Its a small world after all...

Adam, a former coworker at Intel, has a great post up about some of his recent work related travels.

We all hear plenty about the shrinking planet, how we're all more interconnected than ever, etc. This drove it home in a really palpable way. A snippet (as background, it's worth pointing out that Adam spent some time in the past working at Los Alamos):

"I had lunch with the local manager. i was thinking about it last night, the fact that in the past 2 years i have spend a significant amount of time in countries previously considered hostile (read: communist). both the last two places my parents would think their kids would never spend time. think about this for a minute: as soon as 1998, we were afraid of having bombs dropped on us from these people. now, i am having lunch in a country peopel used used to get shot at if they left, and now i am having lunch in a building in that country. i spent time building technology to help defend my country from these people.

It comes out during the discussion that the man across the table from me used to work at sarov. sarov is the los alamos of russia. so here we were, literally trying to kill each other 10 years ago (or protect our country from the killing machines of the other place), talking as if it never happened. i think about this again when discussing the mathematics of snowflake generation and modelling the collection on tree leaves when it reaches a critical threshold and falls off, startled when i hear the engineer say 'this is quite beautiful'."

Go read the rest.

Better pray, better not be gay

This says SO much about what is wrong with this country.

The moment I get citizenship, I'm voting for the first gay black atheist woman who enters the race, regardless of party affiliation or platform!

(via Freakonomics blog)

...but then you have to close

When I lived on the east coast, I never got acquainted with pressure washers. Then I moved to the Pacific Northwest and learned that the hundred-plus days of consecutive wet that we call winter (eat your heart out Noah) tends to make lots of things moldy/mildewy/mossy and so a pressure washer becomes standard household equipment.

I went out and bought one this weekend, and now the deck around the pool looks shiny clean.

When shopping for pressure washers, you quickly learn that there are two variables at play, and that they scale more or less linearly: Price, and Pressure (as in output water pressure ) rated in PSI. There's also a gas vs electric question, but I have a hunch that this is a non issue. Small ones are electric, big ones are gas, and that's that.

It only takes a couple minutes using one to figure out that more pressure means that you can hold the diverging spray further away from the work surface, and that this in turn means the spray is wider and you can cover a larger area in less time. Given that more powerful units cost more, there's a pretty clear time-is-money trade-off the buyer is making.

I don't think most people figure this out before buying one. Thus I was pleased when shopping for one this weekend and saw that Loews has all their displays with a uniformly presented rating translation. Something akin to "this pressure washer can clean a _25_ square foot area in 5 minutes.

I have a hunch, however, that they are leaving a bunch of sales on the table. What they should have done was connected the dots for buyers. Determine the size of the average deck or driveway, and then said "This unit will clean the average driveway in 4 hrs".

Customers would have a clear choice then of what their money bought them. "Hmm.... do I want to spend an extra $100 to save 2 hrs every time I do the driveway?"

Never hurts to make the value proposition crystal clear to the customer.

World of LastResortCraft?

Ok, I'm not a WoW player, so I don't understand teh mechanics of how all this stuff works.

However, I was surprised to hear (via Raph) that Blizzard is suing a company doing in-game spamming of their gold-farming services.

Normally, going the legal route is a last resort. It would seem that in an in-game scenario, for a game for which (a) Blizzard write the policies & terms of use, and (b) Blizzard and their partners administer the servers, there'd just be an easier and more effective way.

Resorting to the courts, especially in this case where (as Raph points out) the defendant is a company based in China, seems like a real last-resort type of effort.

Catchup

Sorry I'm behind on posting.

Busy week last week, the tail-end of which was a quick in-out to LA for some meetings. Managed to squeeze in super yummy Dinner with Justin, Merci, Alice & Cory; and had a super decadent poolside breakfast at the Viceroy with Souris and some of the FrieNDA crew (I'd say more, but of course, 'no one talks about fight club').

(pic via Souris. Hope she doesn't mind my snarfing her flickr pix!)

Oh yeah, and I immediately got a haircut after getting back home, after Alice told me I looked like a Roman legionaire!

Soon I will be invincible

...is the title of Austin Grossman's new book. Site here.

I just noticed it got a side-bar writeup in this month's Wired. It looks awesome. I can't wait to give it a read.

Go Austin!

hammerzeit

hammerzeit, originally uploaded by henrikki1.

Spotted on flickr, (henrikk1's photostream). Brilliant!

Convergence Shmonvergence!

Clint has a his feathers ruffled over Hollywood directory Michael Bay's forray into games.

At first glance it's the standard "those hollywood guys wouldn't know a good game if it hit them!" rant, but it's worth reading, as he hits on some of the key issues in the hollywood and games convergence debate:

Do they think that 10 years from now I won't be sure whether I just watched a movie or played a game? Again, I have to make some assumptions about what they mean to have this kind of crap make any sense at all... I can only assume they mean 'the production methodologies and business models are increasingly similar and it is becoming more and more practical to look at doing feature film development and game development simultaneously as part of a multi-media production that increases efficiency'. In other words, they mean convergence in the purest business sense.

Anyhow, worth a read. I agree with him a hundred percent.

Hath no one an itch to bitch about the pitch?

I have no idea what in-game product placements are going for in triple-A game titles these days. However, the Freakonomics blog points us to this interesting Businessweek post about the cost of product placement in TV shows like Martha, Oprah, etc, that may point to a high point for us to shoot for.

Stewart’s syndicated NBC show, which airs daily at 4 PM, is currently lagging in the ratings and can only charge advertisers about $10,000 for a 30-second spot, as opposed to $18,000 for The View or a staggering $100,000 for Oprah. But if an advertiser spends at least $250,000 total on ads during a season, the money also buys a special “branded segment” on the show, along with mentions in Stewart’s magazine and radio broadcast.

It seems the idea is working: airtime for Martha Stewart Living is sold out through the 2007-08 season. Latecomers or advertisers who don’t want to invest the full $250,000 can also buy a “one-time in-show oral mention with product close-up,” as BusinessWeek calls it, for $100,000, while a two-minute segment that “works in an advertiser’s talking points” starts at $250,000.

A couple things to observe related to gaming:

• The article seems to hint that product placements are being sold in packages along with commercial spots. Most of the game ad stuff I've seen seems to be selling one or the other, not both packaged together (though I'm not sure. I'll have to check what our guys do on MSN Games).
• Not that I've watched a lot of named-for-first-name TV shows, but the product placements are pretty clearly paid-for, and yet the audience doesn't seem to question Martha's cred. Hath no one an itch to bitch about the pitch?

Live on PC

IMAGE_034, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Check out the friend's list. Note Halo 2 for PC showing up on Live.

Sweet!

Stickin' it to the man

IMAGE_033, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Sticker someone affixed to the gas pump

TEEEEEVEEEE!

Souris called it Baywatch + Alias. I'd argue Baywatch + La Femme Nikita.

Either way, the trailer for the upcoming remake of The Bionic Woman has me giddy!

I'll be the first to call it: Lee Majors and Lindsay Wagner cameos!

And can we get some bitchin' 70's track suits in there please?!

Hit (or miss) driven businesses

The Freakonomics blog points us to this article on the publishing business. Some choice snippets:

• [on picking hits] The answer is that no one really knows. “It’s an accidental profession, most of the time,” said William... “If you had the key, you’d be very wealthy. Nobody has the key.”
• [On enthusiasts for the medium making up the core of the employees in the segment] "The people who go into it don’t do it for the money, which might explain why it’s such a bad business"
• [on impressions of the business] ...whenever he discusses the industry with people in other industries, “they’re stunned because it’s so unpredictable, because the profit margins are so small, the cycles are so incredibly long, and because of the almost total lack of market research.”
• “The whole thing is educated guesswork, but guesswork nonetheless. You just try to make sure your upside mistakes make up for your downside mistakes.”

The article, of course, is talking about the BOOK publishing business. However, if you were thinking games, it'd still be right on the money.

