Book Review: The Black Swan

While travelling this week I finished Nassim Teleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and I give it a rating of... well... so-so.

I do so not because it lacks any good ideas - this is not the case - but because of two things.

First, the author writes with such contempt for, well, most of humanity it would seem, and with such an arrogance, that I found myself wavering between being amused and being annoyed. At times it just distracted from the book's content.

Secondly, while the book's central premise is sound, and there are a few discussions about how it can be applied, it really is a 'one idea book'. As well, like many 'one idea' books (Chris Anderson's The Long Tail and Free come to mind), the author stretches the idea a bit too far and to too many areas. e.g. Why did MS beat Apple in the early days of the PC? luck certainly played a role but to say it's the ENTIRE reason is a bit of a stretch).

On the plus side, the idea is sound. The central premise is that people fall prey to two things:

(1) They under-estimate the risk of 'black swans' - unforeseen events that disprove models and rules governing a market or force us to reexamine fundamental assumptions, and (2) that when these events occur, they can be massively larger that we anticipate.

There are many illustrative examples in the book, and many more come to mind. Models of real estate prices prior to the recent downturn; understanding of what the phone market looked like before iPhone shipped (how many planners at Motorola had that plotted on their curves? Likely none!), etc.

The author doesn't suggest that because we can't plan/forecast that we then just throw our hands up and do nothing. Rather, he suggests that we always examine fundamental assumptions, understand that models are built on simplified models, and always attempt to quantify the risk if a black swan occurs.

As someone that does silicon requirements forecasting for a living I found the book to be both useful and disheartening. Disheartening in that I can think of so many occasions that our fundamental assumptions turn out to be wrong (by 'we' I mean the entire industry), but useful in that it's given me food for thought about how to account for the unknown. To ask not just "what should our plans be?", but ask "what's the worst case if they are wrong?"

So, if after reading my warnings earlier in this review, the book still sounds interesting, then give it a go. Once you sift past the ego and the contempt, there are some useful bits there.

(Note, several people commented that the author's prior book Fooled by Randomness, is better. I haven't yet read it, but thought I'd pass that along)

KZero Virtual World dataporn

Raph points us to Kzero (a market research company looking at virtual worlds) and their awesome data visualization of the growth of virtual worlds. I'm a sucker for data porn, and this shows up the worlds split by age demographic, size, and launch date.

Would love to have this as a poster, but for now, here it is in pieces (note that some of these are from last year - guess you have to pay them to get the whole, er, pie.

Book Review: The White Tiger

One part dark comedy, one part Slumdog Millionaire, The White Tiger is a story of an poor Indian boy whose opportunism-cloaked-in-entrepreneurism lets him ascend the social order - to a point - from which further ascension requires a much darker undertaking.

Very entertaining and funny, but with page-gripping parts. A very palpable painting of Indian life as modern progress has thrown the caste system and social order into great disarray.

Ideo on the future of the book

Futurist concept demo on ebook ideas. Touches on some of the ideas I discussed a while back.

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

Book Review: EPUB Straight to the Point

In a previous post, I mentioned how I've been spending some thinking about ebooks and digital readers. As well, I've been reading a bunch about typography and things having to do with print on screens.

One of the books I picked up was EPUB Straight to the Point: Creating ebooks for the Apple iPad and other ereaders, which was recommended by several blogs of experts in the segment, largely because I think it's on only texts in this space that covers Ebooks on the iPad in depth.

Overall the book was too easy for me, though it might be acceptable for non-technical types. There was too much time on step-by-step instructions on how to replace fields in the XML source files, etc, but again, some people may want exactly that.

On the plus side, the author has tested most of the e-Reader devices out there right now, talking about limitations of each one. Some of these are device related, but most have to do with how the implementers of the devices made different assumptions and trade-offs when interpreting the still-wet EPUB standard.

Other than the comment about it being too easy, my only other complaint is this: while the author spends a fair amount of time on making EPUB books 'device proof' between device implementations, she doesn't spend any time making the books 'future proof'. That is, thinking about how they'll display/work on future devices. For example she suggests not using images whose resolution exceeds those of the display, but then those books may one day be displayed on higher resolution screens.

Other than this, it's a recommended book for less technical folk looking to publish or understand EPUB books.

5 Reasons Apple could beat Facebook, and 5 Reasons They Won't

[In the interest of trying to do some better crystal ball gazing, I'm trying a new approach to posts where I try to put some rigor into both sides of an argument. I'll tag these as "TechWafflin"]

After Apple's announcement of Ping at their recent love-fest, a number of pundits were quick to claim a war was brewing where Jobs would take on Facebook. Others were equally quick to claim that this wasn't the case, or that if it was Apple would fail.

The most commonly cited reason for the pro-FB sentiment was "Facebook is too big to be beat" (due to critical mass, revenue, momentum, ecosystem, etc). It burns me when people take this position. Yes, Facebook has these advantages, but saying that FB can't be beat is ridiculous. How many times have we heard someone was too big to beat only to have them, well, be beat? AOL, Yahoo, Everquest, Myspace, IBM... people used to say this about General Motors, and years later they needed a taxpayer funded defibrillator.

Anyhow, the fatalist attitude aside, Facebook's momentum and entrenchment are indeed a factor. My previous thinking was that they'd be beat by an entrant quietly addressing a niche with a better product and growing up from under them.

However, the Apple entry got me thinking and I beleive they have a few factors that mean they in fact could take on Facebook and give them a run for their money. Here are five reasons I think that's the case.

5 Reasons Apple could beat Facebook

1. http://www.kimpallister.com/2009/09/its-complicated-or-beating-facebook.html: Apple has ~150M iTunes users and can piggyback a social network into that installed base with an iTunes update. Also, they could offer any number of incentives to connect with friends.
2. The relationship Apple has with those 150M people is already a trusted and trained relationship with a tie to content people care about (music, movies, games...). Another way to think about this is that the majority of those 150M people have asked Apple to keep their credit card numbers on file.
3. The iTunes economy may be bigger than the Facebook economy. Not sure about ad revenue on both side, but one way people should be looking at #1 above is asking ($150 iTunes users * Avg User Yearly iTunes Spend) > (500M FB users * Avg User Yearly FB Spend).
4. Apple has a warchest of $40B. Yes, FB has real revenue and it's estimated to be as high as $2B for 2010, but at the same time, Apple made in excess of that number every two weeks through the last quarter.
5. Apple has a better relationship and level of interest with the developer community. Neither platform has been perfect, but Apple's been improving their policies over time, where FB's recent gaffs seem to show developer satisfaction is pretty low on their list.

OK, now taking the other side...

