When Untold Entertainment Inc. turned three last year, we were reeling from the fallout of the global economic collapse. It’s been a slow, difficult recovery, and we still have a lot of work left to do, but i’m happy to say we’ve nosed out of the tailspin. This was a landmark year for Untold; we are poised to have an absolutely incredible fifth year going forward. If last year was our Empire, this year is our Jedi. Bring on the Ewoks, baby.

Here’s a look at the Year That Was.

2010

August

Last fiscal ended on a dark note. We were struggling through Spellirium, our post-apocalyptic puzzle adventure game, as various production problems saw the budget sapped with very little to show for our efforts. The year ahead had us planning to complete service projects in the hope that we’d bank enough margin to continue working on the game.

September

My book was published! Unity 3D Game Development by Example: A Beginner’s Guide is a great introduction to game development, computer programming, and Unity 3D itself, which is a super-powerful game engine for creating on a wide variety of platforms. Thanks to you all for buying a copy, or for recommending the book to your friends.

Fall

We launched Jinx 3: Escape from Area Fitty-Two on YTV.com. Jinx 3 was the first game to use UGAGS, the Untold Graphic Adventure Game System. It supported multiple playable characters, an inventory system, a subtitle system, game variable control, and a “puppet” guidance system, which enables the developer to write commands to build in-game cutscenes. Jinx 3 was the first UGAGS game we developed, but the second one to launch, after Heads.

i spoke about UGAGS at Gamercamp Level 2.0, a Toronto convention celebrating the joy of video games.

October saw the publication of a now-infamous article about the Vortex Game Development Competition, where the previous year’s winners were revealed to have never worked on the winning game.

i experimented with a feature called Linkbait Tuesdays, where i used the Linkbait Generator to spit out randomized titles for blog posts. It wasn’t much appreciated by my readership, and didn’t appreciably increase blog traffic, so i killed the feature.

On Hallowe’en, we launched our second free games portal called ZombieGameWorld.com. If you know the song about the old woman who swallowed the fly, you’ll understand our challenge with these portals. We built WordGameWorld.com in order to attract a word game-playing audience, so that we could control the site’s ad inventory and find an audience for Spellirium. When the site suffered from flagging traffic, i decided to build a network of game portals; ZombieGameWorld.com was ostensibly created to help drive traffic to WordGameWorld.com, which should drive traffic to Spellirium.

To round out the fall, i grew a beard to win hockey tickets, despite not enjoying hockey. i spoke at an interactiveontario luncheon. And i wrote an article for Mochiland.com on the disgraceful refusal by contracting companies to credit their Flash game developers.

Winter

As the cold weather set in, i took a position at a private college teaching Unity 3D game development. i had hoped for a better experience than i had at Hervé Velasquez School for the Digitally Inclined, but no such luck: halfway through the course, which was dubbed Programming II (the students had supposedly been taught Flash/Actionscript for four months prior to my arrival), i had to dial everything back and re-teach programming basics to them. And by basics, i mean stuff like “What does the ‘=’ symbol do?” and “What is a variable?”

The class was only eight students, but i had no fewer than two of those students’ parents call or email me to ask why little Billy was getting low grades on tests. YaRly.

In this, i further proved the thesis in my contentious What’s Wrong with Ontario Colleges articles (Part 1 and Part 2). Helicopter parenting and failure aversion have created a generation of non-functional kids, which i later dubbed The Most Useless Generation. My diagnosis is that many college undergrads have escaped high school without ever understanding How to Be a Student (an article i wrote while teaching last winter, which i’ve only just posted now that i’ve put some distance between myself and the situation).

In the interest of helping young people be more successful, i offered My Prescription for (More) Successful Students, which my students all ignored, and i wrote a serious of articles called Understanding Programming to explain programming basics, which my students also ignored. Oh well. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but sometimes you just have a retarded horse.

2011

Spring

In 2011, we launched an exciting blog series called Pimp My Portal, detailing our struggles to drive traffic to ZombieGameWorld.com and WordGameWorld.com. The hook here was The World’s Most Meager Marketing Budget, a pot of just $100 that i spent on Fiverr.com to buy testimonial videos to promote the site, the rationale being that search loves video. The Old Lady who Swallowed the Fly reared her ugly head again, as i found that i had no audience to watch the videos to go to the portal to go to the OTHER portal to find out about Spellirium. The Pimp My Portal series is ongoing.

Around this time, we were commissioned by The Centre for Skills Development and Training to produce a series of games to help teach workplace skills to 15-30-year-olds. The resulting game, Summer in Smallywood, enabled us to make a number of improvements to UGAGS, including auto-save, debug tools, navigation meshes, saved game profiles, and threaded conversations. We’re looking forward to working further with The Centre in the coming year to expand our educational gaming experience.

In March, i admit i was feeling a little bit desperate and squirrely. Work was trickling into the shop in fits and starts, and i was really wondering whether renewing our lease would be wise. Wild-eyed and hungry at GDC, i was overcome with the need to let the world know i am here, like the tiny Whos living on a speck on a clover stalk, who ultimately issue a resounding YOPP! to show the jungle animals that they exist (and to keep from getting boiled in beezlenut oil).

To that end, i pulled some shenanigans at the conference, which came to be known as the famous GDC Coin Stunt. The resulting press on most major online games sites greased the wheels for what was to be our greatest victory yet.

Over the years, we’ve found it so difficult to drive enough steady Flash game development work that we haven’t been able to bank enough time or enough money to do our own thing. To date, the only chance we seem to get is TOJam, an annual weekend-long Toronto game jam, during which we always produce a complete and original game. Indeed, nearly every title in the Original Games section of our portfolio is a TOJam game, completed in one weekend by me alone.

This year, we used UGAGS to create Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure. i worked on the game with my 5-year-old daughter Cassandra. It was no accident that i was wearing my “I have all the coins” T-Shirt in the TOJam group photo this year. After the game went live, it went viral, initially being featured on many of the same sites that covered the coin stunt. In the few months since its launch, the ponycorns game has gone on to become an international sensation (i just granted an interview to a Japanese newspaper this week!).

With the ponycorns game, we took a very important step to improving our viability as a dev studio by launching the game on the Apple iPad and the BlackBerry Playbook. On the third day of its launch week, Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure was featured by Apple in its New & Noteworthy section.

Ponycorns also drove us to develop our first alternate revenue stream based on our original IP. We launched the Untold Booty merchandise store with a number of different ponycorns-based SKUs, and have been very happy with the results.

Throughout the year, i remained active with the IGDA Toronto Chapter, organizing some well-received events including the speed dating-style Game.Set.Match, the Open Mic Night rant session, Straight Outta TOJam: Pint-sized Postmortems, and the Fund in the Sun workshop.

Through the spring, we developed a great puzzle/platformer game called Spladder, which currently runs on a number of kids’ broadcaster sites – YTV.com. TVO.org and CBBC.co.uk among them.

We launched a new games portal called TowerDefenseGameWorld.com and filled it with free tower defense games, because it’s difficult to prove a theory about a network of games portals lending each other traffic if you only have two portals. We also gave a major upgrade to ZombieGameWorld.com by expanding it to feature zombie games and goodies on other platforms.

i know an old lady who swallowed a horse. She’s dead, of course.

Summer. Future.

We’ve come full circle. Spellirium remains unfinished, but we’re finally spending time on it again. We poked Kahoots with a stick to see if it was still twitching. Thankfully, it is! We’ve made some creative changes to it to spare a fellow indie game dev company some unpleasant legal strife; look forward to a Kahoots-related announcement in the coming months.

i’m writing the 3.x update to my Unity 3D book, which will be ready shortly (send me an email and i’ll add you to our notification list when the update is released).

Going forward, our plan is to leverage the success of the ponycorns game to make major in-roads into game development and education for kids (see our article on CBC.ca). i’m preparing a pilot project with Cassie’s elementary school this fall. We’re preparing the unstoppable UGAGS engine for a business-to-business, and then consumer, release – expect it to have a kid-friendly interface. We’re polling people for their interest in an iPhone/iPod version of the game (send us an email!). i’ll be delivering my conference session Ponycorns: Lightning in a Jar at the Screens festival this fall, and at other conventions throughout the year. Ponycorns is being translated into Japanese in anticipation of the Sense of Wonder Night at the Tokyo Games Show.

Untold Entertainment’s fifth year will be filled with low-life panda bears, daily word puzzles, gamesByKids, and more great articles about game development and education, peppered with rude jokes and stolen LOLcat pictures. Thanks so much for your support, everyone! i’m really looking forward to writing an amazing recap next year.

WYSI(N)WYG

There’s a flip side to everything you see at events like GDC. This year marked my sixth trip to the hallowed halls of gamedom. Over the years, i’ve seen mobile game development crawl up from the abyss to a privileged position as the only thing anyone ever talked about at the conference. i’ve witnessed the rapid rise and fall of kids’ virtual worlds, the decline of the casual downloadable market, the explosion of digital distribution, and the Godzilla-like devastation wrought by the likes of Zynga.

The people who take the mic at GDC are almost always the people with success stories to share. These are the people who draw the crowds and the numbers. But the success they tout in their sessions may not be all it’s cut out to be, and it may not even last until the following year’s conference.

Pair o’ Dice Lost

For example, one year i heard a guy speak about all the money he’d made on his game. i was impressed, and more than a little jealous. i thought “man, what i wouldn’t give to have all that money.” And then i envisioned all the things i’d do with it: giant robot races, playroom made of Nerf, Rolls Royce that plays “Dixie” when you honk the horn … and despite myself, before i even realized what was happening, i started vigorously rubbing my thighs. By the time i snapped out of it, i was being asked to leave the conference hall.

The next year, i learned that the very same guy who’d hit it so big with his game was on the financial ropes, and that his house was in foreclosure.

One year at the seldom-publicized conference portion of E3, i heard MYST designer Rand Miller talk about his plans for the upcoming MYST multiplayer game. The game launch was a famously massive flop.

i try to catch Raph Koster every time he speaks at GDC. Despite his brilliance, he’s no stranger to failure (Star Wars Galaxies, anyone?). Most recently, i saw him introduce his new venture, Areae/Metaplace. One (maybe two?) year(s) later, Metaplace had completely tanked, and Raph was on to something new.

Two Plastic Pennies to Rub Together

So the other side of me, the guy holding all the coins (albeit plastic ones), is that i don’t have many coins to hold, plastic or otherwise. i’ve been running my independent game studio, Untold Entertainment, for over three years, and have struggled to release a single game through all of the service work i’ve been trying (and often failing) to land.

So it was in that spirit that while i was at GDC this year, and i saw a nickel on the ground in front of me, i picked it up. It was just underneath the chair in the next row up , where i sat waiting for a session to begin. i glanced around furtively to see if anyone had dropped it, or had even noticed it, and then scooped it up inconspicuously and slid it into my pocket.

i did this in the midst of GDC, a conference for which the alumni pass set me back $1300. i was surrounded by very wealthy people (or so they seemed), some of the biggest movers and shakers in the game industry.

Squirrel Fishing

The next night, i went to a party hosted by Canada, my home and native land. While strolling around looking for someone new to meet who could help me figure out where i was going wrong in my bidness, i noticed a quarter on the ground. i figured “why stop now”, and stooped to pick it up. As i did, i kind of worried that the people sitting in a nearby restaurant booth had planted it there to see what kind of desperate sad-sack stopped to grab it. i half-expected the coin to be jerked out from between my fingers, tied to an invisible piece of thread, as my imagined tormenters laughed and pointed at me. And then the biggest one, the guy they called “Titan”, would dump his milkshake over my head and put his arm around Jenny Jenkins, who was wearing his high school sweater.

But nothing like that happened. i just grabbed the quarter, and into my pocket it went.

The Value of Bending Over

The tidbit of info that runs through my mind whenever i stoop to grab a penny or better comes from The Straight Dope, a weekly collection of ponderables by Cecil Adams featured in various North American newspapers. In his article Is it Worth it to Pick Up a Penny?, Cecil writes:

The Scientific Research Team here at Straight Dope HQ has proven that a proficient penny-picker upper can probably pick up a particular penny in five seconds. On an hourly basis this works out to $7.20 per hour. As of 9/1/97, minimum wage will be a mere $5.15 an hour.

The minimum wage in Ontario is now $10.25, but i think the point is still reasonable. It can’t hurt to grab an errant coin … unless it hurts your ego.

Third Time’s a Charmin

The day after i snatched the quarter at the party, my “teeth were floating”, so i walked into one of the GDC conference restrooms to “drain the tank” by “compressing my bladder and excreting urine from my urethra” (so to speak). There, on the top of the urinal, was a small, tidy stack of coins: a few pennies, and maybe a nickel and a dime. i thought fate was playing a cruel trick on me. i mean, i don’t believe in punitive Greek-style gods who watch mess with us for their own amusement, but come ON. What was this all about?

As a stream of hot me flowed into the bowl, i stared at the little stack of coins. How … i mean, how low would i have to be to pick up those coins? They were probably dirty. Did the guy who left them there put them on the urinal before or after handling the goods? And … well, what did it matter, really? Money is filthy. We all know that. What harm … ?

But NO. No, no, no. Maybe i picked up a couple of lousy coins around the conference. Fine. But i was NOT going to snatch toilet money. i mean, it was toilet money. There’s a difference between picking up money that someone drops on the floor of a convention centre or restaurant, and taking money that some dude piled on top of a john because …

… because why, exactly? Why exactly was the money on the urinal, anyway? Did the last guy put it there because he was worried it would fall out when he dropped trou? Or did it FALL IN the urinal, and he fished it out, and thought it would be weird to throw money in the garbage so he just LEFT IT THERE?

i stared at that little stack of change long and hard, friends. And then, as the last lingering drops splashed on the ceramic basin below, i knew i had a decision to make.

What i thought to myself was this: “when was the last time someone paid me seventeen cents for taking a pee?”

Then i grabbed the change from the top of the urinal and put it in my pocket.

i Don’t Actually Have All the Coins

What you see is not what you get. i appeared to many of the conference delegates, and to the people who read the article afterward, as a guy who really had it together, you know? A Robin Hood figure – a folk hero who had all the coins … when in fact, i have so few coins that i’m not above grabbing them off the ever-loving toilet.

This makes sense, though. It’s consistent with my personality. What is the Pimp My Portal series, if not a sad attempt to scrounge together $33 in pocket change every month to cover website hosting?

Or maybe it was the madness of GDC that made me do it? When it comes down to it, maybe i was simply attending a conference about video games, collecting coins?

i think a lot of what motivates people to gripe about Zynga stems from either jealousy, or the fear by core gamers that Zynga will become so popular that their precious triple-A first-person-head-exploder games will fade from existence and they’ll be forced to decorate bunnies and rescue little lost restaurants for the rest of their lives.

i think the money Zynga makes is well deserved, and that players should be able to decide for themselves when a game becomes too rote or too addictive without it offering them enough value for their time or dollar. But i don’t give Zynga or its competitors a license to exploit. There’s one area in which i feel that social game developers need to act far more ethically, and if they fail to do so, i may even advocate the same type of government regulation that limits the use of tobacco, alcohol, drugs, gambling, and any other addictive substance or activity.

A Moment with Mitchell

A few weeks back, i was at a very small gathering of students at the Herve Velasquez School for the Digitally Inclined, where i used to teach until they fired my ass. The game development students run a club, which offers everything from Magic: the Gathering tournaments to 3D speed modeling competitions (in which the students use all three dees).

This particular week, the students had invited Mitchell Smallman to speak. Mitchell is a writer for a social game on Facebook that’s raking in money left right and centre, as Facebook games are wont to do. Throughout his talk, Mitchell tried to dislodge the students from their biases against social games, and making games (of any stripe) with profit as the main intent, his first bullet point being “get over yourself.”

This was all fine and dandy. But toward the end of Mitchell’s rant, he dropped a megaton bomb: Mitchell Smallman said, in a clear but apologetic voice, “the problem with social games is that they exploit the mentally ill.”

Going Off the Whales on a Crazy Train

To explain himself, Mitchell began describing his game’s “whales”. This is a term borrowed, uncoincidentally, from the gambling industry, which decsribes enormously rich people who jet in to Vegas, drop a disgusting amount of cash at the tables, and jet back out again having had, one supposes, tons of fun.

Mitchell talked about some particular whales in his social game: two Bay Street (Wall Street) investment bankers who were competing to knock each other off the high scores list, and in doing so, dropped over ten grand apiece. We had a good, if nervous, laugh over this.

But Mitchell’s tone turned serious when he confided in the group that a good number of the whales he sees are actually people who spend an alarming amount of time in the game, and who spend an enormous amount of money not necessarily because they’re having fun, but because they feel they have to. These are the first people to angrily harass the live team when the game is down, or when something doesn’t work as they expected it to.

And simply from the timbre of their forum banter, Mitchell said he could tell these folks weren’t of sound mind.

At this point, of course, you can interject that Mitchell Smallman is not a licensed psychologist. But come on, friends. We regular people can smell crazy on our own just fine. If we couldn’t, we’d all be wearing Snuggies out on the street like they’re haute couture.

Let’s Agree to Agree

With Mitchell’s confession in the back of my brain, i attended a GDC “debate” on the validity of social games, called “A Debate: Are Social Games Legitimate?”. i put “debate” in dick quotes because, like many of the panels in the conference’s social games discipline, obvious croneyism kept the session from being truly worthile. The panelists were three developers who made social games, and one academic who had made a satirical social game but was nonetheless doing well by it.

So that’s three “fer”, and one sardonically “agin”. That’s supposed to be an argument? That’s like asking four members of the Wu-Tang Clan to debate the merits of “peein’ on bitches.”

The debate unfolded with all the ferocity of a sorority slumber party pillow fight, with the only true opposition coming from Ian Bogost, who gently massaged the other panelists with soft suggestions of how they may be gently bruising the industry, if you please.

Daniel James, CEO of Three Rings (Puzzle Pirates), who i figured was supposed to be quasi-oppositional (merely because his game wasn’t on Facebook?), clamped up pretty early in the debate when he very visibly realized that any criticism leveled at the Facebook developers could easily be aimed squarely at him, and at point blank range to boot. (Daniel said he would be “personally distressed” if his game relied too heavily on gambling tricks, and despite being a fan, i wondered what planet he was on? Puzzle Pirates hosts regular POKER MATCHES, ffs)

By the time the back-patting was over, i was still hoping to see a little fur fly. i took to the mic during the question period (as i do), and laid the groundwork with Mitchell’s initial whale stories. Then i asked the panelists point blank: do social games exploit the mentally ill?

Getting the Heck Out of Dodge

Nabeel Hyatt from Zynga performed a classic dodge: “What do you mean by ‘mentally ill’?”

Ah. Would this be an argument over semantics?

“You know – mentally ill,” i said. “Like manic-depressive, schizophrenic, or obsessive-compulsive. That type of thing.”

Nabeel gave it another shot.

“I … don’t understand the question?”

i reiterated: were social games primed to exploit, or even promote, players’ mental illness to encourage them to play more often and to spend more money than they really should?

What followed was a bent-over-backwards dodge of Matrix-esque proportions. The panelists, primarily Nabeel, began by redefining mental illness as “fandom”. “i used to collect a ton of comic books when i was a kid,” said Nabeel, “was i mentally ill?” To my dismay Ian Bogost, in what i saw as an abuse of his intellect (and sole devil’s advocate status), came to Nabeel’s aid, asking (with patronizing pedagogy) whether enthusiasm for popular culture didn’t border on madness?

Heavily Medicated Beatlemania

My time at the mic was up, but i thought No, you creeps – i’m not talking about Bieber fever here … i’m talking about the kind of people you watch every week on Hoarders. Actual, real people who can’t, like the rest of us, reason their way out of playing an addictive social game because it’s eating up too much time, money, and sanity.

Of course, no social game developer in his right mind would suggest that these types of people need to be limited in their play time and spending. These are their whales, after all. These are the people pushing up their ARPU and scoring them the cash. If anything, social game developers would do well by attracting (or even CREATING) more mentally ill players, because only someone out of their mind would spend real money on things that don’t really exist (as the panel’s moderator Margaret Robertson suggested, jokingly).

Your Stand on Instanity

So, the question: should companies like Zynga and Playdom be regulated by the government to limit time and money spent when players cross a certain activity threshhold? Or should the governemt stay out of it, and should these companies voluntarily develop these limitations borne naturally of their own corporate ethical policy? And if these companies continue to be left to their own devices, will these innate ethical practices ever emerge?

We regulate and legislate smoking, drinking, drugs, and gambling, but we don’t throw shopaholics in prison. Aren’t these people just online shopaholics?

COUNTERPOINT! Isn’t the key difference that we’re not tracking the every move of brick-and-mortar shopaholics, but we ARE tracking every move of our online players? Since we already know everything they’re doing, isn’t it incumbent upon us to act to prevent them from harming themselves?