Nice to know we're not alone.

Safe sims

These *awesome* safe sex public service announcements from France have a very Sims-inspired look to them. Far more positive and realistic message than what you see here in the US (the slogan at the end translate to 'Live long enough to find The One')

Caution: They are NSFWIPA (not safe for work in prudish America), and if that's true for the hetero vid below, it's especially true for the gay version.

Pub AIDES Baby Baby
Uploaded by PeteRock

Power(up) to the People

In a bizarre example of cultural mash-up, Gamejew (who I chatted with briefly at GDC) covers the police brutality during the LA May Day protest.

Slippery slopes

IMAGE_032, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Did some spring skiing at Whistler as part of a group trip. Weather, snow, and fun were exceptional.

Got rather sunburned though!

Back to work today *sigh*

Are bullet points the new hem length?

Some time ago, Guy Kawasaki blogged about SlideShare, a web startup for sharing/storing presentations, and a contest they were having to judge the best presentations.

The contest winners were announced, and they are worth looking at.

A few thoughts:

• These of course aren't presentations at all. They are slide decks. Presentation materials. Minus the speaker, they aren't exactly 'presented'. That being said, I think the site/service is interesting. It would also be interesting if they supported posting video/audio of a talk along with the deck, or perhaps a transcript (like I described in my presentation-related post a while back).
• Most of the presentations subscribe to the very image-heavy, minimal-text style used by Lawrence Lessig, Steve Jobs, and others (more on this here). The judges of this contest, like me, beleive this to be a 'winning' style of presentation. I do wonder though, if we are collectively blinded by the fact that its just plain different than what we are used to seeing. Is this the optimal solution, or are presentation styles just that... styles. Will text quantity vary with trend? And if so, as I asked in the title of this post, are bullet points the new hem length?
• [It would be interesting to ask Seth Godin, who himself favors this style of presentation, what he things a 'purple cow' presentation looks like when all presentations look like purple cows :-)]

Those comments aside, some thoughts on the specific contest-winning 'presentations':

• "Shift Happens" is a great example of using visuals to give facts some punch.
• "Meet Henry" is a great story-telling, single message sales pitch.
• While a little text-heavier than the others, "Unlocking Cool" uses some 'big font' slides to drive key points home (Slide twelve's "Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast" slide is a great example)

In any case, there are some good lessons to be learned here. The site is worth bookmarking.

Skill vs Chance and the law

The Freakonomics blog has an interesting post about the current debate about poker, and whether it is a game of chance or a game of skill.

The reason it matters at all is because games of chance are covered by a whole other set of laws, namely those covering gambling. The online version of which has recently been outlawed.

Recently a group called the Poker Players Alliance has been trying to lobby for the legitimization of poker, esp online. Annie Duke (of TV poker fame) has a good post on it on her blog. Her post discusses how games of skill can be identified by a "can I throw the game?" test. It's a compelling argument but I suspect it's flawed. As an aside, I predict that mathematician blogs will go through a veritable meme-circle-jerk on this topic over the coming week or two :-)

Does this matter to those of us in video games if we aren't involved in making a poker variant? It does.

The game of skill vs game of chance debate is relevant to any online multiplayer games, especially if any kind of 'play-for-cash' or 'pro tournament for cash prizes' is going to be explored as a possible business model.

Currently, play-for-cash services (e.g. we offer one on MSN Games, in affiliation with a partner) go to great lengths to ensure that there are no random numbers generated differently, or other factors that could result in a randomization of the problem set thrown at the two players in such a way that could affect outcome. As a result, there's a fairly limited set of games they can work with, as each has to be customized for the service.

It's possible that precendent set with poker could affect whether the play-for-cash model thrives or withers.

Silver Surfer

Back before I bought my Cobra, I did a fair bit of research into the different replica manufacturers and how they differed.

Kirkham motorsports was considered one of the premium manufacturers, and one of if not the only one making aluminum bodies, like the originals used.

So if you find yourself blowing the extra cash to get an aluminum body vs fiberglass, how do you show it off? Well one way is to not paint it.

I knew that they offered a brushed aluminum finish, but only today saw that they offer a POLISHED aluminum body. How bad-ass is this car?

Is there not a law against driving a big frikkin mirror around? You could blind somebody!

Will game schools let students actually *make* games?

In a conversation with some Digipen students at the IGF at GDC (their game was a finalist), I was *shocked* to learn that they didn't actually have the right to commercialize their game, but that the Digipen school owned the rights to any games created by their students.

I was shocked. I was also naive. I turns out many of today's educational systems are imposing unreasonable copyright terms on students in their media programs. To my knowledge this isn't happening with written works so much as with film, games, etc. I can't see why one would be treated differently than another.

In an interesting development, Boing Boing today posted something about students at USC's film school protesting the copyright policy, and petitioning to have the right to have their works licensed under Creative Commons.

I hope they are successful, and I hope places like Digipen follow suit (or are forced to).

Let there be Bible Fight

From the folks at Adult Swim, comes perhaps the most sacreligious game ever. Bible Fight

From a mail list I'm on:

Bible Fight is a free web game on adultswim.com and part of their new strategy of offering original games for the masses to play when they should be working. Originally conceived as Sunday School meets Street Fighter 2, Bible Fight blends two of America's favorite past times - religion and violence - to tell the tale of a long lost contest between some of the greatest names of the Bible to see who among them is most deserving to sit at the right hand of God.

Search your hearts, dear friends, and take special care to listen for that quiet knocking. That knocking is Bible Fight, here to fill that persistent nagging emptiness that worldly possessions and success just can't satisfy. Bible Fight will cure what ails you. It will lift you, seperate you; it will turn you into a nine-year-old Hindu boy.

Naughty game designer! You'll burn! :-)

Gametap: Jack of ever-more trades...

This announcement today that Gametap is adding more types of content (current release PC titles), and more business models (ad-supported/free, paid download) to it's already wide mix of offerings.

I don't beleive it's going to help.

As I've said before, I think their problem is that they don't offer a clear best-of-breed, 100% complete solution to any one customer need. Just many things, none of them well.

Dellaro Imbroglio!

I consider it an honor and a priviledge to call Jason Della Rocca a friend and former co-worker. Even more so, now that he's acheived that most notorious of game industry accolades: getting chastized on CNN by Jack Thompson.

For those that haven't followed, it went something like this:

• Guy goes nuts, shoots up Virginia Tech and kills a large number of students in the process. (This would be "The part that really sucks")
• JT gets on the media bandwagon and blames the shooting on this guy's game playing, etc.
• JDR posts something on his blog calling JT an ambulance chaser.
• JT is asked about this on MSNBC, just about poops himself and calls JDR a "jackass" and an "idiot". Video here:

• JT challenges JDR to a public debate on the subject.
• JDR takes the bait, mails JT on interest to debate.
• JT agrees, provided he is paid $3000 for the speaking event.
• JDR doesn't want to get paid for this, JT declines freebie.
• JDR posts whole thread to his blog.

I don't have any specific commentary here other than to point out the sheer lunacy of it all. JT is a buffoon, American media is a corporate ad-revenue-driven machine out of control, and there doesnt' seem to be much that can be done about either.

Some Book Reviews

I've got to keep up on these things...

Here are a few recent ones:

99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style

Inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, in which the author presents the same short story, writen in 99 different styles, Matt Madden gives us the same eight-panel comic, drawn 99 different ways. A very quick read but an interesting an perspective-broadening one. Some of the takes on it are a stretch and feel like he was struggling to come up with a just a few more to make the 99. Others though make up a really wide variety and show us what a different presentation can do to a story.

Geek Mafia

Draw a Venn diagram with 3 intersecting circles. Label one "Hackers", another "Ocean's Eleven", and the last one "Electric Kool-aid Acid Test". Look at the spot where the three intersect and you should find Geek Mafia.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Gripping sci-fi a la Snowcrash, only substitute the motorcycle-n-swordplay for amusement park rides. What Stephenson does to envision the metaverse, Doctorow does to envision life in the age of abundance and immortality.

