More on the MMO numbers game

Man, my WoW related post struck a nerve, both with feedback by email, and on an internal thread at work where I'd posted a similar comment. I guess for many, WoW is almost religion, and you don't go pokin' fun at someone's religion!

While the post centered on WoW, the frustration I was (poorly) trying to express was really about the hype around MMO numbers and the apparent lack of questioning people give them.

It's not unlike the website stats quoted in the dot-com bubble era. Remember all the confusion of page loads vs unique users vs registered users vs user minutes, etc, etc?

Anyhow, someone pointed me to an interesting post by Mike Sellers on Terra Nova, in which they also throw another spanner into the works: That different MMOs have different mechanics in which the frequency & length of play may differ (so concurrent users isn't the thing) and which may use different subscription models vary the revenue per user (so large number of registered users may not matter either, if few of them pay anything). [I can attest to the latter being a concern based on some recent conversations with Korean MMO vendors claiming *crazy* numbers for in-game item sale-based MMO's.]

Anyhow, Sellers and those he interviews, conclude that ARPU/Month or Average Revenue Per User/Month is the best metric, as it lets subscription revenue be compared with game-room revenue or in-game item sale revenue.

I think that's *definitely* better, but it's still not the whole story, for two reasons:

• Revenue != Profit. I might make $12 per player per month, but my operating costs might eat all of that. Now, perhaps they are assuming (or know) that operating costs are a constant from one MMO to the next, thus it's factored out. However, it's worth including because I'd imagine it will vary as types of games and platforms they are played on change over time. (e.g. An MMO played on phones might have MORE infrastructure to handshake with carriers, and then might need to hand over 40% of the subscription revenues to the phone company. Not sure it's the case, just making an example)
• Second, and more importantly, there *is* value to the raw audience size, for two reasons. (1) There's a 'critical mass' threshold at which point you get enough users so that they all run into other people on a regular basis, and (2) there's a 'phenomena mass' at which point your app becomes part of pop culture and gets talked about outside it's core audience. (e.g. Justin's post on WoW is the New Golf)

Anyhow, the post is an interesting read. Check it out!

WoW and the fine print

Mini-rant beginneth:
Man, oh man.

There have been just too many posts about WoW and how everyone on planet earth is happily questing away while direct-depositing their paychecks into Blizzard's coffers. In particular, I'm talking about the recent announcement about WoW's "5 Million Customers", and the more recent one about their "1 million european customers" in which they state 5.5M as the WW number.

Most of the game *ahem* "journalists" *ahem* happily leap all over this number (e.g. gamasutra), sometimes feeling necesary to pepper their article with a few laser-like insights along the lines of "Man, those d00ds are just rollin in munny!". I decided to instead skip past one of the headlines and went directly to Blizzard's own press release and read the not-so-fine print. Far from hidden, in fact just half way down the page, you find the following (emphasis added by me):

• World of Warcraft's Customer Definition: World of Warcraft customers include individuals who have paid a subscription fee OR purchased a prepaid card to play World of Warcraft, AS WELL AS THOSE who have purchased the installation box bundled with one free month access. Internet Game Room players that have accessed the game over the last seven days are also counted as customers. The above definition excludes all players under free promotional subscriptions, expired or cancelled subscriptions, and expired pre-paid cards. Customers in licensees' territories are defined along the same rules.

By Blizzard's own definition, there's at least a 2:1 overlap. The vast majority of subscribers also purchased the retail box, so that's a 2:1 count. There has to be some number of players without credit cards who are playing via pre-paid cards, say in once-a-quarter increments, so they drag the ratio up a bit.

Those that purchased (or were given as a Xmas gift, etc) the retail box, but then never subscribed after the first month or did for a while and then let their subcription lapse, well, they are also included, even though they may not be a current subscriber. That drags the ratio up a bit.

As a very rough estimate, I'd guess the number of subcribers is closer to 2.5M, not 5.5M. That's still *incredibly* successful, and very cool for PC gaming. I'm not trying to poo-poo Blizzard here. Wow is a wonderful game (or so I hear. Can't say I've ever played :-)

I'm trying to make a couple points here. The first is that Blizzard does not have 5.5M subscibers. Blizzard's own PR says that, at least it does if you read it, which leads me to my next point:

Game journalism really has hit a low when press releases are not only regurgitated, and not only go unquestioned, they AREN'T EVEN READ THROUGH!!!! Tabarnaque, c'est mal commode!

That's it. I've worked it out of my system. We now return you to regularly scheduled programming :-)

VIIV-Matrix mockery

Ross Rubin over at Engadget has a funny post that is a parody of The Matrix talking about Intel's VIIV brand/platform/etc.

He takes a few pokes at Microsoft too, but I'm still linking to it. It's a good read.

$tarbuck$

I own some Starbucks shares, and so I just got their annual report in the mail and just got done going through it. There's some interesting stuff in there.

First off, here's to the little things: Starbucks sends out a card with $3.50 on it to every one of it's shareholders. Does it cost them much? No. (I'm guessing COGS on that coffee is peanuts, that not all of them get used, not all of the $3.50 gets used on those that do, and that in some cases it spurs other purchases), but it's a nice touch of customer service. Kudos.

Back to the report. Interesting things:

• While they break down their retail vs licensed businesses, and US vs other countries, they do not break down, say, coffee vs music. Or for that matter, how many of those uber-high-end espresso machines do they actually move? This is interesting because I've heard many people leap to the assumption that they've become a major force in music retailing, but I couldn't find anything in there on it. Also telling is that their list of risk factors includes NOTHING related to the music part of their business, but rather is all about coffee-impacting stuff. e.g. nothing about increases in cost of music licensing, competition from digital music distribution, etc. A search online found some estimates that music accounts for less than 2% of their US revenue and less abroad. That'd make it - at most - a $100M business. Not chump change, but I'm not sure Mr Goody's quaking in his boots just yet.
• The number one risk factor they list is "A regional or global health pandemic could severely affect business". Hmm.... This is interesting for two reasons. (1) Is it really what they are considering their first and foremost risk, or is the bird-flu concern that is so de rigeur today just a convenient pin with which to pop the high expectations balloon (high market expectations, btw, they risk as the number two risk factor), (2) it's an interesting tell because the paragraph that follows it explains their strategic goal, which is to be the number three place (after home and work) where"gather for human connection". Hmm...
• Reasons #3 and #5 are 'we are highly dependant on our financial performance in the US' and 'we are highly dependant on our financial performance outside the US'. Hmm... I think I've seen this game played before, usually with some walnut shells and a pea. :-)
• Buried further down the list is an item about "adverse public or medical opinions about the health affects..." which goes on to say that, basically, if someone comes out with a study saying that latte's cause impotence in rats or something, they are screwed. Personally, I think this one needs to be way higher on the list. I'd worry about this more than the bird-flu thing, if I were them.

Anyhoo. Interesting read.

Canadian Political Satire Game!

OMG! This is toooooo funny.

Someone pointed me to Joe Rhino, a Flash based game of brilliant Canadian political Satire. You play (you guessed it) Joe Rhino, the leader of the Rhino party.

For you non-Canucks, the Rhino party was a bona-fide Canadian political party from the 60's to the 90's, originally started by separatists to contest the federal election, it eventually came to represent the measure of disenchanted voters across the country. When asked to describe their platform, their leader once said "about two feet tall and made of wood". I remember them once promising to (a) chop off the rocky mountains and use them to make sloping bicycle paths from Vancouver to Newfoundland and back, and (b) to empty the lachine canal in Montreal and fill it with champagne. Not that those promises mattered, since they always vowed to never keep any promises they made, since the other parties never did anyway.

Anyhow, the Joe Rhino game is not the greatest game, but there's a ton of variety, and the content is brilliantly funny. I made it through level one dodging falling pieces of the olympic stadium while dodging reporters questions, level two "smash the NDP", level three "nab the undecided voter", only to be defeated in the boss fight against the risen-from-the-grave spectre of Rene Levesque!




Must-play for all canadians and ex-pats!

Time to sweat off those cheezy-poofs!

GameSetWatch had a post about Kraft foods new 'ActiveGaming' effort which is pretty cool.

They've commissioned a couple DDR-style titles (one dancing-themed, another whack-a-mole style) and are selling a USB game pad for 9.99 (for shipping/handling).




I was of course very cynical at first, thinking it was (a) blatant advergaming, and (b) just a 'look, we're doing something about our cheese snacks' type of effort to pre-empt inclusion in obesity-related lawsuits.

However, having looked at the site (one of the games has a Flash version playable by mouse), the advergaming is subdued to say the least. And offering up gamepads at or below cost is certainly putting your money where your mouth is. So, kudos to Kraft.

I'll post a follow up after my gamepad arrives (hey, it was only ten bucks!)

Big is the new small, and google is the new evil

Was bound to happen sooner or later, but Google is the new Evil.

There will always be those that rag on any company that gets to be big and successful, but man, it seems Google-haters/critics are just coming out of the woodwork.

