Why better price won't make GameTap better

GameTap, the 'all you can eat' PC gaming service, has dropped it's price from $15/month to $10/month. They've also added Video-on-Demand to their line up.

It'll be interesting to see the consumer reaction to it. It's also interesting to guess as to the change in strategy. Since one can surmise they didn't just kick back and thing "Hmm... we're making too much money here. How can we reduce it by 33%?", there are two possible reasons for the change:

1. The service has been so successful that they've decided that the audience is larger than anticipated, they've tapped the 'hard-core market', and so are doing this to grow the user base.
2. The number of subscribers has been below expectations, and are blaming price.

Since they haven't been touting their growth (a quick look at their press site shows NOTHING on number of customers, which they'd brag about if they had a lot of them). I'm going to assume it's the latter. And while there's certainly a standard price elasticity arguement that says "lower price - more people", I really doubt that's their problem.

Their problem is, IMHO, two-fold.

First, the service doesn't work as promised. I've tried it out (though it was some time ago) and run into crashes and artifacts. However, this is a very minor problem, and would be fixable if they addressed they next- bigger - problem:

I think they have too many games.

But that's not really the problem either. That's a symptom.

In Inside The Tornado (if you were to be stranded on a deserted island and could only take one business book with you...), Geoffrey Moore talks about new products and services needing 'bowling pin' strategies. Pick one very specific niche, deliver a product that serves that niche PERFECTLY, and let that niche be a bowling pin that (a) provides revenue and learnings to go tackle the next niche, and (b) let the pin fall and help you tackle the next niche.

To pick an overused example: iPod. Initially, didn't view photos, didn't play video, just music. Vertically integrated with a single service - which in theory meant a more limited set of content than a horizontal model with multiple vendors services. However, it did that one thing *super well*. And that's what consumers want. That 'bowling pin' let them tackle photos. And now video. Textbook case.

In the world of digital distribution services for games, you've got a number of different entrants. Steam (Bowling pin? HL2 customers. perfect); MMOs (Bowling pin? The audience for that one game, which in some cases is defined narrowly enough); Xbox Live Arcade? Well, that's a longer discussion - but you could argue that hardcore console gamers were the first pin, and you aim at it by doing a console well. Digital distribution in that case could be part of a larger game, but I digress...

GameTap does just games, right? Sure, but that's painting with pretty wide brush. It's the retro-arcade platform (but doesn't have them all), the retro-console platform (but doesn't have them all), the retro-PC platform (but doesn't have them all, and they don't all work), and the current-and-recent-PC-hits platform (but only has a few of them and there's no clear group they 'own').

So what does that mean to the consumer? What's the message to them that gets them to say "I sure am itching to take my money out of my pocket and put it in Mr. Turner's!"?

The official message right now is (snip) "For the first time ever, gamers of all ages will be able to play the greatest games in their original format, regardless of platform, right on their personal computers." (/snip) - and I'd contend its at best misleading (note the future tense of 'will be able to play') and at worst just false advertising.

To anyone that looks past the press release at the service itself, the message they'll come away with is "we offer a bunch of games". Will it have what they want? Maybe. Will it have the games on teh computer/console they had as a kid? Maybe. Will it have the PC games they loved playing over the last decade? Maybe.

So it does a bunch of different things *kind of well*, but nothing *really* well.

And that's GameTap's real problem. They don't have a particular customer they are trying to serve perfectly. They have a huge number of customers they are going after at once, and serving them all inadequately.

Now, I get why they can't have EVERYTHING there. They aren't going to land agreements with all the IP holders, and there are limits to the emulation tech they are running for some of the titles. I'm not saying they should have everything.

What I am saying is that as long as they offer a bunch of stuff that is maybe what you want, and maybe works, they are going to find consumers are *maybe* interested, but most likely not.

They'd have been better off focusing on getting one group of content for a particular niche *really* nailed, and then grown it over time. (Of course, that idea would ahve been hard to pitch at Turner, due to big-company-therefore-it-must-be-a-billion-dollar-business syndrome, but that's another post for another time).

Consumers are willing to part with their money for quality products and services. I'm not sure what the going rate is for "It might work and you might find what you want", but I'm pretty sure it's not just 1/3 off from what they'd pay for 'great'.

Second round for Second Life

Second Life has scored $11M in a second round of funding.

While I find many of the developments that I read are occurring in the 'game', I really hope they use a big chunk of that money to license a 3D engine, or write a new one, that is not, well, ass.

I've tried my hand at SL a couple of times but have zero patience for circa 1998 style rendering artifacts and crashes.

Also, last time I spent any significant amount of time in SL, I deemed it a "digital shanty town" that was in dire need of an urban planner. Perhaps that part has improved, or they can use this money to hire one. I can't tell if it's improved because I tried to log in the other day and it only ran at 2fps on my 3Ghz multi-threaded box with uber GPU. :-)

DS-envy

OK, I didn't want a DS, because HW design-wise, it was ass compared to the PSP.

Then I started seeing titles. And I wanted a DS. But I didn't get one because no one titles was *really* killer enough for me to go get it.

Then I saw the brain-training game, and I wanted one, but still didn't do it.

Then as I pointed out to Justin, this 'pictochat' stuff that I thought was just for note-passing in class, well, isn't. It's for note-passing at conferences! Or more constructively labelled, back-channel conversation during lectures & keynotes.

And now I really, really, want one.

But there's a new form factor coming out soon, so I'll hold off :-)

Carb shortage

After a discussion with a friend at GDC (and you know who you are), I've decided to have a go at the low-carb thing to lose a few pounds.

This is problematic because it cuts a couple food groups from my diet entirely. Of course, by food groups, I don't mean the ones you learned about in school, but those by which I've divided my own spectrum of sustenance. In order of priority, these are:

1. Caffeine.
2. Pork products.
3. Foods containing complex carbohydrates, processed sugar, and fat. Ideally, fried. (This delicious Venn diagram intersection includes things like doughnuts. Mmm... doughnuts... and cake. Mmm... cake). I know it's covered by 4,5,6, but I think it deserves it's own group.
4. Carbohydrates. Yes, dammit. It's a food group.
5. Sugar.
6. Fat. The more the better.
7. Other meat products
8. Chocolate. (And not poor quality chocolate, which is not edible. period)
9. Fried grains/breads/tubers
10. grains/breads/tubers
11. Stuff lemurs eat (fruit, insects)
12. Stuff rabbits eat (lettuce, carrots, other insects)

So, 3, 4, 5, 7, 9 and 10, are all off the menu. I'm doing a little bit of 11/12 (minus insects) but mainly to cleanse the palette between varieties of pork products.

Wish me luck!

[I'd have drawn this into a nifty diagram but I'm a little woozy right now as my DDI (doughnut digestive index) is low so I'm not up to it.]

Tradeshow Fatigue Factor

Jason "Representati" Della Rocca has a nifty post about how he wore a pedometer around GDC this year to see how many miles he put on his legs.

Got me thinking....

I've worked a lot of shows, and people always gripe about doing them, but some are definitely harder than others. I think we could come up with a formula to provide a more objective rating of how difficult the event was for someone. This would let other people compare notes. ("You going to E3 this year? Yeah, that was a TFF of (insert number here) for me last year. Tough show").

So, here's my crack at it (suggestions for improvement welcome):

TFF =

• Start with Distance walked for duration of event (wear a pedometer the whole time, including to/from lodging, evenings, etc), divide by number of days of the event to get an average per day, then, divide by 10,000 (per Jason's suggested baseline). You should now have a multiplier of how much more or less you walked than an "average healty day's pace".
• Multiply by a 'show duration factor'. one or two days: 1. three days: 1.5. four or five days days: 2. Longer than 5 days (e.g. Cebit): 4. This is the event itself, not travel time, and is for days you are present and working at the show.
• Multiply by an endurance factor for length of your shift (i.e. time working a booth, in meetings, presenting, attending sessions - but excluding cocktails and dinners even if work related). Less than six hours - 1. six to eight hours 1.5. eight to ten hours: 2. More than 10 hours: 3.
• Presenting at the show? Add 2 points per session. 4 points per session if the crowd is over 200 people.
• Had to fly more than 5 time zones to get to the show? Extra 2 points.
• Are attendees allowed to smoke on the show floor? (ugh. Again, Cebit) Extra point per day working a booth.
• Setup & Tear down? 2 points each.
• 1 point for every meal you were forced to skip for schedule/work reasons (being hung over from the Sony party does not count!)
• Subract 5 points if it's in great location and you get any time off to enjoy it (*ahem* Aussie GDC).

OK, this is beginning to sound a little Cosmo-esque. So perhaps we could publish it in Wired, the tech industry's Cosmo :-)

The GDC Post

Saturday I returned home from GDC, exhausted, hoarse-voiced, and (the good news) a few pounds lighter than when I arrived - testament to the rigors of an event where you are basically always "on" from 8am to 2am (and those were the early nights!)