REBUTTAL! Die in a fire, Ian Bogost! (panelist Curt Bererton tears his shirt open and leaps across the table, his splayed fingers aimed at Bogost’s tender face)

Moderator: FINISH HIM!

Erm … sorry about that. i got carried away. Knowing that social games aren’t leaving any time soon, let me know if you think social game developers should be externally limited, whether they should be self-limiting, or whether they should be free to gouge as much time and money from as many people as they like, crazy or sane, as our God-given free market allows. And also, please let me know who you think would win in a bare-chested pit fight between Ian Bogost and Curt Bererton. i’m writing the Bogost/Bererton slash fiction as we speak.

UPDATE!

Mitchell Smallman has responded with a wonderfully thoughtful take on whales and the damage they do to player communities, and the responsibility of designers to create games that strive for more than vapid box-ticking as a mechanic.

Respect is Earned

“No F@%$ucking Respect! Social Game Developers Rant Back” was held in one of the largest spaces at the Game Developers Conference: room 3014 in the West Hall, which seats roughly a billion people. The lunch time session promised informed, thought-provoking and entertaining rants from a line-up of the usual suspects:

• Ian Bogost, wry academic and creator of the Cow Clicker parody of social games
• Brenda Brathwaite, opinionated champion of (sometimes manipulatively) emotional games
• Trip Hawkins, a cool and collective business maven who happened to found Electronic Arts
• Chris Hecker, game graphics guru and indie advocate
• Steve Meretsky, best known to me for his work in interactive fiction back in the day
• Brian Reynolds, comparitively mild-mannered designer of some pioneering 4x games (and token Zynga panelist)
• Scott Jon Siegel, a Playdom designer who was billed as the panel’s youngster, but who actually had more experience in social games than anyone else on the panel (a point he made abundantly clear in a loud, fast-paced, and HILARIOUS “bonus rant”, my favourite moment in the whole session)

Floating in the background was Jason Della Rocca, former IGDA chief who, i should point out, knows me. Moderating the panel was the equal-parts energetic and abrasive Eric Zimmerman.

Pay to Play

As i entered the room, a CA (volunteer “conference associate” who checks badges and collects session feedback forms) was handing everyone a plastic coin from an orange bag. i was intrigued, and rubbed the ersatz booty between my fingers while the first delegates slowly trickled in. A slide on the A/V screen explained the point of the coins: the person who collected the most coins from the other players in the room by the halfway point of the session would be invited to the front to do a “guest rant” on social games.

i didn’t really want to rant, dear readers … but i DID want to win the game. i looked around the room at the hundred-or-so delegates and quickly calculated the amount of glad-handing and baby-kissing i’d have to do to amass enough coins to win. i knew i was up against the likes of Jane McGonigal, who despite being featured in two or three other GDC panels and talks that week AND a recent Colbert Report episode was nonetheless salivating over the chance to grab the mic yet again. i knew i was no match for Jane’s celebrity, eagerness, and feminine wiles. What chance did a chubby nobody with lunch stuck in his teeth have against a Colbert alum?

Clearly, my only recourse was to use social engineering to win the social game.

The Game Was Afoot

i strode back to the entrance, to where the deliciously young and impressionable CA was handing out the coins. In an urgent voice, i said “Excuse me! Chris Hecker, one of the panelists, said he only really wants about half the room to get these coins. He sent me to get the bag and run it up to him at the front of the room.”

Then, with no skepticism or suspicion, the CA pleasantly purred “sure,” and handed me the bag.

He HANDED me the bag. The bag with all the coins. i had all the coins.

My heart racing, i rushed back to my seat at the other end of the cavernous room. i have never shoplifted before. i’ve never possessed an illicit substance. i’m known to my small segment of the industry as being unfailingly honest, often to my detriment. And here, through the uncharacteristic use of cunning and deceit, i had snatched the entire bag of plastic coins that GDC’s social games industry powerhouses needed to run their social game. i tried to judge how best to cram the coins into my body cavity to hide them, and decided instead to furtively stuff the bag into my backpack before giddily awaiting the coming storm.

A Vote for Jane

Meanwhile, my impromptu nemesis Jane McGonigal had started campaigning for coins. At that time, she apparently didn’t have a rant idea either – she, like me, just wanted the coins. She came closer to my row, and appealed to the crowd to give her their coins. i, mad with secret power, tried to look casual as i turned to face her in my seat and said “you’re not gonna win.”

“Why not?” she said, annoyed. This was Jane McGonigal, after all. Why wouldn’t she win?

“Because i’m gonna win.” It was a bold claim from a guy casually kicking back in his seat, surrounded by delegates who still had their coins. Deciding not to waste any more time on my cryptic claims (which were just my misguided attempt at good-natured smacktalk), she spun around to bring her coin campaign to the delegates in other rows.

The Jig Was Up

Meanwhile, at the front of the room, i heard either Jason or Eric snap “what do you mean someone stole the bag??” Oh crap. The doe-eyed CA, realizing he’d been duped, started scanning the rows of seats for me, patrolling them like a prison warden. i kept my head low and stared at my backpack on the floor – the very backpack that burned with ill-gotten gold. Soon, my pretties … soon, it would all be mine.

i exhaled heavily when the rants finally started. Only about an eighth of the attendees had actually received coins (thanks to me), but Eric never let on. He cheerily explained the rules a few more times, never letting on what had happened, and then the ranting began. Panelists after panelist took to the mic to plead their cases on the validity of social games. At the halfway point, Eric announced that it was time to learn the results of the game: who in the room had collected the most coins from the other players?

A few murmurs of “i have five coins” and “i’ve got a couple” kicked things off. Jane McGonigal jumped up and proudly presented her handful. Eric seemed pleased that the winner was someone he knew and could trust not to be an ass on the mic.

And then i stood up.

On the chair.

And, holding the orange plastic bag aloft like Perseus presenting the head of Medusa, defiantly proclaimed “I HAVE THE ENTIRE BAG.”

The room erupted. Some people laughed. Some jeered. Some guffawed. i was beaming, incredibly pleased with myself, like a toddler who’s just learned to take off his own diaper. i fully expected Eric and the other panelists to smile along with me. Aha! We are social gamers, this was a social game, and somehow this delegate had managed to convince, through social contrivance, the impressionable CA to hand him the bag of coins.

It recalled the massive coup in the MMO Eve Online, in which social maneuvering led to a devastating take-over of one of the game’s most powerful cabals.

Taking Crayons, Going Home

Through my squinty smile, i scanned the faces of Jason, Eric, and the panelists. It was not a pretty sight. They were scowling. Actually scowling. “You took the whole bag?” they said, disgusted.

“Well … yeah!”

“That was against the rules, though.” This last came soberly. “It was against the RULES.” Zimmerman petulantly wagged a finger at the slide.

“No it wasn’t. It was a social game, and i gamed it socially. The CA handed me the bag.”

“B… but you have to get the coins from other players.”

A hurried debate broke out about whether or not the CA was a player, and whether or not i had taken the coins “legally”. My interpretation of the rules was that the player with the most coins wins, and i had the most coins. Someone else spoke up and said “We don’t even know he has any coins, though. He’s just holding a plastic bag. He might not have ANY coins.”

The weight of the coin bag pressed heavily against my palm. i was irked. Not only did the bag contain coins, but it contained nearly ALL the coins – enough for the hundreds in attendance and then some. And they were MY coins. Not only was i denied my hero’s welcome and a pomp-filled invite to the front of the room … now i was being accused of CHEATING, and worse … of not even having all the coins.

Someone in the audience shouted out “Who do you think you are – Zynga??” The crowd laughed.

“Show us,” said someone on the panel. “Show us the coins you supposedly collected.”

My fist tightened on the orange plastic bag. Through knitted eyebrows, i raised the bag over my head and showered myself in a cascade of gleaming, glittering plastic coins. It was like that scene from Flashdance, except with a chubby fully-dressed nerd instead of half-naked Jennifer Beals. When the torrent of winnings finally dripped dry, i casually tossed the empty bag on the coin-littered floor and held my hands out plaintively to appease the room.

Eric spun to address the panelists. “What do you think? Should we let this CHEATER do a guest rant?” To a man, every single one of the panelists gave me a thumbs down.

You Don’t Know What You’ve Got Til It’s McGonigal

i had been robbed. And Jane McGonigal, flaxen-haired upholder of the game creators’ true intent, was named the winner.

Two twists in this story came one after the other: Jane was invited up to speak, and brought two friends with her. i later learned that the organizers considered this a cheat as well. In another unexpected turn, Eric came up to me during the rants and mouthed “Do you still wanna say something?” i mouthed “Sure.” Then he mouthed “Okay, but keep it to ten words or less. TEN WORDS. Ten.” He held up ten fingers. “Ten.”

“Sure – okay.” i nodded. Had he actually said what i thought he’d said? He was going to let me do a rant? And he wanted me to keep it to ten words? What could i possibly say in ten words??

In Ten Words

Eric stayed true to his promise. Just before the final ranter, Ian Bogost, took to the stage, Eric announced that “in the spirit of mischief”, he was going to let me do a SPECIAL MINI-RANT. The key word, of course, was “mini”. i jogged up to the front and grabbed the mic, then turned around to face the enormous crowd.

i looked at Eric’s eager face, at his pleading eyes, and remembered his rule: ten words or less. i felt the metal of the microphone that had been burned up, spat in, and blessed by the panelists before me. And as Eric made the hand-over-hand “hurry up” motion frantically from the front of the room, i decided to break another rule. i gripped the mic and said to myself “from my cold dead hand, Zimmerman.” And then i proceeded to rant for as long as i damn well pleased.

Given the same opportunity, what would you say? What kind of rant could you improvise in front of a room stuffed with some of the most talented and well-known game developers in the business, and at GDC, the Mecca of your industry? The scheduled panelists had months to write and practice their rants. i had moments. Predictably, nothing i said was particularly Earth-shattering, but the point i tried to get across was this:

We like to brag about how the games industry brings in more money than the film industry, but as soon as someone like Zynga makes enough money to trigger our envy, we invent interpretations of the game rules to say it’s not okay. Zynga is standing on a chair in the middle of a crowded room showering itself with coins, and instead of applauding them for their ingenuity, we’re crying foul and pointing to the ways in which they’ve broken the “rules”.

Meanwhile, we are breaking the very same rules: the addictive qualities of Facebook social games can be found throughout all our games. i talked about how i had skipped three real-world Hallowe’en parties to stay home and collect the spooky furniture set in Animal Crossing, and how i had spent an ungodly number of hours chasing after the legendary dogs in Pokemon Silver. In both cases, i had to decide on my own that these games had become a chore rather than a source of fun and entertainment, and i stopped playing them.

But this is a case of the pot calling the kettle addictive. Zynga is no more culpable for introducing addictive hooks in games than any other developer. At GDC, years before Zynga’s triumph, the Casual Games Summit speakers all talked about how they needed to make their games more addictive. One of the most popular and profitable game portals for tweens, AddictingGames.com, makes absolutely no bones about it.

Jane McGonigal bent the rules to bring her buddies up to share her rant time, but her shenanigans were sanctioned by the industry guard. i, a relative newcomer, bent the rules by taking all the coins, was accused of cheating, and was barred entry into the club. Tellingly, for all the complaining we do about Zynga, their GDC session on developing games for 43-year-old women was standing room only.

For all the spectacle, for all the drama, and for making an enormous ass of myself, i don’t regret a single moment of it. If anything, bucking convention and winning the coin game reminded me that the greatest gains are made by subversion, disruption, and going against the grain.

In short: break the rules, get the coins.

• Bonus! Flash Gaming Summit
• Tuesday – Scaling Farmville, Fantastic Contraption, and Push Button Labs
• Wednesday – Quality of life, tips from Ninjabee, virtual goods, Agile/Scrum, social games, indie rants
• Thursday – Kids’ talk breakfast, Zynga/Farmville, game studio start-ups, the danger (?) of achievements, IGF/Game Developers Choice Awards
• Friday – Sid Meier, love in gaming, Gameageddon, and party night
• Saturday – Tim Schafer, Will Wright, Walt Disney and American Civil War porn

And now, my awards for the best and worst stuff that i saw at the conferences.

Best Bidness Card

Last year, my Best Bidness Card award went to to Mark Morris from Introversion Software, creators of Darwinia and Multiwinia, who had the deets stamped on a metal card. This year, my hat’s off to Greg Wohlwend from MikeNGreg.com, whose company logo and email are etched onto a wooden chip:

i’m glad i took a picture of this thing as soon as i got it, because i discovered it makes a great slug for the Feed Big Bertha game at Chuck E. Cheese’s.

i’m not necessarily endorsing the work of these companies, but i figure the money spent on a pricey bidness card should at least be worth a mention on some dude’s blog.

Best Panhandler

Last year, dog cat rat took the prize. This year, i have to give it to this horny, chain-smoking golden retriever, who just wanted money for a lapdance.

Once again, to quote Chris Rock: “If a homeless guy has a funny sign, he hasn’t been homeless very long.”

Best Session

i’ve seen a lot of conference talks in my life. The best ones are those which:

• tell me something i don’t know
• are well-presented, with slides that make sense after the session
• provide me with information that i can immediately put to use on my projects

Amitt Mahajan nailed all of these points with Rapidly Developing FARMVILLE: How We Created and Scaled a #1 FaceBook Game in 5 Weeks. He showed slides of the game’s server architecture, introduced me to new concepts (the game doesn’t run on databases? that’s crazytalk!), and provided tips and techniques (like caching FaceBook API calls, and outright turning them on and off via an external config file) that i could put into effect TOMORROW. Amitt’s talk and a few others made the educational portion of the trip worth the time and effort.

i know some of you will say that you can sniff out talks like these online, but i lack the discipline, motivation and attention span to actually hunt down the best talks, and then WATCH them in a grainy, badly-lit camcorder video. It doesn’t beat being there.

Worst Session

i’m amazed that the “this is my company and here’s what we built” style of session is alive and well, because i HATE being trapped in a conference room hearing about how awesome some other company is, with no actionable items that will enable me to be just as awesome.

This year, Sean Murray delivered From Big Studio to Small Startup: Guerilla Tactics from Hello Games. i’ll concede that their game, Joe Danger, looks great, and is well-deserving of its IGF nomination. The big revelation was that all of the games artwork was produced by one guy . So the only discernable take-away was “our artist is is a super-human freak, so go be like him”. That’s a lousy take-away. “Go home and build yourself a time machine and become immortal so that you can develop a horrifying amount of art assets in the span of a few months.” Roger that, Hello Games. i’ll get right on it.

Best (Worst?) Photo of Me Being an Idiot

This one:

Best Conversation

A knife fight nearly broke out at lunch, as some of the Toronto posse and i grabbed some grub at a high-end mall foodcourt. Jimmy McGinley, one of the co-organizers of TOJam, the Toronto indie game jam (where we created Two by Two, Here be Dragons and Bloat.! Shameless plug!), was all fired up about something.

During the conference, Michelle Obama’s handlers announced a game development challenge called Games to Make Fat Kids Not Be So Fat No More (i’m guessing at the title, but i think i’m pretty close). Forty members of the game industry were flown down to Washington to give their opinion (and perhaps blessing?) on the initiative. A few days later, the conference ran a video during the Game Developers Choice award urging the game developers present to get involved and enter the contest, the entries of which must utilize the government’s new caloric content database. Many of the people i spoke to thought that this had been an extremely dry Mega64 parody video, and didn’t get the punchline.

It weren’t no joke, friends. American kids are actually that fat. Jimmy, seething with nerdrage, facetiously suggested that TOJam’s theme this year should be Games to Make Fat Kids Not Be So Fat No More. He resented the government’s interference, and the tacit implication that video games actually caused kids to be fat. He suggested that we all earnestly build games for the America-only contest, to prove once and for all that no video game can make fat kids skinny.

i took the opposing position. Having made my fair share of advergames at a kids’ teevee broadcaster, shilling everything from high-fructose corn syrup lunch buddies to cereal-coated sugar, i actually agree that video games are part of the childhood obesity problem. i don’t think they’re at the root of it, but to be fair, you can surely pin a few pounds on the industry. i also believed that the industry SHOULD earnestly try to rise to the challenge. Year after year, i hear game developers at various conferences spout off about how revolutionary the game industry is, how it can be a force for good and positively influence behaviour. But make fat kids skinny? No way, Obama! You ask too much.

Dear game industry: it’s time to put up, or shut up. Either games can influence behaviour, or they can’t. They either are effective for education and corporate training, or they’re not. They either do cause violence and aggressive behaviour, or they don’t. They either can make fat kids skinny, or they cannot.

What video games can definitely NOT do is be all things to all people. If they influence behaviour, they can’t influence ONLY desirable behaviour, and call in an alibi in the event of unwanted behaviour. Can video games be an incredible force for social change, or not? A challenge like this, whatever the intent, will definitely bear out the truth. So either make a game that is clinically proven to make fat kids skinny, or stop your yapping and climb of your social change high horse.

It’s like the Farmville debate. i’ve been hearing the casual games pundits jabber for YEARS about how much they want to create an addictive game experience. Then Zynga comes along and builds a game so addictive that it’s essentially a crack-coated slot machine that you inject into your neck veins, and the industry cries foul. My hunch is it’s because the critics aren’t vacuuming in those millions of dollars.

The debate was friendly, spirited, and waged over the most delicious bowl of wonton noodle soup i’ve ever had. A number of the other Toronto game developers joined in the fray, and i think one of them limped home with a pair of chopsticks jammed into his eyeball, but it was all in good fun. Except for that guy.

Total caloric content of my wonton noodle soup: 850 calories. (Now where the f*ck is Wii Fit … ?)

Best Chance Encounter

Me: Who are you and what do you do?

Him: i’m a game developer. We worked on this. (Pulling a large, outdated PC game box out of his bag and handing it to me)

Me: (in spite of myself) Shudder.

Him: Yeah, i know. It’s a little old, but we’re trying to drive a few more sales for it.

Me: (taking a closer look at the large, outdated graphics on the large, outdated box, and thinking that i’ve caught him in a blatant rip-off) Hmmm … these levels look a lot like the ones in that old Atari game, Crystal Castles.

Him: (chuckling) That’s because i made Crystal Castles.

The magic of GDC! Try having THAT happen to you while you surf for free conference slides in your gotch.

Best Publicity Stunt

This one goes to Capcom for its Zombrex campaign. If you stopped off at their booth, a nurse would inoculate you against the impending zombie plague. When you were done, she’d tape a Zombrex bandage to your arm, and send you on your way with a zombie plague prevention poster, and a second dose of Zombrez, which was a ball-point pen disguised as a syringe.

My “nurse” had her schtick down cold. When i asked if, like all vaccines, Zombrex contained a tiny element of the zombie plague, she said “Of course… that’s what a vaccine is.” i assume this is the impetus for the outbreak in Capcom’s upcoming Dead Rising 2.

This is my industry pal Adam Clare getting his shot:

When i left the booth with my poster, my pen, and a subtle but nagging urge to feast on the flesh of the living as one of the reanimated souls wrenched from the clutches of damnation. But the feeling wore off after a while.

Best Food

BRAAAAAAAAAAAAINS!

… just kidding. There was this great-looking Mexican restaurant that i had been avoiding the whole trip, because it was really close to the convention center, which is a red flag for me meaning “terrible value”. But on the last night of the show, the Toronto crew and i wound up there, after the cable car was cancelled and we couldn’t find a ridiculously cliché way to get to In n’ Out Burger.

It was at the Mexican restaurant that i had the most delicious spicy meatball soup, and ate my weight in thin, crisp tortilla chips with two kinds of salsa and a bowl of guacamole, which i’m led to understand is made from iguanas thrown through a wood chipper. It was the first time in a long time that i’d been to a Mexican restaurant staffed with actual Mexicans instead of Chinese, and i think that made all the difference. They lost points for not having any piña coladas, but lemmie tell you, my piña was plenty colada’d by the time i finished that amazing meal. (“piña” means “cock”, right?)

Worst Game Idea

i have to hand it to Kim Swift, who had the entire room enthralled because she was the game designer behind a game called Portal, which i believe is about holes. She had the room further entranced, if only by abject depression, with her game concept for You’ve Just Been Given Two Months to Live, so Start Crying, Adam Clare. (i’m guessing at the name, but i think i’m pretty close.)

Kudos to Kim for being the only panelist during the Game Design Challenge to make an honest attempt at tackling the subject matter, “real-world permadeath”, head-on. But MAN, what a rotten game. i feel so passionately about it that i’ve earmarked an entire article to discuss her panel. Set your watches.

Best Schwag

Free Google Nexus One Android phone. Close runner-up: light-up bouncy ball from Hi-5.

Worst Flight Time

7:15 AM on a Sunday morning, the day after the conference, after i begged a 2:30 AM wake-up call from my hotel, and the $15 airport shuttle wouldn’t pick me up that early, so i had to hire a $45 town car and tip the guy another $10 (i could build, like, three games on a $45 budget). All this in the middle of DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME, which i narrowly missed hearing about. And the Air Canada check-in booth didn’t open until 5:30, even though i got there an hour earlier, and the flight crew punched everyone in the sack on their way into the airplane. And they’re STILL not giving out free baggies of salted nuts.