Again, most people cite Facebook momentum. A factor, but not a given. Top most argument for me is that Apple seem to be doing fine screwing this up for themselves before FB need bother respond. Anyhow, here are five reasons Apple won't topple FB:

1. Ping is shop-centric instead of user-centric. Too much thinking around "how can people help other people BUY", not just "how can people connect and share".
2. Not considering FB's shortcomings: It seems Apple's being a bit lazy, and is launching Ping as nothing more than "its a SN, connected to iTunes". They don't have to look far to find a list of things they could actually do BETTER than FB. Better privacy policy, developer platform or policy, relationship control, or as I've talked about, tracking relationships as nouns rather than adjectives.
3. Arrogance. Just as FB's arrogance could be their downfall, Apple's arrogance could be their guarantee of failure. Saying things like "Privacy is easy", are a clear indicator that they either don't take it seriously or haven't thought about it. Allowing users to view, grok, control, and evolve the exposure of information and content over their entire network is a really hard problem that is not going to get easier.
4. Closed Ecosystem mentality (vs open). It's on their software, their devices and adding features as they see fit. As opposed to a liberal policy embracing 3rd party platform vendors to accelerate your platforms development.
5. Fragmented effort from Apple. To me it seems that simultaneously launching Ping while also launching Game Center is indicative of a fragmented strategy at best, or a complete lack of one at worst. Ideally (for them anyway) Apple would have a SN for their iTunes platform, and then all activity over your SN could be tapped by their music services, game services, etc. Instead we have two different systems?

Looking at the latter list, it doesn't bode well for Apple's attempt. Still Zuckerberg would do well to adopt Andy Grove's mantra, "Only the Paranoid Survive". Apple is a well-armed, credible contender that has bellied up to the bar - it's now just a question of whether it came in looking for a fight.

Great analysis of a Kickstartr-funded project

Craig Mod (whom I recently had the pleasure of traversing the Mexican desert with - but that's another story) posted a great write up of his (successful) efforts to use Kickstartr to raise money to fund a print run of his book.

The analysis he does of Kickstartr funding tier levels, time periods, etc, make it well worth the read. I've ordered a copy of the book. It looks beautiful. Cloth-bound in a silk-screened cover.

It's as equally applicable to game-funding efforts as it is to book publishing. (i.e. Indies reading this should be thinking 'collectors-edition boxes!'.

Book Review: Dot Font Talking About Fonts

Dot Font Talking About Fonts is a collection of essays culled from CreativePro.com, the website run by John D Berry, the author. The essays focus on typography, design, fonts, their creators, and a good measure of history on the subject, of which he has prolific knowledge.

I've been reading a lot about typography lately, mostly related to the subject of eBooks and eReaders. I beleive they are going to usher in a whole new era in digital typography, and thought it wise to start versing myself in some of the challenges there.

The book offers a great deal, but also disappoints on a couple fronts. Here are the pros/cons and also an interesting games-related takeaway:

Pro: As I said the author's knowledge and respect for the art of typography are top notch. So he's able to draw connections across time and continents to show how modern day type developments have roots going back hundreds of years.

Pro: I learned a ton about nuances of type design, including things like ascenders and descenders, ears, swelled strokes, and light traps, where previously I knew only what a serif was.

Pro: I learned about some of the challenges and resulting compromises made to type designs because they had to adhere to multiple technology platforms (e.g. Sabon was a font commissioned to work in hand-set type systems as well as linotype and monotype hot metal printing systems). there are some parallels to draw with multi-platform games today.

Con: As a neophyte, I might have done better with an introductory text vs this series of expert columns.

Con: The editing done in assembling the book was not top notch. For example, there are reference numbers on occasion with no references. Additionally, Some of the illustrations taken from his column, when shrunk to the size for this small book, are hard to see. Bring a magnifiying glass.

If you are interested in this subject and already somewhat well versed on it and want to go deeper, this book may be for you. Otherwise go with a more structured text.

Dot Font Talking About Fonts

One last note related to games: The author talks about a challenge they had when the industry was granting awards for font designs, when increasing numbers of submissions were just remakes of fonts that'd been culled from some 200 year old italian manuscript, etc. The design was not the submitor's and yet substantial challenge lay in adapting these to the new digital technologies. They created a new category and dubbed it 'font revival'. Anyhow, struck me as similar to some of the discussion about game remakes, sequels, etc. Food for thought.

Book Review: The Big Lie

I recently got done reading The Big Lie: Spying, Scandal, and Ethical Collapse at Hewlett Packard. I enjoyed it for a couple reasons which I’ll get into in a minute.

The Big Lie is a behind-the-scenes account of the “Spygate” scandal that rocked Hewlett-Packard a few years back, and resulted in stepping down of Patty Dunn, the chairman of the board, not to mention criminal prosecution, senate hearings, and all kinds of other goodies.

The Spygate scandal in a nutshell is this: The HP board, in trying to find the source of several leaks to the press of confidential information, authorized a number of security investigations to be conducted by their own security personel as well as some outside contractors. Some of these folks used methods for obtaining phone records and other information that were at minimum highly unethical, and at worst illegal. The information about the investigation became public after a disgruntled board member decided to inform the press. Before any explanation could be proferred, the media had framed the story assuming the worst and from that point it was no longer possible to put the toothpaste back in the tube.

Its important to note that this is an accounting of the story from one point of view, one sympathetic to Patty Dunn. In this one she’s painted as the board chair that tried to institute modern day governance on HP’s board, and that stopping leaks was part of that. From that point, it was part putting trust in others, part not sufficiently monitoring methods used by underlings and contractors, and one part trusting her cohorts even as they were stirring the tar and buying feathers by the bagful.

Other books exist on the subject. Tom Perkins has one out that paints him as the board member whos moral compass impelled him to blow the whistle. The Big Lie paints him as a vindictive bully who’s disagreements with Dunn led him to wanting to destroy her. Other accounts paint CEO Mark Hurd as being distant from the workings of the investigation, where The Big Lie paints him as an intimately involved player who fed Dunn to the wolves to save his own skin.

I’m not sure which account is accurate, though The Big Lie seems very well researched. Chances are that all three of these players has their own version of the truth and that the real truth lies somewhere in between. No matter though, because the book has value regardless who’s story you believe. Here’s why:

1 – It’s a great view into the subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) politics that take place on a board of directors. There are detailed quotes from email passages back and forth, along with interview commentary about why certain things were said or how they were phrased, etc.

2 – It’s a good lesson in how – especially in the age of the Internet – a media spark or two of a story can start a firestorm that is out of control. Having been involved in a few (far less serious than this one!) PR damage control exercises, this one gave me the heeby jeebies!

3 – Most of all, it’s a fascinating look at how highly professional, seemingly ethical people can embark on a well-intentioned course that inch-by-inch one day results in them on the other side of the law, or at least clearly on the side of wrong. It made me think about some people I’ve known that have gotten divorced. They start out as loving each other and well intentioned, and slide down a slope a bit at a time until one day they are hating each other and you wonder “how could they have come to this?”. Anyhow, it’s an interesting look at this facet of people’s character and behavior.

Overall, a good read and recommended for those interested in these types of topics.

Thoughts on iPad, Kindle, and future eReaders

On a mail list I frequent, there were two separate discussions about latest offering out of Cupertino, the iPad.

