When the little guys aren't so little anymore...

Saw this on Kotaku today:

Ritual Entertainment Bought by Casual Games Dev Mumbo Jumbo.

Mumbo Jumbo are the makers of the popular casual game as Luxor, among others.

That's got to have a lot of people in hard-core games land going "huh? by who?!"

I probably shouldn't comment too much given that I have a professional relationship with these guys and others like them in the space.

I will point out one thing though. The press release states:

"The combination of Ritual's(TM) high-end, multi-platform expertise and our own industry-leading publishing model will set the bar for quality and sophistication in casual games and create a major industry powerhouse. The casual games market is beginning to mature as evidenced by an increase in consumer expectations. Ultimately, the companies providing the best content will win, which is why we are investing so heavily in the development of technology and original IP."

I have to agree with the assertion that consumer expectations are rising in terms of quality, and eventually, some of that translates to production costs. Developers that think that the cost of casual game development is going to remain as conservative as it is today may be mistaken. At the very least it will split into different strata (the MMO space is probably a good example. there is room for targetted, niche, and/or quirky low-production-cost MMOs, but those developers are very concious of the fact that they are flying under the radar of the big guys. If you want World of Warcraft's customers, you better pony up on production costs to compete.

Pontificating Pontiff Pariahs Play!

C'mon Pope, don't pick on my choice of entertainment and I won't come to your work and knock your pointy hat off!

Cross Gaming: hype or the real deal?

Ben Mattes has a good post on The Crossing, an FPS from Arkane Studios coming to the PC.

The Crossing is a HL2-engine based shooter, and it's very pretty. I'd best sum up the story as "Guys with guns are no match against the medieval knights that continue to live as part of a secret society, and who have kick-ass swords and a frikkin' grappling hook!"

Apart from the pretty visuals and the oh-where-was-that-when-I-needed-it-in-HL2 grappling hook, they have one very unique thing they are trying to do, which they've deemed "Cross-play". Singleplayer meets multiplayer.

The idea is that individual players playing through the single player game, rather than playing against a hoarde of dumb AI players, will be plowing through hoards of human players that have logged on to play the multiplayer game. For those logging in to play multiplayer, the single-player players will appear to be grossly overpowered, hard to take-down enemies that you will need to use squad tactics to try and beat. The hoards of enemies for the single player *can* be AI-driven, and multiplayer players can 'take over' their bodies a la Agent Smith.

From the 1up interview:

"Skirmish maps have two contexts: either populated by skirmish players only -- the multiplayer people -- or populated by both skirmish players and story players, the "Elites." When there are no Elites around, the skirmish players play a team deathmatch game that can include various rules, such as land conquest or flag conquest. Meanwhile, the Elite players are playing their story maps -- in co-op, usually -- once they're supposed to join a skirmish map, as part of their story."

It's a really compelling idea. Not sure they'll be able to pull it off. I hope they can though!

Trailer here:

Propaganda: The Game

Today I read this post on Seth Godin's blog. It's talking about a PR campaign to discredit PETA, one pillar of which is this site. The PR campaign is being run by something called The Center for Consumer Freedom, a generic lobby group name.

Usually, the a lobby group's level of evil is inversely proportional to that of it's name. i.e. A group called "Cute children for the adding of flowery scents to cuddly puppies" would probably turn out to be pro-consumer-rocket-launchers AND pro-S&M-porn-in-schools).


Digging on the CCF's site digs up this generic and innocent sounding description of it's backers, but wikipedia nets you more detail, and it turns out that the group is funded by a cigarette company, some fast food companies (owners of Burger King, Wendy's, etc), among others.


Seth's points in his post was that as a corporate sponsor, you are very very visible these days, and that people's opinion on the PR changes once they know who's doing the talking (thus the need to hide behind the generic answer to 'who we are?').


I have two points to add:


1) I *CAN* *NOT* *BELEIVE* that consumers would fall for this garbage. I suppose there are some dumb people out there, but hey, the fact that they group "petakillsanimals.com", "trans-fatfacts.com", and "mercuryfacts.org" all on the same site ought to be a HINT that there's something awry here. Fer krissake! MERCURYFACTS.ORG?!? Sheesh! For a look at something really scary, go look at "activistcash.com". Holy cow.


2) Most suprising to me? They have GAMES! Click here to go see fun online games such as "Does the Government Think You're Fat?" (anti-Transfat-ban), "Lawsuit Fabricator" (anti-anti-fastfood-lawsuits), "Obesity News Generator" (anti-anti-fat campaign AND anti-liberal-media - it's two games in one!), and of course "Attack of the Nanny" and "Nanny Bowling" (anti-nagging-nannies-tellin' ya what not to eat!).





OK, I know there are some hungry game developers out there, but man. People critique developers of FPS games? How do you sleep at night having made this Flash propaganda-game garbage.

Ugh. Pass the pepto.

Manga-Simpson

I *love* this manga-fied version of the Simpsons (from Nina Matsumoto)

The future is now

Two different sentence fragments from my past week:

The first was my son Tom, when he and I were looking for one of his toys.

"Maybe the robot sucked it up. Can you look inside him?", he said. He was talking about (and personifying!) Roomba of course. It occurred to me that even 10 years ago this might have seemed like science fiction. My kids are growing up with a robot member of the household.

The second was one I uttered to a co-worker. A while ago Wired mag had a series of 6-word science fiction very short stories from known authors (e.g. "The baby’s blood type? Human, mostly." - Orson Scott Card).

I found myself saying something this week that would stand on it's own among those in that article, even if it's a bit longer than six words; "Loan me a memory stick, before I forget".

Saints Row Bugs: The Musical

OMG. Truly, the Internet never ceases to amaze.

Saints Row is a fun GTA-3 clone. I've sunk a lot of time into it. It's also buggy. I have seen the bugs. They have, well, bugged me. However, never did it occur to me to make a musical out of it:




Hi res version here.

Rip, Mix and Learn: Technology's impact on education

Last night the Bellevue school district had one of a series of 'roadshow' nights that they do, to talk to parents and the community about stuff going on in their schools. Last night's event was about the use of technology in schools, and since the twins will be in Kindergarten in the not so near future, I thought I'd attend.



I had extremely low expectations for two reasons. First, because generally speaking, we are priveledged enough to work in an industry of very smart people, the caliber of presentations 'out in the real world' is often lower than that which I'm used to (e.g. city council meetings, homeowners association meetings, etc, are normally like pulling teeth to me). Secondly, because my history of use of computers in schools has been that they are outdated, underused, and that the staff is usually so inept at using the technology, in comparison with the students, that it ends up being relegated to the simplest uses, or in dedicated 'computer class' type uses.



I couldn't have been more wrong. I was just *gobsmacked* at what I saw. A few examples (not all of these are in every school yet, but they are agressively rolling them out):

• Their whole curriculum is online. The publicly viewable one (here) is just high level, but the one behind the firewall that the teachers use has every lesson, every exercise, and all that will be parent-accessible within the next year. Even just the high level helps parents better understand what their kids are working on, but long term, it means things like report cards are obsolete because you can get a snapshot of your kid's progress as often as you want, instantly.


• Smartboards installed in every classroom. At first I thought "ok, it's a high tech blackboard", but these projector/touchscreen combinations are being embraced by teachers who are devising custom lesson exercises that use the technology. I saw one teacher demonstrating her dynamic editing of a sample book report, circling and dragging and dropping sentence fragments to let the class try different approaches, saving off two different versions and putting them side-by-side to compare, etc. At the very least, it's a massive timesaver (no more waiting 5 minutes for the teacher to write out the lesson on the board), but more importantly, it adds interactivity to the exercises.

(crappy cell-cam pic of the smartboard - no, the class isn't in a darkroom -that's my phone)

• All of these custom lessons and exercises that teachers come up with, they can save up on the web as custom materials for that class unit, and then any teacher teaching that unit can grab it, improve on it, and use it (think of a giant version of this). They gave me an example of how teachers are using this between units, where an art teacher one day decided they'd do art about their science topic, went over and looked at that day's science class exercise, which was about bugs, and said "ok, let's take those bugs you saw in your last class and see if we can do drawings of them in nature", borrowing the materials from the other class as a starting point.


