Author: adam

Microsoft turns Live.com into a social network?

Post author By adam
Post date November 18, 2008

NB: I can’t actually try it, of course – Microsoft is still subscribing to the classic anti-Web 2.0 ideal of making it “zero information from our walled-garden until you pass a detailed user-verification process; visitors will be shot; guests are not welcome here”.

The interesting piece for me is that they are inferring the social graph from Instant Messenger. It has long seemed sensible to me that building from existing social graphs (email, IM, phone records etc.) is a better way to go than building a new one from scratch as we have all been doing on Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn etc., although there are many tricky issues around service design. Google and Microsoft think the same way according to this Techcrunch post of a year ago, although we have yet to see thought translated into action.

Yeah … we wanted to do the exact same thing with MMO publisher data when I was at NCsoft. Given how much you know about subscribers, you can infer some extremely valuable stuff (that is much harder for people like Google/Microsoft/etc to piece together). Turned out there were a lot of internal political problems in the way (something I’ll be talking about at GDC 2009: “How to sell social networking to your boss / publisher”) that really came down to a handful of extremely powerful people not getting it / not caring. It was an … interesting … journey learning what they didn’t get, and why, and how to dance around that.

(PS: all the above is assuming “without breaking privacy / data-protection laws”; if you’re reasonably well-moralled, you can provide a lot of value while being well inside the law; I have little sympathy for organizations that run roughshod all over the Data Protection stuff – IME you really don’t need to)

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More than 1 billion people play online games in 2008

Post author By adam
Post date November 18, 2008
11 Comments on More than 1 billion people play online games in 2008

Someone asked me:

How many people play online games globally in 2008?

A simple answer

…and with a quick mental calculation I estimated 1 billion *unique registered accounts*. (I’ve been tracking and calculating this stuff a lot recently). That wasn’t good enough – they wanted something to put in a press release, so they wanted a methodology and verifiable data.

So, I went and did the calculations properly, and found:

There are approximately 1.5 billion unique registered accounts (virtual players) of online games around the world in 2008.

They still needed to see the methodology and the figures, of course … here goes!

Some … wrong … answers

Someone at Techcrunch claimed last year that “217 Million People Play Online Games”, by misusing the research that they were referring to. You only have to follow the link to the *press release* of the actual research to see how wrong that is.

The research merely claimed that 217 million people visit a selection of American and European websites that have content that talks about online games, and which *in some cases* actually have some web-games on their site.

The majority of online games were not included in the research. The figure isn’t particularly useful on its own.

A simple question?

The first thing to realise is that there’s no sensible way of answering the question literally. A couple of years ago, Raph Koster did an updated version of the explanation for this problem (it needs updating again by now to take account of how the industry has continued to evolve since he wrote that last version). If you haven’t read it, and want to understand the details of why people argue this stuff endlessly, go have a quick look at his post.

But there is a sensible way we can re-phrase the question to become one that we CAN answer:

How many unique virtual identities are there that are playing online games this month?

Virtual Identity … what? No, that’s not what I wanted to know about

Actually, maybe it *is* what you wanted to know about.

In the real world, we never actually count people for anything (except if we’re physically smuggling them past Border Control, I guess); instead, we count Identities: verifiably unique records that each correspond to no more than one person.

In the real world, one ID does not equal one physical person, even though it is “approximately” that way (bear in mind that even governments have so far proved incapable of legislating + enforcing that concept, despite having tried for the last few thousand years).

In the online world, the concept of Identity is abstracted. This is all the fault of “computers” and especially “programmers” and “database vendors”, who couldn’t cope with the amount of info required to fully represent a single Identity (and as time went on many realised that they did not want to). They cheated. And so, from the earliest days of the internet (and before – back in the days of BBS’s), everyone has had multiple ID’s.

On average, each of you reading this probably has something like 200-300 separate online identities. On average, each of you reading this probably BELIEVES you have something like 2-3 separate online identities. Factor of 100 difference (have fun counting them…).

Those virtual identities are the lifeblood of online services. They are countable, they are serviceable – and they are uniquely and individually chargeable (even when several of these identities may represent just one real-world human: if the identities are separate, then you can charge multiple times, and many people really do willingly pay several times over!)

Many of those identities are “inactive”, and unlike people, the corpses of Virtual Identities do not naturally rot and disappear, they live forever – and can be brought back to life at any moment by the owners. They’re all real – they are still verifiably there – so for now we’re going to count all of them.

(personally I prefer counting “active identities within the past month”, but more on that in a later post. Counting in billions is fun for now…)

How many virtual identities play online games?

Start with the big guns, going from their own official announcements.

Individual games: 400m

Kart Rider = 160 million
Habbo Hotel = 100 million
Neopets = 65 million
Maple Story = 57 million
Club Penguin = 20 million
Runescape = 10 million

+ others I didn’t bother looking up

Subtotal: 412m

Publishers who declare registered directly: 1200m (or 800m)

Then add in the big publishers, going from their official announcements

9You = 120m
Acclaim = 3m
Bigpoint = 30m
CDC Games = 140m
CJ Internet = 23m
Disney = 12m
Gameforge = 60m
Gamania = 10m
GigaMedia = 9m
Gpotato = 2m
HanbitSoft = 8m
K2 Network = 16m
Mattel = 11m
Moliyo = 7m
NCsoft = 2m
NeoWiz = 7.5m
Shanda = 700m (*)

(*) (note: using the active and paying ratios below, this would be approx 150m or 300m, which is such a huge difference (and stands out as massively anomalous compared to industry standard – even for other Chinese operators) that I’m going to treat it with extreme suspicion and go with 300m instead)

Subtotal: 1158m (or approx 800m if we downgrade Shanda by 400m)

Publishers who declare active or paying: 100m

Then add in the big publishers who declare “active” or “paying” accounts instead of “registered”:

As well as just general industry knowledge on this stuff, I have official figures from half a dozen publishers that let me calculate Registered:active or Registered:Paying ratios, so from averaging those I get conservative multipliers of approx:

Registered / Active = 4
Registered / Paying = 40

Gaia = 24m (6m active)
Giant Interactive = 68m (1.7m paying)
NetDragon = 14m (3.5m active)

Subtotal: 106m

Facebook + Web gaming = 200m

Then look at the big Facebook games-publishers, and the online gaming sites from the comScore study:

Yahoo Games = 53m
MSN Games = 40m
Miniclip = 30m
EA Online (inc. POGO ?) = 21m
SGN = 40m
Zynga = 55m
…
Others (from comScore report) = 78m

Subtotal: 173m

Final tally

There are approximately 1.5 billion registered identities in online games in 2008

How many “real people” is that? Well, as noted above, the percent of registered accounts that are active is around 25%, so I would guesstimate (really really rough figures now!):

There are approximately 375 million people in the world who play online games.

The theoretical current maximum playerbase for a subscription MMO would be somewhere in between those two figures (plenty of people pay for 2, 3 – or as many as 10 – accounts, as Raph noted).

The theoretical current maximum playerbase for an F2P game would be the bigger of the two figures, obviously.

WoW (World of Warcraft) still has a long way to go, people…

Exclusions – what did I miss?

There are plenty of operators that are not counted in the above which run games in countries not often associated with online gaming (e.g. Vietnam, Russia, etc) – and yet their figures are significant (I’ve been tracking them for a while and they’re growing very fast).

I didn’t bother including them because even in aggregate right now they probably wouldn’t be able to shift that 1.5b figure any higher.

There are also some who are using a combined service only part of which is games, e.g.

Tencent = 350m users of the IM client which integrates many online games

…which I haven’t included at all. Feel free to take my headline figure and add that on! (and add back in the 400m accounts from Shanda that I discounted / didn’t believe)

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$1.7 billion invested into Online Games and Related Entertainment in years 2007-2008

Post author By adam
Post date November 17, 2008
1 Comment on $1.7 billion invested into Online Games and Related Entertainment in years 2007-2008

NB: Jussi and I have pooled our data, but will be looking at different aspects of it going forwards. Should be interesting…

Background

Roughly a month ago Jussi Laakkonen published a list of $350 million invested in year 2008 into virtual worlds, casual MMOs, and casual & social games. Based on US-centric sites, it missed out the majority of European deals. So, inspired by Jussi’s excellent idea, I then posted my own list of European deals I’d been tracking (which also included some extra things on the fringes of Jussi’s initial set). We decided that the right thing to do would be to put those lists together.

The extra things I’d been tracking were mainly in MMO investments, technology vendors, and support services (e.g. payment providers). I also wanted to add in mobile gaming (especially in light of what’s happening with the iPhone, the iPhone investment fund, and the Blackberry investment fund). These are the areas I’ll be looking into more in the future.

Analysis on T=Machine

I’ll be doing some followup posts over the next couple of days, Jussi’s zooming ahead with his – check out his blog to keep up with his comments too.

Followup posts will all be tagged under “jussi vc deals europe”

Jussi’s Analysis

Jussi’s posted a great summary of the core data.

The data

The data on VC investments has been collected from publicly available sources including but not limited to

* VentureBeat
* PaidContent
* Virtual World’s Management
* Avista Partners’ video game briefing
* TechCrunch
* CrunchBase

The data was gathered by Jussi Laakkonen and Adam Martin. The data is most accurate for year 2008. Year 2006 and earlier years have been only covered sporadically and typically only for companies that have received follow-up funding in years 2007-2008 (IIRC the European data is complete from the end of 2005 onwards, as it started from around the time of Mind Candy’s first announced funding). The data is provided AS IS and the authors make no warranties or guarantees about its accuracy.

Download the spreadsheet:

* Excel format
* CSV format
* HTML format

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Web 0.1: How NOT to run an open beta stress-test

Post author By adam
Post date November 17, 2008
3 Comments on Web 0.1: How NOT to run an open beta stress-test

1. Ask people to join the closed beta 6 months before the open beta happens

http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/8117

Dinowaurs Beta Testers Wanted

We’re now inviting Kongregate members to sign up to test the Dinowaurs Beta. If you don’t know what Dinowaurs is, go here for more info: http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/3350.
Simply pop in to this thread and say that you want in and I’ll put you on the list for the test. Please, no conversations, as it makes it more difficult to pull all the names out.
We’d like to thank everyone who helped us test the alpha! Anyone who signed up for the alpha in the previous thread will be first in line, so no need to sign up again if you already did in the alpha thread.
Thanks, everyone!

