I'm off tomorrow to a conference on Digital Genres, and am currently working on a presentation for it, which I'll post when I get back.

But in the process of doing it, it has occurred to me that there's almost a mathematical way of looking at the problem the game industry faces today, which Warren and I talked about a month ago here.

The basic problem is this: Moore's Law is exponential. Processing power doubles every 18 months, and development costs tend to move along the same curve. As machines get better at displaying media, games demand more media. It took one level designer one day to do a Doom level; it takes two manweeks to do a Doom III level. That's the main driver of increasing development costs, which have the effects (publisher conservatism, loss of innovation) I've complained about.

Game sales, meanwhile, have increased, too, as a larger proportion of the population has become interested in games--and, of course, as the population grows. But that's a linear increase--and it is likely to reach its limits more quickly than Moore's Law. The "proportion of the population interested in games" is mainly a function of age; essentially, people's leisure time interests are set when they are adolescents, and they tend to remain interested in the same things as they age. (That's why, for example, model railroading is dieing out; the average model railroader is in his 60s, adolescents haven't really been interested in it for 40 years, there's little new blood moving into that hobby.)

Anyone who's been a teenager since 1985 has been exposed to games, and substantial proportion of them remain interested in games as they age. Today, a big proportion of people under 40 play games; almost no one over 40 does. Thirty years from now, that trend will have reached its apotheosis, and the "average gamer age" will roughly match the average population age.

In other words, total industry sales, in the US at least, continue to grow, but it's tapering off, and will ultimately be mature, growing only with population.

So we have an exponential curve--growth in development cost--meeting a linear one--growth in unit sales. I said previously that "development costs have increased hugely, and sales have increased less"--but that's a weak way of making the point. The problem is only going to get worse--and more rapidly so, over time.

Unless we find some way out of this bind.

posted by Greg at 9:12 PM

N.B.: This was written in response to a discussion on the DiGRA listserv.

There's been quite a lot of discussion about the importance of the idea of "interactivity" to games. Two points need to be made: First, "interactivity" is not the same thing as "digital." Second, "interactivity" is a rather nebulous concept; for my part, I prefer to think about process intensity.

To take up the first point: people tend to cavalierly use the term "interactive" to mean "digital." As an example, I was asked some time ago to participate in a panel on "interactive games," by which the panel organizers intended to mean "digital games." In fact, all games are interactive. When I make a move in chess, I change the game state; you then consider that state, choose your own move in response, and change the game state again. You and I are interacting through the medium of the game of chess. The rules of the game create a framework through which we interact, with each other and with the game itself. Chess is interactive. Dungeons & Dragons is interactive. Tic Tac Toe is interactive. Sports are interactive. Interaction is core to "the game," and this applies in both digital and non-digital media. "Interactive game" is, on the one hand, a redundancy; and on the other hand, not a way of specifying any particular category of game.

I note in passing that someone on this list questioned whether "interaction" was a particularly important concept when thinking about games, pointing out that, in essence, most (digital) games are largely linear experiences, with "interaction" limited to opening up paths, overcoming obstacles, and so on, in the service of experiencing a linear narrative. Indeed this is so--but that does not, I think, disprove the fundamental importance of interactivity to the game. Rather, it points out one of the current limitations of digital media.

Let's consider a game like, say, Deus Ex. Deus Ex is built on the Unreal engine. The Unreal engine was originally designed to support a freeform, deathmatch, first-person shooter style of play. These kinds of games are quite "interactive," with virtually no attachment to story. The basic verbs of the game are limited--run, jump, shoot, pick up--and the environment in which you play, a level, is limited in size and constraining. You can select different levels to play in, but when in a level, you are restricted to it. But within these tight constraints--small play area, small verb set--you have a high degree of freedom. You can run anywhere, ambush opponents from different vantages, and so on. The experience is quite non-linear.

Deus Ex, however, uses the Unreal engine to build a very different type of game. In a sense, Deus Ex is a conventional graphic adventure, in that it is a set of linear, connected story elements. When you complete one 'level', you progress to the next, and the levels are connected in a narrative sense, creating an overall story arc expressed during play. As is typical with graphic adventures, Deus Ex offers a much wider range of verbs--in addition to run, jump, shoot, and pick up, it permits talk, sneak, use equipment, and so on. It also provides a much larger play area, in the sense that a single "game" is not restricted to a single deathmatch level, but consists of a series of interconnected levels depicting areas of Manhattan, Hong Kong, Area 51, and so on. But in order to craft a coherent, narrative experience out of this larger and more complicated game space (using the term here to mean both the virtual space of the game and the permitted verbs within it), Deus Ex has to impose much greater limitations on how freeform the play can be. You must get through each level in turn, and the potential outcomes to the game are limited to a handful of possibilities, as with a conventional graphic adventure.