• Teachers can choose to record whole lessons, or just segments or excercises, and put the whole video on the site. Once parents have access (next year), they'll be able to better help kids with homework, catch up from sick days, etc.


• 'Student Response System': Think of TV game shows "everyone in our studio audience, use your buttons to vote NOW!". Teachers can turn any question into an impromptu survey, displaying the results on the screen ("ok, only half of you got that right, maybe we should go over that again"). Kids can click their answers in from their desk.


• Document cameras, so that if a teacher sees a student taking a novel approach at solving a problem during an exercise, she can grab the document, put it up on screen instantly and say "let's all look at how Susie did this...". Also useful to demonstrate details of an art or science project without the 20 kids crowded around the teachers desk.


• I even saw a new music class they are adding to the curriculum in which they use SW to do composition, both of the traditional variety, as well as using Fruityloops to have kids do their own electronica type stuff.

Overall, I was really impressed. With my generation's teachers, I remember feeling that they were getting access to technology but had no idea how to use it (remember schools saying "we are getting computers this year." but there was no talk of implications?). In contrast, I felt that with these teachers and administrators, there was a palpable sense of passion and excitement about the opporunity before them; that they'd just started to grok the possibilities before them, and couldn't wait to put it to use and push the system to it's limits.

I'm fully aware that this level of tech in public schools is probably the exception, not the norm. It can't be just coincidence that it falls within the Microsoft campus 'blast radius of money'. Regardless, if this type of thing proves effective, other schools will adopt the same technologies and approaches. It improves the speed and effectiveness of teaching which at the end of the day is a good thing.

More importantly, it is, more than ever, empowering teachers to contribute to one another's teaching. It's putting teachers behind the wheel... and this schoolbus is supercharged.

The social-networking app that Amazon ought to buy

Amazon *really* should buy Shelfari.

It's a compelling super-set of the features that Amazon offers for reviewing/recommending books, but I'd really like it to be ON amazon so that I don't lose my 'associate ' benefits.

I really like the 'real world' UI as well.

Originally seen on Lifehacker.

Diamond Age being made into mini-series!

BoingBoing points out that Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age is being made into a mini-series.

Insert sexual-arousal metaphor here.

Man do I love that book. I am so very excited.

I really hope they do it justice. A mini-series is the right direction given the amount of content needed to do the story right.

Hopefully, it performs well and will lead to them licensing the rights to The Baroque Cycle, which would then be made into a long-running series of, five fourteen-episode seasons, with each week's episode running for a contiguous eight hours. The whole thing would ship in a "crate set" because a box wouldn't do it. :-)

My Car is For Sale (again?)

Hey, my car is for sale again here, which is weird, because I sold it 3 years ago.

Looks like some hot rod site snarfed the content from the site I'd advertised it on in order to pre-populate their site.

Sure am glad I never used one of those dating websites, or I'd have some 'splaining to do! :-)

Oh, and MAN do I miss that car... :-(

War in the Metaverse

I've written before about my dislike of Second Life (perhaps now that they've open sourced the client someone will fix their crappy renderer), but that doesn't mean I don't find all the happenings therein to be fascinating. This occurrence is no exception.

From Wagner James Au (via BoingBoing), on a French far-right political party setting up shop in SL, and the resulting political protest, which escalated to violence of a very surreal nature.

"And so it raged, a ponderous and dreamlike conflict of machine guns, sirens, police cars, 'rez cages' (which can trap an unsuspecting avatar), explosions, and flickering holograms of marijuana leaves and kids' TV characters, and more. By California time, the battles often culminated at 2am, 3am, and even later into the small hours of the American clock, when Residents in Europe are most active. So amid the exchange of salvos, the chat log was choked over with pro and anti-Le Pen curses, most in French. And when the lag was not too overwhelming to stream audio, the whole fracas was accompanied by bursts of European techno."

(I'm surprised by the lack of flying penii)

It's a fascinating read. Go check it out.

Microsoft Game Blogs

A little mail list started internally connecting some of the game-bloggers within Microsoft.

I'll probably add a few to the blogroll once I read them for a while, but in the meantime, here's a list for those curious (in addition to David's and Andre's blogs, already on the list'o'links on the right):

• Brian Benicasa's (a former co-worker): I Killed Your Dude.
• David Weller (also a former co-worker, on the XNA team): Let's Kill Dave.
• Andrea Contino (Italian, no less!): Lost Garden. <-- Dan wins bonus points for his game design analysis of the Five Things meme. Kudos!
• Michael Gannotti's blog.
• Julien Ellie (on XNA team): Reflections.
• Randy Rants.

Carmack's Back

Having not heard anything from the guys at Id in a while (then again, I don't follow the hardcore space so closely anymore), a long interview with him popped up on Game Informer.

I've always been a fan of Id's games, and of Carmack as a developer. While they seem to have fallen behind guys like Valve and Epic in terms of their development model (old skool small team vs large team w modular development, etc), I secretly (not so secretly, I guess) root for Carmack to come out and ship something that kicks everybody's ass.

Of note, this quote about Gfx HW, and when and what users should upgrade to:

I don’t think that there’s any huge need for people to jump right now. All the high-end video cards right now—video cards across the board—are great nowadays. This is not like it was years ago, where they’d say, “This one’s poison, stay away from this. You really need to go for this.” Both ATI and Nvidia are going a great job on the high end.

Wow. It's not just me then. If HE doesn't care about the latest and greatest graphics, then who does?

Also, a game-biz-101 bit from Todd Hollenshead for those that think that digital distribution will make their publisher-dependence woes go away (Steam is the topic of discussion, but to be fair, they are just a proxy here for all digital distribution services):

there were serious flaws in the economic analysis that [Valve] laid out for developers. The problem for most developers is not one of not getting paid enough once the game is out, it’s that they don’t have the seed funding necessary to internally fund development of their titles. That’s why they work for publishers on milestone schedules and advances against future royalties, and Steam offers no solution for that. It also doesn’t offer any solution for the marketing spend question, where if developers don’t even have enough money to fund themselves internally to develop their product, then they’re not going to be able to pay for a multimillion dollar marketing campaign, which is a huge amount of risk that as an industry standpoint is offloaded from developers to publishers.

Manic Mashup

BoingBoing linked today to Best of Bootie 2006 (If it's still up. The site got stomped pretty hard after the boingboing link) , a collection of the best mashups of last year.

Download them all. They are A-MAY-ZING. There's something for everyone there. For a sampling, try Tricky Sandman (Run DMC + Metallica) or Real Back Poppin' (Cheryl Lynn + Fat Joe + Nelly). Totally sweet. Fer krisake! John Travolta mashed up with Snoop Dog! How can you say no?!

Blog Tinkering

Let me know if you see any errors with the blog. I moved to Blogger's new system and did a few things while I was at it (modded my template, moved things under my domain, etc).

Overall, they've added some nice stuff, but there's still some proprietary stuff ('labels'? WTF? Can we just call it a tag and move on please?) that isn't quite in the spirit of 'don't be evil'.

[Update: Google now seems to offer a proper feed, so I'm not sure what to do about people getting the feed from Feedburner. Guess they'll exist in parallel]

When lawyers go to Siggraph...

They may emerge with something like this site (caution, some images NSFW), that scoures the internets, doing algorithmic analysis of images for matches of corporate logos. Very cool, but the possible uses make me shudder.

Visualization Porn

I'm probably the last peron on the internets to link to this Periodic Table of Visualization Methods. (originally seen, I think, on BoingBoing)

I agree with Seth Godin's thoughts on it:

"I love the spectacular use of technology on this web page. I hate the twisted use of the periodic table (because the relationships between the types isn't natural or elegant the way chemicals are) but it's worth it, because it will certainly inspire you to figure out how to get out of your text rut."

After reading it, you can kind of grok why they placed things in the rows/columns they did, but it doesn't intuitively leap off the page as to why they are related. Feels like some were kind of 'plugged into leftover spots'.

Eric Prydz vs Floyd - Proper Education

Techno + Parcour + Environmentalism =
Pink Floyd Remix

Awesome. (Originally pointed to by Souris at hustlerofculture.com)

Steve Jobs Keynote and the Overlooked Shocker

Bert Decker's blog, 'Create Your Communications Experience', a pretty good blog for those interested in public speaking, has a post contrasting the Steve Jobs MacWorld keynote vs the Bill Gates CES keynote. Ouch. According to him, no contest, and I have to agree.