(posted may 1st 2008)

2. When you start an open beta, don’t tell players they’re accepted until 2 days before the beta happens

Hello!

Thank you for volunteering to test Dinowaurs, an upcoming game on Kongregate. As of this email, everyone who volunteered to help test Dinowaurs will now get a chance to do so. We’re very grateful for all your help!

For those of you who have tested before, this is a different request than usual, and for all you new faces, welcome! What we need to do is load test the server – that is get as many feet stomping on it as possible and see if it crashes! Because of that, we’re going to try to stuff as many testers into the game at one time as possible. For this test, Dinowaurs will only be open on Monday, November 17 from 12 noon-2pm Pacific Time (All you non West-Coasters, take notice of the time!)

So we hope to see all 4000 of you Dinowaurs beta testers in here and playing the game on Monday! Don’t be late – our doors will close tight at 2pm.

Thanks again!

Kongregate and Intuition

3. Make it last 2 hours only

(Fair enough, normal practice for stress tests, although it’s usually a good idea to let people in a few days in advance to ensure that they have working clients etc (less of an issue for a web game like this, but still probably worth doing).)

4. Don’t tell anyone the secret link to the beta

Read that email again. Do you see the magic URL? No? That’s because THEY FORGOT TO INCLUDE IT.

Some googling turns up various people asking for it, and some friendly Kong players answering with the URL here:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/flamingbait/dinowaurs

EDIT: they just sent another email which remembered to include the link.

Hello!

Today’s the day! At 12 noon Pacific Time (3pm Eastern), the doors to the Dinowaurs Beta on Kongregate will be flung open!

At that time you should make sure you’re signed in to Kongregate and go here to test: http://www.kongregate.com/games/intuition/dinowaurs-beta_preview

Make sure you’re on time! We will be closing doors promptly at 2pm (PST). If during gameplay you encounter any bugs, please click on the little bug icon at the top right of chat and fill out a bug report. The more actual bugs you find, the better the game will be!

We really want to thank all you beta testers. We really appreciate all your help!

Kongregate and Intuition

Could be they intended this all along. Given that the beta starts less than an hour after that email was sent out, I doubt it :).

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Installing and using PHP Eclipse IDE on OS X

Post author By adam
Post date November 16, 2008
12 Comments on Installing and using PHP Eclipse IDE on OS X

I wanted to knock something up for Facebook, and I thought I’d try out PHP development on my shiny macbook air laptop (I usually develop on a much more powerful windows/linux PC).

This is tortuous, painful, and mostly undocumented on the official site. Sigh. After some experimentation, here’s how to make it work (IMHO you shouldn’t need to do this – although the Eclipse project allows plugin developers to package their plugins in really stupid ways, and doesn’t make it easy for anyone (users, developers, etc) – it’s still the fault of the plugin developer if they ALSO do not make it easy for the users to install).

First problem: get Eclipse

IME, most programmers who would use Eclipse already have it. The PHP plugin website won’t really help you, mostly taking the attitude of “install an extra copy of eclipse, just for doing PHP development; if you already have eclipse … work it out yourself”. I kind of understand why, but still feel that the first duty of every developer is to make their stuff easy to install!

If you don’t have Eclipse, I highly recommend you do NOT follow the PHP instructions (by downloading their pre-made “PHP + Eclipse all in one”) because then you are doomed to having multiple parallel installs if you ever need to use any other programming language; learn how to do it properly instead.

Download eclipse here (you want the latest stable version, currently called “Ganymede” (no, I don’t know why they stopped using Version numbers either – yes, it does make life more difficult for all normal users who haven’t memorized the funny names. Sigh)). You can get “Eclipse with Java” or “Eclipse with C/C++” or whatever you want – they are all identical, some just have extra plugins pre-installed.

NB: the people that run the Eclipse website have some pretty icon-artists, but a cruel sense of humour (or just suck at website design, maybe? I shouldn’t complain – it used to be a LOT worse than this) and don’t provide bookmarkable links to the OS X version (that I could find, at least); you’ll just have to go to that page and scroll till you find it. Right now, the current “standard” Eclipse version is at the VERY BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN (c.f. my previous comment re: sense of humour), and at the right hand edge of that box is a tiny link saying “Mac OS X”)

If you’re new to Eclipse, you will probably find that downloading eclipse is one of the most confusing downloads you’ve ever done; if so, this is part of that same problem mentioned above where the Eclipse project makes plugin installs ridiculously difficult: all those many confusing different Eclipse versions that you cannot tell the difference between are actually the same, but differ only in which plugins are pre-installed.

Yes, this is stupid. Yes, it’s badly documented. Sorry. You’ll learn to live with it – they’ve been doing this for almost ten years now so don’t expect it to be fixed any time soon.

I suggest you run Eclipse once, now, before going on to the next step – if Eclipse doesn’t start at this point, don’t waste time confusing yourself with the PHP plugins until you can get Eclipse working on its own!

Second problem: get PHP IDE (now renamed to “PDT”)

You can try to do the automated-install; Eclipse is bad at handling automated installs, has very poor error-handling if anything goes wrong (it just crashes and doesn’t explain), and plugin developers usually screw-up the auto-install API in ways that can actully render your copy of Eclipse unusable (this happens *a lot*). I would advise never using it if you can avoid it.

This one’s pretty messed-up. According to the website and the list of requirements, if you want to use the latest version (vesion 2.0, not yet “packaged”), then you have to download approx 6 massive files.

I found that if you download the “Eclipse for Java” pacakge then it has some of those built-in already, and even if you don’t, several of those have EACH OTHER built-in (WTF?). I suggest you don’t take any risks, and that you do this the long way (download EVERYTHING).

First, go to this download page.

Decide which version you want; right now you want “2.0.0 Stable Builds”, but soon that will be what you get from “Latest Releases”, so check there too.

Then download ALL the zip files listed under “PDT” AND everything listed under “Build Dependencies”. Right now, there are 3 files for “PDT” (SDK, Runtime, and Tests), and 5 files under “Build Dependencies” (Eclipse gtk, EMF, DTP, GEF, and WTP).

Third problem: OS X can’t unzip the files

If, like most OS X users, you’re using Stuffit Expander to unzip the files, by default it won’t do it, because they all overwrite the same directory name (and StuffIt is designed to “protect” you from that, which is nice).

That’s only slightly annoying to get around, but you are still screwed, because OS X itself is (apparently – I couldn’t find a way around this using Finder) hard-coded to prevent you from copying the contents of the directories into the Eclipse directory. When you try to it says “delete the target directory first, or cancel?” (unlike windows, which says “only overwrite files which are the same, otherwise copy all the missing files … or cancel?” which is 99% of the time what you wanted. I have no idea why Apple uses a “destructive” copy – and gives you no alternative!)

Here’s how to get around both problems: The solution – Manual install via Terminal

Fortunately, if you switch to using the Terminal, and run “unzip” by typing it in manually, by default it’s setup as a unix variant that acts in the same way that Windows works by default.

First, make sure you are in the directory where you saved the ZIP files, e.g. by typing:

cd ~/Downloads

(assuming you saved them to your personal Downloads folder)

Then you just type:

unzip [name of zipfile1]
unzip [name of zipfile2]
…
unzip [name of zipfileN]

…which resolves the incompatibilities in the distro files, and then to install the plugin you type:

cp -Ri eclipse [location of your eclipse folder – usually: /Applications/eclipse]

Note that the “-R” is *required*, and that there is NO trailing slash after “eclipse”. The “i” after the “-R” is optional, it might be good to know if you have problems, but it allows you to get confirmation before overwriting any files. Thankfully, you can just hold down the enter key and it will do the defautl (do not overwrite) as it goes through each file; there are many hundreds of files to copy, and you may already have hundreds of them, so this is handy.

Installation complete

Now start Eclipse – this took 5 minutes for me, where normally it takes 30 seconds, don’t ask me why) – but eventually it worked.

Test it works – go “File -> New Project” and scroll down to the PHP folder, and select “PHP Project”. If there is no PHP folder in the list, then the install has failed. Start again. Good luck.

Otherwise, it should let you create a project, in which case: You now have PDT / PHP-IDE for Eclipse installed and working.

Writing a PHP file

I’m assuming you know how to do this, or can find a tutorial (any PDT tutorials should be fine – it works the same way as the mainstream language plugins for Eclipse, so *any* tutorial on creating a source file and building it ought to work).

Fourth problem: Running your PHP

Oh crap. If you go ahead and create a project, give it a name, and hit OK, you’ll find that the PHP IDE seems designed to not allow you to develop or test PHP on a server; it only supports developing and testing on a local (inside Eclipse) private PHP interpreter. If you’re new to programming, this is fine to get started and learn some basic PHP.

If you’re an experienced programmer, you’ll probably hat that: unless you enjoy tracking down unreproducable bugs and tearing your hair out, you need to develop on the same software + version that runs your production server (in most cases, this will be an Apache2 server running the PHP5 module). Since OS X comes with Apache2 *and* PHP5 built-in, you *already* have a server on your machine that is probably 98% the same as the live server you would use (so far Apache2 + PHP5 on OS X seems to act almost identically to the same versions on Linux, FreeBSD, etc – as you would expect).

(98% is annoyingly short of 100%, but it’s a lot closer than using the bulit-in interpreter)

I can’t find any options in the Run Dialogs to control how it invokes the running of the code from a remote server (or even a local one!) – if you go digging through all the config options, they’re just missing.

NB: there IS something that looks like it might do the trick, where it has a list of “Server” and lets you choose a “PHP Server” – but THIS IS A LIE (there is no cake), do not believe it, this is for something else entirely; it’s just that someone made a poor choice of name for those labels).

Instead, what you have to do is be a lot more careful when creating new projects. Do this:

File -> New… -> PHP Project
Fill in project name as per normal with Eclipse
UNcheck the “default” option for “Project Contents”
Click the Browse button under “Project Contents” and navigate to wherever you keep your source DIRECTORIES for all your projects (see more on this below – and you may end up crying when you see what has to be done)
Click Finish
…NB: BE CAREFUL: it asks you a sneaky extra question, and your answer depends on how you manage source control (see below)

Special Note: where do you keep your PHP?