One of these was about how we unwittingly mortgage our future when we favor closed systems over open ones, and the long-term implications this has for consumers as a whole. That's the subject of another post I'll do another time..

The other discussion thread was about the future of eReaders and eBooks. Since someone on that thread was asking and I'd meant to post on the subject for a while anyway, it seemed time to make some notes. I did so, but then let it sit again for a while. Then this past weekend, I found myself on a sailboat in the Sea of Cortez with Craig Mod, author of this fantastic post on Kindle's implications for an e-book future, and that inspired me to dust off the notes and get them into this post.

I should note at the outset of this hefty list of ideas that not all of them are mine. I stand on the shoulders of (blogging) giants. Craig's and a number of other good posts that stimulated ideas are listed at the end of this post.

Also, I should note that I don't own a Kindle or an iPad. I very much wanted a Kindle (I'm a display technology afficionado and it uses e-Ink!) but opted to hold out because after using a friends a few times, I was disappointed by how much more it *could* have been. In the case of the iPad, the same is true to a lesser degree - it's got the Apple magic - but I feel it still misses as an e-Reader.

So, here I present some ideas in the hope that I can contribute to the conversation and someone will build a better mousetrap (maybe better cheese for the mousetraps is a better metaphor?)

What purpose do books serve?

They serve as many different things to different people. They are containers for ideas: communicating them in a fashion that is both broadcast from author to community and one-to-one conversation between author and reader. They are social objects: Giving a book as a gift or loaning one to a friend says something about both parties and the relationship between them - and augments that relationship in a way - the book is both adjective and verb in that sense. They are part of one's identity: Think of the proudly displayed library many people have.

In this sense, the Kindle seems to have only thought about the book as 'idea container'. As Craig pointed out in his post, there's a whole topic of form vs formless content that isn't addressed well. But beyond this, Amazon and Apple and their ilk are treating the book like it's a thing to be consumed, but no attention is payed to the social aspect. What if I want to share the idea I learned with others, or disagree with it, or debate it? The Nook considered the idea of loaning/gifting books to friends and then did the best they can dealing with publisher licensing silliness, but even then they only thought of it in very limited context.

A clearer example can be found in comics. Scott McCloud said that much of the magic in comics happens in 'the gutter' - the space between the panels. People are excitedly talking about comics on iPad, but mostly about how they might improve (animate, annotate) what is displayed in the panels or the way the panels are displayed. Who's trying to re-think and improve the space between the panels?

How do we consume books?

The e-Ink solutions aimed squarely at the chief complaint about reading on screens - that it's harsh on the eyes. LCDs and CRTs (remember those?) emit light, and which has to contend/compete with whatever environmental lighting is being reflected off the display. the e-Ink solutions depend on using (reflecting) environmental light. Like the dead-tree versions, you can't read them in the dark. Conversely, they work great in direct sunlight where LCDs don't.

Still, this seems like the tip of the iceberg when it comes to making the electronic page as readable (or more readable) than paper. Is there an equivalent of ClearType? Can the rendering of fonts be done differently based on reader viewing angle? Could a camera determine your reading angle and do perspective correction on text so that it appears perpendicular regardless of reading angle (Anisotropic ClearType)? Can the reader use an accelerometer and/or camera to do image stabilization like video cameras do, for readers on a bus or train? Can the bezel have built-in lighting that shifts based on viewing angle (an intelligent booklight)? Maybe tracking with eye movement?

Also, I don't know the specifics of the e-Ink technology causing it, but the "XOR-ing" of the display on page refresh is just horrific. That has GOT to go. At the surface it looks like something solveable with software (and by throwing more memory & compute at the problem) - tracking the state of the framebuffer, comparing the existing one to the desired result, and only spinning the pixels you need to (is spinning the right term for eInk pixels?)

We also consume books differently based on location (at least sometimes). Can geo-location play a role here? If the device sees I'm in bed, default to the novel I was reading last night before falling asleep. And then use the camera to sense if I've fallen asleep and power the device down.

Books and Geolocation

I'd like to see books annotated (by author, editor or crowdsourcing) with geographic data relating to events of passages). Let me walk the streets of London or Paris and follow the paths of characters of favorit books. Conversely, when I'm in a location I find interesting, maybe let me inquire about what books have taken place there in whole or in part. My iphone or ipad should beep when I walk past a location and give me a bit of trivia related to books I've read, much as a friend would; "Hey, this is where that shootout took place in that murder mystery you finished last month".

Social Networks and eReaders

I'm not sure I can think of a form of media that cries out for social network integration more than print. People get very attached to books, and even at the most basic level make a fairly significant time commitment to them. And yet consuming books is usually a solitary act. The book club lets people share the experience, but by constraining when they consume the books and when they discuss them. Forums aren't good at connecting people through existing relationships and you need to find the forum rather than it finding you.

A few ideas of what I'd like to see here:

• Let me layer my some or all of my reading on top of *ALL* my existing social networks. I might want to share my sci-fi reading with everybody, my kids' books with my local PTA and also family, and my business reading with my linkedin group.
• Virtual book clubs are an obvious idea. One could imagine extending this to having discussion topics around particular passages - supported by annotations people make while reading (more on this later).
• Group together findings based on these networks and reading histories ("of the group of you that agreed with this passage, we find you evenly divided on whether you agree on this related work...")
• Let the author engage in conversations directly with the reader if they so choose. "What did you mean by this section here?", "This passage moved me!", etc.
• Let me select a ~100 character quote from a book and automatically tweet it to friends with the source and a shortened URL to the book itself.

Of course authors and readers engaging in conversation leads very quickly down two paths of discussion. First is just how "fixed" a book should be. The second is that of business models. More on these in a moment.

Finally, there's a whole other line of thinking we could explore if all social networks weren't fundamentally broken. I did a lengthy post on this a while back, but the short version is that a relationship is a noun not an adjective.

The living book

The idea of an ebook leads inevitably to a collision between the living nature of information on the Web, and our traditional idea that books are fixed expressions of ideas. There won't be one answer as to the question of what the right hybrid is between these two views. I would like to see though, a few things evolve out of it.

• Give the author the ability to dynamically update books - and provide the reader with the ability to know about that change. A hybrid of footnotes and edit history like you see on wikipedia. One could imagine examples where the original version might be a matter of preference (say a novel or poem) and examples where this history is itself informative (say views on String Theory in a physics text).
• Citations and references to papers could now be forward-looking, not only backward.
• There are whole classes of types of annotations that could be imagined. Imagine a progress-slider on an equation to show it's derivation as a step by step animation. Or a time-line slider for a murder mystery that would let me leap around the text. Or a social graph or family tree of all the characters in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, etc. Of course each of these things could be author-driven or crowd-sourced/authored by fans.
• Books could evolve to leverage web-based application platforms. Letting someone view a location in a book (say Normandy beach on D-day) and let the reader get a first person look at the landscape involved in the story.
• There's room for a whole meta-game around books, reading and an individual or social network's collectively library. Xbox Live acheivements for the librarian set. Better yet would be to have an open platform for building meta-games. Think of teachers making scavenger hunts through the texts of their students are assigned.