I followed his pointer to the engadget coverage of the Jobs keynote, and was stunned. The pictures are fabulous, and the slides that were presented were awesome. It doesn't get much more simple and clear than that. The most crowded of all the slides had less than 40 words on it. Most had none.

Anyhow, it's worth looking at even if you don't care about the subject matter (though I gotta say, that phone is pretty sexy).

I'm surprised that no one commented on what I thought was a real shocker. Jobs wore a BROWN mock turtleneck. WTF?! This change in wardrobe is as surprising as the Pope popping out the window to address his followers with a baseball cap on!

What's next? The Queen in gothic lolita getup? I guess brown really is the new black. Perhaps he did it to match his Zune? :-)

[update: Doh! False alarm. I watched the keynote video and he's in black as usual. This appears to be the result of some image color adjustment on the part of Engadget. (Serves me right for snarfing their pic :-)]

So THAT'S how the Bellagio does it!

To be honest, I'm just having a go at using Revver instead of Youtube. Ad rev-share. yay!

Open the door a crack... and you might see a crack!

Tonights evening news had a brief alarmist piece about how "your kids might be watching porn on their game console!", referring to the web browsers available for the Nintendo Wii (great Kotaku headline!) and Sony PS3.

I'm not sure the PS3 has to have anything special done to any of the multitude of porn sites out there, but it is interesting that some of them are doing "Wii-friendly" web pages for people surfing with their *ahem* Wiimote in hand.

Between that and the free games content that Robin points us to, I wonder whether they'll do anything to lock it down, or if they think the premium (more importantly, royalty-yielding) content will not suffer as a result. Less of an issue for Nintendo, who claim to be profitable on HW sales from day one. Still has to be raising some discussions internally though. What if one of those indie games were a pornographic cartoon game starring *gasp* Mario himself!

The snowball continues

the Slamdance snowball that is.

Good synopsis on Water Cooler Games.

Three more finalists (Toblo, Once Upon a Time, Book and Volume) pull out of the competition. There are now 7 games in the competition from the original 13.

Also, USC Interactive Media program pulled their sponsorship in protest.

3 strikes for Slamdance

Everyday Shooter is now the 3rd developer to withdraw from the Slamdance festival out of protest for the removal of Super Columbine Massacre RPG. (See my earlier posts here and here).

Bowie on Extras

Hysterical. I haven't seen 'Extras', but I want to check it out now.

I like ILike

ILike.com is a new social network + recommendation engine + distribution service + network of trust, that parasitically, um, I mean craftily sits on top of your iTunes usage to supplement it.

Fuck. I hate it when people have crazy obvious ideas before I have them :-)

This has all the trappings of a killer app. I'm not an iTunes user (Zune, baby!) but if I were, it seems this would be a no-brainer to sign up for.

For the Zune folks (if they are listening), could this be the app that bridges the gap between Zune users and their iPod-toting friends? I'd be engaging them in a hurry.

The flOw out of Slamdance continues

Following on Jon Blow's heels (see yesterday's post), flOw is now pulling out of Slamdance as well.

Slammin' Slamdance

I'd been meaning to post about the Slamdance/ColumbineRPG thing for a while, but am glad I held off, as the plot has thickened.

Summary:

- Slamdance is an indie film festival that has a games competition component to it.

- There's been a bit of a brouhaha about the fact that the organizers first nominated/invited Super Columbine Massacre RPG, and then recently, removed it.

- Kotaku reported on this, citing that Danny Ledonne, the game's creator had been told by festival organizers that pressure from financial backers had been the cause.

- This was followed up by a piece saying that the festival's organizers had clarified that it was pulled on moral grounds (though the same piece says the organizer of the games portion of the festival was strongly opposed to it's removal).

- N'Gai Croal was among many to point out the double standard applied when films addressing the same or even more risquee subject matter are never pulled from such festivals. Greg Costikyan's post on the subject does so as well, and is worth reading.


Raph has also posted a lengthy piece on the subject here, in which I learned the latest twist: That Jon Blow has pulled Braid from the competition in protest. Braid, a game I blogged about briefly in my GDC post (which I really liked plain, despite the fact that it made my brain hurt!), was one of the other nominees.

Now a skeptic might say that this is good publicity for Jon, and that he was going to have a hard time winning against games like Flow, Toribash and Plasma Pong (revolutionary, no, but it's pretty), and that this move will get him FAR more press love. However, I know Jon, and I know this is not the case. He's the real deal. His statement on the subject is worth reading.

Plus, he's already won something out of this competition: I intend to buy him drinks when/if I see him at GDC this year, as a token of my appreciation for his taking a stand. :-)

Nicely done Jon! Cheers!

Heat Vision and Jack

This 30 minute flick is hysterical. All star cast. Even some Tom Jones in the soundtrack.

Clarity in the Used-Games-Sales debate?

A recent post on the Freakonomics blog, regarding the debate behind the hypothesized positive/negative impact of used book sales on sales of new books, may help shed some light on the used games sales debate.

The arguments in both industries are similar:

Anti-used: If customers can re-sell their media, they end up paying less for it, and it cannibalized new media sales, as the second and subsequent buyers didn't have to buy new. Furthermore, the channel makes all the used-media money, with copyright holder getting none of it.

Pro-used: If customers can re-sell their media, they use the proceeds to pour back into the market and thus buy more. This makes up for the cannibalization, and in turn, artists also benefit from wider distribution and exposure.

The problem with BOTH arguments is that it has been SO hard to definitively prove either case in an open market.

ANyhow the blog post links to this paper by some folks at NYU and Carnegie Mellon, which is the best analysis I've seen of it to date. At least it seems so. I confess I haven't even tried to grok all the math.

Anyhow, their conclusion supports the 'pro' side of the argument, concluding that cannibalization is insignificant, and that used book sales may actually help grow the new book market, since a used book is more likely to retain value to the customer.

Would be interesting for someone to apply the same model(s) to the used games space and prove the same thing.

Dance Praise

DSC_00092
Originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Seen at the local Fry's. It's a Dance pad/Software combo for the PC.

"Dance Praise: Turn Your Computer Into a Dance Arcade with Top Christian Hits!"

Some might say "targeting a substantial niche"; but *I* say strategically timed product given that the Godfather of Soul just passed away!

[BTW, a James Brown themed DDR-style game would totally rock. It would have to ship with a dance pad that was 15x15 feet with analog sensors to measure your bad-ass-electric-slide-skillz, and a crotch peripheral to score bonus points when jumping into a splits position and contacting the floor]

e.g:

Five Things

A while back I was guilty of tagging others with a '4 things' meme. Karma is having it's way with me, and now Raph has tagged me with a '5 Things' meme.

Ok, I'll bite, but this time the buck stops here. I'm refusing to tag others. Thou shalt not dirty the internets and all of that.

So, here goes. Five things you don't know about me:

1. I was kicked out of college and became a ski-bum for a period of time. Quebec has a system where you finish high-school at 16 and go to something called CEGEP, a kind of interim college or community college before either entering the work force or going to university. At 16 I found girls, beer and the local pool hall far more compelling than my compsci classes and paid the price for it. I subsequently went and worked in a ski town in Alberta for a season before coming back and returning to school.
2. French was my first language, though you'd never know it now. I actually learned both at once (dad's a Brit, mum's French Canadian), but my French was stronger because I was babysat by another francophone while mum and dad worked. At age 3 we moved to an English suburb where I lost most of it until much later.
3. I didn't get a driver's license till I was in my early twenties. I owned and drove a motorcycle and a car before that time, but never got around to actually getting my license till quite late (see number 4).
4. The police once bestowed a nickname upon me. My friends and I had a significant number of *ahem* encounters with the local law enforcement when we were teens. Enough so that they new a few of us by name. One night one of them gave me a nickname and it stuck for a while.
5. The number of drinks someone needs to buy me in order to learn the nickname in #4 is... well... ask it not, for it is legion.

Guilty pleasure

I'm playing Sneak King. I have to confess, I kind of like it.

It's cheezy (like the burgers), lacks any substance (like the burgers), is predictable (like the burgers) and like the burgers, I feel bad about myself after partaking.

But still, I like it :-)

But Can a *CASUAL* Game Make You Cry?