Listening to the diggnation podcast, they just *WAILED* on both the "GooglePak" software bundle (crapware, was I beleive the term used), and also discussed the "Embarrasment of a Video Store" announced at CES. More than just ranting, they make some really good points about why both are sub-par, ill-conceived efforts.

There are even sites like "Google: Evil or not?" :-)

And of course Henry Blodget's "Google: The Bear Case" post is getting a ton of linkage.

Welcome to success, I guess.

Yikes! Here we go!

Post-dot-com-bubble-pop jitters maybe, but it makes me nervous when I log in to all these articles/posts popping up at the same time:

Wall Street punishes Intel & Yahoo
Scoble on all ad-based stocks down in after-hours
Selling panic closes Tokyo market

Ugh. Not going to look pretty tommorrow on the markets. Best I just not look as I don't plan on selling anything any time soon anyway.

End of Moore's Law? BAH!

A few folks around linking to Costikyan's "End of Moore's Law" post, or to Mark Cuban's related post that makes a brief reference to same.

Umm... bah humbug.

OK, maybe too many years at Intel drinking the Koolaid, but I have to disagree with this one on a number of fronts.

1) Moore's law was never about Mhz or Ghz. It was about the number of transistors on a piece of silicon doubling every 18 months. The Mhz just came for free along with that. Though the Mhz train may have come off the track so to speak, the number of transistors keeps on increasing. Yes, it's via more cores, and I'll get to that, but the point is, it's still increasing.

2) The "how to apply the gates" problem is nothing new either. It was via deeper pipelines (which ran out of gas), instruction level parallelism (which ran out of gas), SIMD processing like MMX, SSE, 3DNow (which ran out of gas)... and now it's via more cores. Will that run out of gas? I'll get to that. Whether it does or not is kind of irrelevant. You know why? Because there's something that doesn't run out of gas: Human ingenuity. People will find a way to apply more gates to problems. Gates will get cheaper and people will find a way to make use of them.

3) The "parallel processing is hard and doesn't scale" problem. There's a lot of unsolved problems here. Again, I point you toward that 'human ingenuity' thing. I have faith these problems will be solved. There are still many places that parallel processing can be applied quite readily and where we aren't running out of gas any time soon. Graphics is one example. The Internet infrastructure is another. And by the latter I mean everything from MMO servers to search engines to the wee bits of silicon in them routers and switches. Will it mean thin clients and server processing and "Sun was right all along those guys really get to say 'I told you so'!"? Maybe. Who cares. The point being that there's still plenty of places to apply the mips.

I guess my point here is this: The MIPS-fatigue arguement has been made incessantly for 20 years. Every time, human ingenuity has come to the rescue. There may be bumps along the way (e.g. the move from 16 to 32-bit was a bump, the move to OOO execution was a bump, and the move to parallel systems may be a bigger bump still). But to assume that "yeah, this time we really have it right and it's all over"? Well, that's not only myopic. It's just freakin' arrogant.

I won't be dumping my INTC just yet! I still have faith in the smart guys over there (yes, Mr Dean, that means you! Now stop reading my blog and go solve Mr Costikyan's problem, OK!)

Sticky IP wickets

That'd be a clever title if this was about cricket video games and IP, but it's not, it's about Poker IP, so it's not so clever. Read on anyhow.

Wil Wheaton (yeah, the star trek dude) has an interesting article on 'Card Squad' about the trouble brewing over Poker-related IP with the World Poker Tour (WPT).

Seems those that play in the WSP must sign releases that give away all their rights to use their likenesses (in games, books, TV, etc). Not an issue for no-names signing up, but in a market where brand names are developed overnight (e.g. no-name dude plays online, makes enough to qualify for the big tourney, takes home a million), and where those brand names are *very* marketable (books, games, videos, not to mention the money involved in advertising for offshore gambling sites and their on-shore "schools"), it certainly matters.

It'll be interesting to see how this plays out (there, that was a bit more clever) and which side will blink first (oh, again!). There are probably some lessons to be learned from it that will apply to the ever-looming user-created-content-future of gaming that we keep hearing about.

The Super-Enron: The US Gov't

Catchin up on feeds after lunch, I came across this little gem on Accounting methods and the impact on the stated vs real US deficit and it scared the heck out of me.

WinMacs?

There seems to be a lot of post-Macworld gossip & water-cooler talk about whether or not the new Intel-based Macs will run Windows (some say no, some say Vista only, some say Vista or XP).

Let me first qualify my comments by saying this: I have no idea, I am talking out of my.... well, suffice it to say it's sheer conjecture.

OK, that being said... A couple thoughts:

First off, why has no one tried it? Lots of machines around Apple, probably a couple around Intel, and maybe a few in the hands of some software vendors. Not one leak somewhere? Surprising.

Secondly, and most importantly, why is everyone focusing on whether or not it's *technically* feasible? Instead they should be asking "What would you do if you were Steve Jobs?"

The answer of course, is "I'd mix up the wardrobe a bit, fer gawdsakes!" but after that, the answer I come up with is "I'd prevent Macs from running other operating systems.

I could of course be wrong, but Apple seems to me to have The Vertical Model firmly entrenched in their DNA. The few instances of their software running on other systems (iTunes for the PC; Quicktime for the PC) are paths toward critical mass for those apps, and aimed at drawing consumers into their vertical universe (iTunes on PC as a path toward getting people to buy iPods; Quicktime on PC as a path to getting content producers to produce on Macs with Quicktime - and to get iTunes installed on consumer machines).

One advantage MacOS has over Windows, according to pundits anyway, is "sexier machines". Would Steve Jobs want to give up this bullet point, whether or not there are others?

So while it might be technically feasible - and indeed even if not, it might be hacked into submission by a kid in scandinavia eventually - I just can't imagine Mr Jobs would want it to happen.

But who knows. I could be wrong of course :-)

Ladies in Charge

Seems both Chile and Liberia have elected female presidents, firsts for Africa and (I think) South America.

Which, and I may be wrong about this, leaves our continent in a dead heat with Antartica for 'last continent to elect a female leader'.

Almost makes ya want to root for Hillary, don't it? ;-)

Best pics of 2005

Someone pointed me to this Flickr set of the best photos of 2005. Caution, you'll loose an hour here, and also be reminded that we could all be way better photographers.

For what it's worth, here's my best photo of 2005 (though to be honest, I don't remember if I took it or if Alisa did):

Tripod video

Just in case you missed the thousand other people linking to this must-see comedy routine, here it is:

link

The best companies to work for

Fortune put out their annual "best companies to work for" list again. It's interesting to give it a once-over. It was also interesting for me, having moved from Intel to Microsoft, both of which appear on the list. Some thoughts:

• Intel, who's HR folk (while I was there anyway) tooted the horn pretty loudly whenever this list was published, had better watch out. They've slipped to #97 on the list, and so stand a chance of dropping off it. (This may not be due to any decrease in their quality of employment, but just that others have progressed around them?). Not sure how they ranked last year.
• Microsoft came in at #42 (a rank that will no doubt please many geeky engineers) which isn't top ten, but I guess it means I made a good move :-)
• I was surprised to see both MS and Intel having roughly the same percentage of women (1 in 4). The group I'm in at MS certainly feels like *WAY* more than that. Maybe it varies widely from one team to the other. I wonder if Intel's numbers were thrown one way or the other due to fab workers vs engineers?
• Yahoo made the list (#74). The most common job is "senior technical yahoo" with an avg salary of $117k. They also have free lattes, which for me would amount to a $2k/yr benefit. :-)
• Autodesk (#81) has their sabbaticals every FOUR years, and they still allow employees to bring their dogs to work (which RAWKS!). I've seen dogs running around our Microsoft building a couple times but I don't think it's *officially* allowed :-)

A couple issues with methodology:

1. The company's state is listed by headquarters. Not sure how much this affects things. For example: Intel avg salary was 101k/yr. Msft, 107k/yr. Not sure if they compared it to cost of living though. The majority of Msft employees are in WA. Intel's headquarters is in silicon valley, but only a minority of employees are there, with large numbers in Arizona, Folsom CA, and Portland OR - with Portland probably being the largest and having a lower cost of living. State income tax also varies across those these states (e.g. WA doesn't have any - WOOHOO!)
2. Google didn't make the list. Didn't deserve to? or does stock compensation not make it into compensation calculation? Other reasons? Maybe you have to have been public over N years?
3. Starbucks came in #29, despite having an avg salary of $43k, and a 14% turnover. Both not surprising given their business, but that means they rank #29?!? There must be too the methodology in the actual article in print. Which is a nice segueway to my final point:

Probably my biggest concern overall, however, is it didn't seem to incorporate any element of *job satisfaction* into the survey. To me, and I think to many others, this should be THE most important factor: Do you love what you do, do you feel you have the chance to make a difference, and does your employer empower you to do so?

The best place to work is the one where you wake up in the morning and are eager to get to the office and change the world.

2005 - the year in books

While I'm on a roll, here's my reading list from last year. I'd meant to write up full reviews, but instead will just give a quick note on some. Highly recommended books in bold. (and yes, they are all associates links, so maybe I can make myself latte money :-).