If:

you are just developing locally for now on OS X
AND you want to use the Sites directory to save your PHP files in
AND you want to use your Apache2/PHP server instead of the “fake” one that comes with eclipse

Then:

select your personal Sites folder as the Project Contents above
AND answer “Create project in /Users/[your name]/Sites/[project name]” when you press Finish above

This will:

automatically create a new sub-directory in Sites with the same name as your project
mean that the address of your project is “http://localhost/[projectname]/”
mean that if you delete the project in Eclipse, and select “delete from disk as well” when you do, Eclipse will delete ONLY the “[projectname]” subdirectory from your Sites folder, and leave everything else intact

…ALTERNATIVELY…

If:

you use proper source control which has a unique root directory for each source project

Then:
EITHER:

select the folder for that project as the Project Contents above
AND answer “Create project in [source root folder]. (Deleting the project will delete the entire [source root folder])

OR:

select the PARENT folder that contains the project-specific source folder as the Project Contents above
AND answer “Create project in [PARENT folder of source root folder]” when you press Finish above

I actually strongly recommend the first option, since this will ensure that Eclipse doesn’t mess with your source control’s PARENT folder (which in most source control systems will either screwup the system (happens with crappy source control like CVS) or just be ignored because you won’t have write-access (happens with the more high quality source control) – but this can upset Eclipse if you do some other things wrong in the future.

FINALLY!

After all that, I finally had a working PHP IDE on OS X. Yes!

I haven’t tried debugging yet, but I found the following links that look pretty sound for setting it up. Bear in mind that the first one tells you to setup your Project Contents differently – just adapt what it tells you depending upon what you did above – the author doesn’t seem to fully understand Eclipse’s arcane approach to projects (given the name he uses for his Project!), which is fine, but IMHO not recommended.

How To Setup a Free PHP Debugger using Eclipse PDT + XDebug

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MMO Blogger Round-up

Post author By adam
Post date November 14, 2008

On this site I have a rather subtly-hidden Blog Roll. When I started blogging, the site had less on it, and the roll was easy to find – and short. Now it’s not. And it’s long. And each link on there has been carefully considered. There’s some gems in there (although a lot of them are updated so infrequently few people track them).

So it’s time to call-out some of the interesting things to be found in the blogging world of MMO people.

By the way … you can tell who’s working on uber-secret or personally exciting projects these days because they’ve suspiciously stopped blogging for months at a time. Lazy slackers, the lot of them. The more you do, the more you should blog! :P

There are some that should be on the blogroll but aren’t (yet), and some other bloggers I should mention (but I’m sticking to the blogroll only for this post – I’ll go through others next time). Feel free to add your own recommended reading in the comments.

Blogs to read:
Brinking (Nabeel Hyatt)
* Who? serial entrepreneur, raised funding and sold companies
* What? currently running a funk-tastic social / music / games company with a bunch of Harmonix guys
* Why? big commentator on the games/apps/making money/predictions parts of All Things Facebook

Broken Toys (Scott Jennings / LTM)
* Who? became infamous in the early days of MMOs as a player of Ultima Online who ranted publically, amusingly, and sometimes even insightfully
* What? ex-NCsoft, now doing intriguing web games at John Galt Games
* Why? In his heart Scott’s still a player, and more than anyone else I’ve seen he interprets the world of MMO design, development, and playing through the players’ eyes. Interesting point: he’s mostly concerned with life-after-launch. Funny that. Players kind of find that bit the most interesting. Also keeps a close eye on community-management screw-ups, and WoW generally

Bruce Everiss
* Who? ex-head of marketing for Codemasters
* What? um, I’m not sure what he’s doing these days, apart from becoming a “professional blogger”
* Why? he aims to comment on every single interesting piece of news in the mainstream games industry. That’s a lot of commentary. Always something to read! IMHO he is often completely wrong about anything online-games, and a lot of business and “future of industry” stuff – Bruce is from an older age of the industry. But … he says a lot of interesting things and sparks a lot of interesting debates in the process. Worth reading. Just remember he is extremely (deliberately, I’m sure) provocative, and don’t take it too seriously.

Coke and Code (Kevin Glass)
* Who? A programmer working in mainstream IT
* What? An insanely prolific author of casual games “in his free time, as a hobby”
* Why? Because he’s better at making games than many professionals I’ve met, and he is very very prolific, making new libraries, toolsets, editors, games, game engines – and commenting on it all as he goes, and throwing up new games for you to play all the time

Erik Bethke
* Who? ex-Producer for Interplay
* What? CEO of GoPets, an online casual virtual world that’s especially big in Asia (and based in South Korea)
* Why? A hardcore WoW player who analyses the game-design as he goes, and relates very honestly a stream of both emotional experiences and seminal events in the game that should give you lots of things to be thinking about, especially if you’re a designer, business person, or product manager.

Extenuating Circumstances (Dan Hon)
* Who? ex-MindCandy, current CEO of SixToStart
* What? one of the first Bloggers (on the whole of the internet!) in the UK, and an awe-inspiring assimilator of “everything happening on the internet, with technology, with media, with entertainment and the future of the world” for all of the ten years I’ve known him.
* Why? He’s still an excellent tracker of all those things, and finds memes very quickly. Nowadays he just auto-posts links (lots of them, every day) with a few words of commentary scattered here and there (del.icio.us descriptions) – making his blog a ready-made news filter for you :)

Fishpool (Osma Ahvenlampi)
* Who? CTO of Sulake (makers of Habbo Hotel)
* What? a very technical commentator, often in great detail, on the issues of running a 100-million user virtual world, with observations about Habbo’s community, business, and culture thrown in
* Why? He posts very rarely, but when he does, they’re usually full of yummy detail

Futuristic Play (Andrew Chen)
* Who? ex-VC (Mohr-Davidow Ventures)
* What? entrepreneur with a web-background who’s come into the games industry and bringing lots of useful stuff with him
* Why? blogs a LOT on advertising (and how to make money out of it in games and web and casual), and on metrics, and how you can use them to run you games or web business better. Also has a long fascination with what are the best parts of the games industry, and the best of the web industry, and how we can each put those best bits together to be even better

Off the Record – Scott Hartsman
* Who? ex-Everquest, ex-Simutronics
* What? Senior Producer for MMOs – but previously an MMO lead developer, and once (apparently) a Game Designer.
* Why? he’s funny, he knows his stuff, and he’s worked on some of the most important MMO projects outside Asia, so he’s got an interesting perspective going there.

Orbus Gameworks (Darius Kazemi)
* Who? ex-Turbine, now CEO of Orbus (a games-metrics middleware company)
* What? Likes the colour orange *a lot*, infamous for networking his ass off at games conferences (*everyone* knows Darius), very friendly, generous – and mildly obssessed with the use of metrics and stats to improve the creativity and success of game design (in a good way)
* Why? If you liked the Halo heatmaps when they came out, you’ll love some of the stuff they post on the Orbus company blog. A year ago they were posting heatmaps-on-steroids. If you thought “metrics” equalled “spreadsheets of data” then prepare to have your view changed pretty thoroughly.

Prospect Magazine/First Drafts (Tom Chatfield)
* Who? section-editor of the highly respected socio-political print magaine Prospect
* What? a highly-accomplished English Literature post-grad (bear with me here) … who also happens to have been a lifelong hardcore game player, I think the only person I know who got a hardcore character to level 99 on Diablo2, and now plays WoW a lot.
* Why? although Prospect only very rarely (like, only a few times ever) covers games, it’s very interesting to see what the rest of the world – especially the highly educated and highly intelligent but non-technical, older generations – thinks of us. And a bit of culture in your blog reading is probably good for you, too.

Psychochild (Brian Green)
* Who? ex-3DO/M-59, now the owner and designer of the revamped, relaunched, more modern Meridian-59
* What? an MMO game designer who disingenuously describes himself as an indie MMO designer but like most of the others has probably spent too long doing this and knows too much (compared to many of the modern “mainstream” MMO designers) for that to be true any more
* Why? lots and lots of great design ideas and commentary here for anyone wanting to do MMO design

Scott Bilas
* Who? programmer on Duneon Siege
* What? …in particular, responsible for the Entity System (one of my main areas of interest)
* Why? Scott’s phased in and out of blogging, but when he does blog he tends to do good meaty programming posts that contain lots of source code and some useful lesson or algorithm.

Sulka’s Game (Sulka Haro)
* Who? lead designer for Sulake (Habbo Hotel)
* What? more of a Creative Director than game designer, more of a web background than games, but above all a community/product/creative person who knows his stuff. Also a big player of MMORPGs
* Why? are you cloning Club Penguin or Habbo Hotel and want some pointers about revenue models, community management, and how to be successful with virtual-item sales? You might want to read his posts ;)

The Creation Engine No.2 (Jim Purbrick)
* Who? ex-Codemasters, ex-Climax (both times working on MMO projects)
* What? originally a network / MMO academic researcher, then a network coder, and now the person who runs Linden Lab (Second Life) in the UK. Very big proponent of all things open-source, always doing interesting and innovative things with technology
* Why? Keep an eye on the more innovative technology things that are done with Second Life (stuff you don’t tend to read about in the news but – to a tech or games person – is a heck of a lot more interesting by a long long way), and get some insight into the life of serious open-source programmers who succeed in living and breathing this stuff inside commercial environments

The Forge (Matt Mihaly)
* Who? developer of one of the earliest commercially successful text MUDs, now CEO of Sparkplay Media
* What? spent many years running Achaea, a text-only MUD that made a healthy profit from pioneering the use of itemsales (virtual goods) – and the things weren’t even graphical – and has now finally (finally!) moved into graphical games with the MMO he’s developing
* Why? one of the few MMO professionals who talks a lot about his experiences playing on consoles (especially Xbox), which makes for a refreshing alternate view – especially from the perspective of an MMO person talking about social and community issues in those games. Just like Brian Green, claims to be an indie MMO designer, but probably knows far far too much for that to be even vaguely justifiable

Vex Appeal (Guy Parsons)
* Who? ex-MindCandy
* What? Guy is an extremely creative … guy … who had a small job title but a big part in inventing and rolling out a lot of the viral marketing stuff we did for Perplex City (online game / ARG from a couple of years ago)
* Why? Awesome place to go for ideas and info on the cutting edge of doing games stuff with social networks. Usually. Also … just makes for a fun blog to read

We Can Fix That with Data (Sara Jensen Schubert)
* Who? ex-Spacetime, currently SOE
* What? MMO designer, but like Lum / Scott Jennings, comes from a long background as player and commentator, and shorter background as actually in the industry. Like Darius Kazemi, spent a lot of time in doing metrics / data-mining for MMOs
* Why? Take Darius’s insight into metrics for MMOs, and Scott’s knowledge of what players like, don’t like, and ARE like, and you get a whole bunch of interesting posts wandering around the world of metrics-supported-game-design-and-community-management. Good stuff.