Sure, this post's title is a play on the oft-repeated "can a game make you cry?" question, which IIRC, originally came from the early EA "We See Farther" ad. (BTW, does anyone have a high-res scan of that original ad? I sure would love to read the text of it again...)

The original question (it's rhetorical, those asking beleive the answer is 'yes', and the question's just supposed to make you think about what it might take for a game to illicit any kind of strong emotional response from you.

Today when that question is thrown about at conference keynotes and such (See my MIGS'05 anecdote on this), it's usually made in reference to the 'cutting edge' game development: 'Next-gen', big budget titles, with graphics and animation to suspend disbeleif and rich story and theme to wrap yourself up in. Because if anyone is going to do it, it will be those titles, right?

Maybe not.

A couple nights I rented & watched Wordplay, the documentary about Will Shortz, the New York Times crossword puzzle editor.

Arguably it just uses him as a focal point and is really more about the NYT Crossword 'scene', which includes him, his predecessor, frequently-contributing puzzle designers, and the leading competitive players that meet at the annual championship.

This documentary of course is very similar to Word Wars, the documentary about the players on the competitive Scrabble circuit. (I blogged about this one a while back). While Wordplay leads you to beleive it will be more of a character movie than Word Wars, it falls short in this respect. In covering so much, and talking to SO many people in doing so, and in focusing on getting 'the big names', means it stays pretty high level and doesn't dive deep on any one person. Word Wars is a better character flick, IMHO.

On the other hand, Word Play does a GREAT job of describing the game itself, the process some of the designers use in coming up with puzzles, and -most interesting to anyone in the electronic games business - the interesting relationship between game designer and player. The more 'hardcore' of the players in the movie are often heard saying "Ah, this is a [designer name] puzzle, so you can expect it to have some of [name of unique signature trait here]."

I found that to be very interesting. I'm not sure that same relationship exists anywhere in the electronic game world. Perhaps to some degree. Fans of Lucasarts (old school) adventure games, Bioware titles, and a few others come to mind. But I'm not sure it's at that intimate level. At no point during Gears of War did I get surprised by an ambush of baddies and say, "Ah, Cliffy, I should have known you'd put some of those guys there!".

Anyhow, that was one observation that I came away with in relation to our industry.

The bigger eye-opener was in seeing one of the DVD extras entitled 'Five Unforgettable Puzzles' which gave a detailed look at the story behind five famous crosswords, among them "Wardrobe Malfunction", which definitely showed that a Crossword can make you laugh, and "Drawing Power" a crossword done as a tribute to illustrator Al Hirschfeld, which judging by the mail they got from the latter, proved that at least a *crossword game* can make someone cry.

Anyhow, the movie is worth renting just for that extra alone.

The epiphany for me was that if a crossword puzzle can make someone cry, as can a pop song (vs an opera) or a short poem (vs a novel), then I think there's no reason that a casual game can't do the same.

Food for thought.

Joyeux Noel

Hey Blogosphere!

Happy Merry Chrismolidaymas!

Haven't had much time for posting between festivities, toy assembly, repair, and participation in play. Actually my first time online in a few days.

At least we have electricity!

Who's the brilliant marketeer at Nintendo?

A while back I posted this about Nintendo's gift to George bush.

Now I just saw the Dr Phil Wii product placement.



If it's the same person that came up with both of those, well, as I said earlier, they deserve a raise!

Le 'ockey

For those American readers (esp those on the west coast or in the south) that don't remember what the sport of hockey was like before it was cleaned up for American TV audiences...

... there is YouTube:



9 minutes o' fightin'. Now THAT was Hockey Night in Canada.

Or as Don Cherry would say, before those pansy Swede's started floodin' the league!

Oops. Did I say 9 minutes? I meant 15. Here's part two:

Where the money goes (kinda)

Raph points us to the Forbes article on breakdown of costs of 'next gen titles' (using Gears of War as the case study).

As he points out, there's a gross oversimplification here. All of these percentages(for an individual title, as well as over a portfolio of titles) dial up/down over the lifetime of a title, as does teh ASP of the title. ALso, there's a tradeoff of risk/reward that occurs between partners (eg. bigger advance vs lower royalty after the fact).

Still, it's a good read to get one perspective.

On thing that is interesting: They have disty margin of 1.5%, and retailer margin at 20%. Not sure those are exactly accurate, but they are in the ballpark. Interesting that it's almost a complete flip from, say, 10-15 years ago, where disties often commanded 20% or greater margins and small retailers, well, no Le Sieur peas for them!

Raph opens the kimono

A little bit anyway.

Supply and Demand

SupplyDemand
Originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Supply and Demand at work. $1 will buy you a whole wheelbarrow of wood... when a storm just passed through and knocked down an ass-load of trees

TreeHouse(2)

TreeHouse1
Originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Another tree-hit house in our neighborhood. When I drove by the day after it happened, there was a clear view of hte back yard where that sheet of plywood is now. You can see the size of the tree that went through the house. Yikes.

TreeHouse

TreeHouse2
Originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

One of the houses in my neighborhood that got hit pretty hard in the storm. Looks like it was a bedroom - hopefully no one hurt. Note the broken chimney as well. That can't be cheap to fix!

Power's back on

As of 9pm tonight. Total outage time: 116hrs. Total money spent on equipment (see previous post) ~$800. That's not including any damage to the pool equipment due to freezing pipes. I'm a little scared to go look at it.

Another example

You wouldn't believe what little Johnny just did on NE 10th Pl
Originally uploaded by John Spilker.

Example of damage from windstorm

DSC00620.JPG
Originally uploaded by mini K™.

This is about 1/3 the size of the biggest tree I saw knocked down by the storm

Talkin 'Bout My G-G-G-Generator

So, no blog posts for a while. For those outside the area that may not have heard, Seattle got hit by a major storm that knocked out power to something like a half-million people. We lost power thursday night around midnight and still don't have it back as of Sunday evening, which is when I'm writing this (not sure when I'll get to post it). [Update: Posting from office Monday morning - still no power at home]

Thursday evening was MSCG's Xmas - oops, sorry - holiday party. Alisa and I left the kids with a babysitter and went into Seattle to attend. When we left, we realized the weather really was quite severe. Several blocks in the city were closed due to bits of high-rise buildings flying OFF of those buildings and landing in the street(!).

As we waited at an intersection at one point, the wind was slamming the car so hard that we were rocking back and forth as if driving offroad - only we were standing still. As we drove across the I-90 floating bridge, big cascading waves of water were being blown up over the edge and onto the road. Further down I-90, construction barrels were being blown about the road like moving road hazards. I saw one barrel being blown over the road and my first thought was "Wow! Half Life 2!" :-)

We got home, after driving through a neighborhood of green streets (so covered in cedar boughs that the pavement was blocked from view) power went out minutes after that.

Next morning, thinking "how bad can it be?" I figured I'd go into the office to get some work done. Big Mistake. Huge trees downed everywhere (I saw one that had cut a house in half - right through the living room), many streets were impassable, and all the intersection lights were out. My 20 minute commute took me 2hrs, and another 2hrs for the return.

That night we hung out with the kids and played Scrabble by candlelight. Two 30-pound toddlers in your bed is like a couple of big hot water bottles :-)

On the radio, they were talking about power being out for up to another week in some areas. Having seen the tree that (I think) was responsible for taking out our area - there's one nearby that snapped a telephone pole and took out a whole spaghetti-nest of wires - I figured we might be at the longer end of that time estimate. Our house has a hook-up for a generator, so I decided to bite the bullet and buy one. I called Home Despot, who were out, but expecting more that day. I got on a waiting list and decided to head into the store in case the list wasn't being ahered to.

PANDEMONIUM!

A hundred-person queue had formed, some on list, some not. I was 66 on the list. 54 generators arrived. The called the first 54 names, and if you weren't on there, the called you and gave you one hour to make it in. When that hour passed, they gave up another 15 units, and I was at the tail end of that list. Goodbye, $600. Hellooooo POWER.

Then again, maybe not. To hook it up, I need a special 220-volt, 4 prong locking plug. They don't have one. Neither does the 3 next HW stores I try. All sold out. I also don't have gas, and there are hour-long gas lines at the few stations that are open.