But somewhere in the world, a malnourished toddler just died from a mosquito bite, so i’ll probably be alright.

A Mysterious Adventure in Social Games

If there’s one person i try to emulate in the games industry, it’s Daniel James. The foppish head of Three Rings blew my mind at my first GDC four years ago when he stood at the front of the room and showed slides of his company’s financials. i had never seen that before. Most other companies were enslaved by their publishers, their investors or their shareholders. To give more than a vague notion on the actual financial health of a company or its products was a distinct no-no. When it comes to numbers, Daniel James is free-wheeling and danger-loving. He (almost recklessly) displays his company’s financials on his presentation slides – numbers both good (Puzzle Pirates) and bad (Whirled). He does it scandalously – rebelliously – because it’s simply not done.

Daniel James can often be seen wearing a wine-coloured suit and a tricorn hat. He has a very dry wit, and gets away with saying a lot of audacious stuff with a boyish grin. If you catch him at the right moment, and peer behind this cartoonish public persona, you’ll catch a wild, crazy look in his eye: there’s a fierce passion and imagination lurking behind his social mask, and i love hitting his sessions to find out more about what makes him tick.

Apparently, one of those things is booze. A few years ago, Daniel and his fellow Ringers passed around plastic glasses and bottles of whiskey during the session. This year, there was a free Bloody Mary bar at the back of the room. It was the morning after Three Rings threw a big party at their San Francisco offices … nine o’clock in the morning, to be exact. Cheers!

In Daniel’s session, he mentioned again the failure that was Whirled, discussing the five million dollars they’d spent building it (up from three million dollars just a few days before when Daniel spoke at the Flash Games Summit), versus the three hundred thousand dollars the game had generated. Clearly, they’d done something wrong.

The rest of the talk was basically how NOT to burn five (three?) million dollars on an unproven concept:

• create a hypothesis
• verify as early as possible with minimum investment
• “get out of the building” and into the hands of players
• do not proceed to development or marketing scaling until the concept is proven
• use metrics-based verification and iteration, as opposed to gut instinct

He shared a few tips during the talk, most of which i’d picked up in other sessions:

1. “Do not bother buying servers in this day and age.” Use a solution like Amazon web services.
2. Read Eric Ries – www.startuplessonslearned.com – for info on creating a MVP (minimum viable product)
3. Once you’ve built a small audience around a small piece of your idea, ask them “how would you feel if this went away?” If half of those people say they’d be upset, you might have a hit on your hands.

A lot of companies doing Facebook games have riffed on Zynga’s famous “little lost cow” concept, where a lost cow wanders onto your farm in Farmville, and you have the option to tell your friends about it so that they can adopt this orphaned cow and start their own game. Three Rings wins for the zaniest take on the little lost cow gimmick with its vampire game Bite Me: the little lost hottie. You have the option to spam your friends with a sexy teenaged vixen that the player can bring to his apartment, where he plies the demanding hottie with presents, and drinks her blood. Demented!

Make ‘Em Laugh: Comedy in Games

This panel starred Tim Schafer, one of the minds behind The Secret of Monkey Island and its sequel (which just so happens to be my most favouritest game ever in the whole wide world). He also design Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Psychonauts and Brütal Legend. Joining Tim on the panel were two other people.

The panel moderator, who was also not Tim Schafer, opened up with a great question: why is there no “comedy” game genre? Tim said that back in the old days, management put bets on people instead of ideas. Instead of flying by the dials with sales charts and review scores, management would trust people to build games. i think Tim’s view is tainted by the perfect storm happening at LucasArts at the time; all around him, there was still plenty of developer steam-rolling and publisher/management interference with the product.

The moderator asked “If comedy is timing, and the player controls timing, how do you control that?” (This starts with a bad assumption – “comedy is timing” is a very vaudevillian concept, and not all comedy follows that mold.) Said Tim: “it’s kind of like you’re writing a play, where the main character has come up from the audience, and the rest of the actors are improvising around him. Designers have to think of everything the crazy drunk actor is going to do.”

Said the guy to Tim’s right who was not Tim Schafer: when the writers succeeded, you played Tales of Monkey Island and felt like you (as the lead character Guybrush Threepwood) were the funniest guy in the room.

Tim stressed the importance of creating an environment where people can be funny. He said that at LucasArts, they committed him to writing two puzzles a day. He just sat around eating candy and coming up with puzzles. He also thought that the dialogue he was writing was just temporary, so he felt free to goof around with it. Then Ron Gilbert told him “no – that’s the dialogue we’re using for the game,” and Tim was suddenly terrified, and thought “Is it really going out in front of people like that?”

Said not-Tim-Schafer: “i’d be frozen at the keyboard if i was working ona $30M game.” (but then he later said “”Fear is a giant motivator.” Hmm.)

It reminds me of an anecdote i once read about Walt Disney, possibly from The Illusion of Life (it’s a thick book, and i can’t be bothered to pull the reference). Walt walked into his animators’ bullpen one day. The animators had been kicking back, talking and joking about stuff, and as soon as they saw Walt, they snapped to attention and hunched over their drawing boards, working feverishly. Walt had a fit. He told them that he needed them to be relaxed and inspired to produce their best work, and urged them to go for walks in the parkette outside the studio whenever they felt like it. Walt Disney recognized that he’d get the best work out of people by removing their barriers to creativity.

That man went on to become Walt Disney.

Another gem from Tim: “if everyone’s wearing clown suits, they’ll be funny all the time.”

The guy-who-wasn’t-Tim-Schafer talked about how important it was to work in teams to funny-check your humour. If you come up with a joke, you need to use other people as a sounding board to figure out whether it’s actually funny or not. He suggested that you can’t be funny in a vaccuum.

Tim: “The fear of ‘that’s too silly’ is the enemy of fun.” He gave the example of the three-headed monkey, one of the running gags that has survived throughout the whole Monkey Island franchise. He was a little embarrassed because he thought the joke was stupid – throughout the game, Guybrush tries to distract people by saying “look behind you – a three-headed monkey!” Ron apparently came up with the saving grace for the joke. Late in the game, when you’re trying to escape from some cannibals, it turns into a crying wolf scenario – an actual three-headed monkey creeps up behind the cannibals, who refuse to turn around. It’s one of the funniest moments in the game.

Not-Tim recommended table reads of the script and scratch tracks (where you record temporary voice-over before doing final commits with your talent in the studio).

This panel was a very, very good idea, and it packed the room. i hope to see more like these at future shows.

Play for Free, Pay for Stuff: Virtual Goods go BOOM!

Another Daniel James session, this time with a noticeably absent Matt Mihaly. Daniel asked everyone to refrain from tweeting/blogging during the session, so that the room would feel more comfortable sharing and dishing juicy stuff. There weren’t too many revelations, regardless, unless you count the fact that a certain popular Facebook game cashes out its players with cocaine, and that one famous game company accepts the blood of Christian babies as payment for virtual goods. Otherwise, nothing too terribly exciting.

Here are some tools and services recommended during the session:

• the Electronic Frontier Foundation has some lawyers who may take your case for free if you’re caught in a DMCA take-down. He recommended becoming a member.
• KissMetrics, Kontagent, MixPanel and RJ Metrics were all mentioned as metrics solutions.

Metaphysics of Game Design

Industry pal Jimothy McGinley tipped me off that this session was mysteriously named, there was no write-up about it in the conference calendar, and that buzz was going around the conference floor that it was some sort of announcement or surprise superstar appearance. The buzz was right: out popped Will Wright, designer of the smash hit title SimCopter (among others).

Will’s talk was a little unfocused and scattershot. He made some interesting points along the way, but nothing really gelled for me into a concrete “do this, and be awesome” takeaway. i’ve gone through my notes and pulled a few interesting things out of them, but nothing really stabbed me in the brain.

Will predicts that Facebook games will soon account for a quarter of the market.

He’s had a number of people come up to him and ask if he can help them make x more game-like. He said that people are starting to see game techniques and theory as if they’re MSG – they can just sprinkle a dash on anything they’re doing to make it more fun. Will’s revised acronym: May Seem Game-like.

In one of his more interesting batch of slides, he talked about the digital footprint that people leave behind. A few hundred years ago, a person’s data footprint might have been a few entries in census records, accounting for about 1k.

A hundred years after that, someone might have left behind journals or memoirs consisting of about 100k worth of data.

The persistent record from someone a hundred years after that, in the 19th Century, might comprise a box of letters – maybe 1MB.

In the 20th Century, Will’s folks kept a box of photos, which accounted for maybe 100MB worth of data.

Today, we have maybe 10GB of data on about ourselves on the Internatz, and going forward, that might balloon to 1TB. It’s funny to think that your great-great-grandkids may one day be able to look up vids of you flashing your titties on March Break in Ft. Lauderdale. Personally, i think the Zombie Apocalypse will wipe everything out before it ever comes to that. But could you IMAGINE having a searchable record where you could see great-great-grandma Flora with her funbags out during a wild party in an American Civil War barracks?

They say history is written by the winners. i think that now, history is being written by whoever has the most blog entries.

GDC MicroTalks 2010: Ten Speakers, 200 Slides, Limitless Ideas!

This is my fourth year at the GDC, and i’ve learned by now that there are certain talks you should never miss. The Indie Game Developers Rant, the Game Design Challenge (see below) and the Microtalks are all sessions that people talk about afterward, and if you miss them, it’s hard to be in the conversation. i made sure to catch the Microtalks this morning, along with a few thousand other attendees.

As i learned last year, the Microtalks are hit-and-miss. i won’t mention everyone, but here are a few hits and misses:

Kellie Santiago – That Game Company (Flower) – Hit!

Kellie hates playing games online, because of the rude, caustic, sexual harass-tastic talk she’s made to suffer. (i can understand why, her being such a hot foxy bitch and all.) She blames this not on the players, but on the game designers, for not cooking up ways to encourage more constructive, co-operative, touchy-feely, i’m-ok-you’re-ok communication in their games. She cited the New Games Book from the 1970′s, which eschewed traditional organized sports with the new motto “Play Hard, Play Fair, Nobody Hurt.” Earth Ball and Everybody-Sits-Inside-A-Parachute-Together came out of the New Games Movement. Having grown up as a pudgy, unathletic kid, i owe a lot to this book for helping me survive gym class, and i didn’t even realize it. Also, i was AWESOME at parachute.

i found Kellie’s last slide memorable:

Gary Penn – Miss!

Words! Lots of them! From the dictionary! Coming at you! Fast! Furious! … passion, love, motivation, game, design, source, structure, feel, drama, alive, consistent, twist … obnoxious!

Jane Pinckard – Foundation 9 – Hit!

Jane’s talk was on love, and it was a very easily-received message coming from a woman with (as i’ve said in another post) a lovely smile, and a redder-than-Valentine’s-Day dress. (i think that bit was intentional.)

Jane identified three ways she’s seen love expressed or explored in games:

1. Love as narrative – Final Fantasy VIII. The game was in the service of the love story between the two characters. Jane: “i mean, sure you have to save the world or whatever … ”

   

   Voulez-vouz roleplay avec moi ce soir?

2. Love as nurture – Nintendogs.

   

   The “L” also stands for “love”.

3. Love as Discovery – Star Wars: Nights of the Old Republic. Jane said that KOTOR has you uncovering the love story. i didn’t make it far enough into the game to experience that, but i hope it didn’t involve any wookies.

Jane offered a few tips to foster the exploration/expression of love in games:

• Make use of adrenaline-filled moments, as in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.
• Let the player express herself, as in World of Warcraft.
• Allow for vulnerability, as in Ico.
• Make the object of the player’s affection unique – Jane found that the love interests in Fable II were too samey.

Jane ended on a great note:

I really don’t care about the Citizen Kane of games – I want the Pride and Prejudice of games.

My wife and i each wanted to share an artistic work that held deep personal meaning. She wanted me to read Pride and Prejudice, and i wanted her to play The Secret of Monkey Island. After months of toughing it out on the can with Elizabeth Bennett, having finally finished the book, i checked in to see how my wife was making out: stuck talking to the shopkeeper on Melee Island, near the opening of the game. Sssssuper.

Ian Bogost – Miss!

Ian’s point was that once the game leaves the hands of its creator, interpretation is up to the player. His talk was about as challenging and relevant as a footrace with a fish.

Margaret Robertson – Hit!

Margaret opened ostensibly with a plug for her new game, the details of which were on a flyer that was placed on every seat in the room. After the audience checked it out, Margarat asked by a show of hands what people were willing to pay for the game. She asked the audience to raise their hands if they’d pay $2.99, $3.99 and $4.99. More people on the right side of the room kept their hands up for $4.99. That’s because Margaret had booby-trapped the fliers … on the left (more frugal) side of the room, the flier listed the release date as April 3rd. On the right side of the room, the release date on the flier was April 28th. 28 is a bigger number, and it subconciously made more people in the right side of the room tolerate a larger price point.

Margaret discussed a few other weird headcases. You’re given a game with three doors. The goal is to open each door until you find which one has the biggest point value behind it, and then you click that door as much as possible to rack up a high score. Researchers found that when they made the other two normal-point doors slowly shrink from the player’s view, the player would click on them to prevent them from disappearing, even though they had nothing to do with the goal of earning a high score. Margaret: “people hurt themselves to keep their options open.”

Here are a few other weird behaviours she shared:

• People work harder for nothing than they do for pay.
• People lie more often in response to things written in horrible fonts.

Margaret’s talk tied into one of the most prevalent themes of the conference – player psychology.

Sam Roberts – Meh!

i didn’t take many notes during Sam’s talk, so i must not have found it that interesting. i did prick up my ears at one point when he talked about how subtle changes in messaging can radically change the theme of the game or the motivation of the player. He gave the example of Grand Theft Auto, a game series where you hijack cars and other vehicles. Player intent and motives change radically when the player is comandeering the vehicle, rather than hijacking it.

i don’t play very many mature-rated games, but this is why i did play and enjoy Crackdown. It was sort of GTA lite, but you were taking many similar actions – taking other people’s cars, running down pedestrians, and blowing stuff up. The key difference is that in Crackdown, you play a police officer. You’re scolded by the narrator for harming citizens, and everything you do is in the service of ridding the city of three diabolical crime lords. i’d much rather crack a few eggs to make an omelet in Crackdown, than to crack a few eggs and murder some hookers and kill innocent civilians to boost my rampage score in Grand Theft Auto, with no omelet to show for it.

Jesse Schell – Hit!

One of the most talked-about conference sessions i’ve ever heard of is Jesse’s DICE 2010 talk, where he predicted a future where everything we do, from brushing our teeth to educating our kids to doing our jobs, is tied to some kind of game or points system. Chris Hecker criticized Jesse in his Thursday talk on the potentially negative effect of game achievements and rewards. i’ll admit that i haven’t watched Jesse’s DICE talk yet, but i gleaned that the original spirit of it was exuberance. Unless Jesse’s being a revisionist, i’m likely wrong about that; he took to the stage this time to warn of the coming war between we the people, and the evil corporations and governments who want to co-opt game design to control our behaviour. He calls it “Gameageddon.”

Schell put up a slide with a few alarmist examples:

1. Achievement Unlocked – You drank 1000 Cokes!
2. Join the American Army, and get a free fortress in World of Warcraft
3. Smoke 10 packs of Camel cigarettes, and unlock the Bentley in Grand Theft Auto

Jesse’s argument is fun food for thought, but it’s not bulletproof. He claims that unless we’re conscious of the coming Gamepocalypse, we’ll be powerless to stop it. Said Schell, “Did you complain when teevee ads jumped from taking up 16% of programming to 36%? No! You just sat there and let it happen.” Sorry, Jesse … i actually DIDN’T sit there and let it happen. i bought a PVR, fast-forwarded through the commercials, and swiped my favourite HBO shows from a torrent site. Fight the power!

Schell identified four types of soldiers in the Gamepocalypse. There are, in reality, so many more, but whatever. We like lists.

1. Persuaders: sharky, amoral business types who are only out to make money from games. Zynga/Farmville weren’t mentioned by name, but the reference was strongly implied.
2. Fulfillers: game designers who live only to fulfill the wishes and dreams of the audience.
3. Artists: audience be damned! Let’s make a game about what it is to be human, while the audience scratches their collective heads.
4. Humanitarians: Game designers

Jesse ended his talk by saying “the war is already here. Figure out which side you’re on.”

Suzanne Segerman – Miss!

i’ve seen Suzanne’s talk given by many different presenters at many different conference. Thank God she was confined to five minutes – i’ve had to endure this kind of presentation for much longer. Here’s how it goes:

Hey – Bob Dylan’s cool. So is Vonnegut. i like Vonnegut. And uh … M*A*S*H. That was a really good show. And Kubrick. Kubrick is awesome. The Wire, All in the Family, The West Wing – great. Great, great shows.

Ugh … times like these, i lack the requisite number of faces to palm. Fun fact: i didn’t cough up three thousand dollars to come to a conference to hear about your teevee viewing habits. i’m not particularly concerned about who you think is awesome. The supposed take-away from talks like these is always the same: Dylan was awesome. Go be like Dylan!

Sure thing. That’s what i’ll do. i’ll go home, and i’ll be like Bob Dylan. Because he’s awesome. That was the solution all along – so simple! i was spending all of my time NOT being awesome. i should try to be awesome intead.

In one of the head-shakingest moments during her talk, Suzanne mentioned Al Gore on her list of unassuming but ultimately awesome people, because of An Inconvenient Truth. Suzanne: “he’s now a multi-millionaire.”

Oh – NOW he is? NOW Al Gore, who served as the 45th vice president of the United States of America, is a multi-millionaire? Well, golly. i’m glad that documentary gave him his big break.

Everything You Know is Wrong

Sid Meier, creator of Civilization, packed an enormous room with MOST of the conference attendees to give what was essentially a bush-league talk on the psychology of game design, which featured no actual psychology … just a few anecdotes from Sid. The talk was disappointingly skippable. Anyway, here are a few things i found somewhat interersting (but mostly harmless):

Fudge the math. Sid talked about Civ testers who were upset that they sometimes lost in a battle with 3:1 odds. They were semi-okay with losing in a 2:1 battle, but they didn’t tolerate losing twice in a row. And they felt that in a 20:10 battle, they should win far more often than in a 2:1 battle. The point is that the cold, hard facts of math don’t always jive with what feels right for the player.

Sid also discussed shortcuts in AAA game development to save money. Two examples he gave were:

1. Put a black curly moustache on a bad pirate. No need to fill out the guy’s backstory – he’s got a curly black moustache, so he must be evil. (This brought stereotyping and racism to my mind.)
2. Describe things through text. If those things mesh with what the player wants to believe, you can save yourself some work. In his example from Civilization Revolution, a text prompt says that to show his respect for you, the Sultan of Zanzibar has delivered a caravn of dancing bears. There are no dancing bears in the game – building, texturing and animating them would be too expensive. But since the player, as a world leader, accepts that foreign leaders should be sending him gifts, they don’t have to explicitly depict that through art and animation. The places where they DO have to spend more time on that stuff are where they have a harder time convincing the player of a certain concept or outcome.

Game Writers’ Roundtable

Daniel James’s virtual goods session was packed, so i ducked into the writers’ roundtable to workshop a few ideas i had for Spellirium. There were a few heavy-hitters in the room who had worked on some very big games, but the vocal minority were a few students, who would have been wiser to sit back and listen rather than chiming in. But as someone with a huge mouth who was once young (and still is, in many ways), i am careful to extend grace to young upstarts. It’s been extended to me more often than i deserve it.

The conversation was off to a very slow and painful start, with writers bitching about how managers wouldn’t proof-read their work (boo hoo! where’s the door?) Finally, i asked a specific writing question about my specific game, and it sparked a lot of great conversation about player expectation, determinism vs. free will, moral decision-making in games, and a number of other topics.

There was an old-school Disney guy in the room who had worked on The Curse of Monkey Island (NOT a canonical Ron Gilbert Monkey Island game, but not a terrible game either). He said something interesting about conversation trees: in those adventure games, the main character’s personality is pretty fleshed out in cut-scenes, but they tried to pack the in-game conversation options with many different off-model options. They’d empower the player to sound suave, stupid, snide, urbane, etc.

i had asked specifically about adding a big twist to the narrative that takes the player completely off-guard, and whether that had ever been done, and if it had been done succesfully or ham-fistedly. The room cooked up a lot of great examples from games past and present. One guy talked about a companion technique to the “aha” moment: the “oh shit” moment, where instead of the player discovering that everything he knows is wrong, he instead discovers that everything he knows is on fire. Battlestar Galactica pulled out a number of great “oh shit” moments in its run.

One word of advice from Disney guy, which is SO LucasArts: “never punish a player for doing something fun”.

