But my predictive powers had failed me. i was wrong. When Alex opened his mouth, with a little foam forming at the corners of his lips – possibly rabies, i thought – it was to say the following:

“You have to play SpaceChem.”

He wasn’t kidding. Alex was just making a game recommendation to me, but the fervour with which he said it made me know he was serious, and that my family was quite probably in danger if i didn’t listen to him.

“You have to,” he said. “It’s BRILLIANT.”

He went on to describe SpaceChem as this smart little puzzle game that had you, essentially, programming solutions to problems. It sounded right up my alley. i couldn’t speak for the other people in our little group, but Alex wasn’t being selective with his recommendation – he was spraying it like a gatling gun, hoping to take a few of us out in his frenzied fire. Okay, okay. i told him i’d check it out.

When i got home after the IGDA event, there were incoming tweets from Alex. “Did you try SpaceChem yet??”

The Power of Christ Compelled Him

i didn’t buy SpaceChem that night. i didn’t buy it after i met one of the developers in person at a conference in Seattle. i didn’t buy it until months and months later, during the Christmas sale on Steam.

But in the end, i bought SpaceChem. Sight unseen. And i bought it because of Alex.

Alex was an evangelist. We used to reserve that word for Protestant Christians who, by feverish word of mouth and big revival tents pitched in the desert, would win people over to their cause. Today, tech companies like Adobe have carved out actual job descriptions for evangelists to ballyhoo their brand message worldwide.

As an indie gamer working on a new title, i’ve been thinking back to Alex’s recommendation that night. i want guys like Alex to run into a crowd of people at an IGDA event and rant about how amazing Spellirium is. But that’s impossible, right? Alexes happen because someone tries your game, and likes it a lot, and decides to tell other people about it. It’s a grassroots thing. It’s like a game or a video going viral. You can’t exactly manufacture that kind of thing.

OR CAN YOU??

Spreading Your Seed

i’ve read some articles and have attended some lectures that purport to teach you how to generate virality, and they all came off as hokum. (Matter of fact, i think i’m GIVING one of those lectures at GDC this year) But i’m a bit of a dreamer, so i decided to do a little legwork to find out how Alex, this usually mild-mannered and affable fellow i’d see at IGDA meetings, caught SpaceChem Fever.

After my lazy-ass sleuthing (Columbo could have saved SO much time with Twitter and Wikipedia), i pieced together this timeline of events:

1. SpaceChem developer Zachtronics Industries emailed Valve to try to get the game distributed on Steam. It didn’t happen.
2. Zachtronics handled their own distribution and began to sell the game directly on their own website.
3. Zachtronics (presumably) emailed a number of game industry publications about SpaceChem. One of these was Rock Paper Shotgun.
4. Then-RPS writer Quintin Smith reviewed SpaceChem, calling it “an incredible game”.
5. Valve approached Zachtronics two days later, and agreed to distribute SpaceChem on Steam. Fancy how that happens.
6. Quintin wrote another SpaceChem article, in which he said this:
   

   Anyone who hasn’t yet tried the demo should physically drop what they’re doing to do so immediately. Yes, even if it’s tea. I don’t care if it’s tea and you’re drinking it directly above your child.

7. An impressionable Alex read that article, was infected by Quintin’s ridiculous enthusiasm, and downloaded the demo.
8. Agreeing with Quintin’s assessment, Alex stormed up to us at the IGDA meeting, and attempted to infect us with his enthusiasm.

Note: it helps that Zachtronics is behind Infiniminer, and that Infiniminer inspired Minecraft. This is analogous to AMPAAS overlooking Cuba Gooding Jr. for his performance in Jerry McGuire one year, and then giving him the Oscar for Snow Dogs the next.

(i don’t mean to say that SpaceChem is the game equivalent of Snow Dogs … i only mean that Quintin may have felt that in addition to building a brilliant game, Zachtronics deserved a little more attention for their general briliance, Infiniminer included.)

This all confirms something that i learned about the indie game dev scene a few years ago at GDC. i was getting tired of listening to the Casual crowd year after year – same speakers, same topics, same takeaways. i had never sat in on the Indie Games Summit because i mistakenly thought it would be a room full of students sharing tips on where to find cracked copies of Maya. It wasn’t until i actually broke down and attended the Summit that my eyes were opened.

It was there that i learned the secret to Indie Game Success.

The Secret to Indie Game Success

The indie game scene is a club. If you’re in the club, you get certain opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise – namely, you don’t get to attend the parties. So getting into the club somehow is the first step.

What’s so great about the parties? The parties are where the indies rub elbows with the games journalists. (And let me be clear, because i absolutely hate that designation: there’s a vast difference between a reporter exposing genocide in Malaysia, and a college student complaining about the drift mechanics in the latest Mario Kart game. In most cases, journalists they ain’t. But i’ll use that term here for ease, if nothing else.)

Here’s the thing about those journalists: they’re the king-makers. They are the love that covers a multitude of sins – and by “sins”, i mean complete lack of a marketing budget, a lousy distribution plan, and no localization strategy to speak of … all the bush-league errors that we indies make because we are, quite literally, three guys in a garage, and the garage is rented.

i’ve become convinced that it’s the journalists who make the most successful indies fabulous amounts of money. That’s partly because games “journalists” have this characteristic penchant for hyperbole that you don’t find in mainstream media. You’d never hear Roger Ebert say “OMG n00bs I JUST SAW HOWARDS END AND UR GONNA FILL UR PAMPERS OVER THIS ONE”, but it’s not out of place in a games magazine. If Roger Ebert ever told me “get ready to drop motherfucking TEA on your baby’s FACE because Tree of Life is AMAZING”, i’m sure my impression of Tree of Life would be higher than if Ebert hadn’t said anything. And i’m sure Ebert’s silly enthusiasm would be infectious, and i’d HAVE to run up to a group of people and scream “GO SEE TREE OF LIFE RIGHT NOW OR i’LL SHANK YOU IN THE KIDNEYS!!”

Games journalists are the vehicle by which mainstream gamers hear about (what they think are) worthwhile indie titles. They have an incredible amount of power. That’s how Ponycorns made the rounds. i never would have seen the same amount of success with that game if the journalists hadn’t run through the streets with it impaled on a flaming stick.

Take This, Brother – May it Serve You Well

So the secret, once more, if you want to be a successful indie developer:

1. Get in the club.
2. Make something excellent.
3. Buddy up with journalists and convince them to talk about your game as enthusiastically as possible.

THAT’S how you manufacture Alexes. Organic word of mouth is great, but the effort you’d need to expend to personally seed enough people with infectious enthusiasm to make that fire catch is immense, and it’s probably an impossible task. You need a firestarter log. You need to spray butane on it. Games journalists are made of butane.

Spellirium is a great game, so i’ve got that hurdle out of the way. Now i just need to run up to a group of games journalists at a GDC party and splatter my enthusiasm all over them … Alex-style.

There’s a vast difference between a game that educates a player, and a game that requires a player to be educated. In the past year, i’ve sat down in front of a number of “educational games” which, right from the title screen, require me to prepossess certain specialized knowledge in order to succeed. These game offers no training or instruction. The only way i could learn anything from them was to guess and, if i was incorrect, hope that the game would show me the correct answers. While there’s something to be said for learning-by-failing, i’m not convinced it should be your first line of defense while educating.

Here’s a great example: Financial Football. This “educational game” is sponsored by Visa and the NFL, and the production values (for an educational game) are through the roof.

In the game experience, you fill the role of an unseen coach. In order to successfully choose your team’s play from your playbook, you have to correctly answer a question about finances. The clock ticks down as you face a multiple choice questions about 401k plans and mortgage rates.

B… but what if you don’t know anything about finances? Isn’t the game supposed to teach you?

No!

Apparently, a traditional schoolteacher is supposed to print out the traditional, dry-as-toast lesson plan pdfs linked to from outside the game and teach you the underlying concepts using (presumably) the age-old one-two combo of blackboard lectures and worksheet print-outs.

It’s a mistake to call something like Financial Football an educational game. It’s a rich media quiz, meant to be the carrot-on-the-stick to cap off a few classes of deadly boring traditional schoolwork. This game is the equivalent of signing up for a course and walking in the first day to an exam. We can do so much more with educational games!

(Note: If you’re a cynic like me, you’re already suspecting that Financial Football isn’t an earnest attempt at creating an educational game, but rather something Visa developed as a defense against accusations of predatory or unfair lending practices – the equivalent of McDonald’s funding Ronald McDonald House … an organization to help children … while the food they sell hurts children.)

Watch and Learn

i played an educational game recently that i feel got it right in a number of ways. It’s Playful Minds: Math (5-8 years old) from Gameloft.

A number of math-based mini-games – essentially quizzes – are scattered across different themed maps. The game runs a short tutorial video explaining each new concept as it’s introduced. It provides tools for interacting with the elements that aid in figuring out the answer; for example, in the counting game, you’re asked how many whatevers there are on the screen. As you tap each one, the voiced-over character counts them with you. If you get a question incorrect, the game doesn’t just throw a big red X in your face and move on … you keep trying until you’re correct. The game will repeat the instruction for you if you’re confused. It’ll replay that tutorial video. You can tap a speaker button at any time to hear the instruction again.

Are you developing an educational game, or a quiz? Make sure that your game actually teaches something, and that it gives players interesting ways to explore and internalize the subject matter before you hit them with a time-limited gun to the head. Let’s strive to create more games that use all the advantages of an interactive medium to teach before we test!

The truth is that i Am Not A Lawyer, and neither are you, and that makes us (and most laypeople) incapable of reading and comprehending legislation and bill proposals and legalese. We need our lawyer friends to do that for us, and since lawyers burn money to heat their homes, we have to put up with understanding these proposed bills with second-hand, filtered, and often distorted information.

As a lawyer friend of mine put it to me recently, anyone who does possess the skill and interest to read a bill like SOPA also brings with him an agenda, so you need to crank your bullshit filter up to High Alert (those last few were my words, not his. And, charitably, he didn’t charge me for his words.)

POPE-A

i liken the way we’ve heard about SOPA and PIPA to the way medieval peasants experienced the Bible. They were illiterate, and Mass was in Latin, so they relied on the liturgy to be retold to them after church let out, in the town square. As i tell my daughters: whenever you hear anything, think to yourself “Who’s speaking? Why are they saying what they’re saying? And what do they stand to gain or lose by communicating it to me?”

A bit of what drives me nuts about the current lay “discourse” on SOPA is the standard weaselly excuses people make to protect their ability to steal media. And i will call it stealing, for now, because that’s what it is … taking for-sale or protected goods without paying for them is called “theft”, or “stealing”. i’m not going to argue that. What i will suggest though, as i did to my lawyer friend, is that people constantly push against the boundaries of law in ways that, once the scale tips, those once prohibited behaviours become legally permissible.

Here’s a short list of things you couldn’t legally do a few years back, and can now do thanks to enough people bumping against the boundaries long and hard enough:

- fellate someone (oral sex was decriminalized in Alaska in 1971. True.)
- marry someone of the same sex (boundaries are still being pushed on this one, as you well know)
- sit at the front of the bus if you’re black
- vote if you’re a woman

(the key difference here is that these laws are all about people, whereas copyright and piracy are about ideas and things … and it’s offensive to many of us that theft of ideas and damage to things can be punished as much as or more severely than damage to people)

With that key distinction made, digital piracy is another example of people pushing up against the limits of law, and in great enough numbers, that the law will eventually have to change to meet the demands and desires of the people. There’s a very interesting parallel between video game consumption and linear media consumption. Games can be pirated just like movies, music and teevee shows can. But the gaming industry is younger and more nimble than “Old Media”, and is constantly exploring new revenue models, because the game industry (perhaps uniquely) realizes it needs to Adapt or Die.

F2P via P2P

Free-to-play is one of these new-ish revenue models. It evolved out of a situation where players were being forced to pay a high price – $60 for maybe 20 hours of entertainment – with a sight-unseen product. They could only determine its value via reviews, word-of-mouth, and brand affinity. If they spent the cash and didn’t enjoy the game, they were out of pocket and out of luck – there was really no return policy. Their best bet was to hawk the disc at a Buy-And-Sell shop (about which the industry complained bitterly).

But now there’s this free-to-play model. The game is free – anyone can have it, no strings attached, and perhaps the file is shared on a peer-to-peer network. You download it, and you play as much as you like. There’s no risk. If you don’t like the game, you get rid of it and try something else. People can pay extra money for added value: new weapons, different levels, and snazzy hats. The hope of the game developers is that the minority of paying customers will subsidize the game’s development costs. Good games float to the forefront, and the best developers who offer the best value are rewarded with the most money.

Introducing Free-to-Watch

Now, think about people who pirate movies, and check this out:

Free-to-watch is one of these new-ish revenue models. It evolved out of a situation where audiences were being forced to pay a high price – $20 for maybe 2 hours of entertainment – with a sight-unseen product. They could only determine its value via reviews, word-of-mouth, and brand affinity. If they spent the cash and didn’t enjoy the movie, they were out of pocket and out of luck – there was really no return policy. Their best bet was to hawk the DVD at a Buy-And-Sell shop.

But now there’s this free-to-watch model. The movie is free – anyone can have it, no strings attached, and perhaps the file is shared on a peer-to-peer network. You download it, and you watch it as much as you like. There’s no risk. If you don’t like the movie, you get rid of it and try something else. People can pay extra money for added value: the big-screen theatre experience, film festival premiers with actors and directors in attendance, 3D glasses, DVD extras, and a physical product that they can touch and display on a shelf. The hope of the film-makers is that the minority of paying customers will subsidize the movie’s development costs. Good movies float to the forefront, and the best film-makers who offer the best value are rewarded with the most money.

If movie studios were less entrenched and more willing to try new things like the game industry does, it’s possible that this whole concept of piracy would fly out the window. Laws would be changed, and “piracy” would be seen for what it really is: the agile, forward-thinking film industry’s experiment with their pioneering free-to-watch monetization model.

1. Wifi

Wifi? Thaaaaat’s right. i’m gonna open with a bang. i’m going to argue that the reality of wifi has fallen far short of the promise of wifi. This reality was never more clear a few years ago, when you had the choice of buying a wifi-only, or cellular version of a gadget, and you thought “why pay for an expensive telco contract, when i can just use this thing anywhere there’s a hotspot?” By now, in the future, we should have a land flowing with milk and honey and wifi. Connectivity should be dripping off the lamp-posts and sparkling off the tops of our houses. Entire cities should be blanketed in the stuff – a thin layer of wifi as technological icing, settling into every crevice of civilization like freshly-fallen snow.

What we’ve got for viable wifi hotspots are your house, Starbucks, and an open hotspot owned by a private utilities company that costs two dollars a minute on your credit card. The rest of the hotspots you see, if you see them, require a WEP password, because the FBI thought it would be a great idea to hold people accountable when strangers surfed child porn on their open networks.

Nowhere is the failure of wifi more heart-breaking than at a technology conference. For years, i’ve been attending conferences like GDC, an international conference staged in the heart of Internet-land, and throughout the show have been required to sit immediately next to a single consumer-grade Linksys router jury rigged to a lighting stand, or to sneak into the press room, to check my email. And that’s been my best-case scenario. From Casual Connect in Seattle, to Indiecade and E3 in Los Angeles, to whatever the heck goes on in the Toronto Convention Centre, all the way to visiting someone else’s school, home or office and feeling like a dork for sheepishly requesting the password, wifi as a life-changing technology has a long way to go before it functions as advertised.

And just to add insult to injury, the World Health Organization thinks it gives us cancer. Well done, scientists. Well done.

2. Motion Controllers

The Wii sold like hotcakes on the promise of a new type of input system for video games: one where you move the controller like a sword, and your on-screen character mimics those motions, hacking and slashing his way through enemies. You hold two controllers and use them like drumsticks. You use a controller like a baton to conduct an orchestra. People loved the idea that they could play a video game in a way that felt much more natural than clawing a complicated controller packed with abstractly-mapped buttons.

That’s the myth we were sold. What we actually got was a stick which, when waggled vaguely in the direction of something sort of, in a general kind of maybe way, something on-screen possibly happened. i guess. The accuracy of the input was so underwhelming that Nintendo had to release a “hardware patch” in the Wii Motion Plus dongle, which was a lot like saying “thanks for your money – here’s how it was supposed to work.”

The Kinect system is equally disappointing. It allows you to use your entire body as the controller so that you can operate a video game one half-second into the future. If you want to move your hands to pop on-screen balloons slightly later than you expect them to react, run and grab a Kinect. If you want a true 1:1 motion experience like you saw in that exhausting UX nightmare scene from Minority Report, you’re gonna have to wait a while. More than half a second, anyway, until companies like Microsoft put this bun back in the oven and fully bake it.

And the Playstation Move controller looks like a buttplug.

3. QR Codes

i still don’t understand why marketers think we’ll all get tremendously excited about technologies that exist solely to sell us more crap. QR codes have essentially become an alternate method of typing in Proctor and Gamble website URLs. If you want a faster way to reach Tide.com, photographing a QR code is your best bet.

This technology is another example of marketers going nuts over something while the rest of us squeeze our eyes shut tightly and wait til it’s over. Like the Lambada. What galls me about this particular gimmick is that it reeks of fifty-year-old, technologically unaware ad and marketing execs thinking it’s especially cool that you can take a picture of something that’s NOT a website, and it magically becomes a website. It’s as if the whole concept of interpreting pits and peaks as digital information is entirely new and fascinating to them, so they have to go slapping QR codes on all of their billboards in the hopes that consumers will be equally mystified and dangle themselves out the passenger-side windows of their cars on the freeway trying to snap pictures of these mystical pots of technological gold.

It may not have dawned on them that a) nobody cares, and b) this type of technology isn’t actually new or interesting, because we’ve seen it all before in stuff like optical discs, cassette tapes, bar codes, computer punch cards … and mother-flipping player piano rolls.

4. Augmented Reality

Most people like the idea of augmented reality, but i’d be amazed to find that anyone has enjoyed the implementation of it. The gimmick is that you can point a screen-enabled camera at some sort of marker, and a 3D model or text label will pop out of it, giving you an “enhanced” version of reality that exists inside your cell phone. In practice, what it actually gives you is a glitchy, janky Playstation 1-era graphic suffering a grand mal seizure with the slightest twitch of the marker.

i’ve never looked at a street filled with restaurants and thought “man … i WISH i could aim my phone at this street to see which of these restaurants has bought into a promotion displaying their dinner specials tonight”, or “holy SHIT, do i ever wish i could drum on my own FACE.”

AR is an example of technology where both the quality of the experience AND its proposed uses have stirred in me a big steaming pile of “no thanks”.

5. Stereoscopic/Polarized 3D

Make no mistake: there are two reasons entertainment companies are pushing 3D on consumers so desperately: 1. big teevees, home theatre systems, and BitTorrent have rendered astronomically expensive nights out at the movie theatre largely inviable, so cinemas need an only-in-theatres gimmick to put bums back in seats, and 2. in the absence of a media shift from DVD/Blu Ray to something new, the not-only-in-theatres crowd like Sony Home Entertainment needs a reason to re-sell our entire movie collections to us. The best way to get people to buy a new copy of Steel Magnolias is to release Steel Magnolias 3D.

Forget the fact that it annoys me when someone says “the new Batman movie is in THREE-DEE!” and i think “so … it’s animated?”, but they actually mean stereoscopic 3D. Practically, the technology just stinks. i took my young family to a sterescopic 3D showing of How to Train Your Dragon. The glasses were eight times the size of my youngest daughter’s head, and she got tired of holding them up to her face after five minutes. An uninvolved toddler is an unhappy toddler, so my wife had to take her out of the theatre to entertain her while my eldest and i finished watching. That was fifty bucks in theatre tickets largely down the tubes.

Just the other night, i was playing the new Motorstorm 3D Rift game on one of Sony’s aggressively-priced-and-marketed 3D teevees. Both players wear a set of glasses that make them look like they’re 90 years old. The polarity is adjusted for each pair of glasses so that one player races a dunebuggy while the other races a motocycle, with each player’s version of the game superimposed on the same screen. It’s likely being marketed as the evolution of split-screen, and definitely solves the problem of dividing the screen in half like we do now. However, while fixing the problem of diminished screen estate for each player, it inflames a rash of new problems:

• Both players look like absolute tools.
• No one in the room without glasses can watch the race.
• The player’s filtered view is dimly lit and inferior to an unfiltered image
• The game likely runs at a lower framerate than a dedicated single-player experience.
• The glasses take batteries.
• The glasses can be sat on and/or lost in the couch cracks
• You need to buy a 3D teevee and glasses.

Any technology that solves one minor problem while causing a crop of new ones AND costs consumers more money is not worth our attention. Die die die in a fire fire fire. We’ll shield our eyes from the fearsome blaze with enormous black world-dimming glasses.

With Thanks to Prometheus

These so-called technological “advances” are, in certain cases, a step back. My proposed solution is a technological advance that actually has improved our quality of life: fire. We should use fire to either fully-bake these half-baked ideas before charging $199.99 for them at FutureShop, or let them be consumed in the flames. Then, from their ashes, may arise technologies that actually do make our lives better, from universal Internet access, to accurate motion controls, to g-d FLYING CARS ALREADY.

SERIOUSLY, men and women of science: i’ve been patient. Get on it.

With Jim Henson long passed, the Sesame Street and Muppet brands have really felt the loss. Some people feel Elmo epitomizes a Henson-less Sesame Street (in fact, Elmo was sanctioned by Jim, and even shared some skits with a Henson-performed Kermit). i’m not a big fan of modern-day Sesame Street’s more child-like Zoe, Rosita, Abby Cadabby, and Baby Bear (versus the old school street’s grown-up Herry, Kermit, Bert & Ernie, Sully & Biff and Grover), but the inclusion of more female Muppets is probably a change for the better – even if most of the new characters annoy the piss out of me.

What i found unforgivable, though, was the flagrant rule-breaking the crew engaged in, where one hard-and-fast law of the Sesame Street Universe was trodden and sullied for fans everywhere (even as Sully himself was nowhere to be found). Outraged, I conjured up four other examples in which the “laws” of certain children’s entertainment brands have been broken, and the caretakers of those franchises have yet to be brought to justice.

1. Showing the Interior of Oscar’s Can

The crime committed by the Sesame Street writers in Elmo in Grouchland was filming the interior of Oscar the Grouch’s garbage can. Longtime fans (or anyone even casually acquainted with Sesame Street) can tell you that the magic of Oscar’s Tardis-like garbage can home, which houses (among other things) his pet elephant, was a silly unsolvable mystery and untouchable canon in Sesame Street lore.

Why untouchable? Because if you show the inside of Oscar’s can, the elephant jokes of decades of Sesame Street seasons no longer work. Watch Elmo in Grouchland, and then go back and watch a gag where Oscar tinkers with his grouch jalopy somewhere inside his garbage can. You’ll say to yourself “oh yeah – that’s entirely possible. i’ve seen the inside of his can, and it’s quite spacious.”

It was a wretched, wretched idea to break this law, and worse – it was entirely unnecessary to the film’s fiction. As per usual, Elmo could have described the inside of the can in an echoey voice-over, and tell the viewer how he discovered a portal to Grouchland inside. But “show, don’t tell”, right? There’s apparently no room for imagination in a post-Henson Sesame Street.

2. Poochifying Paddington Bear

The original Paddington Bear adaptation was an unbelievably charming and unique blend of stop-motion animation and classical 2D, where the very Pooh-like title character would interact with paper cut-outs of the show’s less interesting supporting cast. Here’s an episode, in case you don’t remember or have never seen it:

Recently, Cookie Jar Entertainment produced an unnecessary and awful Paddington Bear upgrade. They stripped out the narration, the stop-motion, the wit, the charm, and the Britishness. We’re left with a vanilla Paddington show that looks and feels like any other daytime filler material built to keep the little brats entertained. Watch, if you dare:

Ugh. After that, sticky Paddington and i both need a shower.

(For the record, the intervening Hanna Barbera take on Paddington was also crap.)

3. Naming the Man with the Yellow Hat

The Curious George series of children’s books chugged along for sixty bloody years being content to call the monkey’s friend “the man with the yellow hat”. When the film version came out in 2006, the geniuses in charge named him “Ted Shackleford”.

Why? God only knows.

4. Voicing the Peanuts Teacher

The adults in Peanuts teevee specials are voiced by a muted trombone. Is this a law? Yes. Yes it is. And is it a crime to deviate from this? Yes. It most certainly is.

And why? Because we never see grown-ups in Peanuts, and teachers sound like muted trombones. That’s the way it is. The kids are important – the adults are not. This creative decision, paired with the decision to hire real kids to voice the Peanuts characters, cleverly conveyed that a child’s domain is often worlds apart from an adult’s, to the point where they even speak a different language. This helps to make the Peanuts characters’ adult-like antics, like Lucy’s psychiatry booth and Sally’s obsession with Linus, even funnier.

And … oh – what’s this? Here comes She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown to dump all over that.

5. Making the Cat in the Hat a Safe, Friendly Science Tutor

Dr. Seuss’s bastion of kid poetry, The Cat in the Hat, was recently adapted to television. The book is about two young children who are who are conspicuously abandoned by their mother, and who find themselves bored out of their skulls on a rainy day. They are visited by the titular cat who barges in and promises them a good time. He then proceeds to trash the house, alarming their neurotic pet fish who constantly warns them that their mother is going to lose her shit when she sees the place. With every destructive suggestion the Cat puts forth, he assures them that “your mother will surely not mind if you do.”