This was GDC number 11 for me, and it doesn't get old. The industry changes, the event grows and changes, and my role has changed too - meaning it's a very different event year-to-year.

Last year was pulling together a bunch of stuff around the Intel booth, managing a team that was staffing it, working on demos for months before the show, helping with event organization, and I also spoke at the IGDA "Quality of Life" event.

This year, I spent about 60% of my time in a meeting room talking to casual game developers & publishers, and other related companies. Big change.

Aside from getting business done, I managed to walk the show floor a bit (got to see my alma mater's TripleHead2Go product in action - sweet!), and attended two sessions (yup, only two - The Experimental Gameplay Workshop, and the Game Developers Rant session - both of which were really awesome).

I also had some great impromptu meetings in the hall, and checked out some games. (I loved Jon Blow's "Braid" despite the fact that it made my brain hurt!)

As usual, the best discussions were in hallway chats, and over lunches and dinners or drinks "in the pit" at the Fairmont. It was great having lengthy discussions with people I'd never or only briefly met in person. It was also great seeing friends I'd not seen for some time (Robin, Alice, Mark, Dan, Dean, Will, Jason, Jon, Souris, Sylvio, and.... well, the list could go on quite a bit).

I'm going to wrap this post for now, but I will get around to posting at length about the subjects of some of those discussions when I have more time. In particular, there were 3-4 topics that came up in *multiple* discussions with different people. The short versions, to plant the seed:

• What does it mean to make MySpace a game - and what happens when we do so?
• The sex & violence in games issue, and to what degree to have a responsability (or if you prefer, market opportunity) to create media that is guided by a differently oriented moral compass than our own?
• Managing innovation; and managing creativity vs craft.
• Christensen Effect and its effect on the Developer Relations/Evangelism process for HW companies

But you'll have to wait for those posts. I have a day job to get to!

GDC = The Crazy

I'm flying down to GDC wed morning on the 6am (yawn!) for a few crazy days of back-to-back meetings. I hope I actually make it to some sessions! I hope I make it to the show floor! I hope I actually make it out of the meeting room!

If you are down there, say hi. I'll try to make the blogger meetup on wed at 4, and will be at the Minna Mingle, Sony Party, and MS party.

Also, if you are down there, don't forget to contribute to the wiki!.

Where've you been?

Raph points to this nifty little site that lets you draw maps of where you've been:

Countries:



create your own visited countries map

It would appear I have a couple continents that need some attention!

States:



create your own visited states map

GDC 2006 Wiki is up!

A couple days back, I posted something saying it might be a nifty idea for someone to put together a wiki for everyone to collaborate on their GDC session summaries. I had the idea after reading a bunch of people post about how they were struggling with the conference session overlap due to all the choice content.

Well, super-hero Will put something together in a hurry, which everyone can start using today. I registered a domain and pointed to it, but it'll probably take a day or so to propagate across domain servers. So, you can try:

www.gdc2006wiki.com
[UPDATE: This seems to redirect properly as of noon today]

and if that doesn't work, go here:

www.dennisonstudio.com/wiki

Feel free to post session notes, or if you are going to blog them on your own blog, then post a link to your blog entry in the appropriate place on the wiki.

Be nice to see this get used. :-)

New wheels

Tom got a new trike today. Ahem, and I quote "WANNAGOOUTSIDERIDEANEWBIKE!!!"

It's both fun and kind of sad to think that you are WAY happier at 2 1/2 getting one of these than you will ever be at 30+ getting one of these:

(In other news, the Shozu service totally rocks. SO easy to use. Now I *really* want a decent camera in my phone. If I could get something half decent I'd never go back to my 5Mpixel except on rare occasions.)

GDC-Wiki?

I'd imagine we are going to see hundreds of blogs with session transcripts from GDC. Someone really ought to start a wiki for the purpose.

Any takers?

Testing Shozu

DSC_00005
Originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

I just set up the free ShoZu app/service that Scoble pointed to in his blog. I can now directly send camphone pix to my flickr account (finally set one up) and then from there blog them.

Should come in handy at GDC next week.

Cinq cent

This is post has no other purpose but to mark the fact that it is the 500th post to this blog [which has been up for 440 days, for a rate of about 1.36 posts per day, averages about 80 visits a day (wassup with that?), and according to the fantasy-riffic BlogShares, is worth 13,257.86, for which I would sell it in a new york minute :-)]

GDC Lunacy

Ok, the schedule now is crazy. I'm only attending a handful of sessions, with most of my time in meetings.

The party schedule is crazy too. Wednesday night is quadruple-booked. Make the rounds at all four or just pick one and trade off schmoozing for consumption? Decisions, decisions...

Big Performance

Just got back from my kids' first big stage performance. Their daycare puts on a once-a-year show that they prepare, and use to raise some money for charity. Tonight's show was a pirate-themed one and they brought the kids out by age group. Mine were in the first group - the two year olds. All in little sailor outfits. They "sang" (i.e. occasionally caught a word right) along with "A Sailor went to Sea". Death by cute. I'll post some pix when I get them off the camera.

It's all about BEER

I like good beer. And I like good analogies. So I sure was happy when on Kottke.org I read this fabulous quote from Glenn Reynolds. He was drawing an analogy between journalism and beer making, but I think it could equally be applied to game development & the indie games:

• Without formal training and using cheap equipment, almost anyone can do it. The quality may be variable, but the best home-brews are tastier than the stuff you see advertised during the Super Bowl. This is because big brewers, particularly in America, have long aimed to reach the largest market by pushing bland brands that offend no one. The rise of home-brewing, however, has forced them to create "micro-brews" that actually taste of something. In the same way, argues Mr Reynolds, bloggers--individuals who publish their thoughts on the internet--have shaken up the mainstream media (or MSM, in blogger parlance).

Still smokin' crack

Sony today in Japan announced the PS3 pushout of the launch is official and is happening in November, world-wide.

Back in January, when one of my predictions was that the PS3 would not ship in ANY territory in 2006, some said I was "smoking crack".

Well, I'm still smokin' it. I still don't think it's going to happen this year. November is a short stint from 2007, and there's a lot that can happen in between now and then to force just a little slip. Hardware launches are complicated, designing your own silicon is complicated, learning to harness the power of a multi-threaded architecture is complicated, building games that can show a demonstrable difference from current competition is complicated, launching an online service is complicated.

Then again, Sony did build Aibo, so they are capable of amazing things. Still though, I think it's 2007. Guess we'll have to see if we have playable units at Tokyo Game Show in Sept, as that'd be a good indicator (and more or less a mirror of the 360 timeline of last year).

Living the Artists Life

The other day I received a free copy of Living the Artist's Life. Thanks to Souris for the link to the offer for bloggers.

Anyhow, I haven't had the chance to dig into it yet (way too many in-process reads going at the moment, plus GDC prep is underway). Regardless, I think my daughter has her own ideas about what the artist's life is:



No need to panic. Water soluable markers are a good thing :-)

A peek into the world of goldfarming

There's been no shortage of talk about "Goldfarming" in MMO's over the past year. The term refers to the practice of professionally playing an MMO, usually in an emerging market country like China, to develop characters & items for sale to other players in exchange for real world currency.

Anyhow, if you are like me and have trouble wrapping your head around the reality of it, check this out: A preview video clip from an upcoming documentary about Goldfarming, which includes interviews with the Chinese 'farmers' and the people that run the companies that employ them. Wow.

Via TerraNova.

Game Recruitment-themed game

MGS has a recruitment ad up that is... yes, an advergame.

OK, so the gameplay is pure Track-and-Field (and as such, may actually be a nefarious plan to get people to more keyboards from our peripherals group :-) but it's still a nifty idea!

Wacky co-passenger

I had to fly down to San Francisco yesterday for some meetings, and caught the 6:15am out of Seatac to get down in time.

I get a middle seat (grr..) in the last row of the plane (double grr...). In the 15 rows in front of me, and in the seat to my right, are about 50 college kids on their way to Cabo for spring break. Needless to say, the plane was quite loud. My annoyance was equal parts "too much noise, damn kids" and "I wish I was going to Cabo with those damn kids!"

On my left, a guy in his (guessing) mid-twenties who was really friendly but seemed a little odd. Turns out he is a (HIS description, not mine) "Recently released from psych, bi-polar, homeless, born again christian and spoken word poet & rapper".

So anyhow, this guy alternates between preventing me from working by involving me in conversations (interesting ones, at least some) and shouting prayers at the kids on the plane to try and prevent them from committing too many sins while in Cabo (uh, yeah. Good luck with that).

Anyhow, it was an interesting flight.

He did say one thing that amused me though. When a few folks were comparing where they were from (there were some Canadians on the plane too), someone asked him his nationality and he replied "I'm originally from Pennsylvania, but I like to introduce myself as Pangaean". I got a kick out of that.