Game Developer Challenge: Real-World Permadeath

This was my fourth GDC, and i’ve come to learn that there are certain unmissable sessions that everyone talks about. The Challenge is one of them: a panel of famous game developers presents a game concept based on a difficult, alternative or downright WEIRD concept. In previous years, the challenge had contestants designing a game with a needle and thread interface, and a game around the theme “my first time.” This year’s theme was “real-world permadeath,” a game that involved someone’s actual death.

i have SO MUCH to say about this session that i’m going to save my commentary for a completely separate post. Here’s a sneak preview: game developers are comically insecure about death.

Dinner

Since we were recipients of the OMDC (Optimally Miniaturized Dinky Cars) Export Fund, which pays for half of our trip, we were invited to a special networking dinner on Friday night. A number of well-positioned industry folks were bribed, coereced or blindfolded and thrown into the back of a van before joining us at the event. Not every guest was a good fit for every Ontario company, but i’m sure some good contacts were made.

For my part, i was seated at a table with the head of a triple-A game studio, his bizdev guy, a Hollywood agent representing the games industry, and the head of EA Partners. Apparently Bon Jovi, Stephen Hawking and Jesus couldn’t make it. Just as i suffered the students at the writers’ workshop, my tablemates were very gracious to answer my questions about hiring name voice-over talent, and licensing music for games. Thanks so much!

After Dinner

i headed over to the nearby Three Rings (Puzzle Pirates, Whirled) offices expecting something like the insane bacchanal of three years ago, when the company set up a slip n’ slide slicked with whiskey, and a guy got beheaded in the elevator. (Party hearsay always beats the real thing.) This year’s party (at the behest of their landlord) was far more subdued, but i’ll never miss a chance to visit the fabulously-designed nautical steampunk Three Rings office.

i got back to my hotel room at two in the morning and immediately started blogging the day in service of you, dear reader … but my hotel Internet connection was knocked out, and after a half an hour, so was i.

Here’s what i saw today:

The 4 Most Important Emotions for Social Games

* view the slides here! *

Nicole Lazzaro (@nicolelazzaro) is a psychologist and games industry consultant who’s been around for quite a while. She has studied emotion in games, and based on her findings, has split fun into four categories:

1. Easy fun – exploration and discovery
2. Hard fun – overcoming really tough challenges
3. Serious Fun – high scores, collections, competition
4. Social Fun – trading, chatting, suprPoking

She found that most of the emotions that players experienced while playing games fall into the “Social Fun” category. She further elaborated on the four emotions that make players share (this lady has a thing for fours, i guess):

1. Amusement – dancing, teasing, chatting and jokes
2. Amici (chumminess) – neighbourliness, visiting, people, plants & pets
3. Amidar (admiration) – ranking, status
4. Amigro (reciprocity) – mechanisms for players to respond to each other socially

She also has a thing for words that start with “a”, and – apparently – using Italian words when English words will do. A few times during her talk, she’d say something like “the concept i’m trying to describe doesn’t have an equivalent in English, so i’ll use the Italian word, ‘casa’.” (um … lady, i think you mean “house.”)

It all came off as sort of elitist and obnoxious, and got under my skin. i really got annoyed when Nicole wondered aloud what we have to do to make a game so socially viable and connected that all 6 billion of us on the planet will play it.

It just … does she realize that a significant portion of the world doesn’t have food, let alone electricity, to play her theoretical Facebook game? Here are some facts from WorldVision: 840 million people in the world are hungry. 2.1 billion live on less than $2 a day, and 880 million live on less than $1 a day. 26 000 children die every day from preventable disease – that 9 million kids a year. Games are great and all, but damn, Nicole … the world has different priorities.

One of the concepts Nicole brought up in her talk played into another talk later in the day. She called it “fiero”, which may very well be an Italian sportscar or gelato flavour, but also describes the burning passion that fills your gut when you finally conquer a difficult challenge, after repeated failed attempts. Remember fiero – it’ll come up later in this article.

Creating Successful Social Games: Understanding Player Behaviour / Developing a Metric Mindset

Speaker Mark Skaggs from Zynga redeemed himself a tiny bit from his very tight-lipped panel at the Flash Gaming Summit on Monday. It’s almost as if GDC was important, and FGS was not, so he weighted most of his efforts to today’s talk. He came off snippy and a bit pompous, but it’s easy to think you’re awesome when you’re wearing underpants woven from the fibers of shredded hundred dollar bills.

The thrust of Mark’s talk compelled listeners to move toward a “metric mindset”. That means that instead of championing design decisions by making statements like “on my last game, we did it this way” or “i worked hard on this feature and i think players will love it,” or “i’m the boss, so we’ll do it my way,” you move toward a place where you say things like “what do the numbers tell us?” and “thank God we have these numbers!” His point was that numbers would essentially design your game for you.

Mark gave the example of a text link above the game cross-promoting their latest game MafiaFishTown, or whatever. The team thought that red was absolutely the right colour for the link, but they tested a bunch of colours, and found that pink was the best choice. That bit came up again in another talk, so remember that too! Keep reading to find out how this all comes together.

The biggest and most straight-forward take-away from this talk was Mark’s list of what to measure in your games:

1. How many people install?
2. How many people make it through the first 5 minutes/past the tutorial?
3. How many people are playing today?
4. Do players tell their friends?
5. Who’s coming back?
6. Who isn’t?
7. How much money do players spend in the game?
8. What do players enjoy doing?

Mark said that instead of trying to answer “what is fun?”, try answering “what do players enjoy doing?”

On the last point, Mark offered the example of Super Berries. The team already knew that players loved planting fast-growing strawberries, so they created a virtual item called SuperBerries. SuperBerries cost more than strawberries, but they gave a 3x return in half the time. The important point is that they chose a strawberry-like skin for the item instead of watermelons or blackberries, because the players liked strawberries. SuperBerries were incredibly successful.

Lunch

Lunch was sponsored by PlayHaven. Unfortunately, the best thing about this panel was the food. PlayHaven assembled a room and a panel filled with iPhone developers, lawyers, and assorted hangers-on. The panel questions and responses were far too basic for my taste … stuff about how to register your business, the 99 cent race to the bottom in the App Store, and the difference between copyright and trademark.

The one bit i think that was worth mentioning came from someone i noted as “bald guy” – i was too far in the back of the room to hear everybody’s names. (Bald Guy! If you’re reading this, please identify yourself!)

Bald Guy said that the only way you can make money in the App Store is to crack the top 100, and without smart marketing, the only way to do THAT is to spend $50k on AdMob inventory. So if it’s down to marketing, Bald Guy listed the following tools for getting the word out about your iPhone game outside the App Store:

1. Create a landing page (www.myAwesumiPhoneGame.com). You have a lot more control over it than you do over your game’s App Store page.
2. Use video (trailers, etc) to promote your game. 53% of visitors click on a video. Bald Guy claimed that having video doubles your conversion rate. (conversion to paid, not to Judaism)
3. Use PR firms. Lots of firms will do cheap grassroots campaigns for you. (Ryan’s counterpoint: don’t waste your money! The quality of the campaign you get out of these guys for chump change is just as easy to pull off yourself for free)
4. Involve bloggers, ScoreLoop, OpenFeint, etc.

Crushing the Overhead: Case Study of a Microstudio Start-up

Randy Smith from Tiger Style, creators of Spider, gave this talk. i’m not going to say too much about it, because it made no sense. He might as well have been up there saying “here’s how we made our game: first, i hit myself in the face with a hammer. Then, we made gumdrop shoes and drove a tank into four lighthouses. Finally, dishwasher passion fruit boomerang moustache.”

i was just mystified during the whole talk. Randy told us about how he got laid off from his job at EA and decided to make a game. He emailed a bunch of people to ask if they wanted to work on a game with him for free, and they said “yes”. He didn’t draw up any legal contracts, but wrote all the contracts himself. He gave everyone royalty points based on how many hours a week they pulled on the project. Some people did 2.5 hours a week. Everyone telecommuted. If something didn’t get done because people flaked out on him, he or his partner did it themselves. When the game turned a $300k+ profit, everyone got paid at the same rate – artists and programmers alike. Dishwasher passion fruit boomerang moustache. i left with my head spinning.

As long as i’m being contentious, i may as well take exception to something Randy said:

“We’re good business people, not evil try-to-get-rich business people.”

i hope Randy’s distinguishing here between trying to get rich, and trying to earn a living. i have a wife, two children, a mortgage, and a diabolical cocaine habit. i make no apologies for trying to be profitable in my bidness.

Little Hands, Foul Moods, and Runny Noses 3: Research for Developing Kid-Friendly Social Gaming Experiences

i saw Carla’s talk last year, and actually preferred it to this one. There was a bit of repeat here, like the term “prosocial”, which means “not being a dick.” It’s the concept of doing something for someone else even when you don’t profit. Carla offered a few interesting points about prosocial behaviour and gaming:

• Young people who play aggressive games (Face-Stabber 4: The Stabbening, etc) donate less than prosocial game players
• When presented with a story starter like “An old lady came to a crosswalk, and …” young adults who play prosocial games finish the story in prosocial ways, like “An old lady came to a crosswalk, and a kindly young gentleman helped her across the street”, instead of “An old lady came to a crosswalk, and bitch got FACE-STABBED, yo!!”

i admit i drifted off with most of Carla’s presentation … a lot of heavy slides came up with stuff like “kids between the ages of whatever and whatever like co-play in groups of like-gendered individuals, while kids of gendered play-co prosocial prefer harmonizing trade agreements passive repsonse play dishwasher passion fruit boomerang moustache.” There’s only so much GDC i can take.

Still, i hope to make it to Carla’s breakfast tomorrow morning, if only to brag about my four-year-old daughter, who can do a lot of the things that Carla said 4-year-olds can’t do during the session question period. Yes, there IS a great game that a parent and child can play together: Super Mario Galaxy. (Daddy does all the running and jumping while his little girl collects star bits with the second controller) Yes, 4-year-olds CAN understand asynchronous play – my daughter gets Fishville gifts from her Facebook friends all the time, and seems to grasp the concept.

Achievements Considered Harmful?

The most provocative and best talk of the day, and the one that the Nicole and Mark talks led up to, was this session by Chris Hecker. Chris C’d his A at the beginning of the talk by defensively pointing out that psychological studies are fallible, and went on to talk about research that suggests that rewarding people to do stuff is a bad idea.

To put it simply, if i give you a tchotchke for doing something – a gold star, an achievement, a paycheque – you’re less likely to be motivated to do that thing again. If you pay people to wear their seat belts, they’re less likely to wear their seat belts when they’re not being paid. If you reward people for trying new foods, they’re less likely to eat those foods again. If you praise or reward someone for doing a puzzle, he’s more likely to seek out a different activity than to continue doing the puzzle.

The researchers tested out all kinds of different types of rewards. Here are a few:

• tangible/symbolic (achievements, candy, money) vs. verbal
• expected vs. unexpected
• informational (“you killed 5 orcs”) vs controlling (“you killed 5 orcs, just as you ought to”)
• dull tasks vs. interesting tasks
• contingent (do this to get this) vs. non-contingent (do this, or not – you’ll be rewarded anyway)
• endogenous (read a book, get a book as a reward) vs. exogenous (read a book, get a dollar as a reward)

A meta-analysis of over 100-such tests on reward systems found that when you had an interesting (vs. dull) task that was rewarded with something tangible, expected, and contingent (like XBox Achievements, or many other reward systems we use in gaming), you reduced intrinsic meaning (giving a f*ck).

However, for an interesting task where the reward was verbal, informational, and unexpected (Hey! You killed 5 orcs!) free choice increased, and subjects self-reported higher instances of giving a f*ck.

He also mentioned that this not giving a f*ck effect has a larger impact on females than it does males.

Hecker took on Jesse Schell’s oft-blogged talk from DICE 2010, where he imagined a world where everything around you gave you points – your toothbrush gave you points for brushing, the government gave you points or money for raising your kids well, etc. Hecker suggested that Schell and two other respected colleagues were talking out of their collective asses, because they haven’t looked at the research, which says (among other things) that when you pay a kid for getting good grades, the kid’s grades subsequently drop. Fascinating stuff!

And in the climax of his presentation, Hecker took a juicy bite out of Zynga. i paraphrase:

If you’re intentionally making dull games with extrinsically motivating factors (rewards) to separate people from their money, i pity you.

i really enjoyed this talk because it was thought-provoking and controversial. Hecker didn’t declare himself right, but he made a compelling case based on the evidence. i got into a conversation during the question period with another small studio head, who lined up to ask the same question i did: if rewards demotivate women more than men, why does Farmville seem to be doing so well with such a large female audience? (i found his answer unsatisfying, to the point where i honestly can’t even remember it!)

The other dev and i went over a pile of cases where the research didn’t bear out: he remembers going to the arcade and practicing Dance Dance Revolution until he could get a Perfect rating on most of the songs on a high difficulty level. Remembering that earlier session, i told him that he was experiencing fiero when he overcame those challenges, which is part of Nicole’s “Serious Fun” quadrant.

The session provided a lot of food for thought, but there were too many DDR anecdotes and exceptions to take the research results as gospel. Still, it helped me cook up a never-before-seen style of reward that i’m excited to pioneer in Spellirium! i’ll leave it on that mysterious note.

The Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards

Lots of great games, lots of worthy award-winners … a big sweep by Naughty Dog for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves. i left mid-way through Gabe Newell’s speech (he heads Valve), because i had to pee and i was kinda bored.

Let me just mention that Farmville won the award in the new Social Gaming category, and that absolutely had to happen. Farmville will go down in gaming history as the first social game to make people stand up and take notice of these new social play mechanics. The guy who accepted the award (didn’t recognize him – anyone know?) gave a very defensive, almost hostile speech, goading the largely triple-A console audience to come fill the over 200 job postings at Zynga. He drew at least one “boo” from where i was sitting. The speech was a bit tense. There was only polite applause when Zynga was announced the winner.

People will say bad things about you when they feel you’ve been very successful (financially or otherwise) and they feel you don’t deserve it. i can’t tell if the many, many Zynga opponents take issue with the exploitative, addictive and manipulative nature of the company’s games, or whether they’re simply jealous? Before Zynga came along and struck gold, we were all talking about how to make games more sticky and addictive. When Zynga finally pulled it off and made a game that was ACTUALLY ADDICTIVE, everyone started shaking their fists. For years, developers have been making games that make players fat, that make them aggressive, and that make them anti-social. Let’s face it, folks: the track record for the games indudstry has not been jam-packed with redeeming qualities. It’s just in the past few years that i’ve seen people really start talking about games for the Greater Good. i feel it’s untoward for the industry to shake torches and pitchforks at the monster they themselves helped to create.

How to Manage an Exploratory Development Process

Speakers:
Robin Hunicke and Kellie Santiago from That Game Company (Flower)

This talk had the potential for greatness, but the speakers fell down when it came to providing concrete examples to illustrate what they were saying. The whole talk was given from a very vague, 50 000-foot-level, and i wanted some more blood n’ guts to make the material more relatable.

Robin and Kellie were talking about how the video game industry is a very stressful place, and how team members can end up hating each other, hating the project, and suffering anxiety and nightmares needlessly. The talk was part scrum advocacy, part therapy advocacy. (Don’t know what scrum is? Neither did i, until i had lunch with an expert! See below for more.)

Here are a few points of interest i jotted down:

• Robin – “We don’t have to burn ourselves out, starve, or suffer to create fantastic works of interactive art.”
• When team conflicts arise, the impulse is to say “i’ll just do it” or “i can’t seem weak”
• It’s easy to dismiss someone else’s ideas when you have to build them. That’s why it’s important for your whole team to have ownership of the whole project (another scrum/agile concept)
• If you iterate, you will chuck stuff. And that’s not a bad thing.
• Robin – “Not everyone who gives you money is stupid.” Me – “HAHAHAHA!” She was talking about how keeping constant, open and honest communication with your funder or publisher makes for a better relationship and less anxiety
• Estimates are fake
• When something takes longer than you thought it would, the conversation you have with the publisher/funder doesn’t have to be plagued by shame and guilt. “You don’t have to wear a hairshirt during that conversation.”

Here were the (relatively few) takeaways the speakers provided:

• Put up a big board for your team with a calendar on it. Add blobs to the calendar across different game dev disciplines and buckets (development, infrastructure, marketing). Massage frequently.
• Keep a task board between sprints (2-week development periods), listing team members’ names across the top, and the tasks they need to complete under their names
• Write a private game dev diary. The more you do these, the more you’ll realize that the problems you have on one project are the problems you have on ALL projects – use this knowledge to help you anticipate and navigate problem situations in the future

Robin is formerly of EA, and you could tell from the talk that she’s been through monstrously stressful projects, and game teams with huge egos on them. The thing i found really interesting is that i couldn’t ignore the fact that the speakers were both women, and that the talk itself was very chicky. i started writing down the most repeated words in the presentation: stuff, concerns, thing, worries, communication, anxiety, guilt, conversation, open. Very touchy-feely Dr Phil stuff. That’s not a bad thing necessarily … it just struck me that i would probably never, EVER hear the same talk coming from male presenters.

When people repeat, to my dismay, that there need to be more women/black people/Down syndrome people (or whatever) in the game industry, so that other voices can be heard, this must be what they mean. i’m fine with having more women in the industry as long as they’re smart, with-it and (dare i say?) worthy women like the two presenters. i get my back up when people try to stack teams based on some minority bingo card, as i’ve said before. The talent and ability has to be there. More on that later, when Robin takes to the stage during the indie rant.

Also, i’ve said it before but i’ll say it again: Robin has the best hair in the industry. Sleek, red, and awesomazing.

Ninjabee’s Top 10 Development Lessons

Next up was Brent Fox, who does NOT have the best hair in the industry (sorry, Brent). Brent was a decent speaker, and kudos to him for breaking his talk down into a nice bite-sized list of ten items. Seems to be the only way to get people to read your blog – bullet points and countdowns. Perhaps it’s also becoming the only way to keep people awake during your PowerPoint question.

i won’t list all of Brent’s ten points, because many of them were pedestrian and uninteresting (again – sorry, Brent!) These are the ones that held my interest:

#10. DLC Doesn’t make any money. Brent bemoaned the fact that Ninjabee’s downloadable content for games like Outpost Kaloki X and Band of Bugs didn’t sell well. He later added the exception to the rule: A Kingdom for Keflings had add-ons that sold very well. His conclusion: DLC is worth it if the game is very popular.

i asked him at the end of the talk whether he’d measured the sales of DLC against how many people had finished the game. i didn’t buy Outpost DLC because i didn’t come anywhere near to finishing the main game. i did, however, finish Keflings, and would be far more likely to buy an expansion for it. To my sheer amazement, after hearing Zynga and the other Facebook devs drone on about how important it was to collect and measure player data, Brent admitted that he had no idea what the correlation between finishing players and sold DLC was. Shocking!

#6. A picture is worth a million dollars. If someone says “You can show me a demo with no graphics and i can look past it”, he’s lying. (i wholeheartedly agree here – pretty pictures are CRUCIAL.) He gave an example where his team had mocked up an example of avatar placement in Keflings, and the feeling from the publisher was sort of like “oh – of course they can do it. They’ve got a picture to prove it!”

#5. XBLA is hit-driven (no surprises there). He did say, though, that on the list of the top games for XML, the gap between the sales figures for the games on page 2 and the games on page 8 isn’t significant … but the gap between the games on page 1 and the games on page 2 is immense.

Brent ended his talk by quoting EA’s CEO, who claimed that in the next year (ONE year!), sales from digital downloads would overtake console numbers. Sacre le crap!

Why Do People Buy Virtual Goods? Ten Attributes to Influence Desirability

Speaker Vili Lehdonvirta from the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology is an unnervingly calm, almost robotic speaker. i found him very listenable … if only because i was worried that if i didn’t listen, he’d melt my face with his laser eyes. i didn’t get a single thing out of Vili’s talk, because i knew it all already. Drag.

If you don’t know it all, here are ten factors affecting the desirability of virtual goods as they relate primarily to virtual worlds and MMOs:

1. Performance (+2 sword, +4 sword)
2. Functionality (items that save the player time, like warp gates or loot pets)
3. Visuals and sounds
4. Background fiction (he gave the example of a ring you could get that belonged to a very popular NPC in the game – it’s the same as when people buy Elvis’s underwear)
5. Provenance – the item might have history attached to it (eg a famous player owned it in the past, or a certain item was only given out during an exclusive promotion)
6. customizability
7. Cultural References (ie holiday-themed items)
8. Licensed Items (Nestle Chocobot Power Hour hats)
9. Rarity (he gave the example of an Ultima Online item, horse dung, that did not propagate in the game world. Players realized the stuff was precious and rare, so they started hanging it on their walls as an elite status symbol. Horse dung.
10. Prince. The super-expensive item that you sell to a player as a status symbol.

Getting a Free Phone

After those sessions, and just before lunch, i picked up my free Nexus One phone courtesy of Google. Thanks, Google! That’s super.

