The Escapist has a the first of a two-part article I wrote up; it's basically an elaboration of the argument about why we need to blow up the games industry that I ranted about in my presentation
at Free Play.
posted by Greg at 12:38 PM 4 comments

"Constraining Interaction to Create Emergent Narrative," talk at the University of Art and Design Helsinki, October 4. Part of the Games and Storytelling series of lectures.

I'll be speaking at the FuturePlay conference at Michigan State University in East Lansing--haven't decided what the topic is yet. The conference is October 13-15.

"Toward the True Mobile Game," a presentation at the Austin Game Conference, which runs October 27-28.

Another month with too much travel, but there you go.
posted by Greg at 8:41 AM 3 comments

Dave Kushner has a piece on Wired about Poker bots. This strikes me as inevitable; poker is a bit like Diplomacy, in that at any given point there is a fairly easily calculable optimum play, but the devil is in the unpredictability of the opposing players. I suspect a bot has to have a hard time building a mental model of the personalities and strategies of the opponents, but still, given the variability of skill among human players, it shouldn't be all that hard to build a bot that will consistently win, barring the occasional streak of bad luck. Mind you, since the house takes a rake-off, there's still no guarantee that bots can be moneymakers. But it does cast a bit of doubt on the long-term viability of online gambling sites, which IMO, is no bad thing. (I play the occasional friendly game of nickel-dime-quarter poker, face to face with friends--but generally like goofy dealer's choice games rather than 'clean' poker--and in general, view gambling as a form of fraud on the statististically ignorant.)

So SOE will be publishing a boxed version of Toontown. Slashdot seems to think this means Toontown is going to hit "the big time," but I wonder about that; sure, a boxed edition on the shelves should attract some new players, but the thing has been available online as a free download for years, and at least on the Disney channel, it got quite a lot of TV advertising. SOE will also be doing a console version--which given the limitations on freeform chat in the game, should be more doable than with most MMOs. However, that doesn't get you to "the big time" either, given the relatively small installed base of net-connected consoles--although again, it should help expand the audience a bit. It's a lovely game, btw, and while geared for kids, I had at least as much fun playing it as any other MMO. It's content-light, by comparison to say, WoW--you can max out in a couple of months of gameplay--but maybe that's an advantage, given how much of my lifespan I've lost to games like EQ and WoW.

According to Gamespot, Sony Scores With Station Exchange, reporting $180k of player sales in the first month of operation. Basically, Sony has set up its own auction system for EQ2, available only if you play on servers that allow sales; this is one of the few areas where the "network effect" that drives everyone to eBay doesn't work, because eBay can't enforce transfer of in-game items. (You have to meet up with the seller in-world to exchange, and it's entirely possible to be defrauded.) However, I question whether this constitutes "scoring"; I don't know what percentage of sales Sony takes, but lets say it's 5%, which strikes me as pretty high. 5% of $180k is $9k. $9k per month is not a material addition to SOE's bottom line--that's equivalent to attracting another 600 players to the game paying monthly fee of $15. If this is all Station Exchange is generating, I question whether the development cost of setting it up in the first place is generating a reasonable ROI. Of course, that's only the first month, and doubtless the dollar value will increase over time.

Rumors of unrest and employee dissatisfaction with management at Turbine have swirled for several months (and two high-profile employees, Jessica Mulligan and Jason Bell, both people with sterling reputations in the field, have left in the last year). Which is why it's interesting to see them closing the Santa Monica office (Turbine's main digs are in the Boston area), and also shuttering AC2. The original AC began development at about the same time as UO and EQ, but launched third, and while it operated in the black, at a max player base of 80k, it was considered something of a disappointment. AC2 did even worse, with around 25k players. That's a tricky number; it's certainly possible to operate an MMO with that kind of player base profitably, but it's hard to maintain an active live team generating a lot of new content with those kinds of numbers. I'm not surprised to see the game go--Turbine should be pumping resources into it's LOTR and D&D titles rather than maintaining what amounts to a failure--but I'm surprised they didn't try to sell it to someone. Or even give it away--you piss off your player base when you shut down a game, and someone like Themis or, hell, Psychochild could probably figure out a way to run AC2 in the black.
posted by Greg at 7:31 AM 6 comments