The $39 Experiment

The 39 Dollar Eexpriment is way cool. Rather that read about it here, just go check it out. It's a quick read and a pretty nifty idea.

Hollywood and Games conference(s)

Souris points us to a recently announced "Hollywood & Games" conference, put together by the folks that do GDC, together with The Hollywood Reporter.

As I commented on her post, this seems to be somewhat direct competition for the games audience of Digital Hollywood, a small conference that seems to have been gathering some steam over the past couple years. Will be interesting to see if they both thrive or if HGC eats the games portion of DH's audience.

The Gaping Void

I'm digging the Gaping Void blog & cartoons therein.

[Warning: Some of them are pretty crass (esp most of those about women & sex) but the ones about business & blogging are pretty good. ]

Flagr

This Flagr mashup (you can tell that's what it is because it's got that r-without-the-e naming thing, which is getting old, people!) is a pretty nifty use of Google maps and social networking. Tag interesting locations (with pics if you want), restaurants, bars, ski resorts, etc, and push-pin them on a map. It just launched today and pins are popping up already.

And 'sharewhere' is a clever subtitle (supertitle? go see their logo, you'll see what I mean)

Seth Godin Google talk

This is an AMAZING lecture by Seth Godin given to a bunch of Google employees.

In it he talks a lot about creating meaning and giving people something to talk about. There are definitely conclusions applicable to the game development world. (i.e. his talk about little girls' socks reminded me an awful lot of how Katamari Damacy's popularity spread amongst teh gaming community. i.e. Did you play the game? Why? Because you read an ad? A review? I'd venture to say that most people that played it had it recommended or shown to them by a friend).

Anyhow, he's a great speaker and it's a pleasure to watch. The content is definite must-see, so GO NOW!

Thoughts on Innovation

Lots of people talking about innovation in games this past week, mostly due the catalyst article that is Jeff Vogel indie dev article "View From the Bottom #2" . Not one to miss the meme, I thought I'd chime in with some thoughts.

Among the posts that caught my attention:

• Raph Koster references the above article and extracts a worthy quote.
• Robin references the same article and points out that innovation is hard. (Amen)
• Someone else pointed me to this post by Dan C from a year ago about innovation in games (good read, though I don't agree with all of it)

So that do we mean by "innovation" and why is it a problem? Well, innovation is quite simply "the act of introducing something new". And why is that a problem? Well, it's twofold:

1. You need to *invent* (or 'create', depending if you are a left- or right-brainer :-) something new, and there's a risk that you may fail, and
2. You have to hope that people will buy it.

I suppose there is a third problem which is that you hope someone doesn't build it first - but by definition if you are innovating your chance of this being a problem are lower than if you are building "the same old thing", so let's just focus on the first two problems.

The claim from many is that the first problem isn't a problem, that there's many ideas out there, just no one willing to fund them. Well, if that's the case then it's just another flavor of problem number two, right? People (with $5M) have to buy that it can be built. Then you build it, then you hope that other people (like, a couple hundred thousand of them, with $50 each) will buy it.

That's if you are doing Big Innovation. The kind Jeff says only EA can do. Nonsense, others say, EA won't take risks (I'm guilty of saying this myself, but I have to take it back based on what I'm going to say later in this post) and it's the little Indie guy with nothin' to lose that can take the risks. Well, tell that to Indie guy who's got to eat and all that.

At the end of the day, it's risk taking. And anyone, regardless of the size of their bank account, has a level at which they are uncomfortable. MS, of course, has a fairly sizeable bank account, but I'd venture to say (and I'm guessing, it's not my group) that when the whole Xbox Live thing got underway, some people where feeling that comfort level being stretched. And some people would claim it's innovative (at least parts of it).

So I was ready to dismiss it at that. Big guys can take big risks on little projects (Namco and Katamari) or little risks on big projects (EA's Neil Young's example of innovate a bit within an established genre or franchise), little guys can take little risks in little projects or big risks in, well, little projects (examples to follow).

I *was* ready to dismiss it at that, and then 3 things happened.

• Adam Lake had a think. Adam (a former co-worker at Intel) is enjoying one of Intel's perks, his sabbatical, and is currently trekking around Australian and New Zealand doing things like catering to his girlfriends tropical fruit fetish and spelunking into caves to look at glow worms. (I didn't even know those were real! Note to self - less virtual experiences, more real ones.). Anyhow. Adam's doing some reading on his trip and just got through Stephenson's Quicksilver and made some comparisons to the historical references therein to tipping points. Hmm... innovation. Tipping points.

Is innovation really about carrying everyone from 'as we are' to 'as we could be' single handedly? Or is it a bucket brigade? Or a mix of both.

• The second thing that happened was that I got forwarded to Plasma Pong. Stop now, go play. Ok, you are back? I don't know about you, but I'd say making pong fun again - making pong anything other than tedium - is innovation.
  

Plasma Pong.

But what is the innovation? Pong's been done. The author credits Jos Stam's fluid dynamics work from a couple years back for that part of it. There's probably some IHV demo code influence behind the choice graphics. Innovation? Or tipping point? Or is this one step away from a more finely tuned multiplayer version that sells a few hundred thousand units on Xbox Live Arcade, and would that be the tipping point?

• The third thing that occurred to me is one I can't talk about, and it's too bad because it's the biggest one. I saw a game prototype (I see a lot of stuff in my new job here) that was a significant twist on a mechanic within a well established casual game genre. Not a "oh, that's neat, it changes it a bit" kind of twist. More of a "Holy crap, you've invented a new genre" kind of twist. A "Why in tarnation has no one in twenty years of this genre existing not thought of this!?". This was less "there's gold in them there hills" and more "turns out there's a secret gold mine under New York city".

Ok, maybe now I'm overstating it, but I have a point to make. Innovation is all around us. Anytime someone pushes their comfort level a little and takes a risk on something new, there's a chance they may innovate in some way. Building on these, both the good and the mistakes, pushes us forward.

I play a lot of casual games *A LOT* as part of my new job. I came into it with the same prejudice of "not another dang match-3 game", only to realize that there is far more innovation than people realize. Sure, there are clones, but there are many interesting twists, changes to mechanics or theme or gameplay balance, that make many of these innovative games. And it occurred to me that the negative stereotype of the match three games wasn't coming from people that played them - it was coming from the hardcore gamer crowd. Guess what guys and gals, outside fans of the FPS genre, Half Life 2 was just "another game where you kill people". Your gramma might confuse it with Unreal.

This is no different than kids saying "opera is crap" and old folks saying "that dang heavy metal music all sounds the same". Each wouldn't recognize innovation in the genre they dislike.

So I'd argue again that innovation is alive and well. It hurts to take risk - for anyone. Nothing new there. Maybe part of the problem is that incremental risk and incremental innovation doesn't breed anything but incremental reward and recognition. Is the problem that both fans and developers alike want "hero innovation" of the Carmack kind? We want to be wowwed all in one go in a big orgasm of innovative gaming, or we want to be the hero that delivered it.

Food for thought.

WWWIIIIDDDDEEEE view

My old buddies at Matrox have intro'd a pretty nifty product.

I was running a Parhelia for a long time in my system at home until a combo of HL2 taxing it too much and the Vista beta wanting a little more graphics mips made me upgrade.

Unfortunately, I had to give up the sweet "surround gaming" triple monitor setup that only that card offered. But now they've intro'd a pretty nifty bit of tech that serves as an external breakout box for your Nvidia or ATI card and makes your 3 monitors look like one WIDE monitor.


Oh boy. Need me that screen real estate!

When I had this setup previously, I played UT2k4 and Medal of Honor (among other titles) start to finish with the wide aspect ratio and it was totally killer.

Good for productivity too. It was sweet for editing big-ass powerpoint presos in thumbnail view. You could lay out 3 screens worth of thumbnails and actually read all the text on them.

Now I just need them to ship it!!! I really mis my 3840*1024 desktop setup. :-(

I'll post some notes on how well the gizmo works once I get hold of one.

(on a 'strange bedfellows' note: Old enemies ATI & Nvidia should suddenly love these guys for this. This is going to eat a little fill rate, to say the least).

Big(MULE)Dog

Mark posted a link to the creepy/awesome video of the BigDog robot, but I didn't bother posting a link.

Today, though, I couldn't resist after GameSetWatch's *spot on* comparison to M.U.L.E. in both form and intended function.


Solar Flare! Energy Production is up!

(BTW, I have personally decided to wait until BigDog is in production until I take up camping again. Finally, something to help me pack in the required amount of beer for a decent camping trip :-)

Yay! I'm on air!

Daily Source Code's friday show played a piece of audio feedback I sent.

Adam Curry's been suing a tabloid in an interesting court case where the tabloid wrote an article about him in which they used images they'd ripped off his Flickr site. The images were posted under Creative Commons license, and so this will likely set some precedent as how well Creative Commons can apply (esp in Europe).