So, back home get gas can, borrow gas can from neighbor. Get gas (queue wasn't so bad by the time I got there), get home, assemble generator, run extension cords for 120v into the house, power a couple lights and a space heater. Better, livable. Still no heat though. Still, with a gas stove and gas water heater, it's not so bad.

Sunday, I got up, stoked the fire, started generator, and then we had some neighbors over with their kids and had quite a decent breakfast. Later, my mission was to find that power hook up.

I ended up finding not the cord, but the components to build one myself. Two 4-prong, 220v male plugs, and a lenght of 50A rated 220v dryer cord that wasn't long enough, but would do to put the generator outside the garage and close the door (did I mention that as of Sunday morning, 1 dead and 100 hospitalized in Seattle area from carbon monoxide poisoning?).

So, I built myself a generator cord, took the house off the grid via the main switch, plugged the home made cord into the house, threw all the breakers to 'off', and plugged the generator into the other end of the cord. Then I switched on the breaker for the furnace and.... Ahhh... sweet, sweet, heat. Next some lights... Ahhh... beautiful incandescent bulb, how I missed basking in thy glow.

As of my writing this, we really aren't THAT bad off. We have heat, power, gas for cooking, the fridge and freezer are full (managed to even save the ice cream). Only negatives are that it's a pain to throw circuits on and off (I don't want to overload the generator, which is only a 5500-watt unit), and of course, no cable - and thus no internet nor cable tv. Oh, and I'm behind on work since I didn't count on 3 days of suburban survival action.

Could be much worse though. We could be one of the poor people that lost their entire home or had major damage to it via a tree going through the middle. Look on the bright side and all of that.

I'll try to snap some picks of the destruction in our neighborhood once I get the chance. In the meantime, I'll post some examples from other people's Flickr pages.

Second Life reality check

Clay Shirky has written a very good article throwing a bucketload of reality-check onto the hype surrounding Second Life. It's worth reading.

I find many of the things being attempted and sometimes accomplished in SL as fascinating as the next guy. I just think the hype is outpacing the reality and proponents should come back down to earth a bit.

Warning: Excessive Levels of Cute

Ok, here's your dose of gaming cuteness to last you through the holidays. YOu may need an insulin shot after sampling this.


Winterbells

Courtesy Orsinal and tip-o-the-hat to JayisGames for the pointer.

L337 HW SKILLZ

I gave the Media Center box a much-needed space upgrade last night. I added a second 120GB drive to it.

The drive I had in was 80Gb, of which only about 60 was free for video, so I've basically tripled my effective space. Ahh...

However, to give you an idea how long it's been since I fiddled with PC componentry, I grabbed the drive out of the box, looked for the IDE connector and said "WTF?". Oh yea, this must be that serial ATA interface. Cool. So I mount the drive in the bay (which I made room in by pulling the mega-obsolete 3.5" floppy drive) and plug in the cable. Oh yeah, power. WTF? Never seen one of these power connectors.

I found some level of redemption in the fact the box didn't have an extra power connector of the 'new fangled' type to use with the drive, so I pulled a cable from another machine and spliced the connector to the MC box's power supply.

I am rusty, but L337. I wasn't doing this nekkid, however.

Watching Wii

I went to a Xmas party at a friend's place this weekend, and he had a bunch of people over, many of whom brought kids. I sat for a while in his home theatre room and watched 3 boys of ages 8-to-10 pick up the Wii for the first time. Amazing how fast they took to it.

In fact, the only thing they had any problem with was the qwerty keyboard layout when entering their name, as they weren't computer-savvy kids. Everything else was easily picked up.

Then they started Wii Sports boxing and all heck broke loose! No broken straps though.

On a related note, Alice points out that there's a WiiMotion flickr pool. Tabarnaque que c'est genial! :-)

Nintendo really has built something wonderful here. I was really skeptical about the controller, but am coming around. I still think it will have issues for long bouts of gameplay, but maybe gaming in 15 minute bursts, along with a play style that doesn't fit the preconceived notions about gaming, are just what we need to attract new gamers (or the 'dormant' gamers).

If you have any doubt, just have a look at the pool. Those are people have FUN!

Carnival Time

MMOG Nation is hosting the December Carnival of Gamers. Go check it out.

Out of the Dark(room) Ages

I've taken a few days off work this week to use up some unused vacation time (this is actually the first vacation time I've taken since starting at Microsoft, apart from a couple days at Xmas break last year). I'm splitting the time between playing with the kids and getting some stuff done around the house.

One of the jobs that has been pending for a while is a new cabinet, sink, and countertop for the laundry room.

The previous owner of the house was a professional photographer. So, along with some very useful stuff that came with the house (e.g. drop down screen and projector in the media room), we also got some not-so-useful stuff, like a darkroom (which doubles as a laundry room).

Some people might think a darkroom is useful and cool. However, in the age of digital photography, I think it's about as useful as a home printing press or backyard trepanation table.

Anyhow, so I've pulled the cabinet and sink, and am in the process of putting the new one in. There's a huge (4' by 2') darkroom sink and water purifier that are coming out on Friday, and will be craiglisted to fund the new sink and countertop.

Should be considerably less troublesome and costly than my last sink replacement job.

Aaiiiyyy! Mein Eyes

Uhh... No thanks. You can keep your PS3.

(This may turn out to be a guerilla marketing tactic to deal with the allocation problem by pushing down PS3 demand).

Bond commentary

Went to see the new bond flick on the weekend. I really liked it. I enjoyed darker, grittier Bond. Sort of Sean Connery Bond meets a Tarantino flick. (Nowhere near as graphic as a Tarantino flick, but certainly further down that spectrum than other Bond movies).

Enjoyed the airline-related cameo in it.

Not seeing the forest for the trees (and mud)

There was a story on the news last night about Thrifty car rental, and how they are marketing buffoons.

OK, it wasn't about that, but it amounts to that.

Recently, a guy got stranded in Olympic national park near here, after heavy rains washed out the roads to where he was at. He and a friend hiked out with help from the national guard. Only problem was, his car was still there.

It'll take anywhere from 3 months to a year to get the roads fixed. Thrifty wanted to charge him $30 a day, or anywhere from $3000 to $12000.

That was just typical corporate red-tape type stupidity. Irregular case, some clerk doesn't know how to circumvent procedure.

The buffoonery starts when a news story runs on the subject, and what does Thrifty do? They offer him a discount rate of $13 per day. So, now the get to extract the princely sum of somewhere between $1500 and $5000, and look like customer-hating buffoons while doing it. This makes a lot more sense than waving the cost entirely and painting a picture of a company that cares about its customers.

Seems like a big hit to your corporate image for just $5k, but then they are Thrifty, after all.

A ruler with which to measure a game's Wii

Alas, even I can't resist the Wii jokes.

Corvus over at Man Bytes Blog has an interesting take on the Wii titles, discussing two approaches to designing games to use the gizmo controller.

At one extreme, "what player gesture can we map to a game's actions"

At the other extreme "what game can we design around a given gesture/action we're trying to inspire".

He puts a bunch of the launch titles on a scale between these two extremes (bracketed terminology mine):


Traditional [Suxors]
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
Madden ‘07
Red Steel
Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
ExciteTruck
Wii sports
Rayman Raving Rabbids
Innovative [Rocks]

The Watch to Watch

When I bought my Tissot T-Touch a couple years back, I thought my inner chrono-geek was sated for a long while.

Various watches have tempted the geek, but I've resisted.

Then I saw this.

O.M.G. Belt-drive watch. Chrono-1337.

It is cool because It was done, ours is not to question why.

BTW, note that Tag Heuer also has a 'flippable' watch with analog on one side, digital on the other. The name? The Monaco 69. Way to go for the risquee branding!

(thanks to BoingBoing for the link).

Best Xbox Achievement Since 'Pacifist'

Perhaps better.

The GeoWars 'pacifist' achievement (survive 120 seconds without shooting anything) was pretty high on the 'water cooler conversation' scale.

Last week's XLA release, Small Arms, has an achievement called 'six degees of small arms'. You can only earn it by playing multiplayer online with someone that already has it.

So who has it initially? Only the members of the Small Arms development team!

(I sure I hope someone is tracking/graphing the proliferation of that achievement. Coolness!)

Willi Waller

Oh, how this made me laugh. I'd wager to say that even non-quebecois-speakers will find it funny.