Deus Ex is, in other words, one of a fairly recent breed of games. Conventional graphic adventures are far more restricting on a minute-to-minute level; movement is from one discrete location to another, the allowable actions at each location are highly limited and scripted, combat is generally irrelevant. Deus Ex is more freeform than the conventional graphic adventure precisely because it is built on an FPS engine; movement is not from discrete location to discrete location, but continuous, within the 3d modeled world; actions are not prescripted, but fall out of the physics model and allowable verbs of the engine. (Actually, that is untrue in two cases: Conversations remain scripted, as are "equipment use" actions. But the FPS engine itself does not provide any support for more freeform interaction here--and the problem of allowing, say, freeform conversation is one that has just not been solved by software engineers, despite considerable effort to address it.)

What's the importance of this? That's simple: The graphic adventure is largely dead as a commercial medium, at least in the US (it seems to continue to have something of a following in France). In my opinion, this is largely because it was always a very unhappy compromise--the level of interaction in a graphic adventure is so tightly constrained as to be, often, frustrating. Using a 3D engine to implement the same basic game style is far more satisfying, because the engine allows a more fine-grained level of interaction on a minute-to-minute basis.

At this point, however, we need to think about the nature of interaction, how interaction works with different types of game assets, and why it is that more "fine grained" interaction is more interesting.

To do that, I want to borrow a concept of Chris Crawford's--but update and modify it a little bit. In THE ART OF COMPUTER GAME DESIGN, Crawford discusses the dichotomy between "instantial" and "process-intensive." A game is "instantial" to the degree that it provides pre-rendered, invariant, unchanging assets; a game is "process intensive" to the degree that it creates more variable elements, through process, on the fly. A conventional graphic adventure is almost wholly instantial; each scene, each possible set of interactions, is prescripted, stored on the disk, and planned by the creators. A first person shooter has some "instantial" assets--there are only a limited number of pre-designed levels, 3D models, and textures--but all action within the game--movement, combat, etc.--is "algorithmic" (a term I prefer to "process intensive" in this context), determined through calculations by the game engine at runtime.

Crawford's point at the time--a point the advance of technology has rendered moot--is that when you are limited to 64k, you can supply a very small set of instantial assets, and you can create a much richer game, given such tight asset constraints, by exploiting process intensity as much as you possibly can. Today, with several hundred megabytes of data for a typical game, you can provide all of the instantial assets you could possibly want--at the cost of an ever-increasing budget, of course.

So Crawford's argument for the superiority of process intensity is no longer relevant--but another, and I think fundamentally more important argument, retains its strength.

Algorithmically-driven games permit a much higher degree of interaction; a far wider range of potential outcomes; and more satisfying gameplay than instantial games.

Deus Ex and, say, Myst, are similar games, in a way; both involve a sequence of levels, with the players solving puzzles or overcoming obstacles to unlock each in turn. But Myst is wholly instantial; everything is prescripted, all settings are prerendered images. Deus Ex has many instantial elements--the sequence of levels is invariant and prescripted. But because Deus Ex is built on a FPS engine, it is far more algorithmic on a minute-to-minute level, and therefore more interesting as a game qua game.

In general, to the degree that we can, it always makes sense to move toward algorithmically-driven systems. As another example, some years ago, I designed a game called Evolution. It contained more than 160 extinct species, and was a 2D isometric game. Each creature could move (in eight directions), fight (in eight directions), rest (in eight directions) and die (in eight directions). Each behavior was represented by a multiframe animation. Each frame had to be pre-rendered and stored on the CD as an instantial asset.

If, halfway through development, we had decided to add a new creature behavior--play, say--we would have had to go back, render new behaviors for every one of our creatures, and store them on the disk. It would have been a huge, and expensive undertaking.