Zen of Design (Damion Schubert)
* Who? ex-EA (Ultima Online), currently at Bioware (MMO)
* What? MMO designer who’s been around for a long time (c.f. UO)
* Why? Damion writes long detailed posts about MMO design, what works, what doesn’t, practicalities of geting MMO development teams to work together, how the playerbase will react to things, etc. He also rather likes raiding in MMORPGs – which is fascinating to see (given his heavy background as a pro MMO *designer*)

[NC] Anson (Matthew Wiegel)
* Who? ex-NCsoft
* What? Dungeon Runners team
* Why? was doing lots of interesting and exciting things with data-mining/metrics in the free-to-play low-budget NCsoft casual MMO. Watch this space…

People with nothing to do with games, but you might want to watch just because they’re interesting:
Bard’s World (Joshua Slack)
* ex-NCsoft
* Josh is one of the key people behind Java’s free, hardware-accelearted, game engine (JME)
Janus Anderson
* Who? ex-NCsoft
* What? um, he’s been taking a lot of photos recently
* Why? watch this space
Mark Grant
* Who? non-Games industry
* What? an entrepreneur, web-developer, and Cambridge Engineer
* Why? very smart guy, and interesting posts on web development (no games tie-in)

maintenance

What topics do you want to read … followups

Post author By adam
Post date November 14, 2008
2 Comments on What topics do you want to read … followups

Thanks for everyone who voted in the survey (What topics do you want to read more about?) – very helpful.

You can help by rating the posts from now on whenever you see one that you greatly prefer / greatly dislike (I’ve added a plugin that lets you rate each post from 1 star to 5 stars without reloading the page or having to login etc).

Your top votes:

MMO operations issues / running online games (80%)
MMO programming (75%)
MMO design issues / inventing online games (75%)

So, you all want to know more about how to make and then run an MMO, huh? :)

But … don’t want any more Casual MMO analysis (15%) nor anything to do with Social Networking (5%), even though MMOs are really the world’s most advanced Social Networks and depend upon it for their revenue. Interesting.

So, I guess this reflects an interest in more of the MMORPG / $50 million budget side of the MMO industry? a.k.a. “how do you even spend that much money in a sensible way”?

A few generic areas there I’ve long been meaning to write about:

Mistakes in MMO design
Mistakes in MMO programming
Classic (and not-so-classic) MMO server architectures
What “running an MMO” looks like (staff, job roles, hardware, software, processes)
Better ways of running an MMO (mostly: different approaches to process and to software)

Is that along the right lines? If not, let me know (comment on this post, or grab my email from the About page) – suggestions / requests welcome too, although do that for information only, don’t expect me to automatically fulfil them!

And, as mattb pointed out, there’s at least one person wanting more on Component / Entity Systems. That’s tricky. The ES posts so far took a very long time to write (contrary to what some people have said, an awful lot of research and cross-checking went into them, in an attempt to clarify what has historically been a very murky and poorly-described subject, and prone to confusion and misinformation). Until recently it also looked like I was going to have an opportunity to see another ES go into production for a major MMO, and I was hoping to wait and see how that went before coming back to the topic. That ain’t going to happen now, which leaves me with several directions I could go in. Feedback needed, guys – what needs saying that isn’t already said? I’ve got one interesting post left that explains the whole “Future of MMO” part (although I think it’s pretty obvious already what that will contain), but I’m sure there’s a lot more advice and thoughts I could throw out if there’s specific areas people are looking at (except not source code – I’ve tried blogging source before, this is the wrong medium for that).

community conferences entrepreneurship mmo signup processes Web 0.1

Web 0.1: How NOT to organize an event on Meetup.com

Post author By adam
Post date November 12, 2008

(a FAIL using web-based meeting tools)

1) Make it look fun and interesting and seemingly inclusive:

“MiniBar is a social evening in East London which offers people a chance to snaffle some free beer while discussing p2p, Creative Commons, web applications, social networking and general Web 2.0 (3.0) mayhem & fandango.”

2) …but require that signup has to be done in two separate places for two “halves” of the event:

“You can come at 5pm … You need to register separately here for this part.”

3) …and make the location a Secret, known only to the special few:

“Location
This location is shown only to members”

4) If someone attempts to signup for the (free) event, deny them, and demand 250 letters explanation (no more! don’t you dare go over 250 chars!) for why they are important enough / l33t enough to be allowed to come:

(the way meetup.com works, I can’t access this page from cache to copy/paste the text, sorry – you’ll just have to take it from me that it’s pretty abrupt, demanding you justify yourself without offering anything in return, or any kind of explanation of WHAT you are supposed to write, or WHY)

5) Finish your event description with not one but TWO content-less/broken links, and describe them as “more info”. For bonus marks: forget to hyperlink one of them:

“More Info at: OpenBusiness.cc and barcamp.org/minibar”

(the first domain there is hotlinked to: http://www.openbusiness.cc/minibar/)

NB: http://www.openbusiness.cc/minibar/ == a empty webserver directory on a webserver allegedly running Apache version 1.3.39 (!) – not impressive for a web/internet event.

NB2: http://barcamp.org/minibar == a webpage with adverts for 50 odd totally unrelated items, e.g.

“angled bob hair style
black braided hair styles
jc penny free shipping
trendy hair style
victoria secret free shipping”

(yes, really – Victoria Secret and JC penny. For a supposed BarCamp about startups and internet companies. Um … OK.)

I guess that’s another Web 0.1 example, then…

maintenance web 2.0

What topics do you want to read more about?

Post author By adam
Post date November 12, 2008
4 Comments on What topics do you want to read more about?

Inspired by Andrew Chen (whose question I’ve copied exactly :)), here’s a poll to find out what YOU, thre readers of this blog, would like to see more of.

(tick all that apply; if you tick the “something else” option, please comment on this post and say what’s missing)

[poll id=”2″]

If you believe in metrics, user-interaction, and sampling your userbase, doing something like this is a no-brainer :).

computer games programming

Tilt-sensitive game using Macbook / Macbook Air

Post author By adam
Post date November 7, 2008

This is a tiny game we made more than 2 years ago as part of Perplex City. Many people are unaware that the tilt-sensors inside the iPhone are also available (or something very similar) inside every apple laptop (all Macbooks/most Powerbooks/some iBooks); we made a game that made use of this.

Unfortunately, this feature of the laptops is undocumented, and so Apple has changed the specs a few times, so the original files no longer work. With a small bit of mangling, I’ve fixed the very simple input script, and it all works fine on my Macbook Air.

Links:

Info on how this tiny minigame fitted-in to the overall Perplex City game
(mirror of) The original in-game website that holds the original download files (note: Mindcandy is hosting this for now, but I don’t know for how much longer they’ll keep this stuff up)
UPDATED version (0.34) of the hardware driver that you need on Macbook / Macbook Air to make this work (current homepage for that software is here)

Instructions:

Download the file “maze-inertial.zip” from the second link above, and unzip it
Download the AMStracker dmg from the third link above, and open it, and put all the contents in the Maze subdirectory of wherever you just unzipped to; it will want to overwrite a file – say “yes”
Make a new file in that directory using a text editor, call it e.g. “start.pl”, and copy/paste the lines below (bottom of this post)
Run the file start.pl; you might be able to double click on it, you might have to go to the directory in Terminal and type “./start.pl” to make it run
Wait for the java app to load, you should see a ball on a chequered background
Pick up your laptop and start tilting it to make the ball roll around
NB: the lack of graphics was deliberate! the idea was to close your laptop lid and play just using the sound (this requires you to disable OS X’s auto-suspend feature though)
You will get cryptic messages as you complete levels; there are hundreds of levels, and no save feature (!). Read the website links above to find out why…

PS: if you read the source and think “ugh, what a brutal and inelegant way to make this work” then congratulations – this whole game was done start to finish in something like 2 weeks (part-time; if we’d all been working full-time on it it was probably more like 4 days). We had to cut a lot of corners…

Source of file start.pl – copy/paste everything below this line

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use IO::Socket::INET;
use Getopt::Long;

$| = 1;

my $flipx = 0;my $flipy = 0;my $port = 5399;my $ams = “./amstracker”;my $maze = “./maze.jar”;my $scale = 5;

GetOptions(“flipx” => \$flipx, # –flipx flip x axis
“flipy” => \$flipy, # –flipy flip y axis
“port=i” => \$port, # –port 5399 port to talk to
“ams=s” => \$ams, # –ams ./amstracker location of amstracker
“maze=s” => \$maze, # –maze ./tiltmaze.jar location of tiltmaze.jar
“scale=f” => \$scale); # –scale 3.0 tilt scaling factor

# Needs AMStracker v0.34 or above, currently at:
# http://www.osxbook.com/software/sms/amstracker/

print STDERR “Starting amstracker ($ams)…\n”;
open AMS, “$ams -s -u 0.1 |” or die “Can’t start amstracker: $!”;
my $line = ;
print “$line”;

if ($line =~ /software/) {print STDERR “No tilt sensor found.\n”;exit 1;}

print STDERR “Starting maze ($maze)…\n”;
system “open $maze”;

print STDERR “Connecting to game…”;
my $sock;my $count = 0;

while (1){
$sock = IO::Socket::INET->new(PeerAddr => ‘localhost’,PeerPort => $port,Proto => ‘tcp’);
last if defined $sock; # success!
$count++;
if ($count > 20){die “Can’t connect to game: $!”; }
print “.”;sleep 2;}
print “\n”;

while () {
my ($x,$y,$z) = split;
next unless $x =~ /\d+/;
$x = -$x unless $flipx; $z = -$z if $flipy; $x = int($x * $scale); $z = int($z * $scale);
last unless $sock->print(“[$x,$z]”); }

games design

Micro-micro-payments via electricity bill

Post author By adam
Post date November 7, 2008

A new startup has appeared that essentially charges people a per-second subscription to play games that is added to their electricity bill.