Business Models

This is where my biggest beef is with both the Kindle and the iPad. They are razor-n-blade models. Closed systems that insist that the use of the device comes with the use of THEIR store on THEIR terms.

This has a host of issues not the least of which is a lack of competitive pricing for consumers "buying" books. More important to me is that it comes at the cost of hindering (or at least, not encouraging) innovation in the areas of stores, books, business models and licensing terms.

Beyond that, there's a long-term cost to society of allowing these closed models to become the prevalent ones. They become codified in our laws as the norm (DMCA, ACTA, etc). But that's the subject of the other topic post I alluded to earlier.

I beleive there's a real opportunity here for someone to get into the device game while opening the platform to all comers commerce-wise. Google, perhaps? PC OEMs? Microsoft?

Whether closed or open though, I'd like to see flexibility offered to publishers and authors to experiment with different licensing schemes and business models. Cory Doctorow has ranted about this a number of times (1,2)

Discovery

Here again, both devices have made attempts at improving discovery. Amazon through their recommendation engine and Apple largely by following in Amazon's footsteps. This is something but it so little compared to what could be done here. Don't show me what other people bought - show me what they bought and LIKED. Don't show me what just ALL other people bought, but those that share similar sentiments regarding books we've both read.

DRM

In short, it's ass. I get why it's happened, but at least let authors/publishers opt out of it so that someone can show that maybe the sky won't fall. This isn't just about portability between readers and devices, though that's part of it. The fact that I can't cut and paste text is extremely frustrating.

I want the ability to share annotations with friends and a network at large, I want to highlight sections of text (not just the text, but it's context as well) and flick them off to google to flag for further learning/reading, or flick them off to a workspace where I'm working on a presentation.

In summary

It's clear that these devices offer benefits over the traditional book, despite having a long way to go to equalling the dead tree's readability. That's to be expected given that we've been working on 'version 1.0' for hundreds of years.

While they improve readability though, I hope they'll also start to work on improving the things a paper book CAN'T do.

Further reading

Here are a few posts I highly recommend reading (if pressed for time, choose them over this post):

• Books in the age of the iPad, Craig Mod, March 2010: A ton of thoughts on layout, typography, and purposes books serve. Among other things I thank him for crystalizing in my mind the idea of "Formless" vs "Definite" content, a concept I'd been thinking about but couldn't nail down the way he did. His follow-up piece is also must-read.
• Random Thoughts about the Kindle, Seth Godin, June 2008: First of his two posts riffing on what Kindle is and what it could be. Money quote: "Kindle does a fine job of being a book reader, and a horrible job of actually improving the act of reading a book"
• Reinventing the Kindle (part II), Seth Godin, February 2009: His second post on the subject, conceived mainly while wearing his marketing hat, with a sprinkle of 'how could social networks make this better'.
• In addition, it was Dave Edery who opened my eyes to thinking of the Kindle as a game platform, which of course it can and will be.
• Also, this presentation summarizing Portical's research project into the usage of books and ebooks had a few ah-ha's that make it worth reading.
• Additional fuel the the fire from Cory Doctorow's many posts on the Kindle and the iPad. Many of them related to the other topic I alluded to above, but some of which pertain to things I'd very much want in an eReader. (1,2)

Yakuza on Yakuza

Lisa Katayama & Jake Adelstein bring us a pretty unique game review, Sega's Yakuza 3, as reviewed by three members of the Yakuza (who all walk away pretty impressed with the game's accuracy).

Book Review: Our Days are Numbered

I bought this book on a recommendation*, and it turned out to be a bad call. I was expecting something like a cross between Freakonomics and Jim Blinn's Corner series, taking every day observations and taking a mathematician's view of the subjects. The author sets out to do this, but they bulk of topics are far too lightweight. Ranging from geometry to solve carpet area (really?) to a high level view of fractals. I did manage to glean a bit of info from it (e.g. why it takes four rather than three satellites to accurately triangulate a GPS location), but mostly it wasn't of use to me.

Might be ok for a high school kid or for someone with little math, but otherwise pass.

Our Days Are Numbered

*One of the downsides of using my Amazon wish list to manage my book consumption queue is that when I add a book on a recommendation, I later don't remember who it was that gave me the recommendation. :-/

A couple digital distribution points of interest

Sighted today, two different - but related - items on digital distribution:

1. Amazon noted today that Kindle sales of books have surpassed hardcover.

"While our hardcover sales continue to grow, the Kindle format has now overtaken the hardcover format. Amazon.com customers now purchase more Kindle books than hardcover books--astonishing when you consider that we've been selling hardcover books for 15 years, and Kindle books for 33 months "Bezos says

Different than games you say? High price premium at launch - check, hit driven - check, most titles consumed once - check, atoms resellable buts bits are not - check, etc.

Still think people won't give up their shiny DVD?

2. Gamasutra had this story on Gamestop looks to Netflix for Online Business Cues.

Of course the last retailer with a boat-anchor of retail outlets that looked to Netflix for cues was Blockbuster, and it didn't work out for them so well. So good luck to you, Gamestop!

And the money quote:

"...The world won't be all digital tomorrow, even though that's what people are claiming. In this business, users still want physical content." said CEO Paul Raines.

Hey Paul. See item #1 above. KTHXBAI!

A couple VC Gems

I have a few of the better (I think they are, anyway) VC blogs on my feed reader, and just recently did some catching up.

A few snippets caught my eye:

1. Ben Horowitz, on "How we picked our first cloud investment" makes this point:

...the first attempts to build applications in the cloud from companies such as Corio simply fork-lifted the leading on premise software and moved it into the hosted environment. While this sounded like a good idea to many VCs at the time, it turned out to miss important details and advantages of the cloud...

Reading this should spin your gears if you are thinking lately about OnLive, Gaikai et al. (And thinking about it further, you might see why I was saying early on that MMOs are a really good customer for these services - Already architected for the cloud, just the network stack sits at a different point in the pipeline). Regardless, key point is that content that is ported is always second-rate compared to content authored from the outset for a platform.

2. Lightspeed Venture Partners has this post (2 months old now) estimating Zynga revenue at ~240M for 2010, down slightly from 2009.

a) It's a fairly thorough model, and they have the spreadsheet shared on google docs if you want to tinker with it.

b) The graph of Zynga's revenue over time sure made me think of Dave Edery's inevitable misery pitch.

Anyhow, something to noodle on.

5 Things I'm Thinking Right Now

I've been very busy at work. Other than taking some time to write a few notes up about E3, the blog's taken a back seat right now.

However, Alice did a post on her current thoughts that I thought might make a nifty meme, so here are 5 Things I'm Thinking Right Now. (What are 5 things YOU are thinking?)