A couple of years ago, EverQuest added a whole new series of "socials"--animated behaviors for characters in the game. Bow, wave, that kind of thing. EverQuest uses a 3D engine, and all the characters are bipedal. Each "social" is a simple set of bone motions. The same set of bone motions can be used with every character. Actual motion during play is rendered, on the fly, by the game engine. For EverQuest to add a new behavior was simple: just add a new set of bone motions, and apply them to every biped in the game. One simple patch to the code does it.

Algorithmically-generated behavior is preferable to instantial behavior.

Creating algorithmic systems is far more difficult than creating instantial ones--a huge amount of thought, experimentation, and coding is required to build a 3D engine, for instance. But once the system is in place, the problem is solved--and it allows a much higher degree of interaction. The movement from 2D to 3D is not driven solely by audience aesthetic--but also by the strong advantages that 3D gives us. 3D is more algorithmic.

Let us return to the argument that interaction is not important when thinking about games because most (digital) games are inherently linear, and therefore can be understood in the same narrative fashion as other (linear) media. The fundamentally linear nature of most digital games is a function of the attachment of digital games to instantial assets. If I am creating a game like Deus Ex, most of my development funding is spent on creating instantial assets--settings, characters, models, textures, scripted conversations, scripted item use. If I do not restrict players to a relatively linear path, players will fail to encounter many of these assets. Suppose I have a branching tree structure, like so:

                     *

                   /    \

                 *       *

                /  \    /  \

              *     * *    *

I need to flesh out seven nodes, and in any single game, a player will encounter only three. More than half of the money I spend is, in a sense, wasted, because the players never see four out of seven of the instantial assets I created (unless they replay down another path, of course). I can create a longer, and richer, game, by forcing players down a linear path of seven nodes.

Consider by contrast a game like Civilization, which is far more algorithmic in nature. Two players starting from identical conditions can end the game with very different worlds. Rather than thinking of this type of game as a series of connected nodes, you have to think of it as a triangle of possibilities; from the same starting position, you can progress in a continuous fashion through a huge range of possible game states, ending at the base of the triangle at any one of a huge range of possible end states.

To my mind, this is clearly preferable. In a game like Civilization, your actions matter. In a game like Deus Ex, they don't really, except to the degree that you "fail" over and over until you finally beat the game. But the ultimate "end state" of the game is only slightly variant.

Please note that I am not arguing for absolute player freedom; every game is a rules-bound structure. What I'm arguing is that within a structure, it is preferable to give the player continuous options, not discrete and instantial ones; the 3D motion of Deus Ex is preferable to the node-to-node movement of Myst, a system of freeform conversation with AIs would be preferable to our current system of prescripted conversation trees. Object interaction through a physics engine is preferable to prescripted object behaviors.

To summarize the argument, then: Interaction is core to games of every style, non-digital as well as digital. Freeform interaction is preferable to prescripted interaction. Algorithmic systems are preferable to instantial ones. Consequently, the idea that we can neglect interactivity as important to digital games is silly; the fact that many are linear is a consequence of frustrating limits of current technology, the tie to instantial assets, and the cost of development. It is neither something fundamental to digital games, nor considered desirable by developers.

posted by Greg at 12:00 PM

At E3, I spent a fair bit of time talking with South Korean developers and online game producers. I'm not sure I have a coherent picture, as of yet, but some salient points that may be of interest:

* There are over 100 MMGs on the market in Korea at present.
* Total annualized dollar gross is probably larger than the US market.
* Per-user community support costs are small, largely because of the PC baang culture. The split between PC baang (cybercafe) players and at-home players is moving more toward at-home--more than half of current subscribers are playing from home--but nonetheless, most people were introduced to this games in PC baangs. The advantage of a cybercafe environment is that you have a bunch of people nearby who know the game and can introduce it to you; MMGs are, typically, fairly hard games to pick up and play. Not only are there a lot of interface features to master, but just learning about the world itself takes a while. US MMGs typically provide large manuals, training missions, and in-game community support people to help out newbies; Korean MMGs don't.
* There is no retail market. Everything just gets pirated anyway. Clients are a free broadband download (and many games require broadband to play). Korea has a far higher rate of broadband adoption than the US. (Easy enough to see why; it's a country smaller than New England, with 40m people--not that hard to wire.)
* Korean MMG developers are (largely) convinced that the US market isn't worth the bother. Americans are too culturally alien. And besides, there's so much money to be made in China that who gives a crap anyway?
* One Korean game, Legend of Mir III, claims 700,000 simultaneously online users in China. (It's rare for EQ to have more than 100,000 online simultaneously). Yes, they pay a lot less on a per-user basis. But for some developers, China is extraordinarily lucrative.
* Because there is no retail market, a partnership with one of the big online portals in Korea is key to attracting a substantial user base there.
* In China, a relationship with either China Telecom or China Unicom is vitally necessary to reach users.
* In Korea, there's basically no console market, because they hate the Japanese, and have basically used trade barriers to prevent any widespread deployment of console systems.
* None of the Koreans I talked to really have a clear understanding of why the Korean games launched here have largely failed--or why the US games launched there have not done all that well, either. They chalk it up to "cultural differences," which strikes me as a glib and not necessarily useful explanation. After all, (some) Japanese games do just fine in the US, and in some ways, Korean culture is less alien to American culture than the Japanese. (Japanese avoid conflict; Koreans don't believe in bullshit.)