On the one hand, I am personally against this kind of “invisible” charging because it can be – and indeed is being – mis-represented as “free”, when in fact every single user is being charged. I also feel it sets a set of very bad incentives for the lower-end game developers – essentially encouraging them to make lower-quality games. But that isn’t really a problem for me, it’s a problem for them, so … shrug.

So bear in mind my latent antipathy :) which I’ll try to keep quiet about – but for me the really interesting part is the use of this as an alternative payment system.

The Premise

On the face of it, they started with some assumptions like this:

Computer games don’t use much processing power, and yet game-players have really powerful PCs – just go look at the market for buying new PC’s: those marketed at video games players are the only part of the PC hardware market to have preserved and grown some decent profit margins on hardware, and very high prices.

Meanwhile, game developers have large amounts of extra content for their games that they don’t charge for and which they don’t allow the players to experience – it’s all there, but they can’t be bothered to let people play it. I mean, why would you? You’ve paid to create it, therefore you want to keep it secret.

Also, casual game developers, those making all those Flash and Java games you see on Miniclip, are all awesome experts when it comes to hardcore programming optimization. They might be a bit lazy, not bothering to do it a lot of the time, but despite this total lack of practice, they are all latent geniuses if you give them enough incentive.

…although actually I think they didn’t really think any of that, they just came from a compute-farm background and jumped on Games as an easy first target market.

Plura Processing is embedding an app in browser-based games that uses local CPU to run remote processor-intensive tasks – and then they charge the remote task-owner for the “rented CPU time”, and give a percentage of that back to the game developer in whose game the app was embedded. You can see a bit more on it on GigaOM, including a brief response from the company. Their VC backer, Creeris Ventures, appears to have an exec on the board who came up with this in defence of the product:

“At the end of the play session, the game sees how much compute time the player provided and rewards him with an in-game item (e.g., +1 longsword).

So what you get is something that the user loves (because he’s being directly rewarded) and a model for computing power that does work (because it’s using the PC as efficiently as possible). Both sides win. :)”

Yep. They are actually encouraging you to reward people for leaving their computers logged-in and churning up electricity by gifting them in-game items. I’m all in favour of making computer-games unfair, but I don’t see this as a sensible way to do it (from a design perspective).

A quick perusal of my LinkedIn network suggests that the company founders aren’t from a games industry background, so I guess that they thought of charging people for CPU time (an old business model from the late 1990’s that never took off, despite many tries), and then spotted games as just a good market they could take advantage of.

Something fishy

Plura is lightweight and secure

Plura applets use minimal resources on most computers. Our system is secure and each application’s integrity is verified before it can use Plura.

If you’d like to see Plura first-hand, just click here. We think you’ll see how harmless Plura really is.

…given that your business model is to use as much resources as possible, the above statement is surely only true via sophistry? (they’ll be going for “minimial resources” when it comes to RAM usage, clearly, but maximal *CPU* usage, which is what most people care about given how cheap and abundant RAM is today). Am I missing something here?

Anyway, that’s not what this is really about, IMHO, because:

Business Analysis

Finally, because Plura is an enabling technology, it allows other people to create new sites and web applications that previously could not be financially supported. Plura does this in two ways. First, it offers a completely new revenue stream to new and existing sites.

How much money?

Well, according to their website, they’ll give the developer $2.60 for each computer that spends a month devoting all its CPU power to their processing. Is that a lot?

Let’s put this into perspective.

The ratio between “users online” and “users” is around 1:100 for a free game, 1:20 for a free MMO, and around 1:6 for a subscription MMO.

So, with Plura, in a subs MMO you would be earning at the rate of around 40 cents per month per user.
At the opposite end of the scale, in a free web game, you’d be earning at the rate of around 2.6 cents per month per user.

That’s assuming 100% CPU usage devoted to Plura. In practice, an MMO would be sparing around 1% CPU (assuming this app is correctly configured), and even for a free web game, you’d have IM running, probably Outlook, etc, and you’d expect with a *well-written* flash game on a Single-Core sysem to be seeing at most 30% of the CPU going to Plura, probably more like 5% realistically (pure guess, based on the CPU usages I’ve typically seen of Flash apps on the few occasions they’ve been tuned for minimal CPU). NB: this WILL change as adoption of Flash 10/11 increases, assuming that the rendering engine efficiencies come in as expected (flash prior to 10 uses the CPU for graphics).

What about dual-core systems? So long as flash games are single-threaded, Plura could get 50% CPU to itself (well … fighting off Outlook, IM, etc – so perhaps more like 40% to itself). I’m not about to try it on my Core2Duo here, though, since this is on a laptop and anything that maxes both cores will usually overheat and crash the laptop (a problem with the Macbook Air and it’s Intel CPU. Sigh)

So, my guess is that a typical casual game developer will see around $1-$5 per thousand users, whilst taking away their users’ CPU power. At the bottom end, that really does NOT compare favourably with advertising revenues. At the top end, it starts to look worthwhile; all depends how much CPU power you give up, I guess.

Risks

As a developer, you are merely replacing one agency-based fluctuating-value revenue model (advertising) for another (compute-farming).

Even with the many agencies and advertisers and healthy industry behind advertising, rates soar and plummet unpredictably, which is enough to put game developers out of business all on its own.

It’s going to be a lot worse working within what is by comparison a tiny niche marketplace, and where you are so heavily disengaged from the purchasers.

I’m sure plenty of people will try it out since it’s simple to attempt, but it doesn’t currently appear viable as a source of revenue for any game studio that wants to remain in business long-term.

Cost of Goods Sold … to the user

How much is this costing in electricity? Interesting question…

For a modern PC, with an Intel Core Duo, the difference between 0% CPU and 100% CPU is around 60 watts, which works out to a little over 40kWh per month.

At the moment you pay around $0.2-$0.5 per kWh for electricity. So, the electricity used by each home user will cost them from 80 cents (cheap power, efficient CPU) up to $4 (expensive power, inefficient CPU – e.g. the Pentium 4 uses almost twice the watts!).

i.e. as a game developer, you are being paid at just around the cost of the electricity used. That’s how this could be seen as a somewhat odd (but nevertheless interesting) indirect form of payment-system for users without credit-cards etc.

Growth potential?

But it’s capped at very very very low ARPU. Ridiculously low. This is a poor business model for anything except lowest-common-denominator games. Strangely, the company advertises it on their own website as a “replacement” for advertising, although they also run testimonials from a game developer who tried it and said the opposite.

(that developer, by the way, was Paul Preece, famous for making just one game (Desktop Tower Defence), and I suspect he’s getting a much better rate than $2.60 per month given the huge marketing value to Plura of having DTD as a “client”).

Market: gamers with powerful computers?

Generally, gamers who have spent vast amounts of cash on powerful computers are playing powerful games – not casual web games
All games, everywhere, use 100% CPU. The basic, fundamental model of game development mandates this: it is far too expensive to faff about on optimization that is not absolutely necessary
A game that does NOT use 100% CPU does poorly in the market, because the players will condemn the noticeably poorer graphics, framerate, AI, sound quality, reactiveness (of controls), etc.

Market: casual gamers?

Typically have weak and crappy PCs
If you’re playing games in a browser, that almost always means you have other apps open at once
Generally speaking, you don’t want the rest of your PC slowing down because a low-quality game is killing it
Flash is already phenomenonally bad on some platforms, and will steal 100% CPU at the drop of a hat; this causes lots of problems in the game-playing community of casual gamers who don’t understand it, but condemn games for it and refuse to play them. If you played much on popular casual games sites, you’d notice this uncommon but not rare problem
Flash game programmers generally know little about how to write good code (this is why Flash is great – it opens up the market to more programmers, rather than requiring everyone to be a highly experienced, highly trained expert), they certainly don’t write efficient code; if you want them to start learning how, expect a long long uphill struggle to re-educate the entire worldwide base of Flash programmers

So, I don’t think this is particularly exciting as a revenue model itself.

But I do like this idea of the consumer’s electricity bill being converted into per-millisecond subscription to the game they are playing; in a world where you are not able to get direct payment from your consumers, or are somehow prevented, this could *in theory* (I think the lack of established marketplace invalidates this in practice) be a good poor-man’s replacement for micropayments

community

Community outreach: Going back in time, to an era before IM

Post author By adam
Post date November 7, 2008

In case you hadn’t noticed, there’s been a recent disturbance in the force for the inhabitants of the place they call Second Life, and it’s all about money.

But that’s not what this post is about (I’m not that interested in the internal politics of a single VW/MMO/whatever, until/unless they have wider general meaning / effect).

No, this post is about Linden Lab’s actions following the uproar, where (among other initiatives) they held an open meeting within SL to discuss the issue, with the company CEO present to do a big Q&A session. Since LL has been touting SL as a great place to hold meetings – better than real life – and someone conveniently posted a transcript, I thought it would be interesting to see what an LL-run meeting looked like, under pressure.

The simple answer (if you glance at that transcript, about 50% of which is noise), is: chaotic.

computer games entrepreneurship games design

Reality Distortion and Entrepreneurship

Post author By adam
Post date November 2, 2008
2 Comments on Reality Distortion and Entrepreneurship

I was looking through presentation slides the other day, and saw this:

“As children develop, they make greater and greater efforts to adapt to reality, rather than distorting reality, as in make-believe play.”

The implication, contextually, was that ultimately as a child becomes an adult, their reality becomes fully adapted, and no longer distorted. That might not be the intended implication, but it’s interesting: I’ve been fighting against this since, well, since forever, really. And spending your life constantly distorting reality it seems to me is neither a bad thing nor a limiting thing.

Because it trains you to be good at two things: seeing how you might change reality, and believing that you CAN change it.

At one end of the spectrum, distorted realities make it much easier for you to visualize what is “possible” instead of what is merely “probable”, and that’s the essence of spotting opportunities.