And just when the kids think things couldn’t get any worse, the Cat unleashes his two frat buddies, Thing 1 and Thing 2, who demolish everything in sight. The Cat is not a nice, friendly character. For 3/4 of the book, he’s a villain, and the story builds towards this impending doom as we draw nearer and nearer to mom’s return. The Cat in the Hat is essentially a horror story for preschoolers.

Sounds like a fun concept for a teevee show, right? So what’s the premise for The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That?

First of all, the boy is brown. Whatever. i’ll let it slide. i always thought that “Sally and I” were brother and sister. If you’re going to muck with race, why not make them both brown? Because it would alienate white kids? Then why didn’t they make the fish Asian? i dunno. i don’t care too much about it.

What i do care about is that the Cat in the Hat, anarchist, tormentor of fish and destroyer of private property, is now a friendly character who teaches the kids about science. Naturally. The show is so-titled because the Cat is ever-so-knowledgeable about aquatic life, the water cycle, the seasons, and any number of other natural phenomenon.

You know what Seuss’s Cat knew a lot about? Flying kites inside the house.

The most awful part of this show is that the kids’ mom is always home when the Cat shows up, and when the Cat suggests they “go go go go … on an adventure” to learn about colour theory or some bullshit, he says (as in the book), “your mother will surely not mind if you do!” And you know what the kids do? They ask their mom for permission. i can’t think of anything more antithetical to the spirit of the book than taking the teeth out of it and making it that safe. It’s a true testament to modern-day paranoid parenting.

Thing 1 and Thing 2 make an appearance in every episode, usually to help the kids when they’re in a jam. Because, as we know from the book, that’s what Thing 1 and Thing 2 love to do: help little children get a grasp on science.

No. You know what? NO. Thing 1 and Thing 2 are not preschool science teachers. They’re here to FUCK SHIT UP, and that’s ALL that they’re about. If you want your kids to watch a kids’ show that teaches science, the pickings aren’t exactly slim. You’ve got Curious George (makes sense – he’s curious, and he’s a monkey, and we use monkeys in scientific experiments), Peep and the Big Wide World, Sid the Science Kid, Dinosaur Train, Wild Kratts, and Mama Mirabelle’s Home Movies. Thanks to a big STEM push by the US government (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math), we have preschool science shows in spades.

If you’re going to teach anything using the Cat in the Hat, you might try ethics and morality as a more brand-appropriate topic. Or teach kids what to do when people – particularly grown-ups – put them in situations that make them uncomfortable. i’m not suggesting every episode be about molestation, but rather assertiveness, communication, and self-awareness. Here’s how Seuss ended his book:

Then our mother came in
And said said to us two,
“Did you have any fun?
Tell me. What did you do?”
And Sally and I
did not know What to say.
Should we tell her the things
that went on there that day?
Should we tell her about it?
Now, what SHOULD we do?
Well…
what would YOU do If you mother asked YOU?

The US government doesn’t have a vested interest in preschool shows that teach morality or self-awareness. Being tops in science helps the country subjugate the rest of the world and remain a superpower. But being a morally sound or independently thinking nation doesn’t pay.

Crapping on the Shoulders of Giants

Henson, Schulz, Bond, Geisel and the Reys. We can posthumously mess with their creations and make everyone completely forget what was charming, subtle, and valuable about their work to begin with. This is what we get when men and women in ties have say over the creations of men and women with pencils.

1. No deadlines. Students are free to submit assignments whenever they feel like it. So an assignment that was due in September can be submitted in June with no penalty.
2. No failing. As of the 1996 intake, students could not fail the ninth grade.
3. Social promotion. While students could still fail individual courses throughout high school, every effort was made to “socially promote” them in order to keep them with their peer group. So a student in his fourth year of high school, who was working at a grade nine level or below in various subjects, was still considered a grade twelve student.

Note: The Ministry of Ed has recently reversed its experiment on late penalties. Teachers can once again dock marks for late assignments. A teacher friend of mine thinks it will take another 5-10 years to see the benefits of an improved work ethic in our graduating students, as current grade nine students are brought up under this regime.

The result of these decisions, in conjunction with permissive parenting, is that the current crop of high school grads (which i’ve dubbed “the Most Useless Generation“) has turned out foolish, lazy, and entitled. Not to mince words.

We Don’t Need No Education

When i was teaching a Flash course earlier last year, this exchange took place between a student and me:

Me: You need to understand this concept in order to program a game.
Student: Well that’s your job.
Me: What is?
Student: Making us understand.

“Students” today expect some sort of Matrix-like solution where their responsibility ends with showing up to class. It’s there that the instructor somehow jacks a cable into their necks to inject knowledge into their brains. If the student leaves that 3- or 4-hour class without new knowledge, it’s a failing of the instructor.

That’s the fantasy. Here’s how it actually works:

The responsibility of the instructor is to disseminate information. The very worst instructors do this by standing at the front of the room and talking. The very best instructors do this by combining a variety of stimuli – they speak, they gesture, they sing, dance and play music, they use call-and-response to engage the class, they have the class members participate by doing (typing the code, touching the fabric, operating the drill press, tabulating the survey results). They try to gauge the students’ UNDERSTANDING of the material as they teach. (Although, despite what Dead Poets Society taught you, it’s not the responsibility of a teacher to be entertaining.)

As a student, you have a number of responsibilities. The first is ABSORPTION. You need to come to class on time, fill a seat, and soak up the instruction. It’s all about using your senses: hear the instructor’s voice, look at the visuals, repeat the terminology, touch the equipment (type on the keyboard, operate the drill press, hold the notepad). Your learning increases exponentially when you use two or more of your senses at the same time: touch one of your fingers while repeating a key term, write a note while listening to the lecturer’s voice, or ask a question while looking at a visual aid.

Through your ABSORPTION of the material, you need to reach UNDERSTANDING. If you don’t understand the concepts, you can ask questions of the instructor, your classmates, or the Internet (which knows pretty much everything, so i’m not sure why you’re acting like your Google Fingers are broken).

The Old College Try

Once you have (or think you have) UNDERSTANDING, you need to convert that into KNOWLEDGE by way of PRACTICE. This is especially important in a technical or a vocational pursuit like learning to program games, learning to play the piano, or learning to make a hope chest out of pine wood. The reason you need to gain KNOWLEDGE is because the instructor is going to test you on your knowledge through tests, quizzes, exams and assignments. This is how you get marks in a class: by demonstrating your KNOWLEDGE in these situations.

So PRACTICE is the way you convert UNDERSTANDING into KNOWLEDGE. Okay – i get how to use a tablesaw to cut a piece of wood … now i actually need to use a tablesaw to cut a piece of wood. Because if the instructor gives me a test, and one of the steps is cutting a piece of wood with a tablesaw, and i’ve never actually practiced that, i may be on thin ice during the test.

Likewise, if the lecture was about writing a custom class to program a game, i ABSORBED the material, and gained UNDERSTANDING of how to write a custom class. On the test, the instructor will require me to demonstrate my KNOWLEDGE of how to write a custom class. In order to convert my UNDERSTANDING into KNOWLEDGE, i need to PRACTICE … that means i actually have to write a few custom classes. If you just listen to the theory behind writing a custom class, but never bother to actually write a few on your own, you won’t fare well. (But that’s exactly what most of my students have done. And then their mommies call me up to ask why they’re failing tests. Seriously.)

PRACTICE may require some back-and-forth. You may think you understand the material, and then fall flat on your face when you go to practice it. That’s when you return to the instructor and say “i tried this and it didn’t work – could you help me improve my understanding?”, or “could you clarify what you meant by X?”

You’ll know you’ve gained KNOWLEDGE when you can demonstrate the material without having to ask questions or refer to your notes. Someone with a KNOWLEDGE of how to saw a board does not need to check the tablesaw manual or refer to a list of steps on sawing a board. Someone with a KNOWLEDGE of how to write a custom class does not need to call up past assignments, or Google a tutorial on it.

Prove It.

Finally, back in class on test or assignment day, you DEMONSTRATE the KNOWLEDGE you have gained through PRACTICE. That is what is required of you as a student.

The approach that the no-fail generation takes to education is lazy and firmly rooted in fantasy. They think “If i take a course in X, then at the end of the four months, i will be able to get a job doing X”. (Of course, only people with KNOWLEDGE of X will be in any kind of position to get a job doing X … and it’s only the people with KNOWLEDGE who compete for that job. If you have no KNOWLEDGE of X, you’re automatically out of the running, unless you have a well-connected uncle. )

A better attitude is “If i take a course in X, they will provide me with the information i need to learn X. If i take the responsibility to learn X well enough, i may be able to compete for a job doing X.”

I’ll Buy THAT For a Dollar

i’ve heard a little murmering about the game’s price point. For your education and edification, here is a list of five things to occupy your kid that are more expensive than Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure:

Sissy’s Magical Ponycorn Adventure is $2.99 on the iTunes App Store. i leave you with The Oatmeal. Seacrest out.

Thank you for sending me a Playbook. i like it very much. i didn’t very much like the steps involved to put my work on the device, though. It was the most needlessly complicated thing i’ve had to do in all my life. i’d like to see the Playbook succeed, but you need to put more effort into helping your developers succeed first.

Here are a few of the issues i ran into while porting my game Heads to your platform:

1. i had to download Many Things, and sign up for Many Accounts. Each Thing and each Account came with 15 pages of legalese with an “I Agree” button at the bottom. I Agree … that this stinks.
2. One of the Many Things i had to download was Adobe AIR 2.5. i followed the link on your site to Adobe AIR 2.6, which i downloaded instead. When i tried to follow your workflow, i was told that only AIR 2.5 would work, so i had to cast about the Internatz to find the 2.5 download, which wasn’t made immediately and obviously available on the Adobe site. If i’m creating something for your platform, everything i do should ideally be immediate and obvious.

   

3. i downloaded VMWare and your VMWare Playbook profile so that i could run a virtual Playbook. But the emulator stalled at the startup screen for a very long time. i checked message boards, and found two possible solutions:
   1. Leave it overnight.
   2. Alternatingly restart your computer or VMWare multiple times (some reports said “six or seven”) until it works.

   i opted to restart VMWare and my computer multiple times until it worked. This was very frustrating. i’m not the only one who experienced this problem, as evidenced by this web comic by my Twitter pal @IQAndreas:

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

   

4. In order to deploy my game to the virtual Playbook, i had to know its IP. To get that, i had to swipe the “development” option into the “on” position and punch in my password. i had to use the software keyboard to punch in my password, because my computer keyboard didn’t work. And worse than that, it took about 4-5 tries swiping the slider and punching in my password before the Developer hammer icon would appear on the home screen … for whatever reason, that slider kept undoing itself.

   

   Somebody call Jerry O’Connell, cuz this slider be busted.

5. When it came time to bundle my files together in a .bar file, i was dismayed to find that since i don’t use Flash Builder (but, rather, FlashDevelop), i would need to use the command line to continue. i hate the command line. HAATE it. i know that eggheads love it, and that you employ Many Eggheads at RIM, but you have to understand that even though the command line is useful and powerful and 1337 and everything, i absolutely can’t be arsed with it. Like, not at all. So knock it off.

   Here is what i had to type into the command line in order to bundle my project into a .bar file:

   C:\dev\BlackBerryTabletSDK\blackberry-tablet-sdk-0.9.3\bin\blackberry-airpackager -package MyGame.bar -installApp -launchApp MyGame-app.xml blackberry-tablet.xml MyGame.swf blackberry-tablet-icon.png -device 192.168.58.128 -password 123456

   This is not a fun thing to have to type. Know what i want to do? Click a button. Can you make it so that i just click a button? Buttons good, typing bad. It may not be 1337, but it also doesn’t eat up my entire afternoon.

6. i am currently rocking three Blackberry accounts: one to develop my game, one to sell my game, and one to talk about my game on your forums. This is Too Many Accounts. Know how many there should be? One. Know why? Because it’s easier. Know what’s not easy? You.
7. When i signed my application, i had to download a file that you sent to me two days after i emailed you and asked you for it. That’s Too Many Days. That’s because you also took two or three days to approve my vendor account. Why not do this in one step instead of two? Clearly, a vendor is always going to need the application signing file. See how you don’t make things easy, when you potentially could?
8. Then i had to use the command line (which, as we’ve already established, is bad) to create a file that i could send to you so that my computer could sign files. At least i think that’s what i was doing. Here’s what the command looked like:
   

   blackberry-signer -csksetup -cskpass DesiredCSKPassword

   Then i had to use the command line (bad. BAD!) to send you my .csj file to receive permission to sign my other file. i think. i’m not quite sure what was going on, because it was tough to interpret the command, which looked like this:

   blackberry-signer -register -csjpin PinEnteredWhileRequestingCSJ -cskpass PasswordEnteredWhileGeneratingCSK client-RDK-XXXXXXXXXX.csj

   Next, i had to create a .p12 certificate using this command:

   blackberry-keytool -genkeypair -keystore DesiredCertificateName.p12 -storepass NewPassword -dname “cn=MyCompanyName” -alias author

   Then i had to get you to sign the file using this command:

   blackberry-signer -verbose -cskpass CSKPassword -keystore CertificateName.p12 -storepass StorePassword BarFileNameForRIMToSign.bar RDK

   Then i had to sign the file myself using this command:

   blackberry-signer -keystore CertificateName.p12 -storepass StorePassword RimSignedBarFile.bar author

9. When i finally went to upload my file, in the web form you asked me for an additional icon in some bizarre size (243×717 or something like that). i went away and produced that icon, and by the time i returned, the web form had timed out. Know what would be easier? A checklist!
   

   YOU WILL NEED:

   • A swf
   • An xml file called whatever.xml – download it HERE!
   • A thumbnail icon – download a template HERE!
   • A second icon – download a template HERE!
   • A brief description of your application – max X words
   • A long-form description of your application – max Y words

   And HERE’S an image of how all this stuff looks when it’s in the Blackberry App World! We’ve LABELLED everything for you, so you know where the descriptions and icons appear and how they’ll look to the user.

   Really, though – how long does that kind of thing take to set up? An afternoon? Why does this not exist yet?

10. To add insult to injury, my game was initially rejected because it did not contain the icon.png. i figured i must have forgotten to include the .png filename when i created the .bar file, so i went through all of those horrible steps again. For a second time, my game was rejected. Same reason.

    Know what the problem was? i hadn’t added this to the xml file:

    <icon>
        <image>whatever.png</image>
    </icon>

    N’awesome.

i didn’t enjoy doing this, and i don’t want to have to do it ever again. Know what i want? i want a big blank area where i can drag and drop my file, with a huge shiny juicy button that says “GO BITCH GO” which, when i click it, does all the bullshit i just described above. Please get your eggheads on that.

In addition to all of the brilliant software and hardware engineers you employ, you simply need to hire more people to evaluate this process. An egghead will tell you that using the command line is cool and awesome and that everyone loves doing it. A person will tell you the actual truth: using the command line blows, and you need to put that shit on a button.

Please let me know if and when you plan to put that shit on a button, and i’ll gladly continue developing for your device, because it’s pretty cool.

Sincerely,

Ryan Henson Creighton

President, Untold Entertainment Inc.

Following the Greatest Generation, we had the Baby Boomers, and then Generation X (which is lazy naming), followed by my people, Generation Y (which is even lazier). i have a feeling we’ll eventually take to renaming Generation Y “the Internet Generation” if we haven’t already.

Rare Sandwich Filling

The interesting thing i’ve noticed about the Internet Generation is that it’s sandwiched between two generations of people who are completely crap at using technology and computers: the kids who are now 45-50, who went to high school in the 80′s, and their kids, who are currently in – or graduating from – college and University. The difference between the kids of the 80′s and their kids is that while the parents arguably didn’t need to know how to use computers effectively in the workplace while they were being hired, their kids absolutely do. But since the parents weren’t immersed in the Internet and computers, they raised their kids to be similarly disconnected. The result is a generation of kids who absolutely do need to know how to use computers and the Internet, but don’t. i dub them the Most Useless Generation.

Simple Pleasures

i can honestly say that one of the biggest thrills, one of the most memorable times in my life, was when i sat down at my friend’s computer while he launched mIRC, an Internet Relay Chat client. These were the early days of home Internet usage … the 14.4 dial-up days. My friend, a year older than me, had convinced his parents to get access because he wanted to use the Internet at home. Universities across Canada were providing Internet access to their students, right in their own dorm rooms.

Until then, the only real access high school students could get was on ONE machine in the school library, IF their school was progressive. And that computer was treated like a rare and precious angel fart – you had to book it in advance, and the whole time you used it, you’d have the head librarian breathing down your neck making sure you didn’t “hack NASA” or whatever.

But here in my friend’s room, and in Universities across the country (it was one agonizingly long year until i’d get my chance), we had unfettered, gloriously unsupervised access to the Internet. The thrill – the unbridled thrill of chatting to complete strangers in a text-only chat channel was a magical moment i’ll honestly never forget as long as i live. i’m not being cynical here: it absolutely blew my mind.

Denerdification

All through grade school, only the nerdiest kids learned to use computers because it was a niche interest that effectively turned you into a social outcast. But in high school, with the advent of the Internatz, everyone learned how to use computers – often under their own initiative – because computers became that damned interesting.

Flash forward to today, when i discover while teaching group of college students that they don’t know how zip a file and send it as an attachment in an email. This is email we’re talking about – the Internet’s killer app – and it was causing anxiety attacks in students enrolled in a computer art program.

This is the generation of kids who were horror-stricken that i’d been teaching Sunday School using Wikipedia as a research guide. Their teachers have long told them that Wikipedia is absolutely unreliable, and they’re not to use it. This is the generation that can’t Google worth a fat damn.

This is also the generation, incidentally, that doesn’t offer the courtesy of a phone call or an email when they don’t come into work. This comes from both personal experience and from anecdotal word-of-mouth, as i’ve heard that many employers are frustrated with The Most Useless Generation. Instead of giving notice, they just don’t show up. If they don’t want to do something because they don’t find it fun or interesting or engaging, they don’t do it. i once had an intern quit on me by phone call, with zero notice, and i suspect it’s because he wasn’t having any luck with the CSS task i’d given him. Based on all i’ve been hearing, i’m frankly surprised i received a phone call at all.

Let’s Get Out of Here

i’m not sure how to solve this problem, or even if we need to? Maybe we just have to put up with a generation of unemployable kids, until the next generation can put us back on track? Perhaps we can wage a special, separate World War III and draft everyone between the ages of 15 and 25 to fight it? But there’s a good chance they’ll find war either too difficult or too uninteresting, and will lay down their guns so they can butcher the English language in undecipherable text messages to each other.

Or maybe we should just build a spaceship to somewhere else? Everyone is freely invited to board it and get off this rock. We’ll send the invite by email.

While he was giving a series of lectures,

[Nye] brought up Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”

The lesser light, he pointed out, is not a light at all, but only a reflector.

At this point, several people in the audience stormed out in fury. One woman yelled “We believe in God!” and left with three children.

The way in which this story was reported, and the way folks in my social sphere are having a gleeful field day with it, rubs me the wrong way. Here’s why.

Intolerants

Very recently, game designer Dan Cook asked his Twitter game dev followers if they were “religious”. He was presumably looking for a correlation between game design and godlessness. i offered up my list of “religious” (read: Christian) game devs (a number i can count on one hand), but i also made sure to mention that there’s a rampant anti-religious (read: anti-Christian) vibe out there among the people in my social sphere – namely, game devs and tech types.

Over the years, we develop shorthand when referring to or thinking about groups and types of people, because we can’t be arsed to do proper research or to practice empathy. This is how stereotypes work, and they’re quite useful.

What do we know about Waco and its people? Well, first and foremost, Waco is only a few letters off from the arbitrary English word “wacko”, meaning “crazy”, so logically, Waco’s residents must all be nuts. That’s the easy part.

We also know that Waco is home to religious zealotry. A few years back, there was a religious cult in Waco led by David Koresh. The FBI surrounded his compound, which was eventually burned to the ground under mysterious circumstances, and everyone inside the place died.

Now we’ll delve a little deeper to pull in everything we know about Waco’s people in order to properly judge them. First, Waco is in Texas. Texas is full of Christians, because George Bush. Christians don’t believe in science, because it contradicts the Bible. Since science is the exclusive domain of smart, educated people, we can deduce from this that Christians are stupid. And they’re warhawks. And they don’t like gays. They’re a pretty detestable lot, so it’s pretty great that we get to make fun of them.

A Working Model for Ridicule

So! We have a city packed with stupid Christians, in a town known for its religious zealotry, attending a Bill Nye lecture. Put it all together, and we get the following read on the story:

Science hero Bill Nye, in the proud tradition of Copernicus and Galileo, descended upon Christian backwater Waco, Texas, to enlighten the locals about a scientific fact that contradicts their creation myth. In response, the attendees decried his assertions as witchcraft, rejected his blaspheming, re-affirmed their love for their invisible and scientifically unproven deity, and stormed out of the venue, kids in tow.

The “kids in tow” bit is important. It’s conspicuously mentioned in the article. We don’t get the demographic breakdown of the other dissenters, but we do know that one woman led her three children away. This is mentioned because it’s important to know that Christians reject the findings of science, and that they pass that ignorance on to their children. (And who has children these days, anyway? Pfft. Breeders.)

Let There Be Reflection

Just as a side note, i’ll defend the Genesis verse for kicks. Does it matter if a something described as a “light” is self-illuminating? If you were trapped in a dark place, and you said “Hey Bill – can you shine a light on this keyhole so i can jimmy the lock?”, and Bill – for lack of a light – ingenuously angled a mirror to bounce a beam across the room to the dark keyhole, would you say “Dammit Bill, i said shine a LIGHT -not ‘reflect a beam of light’?”

Let’s edit the verse so that it’s needlessly specific:

God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser reflector to govern the night.

There. Does God exist now?

A Different Read

Christians are so stupid that, when faced scientific fact that humankind has long held to be true, they reject reality and cling to ancient superstition. Then they pass that stubborn idiocy on to their offspring. We’ve figured this all out thanks to the magic of stereotypes, and our own actualignorance.

Here’s another way to read this incident, from someone who is a practicing Christian:

Bill Nye is a massive cock. He’s a very bright guy and an experienced speaker – you don’t land your own teevee show otherwise (Glenn Beck notwithstanding). One of the first rules of public speaking is “know your audience”. Nye knew full well that, being in Texas, there was a high probability that he’d be speaking to at least a few Christians that day.

Nye also knew that some aspects of science are at odds with, and at times appear to completely contradict, scripture. He knew that there is an ongoing tension between the realms of faith and science. He was aware that this is a touchy subject.

Yet, despite knowing all of this, Bill Nye had an axe to grind with Bible-believing Christians. Instead of simply stating the fact that the moon reflects the sun’s light, he deliberately put that fact at odds with a verse in the scriptural account of creation in order to stir up shit. There’s no other reason why he decided to frame that fact in that particular way. i haven’t heard this piece of his presentation in context, but it’s clear that he wasn’t innocently invoking the Judeo-Christian creation myth with an absent-minded frivolity, as scientists often do (??)

No, Bill Nye intended to provoke. And he got what he wanted: the devout, practicing Christians in the room booed him. It’s important to realize here that they weren’t booing science. They weren’t necessarily rejecting the evidence that the moon is not self-illuminating. They were rejecting the callous approach of a speaker who unnecessarily invoked the debate between science and faith in a known hotbed for Christian adherents.

You don’t book a speaking tour in wine country, take the podium in front of hundreds of vineyard owners and wine enthusiasts, and start off by saying “You know what i hate? Grapes.”

Taking a Stand

When an industry pal of mine gleefully retweeted this story, i gave him this more fair-minded read on it. He said fine and dandy, but was it really an appropriate response to boo the speaker and storm out of the auditorium? If you’ve ever believed in something as strongly as Christians believe in (and love) their fantasy God, then you’ll understand that, yes – it is entirely appropriate to stand up for your beliefs when one among you launches an attack on those beliefs. In other words, if someone is being a dick, it’s alright to call him out on it.

Of course, Christians aren’t the only people who believe in this creation story. The concept of an omnipotent god speaking the sun, moon and stars into being is shared by Christians, Jews and Muslims. But no one would dare attack Jewish people for their religious conviction, because many of them were killed in the holocaust, and any criticism of Jews is seen as insensitive. And you’d better not ridicule Muslims, because they’ll burn your embassy down and put bombs on your airplanes. This is the easy shorthand we’ve developed when dealing with those two groups.

But Christians? They’re a safe, easy target. They’re ignorant, backwards-thinking, and simple-minded. More importantly, they’re powerless to stop you from saying whatever you damn well please about them. They love God, “hate fags”, and despite the likes of noble Bill Nye trying in vain to re-educate them, they think the moon is self-illuminating because the Bible tells them so.

Ah. Thank God for stereotypes.

…

Oops. Did i say “thank God“? i’m such an idiot.

i’m ready to declare holy Jihad on anyone who botches it. Being a Christian, i’m not really sure how holy Jihad works, but if it means you get to harm people who annoy you, then yes. That.

Further Reading:

• 5 Words You Probably Misspell
• Words We Have Invented

A few people took exception to my saying that the stink over Zynga and the horrible scads of filthy cash they’re earning, perhaps at the expense of crazy people, was due to jealousy. “No!” cried The People. “It’s not because i’m jealous that they have more money than the Federal Reserve fresh off a print run. It’s that Zynga (Playdom, Playfish) develop games that are shallow.”