Once, in the mid-80s, I was working late at the West End offices in New York, which were in a pretty dicey neighborhood, on a Saturday. I went out to pick up some takeout, and while I closed the gate, which locks, I did not close and lock the metal door--it was possible to open the gate with a swift kick. While I was out, the fellow must have gotten into the office. And he must have been there for some hours, hiding in another office, waiting for me to leave and getting frustrated when I didn't. At one point, I walked down a corridor, and he came out of a darkened office along it, pistol-whipped me, got me into the office, and tied me up (incompetently) with a phone cable. I realized almost immediately that I could free myself quickly if need be, but frankly didn't want a confrontation with a gun-toting idiot, so waited as I heard him rummaging about the office. Eventually, I heard the back door close--he had taken my keys--and after waiting a bit, got up, and went down the street to the nearest police station (a couple of blocks away).

Two cops came back with me, and we took inventory; as far as I can tell, the only thing he got away with was a roll of quarters (hadn't even lifted my wallet). In a back area, there were a bunch of storage boxes he had been going through--and it seems that he had been opening them with a scissors, and must have sliced open his palm with them, because there was some blood about. I called Eric and Holly Rubinstein, then the company's president, and we had a locksmith in to change the locks.

One of the cops was an old Avalon Hill gamer, btw.
posted by Greg at 10:21 AM 4 comments

James Wallis, original publisher of my obscure tabletop RPG, Violence: The Roleplaying Game of Egregious and Repulsive Bloodshed has kindly generated a PDF from his original files.

I'm releasing it under a Creative Commons license; you can download it here. Warnings: It's about a meg. It also contains foul language, lots of violence, and drug references, and certainly implies some rather unpleasant sexual practices. Also: If you actually expect to get a playable game, you may be disappointed. However it is, I believe, pretty funny.

The history: James founded a company called Hogshead Publishing (which still exists, under new management), and produced a line of small, cheap RPGs called "New Style" which were designed to showcase innovative and offbeat ideas. (Other games in the series included James own The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, John Tynes's Puppetland/Power Kill, and Robin Laws's Pantheon.) I had mentioned the idea of a satirical game dealing with violence to him a couple of years previously, and he wrote asking if I'd consider doing it for him. I said sure, what the hell, and cranked the thing out.

It was released at GenCon in 1999--but GenCon's rules specifically rule out games with sexual content. So James sold the game over the table by selling "a brown paper bag, the contents of which I am forbidden to reveal." Apparently, Peter Adkison, then CEO of Wizards of the Coast, which then owned GenCon, found it so amusing he wandered about the show floor reading bits of it to people and chuckling. You see the irony in this, I trust.

The game sold pretty much what James had expected--a few thousand copies--but has been out of print for some years now. I hope you're amused.

I still want to be a shooter bhoddisatva, baby.
posted by Greg at 9:31 AM 4 comments

According to this article at Forbes.com, News Corp, Rupert Murdoch's company, which owns Fox and the New York Post (America's sleaziest major urban paper), is contemplating buying out IGN, parent of (among other sites) GameSpy.

Just so long as they don't replace Fargo with Bill O'Reilly, I guess.
posted by Greg at 4:29 PM 5 comments

As you might expect, I generally like Scott Miller, since he actually puts his money where his mouth is, in terms of the necessity for developers to own their IP--and deliver original content. Which is what his most recent post is about: the fact that 80+% of best-selling games are based on original IP, rather than licensed crap. (Take that, Warren.)

Of course, the calculation only works if you include sequels of successful games in the "original IP" column. And I suspect it works less well for console than for PC, where the conclusion is clear.

At this point, though, I'm less interested in "original IP" than in "original game." EA has apparently decided that it needs to foster "original IP," and has actually appointed some fellow (don't recall the name, saw him talk at a conference, he was godawful dull) to encourage the development thereof. In other words, I can have "original IP" by trying to establish a new brand for the same old driving game, the same old RTS, but marketing it under a new name.

Age of Empires, when first published, was "original IP," but basically, it was the same game as Command & Conquer and Warcraft, but with a slightly different take. No shame in that, really, as they did a good job. Diablo was a computer RPG, not all that different from, say, Akalabeth--but was done well. It was "original IP." I have no beef with this--doing an established game style well is perfectly honorable (doing it badly is not).

