your own Media Library. The application creates a connection to the PS3 and manages the nitty-gritty stuff and all you have to do is to point out the media files on your network. There is some additional codec installations if you are running Linux on your Media Library host.

So you need a host computer where you run the PS3 Media Server and any OS is supported. Install the PS3 Media Server and point out the media files within the application.

You can access you photos, music and the application re-renders video on-the-fly to a format the PS3 is ok with.

I’ve had a few hick-ups so far (on Linux), but the PS3 Media Server is enabling more use of the PS3.

Read more on the PS3 Media Server blog or the PS3 Media Server code project page.

Good luck.

EA Sports extends Fifa 09 with a new game mode; Ultimate Team. An interesting  move.

Ultimate Team is in brief a mode where you collect cards according to the Collectible Cards model, meaning you can earn, buy and trade cards with your favorite players pictures and bio. The interesting part is the integration with the actual game where you use your deck of cards to create your Ultimate Team of players.

Why is this interesting? Trading Cards has been around since beginning of the 1900s, through baseball cards, and could therefore be considered quite successful i think. In the 1990s the first variants of collectible gaming cards came. This was the crossroads of cards and gaming.

An example of a card-gaming variant is Magic: The Gathering. This example is brought up in The Medici Effect (which I highly recommend) written by Frans Johansson.

Ok, but why is it interesting..? Collectible Cards create communities. When I talk to kids using this kind of cards they are part of a card community. The gaming is something the community can gather around even more -creating an even stronger identity and communication bandwidth within the community.

One area game consoles are not getting a mainstream break through on is the user community. We are starting to see combination of other areas and online gaming; Singstar, Buzz and others. It looks like Fifa 09 – Ultimate Team is another area of combining a strong phenomena with the gaming and console possibilities.

It should be on the radar of the consoles to move to online services, communities and stronger brand. This move is in the right direction and could have impact.

I’m a bit hesitant to the strategy of a initial give-away and then starting to cash in on the same; I don’t think they need to do that.

Social media and communities are really in hype now. How can the gaming world on Xbox, PS3 and Wii get on the train and start living in the youth communities? Maybe using an traditional community-inspiring model like collecting cards. Smart.

Anyways, together with the other community based games this move is somewhat ground-breaking in combining and building a strong user community. I don’t think we have seen real disruptive innovation in the online gaming world for some time, but I’m looking forward to that as well. Interesting to see what stake the console maker and the gaming label take in the eco-system.