I have to confess that I feel a bit fraudulent in posting the last of these as an Amazon associates link though, as I didn't buy the book! Cory Doctorow has licensed the book under creative commons and thus it's available in forms other than print, most of them free. I read it via DailyLit, which will mail you many books in bite-size chunks, daily.

Technology is to politics as chocolate is to peanut butter

And if you don't think so, I think you'd change your mind after attending this conference:

Personal Democracy Forum – Technology Is Changing Politics.

Check out a partial speaker list:

Tom Friedman, Arianna Huffington, Jay Rosen, Kim Malone, Robert Scoble, Jeff Jarvis, Cheryl Contee, Eli Pariser, Sara Horowitz, Josh Marshall, Ruby Sinreich, Craig Newmark, Joe Trippi, Becki Donatelli, Andrew Keen, Ellen Miller, Chris Rabb, David All, Todd Ziegler, Allison Fine, Clay Shirky, Liza Sabater, Brian Dear, Ben Rattray, Seth Godin, Steve Urquhart, Mindy Finn, Mike Turk, Zack Exley, Walter Fields and Robert Greenwald.

Thanks to Seth for the link.

Bizzy

As you may have guessed, I've been fairly busy past few weeks, thus the lack of activity on the blog. Well, ok, slight stretching of the truth there, as I've been fairly busy but have also logged a lot of guitar hero action :-). Priorities and all that.

Last weekend I got down to Portland to see some friends and former co-workers from Intel. A couple of them are involved in the "larabee" project that just got announced (vaguely) at IDF. Got to have some interesting conversations about how life in The Empire differs from life with The Borg. (One of those former co-workers was having his side-project shown in a local fashion show the evening we were leaving. Not exactly what you expect for an Intel engineer, no?)

This past week I got down to San Francisco for one night. Mostly work and little social, but did manage to hook up with Robin for crepes and some interesting discussion comparing life at two different big games industry companies.

Hoping life gets back to normal a bit so I can post a little more frequently. Well, that and I'm almost done the all-songs-on-medium-at-five-stars achievment.

On 300 and convergence...

Clint has a great post about the movie 300, and what it exemplifies (and doesn't) in terms of the 'convergence' between film and game media. Great read.

TEDriffic

Wow. TED revamped it's site and along with it, posted 30 new videos (from past conferences, but new to the site).

I've blogged about the TED talks before. They are almost all well-polished, moving, inspiring and/or educational. Great site to bookmark, and great talks to download watch when you have time (I always have 5-10 of them on my Zune for watching on flights). Hans Rosling gapminder talk, Malcolm Gladwell's talk on spaghetti sauce, and Majora Carter's talks are ones I could watch multiple times.

Bookmark it here.

Good take on the Guitar Hero Song Pricing Kerfuffle

In case you missed it last week, the internets were abuzz with the griping of many a gamer.

This is of course true of every week, but the target of last week's ire seemed to largely be directed at the pricing/packaging of downloadable song content. (3 songs priced at ~$6.50). The griping being directed (a) at the price of >$2 a song, more expensive that iTunes and they are covers at that, and (b) at the packaging, necesitating the purchase of 3 songs at once.

While I have *no idea* on what the real story is (not involved in that part of Microsoft at all), and while I'm not saying whether the pricing strategy is a good or bad one, I did think that this post by DonkeyXote was a good take on the subject. He's a lawyer who works with our games group (but did not work on GH2 in any way), and his post goes over some of the complexities involved in digital distribution of music, performers rights societies, etc.

I'd label this 'what you have when the round peg of new technology, new mediums, and new business models is smashed into the square hole of antiquated organizations and business models; and what happens when people try to get it to work.

Casual gamers are PEOPLE!

[OK, the image isn't contextually relevant to the post, but Kim's #7 Rule of Blogging is that 'When presented with an opportunity to include references to a Charleton Heston movie, one should do so, regardless of how far a stretch it may be to make relevant'. We now return you to regularly scheduled programming]

Lots of people have been quoting this report that states that women constitute a majority of the US internet population. (saving you the click, it's about 52% women, 48% men).

My point is this:

The casual games industry has spent a lot of time talking about how there are more women playing casual games than men. Stats go anywhere from 55% to 70% depending how you slice it and which site stats you look at. These numbers get dampened somewhat when normalized to take into account the general internet usage gender split.

Having said that, perhaps we're better off looking at casual gamers as just "people".

Gotta have!

Dear Blogosphere,

It was my birthday earlier this week.

Someone please please please buy me one of these impossibly cute funky gizmos.



(via Collegehumor via ShinyShiny)

Akihabara Cosplayer Flashmob!!

Just when you think the world couldn't get any stranger...

Flashmobs of cosplayers doing choreographed dancing [update: from an anime called Haruhi] in the streets of Akihabara. (I love the hurried-but-polite rapid dispersion by police at the tail end of it)



via Tokyomango

Students suing SW company for copyright infringement

Yes, you read that correctly, not the other way around.

The Patry Copyright Blog (a good, if thick, read - think 'Copyright equivalent of Freakonomics, written by an attorney') has this interesting story, best summed up as follows:

- A number of schools use an anti-plagiarism software service called Turnitin from a company called iParadigms.
- The service works by allowing teachers to enter students works, where they are compared against a database of 22 million student papers and other resources.
- The student papers are then added to the database. (see where this is going?)
- The students papers are copyrighted works, and the students never granted this software company permission to store a copy of their works for their use.
- A couple of high school students are suing the company for this reason.

Cheeky monkeys. :-)

Sure, the use is a well-intentioned one, but that doesn't matter. The company argues fair use, but their software is worthless without the database and thus they are deriving commercial value from it, and that's not fair use. At least it's debatable.

[update: Looking this up in wikipedia, it appears they've been challenged a couple times before, most notably by some McGill students first. Go Montrealers!]

Nice match

IMAGE_024, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

The crappy phone cam doesn't show it very well, but the Xbox360 GH2 controller is a nice match for my Steinberger.

Unfortunately, the GH2 controller is seeing WAY more usage that the real guitar. I ought to do something about that.

But mom! All the kids are doing it!

IMAGE_023, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

Logged in tonight to play some GH2 and look what everyone's playing...

Stop and smell the roses

What a beautiful experiment. What an ugly result.

[There's a cynical statement to be made here as well. How many people would have stopped and listened if they'd *known* he was "was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made". Same kind of folks that comment on an 'insouciant little pinot'... after hearing the price.]

Thanks to Souris, Hustler of (high and low brow) Culture, for the pointer.

Originality

I know almost nothing about this book but I love the website so much I'll definitely check it out.

Joost the facts, ma'am

Sorry, couldn't resist the pun.

I just got on the Joost beta and holy cow. It's WAY slick.

This weekend it's moving ot the living room to try and co-exist with Media Center. We'll see how that goes.

Carnaval, Festival, Carnaval...

The always-juicy Carnival of Gamers is up after a bit of a hiatus, over at Gaming Nexus. Go check it out.

...but we make it up in volume!

Robin points us to the "Develop 100", an interesting attempt by Evolving Media to build a list of "The World's Most Successful Game Studios" by (according to their site):

Develop 100 ranks the world's games development studios based on the revenues their products made at UK retail in 2006.

While and interesting idea, it falls short of the mark for a couple reasons:

- UK only. Meh.
- Retail only. ('We rated the most powerful transportation vehicles by the amount of hay they consume in a day!'). 'nuff said.

And of course the biggest issue (and granted, hard to put THIS list together) is that I'd much rather see the list ranked by contribution margin rather than just revenue. To borrow Raph's metaphor, (which is also his business plan, I guess) I think you'd see a lot of small mammals ranked higher among the dinosaurs.

And as Robin points out, it'd be interesting to see this ranked by a number of factors. QoL, GameRankings average, etc, etc.