I sent some feedback regarding Flickr's (and thus Yahoo's) terms of service.

(and for the record - I didn't have the laundry running in the background, it was the stupid cooling fan on my laptop that fires up occasionally when the processor gets hot. oh well. time to get an external mic!)

Yay! I'm a carny!

I made this month's Carnival of Gamers!

Nintendo DS Download Station review

Gaming Steve (who runs a half-decent podcast if you can stomach the obnoxious jingle :-) has a great, very detailed review, of his experience using the first US Nintendo DS Download Station (location-based wireless service that lets you download demos and such to your DS). Sounds pretty nifty. Definitely sounds easy to use.

I could imagine expanding these to have location-specific games as promotional offerings (e.g. having a disney-themed mini-game at Disneyland, or McDonalds-themed game at McDonalds locations. (not THIS game though ;-).

Math & Nature

Anyone you's ever spent any time looking at fractals will love the "gardens in a petri" post on the Pruned blog.



Nature rawks!

(Thanks to kottke's blog for the link)

Fast Food Nation: The Game

Difficult Sim; Brilliant Parody.

It's the McDonald's Game!



Everyone's talking about it, you should check it out too. At the very least, walk through the tutorial, you'll get a laugh out of it.

Interview with the developer on Gamasutra here. On a serious note, this is very much an example of the whole "games as art" thing. It's social commentary more than entertainment experience.

(Thanks to JayIsGames for the initial pointer)

Monster Katamari

They call it the "Monster-Pod" but any gamer will tell you what it really is - a real-life Katamari!!!

Boing boing indeed

In the (pun intentional - you'll see) running for craziest flash app of the year, it's a bouncing breast simulator from a sports-bra manufacturer.

Link. (Safe for work in Europe and my native quebec. Increasingly unsafe for work as you head westward across canada. Not safe for work anywhere in the puritan-rooted US of A.)

via (snicker, snicker) Boing Boing.

Good Vista writeup

Extremetech has an article about many of the new features in Vista that is a good read.

Sight for sore eyes

After months of working on laptop without an external display, I finally got around to ordering a shiny new monitor, a Dell 19" LCD.

And what's better than a 19" LCD? Why, THREE of them, that's what!

Why three? Seems a bit much, doesn't it? Well, that'll have to wait for another post.

If Microsoft made the iPod...

"If you can't laugh at yourself..." + "It's funny because it's true" =

Microsoft iPod parody video

On the serious side, anyone at any large company (come on Intellites & EA friends, admit it) has been in a meeting where at least one of those phrases was uttered.

The future of arcades

It used to be that arcades offered technically superior machines to what you could ever game on at home. That ended with the last generation of consoles, when the dreamcast, PS2 & Xbox were on par, and the 'next gen' certainly exceeds.

The only thing they had left to differentiate was peripherals. You could build a cabinet with a game-specific controller, and people wouldn't do that for the home, right? Enter dance pads, and of course, Guitar Hero.

Nowhere left to run for the arcades, right?

Maybe not. Speaking of running, enter La Fuga. 50% theme park exhibit, 50% location-based computer game, and from the sounds of it, 100% awesome.

To boot, it sounds like some of the core mechanic revolves around the same thing as some of the "find your way out of the room" casual games that Jay is always reviewing, and for that matter is similar to Myst.

Coming soon to NYC! Sign me up!

A post for the managers out there

This blogging/transparency/everyone-is-an-evangelist brave new world we find ourselves in has all kinds of sides to it.

Everyone's heard stories about how that ONE customer Dell or some other company ticks off starts a blog that suddenly is a PR nightmare. (e.g. I even got pointed to a podcast where one guy is interpreting that "This call may be recorded for..." support call header message as *permission* to record the call and then broadcast it in his podcast!!! It's called "talk about service")

This post is a nice reminder that the same is true of employees. If you manage employees, are you creating great product & company evangelists, or just the opposite?

Are your employees doing the online (ie. Amplified 1000X) version of this:

(from Church of the Customer Blog).

4 employees. How many people walked past that store that day, didn't buy coffee, and then decided they'd never buy coffee there again? Now put it online where you can't tear the page down...

Mini-microsoft is of course a great example. I *hope* that Scoble and the thousand other Microsoft bloggers (like me!) balance out people's views, but who knows.

I managed a fair number of people during my tenure at Intel, and while I tried to "infect with enthusiasm" through example, I know I often slipped into gripe mode and/or cynical mode. As my manager at the time pointed out, Hanks had it right in Saving Private Ryan - "complain up". Anyhow, while I tried to prioritize their current state of mind & future development, I'm not sure I considered it in the vein of "are they out there right now evangelizing the company or it's products enthusiastically to someone?". And If I'd thought about things that way, would I have done stuff differently?

But I digress. My point was mainly that with all the current day focus of "your customers could be your best proponents", don't forget that your employees better be even better proponents than that.

Breaking records

You have to hand it to the Rolling Stones. In their sixties, with many dozens of world tours under their belts, and with album sales that will never top those of their peak, they are still out there doing it.

So how to you top everything you've done before when you have done so much? You go to one of the biggest, densest urban centers of the world, one with a reputation of loving to party, and you hold a free concert. And the you make the venue big enough to accomodate all that show up.

And then a million people show up.

Hey-SOOS! That's a lot of people!

Here's a pic nabbed from the BBC article:

A MILLION people! I've been to a concert with, I beleive it was 40,000 people, and THAT's nuts. Now multiply by 25. Crazy.

Way to go Stones. Nice topper. What's next?

[update: The article points out that the same venue once saw a larger crowd - when Rod Stewart did a free show there attracting 3.5M people. The most shocking thing about this, of course, is that through volume, even with a low estimated percentage hit-rate, you get an enormous number of people who find Rod Stewart sexy. Even accounting for the subset who really want his body, and the remainder that just reach out and touch him, it's still in the thousands! *Shudder*]

It's official, the GDC craziness starts NOW

Already this week, 4 meeting requests, 3 party invites. . I guess this is the week everyone wakes up and says "ACK! How can it only be a month away!?!?"

In other news, we are hiring for a bunch of positions in the casual games group - dev, test, designer/producer types, biz folk, etc, etc. Any of you readers that I already know, or that I should know, please drop me an email with your resume.

It's a fun place to work, and we are working on way wicked cool stuff. 'nuff said.

Broke Back(-side on) Mountain

It's been 5 days since I went snowboarding and fell hard on my tailbone and it is still really sore. I'm beginning to wonder if I did more than bruise it.

Adding link...

I've added Raph Koster to my list of links off on the right hand side. The man's just got too much good stuff to say. Go subscribe to his feed and, well, feed on it!

Video podcasts

Other than Rocketboom, I hadn't checked out too many of these.

On the way up to go skiing the other day, I checked out my friend Pete's Video Ipod (sexy device, I must admit) and he pointed me to Snowfix, a ski/snowboarding podcast by a couple kids from the UK.

The quality is suprisingly good, and reminds one of a combo sports network show and Warren Miller flick, and the low-budget nature of it actually is part of it's attraction. Episode 7 even has a how-to on riding the half-pipe. Just what I needed! Check it out.

BTW, it was very cool that Rocketboom decided to run ads and was auctioning off their first one on Ebay. Very cool.

Tom Pallister's First OS Critique

Today, my son Tom, aged 2 years, 4 months, offered his first critique of the Windows operating system; specifically, the appearance of the default cursor.

Since he'll undoubtedly become some kind of world-famous scientist, I thought I'd document it for future generations.

We have a little interactive CD on shapes, numbers & letters that we picked up for free somewhere, and Tom likes it. It's implemented using PowerPoint, actually, and he normally just clicks through it by tapping on the space bar. I was trying to teach him to use the mouse. When you move the mouse inside presentation mode of a PPT preso, the cursor arrow becomes visible.

Kim: "See that Tom? When you move the mouse, that arrow moves there."

Tom (surprised and pleased): "Tom's moving it!"

Kim: "Yeah."

Tom (pausing, squinting, examining cursor, pointing finger at screen): "LOOK AT DAT LITTLE TING!! It's small"

Kim: "Yeah."

Tom (giggling): "Dat's silly"

Tommorrow I'll have to see about getting Tom on the Vista beta program :-)

Good presentations online

I just love a good presentation. Something well thought through, well structured, well written, and well presented. I don't see many such presentations (let alone deliver such presentations - though I aim to improve...), but came across a couple this weekend. Both of them are aimed at "non-gamer" audiences about the promise and future of the medium, but they are both thought provoking enough to warrant some time from gamers and game industry folk

• Raph Koster (always entertaining and a couple steps ahead of the rest of us) offers us a link to his talk on "The medium that ate my world". Watch it with streaming video. Raph even acts a little when presenting, so it's worth watching. If you've read A Theory of Fun, much of it is repeat, but worth watching anyway. If you haven't read the book, this will likely incite you to go buy it.
• Alice points us to this presentation from Kim Plowright on what the future of 'interactive fiction' means to writers, among others. Thought provoking and with good speaker notes to boot. (Kim, we forgive you for the shoddy layout, the preso more than makes up for it :-)

Weekend

Well, the weekend's almost up, and I still have a ton of work to do. Didn't have a chance to do much productive while in the middle of vomit-cleanup duty Friday night. Yuck. Ran a few errands yesterday, watched a bit of TV, played some Guitar Hero.