Entrepreneurship and Seeing Change

(good) Entrepreneurs are constantly seeing new ways to “change the world” in ways both small and large. Often the change is small, but the effects are large, or vice versa. It’s often said that “you cannot teach Entrepreneurship”, and while I beg to differ, I have experience of actually trying it, and huge experience of arguing the concept with people. Mostly, the argument against the teachability of entrepreneurship is rooted in the inability to “make” people “become able to” see Opportunities.

I think one of the primary differentiators for having/not having that ability (irrespective of whether it can be taught) is the extent to which you see:

The world as it is

as opposed to

The world as it could be

and even

The world as I would like it

Looking at the Entrepreneurs themselves:

Good entrepreneurs, in my personal experience, see the world always as It Could Be.
Bad ones usually see it as They Would Like It To Be.
Great ones ALSO see it as They Would Like It To Be
Non-entrepreneurs see it As It Is

…with the difference between Great Entrepeneurs and Bad Entrepreneurs being mainly that the former *also* see the world As It Is, and hold the two visions in their head at all times, simultaneously.

Because the Great Entrepeneurs, while constantly (many times a week) spotting things that They Would Like It To Be, also – constantly – imagine how they might transform the world As It Is, usually by a series of steps, into that target. The Bad ones simply employ the tried-and-tested Hope plan:

Have Idea
?
Profit

…which – let’s be honest here – occasionally works (usually if you simply get massively lucky with timing / outside events).

Entrepreneurship and Effecting Change

Why are some people better able to see how to make their desired changes come true?

I believe it’s largely driven by two skills. Firstly, the obvious one highlighted above – that the more practice you have of thinking about how you might change reality to fit what you want it to be, the better you will be at that process.

“Better” here means that you will

have more ideas for each transform in the chain
be better at recognising “good” and “bad” transforms
process suggested transforms – and transform-chains – more rapidly (quick accept/reject)

The second skill is believing in yourself and your ability to change the world. Often, the successful changes that Entrepeneurs effect are surprising to most people – they question how that could even be possible – while *in practice* not being so difficult to achieve. Usually, this is because normal people see only the beginning and end of a sequence of changes.

To take a simple example that illustrates the kind of “impossible” being “possible” given some clever changes that I’m talking about, look at Freeserve. (NB: this is based on my memory of events more than 10 years ago, much of which I found out 2nd or 3rd hand, when trying to understand how Freeserve had achieved something that had eluded all the other ISPs – so take this as an example in theory, it may not be accurate in practice! Incidentally, there seems to be VERY little public history on Freeserve, how it started, and how massively it changed ISP / internet access in the UK – I’d be interested if any readers have seen any articles / interviews about the details of its inception?)

Freeserve … the first “free” ISP in the UK

When Freeserve was created in the UK providing “free internet access” in the 1990’s, it seemed impossible. They even provided a cheap local phone number that could be used anywhere in the country – so it was cheaper on your phone bills than calls to your subscription ISP!

Ahem. Except, it wasn’t the cheapEST kind of local phone call, it was partway between an “ultra-local” call (very cheap) and a “national” call (expensive).

And, in an unprecedented move, Freeserve had managed to get the telephone company to give them a share of the revenue from that particular phone number. For reference, at the time, if you wanted to get revenue from the telco for running a phone number, you had to get a number on the “very expensive” plan, where the telco would charge the consumer as much as 10 times the cost of an already expensive national-call.

Of course, given the huge volume of calls that then went through to that number, the telco made a huge profit out of the scheme – so it worked out in their best interests, and everyone profited. (although I have no idea how this was negotiated, or whose idea it was – and “persuading a telco to change their revenue model” is itself a problem I’d usually classify as “impossible”, so I’m guessing there was another, similar, chain of small changes that lead to this being acheived).

About two years before this all happened, I was working on a project to create a new ISP, and I’d got as far in breaking down the steps as to see that you HAD, somehow, to find a way to remove the “dual-billing” model from consumers (pay once for internet access, pay twice for the per-minute, uncapped (!) phone call too). I didn’t have the confidence to believe it was possible, and after running through some fairly crazy ideas (including looking into internet access via broadcast radio for downstream, and home modem for upstream), I gave up and moved on. With hindsight, at the time, I realised that I’d have hit upon the change-the-telco idea within another couple of months, and that I’d have had a clear year to find a way to ACTUALLY get a telco to change, and still be able to launch before Freeserve.

(for the record, that event finally kicked me into realising that the world-changing ideas I had all the time, and thought through as often as multiple times a day, were actually all realisable (potentially). Many people I know, potentially good entrepreneurs both older and younger than me, still don’t believe the world can be changed to their tune, they can only see the world As It Is)

How to … Influence People

This is a big topic; whole books have been written on it! (OMG!!1!!!!0).

But just to select ONE of the most powerful weapons: imposing a personal view of reality onto the reality you find, and living and acting as though your view of reality is the real one, and keeping at it until everyone else gives in. The real beauty of this being that if the only differences between your reality and the real reality are the beliefs of people, then it becomes a self-fulfilling dream.

This is basic sales-technique: it’s usually more effective to sell people on a shared belief than it is to sell them merely on a bunch of facts and leave them to guess for themselves whether those facts are real or not. But it takes a particular kind of personality to be good at imposing their desired reality (if that’s all you do, it tends to come across as mere bullying), and also at making it stick.

IMHO, people who spend more of their time adapting reality are much better at the “making it stick” part.

Conclusion

So, ultimately, one of the things that makes a great Entrepreneur is huge practice with very much NOT adapting to reality, but instead adapting reality to their own ends. And it helps in ways beyond the obvious (spotting new opportunities).

If you want to be a great entrepreneur, I’d recommend you start dreaming more, and make your dreams more vivid and concrete, and try to change the world to fit them, rather than the other way around.

PS: from reading this post, all of which has been written between going from that slide of the presentation to the next, you may come to think that it can take me a long time to read a presentation. You’d be right. This is partly why I’ve taken to transcripting in real time every conference talk I attend (and usually publishing them on this blog) – the smallest comment can spark off so many thoughts that I miss the rest of the talk, and it’s a way of giving me a chance to hear the whole talk.

computer games games industry security web 2.0

EA DRM redux

(in case you hadn’t been following, this year EA has been putting some particularly nasty DRM on their most-hyped games such as Spore and the Crysis expansion; but unlike previous years, there’s been public outrage)

A couple of things of note here:

EA thinks it can get away with what many consider lieing and cheating – and then having the CEO publically insult the customers

Lies: they claim it’s all about piracy (the evidence suggests strongly that it’s about preventing 2nd hand sales while shoring up the artificially high prices that EA’s products retail for)
Cheating: EA’s PR people claim you can always get around their dodgy restrictive-use business practice by calling a phone line, that they own and operate (there’s no reason they need to keep that phone line open, and there’s no guarantees that they will honour the customer request)
Insulting: the new CEO, who came in on grandiose claims of reforming the company after the scandal of EA-spouse which revealed some very nasty internal practices of the company (apparently institutionalized abuse of its own staff), spoke to one of the largest trade-press websites and told them the people complaining were probably just pirates or stupid (*) (again, this is clearly not the case)

(*) “half of them were pirates, and the other half were people caught up in something that they didn’t understand” – see halfway down the article.

Apparently, little or no lessons were learnt with the public outcry over Spore

…in that the damage seems to be happening all over again with Crysis: Warhead, the same identical problems (c.f. the massive negative Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk ratings). I would have thought that a publisher the size and power of EA would have managed to prevent “another Spore” – if they had wanted to.

Maybe the fallout isn’t so bad this time? There aren’t quite so many negative reviews this time around, but then Crysis:Warhead wasn’t so big a game as Spore, either in marketing or in predicted sales figures.

Amazon changes it’s mind about its policy on user-reviews more often than a Politician trying to appease the electorate

They’re there! Amazon is full of negative User-Reviews!

They’re gone! They’ve all been deleted!

They’re back again! They’ve been reinstated!

(this happened with Spore. Fair enough. They weren’t sure what to do).

But … reading the comments and off-site commentary apparently it just happened all over again with Crysis: Warhead. Huh? Why? What’s going on over at Amazon HQ?

(I’m getting visions of engineers in a central control room fighting over the keyboard of a machine running an SQL database client, alternately deleting and reinstating the comments, while a prematurely-aged sysadmin huddles in the corner weeping to himself)

The customers are refusing to be tricked into damning themselves; what appear to be EA’s shills are being spotted and beaten at their own game

Witness this fascinating comment on Amazon.co.uk review page for Crysis: Warhead:

C. Chapman says:
[Customers don’t think this post adds to the discussion. Show post anyway.]
I’m so glad to see Amazon has taken steps to filter out all of the useless nonsense being said by the DRM protestors.

Brian W. says:
Hey dude, Amazon just reposted all of the bad reviews and this game is down to the 1.5 stars it had a few days ago.

J. Schwarz says:
Don’t even bother responding to this troll Chapman, he is obviously a company man who is afraid that EA may go out of business. In fact he truly has something to worry about b/c the only other job he could get was shoveling the bs and for that he had to pass an IQ test which he failed.

WolfPup says:
I’m not sure which is more sad. Is Chapman an actual person, who honestly holds such crazy beliefs? Or is Chapman a corporate troll, who thinks that insulting non-crazy people will somehow make their activation DRM acceptable?

Either possibility is frightening.

Paul Tinsley says:
I think Chapman is employed to post. He does use a classic strategy that involves discrediting the thread by making the discussion descend to a personal level. He also attempts to alienate the protest away from the topic by declaring them to either be criminals or a small sector of the community that isn’t even a targeted customer. It’s textbook “digital” insurgency or deep strike, just choose your analogy and most will fit.

WolfPup says:
Interesting. I guess I just thought someone working for a corporation would be more professional about it or something, but…yeah…I probably didn’t think that through very well. They’re not above using any types of tactics.

I guess he’s still a corporate shill even if he’s not paid, but I’m leaning heavily towards him being paid after reading your post.

Paul Tinsley says:
Think of Chapman as a sort of “troubleshooter”. He’s not the sort to polish the company front line, he’s the clandestine stealth agent, sent forth to discredit the argument, to make people think they we can’t hold a solid debate without being personal and also to convince casual readers that our complaint is irrelevant. If Chapman was just another gamer like you or I, he wouldn’t waste so much time trying to make us all “look like idiots” as he might put it.