• The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman (started in '04, finished in '05). 3/5
• System of the World by Neal Stephenson (started in '04, finished in '05) 4/5
• Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster. Awesome book. 5/5. Must buy. Go now.
• Difficult Questions about Video Games by Newman and Simons. Also a great read, if you can find it. Search around, it's worth it! 5/5
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries. Good quick read. 4/5
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding by Al Ries. A lot of repeat with the above, but enough material to make it worth the additional read. 3/5
• Savage Pastimes by Harold Schechter. 3/5
• Strategy Bites Back by Henry Mintzberg et al. Hard to rate this one. It's a 'gems' style book about business strategy. While some of the essays in includes are five-star ones, many are just the opposite. Also, about half of them are by the authors themselves, giving the feeling that they couldn't gather enough contributions from external authors. I'll give it a 3/5, but if you pick it up, skip straight to essays from Michael Porter, Hans Christian Anderson, and Peter Drucker. I also really liked the "Strategy as 'Little Black Dress' by Jeanne Leidtka.
• Our Band Could Be Your Life by ... I linked to this one a while back in my 'game industry 2.0' rant. It's a great history of the indie punk rock scene of the eighties, but I'd argue it's a great blueprint (maybe more of a treasure map - it'll require some decoding) for all the indie game developers out there (which was the reason Elliot G over at Intel recommended it to me during a conversation about the game industry). 4/5
• Losing my Virginity by Richard Branson. Great inspiring read. Fun and there are some lessons in there to boot. I didn't read many novels this year but this one felt like one with all the romping adventure. Still it's a good read from a biz book perspective as well. 5/5.
• In Search of Stupidity by Merrill Chapman. Picked this up on a whim and did I find stupidity? Yes! In me, for buying this book! The author looks back at various blunders in the tech industry, and instead of saying "this is why idea A *seemed* like a good idea at the time" and explaining how we might look to our own times and ideas and look for parallels, he instead just says "It was marketing's fault! What the hell were they thinking?!". It should play well to programmers with limited empathy for those outside their ilk, but I think the book's a dud. 1/5
• Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson. Definitely recommended. Powerpoint gets used TOO MUCH in corp communication these days, and instead of a tool it's often used as a crutch. If you ever have to give any kind of presentations, whether to groups or 1:1, it's worthwhile picking this up. 4.5/5.
• The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. Figured this would be a good read when starting the new job. Can't say I followed his instruction 100%, but I still think it was valuable from a couple points. 3.5/5
• The Rules of Work by Richard Templar. Ugh. Did not finish this one. It was awful. The author takes such a "you vs everyone" approach to how you should "attack" the corporate ladder. He should have stuck to watching Wall Street re-runs. 1/5
• Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. What an awesome and fun read. Though provoking and very analogous in many ways to the gaming medium. Plus the whole thing is in comic book form! 5/5, or rather *****/*****
• Smartbomb by Heather Chaplin. Did not finish. I give this one a 2/5 (for what I read of it) since some folks might find it of use, but definitely not of interest for game industry folk.
• The Meaning Of It All by Richard Feynman. I wrote up a review here. Good quick read. Thought provoking reading. 4/5 only because it's so short!

So, not bad. I felt like I didn't do enough reading, but in retrospect, not so bad. 17 books started, 14 finished. I've already got an eye on a few for this year.

2005 - the year in cities

Noticed over on www.kottke.org that this is becoming a bit of a meme.

Go ahead, blog your cities for 2005. Anywhere you were at least overnight. Here's mine:

Toronto, Ontario
Las Vegas, NV
San Jose, CA
Annaheim, CA
Montreal, Quebec
San Francisco, CA
Big White, BC
Seattle, WA
Los Angeles, CA
Montreal, CA
Tokyo, Japan

Definitely a smaller list than past years. I'd like to think it's because I've chosen to travel less due to family, but truth is that's only part of the reason. The job change and move was a big part of it too. We'll see what it looks like in 2006.

Attention! Artist at work!

Along the lines of the MGS story I posted a while back....

Behold... The Artist. Note the intense concentration. Note the precision execution:


Ladies and Gentlemen! I give you...

"Le Visage Content" (The Happy Face)

To look into his pinhole eyes are to look into your own soul. Your inner despair cannot cry out loud enough for his tiny ears to hear you. This is why he smiles his crooked wry smile, despite your unhappiness. The Happy Face turns up it's disproportionately large nose-scribble at you. He cares not.

Looking out for #1- whoever that might be

Jason Kottke, who's blog is a great read on a regular basis, posted this gem regarding the USPTO's announcement yesterday of the top 10 companies granted patents in 2005.

The undersecretary of Commerce for IP was quoted:
"America's technological and economic strength is the result of its tremendous ingenuity. The USPTO has taken and will continue to take aggressive steps that will enhance quality and improve productivity to ensure that U.S. intellectual property protection remains the best in the world, protecting American innovation and sustaining economic growth."

The problem? Six of the top ten companies are not American ones. So much for protecting *american* innovation.

Anyhow, it's interesting if you think about it. We live in a global economy, but is it America's job (and that of the tax payer by extension) to protect foreign companies against their IP being violated by American companies? Guess you need to treat everyone fairly in the courts. Anyhow, food for thought.

Best CES moment

I haven't had time to write up notes about CES yet (next day or two) but thought I'd share this gem with you all. Definitely best moment of the show for me.

I spent 4 days there demo'ing Windows Vista. Mostly, I was supposed to be showing the new graphics user interface and it's various bells and whistles, and a bunch of the stuff we've done for improving gaming on the PC (Games Explorer, game-related metadata files, parental controls, Xbox360 controller for Windows, and the new inbox games - updated versions of Solitaire, Minesweeper, etc, plus a few new ones).

About 90% of the time though, people just came up and said "show me Vista" and I'd walk them through a ton of other stuff (desktop gui navigation, desktop search, new features in IE, navigation of folders, etc, etc).

10% of the time, they'd have game- or graphics-specific questions. Now and again, they'd say "oh, that version of Solitaire looks fancy" or something.

Then on day 3, I had these two little old ladies come up to my station. They looked really out of place at CES. I swear I kid you not when I say that one had a shawl of some sort and the both had the 'neck chain' hanging off their glasses and around their necks.

"Can I answer any questions for you?"

"We want to see the new Freecell!" was the reply in stereo.

So I walk them through a demo, and they ask a bunch of feature questions (can I change the background color?, can I save my game?, etc)

I tell them when it's coming out, and ask whether they want to see anything else.

"Nope, I'm gonna buy it to upgrade my computer. That looks really nice."

Pay attention, casual game devs. That's a target customer right there.

To think that people are debating whether the casual games market is elastic enough to support $29 ASPs. According to my sampling (albeit not exactly scientific, I pitched maybe 400 people at CES) shows that 0.25% of the population is willing to pay several hundred dollars for a casual game.

:-)

Crazy Car

Check this out. Especially the guy's face around the 3-minute-30 mark.

Wow. Santa's only getting one item on my list next year!

More on Video Podcasts, machinima

Someone pointed out to me that there's overlap between some of the Machinima being done today and the video podcasting space. I have to agree. Certainly things like This Spartan Life, the Halo-based talk show, qualify. Episodic, off-line viewable, news'n'views style video content. Same goes for drama, comedy, etc.

If you are looking for an example, I think the Peggy Ahwesh interview from Episode 1 is a great example. Interviews taking place while wandering a virtual world have to be more interesting that just sitting on Leno's couch, no?

1up show's a no-go, game podcasts

I'd been meaning to do a write-up of the 1up show, 1up's downloadable game-industry-insider vodcast (video podcast? vodcast? camcast? No concensus on lingo here). Anyhow, I'd been meaning to do a write-up of it, but Robin beat me to it, and I couldn't have said it better myself:

• "The overarching in-club pose of this stuff just makes me ill. It’s so closed, so pointless… so niche. So name-droppy and needlessly self-directed."
• "I believe the gaming press has a serious job to do! It needs to educate and inspire our users so they continue to explore new games! New players need tools to help them appreciate execution AND experimentation alike, and to help them look beyond muzzle flashes, explosions and crisp sound - to the messages and experiences possible in this medium. How does spouting about PR visits, release dates or feature deadline drama help accomplish this???"

Couldn't have said it better myself.

And boy oh boy did I *want* to like it. With my new Media Center setup at home, I was hoping to set up a podcatcher to just download the latest shows as they became available, and just have them show up in my list of media like any other recorded show.

But alas, I shant be subscribing.