I'm interested in looking at that issue more deeply. I'm not sure I have any real solution, but some thoughts to occur to me:

1. Most Korean games are a great deal smaller than US games. The developers of Legend of Mir III proudly told me that it takes 2 hours to walk from one side of their world to another; EQ, when it launched, had world the size of Rhode Island.

2. Many Korean games are isometric 2D; virtually every US MMG since UO has been 3D.

3. Most Korean games promote PvP as a feature; the most successful US games are mainly PvE.

4. The Korean games that have launched here have not provided the level of community support that US gamers expect.

5. Koreans are used to dealing with a broadband, free client download world; all successful US MMGs to date work fine on a dial-up connection, and sell clients at retail.


posted by Greg at 10:28 PM

.Boom. PDF

No fewer than four readers read my previous posting here (which indicated that I didn't have Acrobat, hence couldn't make PDFs of the dotBoom rules and cards, as a reader had requested--offering RTFs instead) and sent in PDF versions...

Thanks to Collin Burton, Gil Maevski, Michael Croft, Dave Rogers, and Jim Holgate.

• The Rules
  
• The Cards
  

And if you prefer RTF format, they're still on the site:

• The Rules
  
• The Cards
  

posted by Greg at 4:04 PM

I designed this card game last year, and circulated it to a number of publishers, none of whom bought; the general consensus seems to be that anything involving dot-commery is so old news that the thing wouldn't sell. Maybe so, but I think it's cute... I could, I suppose, continue trying to flog it (I haven't tried any of the German publishers, for instance), but doing so doesn't particularly sound like a cost-effective use of my time... So I'm putting it up here.

Dot Boom is a satirical card game of the Dot Com era. Each of up to five players takes the role of a major venture capital firm (like Eine Kleine Perkins or noidealab!), investing in dubious companies like iPotemkinVillage and Thiefster, and trying to take them public. The game is over when the "dotCrash" card comes up, at which time the player with the most money wins.

You'll need to download the rules and the card document. Print out the cards and cut them apart; I usually print them out onto un-diecut label stock, cut them apart, peel off the backing, and stick them onto index cards. But in a pinch, you can just print on paper--not too sturdy, but good enough. You'll also need Monopoly money, and some "stock counters"--I generally just scrounge pieces from another game--as well as a six-sided die and an opaque cup (like a coffee mug).

Have fun.

• The Rules
  
• The Cards
  

posted by Greg at 12:58 PM

For years, I've been a skeptic about online distribution. For years, it was promoted as a panacea. Unlimited shelf space! Cut out the retailer! Reach players directly! Game on!

Hogwash.

Once upon a time, 150,00 people downloaded Doom the first day it was available on the net. JC Herz said "You can imagine the day when videogames shed their shell, and become virtual artifacts entirely."

But that was before CD-ROM. When CD-ROM technology became widespread, games bloated by an order of magnitude, and modems did not keep pace. It was reasonable for people to download a game that was a few meg in size over 9600 baud modems; it is not reasonable for people to downloand 200+ megs over a 54k modem.

From about 1996 to, oh, 2001, shareware basically disappeared. It didn't make sense any more.

But...These things are bytes. It's ridiculous to spend fossil fuels and forest products to turn bytes into plastic-coated metal disks, placed in a box full of air, and shipped to a store in the mall. We have a network whose sole function is moving bytes. Software is the most obvious thing to shed its connection to the physical world and become wholly digital.