1. The time is right for a explosion of funding models. Over the past few years, we've seen things like funding disaggregated from the other facets of publishing, we've seen government grants, Indiefund, Kickstarter, and others. But when on one hand projects can raise $10-20k on Kickstarter based only on a good pitch - and large projects can do retail pre-orders for millions, months in advance (GoW3 went on pre-sale *10* months before release!!), it seems there's a lot of play in the middle. If gamers are willing to part with $60 6+ months in advance just to ensure they get a copy on release day, are they willing to part with $100 a year in advance if it gets them an advanced copy and possible repayment from the developer? Seems there's a lot of room for play (and opportunity) in between these two extremes. (Right now pre-orders are rewarded, if at all, with a piece of DLC. Couldn't they come with a royalty or dividend check?)
2. There's a new wave of growth coming. While down at E3, I ran into a number of industry veteran friends who've quit posts at large companies to pursue their indie interests. Then in the few weeks since E3, I've had four different friends (from very different areas of the tech industry) call me for feedback on their startup pitches. Maybe this is just symptomatic of post-recession exuberance? I don't know, but I put it to a friend that I felt like I was seeing a bunch of surfers waiting on the right wave. I'm suddenly seeing a bunch of people paddling hard to catch a wave I don't yet see, but there must be one coming.
3. An explosion of graphics capabilities is good and bad for game devs. This deserves a much longer post, but the short version goes like this: People are becoming accustomed to sexy UI (iphone, ipad, win7, consoles - all doing UI leveraging GPU transistors to do visuals). As this trend continues, graphics vendors are going to be putting more graphics power into devices across the board (good for devs) but the 'top customer' dictating the requirements for these things is not always going to be the game developer (bad for devs?) and there will be wide variance in solutions (not just performance, sometimes DIFFERENT - like the stereo3D gap I mentioned in my E3 post).
4. We are vastly underestimating the 'next wave of social'. Alice touched on this in her post, talking about how current social network games are only touching the basic 'slot machine/food pellet' buttons in folks. However, here are a couple things to think about: (a) There's a lot of money being poured into chasing Zynga's tail lights. Some companies will pour that into game design, production quality, and technical innovation - all of which will explode genres and offerings. (b) The console vendors have all learned a lot from MS's effort with Live. Last round we got a very basic stab at social with friends list, acheivements, messages, multiplayer, etc. Remember, this was a console shipped in 2005 and shipped before that. Pre-facebook-hysteria. The set of capabilities to trump that next time around has to be a pretty high bar. OnLive had some early glimpses of this at E3, but you could riff on this one all day. Forget Gamerscore and MS Points. Give me GamerWhuffie.
5. This time the phone is for real. By that I mean that we've been hearing for years that "The phone will be the leading device connecting people to the Internet". To which many have replied, "well sure, if you count texting, or very basic services, or voip". The reality is that Apple reset everyone on what high-end phones are expected to do, and low-end phones will follow in short order. First-world, money-spending consumers are going to use phones more than PCs in many cases, and so there's a real market there. The Apple vs Android will look like a blip when we look at the bigger picture years from now.

OK, back to work now!

A belated E3 2010 post

E3's been over a little while, but work's been *crazy* lately so I'm only now getting around to posting some thoughts.

The show got big again this year. Not much sign of recession other than on the faces of some friends who's studios either were casualties or are still standing after a grueling year. Signs seem to point to things being up though, and that's a good thing.

Short version of E3 was absolutely nailed by Penny Arcade and by Zero Punctuation:

So, E3 in short form:

Motion Control: MS and Sony *finally* show up with their Wiimote-killers. Sony's is a Wiimote with better accuracy (camera input to add some multiplayer capabilities) and MS's is the more ambitious Kinect. Why did it take so long? Because both companies went through the Five stages of competitor acceptance: "It'll never work", "It's a fad", "It's a novelty that appeals to a niche", "well, they'll never beat our installed base numbers", and finally "holy crap, we need to build us a wiimote!". Add product development on top of that, and you get five years of Nintendo first-mover advantage.

Ironically, there was a bit of ho-hum as maybe people are tiring of Wii style motion control and were hoping for dramatically better but didn't see it? At the very least, the hype has subsided from "In the future all games will be played this way!" to "It's good for some types of games"

Stereo3D: Sony's doing stereo on TVs with glasses, tapping their performance headroom to engage with developers and to the full cinematic immersive thing. Nintendo on the other hand impressed folks with the 3DS, which is using a lenticular filter/display to do no-glasses, single-player viewing.

One interesting point that I haven't heard anyone talk about (which I should do a longer post on at some point) is that the type of content that will lend itself to the handheld Stereo3D (DS, plus people are talking about doing this on phones, etc) will likely be different content. Rather than think stereo3D movies like Avatar, think macro-lens style close-ups of small objects.

I'll have to think about what that means for developers. Also, it makes me wonder where on the spectrum PCs will end up. Are they single viewer devices?

Onlive: There stuff looked good. Lots of interesting features that are one-up over consoles (e.g. jump in/out of spectator mode). Of course, the real question is how it runs in the field.

Favorite game of the show: A toss up between Pacman: Battle Royale (Warlords meets Pacman for a 4-player competitive arcade deathmatch), and Miegakure, a brain-twisting FOUR-dimensional puzzle-platformer. There’s a video here, but you won’t get it until you play it (and even then, it’s doubtful!)

Best graphics of the show: Many people claimed PS3’s Killzone 3, but I thought that was mainly cinematics and presentation. Personally, I thought Mafia 2 on PC was outstanding. I heard that Id’s Rage was awesome as well, but didn’t get to see it.

Best Game that wasn’t on the showfloor: I went to the Indiecade BBQ on Thursday and got to playtest Chris Hecker’s SpyParty , and even this early it’s a temple-sweating, nail-biter, multiplayer game.

Best Random Art Encounter: I was walking down the street after dinner and happened upon The Vader Project

Slush(y) Fund: Piggybacking Bits on Atoms

Someone put this on my radar on Facebook today:

Zynga and 7-Eleven partner to bring game content to ice cream, Big Gulps

Short version is: Buy ice-cream, comes with a code, redeem code in-game for virtual items.

Gimmicky, right? Wrong. Brilliant. OK, why?

I wrote some time ago (wow, 3 years ago!) about how kids "connected toy" products like Webkinz and other entrants were bundling services with a toy.

The most brilliant thing about this is not that "you get a game with the toy!" or vice versa. The way to view it is that the physical product allows the virtual item sale/subscription/etc piggyback on a channel that the customer understands. And if that gets you over the hurdle of a massive number of customers not having credit cards or being afraid to type them into a browser, then it's well worth the cost of the plushy (or in this case slushy).

I'll bet that we're going to see piggy-back revenue models like this (you can call it a promotion, or a bundle) are going to grow significantly.

One way to accelerate it would be to think about ways to remove the friction of having to enter a lengthy code while in front of the PC. Maybe it's texting the code from your mobile to automatically credit your account, or a unique bar code you hold in front of your webcam?

Anyhow, it will be interesting to see how well this does for Zynga. I'm betting it's going to be copied a lot

Better, not simpler

I love this presentation from Daniel at LostGarden on the design of RibbonHero, his MS Office learning game plug-in. I love the point about culling features and complexity being an answer, but the wrong answer. The right, but difficult, answer is to help people to master the complexity.