On a related note, I only became aware of the show (sorry, I don't frequent 1up.com) through a gaming podcast called the CAGcast (cheap ass gamer podcast). A while back I had some airplane time lined up so I downloaded a bunch of gaming-related podcasts to sample. Those I checked out were rough around the edges, but there is gold in them thar hills. Here's a short list for those interested:

• CAGCast: Two gamers, one located in NY, the other in Tokyo, collaborate virtually to produce a show that reviews game titles, HW, and media (mags, shows, and other podcasts). They even highlight sales and promotions at US and Japanese retailers or online, telling folks where to get a bargain. On the down-side, the humor is sophmoric (e.g. "heh heh... it sounded like you said Call of Doodie"), and one of the two podcasters (the one in NY) *regularly* doesn't do his homework. However, the guy in Tokyo definitely does, and it's overall a pretty good podcast and worth giving a listen to.
• Gaming Uncensored: Ugh. If the above review seemed someone wishy-washy, this one will seem downright bi-polar. On the plus side: It's gaming related, it's fairly well produced (maybe access to college radio equipment and resources?) and one of the podcasters is pretty savvy and well spoken. On the downside, the other DJ is *so* intolerably annoying that I just can't advocate listening to the show. He sounds like a college kid that's partaken of the wacky weed to a point where he thinks it will be funny to do a bad impersonation of someone afflicted with Down's syndrome. He sounds more like he belongs in Howard Stern's circus-side-show posse.
• GameOn! Chris Melissinos' podcast which I wrote a review of here. Chris has only done one so far, but I expect this at least to develop into a good podcast for those with a taste for retro-gaming, and at best to be a good place for discussion about the industry as a whole.
• [EDIT: Someone pointed out to me that there's another GameOn! podcast that has 50 episodes already, located here. I'll be checking that one out soon]
• Gaming Steve: Pretty good show. About a 50-50 mix of game reviews/commentary and game industry discussion. Occasionally some interviews with industry personalities as well. This is like a verbal mix of gamasutra and gamespot over audio. Only downside: An opening jingle/theme song worth of the worst of 70's sitcoms (think 'and then there's MAUDE!!!...' ugh).

Anyhow, I expect we'll see more over time, and that vidcasts will follow, and that some of them may actually be good.

Go ahead, the opportunity is out there for someone to become the Rocketboom of the game industry! It could be you! (Trivia: You can see half my head in a fraction of a second segment of Rocketboom's CES parody bit)

Blog-ku

Jim asks, "no haiku?"
It seems I've fallen behind
Spring into action

word verify stumps
seems Dean's been Turing tested
and failed. What's it mean?

Could Haiku whole blog
Get five seven five dot com?
That would be cool, man.

Checked, it's taken
maybe spell it out instead
drat, foiled again

Get back to work Kim!
Get artsy on your own time!
You total slacker!

It's de-lurking week! Speak up!

I learned from Janel that this week is De-Lurking week!



Do you frequent this blog, but don't chime in? Speak up! Leave a comment, give me a topic you'd like to hear my thoughts on, or just say hello!

SoC rendering interview

Robin points us to this translation of an article from Fumito Ueda & team who did Shadow of the Colossus. The article contains some art & graphics how-to, with some interesting bits about how the worked around some of the capabilities they didn't have on PS2 (e.g. HDR, fur shaders, volume particles, etc).

Interesting read, and maybe useful for folks trying to scale back designs for older GPUs on PC titles.

Scoble points us to this very cool story about one person's digital lifestyle earning them a free first class upgrade. What an awesome time to be alive.

Coolest product at CES

OK, I agree with everyone else.

THIS is the coolest thing that was shown at CES.

Adios, Las Vegas!

If you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME.

I was in the Vegas airport squinting at friends blogs on my smart phone when I read on Steve Lacey's site that the Vegas airport has free wi-fi. Duh. Pull out laptop. I'd just assumed that they'd charge for it, since you pay for EVERYTHING in vegas.

So I've survived another trip to vegas. I definitely took it easier than in my younger days, but it still takes it's toll on you. Average day at one of these big conferences tends to go something like this:

- 7am - get up, shower, dress
- 8am - Futile attempt to get hotel wifi to work
- 9am - grab coffee, head to show
- 8 hours of walking and standing. Generally no lunch
- 6pm - 30 minutes of figuring out what to do
- 6:30 pm - 40 minute wait in a line for some kind of shuttle/cab/etc to get to where you are supposed to meet for dinner
- 8:00 pm drinks to tie you over until your earliest-we-can-do-is-10pm dinner reservation
- long dinner, more drinks, back to hotel

Guess I shouldn't complain. I don't clean out septic tanks for a living.

Anyhow, it was cool that I was able to see so many friends from around the industry while I was here, even if only for a few minutes on the show floor. I saw Razid, Adam and about 10 other Intel former co-workers, Steve, Souris, Jane, Alexis, and of course a bunch of microsoft collegues, some of whom I don't get the chance to see much up in Redmond.

I'll post some pics and writeups of a couple CES things I thought were interesting, as soon as I get the chance. In the meantime, time to go catch a plane!
-

CES keynote

Scoble's got a nice play-by-play of Bill G's CES keynote that you can read in 2 minutes.

One of the main things shown was Vista. After showing off the OS & GUI functionality in the core OS, the *first* usage they talked about was gaming. Very big focus for Vista and there's a ton of cool stuff happening for it (my group is a big part of it, though much of the work was done long before I got here).

I'm heading out on a 6am flight tommorrow and will be working the booth in the afternoon. Drop by and say hi if you are there!

Milestones

Thinking a bit about future directions for the blog. More extensive post on that later, but in the meantime, a couple things:

I noticed that I head 10k visits today. Yippee. I guess that's some kind of milestone. So I poked around Sitemeter a bit and noted a few things:

- I've definitely passed the mark where friends & family have been surpassed by people I don't know. Not that that's good or bad, just interesting. May change how I word some posts and such.

- Surprising number of international visitors, even not counting those visiting from globetrotting vacations!

- Traffic's gone up steadily over the year, so I guess I'm doing something right. Bully for me.

Victory in hand

Robin has a nifty cartoon and a pointer to an article about Nintendo's DS and it's continued leadership in handheld over Sony's PSP.

While it's too early to declare the handheld war over (indeed, there may be two winners possible), it's certainly not the Sony-dominant picture many forecasted over the past couple years.

The most amusing part is that Nintendo, despite having done some innovative things with the DS platform, is winning more or less with the same formula they used to kick GameGear's butt a decade ago: Have a lower ASP + focus on content.

The games are what everybody's talking about, but you have to think the ASP is a big factor for handheld too.

And they haven't even hit $99 yet. That should show a huge spike in unit sales. Maybe in the spring?

Qwerty's quirkiness

This article over on cnet caught my eye about a new keyboard being shown at CES that is taking on Qwerty-style keyboards. Good idea, right? I agree, but blech! Look at it!

I just CANNOT beleive that strict alphabetical order is the right answer here.

I think that Dvorak had the right approach (design for usage patterns, vs qwerty, which was designed to slow down typists so that Underwood-style typewriter letter-hammers wouldn't stick), but:

- Dvorak was aiming for speed - a modern approach would aim to balance speed with comfort (RSI-prevention)
- computer keyboards have more keys and different usages than typewriters in teh 20's (e.g. CTRL, Windows key, etc).
- Software today could be used to instrument different designs.

I think the best idea would be to build a keyboard with a small LCD built into each and every key, and have the layout be reprogrammable. It could default to qwerty, but different optimal designs could be devised and used by different classes of users (e.g. programmers might end up with thesemi-colon on their home-row index or middle finger position).

Any PC's keyboard could defaul tot qwerty, but users could log in and have their profile update the keyboard layout.

OK, enough crazy ideas. I'm off to bed!

Ask not of my yo-yo-fu, for it is legion.

Alice posted this about a cool new toy called Kodai Djinns. What is it? Take a yo-yo, embed a tamagochi-style game in it, let it communicate via infrared with other units and what do you get? A head-to-head wireless battle where your Kodai Djinn warriors are levelled-up by your spinning them up to power and playing the on-device games.

It's been a while since I've spun the yo, but I was pretty good at it back in the day. I wonder if they sense the length of spin at the end of the string, or if tricks are being done. Would be very cool if you could unlock powers by doing a Man-on-the-Trapeze (which was about the limit to my abilities)

Mind you, that was back on a standard Duncan ol'school wood yo yo. In MY day we din't have no fancy-shmancy magnesium, ball-bearing-axle, high-end yo yo's! (BTW, a cool thing to do would be to light that magnesium yo yo on FIRE while doing 3-leaf clovers with it!

Maybe if I got one of those fancy new yo yo's, I'd be able to compete with THIS GUY. Holy cow, that guy is so awesome.

Jay Bibby's Top 20

Jay's posted his top 20 games of 2005 over on his site. Anyone in game design and/or the casual games business should definitely make a point of checking out each and every one. I know I intend to.

I've played more than half of them over the course of the year, and was pleased to see two of my favorites up there: Kingdom of Loathing (#6) and N (#8). I have to confess that I blew more hours playing N than I did playing Half-Life 2. It's both maddening and brilliant.

Taking potshots at Smartbomb

Just finished reading this Newsweek interview with Smartbomb authors Aaron Ruby & Heather Chaplin.

While I'm not a huge fan of the book (might be of interest to some, but I echo Dellaro's sentiments on it), I felt bad for the authors as they were definitely facing a confrontational interviewer for this. It's one thing to ask difficult questions; It's another thing to approach an interview with a bias, which is clearly the case here.