Shallow Is as Shallow Does

Oho! i see. The problem is not that social game developers have enough cash to make papier mache pinatas for their kids’ birthday parties out of fifty dollar bills. It’s that their games don’t deliver a satisfying experience. It’s that they’re shallow.

Let me tell you about some shallow games, because i’ve spent my life playing them. And it’s been most of them.

i’ve played a game called Blue Dragon, a Japanese RPG where you keep pressing the “A” button for about 40 hours until you win. (Blue Dragon is also known under its import titles “Final Fantasy”, “Dragon Quest”, “Phantasy Star”, “The Secret of Evermore”, “Earthbound”, “Pokemon”, “Star Ocean”, and a few hundred other names which escape me.)

I’ve played a game called Double Dragon, where you press the joystick button for about 2 hours until you win. (You may also know this game as “Final Fight”, “River City Ransom”, “BattleToads”, “The Simpsons Arcade”, “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV”, “Bad Dudes vs. Dragon Ninja”, and many more.)

I’ve even played a game where you continually pressed a button to win, which i think was called Zaxxon / Xevious / Centipede / Bangai-O / Silpheed / Commando / Rambo: First Blood Part II / Contra.

And all in the name of playing a game with a little more depth, i even tried a game where you’re a guy, and you have to punch another guy using a combination of buttons until the other guy falls down (or you murder him). That one was called Mortal Kombat / Marvel vs. Capcom / Street Fighter / Killer Instinct / Clay Fighter / Virtua Fighter / Tekken / Pit-Fighter / Bloodstorm / Time Killers.

And if i ever really wanted to blow the barn doors off, i’d play this game where you walk around a 3D maze with a gun, and you SHOOT enemies with it, until all the enemies are gone. Sometimes, i’d play that game with other people in a “death match”. That’s a game mode where sometimes i would kill the other players, and sometimes the other players would kill me. Then we’d get a score sheet of who killed who. Then we’d play again. The next time, i would kill the other players a number of times, and they would kill me a number of times. The numbers sometimes changed, you see? That one was great. It was called Wolfenstein 3D / DOOM / QUAKE / Serious Sam / Duke Nukem / Call of Duty / Halo / Shooty McBang-Shoot.

For 25 Points, Define “Shallow”

What’s shallow gameplay? Is it gameplay where you strategically place assets and efficiently use time and resources to maximize profits and dominate the game board, as you do in Farmville / Restaurant City / Cityville (or Dune II / Starcraft / Act Raiser / Populous / Age of Empires / Sim City)? Or is a “shallow” game one that you don’t enjoy?

When we think “film”, we think of the best-in-class examples, like Citizen Kane, The Shawshank Redemption, Taxi Driver, and Lawrence of Arabia. We don’t necessarily call to mind Dude Where’s My Car, The Hottie and the Nottie, and Good Burger (although i’d really like to put in a good word for Good Burger, because it’s awesome. Check your Netflix listings.)

Similarly, when we think of “games”, we think of Shadow of the Colossus, Braid, Super Mario Bros, Pac-Man, Metroid, The Legend of Zelda, and Tetris. We don’t necessarily call to mind Superman 64, Night Trap, E.T. the Extra Terrestrial, or the writing in Braid.

Starting with the Man in the Mirror

Can we be honest? Just as we’ve seen a lot of crappy movies over the years that weren’t really worth our time, we’ve played a LOT of horrendous games that we really should have passed on (except that we needed to beat the high score/get the last achievement/collect all the things). Sometimes, movies we dismiss as derivative or shallow get all kinds of money and attention (Steel Magnolias please?) Other times, we approve (Academy Award Winner Heath Ledger).

So you don’t approve of Farmville? Why troll out your film critic’s turtleneck and goatee and try to pontificate over the lackluster aesthetics or shallow gameplay? Why isn’t it just good enough to say you don’t like it? “It’s not for me, but it’s okay for them to make money from it because other people seem to enjoy it.” There. Try saying that. It’s therapeutic.

Cozy Up with Grandpa Ryan

Look, i went through this. i’ve been in your shoes. Back in the mid-90′s, i lived and breathed graphic adventure games. They were witty, they were story-based, and they had GREAT characters and beautiful graphics. Then somewhere along the way, we went from LOOM to DOOM – from Zak McKracken to crackin’ skulls. Suddenly, the kinds of games i enjoyed stopped being made, because everyone was into running around and shooting things and not having to think. This brought an influx of the wrong kind of people into games: jocks. The very people who tormented me in elementary school for liking video games were now the industry’s target demographic, and would be for decades.

Sure, i could rail against those games – talk about how they’re vapid and shallow and uninteresting. i could smoke my unfiltered cigarette through one of those long holders and sip red wine from a high-heeled shoe, and then splash it on some fashion model i keep around my studio apartment to brighten up that corner near the Bauhaus-designed furniture set. And i did, actually. i did just that.

But eventually, you just gotta say “that game is just not what i’m into.” Stop feeling threatened. Game genres fall in and out of favour. Are you worried that casual games become so popular that no one will make your empty-headed idiot shooters any more? It could happen. Then you’d become a niche player, like those of us who scour the bargain bins at Wal Mart looking for games that scored above a C- on JustAdventure.com. LOOK UPON ME: THIS IS YOUR FATE!

The bottom line is that social game developers have made a LOT of money creating games that you don’t enjoy, and you feel threatened and resentful (and perhaps a little jealous) because the games that are getting so much attention aren’t the ones you enjoy playing. Do you really think that convincing those Farmville-addicted moms to play a metroidvania platformer is the answer? How will you choose to articulate your feelings? i like collecting little lost cows, and you like shooting space demons in the head. Be very careful who you’re calling shallow.

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.

Credits are those long, scrolling pages of text at the end of the movie that you watch just to see if the filmmakers added a special jokey tack-on scene at the end of the flick. If you read closely, you’ll see that they are the names of people who worked on the movie, listed alongside their job titles. In film, there are credits for the big people – the executive producer, the director and the principal actors – all the way down to the little people – the sandwich grip, the second-line gaffer, and the assistant schloob.

If you look closely, you’ll begin to see credits everywhere. They’re tacked on to the beginning and end of teevee shows, they’re inside album liner notes, and they pop up at the end of your favourite home console or computer video games. But the one place you won’t find them is in online free-to-play Flash games – partly because Flash game developers decide not to put them there, and partly because developers are actively blocked from adding credits to their games by corporations with selfish interests.

Flashsploitation

More than just being a token kind gesture recognizing the hard work and effort people put into an entertainment product, for mature industries like film, television and music, credits are actually a key cog in the machine. The CVs and resumes of performers and technicians rely on the credits system; often, your ability to land future jobs is based on the credits you’ve amassed on earlier projects. Because of this, there are unions and guilds strictly guiding the practice of giving credit, in order to protect entertainment professionals from exploitation.

The Flash game ecosystem is notorious for being packed with non-professionals, but we boast our fair share of pros. Many game developers do what’s called “service work” to pay their bills. A company will approach a known game developer, and will contract him to build a Flash game to certain specifications. My own company, Untold Entertainment Inc., is just such a developer. We survive on service work, largely building Flash games and Flash websites for clients like kids’ television production companies. If a prodco has a teevee show, especially if it’s targeted towards kids, they’ll also want someone to build them a web game to help promote and extend their brand. Companies like Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, and Disney regularly contract Flash game developers to build their arsenal of online games.

If you wanted to find out which developers built these games though, you’re largely out of luck. Try fishing through the games on the sites i mentioned and look for production credits – even a single logo of the developer who built the game. With a few rare exceptions, you’ll come up empty-handed, game after game. Before founding Untold Entertainment, i worked at a media conglomerate serving a number of kids’ teevee stations. Throughout my time there, i made over fifty games. i was not credited for a single one.

Keep it Secret, Keep It Safe

Once out in the “real world”, i began to actively ask my clients for credits in the games i produced for them – a logo, at the very least. Credit is one way to boost morale and mutual respect among your developers, and beyond that – it just seems RIGHT, you know? When teevee and film are crediting their most important people down to the very guy who tapes the pylons to the road, it just didn’t seem right that the team or individual who created the entire game wouldn’t be recognized. And having my logo feature in the game somewhere could be a compelling driver for future business. All a prospective client need do is cruise through Cartoon Network’s site, for example, see my logo, and call me up with a contract offer.

Aye – there’s the rub. That’s exactly the situation that a client like Disney or Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon wants to avoid. They don’t want anyone else contracting out “their” developers. More competition for developers means that the devs will be more highly paid, and it may be more difficult for them to get their games made if the best devs are in higher demand.

No Promo

The second excuse i hear for not allowing credit is that these companies don’t want to let on that they didn’t do all the work themselves. There’s this strange macho corporate pride in pretending that all of their interactive work was done in-house – or at least, that’s the excuse they all give me. But a quick look through the credits of any special effects-laden film, for example, shows that individual effects shots are farmed out to numerous different special effects houses. This serves the special effects team in two ways: they can say they worked on Blockbuster 2: the Awesoming, and prospective clients can see their name in the credits, which both increases their brand recognition, and enables clients to contract them for new work.

But surely, a Flash game developer can at least SAY he worked on a given project, right? Actually, no. Many of these clients specify in the contract language that the game developer cannot even say he worked on the game. That means no screenshots on his site, and no link to the game. The developer must disavow any knowledge that the project ever happened, Mission: Impossible style. On one of my contracts, the client forbade me from ever mentioning i worked on the project. This became a sticking point, and when i fought for the right to promote, the client struck a bizarre bargain: i could promote my involvement in the project anywhere but online. Of course, the web is the only place i ever promote my work with Untold Entertainment.

It Doesn’t Ad Up

You could argue that the work we Flash game developers do for these companies amounts to advertising. Creating a game to promote The Family Guy or the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse shows is tantamount to creating an interactive advertisement online. And since teevee commercial spots don’t credit their creators, games promoting shows don’t need to either.

This argument falls down for two reasons: for one, there’s really no room in a teevee spot to credit the creators, but there’s plenty of room in Flash games, as they’re not temporally limited to 30 seconds. On the second count, advertising agencies promote their work all the time. Visit any agency website, and you’ll see the logos for the brands they’ve repped displayed proudly and prominently on the main page. Many sites actually do list credits for the commercials they created. Industry awards like the Clios list teevee commercial and print ad credits in full on their websites.

Credits are important. They serve as proof that a developer completed the work he said he did. They help to increase a developer’s brand awareness, and they help new clients reach Flash game developers that they otherwise may not have known about. Clients who refuse to credit developers, and who actively block developers from promoting the work are preventing the industry from maturing in the name of their own selfish interests.

Resistance by Insistence

So what’s to be done? When I started hearing from new clients that they wanted to use me instead of my more well-known competitor, i asked what he’d done to lose their business. Their answer? “He started getting pushy about credit.” Asking for credit, or even demanding credit that is rightly due to us as developers, is apparently hazardous to your health. It can harm your business. It may even be possible to land new contracts simply by forfeiting your game credit. Clients really seem to go for that type of thing.

But you know what i say? Screw that. The solution is for ALL Flash game developers to demand the credit they are due on ALL projects. Even if you’re not in this fee-for-service racket, you should add a Credits link to the main page of your Flash game as a matter of course. You need to create a logo and preface your own game with it – or simply use your own name (e.x. “A game by Ryan Henson Creighton”) Build your personal brand so that if clients come calling, you’ll have established a credit expectation in all of your games.

If ALL Flash games have a credits page (just as ALL teevee shows, movies, album liner notes, gallery installations, operas, stage plays, and nearly every other mature form of artistic expression or entertainment already has), then it will be simply unspeakable for a client to ask that you remove your name from the game. You can also support the IGDA in their efforts to create a Credit Standards guide, and point your clients to that guide during contract negotiations. For our part, Untold Entertainment now requires credit and promotion rights on all of our contracts – otherwise, we simply don’t take the job. If we as developers band together and demand recognition for our creative efforts as they do in so many other entertainment industries, together we can drag online games kicking and screaming from adolescence to adulthood.

Credits: this article was written by Ryan Henson Creighton, assistant schloob.

Recently, the battery power on the iPod has been dropping dramatically. This week, it stopped charging altogether.

i took the device to the Apple Store, where the Genius™ in the back told me that the iPod’s battery “is consumable”, and that two years is pretty much the upper limit of use that i could expect from the device.

He offered me exactly one option:

1. Pay $69 (about a quarter of the price of the device) to swap it for a new one with a fresh battery.

All-Consuming

These two devices are the first Apple products i’ve ever purchased. i’ve been hearing for years about how user-friendly the company’s products are, and how they have a mind toward building green products (i believe their latest laptop is made from wood chips and rabbit pellets).

i can’t think of anything less user-friendly than a 21st century device which does not allow its owner to replace its battery. The battery is “consumable”, yes … but consumption implies that i can replenish the consumable, and consume it again.

i consume food on a daily basis, but once the food in my fridge runs out, i replenish it with new food – i don’t pay a quarter of the price to buy a new fridge.

Imagine a world where we were unable to replenish the power supplies in our devices. Car’s battery died? Pay a quarter of the price to trade it in for a new car. Video game controllers? After a few weeks, you need new ones. Watches? Remote controlled cars? Hearing aids? Despite it being a simple process to swap in a fresh power source, all of these devices would become defunct.

Green and Greed

There are two angles to this issue: green and greed.

Apple’s design decision to prevent users from being able to replace the battery is an environmental no-no. i’m sure they’ll do all sorts of wonderful things with my traded-in device (like throwing a new battery in it and selling it as refurbished, or planting it to grow an Apple tree or whatever), but because i feel like Apple is ransoming my use of the device, i have half a mind to throw my defunct iPod into the ocean, specifically aiming it at a dolphin’s face. Perhaps i’ll dip it in crude oil a few times first? Apple’s locked design of the device is environmentally unfriendly.

Perhaps more transparently, this is planned obsolescence at its ugliest. To specifically design a device that lasts only two years is irresponsible at best – insidious at worst. Apple knows darn well that after two years, an iPod customer will likely have made a significant temporal, financial and emotional investment in the device – purchasing iTunes apps and songs, sinking time and money into certain iOS games, and integrating the device into his lifestyle (public transit and toilet time, most notably). Squeezing another 25% of the device cost from the customer every two years is a solid way to pad company coffers.

Not a Fan

When i slide the back of my Nexus One Android phone open, there’s a replaceable battery staring back at me. When it gives up the ghost – hopefully beyond the 2-year mark – i can choose to purchase a new battery from either Google or a third party, at significantly less than 25% of the phone’s price ($10 or less on eBay – that’s 2% of the device price).

Apple has its fans, to be sure, but i’m not willing to sacrifice basic consumer control over the utility of my devices for a few shiny logos and a high-profile (yet environmentally irresponsible and ultimately consumer-hostile) brand.

UPDATE

i didn’t mention it in the original article, but things started to go South once i installed the iOS4 update for my device. Suddenly, the battery lasted one hour instead of the days of juice that it used to provide. i mentioned this to the Apple Store guy, who swore up and down that iOS4 has no effect on battery life. He actually made me feel like a bit of a fool for even bringing it up.

Enter the Internet:

• iOS 4 Severely Affects iPod touch Battery Life
• iOS 4 Causing iPod Touch Battery Problems
• iOS 4 drawing complaints about poor battery life from iPod Touch users
• iOS4 Battery Issue?
• iPod Touch Battery Issues in iOS 4
• iPod Touch battery life dwindled after installing iOS 4

So it appears that, non-replaceable battery notwithstanding, the iOS4 upgrade may have devoured whatever juice the “ancient” 2-year-old battery had left in it. i’ll pay another visit to the Apple Store tomorrow to see if i can’t get this sorted out.

ANOTHER UPDATE

Today i returned to the Apple Store, ranting and raving and foaming at the mouth. Craftily, i told the salespeople that i wanted to buy an expensive iPod Touch, but was concerned because the battery wasn’t replaceable. How long would the device last? One guy said “WELL over 2 years … possibly 4 or 5 years.” Hmm. But then a girl i spoke to said that it depends on my usage.

Me:Very well – i pay $400 for the device. How much usage does that get me, at maximum abuse? 3 months?
Her: Probably more than that, but i can’t say for sure.
Me: You can’t say for sure that i’m going to drop $400 on an iPod Touch, and it’s going to last longer than 3 months?
Her: Okay – probably longer than 3 months.
Me: How long? 6 months?
Her: i can’t say for sure.
Me: So $400 won’t even buy me 6 months with the device?
Her: It all depends.
Me: Depends on what? Don’t you have any benchmarks?

By that point, the “Genius” at the back was calling my name. As a (fake) new customer, though, i don’t think i would have made a purchase with such a non-committal answer. At least lie to me, lady. You’re in sales, after all.

i went in hollering and carrying on and telling them that the iOS4 upgrade had destroyed my battery. One Genius had to step in and, in his smoothest “i’m a very very cool dude who works at the Apple Store and check out my awesome tattoos but they’re too obscure for you to understand” voice, he asked me to calm down. Said that iOS4, while very hard on the battery and probably a bad idea for iPod Touch owners to install, had nothing to do with my device’s battery dying. Completely unrelated.

i asked him how an ill-advised upgrade that destroyed battery life could possibly be unrelated to a battery-destroying issue. He said it was pure coincidence that my battery happened to die after i upgraded. i reiterated that after i installed the iOS4 upgrade, my battery life began to rapidly decline over a period of two weeks, going from holding a charge for days, to holding a charge for an hour. He said that when the batteries degrade, they do so very quickly. i called bullshit.

They gave me options. A battery replacement was $99. The other guy jumped in and said they don’t actually replace the battery – they give me a new device, and that would cost me $89. Both numbers were a chunk higher than the $69 mystery figure the “Genius” had offered me one day earlier. i felt like i was paying The Price is Right.

The other “Genius” offered to wipe my device and install iOS 4.1 on it. “Genius” #2 told me that any time i used wifi on the device, i’d have to shut it down by putting the iPod into airplane mode before i pushed the Sleep button. There was still no option to disable the “always-on” wifi problem that iOS4 introduced.

“Genius” #2 also mumbled something to his colleague about there being a software bug on the recharge screen when it showed one red stick, which mine did. Funny – it was the first i was hearing of it.

So i told the guy to go ahead with the reset. He wiped the device, and upgraded to iOS 4.1. Suddenly, the device started to hold a charge. i went home and plugged it in, charging it fully. It took much longer to charge this time, instead of the half hour it took when it was suffering from iOS 4.0. Wifi is off. The battery is draining at a normal, pre- iOS4 rate.

Apparently, iOS4 is not an issue for older iPod Touch devices until Pope Steve says it is. Until then, ranting and raving and demanding satisfactory service in the face of a conflicting and ever-changing customer service response is the only way. You need to be a modern-day Galileo to convince Apple that the universe does not revolve around their company.

But now that my months-old Pocket Frogs saved game file is lost forever, there’s very little compelling me to use my iPod in the near future, charged battery or otherwise.

The Anatomy of Failure

So it was nice to be asked, but humbling to speak on the topic: “I Wish I Knew Then What I Know Now” … AKA “here are all the ways in which i’ve botched it as a small business owner.” i joked that it was a difficult task because they’d only given me fifteen minutes. i also felt very junior. i’ve been making games professionally for ten years, but have only been running my own shop for three – the other two panelists (Jason Krogh from Zinc Roe and Deborah Esayian from Emmis Interactive) had each been running the show for a full ten years.

As expected, i did a lot of listening. Jason and i build games for the same kids market. i have watched his company very closely, and dream of one day running a studio as well-regarded as his. The difference between us is that i’m sure Jason has never used the word “wang” on his blog. Conversely, i have a corporate mandate to fulfill a wang quota by the end of each fiscal quarter. Wang. (sorry – just maintaining my output.)

The one piece of advice Jason gave that stuck in my mind and has loomed there ever since is that you need to value your time, and you need to be wary of people taking your time for free. Deborah was of the opposite mind: she says she meets with everyone and anyone, never knowing when that seed she sowed will turn into a business opportunity years down the road. i’ve been more of a Deborah for three years, but it’s getting to the point where i don’t have nearly enough time and money to be a Deborah for very much longer.

Let’s (Not) Do Lunch

i try to be a very nice guy, and i like to share my knowledge with people. But i’ve come to realize that i’m being nice to the severe detriment of my bottom line. Since the iLunch – not yet two weeks gone – i’ve spent an entire morning answering interview questions by two researchers from the University of Alberta, i’ve given a phone interview and have written two longish emails to a reporter from KidScreen, and i’ve spent hours discussing an unfunded spec project by phone and by email. i’ve been wise enough to turn down 3-4 people for lunch/coffee meeting requests. But just this week, someone said to me “we wanna make a Facebook game – come meet!” and i, because i’m dumb and did not heed Jason’s advice, said “sure!”

This is how that scenario should play out:

THEM: We wanna make a Facebook game – come meet!
ME: Very well. My consultation fee is $x/hour.
THEM: …. …. we’re not so interested in meeting any more!

But i didn’t do that. Instead, i said “sure!” because i wanted to be nice and helpful, and who knows? Perhaps it will turn into some business.

It will not.

Will You Build my Game Idea?

This is how those meetings always, always go – and i’ve sat through enough of them to know:

“We don’t know much about games. We don’t play them, and we’ve never made them, but we’re applying for government funding, and we need to present some kind of interactive component attached to our teevee show, or we won’t get funding.

“So based on the articles we’ve read in the Globe and Mail and the daily commuter paper, we’ve come up with this game concept. It’s a cross-platform game that you can play on Facebook, the Twitter, the iPad, and the Kindle. It’s an ARG. It does that alternate reality camera thing. It uses quick codes. And 3D glasses. It’s like Avatar. And Farmville. And Angry Birds. It’s social. It’s real-time. Here are some mock-ups of gameplay.”

Shouting Into the Void

If you could see me right now, you’d see me holding back a pressure headache behind my eyeball with my right palm as i type. At the iLunch, i just HAD to get this message out. It was a complete non-sequitir, and it had absolutely nothing to do with the topic at hand, but i had to say this to anyone who would listen:

The interactive industry is its own separate industry. It has its own experts who play games, make games, and are very well-versed in all things game. These people can help you with your project, but you have to involve them in the creative process early (Jason might have added “and compensate them for their time”, but i was on a roll).

If the last game you played was Pac Man, and the freshest data you’re getting about the industry is from mainstream print media like a newspaper, you need to 1. recognize that you are not an expert, and 2. hand the task over to someone who is. Here are the questions you should ask:

1. Is a video game or interactive application an effective and appropriate way to extend my brand onto other media?
2. If so, which platforms and genres should i be considering? This is who i am trying to reach, and this is the kind of return on investment i’d like to see.

That’s it. Find a vendor, pay his consultation fee, and ask those two questions. Any capable vendor – and this country is FULL of capable vendors – will be able to run with that question and give you all kinds of options that you probably haven’t even considered, because you are not the expert.

The Areas of My Expertise

In order to drive that point home, i repeated this familiar refrain … you know, the one i’ll be chanting when this industry finally kills me and i become a ghost haunting the foyers of future transmedia conferences:

If you want to build a teevee show, go to the experts: people who make teevee shows. If you want to build a game, go to the experts: game developers.

At the iLunch, i took it even farther, and said that a game developer can build a teevee show better than a teevee person can build a game. Why? Because linear media is just one component of video games. We have cut-scenes in games that use the exact same visual language and storytelling technique as film and television. Add to that the fact that game people actually watch teevee. But teevee people – the ones i’ve met – do not play games. Their kids play games. Marc Saltzman writes 100-word capsule reviews of games in FutureShop flyers and on pre-show slides that flash before the movie starts at the Cineplex, and teevee people read those and figure they’re pretty much up on all this technology stuff.

i … it’s depressing. It makes me alternately sad and angry. i don’t know how to deal with my emotions over this. Maybe i’ll make a little doll and confess my impotent feelings of rage to it? Maybe Jason Krogh with let me rest my head on his lap and he’ll stroke my hair and say “there, there” as i quietly sob?

Or maybe teevee people will figure out that we can build far cooler projects if we work together? And then maybe all the bad people will throw their guns and bombs in the ocean, and …

… wang.

(huge thanks to @cartoondutchie for helping me save my breath)

It never used to be this way. Canada, the friendly and primarily Englsih-speaking neighbour to the North of the USA, used to get all the same stuff that they got stateside, at roughly the same time. Movies would be released on the same weekend, Canadian stations would broadcast big teevee shows on the same night, and all was right with the world.

Lately, though, this wonderful system has been falling apart. It became personal when the hotly-anticipated video game Rock Band was delayed a number of months in Canada – ostensibly so that the company could produce the bilingual French and English print materials. (i never bought that excuse … the game was published by EA, who have had ample experience writing French and English game manuals over the years). CTV, the primary Canadian carrier of American teevee for the masses, started pre-empting and re-scheduling certain top-tier shows like LOST, because they’d ordered hit shows from two competing American networks. Geo-blocking is rampant; Canadians can’t access Comedy Central, we can’t watch Hulu, and we don’t have TiVO. And the biggest cultural carrot that’s been dangled in front of our noses for years has been Netflix.

Netflix is a video rental service that charges a flat monthly fee, and provides subscribers access to a library of DVDs. More recently, they’ve added a video streaming service. As this service has been rolled out to numerous gadgets and gizmos that we Canadians own (iPods/iPhones, Xbox 360′s, PS3′s, Wiis), and the Yanks have made a huge fuss over it, we’ve been positively salivating at the prospect of the service coming to the Great White North.