So why have I been a skeptic?

For a start, for the same reason that shareware disappeared: Modem speeds have lagged behind application bloat. If transmitting a game takes an hour or more, disks are better than wires.

But that argument is starting to look stale. It may still take multiple minutes to download a game over my cable modem, but it still takes a damn sight less time than it took me to download Nethack from GEnie, over my 1200 baud modem, back in the day--I had to let my computer run all night, and thank god for the 'restart from last byte' feature of the zmodem protocol.

The point is: broadband is an order of magnitude increase in bandwidth, and it makes games designed for CD-ROM application sizes downloadable in a reasonable amount of time. We're back to 1992, in terms of the bandwidth-to-app-size comparison. The obvious corrollary is:

Shareware Will Rise Again!

Well, maybe.

Only about 15% of the US population has broadband at the moment. The proportion is increasing--but far slower than people predicted a few years ago. (Anybody want to buy equity in Psuedo.com? I'll sell cheap....)

On the other hand, gamers are early adopters. The reason you have a VGA card in your machine is because gamers wanted it-- you don't need color to run Windows. And you have a sound card because gamers wanted it--you only need a few bleeps and bloops in your email client, and up until recently, nobody thought about using their computer to pirate Mudvane. And if you bought your box in the last three years, you probably have a 3D card, too--and it's there because gamers wanted it, not because you need it to run Excel. And, in fact, except for gamers and a few forlorn graphics folks running Maya, you don't need it at all. But gamers demanded these technologies, and brought the prices down to the point that they've become standard equipment. The point is: More gamers have broadband than the population as a whole.

Three years ago, Gordon Walton, then at Origin, said that 40% of UO's subscribers even then had broadband. According to Gamespy, 70% of their users have broadband--a skewed sample, to be sure, as one of Gamespy's main money earners is charging people to download patches, movies, and other high-volume files. Nonetheless, the point is: Data about the US population as a whole undercounts the proportion of gamers with broadband. We have the strongest motivation to adopt broadband, we're early tech adopters anyway, and any gamer with an interest in online will pay for a broadband connection, if it's possible to do so, and the cost isn't exorbitant.

Still, if you move to online distribution, you do lose some proportion of your potential audience.

But the scarcity of broadband isn't my only reason for skepticism about online distribution. My main one is a marketing concern. In the past, review media--both the magazines and the online publications--have catered to retail product almost exclusively. They cover "real" games published by "real" publishers, who (not incidentally) pay "real" money for large display advertisements in print and online publications. Of course "real games" get review attention, and previews, and cover art devoted to them.

Moreover, a box sitting on the shelf at CompUSA or J & R (the largest family owned independent software outlet in the nation, located in downtown NY, mere decameters from Ground Zero, who greatly need your custom) serves as a billboard for the product. Only the hardcore reads review media; I have to believe many games are bought on impulse by people who see a box, and maybe heard of it somehow, somewhere, once upon a time, maybe from a note in a local newspaper, maybe from a friend -- but bought the game largely because the box looked cool, sitting there on the shelf...

When you go online-only, you sacrifice that box exposure--and you likely sacrifice any real attention from review media.

But you know what? That's a solvable problem.

All you have to do is devote the same kinds of bux to promoting an online-only title that you devote to promoting a retail one. Publishers typically spend as much or more on promotion of a retail product as they spent on its development. If they spend $5m developing a game, they're quite likely to spend $5m on promotion. That buys a lot of ad space in potential review media--and ensures that they'll pay you the attention you deserve. In fact, I'd argue that, given the lack of shelf exposure, a retail-only product needs to spend MORE on promotion, not less. And it's worth doing so--after all, you're not cutting the retail channel in for a percentage of your gross. You can afford to spend more per buyer.

(And why is it that people who've tried to go online-only don't grasp this fact? Is it that they're so focussed on the idea that they're going to save money by cutting out the retailer that they don't understand the corrallary--that the have to spend more on marketing and promotion to attract the same audience? That's my guess, anyway---Nothing in life comes free. Spend more, assholes--not less!)

So--are we seeing a revival of shareware? A little bit, at the margins. Operations like Real Arcade and Shockwave are experiencing considerable success with simple shareware puzzle games. But we've yet to see success for a game aimed at the hardcore, with the possible exception of Laser Squad Nemesis.