An aside: At one point Chaplin compares the animosity toward games to that of other media, and states "Socrates thought the oral tradition would die because of the printed world". I'm no history buff, but didn't Socrates live something like 1200 years before the Chinese invented printing? Did she mean the written world, or did she mean someone other than Socrates?

Good DVD rental: The Aviator

I just got done watching the Aviator which I'd rented at BBuster (yeah, I'm a netflix-luddite), and highly recommend it.

- Good movie
- 3hrs because it covers a lot of ground (not LOTR-3Hrs, which is "3hrs cause that's what an epic's supposed to be so let's pack in more hobbits-staring-longingly-at-one-another-shots" long)
- More DVD-extras than I've ever noticed packed on a disk, and some of them are actually interesting (interviews with OCD doctors and patients, Discovery channel documentery on Hughes, etc)

So anyhoo. I recommend it.

Also rented "The 40 year old virgin". It had it's moments but certainly didn't deserve the hype it was getting.

The Obligatory New Year Post

Well, Jan 1 has come and gone, and I didn't accomplish nearly as much over the holidays as I'd hoped to. Were and still are on my to-do list:
- Updated blog with more functionality and more focused purpose (stay tuned)
- Decide on whether or not I want to dabble in podcasting (I have what I think is a nifty idea)
- Reflections on predictions for '05
- Reflections on my changes over '05 (Intel->MS, Pdx->Sea, Mgr->non-Mgr, tech->biz, etc)
- Predictions for '06

But alas, I blew the holidays catching up on some work and playing with my kids. Can't say that I regret it, but now the to-do list is as bad as ever as we head into '06.

Later this week I have some airplane time as I head out to Vegas for CES, so maybe that'll be a good time to tackle some of the above items. In the meantime, here's more trivial subject matter coming in my next post.

Java perils and Kim's geekery

Steve Lacey points us to a great read: Joel on Software - The Perils of Java Schools.

I definitely suggest reading it, but in case you are too lazy, here's the one sentence synopsis: The trend of CS programs in schools to move to all-java programs, under the guise of being able to spend more time on software design principles and such, is dangerous because it fails to weed out those that will ultimately make poor programmers.

Relevant quote:
"All the kids who did great in high school writing pong games in BASIC for their Apple II would get to college, take CompSci 101, a data structures course, and when they hit the pointers business their brains would just totally explode, and the next thing you knew, they were majoring in Political Science because law school seemed like a better idea. "

Amen!

For what it's worth, it's been my experience that this is absolutely the case. During my time managing people at Intel (I managed about 20 different people over the course of 5 years), ran into this twice: I 'inherited' (i.e. I didn't screen them) employees that had CS degrees from a Java-based program. In both cases they had taken some elementary C courses, but then the bulk of the program had been taught in Java. In both cases, when they had to pick up more complicated principles involving pointers and such, it just did not click. When you are doing low-level optimization work, you need to understand things like memory alignment, packing bits into registers in different arrangements, the cost of indirection, etc. (Both these people ended up in non-technical roles at Intel. They were great workers, and smart people, they just didn't belong in a programming role).

Due to my current role, I no longer hire programmers now, but if I did, I'd (a) test applicants from schools like this a lot more heavily, and (b) only consider them after I'd run out of other options.

Another quote from the article caught my eye:
"... there are two things traditionally taught in universities as a part of a computer science curriculum which many people just never really fully comprehend: pointers and recursion."

I thought about this a bit and realized that there's a corollary to this: An automatic qualifier of geek is anyone who is ecstatic after learning about pointers and recursion. And that includes me.

I've witnessed and exhibited many geeky things in my 36 years on this earth, but I can think of four that really stand out:

• Learning long division: I think it was the 2nd or 3rd grade. When I learned how to do it, I became so enthralled that I started writing down the biggest problems I could (e.g. divide this random 4 digit number into this random 25 digit number). Eventually they wouldn't fit on the paper, so I was asking my mom for some of her sewing pattern paper because it was 36 inches across, and THAT could fit some serious long division problems.
• Making my own gun powder: In the 7th grade, a friend showed me how, and how varying the ratio of sulphur/charcoal/saltpeter you could make smokebombs, stinkbombs, etc. Now this was chemistry with RESULTS!
• Seeing BASIC for the first time. Also 7th grade. TRS80 model 4 in the school 'computer room'. I saw some guy type in a bunch of stuff I didn't understand, he hit enter, and a game (variant of snake, I guess you could say it was) popped up on the screen. I thought it was magic and I was hooked.
• Learning and applying recursion. It wasn't till much later in life that I learned C (in night school while working at Matrox). The college I'd gone to, because it was an EE-type program taught all it's programming in assembly, since it wasn't about SW design, it was about understanding how the HW ticked. Anyhow, in this C course, we learned about recursion and I went right home and wrote an asteroids clone which used a recursive routine to render all the asteroids (which were stored in a tree structure). The idea that I could call a draw routine with a pointer to the root node was, as they say, da bomb!

Umm... I think I've said too much now. Geek number one signing out!

Ooof! My achin' thighs!

First time out on the slopes this season today, as Alisa and I took the day off (leaving kiddies with grandparents) to do a little outing.

Went and had lunch at Salish Lodge (butternut squash gnocci = crazy delicious!) and then went skiing at Summit at Snoqualmie for the afternoon.

The bad news: It's not a great hill, and their coverage wasn't great, especially on the black diamond run we ended up on accidentally (and which Alisa actually took her skiis off for and slid down on her butt). It's better than most hills back in Quebec, but certainly no Mt Hood Meadows or Big White.

The good news: It's 49 minutes from our door to the ski resort parking lot. WoW! Way closer than it was in portland.

Anyhoo. Think I'll go lie immobile for a while now :-)

Kim's guest review

I did a guest review over on Dan's GameFam site.

In the future, these types of things might be a bit of a conflict of interest, and I won't do them if and when that's the case. However, in this case, Kim The Dad saw a great website for toddlers and wanted to point others to it. 'nuff said.

Great Honda ad

This is a great Honda ad.

I beleive that's a Honda Z50 at the beginning of it. That's the first motorbike I ever rode, and learned to shift on it. Man, that was a fun summer!

Random Observations

- Sorry to disappoint all you Sodoku fans out there, but I just don't get this game. If everyone had just taken programming 101 in their youth they'd see this as the simple algorithmic exercise that it is and we'd be done with this crazy trend that's going on right now. I guess there's something to seeing how quickly you can solve it, but apart from that, it just seems an exercise in tedium. It's logic Solitaire. Perhaps I should get rich starting an "eight queens" trend. Hmm...

- I went to the gym and also the grocery store yesterday and found it funny how "Athletic wear" (sweats, spandex/lycra, etc) seems to be worn out in public mainly by people at complete opposite ends of the physical fitness spectrum - those constantly exercising, or those to big to fit comfortably (or at all) in anything else. Athletic wear is the band-rejection filter of fashion.

- I tried and failed to watch Howard Stern's "Private Parts" movie from a few years back. I'd heard that it was a good insight into how the radio biz really works, but I just couldn't suffer through the movie so I deleted it. I noticed though that the first two actresses to appear in it are both on West Wing now. Coincidence or are the hooked up with the same management?

- I watched Metallica's Some Kind of Monster, which was an interesting insight into the process of creating an album. However, I don't know if I can accept all this "bands and their therapists" stuff. Whatever happened to bands working out their problems by trashing hotels and sleeping with groupies? Really, what's the world coming to!?!

Wordy Xmas goodness

Two bits of wordy goodness from Santa today:

- Super Scrabble, which is a variant of the game expanded from a 15x15 board to a 21x21 board, i.e. roughly double in size, with 200 tiles and 4x letter/word multipliers added to the 2x & 3x ones. Had a game tonight, and it was fun despite the fact that Alisa Bingo'd "Frocking" across BOTH triple- and quad-word scores giving her 18x3x4+50=266 points for that turn alone. Needless to say, the rest of us had no frocking chance after that!

- "The Wordsworth Dictionary of Phrase and Fable". Wow. Super find from my mum-in-law. I hadn't asked for it, but I imagine it will come in super useful. I'd certainly recommend it to anyone in the gaming biz as it's got a ton of useful stuff in there. Read the back cover description for more detail.

My goodies aside, the highlight was definitely seeing the kids go nuts for all their goodies under the tree. Thomas the Train, a doodle pro pad, and other goodies had them well occupied all day and they crashed pretty hard come bed-time. Tom woke up late this evening and when I asked what was wrong he said "go downstairs and play with presents". :-)

On the dungeon siegin' wagon

I've officially kicked my addiction.... to dopamine.

The steady drip-drip-drip of dopamine fed to my brain through the steady click-click-clicking my way throught Dungeon Seige 2.

O.
M.
G.

What was I thinking? Was I even thinking at all?

I played DS1 (how many years ago was that) and while it was good, I'd complained it was TOO long.

Now with my gaming time at a premium, I have a lapse in judgement and install DS2 that promises (a) much more of the same, so not much new to see in terms of game design and (b) it's a sequel, so they've probably made it longer.

And WOW, did they ever make it longer!