What hath the Game Gods wrought? GH2, that's wot!!

Guitar Hero 2 *finally* shipped for Xbox360. Ah, but how I'd waited for this day. This is a good thing.

I went by Circuit City yesterday morning to pick one up, and they were bundling a $20 points card with it. This is also a good thing.

Extra content and downloadable songs on Xbox Live. This is an even better thing.

And now this news from Kotaku: The Xplorer controller works fine out of the box in your PC to play the awesome Frets on Fire. Well, that's it then. See you all next year. (jk)

Cranky...

... not one, but TWO crowns done at the dentist today. Had some faulty dental work from years back that got some decay under it and... well, I'll spare the details but suffice it to say that two hours in the chair ain't any fun.

Channelled the negative energy into some Guitar Hero 2 shredding though. Ah. Gaming goodness.

Great example of how games can teach

Perhaps a lesson more in how games can help you visualize:

We have often heard people talk about financial data or housing prices using a 'roller coaster' metaphor. Here's an example where SpeculativeBubble used Roller Coaster Tycoon to build a roller coaster using US housing prices (adjusted for inflation) to construct an actual roller coaster in-game.

I dunno about you, but that next hill is going to scare the heck out of me...

Bodies

Went to see the Bodies exhibit this past weekend. It was pretty nifty, but I'm not sure it was worth the $27/person they charge for it.

It was educational and let you see all the bits of the body cut up and splayed out in ways that a textbook could never do justice to. Still, probably more educational for those that aren't married to and/or have siblings in the medical profession. (I've been surrounded by some fairly disgusting-yet-detailed dinner conversation on occasion over the past 15 years :-)

One thing Alisa and I both found funny was that people that were unphased by the majority of the exhibit would suddenly cringe and flee from the room with preserved fetuses. I witnessed a couple people rushing through that one room, one saying "ugh! Let's just get past this one!". This must happen a lot because they have a big warning before that one room. Hmm...

Personally, the only one that even mildly gave me the willies was one exhibit with man's entire skin preserved like some kind of tanned leather hide. Here's a similar example from another one of their exhibits (lots of good photos of this up on flickr)

Raph at Etech

Turnabout is fair play.

Alice has liveblogged Raph's session from Etech. Also a good read.

(As an aside, I would like to pit these two against each other in a game of TyperShark. M4D typing skilz!)

A fantastic ETech talk I wish I'd caught...

Raph has liveblogged Danah Boyd's Etech talk entited "Incantations for Muggles". Its awesome. Wish I'd been there for it, but Raph's thorough notetaking are a nice substitute. Really interesting stuff on changing social norms due to impact of technology, and on the use of technology by different people at different stages in life (and the costs of trying to make one size fit all).

Notable quotes:

"Expansion has costs. One of the costs is that you get people angry with you. The common response is lock-in: you have to stay even if you don’t want to, which goes against what people really value. Unhappy users do not make products stick, cf Friendster."

" Twitter is the most fascinating example of complete cognitive overload. Is it really building meaningful social realitions? Do we really gain anything? I know way too many details about Angelina Jolie. She won’t be there for me when I have a crisis. Will Twitter friends be there for you?"

One of the closing comments of the talk is particularly relevant in the context of my earlier post about Kathy Sierra.

"What does it mean to pay attention to the spells cast in both directions? The accidental spells? The Star Wars kid? The student who gets kicked out of college because of their Facebook? We think it’s all positive. Are we always happy with that? Do we even think about it, or do we forget that people’s lives are at stake."

The downside of anonymity in the blogosphere

Creating Passionate Users is a fantastic blog. A real gem, and definitely on the short list on my blogroll.

Which is why its extra disappointing that Kathy Sierra, the blog's owner, was recently threatened by some anonymous posters on another blog (warning: that link is disturbing to read). Threatened to the point where she feels forced to hide, forced to cancel speaking engagements, etc.

If she decides to quit blogging, the world will be poorer for it.

It saddens me that mysogynist trolls like this still exist in this day and age. I guess I'm not surprised, but it's a sad reminder.

The anonymity afforded by the internet just fuels it further of course, and it's got me thinking about anonymity some.

Two subjects get confused in many of the posts on this topic come up: Free speech and anonymity.

Free speech is a good thing. People should be allowed to share ideas, but as Kathy points out, death threats are not protected speech, nor should they be.

There are reasons to allow for and protect anonymity: press sources, whistleblowers, etc.

Its the combination of the two that disturbs me. It seems teh price of free speech should at the least be assignment of your name to your statements, and that you be held accountable for your words.

I've been pretty lucky in that most posts on this blog have been reasonable, but there have been a few examples where someone disagreed with a point, told me I was wrong, etc, without making an argument, and without identifying themselves.

"'cuz I said so" doesn't count for much when I don't know who "I" is.

Not sure I have any constructive suggestions here. I'm just saddened by it all, is all.

Kickin' it old school

This video of seniors bowling on Wii is just awesome. Kudos again to Nintendo.

(Have to add this though, from a coworker: I like the last sentence in the article… “That isn’t the case with Millicent, his wife of 55 years. She sticks with bridge”. Hmm… I wonder if she plays on our site? )

300

Went to see 300 this weekend. Whee! Great feast for the eyes. Gladiator meets Sin City.

It also inspired someone to make this web comic about the whole Chris Hecker rant thing. :-)

Joystiq v Kotaku

I have both Kotaku and Joystiq on the blogroll. The seem to both tackle the same type of content (humorous take on game industry news and game culture), and seem to cover most of the same news. So I guess they are competitors of sorts.

I'm not sure who beats who to the punch more often, but these days, does it matter when a 'scoop' is a lead of hours or minutes?

Lately, I've been frequenting Kotaku more. On the one hand I feel they 'chase the headline' a little more (I should come up with some hard examples to back this up later. For now call it an impression I'm left with); but on the other hand, I'm really digging their sense of humor.

So it was Kotaku up by a point for that, but today I was out running some errands and had some time to kill so I brought up both sites on my phone and found that Joystiq was very mobile-friendly formatted, while Kotaku was not. Perhaps just on windows mobile (which I'm running)? Maybe others are seeing the same?

Anyhow, score one for Joystiq, tieing it up.

I was surprised by this, give that of Kotaku's numerous Brians, at least one lives in Japan, where they likes dem lil'phones.

The flipside of transparency

... is that anyone on my friends list, or hovering over the icon on the far right, sees this:

Yea, that's right. DDR. You wanna make something of it, toughguy!?

Philosophical Mii

Funii...

Understanding Games - Part 3

Part 3 of understanding games is up, and it's better than the first 2. The game you play really is a nice example of the trial-and-error system exploration.

I'm disappointed that this is only a 4-part project.

Red5's awesome recruitment tactics

Awesome, remarkable, "purple cow" if you will, recruitment effort by Red5, pointed out to us by Ben Mattes:

"... FedEx parcel arrives for you. [snip]. So you open the box and find inside a series of 'Russian Doll' type nested boxes, each more beautiful then the last. Written on each box a section of what appears to be a riddle.Of course, as you open each subsequent box the attention to detail in this package is sure to start to attract attention. Some of your coworkers would certainly be drawn to the affair and hover around to know more.So finally you reach the fifth and last box, open it up, and find...."

Go to Ben's blog to find out the rest. I don't want to steal his thunder. (just realized this is also covered in detail in this escapist article here. PIctures of the nested boxes and surprise inside are here)

This is a great example of how recruiting - if you really want top notch, cream of the crop people, should be viewed as wooing. You need to go above and beyond to stand out from the other suitors, and make the person feel special, wanted, etc.

One more GDC post

I forgot one more highlight that was worth mentioning.

Justin introduced me to Don Hopkins who gave me a demo of SimCity running on the OLPC (one laptop per child). Was nifty to actually hold one of them and fondle it (uhh... the OLPC that is. I didn't fondle nor hold Don or Justin).

