• Forgive Us Our Facebook

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal interviewed Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who had similar ideas. Schmidt’s vision of the future allows all young people to change their names when they reach adulthood, as ReadWriteWeb reports:

• Google CEO Suggests You Change Your Name to Escape His Permanent Record

My wife and i are keenly aware that “adulthood” is on a sliding scale – a scale that is increasingly sliding towards age 30. It seems to have taken a very long time for the media to catch on to this trend that we’ve seen going on for years, but at long last, here comes the New York Times with a meaty article on the subject:

• What Is It With 20-Somethings?

(btw, the show Big Lake that they mention off the top of the article is one of the worst teevee shows i’ve ever seen. Work that laugh track, fellas.)

And finally, to add context to this discussion, here’s a cockatiel singing Tequila:

What do YOU think? Should Spike the singing cockatiel be legally allowed to change his name to Eric Schmidt on his thirty-second birthday?

This was my second time at the conference, and like most repeat visits to places, the show lost a lot of its lustre for me. i’m just going to offer my Monet-like, impressionistic view of the show without going into gory detail like i usually do, because you’re very busy and you have awesome things to do.

Hive Mind

Casual Connect is a conference of singularity. The show itself hosts mostly casual game industry companies – these are the folks who pioneered the “pay $20, download a match-3 desktop game” model in the early aughts. They were essentially riffing on the shareware model, where they’d offer a free time- or feature-limited trial, and the customer would pay to unlock the full experience. Companies like Big Fish Games, Pogo, and GameHouse/Real Networks became content aggregators, the game-centric equivalents of TUCOWS and Download.com, and they grew massive audiences of mostly soccer moms who lapped up games and genres that are largely derided by “real” gamers. These were games like Match-3 (Bejewelled), HOGs/Hidden Object Games (Mystery Case Files) and other light, friendly and very dumbed-down puzzle games engineered to have wide appeal to the lowest common denominator of players.

i say the show is singular, because the casual games industry really gets on these kicks. Once the industry is riding a wave, it’s all you hear about. Five years ago at GDC, it was the casual downloadable model that i just mentioned. Last year, everyone was nuts about social games on Facebook. It’s all i heard.

This year was interesting. The conference had one common focus: lack of focus.

Agreeing to Disagree

The buzz this year, even more than last year when social was exploding, was that the casual downloadable payment model is either dead or dying, depending on who you talk to. Companies like Big Fish Games, who made their millions on that model, naturally begged to differ. They attempted to show that the model was actually growing by 20-30% every year. In one talk, Big Fish’s Sean Clark interestingly turned it back around on social, reminding everyone that in there was a massive disparity between the money Zynga was raking in, and the money that the other 9 companies in the top 10 were earning … and that once you leave the top 10, the drop-off is precipitous. Big Fish’s corporate line is now to call social a “red herring”, or as two Big Fish employees repeated to me, a “distraction”.

That’s actually how i’ve long felt about social. You hear these fantastic success stories about the space, but you really only hear them about three or four companies. i don’t run one of those companies. My best strategy there is to release something on Facebook, trump myself up and hope to get bought by Playdom or some other social company. That’s not what i want out of this life. Very early in the show, i had a brief chat with Erik Bethke, whose company was bought by Zynga. i’ve heard Erik talk about his game GoPets for years at GDC and elsewhere, and i found it really sad to see him swallowed up by Zynga, and to have his game shut down. When i expressed that sentiment to a few folks at the conference, they said “it must have been worth the money.” i remain conflicted about it.

The gatekeeper issue is the single largest factor keeping me from charging into Facebook game development. Just before production stalled on Interrupting Cow Trivia a few months ago, we were working on adding Facebook Connect integration to the game. Not long afterward, Facebook yanked the feature entirely. And enough articles have been written on the 30% drop in traffic social games receive in what the Casual Connect crowd dubs the “post-viral era”, after Facebook changed its policies around how game devs can tap into the graph to spam the users about their games. Very shortly, we expect Facebook to cut out all external payment providers and force devs to use Facebook credits. i run a really small shop, and simply lack the money and time to constantly tune my games according to the whims of a gatekeeper.

Robotic Game Design

Beyond downloads vs social, the other big argument going on this year was data-driven design vs what i’ll call “organic” design. If you can coin a better term, please let me know. Data-driven design is like flying a plane by the dials. You release something half-baked to the audience, load it up with tracking hooks, and build out the rest of the game using heavy A/B testing to figure out what they players are interested in.

Organic game design is old-school. You come up with an idea for a game that you think people would like to play. Then you build that game and hope for the best.

Nowhere was this issue laid bare more than at the six-person panel i attended on day two, which was stacked with head honchos from Sandlot Games, Playrix, Large Animal, HipSoft, Last Day of Work and Shockwave/MTV. The panel was called “Taking Your Games to the Next Level: Investing In Your IP”, but it should have been called “Sassy bitch slap-fight”. i like a contentious panel discussion, and this one didn’t disappoint.