After sinking as much time into it as I'd taken to complete Psychonauts, I get to a big milestone along the lines of "congrats, you have found the second piece of the four pieces of the big-ass magic shield you'll need for The Big 60 Minute End-Boss Fight of Carpal Tunnel Certainty".

SECOND OF FOUR!?!? And I think there's a sword to get after that!

I'm done. Games are too effing long.

And what better reason to blow the install than a brand new shiny CTP Vista build to install! Yippee!

//homer voice on
Mmmm.... shiny gui... mmmagugugghhh (drool)
//homer voice off

As the kids would say these days, Vista is the bombdiggity.

Now, I have a backlog of games to play over the holidays:
- Prince of Persia 2: PC
- SSX on tour: Xbox (what can I say. I likes da boardin')
- Burnout Revenge: Xbox
- Spiderman 2: Xbox (a bit old, but I'd heard some people talking about the web-swining mechanic, so I want to check it out)
- I have a BIG list of casual titles I've been meaning to check out for work-related reasons

And just in case Santa's been good to me this year and got me a guitar hero, I'm going to play it, and then I'm going to contemplate hacking it >:-)

Begin the GameBiz podcasts

I've been toying with the idea of doing a podcast for a while now. I'll need to decide over the break whether I have time to fit it in, but I think it would be fun.

I started blogging almost a year ago as a learning exercise as much as anything, and I've definitely gotten more out of it than I've had to put in. Perhaps the same might be true for another medium? Hmm...

In the meantime, Chris Melissinos over at Sun has had the same idea and debuted his show GameON! yesterday. I gave it a listen in the car this morning, and give it a 3 out of 5 rating. Don't get me wrong, that might seem like a low score, but it's a great score for a first episode (edition? terminology uncertain to me).

What I liked: (1) Best intro theme EVAR! Taken from M.U.L.E. - I'd have picked the same and now will need to find something else, dang nab it. (2) Very well produced. Chris, you doing this at home? Or does Sun have a studio full of folks helping? Anyhow, well done. musical spacers to delineate segments, volume is all at a good level, audible without any clipping; minimal verbal stops (ummm, uhhh), (3) Chris is a good speaker and is easy to listen to. Some podcasts are intolerable for this reason alone.

What I didn't like: (1) drifting from the stated mission. Chris claimed he was going to talk about biz & impact on culture, interview folks in the industry, etc, but the bulk (not all) of the first episode was mainly game reviews, (2) the trip down memory lane-slash-bio at the beginning was WAY too long, but I guess I should forgive him for that as it IS the first episode after all.

So, that being said, it's earned a place on my MP3 player.

Chris, time to start embedding subliminal Java messaging in there to corrupt my microsoftie brain! :-)

Oooohhh Canada!

Whilst America grapples with the War on Xmas, and it's courts decide on whether
"intelligent design" should be taught in schools, my homeland's courts ponder topics of a far graver nature:

Canadian Supreme Court OK's Group Sex

Oh Canada indeed.

Moralists, say what you will, but there's a far smaller number of people shooting one another up there!

Blue skies turn to grey... or pink?

While I might not see enough blue sky in games, I *am* getting a little tired of the blue sky on my desktop.

So thanks a BLOODY lot to Steve Lacey, for pointing me to some uber-cool desktop wallpapers via this flickr site, and as a result, costing me triple-digit-minutes of wallpaper browsing! ;-)

Still haven't picked something, but have linked on to others. Also recommend checking out:

www.queenofdorks.com

www.pixelgirlpresents.com

Super awesome anime-styled wallpapers!

Worst of all, this may waste more time as I'm considering writing a little wallpaper rotator app. Maybe it could be a mood-ring thing that decides on your mood based on a running average of emoticon types in your email & IM messages :-)

The Hack beckoneth!

I haven't even picked up Guitar Hero yet and already I *REALLY* want to hack the controller.

It's just crying out for someone to rip the electronics out and jam them into a real guitar. That little plastic toy is NOT what a guitar feels like, folks!

My $75 Kramer garage-sale-special is looking at me sheepishly from the corner of the room like I'm Dennis Hopper or something.

>:-D

Someone please do this hack before I do, or my Kramer will never be saved from the state of mind represented by the above emoti-text!

Narnia Rap!

I'm way behind on my movie watching. Usually will wait to rent, but some movies you want to see in the theater, and Kong, Narnia, Potter, Aeon Flux, etc, are all on that list.

So last night on a whim I decided to check out Chronicals of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. I caught the late show at 10:30 which was nice because I was one of only a handful of people in the place and could get prime seating.

Anyhow, great movie. Most are saying it's "not lord of the rings great, but great". I'm not sure. I think I liked it better. Some parts weren't quite as good, and it was shorter. But then I think LOTR could have used an hour less "Hobbits looking desparingly over panning vistas". Also, I think that real (vs mythical) animals are probably harder to animate as we are accustomed to seeing them move in a particular way.

Anyhoo. I enjoyed it.

But what I REALLY enjoyed was watching the PVR'd SNL this evening and coming across the Narnia Rap. YOu can view it here.

Not only is it funny... it's actually good. I want the MP3!

Katamari Dilberty

Funny Katamari-inspired Dilbert comic this morning:

Gamers Revealed!

AWESOME side-by-side pix of gamers and their in-game avatars on the BBC website.

Thanks to Souris for the pointer.

Yet another sign games have "arrived"

The other night I went to a cocktail party with a bunch of 30- and 40-somethings. Very suburban, very yuppie. Lawyers, business owners, aerospace engineers... I was surprised that I was the only microsoft guy there.

So it's party gathering time in the kitchen, people are arriving, giving the hostess bottles of wine, fancy cheesecakes from high-end bakeries, cheeses from places whose name must be worked into the conversation in order to point out how much the cheese cost (and therefore how good it must be). I felt a little like John Cusack in High Fidelity in that scene with Catherine Zeta-Jones, only replace "music-loving counter-culture dude" with "game geek".

Anyhow, at one point someone goes into the den to say hi to the hostesses kids, comes out afterward and says "I see you have Dance Dance Revolution.", to which the hostest nods yes.

"So do you play it too?"

Hostest replies "Yes. And I'm pretty good. I play it at medium level".

And then everyone else chimes in about how they play too, what level they play at, what kind of game pad they use (same yuppie tone used for the camembert: "You really MUST get the metal pad. It's SO much better").

I chuckled to myself that the one game industry person in the room was the only one who's never played :-) (I'm holding off until my 360 purchase. Though the praise for Guitar Hero may have me getting that first).

Anyhow. If that's not a good example about games in the mainstream I don't know what is.

Will Wright video

CNet has a video up of a segment of Will Wright's "When 2.0" talk that I mentioned a while back.

Bn-n-n-n-na-na

Listen to this.

While watching this.

From now on, everyone wears red shoes.

Amen.

via Robin

Poker for Dummies

There is probably a book by that title. I haven't read it. Here's my couple-o-paragraphs version.

We had our "holiday party" at work this afternoon. We had a big poker tournament as part of it, what with the current texas hold-em craziness. Not for real money, fake money with some prizes for the top players at the end of it all.

So the secret is this: If you have to meet your wife and kids, and are desperately hoping to lose all your 'money', people can't freaking grok it and you have the ultimate bluff. I would bet big and people would say "Whoah! Kim's gonna be out quick!", to which I'd reply "yeah, I have to get out of here soon, so hopefully I'll lose all my money". Then people would think I was lying and would fold.

So before I know it, the 10 or so tables are down to 2 tables, I've got a huge pile of chips in front of me, and I've got to go!

So, I told my boss to take over and will get to blame him if he lost it all :-)

Now I know the real action doesn't happen until the final table, but it was still fun. It certainly was a lesson on a couple fronts:

- when playing with average players, playing aggressively has an advantage. It's amazing that even with FAKE money, people were intimidated by agressive bets.
- people watch WAY too much poker on TV. Everybody's trying to "read the tells" on other players and shit. One guy said to me "I could tell you had the flush by the way you tapped your fingers" - on a hand where I *no shit* had forgotten whether my second card was a spade or a club, but had gotten too far into the betting to care. It was either a flush or a bluff and it really didn't matter.

Next year I'll make sure I have time to see it through and we'll see whether my luck holds out!

Counter(feit) Strike

Something to chew on whilst I find time for longer/better post on other topics:

One has to wonder whether South Korea would continue to complain about the portrayal of North Korea in US Games if Americans paid for the in-game items on "Free" Korean MMOs using the counterfeit cash the US says North Korea is creating.

Hmm...

Sweet cake

Best cake I've seen in a while: The Long Tail cake. Best one I've seen since Robin's b-day Katamari cake a Lulu's post-GDC shindig last spring.

Plus I love the phrase "we had a bake-off at the office". Sweet!

Attack of the Free MMOGs

We knew they were coming. We just didn't think they'd arrive in packs.

The Korean government just launched GamenGame, a US-targeted portal for Korean MMO's, trying to attract the US customer.

For what it's worth, I *love* the variety offered here. Enough with the 'men in tights' games. There's a baseball MMO, A golf MMO (which I referenced in my TGS report a while back)...

