...is the indie label that carries Sleater-Kinney among others. But actually this post is about Take Two.

If you'd told me that, say, last week, the New York Post would become an interesting breaker of important game-related news stories, I would have asked for some of what you're smoking. But astoundingly, they were the ones to break the news that Take Two board member Barbara A. Kaczynski had resigned, citing an "increasingly unhealthy relationship between the board and management." (The link is to Gamespot instead of the Post, as the Post has a silly policy of charging for archival material.)

Kaczynski was chair of the audit committee, and previously had served as CFO for the NFL.

Now, I want to speculate about this, but I do need to be careful, as some speculations could easily run me into potentially actionable territory. Take Two annual reports have often made for interesting reading--for years, as an example, they reported that Take Two leased office space from the CEO's Dad, reporting this along with a statement that management believed that the rent was reasonable and comparable to rents available elsewhere. But there was certainly the appearance of potential inter-family self-dealing.

That's at least a matter of public record, and virtually anything else I could say about the, ah, ethical standards of Take Two management would be pure hearsay and speculation on my part. And to be sure, in recent years I've gotten the impression that they've been attempting to clean up their act, if only because as a larger and more prominent company, they've come under greater public and regulatory scrutiny--culminating last year in an SEC lawsuit for accounting fraud (which was quickly settled).

And of course as head of the audit committee, Kaczynski was potentially personally and criminally liable under Sarbanes Oxley if indeed there are ongoing issues at Take Two. I have no personal information one way or the other, but you can imagine circumstances under which resigning might have been a prudent move.

Yesterday, the Post again broke a story, claiming that Take Two is in buy-out talks with "several" potential partners. Which, given that they had a dreadful 2005, is credible, albeit the Post's source is anonymous, and anonymous sources are inherently not all that credible. And to be sure, given the recent drop in Take Two's share price, and yesterday's rebound on the Post's report, well, if you're a Take Two shareholder, it's a nice rumor to have out there.

Take Two's basic problem is the same shared by many mid-size publishers--they're essentially dependent on a single franchise for the bulk of their profits, and they've been unable to establish anything other than GTA as a reliable source of revenue. When your cash cow falters, you run into problems. Hence the decline and fall of Eidos--and it's at least possible that the same thing is happening to Take Two now.

All very interesting, to be sure. And perhaps typical that the game press has given vastly more play to the lawsuit by LA over Hot Coffee--which frankly is just an irritant.
posted by Greg at 12:05 PM 4 comments

Iesu fuckin christe.

I'm not sure whether this wants to make me kill myself or laugh uproariously, albeit with a sort of manic and potentially deranged overtone.

In related news, I absolutely adore Nouvelles Vagues's bossa nova version of "Too Drunk to Fuck." (You'll have to buy the CD, but their lounge version of The Guns of Brixton is pretty weird too.)

Update: And then I went and looked at some of the Devo 2.0 videos. When the lead singer performing "Beautiful World" says "and for me too," that completely and utterly destroys the meaning of the song, eh? I like the po-mo irony of having 21st century teen dudes and chicklets performing this music, but can't they do it straight? Does it have to be turned into Disneyfied happy crap? No, we don't live in a fucking beautiful world. Indeed, it is a veritable vale of tears, and we all must make our peace with that. But perhaps it's a beautiful world for you. You purblind idiot.
posted by Greg at 11:46 PM 4 comments

...says Kristian Segerstrale of Glu (nee Sorrent). Sure, pal.

Apparently, Glu funded a study. Not surprisingly, gamers claimed they were more influenced by price and "quality." Not by brands; no, that would admit that they were mere sheep, yes?

But it's bogus. 90+% of mobile games are sold off operator decks, and while some operators now give you screenshots and even reviews from Wireless Gaming Review, you have to click through to get those, people mostly make buy decisions from the top of the deck. Where all they have to base a purchase decision on is one line of text: the game's name.

Is price an influence? Sure. But how can a buyer make any kind of quality decision? "Try before you buy" is a rarity in mobile games, there's virtually no review coverage and it reaches a tiny portion of the market, and consumers don't really know anything about the companies who provide mobile games. So what you're left with is the title--and if the title is "Space Invaders" or "Price of Persia" or "The Matrix" game, at least you have some idea what you're getting. Note that the consumer perception of what a "brand" is probably only includes the last of those three--but for sure the previous two are "brands" in this sense, that is, they are IP licensed by the developer or publisher in order to increase sales. An "unbranded" game would be an original one, not tied to a license.