Wordcamp 2010 public

View more documents from danctheduck.

Can Gucci teach game devs about innovation?

Really good talk by Johanna Blakely on innovation, remix, and the lack of copyright in the fashion industry. Punchline is that the industry can't use copyright to protect innovators, and yet, they innovate. Lots to think about here. Great talk.

Book Review: Fables Vol 1

Fables Vol. 1: Legends in Exile is a graphic novel I picked up after hearing two different friends recommend it. It takes place in New York where the characters of fairy tales, cast out from their lands by an evil demon, are forced to live undercover among regular folk.

I thought the premise was original, but the story (from the first volume anyway) not all that remarkable. Where there really is some gold is in the remix of the characters. Snow White as the tough as nails matriarch running the show, Prince Charming as a deadbeat gigolo, etc.

The characters alone make it worth giving the first volume a try. I don't think I'll be continuing, but that doesn't mean others won't find it their cup of tea.

Book Review: The Big Short

I ripped through The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine in a few days. I'd been told it was a easily digestible take on the recent financial crisis.

What I didn't expect was something that frightened me like a horror novel. For such a dry topic, he really turns it into a page-turner.

Some folk have critiqued the book for over-simplifying the topic. Little blame is placed on government, for example. The blame is mainly placed on improperly structured incentives and lack of risk prevention systems in Wall Street firms. These concerns are probably well founded. Nothing is so cut and dried, for sure.

That said, it's a good lesson in how companies - especially large complex ones - can get into real trouble when the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and in how leadership has a responsibility in both understanding their businesses and making sure the systems are in place to make sure those businesses don't run off the rails. Bottom line: If the buck stops with you, do you understand your balance sheet, and do you feel confident that the people and systems that report information into it are honest and correct?

I recommend the read, though be forewarned that you may find yourself pulling your money out of your mutual fund afterward and shoving it under your mattress.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine

Book Review: Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators

Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution is the best business book I've read this year, and may one of my top favorites of all time.

Many books have been written about intrapreneurship, the incubating of new businesses or products inside large companies. This is the first I've come across that looks at the causes of success and failure when those incubation projects are brought out of the back room and re-integrated into the larger fabric of the company.

It's at this point that many fail, and they do so for a number of reasons. This book looks at a number of case examples and illustrates what things were done right and wrong, and more importantly why this is the case.

The book hit close to home with me because there are many examples (both good and bad) that resonated with the Larrabee project I came back to Intel to work on. This aside though, I found it relevant to many efforts I've seen at Intel and Microsoft and at other companies through conversations with friends.

If you work at a large company and are interested in the dynamics of trying to bootstrap new products or businesses within those walls, you owe it to yourself to pick up this book.

Ten Rules for Strategic Innovators: From Idea to Execution

Behold: Nature

Awesome timelapse footage of the volcano in Iceland:

Iceland, Eyjafjallajökull - May 1st and 2nd, 2010 from Sean Stiegemeier on Vimeo.

App demonstrates Facebook privacy pains

Following up on my last post, a friend developed this:

http://youropenbook.org/

Go there and type a few keywords in that you figure people might want available to friends like "parole officer" or "DUI" or "Lost my virginity". I'm certain most of these people have an idea this is being made available to the world.

Also, danah has another awesome post on the subject.

Thoughts on the Facebook privacy outrage

Many are expressing a lot of angst about Facebook's privacy policy changes over the recent months. Here's some essential reading on the subject:

Matt McKeon has done an awesome bit of data-viz porn on the subject to help folks grok how FB's policy has changed over time. You can go play with it here. (As a bonus, Paul L pointed out to me how Matt's released source to the app to do this). Here's a snapshot:

If the above gives you the 5-second dump on what's changed, then the incomparable Danah Boyd's lengthy post on the subject will then let you simmer on the implications. Danah is one of the smartest people I know of looking at what SN's mean to people and how society is being shaped by them. Her post is essential reading for everyone. Period. So are a number of the posts she links to.

Talk of course has turned to whether there is an alternative to FB, and whether they've overplayed their hand. People are looking to alternatives and wondering whether someone can use this as an opportunity to topple the unstoppable giant*. A fave underdog in recent days is Diaspora, a Kickstartr-funded project that used the angst to raise $145k in 12 days (from >4000 people, 9 of which gave over $1k) - that's a lot of protest money.

*which is silly. How many times have we heard "no one can stop the unstoppable (yahoo, GM, Microsoft, Everquest, Genghis Khan, etc)"?

The idea of an alternative with more user-centric privacy controls is interesting, as is the idea of a distributed network like Diaspora's attempting.

My own opinion is that if people really start leaving FB in droves, or if regulators start getting heavy-handed (Danah points out that they are sniffing around), then FB can choose to dial back their policies. They'll be OK on this front if they do so soon enough.

It won't matter though. I still believe that FB is going to collapse under their own weight - and by that I mean the narrow, limited way in which they link people, and the band-aid solutions they have to add on to try and work around this. As I've pointed out at length before, the problem is that Facebook doesn't understand the difference between an adjective and a noun.

Google Chrome Speed Tests

There are a couple remarkable things about this bit of marketing.

1) It's Google doing marketing, which I can recall them doing so overtly for other products. Normally it's "offer the feature/product/service, let word of mouth do the rest"

2) It's a *spectacular* way of simultaneously claiming superiority on a feature without having to compare directly to competitors, AND poking fun at how absurd it is to be differentiating on speed of what for most people is 'fast enough'.

3) It's dead awesome.

The digital divide is alive and well

I did two volunteer activities recently that happened to fall back to back. On Friday I gave a career day talk at a middle school in Gresham (town east of Portland), one that I've done in past years. On Saturday, I gave a talk to a different group of middle school kids participating in the Oregon Game Project Challenge,

The first of these talks was about video games & tech careers, the latter was about predicting the future in tech (and how such predictions are almost always wrong).

Having the two talks back to back highlighted the disparity in tech knowledge and access that exists across communities even within a (relatively) homogeneous place like the PDX area. Now granted, the OGPC group was self-selected game enthusiasts. But even with that being said, I saw some kids in the hall doing last minute tweaks on their entry, working on a macbook pro while checking references on a Kindle.

Contrast that with the middle school I was at. Last year, the teacher I was working with explained that the schools computers were used almost exclusively for standardized testing, giving no student time for tech access for electives or homework. This year she bashfully showed me the one room of machines they now have for students... why? because the machines are too outdated to run the latest standardize testing platform and other required software. So students without their own machines have shared, part time access to shiny blue twelve year old iMacs. Discouraging to say the least.