And all the MMOs are free to play, with the sell up being extra features or in-game items.

(BTW, I think it's pronounced game'n'game, though I prefer 'Gamen', like 'Ramen' for the first word. Perhaps 'RamenGame' will take off as a non-PC derogatory reference to cheap MMOs coming from Asia? :-/ )

Do you hear that shuffling sound?

It's Charles Schultz rolling over in his grave.

Reason.

Addendum to last post

Someone pointed out some similarities between my last post and Raph Koster's Future of Content post. I hadn't read it until just now, but agree there's some overlap.

Raph's is certainly a better and more thought-out post, but I think mine makes a nice complement to it. His is the meal, mine is the appetizer or deser, depending on your preference.

Bon appetit!

Games Industry 2.0

Those with an interest the indie gaming scene would do well to keep an eye on the music industry.

Oh sure, you say. "Digital distribution killed retail" the obits will read. Happening in music, and will happen for games. So what!? Whether you stand on the "bah humbug!" or "viva la revolution!" side of the argument, there's nothing new to this discussion. It's been going on for years.

But look again. A little closer this time. You'll see there are bigger changes afoot. I'll get to that in a minute. First, let's talk about something else.

I've been bitten by the podcast bug as of late and have been listening to a number of them in the car, on the plane, and at the gym (when I can get my keister out of bed to get there, that is). Adam Curry's Daily Source Code, Rock and Roll Geek Show, ABritAbroad, The Rock Show, and a number of others that I've sampled but once or twice. And if there's one thing I'm gathering through listening, it's that there are more differences from traditional radio here than just the budget applied and the music played.

Digital distribution is only a piece of a much larger puzzle.

Retail is only the end-point of a very complex ecosystem that the music biz has built up over time - largely over the past 50 years. Retail was needed for the actual sale of media, but radio, print, tv appearances, MTV vids, etc, etc - all this informed people what was available, built their tastes for certain content, informed them where they could get it, and pushed them into the record stores to get it. Music Industry 1.0.

Today's digital distribution of music relies largely on that same infrastructure. Sure, you can download from iTunes, but your learned about iPod from Bono in the TV ads and then went there to download your U2 box set. I'd call this is "Music Industry 1.5".

If you look to the podcast scene, you see some of the other pieces of the infrastructure coming into place:

• Podcasts replace radio. And with geographic limitations gone, and with content being time-shifted, it's allowing for a level of micro-niche proliferation that was never possible before. You could do an all-steel-drum, all-the-time podcast and probably find an audience for it. Jeez. RRGS pointed me to WhoreCast - talk about microniche - a podcast by and for sex-workers. Not my cup of tea but fascinating that it's there at all! You can even give your show a name to reflect the niche! How about "There are Jews in Alabama"! Yes, that's an actual podcast!
• Sites like The Podsafe Music Network, Podsafe Audio, and others are providing a place to link artists and podcasters, and in turn link them to users. Plus, they are letting artists retain rights to their content in exchange for a reasonable cut of the action.
• Laws around the world are being tested in ways that weren't imagined when they were authored, and undefined legal areas are being discovered. It's going to be a facinating journey, but painful for some, I'm sure.
• New levels of collaboration are possible. Remember "We are the World" and all the other cloned of relief-for-africa celeb collaborations? Check out Podsafe for Peace. 32 artists from 9 countries collaborated over the web to do a Unicef benefit song. (That they turned out similar syruppy pablum to the celeb ones is beside the point). No flying-in-Michael-Jackson's-Unicorn-before-he'll-perform to deal with either!

I think when the dust settles, we'll see that Music Industry 2.0 doesn't kill 1.5, nor does it kill 1.0. All three will co-exist, though not necesarily happily. There will be cross over in both directions: Mainstream artists using guerilla marketing tactics to market their wares via the 2.0 channels; indie artists that "sell out" for mainstream label record deals, limos, groupies, and trashing hotel rooms. Radio will evolve just as AM wasn't killed by FM, and just as Video didn't kill the radio star (though maim may be a more apt verb). Bloggers are taking readers from the mainstream press and the mainstream press is blogging in reaction.

I beleive when the dust settles, we'll see that Music Industry 1.0 will be humbed a notch or two, but not killed. And Music Industry 1.5 will help keep it alive. Music Industry 2.0 will provide a viable alternative for works that wouldn't make sense elsewhere, and that wouldn't be viable in the 1.0 world. And that means two things: (1) Indie bands, who's prior options were to be starving artists, can actually make a modest (and will need to accept this!) living, and (2) more choice for consumers, which is a good thing.

So what does this have to do with gaming?

I think the *same* *exact* *thing* is happening in the games industry.

Cartridge/disk/CD/DVD Games at Retail: Games Industry 1.0

Digital distribution of existing content, or similar content, from existing players. Same traditional marketing, just distributed online rather than at retail: Games Industry 1.5. Adds a "long tail" but mainly as clearing house. The worlds biggest K-Tel discount rack.

Is today's casual games industry "Games Industry 2.0"? Not quite. Maybe 1.9. A few new genres and price models have appeared. The traditional retailer has been replaced, or at least complemented by, the Big Game Portal (Zone, Pogo, etc). New funding models have started popping up in a few places. And players like Steam, Garage Games, Multiverse, and others are providing the distribution infrastructure/tools. Bloggers are supplanting the gaming press and the press is blogging in reaction.

So what's missing? The last piece of the puzzle, in my mind, is Niche Proliferation. Once we have a way for people to make games that appeal to a very specific audience, and connect them to that audience automatically, then we have Games Industry 2.0.

And 2.0 is already being alpha-tested, if it isn't feature complete yet:

• Steam is a step in the 2.0 direction. That their "niche" is significant enough to be extremely lucrative helps, but it's still a very specific type of audience.
• Jay probably doesn't know it, but his site is very "2.0": A casual games site aimed specifically at game designers, with both a review of the game and a critique of the games aesthetics and mechanics.
• Game Services and Service Clients (Steam, GameTap, etc) are the game & game info distribution equivalent to Podcasts+Podcatchers+RSS - letting the content come to the audience rather than the other way around. The difference of course is that right now every "podcast" in this case needs it's own proprietary "podcatcher".

There are certainly more signs of life than that. I don't think we are far off. The next steps are being laid out for us. You can listen to them on your way to work in your nearest podcast.

Alls well that ends well

Regarding my last post, the owner of the site has apologized and taken down all non-authorized content. Seems to have been a misguided but well intentioned effort. Kudos to him for righting the wrong so quickly.

//back to work

Contributor, my ass!

Hey kids. Look up at the address bar on your browser. Where are you reading this entry from?

If it's kpallist.blogspot.com, great.

But if you are reading this from www.casualgamedev.com, then you are reading a site/blog that is snarfing RSS feeds from other folks blogs, mine included, and listing them as contributors. (Greg Costikyan, Sean Ryan, and Phil Steinmeyer, are also listed - I am in good company, it appears)

I have no problem with people referencing entries I've made or quoting me. However, aggregating entries directly and listing me as a "contributor" to the site? That's a no-no. For one thing, it's false. For another, it could get people in trouble with their employers (not an issue for me, but imagine they were snatching the RSS feed from a press person and their employer then said "hey, you are contributing to a competing site"!).

Guess I'll have to put up a disclaimer, putting my blog entries up under creative commons or something. My bad for not doing so to start with. Oh well.

Gee, I had no idea my ramblings were of value to others ;-)

A quick WhoIs on the above domain tells me it's owned by Duncan Gough, same guy that created www.millionsofgames.com (which looks to be a cool site) and www.chickstop.com (a girl-gaming site that has the look and feel of one that wasn't created by women :-). Though who knows who's really behind this nefarious internet activity!

In the meantime, I continue to be a humble contributor to a single URL.

An attestation to my geekdom, gone.

I sole my M.A.M.E. arcade cabinet this morning. With the departure of my Ms Pacman cocktail, my Twinky pinball, and my SmashTV cabinets, this now means I have *no* arcade machines in my posession *sniff*

Sad to see it go, especially considering all the work I put into the conversion and the custom control panel, but there simply isn't room for it in the new house.

Perhaps using the money toward a new 360 would make me feel better?

At least I still have my Pong machine and ColecoVision! Ladybug anyone?

Figurines teaching you how to develop websites!

OMG! Coolest how-to article EVAR!

Why? Cause it's illustrated with figurines!

Pic:


Link.

They grow up so fast!

Seems just yesterday my kids were born as frail little two-pounders.

Tonight we were attending open-house for a pre-school we're considering for them for next September.

Man, time flies.

A scapegoat is born!

Game industry folk everywhere should rejoice, for the media has birthed another scapegoat for society's violence, and so soon games will no longer bear the wrath of the Right.

I speak of course of the blogging movement, that menace that threatens to turn your kids into violent murderers.

This article appeared on MSNBC today: When Murder Hits the Blogosphere. The main focus being around the murder of 14 year old Kara Borden's parents by an 18-year old she met through her blog on MySpace.

Once again, new media and new technology are at fault. Not bad parenting. Of course nothing to do with their self-avowed Chistian faith.