Microtransactions & copyright

In followup from my earlier post on Copybot & copyright issues, here's some more stuff to consider.

First, off, Raph (where does he find the time?) once again has posted a thoughtful and lengthy set of thoughts on microtransations and copyright issues.

Raph points out that virtual world "objects" aren't objects at all, but only specific database entries, and that what you are getting when you transact is just the change of one or more fields in a database (corresponding to, say, gold pieces) in exchange for the changing of one or more other fields (say, incrementing 'num items' by one, and adding a pointer to 'Sword of +1 Pownage' to your array of inventory items).

I like his explanation, and it jives well with mine, which I posted here, which is that what you are buying is a sort of promisory note. A promise of a service to be delivered. i.e. "You give us your credit card number and authorize us to charge you $2, and we promise to change the fields in our database in an agreed upon way".

Raph goes on to talk about some of the more interesting issues that come into play when the bits are arranged in a specific fashion that may make them a work that is covered under the definition of copyright.

An analogy he draws is in that of books, where the book is a 'container' that you purchase, and the arrangements of words inside it is the copyright-covered item of value that you have acquired the right to read, but not copy, make an audio-recording version of for resale, etc.

These definitions work quite well. In the case of an MMO, you have an arrangement of bits that may be covered by copyright, sitting within a container that you do not own, but have paid for a promise of service. The service is letting you access those bits and do certain things with them.

In the case of second life, the person arranging the bits into a copyrighted work may or may not be the same person that owns the container (server storage). And that a local copy of the bits is made to your hard drive is immaterial. In that sense it's no different than copying a text version of Stephen King's latest book off the publisher's computer. That may or may not violate an agreement by which you got onto the publisher's computer, and regardless, it's still his copyrighted work.

Anyhow, Raph's post, while long, is worth reading. Nice to see a thorough analytical treatment of the subject, rather than the usual ranting.

Gears of War redux

Finished Gears of War this weekend. Some more thoughts following up on my previous commentary:

First off, I stand by my comment that it's a REALLY fun game. Probably the best fun I've had with an FPS game since Half Life 2. Better than HL2? Hmm... close, but for me, no. Probably a matter of taste.

HL2 had more story and more variety. Each chapter had a distinctly different feel. There was some of that in Gears, but less so. And there was very little story to it.

The Final boss was pretty lightweight once I figured out the technique to beat him. Mind you, I played through on casual. I've started playing through on hardcore now, which isn't hard now that I know how to play the game, but I'm not sure I want to play the thing the whole way through again. Hmm... chasing acheivements though... we'll see.

While the final boss was a bit of a let down, there were several episodes of the game that were first rate. The fight at the gas station, the "Alamo" battle, and some others were really fun. The bit driving in the car with the spotlight felt a bit contrived and very 'mechanical' (the suspension of disbeleif was broken completely for me), maybe it's a bit better in co-op where you wouldn't have to swap?

Anyhow, it's definitely worth the spend. Good fun.

Also played through most of Cloning Clyde on XLA. Bit late in getting to this one. It's a fun little platform/puzzler.

Sims->Cute++;

Congrats to Robin, who's game got announced this week. A Japanese Wii-targeted Sims title. Not bad for a first job out of school :-)


Doesn't the game look cute enough to make you ill! Enough already, bring on the schwag! (And who do you think the above character was modelled after anyway?... :-)

Wii me

On Wed on my way out of the office I passed by someone's office and they had a Wii in there. I finally got a chance to sit down and play with it. I played around with the UI a bit, created a "Mii", and they played Wii sports to calculate my "fitness age" (it's like brain-age, but with sports, get it?)

Here's my quick 2c worth:

1) It's fun. You'll have fun. With friends over on a friday night you'll have fun. Kids will have a blast.

2) If my 'fitness age' were my real age, I'd not only not be writing this, I'd be dead. I was hands-down the worst of the group of people at the office. Now, mind you, I did not rtfm, so my first few rounds were getting used to the controls. Next time I'll do better.

3) The "lobby" for multiple 'Mii's on one system is well done. This really seems like the console was design with "multiplayer" in mind, where multiplayer means same-box, same room.

4) The controller works better than I thought, but I'm curious whether there's any calibration involved, and what that does to it. In particular, I'm wondering about screen sizes *significantly* different than the remote receiver widget. E.g. My console setup is a 7' screen with a projector. Is that going to be an issue?

As for whether I'll buy one... well... I haven't seen the killer app for me yet.

DMCA arcade and console game exception

BoingBoing posted this about six new exemptions to the digital millennium copyright act. In particular, note this one (the paragraph below is the EFF's summary):

2. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.

Hmm...

I wonder what that implies for arcade or console titles that are for obsolete HW, but for which emulated or re-written versions are still in distribution?

Gino Blog!

Gino Yu is blogging. Subscribed!

Gino's one of those super-connected industry dynamos who's a pleasure to be around except for the fact that he makes you feel like you aren't moving fast enough :-). He kind of has one foot in the game industry, one in academia, one in the venture capital space, one in North America and one in Asia. If I can count, that makes five feet, so he'd have to be fast moving, wouldn't he?

I had the pleasure of spending some time with him when speaking at a conference he organized in Hong Kong a few years back, and also at Australian GDC where we both were on a boon.. umm... trip that the conference organizer, John De Margheriti organized for the international speakers down for the trip, where we went diving/snorkeling on the Great Barrier Reef for a few days. Ahh... the days before the bubble burst...

Anyhow, he's definitely someone to keep an eye on. Always up to interesting things.

Cool Tunes!

Intellite Cody pointed out that the Arcadia (post MIGS gamer event I couldn't make it to in Montreal) website is a Flash bonanza (usually a bad thing) that has an *awesome* soundtrack. I've got it playing in the background instead of my Zune player.

 

Il y a du Freezepop l'a dans!

Click

Net Neutrality, Copyright, and brave new (online) worlds

Two really good reads:

- Over at RampRate, they've posted a good paper entited "Every Time You Vote Against Net Neutrality, Your ISP Kills a Night Elf - Why online gaming will be the biggest casualty if ISPs prioritize packets". The title pretty much says it all, as does this line from the conclusion: "Out of all the victioms of the loss of net neutrality, online gaming is likely to be the most fragile and irreplaceable".

- Raph Koster opines brilliantly on the CopyBot meme. CopyBot, if you haven't heard is an open source app for Second Life which creates copies of in-game objects. Since Second Lifers can create AND SELL in-game objects, this open source app has some ramifications upon the in-game economy, to say the least. Raph's commentary is the most thorough and objective I've read so far (though there's too much posting on this subject to have read but a fraction). In it he points out that this is essentially another example of how ALL content is being commoditized and the money of the future is in services. I agree! It also deserves reading if only for the fact that he uses the line "hoist by their own petard", which in my book is deserving of a blogging-pulitzer! :-)

One more thing on CopyBot. Raph's post goes into some detail about client vs server, data streams vs tokenized streams, etc. Bottom line being that the more you stream/store on the client, the more you open up to copy, or 'theft' if you prefer. It'll be interesting whether the solution for copybot (and what's likely to be hundreds of derivatives) is (a) move more upstream to server side - unlikely as current bandwidth requires the 'local cache', (b) commoditization of content and a 'potato famine/gold rush combo' of a move to services - doubtful as the ingame economy may likely collapse before they could evolve the services model, or (c) evolution of some in-game DRM for content combined with an arms race of client-'malicious'-code-detection against the evolving copybot variants.

(c) seems the most likely, and also seems a losing battle. Will be very interesting to keep an eye on this one.  

Presentation Postscript

OK, last presentation-related post for a bit. I promise.

Several people pointed out to me that what I referred to as 'minimalist style' (in my MIGS talk prep post) that Dick Hardt used, is often referred to as 'Lessig Method' , named for Stanford law prof Lawrence Lessig. Lessig's Free Culture talk from a few years back is a must see. So see it here. The Lessig method is more 'minimalist text-only', and there's a parallel path of 'minimalist image-only'. People like Clint Hocking and Seth Godin use an effective mix of both and it's certainly what I was going for. More on Seth's approach here.

As you'll see from the links above, Steve Lacey was kind enough to point out the awesome site that is Presentation Zen. Subscribed!