Anyhow, given that the Friday talk was to 150 kids, here's an update to the Q&A I gave at the beginning of 98's year's talk:

• Number of kids who play games: ~98%.
• Number who have a parent that plays games: ~%50
• Number who have a grand-parent who plays videogames: :20% (Yes, the Eberts are dying off)
• Number one title I got questions about: COD:MW2 (2 years ago it was GTA: San Andreas). Someone's not checking those ESRB ratings :-/
• Surprising number of questions about hardware (which do you think is more powerful, PS3 or 360? Is the PC more powerful? Is iPhone more powerful than PSP? etc)

Anyhow, both talks were fun, but it's always frustrating to see some kids held back because of lack of access to technology.

Book Review: Tea Time With Terrorists

I recently finished Tea Time with Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart of Sri Lanka's Civil War. The author, Mark Stephen Meadows, and I are on the same mail list and I thought enough of his ideas to buy the book knowing nothing about it. And wow, I sure am glad I bought it.

Finding himself in Europe when 9-11 happened, Mark watched from the outside as our government and media conjured up a boogie-man of 'terrorist' that quickly took on a hype beyond even the events of that day. Questioning what he was being told to fear, and feeling that the best way to deal with fear of the unknown is to make it known, he decided to spend some time meeting some terrorists and finding out what makes them, well I suppose 'tick' is a poor choice of word.

After a little research he settled on Sri Lanka as his petri dish, flew down to the tourist capital Colombo, rented a motorcycle and headed north to the home of the Tamil Tigers and what has essentially been a war zone for ~30 years. The Tamil Tigers having the unique distinction of having invented suicide bombing and exporting that to other terrorist organizations.

Thus begins a very unique travelogue. It's part introspective, part narrative. A look at the horrors people can commit, and the beauty that people can find in living their lives despite this.

Mark comes off as two parts Indy Jones (playing motorcycle bullfighter with trucks, getting escorts at gunpoint, etc) and one part Mr Magoo (leaving the road to investigate a bombed out tank, only to realized he'd wandered to the middle of a minefield).

All the while he approaches his adventures with the type of drink-heartily-of-life gusto to which we should all aspire.

If you are looking for an insight into the mind of a terrorist (he meets and interviews several), a portrait of a beautiful country, or a great story of travel and adventure, this book is for you. It delivers on all three counts.

Tea Time with Terrorists: A Motorcycle Journey into the Heart of Sri Lanka's Civil War

Book Review: The Universe In A Nutshell

I picked The Universe in a Nutshell an audiobook and listened to it during my commute. It's Hawking's more accessible overview of astrophysics and it's history.

It's a fun and accessible read for those that have an interest in the subject matter, but aren't well versed on it (or have let their knowledge atrophy). I don't think I'd recommend it as an audiobook for commutes though. For one, it's not exactly concentration-free. Secondly, he refers to the occasional diagram which of course you can't see.

There are a couple sections of the book where he talks about thought-trends in the scientific community and how often they fall by the wayside for the next big thing. For a field with a storied history, you'd think they'd learn that their history indicates that each idea has a high probability of not being "the final theory". Kind of reminded me of our own obsession with whatever the current 'big thing' is (microtransactions, facebook, etc).

Ilomilo!

Polish + Cute + Platform/Puzzler. Coming to XBLA. Looks awesome. This and Monday Night Combat are all I'm really excited for... esp since hearing that Joe Danger isn't coming to the platform :-(

Vintage Book Win!

Score!, originally uploaded by Kim Pallister.

I got this awesome book via ebay. "Inside the Personal Computer" is a somewhat dated but still useful and highly intuitive pop-up book on how computers work. Great for the kids

Thanks to Margaret Robinson for the pointer. Someone else has captured pics of the inside here:

http://jonathanryan.org/2009/04/28/pop-up-guide-to-the-personal-computer/

Sigh. Games as Art (again)

So Roger Ebert has gone curmudgeon on games again, this time using Kelly Santiago's TED talk as fodder. She posts a good rebuttal here. Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft also chimes in with a good response.

If you were following, you might have missed this really good response from the esteemed Scott McCloud. The whole thing is worth reading but here's an excerpt:

If you’re asking if videogames are art, I think you’re asking the wrong question. I don’t think art is an either/or proposition. Any medium can accommodate it, and there can be at least a little art in nearly everything we do.

Once in a while, someone makes a work in their chosen medium so driven by aesthetic concerns and so removed from any other consideration that we trot out the A-word, but even then it’s a matter of degrees, and for most creative endeavors you can find a full spectrum from the sublime to the mundane.

Book Review: The Invention of Air

Wow, was this a lucky surprise. I picked it up off the shelf at the library, randomly browsing their history section when another book I was looking for was out. Here' s a link to the book on Amazon:

The Invention of Air: A Story Of Science, Faith, Revolution, And The Birth Of America

The book is the story of Joseph Priestley, who though he is not nearly as well known as the founding fathers of the US, was friend to many of them, published over 150 works, and did no less than discover oxygen and the concept of biosystems.

It's a fascinating bit of history, and holds some interesting lessons for today. For example, after providing for his family for several years under patronage of a wealthy individual, that patronage was revoked. He then had the idea of crowd-sourcing that patronage, distributing among a collection of patrons to diversify risk. I couldn't help but think of many of the game projects being done on Kickstrarter.

Anyhow, fun bit of reading and illuminating from the standpoint of history, politics, and science

Book Review: The Audacity of Hope

OK, maybe I'm the late to the party, but we had a long car trip and brought it along as an audio book.

Obama reads it himself, which is nice. he's such a great speaker. I agree with most of his ideas and would have voted for him if I could have (still don't have citizenship).

One thing that did strike me though was how... formulaic, his prose is.

"When it comes to issue A, some people feel adjective A, adjective B, or even adjective C. Then again others feel adjective D, or E, or F." - Rinse, lather repeat.

I still think he's great, but he's more of a politician than most would have us beleive

Steve Jobs shows his REAL thoughts on iPhone development

I'm long overdue to write up a post on the iPhone, appstore and closed-vs-open platforms. This isn' t it.

In the meantime though, Dave wrote up some thoughts on the announcements from Apple recently, and *brilliantly* caught something Jobs said that most folks seem to have missed:

Jobs, in speaking of the addition to an advertising revenue model to the platform, said

“This is us helping our developers make money so they can survive and keep the prices of their apps reasonable,”

To which Dave asks:

Btw, was anyone else struck by Jobs’ use of the word “survive?” I think that’s the closest he’ll ever come to admitting that life for developers is rough in the world o’Apple.

Bravo! What a catch. Quelle choix de verbe! "Survive" indeed!

Pixels

Fun game-themed vid for those that haven't seen it plastered everywhere already:

Book Review: For The Win

After seeing my write-up of Makers, Cory was nice enough to send me an early copy of For the Win, his next novel due out in May.

I really loved it, proven by the fact that I had, for the first time in a long time, a late-night reading binge where I could not put the book down for the final third of it, staying up until the wee hours on a night that I really did need to get up early.

For The Win follows several characters, a so-cal high-school nerd, an Indian slum girl, a Chinese 20-something former factory worker, who share in common that they play MMOs, and do so for money - as gold farmers or similar. They share in common that they are tired of their rights being abused, in one case by parents, in others by mafioso-type bosses.