Tidbits:

- Seattle east sider metrosexuals (or closet metrosexuals like myself) should definitely check out Weldon Barber. New one opening in Kirkland soon.
- Watched another episode of Hustle. Still an awesome show. Love the concept, the way it's filmed, and most of the cast are pretty good. (BTW, the website has a section on the history of some 'classic' cons, one of which is "The Spanish Prisoner" a scam that originated in 1588, but exists today in the form of the "nigerian money transfer" spam scam.)
- Finished a short book this weekend, "Playing Around: My Adventures on the Zone.com" by Dorothy Rosencrans. A good (and quick) read for anyone in the casual games space looking to get a better grip on who their customers are.
- Guitar Hero: I've hit a wall. I've finished all 30 songs on medium, but only 4 on hard and only 1 on expert. >:-(


I also made two Cheney jokes, neither of which was terribly great, but that I hadn't heard anyone else say, so I'll state them here:

- Cheney's a man of action.... PUMP-ACTION!
- "Quail? Oh, I thought we were hunting QUAYLE!"

Guitar Heros

Had friends Pete & Dean over tonight. They are up from Portland to do a day of skiing tommorrow (fingers crossed for good conditions).

Anyhow, we ordered a little butter-masala chicken pizza from Can-Am Pizza, had a few beers and then I introduced them to Guitar Hero.

I back up what others have said: Everybody loves Guitar Hero. Even those who suck at it.

Now I'm not naming names, but at least one person in my house tonight did not fare that well at first attempt :-)

Runnin on empty

...or so it feels.

I haven't blogged much this week as a cold the twins gave me has just wiped me out. Seems to be waning though, and just in time, as I have friends coming into town tommorrow night to stay over and go skiing on Friday. Yipee!

Anyhow. In the meantime, enjoy a little Googlepark :-)

brrreeeport

brrreeeport

Churchill club panel

Raph Koster points us to GameSpot’s video of the Churchill Club Panel that there’s a lot of buzz about in the blogosphere.

It’s a good view, and I recommend watching it. I don’t, however, agree with all of it.

The panel had 4 people on it: Microsoft’s Peter Moore, Sony Online’s Raph Koster, Ubisoft’s Laurent Detoc, and EA's Lars Butler.

It's a great panel, in that many controversial remarks are made (that's what makes for a great panel, no?). Among them:

• "Single player games are an aberration" (Raph)
• "Single player games are to multiplayer games as masturbation is to sex - it'll always be there, but it's not as good as the real thing" (Lars)
• "Physical media is stupid" (Peter)

While I thought the panel was great. All members, especially Raph, made great points. I thought that Peter Moore was a little too much in "Xbox talking point" mode, to a point where it damaged his credibility a little. I found myself tuning him out a bit.

I have to disagree with the "aberration" point that Raph made. Interpolation breaks, dude! Just because something is new (and I don't agree that 'single player entertainment' experiences are new) doesn't mean it'll go away. TV was an aberration. BOOKS were at one time an aberration, and story telling was a two-player experience! That said, when he later qualified it (e.g. community around single player experiences), I agree. Just in the extreme I think it's off some.

Anyhow, view the video and judge for yourself!

The rest of Casuality, in a nutshell

I was going to do a number of posts on the other sessions I attended, and on other thoughts from Casuality. However, it's Sunday night, I have work to do, and so my time is limited.

I've also found a number of other posts that cover the show nicely:

• Suttree covers the conference in brief.
• Tom Hume has a few (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, ) posts on individual sessions (better notes than the ones I had on the opening session)

Rather than cover the other individual sessions separately, I'd like to merge them, as this is kind of how it worked at the conference.

The sessions I attended, including the panel I spoke on (subbing for a coworker), all basically drifted between the same 3 topics:

• Busines models for casual games (is Try'n'buy it? Will in-game item sales work outside Korean and Finland? Will portals ever share ad revenue with developers? Do free web versions of games cannibalize downloads? What's a healthy conversion rate? Is 2% conversion really a bad thing?)
• Addressing a global market (game design issues, payment issues, biz model issues)
• Cell phones (will the market grow as stated? Will we always have to go through carriers? Will cross-platform cell/console/PC/etc gameplay ever happen?)

I'm not sure whether the 'agenda blend' between sessions was a sign of poor organization, poor moderating, or just inevitable because that's what people wanted to cover.

Anyhow, it was what it was, and many useful discussions happened. Nothin' wrong with that!

The last day, they had a "speed netowrking" event set up, for people to rotate and do mini-meetings. It was super productive. I loved that format in particular.

Media experiences

Alisa and I took the twins to their first movie today, Curious George.

It was a big hit, but perhaps a little long to sit in a theatre for kids their age. Still, was good fun. Oh that George. He's so curious!

Later this evening, I worked on my own media experiences by setting up my Logitech Harmony 890 Remote. Woohoo! Finally, one remote to rule them all!



I've set it up so far to control the media center PC, my projector, my ReplayTV, my DVD player, my CD changer, my PS2, and my AV Receiver. The setup was pretty painless once I got past one glitch (browser security settings prevented it from fetching updates).

Last thing to do now is set up the RF component so that it will control the music from rooms out of line of site.

What did you do today daddy?

Steve Lacey points us to this AWESOME video, done by an AA pilot as an answer to his daughter's question about what he does for work.

For an amateur production, it's outstanding. Another way to look at it is yet another example of bloggers (or vbloggers in this case) putting a human face on their company. American just ceased being a faceless airline.

Fantastic!

Buck a point

Following the session at Casuality on Designing casual games (see previous post), I had an epiphany based on something Jason touched on in his presentation.

He cited some of the positive feedback Popcap received in testing bejeweled when they added a zero to the scores granted (e.g. going from 1 point per 3-stone match to 10 points per match).

That got me thinking. I used to own a few vintage arcade games, one of which was an old 1967 Woodrail pinball called Twinky. I used to prefer some of the older, simpler pinball games from the early 60’s through to the early 70; 80’s and 90’s. For what it’s worth, 8-ball by (I think it was Bally, but I'm not certain) was I think my favorite.

Anyhow, one thing that is apparent when looking at these games over the years is the “score inflation” that occurred. Games in the early sixties had bumpers, gates and buttons worth 1, 5, and 10 points. In the late sixties, this turned to 5, 10, 20 and perhaps 50. Move through the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s, this kind of “point inflation” continued.

A good final game score for those generations of titles might have been 5000, 50,000, 1 million and 10 million or so, respectively.

Clearly, there was something behind this.

One could argue that if game A offered more points than game B, it would make players feel better and that positive reinforcement would lead to repeat plays. Thus competitors building machines would increase their score more than the next guy.

However, as the inflation continued, it reached absurdly high levels, where points of 100's of millions were attainable. I submit that this became one of many contributing factors in the decline of pinball (admittedly a minor factor when compared to everything else).

So, here’s my epiphany, which I will state in the form of a rule.

Kim’s First Rule of Casual Game Design: Points awarded should correlate to real-world currency and the reward for an accomplishment should correlate to the value to the user.

OK, so what does this mean?
First off, when I say “first rule” I don’t mean most important. I just mean it’s the first I’ve come up with :-)
Secondly, when I say correlate to real-world currency, I mean the basic unit. E.g. 1 point = $1.
Finally, when I say value to user, I mean that you should think about things like “if these points were dollars, how would I feel about accomplishing that act and winning that amount?”

Another way to look at this: The high score attainable for a game should equate somewhat to the prizes awarded by a TV game show. Since the “grand prize” awarded by a game show might vary somewhere between “winning a new car” and “getting rich”, game scores should fall somewhere in the same range. In 1960, a new car cost a few thousand dollars. Today, perhaps $25,000 to $50,000. The “getting rich” number used to have a range of $50,000 to $250,000 (e.g. the $64,000 pyramid was a popular TV show). Later it meant being a millionaire, but as of late even that isn’t as significant an amount (e.g. Austin Power’s Dr Evil’s “one meeeeleeeonne dollars!!!”)

Taking this into consideration, I’d argue that a good “quickie” casual game should have a high score for a good player up around the 20k to 50k point range, and that a game requiring some time investment and learning complexity might be OK having a point system that allowed for high scores of 1 million to 10 million.
Points. Examples like Zuma, Luxor bear out the former; and maybe examples like geometry wars bear out the latter? I’m sure there are also examples that contradict.