Data Meister

OK, long story short; I got a Zune, I crammed it with all my music, some video, some pix. Among the video I crammed on there were a whole whack of the TED talks you can download here.

In case you hadn't noticed, I've been on a bit of a 'presentations kick' lately.

Anyhow, I'll post some thoughts on the Zune in the next day or two. In the meantime, this can't wait.

You ABSOLUTELY MUST go watch Hans Rosling's TED lecture from Feb of this year. You can watch online here or download here. I recommend downloading. You are going to want to watch this again. The best data visualization I've seen, hands down. This guy would school Tufte!

Add to that the powerful message the data delivers (you'll have to go see...) and you'll see why data visualization is such a powerful tool.

PS3 ships - Let the eating of crow commence!

OK, so Mark was the first, but not the last, to point out to me that PS3 finally shipped, and did so 50 days before the end of calendar year, thus rendering #1 of my 2006 predictions to be incorrect. In doing so, they've cost me two wagers I took on the subject. Ah, the perils of being opinionated and pigheaded.

On the PS3 launch, amid the stories of drive-by bb-gun shootings, robberies, retail line fisticuffs and shenanigans, there's also been a ton of news about the negative side of the Japanese launch. Lines in Japan have long come to represent a sign of commercial success (similar to big-line-for-tickle-me-elmo over here, but to a whole new level). To that end, it seems to have bred two things: Vendors (Sony in this case) trying to ratchet up the frenzy, and nefarious elements looking to exploit it. Below is what I've heard from some friends in Japan and on the web, so take with grain of salt, throw pinch of salt over left shoulder, do other things with salt, etc.

- Sony, rather than doing a lottery system for their 80 units, chose to encourage lines and only supplied retailers who agreed to force consumers to wait in line.

- Lines at the main retailers in places like Akihabara were made up of a majority of Chinese immigrants and homeless people. Rumor has it that these migrant workers and homeless were paid ~$100 to wait in line on behalf of Yakuza mobsters aiming to later scalp the systems.

- Most of this first wave of customers bought PS3's and no software. If true, relective of the point above, and of data I saw somewhere of an initial attach rate of 0.98.

- The interview with the first customer didn't go well as he didn't speak Japanese.

Various posts on the issue: 1, 2, 3,

Crazy if it's true.

Gears of War commentary

Just a quick commentary on Gears of War. I got back from MIGS'06 to find a copy waiting for me (we get complimentary copies of all MGS published titles - eat yer heart out!), so I've spent a little time playing the past two nights.

Despite all the hype, I really was expecting a tried-n-true formula shooter with shiny graphics. I really was ready to not like this game. Boy was I wrong! I really am enjoying it.

- Yes, it's very bump-mappy/shiny/shadery. (not a plus or a minus, just expected)
- There's some kind of post-processing filter/shader that they are doing on the screen that has some weird artifacts when you turn up the brightness, as I have to do on my ancient projector.
- The combo of heavy use of duck-and-cover and team-based-tactical gameplay is, to my knowledge, really innovative. I haven't played every shooter out there, but this feels WAY different (and better), than the squad portions of Half Life 2 and Medal of Honor. I really feel like I'm part of the squad, that my teammates need my help, that I need to work with them.
- I still hate game controllers for shooters. I may go back and play this game again on PC just so I can have my mouse.
- Best use of rumble EVAR! When you get hold of one of the enemy turrets and wind it up to speed, it feels like total Rambo-meets-Predator mayhem. I dunno what it's going to do to battery life on the wireless controller but who cares. It's also effectivly used for ground shaking due to ominous underground creatures coming up.
- The close-combat control feels messy and imprecise, but maybe that's intentional? Maybe you should feel panicked and sloppy and desperate when an alien is taking swipes at your head.

Anyhow. If you have a 360 and like mayhem, go buy! In the meantime, I have to go look up how to beat this Beserker thing because it's totally kicking my butt!

MIGS dinner and the presentation pow-wow

In my last post, I went on about the prep for my MIGs presentation and the prep that went into it. I worked on it up until 3pm the day before, and then took a break to attend a couple presentations, and then go to dinner.

As I mentioned here, the presentations were both great. But one thing that struck me (esp with Hecker/Gingold's) was that they too had moved to this super-minimalist-ppt presentation style.

At the end of the day, I bumped into Jane, who was on her way out to dinner with Chris Hecker, and they invited me along. By the time tradeshow-dinner-katamari rolled through the post-show cocktail reception and arrived at the restaurant in vieux montreal, it was Jane, Chris, Clint (who's presentation I mentioned in the last post), Jade Raymond and a friend of hers (forgot name. Bad Kim!).

At one point, Chris, Clint and I got onto a deep geek-rant about powerpoint, presentation style, prep methods and such.

- Chris made the point that "everyone is moving to the 'Will Wright method'". Which was the name he gave to the minimalist, image-heavy style.
- Clint pointed out that others had popularized before Will (though now I forget who he referenced).
- I was surprised at how close the prep method I came up with (see last post) mapped to the method that Clint used. Chris' was different given that it was a two-person talk.
- Chris pointed out that doing a two-person talk - effectively - is even more difficult. You'd think it's half the work, but the choreography is harder, plus it's hard to agree on what you want to say. If you aren't passionate about what you are saying, your talk will be crap, and it's hard to reach a point of agreement that isn't a compromise of the original idea. This is worth pondering some.
- We talked about the value of 'circling back' to the same point/slide (see the identity 2.0 talk), as an effective technique, and I pointed out that good standup comedy routines often do this.
- We talked about confusion as a presenter when you 'circle back' to a recurring slide, and then maybe forget where you are (which instance of that slide). I proposed that the 'presenter mode' in Powerpoint, which Clint didn't know about, could solve this problem.
- Chris pointed out that this mode in PPT, while a good idea, was in impementation, "ass", but then, he says that about a lot of software.

There was also some talk about the source material for presentations, for ideas. (I won't give away Clint's inspiration and materials for his GDC'07 talk, but it sounds awesome. I'll definitely attend). I guess it's true for many things in life, but it's interesting how the smallest things (single images, hallway conversations, etc, can plant the seed of these ideas that grow into a whole talk.

Anyhow, that's all that was related to presentations adn presenting. There was also lots of talk about how Chris has never shipped a game (pre-emptive strikes on his part, mostly), of life in Montreal, and about how A2M has a very, very bad name as it will shock customers. :-)

Presentation Prestidigitation

As mentinoned in my previous post, I gave a presentation at MIGS06. I'll eventually post it (along with transcript) but I wanted to do a little mini-post-mortem on what I was trying to do with it and how well it worked.

I've given hundreds of presentations over my career in groups ranging from five to five hundred. Truth is, I've never been terribly pleased at the results of any of them. Some were atrocious, some were well received. At best, I'd say I've given a "b minus" level presentation. Something like the QoL talk I did at GDC 2005 was maybe an example of this. However, I've never given a *really* top notch talk.

Now, let's get this straight, I'm not saying I did this time either.

What I did know was that something had to change, and over the past year, it's been a background goal of mine to improve.

So, I'd had a 'dump and chase' idea (a hockey analogy: Lacking a plan/play, dump the puck over the blue line, chase it in after it, worry about a plan then) about a talk around Digital Distribution and I proposed it for the Montreal Summit. It got accepted and so the forcing function was there to work on the talk and use it to try and reach a new level of presentation skill.

I had 3 goals for the presentation:
- Compelling presentation style. People should be intrigued - rivetted, even - start to finish.
- No words. I am presenting, not powerpoint. Picture is worth a thousand words. (More on this later).
- Deliver one or more valuable calls-to-action that, while beneficial to my business and my employer, are honest and interesting to the listener, and don't come off as 'the microsoft pitch'.

I spent a long time bookmarking and filing things that might be relevant to the presentation when it came time to assemble it. Hundreds of clippings both digital and analog were stored away over the course of six to eight months. However, for the presentation style and form itself, I specifically drew inspiration from five places:

1. Clint Hocking's 'Next: The Designer's Generation' talk from MIGS05. I blogged about it here. It moved me. It made fantastic use of imagery to both support and/or contrast the speaker's words. It had humor. It told stories. It delivered a powerful message. It in many ways was the amalgamation of 2 through 5 below. It was performance art.
2. Dick Hardt's Identity 2.0 Presentation. Superbly scripted; rapid-fire presentation slides with single images or single words on each. Even background color is powerfully used. A barn-burner.
3. Seth Godin's "All Marketers are Liars" talk at Google. Seth tells stories. Very human, very 'everyday' stories that audiences can connect with.
4. Guy Kawasaki's Art of the Start talk from TiECon 2006. This is a good talk any time, but for this one in particular, Guy was on fire. In particular, I liked the use of humor, of analogy, and his handling of the 'handlers'.
5. James Burke's ACM Siggraph 97 Presentation: Fantastic use of analogy and learning from history. There are some particular examples in digital distribution where I wanted to use this. Also like his occasional use of humor.