Lunch

i had lunch with three great guys – Joe, who you may know on Twitter as @retrogamer4ever, Shane and Vince. It was then that i brought up Robin’s talk, and Shane exploded with a passionate hour-long diatribe about the wonders of scrum development, with Vince chiming in every so often with a “what what!” and “daaaamn!”

i hadn’t paid much attention to scrum, and only kind of knew what it was. Or so i thought. i learned so much more from Shane during lunch. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Traditionally, when you make video games, you use the waterfall method. You write a game design document describing the entire game, you break it up into tasks, and you build the game. The final game MUST keep referring back to this increasingly ancient GDD, and there is very little room for iteration (changing the game little by little on the fly in response to playtesting, new ideas, etc)

Agile development philosophy aims to solve a number of problems that waterfall causes. Scrum is one way to implement Agile concepts. Here’s how you develop a game using scrum:

1. Cook up the KINDS of things you need to build. The whole team meets and decides how much effort something will take to complete. Not how much TIME … how much effort. You assign effort points to tasks. So if you’re talking about a programming system, the programmer talks about what’s involved in implementing it, and the TEAM decides how much effort it’ll take. Not the programmer – the whole team. The aim here is to get everyone owning the project. As Robin said earlier in the day, it’s easier to disregard someone else’s input if you don’t own it, but are just building it.
2. The whole team works towards a sprint. At the end of a 2-week run, the game will be finished. The whole team works towards a common goal: a build of the game. It’s not feature-complete or necessarily awesome, but it’s a working (if stunted) version of the game. The benefit here is that you always have a working, playable version of the game. Vince and Shane told us about the different public humiliation tactics they’ve employed to shame a team member if he let everyone down by breaking the build.
3. Within a sprint, the team members review their assumptions every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
4. Repeat this process every two weeks until the game is done, or the money runs out and the Earth crashes into the sun.

There’s way more to it than that, but that’s a primer. It’s the primer i would have wanted when i was trying to casually understand what scrum was.

The Convergence of Flash Portals and Social Games

* view the slides here! *

It’s no secret: i have a total man-crush on Dan Cook. It was a thrill to meet him in person, and his talk was typical Dan Cook – whip-smart, on the money, relevant and kickass.

Dan’s talk was on the Flash game industry – the devs, the portals, the middle-men, and the incredible opportunity for developers in that space. i have a hunch that most of you reading this blog know most of what Dan was saying, but the way he said it and the slides he’d put together had me riveted to his talk, even though i knew most of what he was saying beforehand.

At the end of his talk, Dan painted a very bleak picture of the Flash games industry, one where ongoing consolidation leads to big, unstoppable companies, and Flash developers serve at the behest of their new overlords. He’s totally right – that’s already happening. But then he started channeling Karl Marx and Sun Tzu, preaching that workers (Flash devs) must own the mode of production, or build their castles on less crowded hills. His advice: be platform-agnostic. Don’t be a Flash developer or an iPhone developer or an Android developer. Be an octopus. Constantly dip your tentacles into many different buckets, pulling out new players and audience members on a variety of platforms, so that you don’t become beholden to the powers that will eventually control any particular platform, given enough time.

My thoughts, of course, immediately went to Untold Entertainment’s site masthead: “We make Flash games.” i hate that credo, but it’s true. i am dying to develop something on a different platform so that i can finally change it, but for now i gotta call a spade a spade.

i love you, Dan Cook. Please have my man-babies.

From Casual to Social: What to Pack

Unfortunately, this talk was at the bottom of the heap for me. Presenter Jeferson Valaderes from Playfish spoke too quickly, in a rapid-fire South American (?) accent. Everything he said sounded like a throw-away. His slides were almost incomprehensible. Ugh. It was just a really, really bad session. The conference volunteer kept bringing him cup after cup of water during his presentation, as if hoping that if he took a sip, he’d magically start being interesting and relevant. Alas, water only keeps you alive. It does not keep you alive and bearable.

Indie Gamemaker Rant!

This series of 5-minute talks from various indies in the increasingly upsetting indie Old Boys Club was hit and miss. Here are a few things that jumped out at me:

Tommy Refenes pulled kind a dick move in his rant about the app store by implying that Adam Saltsman “got lucky” with Canabalt. If i were Adam, i can’t imagine i’d feel good about that. And if i were Adam, i imagine i’d have enough money from Wurdle by now to buy myself a Tommy Refenes-skin rug.

Anyway, Tommy ran a really interesting experiment. He put a game called Zits n’ Giggles in the App Store and didn’t make any money from it. So he jacked the price up to $15, and three people bought it. Then he jacked the price up to $50, and four people bought it. So he decided to keep jacking up the price as long as it kept selling. Fourteen people bought it on Valentine’s Day for $199 a pop. The game currently sells for $350.

He did this to illustrate why he thinks the App Store is a joke, filled with uneducated consumers. It’s hard to argue with him, but his elitist attitude and opening complaint that it’s too hard to beat Mega Man 2 on the iPhone betrays a very close-minded, old-school mentality that implies that games and systems are only valid or valuable if they have traditional controls, and if their games are called Mega Man 2.

Robin Hunicke will be happy to know that her rant tipped me from being a staunch opponent of affirmative action, to someone who now sees the benefit of having a sexually and racially diverse game development team. It’s hard to say what did it: it was either her mesmerizing red hair, or the science she provided that showed that teams are more productive, creative, and effective when they are diversified.

i have a big chip on my shoulder about affirmative action and women in the games industry, because i come from an office where the management layer was suspiciously stacked with women, and the worker bees were almost all men, and a certain degree of nepotism and unfair hiring kept it that way. Many of the women in the management layer weren’t worthy of the jobs they held, in my opinion, and it was hard to get excited about women in the workplace when i was surrounded by so many women who shouldn’t have been there.

Since then, i’ve met many more women who don’t get it, and who have their jobs because they’re women, and that really gets my back up. But i have met a few women who are savvy and smart and really knowledgeable, and i’m very happy they’re here.

Robin talked about a concept called signaling threat, which is where you’re surrounded by people who are all cut from the same cloth (white men … or heck, even black women with green hats), and the imbalance makes you want to run like hell, or stay with all your defenses cranked way up. i think that i actually experienced signaling threat at that old job by being surrounded by those women, so i totally buy the case for diversity now. i’m about to put together a team for Spellirium, so i’ll definitely keep Robin’s rant in mind.

Journalist Brendan Boyer’s claim was that “Seanbaby has ruined video game journalism for an entire generation.” Seanbaby is an initially funny, but ultimately caustic commenter who had a stint on IGN, and who Brendan blames for poisoning game journalism by making every game insight flippant and rude. He called for 2010 to be “the year we sunk snark.” The point would be hard to argue, if Brendan wasn’t such an ass-grabbing tard-monkey.

Anna Anthropy called for video games to have more personal stories. “i’m tired of male fantasy wish fulfillment and saving the world.” i was later informed that Anna was a pre-op transgender – another case of a different viewpoint enriching the dialogue. Spellirium actually aims to do what Anna is talking about – the story will completely deconstruct the same tired save-the-world, you-are-the-most-imporant-person-on-the-planet arc that so many video games follow relentlessly.

In Anna’s stack of rants, she also made the bold claim that the term “Indie” is no good, and that it is increasingly exclusionary. i completely know where she’s coming from, and will give specifics of indie snobbery in my GDC wrap-up later this week.

The first two days of the show are Summits days, with clusters of panels and talks in certain narrow or niche segments of the industry. This year, the casual games and virtual worlds summits were combined and enhanced to form the Social & Online Games Summit. There was also an iPhone summit (which last year was called the Mobile Games Summit … telling?), the AI (Artificial Intelligence) Summit, and the Let Me Tell You Summit, which was for British people.

Generally, i was disappointed. This is the fourth year i’ve been at the show, and i almost worry i’m getting too smart for GDC. I don’t want that to sound pompous … i’m just wondering if, having spent an entire year reading and researching, following excellent Twitter posters like @retrogamer4ever, and cramming so much stuff into my brain, that i’ve outpaced the more general-interest tone of the conference?

It’s also … this is kind of weird, but i think it’s valid … the few Indie Games Summit talks i attended are in a cavernous and very dimly-lit room, as opposed to last year’s brighter, cheerier room. The mood in the place is almost ominous or sombre. But i could very well be crazy.

Click on the headers that interest you to read more about the sessions i attended!

Meeting with Push Button Labs

The State of Social Gaming: Industry Overview and Update

From Big Studio to Small Indie: Guerilla Tactics from Hello Games

Postmortem: The Design & Business Behind Fantastic Contraption

Standing in Line for a Free Phone

Rapidly Developing Farmville: How We Created and Scaled a #1 Facebook Game in 5 Weeks

i’m hoping there’s more in it for me during tomorrow’s Summit day. Wednesday also culminates in the Canada Games party – your tax dollars hard at work. It’s there that Canadian game devs can get industry folks liquored up and ready to shake on some deals, and/or eat poutine. i, for one, will be there for the poutine.

… for ONE WEEK ONLY, while we take in the Flash Gaming Summit and the Game Developers Conference 2010 in San Francisco!!

Lost in La Mancha

This will be my fourth year at GDC, and my first time to the now sophomoric Flash Gaming Summit. i tried to hit the FGS after-party last year, but somehow had a REALLY wrong address. i arrived in San Francisco from Toronto after a 5 hour flight, dropped my bags at the hotel, and jumped in a cab for what i thought was the FGS venue. The place was so far-flung that the cab ride cost me twenty buckaroos, which is what Americans call their money. After wandering around for an hour in a bad part of town, asking people to help me find a bar that had apparently shut down the year before, i gave up and took a second twenty buckaroo cab ride back to my hotel.

Another glance at my notes, and i realized that the venue was actually a block from my hotel.

i hiked three minutes to the place, and everything was shutting down. There were angry-looking men with thick eyebrows unstapling signs that read “Best Conference Evar”. The floor was littered with wilting confetti. In a distant corner of the room, a sad-faced circus clown was cutting himself. i had missed it.

i managed to tag along with a rowdy group of devs who had overstayed their welcome, and we had a decent meal together at a nearby diner. There, the regaled me with tales of what i had missed: free Flash pants for all attendees, a special preview version of CS4 that didn’t crash every five minutes, and an exciting round of ultimate fighting-style mixed martial arts between MochiMedia and GamerSafe, during which Mochi’s sr. staffer Jameson Hsu lost an arm. It had been AWESOME.

So, protip: always check your notes before you leave the hotel and hallucinate some random address in the barrio that’s a 20 buckaroo cab ride away. Write that down.

Let’s Be Temporary Friends!

If you’re reading this and i follow you on Twitter, or if we’ve talked on LinkedIn or Facebook or some other site, please let’s shake hands and have a chat. Very few people put pictures of themselves online, so i know you all as “that guy with the dog in a party hat avatar” or “that lady with the posterized picture of her three-year-old as her avatar.” If i put a human face to your ridiculous social media handle, i’ll be more apt to treat you like a human, rather than … well, rather than a dog in a party hat.

(All this from the guy with a red monster doodle for an avatar)

If you’re looking for me in San Francisco this week, this is what i look like, plus or minus five pounds:

i’m the one in the picture who isn’t a monster.

…

Er … to be more specific, i’m the white guy with the dark eyebrows.

Vengeance is Yours

If i’ve publicly berated you for running a crappy college video game program or stealing your game graphics from Star Wars or controlling your microtransaction service like you’re the mafia, this is your chance to shank me, prison style, in real life. Don’t blow it!

As i did with last year’s GDC, i’ll write some articles reporting on what i did, who i met, and what i learned, so that you can save yourself the buckaroos and learn the same amount from the comfort of your Fat Chair. After i get back, i have a few weeks to finish some service projects before diving into a new original Untold Entertainment game, with the help of grant and refund money from the OMDC and the SR&ED.

i don’t know much about acronyms, but i do know what i like.

UUG

This is last call to buy tickets for the Toronto Unity Users Group, which runs tonight at the Gladstone Hotel. Here are some fast facts about Unity 3D to refresh your memory:

1. The game engine has been around for a number of years, but the recent port to the PC and the price reduction to FREE has garnered a boatload of attention.
2. It’s kinda like Flash, except it uses 3D graphics, and it’s actually tuned to make games. So instead of bending it to your steely will as Flash requires by adding 3rd-party physics, for example, Unity comes with many crucial game features right out of the box.
3. There is a world of opportunity in marketing for folks that can use Unity. Unity 3D games can be played directly in the browser. Advertisers looking for something shiny and new (“new”) will be plenty impressed by the technology.
4. Can’t do 3D? If you live in Ontario, there’s plenty of under-utilized, inexpensive talent coming out of the colleges and universities. It seems every school has at least one 3D art program, but the demand for these graduates is rock-bottom in the province.

Here’s an example of what Unity 3D can do in skilled hands:

MUG

On Wednesday, there’s a double-shot of Unity goodness. There’s a half-day workshop at George Brown College. After that, i expect most of the participants will pub crawl a few blocks over to Kensington Market, where the Rich Media Institute is holding the monthly Mobile Users Group for Games and Apps. They’ll be talking about (among other things) the u3dobject framework, which enables you to communicate between Flash and Unity.

When i read the MUG description, i was worried that it stepped on the UUG workshop. Then when i read about the content of the meeting, i was really concerned – not only was it stepping on the other event, but it was about Unity 3D! As it turns out, one event begins as the other ends. i know that the UUG organizers, DimeRocker, had met with Shawn Pucknell at the Rich Media Institute, so i’m glad that everyone is playing nicely together.

Streaming Colour Studios’ Owen Goss is a regular at the event. Here’s his latest vblog developer episode:

No Elbow Room

It wasn’t the case last week, when the Vortex Game Competition ran concurrently on top of the DIG London conference, which split a few loyalties. But as anyone who’s tried to organize a Christmas party in December can tell you, sometimes there are just no openings. Other times, the event has to happen because it’s reliant on a funding schedule – that was the case two years ago when interactive ontario’s GameON: Finance conference ran the week before GDC in San Francisco.

i am THRILLED that gaming is so red-hot in Ontario that the calendar is so packed with events. i sincerely hope that we all stay well-connected enough so that there’s enough breathing room in the schedule to give everyone a break. If you’re running a game-related event in Ontario, please check the calendar first to ensure that you’re not encroaching on another initiative. And if you know of any game-related events – in Ontario or abroad – that should be on the calendar, please feel free to add it to our events page and we’ll update the calendar PDQ.

If you’re a Flash game developer, you’re in at the ground floor of a new service: payment systems for Flash games. These systems make it easier for game developers to charge money both for their games, and for things within their games. Here’s how it works:

1. Player pays real money to buy fake money through one of these systems.
2. Player spends fake money on virtual stuff. As a game dev, you can technically charge for whatever you like: level packs, hats, extended versions/director’s cuts, etc etc. The sky’s the limit.

It’s So Workable, It Just Might Work

i’ve been following the microtransaction model for a number of years. It’s been crazy popular in places like Korea for a good long time, and it was amusing to see the initial resistance and resentment in North America to the idea. Panels at the Game Developers Conference were filled with folks nibbling their fingernails and asking “Will it really work over here?” and “Won’t players be angry with us?”, with at least a few devs boldly insisting that micropayments are strictly a Southeast Asian cultural anomaly, and the system won’t work here. Meanwhile, in the other room at the Worlds in Motion (virtual worlds) summit, early North American pioneers of those systems were running panels titled “Can You Believe We’re Making All This Money?” and “Who Wants a House? Cuz I’ve Got a Bunch of Em”.

Of course, virtual currency systems do work here, as evidenced by Microsoft’s successes with its GamerPoints (AKA “BillyBucks”), enabling the creators of Rock Band and others to pocket obscene amounts of cash in dribs and drabs for virtual whatsits. Microsoft’s new fall Xbox 360 seems to exist only to take more money from people in the form of digital doodads for their avatars. Proprietary systems have been rolled out in numerous other games and portals, including Three Rings (OOO) Puzzle Pirates with its dual-currency system, and the WildTangent game portal, where players can spend virtual coins to “rent” games. But no one has thought to capitalize on the literal kerfillions of players in the Flash casual games space. Until now.

There are three companies i’m aware of who are rolling out virtual payment systems for Flash games: MochiMedia, GamerSafe and HeyZap. Please let me know if there are others. They all work roughly the same way: pay real money for fake money, and spend fake money for fake things in fake games for real thrills. One of the key take-aways for me from GDC 07, by the folks running the “Seriously. My Pants Are Woven From Hundred Dollar Bills” panel, was this: do whatever it takes to enable your players to give you money.

What they meant was that you should provide as many payment methods as possible if you want to take as much money as possible from your players. This came up in the context of the myriad wild and wooly ways that Europeans pay for things online. (The French, for example, pay by cheque. True story.) The speakers advocated pay-by-phone, PayPal, credit cards, debit cards, SMS, and a number of crazy payment methods i’d never even heard of. (Pay with your own hair? What the heck is that about?)

Untold Entertainment Enters the Fray

So here we are, poised to release a few games in the no-longer-free-to-play ecosystem. These are early days, and i have no idea which microtransaction system will take the biggest piece of the pie: MochiCoins, GamerSafe or HeyZap. And frankly, i don’t care. Why should i have to choose between them? Here’s what i want to do:

ME: Hey Player! Wouldn’t this game be more fun if your character was wearing SexyPants??

BUTTON: Hell yes!

ME: Great! A pair of SexyPants will cost you 95 cents.

BUTTON: Pay via HeyZap!
BUTTON: Pay with GamerGold!
BUTTON: Pay with MochiCoins!

Sounds good, right? i’m not shutting anyone out. i’m not preventing the GamerGold folks from buying SexyPants. i don’t particularly care which system the player supports – i just want to take his money.

However

The scenario i described above can’t happen at present, because MochiMedia has written into their terms of service that devs shall not hook multiple transaction systems into their games. GamerSafe and HeyZap have not made this stipulation. So i can have a game that either allows MochiCoin payments exclusively, or i can have a game that allows for GamerSafe and HeyZap payments. And that, in my professional opinion, stinks.

This type of exlusivity is NOT analgous to going into a restaurant and ordering a Coke, and the waitress says “Is Pepsi okay?” because the restaurant has an exclusive arrangement with PepsiCo. No – this is much more like eating your meal (Coke or Pepsi nothwithstanding), and trying to pay with your VISA card, but the restaurant only takes MasterCard and American Express. If i walk into a store and they don’t make it convenient for me to pay with a commonly accepted system, i walk out of that store and i don’t come back … but not before i punch someone right in the face, because that’s how angry it makes me.

Three Facts About Payment System Exclusivity

MochiMedia’s exclusivity clause is not good for developers. We want to lower the barrier to entry for our players, especially since getting people to buy goods in the formerly-free-to-play space is already an uphill battle.

MochiMedia’s exclusivity clause is not good for players. It’s forcing players to wait until a clear winner emerges in the Flash virtual goods space. Why would i sink my money into GamerGold only to find that every single game supports HeyZap or MochiCoins? i’d better play it safe and let early adopters figure it out for me. When a leader emerges, i’ll start spending my money.

No, Mochi’s exclusivity clause is only good for Mochi. It’s a clear attempt to be the only game in town, and to monopolize this service in its infancy. And we all know what happens with monopolies, don’t we? You end up rolling a “3″ and landing on Park Place with a hotel, and then you get reamed up the pucker.

Thankfully, it’s still early enough in the make your voice heard about how this stuff will work. If you think Mochi should play nicely with others, why not toss them an email here?

team@mochimedia.com

Or, if you think they’re making the right decision, give them a call and let them know:

(415) 680-3740

Or, you can just voice your opinions in a comment on this blog and bathe me in sweet, delicious Internet traffic.

For my part, i believe they’re hurting players and devs right out of the gate in an early, unnecessary bid for domination. Given the choice, i’d rather support two systems than one – HeyZap and GamerSafe. Ideally, i want to support all three, along with any other system that enters the space. So i’m making a public appeal to you, Team Mochi, to rethink your policy. i’ll even use your first and last names here so that your Google vanity searches will bring you to this article.

On George Garrick! On Jameson Hsu! on Bob Ippolito! On Vixen!
On Comet! On Cupid! On Justin Wong! On Eric Boyd!
To the top of the porch! To the top of the stair!
Renounce this proviso, and please grow a pair!

Here, then, are the ideas and buzz words that jumped out at me and grabbed me by the throat while i wandered innocently through the conference floor forest.

iPhone, iPhone, iPhone

No big suprise here. i’ve briefly attended – and ran screaming from – the Mobile Games Summit in previous years. Mobile has always struck me as a terrible business model and a very unattractive space to be in. The whole reason i jumped into Flash over web design was because i couldn’t stand the lack of standards: you had to test for different browsers at different screen resolutions, and (back then) different colour modes and different operating systems. It would have made me old before my time. Ditto mobile: one game might be built for and tested on sixty different handsets, and there was no guarantee the carrier would even pick up the title.