So you know, nice try, Glu. Sure, it would be nice if the operators didn't give such premium placement to brands they think will sell. Sure, it would be nice if you didn't have to pay such a large portion of your potential revenues to brand owners. And therefore sure it's worth trying to change perceptions a little with this kind of corporate propaganda. But it's bogus. Brands rule mobile.

Which sucks, of course; mobile games have quickly become even less interesting as a potential place for innovation than conventional games. Which of course is one reason why I no longer play in this space. But realities are realities.
posted by Greg at 5:14 PM 4 comments

I haven't posted much recently about Manifesto, mostly because we've been making steady progress, but haven't had a "shout for joy" milestone to announce yet. But perhaps it's time to bring you up to date.

Funding:

I now have close to three dozen people (or early stage VCs) on my "active" list. Of course, "active" means I've approached them, and they haven't said "no" yet. Still, there are a couple I think are extremely good prospects, and a number of others who get and like what we're doing, but are unlikely to commit until I show up with a lead or can demonstrate revenues. So those two things are basically "critical path" at the moment: cultivating possible leads (that is, people who could take a big chunk of the seed round) and accelerating our site development.

Business Development:

Bill Folsom recently joined us to concentrate on cultivating developer contacts; while Johnny and I between us know almost everyone (in North America anyway), we've got other things to worry about too. Bill has been aggressively contacting lots of people, and we're now up to about two dozen Letters of Intent, and two offered contracts. We could probably turn a bunch of those LoIs into contracts in relatively short order, but our lawyers are still working on our boilerplate. They're Perkins Coie, a West Coast firm with excellent tech and media credentials, and the partner who handles us was my lawyer at Unplugged as well; and I won't talk deal terms, but in essence they're providing us with critical legal services at present for a whole lot less than we'd otherwise pay, with the expectation that we turn into a "real" client down the line. A nice vote of confidence.

At the suggestion of Katherine Neil (an Australian developer currently working in France who is a 'friend of the company'), we've also put together a one-pager for developers, analogous to the one we use for potential investors, but geared toward explaining to developers what Manifesto is and what we're trying to do. Comments and suggestions welcome. My partners made me take out the Warren Spector quote, alas ("We must kill the publishers, or we are all doomed.") Well, yes, maybe that was over the top.

Site Development:

This is the area where we've been weakest. A fair bit has been done, but there is a daunting amount more than needs to be done prior to launch. One issue is that Drupal has recently upgraded to version 4.7, but version 4.7 of the ecommerce module isn't completed yet, so we're waiting on the relevant Drupal team (though I've encouraged our guys to help out). Another is that of the 20-something people on our sitedev list, perhaps a half dozen are active--and of course they all have paying gigs that demand a fair chunk of their time. The third is that organizing their efforts has taken a back seat to getting going on fundraising and business development--and I think they've felt a little adrift, too.

So while I can't stop pushing ahead on funding, my feeling at the moment is I need to focus more on site development. In particular:
1) Getting more organized, in terms of tasking people with particular features, figuring out what critical-path items aren't getting done, and figuring out how to do them.
2) Pruning the list of dead wood.
3) Actively looking for someone who can devote full time to this--ideally someone with strong ecommerce experience, as that's one thing our current team lacks. Preferably someone willing to work for equity, of course, but my pockets aren't empty yet, so some cash isn't impossible.

In general, if you're interested in helping out, there are a couple of areas where you can:

1. If you've got good PHP chops, better yet know Drupal like the back of your hand, better yet have worked on ecommerce sites, and best of all, are New York or Atlanta local, and are willing to help out, let me know. greg +at+ manifestogames +dot+ com will get to me.

2. If you're interested in investing or have an interesting contact who might be, that's good too.

3. If there's a cool "indie" game, or "serious" game, or something otherwise offbeat you'd like to see us carry, drop Bill a line... Based on my email above, you can probably figure out what his is :).

4. And of course, if you're a developer or smaller publisher or shareware author who'd like to know more about working with us, contact us, too. Bill, Johnny, or me, whomever you feel most comfortable contacting.