Pic of Don, Justin, and the OLPC here.

Strike a pose

Steve Lacey, ex-microsoftie, now a googlite, is a pretty proficient amateur photographer... usually.

However, I think he harbors some malicious intent toward me, as he is now responsible for two of the three worst photos ever taken of me. This one, taken at CES a year+ back, and this one, taken just before GDC at the b-day party of a mutual friend's toddler, which clearly shows the state I was in in the weeks leading up to GDC, looking like a meth-addicted hobbit or something.

Steve, from now on I'm running from your camera. Either that or going all 'Sean Penn' on you!

Peggle: Casual Gaming Brilliance

About 200 million people are about to have a revelation. The 100 million or so casual game players outside Japan are going to say "Wow. Now I get why Pachinko is so appealing!". The 100 million or so people in Japan are going to say "Wow. How can I ever go back to Pachinko?"

I've had to bite my lip for a long time about Popcap's Peggle, a game I've really been excited about. It's really slick. It's easy, it's polished, it has wide appeal (my 3 year olds are equally hooked, and my son may be better at it than I am by the week's end).

Go play!

Congrats to the gang at Popcap for such a great piece of work. I'd be very suprised if this isn't every bit as successful as Zuma over the next year.

Understanding Games

Via Raph comes this awesome pointer to a couple Kongregate titles.

Just as Understanding Comics is to comics, Understanding Games is (attempting to be) to games. An interactive game that explains the fundamentals of the medium. Brilliant. Andreas Zecher is the creator.

Part 1
Part 2

It's ambitious, but he's starting simple and I applaud the effort.

GDC 2007: Event highlights and thoughts on the future

OK, final post on GDC (I think. No promises). Some miscellanous notes on the conference this year, and some thoughts on directions for GDC.

• I was looking at a friend's GDC blog post and realized that - Holy Cow! - I never even set foot on the show floor this year. Was it in the west hall? north hall? I don't even know! I did walk through one of hte smaller booth areas on the way to/from the MS suite, but that's it. First time in the 13 years I've attended (of course, my first year the show floor was about a dozen 8' draped tables and that's it).
• Something weird happened over the past year to where about one third of the time people introduced me to someone they knew by saying "This is Kim, he blogs at...", and the other two thirds of the time was "This is Kim, he works at Microsoft doing...". That totally threw me for a loop. I thought there were only a couple dozen people that read this thing. Anyhow, neat.
• Greg Costikyan's Maverick Award acceptance speech is a thing of beauty.
• Justin's 'Passively Multiplayer Online Game' poster session. Lots of unsolved problems (he griped about how many times he was asked "how can it be monetized?"), but the guy is onto something.
• I attended the Second Life party. OK, the second lifers are as nuts in person as in the metaverse. The piped-in-dj-from-second-life was kinda cool. Being lewdly accosted by a second lifer at the bar was strangely uncool (uh, "I love you" is no way to greet a nice canadian boy like me!). I have a theory that some of the attendees were from of SL's more questionable online 'businesses'. Makes for interesting parties anyway.
• The minna mingle (casual games assoc party) was cool, but the hidden secret was the rockin DJ/guitarist combo (Chris Clouse and DJ Solomon) and ensuing party playing at Slide next door. Way better than any show party :-).
• Espetus is most awesome restaurant every for low-carb folk. "You sit at a table. A river of unending charbroiled meats approaches. You have a green and red wheel, a cocktail, and a fried plantain." Sounds like it should be a snippet from Kingdom of Loathing.

Thoughts on GDC

Overall, Raph sums it up nicely, and I agree with his points.

• The "infusion of E3" that happened came in three forms. (1) E3-esque booths and product exhibits (I have to wonder whether some people really think through WHY they are exhibiting at a show and considering who their audience is). (2) Press looking for hints as to next Xmas' stuff have always been interested in GDC, but perhaps now are thinking this is last chance for a while, and (3) all the E3 business meetings just packed up and moved to GDC. It's this last one that is killing GDC for me. I really want to attend GDC for the sessions and networking. Not to spend more than half the time in a meeting room. Now, granted, that's my job, but a balance needs to be struck, or I need to find somewhere else to get the mind-expanding bit of GDC.
• The size of the conference is making the networking/social bits difficult. Spreading things out to a couple halls doesn't help. GDC Prime doesn't help.
• GDC Prime rubbed me the wrong way for a couple reasons. I heard mixed reviews from the couple attendees I spoke to, but am curious what others thought.

One more thing: I hinted at it in a softball way in the news.com article, still think that GDC is at real risk of super-nova'ing like E3, Comdex, and other shows have. It's getting very expensive to attend, exhibit at, or cover. Segment- or market-specific conferences may be a better spend for many here. The issue isn't whether it's a valuable show. The question is whether it's the BEST use of money given teh choice.

As an example, GDC next year is moving to Feb. Which means there's a very real risk of it overlapping with Casual Connect (FKA Casuality) in Amsterdam. If that's the case, I very likely will NOT attend GDC for the first time in 14 years. Casuality is a better bang-for-the-buck show for me. (Of course MS as a corporation would likely do both, but I'm speaking from my personal POV).

Now, to Jamil, Kathy, and the others at GDC, this will seem like lunacy coming off the heels of the biggest-gdc-ever. Of course, that's the same kind of hubris that the owners of E3 had up until a year ago...

GDC 2007: Sessions I attended

As I stated earlier, I only attended a small number of sessions. In ranked order, they were:

1. Clint Hocking's presentation on (self) Exploration in Games.

Clint's own post-mortem on the session, along with the slides and accompanying paper, can be found here. (Note that the talk was written as a paper first, like I did here, and like he, I and some others discussed here).

Clint is the awesome. At some point I decided that if I'm going to a conference where he's speaking, I block that time to attend and schedule around that. The guy takes some hard topic ideas, dives after them, and does some serious work on both the research and the resulting presentation. Clint is my presentation hero :-). Go read the paper, or get the short version in the gamasutra coverage here. (or buy the Mp3 version here, if reading is more painful to you than parting with $8 :-)

2. How Casual Games Will Kill the Console (and Why That's a Good Thing)

John Welch, President of Playfirst, gave a really good session that I'm surprised wasn't blogged more widely. John subscribes to the same Geoffrey Moore school of thought that I do, and he led the audience through a well thought-out argument about how open markets win, and how games will be no exception. Plenty of good analogies from other mediums & markets, and a good presentation style to boot. I beleive his pitch was right on the money, and is the long-term light at the end of the tunnel that Greg Costikyan presented during the rant session. Speaking of which:

3. Burning Mad: Game Publishers Rant

The rant session is always entertaining, enlightening, and provocative. This year's was a little more mixed, which is why this falls midpoint on my list. Some rants fell flat, while others were well prepared and thought through. Details on the sessions here. My short comments on each:

• Great: Chris Hecker's Anti-Wii rant. Already blogged in detail around the web. I agree, and he's my hero for having stones to get up and say it, even if he regrets the way in which it was taken.
• Great: Nicole Bradford's "excite the young'uns using games" rant. It was a strong message, well written, and well rehearsed. A lot of similarities (and no, I am not refering to race nor gender similarities) to Majora Carter's TED speech I blogged about a while back. Perhaps that's the style/effect she was aiming for? The only thing making me rate this one second is that it was perhaps a bit TOO rehearsed for the GDC rant session. It's supposed to come off as a rant; a little rough around the edges. That commentary aside, she was very good.
• Good: Greg Costikyan's "wolf in digital distribution clothing" aka "the consoles will be our new overlords" rant. Greg is always a little understated in presentation style, but I beleive his to be the most insightful of all the rants. I beleive his argument is absolutely on the money and one that developers/publishers should keep in mind. And yeah, I say that despite his bagging on Arcade, and despite his misnaming Arcade 'Xbox Live Arena'.
• Good: Richard Hilleman's Leadership rant. Spot on topic, well delivered, if a little understated for the flavor of gdc rant.
• Good: Lee Jacobson's "some devs pull some funky sh*t" rant. A good look at walking in the other man's shoe that hopefully let devs understand why the evil publisher sometimes needs to be as evil as he is :-)
• Poor: Jason Della Rocca's "I read some books this year" rant. Uh, sorry J, you're a friend, but that was a pretty shoddy rant. (a) it was more or less a repeat of Seamus' rant from last year, and (b) it was far less specific. It also made a pretty big assumption: That the rest of the industry doesn't already dabble in other media by reading books, viewing movies, etc. I don't know what your IGDA polls are telling you, but many of the devs I hang with are the biggest renaissance men & women I know, reading far more, and far more varied fare, than most folk I know outside the industry. Gotta ding you for this one buddy, sorry.
• Poor: Alex St John's yet-another-vista-rant. I've addressed this in the IGDA Casual Games Sig Q&A, but I think he's overstating the issue, and came off looking that way. No real call to action anyway, though I'm sure he's pitching his company's product as a solution in other sessions/meetings. Whatever.