WolfPup says:
Yeah, you’re probably right. Unfortunately I have a pretty low opinion of how stupid and/or evil people can be, at this point in my life so I don’t really doubt there could be someone out there that clueless about these (or any other host of) issues :-(

Paul Tinsley says:
Well, I will be called delusional and paranoid for stating my opinion. Neither are true, as anybody who thinks that limited activations is better than no activations isn’t thinking like a consumer, they are working to a different agenda.

It doesn’t so much matter whether the OP was a shill or not, it’s the reaction that interests me.

I remember a time (“in the olden days, when I were a lad”) when the audience who A) cared and B) understood the issues were generally teenagers and a very narrow band (niche within a niche) of hardcore gamers with little experience of expressing themselves or dealing with sly cunning bastards. Those people would easily get sucked into tit-for-tat rants and regularly derailed (and sidelined) in such conversations. It was almost too easy. I was once one of them :).

Nowadays, I believe there are three differences.

Firstly, the audience who cares is much more mass-market (mostly IMHO thanks to the arrival of Playstation in 1995, and Sony’s successful marketing of it to young-professionals instead of just children), skews somewhat older (although still noticeably heavily biased towards young and male for many of the PC games, action PC games in particular), and is generally more experienced with the gamut of humanity and the tactics they employ.

Secondly, and this one surprised me, the subset who grok the issues seems to have massively expanded over the past 10 years. If you read through the negative comments, the arguments against DRM are often cogent, direct, and well-informed. Views that were once only understood and appreciated by readers of TheRegister seem to be (finally!) making their way into the mindsets of the public at large. I am beginning to think that we may yet manage to rescue ourselves and our futures (and those of our children) from the idiots who seek to make Copyright last 100 years, put a 10-year minimum jailterm on anyone who copies a *digital file*, and want to force everyone to carry compulsory, biometric, ID cards.

Finally, the audience of hardcore gamers themselves seems to be a lot more skilful at manipulation, especially the “people hacking”/social engineering skills. They are much harder to deceive, and much harder to defeat, compared to the days of Usenet (and here I’m very happy to accept I may just be deceiving myself with my own sentimental memories). If that’s the case, I believe it’s a direct result of the increased prevalence of online communities, especially out-of-game communities, and to a lesser extent in-game communities: these things have made people better at dealing with other people, in ways both good and bad.

computer games Web 0.1

Crysis Warhead: EA Targetted-Advertising FAIL

Post author By adam
Post date October 31, 2008

So, on this Amazon page, which starts with:

then has a sponsored advert from EA further down the page:

Yeah, um, well. I guess that targetted advertising isn’t quite working out the way it was intended.

Of course, it makes an EXCELLENT pun on the fact that I was *going* to mention that EA has “done it again” and done it’s best to screw the consumer out of 2nd-hand sales, just like they did with Spore. In fact, it’s allegedly identical to the final Spore situation (where the number of times you’re allowed to upgrade any hardware in your machine, or re-install, was upped from 3 to 5). There’s several people claiming that there’s an added “shoot-your-argument-in-the-head bonus” that even Steam-based installs have the DRM feature, although my guess is that this is just people misinterpreting the fact that there’s a different flavour of SecuROM with the Steam version (?).

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Arrange a meeting in multiple timezones

Post author By adam
Post date October 30, 2008
1 Comment on Arrange a meeting in multiple timezones

Lots of people are using Yahoo’s Upcoming more and more these days, going by the invites I get (many have switched from using Facebook to using Upcoming recently). But it completely sucks for arranging anything in a foreign country, or where people will be attending from foreign locations. Common examples:

Any meeting, event, or party at an international conference; many attendees will be flying in a day or so beforehand
Conference calls with people in more than one timezone; conference calls tend to be with multi-timezone, otherwise you’d just have a face-to-face meeting

I’ve tried lots of things, and although Outlook 2003 and beyond have some moderately handy tools for this (you can view “2 timezones simultaneously”, although IIRC *only* 2, sigh), 99% of the time I need something web-based that anyone/everyone can use. And today I found this piece of awesomeness:

http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/advmeeting.html

…which produces things like this:

(I would insert an image here, but unfortunately – despite the claims of the Debian maintainer of WordPress – Debian WordPress still can’t do file uploads, and WordPress’s authors haven’t fixed their extremely poor approach to file uploads. Sigh)

conferences

Interactive Conference Presentations, pt.1

Post author By adam
Post date October 27, 2008
2 Comments on Interactive Conference Presentations, pt.1

Thoughts on making an awesome conference, #1: Interactive Presentations

(Part 1: The Problem. ATTN: Darius – you know what I’m doing here :))

The problem with interactive presentation is simply that, in its most obvious fashion, it completely doesn’t work.

I’ve seen presenters stand up, with the best will in the world, and say “what would you like to hear about? I can focus on A, B, or C”, and the response of the audience is:

Well, YOU’RE the expert, you tell me what I should be hearing about!
You listed A+B+C in the conference brochure, so I want my money’s worth: all of them
When you put it like that, without “selling” it to me, they all sound a bit dull, actually

The other major alternative is to split by audience expertise, rather than topic, so instead of A/B/C it’s A-basic/A-intermediate/A-advanced.

This way, the speaker can at least talk about every *topic* they were going to, and the audience has no *decision* they have to make – they merely have to self-identify their level of expertise. Unfortunately, this also means the speaker has to do 3 times the preparation effort, since they have to re-phrase the whole topic for 3 unique perspectives / levels of expertise. Mostly, speakers don’t spend anywhere near enough time crafting their talks as it is – anything that places extra burden on them is almost certain to destroy what quality there might have been in the talk.

To summarize “Interactive Presentation”

The audience must NOT be required to DECIDE what they want to hear
The presenter must NOT be required to OVER-PREPARE their content

Perhaps it would help – with these issues in mind – to re-visit the Use Case: why did we even want an interactive presentation in the first place?

Why “Interactive”?

Reasons I can think of off the top of my head:

Audiences get bored and fall asleep
Crowd-sourcing the expertise of the audience
Correcting mistakes

Stimulation – audiences get bored if they are forced to be physically dormant (sitting motionless) and are not being provided any mental stimulation; asking them to “interact” excuses some physical movement, and provides opportunities from some CHALLENGING of the audience, requiring them to THINK before responding, and allowing them to actually TALK to the speaker (and to the rest of the audience – don’t forget this; this is not a private dialogue)

Crowd-sourcing – it’s rare that the speaker knows more about the topic than the entire audience combined; in fact, in general, it never happens, not by a long way. Often, the speaker knows less – in some areas – about CORE aspects of the talk than some members of the audience (but much more in other areas). That extra knowledge is locked up in the heads of the audience, and given no forum, no channel, to be shared or distributed among the audience.

Correcting mistakes – speakers, especially mediocre or poor ones, often make mistakes – either factual or opinionated – during the prepartion of their talk, let alone the small slips in delivery. By sharing slides after the talk, the latter problem is already solved. But the former problem – speakers who disseminate misleading or even downright false information – is rife even in many highly-skilled conferences. If the audience can “talk back” (aka heckle), then this can both be fixed in-situ – and the speaker can get a chance to demonstrate that it was a genuine mistake and not ignorance or malice on their part.

Current typical “solutions”

There are some half-hearted attempts to solve this, in order of increasing success:

Interviews
Panel sessions
Roundtables

Interviews

I advise anyone who goes to a conference where a session is in the format of an “interview” to simply boycott those sessions. Generally speaking, unless the interviewer is extremely good at their job, interviews are a boring waste of time, with LESS of interest coming out them than a simple presentation, simply because the dialogue is NOT under the control of the expert who has the knowledge. And, of course, the interviewee can simply refuse to answer any question they “don’t like”. Ugh.

Or, in even more simple terms, you’ve doubled the opportunities for human failure, without adding any benefits other than “hoping” that the interviewer will serve as a check-and-balance on the interviewee.

Note: there is still no increase in audience participation here – you can have a Q&A session at the end, but it’s indirected through the interviewer, so it’s LESS effective than when there’s a single presentation.

I have something else to add about Interviews that should make you VERY suspicious of them, but it’ll come uip again in Panels, so … moving swiftly on…

Panel sessions

I’m going to start with a wake-up call for some conference organizers:

Panel session != roundtable.

At CMP’s Austin GDC, the first year that CMP ran it, I went to the post-conference “feedback session”, and suggested that there should be roundtables the next year. The conference organizer responded that they had roundtables that year; no, they had panel sessions. Big difference.

Panel sessions supposedly do one of two things:

Cram more content into one session without over-stretching a single presenter
Crowd-source a very, very small crowd, using a “moderator” to control the flow of info

Here’s the problem: in most cases, panel sessions are suggested by the Moderator, who generally doesn’t know what they’re talking about (otherwise they’d have a presentation session instead…), and whose reason for doing this (other than to get a free conference ticket, of course) was “I want to know more about X, so I’m going to probe experts A, B, and C about it”. This is just a slightly more freeform version of the Interview – and yet it happens very often, and suffers worse from the interviewer’s lack of expertise: they not only don’t know what to ask, but often the panellists steamroller them and either dominate the conversation or collectively shut it down.

It is very, very hard to get a panel of people together who are neither “too similar” (you often see people say “ditto” when asked their views in turn on a panel topic), nor “too different” (what person A says is simply meaningless to person B, they don’t exist in the same universe).

Note: there is still no increase in audience participation here – you can have a Q&A session at the end, but it’s indirected through the moderator, so it’s LESS effective than when there’s a single presentation.

Roundtable

Here, there is no “official” speaker, only a moderator. In practice, every person who turns up to the session is a speaker (and when roundtables work well it’s because the majority of the audience DO each speak during the session!). That moderator has no idea who the “speakers” are, and has a relatively low responsibility to be even-handed or steer the conversation – because this is simply too hard to do.

In practice, the people who chose to speak get to dominate the conversation.