The thread running through the talk, punctuated by the terse exchanges between George Donovan of Gogii Games and Last Day of Work’s Arthur Humphrey, was this data-driven vs organic design debate. George is all about spending as little money as possible to develop games that ride the wave of whatever his metrics tell him is most popular on the casual games portals. Arthur is about developing games passionately, and sinking a lot of money into them to make them the best experiences possible.

i assume both approaches have merit, because both of these girls remain in business. It won’t surprise you to know that i side with folks like Arthur on this debate. i make video games because i like video games. i don’t want to fly by the dials and develop dramatically dumbed-down experiences to please Midwest soccer moms desperate for an escape, for whom casual games have become a substitute for Harlequin Romance paperbacks. No thanks. Design-by-data has made a lot of money for a lot of people, but it’s also ruined a lot of stuff (read up on the test audience that demanded a happy ending for Little Shop of Horrors. Why i oughta …).

Call me a terrible, irresponsible bidnessman, but i’m led by my passion. i would much rather create build games by my gut, intuition, and love of the medium, hoping that i find that perfect mix of creative ingenuity and luck, than to deliver rote me-too experiences according to what the top ten charts told me was popular a month ago. If i wanted to do that, there are plenty of service jobs that demand far less time and mental energy from me.

Buy Our Crap

i may as well raise this post to full-fledged rant status by calling out the (many) speakers who used their sessions solely to promote their companies (Joel Breton of Addictinggames, i’m looking at you). Google ran a Trojan horse session where they roped everyone in ostensibly to talk about their upcoming Google Chrome Marketplace, and used scant information on that to house a long-winded ad for HTML5.

This is starting to annoy me far more than speakers who leave the mouse cursor in the middle of a video during a presentation. i don’t spend thousands of dollars and fly across the continent to attend hour-long commercials for your products. Put in a quick plug, point me to the brochures at the back of the room, and then tell me something useful. Or shut up.

In Summary

So there it is: Casual Connect Seattle left me with the impression that the chinks in the industry’s armour are showing up all over the place. Confusion, conflict and uncertainty reign. It’s an industry dominated by business types paying passing lip service to the creative work that fuels the money flow, and whatever scant creativity does exist is being eroded by a hit-driven, top 10 sales chart mentality.

And then we die.

Over the weekend, I was speaking with someone who was working construction on the building. i asked him if it was a positive experience, and he said “nah – the whole place is built on a graveyard. All the wires and stuff.” i didn’t know what he meant. “You mean it’s built on outdated technology?”

“No,” he said, “the Bell Lightbox is built on a literal graveyard. Stuff would be working one day, and then, inexplicably, it would stop working the next.”

Who You Gonna Contact on the Telephone?

Is it true? Does the new Bell Lightbox have a poltergeist problem? And on what kind of burial ground is the the new home of the Toronto International Film Festival situated? Are these spirits harmful or helpful? Will they launch the career of a hot young starlet, like they did with Christina Ricci in Casper? Will they wreak havoc on the box office, like Bill Cosby in Ghost Dad? Will they give everyone raging boners by doing sexy pottery like Patrick Swayze in Ghost? Or will they be insidious boner-shrinkers, like Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost?

My Bell Lightbox source said that the building was erected on the earthly remains of Irish potato famine victims who arrived in Toronto fleeing the crisis, and promptly died. i remember hearing a similar story about Holt Renfrew in Yorkville – that the ritzy uptown shopping district is built on the mass grave of Upper Canada settlers who died of cholera in the 1800’s. i live a few blocks from Yorkville, and i can only offer that a few of these elderly ladies get facelifts so extreme that they merely look like scraps of skin stretched across terrifyingly re-animated skulls.

So! Could the ghosts of Irish immigrants be tampering with the new theatre equipment?

Well – could they? i’m no expert in spooks, so i’d like to crowdsource a definitive answer on this by the end of the week, folks.

TOJam, you may know, is the Toronto Indie Game Jam, where sweaty nerds spend a weekend building games. The fifth anniversary of the event was my fourth time attending. If i could go back in time, i’d definitely attend the first one. i’d also give Hitler a purple nurple.

A month or so after TOJam, the organizers put together a public exhibition of the games called the TOJam Arcade. The game creators can use that time to fix whatever didn’t work by the end of the original weekend (which is usually everything.)

Beer.

This year’s arcade was held last Saturday night at the Imperial Pub near Yonge and Dundas Square. We succeeded in putting out the older barflies, who were pissed at not being able to watch their horse races, and the inebriated college crowd, who came precariously close to sloshing house draft on the data projectors.

Prizes.