Having looked at #1 (and another of Clint's presentations) and #2, as well as a number of others following the same style, it was obvious they'd been highly scripted. So that was where I started. I looked at a number of presentations along those lines to guess how long a presentation of that length had to be. Some had online versions on which I could do word and slide counts. Answer: 100 words/minute for someone of my speaking cadence. This would result in a 6000 word presentation that I would dry run in one hour and deliver live in 45-50 minutes (live always goes faster). This turned out to be a surprisingly accurate estimate.

On the slide front, the one-picture-per slide seem to average 1 slide per minute. This generally worked out to 3 or 4 slides the presenter would fire through rapidly, say 10 seconds each, and then a slide the presenter might spend four minutes on, like a diagram or something else that illustrated a process or concept, whereas the rapidfire images were just supportive imagery. The extreme of this would be #2 from above, which averaged 40 slides PER MINUTE. I counted. That's over 500 slides in his pitch of 15 minutes or so.

So, using these guidelines, I laid out what I wanted to say in bullet form. From there, I thought aobut some interesting analogies and anecdotes I could use to tell stories around this. Then I scripted it out. I turned it into roughly a 5000 word script. I did this over the course of weeks, but with bits and pieces done out of order. I had certain stories or sections that I tried dry-running on their own to see if they felt right. Eventually though (very last minute - more on this later), I had a whole script.

From there I dry ran it - without slides - a handful of times. I changed order around, threw out some pieces, added others. Once I had something I was happy with, I assembled slides as supportive material. I'd been working on bits and pieces already done, but the point here is the first time a start-to-finish Powerpoint deck was done was AFTER I'd dry run the presentation and was roughly pleased with it.

While I cant post it yet, this reduced images should at least give you a feel for the image-heavy, minimalist feel of the deck:

Now, once I did that, I dry-ran it again. And realized I still wasn't pleased with some portions of it. Now this was 1am the night before the presentation (10 hours to go), so I had a choice. Muck with it in the morning, or do it right. I chose the latter and pulled an all-nighter, rearranging things and dry running it another 4 times or so before the presentation (at a full hour per dry run, it adds up).

The next day I delivered the presentation and it went off pretty well. I'd give myself a B+, maybe A-, but not better than that. That's not bad considering I was moving to a new format & style that I was very uncomfortable with.

So what happened?

On the plus side, the format worked, and more importantly, was a forcing function for me to have an extremely well rehearsed presentation. No hiding behind bullet points. The analogies and illustrative imagery made for an entertaining presentation and I could tell people were engaged. I had lots of positive feedback after the talk.

On the minus side, I left far too much till the last minute. Aside from the sure-to-get-my-wrist-slapped-move of not being able to run in by our PR folks for approval, it let to me pulling the all-nighter, which meant I wasn't as sharp a presenter as I could have been - espresso treatment aside. Also, I had it pointed out to me that I'd have done well to follow the "tell them what you are going to tell them" rule at the start of the presentation, especially when you are going to go off on 'anecdotal tangents'. Finally, while some things might serve well as analogies, as someone from MS I need to keep in mind that these can be pulled out to serve as headlines where they can be construed differently (google 'pallister' and 'fruit flies' to see what I'm talking about).

Overall, I'm still pleased. I'll definitely continue with the new approach, especially given teh dinner discussion I had with some collegues... which will be the subject of my next post.

MIGS06 Wrap-up

Sorry for the blogosilence. Last week was a whirlwind of action between attending the Montreal International Games Summit, getting in visits to friends and family, and trying to keep up with goings on at the office. Didn't leave a lot of time for posting.

I gave a presentation at the summit which I'll do a lengthier post about when time allows.

Summarizing the summit itself, there are a few things worth noting.

First off, the conference is rapidly growing, as it appears the montreal gaming industry is, and this year it definitely reached a critical mass, popping its head above the radar of the mainstream press (at least in Canada).

I don't know what attendance was recorded, but it was definitely larger than last year. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd say 800 or so attendees.

The scene in monteal is buzzing. EA has 150 to 200 people there, Ubisoft has well over a thousand with plans to grow to over 2000 in the near future. Artificial Mind and Movement (often referred to by the sure-to-get-more-googlejuice-for-all-the-wrong-reasons acronym of A2M) has over 300 people. Over three hundred! Where did that come from?!

Add to that Softimage, Quazal, and a host of other middleware and service companies (not to mention my alma mater Matrox Graphics, who is Montreal-based and was exhibiting at MIGS :-).

Anyhow, games is growing in montreal and people are taking note. Lots of government folks floating around, lots of tax breaks for those looking to grow businesses or facilities there.

The exhibition hall was small, but had a few booths of significance. The Nintendo booth was the hit of the show, with a large queue lining up to play Zelda and tennis, as well s the offroad racing game.

Between meetings, press interviews, my session and the prep for it (more on this later), I only had a chance to attend a few sessions, only two of which were of note:

Reid Schneider and Vanderlei Caballero's talk entitled "Building New IP and Innovation in Games, How to Break Out of the Box" was the first, and Chris Hecker and Chaim Gingold's "Advanced Prototyping" keynote .

You can find blogged summaries here: Schneider/Caballero: link. Hecker/Gingold: link, link.

In many ways, they were the same talk. The Hecker/Gingold talk was about the method of prototyping they use at Maxis on Spore, and how they wrapped some thinking and methodology around how and why to prototype ideas in an interactive medium. Basically, prototyping is how you implement the scientific method in game development. Hypothesis, experiment, results. Rinse, repeat.

The Schneider/Caballero talk was around how they used prototyping to innovate in a bunch of areas in the development of Army of Two. Or more to the point, how they used prototypes to sell people (including themselves) on a bunch of really crazy out-of-the-box ideas around co-op gameplay that otherwise NEVER would have been ok'd.

Two things to note:

(1) I wish I'd seen the Hecker talk first (it was actually more or less a repeat of a GDC 2006 talk), as it was more the 'theory' talk, and the other was the 'theory applied' talk.
(2) Army of Two *really* looks awesome. Some very cool, innovative stuff here.

That's it for now. MOre on the summit and on my talk there in a later post. I have some day-job stuff I have to get to first!

We're gettin' short changed!

DSC_00093
Originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Someone at the office brought in a bunch of Japanese candy to put in their "it's halloween, come by my office and slip off your low carb diet" bowl.

Banana Kit Kat?!? Green Tea Kit Kat?!?!!

Why don't we get any of these cool flavors here. I want!

Green tea is awesome, btw. I've cleared him out. Time to get back on the wagon.

Best blog post EVAR!

OK, this is the best blog post ever. EVAR!!! That includes future posts too. We're done.

Now, people with time on your hands that want to prove me wrong and make my day. Go start a company that makes blogging software to auto-generate blog posts like the one I just linked to, using your flickr photos, and THAT is going to shake things up a little. Go. Do it. I'm waaiiittting....

Don't Mock the Monger

I had lunch a while back with Eric Mattson. Eric writes the very cool Marketing Monger blog. He was based over in Europe for some time, but recently moved back to Seattle. We'd exchanged some email and agreed to meet for lunch.

Along with the blog, Eric also has a podcast called... wait for it... the Marketing Monger Podcast. A while back, he set what I thought seemed an overly agressive goal: Do do a thousand podcasts, all of htem interviews with marketing folks around the industry.

A thousand.

Seemed nuts to me. They take time to put together, and you need to find the people to have the conversations which requires a bunch of legwork, etc.

Anyhow, he recently hit his milestone of 100 podcasts. 10% of goal. And the caliber of people he's landing interviews with is pretty impressive. CEO's of web startups, senior leaders at fortune 500 companies, and everything in between. Pretty impressive.