Well, Netflix is here now. And what do we have, after the long wait? Imagine if, for just eight dollars, you could watch any movie – ANY MOVIE YOU WANTED – from that discount DVD bin next to the cash register at Home Hardware. ANY MOVIE. You’d just have to pay Rogers or Bell the extra fifty bucks a month to increase your bandwidth cap, and this world of Earthly pleasures would open up to you.

Supreme Netdown

i haven’t counted the number of movies on the Netflix Canada service, but i think it’s roughly twelve. Twelve movies, and i’ve already seen three of them. The movies are grouped into pretty granular categories, with a LOT of repeats between genre listings. Let’s take a look at the Netflix Canada offering of “Classic Sci-Fi & Fantasy” movies. But before we do, quick: what are the top ten Classic Sci Fi & Fantasy movies that come to your mind? i hope you could name ten, because Netflix Canada only offers seven. Seven movies. And classic, they ain’t:

• Mad Max (no Road Warrior, no Beyond Thunderdome)
• Godzilla’s Revenge (no original Godzilla, which has an IMDB rating of 7.3, to Revenge‘s 4.0)
• Ghidora: The Three Headed Monster (i’m no monster movie fan, but where’s Gamera? Mothra?)
• Fahrenheit 451
• Silent Running
• Red Planet Mars
• King of the Rocket Men

Did you perhaps think of Metropolis, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or THEM? Or did you conjure up more recent classics like Blade Runner, Alien, Willow, The Abyss, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Well tough nuts. They don’t have ‘em.

BONUS: Can i get an American subscriber to list the movies in this category on American Stream Instantly Netflix? Kthx.

The Hits Just Keep On Failing to Come

Netflix Canada’s twenty-two selections in the pure “Fantasy” section include stinkers like The Golden Child, Bewtiched (the Will Ferrell bomb), Cool World (??), and the Uwe Boll schlockbuster In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale.

“Cult Comedies” (thirteen movies in total) has a few decent picks like The ‘Burbs, Being John Malkovich and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, but really stretches the category with Teen Wolf (which is also inexplicably found in “Teen Horror”) and Big Top Pee Wee. No Election, no Rushmore, no Living in Oblivion, Ghost World, The Big Lebowski, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Heathers, Very Bad Things, or any other cult comedy I can think of.

(You’ll find Jeff Dunham and Joe Rogan in the Stand-up Comedy section, incidentally, which also stretches the genre category beyond its reasonable limits)

Flame On

i’ve complained about it a bunch on Twitter, so i think i should just post this last rant and shaddup about it. Here goes: Netflix Canada perfectly recreates the depressing feeling you get when you go to a Blockbuster Video store closing to buy some discounted DVDs and the place has been picked over, and all that’s left are twelve copies of Jim Carrey’s The Number 23. You try to convince yourself that your wife will really like the romcom Picture Perfect (starring Jennifer Aniston and Kevin Bacon), or that $6.99 is a small price to pay for all the fun your kids will have watching the animated feature film The Missing Lynx, with the voice talents of … no, seriously – WTF? The Missing Lynx? What the hell is that? MetaCritic and Rotten Tomatoes don’t even have entries for it, and the IMDB folks put it at a 5.6. Based on my viewing preferences (i spent an hour or so rating movies on the Netflix site – movies that Netflix Canada doesn’t even have in its library), Netflix itself thinks that i’ll rate The Missing Lynx at about a 2.4/5.

My American friends to the South speak of a land flowing with milk and honey – of a Netflix that has absolutely everything you could ever want to watch, streamed to every digital device you own short of your pocket watch. Now either the Yanks have a peculiar predilection for bargain bin trash, or we hosers are, once again, gettin’ hosed.

1. You Could Use a Hole Punch to Double Your Disk Space

The Commodore 64 was an immensely popular home computer in the 80′s. My family didn’t own one because we were dirt poor, but i used to play with one at the twins’ house (the twins’ mom would babysit me after school). Copy protection was almost non-existent on C64 games, so most kids (the twins included) had one or two enormous troughs of 5 1/4″ floppy disks that were mysteriously labeled. Sometimes up to three games were crammed on a disk. i remember the first time i ever saw a C64 game being sold new in the box in a computer software store and thinking “Oh … so THAT’S where they come from.”

These 5 1/4″ floppy disks were, by their very nature, double-sided. You could buy blank floppy disks, or you could pay extra money for double-sided floppies which you could flip over and insert into the disk drive upside-down to write to the other side. The way the drive knew that a floppy was double-sided was by a square notch cut into one side of the disk sleeve. By using a simple hole punch, you could pop a divot into your supposedly single-sided disks and voila – twice the space, half the money!

Bonus Fact: When 3.5″ floppies came out a few years later, many people took to calling them “hard disks”, a term which actually described a hard disk drive array where the disk media and read/write head are combined in one unit. If you cracked a 3.5″ disk open, you’d see that the disk inside was just as floppy as its larger-format forefather ever was.

2. Loading a Game Required Typing Skills

The common routine for loading a single game on the C64 went like this:

1. Fish the disk out of the trough. The hand-written label says “Dallas.” No idea what that is. Let’s try it.
2. Put the disk in the drive and flip the door lock down. It goes “caCHUNK.”
3. You’ve got a blue screen in front of you. The prompt says “Ready.”
4. Type LOAD “*.*”, 8, 1 (sometimes LOAD “$”, 8, 1; depending)
5. Type LIST .
6. The directory listing comes up. Cursor up to the name of the file you want to load. i think that the up/left arrows shared a physical keyboard key, as did the down/right arrows, so you’d actually have to hold a modifier key like CTRL in order to cursor up the screen.
7. Type LOAD before the name of the file. Cursor right to the end of the file name and type ,8 ,1;
8. With any luck – and sometimes it WAS just luck – your game would (slooowly) load. The actual loading process could take up to five minutes, depending on the game.
9. You discover that the game you chose was Dallas Quest, the text adventure based on the popular prime-time soap opera. (Yes, this is an actual thing.) A winner is you! Watch out for that conniving Sue Ellen.

3. Blowing on a Nintendo Cartridge Could Damage It

The Nintendo Entertainment System was not a very well-built machine. To play a game, you would flip open a little door, slide the cartridge inside a hinged carriage, and press the housing down until it clicked into place, making contact with the system’s guts. This mechanism wore down over time – a very short time, if i recall correctly – and the system’s innards were like a dust magnet. Most of us would try to fix the lurking problem of interior dust clogs by blowing on the cartridge contacts. This was a bad idea. We were actually blowing spit onto the metal contacts, making them vulnerable to corrosion.

The very best plan if you want a working NES these days is to eBay yourself a top-loader like i did. (note: “top-loader” is not to be confused with “top-shelfer”, which is where you take a crap in the toilet tank.)

4. Loading a Saved Game Took Five Minutes (And You Could Be Arrested For It)

1986′s The Legend of Zelda on the NES deserves a place in gaming history first for being awesomesauce, and second for being the first home console game cartridge with a battery back-up to store a saved game. You’d think that would be the end of it, right? Unfortunately, due to the added cost to integrate this feature, the vast majority of games did not have a battery in the cartridge, relying instead on very long passwords that described the variable state of your game progress. You’d usually get one of these passwords only when you passed a level, and they were often about forty characters long. Due to some lousy font choices by developers, you’d usually have an ass of a time distinguishing between 1′s and lower-case L’s, and zeroes and upper-case O’s. Entering one of these codes could take five whole minutes. Early game reviewers took to warning gamers about games using these clunky systems.

The one upshot to this was that you could enter passwords to get to later levels in the game that you’d never reach otherwise, if the game was too difficult or you couldn’t be arsed. These were pre-Internet days, so you’d usually only find these codes in gaming magazines and paperback books. i distinctly remember being chewed out by an uptight bookstore owner who caught a friend and me copying a 40-character password from a video game book in her store. “Do you know what that is, boys? That’s theft of information, and i could have you arrested for it!” These were also the days before mega bookstore chains like Chapters|Indigo here in Canada – if you were caught giving books more than a lingering glance, you’d get the old “EXCUSE ME SIR THIS ISN’T A LIBRARY.”

i quite like the future.

5. Pause or Die

Even worse than password-enabled games were games with no battery and no password system whatsoever. This was the pinnacle of lazy development, and it would force you to put your game on pause to go eat dinner, or sometimes leave it on for days while you were grounded. You were always paranoid that Mom would cruise by with the vacuum cleaner and nudge that exposed Reset button on the front of the NES. Systems like the Atari 2600, the joystick for which had only one button, actually pre-dated the convention of the now-ubiquitous “Pause” feature.

Weren’t no pausing, weren’t no saving. Thank goodness those games were such shorter experiences. Except …

6. The Atari 2600 Had an RPG on Cassette Tape

i remember my mind being officially blown when my friend came over to my house with a DragonStomper cassette tape. DragonStomper used the Starpath Supercharger add-on to milk more out of the startlingly limited Atari 2600 system. You’d jack the Supercharger into the console, and then feed the line into your ghetto blaster. You’d insert the DragonStomper cassette and press “Play”, and what unfolded on the screen really opened my eyes to the possibilities of the medium of video games. You played a little white dot, and on the Atari 2600 – yes, the Atari 2600, famous for its dead-simple single-screen games and rudimentary goal structures – you had to roam around the countryside buying supplies and assembling a small army to take on a ferocious dragon. What? It was a far cry from fighting that yellow duck thing in Adventure.

Wikipedia has a great article on DragonStomper. It’s a good read if you want to find out how developers were really pushing the limits of the hardware when every bit counted.

7. Per-system Game Ports Were Radically Different

Quite often, when a game like Pac Man came out for the Intellivison, the Coleco Vision, and the Atari 2600, three completely different dudes worked on the arcade port in complete isolation. The result is that Pac Man could be a completely different experience from console to console – a fact that we tend to forget in the days when the only palpable difference is often which exclusive Star Wars character you unlock in your system’s version of your favourite fighting game.

8. Games Cost Money

When you played a game in the arcade, you had to pay money. It was 25 cents per play, and it’s quite likely you would lose like an asshole in the first two minutes. It was like slot machines for kids, with no chance of ever earning your money back. When ports of popular arcade games hit home consoles, it was like a dream come true: i can play all i want, and i don’t have to insert any quarters!

These days, we’re adverse to shelling out a lousy dollar for an entire game experience on the iPhone. (But dadgummit, Apple’s doing its best to charge rental fees for teevee shows with its new set-top box, and i foresee a future where companies start abusing digital distribution to the point where we’re back to paying per-play again. Hell – WildTangent’s already doing it.)

9. Games Were Bitching Hard and Absolutely Unforgiving

Slowly, certain saving graces have developed as standard video game conventions: the saved game, the password, the battery back-up, the concept of lives (three strikes and you’re out), the extra life, the concept of a limited number of Continues after your lives were used up, earning extra continues after passing a score threshold … but in the Wild West of early video games, you were lucky to get just one of these features in your game.

The rest of the time, you were subjected to super-twitch gameplay that required the reflexes of Mr. Miyagi on uppers if you wanted to survive past the first level. Shadow of the Beast, Solstice, the Peter Puppy escort level from Earthworm Jim, Zaxxon, Zorro, and that bloody f*cking Turbo Tunnel race from BattleToads all stand out as games that i desperately wanted to see more of, but couldn’t, because i wasn’t all that excited about popping bennies as an eight-year-old to increase my alertness.

If you wanted to take it easy (like i often did) and kick back with something more cerebral like a text adventure game, you’d be confronted with a text parser that made you talk like Tarzan (TALK MAN! TAKE GEM! HIT HEAD!) with such a limited vocabularly that the game was impossible to play because you were too intelligent for it.

Chip, I’m all jacked up on Mountain Dew!

Any other gaming grandpas wanna weigh in on the so-called glory days? Leave a comment and tell me all about it, before we all get wheeled away to a retirement home and forced to stand up to play Wii Sports.

Note: While i didn’t use the LinkBait Generator this week, this article is still a proud part of LinkBait Tuesdays! Please enjoy responsibly.

The panel was moderated by Jason MacIsaac of Electric Playground fame, late himself of a small Ontario game studio from the Niagara region called Cerebral Vortex Games.

My fellow guests on the panel were (from right):

• Ian Kelso, head of interactiveontario
• Leslie Phord-Toy, a producer at UbiSoft’s new Toronto Studio
• Ryan MacLean, formerly of Pseudo Interactive and a founder of Drinkbox Studios (also both the second Mac and the second Ryan on the panel)
• Philippe McNally, from Longbow Digital Arts, who recently released their PC RTS Hegemony: Philip of Macedon

i was thrilled to see that the line-up for the talk was substantial. A Fan Expo staff member asked us if we were okay with people sitting on the floor when we ran out of seats. Of course, Ubi Soft was the big draw, as many of the audience members wanted to know how to get a job there working on their favourite triple-A console franchises. i made a point to mention that UbiSoft also developed the Nintendo DS Babiez/Petz/Horsez games, as well as a number of cash-in movie licenses that have failed to pull in the same acclaim as their more well-known blockbusters.

i’m doing my best to end this (apparently prevalent) notion that working in the video game industry is the ultimate fulfillment of this masturbatory Tom Hanks in BIG fantasy everyone has. Bills gotta get paid, and you may be asked to (gasp!) work on something you don’t like, such as a (shock!) video-heavy bank website instructing visitors on the various retirement products available to them (as we did last year).

Half-Remembered Q & A

i admit, i’m having a hard time remembering what went on at the panel. There was a girl in the second row wearing an incredibly distracting Slave Leia costume, so i think most of what i had to say was along the lines of “hummina hummina hummina.” (Slave Leia costumes don’t usually do it for me, but this one was worth strangling your hutt over.)

So the pro reporters will definitely cover the panel better, but here are a few questions and answers that i can recall:

Q:Why develop games in Toronto?
A:Lesley’s answer was no secret – Ubi was attracted by the tax credits and government funding. Ian hinted that interactiveontario and the government are trying to secure at least one more “whale” to move into the province. For the three small developers, the answer was “intertia”. Our families are here, we live here, and for folks like me who have young kids and ties to grandparents, it’s very difficult to seek our fortunes elsewhere. Ian added that the work they’re doing to attract big companies helps heal the brain drain; if Lesley were to leave UbiSoft (for example), he wants enough studio muscle here to retain top talent in the province.

Q:Does your choice of school make you more or less employable?
A:Ryan M seemed to be more impressed by educational pedigree, saying that it was not the only thing he looks for, but that it is an indicator of a qualified applicant. The only “good” Ontario schools mentioned were Waterloo, Sheridan, and University of Toronto. There are many, many schools that aren’t on that short top-of-mind list, including yours. Reflect on that.

i took a few digs at the International Academy of Design and Technology, saying that nearly everyone i’ve known from that school – both students and faculty – bad-mouthed the place (and forgetting that the moderator had been an instructor there – oops). Despite the school’s rock-bottom reputation, i’ve hired two programmers in my stint as a studio owner, and they’ve both been IADT grads. For me, individual excellence beats a school’s bad rep.

Q: Why aren’t more studios embedding themselves in schools to cherry-pick the best talent?
A:(no one really weighed in on this, but i gave it a shot at a local community college this year with disastrous results)

Q:How do you get a job in the industry?
A:The panel agreed that portfolios were really important. Ryan M said that demonstrated capability trumps a fancy CV. Philippe liked to see evidence of problem-solving ability. i said i’d much prefer a candidate with a portfolio of a few finished games he’d created himself, rather than a student project he completed with a number of classmates.

Q:Why don’t more companies take interns?
A:The three indies – Philippe, Ryan M and myself – said that interns were a risky proposition for small studios, due to the resources they demand. Leslie said that Ubi takes interns (theirs was in the front row taking pictures), but that the intern would have to have something valuable to commit to the organization.

One thing i didn’t get a chance to say was that people should be very wary of schools that offer internships. Picture it: you’re a college program head, and your school has guaranteed this placement program. You’ve got a few great students, a handful of middling ones, and two or three absolute morons who have barely managed to squeak by. Do you really want your school’s reputation stymied by those guys? Do you really want to risk damaging your relationship with industry by sending them out on a placement? No, you don’t.

Add to that the fact that there are very few shops in town, compared with the number of schools cranking out game-trained grads (Humber, Waterloo, George Brown, Durham, U of T, UOIT, Ryerson, Trios, Sheridan, Seneca, York, and Max the Mutt off the top of my head). Some schools churn grads as often as every six months. There’s a clear internship supply-and-demand problem here.

That’s why in my personal experience (and from what i’ve heard anecdotally from others), when you enroll at a school that promises a great placement program, they’re lying. It’s often a marketing ploy to get you in the door. You’ll certainly have to complete a placement to earn class marks, but you’ll have to hunt down the placement yourself. When i was a student at Seneca College here in Ontario, the school had two or three placements in industry for their favourite sons, and the rest of us scrambled. One girl got a job at her uncle’s trucking plant. i found an internship on my own at the Durham Board of Education, working in the computer lab with students in junior kindergarten. This was the final program requirement for 3D computer art and animation students.

The type of school you really want to attend is one that has high entrance standards, and that fails students early and often. There are very few that do this, but i heard an apocryphal tale that Sheriden will refuse to graduate a 4th-year student with a weak portfolio/art thesis presentation. (Note that Sheridan was on the panel’s very short list of prestigious schools.)

Q:How do you choose the right school?
A:Most of the panelists were too political to answer frankly. i don’t toe the same line, because i feel that many of the schools in this province – particularly the community colleges – are doing the industry and their customers a great disservice, and should be held accountable. i warned against schools with very new programs (which is most of them), because they often work out the kinks at the expense of their initial student intakes. i also took issue with schools whose teachers have very tenuous connections to industry. i was speaking to a colleague of mine not long ago, who suggested that every two years, the colleges should kick their instructors back out into industry to ensure they’re keeping their skills up to date.

Ian mentioned that organizations like io in other countries have partnered with (bullied?) schools into an arrangement where the trade association has to approve its course offering in order for the school to earn a passing grade from industry. As a prospective student, you just look up which schools the association recommends, and apply there. i like that idea, but i worry it’s prone to abuse in the name of politics and playing nice.

Party On and Be Excellent to Each Other

If there was one main takeaway from the conversation, it was to focus on personal excellence. The very best stand out, while everyone else falls to the wayside, as in all things. You wanna make games? Then the barrier to entry is so low, as Jason said and as Ian reminded us, that you should already be making games. Don’t wait on UbiSoft or some small indie shop to give you your big break. There’s a golden opportunity for you right here, right now that didn’t exist when the rest of us were getting our start.

The panelists spoke about a number of groups, technologies and resources. Here’s a non-exhaustive list:

Groups

• Hand Eye Society Where Toronto’s indie developers meet.
• IGDA Toronto Chapter This group places more emphasis on professional development than the HES.
• Artsy Games Incubator Artists who want to make games, but have no programming ability, get together to … make games! Closely tied to Jim Munroe’s efforts at the HES.
• TOJam The Toronto Indie Game Jam, an annual event where the city’s pros and hopefuls get together over one weekend to make games. A fantastic event.
• FlashInTO The Toronto Flash user group.

Technologies

• Unity 3D Create 3D video games in the browser, with a (comparatively) low learning curve.
• Adobe Flash A relatively inexpensive program for creating 2D and quasi-3D browser games. Lots of books and tutorials – join our ranks of over two million developers!
• Game Maker A free game creation tool, and the favourite of many indies.
• Scratch An easy-to-grasp game creation tool from MIT
• UDK The consumer version of the Unreal Engine. i don’t recommend this one because of its eventual high cost (despite an initially free download)

Resources

• Unity by Example, a book written by me that is coming out very shortly. It’s a great resource for new game developers that teaches you how to make small, simple games, and how to approach your game dev career so that you don’t give up on it. Send an email to info [the at symbol] untoldentertainment.com and i’ll send you a note once it’s available.
• MochiMedia, Kongregate, FlashGameLicense, HeyZap Four places (of MANY) to distribute and monetize games you create with Flash.
• Wooglie A unity game portal.
• TIGSource The de facto site for indies.
• Pimp My Game Our own series on making money (or not) with Flash games. Includes tons of sites that spill the beans about the financials on their games.

Were you at the panel? Do you have anything to add? Was there anything you wanted to ask that you didn’t get a chance to ask? Leave me a comment and we’ll have a great discussion.

Thanks to dendritejungle and Jason MacIsaac for the pics!

And i do! i want Toronto to have a really first-rate, world-renowned game design competition, but Vortex falls so far short of its potential that its participants, speakers and volunteer staff come out scathed every year.

Some of the problems plaguing the event in the past have included an impossibly short six week development time frame from funding approval to event date, lack of interest/commitment from industry (as the competition demanded too much commitment), and an outrageously imbalanced judging process that would make Middle East elections officers blush.

Here’s hoping that this year’s event improves on past transgressions. These are the changes i noticed from touring the new website:

Site’s Set High

The new Vortex website has much higher production values than in previous years. The design is far brighter and more Web 2.0-looking than the black and pink (??!) morass it once was, but the old design lingers in the occasional corner badge and logo treatment. It’s easier to find crucial information, like dates and prices, on the new site.

DIG Didn’t Get Buried

The Vortex site now partners with DIG (Digital Interactive Gaming), a mostly student-focused conference in London Ontario. Last year, presumably due to the six week ramp-up, the Vortex event was scheduled right on top of DIG, and the two events had to fight for speakers and attendance. It’s heart-breaking to see that happen – i’m very glad that this year, the two events are not only co-existing, but cross-promoting. The Vortex semi-finals take place in London at DIG this year; semi-finalists will be ferried for free to the event in a special Vortex shuttle (read: the organizer’s car ;)

The Calendar is Roomier

Last year’s competition clumped three days back-to-back at a rather nice venue near the train tracks, just East of Parkdale – the former site of Mildred Pierce, across the street from Famous People Players (that’s the one where mentally challenged performers put on a black light show – i recommend a visit!) The event felt like a bit of a death march – partly due to some incredibly dull speakers and drab presentations by entrants – so i’m not suprised that Vortex is parceled off into four separate dates, spread out across four months and (technically) two years, on into February 2011. (The site says “ONE room, FOUR days”, because “ONE room FOUR days THREE months TWO years” makes it sound like a sentencing hearing.) i hope this will make it easier for the organizers to source speakers and to get the kind of commitment they need, now that the ask is a little more bearable.

Likely owing to organizer Sari Ruda’s TIFF ties, this year’s event takes place at the new Bell Lightbox building (which may or may not be haunted by the souls of dead Irish immigrants who fled the potato famine, and on whose graves the building was constructed).

Inflation

The fees are jacked, to the tune of a 135% increase for industry entrants, and a 65% hike for students and individual industry team members. There is a multi-tiered pricing schedule (perhaps too multi-tiered?) that enables participants to experience the event’s three big dates a la carte, or as a complete package. Despite whatever lofty goals the organizers put to this event, it’s no secret that Vortex intends to earn money from its participants. i’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but let’s just call a spade a spade. Even at $235, Vortex is a great deal less expensive and contains potentially more (and certainly more game-focused) content than, say, an interactiveontario event like IN10 ($695!!), their recent INPlay conference ($899!!), or the amount of power required for the DeLorean to travel through time (1.21 jiggawatts!!).

FUN FACT: Last i checked, Vortex is a registered charity. That’s right – you don’t actually have to cure diseased orphans or nurse roadkill dolphins back to health to call yourself a charity in Canada.

It remains to be seen whether the price hike will scare students away. i felt last year that one big improvement would be to cull the entrants far more mercilessly, to avoid these drawn-out days where groups of ten college students would cluster around the podium mic, not saying anything, while their ordained leader would mumble something incoherently about the year-end project they (barely) completed.

i’m not saying that students shouldn’t be involved, but i think there must be a better way to help train and inform mediocre presenters during the boot camp phase of the event. i’m picturing something like an interactive presentation workshop (rather than a podium sermon) where participants get to stand up and practice their public speaking skills in front of the group. We did something like that two years ago with the feds when they ran a GDC preparedness seminar. It was a video conference between Toronto and Montreal delegates, and we were each asked to give our “elevator pitch” – a one-minute spiel on ourselves and our companies in case we met Rich Investor von Jinglepants travelling between the 4th and 18th floors or whatever.

Clarity

The Vortex Competition has vastly improved its stated intent. Here’s what the main page of the site said last year (i’m recounting this from memory, mind you, because i couldn’t find an archived copy of the site):

Hey, kids! Do you love to FRAG N00BS with your BFG on your PS3 while GETTING CRUNK?? Do you have a GREAT GAME IDEA that came to you while you were HUFFING GYM SOCKS? Super! Give us $100 to enter our game design competition and you could win $2000 and an Xbox 360! Daaaaaaaaamn, son!

In stark contrast, here’s how the site frames this year’s competition (emphasis mine):

Enter with your submission for a game concept or prototype. It will be reviewed by the stellar Vortex industry panel from whom you’ll receive feedback. Some of you will then get the opportunity to actually pitch your concept or prototype at the Vortex competition. The Vortex Conference and Competition is the only place in Canada where emerging game designers and developers can present their concepts to an outstanding line up of international industry honchos, financiers and venture capitalists in the hope of winning the competition and along the way getting their creation to market. Think a kinder, gentler “Dragon’s Den” with massive networking opportunities and prizing, coupled with industry sessions and coaching from the most successful entrepreneurs in Canada.