Would the same level of media coverage happen if they'd not met online, but say, in an arcade instead?

Silly me. Of course. Because then it'd be the video games that caused it.

Attending Casuality?

Hey Gang? Any readers attending the Casuality conference in Amsterdam in Feb?

Leave a comment or drop me a mail if you are!

Good notes Will Wright talk

I didn't attend, but Oren Sreebny's blog contains a good write-up of Will Wright's talk at the "When 2.0" conference going on in Palo Alto this week. It's a good quick read.

Thanks to Steve for the pointer.

Could the homeless hold the key to the future?

Not that we should make fun of the homeless, but we appear to be adopting their savvy biz skills.

This morning I saw two guys standing out on 148th ave in Bellevue holding homeless-beggar-style cardboard signs. I thought they were going to read "homeless, 8 kids, need money.." or such. Rather, they read:

"Seattle Start-ups! We want to Meet you! Meeting Dec 8 & 9 at...."

So I'm assuming some crafty-but-desparate VC's have adopted this fine method of laser-like focus.

Crazy world.

Victoria and her not-too-dirty Secret

Flipping channels tonight, I noticed that The Victoria's Secret fashion show was on prime time TV, on one of the major networks.

WTF?

It's a pretty peculiar thing if you think about it.

With all of the uproar about cleaning up TV, Radio & Games, the various other moves of the far right, parental & family values, etc... here we all are, 20 million people or so watching waif-like girls parade around in their finerie.

Is there any other branch of fashion that has justified a mainstream TV viewing like this? No. So clearly it's about the T&A. But it's deemed acceptable. Clean enough for mainstream, risquee enough to feel naughty.

It's like a tenth of the country is huddled together readng a Judy Bloom book and snickering.

A boozy post

Ah, the dilemma of being a girl-drink drunk.

When we moved up from Portland, we had a problem: No bar.

Not to say there aren't bars in Seattle, there's bars a-plenty. Rather the problem is that our Portland house had a full wet-bar which I'd fully stocked with a full selection of booze.

The Bellevue house just doesn't have a good place to stock it all, so we've been getting rid of it the best way I know how - by drinking it! A little at a time, of course. All things in moderation and all that.

Anyhow. The problem is that, lightweight suburbanites that we are, we quickly got rid of the lightweight staples (Kalua, Baileys, Midori, etc, etc), and are now left with two groups of spirits: The hard stuff (whiskey, gin, etc) and the lesser-used-but-necesary-to-properly-stock-a-bar drinks (Galeano, Curacao's, Vermouth, etc), not to mention all kinds of mixers.

So I was tempted to buy some Kalua, which I enjoy in coffee or hot chocolate (especialement pour l'hiver!) but how could I when there's still so much other stuff in the house?

Well, surprise surprise, friends Adam & Stacey came up for a visit this past weekend, and came bearing gifts. They brought us a bottle of Starbucks Coffee Liquer.

YUMMY! It's of course very much like Kalua or Tia Maria or other coffee liquers, but they've added a stronger coffee taste to it. And if you know me, you know I likes my 'spresso!

Anyhow, I recommend picking up a bottle next time you are at the liquor store. Make your Happy Holidays just a wee bit happier!

Uncanny Valley Girl

Steve Lacey points us to this wired article, the first of what I would imagine will be many articles about next-gen consoles and the "uncanny valley". I do like the author's take on it though:

"My hat is off to whoever designed the new King Kong game for the Xbox 360, because they've crafted a genuinely horrific monster. When it first lurched out of the mysterious tropical cave and fixed its cadaverous eyes on me, I could barely look at the monstrosity.

"I'm speaking, of course, of Naomi Watts. "

How-to Wiki

This is a cool idea.

WikiHow is aiming to do to the How-to manual what Wikipedia has done to the encyclopedia. Very Cool indeed. I've got several past projects I'd like to write up. Not sure if I'll find the time, but we'll see.

It looks like Wikihow, or at least the sister site, eHow, is making ad revenue. If they could figure out a way to give a stipend back to contributors, they'd really turbocharge the rate of contribution, but I doubt we'll see them do that. sigh.

Man among geeks

There are geeks, and then there are geeks.

And then there are people whose communities pass laws to prevent them from building particle accelerators in their houses.

Link

Jiminy Cricket!

Undies Showing! Player 1 Wins!

OK, it's a very strange world indeed. Link via Robin.

Book Review: The Meaning of it All

Richard Feynman was a great speaker. If you haven't had chance, check out the Feyman lectures on physics, and at a minimum, give the first 3 a try.

I also really enjoyed his more anecdotal books, "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?". I was disappointed that there weren't more like them.

So what a pleasant surprise when I came across the title "The Meaning of it All" when browsing the local second hand book store.

The Meaning of it All is not a book he wrote, but rather the transcript of three lectures he gave at University of Washington in '63.

From the Amazon site's reviews:

"Many appreciate Richard P. Feynman's contributions to twentieth-century physics, but few realize how engaged he was with the world around him-how deeply and thoughtfully he considered the religious, political, and social issues of his day. Now a wonderful book-based on a previously unpublished, three-part public lecture he gave at the University of Washington in 1963-shows us this other side of Feynman, as he expounds on the inherent conflict between science and religion, on people's distrust of politicians, and on our universal fascination with flying saucers, faith healing, and mental telepathy."


It surprising how many things he talks about are still current-day issues. Culture of fear and use of fear by the far right to justify actions; dangers of dumbing down media; ethics in science... It makes me wonder how much these really are 'new' issues. Are they really constantly there and we fail to have the hind-sight to see that, or are they cyclical perhaps?

Anyhow, if you can find a copy, pick it up. It's a great, quick read that will help you frame some of your thinking, regardless of which side of the issues you stand on.

On the 360 marketing campaign

Many have griped about it. Of course, armchair quarterbacking and 20/20 hindsight are both easy, and in combination they are extra strong.

John Porcaro on Xbox's marketing team (don't know him, just got pointed to his blog) pointed out some of the difficulties and thoughts that go into such a campaign and why it ended up where/how it did. Good read.

Link.

I agree 100%!

Store water, gorp, and fetch my musket

It's snowing again tonight. Will be interesting to see how many people show up for work tommorrow if it keeps up. The office cleared out pretty early this afternoon in a panic over the 1/2" of snow that had fallen and the fourteen individual flakes that were rumored to have not melted somewhere on Seattle's highways, leaving a sense of imminent certain death in the air.

Years ago, when I first moved to Portland, I was shocked by the behavior of people in the Pacific Northwest when snow started to fall. Since then, I've realized it's because all of them can be grouped into one of two categories:

• People that once lived in a place with snow-filled winters (eg. Montreal, NY, Denver, etc), or,
• People that seize the conch, smash Piggy's glasses, and start to feast on the still-warm flesh of their soccer-playing teammates the moment white stuff starts to fall from the sky.

Jeez, people! Chill! (Pun intended, of course)

What's in a blog?

I saw that CMP launched GameSetWatch this week, which (ahem) "aims to pinpoint and succinctly link to the gems of video game coverage online".

Hmm... I'm not sure what to make of it. Certainly can't blame CMP for wanting to hop on the blogwagon (Hey, I can portmanteux with the rest of you), and they've certainly put together a good crew to do so, including EIC of GDMag Simon Carless, the creator of Geeks on Stun, and BBC-ette Alice (link on the right).

That being said, there's still something irking me a bit, and I'm not sure why. Here's a try at a couple things that are nagging at me:

• Will Simon's job editing GSW improve or diminish the quality of GDMag. Will it let the mag focus on 'big picture' type features, or will juicy items need to get up there right away. Same goes for Gamasutra, btw.
• Where does a blog end and a website begin? And does it matter? On the continuum of sites that goes from, say, a news.com type format, to a slashdot, to a boingboing or engadget, to a gewgaw, what's really the difference? I guess I still cling to an antiquated concept that a blog is a personal thing, but I guess that doesn't hold much water. I dunno.
• Will we lose the better personal coverage from some of this crew? For example, I frequent Alice's blog, but it seems that some things that she used to post now will clearly belong on GSW. Maybe the rest will still be compelling? Maybe GSW will be a better place to frequent?
• Will a corporate charter lead to the same pressures that a lot of mags/sites face, and will they be good about being unbiased/tainted? Pretty easy when things are looking up and lucrative like today, but if the ad market takes another 99-style hit, well, integrity is harder to keep when you need to eat, right?

Alright, enough negativity. I guess I should give the site -oops, blog- the benefit of the doubt, and so should you! Go give it a once over and subscribe to the feed for a while and let me know what you think!

Swish, swish, swish

It's snowing here in Redmond, which makes me pine for the slopes!

(view out the office window)

MS - Reality TV

Tonight's Apprentice will show the Trumpster tasking his would-be cronies in a challenge featuring an MS product.

I'd kicked the Apprentice habit but may fall off the wagon tonight only.

(And I still think Branson's Billionaire show was a billion times better!)

Cards, anyone?

Justin's got a post about an interesting game experiment they are doing on campus at USC involving giant cards in a "massively multiplayer" real world game. Sounds cool!