They then meet a mysterious figure online who proposes to organize them into a union. Postulating that while the MMO EULAs stipulate that anyone can get kicked off at any time for any reason, kicking EVERYONE off will be a nose-severed-to-spite-face thing, they team together to orchestrate a virtual walk-out.

From there the book takes off and becomes one part Halting State, one part Hoffa, one part Matrix and adds a pinch of Tarantino. If that wasn't enough, there's a parable about Wall Street and the mortgage crisis.

Here's the thing though. Cory is usually thought of as a science fiction author but I'm not sure For The Win counts as science fiction. The book is set in the near future and there are some passing references to tech that doesn't yet exist today, but most of the book is absolutely plausible today. The premise isn't based on tech getting to a certain point - its already there - but more on just the idea of a Hoffa-style union-forming organization happening online. Totally feasible, just difficult.

Just as Halting State provided us with some glimpse as to the future of games, For The Win provides with us with a glimpse of a near future where the one-sided EULA may come under scrutiny of the customer, and the customer may say "No."

Great entertainment, and a good perspective on the future of MMOs.

Class Acts at GDC

It's been a few days since GDC 2010 wrapped, and between the thoughts reeling in my head and the work that piled up at the office, I haven't had time to post much on what I learned.

Having thought about it though, I've decided what my favorite session was this year: the rant session. It's among my favorites every year, but this year's rant, "Fired and Fired Up: Jobless Developers Rant" had a couple of rants that I thought were worth calling out.

I had to dash out of the session halfway through in order to make my flight, so I missed a couple of the rants. However, the first half-hour had two sessions that shared a commn thread:

Justin Hall, former CEO of Gamelayers, now at NGMoco (disclosure: he's also a friend), presented on the rise and fall and eventual crash & burn, of Gamelayers. He talked about everything that happens when a graduate student takes on 1.5M in VC money and ramps a company rapidly up to a dozen-plus employees to build an innovative browser-based MMO. Raph koster has a detailed write-up of Justin's rant.

Paul Bettner, formerly of Ensemble Studios, spoke about the decline and eventual closure of Ensemble. Pretty different than Justin's case, where this was the decline of a well-funded studio with a long history of doing AAA titles. The rant centered on how the grind of crunch in trying to chase the high of hitting the top 10, over time wore away at quality, morale, and execution. At the end, Microsoft was shutting down a studio that was a shadow of its former self. Joystiq has a detailed write-up here.

So, given these very different stories, what did they have in common? Both Justin and Paul had one identical phrase in their presentations:

"It was my fault. I failed."

Justin could easily have blamed the gamers for not 'getting it', the VCs for not throwing more money at it, browser companies for lack of interoperability, or any number of things. Instead he blamed himself. He was at the helm and it was up to him to watch the bottom line. Raph's writeup has the details.

Paul could have blamed Microsoft for mis-management, the team for not crunching hard enough, HR for not hiring the right people, console vendors for their complex platforms, etc. Instead he pointed out that he failed by ignoring the wear of crunch on people and families and he apologized to the people who's years he stole.

Both talks were passionate and brutally honest.

I watched them and noted that we came out of 2008/2009 watching news coverage of a cavalcade of Wall street and Detroit CEOs shirking any responsibility for their companies tanking and taking out people's life savings and jobs in the process.

I think in an age where "The Buck Stops Here" has disappeared from the leadership vernacular, I think these guys deserve kudos for displaying leadership and, quite frankly, class.

Jane McGonigal's Epic Win at TED

Jane's TED Talk is fabulous:

Monday Night Combat teaser vid

It's like TF2, but with bacon. :-)

Seriously, these guys are super bright and have been working on this for a long time. It's going to be a fun title.

Thoughts from DICE 2010 (Dice-10-post1)

I got back from DICE Friday, and my head is still swimming a bit with all the information I soaked up.

Overall, the sentiment seemed cautiously upbeat, certainly more so than GDC. Studio closures are still happening, but there was a feel that a good deal of the blood-letting happened when publishers canned many of their 'B' titles last year.

Like with GDC, there was a good deal of noise about console downloadable, iPhone, Facebook, etc. Unlike GDC though, this conference is heavily slanted toward 'big game' pubs and devs. Many in the audience are clearly biased when it comes to all other platforms and business models. They may be keeping an open mind, but messages like that given in John Schappert's talk ("don't give up on shiny discs just yet") are both a voice of reason, and an indication of the skepticism about these new models. There's validity on both sides. The world is changing, but maybe not as fast as some would have us believe.

G4 has vids up of all the sessions. Some thoughts on a few of those I managed to attend:

Disney keynote. I wrote on facebook while it was happening: "The Disney keynote is an amazing concatenation of stereotypes, platitudes, and stock photo pablum. Several of us in the back are playing 'predict the next slide'. I'll take "old folks playing wii sports in a retirement home" for a thousand, Alex. We have a winner!" ' nuff said.

Designing Outside the Box. Best session of the conference. Lengthier post here. Best quote from it [while poo-pooing convergence] "The iphone is hte Pocket Exception: It's the Swiss army knife. Like a swiss army knife, it does everything (not necesarily perfectly) but fits in your pocket. However, if someone gave you a 24-inch swiss army knife that had a butcher clever, a spatula, knife, fork, spoon, etc, and said here is the ideal device for your kitchen, you would say bullshit. And THIS is why everyone hates the iPad."

EEDAR's Forces at Play. Another one of my favorites. Lots of analysis here. A couple interesting observations though:

• The "focus on quality" the point to as resulting in higher meta-critic scores I read as just "publishers cancelled a bunch of their B titles" - it's a focus on quality, but in a different way.
• The shift away from Q4-for-focused release calendar toward more distributed looked like it was actually cyclical - meaning that early in console life-cycle publishers focus more on Q4 releases - makes sense as the consoles will be big Xmas pushes

The one down-side of the above talk (and one would infer EEDAR's data as a whole) is that while they made a small reference to the fact that they have no data on PC downloadable, iphone, MMO subs, etc, they then didn't note that these things could have been part of what was impacting those trends noted in the presentation.

Randy Pitchford's talk. The talk was OK, strayed from the point in the middle a bit, but came together a bit. I love his historical example to back the main point of the talk, and the way his talk came full circle. Bravo.

The hot topics sessions were pretty good. I posted some thoughts on one of them here.

Lots of others worth checking out, a few of them, not so much. Still, they are posted and free so make a point of viewing them over the next week or two.

It's worth noting that this is a great move on the part of the organizers, putting their money where their mouth is, and showing that the real value in attending the conference is in the networking, so the session vids are just a sales tool. [GDC folk take note!]

Bonus: Best comment from the show, IMHO: At one point when Richard Garriott was speaking, a woman sitting next to me turned and said "Is that the same Richard Garriott that went into space?!".

I replied "Yes it is. However I'll bet that 9 out of 10 people in this room are remarking 'wow! that's the same Richard Garriott that created Ultima' and really aren't impressed with the whole getting shot into space thing!"