Publishers are not likely to adopt online distribution quickly; they're used to the conventional model, and it's made them money. And there's the problem of channel conflict; if you go direct, you run the risk of pissing off the distribution channel that pays your bread and butter. But there's one game style, in particular, that makes sense for online distribution: That's massively multiplayer gaming. An MMG doesn't really give a crap if anyone pays for the client software, so long as they subscribe. $120/year for a subscription far outweighs the $25 [after retail discount] the provider is likely to make from a retail sale. If you can get more subscribers by offering the client software for free, then wah fucking hoo, go ahead and do it. Retail is irrelevant.

MMGs in the US have gone to the retail channel for three reasons. First, their publishers are comfortable with that route. Second, it provides promotional exposure. Third, it throws off a little more money. But note that they've cut the cost of software to the minimum necessary to get the retail channel to stock it (as I predicted back in 1999); you can get the basic client for EverQuest for $19.99. But basically, they all want the maximum player base; retail sales are irrelevant.

For MMGs, online-only (or online-subscription, with retail-miniscule-price) makes all kinds of sense. Some MMGs have already gone that route (e.g., Anarchy Online), mainly because they don't sell enough to justify a retail SKU… But as they get used to thinking about budgeting reasonable per-subscriber acquisition costs, and spending amounts on promotion comparable to that spent on conventional retail product, expect them to sever their lines of communication to the retail channel entirely.

Korea (as usual?) shows the way here. Virtually none of the 100+ Korean MMGs offer client software at retail. It's all a free download over broadband.

Sell your CompUSA stock, boys and girls. Their days are numbered. Ten years from now, retail distribution of software will be at an end.

But don't bet on the folks who push broadband distribution, either--because none of them have faced up to the single most salient problem: Customer acquisition is going to be costlier in this world, not cheaper. Cutting out the retailer is great, but that's not the whole story. The companies that will profit most are those that know how to market online.

(To which end, self-serving dweeb that I am, I offer this).

posted by Greg at 11:10 PM

So.... Infogrames is now Atari... Which makes sense, I guess. Infogrames is a silly name, sillier in English than in French. And Atari, largely due to the retro games/techno crossover, is now a fairly hip name.

Although, as Marc LeBlanc points out, this means they'll need to record a new corporate anthem. (Brace yourself before listening--it's pretty apalling.)

Of course, Infogrames was on the verge of delisting not long ago... At the moment, they're counting on the Enter the Matrix game to save their butt. Which it may; 4m copies shipped to retailers in advance of release, which will be on May 15th, the same day the movie opens.

If that trick doesn't work, expect Infogrames, scuse me, Atari, to be taken over before the end of the year.

posted by Greg at 4:42 PM

Haven't posted in a while.... Been remiss. The only excuse is that I've been busier than the proverbial two-peckered goat (an unfortunate metaphor I got from Ken Rolston, designer of Morrowind).

Some recent stuff of note:

1. In my opinion, Introduction to the Mobile Games Business is well worth checking out, for anyone interested in the field. Modesty (and NDAs) forbid me from mentioning any role in it.

2.I also like What's In MIDP: A Guide for Mobile Developers, written by the redoubtable Kent Quirk of Cognitoys. It's a useful guide to the differences between J2SE (desktop Java) and J2ME/MIDP (cellphone Java).

3. Unplugged recently received certification for its first BREW game, something called Skirt Fighter, which should launch on Verizon realsoonow. It's one of the first localizations of a Korean mobile game for the US market; a fairly straightforward sidescroller, with the difference that you play a woman trying to get home from work, fighting aggressive thugs with your high heels and handbag. Soon to follow: Trophy Fishing, another localized Korean game that's notable for the first interesting use of a mobile phone's vibration function that I've seen. (Essentially, the phone shakes more or less, depending on the size of the fish you've hooked, and it's state, in terms of how much you've reeled it in--feedback that's actually useful for the player.)