4. Innovation in Indie Games

An interesting and entertaining panel during the Indie games track. I commented to Jon Blow after the session that he came off as the time-tempered old veteran of the panel, whereas just a few years ago it seems he would very much have filled the raging, stand by your principles and damn-the-torpedos role that this year was filled by Jonathan Mak (creator of the brilliant Everyday Shooter). A summary of the session can be found here.

5. Jeff Minter 'keynote' from Indie Games Summit

Hrm. Jeff's a pretty poor speaker, didn't have a well thought out message to give people (other than perhaps "do your own thing") and labored through a bunch of demos of old games saying "I didn't want this to be a clone of X", and then would show us a clone of X where some element had been replaced by a bunch of wildlife. Sorry dude, but replacing a space ship with a camel doesn't exactly make it innovative. To boot, he was rude during Q&A by ignoring audience member questions while playing his own games on screen.

There were a couple highlights: (1) Space Giraffe does look to be an LSD-like trippy game. (2) I like than an equally, ahem, alternate substance afficionado got up to ask a question along the lines of "so, this is a game where I can take alternate substances and trip out while I play?" and he answered "alternate substances are optional, but yeah". Kindred spirits. (3) Clever wordplay when he said his small indie games that are visual-rich but not aimed at the commercial big time were "about electronic art, not Electronic Arts".

6. Sony PS3 keynote

This has been covered to death elsewhere, and I'm not listing it last because I'm a microsoft guy. I just wasn't wowed. I have two things to say:

I was asked *a lot* what I thought about PS3 'Home' while at GDC. Here's my opinion: It looked like the software embodiment of a knee-jerk reaction. It was a feature list, implemented, and wrapped into a demo. It's basically like someone said "Go do Xbox Live, Mii's, Habbo Hotel, and some of the better bits of Second Life". They concatenated those feature lists and then built it. Only then did it seem they said "what might we then do with it?". Rather than starting with "what do we want people to be able to do?". Many of the demos were about technically impressive things as a result. Few were 'omygosh gotta have!'. Mostly, I saw things that would be HARDER to do/use as a result of having been done prettier or in 3D.

On the other hand, LittleBigWorld looks *really* good. I really would like to have a go at playing it.

GDC 2007: Post-mortem on my sessions

I sat on two panels, and also gave a sponsored session. Here's my thoughts on each and the results thereof.

Console/PC Distribution Gatekeepers

I sat on this panel moderated by Simon Carless. Other panelists included people from Sony,
Manifesto games, and Gametap. There was supposed to be someone from Nintendo but he backed out. The panel got covered here, here, and here, and if interested, you can buy an audio transcript here.

I think I did OK, though I gave pretty middle-of-the-road answers. Panels are more entertaining when provocative, and several people afterward picked up on the fact that I failed to bite on some obvious opportunities to stir things up a bit (e.g. I've griped about GameTap before). This was a case where I felt I was more "the Microsoft guy" on the panel, rather than just "kim pallister", and so had to take the high (less-risky-but-less-entertaining) road. Oh well.

I do think I acheived the goal of letting the indie games track attendees better understand how to get their titles on Xbox Live Arcade and MSN Games, which was the main reason I was there. We had a few hundred people in the room and I was swamped by about 20 people afterward with questions about just that.

I give myself a B+.

Casual Games and Windows Vista: The Real Story on What It Means For Casual Games

This was a sponsored session braindump on Vista, Games explorer, GDF files, etc, etc, from the perspective of casual games. Very much along the lines of what my Q&A with the IGDA Casual Games SIG Quarterly covered.

The session got covered at Josh Bancroft's blog (Intel bloggers? WTF? when did that happen. bully for them).

This type of session is a brain dump and while you can try to convey the information in an engaging manner, it's never quite as fun to give as a more creative presentation (see my post about my MIGS06 presentation for more on this).

While I think I helped some attendees, and had some positive feedback after the talk, I still give myself a B- on this one.

Sharing Control

This panel was moderated by David Edery, a co-worker of mine. However, he wasn't a coworker at the time he set up the panel and invited me. I certainly had less business being on the panel than the others up there (Raph Koster, Ray Muzyka, Matt Brown...), but pinged David about it when he was putting together the panel because at the time we were working on the details around hosting Cranium's Pop5 game - a web-based casual game featuring user-created content.

So, I was about to contribute and I think I got some positive reaction out of the audience and brought a different perspective to the table. I was happy with it overall. I give myself an A-.

The highlight for me was that I used my MIGS05 UGC anecdote, and the guy that gave the Mona Lisa comment at the MIGS session was in the audience for this panel and came up afterward to point out that he was the guy. Cool!

The session got covered here.

GDC2007: The Pedantic Stats Post

I was inspired by a post by Mark Deloura about his trip to to DICE in which he tracked stats about how he was spending his time. I decided to do the same at GDC. I carried a little notepad with me and made a few tickmarks about how I spent my time over the course of the week. Here are the details:

Over 5 days, I met & had conversations (I counted anything beyond a 2 minute discussion as a 'conversation') with 232 people.

108 of those were people I already knew, and 124 of those were people I met for the first time (or didn't recall meeting previously). I had 22 meetings with developers/publishers (more on this in a later post)

The 5 days were pretty much 8am to midnight (or much later) every day, so roughly 80 hours. Of that, I spent 22 hours in meetings, 3 hours presenting and/or panels, 8 hours preparing for sessions, and 7 hours attending sessions. I slept 21 hours over 5 nights, which pretty much explains how I felt Saturday morning, and also why I caught a cold that followed me home.

I spent 4 hours at parties. Pretty conservative compared to past years. I logged another 4 at the CMP suite, which given the caliber of conversation was arguably a productive use of time, at least I think it was, but I'm a little foggy. :-/

OK, so what did I learn from my scribbles? First off, I hope that I do the same next year and can use it as a benchmark of sorts. Second, I either need to attend more sessions, or share my pass with someone. I had a speaker pass, so it didn't cost me anything, but still, I didn't get much use out of it. Finally, time spent prepping for sessions was ineffective, and should have been done ahead of time. Part of this was thrust upon me fairly late in the days leading up to GDC. Still though, that 8 hours could have been spent doing business or doing general elbow-rubbing.

Next year, I have to carry a pedometer with me so I can measure my TFF.

Begin the GDC posts!

OK, a day late and a dollar short (well, a week late and only my 2c worth), I have a series of GDC-related posts. Other than the previous "In defense of Hecker" post, I was a little to burnt out post-gdc to do any of these. I took the week off and spent most of it running kids around to school, optometrist, ballet class, gym, etc, etc.

Anyhow, I have a bunch of stuff to say about GDC but figured I'd break it up.

First off, my post in defense of Chris Hecker's GDC rant got Joystiq'd, and if the amount of fanboi wrath I incurred is any indicatin of the heat he's taking, then wow, I feel for the guy.