“A kinder, gentler ‘Dragon’s Den’”. That’s the key, folks. That’s what Vortex was supposed to be all along, and only now is it being made crystal clear. Gone is the phrase “game design competition” from the site. That’s because Vortex isn’t a game design competition. It’s much more about the bidness of games. Successful entrants and presenters will have their entire gameplan worked out, from timeline and budgeting, to development and marketing costs, to actual marketing and launch specifics. This is a presentation of a game concept as a business proposition. If you’ve ever applied for one of Canada’s content funds, or pitched a game to an investor like a VC, angel, or the Bank of Mom, you’ll know that the actual game idea is only one component in the complex machinery of your proposal. i’m very glad to see that the intent of the event is being made more clear, and i hope word spreads about what’s expected of entrants.

Final Words of Warning

Am i going to enter this year? i’m actually amazed Vortex hasn’t shown up at my office with a pipe bomb by this point. i’m not their favourite person. If i enter, i’ll likely be burning my $235 entrance fee, because it sounds like they’ll be culling their entrants. And man, they’re probably itching to “cull” me.

Take a quick look at their Privacy Policy, where they admit they’ll share your personal details to “like-minded organizations” and possibly hit you up for money. If you’re not cool with that, make sure to opt out, and to wait their two business days (!!) to be removed from the list.

Finally, i find it amusing that Vortex claims to be “only place in Canada where [you] can [present your game] in the hope of winning the competition”. So … Vortex is the only place in Canada where you can win the Vortex competition? That’s most likely true.

However awkwardly written, the sentiment that Vortex is the only place in Canada where you have access to industry “honchos, financiers and venture capitalists” is a bit off the mark. Thankfully, there are a LOT of great game-related events going on in this country. Here are just a few (and i’ve highlighted those that are free to participants):

• FITC
• Hand Eye Society
• Montreal International Game Summit
• Unite
• FlashInTO
• FlexCamp
• IGDA
• DIG
• Jalloo
• GDC Canada
• Gamercamp

Go forth and game!

i’m old.

i’ve been going to these events for at least five years now, and with every passing year, i am reminded with more and more clarity that the big video game titles are not for me. i’m a father of two now, and i run my own bidness. i spend my evenings working on great stuff to entertain you nice people – and that’s after i play with my kids, eat dinner with the family, tuck the tiny little girls safely into bed, and sit vigil for a few hours perched on the roof of my condo scanning the streets of Toronto for evil-doers. i do not have time for your Fable Threes, your Calls of Duty, your Fallout 3 New Vegases, or your Halo Reaches.

Not only that, but i don’t like those games. i can’t get past the cut-scenes. i know many people skip those, but i really like to be told a good story by well-animated figures. After the bar set by Pixar and others for 3D animated movies, the emotionless mannequins mugging and mouthing through toneless, dry dialogue just don’t do it for me. One glance around the room, and all of these games are starting to look more and more the same.

i really like a game with a bold art direction. Give me Wind Waker over Twilight Princess any day. i enjoyed Crackdown, partly because they tried to do something unique and interesting with the style. When i saddled up to game after game at X’10, i couldn’t figure out what each game was by looking at it. Is that a knock against art directors? Identity and branding specialists? You’d think that games with these million dollar budgets would drop a few bones trying to differentiate themselves from the competition.

The one game on the mostly hardcore show floor that stood out for me was Shank. i’m not a fan of bloody, M-Rated games, but Shank has style. The new Mortal Kombat game also turned my head, because of a feature where you could pull off a special move and, in addition to the slow-mo shot of you hurting your opponent, you’d see an X-Ray view inside the opponents body depicting cracking ribs and rupturing organs. Definitely not my cup of meat, but at least it’s an interesting visual addition to a stylistically bland landscape.

Rock Band 3 FTFW

Because i have very little time to enjoy gOnames these days, Rock Band really turns my crank. i can get in and out in under 10 minutes, make a dent in the story mode, and enjoy myself. i got a chance to try out the RB3 keytar (which you should NEVER use as an actual keytar because it’s hella complicated). On Pro mode, you’re playing the piano line note-for-note. i thought i’d have a leg up because i’ve been playing piano most of my life, but the trickiest thing is that it’s very easy to lose where your hands are on the keys … and in order to fit the whole highway on the screen, the viewable area shifts around from left to right, making it even more difficult and confusing.

But it’s still a must-buy. It has drop-in, drop-out – a sorely needed feature. i played Bohemian Rhapody (finally!) and The Power of Love by Huey Lewis and the News. Both were very fun. i fully expect Bat Out of Hell, with its crazy keyboard intro, to appear on the platform now that there’s a piano instrument.

Windows Phone 7? Tasty.

The Windows 7 mobile platform was very enticing. Seeing the excellent Xbox Live social features, including ‘Cheeves, appear on a mobile phone raised my lusty dev hackles. i want in.

Kinect Will Bomb.

i got a chance to try a few Kinect motion-sensing games. i say it’ll bomb. i’m not saying it won’t sell well – it actually might – but i think that, like the Wii before it, there will be this big media scramble and we’ll hear a lot about it, but the technology is doomed to collect dust in a corner.

The first game i tried was Kinect Sports. My friend Emily and i limbered up for the track & field event, and when the starter pistol was fired, the demo jockey said “run!” So of course, we both started doing this weak little jog, pantomiming the act of running. Our characters weren’t really going anywhere. The demo jockey said “No – actually run. Get those knees up in the air.”

Uh … there i was in a light-coloured shirt, because i was out of black ones, and it showed off my natural curves a little more than i usually like them to be shown. i started running on the spot – hauling actual ass, trying to get my on-screen character to move. It was a lot of effort. And then came the hurdles. That’s right, friends – hurdles. i did a feeble little hop, and my character tripped over the hurdle, knocking it over. i ran on the spot some more, feeling like a kid at fat camp, and tried to jump the second hurdle. No good. This went on for more hurdles and more running and more grunting … and then, eventually, the sweat came. It came first in small rivulets trickling from my temples, and soon started gushing out of my armpits like the levee broke. My repressed memories of gym class came flooding back to me, and all i wanted to do was escape to the safety of my rec room and play some video games.

Oh, wait – i was playing a video game.

In my youth, when i went to my friend’s house after his mom bought him the Nintendo dance pad because he was a fat f*cker, we learned how to game the system by sitting on the floor and slapping the dance pad sensors with our palms. It became an exercise in speed drumming. (And i’m sorry, but no human being is able to run as fast as Nintendo’s track & field game demanded.) There’s no obvious way for fat kids to cheat at Kinect, which i count as a victory for disapproving moms everywhere. Maybe wheel a paint shaker machine into the living room? i’m not sure.

Ubi Soft has a fitness game that looks interesting. i never liked how the exercises in Wii Fit worked. It would tell you to do push-ups, but since the game could only sense when you were applying pressure to the balance board, you may as well have been enthusiastically humping the device. (At times, i know i was.) The Ubi game puts you alongside a yoga guru. The shape of your on-screen character is exactly what Kinect “sees” – a purply blob more or less shaped like you, down to details like the flared hems of your shorts. When you follow the guru’s motions, the game overlays a skeletal system that turns white when you’re doing it wrong, and green when you’re on the money. It looked interesting, because if one leg is out of place, you can nudge your knee into a better position to correct your posture.

i asked the demo jockeys if the game was accessible to amputees (or freaks of nature). They didn’t know. i was surprised to learn that i was the first to ask the question.

i took a brief look at Kinectimals. A player was running as a lion cub through an obstacle course. Same story there – she was doing a gimpy sort of pretend jog-run, and the lion cub was stumbling around like it was drunk. i called out from the sidelines “you gotta haul ass!” She did, and the game went better for her.

Here are my main concerns with Kinect:

1. You need a 10×10 square feet of floor space. The track & field game kept telling me to “move back” … i couldn’t help but think that if i was in my tiny condo right now, moving back would put me inside the concrete wall.
2. Even if i did have the space, i’ve got two tiny little girls who litter our living room floor with jacks and Legos and other foot-demolishing traps and hazards that would land me in the hospital faster than the balls-out sprinting that the game required of me.
3. Very tiny kids, like my murderous toy-strewing daughters, may not be able to play, because there’s a certain degree of calibration and patience required to start games. There are moments when you need to stop moving, or to move slowly and deliberately – two skills my 2- and 4-year olds are nowhere near mastering.
4. A few times, while we were trying the bowling game in Kinect Sports, some wait staff crossed the room behind us, causing our characters to throw their bowling balls up in the air. Depending on your game room setup, you could be primed for some background interference douchebaggery from your so-called friends.
5. The system allows me to run, jump, throw, box, dance, catch, and gesture wildly. When i finally do eke out some come-down time, my chosen activities more often encourage me to sit, scratch, space, munch, and snooze.

Much like the Wii, the technology is promising, but it’s not quite there. It’s juuust inaccurate enough to be unfun. Just as game critics have taken to using the word “waggle” to derisively describe interactions with the WiiMote, i predict that the new watchword for the Kinect era will be “flail”.

So we shopped Spellirium around at the Casual Connect conference in Seattle this past week, and the consensus was that the game was good … for them to poop on.

Category Exclusivity

i’ve been billing Spellirium as a “word puzzle/adventure game hybrid”, or “Jim Henson’s Labyrinth meets Boggle.”

To the casual games portals and bidnessmen i met at the conference, the phrase “word puzzle game” was tantamount to box office poison of Carrot Top-ical proportions.

Said one acquisitions director for a well-known casual downloadable games portal, “word games don’t do well.” He cited the only three word games he’s ever known that did do well: Scrabble, TextTwist, and “to a far lesser extent”, Bookworm. Apparently Bookworm Adventures, Spellirium’s kissing cousin, didn’t even rate.

i did my research before embarking on this project. i knew that word games don’t sell. i even wrote that fact into our business plan. i was quick – perhaps too quick – to point out to him that there are no other word games quite like Spellirium. i wasn’t just shilling, though – honestly, no other game i know has tried to combine an early-90′s LucasArts-style adventure game with a word puzzle mechanic. All other word games i’ve seen have been just the mechanic, and that can get old quickly. Even Bookworm Adventures, with its worm-on-monster battles and its levelling and inventory systems, didn’t do story. Story is not a blob of text you frantically skip after the title screen, or an explanation of how Character X has to retrieve the Magic Y.

i also tried to explain that Spellirium does word puzzling like no other game. We’re really stretching this simple mechanic to its farthest logical limits – you’ll be spelling words to paint pictures, navigate mazes, move objects, balance balls … in many of our modes, spelling words doesn’t even matter. It’s crazy, it’s creative, and i think players are totally gonna dig it.

Idiocracy

The casual games publishers do not dig it. “Anything that involves thinking”, they said, “is a non-starter.” The same acquisitions guy told me that one of our other games was “too cerebral”, and followed up by saying “i don’t wanna say that our audience is dumb, but … ”

And i won’t say that either. i’m sure that the Big Fishes and the iWins and the Gamehouses have more than their fair share of dim bulbs buying games from them. But i think the real challenge for us with Spellirium is finding the right audience. The casual downloadable audience is mostly female, and mostly older, and they play games to escape. Spellirium is not an escape in that clicky-gemmy, findy-object kinda way. It’s escapism in that “i’ve been transported to a fascinating and fun other world where there are characters who are more interesting than anyone i know, and places more vivid than i’ve ever visited” kinda way.

Luna-cy

i was never more dismayed during the conference than when i attended the talk by Luna Cruz from Boomzap, who talked about economizing story in her game Awakening: The Dreamless Castle. Look: i know i’m a wordy writer, and i know the Spellirium script could use trimming as badly as those ladies from the 1970′s skin mags. So it was with great hope that i sat down to hear Luna’s talk.

Early on, Luna said “We really needed to find a way to simplify this cut-scene and get the most important information out in as few lines as possible.” i was all ears. But then: “The original cut-scene had six lines of dialogue, which we knew was way too much for our audience, so we worked really hard and gave it a lot of thought, and cut it down to only two.”

You cut it down to – guh. What? How many lines? And you say six lines was too much for your audience to bear? i have to say six lines of dialogue before i can even establish one of my characters’ names. i was going to approach Luna after the talk and ask for her advice, but i began to worry that she’d look at one of our cut-scenes and start vomiting on me uncontrollably.

But let’s compare. Here’s the entire story of Awakening:

*** spoilers ***

A princess who can’t wield magic wakes up in a magic-imbued world and must escape the castle, with the help of a magic mirror and some ornery trolls who were sworn to protect her.

And here’s just the backstory to Spellirium:

*** no spoilers ***

In the future, a young apprentice journeys with an ill-fated monster to find his missing guardians, using a dangerously magical device to battle enemies and to overcome challenges.

Luna can tell her entire story in the same space that it takes me to write a synopsis of Spellirium. We’re dealing with apples and oranges here. Which suggest to me that the audience, likewise, is like apples and oranges.

What Sort of Gamer Plays Spellirium?

The suggestion was repeated to me by a number of people at the conference, when i asked whether i should just scrap Spellirium and take up pork farming: i need to find the right audience for the game. So what sort of gamer plays Spellirium?

We tried to answer this question way back before production began by stating the obvious: people who play word games will play Spellirium. So we built a game portal called Word Game World and stocked it with word games leftover from the MochiMedia/Dictionary.com contest they ran last year. Here are the less-than-stellar results:

The trouble is that now we found ourselves with the challenge of generating an audience for TWO properties. It makes more sense to just bring people straight to Spellirium, than to drive them to the game via the scenic route. That, and many of the word games people have made have turned out less-than-scenic, if you get my drift. (Yet another nail in the coffin for the genre – too many people making it look bad)

Beer Covers a Multitude of Sins

i got a hot tip from my fellow Christian game designer pal Grant Shonkwiler (who you’ll remember from our earlier post on the impossibility of Christian gaming). These days, Grant designs games for tabletop bar cabinets (like any good Christian would … i forgot to ask if he got paid in hooch). He designed a word game for his company that was a smash success with the audience, and offered that bar patrons love word games. It reminded me of Norm MacDonald’s old SNL Weekend Update punchline: Germans love David Hasselhoff. You hit the right niche with the right product, and you’re sailing.

So what combination of Knight Riding and Baywatching will Spellirium have to pull off to find its Germany-sized pool of rabid fans? Here are some facts about what i *think* a Spellirium player is like. i think the game will appeal to both sexes, but i’ll use masculine pronouns for simplicity:

1. He can kick ass at Scrabble. Don’t mess.

   

2. He does crossword puzzles on his way to work. In pen. He may even feel that British cryptics are far superior to American-style.
3. He watches movies. Among his favourite films are Labyrinth, The Dark Crystal, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, The Road Warrior, Twelve Monkeys, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Princess Bride, The Last Unicorn, Dragonslayer, and The Goonies.

   

   

4. He reads. He likes sci fi and fantasy. He may enjoy Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Lloyd Alexander, J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Terry Brooks, and Neil Gaiman.
5. He plays games. He quite liked Puzzle Quest, Bookworm and Bookworm Adventures, digital versions of Scrabble and Boggle, Wurdle, TextTwist, LucasArts and Sierra On-Line graphic adventure games – possibly even Infocom text adventures or MUDs – as well as Out of This World, Beneath a Steel Sky and the Fallout series.

   

6. When he’s playing a game that has story elements, including dialogue or cutscenes or even blobs of text, he does not – does NOT – push the A button to skip. He becomes particularly upset if he accidentally skips story, even if he’s not particularly enjoying that story. If he’s gaming with a dumb jock fratboy friend who blithely skips past all the story sequences saying “let’s just play already, d00d”, he punches that friend in the throat. (Then he gets his ass kicked, because he’s a lover, not a fighter.)

i know, friends. i know. i’ve just described myself. (Or perhaps Jerry Holkins / Tycho Brahe from Penny Arcade – i’m convinced we’re the same person.) i am a little concerned that i have not paid enough attention to the needs and wants of the market, over the needs and wants of the me. i have not designed Spellirium as an ineffectual, casual click-fest with simple puzzles and two-line cutscenes. i thought, perhaps foolishly – perhaps arrogantly – that if i designed a game that i desperately wanted to play, there would be others like me for whom this game would be a breath of fresh air.

Was i wrong? Like chocolate and peanut butter, is our word puzzle/adventure game hybrid born of two great tastes that taste great together? Or is it born of two disappointments – an overly cerebral genre that repeatedly fails to perform in the marketplace, and an outdated genre that saw its best days twenty years ago? Should we finish Spellirium and bury it as quickly as possible, or should we keep working to realize our vision – the vision of a smart, funny game for well-read, literate players that melds two genres like no other game before it?

i defer to your judgment and expertise. If Untold Entertainment needs to become a Hidden Object Game developer, please tell me now so that i can go get a lobotomy and get myself fitted at the Vagina Depot.

Word.

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

Hive Mind

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

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

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

Agreeing to Disagree

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

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

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

Robotic Game Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buy Our Crap

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

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

In Summary

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

And then we die.

Many of you have only taken the first step to ridding your life of Flash by installing the ClickToFlash browser plugin, which promises to “rid the web of the scourge that is Adobe Flash, but still retain the ability to view Flash whenever you want”. But who in their right mind would even want to see Flash content?? What self-respecting disciple of latter-day web browsing would smugly point out in web forums that “i use ClickToFlash”, when the answer is not less Flash – it’s no Flash.

Let’s face it: Flash has had its day. It was a GREAT technology for 1987, but we’ve moved on. We have touch interfaces now, and there’s no way that such a decrepit technology could ever keep up.

Touch interfaces, people. It’s the friggin’ future.

Why be content with apartheid when genocide is readily available? The final solution to the Flash question is not to merely quarantine Flash, but to completely eradicate it from your system.

The answer has been front of our noses all along, buried in an Adobe tech note: How to uninstall the Adobe Flash Player plug-in and ActiveX control. Just follow those simple instructions, and you won’t have to worry about Flash ever again! You’ll be able to enjoy that idyllic web paradise foretold by futurists and sages for time immemorial.

Enjoy!

Here are a few glaring Fox News-like issues i had with what he said:

they [Adobe] say we want to protect our App Store – but in reality it is based on technology issues.

Yes, and the Iraq war wasn’t about oil, but about removing a cruel dictator and bringing democracy to the Middle East. And Osama Bin Laden didn’t attack the twin towers because of America’s meddling and destructive foreign policies, but because he “hates our freedom.” Lines like these are so hideously transparent and bald-faced they get my bile brewing.

Make no mistake: more free games on iPlatforms outside of Apple’s control means less money for Apple. This is so undeniable, it mystifies me that he’s even trying to spin it. This one statement paints the rest of his article with a dishonest brush.

Adobe’s Flash products are 100% proprietary. They are only available from Adobe, and Adobe has sole authority as to their future enhancement, pricing, etc.

Pot, meet kettle. Jobs goes on to point out that “Apple has many proprietary products too”, but goes to laboured lengths to uphold WebKit as the shining example of open web technology. Forget the iPod, iPad, iPhone, App Store, and the closed technologies that are at the center of this debate. We’ve got WebKit. In magician’s parlance, this is called misdirection: get the audience to focus the shiny coin in your left hand, while you pocket the Eiffel Tower with your right.

HTML5 … lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins

The implication here, though not explicit, is that HTML5 can do what Flash can do. This simply isn’t the case. While many writers have focused on the fact that HTML can run video admirably, they’ve glossed over the fact that with Flash, you can put that video on a 3D plane, map it to a cube, spin the cube, and on click make the cube explode into a flock of bats, with each bat holding a placard that has another embedded video on it, and all those videos have cue points that change the values in a web form. Some of you will argue “wait! Just because you CAN do it, doesn’t mean you should!” Of course, i’m offering a ridiculous example, but the fact remains that HTML5 simply cannot do what Flash can do. And if you want to claim that video is enough, then i’ll happily leave you behind in the Old World and continue exploring the Wild West, and its ever-expanding realm of possibilities. And whorehouses.

There are more games and entertainment titles available for iPhone, iPod and iPad than for any other platform in the world.

This is a lie, plain and simple. There are more entertainment and game titles on the venerable PC platform than the 2-year-old App Store could ever dream of. You can call an elephant a house cat all you like – you’re still going to need an awfully big litter box.

In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices.

From what i’ve seen, i’ll actually hand it to Jobs on this one. i have yet to see a convincing tech demo by Adobe showing a practical piece of Flash (ie something other than the sleazy swarming coloured dots) moving at anything above zero frames a second on an Apple device. But the stuff i’ve seen running on Android looks a lot smoother.

Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

“Most” is not a statistic. There is no empirical research behind the word “most”. Wikipedia calls this a weasel word – it’s like saying “some have said that Steve Jobs has a third nipple”. Really? Who? Who, specifically, has said that? Because you’re not backing your words up with actual data, you’re being a weasel. Knock it off, Triple-Tits.

A less slimy way of putting this would be to say that “Flash developers who want their games and websites to take advantage of the new touch screen interfaces developed by companies among which are Apple because we’re not the bloody progenitors of this interface style may have to redesign some elements of their projects … much the same way that web developers have decided to redesign their websites to offer more smart phone-friendly layouts.”

If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

Because the time difference between removing a few rollovers and learning an entirely new technology and re-coding a project from the ground up is immense, you git.

Even if iPhones, iPods and iPads ran Flash, it would not solve the problem that most Flash websites need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices.

Even if Apple were to release a new iPhone that had, say, an increased resolution somewhere between the resolution of the iPhone and new screen resolution introduced by the iPad, it would not solve the problem that most Apps would need to be rewritten to support all three resolutions, as well as a growing number of operating systems that lack backwards compatible feature sets.

Fourth, there’s battery life.

Jobs focuses on video here. That’s fine – there may be well-documented benchmarks there. But i don’t really watch video on my iPod – i play games. And some of those games suck juice like a Hoover. If Flash was on the iPhone, and there was a less battery-intensive reason to use non-Flash video, that option is there for me (that is, as long as the video is available in a non-Flash format). But the implication here is wider: Flash drains the battery. That’s the buzz that Jobs is hoping people will disseminate from this article.

We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.

Again, outrageous. Apple would not be at anyone’s mercy if a third-party developer was slow to implement new features; rather, it’s the third-party developer and their customers that would be at Apple’s mercy, trying to keep up with their relentless device upgrades and planned obsolescence.

The other thing that galls me about this bit is that if Apple has such an issue with third-party devs, why is there no mention of Unity in this article? If that’s really such a problem for them you’d think Unity would be in the same boat. But they’re not. This is clearly a battle between Apple and Adobe, so Steve’s last point falls flat. As Mike Chambers from Adobe said last week, in reference to the Terms of Service change disallowing any App store submission that was not created with Apple’s own language and tools,

While it appears that Apple may selectively enforce the terms, it is our belief that Apple will enforce those terms as they apply to content created with Flash CS5.

Bushmouth

i have no filter when i speak, and i’ve been told that i’m honest to a fault. Perhaps that’s why i wish Steve would stop spinning this issue, and say what he means. It’s like when George Bush went on teevee after dethroning Saddam Hussein, when the Iraqi people started setting their oil fields on fire. Bush urged them not to do that, saying something like “that oil is your inheritance, a valuable resource that will help you attain your freedom and blah blah blah apple pie Little House on the Prairie bikini contest.” i just wish he would have said “Now don’t set those oil fields on fire, because … because THAT’S MY OIL, BITCHES! And ima spend three trillion dollars of my country’s money sending troops over there to collect every last drop. Yeehaw! Remember the Alamo!”

My political leanings aside, it makes me a tiny bit sad to live in a world where, increasingly, you can pass off a bald-faced lie as a talking point for inexperienced “citizen journalists” to distill and disseminate across the Internatz. When you start seeing bloggers post “FLASH IS BAD FOR iPHONE BATTERY LIFE”, you can think back to this article.

For my part, i’m going to play along and generate a sound bite of my own: Apple fuels its App Store by drinking the blood of Christian babies. Happy blogging!

Further Reading

• Steve Jobs on Flash: Correcting the Lies by Jesse Warden
• Thoughts on ‘Thought on Flash’ by Adam Banks
• Highlights: The Journal’s Exclusive Interview With Adobe CEO
• Moving Forward by Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch
• Thoughts on Apple by fbindie
• One more thing… Apple’s dubious defense of the Open Web by fbindie
• Please stop thinking about Gizmodo, doors being broken down, etc. from The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
• Steve Jobs is Full of It by Lee Fernandes
• Steve Jobs Blogs On Why He Hates Flash, But Can’t Get His Facts Straight by Dan Rayburn
• Steve Jobs thoughts on not supporting flash – they just aren’t justification! by Andrew Smith
• Steve Jobs doesn’t like Adobe Flash by Rob Pegoraro
• Jobs on Flash: Hypocrisy So Thick You Could Cut it with a Knife by Thom Howlerda
• Steve Jobs: ‘Thoughts on Flash’ by John Gruber (Gruber calls the article “brutally honest” … this is how spin works, friends)
• Open Letter to Steve Jobs by Hugo Roy, to which Steve takes the time to personally respond
• The Real Reason Why Steve Jobs Hates Flash by Charlie Stross
• Steve Jobs Claims Flash Will Kill the Mobile Web by John C. Abell (Wired)
• Steve Jobs attacks Adobe’s Flash as unfit for iPhone by the AP (Toronto Star)

The HTML5 Experience on the iPad:

i’ve been to Chichen Itza. i was there during one of the last years you were able to walk up and down the pyramid, and to go inside it. We couldn’t climb and explore one of the other temples because tourists had defaced it with graffiti. “Tommy loves Suzie ’95″ carved into the millenia-old stone with a switchblade – that kind of thing. L’enfer, c’est les autres. From what i understand of Giza, the Great Pyramids lose some of their majesty when you realize that all of the postcard shots you’ve seen are carefully cropped, and that there’s actually a highway and a mall next to the ruins.

i visited the Statue of Liberty years before 9/11 (the day Saddam Hussein bombed Oklahoma City or whatever), when you could still walk straight up Lady Liberty’s skirt. Again, it loses a bit of its sheen when you stumble off a packed ferry and wait in line for hours to trudge up a spiral staircase inside a hot metal colossus with your face in another tourist’s ass, just to peer through the grimy windows in the statue’s crown.