Duty now for the future!
posted by Greg at 3:54 PM 5 comments

(Via Slashdot Games)

An AFP story picked up by Yahoo and CNN reports that a gamer committed suicide on live webcam at the site metalgearsolid.org while other gamers taunted him. (The site has been taken down on request by unidentified American law enforcement officials.)

Per Gaming Horizon, the actual facts are that he posted (in the site's forum) about his intention to commit suicide, members of the community tried to talk him out of it, no webcam was involved, nobody taunted him, and the story is completely bogus.

Good to see the members of the Fourth Estate taking their responsibilities seriously.
posted by Greg at 1:34 PM 4 comments

NPD says that PC game sales slid 14% in 2005, down to $954m from 2004's $1.1b revenue number.

And they also point out that of course this number doesn't capture MMO subscription revenues, sales of downloadable games, and so on. (Which it doesn't; NPD's numbers historically capture only brick-and-mortar retail sale). And that they will be "revising" how they calculate PC game sales in future to capture these numbers.

On the one side, this is a good thing; PC games are continuing to shift toward online revenue, however captured, and since I'm flogging a PC game venture, it would be nice not to have to start any conversation about future potential revenues by talking about the dramatic slide in sales over the last few years. Much better to be able to say "growing market."

But I somewhat wonder how, exactly, NPD will go about "revising" their numbers. Figuring out what's going on at retail is (at least in the US) not all that hard; there are a handful of important retailers, who will report these numbers. All of the markets NPD says they want to add are far less transparent. MMO providers, for instance, are not in the habit of releasing information like exactly what proportion of their claimed player base actually subscribes, and what the actual per-person average revenues are. People habitually refer to Sir Bruce's chart, but he will admit that a lot of it is guess work (and has recently taken to qualifying each of his numbers with a letter grade to represent how accurate he thinks it is, which is helpful). And even it just gives you a sense of raw numbers, not actual revenues.

As for the casual downloadable market--people are currently claiming it's anywhere from $80m to $400m, and as far as I know, none of the leading etailers of this stuff actually report the revenues they gain from it. Sure, most are publically traded, but obviously Yahoo! and Real's revenues are derived largely from other things, and their 10Qs don't break out game revenues.

I'd like NPD to succeed in giving us a better view into what PC games are actually generating, but, you know, good luck with that.
posted by Greg at 11:54 AM 4 comments

Actually the Game Daily article here is pretty lame, but I have to say, it's brilliant from a conceptual point of view. My guess is what happened is Chris Buffa thought up the title, pitched it to his editor, the laughed his head off, and Buffa got an expenses-paid weekend in Vegas, in exchange for which he hit up the Adult Entertainment Expo (a trade show for the porn biz), took some snapshots of chicks, a few actually admitted to playing video games, and presto, you have an article that the sorts of dweebs who frequent game news sites probably cannot resist clicking on, just on the basis of the title alone.

Degrading and dumb, but evil genius from a marketing perspective. Hope you didn't drop too much on the slots, Chris.
posted by Greg at 10:17 AM 4 comments

When I was a teenager, I published a Diplomacy fanzine--we ran several games of Diplomacy (and variants) by mail, with people mailing me their moves, and results of each turn appearing in the next issue. And, of course, I ran articles on whatever struck my fancy at the time--not all that much difference between being a zine publisher and a blogger, in fact.

I've long maintained that digital games have been warped in ways their designers only dimly understand by the essentially single-user nature of PCs and consoles. And I viewed the advent of networking as a way of redressing that fact, and making of digital games what games were always meant to be: essentially social undertakings.

To date, the most commercially successful online games fall into two categories. There are massively multiplayer games, which in almost all cases have no defined end and charge a monthly subscription (or, in Asia and few cases elsewhere, make money by selling in-game crap to players); and there are FPSes and RTS games that offer online play for free, make money off the conventional retail sale, and use a number of strategies to ensure that providing free online play is a relatively small ongoing cost for the game's developer.

Nothing wrong with this, and I enjoy both MMOs and playing RTS games online (I suck at shooters). But the neverending nature of MMOs (and the grind) become wearisome at times, and RTS, played online, is essentially a twitch game--mastery of the interface and fast action becomes far more important than strategy.

As an old Diplomacy player, what I really want to play, of course, are games -of strategy- (that is, which make you think about what you're doing), played by a handful of people so that interactions with the other players are meaningful, and played to completion in a reasonable amount of time.