But here comes iPhone, and finally something is standardized. The iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPod Touch and iPod Touch Second Generation all have the same screen specs. The earlier devices may struggle to keep up with a framerate that the 3G and Generation 2 handhelds enjoy, but at least it’s all the same code base and we’re all on the same page.

As with IN09, people could not shaddup about the iPhone at GDC. There came the frequent warning that “it’s a very crowded marketplace” and “it’s hard for your app to get noticed in a sea of software”, but those tired cautions were a lot like “you’ll shoot your eye out” to a crowd of rabid and salivating fans of the Red Ryder 3G Carbine Action iPhone BB Gun 200 GB Range Model Portable with a compass in the stock and thing which tells time.

Outsourcing Gameplay to India

i didn’t attend the Worlds in Motion summit this year, but i imagine the sessions were either a deserted ghost town, or they played host to a room packed full of angry people wondering how to get their million dollar investments back ever since their Club Webpenguiz clones crashed and burned. i can’t verify if the idea came out of a WIM session because i heard it second-hand, but here it is:

What do you do if you build a virtual world and no one comes? People who jump in are going to bounce right back out once they see that the place is empty. You need an established player base to give you traction so that people who join the game will see a lively community and stick around.

So, you pay India to play your game. That’s right: hire Indians for a month to populate your game so that new people see a thriving community and decide to hang out. i thought this was a brilliant idea. Just make sure to filter “paneer” and “aloo gobi” out of the chat window – otherwise, your legitimate players may suspect a ruse.

Digital Distribution

It could have been due to the fact that i spent my first few conference days at the Indie Games Summit, but i heard the term “digital distribution” bandied about a LOT. Digital distribution, where players download their entertainment from services like Steam, Xbox Live Arcade, NetFlix, the Playstation Network, and PopCap, instead of buying it in a brick-and-mortar store, has been an enormous boon to indie developers. Now, for perhaps the first time since the heyday of the Atari 2600, developers can assemble a team of as few as one dude in a rat-infested basement with a limp who is paralyzed from the neck down and makes video games with his mouth, instead of signing a contract with an evil video game publisher, who eats babies and performs ritualistic sacrifices involving game developers’ hearts and very sharp and scary knify things.

i heard digital distribution being attributed to everything from the death of phyiscal disc media (to wit, “Blu Ray will be the last physical disc medium”) to the real Second Coming, where digital distribution pushes Jesus off a cloud and plays professional wrestling-style entrance music instead of trumpet-song. HOO YEAH!! Digital Distribution, bitches!! Can you HANDLE IT?? RrrrrAAAAAAwwwwRRR guitar guitar guitar noodly noodly fooOOOM zhONGGGGG!!! Cymbal crash!!

i even heard that someone was spouting crazytalk nonsense about how the console manufacturers would be dethroned because they were developing a cloud-computing solution where players wouldn’t even use digital distribution – they’d just play their games on the video game company’s server, no console required. (post-blog note: the product is called “OnLive”. God bless you, Raph Koster)

Not to be outdone, some other dude said that he was working on a solution where people would just have to think about playing a game and it would happen right inside their heads. He called it “imagination.”

OK – yes. Yes, i did make that last part up. But the first two bits are accurate. Except for the Jesus thing. Hell – i dunno. Buy your own damned conference ticket next year if you don’t believe me.

Pipeline

For the longest time, i’ve ignored the term “pipeline” because i always thought it applied to larger studios with seventeen guys all working on a single graphic asset, who need some complex asset management software and productivity charting so that they could draw a single enemy’s dragon claw by committee and no one would overwrite everything. i was wrong. “Pipeline” is just a trumped up term for “the way you get stuff done”. A “good pipeline” is one where you use tools to get stuff done quickly, and you don’t waste any money if you can help it. A “bad pipeline” – the kind i’ve most often experienced – is one where all of your developers work in complete isolation, and they re-invent the wheel on every project because you’re working them too hard to stop and take a breath and review inefficiencies.

So here’s an example of how a scary word like “pipeline” breaks down for your game project: Nathan Vella of Capybara games told me about how his shop writes a bunch of JSFL (Javascript) routines in Photoshop to speed up mundane chores like sizing, cropping, and downsampling images. See? Not so scary. Just pick something that you’re not doing optimally, find a method or a tool to fix it, and implement the fix. Now you’re improving your pipeline, and you can sound all awesome too.

Unity

A few months ago, i met with some folks from Argentina’s QB9 and Three Melons game companies. Three Melons raved on an on about Unity, a game engine that allowed for 3D games in the browser with a reasonably-sized plugin. i had heard about Unity at least a year earlier, when it was in its infancy along with other 3D browser programs like Virtools. Unity’s been picking up major buzz the whole time, and i think this GDC is where it’s completely exploded. The Unity folks have created an add-on that enables publishing to the iPhone, on top of its web publishing capabilities. Some well-known games have been made with Unity, including indie hit Off-Road Velociraptor Safari, current iPhone champ Zombieville USA, and the company’s biggest coup: Cartoon Network’s multi-hundreds of dollars kids’ MMO FusionFall, which now has over 3 million reigstered users.

Here’s what my gut says: thanks to its bad reputation for crummy content and the audience expectation that anything created with it should be free, Flash is on the wane. And i’m saying that as a Flash developer who has never, ever built a game in any other program ever. But hear me: Flash out, Unity in. We’ll be buying our licenses at Untold Entertainment within the week.

Long Tail

The term “long tail” describes the practice of selling little things over a long period of time, rather than “plummeting cascade” (note: not a real term), which is where you have one big hit-based expensive thing, and the sales chart looks like a doodle of Niagara falls – item sales peak in the first chunk of time, and drop precipitously ever after. i mention “long tail” much the same way i’ll walk up to strangers and hum “Muskrat Love” until they get it stuck in their heads: i am sick to death of hearing it, and i hope some analyst coins another BS Bingo term so that folks can latch onto it and beat it to death.

As i mentioned in my GDC prep post, the homeless and professional panhandling community in San Francisco is vibrant, prolific, and creative. While most Toronto panhandlers will sit all day with a Tim Horton’s coffee cup in front of them, the San Fran people (mostly men, interestingly) really work for every penny they get. Here are a few of the gimmicks i noticed walking around downtown. Toronto folks, take note!

Funny Sign

The funny sign is nothing new, and it’s been in Toronto for a while. i notice it started with younger panhandlers using messages like “need money for weed” and “let’s face it: i just want a beer”. Slowly but surely, the more senior guys started using humour in their signs. But as Chris Rock says, “if a homeless guy has a funny sign, he hasn’t been homeless very long.”

Tour Guide

Any city with a strong tourist industry can benefit from panhandlers pointing people to where they need to go. i actually think this is a great relationship: the panhandler provides the customer with a needed service, and earns money for that service. Kinda the way a real business works. (Imagine!) It didn’t work out so well for one guy i saw in San Francisco who, after many attempts so sell himself as a tour guide with a free hotel map in his hand, eventually charged off yelling “eff this city! EFF this place! Nobody wants directions! i can’t BELIEVE this place!” i think his heart was in the right place, but he could have worked harder on his image to appear more approachable.

Dog, Cat, Rat

This one is my new favourite. i saw a man with three animals: a dog, a cat, and a rat. The dog was curled up on the sidewalk. The cat was curled up on top of the dog. And the rat was draped over the cat, like the cherry on a domestic animal sundae. The guy drew quite a crowd of people taking pictures, pointing and giggling, as tourists do. i thought it was a BRILLIANT schtick, and one i think some enterprising Torontonian can co-opt to make a decent wad.

Trunk, Pillow, Sickly Plant

i told a colleague of mine about the dog cat rat gimmick, and he countered with the act he saw that involved a ratty steamer trunk, an inflatable pillow, and a diseased-looking plant. i asked him what the practitioner did with each ingredient, and he said he didn’t know – either he missed the show, or the guy was just hanging out with those three objects in front of him. Apparently, the pillow was inside the trunk, while the plant was placed on the sidewalk next to it. If anyone’s seen this guy, or cares to posit a theory about what might have been going on, please let me know by leaving a comment.

Rock Balancing

This is one that actually has made it to Toronto, but i’m sure it got its start with the brighter minds on the West coast. The panhandler collects a bunch of rocks – usually rather large and heavy ones – and spends the day stacking and balancing them. i saw one such act down on Queen street a few weekends ago. i overheard two girls marvelling over the act. One asked “how do you discover you have that talent?” i thought that was interesting – “talent”. The act does give the impression that there’s some knack to it, but i maintain that any amazing thing can be achieved with ambition + time. And if there’s one thing a pro panhandler has on his side, it’s time. It’s a good schtick, and it makes believers of people, but i really wonder how many rock-stackers a single city can bear?

My Personal Panhandling Plan

So with the economy in the dumper, i like to sketch out my contingency plan to extreme degrees. i’d like to think that if i ever took up panhandling, i could blow the dog cat rat guy out of the water. i do realize there’s a natural disposition towards mental illness when you’re on the streets (likely a chicken/egg issue to boot), so the creativity and ingenuity of the panhandler’s schtick is likely to be stifled. But i’ll be interested to watch whether the bleeding edge panhandling techniques that i see pioneered in San Francisco every year make their way across the continent to our little burg.

The return trip from conferences like GDC are always deceptive. You think you’re going to arrive at the office fresh-faced and equipped to take on the world. But before long, reality sets in and you wind up putting out the same fires and tending to the same issues in the same fashion as before. The mundanity is made all the more unbearable by the fact that your brain is buzzing with schemes and plans to rule the world. After a few weeks or months, you return to the same snail’s pace as before, rotely executing the same old schemes that come most naturally, and shortly thereafter you die. One or two people attend your funeral, mostly out of obligation, and your flimsy grave marker is knocked over in a wind-storm, leaving your mortal remains and memory to languish in obscurity for the remainder of human existence, however long that lasts.

So before that inevitable charade plays out, i’ll choose to remain in the moment, excited by the buzz of possibility. Let’s take a look at the session i hit on the final day of GDC 09:

Session: Negotiation 101
Speaker: Vincent Scheurer

To be fair to Vincent, i came very late to his session. To be unfair to Vincent, the parts of his presentation i did see appeared to be cribbed directly from a popular book on negotiation called “Getting to Yes”. i recommend the book. There’s not much a speaker can do to top it in a twenty minute talk. But if you’re an avid Coles/Cliff Notes reader, or are just outrageously lazy, you might have enjoyed this session.

Session: Beyond Balancing: Using Five Elements of Failure Design to Enhance Player Experience (AKA: A Video Game Does Not Stop at the Edge of the Screen)
Speaker: Jesper Juul, lecturer at the Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab

Jesper wins the award for “Most Needlessly Verbose Session Title That Goes on Forever With a Lot of Words in it and Also Has an Unnecessary Secondary Subtitle”, which is not a real award.

Jesper (pronounced “yes-purr”, which is how my cat responds when i scratch his ears) insisted that designers work towards Failure Cost instead of Failure Count. Failure Count, simply put, is when the player has three lives, and loses one each time he fails. Failure Cost pays closer attention to what the player loses for failing – time, money, dignity, progress, etc. All in all, the session didn’t really gel for me, so i can’t really say much more. i think Jesper wanted people to pay closer attention to ways of letting the player fail that don’t boil down to a simple “you suck! lose another life!”

Session: Paper Prototypes of Spore
Speaker: Stone Librande – Lead Designer, Spore Galactic Adventures (an upcoming expansion pack)

i didn’t expect much from this talk, because after three years i’m frankly rather tired of hearing about Spore – particularly because it didn’t live up to the hype. Stone was an interesting fellow because he was brought on to the team to address the gameplay of Spore long after the technology and the assets were developed. One of the major criticisms of Spore is that as a creation tool, it was great, but as a game, it just wasn’t very much fun. i suppose that’s what happens when you leave gameplay to the 11th hour (or, in this case, two years before launch, which Stone tells us is pretty late in the development cycle).

So Stone’s session absolutely ruled. When faced with a challenge, be it how to make the Cell level of Spore enjoyable, or how to decide what to cook for dinner, Stone apparently runs to his craft drawer and starts cutting out paper pieces to solve the problem. Stone’s slides had the very best visuals i’ve ever seen in a GDC presentation. He included paper games that he created in middle school, all the way up to the complex fridge magnet game that his family helped him to test, which later evolved into Spore‘s Space level. Here are a few things that struck a chord:

1. it’s hard to get people to play your game if it’s ugly (SO true)
2. when creating a paper prototype, focus on one idea at a time (instead of modelling the entire system)
3. be as abstract as possible. You’re essentially moving around ideas on the table, not units and rules
4. don’t worry if your paper prototype is not fun. That’s exactly the point of going through this process: iterating on the concept until it becomes fun
5. creating a paper prototype can help to keep the team’s imagination in sync. Once it’s there on the table for everyone to touch and poke and play with, you’re basically pulling everything out of everyone’s heads and laying bare on a slab for the whole team to discuss.

Session: Flash SIG (Sturgeon Impregnation Goalsetting)

This was the inaugural meeting of game industry folks using Flash to get the job done. i was surprised to hear about all the so-called triple-A console titles using Flash for their interface design, with the help of an app by Scaleform. Scaleform formed the ad hoc committee to form the group’s actual steering committee. They were very grateful to have Dave Rohrl from Zynga in the room, as Dave chairs the Casual Games SIG and had a lot of fatherly advice to offer.

i hope that Flash’s role in console titles will help to lend legitimacy to the Flash scene, which is (perhaps fairly) characterized as a baby program absued by under-20 wanna-be developers producing poor quality games from their moms’ basements. The room today was filled with mostly Flash web devs, with a small console contingency, who want to see that perception changed. Next steps are to assemble the committee (i let my name stand … am VERY interested in this initiative), and to start building out the Flash SIG Wiki on the IGDA website. This is a group to watch, folks. If you’re a Flash developer committed to producing quality game products, keep your eye on this blog and i’ll let you know how to get involved.

Session: Lunch
Speaker: Howard Tomlinson, Director of Game Development for Handmark

Howard and i struck up a conversation over sammies. He’s a … i hesitate to say stereotypical – maybe archetypal … bearded and bepsectacled brit in a brown cuorduroy jacket. i suggested that all he was missing was a pair of elbow patches and a pipe to complete the picture. He’s working on that.

Howard was a physics teacher and is a fellow fan of old-school kids’ programs like the stop-motion Chorlton and the Wheelies and Will O’ the Wisp. i know these shows because the province’s publicly-funded station, TVO (TVOntario) habitually buys UK import shows for kids, and inflicts them on the unsuspecting children of the commonwealth – programs like Dr. Snuggles, Jamie and the Magic Torch, That’s My Gran, the original Paddington Bear, and the like. TVO currently airs Little Princess which, to coin a Britishism, i find quite beastly. i’ve never wanted to discipline a cartoon character so badly in all my life.

Howard’s company Handmark creates mobile games. In his off-time, Howard plays World of Warcraft with his wife “Kirk”, who won an online Star Trek trivia competition, cementing her nerd supremacy for all time. Howard and i found a common bond because we’re both piano players defecting to guitar for its portability (i’m taking a brief banjo detour en route, after the accordion proved too heavy and universally despised around campfires). We both have daughters … his is old enough to play a mean boogie woogie. i’ve lost hope for my eldest, who can’t be arsed, but my youngest stays still enough on my knee to tolerate my playing, so i may make a musician of her yet.

Howard has boxes and boxes of teevee series still in the shrink wrap on his shelf. i asked why he doesn’t crack into them more often. His feeling is that a good show will always be a good show, but the bizdev side of his business requires him to find creative outlets to let out steam. He wonders how many years he has left in the industry if he doesn’t open that pressure valve often enough. He said he’d rather be creating – actually participating in art and entertainment – than idly watching television. i took this lesson to heart, and plan to use my scant spare time mroe productively.

Incidentally, Howard bestowed his British blessing on Kahoots™, our upcoming iPhone game set in fake Britain. i ask Brits about the game every chance i get, to find out whether it provokes a positive or negative reaction. Howard called it a “reasonable pisstake”, assuring me that the right type of people would appreciate it. And for our enriching conversation, i appreciated Howard.

It wasn’t an official GDC session, but my chat with Howard is just an illustration of the kind of conversation you can have when you put thousands of like-minded people together in a convention center.

Session: Fresh Demographics on Teen and Adult Gameplay and How Games Can Teach Kids to be Good Citizens
Speaker: Amanda Lenhart

A Canadian colleague of mine teamed up with me to call “bullshit” on this session, the title of which was about as misleading as they come. The “fresh” demographics the speaker presented were twelve months old, a dog’s age in the gaming world. And the bit about games teaching teens to be good citizens was hung on a flimsy premise. The stats for the back half of the presentation were all about players’ experience in “civic” or “pro-social gaming”. i asked what constituted a pro-social game, because the only title bandied around was Civilization, which i sincerely doubt was mentioned much by the thousand-odd teenaged sample group. As it turns out, this info was based on respondents saying that they had witnessed “pro-social” behaviour in games – things like helping each other out or exchanging kind words. Flimsy. i appreciate what the researchers were trying to do by linking teenaged player data with their parents’ responses about video games, but the back half of the report smelled phony like baloney.

At any rate, you can judge for yourself by pulling the report down from their site:

http://www.pewinternet.org (“pew” is right)

i wrote down a mountain of stats from the presentation, but i’m not sure how useful any of them were. i am wary of this random-dialed survey research method, and of any data based on sample size. This is the computer age. i think we can do better.

For what it’s worth, here are a few stats that jumped out at me:

1. “racing” topped the list of preferred game genres as boys’ number three choice and girls’ number two choice. i wonder if it’s because of their pick-up-and-play quality, or if it’s because the respondents were all playing Mario Kart?
2. 55% of parents polled say they always check a game’s rating
3. 31% of parents play games with their kids (i’ll believe it when i see it)
4. despite these last two points, 90% of the parents say they always or sometimes know what their kids play (IMO the gap between “always” and “sometimes” is immense … consider: i always pay my taxes vs. i sometimes pay my taxes. Is the government willing to group “always” and “sometimes” together? i think not.)

Where the report really spiralled into phony-land, particularly for one ESA (Elephant and Sloth Aggregators) employee, was where the speaker said that 32% of teens say their 3 favourite games are Mature or Adults-Only rated, while 12-14 year olds were just as likely to play Mature or Adults-Only titles.

Friends, i’ve been playing games for a long-ass time. If the final quiz question on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire: Video Game Geek Edition was “name a game that has been rated AO by the ESRB”, i’d be heading home without a million dollars stuffed in my pockets. i can’t name a single AO title, and i doubt you can either. In fact, the ESA employee later told me that there were something like sixteen AO titles rated by the ESRB – ever – and that most were interactive DVDs from the 90′s. No mainstream console will even allow AO titles on the box, leading me to two possible conclusions:

1. The respondents mistook a game that had adult content in it (ie Grand Theft Auto IV or Halo) with an AO-rated Adults Only title, much like many of us use the term “stomach flu” when influenza is actually a respiratory disease
2. The respondents were talking about actual adults-only games that were not actually rated AO by the ESRB, but certainly have some hawt weiner-in-bun action, like the “dating” sims on Flash game portals like Newgrounds

Either way, the slip-up illustrates my point that survey polling is of questionable accuracy, and that we can get much better data in a technological age 100 years removed from the invention of the telephone. The ESA employee accused the speaker and her cohorts of being needlessly inflammatory by including the AO stuff in the report. Due to their year-old data and fallible methods, i like to think they’re too old-school to be considered highly valuable. But as i mentioned, the report is free and the link is all yours. Do with it what you will.

Tonight’s the night when everyone overdoes it at parties. i’m heading out soon to drink spiced non-alcoholic Fun Rum™ from a pineapple at the tiki-themed Tonga Lounge with some other Canadian folks in the industry, and i’ll likely wind up at the W Hotel to see what Suite Night (a series of hotel room parties) has to offer. Meanwhile, let’s take a look at the lessons of the day.

Session: GDC Microtalks
Speakers: Assorted

This pecha kucha-inspired series of talks from ten speakers was fun, fast, and inspirational. It got off to a very slow and pretentious start with John Sharp discussing the Primacy of Play (snore), and Tracy Fullerton throwing out needlessly decorated terminology in a show of exactly why i steer clear of academic speakers as a general rule. Here’s a sampling of Tracy’s linguistic self-love:

• liturgical
• transcendence
• sympathetic magic
• educated spectatorship
• spiritual exhileration
• ritual power

i mean, i know what all of those words mean on their own, and i’ve definitely been guilty of churching up a sentence or two. But you have to pace yourself. i like to surround one wealthy word with a bunch of mono-syllabic beggar words, like a crowd of Indian kids swarming a well-off German tourist. It’s my trickle-down theory of sentence composition: you have to give readers time to let the big words to sink in, but the million dollar words help to raise the rent for the rest of the sentence.