One more thought: There may be another benefit to using such a ‘real life’ metric to a scoring system. It’s analogous to how many (including me) think it’s a good idea to build any simulator (for graphics/physics) scaled to real-world units so that you can better judge if things are working right.

Please post comments. I’m curious if people agree/disagree.

And if you do agree, what does it mean when localizing games to other countries?

Casuality Session: Designing casual games

Jason Kapalka, Popcap games was asked to do a session on what it takes to design a casual game. He said it was hard to come up with ‘magic rules’ but instead did a session on 10 things you can do to screw up a game, citing less than perfect Popcap games as examples of each of these. The list, in brief, was:

1. Make it too hard
2. Have a dozen mediocre game modes instead of one good one.
3. Make your tech requirements to high
4. Self-distribute, price it bizarrely, or other biz no-no’s.
5. Give it a terrible name (interesting example: Dynomite’s sales went up when the changed the name from the original: Egg Sucker).
6. Award Low scores (another detailed post coming on this one).
7. Use the right mouse button. At all. Ever. Casual players don’t get it.
8. Expect users to read. That page of directions is never going to get read.
9. Make it too challenging and insult the user if they lose (exending this: casual games shouldn’t be ones you can lose. Just win, or win really well.
10. Ignore feedback.

The funniest bit of the presentation was the mock up he did of Bejeweled, if they had violated all 10 of the rules.

The game was renamed: Bloodwar: The Revenge, but then renamed again to Bloodwar Manager. It used skulls instead of jewels, had a dark theme, tons of complex game modes, etc. Plus it had this great end-game screen:



I give this presentation a 8/10. The speaker definitely knew what he was talking about and provided plenty of their own examples of mistakes, which showed some humility. However, his perspective was pretty US-centric, and limited to their audience and business model.

Casuality Europe Notes

Today wrapped up the first "Casuality" event in Amsterdam. I have a bunch of notes to post, but will likely only get to most of them on the plane on the way home or on the weekend. In the meantime, I wanted to post a few thoughts on the conference overall.

The conference was held in this unassuming venue:

Which, inside, was just a great little venue. A 3-story high old theatre-type venue with a huge pipe organ on the wall. I didn't get the greatest shot inside, but this should give you and idea:

Overall, the event went pretty well for a first time event.

Good: Great sessions, great attendees, great networking, great venue.

Not so good: No feedback forms for sessions, sessions drifted *far* from their stated descriptions in many cases (see my notes on the panel I participated in - stay tuned), and the schedule wasn't adhered to so well. Also, having day 3 of the event at a different venue was kind of a pain, but not the end of the world.

Overall, I give the conference a high rating. Maybe 7/10.

When game tat's go wrong

So I get into Amsterdam, decide to check mail before running off to meetings and I am greeted with the following.

Its kitchy to get a gaming-themed tattoo, right?

Oh no it's not. Not in this case.

Behold. Pac-man butt. Courtesy Alice's blog.

Like she said. Oh. My. God.

Dreadful thought: Where, oh where, is the warp tunnel?!? AHHH!

Casuality

I'm off early in teh morning to Amsterdam to attend the 'Casuality' conference. I'll try to blog a little while I'm over there.

Exciting, as it will be my first trip there, and the conference is shaping up to be interesting.

Hacking the State of the Union

Showing that he's still got a couple gems left in him, Mark has hacked Bush's state of the union speeches. Now that is really cool.

He makes some interesting observations too. Go check it out!

Used games: Good or bad

There's been a lot of discussion lately about the used games market, and whether or not it's good for the games industry.

In this corner:

Pro-used games: (1) Used games allow consumers to get more gaming for their dollar, the amount they were going to spend was a 'fixed' amount anyway, (2) Games are property, and people have a right to do what they want with that property, including to sell it, (3) low-price used games allow people to try games they otherwise might not, and provide a path for non-gamers to dip their toe in the water, growing the gaming market overall.

(Proponents include Alice, Billy, many others)

In the opposite corner:

Anti-used games: (1) Used games reduce the number of people that buy the title new, thus decreasing the revenue to the developer/publisher, (2) retailer margins are better on used games, incenting them to sell those first and foremost*, (3) while sold on physical media, the consumer is actually buying an entertainment experience, which shouldn't be transferable/replicable, or at least if it is, the 'performer' should get paid again in some way.

* I haven't seen any date on (2) above, but do have one anecdote. I had a game developer in Japan actually take me to a couple shops in Akihabara where (in one) the used games were stacked IN FRONT of the new games, so you had to dig for them, and (in another) the used games were on display and the new games were hidden away and had to be asked for (only displayed if they were sold out of used). I've only seen this taht one time, and only in Japan though. For this case at least, it was pretty clear where the retailer's preference was.

(proponents on this side include: Mark Rein, Mark Deloura, and -until recently- me.)

Anyhow. There are plenty of proponents on both sides of the argument - probably a good indication that the reality lies somewhere in between.

While I've stepped out of the "anti-" camp, I haven't stepped into the "pro-" camp either.

Why? Because I haven't seen a good thorough analysis of the problem. So I just don't know the truth.

What I would like to see is a piece of research, backed by data (ie. research, not opinion) that answers the following questions:

• Do used games increase/decrease the amount of money the average gamer spends?
• Do used games increase/decrease the amount of time the average gamer spends playing games?
• Do used games introduce new gamers to gaming, or gamers to new genres?
• How do margins compare, and what is the split between various parties, between retail new and used games? (Looking for something better than my original stab in the dark. This post looks like it goes into some detail, but I haven't made my way through it all yet).
• Do the above answers vary significantly between different countries? different platforms? (e.g. PC vs console, handheld vs console...)
• How does the above compare with other media (music, video)?
• How does the rental market compare (e.g. I've heard that with video rentals, IIRC, some portion gets back to the publisher, but not game rentals. Is this true?)

Anyone know of one any piece of real research that can help answer the above, or is it just a religious argument and we are left to choose our favorite preacher?

I'm excellent at being mediocre!

I finally beat Guitar Hero on medium. Have now cleared a few more tracks on expert.

Bad taste in ads

That last post reminded me; that PSP ad is NOT the poorest-taste winner for high-tech industry ads.

This old favorite from Gainward for it's "Golden Sample" graphics card STILL holds the number one position (as well as holding the, er, sample):

Is that a PSP in your pocket, or.....?

Via GameSetWatch, a link to a japanese ad for PSP porn.

Umm.. is Japanese culture really so different that these situations wouldn't be... embarrassing? I mean, come on! Especially in front of Hachiko! It's really crowded there! And skydiving? Someone could get hurt!

Ol' Yellerbot

Mark posts his thoughts on Sony's euthenizing Aibo & Qrio.

I have to say I agree. While it was a long-shot that Aibo would ever be profitable, it was definitely a huge win for their brand with tech enthusiasts.

For all the talk of DS beating PSP, Rootkit fiascos, missed earnings targets, etc.... one look at an Aibo or Qrio in person and you just thought "wow. this is a company that builds the future". Simple as that.

RIP poochie! You'll live forever on Ebay, I'm sure!

Stumbles

EA announced a 5% staff layoff across their studios.

Of course this sucks for those being laid off, and for those still there having to watch others pack up and leave. However, if it's done right, (i.e. make that 5% your slow performers, problem children, etc), then it's good for the company long term.

EA's definitely at the size (~7000 world wide) where they've got to worry about the bozo factor.

Now if it's being done wrong and bozos are staying while quality people are let go, well, that's bad by a larger degree. Not only does you "bozo percentage" go UP, but you demoralize those still there who think "why did they lay off Joe and keep Schmo?"

Regardless, my sympathies to those laid off and to those friends of mine still there who had to go through what was surely a crappy day at work.

---

In other stumbling news, Google missed estimates and that lopped $40 off the stock. This is not surprising, given all that's been written about the improbability of their sustaining the revenue growth rate of the past year. What's surprising is that people still are betting on them. Aren't these analysts supposed to look at things objectively and calculate figures, not just be wooed by lunacy? This just proves I don't get the stock market at all. Sigh.

Frettin'

Wasted another hour this evening playing GH. Beat Cowboys from Hell, just have Bark at the Moon to beat. And that's on medium difficulty. I went back and cleared a few songs on hard as well. Expert, well, I ain't ready for that yet.

I learned on an email thread that Brian beat GH in expert mode and scored >350k on one song. Compared to my piddly 100k for one song on medium, that is awesome. I told him that his URL was fitting (blue and orange are the color of the two 'frets' that are only used in hard and expert mode.

I really should get rid of this game and get back to real guitar...

Beat match

Progress on Guitar Hero continues. I got past my last stall, and knocked off 3 more songs. Stuck now on both Cowboys from Hell (the fingering is not too hard but the half-beats that occasionally pop in screw me up) and Bark at the Moon (though I only tried this one a couple times).