The problem is that no one has ever been able to make a successful business out of games like this. Or not a very successful one, anyway. That was true in the days of the commercial online services, and it remains true on the public Internet.

The problem, I think, is essentially one of business model. People understand the major costs MMO providers incur, in terms of bandwith, customer support, back-end architecture, and continued development; they find the monthly fee reasonable, particularly given how many hours of entertainment a typical MMO player gets out of the game per month. But for other game styles, people generally expect online play to be for free. That's okay if online play can be provided cheaply and there's a retail box to be sold, the revenues from which can defray the cost of providing online play--but if you're don't get revenue from retail, you need some other way to extract money from people, which is a problem if they expect stuff for free.

People have certainly tried; I tried with Fantasy War (now defunct), which basically charged you a buck to play a game to completion (and boy was that unpopular, even though you would have had to play the game a LOT to pay anything like the cost of a retail product). Virtual trading card games like ChronX try to charging you for booster packs, in essence (and I guess you could argue that Magic Online is successful, albeit by piggybacking on the success of the conventional card game). Games like Cosmic Encounter Online offer free play but with limited capabilities for free players, charging if you want access to (in Cosmic's case) the full range of aliens. Skotos offers a number of such games (like Imperial Space: Hegemony) that are "free" to Skotos members (who also get access to their text-based MMOs), with membership costing $13/month--but Skotos's strategy games get far less play than their MMOs.

One of the few operations that does seem to be successful is Laser Squad Nemesis, which was originally a free download but required you to subscribe for a relatively small fee--I think it was $15 for a year, initially--to play online. Over time, they've added features to the game, including a soloplay campaign, so that the game now looks much more like a conventional RTS game--buy the game for $20, this gives you the solo game and six months access to online play, then you have to re-up your subscription if you want to continue playing.

The point is that games like this may not have the bandwidth and server costs of MMOs, but they do have some--unlike FPS and RTS, individual users can't run their own servers (ala Quake), nor does a player-matching server hand off the game for operation by one of the player's machines (ala Battle.net), both strategies to minimize the game provider's ongoing costs. So games like ChronX or LSN or Imperial Space do have to have some ongoing revenue to offset ongoing support costs. Clearly they don't need $10 a month, but they do need something... And no one has really found a business model that's both appealing to consumers and profitable for game providers.

Except that perhaps Days of Wonder has done so.

Days of Wonder is a French board and cardgame publisher (with a US wing). They have developed online versions of a number of their titles, including Alan Moon's Ticket to Ride (a railroad game) and Fist of Dragon Stones. The games are playable for free, but Days of Wonder has several ways of monetizing players:
1. As a free, guest player, you cannot create a new game (though you can join one created by a registered player), your play is unranked (no contribution to the leaderboard), and you cannot maintain a buddy list. You can upgrade to registered player status, but this costs $12 for a six month subscription.
2. If you buy a physical version of one of the games, a sticker on the back of the rules book contains a code that you may enter on the website, which gives you registered player status for six months--so online play also serves as a promotion for the board or card game, and the offer of online play may spur some incremental sales of the physical game.
3. Additionally, they offer (for $20) a "computer version" of the game, which has superior graphics and sounds to the free, Java version, as well as the ability to play offline against bots to your heart's content. I believe (but am not sure) that the PC version connects to the same servers as the free version. So, in other words, this is the same "upsell" approach used to get people to buy casual downloadable games--the Web version is free, but the paid version is a lot prettier and more fully featured.

Go play Ticket to Ride right now. It's a first-rate game, and the site has both PDFs of the rules and a tutorial. And you can observe a game before you play one if you want to. It is, after all, free.... although I suspect if you get hooked you'll want to spring a few extra bucks for registration.

You know, you look at this and say, fuck me... This is what Hasbro should have done with Games.com instead of trying to build a Pogo/Yahoo! Games competitor (and losing a lot of money in the process... Games.com was sold to "Atari" as part of the sale of Hasbro's digital game studios). Use online play as a way of promoting the physical games, include a link from the physical game to the online one, charge for premium access. It's so obvious.