In practice, the larger conferences have lots of ignorant, dumb, lazy, selfish, or simply scared audiences who turn up to Roundtables and “expect to be entertained” – they have no intention of speaking or participating, they sit there silently. These people DESTROY roundtables, sitting there like wells of depression and darkness, sucking the life and interest out of the roundtable. Do I hate them? Yes, absolutely – having a minority of the audience like that is fine, but when – as at GDC 2007 – you have a roundtable that turns away 50+ people at the door, and allows in almost 100 people who DO NOT SPEAK A WORD, it’s out of hand.

I’m bringing this up because it points to a real problem: you might provide the perfect audience-participation system, but if the audience don’t want to use it, it could end up as the worst of all worlds (!).

Summary

Hmm. This is beginning to look like a communication problem. What’s going on?

Type	Presenters	Moderators	Audience	Comm-type	Level of control	Live feedback
Presentation	1	0	Many	Broadcast	Complete	0
Interview	1	1	Many	Broadcast	High, non-expert	Slight
Panel	Several	1	Many	Broadcast	Moderate, non-expert	Slight
Roundtable	Many	1	Many	Dialogue	Slight (*)	Substantial
Freeform	Many	0	Many	Conversation	None	Infinite
-IDEAL-	Ranked?	None?	Many?	Conversation?	Moderate?	Substantial?

(*) – since roundtables have no “speaker”, and only give a conference ticket to the “moderator”, it’s much more common to see “moderator IS an expert” than with the other options.

Part 2, to follow soon, will list some ideas on what can be done about this. I’ll edit this to add a link once it’s up.

computer games conferences dev-process security

RSA Conference 2008 (London)

Post author By adam
Post date October 27, 2008

I’m there now, drop me a line (see About page for email) if you’re around.

I’ve just given a quick presentation introducing the ENISA’s (European Network and Information Security Agency) whitepaper on “Security and Privacy in MMO’s and VW’s”. It’s free, and it’s fairly simple (aimed at everyone from consumers to governments), worth a read if you’re interested but relatively new to this stuff. Contributors include people from Sulake (Habbo Hotel), CCP (EVE Online), NCsoft, and people like Richard Bartle and Ren Reynolds.

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Thunderbird 3.0: stick with Alpha2

Post author By adam
Post date October 22, 2008
1 Comment on Thunderbird 3.0: stick with Alpha2

Mozilla just released Alpha3 of Thunderbird version 3; my advice: don’t bother.

dev-process facebook games design games industry web 2.0

Cultural differences: game developers vs web developers

Post author By adam
Post date October 22, 2008
12 Comments on Cultural differences: game developers vs web developers

Andrew Chen has just written a post comparing the cultural differences between Web industry people and Games industry people. They’re all very interesting, and on the whole I’d say they’re on the money – definitely worth reading (and see if you can spot yourself in some of the either/or’s ;)). At the start of the post, I stopped reading and paused to list my own observed differences, so that I could then compare them to what Andrew had written. There was no overlap, so I thought I’d write them up here.

Cultural differences: game people vs web people

concrete revenues vs “future monetizable” growth
team-as-blob vs sliding scale of headcount
obsessive search for fun vs time-wasting activities
surprise and delight audience with something we liked and think they want vs randomly guess and test on live audience; iterate until done
very high minimum quality bar vs dont worry, be crappy
high, strict specialization vs almost no specialization
money happens elsewhere, far down the chain vs show ME the money

concrete revenues vs “future monetizable” growth

Largely driven by the “money happens elsewhere” part, game people are obsessive about “what’s the actual revenue this will make (what’s my percentage of the revenue this will make)?”.

In particular, if you cannot *prove* the expected revenue (and in many cases not even that: instead you have to prove the *profit*), they won’t even carry on the conversation. This happens everywhere from small startups to massive publishers. I’ve seen meetings on “social networking” get shutdown by a senior executive simply saying “how much profit will this make at minimum, even if it’s not successful? Remember that these resources would instead bring in an extra $5million if we deployed them on [one of our existing MMOs]”, and refusing to carry on the meeting unless someone could prove that the opportunity cost to SN didn’t exceed its income.

surprise and delight audience with something we liked and think they want vs randomly guess and test on live audience; iterate until done

A team of game people sets out to make something fun. They like to get some input from experts on analysing and predicting the market (market researchers, marketing departments, retail executives, industry analysts, etc) – and then use that merely as “inspiration” and “guidelines” to making something awesome and new. They assume that “the customer doesn’t know what they want, but will recognize it when they see it, and fall in love” (which is largely true!), and so they go off and build something beautiful largely in isolation.

This beautiful thing then surprises and delights the consumer when it finally comes to market.

Web people do the first thing that comes to mind, care not whether it’s objectively good or bad, and test it in the market. Then they try again. And again. And again. And look for patterns in what is popular or not.

As a result, game people tend to think of web people as “skill-less” (partly true) and “puppets of the market” (largely true). Meanwhile, web people tend to think of game people as “perfectionist” (largely true) and “monolithic / unagile” (largely true) and “non market-lead” (partly true).

obsessive search for fun vs time-wasting activities

Game people don’t make stuff unless it’s fun. If it’s not fun, it’s a failure, and only a stereotypically bad EA Producer (or a second-rate clone) would OK the ongoing funding and/or production of a project that wasn’t fun any more.

Web people generally couldn’t care less. They generally think they want stuff to be fun, in a “well, it’s better if it’s fun, isn’t it?” kind of way – but they usually only really care that there is some activity going on, and that the users come back to do more of it. They are less judgemental about the type and motivation of activity going on. They will slave away to try to understand this activity, to extrapolate better ways of motivation people to do more of it, and to monetize people for doing it, but the activity could be selling used cars or real estate and they would not be greatly affected.

This one even shows up subtly in Andrew’s own writeup – he casually uses the word fun. To game developers, the word is Fun, and they would never write:

Now, I think that the productivity-inclined have their claim to the world, as does the fun/entertainment games people. But the intersection of this, in web media, is where the fun happens.

…because you don’t use the word “fun” casually like that where someone might hear it as “Fun”. You are sensitized to all uses of the F word :). Fun would never come from an intersection like that; that intersection could give rise to a number of side-effects and new content areas, and those content areas – with appropriate rulesets imposed – could merge, and react with some of the side-effects, to give rise, finally, to something “Fun”. Fun is not a simple concept.

very high minimum quality bar vs dont worry, be crappy

Game companies have QA departments that are larger in headcount than the entire development team, often by a substantial margin. They don’t ship stuff that is half-arsed, partially complete, partially working, etc. Hence, when they do, there is huge press and consumer attention around it. This is one of the thigns that the games industry has been doing more and more web like over the past 10 years – ever since they realised they could drop some launch-quality and end up with the same level of quality as standard by shipping a “patch” 1-3 months after launch (and probably getting an uptick in sales as a result, re-box the patched version as an “improved” version).

But, on the whole, games companies still consider quality the one unassailable pillar of the development triangle (“quality, short development time, cheap development cost – you can only have two at most”).

In fact, most game people turn “Quality” into 3 separate sub-pillars: core fun, longevity, and polish. And consider all three inalienable, but occasionally flirt with sacrificing one of those three instead of sacrificing either of the two other full pillars.

If it strikes you that the games industry is thereby trying to cheat and get “2 and 2/3 pillars out of 3” then … you’d be right. Understanding this can help explain a lot both about individual games and the industry in general over the past 15 years.

high, strict specialization vs almost no specialization

A game team is (typically) made up of distinct people doing:

Art
Code
Design
Production (project management)

You need at least one person devoted to each. For teams of size less than 5, it’s acceptable to have some people do two of those roles rather than just one, but it’s often considered “hard”
(by default – although in practice many teams flourish with people moonlighting/two-hatting these roles).

It is an onrunning joke that various non-design people in games companies have the unofficial job title of “Frustrated Designer” (most usually Producers and Programmers get labelled with this). i.e. someone who secretly wants to be a designer, but lacks the skill and experience – despite potentially many many years working in their person discipline, developing and launching games. Nowadays you also see people labelled as Frustrated Artist, and occasionally even Frustrated Programmer (although anyone brave enough to do that in the face of the programmers, who tend to be quite bullish about welcoming such people to try their hand at fixing a code bug (snigger, snigger, watch-him-fail) generally is quickly disabused of their frustration).

There’s good reason for this, too – the expected level of skill from anyone non-junior in a game team is sufficiently high that it can be very difficult for people to cross skills. It’s easy if they’re willing to drop to “junior” status (the level of incoming recent-graduate – very low-paid, and with very little creative or project input/control), but few are willing to take the massive drop in status and (usually) pay to do that.

money happens elsewhere, far down the chain vs show ME the money

Interestingly, perversely, this means that game people obssess about the money, despite never seeing it themselves, and worry about how their actions will affect the ability of later people in the value chain to make money, and how much the total pot will be.

Whereas the web people generally are much more blase about the money side, because they know it’s going to come almost directly to them, and they have a much more direct relationship with it (understand the ups and downs).

Game people’s approach to money is generally characterized by Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt – plagued by rumour. Web people all know for themselves how much money can be made, and how, and don’t peddle in rumours.

Comments on Andrew’s observations

Andrew’s observations were all good, except for one thing which I think he misunderstood: “By withholding levels, powerups, weapons, trophies, etc., it creates motivation from the user to keep on playing. They say, “just… one… more… game…!!””.

…and then he makes a conclusion that makes sense given what he and wikipedia have said, but which is almost the precise opposite of the truth.

As a result of this treadmill, there is a constant pressure for players to stay engaged and retained as customers. But the flipside of this is that it’s not enough to build one product – instead you build 70 product variations, and call each one a level!

The truth is that content-gating was introduced and/or stuck around as a technique because the cost of creating content is exponentially higher than the cost of consuming it without gating. If you have decided to operate a content-centric game, you are doomed to be unable to run a service product based on it – no matter how many years you spend developing content before launch, your playerbase will soon catch up to your level designers etc and overtake them. Content-gating, levelling especially, forceably slow players down in their content consumption rates, even forcing them to re-play set pieces of content many many times (if you can get them to replay it enough, you can lower their rate of consumption to the point that a sufficiently large team of content-creators can keep ahead of them. Just).

Various other experiments have been tried over the years – most notably, User-Generated Content, but none have achieved the same level of efficiency (or yet been as well understood) as level-based content-gating.