And if Sleepless in Seattle taught us anything, it’s that when you want to be alone in New York for an evening of quiet reflection and pining for lost love, you just go up to the top of the Empire State Building and gaze longingly at the night sky while leaning off the observation deck. In reality, you need to buy a ticket, wait in line, share the deck with a crowd of tourists, and stare at the sky through the mesh of a suicide barrier.

i say all of this to punctuate my point: to me, travel is WAY overrated. i’m happy just to sit at home on my duff. MY list of places i’m dying to visit exists in my mind. For every real-life trip my friend wants to take before she dies, there’s a game i want to create.

Art Trumps Life

Games don’t let you down like real places do. In real life, there are waterfalls. Those are okay. You never get to shag some hot model beneath them, because you’ve just paid 40 pesos to see the them, and you’re standing in line behind a dumpy German tourist who wants to handle your kugelschreiber (not on the first date, lady). Then it sort of dawns on you that waterfalls are just that – a bunch of water that falls off a cliff. And they’re rendered less majestic when you can fork over five bucks to buy your very own three wolf moon waterfall T-shirt on the way out, with a poorly-airbrushed approximation of your experience.

In video games, waterfalls never disappoint. There’s friggin TREASURE behind them, friends. And i’m not talking SOME waterfalls … every g.d. video game waterfall has a secret cave behind it that houses an orb that lets you carry more bombs. Every one.

In real life, lighthouses are dull. They look nice in pictures, i guess, but if you ever shell out five Canadian toonies to go to the top of them, you look out and think to yourself “wow. i am presently at the top of a real live lighthouse. And i am a sucker.”

In video games, there are JEWELS at the top of EVERY LIGHTHOUSE. Jewels, or a zipline that you can use to fly down and land on top of some guy’s house which contains jewels. Or a new tool that helps you get up to a HIGHER lighthouse. Video game lighthouses are awesome.

In real life, wells are very very deep, and if you climb inside them, you fall and die like an idiot. And there are no refunds for those £5 ticket you bought to SEE that well. In video games, you get to go down wells ALL the TIME, and if you die you just hit RESTART, and once you’re inside the wells you get to battle SHADOW LORDS and retrieve MAGIC MIRRORS. No questions asked.

In real life, fireplaces are bullshit. In video games, EVERY FRIGGIN ONE rotates to reveal a secret room.

Suits of armor in real life? Boring. Video games? The re-animated souls of long-dead ZOMBIE KNIGHTS fight you in the GRAND BALLROOM and drop POWER ORBS that extend your life metre by TWELVE PERCENT when you defeat them.

Real-life libraries? Ass. Video game libraries? SECRET BOOK SWITCHES.

Real-life lakes? Dull. Video game lakes? Home to UNDERSEA CIVILIZATIONS and SEA MONSTERS giving HAND-JOBS to MERMAIDS.

This Blog Requires More Shouting

What do i use to make the stuff i’m saying louder than capitals? A bigger font? i can’t possibly GET more excited about this stuff.

In sum: traveling is for suckers. You’re better off enjoying ruins from the relative comfort of a stack of postcards or Google Image Search. Video games are a thousand percent more rad than real life, and my own bucket list contains nothing but a list of experiences i want to create for myself in games, because the games i’ve played that other people have made have not yet allowed me to knock everything off my list.

Video games ftfw! Take THAT, Travelocity! \o/

i mentioned last week that we launched a free games portal called WordGameWorld.com. Here’s how that whole process works. i spend a few bucks buying a domain name, a hosting account, and a WordPress theme. Then i go to MochiMedia.com and started cherry-picking games from their list of thousands, at no cost. If i see a game that i like, i can just take it and put it on the site. Then i put ads on the site. Step 4: profit.

i didn’t have to pay for the content. The content is, theoretically, paid for by advertisers whose ads are injected into the games via the MochiMedia service. But as we’ve seen before, in a hit-driven business like Flash games, a non-hit is also a non-earner.

If you’re producing content essentially for free, with the hope of possibly earning fractions of pennies on advertising rev share, and perhaps a sponsorship or two for a few thousands bucks (when perhaps you sunk more than a few thousand bucks in labour into the content), i have a startling revelation for you: content is NOT king. Content is peasant. Content is plebian. Content is serf. The exploiters of content are closer to the crown than you’ll ever be.

Look Who’s Talking

There’s a lyric from a John Lennon song that frequently comes to mind whenever i hear someone chant the “content is king” mantra:

Keep ‘em doped with religion and sex and teevee
And they think they’re so clever and classless and free
But they’re still f*cking peasants as far’s I can see

i’ve been paying more and more attention to who is saying “content is king” and how they are saying it. The people pulling the strings, who are actually in a position to monetize content, say it more often and in a much different tone of voice than the content producers:

Content monetizers: (knowing that their livelihood depends on people constantly producing content that they can exploit) Content is king!

Content producers: (wondering why the hell they’re not gaining any ground, despite being told on a daily basis by the content monetizers that content is king) … Content is king?

The Content Food Chain

i’ve developed a hierarchical chart to illustrate who’s actually in control here, and how the money flows.

Content Consumers

i hope we can all agree that consumers are at the bottom of the chart. Yes, technically they should be at the top, because they make the decisions and vote with their money and rah rah consumers blah blah blah, but who are you kidding? When i got into the ad-supported web world, working in the interactive department of a teevee broadcaster, we talked a lot about eyeballs – how many unique sets of ocular orbs were looking at our web pages. Not people, not consumers, but their actual eyeballs. We had reduced consumers as a commodity to their component parts! It wasn’t “how many human beings visited our pages”, but “how many eyeballs did we get”? “How do we get more eyeballs on this?” It’s a tiny bit ghastly. Consumers, you’re at the bottom of my chart.

Content Creators

Next up are the content creators. We content creators subjugate consumers. If we’re business-minded, we want to build games that get a lot of those eyeballs, so that we can command higher sponsorship deals and earn more fractions of pennies on advertising revenue share. Some of us want millions of eyeballs on our content just so that we can feel good about ourselves. As i’ve mentioned before, that drive tends to go away when you become a more advanced life-form with a mortgage and kids to feed.

Pickaxe Salesmen

In an offshoot segment of the chart are the pickaxe salesmen. In any Yukon gold rush, there are the people doing all the work and panning for the gold (game developers), and there are the shop owners selling ropes and pickaxes and whiskey. They are the tool providers. FDT, SmartFox Server, ElectroServer, and to an extent ActiveDen (who are, themselves, content aggregators) all make their money selling content producers the promise of becoming rich and famous through their gold-panning content creation efforts.

Content Aggregators

One step above content creators are the content aggregators. In the Flash games industry, these are the portals that pull all the games together in one place – Kongregate, NewGrounds, Big Fish, AddictingGames, King, Gimme5, WordGameWorld, etc etc. In publishing, they are the magazines that assemble and bind the individual articles. In the teevee world, they are the broadcasters who fill their programming hours with shows. Content aggregators treat content as a commodity to be shoveled into their wrappers, especially in the Flash games world, where you can set up an RSS interavenous drip to have free Flash games automatically pumped into your site with zero effort or cost. These people have a vested interest in repeating the “content is king” mantra – their livelihood depends on content producers believing it. Their goal is to get the best content possible for the lowest price imaginable, always.

Advertisers

Advertisers hold us all in thrall. They foot the bill for all of this stuff. Magazines and teevee shows are merely vehicles to sell advertising. That’s what games portals are as well: extended banner and video ads punctuated by the occasional match-3 game. Without advertising money, this whole ecosystem dies … which is why new monetization methods like microtransactions are given so much gravity. Like the United States weaning themselves off oil dependency, it’s in the best interests of content producers and aggregators to develop new sources of energy (money).

Aggregator Aggregators

Above the advertisers are the aggregator aggregators: those who aggregate the aggregators. i can’t think of any examples in the Flash games world, but i’m talking about cable providers in the teevee world. These are the people who pull together the aggregators – the teevee channels – into one big package of aggregators, and charge a fee for access. i don’t *think* one of these has emerged in our industry quite yet, but correct me if i’m wrong.

Lord Jesus

Floating high above all of these and seated at the right hand of God is Jesus, who is awesome.

Do You Feel Like a King?

And there it is. With so many strata of folks making money from the lowly piece of content you produce, it’s clear that just as players are a commodity to you as a game developer, your content is a commodity traded in bulk to a higher power skimming off the top. Those higher powers, in turn, are a commodity to someone higher up the food chain.

Clearly, “king” is not an appropriate word to describe the games you’re producing. i’ve never known anyone to trade in large sacks of kings. Perhaps “content is lynchpin” is more fitting: yank the content out from this structure, and the whole thing comes crashing down. But the same thing happens when you pull advertising: you’re removing the wealthy benefactor, the rich uncle, who fuels the whole operation.

i’ll stick to my original claim: content is peasant. Kings can’t be kings without someone farming their crops, cooking their meals, and buffing their toenails. Whose toenails are you buffing? Because if you’re creating Flash games, selling them for a song, and scraping fractions of pennies on advertising revenue share, news flash: you ain’t the king. You’re somebody else’s bucket of eyeballs. You’re responsible for producing a pinch of salt in a barrelful, and it’s the people shipping the salt who are really in bidness.

i’m not saying any of this to upset the applecart, or to suggest that Flash game developers storm the castle and steal the crown. i just want to put it out there, so that the next time someone who makes money off your back tells you “content is king”, you can sock him in the snoot.

To recap:

1. Jesus is king.
2. Rogers cable answers only to Jesus.
3. You’re getting screwed.

• 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.

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.

i spent the past month tweeting rotten poetry to the FGS Twitter account. The entry fee for the conference wasn’t very expensive, and the OMDC (Ontario Mosquito Death Camp) is footing the bill for half of our activities in San Francisco this week through the Export Fund. But if i see a chance to get something for free, whether it’s a conference pass or a Scientological stress test, i jump at the chance. And lo and behold, at the eleventh hour, @FGS comped me a pass … but not before GamerSafe/Flash Game License comped me another one. i felt like the one girl in grade eight who had breasts … so much unwarranted attention! Thanks, everyone. i was very happy to be there and to meet everyone in person.

If you couldn’t make it, you missed a pretty solid show. i almost wish that GDC was one day only, and FGS dragged on for a month or more. Here’s a run-down of who i saw and what i learned.

Bidness

The show was split into two tracks: business on the upper floor, and creative on the lower floor. It was the conference equivalent of a mullet.

i stayed upstairs the entire time. Adam did a great job with Canabalt, but i’d much rather learn how to make myself money than to hear about how he built a walk-in freezer made of money to store all his money, or whatever.

Opening Keynote – Jameson Hsu

Jameson’s a good guy, but a somewhat nervous presenter. He announced a few new initiatives from his company, MochiMedia: the Mochi Social Platform, and the Mochi GAME Developer Fund. i have NO IDEA why they capitalized “game” … maybe to differentiate it from their Mochi ACCOUNTING SOFTWARE Developer Fund? Not sure. The idea is that Mochi’s new supreme Chinese overlords, Shanda Games, who recently bought Mochi for $80 million, would put up $10 million to help developers make games. i didn’t quite find out what the catch was … obviously, Mochi wants any games it funds to tie into as many of its own initiatives as possible – microtransactions, ads, and the new Mochi Social Platform.

The Platform didn’t really seem like a new or Earth-shattering announcement – you could see them building up to this at least two years out. Mochi is creating an easy-to-implement solution where you can leverage social media – Facebook, MySpace, YourPants, etc – with a single, simple API. It’s nice, but like many of the other services Mochi offers, you can roll your own and have a lot more control, but at a longer development time and greater financial risk. With Mochi’s solution, you gain ease of use but forfeit control.

i was pretty happy to see the developer fund, because it was a little tiring to keep hearing Mochi and pals chanting the mantra “Make multiplayer games! They rake in a lot more dough!” They also cost a big wad more to develop. Our first foray into a multiplayer game, Interrupting Cow Trivia, means that my daughters won’t be able to get braces and will look like snaggle-toothed freaks the rest of their lives. The game was expensive to build, in other words. Mochi’s fund, they say, aims to mitigate the risk of that more expensive development, and i think it’s a step in the right direction.

They’re still, however, giving away MochiCoins to players, which the players then use to buy virtual items in your microtransaction-enabled games, which is kind of like the government approving citizens to walk out of your shop with a free television or whatever, so Mochi remains on my handle-with-care list.

Mochi’s Ada Chen said she was afraid to open her mouth around me because she never knew whether i’d write something negative about the company. Roll with the punches, Ada! If you didn’t have critics, you’d go mad with power. i’m just here to keep you honest.

4 Keys to a Successful Social Game that All Game Developers Should Know

On the panel:

• Dan Fiden – Playfish
• David Stewart – Playdom
• Gavin Barrett – Crowdstar
• Mark Skaggs – Zynga

This panel was stacked with Zynga, Playdom, Playfish and Crowdstar, the companies who – God love em – have actually turned a buck on Flash … and a BIG buck at that. When the same companies spoke at Casual Connect in Seattle last year and dropped the bomb about how much they were raking in on Facebook, i could tell the whole conference was freaking out and trying to figure out how to get some of that action. i also knew that by then, it was too late – these guys had sewn it up, a fact that they repeated often throughout this panel.

This panel, and nearly every other at the conference, was plagued with some uniformly terrible moderation. Moderator Sana Choudary, and every panel moderator at the show, pulled the same rookie error of asking very broad questions, tiptoeing around controversy, and ending on the same ridiculously vague question “Where do you think the future of _____ is going?” Oh maaaaaaan … if i have to hear that question one more time, i’m positively going to bite my pillow.

The moderator asked the audience to tweet questions. The first one i came up with was “Are you making games or slot machines??” Not very original, i know, but i have a hunch i wasn’t the only one thinking it. i could only hear these companies talk about the fun, original and interesting games they were making for so long before i really had to give my head a shake. At least one other person in the peanut gallery had tweeted the same question. Unfortunately, the moderator censored the questions, and it was as if she’d been coached to do so – like when you interview a celebrity and you’re not allowed to ask about her recent divorce or that thing on her neck. Zynga was here, and they were rich, and they were only going to deign to visit us from Mount Olympus if we were all on our best behaviour.

The end result was that the questions were vague, the answers were more vague, and at least two of the panelists were ignorant enough to clam up about numbers and say “it’s all on the Internet – go do some research and look it up.” No, fellas – i didn’t fly from Toronto to California and haiku my way to a free pass to be told to go Google my questions about your companies. You’re on the panel for a reason, and i’m in the audience for the same reason. Me: questions. You: answers. Telling people to “just Google it” is ignorant.

The conclusion the panel came to was that yes, you can make lots of money on Facebook … if you’re Zynga or Playdom or Playfish or Crowdstar.. A few other points of interest:

• Games need to be designed with social hooks from the ground-up. Retrofitting doesn’t work.
• Mark – if your numbers are going down, it’s time for a sale!
• Mark – “Zynga collects 5 terabytes of data a day. (Ryan – holy SH*T!) Don’t underestimate the data side of this business.’
• Gavin – “The support of your community and your interaction with them is the most important thing you can do.”
• Mark – (answering “what’s a minimum bar for success?”) “5 million daily active users.” (Ryan – DOUBLE holy sh*t!)

In conclusion: if you can collect and parse 5 terabytes of data a day, pull in and retain 5 million daily active users, and hook grandmas to your virtual slot machine like they’ve got a crack habit, you too could be the next Zynga. It’s that easy.

Money in Flash: Next Gen Monetization of Flash Games

On the panel:

• Chris Hughes – flashgamelicense.com
• Jim Greer – Kongregate
• Justin Wong – Mochi Media
• Vikas Gupta – Social Gold

Initially, i was a bit annoyed during this panel. The fellas weren’t talking about some space-aged monetization techniques from the future that i’d never heard of. They were talking about microtransactions, mostly – current gen stuff, not next-gen stuff like the topic promised. Still, it’s not fair for me to demand new monetization ideas when i (and many, many others i know) haven’t even made good on the current techniques.

Here were a few nuggets from this panel:

• Jim says Kongregate’s best multiplayer game is raking in 5x more cash than their best single-player game
• Justin reiterated the thing that most successfully drives microtransactions: “Getting the player to the point of need.” That’s where, for example, the next level is going to SLAUGHTER the player, and he knows it, but hey! He can buy a bigger gun for two bucks. It’s a lot like putting a condom machine in the bathroom of a cougar bar. The point of need drives more sales. (That’s my analogy, not Justin’s.)
• Jim says Kongregate is making about 1/3 of its revenue from virtual goods, and 2/3 from advertising. He expects that to level out to about 50/50 in the next year.
• Jim added that Kongregate makes about half of its ad revenue in the 4th quarter, when its advertisers need to sell video games to people for Christmas
• Justin says Mochi makes about 15%-ish of its revenue from virtual goods sales
• Echoing the sentiments of the previous panel, the lads emphasized that games need to be built with microtransactions in mind from square one. Retro-fitting an older game with new microtransactions is not as effective.
• Jim says analytics are important, and adds that you should “watch what [players] do, not what they say.” i’ve heard this before – believe it or not, the two can be completely different.
• Jim says “The vast vast majority of revenue comes from credit cards and Pay Pal.” “$100 at a time is the most common.” (Surprising! Higher than i expected.)
• Chris and Vikas agreed that once you get a player over the initial hurdle of paying the first time, it’s much easier to get that player to continue paying. Chris added “If you can sell a dollar to a user, you can sell fifty dollars to a user.”
• Vikas offers that the best way to use subscriptions is in conjunction with virtual goods payments. You offer virtual goods deals or bundles with subscriptions that end up saving the player money. He says the two are a fantastic combination.
• Justin says games that used Facebook Connect saw a 30% jump in gameplays.

One of the most interesting insights i got out of this panel came about when one of the guys from Yummy Interactive took the Q&A mic for the first of two somewhat obnoxious self-promoting speeches. He pointed out that you could also sell games for a flat fee (which conveniently ties into Yummy’s model of selling a Flash wrapper for downloadables). What ensued was a tense, almost exasperated exchange that gave me an Aha! moment.

Casual downloadable titles from sites like Big Fish Games started out at $20. The price has dropped over the year, thanks to market interference by folks like Amazon, to the point where it’s now at about $7. Flash games started at zero dollars, and have been struggling to increase. So you have this race to the bottom in the casual downloadable space, and a race to the top in the Flash games space. Is the point at which the two segments meet the perfect price to charge for an online video game? Or will Flash games prove that microtransactions in multiplayer games suck way more money out of people’s pockets than a $20 price point ever did?

Adobe Tools and Services for Flash Games

It was more than a little embarrassing that Adobe, the people who make the software that all the conference attendees were meeting and speaking about, had such an inept presentation. Technically, it was like giving a camcorder to a spider monkey and expecting it to take coherent pictures. The presenters tried to show off Flash Player 10.1 running on a number of smartphones with a very dim presentation camera, and one monitor cable that they constantly had to pull out of the camera and plug into the laptop when switching between demos and slides. The demos of games like Bloons on the various handheld devices ran disappointingly slowly. One of the presenters swallowed her mic or something by the end of the talk, and had to lean into her fellow presenter’s chest and talk into his lavalier. Just awful.

The whole time, i felt very bad for them, struggling like they did with bad tech, bad demos and no new information to share, like the release date for Flash CS5. It was the Flash Gaming Summit, Adobe. Throw us a frickin’ bone.

One demo that did pique my curiosity showed a Flash game online where the player could log in using Facebook, MySpace or YourPants, and then another player could log into the same game on the iPhone, and the two could play the game on the same network. This was a demonstration of a new initiative called Adobe Services. i need to ask them about it at GDC, but i can’t imagine what they’d charge for that setup. My guess is $lots.

The Mochis Award Show, Sponsored by Kongregate

This was a chance to see the usually serious-faced Jim Greer from Kongregate have fun and lampoon himself a bit, which was nice. The award winners all look like they deserved their hardware, but i was dismayed to discover i hadn’t heard of most of the games in the running. i knew Canabalt Machinarium, and had only heard of Time Fcuk because of a podcast i did with the developer, Edward McMullen. It underscored the fact that this past year has been non-stop work for me, and that i need to lighten up and start playing more games. i shouldn’t be such a Jim Greer all the time.

(i keed, Jim! i keed! Don’t hate.)

Monetizing Your Game Outside of Sponsorship

This panel consisted of:

• Colin Northway, Fantastic Contraption
• Daniel James, Three Rings
• Sian Yue Tan, Rocketbirds
• William Stallwood, Cipher Prime

This was a GREAT panel. i absolutely loved that it inadvertently pitted three young bucks, whose recent successes had not yet been proven as deliberate business savvy or lucky strikes, against Daniel James, who’s had a chance to very publicly succeed and fail over the years he’s helmed Three Rings.

When asked how they chose a price point for their games, the answers were naive:

Colin – “Well, World of Goo cost $20, and i figured my game was half as good as World of Goo, so i charged $10.”

Sian Yue – “We looked at $10 and $20, and went with $15 cuz it was about halfway.”

Adorable.

i could see Daniel biting his tongue, but knowing him, it wasn’t going to last long. Finally, he said in his refined British accent “So … you guys basically pulled your numbers out of your butts?”

Soon after, Sian Yue sagely added “We chose a price and we stuck with it. Moving your price point around is never a good idea.”

i could see Daniel facepalm using only his face. Having been to his monetization roundtables at GDC for the past few years, and knowing how much they monkey with their payment systems and pricing strategies, i knew he was about to assplode. Finally, he couldn’t resist speaking up: “Actually, there’s a lot of scientific research that proves you should move your price point around.”

Oh snappeth! Thou didst not!

The old dog had schooled the young pup. Here’s where Daniel’s wisdom and experience shone through. He said it was alright to make that initial guess, but that you should “be diligent about testing your hypotheses.” He went on to explain that his company had spent 5 million dollars on Whirled, only to see a $300k return. He said they could have done the same learning in far less time with far less money by testing their hypothesis early and often.

i had read Daniel’s blog where he explained the lesson learned from Whirled. He said that Three Rings was now testing Facebook games in small doses to see what would take off. i had no idea what this meant. Were they building portions of the games? How could you know if a game would do well if you only built a fraction of it?

He clarified the strategy: they were putting together highly-target Facebook banner ads for games that didn’t exist yet. Each ad would lead to a landing page with a button where the potential player could sign up to be notified about the beta, which may not ever happen. Daniel said that one of the theoretical games out-performed the others 5 to 1 in terms of interest, so that’s the one they’re going to build.

They even did granular testing on THAT game. They did at least two ads with the same artwork and a different game name. One name tested better than the other, so that’s the name they’re gonna use.

Brillant, as any true Brit would say.

Everything About Sponsorship & Licensing

What a panel!

• Greg McClanahan, Kongregate
• Joel Breton, AddictingGames.com
• Lars Jornow, King.com
• Robin Yang, Candystand

Of all the panels, this was probably both the worst and the most delightful. Let me explain.

i’m told that AddictingGames.com were harangued by a developer last year for encouraging the Flash devs in the room to submit their games for free to that portal. It was really nice to see how, after one year, the tide had turned, thanks in no small part to the effort of Chris Hughes and the Flash Game License team. FGL clearly became the Great Equalizer in the war between the portals, who want as much content as possible for as little money as possible, and the developers, who deserve to be paid for their work.

You could tell that everyone on the panel, now matter how much they downplayed it, used FGL to find the developers they sponsored. Robin, the most intolerable panelist, along with Joel, continually made the appeal for developers to forge a relationship with the portals, ostensibly so that devs would skip FGL and continue to deal directly with Candystand. The advantage, of course, is that Candystand avoids a bidding war on FlashGameLicense.

Greg from Kongregate cottoned on to this real quick and said “what’s the advantage to the developer of going to you first?” Robin and Joel each tried to spin a yarn about how they know their audience best and can give developers suggestions about how to build their games (uh … great?), and how they’ll put all kinds of money and promotion into a sequel if the first game does really well. With a huge grin, Greg said “ANYONE will give the dev all kinds of money and promotion for a sequel to a successful game!” He put a fine point on it by saying that devs should go with the highest bidder, period. Robin’s angle was so transparent that i could hardly believe her audacity. The closest parallel that came to mind was when George Bush went on teevee right after the Shock and Awe bombing campaign in Iraq and said “Now, Iraqis, please stop setting your oil fields on fire. Those are precious, and they’re the inheritance of the Iraqi people.”

Really, Bush? You don’t want the Iraqis to set their fields on fire because it’s for THEIR own good? Aren’t you the least bit interested in maybe having a little bit of that oil for yourself? Not even the teensiest amount?

It was justice, to see the reps from those two big portals twist and squirm before an audience that, in the course of a year, had begun to turn the tables on them. The white masters were suddenly so concerned for the welfare of their newly-emancipated slaves.

Ok – i’m probably going overboard with these analogies. The Iraq War? Slavery? i’m a step away from Hitler.

….

Oh, what the Hell? Candystand and AddictingGames are Hitler. There. i’m officially a hack.