N’Gai Croal

N’Gai talked about sliding difficulty scales in games and how great they are. Not easy/medium/hard stuff, but more like games that make enemies stronger the better you do, or games where two players can play co-operatively at different difficulty levels. For this last example he held up Gears of War, saying that it’s a great example of a game where a parent can play with a child. i thought it was irresponsible of N’Gai to suggest that children should go anywhere near a game like Gears of War. It’s kind of like saying that the broad physical humour in Kill Bill is great because it will keep the kids entertained while you watch as a family. Check your head, N’Gai.

N’Gai’s take-away was that players who criticized Prince of Persia‘s forgiving “death” rewind should re-consider what they value in games, because a punishing “fail” screen isn’t necessarily key to a game’s fun factor.

Robin Hunicke

Robin is pretty, so she commanded my attention. i’m afraid that’s just how the world works. Her talk was a tad bubbly and less inspiring than the others. She spoke about how she was disappointed with Sony’s Home virtual world, and listed a few features that would make it a great place to be. These included:

1. graffiti@home – walk around tagging the joint
2. jam@home – give everyone drumsticks to tap on the environment and make music together
3. climb@home – jack climbing pegs into the world’s surfaces to turn Home into a massive virtual rock-climbing club

Robin admitted that these were not quick features to implement, but lamented the fact that Home‘s only purpose was apparently to sell virtual Jordache jeans. She looked at these features through the lens of the four C’s, which i’m ashamed to say i’d never heard of:

1. Creativity
2. Collection
3. Competition
4. Community

These four C’s were the most crucial and applicable piece of learning for me in any of the talks, but i don’t think Robin is credited with them. Does anyone know who came up with these? They sound like something Bartle cooked up. (note to self: Google works wonders)

(additional note to self: notes to self need not be published publicly on a blog, as they cease to be notes to self and become, instead, notes to everyone)

Eric Zimmerman

Eric wrote books like The Power of Play and others that i haven’t read because heady game theory annoys me somewhat. But he may have broken my will with his “talk”. He passed out coloured cards and engaged the entire room in a game of card-passing, where the goal was to end up clumped with the largest number of people holding the same colour card as yours. The room erupted. Strangers became allies, smiles became frowns, and a number of people took of their clothes and spontaneously started having sex with each other in the middle of the conference hall. After it was all over and cigarettes were lit, Eric joyously proclaimed the power that games and playing had to transform the way we think, socialize, communicate, blink … it was definitely an energy booster, and the perfect thing to wake me up during a very draining conference. i may read the speaker’s book after all.

Clint Hocking

Clint’s famous potty mouth starred in his talk about the “cult of 90″ in the wine review circuit, where much is made of the difference between an 89% wine score and a 90% wine score. Clint’s talk was essentially a rant against MetaCritic, but his proposed solution was a five-star system, which wouldn’t solve his problem at all – the cult of 90 would just suffer some division and become the cult of four or five. Clint’s talk turned me into a whine critic.

Jenova Chen

Jenova’s talk was dense, clever, and FANTASTIC – probably my favourite of the bunch. He talked about emotions in games, and compared the emotional “hue” of games in this, video gaming’s infancy, to the emotional hue of movies in their infancy. Both games and movies offered experiences that were empowering and stimulating. (He mentioned two other emotional qualities, but i wasn’t writing fast enough.) He called these emotions “primal”, and suggested that games in the future would take advantage of a larger range in the emotional spectrum. We’ve already seen this with many 99 cent iPhone games, which go beyond empowerment and stimulation, and instead evoke more nuanced feelings of betrayal. i want my dollar back.

Frank Lantz

Frank’s sound bite was “games are not media”. The one concept that stuck with me was the idea that currently, we think of games as things we put into computers: computers contain games. His point was that games are so big and important and all-encompassing and unique that in the future, we’ll put computers into games. Games will contain, or include, computers. That was food for thought.

Jane McGonigal

Jane’s idea of fun includes Chinese philosophy, the zombie apocalypse, and humiliation. She encompassed these in the acronym CZADOF:

• C – Confucius/Chinese philosophy Confucius spoke of the “jen ratio” (not sure how to spell that – Jane used a Chinese character for the word). A high ratio is inversely proportionate to the degree of dickishness going on.
• ZA – zombie apocalypse A game like Left 4 Dead has a high ratio because no one has the luxury of being a dick. Everyone has to pitch in and help his fellow man. (Jane’s obviously never played the tabletop Zombies!!! game, where dickishness is crucial to victory)
• Dance-off This was one of the very best things i’ve seen in the whole show. Jane’s Top Secret Dance-Off is a socially networked RPG game where you level up by completing dance-off missions: dance in a disguise, dance at a cross-walk, etc. You get your friends to videotape you, and then upload the vid to earn points and levels. i nearly spat my food out laughing so hard, and i wasn’t even eating any food. Jane contends that humiliation is a key ingredient to having fun, and Top Secret Dance-Off made me a believer.

Session: Making the Impossible Possible
Speaker: Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear Solid developer)

i won’t waste time talking about this one too much, because it’s probably being covered ad nauseum by fans across the Internatz. Hideo’s thesis was that things that seem impossible now will be made possible through technology and human ingenuity. His definition of impossible was a little loose, and his presentation was tedious and repetetive. i appreciated his point that game hardware only brought him part of the way towards achieving his goals, and that clever game design was needed to bring him the rest of the way. i recommend finding a video stream of the presentation, but you should probably watch it in fast-forward once it starts feeling familiar (that wasaround the 20 minute mark for me).

Session:Multiple
Speakers: i couldn’t decide

i really agonized over this particular slot, because there were about five great-sounding sessions i wanted to attend, and there were only three clones of me. i finally landed in the iPhone talk, which was spuriously labelled a “programming track” session. i must have missed all the programming chatter at the beginning, because the session was a repeat of every non-programming-related thing i already knew about iPhone development – really basic stuff like how to get into the developer program. i did appreciate the speaker’s advice to price your iPhone app at what it’s worth, instead of joining the race to the bottom of the heap with the ubiquitous (and damaging) 99 cent price point.

i skipped the Q+A session and ducked into a session called “Failure is Not an Option”, a talk targeted at lead designers and producers. i had hoped from the title that this would be an entrepreneurial session around how your company’s failure is not an option, but unfortunately it was more project-focussed. Here are the points that resonated with me:

1. hire on demand
2. don’t hire until you get your core game mechanic working in a prototype
3. always have something to demo (this is a great point)
4. re: the good/fast/cheap pyramid, make the right trade-offs during production by actually playing your game extensively

Session: Some long session title about metrics that i can’t be arsed to re-type
Speakers: Trevor Fencott from Bedlam Games, Simon Carless from Gamasutra, Marc Doyle from Metacritic, Michael Klotz from the NPD Group, and Michael Pachter from Wedbush Morgan Securities

It was a tiny thrill to recognize Michael Pachter, as i’m an avid Joystiq reader (he gets covered there a lot). Pachter is very vocal about his predictions for gaming’s future. i think he’s full of nonsense most of the time, but the guy blew my mind with his encyclopedic memory. i stood up at the end of the session and gave the Metacritic guy the business for ignoring sites like YTV’s Gamepad, whose reviews he rejected because they gave Piglet’s Big Game a 9 out of 10 (imagine that? A quality kids’ game getting a high score on a kids’ gaming site.)

Marc dismissed my criticism, saying (somewhat dickishly) “i’ve never heard of Piglet’s Big Game“. Pachter rushed to my defense and rattled off the game’s release date and sales numbers (over 100k copies) like some freaky human ticker tape. Marc tried to deride me by questioning what a 30-year-old man was doing reviewing Piglet’s Big Game in the first place. i didn’t review it, actually – a 24-year-old woman wrote the piece – but his crummy attitude just reinforced the flaws inherent in Metacritic. It’s a site that tries too hard to maintain its street cred with game industry insiders, and it couldn’t care a fig about the gamer population at large: namely, moms and dogs.

In the end, the creators of Jillian Michaels’ Fitness Ultimatum got the last laugh. Who needs Metacritic when your Wii Balance Board game sells over a million copies? Lesson learned: ignore moms and dogs at your own peril.

Best Business Card

Gone are the days of E3 – the Electronic Entertainment Expo – when we could rely on people for such unsavoury and useless articles as “E3 Booth Bunny Wrap-Up”. Well, today i have something equally useless but with a lot less jiggle: my pick for the best business card i encountered at the conference.

There it is, folks: a real-life, metal business card, courtesy of Mark Morris over at Introversion Software in the UK. (“UK”, as i recently learned, is an acronym for “United Kingdom”, and is not actually pronounced phonetically.)

The first question, of course, is “holy crap!” This is usually followed by “how much did it cost?” Mark tells me the cards came in at around one US dollar apiece, at which point i proceded to mug the man and plunder the spoils of his cash-stuffed pockets.

Back at the hotel, and while rolling around on my bed strewn with Mark’s money a la Scrooge McDuck, i thought about the adage “a fool and his money are soon parted.” i mean, metal business cards? Really?

The next day, at the conference, i was eating lunch with some strangers and i said “Hey – get a load of this. A metal business card!” The crowd gathered around and i explained who the card belonged to, and what he did for a living. i repeated this process about five or six times throughout the day, before realizing what an amazing promotional piece the business card is. And here i am, actually blogging about it.

Damn you, Mark Morris at Introversion Software! i refuse to play into your wily plan.

Introversion Software, the scourge of the UK video game industry, is known for routinely murdering puppies and babies. They may also be behind those missing socks that don’t come out of the wash, so be on your guard.

There. Take that, Morris. A metal business card indeed.

This may also be a fine time for some shameless self-promotion. The Untold Entertainment business cards may not be made of metal, but they do have one thing going for them: they were paid for by money i nicked from Mark Morris at Introversion Software.

The concept is that i am dumb, and i took the standard card template and hastily threw my logo on top of it. This gag is lost on most people. That’s okay. i’m used to telling jokes that no one laughs at. Case in point: this entire entry.

These talks actually turned into “Start-up Horror Stories”. Here’s a sampling of the hair-raising tales people told:

My receptionist embezzled tens of thousands of dollars from me and moved to a different State.

i licensed and localized a game from Korea, and my North American publisher went bankrupt. i couldn’t do anything with the game because i didn’t want my publisher’s creditors to take the license away from me.

After we’d built our studio and hired our staff, our investor pulled out and took off with the money.

And so on.

What i found really interesting were the rags-to-riches stories told by successful CEOs in other panels. It was neat to see the common threads running through these sessions, which i present presently as a present to you:

Equity does not mean equality. Four successful CEOs were assembeled for Lessons from the Front Lines: Startup CEOs share their Insider Stories. 4/4 CEOs agreed that when starting a company, it’s not always the best policy to give everyone an even split. What happens when, in a year or two, Founder A is doing 20% of the work, but enjoys 50% of the company equity? Crabby and opinionated Erik Bethke, founder of Korean virtual world startup GoPets, suggested that a keen lawyer can help you set up your company so that shares are handled more fluidly. Shares can be redistributed as time wears on to more accurately reflect the contributions of the founders.

Hire good people. “i only hire people who are smarter than me.” So said Paul Wedgwood in his lecture Splash Damage: From Amateur to Triple-A in Five Years. This was echoed in a few different sessions as “‘A’ people hire ‘A’ people, but ‘B’ people hire ‘C’ people.”

Fire bad people. When the same four CEOs were asked what one mistake they learned from, they all said the same thing: they let poor performers stay at the company for too long. Get rid of people when it’s obvious that they aren’t a good fit for the company. There seemed to be a lot of untold, painful stories as the panelists winced and grit their teeth, imploring the audience to keep good personnel policies. Craig Sherman, adopted CEO of hit online community Gaia Online, said that this was tough to practice. He suggested paying outgoing staff more than their due to keep everything amicable, and to prevent ousted employees from bad-mouthing your operation.

Best Panel or Lecture

There were so many amazing sessions that it’s hard to pin one down. Last year, it was Damion Schubert’s “Writing Great Game Design Documents”, which i thoroughly enjoyed. It actually turned out to be the highest-rated lecture last year, and i can understand why. Unlike most of the other sessions, i used the information in Schubert’s lecture all year long since that last conference. Here’s an example of the wisdom imparted by Mr. Schubert:

5. Limit your use of the phrase “Man, this game’s gonna suck” in your GDD.

i keed, i keed.

The first two days of GDC are home to the summits – clustered lectures strung along a certain theme. i chose to attend the Worlds in Motion Summit this year, because i had already been to the Casual Games summit. Anyway, it looked like the Casual crew were getting comfy. Their schedule listed the same speakers talking again and again throughout the two day Casual Games Summit. And get this: the first session was called “Intro to Casual Games”. The second session was “Intro to Casual Games Part II”. Puh-LEEZE. Get a job, guys.

The Worlds in Motion’s chair, Leigh Alexander, was a self-aggrandazing egomaniac (it takes one to know one) who had to introduce herself before every session, although the room’s turnover rate was low. Despite this, if Leigh was the one responsible for booking the summit’s speakers, she did a great job (with some exceptions).

Get On With It

This year, two sessions stood out in my mind: Treat Me Like a Lover by Margaret Robinson, and Let Me Win! Best Practices for Approachable Game Design by Katie Stone-Perez.

Katie’s “Let Me Win!” talk began with a provocative opening volley befitting a Microsoft-sponsored session: if the player doesn’t finish your game, he’s less likely to buy your sequel. The speaker backed her point up by showing the kind of data-mining MS does on its XBox 360 players:

This is Joey. Joey played Call of Duty 3 on his XBox 360, but as you can see from his player profile, he didn’t get many Achievements in the game. He also hasn’t played the sequel.

Meanwhile, he got all 1000 Achievement points in Viva Piñata, AND he bought Viva Piñata Party Animals (poor, poor Joey – ed.).

If you didn’t realize that Microsoft is carefully scrutinizing its Achievement infrastructure like this, i hope you’re enjoying your latest adventure in Gullible’s Travels.

note: In Joey’s defence, let me point out that the speaker likely chose a Viva Piñata because it sounds easy. If you’ve ever played the game, you’ll know that Viva Piñata is a very complex and challenging simulation. If Joey actually did get all 1000 points with no help from GameFaqs, frankly, he’s a bona fide badass.

Easysaurus Rex

The speaker went on to talk about ways to make your game easier. For example, if the player tries three times and can’t defeat your T-Rex boss, maybe the T-Rex picks the player up and throws him over the wall into the next level.

Immediately, the blue-blooded gamer in me raged “Yeah! And why doesn’t the T-Rex chew up the gamer’s food and regurgitate it into his mouth for him, huh? WHY DOESN’T THE GAME SUCKLE THE PLAYER AT ITS WARM COZY VIDEO TEAT?? HUH????”

i calmed myself down by hyperventilating into a paper bag. When my ire had settled, i thought through it calmly and rationally. She’s right, of course. i can count on 400 hands the number of games i’ve had to abandon halfway through, either because i reached a stopping point, or because i’m a weak sissy girl-baby and i can’t play video games worth a damn.

Here’s my latest unbeatable T-Rex: i’ve stopped playing the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney because i’m stuck in an endless line of questioning with one of my witnesses. She states a series of truisms like “the sky is blue” and “water is wet”, and i’m supposed to object to one of them and show the court evidence to the contrary. i have no idea where i’m supposed to speak up to further the plot, and the judge keeps saying “Why don’t you repeat your infallible witness testimony, ma’am?”

Stupid game. i actually do wish a T-Rex would pick me up and throw me into the next courtroom, where the guilt is a little more obvious. An OJ trial, for example.

Gettin’ Sexay with Margaret Robinson

For her part, Margaret Robinson opened with a provocative tale of sharing a bath with her new lover, which turned out to be the DS version of Advance Wars. Meh – it was still kinda hot. i’m ashamed to admit it, but for the whole first half of Maggie’s talk, i sat there wondering if she was a good kisser. It was probably her UK accent.

When i snapped out of it, i found she had a few profound things to say. i’ll paraphrase:

Imagine a game where all of your cut-scenes and story exposition were available to the player right off the top of the game. Any new player could watch the whole story from start to finish without actually playing your game. (Pause for effect.) That idea makes many of the developers in the room uncomfortable, and yet we’re somehow not uncomfortable with a game that the player might never finish. The player might never see those cut-scenes or experience the story that we put so much hard work into, but that seems to be okay with most of us.

An excellent point.

During one of these two lectures, a lady stood up and introduced herself as the site manager for an online women’s game review magazine. She said that if one of her readers can’t finish a game and see all of its content, she should return it to the store as a defective product.

It’s an entirely new way of thinking for me, but i’ll give that a tentative … amen?

You’d never rent a movie or pick up a book and expect to miss the ending because you’re not smart or crafty or skilled enough to get through it. Why should we endure that kind of punishment from a game? i’m all for rewarding the players who were smart or crafty or skilled enough to experience all of the content without my help, but after attending these two sessions, i’m a changed man.

i am a reformed game developer. i will forever strive to make my games forgiving, loving, accessible and approachable to the throngs of hot young women who clamour to play them.

Best Party

i’m not a party person, but i can be astoundingly frugal when the mood takes me. That’s why i went to the Game Developers Conference hoping to catch a few free meals of hors d’oeuvres (the best part of the hors) before leaving for home. That’s why my pick for best party might not be status quo.

Last year, the best “partay”, in the strictest (and sleaziest) sense of the word, was thrown by local game dev team Three Rings, the folks behind Puzzle Pirates. That party was bona fide out of control, with plenty of free booze and a mad science theme, with a Doc Brown-inspired deejay inviting guests to spin the Wheel of Mash-Ups, from which he’d choose two songs to blend on his turntables. i was also floored at the amount of decoration going on in the Three Rings office until, nearly a year later, i read this article about how Three Rings’ workspace was custom-designed.

Apparently, the party got a little out of control. Something about a bloody stairwell and an angry landlord – the folks who work there tell the story sheepishly.

This year’s most outrageous party was thrown by CCP Games, who make the backstabby space-themed MMO Eve Online. i didn’t actually go myself, but apparently it was held in a San Francisco fetish club, with midgets in plasma backpacks and topless women flogging people who were tethered to a central whipping post. Erm … sounds like “fun”, but i can’t imagine how i could polish off a whole tray of free crabcakes with a topless lady going at me with a cat o’ nine tails. And believe me, i’ve tried.

Instead of basking in the unholy delights of an open bar (i don’t drink) or a loud club atmosphere (how can you network if you can’t hear each other?), my nod to Best Party goes to the Autodesk shindig thrown on Suite Night, where a few companies deck out some ballrooms at the W Hotel and invite the whole conference over.

The Autodesk party was really great. They had a candy bar filled with bonbons, flavoured popcorn and big bowls of Skittles. That’s what i’m talking about. The room was filled with inflatable couches in front of teevees hooked up with Atari 5600′s. One of these was playing Yars Revenge, which is only the best Atari game ever made, thank you very much.

i spent an hour parked on a plastic sofa eating Skittles and daring all comers to beat my Yars Revenge score. It was glorious. The deejay played nothing but the hottest late-70s tunes like The Hustle and Le Freak. i was in my element. i was eventually dethroned when someone beat my score of 49312, but it didn’t matter. The Autodesk party was a groovy reminder of why we were all gathered at the conference in the first place: the rec rooms of our youth.

Just after i left, Hair Supply, an Air Supply cover band, played a nostalgically horrible set. i’m both sorry and relieved that i missed it.

Best New Game Announcement

i was pretty impressed with APB, the new multiplayer game announced at a keynote by Realtime Worlds. Realtime Worlds also developed Crackdown, one of my most favourite games from last year.

Expectations fell flat when i realized that APB was all about driving and shooting. The real hook in Crackdown was the Agility feature. You could ignore all the gangland violence like i did, and instead collect little green orbs that made you run faster and – most impressively – jump higher. Once your Agility rating was high enough, you could leap to the top of a nearby building and rain down bullety justice from above. This feature turned Crackdown into a platformer game – a sort of Super Mario Bruthas.

The game that really piqued my interest was Recoil: Retrograd by Zeitguys. Recoil is a third-person time-travelling game with a solid steampunk style. Steampunk is a “what-if” motif inspired by Jules Verne and HG Wells where steam, rather than electricity, became the dominant driving force behind technology. Steampunk style touchstones include brass goggles, wood, ornate trim, zeppelins, knobs, and wires. The high technology is always wonderfully low-tech. i’ve only seen a select few games that have achieved commercial sucecss using this style, most notably the Dark Cloud series and the huge hit Bioshock.

Neither of those games, in my opinion, went as far as possible with that style. Recoil takes it to amazing new levels; i stood staring at the demo, my mouth half-open, with the sheer volume of steamy goodness pouring out of the game. Their hype mission was helped along a little by the actors they hired to run around the expo floor in the most ass-annihilating steampunk costumes i’ve ever seen.