4. Themis has signed a deal with Level Three, one of the top two broadband providers (they recently acquired Genuity, formerly BBN, one of the pioneers of the Arpanet, excuse me, Internet). Essentially, this allows Themis to offer MMG developers and publishers an all-in-one solution, including hosting, broadband provisioning, and customer and community support, freeing them to do what they know best--software development and marketing--while turning the things that make MMGs drastically different from conventional games--ongoing serverside support and community management--over to a partner. I think this is big deal, and wanted Themis to trumpet it to the winds, but they have a charmingly old-fashioned notion that results are more important than glitzy deals, and want to show results in successful implementation for an MMG before we go out for publicity.... And I can't really argue with the notion, given the nonsensical hype that surrounded so many dot-coms. Sure, let's get an MMG partner to pick up the package before pointing out how much sense this makes. But it does make enormous sense--most MMGs fail at launch, either because client software is buggy, there's inadequate support on the server side, or community support sucks. The Themis-Level Three coalition can't do anything about buggy client software--that's up to the developer--but it can, cost-effectively, ensure that there is adequate hardware and bandwidth on the backend to support any anticipated load (and throw more resources at the problem if there's more than anticipated)--and it can ensure that players have a good experience out of the gate, and on an ongoing basis (the community management issue.)
Bad MMG launches are the thing of the past--if you partner with Themis.
Okay, that's a little bit of corporate hype there, but I'm serious, really. I'm jazzed.

5. I've been working on the design for a mobile game, tentatively called Hackenslash. ("Welcome to Hackenslash, New Jersey, where the brilliant scientists of Unplugged Labs have developed a new technology that allows you to enter realms of magic and mystery through your cellphone alone, and bring fantastic magical items back that you can trade with other players at the Hackenslash Swap Meet.") Think of it as Nethack for your mobile phone--soloplay dungeon crawling--with a persistent multiplayer environment -- trading stuff with other players, and establishing guilds that give you a benefit in the game. With a bit of humor, since you're all entering mystical realms from New Jersey, and returning there to swap stuff at the local Swap Meet, buying your equipment at the local Seven Eleven. Or Wawa's... hey, maybe there's a corporate sponsorship opportunity here :).

6. I recently received the French language edition of my novel First Contract, published by Librarie L'Atalante. Apparently, however, the pun is untranslatable (which I'm surprised at--I mean, premiere contact, premiere contrat? But perhaps the former is not commonplace for "first contact with aliens" en francais), so the French edition is titled "Space O.P.A.". I'm not sure what "O.P.A." means, but I presume it translates as "I.P.O.". Other things I found interesting: Where I use French in the original (as, for example, when referring to cuisine) the translator includes a note saying "En francais dans le texte." The Spanish appears in the text in Spanish. BEM (bug-eyed monsters) becomes MYP (monstres aux yeux pedoncules--and is this au courant among French SF fans, as BEM is among American ones, or did the translator feel the need to invent a corresponding acronym?). RICO, FDA, and Night Train ("vin a bas prix, de mauvaise qualite," and who can argue with that?) require explanation. "Tune in, turn off, drop out" becomes "Branchez-vous, planez, larguez-tout," with the footnote "Tune in, turn off, drop out, jerk off, celebre slogan de Leary et Alpert..." which makes me wonder. Jerk off? Haven't heard that before... Not that it's a bad idea. And Leary, maybe, but Alpert? Who's that? Herb Albert? Jazz trumpetist? Don't think so... The Greatful Dead is a "celebre groupe de rock psychedelique dont le leader etait Jerry Garcia," which kind of astonishes me--if only because, a priori, I would have thought that so loopy a group as the Dead would have already been celebrated and widely known by the French--seems like quite up their alley. My commercial jingle seems to have lost its scansion--in respect, I imagine, of its literal meaning.
The one thing I found potentially embarassing is that I make a reference to... It is Milken in the original? Or Milliken? The error may be mine..... The translator's note is "Allusion a Roger Milliken, magnat American du texitile ultraconservateur, quite financerait secretement diverses organisations comme Public Citizen, etc."... when actually, the allusion is to Michael Milken, creator of the high-yield (aka junk) bond and, to my mind (and almost no one else's) unjustly persecuted by the SEC for trivial and unimportant violations of security law despite his imaginative and substantial innovations in the field.
Oh, and "CEO" becomes "P-D.G."--- President et Directeur Generale, perhaps? Brits would say "President and Managing Director," which I assume is parallel.... CEO is an odd parlance, after all, necessary largely because of title inflation. Twenty years ago, "President" sufficed. These days, people (well, VCs, anyway) talk of "C-level positions", not to be confused with "sea-level positions"-- CEO, CTO, CFO, or in my wonky case, CCO (chief creative officer). President ain't good enough, you gotta be chief.







posted by Greg at 1:45 AM