To mix it up a bit I went back and played through the first group of songs on Hard setting. Adding the fifth 'fret' adds a small level of difficulty as your left hand can no longer stay stationary, but other than that it's not much different. Will have to try expert tommorrow.

After I was all done playing and needed to get some work done, only then did I notice the shipping package at the front door..... my Kraft Dance Pad had arrived! I didn't get a chance to try it yet, but will write it up once I do.

Had dinner with a couple good friends that were both in from out of town on separate biz trips. Good sushi was had by all at Flo in Bellevue.

Some good biz reads

Thinking a lot lately about the 'Web 2.0' movement (or bubble, for you skeptics) and it's implications to the game biz. Anyhow, I've come across a number of good reads, so I'll post them here. My thoughts on how this all affects the games biz specifically later, but I didn't want to wait to post.

• Privacy as a Property Right - good mechanical argument that your personal information is not just yours by right of privacy - it's property and thus protected under a number of other rights.
• The NewEconomics of Media - by Umair Haque - a great PPT on media economics in the new age. This does a MUCH better job of capturing what I was trying to say about the media value chain in my game industry 2.0 post. Read it once, bang your head on your desk, read it again. It's pretty deep, so not for when the brain is drifting.
• Death by Risk Aversion - on Creating Passionate Users Blog. Not really '2.0' related, but a good read for anyone at large risk-averse companies (MS, Intel, EA, etc). As a bonus, the graphics scattered throughout the text are *wonderful*.

Now you've got something to do over that morning latte. :-)

East vs West Coast

Now even rap parodies have an east-vs-west battle going on.

http://www.narniarapbattle.com/

Oh the humanity. When will it all end. Can't we just get along?

Knowin' your gamer

Robin posted a good anecdote that serves as a reminder that those of us in the games biz often forget what it's like for the rest of the customer base that isn't.

This is especially true for casual games, where the audience is so varied that falling into the "develop for yourself" trap can be far more dangerous than it is in first-person-shooter-land.

Anyhow, that got me thinking. As you may have noticed from recent posts, I've been playing Guitar Hero. Who else is playing it? if I were teh developer of that game, and had developed it for the MTV crowd (assumption) would I know if the audience strayed from that demographic? Would I know HOW people played it?

And then I hit upon a nifty thing, at least for "performance" games like DDR and GH. I typed "guitar hero" into Google Video.

Wow.

Well, you can do the same yourself and see the result, but here are a few choice bits:

Webcam looking down fretboard.

Playing with the feet.

This kid needs a wireless peripheral so the cord won't interfere with his playing while spinning on his back!

And here's a crazy DDR vid for good measure. Compare to how I've seen it played in Japan (I'm not sure if it gets played that way in the US, but I've seen it in arcades in Japan). The former is about beating the game, the latter is about doing it in style (hitting the pads with knees and hands, not just feet, and also turning the back to the screen at times. Here's another, with two guys sometimes climbing the machine itself. I guess the competitive angle is worldwide, but there certainly seems to be a difference in styles.

Anyhow, there's some cool, free non-quantifiable market research for you! Check it out!

'tis the season to link to vids

time-wasting giggle vids that is:

James Lipton recites Kevin Federline's Papazao on Conan (very similar but not quite as good as Jesse Jackson's appearance on SNL a few years back to recite Green Eggs and Ham, but still funny).

David Hasselhoff is Hooked on a Feeling. OMG. Did he produce this himself on his mac or something? Such cheeze. Such low-budget video production. Such lack of shame. There must be Germans behind this.

Enjoy, and now go back to work.

MS gets bloggers

Thomas Hawk has a cool write up of a dinner MS's PR firm organized for select bloggers with Jim Allchin and some other execs.

It contains a good write-up of some of Vista's cool features, but also some good thoughts on DRM, the CableCard announcement a while back, thoughts on Apple, and tons more. A good read.

Also contains this quote which made me happy:

"it is very cool that Microsoft is willing to open up senior management to bloggers. Whether because of Scoble or Waggener Edstrom or whatever, Microsoft gets blogging -- really like no other big company out there. Not only does Microsoft have more employee bloggers than any other company, but I have found the employees at Microsoft and their PR firm Waggener Edstrom very accessible."

Go Scoble go!

Bleeding fingers

...is what you get when you first take up guitar if you are really, really into it.

With Guitar Hero, that is instead replaced by really sore wrists and forearms. AIYEE!!!

Cream's Crossroads is KICKING MY BUTT!

Of course have making it through like ~25 songs in medium mode did I then learn that they have "hammer ons" and "pull offs" (they don't work exactly like the real ones, but they are similar in that they don't require you to pick/strum the note with the right hand. I guess they are they same if you consider the peripheral a one-stringed guitar with five frets). Anyhow, I should be able to nail that one tommorrow and unlock the next five songs.

Sunday's vids

Videos for your viewing pleasure:

Fear of Girls, a mockumetary is more like it of D&D players. Good for a giggle.

On a more serious note, Ha Ha Ha America. Best just to view. Go now.

Four Things

It's meme-riffic!

Going of Kottke's blog, I for some reason felt compelled to do this myself:

Four Jobs I've had:

• Garment Factory Worker (one winter, while a student)
• Bike Courier (one summer while a student)
• Developer Relations, Matrox, then Intel
• Business Development, Microsoft

Four Movies I can watch over and over:

• The Great Escape
• The Blues Brothers
• Braveheart
• Dogma

Four Places I've Lived:

• Montreal, Quebec
• Lake Louise, Alberta
• Portland, Oregon
• Seattle, Washington (how sad that if this category was 'five places', I'd have left one blank!)

Four TV Shows I Love(d):

• West Wing
• Hustle
• Junkyard Wars (pre-format-change)
• Kids in the Hall
• (adding a fifth) Richard Branson's Rebel Billionaire

Ten highly regarded and recommended TV shows that I've never watched a single episode of (1):

• Miami Vice
• Twin Peaks
• Deep Space Nine
• Doctor Who
• Desperate Housewives
• 24
• Lost
• Arrested Development
• Battlestar Galactica (the old one OR the new one)
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Four places I've Vacationed:

• Zermatt Switzerland
• Maui Hawaii
• Paris France
• Australia

Four of my Favorite Dishes:

• Pastamore's Gnocci with Gigi Sauce.
• Roast Beef and Yorkshire pudding
• The "thousand pork products drowning in maple syrop' that is 'sugaring off'
• Chicken Tikka Masala

Four sites I visit daily:

• Gamasutra.com
• (lately) digg.com
• www.start.com (which I use as my homepage)
• Robin Hunicke's blog (cause her feed's busted and thus can't fit into my aggregator!)

Four places I'd rather be right now:

• Snowboarding (preferrably in Zermatt, but any number of places would be OK)
• Hawaii
• Paris
• Sailing on the Great Barrier Reef

Four people I'm tagging with this (and for which I will dirty):

• Adam Lake
• Mark Deloura
• Souris Hong Ponsetta
• Robin Hunicke

(1) I changed this from 'single minute of' to 'single episode of, because there are several that I've flipped across them, watched 5 minutes, and then abandoned.

Powerpoint, papers, and pinpointing problems

Adam Lake recently posted a gripe about Powerpoint, and it's abuse in corporations. If you work at Intel (like Adam does and I used to) you are familiar with this gripe as Intel is a prime example of a company in which Powerpoint has become the second most common form of information communication. Exactly the type of 'powerpoint cancer' of which Adam's post speaks.

I posted a response on his blog, but in giving it some more thought, figured it deserved it's own post here, so here goes.

After joining MS, there were a couple things that struck me as similar to Intel, and a couple things that struck me as significantly different. One of the most significant differences was this: The majority of proposals outlined in powerpoint are also outlined in a document.

So why is that a big deal?

Couple reasons. First off, it's a lot harder to hand-wave in a document, or at least it's immediately apparent if you do. Second, Powerpoints are not required to 'stand alone' for offline reading, and thus can become that for which they were intended: Presentations that are meant to accompany... a speaker! They are for use in assisting a speaker, not as a substitute for one.

I've been reading Guy Kowasaki's Art of the Start lately, and in it he suggests a 10/20/30 rule: 10 slides, 20 minutes, minimum 30 point font. If you follow it, you simply have no choice but to (a) exclude BS and (b) use your slides as aids, not as containers for 100% of your material. No room, so most of it has to come out of your mouth. I'm also a fan of Cliff Atkinson's Beyond Bullet Points, and while the budget there isn't as strict, there's definitely an alignment with it's recommendation that we should tell a story first and foremost when presenting.

So anyhow, this got me thinking: In a corporate culture where the "paper" is the norm, at least to pack up a proposal of some kind, is there an analogous optimal format? One that would be enough to get to the meat of what's being proposed, while still being narrow enough to not allow for gratuitous hand-waving and jargon-laden obfuscation?