Hope it all blows over and we can put it behind us.

Anyhow, onto the gdc posts...

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In Defense of Chris Hecker

Just got back from GDC last night. A day has passed and I am still *spent*. Didn't help to get back to the airport to find my car battery dead either. *sigh*. A half-hour and a pair of jumper cables later and I was on my way home.

I plan on doing a pretty lengthy post about GDC, sessions, impressions, etc, but I wanted to first post my thoughts on the Chris Hecker, Wii-rant debacle.

So, for those coming up to speed, here's the short version:

GDC has had a 'rant' session three years running (summary of 2005, 2006, 2007 ). In one of the rants from this year's session, Chris Hecker (who works for EA/Maxis) gave a rant about the Nintendo Wii in which he called it a 'piece of sh**', also claiming that Nintendo doesn't care about games as art. The short version of the fallout is that the game bloggers all had a simultaneous blogo-gasm over the provided provocative headline, the Nintendo fanboys decended upon the internet with torches and pitchforks, and I'd imagine that EA's PR depart told them to get in line and wait till they were done getting medievel on his heiney. Hecker issued an apology the next day, but the torches and pitchforks continue to flame/poke on the web, and I'd imagine there are many calling for his head on a pike around the EA PR office. Perhaps they'll end up getting it.

With all the noise on the subject, I'm not sure my two cents is worth even that, but I'm going to give my opinion on the subject for those who care.

First off, I think it's clear he made a huge mistake, not knowing the weight and impact his statement would have, and more importantly, how it would be associated with his role at EA. Chris has spent the past (10? more?) years working as an indie. He's well known (more on this later), but it's different when the press can say "Spore Developer says...". Now, while I think he made a mistake not thinking about impact, I *agree* with what he said - at least if taken in the context of the talk as well as the rant session.

Chris' talk and it's intent have to be taken with the Rant session's setting in mind. People over state for purposes of firing up the room and to bring issues to the surface in hopes that people will consider those issues, discuss them, and perhaps do something about them.

My own read on Chris' intent with his talk was as follows:

• That while people have raved about their innovative controller and the more risk-taking games they have brought to market, this should not give them a 'get out of jail free card' on the fact that they have delivered an underpowered machine.
• That while it is certainly possible to deliver works of art in a minimalist fashion, artists shouldn't be REQUIRED to do so. (Just because it's possible to render fantastic art using only a piece of charcoal, that doesn't mean artists can't also accomplish a more varied spectrum of work using color, if you'll pardon the pun). This is as valid an argument as that of the people saying that "high def doesn't mean better games". Amen. [Worth noting that Hecker's rant last year was anti-Sony and anti-MS, chastising the two platforms for being graphics-heavy and general-computation-light]
• The other part of his talk was chastising Nintendo's focus on lighter-weight fare and on 'fun' as being detrimental to the industry's efforts on getting games taken seriously as art. While I agree less with this one, I do think it was valuable to state, if for no other reason to get people having the conversation.

Since the talk, Chris has taken a lot of heat, and a lot of people have said some not-so-nice things about him. He's got thick skin, but it's got to be tough to have that many people coming down on you.

The Nintendo fanboys and others that are responsible for coming down on him like that should at the very least put this one rant in perspective with the rest of Chris' work. He won the IGDA community contribution award last year, and a ton of people said fantastic things about him. I still beleive those things are true. I respect Chris a great deal and would ask that those that are reacting to this one rant try to look past it and at the bigger picture.

Robin's Sims

Robin's game project, MySims, has been announced, and it looks totally sweet. Like syrupy sweet. It looks like everything is made of candy!

I know a game like this has a huge number of people on it, all contributing, but I have to say that I've never seen a game that just oozed one person's personality as much as this one does. Coincidence? Perhaps.

Either way I'm super happy for her and her team and am looking forward to playing it (might have to buy that Wii or DS after all. Have been holding out so far)

"we posted said email... and the internet imploded"

...Kotaku, on their posting an email from Sony's PR group, blacklisting them due to posting/commenting on rumors, and the subsequent fallout.

Sigh. Where to begin?

This post sums up the story from Kotaku's side. In short, Kotaku posted on a rumor of what may be in Phil Harrison's GDC keynote. Sony's PR freaked out, Kotaku stood their ground (way to go Brian C) and posted Sony's reaction to boot, and then the Internet imploded.

Presumably, at this point Howard Stringer got a call from Al Gore saying "leggo my Internet", and Sony backed off and apologized. The Internet is back up, and the various Brians and such at Kotaku can attend Sony's GDC functions and eat expensive puff pastries while getting dirty looks from PR guys in striped shirts.

OK, kids, what have we learned?

• Refusing to comment on rumor is moderately effective. It's neutral. Reacting to rumor this way is essentially the equivalent of posting a rehearsal of the keynote on GooTube. If I didn't feel confident it was true before, I sure do now.
• The internets & the press, *especially* the blogging press, love a good scandal. It's way bigger story than whatever your keynote is going to contain, and customers aren't going to like it.
• People at a big company can get so wound up about self-importance that things get out of perspective. The keynote will still go fine, and even if you yourself leaked what was going to be in the keynote, people would still show up to see it. Perhaps more so. Don't kid yourself. I personally doubt the value of 'the reveal' in this case. I think the keynote would get 10x coverage if they put out a press release that was 7 words long: "avatars, acheivements, more. Show up and see"

Now, PR fustercluck aside, the rumored Sony offering of 'Gamerscore + achievements + Mii's + Habbo Hotel' sounds pretty compelling. I'm looking forward to seeing it... and competing against it.

As my friend Casey once put it... "Now the dancing turns German".

The Arcade, the Artist and the Algorithm

Raph Koster pointed to this lovely set of images from artist Rosemarie Fiore, that are all long-exposure shots of old arcade games (mostly old color vector games, though Qix was a raster setup, IIRC).

It occurred to me that you could probably get similar shots by getting the source code to MAME, and either switching off back-buffer clears while doing some post processing on the back buffer. Not sure you'd have the same beauty in the final result though.

My GDC Sessions

For those interested, here are my GDC sessions this year:

Console/PC Distribution Gatekeepers (Kim Pallister, Microsoft; Jason Holtman, Valve; John Hight, Sony; Sandy Resnick, GameTap; Moderator: Simon Carless, IGF)
Monday - 11.15am - 12.10pm
This vital panel talks to the employees who evaluate submissions for some of the major indie game distribution channels on both console and PC, talking about how to pitch your game to get on these services, exactly what the gatekeepers are looking for, approaches to royalties, and much more.

Casual Games and Windows Vista: The Real Story on What It Means For Casual Games
Wednesday 12.00pm - 1:00pm
Vista provides casual gamers with a whole new games experience, enriched by graphics and features that were not possible on previous operating systems. Join Microsoft Casual Games for a deep-dive on how Vista benefits the casual game developer and enhances the casual games experience. This session will cover challenges and opportunities in development and distribution, and what it means for the casual games community.

Sharing Control: Moderator David Edery, Worldwide Games Portfolio Planner, Xbox Live Arcade), Raph Koster (President, Areae, Inc.), Kim Pallister (Microsoft), Ray Muzyka (CEO, BioWare Corp.), Matt Brown (Technical Director/Design Director, Maxis/Electronic Arts) Friday 10:30am - 11:30am
This year's GDC theme is "Take Control", but this next generation of gaming should be equally remarkable for its emphasis on broadband-enabled social systems, multiplayer games, and user-generated content. This panel will grapple with the benefits and challenges of *sharing control* with gamers. Issues include: how can developers involve consumers in the design process, how can user-generated content help and harm a game, what are the best ways to prevent "low quality" UGC from frustrating the community, and how can user-driven marketing be encouraged?