But what I really want is for people to find entirely new game styles, combinations of mechanics that work well and haven't been seen before, at least in this combination. Doom, Dune II, Worms, The Sims--for that matter, Magic: The Gathering and D&D. I want not "original IP," but original =designs=.

And my frustration with the current industry derives from the inability of anyone other than Will Wright to create them.

I don't think I dimish my admiration for Wright by saying that I don't think he's the only guy who can do so--he's just the only guy with both the creativity and the clout to get innovation through the system.

Here's a proposal, EA: Instead of funding only $10m+ sure bets, why don't you fund ten $1m wild-ass ideas? You only need one Katamari Damacy out of the ten to justify the investment....
posted by Greg at 2:26 AM 4 comments

So The Escapist has an interview with Warren Spector, conducted by Allen Varney in which I'm protrayed as sort of the anti-Spector--Warren the proponent of the view that licenses aren't necessarily a bad thing, and I fulminating that they are eevviill (which they are, by the way). This has a couple of humorous aspects for me:

1. I've actually done licensed games (Star Wars: The RPG, Star Trek: The Adventure Game, Star Trek III, and Return of the Stainless Steel Rat). Warren never has :).

2. This is so incestuous. Warren and I are old friends, and went to the same high school; in fact, I tried to hire him in the 80s (he was at TSR) for my then-company, West End Games. Allen and Warren worked together at Steve Jackson games, both live in Austin, and hang out together. Allen and Warren collaborated on a Paranoia adventure (I co-designed Paranoia), and Allen is currently editing the Paranoia line for Mongoose, which publishes it under license from me (and Eric Goldberg). And--The Escapist is published by the Themis Group, on whose board of advisors I used to sit (I was required to resign when I went to work for Nokia).

Incidentally, if you haven't been reading The Escapist, you should check it out. It's uneven, but it's trying to do something nobody else in the industry does--showcase intelligent writing about games, often by "New Games Journalism" types. I'll have a piece in it in a few weeks, btw.

It's not clear to me what the business model is. Though the corporate bumf on the site provides a contact for those who want to advertise, the current issue, at least, contains no advertising--and they're paying a pretty high word rate. Themis does well enough to carry it for a while, but my suspicion is that it won't last long unless they start getting some advertisers.
posted by Greg at 2:34 PM 6 comments

So it seems that Vivendi is licensing the rights to Ludlum's books. Obviously, they're looking at the success Ubi has had with "Tom Clancy" as a brand for military thrillers (something they inherited when they bought out Red Storm, which Clancy co-founded). And yeah, okay, if you say "thriller," Ludlum's the next name you think of.

There are, however, a bunch of problems with this:

1. My guess is that the average Ludlum reader is 50+, with the average Clancy reader at least a decade younger. My Dad reads Ludlum. I certainly don't. Is this a name that particularly resonates with current gamers? I'm doubtful.

2. Clancy's work is almost all tied to military tech in some way; he's the virtual inventor of the "technothriller" genre. Ludlum's stuff is much more along the lines of the conventional spy thriller. Now there have been successful spy games--but if you're looking for something to go up against Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Rainbow Theory Chaos Somethingorother Redux Tomorrow, or whatever silly long name Ubi gives the next one, you want something that focusses on combat action, not spy stuff. In other words, the nature of the material does not really give VUG the directly competitive brand they want.

3. Clancy is a gamer. He often shapes his novels with the game version specifically in mind. This makes it a lot easier to get a good game out of his work. What, exactly, is the game in The Bourne Identity?

I see the logic behind the deal, but I'm pretty skeptical. And of course, there's always the question about why you buy instead of build. Why doesn't VUG establish its own brand for military action games? Isn't it better to build your own IP than pay for someone else's?
posted by Greg at 8:35 AM 4 comments

Har... Gamesindustry.biz is reporting (by way of Kotaku that ESA president Doug Loewenstein (along with Steve Schnur, EA's head of music) are attending a $1000-a-plate fundraiser for my state's junior senator, the renowned scurge of the Eeevils of games, Ms. Hillary Clinton.

I suppose Doug can have whatever politics he likes, and maybe he can even get a word in sideways over the rubber chicken--and you know, I'm a Democrat by genetics, but yeech. What next, drinks with Jack Thompson?
posted by Greg at 6:57 PM 3 comments