Last year, i made the mistake of suggesting i was going to skip a keynote speech. The guy i was talking to gripped me by the lapels and, wide-eyed and frantic, said “you DON’T MISS THE KEYNOTES.” i asked him why, and in reverent, hushed tones, as if we were sitting around a campfire, he recounted the legendary tale of a Microsoft keynote a few years back where they gave out free HD-teevees to a quarter of the audience.

There were no free teevees at Ray Kurzweil’s keynote, but one could argue that he gave away something much more valuable: the promise of immortality for those of us who could hang on long enough.

The premise of Kurzweil’s message was that information technology grows at a predictable, exponential rate. He blithely flipped through a series of graphs and charts demonstrating how all of the significant advances in human history, including the actual evolution of the species, fall along a predictable line that extends through an exponentially-stacked axis.

In his talk, Ray singlehandedly eased the audience’s minds about the energy crisis, famine, disease, mental illness, language barriers, obesity, forgetfulness and nearly every other ailment affecting mankind:

The Energy Crisis

According to Kurzweil, improvements in solar cells thanks to nanotechnology are increasing at an exponential rate. He says that the energy output from the sun is 1000 times greater than our energy demand. Installing enough of these solar panels will negate our need to burn coal and oil as fuel.

One thing he didn’t account for was the increase in energy demand as irresponsible initiatives like A Laptop for Every Child and building infrastructure in developing nations will increase our appetite for electricity. Is that appetite also exponential? Dunno. i’m no Kurzweil.

Disease

One of the speaker’s most interesting points is that thanks to DNA indexing, we now have the “source code” to our own biology. As genomes are mapped at an exponential rate, our understanding of how our bodies work also grows exponentially, as does our ability to create nanobots and genome inhibitors to zoom through our bloodstreams and cure disease. He talked about inhibiting the gene that causes Type 1 diabetes, thanks to the fact that we now have the “code” for how that gene behaves.

Mental Illness

Kurzweil also discussed mapping the human brain in a similar way. The more we’re able to replicate, with exponential growth, the way the brain behaves, the more likely we’ll be able to sort out mental health issues like schizophrenia – again, creating cures and solutions at an exponential rate. He talked about pea-sized processors that are implanted into Alzheimer sufferers’ brains that augment or replace the brain tissue forfeited to the illness. This is already happening? i was unaware. Or perhaps i heard that somewhere and forgot about it due to Alzheimers.

Language Barriers

Midway through the presentation, the speaker talked about how, using a combination of text-to-speech and translation technology, he had a conversation with a native German speaker. They both spoke in their own language, and the technology translated on the fly. He went on to back this up with an actual demo. Douglas Adams’ babel fish came immediately to mind. More on Babel later.

Obesity

Ray’s cure for obesity involves nanobots that strip the body’s propensity to hang on to calories, which will enable us to eat as much as we want without getting fat. And by “us”, he means wealthy members of the Big Seven richest countries in the world, for whom i believe obesity is a just penalty. The idea of negating this consequence for the minority who are hoarding food from a starving world turns my stomach, so to speak.

Forgetfulness

One interesting prediction Kurzweil made that’s been echoed elsewhere at the conference is that the virtual reality spaces that exist only on computers today – World of Warcraft, Club Penguin, Second Life, etc – will some day (soon) go with us throughout the “real” world. He said that you could have some sort of processor in your brain, interacting with some jazz in your eyeball, so that when you see someone at a conference or a party, you’ll see his name floating above his head.

i wondered if we’d see a yellow exclamation mark above the heads of real-life people who were offering us jobs?

And Then There’s God

As a Christian, i found some of Kurzweil’s talk to be at odds with my beliefs. i guess i see myself as a bit of a catastrophist. The Bible tells the story of Job, a man who had everything – a wife, kids, a kingdom, an iPhone – until one day God decided to test his mettle and instantly wiped out everything he had. A little earlier, He flooded the entire Earth when human beings got on His nerves.

We also have the story of the tower of Babel, after which Adams’ fish is named. In that story, mankind was getting a little uppity with its tech and decided to build a very large skyscraper so they could push the button for the top floor and go poke God in the eye.

God looked and this and said “if they’re already up to this, so early in their history, what else could they accomplish?” Being omniscient, God of course knew. He was just thinking out loud. Nevertheless, He waved his hand and suddenly everyone on the construction project started talking funny talk. Such is the Bible’s explanation of different languages.

Kurzweil’s talk, while fascinating, brings to mind a present day tower of Babel. There are enough volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis and meteors out there to keep me from getting too smug about the inevitability of our so-called evolution.

Microsoft’s XNA Framework for XBox 360

The not-so-big news at the Microsoft keynote on Wednesday (aside from the Gears of War 2 announcement – whatta shocker!) was the removal of the membership wall to their XNA Game Creators Club. You’ll still have to be a Club member to push your game from your PC to your XBox 360. But now, once the Club members have vetted your creation (handily removing the burden of policing content from Microsoft’s plate), XBox owners at large will be able to play your game.

i say that this is not-so-big news because it falls in with the likely “what if” scenarios that Microsoft has been discussing for its XNA project all along. The next step, predictably, will be the integration of the Creators Club games into the marketplace, so that XBox 360 owners will be able to buy the indie games with their Billy Bucks, with Microsoft naturally taking a cut.

Kongregate

i caught a small panel with a Kongregate member early this week, having attended a much higher-profile talk by site head Jim Greer at last year’s conference. Kongregate is a site where Flash designers can upload their games and get a cut of ad revenues based on the popularity of their creations. Kongregate also funds developers a lot of money in limited doses to create products that integrate with their multiplayer API.

Sims Carnival

The people behind the outlandishly successful and ubiquitous Sims series have released a series of tools enabling players to build their own games and upload them to the Sims Carnival site. The complexity of their tools ranges from prefabricated formats where you choose a game genre and adjust variables to change gameplay – gravity, number of enemies, etc – to a much more complex tool that uses hierarchical nodes to manage gameplay elements.

Metaplace

This is the flagship product from Raph Koster’s Areae startup. i don’t know anything about it. Wikipedia says, cryptically, that worlds and games created with (in?) Metaplace will be accessible by any device that connects to the web.

Multiverse

One of many create-your-own-MMO tools, Multiverse is a mediocre-looking tool with very a permissive rights structure that enables you to create your own virtual world. The 3D worlds that have been created with the tool range in utility, from a straight-up shooter MMO to a virtual office simulation for new hires and a game that teaches astrophysics to graduate students in Florida.

The artwork in most of these projects rivals mediocre-looking 3D games from 2002, which is more than a little disappointing. Sulka Haro of Habbo Hotel fame always extols the virtues of his project’s retro-pixel art style by arguing that time is not kind to 3D artwork. i’m with him all the way on that. 3D does not age well. 2D has far longer legs.

Whirled

Puzzle Pirates microtransaction millionaire and all-around crazyperson Daniel James apologized that his newest project, which he announced last year, was still in closed alpha. Whirled is a very post-modern approach to virtual worlds, enabling participants to tool up basically anything in Flash to integrate in a visual space that includes mermaids, moustaches, mech suits and talking jars of marmalade. i can’t see it appealing to all tastes, and i’ll be interested to see if “design cliques” form, where fans of the medieval content band together, while the furries stick to their own corner of the virtual space (as furries most definitely should).

Like Kongregate and Sims Carnival, Whirled team Three Rings is hammering out revenue-share model for its creators.

Everything Else

That’s to say nothing of all the games that support player-created content, including but by no means limited to

Lego Universe
IMVU
Lord of the Rings Online
Second Life
Little Big Planet
APB

Admittedly, that’s not much of a list. The point is that there are many, many games doing this. i can’t seem to remember them all. After four days at GDC, i think my brain is full.

Game Creation Tools Even Mom Can Use

The key tip i’ve heard for creating tools that anyone can use is to build them with simple interfaces like household appliances. In other words, building an object should be as easy and straight-forward as making toast.

While it takes a lot more time to build a creation tool like a level builder that’s friendly and intuitive enough for all the toast-adept out there, it’s well worth the effort. Suddenly, you have a community of people willing to do the heavy-lifting of content creation for you. i can’t be bothered creating the game – here, YOU create the game. Sounds alright to me.

i wish other jobs were perceived to be as enjoyable as game design. Cab drivers could sit in the back seat while their fares drove themselves around. Students would throw themselves into their studies while their teachers kicked back in the staff room. Dogs would scoop their own poo into little baggies. What a utopia.

Easily the weakest session so far has been “Now That We’re All Here: Next Steps in Online Play Sessions” by Christopher Romero of Worldwide Biggies. The session title is extremely misleading. For the bulk of his talk, Romero did a project showcase of Nicktropolis, a virtual world on the website supporting US kids’ teevee network Nickelodeon. This was a little eyebrow raising, because the speaker admitted off the top that he no longer works on the project and, as he revealed later in the question period, he left the project between the open public beta and the mysterious multi-month gap that ensued before its live launch.

Ass-Tastic Graphics

Sitting through Romero’s presentation was painful. Quite literally painful. Painful to the degree that i had to HIDE MY EYES from the presentation screen while he showcased grabs of the game. This was for one simple, inescapable reason: Nicktropolis looks like ass warmed over and poked with a stick.

i’ve worked with a kids’ teevee company for over seven years, so i know how strict brand managers can be with their precious properties. i built one simple Flash game with a certain young female explorer character that Nickelodeon owns, and there were some very strict brand rules to follow. i couldn’t deviate from the colour pallette, i had to use an approved still shot of the character, etc etc.

Contrastingly, Nicktropolis takes beloved and tightly brand-managed characters like Spongebob Squarepants and makes them look like they were designed by college interns designing drunk. Back at the kids’ station i worked for, we received fan art that looked better than most of the stuff in Nicktropolis. It’s, honestly, really hideous stuff, and i’m amazed that Viacom promotes the project without the slightest hint of shame or irony.

The Opposite of Sticky

The functionality in Nicktropolis matches its ass-thetics. The virtual world is split up into multiple mini-worlds, many of which promote the station brands. This is the one aspect of the game where brand managers did seem to have input. A Tak and the Power of Juju avatar would not mesh visually with a Dora the Explorer avatar. In an attempt to solve this problem, the Nicktropolis un-gineers force the player to tool a new avatar whenever he enters one of these sub-worlds.

The result, as the speaker sheepishly pointed out, is that your very identity in Nicktropolis is stable as the shifting sands. One of the key hooks of participating in a virtual world is that you get to adopt and invest in an identity. Nicktropolis shreds this idea and throws it out the virtual window, resulting in a virtual world that is impossible to invest in personally and emotionally.

The real-life equivalent of this terrible idea might be a puppy that you’re not allowed to name, or having your own personal photo id card with someone else’s picture on it. Nicktropolis effectively answers the “Where am i” question, but flunks the “Who am i” test that’s so integral to virtual worlds.

Why return to an online community when you essentially have to wear a new body wherever you go? What emotional ties keep you tethered to that place? These are rhetorical questions. The fact remains that Nicktropolis failed at one – if not the – key hook in a virtual world.

Talk At Your Favourite Characters

The speaker spent a long time explaining the challenges he and his team faced designing Nickelodeon’s ChatBot system. This is a feature where you can converse with the station’s key characters using technology that dates back to at least the C64 where i first saw it. It’s little more than a text parser that analyzes certain key words and spits back an automated, robotic response. The C64 ChatBot i played with was a virtual shrink:

You: i like candy. Do you like candy?

Virtual Shrink: How does candy make you feel?

You: It makes me feel happy.

Virtual Shrink: How do you feel about happy?

You: Uh …

Virtual Shrink: Tell me more about your mother.

And so on. Even when i was eight years old and it was 1988 or whenever, this technology was fun for about five minutes and then we moved on to something else. You’re not going to convince anyone, kid or otherwise, that a ChatBot is bona fide Artificial Intelligence. You’re also not going to spend a whole lot of time interfacing with a ChatBot because frankly, the thrill wears off a little faster than your favourite chewing gum flavour.

And yet, Nickelodeon really pushed this feature on its release, ballyhooing the fact that you could “interact with your favourite Nickelodeon characters!” During launch week, i jumped into Nicktropolis and (after throwing up in my mouth a little), i beelined straight for Spongebob’s house.

And there he was! Spongebob! Or a reasonable facsimile. Well, more like an unreasonable facsimile, really. And he was … standing there. Staring. Staring at the wall.

i walked up to him with my horribly-animated anchovy avatar and, using the prohibitive white-label chat system, started asking him questions. i don’t think he responded. Even if he had, i’m not sure i could have been more disappointed.

Romero talked at length about how he and his team ate up a large portion of development time retooling the 3rd-party ChatBot solution to make the responses match the characters’ personalities. This, to me, is like meticulously decorating your dumpster bin. It’s not worth the effort to church up a fundamentally crummy feature.

What the dev team should have done was create a handful of what i like to call “puppet avatars” – characters that people on the live team can inhabit and walk around as. If virtual worlds are essentially theme parks, then these puppet avatars are the costumed characters, with the added advantage that they can actually chat with the players.

With puppet avatars, you might not see Spongebob in the game all the time, but those few times you did see him and got to ask him your burning question about the script error in episode #332, you would be RILED UP. It would be like catching Mickey and Minny smooching and hopping into a silver carriage in a scripted costumed character appearance at Disney World. i saw it happen there when i was seven, and i’ve never forgotten it.

Fifty Bazillion Kids CAN Be Wrong

To wrap up his presentation, the speaker used the same dodgy metrics that Viacom uses to paint the project in a better light. He talked about stats like the number of people who have signed up for an account or the number of rooms created in-world. In my opinion, the only stat that’s worth its salt in this case is “number of currently active players”. Active players can be people who have logged in in the past month, say. Active player stats really say something about the utility, stickiness and enduring appeal of your virtual world after the initial marketing push.

In other worlds, the total sign-ups might hold a little more water. But Viacom is pulling the digital wool over the media’s eyes because its existing membership base was rolled into the Nicktropolis membership system. That means that every kid who watched the immensely popular teevee station and signed up for member content was considered a Nicktropolis user, even if he signed up years before Nicktropolis was an ugly little gleam in a developer’s crusty left eye. That’s what i call dodgy marketing.

i also happen to know a little something something about the relationship between a teevee station and its support website. Basically, anything you launch on the site, if it’s supported on-air, will get far more plays than it might even deserve. i’ve seen numerous mediocre games launch on my former employer’s site, and the gameplay statistics come out rosy because a good portion of the on-air viewers decide to come and check it out. As game designers, we started to pay much closer attention to repeat plays when we analayzed whether a game was successful or not.

Sucktropolis

With Nicktropolis, Viacom and Nickelodeon are keeping the bar very low for online kid-targeted virtual worlds and MMOs. Kids don’t deserve the shovelware that their favourite brands feed them in the form of video games, from crummy licensed console titles to boxes of Krusty-Os with sharp metal sprockets inside them. In the face of the hype, the number-fudging and the self-congratulatory back-patting, i am declaring that this emporer has no clothes, and looks pretty rough in the nude to boot. In my opinion, Nicktropolis is a shameful, horrible waste of resources and a disservice to Nickelodeon’s once excellent online brand.

Further Reading

Over at his Clickable Culture blog, my fellow Canadian commentator Tony Walsh had the nuts to deride this steaming pile far more eloquently back when it launched:

‘Nicktropolis’ Fails on Many Levels

That Nicktropolis is a terrible product isn’t an industry secret. But why a respected conference like GDC would invite Chris Romero to showcase it is.

Untold Entertainment is, not surprisingly, in no way affiliated with Viacom or its subsidiaries. All images used under Canadian fair dealing review provisions.

There are, as i’ve discovered, ways to get here by hemorrhaging less money than usual, which i will presently document for your reading pleasure:

1. Alumnus/Early Bird pass pricing.

This is an obvious one, and it requires a little advance planning and foresight. If you’ve ever attended GDC and are on the conference’s mailing list, a few months prior to the event you’ll be offered a special discount price. For the rest of us plebes, there’s the early bird price, which cuts off a month and a half before the event. The difference in an all-access pass at the regular price and the early bird price is around five hundred bucks, so it’s worth your while to plan a trip to GDC in advance.

2. Volunteer program.

A great option for students and hobos, the volunteer program requires you to write an essay or two on why you’re a worthy charity case. If you’re accepted into the program, you’re required to pull twenty hours of “stand around in a pink shirt duty” before you’re given a free all-access pass, though i’m not sure how much of the conference is left to be seen once you’ve sunk your twenty hours. The program also heavily subsidizes your accommodations by reducing, for example, a $275/night room at the San Francisco Hilton down to $50/night. The hitch is that you might have to share a queen-sized bed with another volunteer whom you’ve never met. This, in my opinion, is an excellent way to make new contacts and form fast friendships. Call it up close and personal networking.

“Where’s your other hand?”

“Between two pillows.”

“THOSE AREN’T PILLOWS!!!!”

Cue hilarity.

3. Off-peak airline deals.

i ran into one delegate who had purchased an unlimited air travel package from Air Canada for the sum of – i think – $1600? This enabled him to fly anywhere in North America, weekends and Tuesdays only, for two months. Unlimited. That’s what i call “a steal”. Almost literally. It’s like he’d put an airplane in his pocket and tried to smuggle it out of the airport.

4. Media credentials.

Like most other big conferences, if you’re able to prove your media credentials, you can get a conference pass for free. i’ve never tried for one, though i’m sure i could qualify. If it’s anything like E3 used to be, you have only to kick up a fan blog a few months prior to the event to lay claim to a pass. Indeed, i hope it’s a little more difficult than that, otherwise GDC may turn into what E3 had become at its most bloated: a fan convention for tourists.

5. The OMDC Export Fund.

Of interest only to Ontario game and new media companies, the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Export Fund subsidizes a good part of your trip in exchange for … your mortal soul? i’m not sure. i haven’t looked into it. But it’s possible that if you live in Iowa or Behrain or some place without a booming game-based economy, your local government is looking to create a booming game-based economy, so ask around. Free money never hurt anyone. Unless that money was rolled into wads and packed into your rectum in a heavily-lubricated condom so that you could mule it over the Turkish border. Sources say that hurts quite a bit, thank you very much.

6. Contests and events.

Some folks i know received a little help with their trip last year by entering their game into a competition that was featured during the conference. i don’t know the details, but i do know that many of these contests and awards have some of the longest lead times in advance of the conference, so if you hope to cut costs for next year, start designing your indie game masterpiece now.

i’ve pulled double-duty at every conference i’ve attended, being both a delegate and a member of the press for an online kids’ gaming magazine. This commitment has seen me hauling a one-man arsenal of recording equipment across gaping conference halls, eating bag lunches on the floor near electrical outlets to recharge my batteries, and experiencing everything through the limiting lens of a video camera.

i’m a nervous traveller – one of these types who has trouble juggling his passport, plane tickets and doffed shoes at airport security. i could do without having to futz with camera bags and headphone cables everywhere i go. i remember one year at E3, i was with a small group of reporters interviewing Peter Moore, then marketing manager for Microsoft’s XBox. i couldn’t take interview notes to save my life, so i’d brought along a mini-disc recorder. After playing cat’s cradle with the tangle of microphone cords, i finally wrangled the little omni-mic onto the table and started the interview. The recorder issued a “Battery Totally Dead” beep before i could slip it into my pocket and pretend that everything was okay.

One of the other journalists called my bluff. “i don’t think that thing’s recording,” he said. “Sure it is.” He looked doubtful. “How come the LED on the mic isn’t lit?” “i uh … i turned it off.”

“There’s an independant toggle switch for the power LED?” The chinks in my armour were starting to show.

The interviewee’s time was short, so we started into it. And all the while, i pretended stubbornly that the recorder was working, not fooling anyone.

Another time, i managed to get pro skater Tony Hawk to give a quick shout-out to my camera. i was ecstatic! When i reviewed the footage later, i saw one long shot of my shoes. The camera panned up to Hawk’s face. There was a cut. Then Tony Hawk disappeared into a crowd of handlers and hangers-on.

Later in the show, i was nearly murdered by a very large bodyguard who didn’t want me taking any footage of the back of Steven Spielberg’s head. i quickly calculated that my grainy footage of Spielberg’s yarmulke wasn’t worth a cracked spine, so i put the camera away. But i still used the half-second of footage i caught before chickening out in my final piece!

So this year, with my ties to the press voluntarily severed, i head off to San Francisco a free man. The Matt Cassamassinas of the world can lose their hair over live-blogging the minutiae of every keynote address. i, for one, am going to kick back and relax. i’ll meet a few people, learn a few things, and leisurely report back with my findings when it suits me.

i do, however, promise to report on which employees of your favourite Canadian media companies pick up underaged strippers and take them to night clubs that hand out free Ecstasy at the door. True. i had heard stories of the wily things men get up to when they’re away at conferences, but i thought these tales were artifacts from the 1970s.

No, friends. Male chauvinism and philandering is alive and well, and in full effect at shows like GDC. The carrying-on i witnessed at GDC 07 has helped to steer and shape my business decisions over the past year.