Turbulence Ahead: The Ups and Downs of Getting a Premium Flash Game to Success

The last session of the day was a solo flight by Tim Flowers of Gabob LLC, who made six figures on Now Boarding. i was initially worried that, like many developer talks, Tim’s would have a very narrow focus with very few take-homes and loads of inapplicable advice, like “then my auntie died and i got some money, so i was able to fund the next portion of my game.”

i found myself actually hanging on every word of what Tim said. His whole plan for his game had been the exact plan i’d had for Kahoots – push the game out to casual downloadable portals, who take an 80% cut. His art style, liberally borrowed from Catch Me If You Can, reminded me of the pop-art style we adopted for Interrupting Cow Trivia. i wrote down everything Tim said voraciously, and after asking him a few questions at the mic, returned to my seat and somehow lost my notebook in the process. He said some absolutely smart things that are now lost to time … or to the two video cameras that taped the session. Know this: daddy wants the video tape of Tim’s session. i suggest that if it’s available, you watch it too!

NICE TO MEEEET YOOOUUUU!!!!! (WHAAAAT???)

All in all, it was a fantastic day, and i didn’t want it to end … until the after-party started, and the organizers thought it would be a simply smashing idea to blast incredibly loud club music into everyone’s ears at a networking event. i DO NOT understand why companies do that. After i grew tired of yelling into people’s faces for hours, i left the party and started writing this postmortem back at my hotel.

GDC starts tomorrow, and i’ll do my level best to pussy out of Tuesday’s parties to write more for your enjoyment.

This series is called “What’s Wrong with Ontario Colleges?” A number of you have pointed out, on Twitter and elsewhere, that what i’m describing is what’s wrong with all colleges. But now, i want to shine the spotlight on perhaps an unexpected target, and suggest that not only are colleges flawed, but so too are their customers.

Part 2: The Students

In order to discover why Ontario colleges can’t seem to produce workplace-ready graduates for the casual games/rich media content industry, i went deep undercover as a fledgling teacher at a Toronto college that shall remain nameless: Hernando Velasquez School for the Digitally Inclined.

i went to … oh, damn. i just said the name, didn’t i? Unfortunately, the backspace key on my keyboard has been rigged to issue a low-grade electrical shock every time i press it, so i have no choice but to speak to you about this frankly and honestly.

So i completed 200 one-armed push-ups on my knuckles, and then accepted a part-time position at the school. i’m teaching a second-semester Flash course. Owing to my sense of self-preservation, i won’t identify any one student. There’s enough trouble to go around for me to treat the entire student body as one collective asspain. Game Development is the type of program that attracts a certain type of person, and the blame for that is shared by both the institution and its customers.

Everyone Can Get a Job Making Games

Colleges are businesses first and foremost. They need to offer desirable products. The perception is that purchasing their product will provide you with sufficient training to seek and (hopefully) land a position in that field. This is not the stated goal of all colleges, mind you – i remember clearly that when i recommended to Durham College as a member of their advisory panel that they increase their Flash offering to improve their students’ employability, the school’s teacher rep said “oh – we’re not here to get the students jobs. We’re here to facilitate their exploration of their art, of their chosen pursuit.” Yes – that actually happened.

But Hernando Velasquez School for the Digitally Inclined is a different story. They proudly proclaim in their literature that 90% of their grads get jobs within the first six months of graduating. Note that they don’t say 90% of their grads get jobs in the industry for which HVSD trained them. They just claim that the students were employed within six months. Now, really, since we all need to get a job doing something, this is actually an alarming stat: Hernando Velasquez is tacitly admitting that 6 months after graduating, 10% of their graduates are either unemployed or dead.

So the college is under pressure to put together an attractive offering in its course calendar. Nothing’s hotter than a job in the oft-heralded video game industry, so colleges across the province (country, world) are now purporting to train students in the video game industry.

Who Applies?

Now, let’s assemble a profile of the average teenaged male in high school to whom this offering might appeal. He’s tall. He’s gawky. He plays video games all the time. He masturbates to the underwear pages in the Sears fliers. He’s not bright enough to be a doctor, or he’d apply for in pre-med. He’s not bright enough to go to University at all, in fact. Ontario high schools are usually streamed, and it’s generally accepted that kids in the upper stream go on to University, and kids who take the lower general-level courses wind up in either college or prison. This is not by rule, but by reputation.

So this college-bound gamer has two options to him: he can enroll in the college’s programming course, or he can take their video game development program. Programming likely has grade 12 math prerequisites, and he’s not nearly smart enough for that. The video game program is an art program. So is this guy a fabulous artist? Probably not, or else he’d be taking a fine arts program somewhere. So he’s a gawky, hairy-palmed male gamer with perhaps no remarkable drawing skills and no great ambitions to use his grey matter in post-secondary education. This – THIS is the student who enrolls in the game development course at XYZ college. And THIS is the only type of kid who gets a shot at learning Flash, because we’re not teaching Flash very much in University, and we’re likely glossing over it in college-level programming.

And THIS explains why most of the Flash shops i know are trying to hire, with no luck. As i mentioned in the previous post, it’s a ten-year-old problem.

The No-Fail Generation

There’s another important thing to understand about our game dev program applicant. He hearkens from a generation of kids who, as of the late 1990′s, were unable to fail. It’s true: changes to the high school curriculum brought about by the Ministry of Education forbade teachers from flunking grade nine students. No matter how truant, lazy, or downright dumb a student was, he would sail on straight through the ninth grade. In my experience working as a part-time youth pastor at my church, i found there are even more cracks for these kids to slip through. i’ve known more than a few kids who should be failing, should be held back, but are repeatedly promoted to the next grade by an education system that doesn’t want to bruise their egos. Anecdotally, my friend who works at a major Canadian chain of retailers for young people tells me that when these kids get part-time jobs, screw up, and get fired, it’s an absolute shock to the system. They’ve never failed.

i was invited by colleagues of mine to lecture at a game development program at Humber College here in Ontario. The course outcome was to complete a Flash game. The class was divided into two groups of about eight students. The students had four months to collectively complete a flip n’ match memory game in Flash. And they were struggling.

Let me just punctuate that for you: it wasn’t one game per student. It was eight students working as a team to complete one game.

They were taking the typical college-level token Flash Actionscript 3 course along side their game dev course, and were swearing a blue streak at what they called an impossible task. A game, they said? A full game in four months with only eight people?? They told me it couldn’t be done.

i told them that for an experienced solo Flash developer, a flip n’ match memory game was the work of a single afternoon. They didn’t believe me. So for the next three hours, i sat down and walked them through the process of building the game from scratch. Along the way, i pointed out all kinds of programming shortcuts they could take, dropped sparkling gems of advice that would speed up their workflow, and built a functioning flip n’ match game before their very eyes.

Or it would have been before their very eyes, if any of them had been watching. For the most part, they futzed around on their computers with other projects, chatted to their friends on Windows Messenger, or surfed the underwear pages of the online Sears catalogue.

One particularly slimy student who had been glued to Facebook for the entire lecture slithered up to me after class and held out his keydrive. Like a greasy lounge lizard trying to pick up a chick in a low-rent bar, he said “Yyyyyeah, uh … do you suppose i could just … put that finished game on my kkkeydrive?”

i had two words for him. The second word was “you”.

Playing Games vs. Making Games

This week, i arrived early to teach class. The group has another class before mine in the neighbouring room. That room was blasting with machine gun fire, swearing, and the stench of gym class. All of the students were in there playing games. i wondered where the teacher was. One of the students told me he was a no-show. So, of course, that’s how they decided to spend those three hours – playing games.

Every time there’s the briefest pause during my class when i go to help a flailing student, the monitors light up with Team Fortress 2 and Quake and online web games. So a few weeks ago, i dropped this truth-bomb on them:

Listen, everyone. i know you probably go home to Chatham or Barrie or wherever it is you’re from and brag to your dumb buddies that you play games at school all day, but that’s not why you’re here. You’re in a game development program, not a game playing program. You’re a different breed of person now. You’re behind the scenes, not in front of them. You’re a creator, not a consumer.

It’s like you’re trying to get a job in a cake factory. Cakes are fun and enjoyable and people like to eat them, but a factory job is a factory job like any other. You don’t get a cake factory job to sit around and eat cakes all day. Turn the games off. It’s time to put some blood, sweat and tears into learning how to make cakes.

Email: The Insurmountable Challenge

i had to write a mid-term exam for the students. When i asked him to show me the ropes, the guy who teaches the same course to three other classes imparted some advice: the best thing to do, if i want to make sure i get all of their finished tests, is to pass around a keydrive. Whenever a student finishes his exam, you pass him the keydrive and he puts his files on it. i asked why the students couldn’t just email their files. He said that when you ask the students to email their completed exam files to you, there are problems. They type your email address incorrectly, they send you shortcut files as attachments, and they forget to include files.

And my response? Forget it. Not on my watch.

If you can’t competently email an attachment with your name on it, you’re not only going to fail my course, but you’re going to fail life in modern Western civilization. To make sure that everyone knew the score, i told the students in no uncertain terms that i expected a zip file containing their completed exam files with their first initial and last name emailed to me at the correct address. Then i would go down the class list and start checking off names. If i didn’t receive their file, they’d flat-out fail the test.

There’s one exception:

No – i’m just yanking your chain. There are NO exceptions. No email, no mark.

So we actually took 15-20 minutes out of the class to learn how to right-click a folder, add it to a zip file, and attach it to an email. It was embarrassing. i was embarrased.

At break, one of the students piped up to tell me that in another class, their teacher had asked for the same thing – zip files with students’ names on them. He provided a sample naming convention – the teacher’s name was Gord Smith, so he wrote gsmith.zip on the whiteboard as the example.

And what do you think happened? Dear friends, his inbox filled up with multiple files called gsmith.zip.

The Chain of Irresponsibility

i don’t actually blame this all on the students. Somewhere, someone let them down. If these kids don’t know how to use email, it’s not the Colleges’ fault. That burden is squarely on the high schools. So in conclusion, the problem with Ontario Colleges is not the students, but the high schools.

EXCEPT that i recently had dinner with a high school English teacher. She has to administer the grade 10 standardized testing to her class. In order for her school to score highly on the testing (and it does), she is encouraged by her department head to hand out IEPs – Individualized Education Plans – to students left, right and center. It’s a loophole. With an IEP, any student who wants an extra hour on the standardized test, gets an extra hour on the standardized test. (Make no mistake – the department head can and should be fired for this.)

So the English teacher is no longer able to teach high school English. She has to teach to the standardized test. If you’ve seen the excellent HBO series The Wire, the same shenanigans went down in that show. The burden of standardized testing put on the high schools is the Ministry’s fault.

So the problem with Ontario Colleges, conclusively, is the Ministry of Education.

BUT … what about the fact that these teachers are at the mercy of the students’ parents? Everyone in high school gets a passing grade these days, and that’s largely because if you try to give a student less than a passing grade, you find yourself on the phone having to justify your decision to the kid’s parent. i have many friends who are teachers, and the stories they tell about parental interference could curdle your milk. The CBC recently ran a documentary about these people called Hyper Parents & Coddled Kids. You can watch it on their site for free. It talks about, among other things, parents who call up their kids’ places of employment to negotiate their pay raises.

In … Conclusion?

i’ve traced the problem with Ontario Colleges through the institution to the students, back to the high schools, up to the Ministry of Education, and back around to the kids’ parents, who demand it be that way in the first place. These parents, to have teenaged kids, were likely born some time in the 60′s. So my penultimate conclusion is that the problem with Ontario Colleges is children of the 60′s.

Because i’m a lousy researcher, the trail runs cold there. If you want to take up the torch, i welcome you to it. Here’s where we left off: what the Hell is wrong with children of the 60′s, and are THEY the reason that nobody in Toronto knows how to make games in Flash?

The film world sticks to a plot device that grows increasingly implausible as time marches on.

In film (and teevee), nobody checks their phone messages like a normal human being. Here in Canada, you pay the phone company for the Call Answer service. Messages are recorded silently through your phone. To check your messages, you put the receiver to your ear and navigate a little audio maze, usually pushing “1″ to listen to messages, and maybe “7″ to delete them. Then you hang up.

But of course, if you are in a movie, nobody will know that you just received word that the President has been kidnapped.

ROM-COMmunications

Similarly, imagine you are lying in bed crying because the sinewy window cleaner you’ve been dating has just admitted to cheating on you with your snarly rival from that high-profile fashion magazine. In real life, when he calls, your phone rings once or twice, and then he is “forwarded to an automatic voice message service”, and told that “[Fiesty Female Protagonist] is not available”. He’s resigned to leaving a message on your modern-day Call Answer service. But the audience can’t hear any of this.

So instead, you have an old-school answering machine that actually broadcasts all incoming calls through its speakers, live, while the machine tapes them. “Diana … Diana, are you there? … C’mon – pick up, Diana. Allison lied to you. There’s nothing going on between us.” (The camera, at this point, is focussed on the machine, with you writhing in emotional agony on the bed in the background, out of focus.)

So here’s the deal: in our modern-day, post-1993 society, no one owns an answering machine like that. It’s a complete contrivance cooked up by film and teevee writers to let the audience in on the action, and it’s ridiculous. You might as well show your protagonist churning her own butter to demonstrate that she’s dilligent. Attention writers: we don’t churn butter any more. Whenever i see one of those answering machines in a movie (and indeed, WHENEVER a character checks messages in a movie, it’s on one of those machines), suspension of disbelief is RUINED. Thanks for NOTHING, Hollywood. i want my thirteen bucks back.

Thank goodness GAMES don’t have any hackneyed contrivances like the answering machine, huh?

Oh wait. They do.

Keeping Up with the Forgetful Joneses

If i were to pick the single most overused, implausible storytelling device in video games, it’s retrograde amnesia. The cast of video game characters who start their adventures not knowing who they are or where they came from stretches on for miles. i found a partial list over at Giant Bomb. It’s so rampant that it’s enough to make me NOT want to play a game. i know that if i start into an adventure where the playable character has amnesia, the rest of the game’s writing may be similarly uninspired.

A nearly comparable offense is to start your character off grossly underpowered. Everyone likes an underdog story, and many games slowly introduce abilities as the player progresses, but DAMN, folks … when i start playing an RPG, and my character is a pasty-white androgynous skinny kid with spiky hair and a wooden spoon, i sarcastically say to myself “Gee – i WONDER if he’s going to get mega-powerful and dragonpunch Satan in the face by the time this thing ends?”

Answer: yes.

Credit Where Credit is Due

So i need to offer my props to a few games i can think of that don’t commit this sin: Banjo Tooie, where the bear and bird start with all of the moves they learned in the first game; Final Fantasy IV, where the main character is a well and respected Dark Knight who knows a thing or two about wielding a wooden spoon; Full Throttle, where you begin and end as a badass biker; and … maybe Shadow of the Colossus, where you are required to complete the entire game using your God-given gifts, and can only unlock extra items and powers on successive play-throughs.

i’m sure you can think of better examples! If you dare to defend amnesia in video games, lay it on me. OR: What’s your favourite game where your character DOESN’T start out as an underpowered know-nothing?

The story continues today. A new client – an animation company – asked to partner with us on a Request for Proposal. They asked me to provide a credits list. i had never heard of such a thing. i told them that i could provide a list of games and projects we’ve worked on, but i confided that i hadn’t actually been credited on anything. This was despite over two years of operation as Untold Entertainment.

Disavow All Knowledge

A prospective client, a broadcaster, contacted me a few weeks ago and asked me to bid on a project. i came back with a very competetive price, but one of my stipulations was that i wanted to link to the finished project from my website, and to host a video of gameplay on my site in case the client’s link ever went down. The prospective client adamantly refused to allow this. “Media Conglomorate X is a self-contained, self-sufficient entity that does NOT outsource work to vendors (even though we do).” The issue was a sticking point for me, and i declined the contract.

Still another teevee client made it a make-or-break condition of a contract on a six-month job that we didn’t link to or mention the project on our website. We could talk about the project in any medium other than web, including (presumably) film, teevee, physical sell-sheets, and interpretive dance. They allowed for these, knowing that the only place we promote our work is on our website.

i have taken work from teevee clients who have revealed to me that they’re no longer hiring a colleague of mine, because he has started asking for credit on final projects.

The Credit Double Standard

This all leads me to believe that while those of us who have been involved in video games all our lives see it as a legitimate medium, the Old Guard – particularly teevee people, and especially Canadian broadcasters – don’t. Everyone who works on a film, down to the seemingly most insignificant person who holds the lunch platter (the “sandwich grip”), gets credited by name at the end of the movie. And in cases where animated movies or special effects-heavy flicks outsource shots to other production companies, you see those production companies listed by name, with all of their employees individually credited.

Ever read the liner notes on a music album? The guy who played the triangle gets a credit.

Ever watch the credit roll at the end of a teevee show? The Executive Producer on the broadcaster side who had nothing to do with the conception or production of the show gets a credit – usually top-billing.

But what do they give a web game developer who handles the art, animation, programming, writing, voice-over, sound effects, music composition and performance, bug testing and sandwich holding? Bupkiss. No credit. And worse – the threat of a lost contract to anyone who dares ask for credit.

Disgrace

i know many of the posts i write here are rife with griping, ranting and finger-pointing, but in this event it’s justified. Old Guard teevee types who pack a show’s credit list with names, but who refuse to acknowledge that a single soul (and in my case, ONLY a single soul) worked on a video game supporting that show, should be publicly shamed. So here i am, publicly shaming them.

For shame!! The people who work on a project must be credited for their work on that project. Vendors must be permitted to showcase that work on their own sites, so that they can successfully contract more work. And the medium of video games – web games included – must be treated as a significant one. The creators of web games are worthy to be recognized to the same degree as producers of film, teevee, music, and radio.

explicit sexual content exists “free of charge, in online virtual worlds that minors are able to access.”

i hate to break it to the FTC, but the Internet also happens to offer explicit sexual content that minors are able to access. And that content goes far beyond the mostly “low-level”, text-based content found in half of the kid-targeted virtual worlds that the FTC studied. i’ll dismiss out of hand the report’s revelation that there is “a greater amount of explicit content in worlds that were geared towards teens or adults.” Really? Pray tell, if the report is about protecting kids and youth, why did the FTC bother looking at worlds aimed at an older audience? It’s like saying “pornography was found to contain material that was unsuitable for minors.”

It’s For Kids

The implication must be that, like comic books and cartoons, some people associate virtual worlds primarily with children. When Ralph Bakshi released Fritz the Cat, an animated pornographic movie, in 1972 – or indeed, when Watership Down came out a few years later and the adorable bunnies drew blood from each other’s necks – parents raised a hue and cry because they did not expect the animated film medium to contain explicit material. After all, cartoons are for kids. Right? Ditto those parents who brought their kids to see Watchmen last summer because it was about superheroes, without bothering to check the rating to determine the intended audience.

It looks as though the virtual worlds medium is suffering from the same poorly-informed people holding it to a standard it was never meant to meet. There’s nothing inherent in the concept of a virtual world that suggests it is a strictly kids’ medium, or that it will appeal expressly to children. The trouble here is that the most successful virtual worlds to date, including Neopets and Club Penguin, have been kid- and teen-targeted. Does that mean that all virtual worlds will appeal to all young people? Of course not. And does it mean that virtual worlds that serve the needs of teens and adults should beef up their security to keep kids out? Emphatically, no.

Forget one or two virtual worlds members typing “i want to touch you on your nay-nays” in open chat – the amount of full-colour, HD titties n’ schlongs available at the click of a button to any child on the Internet is staggering, and it’s all without benefit of a membership wall and registration process. It’s actually far more difficult to sign up, create an avatar, learn the virtual world’s navigation and go hunting for text-only “sexually explicit” material than it is to type “mouth on bum” in Google Image Search to call up a gallery of pics that’ll turn your hair white. Whatever Google serves up will be far more psychologically damaging to a child’s psyche than the “shocking” content the FTC discovered in any virtual world.

An Unappealing Argument

The FTC’s excuse for profiling teen and adult virtual worlds is likely that these sites will appeal to younger players, perhaps due to their colourful graphics and similarity to Club Penguin, (the clueless adult might reason). You know what else appeals to young people? According to a survey by security firm Symantec, titties n’ schlongs. ReadWriteWeb reports that among the top ten most common search terms entered by children are “Sex” at number 4 and “Porn” at number 6, followed by “boobies” and an assortment of other interesting body parts in the ensuing slots.

i don’t buy the “appeal” excuse for a second. Children are sexual beings, and are just as entranced by All That Jiggles as we adults are. In its report, the FTC recommends more powerful age-screening mechanisms, enhanced age segragation techniques, stronger language filters and better training for moderators in virtual worlds. It all adds up to a completely imbalanced, unfair and unrealistic expectation of virtual worlds staff, an expectation that is not being levied against far worse “offendors” like Google. And sites like Google have far greater sex appeal than virtual worlds. Pictures speak louder than whatever naughty words the FTC uncovered.

Catcher in the Wry

You have to believe that i am all for protecting children from explicit content. In fact, i often go a step farther to point out that adults shouldn’t be viewing a lot of this content. The reason we don’t want kids to see it is often the same reason why grown-ups shouldn’t be looking. But having worked on a number of virtual worlds projects for kids under 13, i’ve seen the heavy-handed amount of legal hoops to jump through and protections you need to add to your product, and i assure you it’s excessive. As a parent, i only take exception to sites that claim absolute safety for young players and can’t deliver on that promise. This is why we sent Mr. McBadTouch into Green.com to see if he could find some new underage playmates.

Cracking the Safe

i’m far more comfortable with the ESRB’s blanket admission that “Game Experience May Change During Online Play”. This covers any number of sins, from someone asking my daughter if he can put his mouth on her bum over Xbox Live, to being called the N-word by some drunk Southerner (on Xbox Live), to someone simulating touching his scrotum to my corpse’s forehead in a death match (… again, on Xbox Live). Chris Rock said that a father’s most important duty is “keeping his daughter off the pole”. i’d like to add that a responsible dad also keeps his daughter off Xbox Live.

The world, in short, is a dangerous place (not least of all over Xbox Live). i appreciate the steps that some people voluntarily take to help me raise my children in a safer environment. i even appreciate some of the precautions the government mandates to improve that safety, because Lord knows not all parents are responsible. But the Federal Trade Commission’s recommendations to tighten up virtual world security are over-reaching and unfair. Virtual worlds are not the sole territory of children and youth, and parents should take the same precaution with them that they should take with any medium, including comic books, cartoons and animated films.

Yesterday was a deadline day here in Ontario for the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Interactive Digital Media Fund. That’s a lot of words, so let’s just shorten it to “OMDC IDM”. Of course, that’s a lot of acronyms, so let’s just shorten it to “OD” … as in, “i just OD-ed on application writing, and now i need some detox.” The IDM Fund adds a “D” to the end of the word “FUN”, rendering it completely UNFUN in the process. Every time i finish one of these applications (this was our third), i feel like i’ve been sapped of my vital life force like the podlings from The Dark Crystal:

i’ve said it before, and i’ll say it again: there are problems with this Fund. To put it succinctly:

1. It requires you to request too much money.
2. It does not move nearly quickly enough.
3. It requires too much needless documentation.

To put it far less succinctly, let me expand on those points individually. Please keep in mind that i’m approaching this from the perspective of a small causal games studio. If your company name starts with a “U” and rhymes with “Boobysoft”, you may not agree with everything i posit.

1. The ask is too large.

When we submitted Spellirium in the Spring OMDC IDM round, we were told that the $19.99 price point was too high. At least one juror suggested that we were incapable of producing a game of sufficient quality for that price point, which galled me. Nonetheless, this time we reduced the price point to $9.99.

On the other hand, the OMDC suggested that we were one of the smaller applicants, and that our $40k ask was pretty insignificant. It put us in competition with a number of other small companies, and our app simply wasn’t the best of those competitors. The notion here is that a three dollar hamburger will receive harsher criticism than a nine dollar hamburger … if you pay nine dollars for a hamburger, you already know it’s good. The price tends to say a lot about the quality, even if it doesn’t play out in reality. So we needed to lower the price point on the game, while increasing the budget, so that we could ask the OMDC for more money to look better on paper.

We also took a hit because we were only creating roles for four people. The first time we submitted Spellirium, they asked why we didn’t support the iPhone. The second time we submitted Spellirium, we added iPhone support, and the OMDC asked why we didn’t support Facebook. So this time out, we said FEKKIT. We moved Spellirium from Flash to Unity 3D, which gives us PC and Mac downloadable, web, and WiiWare/iPhone/Xbox 360 with the purchase of engine add-ons. Take THAT. Since a 3D game is often more costly than a 2D game, our production schedule was packed with more people: 3D modelers and animators, texture artists, UI designers, and a gaggle of others. This is what the OMDC wants to see for its investment. Our project will create jobs in Ontario.

But what do we end up with? A bigger budget at a lower price point. That means we’re even LESS likely to break even, so we have to re-visit our sales targets. The only way to make it work is to crank up our projected unit sales. We discovered that we’d need to sell ten thousand units to make a go of it, which is a challenging number, especially for our first outing. But i feel this situation was kind of forced on us by the suggestion to lower the price point and increase the budget. We need to ask for enough money so that the OMDC won’t just dismiss us out of hand, but it has to be an amount of money that we can realistically recuperate through sales. Rock, meet hard place.

i would much rather work with a modest budget and a realistic sales target. But as James Weyman from the OMDC said during an info session (and i paraphrase), “Why would we spend $40k reviewing an application when the ask is only $30k?”

i agree, James, and i counter with this: Why are you spending $40k reviewing my application?? Give me a fund where i can ask for a small amount of money to take baby steps on my way to becoming one of the Big Guys, instead of requiring me to put on one of daddy’s suits and pretend that i’m one of the Big Guys already.