A keen eye might note both me and David are from MS and are on teh same panel. David didn't work at Microsoft when he submitted and organized the panel! Nevertheless, I promise to be a slight pain in his butt during the panel so as to remove any appearance of corporate favoritism :-)

An even keener eye might also note that I was scheduled to host the blogger's get together at GDC. Because of a conflict with the 3rd session above, I've had to hand it off. Darius Kazemi was kind enough to step up and cover that. He da man.

Come by the sessions and say hi!

If stoner doodles were animated

As Steve puts it:

If you’ve ever played Line Rider, you are completely owned by this video. Just give up now.




This is complete Line Rider pownage. It occurred to me watching it though that it was like a moving version of the doodles that stoners in high school (yours truly included) would draw on their notebooks (back when notebook meant paper, not a $2000 computer).

Long time no update

Sorry blogosphere, I've been busy. Work, kids, wife, getting ready for GDC, etc.

I also have to admit that I've sunk an ungodly amount of time into Saint's Row on the 360 lately. Just an hour or two a day but it adds up! Anyhow, here's an update on that and a number of other games I've had some time with.

Saints Row:

• Saint's Row is good, if you like the GTA-3 style sandbox games.
• I thought the missions/story/writing/etc was pretty good. No one's winning a pulitzer, but hey, it's as good as other high end game titles out there.
• I'm all for 'games for grownups', and with the language and content to suit it - where it helps the story. There were a few (not many) places where it was so over the top that it detracted from the story and felt more... adolescent. The escort missions (where you drive around a call girl and her client, trying to avoid the paparazzi while they get their freak on) were just over the top. Didn't add to it.
• A couple of the aside-from-story activities (eg. Hitman, Chop Shop) felt totally like a needle in a haystack. Even more true for the music cd's and tag locations all over the city. There was little in the way of a feedback mechanism to let the player know they were on the right track. For example, Hitman should have let you ask passers-by (by shaking them down, bribing them, etc) if they'd seen someone, letting you do the time-based equivalent of a sonar ping; "he was here 3 minutes ago".
• I finished the story long ago. The amount of work to mop up all the onesy-twosey 10 point acheivements is pretty high - so why won't I put it down?

Lost Planet:

• Played it through to end of first boss. Maybe that isn't enough to judge it but...
• ...I can't beleive people are rating this game as high as they are.
• Writing is attrocious. I know some of it is 'lost in translation', but even that's not the whole problem. THe story right out of the gate is full of holes, and then they plug those holes with cliches. Ugh. It's laughable.
• It's pretty. OK, that's good.
• The enemy AI is crap. Boss fights (well, the first one anyway) feel very 1990's.

Crackdown:

• Haven't played it yet, but I *have* it. Maybe tommorrow.

Pacman, Ms Pacman:

• I'm assuming you know these games. If you are an acheivment-chaser, these are pretty easy to bang through to get them all. I have 200/200 on Ms P, and 170/200 on Mr P. Getting all four ghosts with all four powerups on Mr P is pretty hard.

Root Beer Tapper:

• I haven't given this one much of a chance yet, but I'm curious how well I can get used to the controller. Tapper in the arcade was always a button-up/button-down dependant game, where the button was effectively replaced by a keg-tap-lever type of controller. The button might have been better mapped to one of the analog controllers?

OK. Back to GDC planning. I'm doing 3 sessions there. More on that in the next day or two...

Shareware Espresso: Coffee without the DRM

There's a coffee shop startup in Kirkland (a stone's throw from here) started by Ervin Peretz, a programmer at Google, which has been making the news because of their pricing: They don't have any.

Just a black metal lockbox. Order your mint double mochachino extra foam, then just decide what you ought to pay for it and put some money in the box. No one will peek at how much you put in.

Through his "voluntary payment" cafe, Peretz is poised to become the Robin Hood of the Starbucks set. Using an efficient, low-overhead business model and narrow profit margin, he figures he can finesse the largesse of well-off latte lovers to cover the tabs of the less fortunate. The idea emerged during a booze-fueled debate in a Saigon bar, where Peretz and a colleague had traveled to blow off steam after a period of long hours at work.

OK, any entrepeneur whose business plan was devised "during a booze-fueled debate in a Saigon bar" has my official stamp of approval! I like the guy already.

Will be interesting to see if it pans out. In a high-end neighborhood like this one in Kirkland, it's likely it could work. Would the same thing fly in a rougher-around-the-edges urban area, likely not.

I can't help but think that there's some similarity here to the no-drm music sites starting up. PC usage is of course far more anonymous, but there's there's some similarity in the cost/convenience side of it. 99 cents for a song is pretty reasonable, as is $2-3 for a latte, or $10-$20 for a premium casual game.

Is there a demographic equivalent to the high-end neighborhood in the coffee case? If you shipped casual games without DRM, would the bulk of the paying customers CONTINUE to be paying customers? Esp if you could somehow make payment easier as a result? I dunno.

Web 2.0 - The Machine is Us/ing Us

Everyone on the web will link to this, because it's the most concise explanation of Web 2.0 seen to date, and is entertaining and inspiring to boot.

Crowdsourcing: New name, same old story

Robin posted a link to this Wired story on "Crowdsourcing". While the word is a clever portmanteau and play on 'outsourcing', after reading the article, I don't really feel there's anything all that new here.

This is yet another story of disruptive technology (in this case, the internet & online community technologies) allowing new business models to rapidly displace incumbents.

The first example they discuss is iStockphoto. In this case, it's Internet + online community + cheap professional grade digital photography combining to disrupt the stock photography business. (More on this in a minute)

The second example include user-created video content. America's Funniest Home videos was perhaps the advent of this; with the proliferation of cheap camcorders. The current 'wave' of sites and soon network shows taking advantage of this have just added Internet + community to the disruptive technology brew.

The also look at examples of 'crowdsourced' R&D and menial problem solving. But in all cases, it's the same thing: The internet solves the distribution of labor problem, and the community tech solves the 'how to connect to the right person on the internet' problem.

New name, but its the same old thing. No different than when the word processor displaced the typewriter, or (to use my favorite Guy Kawasaki example) when the advent of refrigeration displaced the ice harvesting business.

Now, back to the iStockPhoto example, there's another interesting lesson here. From the article:

"In 2000, Harmel made roughly $69,000 from a portfolio of 100 stock photographs, a tidy addition to what he earned from commissioned work. year his stock business generated less money – $59,000"

And they are implying that the stock-photo side of his business will eventually go to zero. Note though, that his commissioned work business, at least as far as we know, is unaffected.

There's still value in the service side of his business. It's the product side that's been commoditized.

Feb Carnival of Gamers is up

As of a few days ago. I only just now noticed it. Check it out here.

We now return you to regularly scheduled programming

Bonjour Blogosphere,

Apologies for going dark for a while, but I had a bunch of things line up on top of each other that kept me fairly busy.

As stated in the previous post, my son Matthew was born just over a week ago. He's a delightful little fellow who's actually pretty low maintenance; at least when compared to our experience with preemie twins. Alisa's doing most of the work (alas, I am without the means to feed him), but I've been shuttling the twins to school, swimming lessons, etc. Had a nice outing yesterday taking my daughter to Fry's for the first time. "Daddy, I LIKE that big tv!". *sniff* *that's my girl*

However, I've not been exactly idle from work at the same time. I had a bunch of Vista-enhanced casual games being released in time for the Vista launch; a bunch of work in getting some Vista-related developer documentation together, and was helping with a bunch of the aspects of getting our crew ready for the Casual Connect conference (F.K.A 'Casuality') in Amsterdam this coming week, even though I don't get to go this year >:-(

On top of that, I upgraded my home dev machine to Vista RTM, and have the SW set up to join the XNA Creators Club, should I ever get around to dusting off my coding chops.

Allo!!!

Hi.



My name is Matthew and I'm the reason my dad's not been blogging lately.


See more pics of me here.

Dad will be back blogging in the near future...

Hopes for Game Innovation "Crushed"

... and by this I mean they are alive and well.

I *love* the idea behind Crush from Kuju. SWEETNESS! Go watch. You'll get it.