Let me start by trying to be clever and draw analogous split of material too. We'll see if it stands up to scrutiny (this is very much work in progress and I welcome feedback). I'm going to suggest the 1/2/3 format:

• 1 Page "Complete Story". I didn't call this an "executive summary" because it's not just a summary, it's the story. Also it's not just for executives, it's for anyone that reads it. It should, in the clearest, most jargon-free language possible, explain what's being proposed (size & relevance of opportunity), what's required, who's involved, how and when it will get done (which might be the summary but not detailed description of the business model/technology solution/target market/etc), and why it will succeed.
• One way to think of it: There can only be three outcomes following someone reading this page: They are uninterested (in which case you've losted them anyway, and another 5 pages won't change things), second, they are immediately sold on it and have stopped reading to call you and offer to enlist, or third, they are intrigued but skeptical or puzzled about a particular detail or hingepoint. The last 5 pages is only for this audience. Everyone else has stopped reading.
• 2 Page "Core Details": Drawing heavily on Kowasaki's breakdown, think a couple hundred words each on the problem you are trying to solve (you've mentioned it already, but maybe size it, explain the 'pain level' of the problem), the business model (you've mentioned WHAT model, but maybe here you explain the breakdown of who gets what when), etc. Omit the statistics, quotes, etc from this section in order to keep it breif.
• 3 pages of backup material: The technical explanation of how it works; the statistics from which you derived , etc. If someone needs to fact check or understand how you got to a number, they can go find it back here, but otherwise they should stay out of this section.

Anyhow, just an idea. I'll have to see if this format stands the test when I actually try using it. In the meantime, I welcome feedback!

Guitar Hero

First off, let me say this: Anyone who complains to me about "complete lack of innovation in games today" runs the risk of being beaten to death with my Guitar Hero peripheral.

Why would I resort to violence? Because I am a raging-against-the-machine guitar-weilding rock super star, that's why!

OK. Calming down now.




I picked up Guitar Hero today first chance I got and played it for some time tonight. Not having the patience to struggle with it too much, I played it on medium and when through the first dozen songs without too much struggle. Alisa liked the game too, making it through a couple tunes, dancin' and rockin' out while doing so. She wasn't crazy about the selection of songs (not to her taste) so she asked that I play more and unlock some for her to play tommorrow).

There is something very special about this game if it can get my wife rockin' out to Iron Maiden, let me tell you.

Surprisingly, on medium level, the only songs I struggled with were the couple that I actually know how to play on the real guitar. They simplify the riffs some, dropping a couple notes out, which I'd re-introduce out of habit and get penalized for (of course you don't make actual 'notes' with the fret buttons, but I'd hit the right hand peripheral where there should have been a note but wasn't).

Brilliant game. Go buy!

2006 predictions

I know, I know, you are supposed to do this around Jan 1, right?

Well, I had a little time to kill on the plane and reading some other folks' feeds I'd aggregated, I decided to do my own top 10 list. Only mine only has 5.

Also, it’s never interesting if they are too milquetoast, so I’m going to go out on a limb and make some bold predictions. In a year, you can come back and say I was way off (but you'll forget) or if any are right, I can say "I told you so" (and I'll remember) :-)

1. Playstation 3 will not ship in 2006. Not in North America, not in Japan, nowhere. It'll be a Q1 or even Q2 2007 launch. No, I don't have anything to back this up. I just think that things have been too quiet recently, and am interpreting that to mean that some things are behind schedule. Combine that with the fact that Sony can’t afford to have a lack-luster launch, and I think they’ll hold off until their line-up is stellar. (I just bet someone $20 on this one today).
2. Another Sony prediction: Howard Stringer will be removed as CEO. A lot of people have hypothesized that he was just brought in as an axe-man (he has experience in this area), however, I think he will also take the fall for a delayed PS3 launch. Who will replace him? I think Kutaragi will be be given the helm, positioning it as a Steve-Jobs-like “The Man is Back” tale of daring-do. This will distract shareholders to some degree, and make analysts all giddy in their nether regions, what with his quotes of +4 extreme bravado.
3. (I credit Terra Nova for this one, but I agree completely) World of Warcraft will end 2006 will fewer subscribers (or 'users' or 'customers' or whatever) than it started the year with.
4. "Casual Games" will continue to grow and will bifurcate into multiple distinct markets (this is already true to some degree, but it will be better understood and recognized).
5. (The only one of these I really hope I'm incorrect on). EA's Spore will ship to overwhelming critical acclaim but underwhelming sales figures.

That's it. My bold-ass predictions for 2006.

Good friends and Guitar Heros

Since I was in LA with an evening free, I arranged to meet up with some local friends. Souris and Sylvio were nice enough to host, Stefanie and Justin also attended, as did Sylvio's friend visiting from France,

Hearty Lasagna, good wine and stinky cheese were had by all. (At least we thought the wine was good, but who can tell what with the cheese and all).

A good time was had by all. We played some Xbox 360 titles (I'd brought a couple gifts) but most importantly: I finally tried the most awesome goodness that is Guitar Hero. And I am in full agreement. It is the fully overlapping Venn diagram that is Awesome + Goodness.

[Aside:
Comments and nits about the game: It's pretty cool and does an OK job of simulating the very basics of the feeling of playing guitar. The 'strum' part of the peripheral is well done, and the fret buttons are ok.

I'd have liked it if it differentiated between up and down strokes as it could make a difference on advanced levels. Also, at first glance it appears that advanced levels just means 'more notes faster'. Would have been nice if they'd done a variancy in error tolerance on button accuracy, maybe lag on the controller?

Also, other than appearance, it wasn't apparent what the difference was between characters and different guitars. If they did vary stats (e.g. accuracy vs endurance), they should have showed the difference. If they didn't vary stats, well, opportunity lost

end aside.]

Anyhow. Was fun, but I have to get to bed now!

Scenic

Sights for the eyes today.

I had to get up before 4 am to make my 6am fligth out of SeaTac (yawn). My Alaskan flight left on time (surprise) out of SUPER thick fog. When we got about 100 feet up, we shot out of it, revealing a thick blanket that covered the landscape. The traffic lights and buildings left eerie colored glowing patches in the fog that looked really cool. Unfortunately, the cell-phone cam wasn't up to the task.

About 30 minutes later, we were flying directly over the crater of St Helens, which was fantastically lit because of it's coat of snow and the blue glow of early dawn.

Two hours after that I was cruising around Marina Del Rey on my way to a meeting, seeing all the pretty boats under a strange yellow orb in the sky (Seattle just ended a ~40 day streak of no sun appearance :-(

Anyhow, lots of variety in the eye candy dept. Can't wait until phone cams get up to dedicated-device quality of today.

It's still all about mad skilz

I occasionally get questions about employment requirements in the tech industry or in the games industry specifically. Some come from relatives or friends, some come from people that come across my blog, others from speaking events.

In the past, I've said that while a college degree helped, it wasn't a requirement, and that it was more about your skill set and what you've accomplished. In the past couple years though, I've waivered on that, as more and more people, especially at the larger companies, tend to not look past the "no college degree" point.

So I was really tickled to see that Jenna over at JobsBlog posted this gem today, throwing down the tech challenge gauntlet, where they'll mail programmers a programming challenge and give them one hour to mail back a response. And I quote:

• Are you a Master Coder?? Here is your chance. For one week (starting today), I will send you a coding exercise, and your results will be personally evaluated by a team of engineers. No more worrying about if you have the right title, degree or job ... just proving your core smarts will have us rolling out the red carpet.
• ... and if you are the dragon slayer of syntax and you impress my team with some high performing, elegantly written code, I am happy to post your name/picture here (with your permission of course) and name you the Grand Master. (Oh yeah ... and if you want a new job you can likely get that, too.)

I think it will be fun for people to participate even if they aren't job hunting! (did you hear that, programmer/readers? Yes, it was the slap that resulted in that gauntlet-shaped red mark on your cheek!)

Anyhow, it's nice to see that there are still some folks at MS that beleive that, at the end of the day, it's the skills that matter, not the letters after your name.

Video of 60 Minutes story on Fatal1ty

If you missed it, you can see it here.

Worth viewing just for footage of the INSANE turn-out at Korean game tourneys. Nuts. I've seen pro sports events with smaller turn out!

Also a good pointer to those friends and family that "still don't get it" that games are a real business.

TV Comes, TV Goes...

Argh! I just read that they've cancelled West Wing, one of the few pieces of decent, well produced television on air these days. Oh well, I guess I'll get 40 minutes of my week back...

... which I can spend watching Hustle, a new drama/comedy on AMC. Great show. I've only caught the debut episode but loved it. It's a weekly comedic drama about a gang of con artists and the cons they put together. Very Guy-Ritchie-esque in style, it's a one hour "heist movie" every week. Good characters, and good cons (at least the debut episode had that twist-you-didnt-expect at the end that are must-haves for any good con or heist flick). Make sure to put this one on your Tivo list (or whatever your PVR solution is).