At the end of the evening, they held a raffle with prizes comped by Big Blue Bubble, and some guy named Andy. They called my ticket number, and i was stunned to find i’d won the big prize of the evening – an Xbox 360 Elite bundle with Halo ODST, Forza 3, and a copy of Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia. It’s been over a decade since i’ve won something in a raffle, so it was a nice surprise. Thanks, Big Blue Bubble!

Soon after, they announced the People’s Choice Awards. Our game Heads was voted “Best Use of Theme”. The TOJam 5 theme was “missing”, and Heads is about a guy who wakes up to find that he’s literally lost his head. It was a really nice and unexpected win, but i think some other teams came up with far more subtle and clever uses of the theme. (Don’t get me wrong, though – i’m not complaining!)

After struggling to balance the Xbox home on my bike through rain-slicked streets, i went to lock up in the bike room and found a ten dollar bill on the floor. True. That actually happened. It all made me feel bad for kicking that kitten in the face earlier in the day.

Other Non-Me Winners

The top three Peoples Choice games included Nom Nom Nom Nom (a Hungry Hungry Hippos clone with three cats and a goat), MonoClimb, the black-and-white co-operative platformer by prize-donating Andy and friends (i mentioned it in my last TOJam article), and Last Hadron Collider, a two-player simultaneous obstacle race with randomly-generated levels and great-looking character sprites. You’ll be able to play all these games and more at the TOJam site once everything is uploaded.

Once the games are up, i’ll write another post listing my own People’s Choice picks with some undiscovered gems. In the meantime, i’ll try not to let our productivity on Spellirium take too much of a hit, now that we can finally put those extra Rock Band instruments to use at the office.

These are the notes for the mid-term that the students followed. They had to build this game:

To date, the students have received 20 classes (60 hours) of Flash instruction. i’ve taught 6 of those classes. i haven’t marked the assignments yet, but i have the distinct feeling that very few of the 30+ students, if any, finished with a working “game”.

An End to the No-Fail Generation

i mentioned in another post that these students are the No-Fail Generation. They have been given breaks and second chances left and right. Since they were completely inept at emailing files, at least one teacher took pity on them and would pass around a keydrive for them to upload their finished exams. i decried this as so much spoon-feeding. i was bound and determined to require the students to email me. Here were their instructions:

HANDING IN YOUR MID-TERM EXAM:

Add ALL of your files to a zip archive file. This includes your fla, your swf, your .as files, and your FlashDevelop .as3proj file if you have one. Name the zip file using your first inital and last name.

Example:

My name is Ryan Creighton, so i would name the zip file rcreighton.zip.

Use your own name. DO NOT send me a file called rcreighton.zip.

email the file to profryan ~at~ untoldentertainment ~dot~ com. (i had the actual address available – obscuring it here to foil the spiders.) If you want to be sure it reaches me, add your own email address to the cc (carbon copy) line. If you receive the email, I’ll receive the email.

Failure to email your properly-named zip file to me by the end of class at 6PM will result in a zero grade – no exceptions, no extensions.

Read that last part carefully for me. i wanted a properly-named zip file. That’s all i asked. One simple thing. And screwing that one simple thing up would result in an Insta-Fail, and a loss of 20% of the final class mark.

So! What did i receive in my inbox? A number of students sent me zip files that were called “monsterGame.zip” or “midTermExam.zip”. Those students, i’m resolved to fail. i have to. i will mark their exams and show them the grade they could have earned. But despite the instructions being clearly stated, and despite having spent 20 minutes on how to zip, name, and attach a file to an email in the previous class, i still got monsterGame.zip from some students. If that’s not a fail, i don’t know what is.

Oh – So You’re a Hard-Ass?

No, i’m not a hard-ass. i’m a realist. i want these students to succeed. And if the most careless students want to waste their time and tuition money learning how to follow a simple instruction and send an email attachment, and that’s the ONLY skill they possess when they emerge from college, then at least i’ll have taught those students something.

The LAST thing i want is for these students to embarrass themselves in the workplace by being completely useless, telling everyone “Ryan Creighton taught me Flash!”

Your Opinion Required

My dilemma is what to do with a student like Bob Smith, who emailed me a file called bsmith_monstergame.zip. Technically, Bob Smith did not follow the instructions. i did not receive a file with ONLY his first initial and last name. i got a file with his first initial, last name, an underscore, and some other nonsense that he thought might be helpful.

i haven’t checked all of the files, but i know there are at least three Bob Smiths in the class who messed this up in a similar way. So i open the floor to you, dear readers: knowing that i am going to award a zero grade to students who did not follow the naming convention, what do i do with the students who named the file properly, but appended some extra jazz to the end?

Take the poll and let me know!

[poll id="5"]

And if you’re one of my students and you decide to vote, please identify yourself in the comments! :)