2. The Fund does not move quickly enough.

The IDM Fund has two deadlines each year. It takes many weeks after the submission date to find out whether or not you’ve been funded. It’s a number of weeks after THAT before you start the project. This latest deadline was yesterday, November 16th 2009. The project has to begin within a number of weeks of funding approval, which puts us at March 2010. That’s three and a half months from submission to project. Any small, lean developer like us could complete one or more high-quality games in that time.

And i don’t quite understand how scheduling is supposed to work. Are we supposed to book that project time off? If a client comes to me and offers me a contract that starts in March, am i supposed to say “no thanks … i think we might get OMDC funding in March”? A much larger company might be able to work like that, but little guys may only be able to run one or two concurrent projects, max.

You need to cook up at least 50% of a project’s funding on your own. The bare minimums are 20% deferral (working for free), 20% in-kind contributions, and 10% cash. We have to scare up as much cash as possible, because 1) ain’t nobody gonna do nothin’ for us for free (except my wife and me), and 2) we have no partners. So if the IDM application happens to fall on a dry spell when we can’t show a lot of green in the account, we essentially can’t apply. It’s another six months until the next application. Who knows where we’ll be by then? Selling our toenail clippings for enough money to buy the leftover cookies from the blood clinic, perhaps.

i would like to see a fund where, instead of two hard deadlines a year, there is a perpetual submission window. We could submit whenever we had the cash, time, and project to submit. If any OMDC folks are reading this, they’re probably angrily tallying up a massive list of why this can’t work. So let’s play the “Ryan is the New Ontario Minister of Culture” game, everyone: i come to the OMDC because i won the position of Minister of Culture by defeating the former Minister in a bare-chested steel cage match or whatever, and i say “Here’s how it’s going to work: structure a Fund with a perpetual submission process, or i disband the OMDC and sink all the money into a new prime-time variety special starring the cast of the 1972 smash hit The Beachcombers.”

Now, throw out all your reasons why something like that can’t work, and let’s brainstorm how we can build a fund to solve this problem.

3. The app takes too long to prepare.

The kind of company that can reasonably apply to a fund like this on a regular basis is large enough to employ a dedicated app writer. The application requires sixteen different sections. Some of these are copy/paste – throw your Articles of Incorporation in there, your shareholder info – no problem. But the majority of the required material poses an onerous task to a small studio like ours. Required elements include a business and marketing plan, a development schedule, and a detailed budget. Those are all nice to have, but the OMDC grossly underestimates the difficulty a small company faces in producing those documents.

And funder, please. Don’t get me started on the budget. The Excel files provided by the Corporation are ripped from other funds (Bell and Telefilm). They are extremely teevee- and film-focussed, including line items for things like location scouting and talent. They have very few formulae built into them, so you end up having to hand-calculate many of the cells. There is a labelling error on the Minimum Schdule of Ontario Expenditures that the corporation knows about, but they haven’t bothered to fix it yet (it’s only been six months since the last application round, after all …) i have no idea why the OMDC would spend $40k reviewing one of these apps without spending two hundred bucks paying a CA student to add formulae to their spreadsheets and fix the errors. No – instead, we all have to waste our time struggling with these files.

The cost of physically producing the app is higher than it needs to be. The app must be printed as four separate copies. This year, we purchased four red binders and four sets of binder tabs to bind the app. That put us out seventy bucks. We don’t get the binders or the tabs back (i think the OMDC and the jurors secretly eat them … monstrous bureaucrats who are fueled by delicious life-giving stationary supplies). We spent another thirty bucks on printer ink, and maybe another ten on paper. i can’t imagine what the cost would have been to have the thing professionally printed and bound. i believe some applicants do this, but again, those are the applicants who can afford to have an app writer working on this thing.

Those companies are also large enough to pay for pre-production artwork to make the app look really good. i do what i can to add screens from movies and games that convey the feeling i want to invoke in the final game, but i have no artists on staff. i can’t afford to hire a contractor to create spec art for an app. We’re just too small to do that.

The apps i write come in somewhere between 60-80 pages. The OMDC has suggested that other successful applicants have had much smaller apps (30 pages?) but i don’t see how that’s possible with sixteen required sections. The time it takes for me to write an 80 page document could be much better spent scavenging for food from the floors of fast food restaurants to feed my family.

If i could make any suggestion about how to solve this problem, it would be that the expectation should be proportionate to the ask. Small game, small budget, small application. Lowered expectations. An app submitted by a company with two employees should not be compared with an app submitted by a much larger company. But since the ask is necessarily high (see above), the app needs to be thick. Jurors will say “why aren’t there any images of gameplay?” and “why doesn’t the budget list a production assistant for four days in July to help oversee this aspect of the design?” Simple: because you’re looking at a PROPOSAL, not a post-mortem of a finished game. The game isn’t built yet. i need money to build it. And here i am asking you for money. If i HAD the money to pay an artist to create images, i wouldn’t be grovelling at the feet of the Ontario government for funding. If i KNEW that i needed a production assistant for four days in July, i’d be visiting you FROM THE FUTURE.

Cry Me a River

i know this griping has probably moved many of you to tears. Thank you for your empathy. For my more jaded readers, i suggest only that this IDM fund money is my money. It’s your money. It was taken from our pockets specifically to be paid back in this initiative. The OMDC is not being kind or benevolent by handing it out. They exist due to a mandate from the Ontario government, by our elected officials. If we elect officials who decide that this funding is not important, the OMDC ceases to exist. i can kiss ass with the best of them, but i draw the line here. Neither do i beg Canada Post to deliver my mail. It’s a service paid for by tax dollars – my mailman is not doing me any favours by giving me mail. The OMDC does not deserve a philanthropy award by making a calculated decision to fund my project.

One piece of good news is that we WERE approved for one OMDC initiative, the Export Fund. They’ll throw a few bucks our way to lower the cost of attending GDC and Casual Connect. ROI is measured by the number of sales leads we generate, among other things. Don’t get me wrong – it’s great to have that assistance. But it would be more useful to us if we actually had a project to show at those conferences. i don’t see how i’ll ever be able to get project funding money if i’m competing against console companies with armies of partners and multi-million dollar budgets.

It’s a big-company, small-company dichotomy in this province, increasingly so. Big companies present no-brainer, lower-risk proposals than small companies often do. They can simply hire more people and spend more money. When it was recently announced that the OIDMTC (an interactive tax credit) would be claimable every year, rather than only on the year that a project was completed, it was GREAT news. Then came the stipulation that only companies who paid out one million dollars in payroll were elligible for this increased claim frequency – in other words, only UbiSoft.

The Ministry of Culture and the OMDC need to realize that UbiSoft and other big successful companies were not birthed from their mamas’ wombs as big successful companies. We begin life as whiny, squealing infants, both in our personal lives and our corporate lives. We all start somewhere. Untold Entertainment remains in the whining and squealing stage: this is me, whining and squealing, asking the government to supply child welfare, in addition to what they regularly pay out to old and fat companies.

That’s right, other companies: i’m calling you fat. Whatcha gonna do about it? Chase after me? i got those nimble little baby legs. Hiiii-YAH!

I Can Haz Beer?

i don’t drink, but i have it on good authority that some among you do. Everybody i knew put in an application for this last IDM round, including my mom, who doesn’t even make games. It’s always an enormous burden off my already-burdened shoulders when i hand the thing in, and i know i’m not alone in that. i hereby decree that the next time there’s an IDM submission deadline (20 months from now, or something like that), we should all meet somewhere and have a post-app evening to unwind. OMDC, you’re invited.

Word.

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So while i sat in the session, which was quite full of mostly teevee industry folks (and a small but extremely vocal and TERRIBLY worried-looking group of documentary filmmakers), i heard the word “digital” thrown around to describe what we do here at Untold Entertainment. The suggestion came up more than once that the “Experimental” stream, the one that was not concerned with teevee, be renamed the “Digital” stream. “Balls to that”, i say. Here’s why:

You Crazy Kids With Your “Rock n’ Roll” and Your “Hyperlinks”

The consultation really got me thinking about nomenclature. i see the term “digital” being thrown around all the time to describe what we do. The people using this term are mostly my parents’ age – baby boomers who have evolved from calling the computer mouse a “whatsit”, and are in positions of power at various places. These folks comprise the Old Guard of the entertainment industry. They’ve wrapped their minds around all this “new media” stuff to the point where they’ve siezed upon a catch-all term for any kind of content that wasn’t around when they were watching Howdy Doody on their 6-inch teevee screens in their costume chaps: digital. They must be so pleased with themselves.

The Messenger is Not the Medium

The trouble with the catch-all term “digital” is that it doesn’t do a damned thing to differentiate between linear, one-way communication like radio and teevee (phone-in shows excepted), and true interactive content that you find in video games and on websites. “Digital” describes a method for delivering content – breaking the material down into discernable ones and zeroes (“digits”) and pushing those numbers through a pipe (cable, phone line, airwave) to the end user, where the numbers are translated back into pictures and sound. “Digital” is the evolution of “analog”. “Psycom” may be the evolution of “digital” for all we know – content transmitted directly to your brain. It STILL doesn’t help us describe the type of content that is reaching the end user.

It’s as if you were trying to differentiate between horses and cars, so you choose the term “commuting”. But then in many parts of the world, people start riding horses to work. Suddenly your term does nothing to differentiate the two concepts, because it described a method of consuming the thing, instead of describing the thing itself.

Oh No He Di’in’t

So don’t call me digital. Teevee is digital, and i deplore the comparison. Teevee is also unidirectional, dumb, and on death’s door. And that’s fair – i’m sure teevee people resented being lumped in with radio, while radio didn’t appreciate being mentioned in the same breath as … i dunno. The Pony Express? At any rate, it’s all fruit, but when we lump teevee in with interactive, we’re comparing apples to pictures of apples.

Call me “interactive”. i feel it’s the best term that differentiates linear content from the amazing things we’re doing to involve and engage our audiences. If you’re part of the old guard and you’re clinging to your burning, sinking teevee ship with a tear in your eye, and you’d like to keep calling anything that follows teevee “digital”, be my guest. i promise we won’t put any Playboxes or X-Stations in your retirement home.

These are Mason’s tips, with my own input straddled betwixt:

1. Respond Quickly to Calls and Email

It seems like such a small thing — answering client emails within an hour, instead of within a day or within the week — but it actually makes quite a difference in how potential clients perceive you and your company.

This one’s huge – so huge that we made it one of our five corporate operating policies. When i was working at a broadcaster, towards my departure they began to outsource more and more work to external game studios. The project manager would wail and moan and pull her hair out, because the studios wouldn’t respond to her calls and emails. Living my sheltered payroll existence, i had never heard of such a beast. What was this mythical “not-answering-emails” creature all about, anyway? How is that even possible??

The more experience i gained, the more i learned that one of the biggest problems with freelancers and vendors, not least of all Flash game vendors here in Ontario, is that they don’t communicate well. So when i started my own company, i made sure that “constant communication” was high on our list of principles.

2. Negotiate on Scope, Not on Price

Lowering a price for your client, in most cases, will make you seem more desperate and less confident.

Agreed. Indeed, when i outsource work to freelancers, i know the quality of service i’ll receive by the way the freelancer prices his work. If the price is too low, i know i can’t expect to see the work arrive on time and on spec.

3. Show Off Past Success

One of the best ways to give your clients this confidence in your work is by showing off previous work and successes. A portfolio, testimonials, and case studies are all good ways to show off your previous work.

There’s obviously a huge “duh” factor to this one. Suffice it to say, when i receive a resume from an artist or programmer (especially an artist), i need to see that portoflio link at the very top, and it needs to be an actual clickable hyperlink. Then i need to see evidence. If i like what i see, i go back to the resume and read the part with words on it. If the link is at the bottom of the resume, you’re flirting with disaster. If there’s NO link, i delete the resume.

But in addition to just showing off your work, consider case studie and testimonials, as Mason suggests. Wherever contractually possible, we try to give an insider’s look at what it was like to create our projects. i find it frustrating to look at someone’s work, and to not know who the client was, and why the project existed to begin with.

4. Use Pretty Things

Even Mason admits that this one is obvious – put your best foot forward. But to put a finer point on it, he talks about paying attention to detail and the trim that you put around your work:

Using a collection of professional and visually appealing materials will make your business seem more established, credible, and attractive to potential clients.

If you professionally frame and matte a photo of a turd, it’ll be a very nice-looking turd. Every supporting material you use, from your site to your business card to your letterhead to your invoices, should be polished, tight, and consistently branded. We could stand to clean up some stuff on our site because we’re not exactly putting our best foot forward. The problem is that when you have a very small body of work, you don’t always have the luxury of displaying the best stuff and enough stuff.

5. Be Personal

Take an interest in your clients, their situation, and the overall well-being of their business. If you care about them, chances are they will start to care about you — and before long you’ll have a lasting freelance relationship.

This is one area where we excel. i find that if you humanize your business relationship, you’re much more likely to extend grace to your client in difficult situations, and to have that grace extended to you when you make mistakes. But if you give no quarter, no quarter will be given.

i was at a conference earlier this year, and met with a woman from a casual games portal. We shot the breeze for much of the meeting – i joked around, and was very relaxed, and tried to be that bright spot in her day when she could let her guard down and enjoy an easy hour. When we shook hands, i saw that the next guys in line for a meeting were a very bidness-oriented game studio: two fellas who wear daddy’s suits and run a meeting like they’re representing Iran and Pakistan at the Model UN.

The studio rep sighed and asked me what i thought of the next two guys. i said “they could stand to loosen up a little.” She gave me a forlorn, rueful look, and then shook my hand and thanked me for a wonderful meeting.

Lesson affirmed: people are people. We all need a break. We need to be loved, looked after and paid attention to. We need people to take an interest in us – in our well-being and our state of mind. And those rules don’t fly out the window just because you’re doing bidness.

The correct answer is “SEX”.

It annoys me to no end to see “GENDER” on a form asking me whether i have a penis or a vagina, because gender is not determined by that factor alone. Gender – masculinity and femininity/maleness and femaleness – is determined by a number of factors, and is not solely influenced by the amount of testosterone / progesterone / estrogen / Legolas / pepperoni in your body. i reflected on this while i read guest author Julia Barry’s How to Create/Market Games for Women article on Taylan Kay’s “The Selling Game” blog.

Sissy Boy

i comment a lot on violence in gaming, often complaining about it, as i would if i were a filmmaker who wanted to create great films, but the dominant genre in my industry was porn. Or if i was a television producer, and the top-ranking shows were fishing shows, and you couldn’t get any considerable love or attention unless you created a fishing show. It’s depressing.

But i was reminded throughout Julia’s article that i have had a far different upbringing than most men. i was raised the only child of a single mother who abhorred violence of any kind. Most of the men in my life were baddies. And today, i am the only male in my family unit save for the two cats, and we cut off their testicles years ago.

So when i rail against violence – when i commit to non-violence in my company credo – i’m doing so from a unique position where, through my upbringing and conditioning, i skew further toward the feminine end of the gender spectrum than the masculine end. And i’m okay with that. It helps me to appreciate and understand Julia’s perspective far more than if i’d been raised on a steady diet of blood n’ tits.

Barbarians at the Gate

With many videogames, we are entrenching a world of values where boys impress each other by being violent, and girls impress boys (and compete with other girls) in being pretty and inviting of sexual encounter.

i agree with Julia here, as long as we replace “are entrenching” with “have entrenched”. It feels like this attitude of betterment-through-beheading has been firmly set, and we are enslaved to it. This value system was already in place in other media while the pioneers of video games were creating Space War!, Pong and Zork on monstrous machines at the turn-of-the-80′s. Video games were far less visceral while i was growing up – not because we lacked the technology to depict dismemberment and disembowling, but because i believe the people creating games were kinder, gentler and more thoughtful. Dare i say it? More feminine.

It wasn’t until the 90′s that jocks got involved in gaming in a big way, thanks mostly to id software. Suddenly, there was an influx of customers whose needs were being catered to – in this case, manly red-meat-eating macho MEN with back hair and cocks the size of SUVs who wanted to kill, compete, maim, humiliate, screw, devour, shoot, mock, explode and teabag their way to that thrillingly blunt endorphin release that the more reasoned among us can achieve with a particularly stimulating crossword puzzle. Simply put, dumb, base males aged 18-35 hijacked the video game industry in the early 1990s, and they remain the ruling customer class to this very day.

But Julia’s article gave me hope: hope of a day when we see a similar shift as the jock renaissance of the early 90′s, and game developers figure out how to best appeal to women – how to reliably give ladies their endorphin release (hint: it takes longer, but they can experience it multiple times). Then – who knows? We might see another complete shift that sees the game industry dominated with games about buying and selling real estate, improving situations through the power of colour and texture, nurturing the growth of plants and animals, stealing each others’ friends, and other more feminine pursuits.

Hope Only Exists in an Alternate Universe

Realistically, though, i don’t see this happening, unless we see a major shift in the way electronic entertainment is designed and built. The dominant programming languages, techniques and methodologies, hardware and software have all been designed by certain types of men, so that the same types of men can understand and use them to create more tools and technology, which beget more tools and technology, and so on. All of these created elements play to the strengths of an analytical, scientific mind – the type of mind that is most often found pulsating inside a body that has a penis. PLEASE DO NOT EMAIL ME INSISTING THAT WOMEN CAN ALSO BE ANALYTICAL AND SCIENTIFIC. i’m speaking generally here. And generally, the tools and technologies have been built by nerdy males and for nerdy males, and now that the beget-ball is rolling, it’ll be very difficult to stop.

In trying to create “girl” games … companies pander even more to gender stereotypes. Marketing games to girls shouldn’t mean making everything gossipy and pink, yet there are countless products in that vein. Games and toys aimed at the female population are often shallow, fluffy screen versions of dress-up and shopping.

The challenge here is that women – and men, for that matter – don’t know what’s good for them. i remember sitting at a panel discussion on this topic, where the game developer said that they tested a number of themes and concepts on little girls and female gamers, and the results that consistently scored the highest involved pink, shopping, dress-up, baking, and pets. The OOO (Three Rings) crew defended the sexy, skimpy female pirate clothing in their Puzzle Pirates online game by revealing that not only did pirate bikini tops sell better than other female characters’ clothing, but that they started the game with more modest attire and were hounded by their female players requesting sexier clothing options.

So this begs the question: are less-sexualized, more thoughtful and more “3-dimensional” (as Julia puts it) games something that:

1. all women want
2. some women want
3. all women should want, but don’t know it
4. some women want on behalf of all women, who should really know better?

My suspicion is that it’s that last point, in which case i suppose i am similarly one man in a minority of men who want something better on behalf of all men. Masculinity and manhood are not proven through achieving the most headshots, or ripping the most still-beating hearts out of digital characters’ chests, in the same way that femininity is not demonstrated by combing and washing the sparkling mane of your pink flying unicorn vagina pony. A better, more balanced world, both virtual and actual, lies somewhere between the extreme ends of the gender spectrum.

For at least a decade, all my game development endeavors had one thing in common: none of them were ever finished.

With these words, indie game developer Jacob A. Stevens established himself as my soulmate, and endeared himself to my heart forever. From this point forward, i will be there to peer into his kitchen through the shrubbery outside his house, as if locked in a trance.

That is to say, i can’t recommend Jacob’s Gamedev.net article Practical Tips for Independent Game Development highly enough. Our experiences and opinions are so common, i have to wonder if he actually dug through my trash and assumed my identity to write the piece.

Hang on a tick …

Alright, i’ve just looked out my kitchen window and have discovered that Jacob is actually peering through my shrubbery at me. i’ve waved to indicate that he can come inside, but i think he just wants to watch. Oo-er, missus. Soul mates indeed.

Jacob drops so many truth bombs throughout the article that i believe he should be arrested and tried for truth crimes. Here are a few salient points that stood out while i read:

Build the Game, Not the Infrastructure

It’s easy to get distracted by tasks that don’t directly contribute to the final product, like building tools and editors. Hardcode the levels.

i’ve spoken to many a fledgling game developer who’s said “our engine is 75% complete!” Good for you. How’s your game doing? We technically-minded perfectionists (myself included) are often so caught up in making pretty, slick tools that by the time we burn out on a project, we haven’t actually produced something a person can play. It’s far better to have something tiny, playable and rough around the edges than a slick level editor that you abandoned at 75%.

Are You Sure You’re Cut Out For This?

Lots of people think they want to make games.

To quote Jack Black, “i’ve got sour news for you, Jack. It’s not that easy. Are you willing to make the commitment to rock-hard tasty abs WASHER-BOARD STYLE, glistening in the sun??” The classic fable of the little red hen comes to mind – everyone wants to play games, and everyone wants to have made games, but very few people are actually equipped to deal with the mental and physical anguish involved in making games. At the end of the day, most of us are ducks, cats and pigs, rather than little red hens.

“Who will help me code the user interface?”
“Not i,” said the practically everybody.

Just because you enjoy eating ice cream, doesn’t mean you’d enjoy working for minimum wage in an ice cream factory! Try on game development in small doses, and decide – really decide – whether you want to play games, or make them.

Self-Propulsion

In trying to find the right people to partner up with, even if those people have never made a game before, Jacob says:

The key is to look for demonstrated self-motivation.

We have a saying in our family: the drive is the talent. None of us are particularly good artists, musicians, programmers, businessmen, jugglers or bow-hunters, but we do possess a heaping helping of drive, or ambition. That drive is what possesses us to go ahead and learn bow-hunting when it’s called for. And though we may not emerge the world’s best bow-hunters on the other side, at the end of the day we got it done. We’re like those characters in Heroes who can absorb other superheroes’ abilities. Or we’re like the writers of Heroes who re-trained to become accountants just to escape their jobs on that show, because it friggin’ stinks.

When i got my first job in the games industry, i was hired for my drive. It certainly wasn’t for my artistic or programming talent – i had neither. And i had never made a game before in my life. But there’s a lot to be said for motivation. i don’t know if this is an ingrained quality in a person, or whether it can be practiced and improved upon. Either way, i’d be more likely to partner with, say, a decent and motivated artist than a fantastic artist who was somewhat of a slouch.

U Ay-yi-yi

A common misconception is that a great game starts with a great idea. StarCraft, Zelda, and Resident Evil are genius games because their creators painstakingly refined the details of the games until they were virtually flawless.

My opinion here may be due to the current struggles we’re facing with our games, but in my up-to-the-minute opinion, the very best strategy is this: start with a game concept so small, you figure there’s no possible way it could possibly stand on its own as a complete game. Then build it – that’s the easy part. Then go build the UI – the buttons, the title screen, the win and lose conditions, the log in, the sign-up, the high scores, the level selection screen, the error messages, the credits and the modal dialogues. If you fail anywhere, that’s where it’s gonna happen. You can always go back later and expand the game idea, but bear this in mind: 10% of the work is building the game, while 90% of the work is building everything surrounding the game.

i can tell whether i’m going to enjoy a free online game within the first three seconds. If care and attention have been paid to the intro logos, the title screen and the Play button, i know i’m in good hands. But if i see an unincluded font outline on that Play button, or an amateurish load bar, i don’t stick around long.

If you put together a complete game, with all the fixings that i mentioned above (registration and high scores are optional, of course), then you can go back and start building out your game’s features. In fact, if i were to teach game development to students, i’d be tempted to have them start with the front-of-house donut, and work in the actual gameplay once all that jazz was in place. Your appetite for feature creep will be a LOT lower once you consider all the UI you’ll need to support it.

Why Haven’t You Launched Any Games?

Case in point: both of our original games in our development queue, Kahoots™ and Interrupting Cow Trivia have been finished for months. We haven’t worked on the Kahoots™ gameplay since about February. This whole time, we’ve been programming the dozens of dialogue pop-ups and screens that facilitate the gameplay. And we just released a first look at ICT‘s graphics and theme yesterday – now we’re faced with the grim task of doodling up the scads of checkboxes, input fields, windows, prompts, scrollbars and messages that comprise the game’s visuals.

So you want to be a solo indie game dev? Start out by testing your passion for being an indie UI designer, and see where that takes you!

Microsoft usually wears its heart on its sleeve at the X events. You can tell by looking around the room where they’re hedging their bets for the holidays, how they’re hanging their hopes. One quick glance around the room at this year’s events spoke volumes about the company’s holiday strategy: no kids, no families, and no casual gamers: just pure, unbridled core players with a penchant for blood n’ tits. God help us.

In the past, i’ve written for Whoa! Magazine and GamePad, two Corus Entertainment kids’ properties, and The Magazine Not For Adults (formerly Disney Adventure magazine), so my kid-dar is pretty finely honed at this point. i’m pretty adept at sussing out which titles will be M-rated at launch, and which ones will be T-rated but still inappropriate for the audience (realistic war games never made the cut, by my insistence). i strolled down one wall of the This is London night club in Toronto dismissing each game in turn: first-person shooter, first-person shooter, South Park-themed tower defense game, first-person shooter, third person stealth espionage, first-person shooter, first person shooter. And so on.

And sequels! i caught a glimpse of Splinter Cell: Enough Already, and Grand Theft Auto: Repeatedly-Sodomizing-a-Dead-Horse City. And the game landscape was the blandest, most unoriginal i’ve ever seen it.

Variety Doesn’t Sell

In previous years, there had been Xbo