Of course, the model is not necessarily generalizable. It does depend on a tie to a physical game. And it won't work for hobby game publishers in the US, either; Ticket to Ride has sold in excess of 300,000 copies worldwide, almost all of that in Europe. With unit sales at that scale, you can afford to spend several hundred thousand dollars developing an online version (I don't know what Days of Wonder spent, but if I were bidding on building something like the online version of Ticket to Ride, I'd be asking for something like a dev budget of $400,000). For small hobby publishers in the US, who are lucky if a game sells 20,000 units, doing something like this is a whole lot less affordable.

And, of course, it depends on having a game that works both in an online and physical context. You couldn't do a boardgame version of Fantasy War, for instance--that game allowed you to build some pretty massive armies, and if you had to have a piece in the box for every unit you could build, you'd have a boardgame costing something like a hundred bucks. Not to mention that the combat resolution alogorithm, while trivial for a computer, would be onerous and tedious in a physical game. Similarly, some boardgames would suck online--Monopoly, for example. And there's a reason why all the digital versions of Axis & Allies have been nasty.

So perhaps there's a relatively narrow range of product for which this model works. But still--it's nice so see that it is working at all.
posted by Greg at 2:34 PM 4 comments

I first met Charles Ardai something like fifteen years ago, when he was an associate editor of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and also a frequent game reviewer for Computer Gaming World--just another young, enthusiastic geek, in other words, seriously into noir fiction and computer games. But being more sensible than the rest of us, he went and got a Real Job, for D.E. Shaw, which, among other things, provided the initial funding for Juno Online, which you may recall from the dot com days as one of the leading "free" ISPs. Even at the height of the boom, however, he remained far more modest than most dot boomers; he attended a meeting of the Gamoids, NYC's IGDA Chapter at one point, and I remember introducing him to Frank Lantz as a reviewer for CGW. During the conversation, Charles admitted that he worked for Juno, but it wasn't until later, when Frank looked at the business card he'd been given that Frank realized Charles was CEO.

What's that got to do with anything? Well, I'm more a skiffy than mystery geek, but I have a fondness for noir and pulp fiction in general. I've been reading a bunch of books recently in the Hard Case Crime series. And while it's gotten some press in the MSM, I'm surprised to find that the only mention Google turns up that mentions the Juno-Hard Case connection is Charles's Wikipedia entry... And surely this is the kind of goofy thing that bloggers love...

Charles is the editor of the line. It's a series of noir novels, some original and some reprints of older work, almost all by well-known writers like Lawrence Block or Donald Westlake. And they're all packaged with covers that evoke the pulp mysteries of the 40s and 50s, like say:


Haven't read one I didn't like yet. And... It may be hard to see in the image, which is pretty small, but this one is by Richard Aleas"... Aleas? Pretty obvious, eh? I guess Charles couldn't resist publishing a novel of his own. And it's not bad, and even had one line that made me laugh out loud: The protagonist is talking about how, after he graduated from college, he became a private eye. "It was either that or working for an Internet company, and I still had some self-respect left."
posted by Greg at 12:43 PM 5 comments

Apparently that's what the analysts are saying.

Okay, I understand why; Sony spent a crap load of money on the Cell processor, and it's got both a hard-drive and a Blu-Ray drive, and at the moment, a Blu-Ray player sells for $1800 bucks. I can see why $500 might be the bare minimum Sony could charge.

But you know, crap.... The whole point of consoles is that they're a cheaper way to get your games than PCs (and you don't have the configuration issues, of course). At $500... I don't think so. And yes, presumably the price comes down over time.

And the fact that it's a cool piece of hardware cuts no mustard; software sells hardware. There had better be some kickass games at launch.

It sure looks to me like Sony talked itself into thinking they had to have better hardware than MS this time round, and wound up with something just too damn pricey at the time of launch. In the last go-round, PS 2 and Xbox were broadly comparable, PS 2 played your older discs, and there really weren't enough Xbox-exclusive titles to make you want to pick up an Xbox over a PS 2--PS 2 was the obvious default choice.

At this point, I would imagine most gamers would say: I still have my PS 2, so backward compatibility isn't that big a deal; Xbox 360 is a whole lot cheaper; so the only reason I might want to spend the extra bux on a PS 3 is if it has hot exclusive titles.

Or unless I want a cheap Blu-Ray player, I suppose.

I dunno. I sort of wonder whether Sony isn't shooting itself in the foot. Or possibly the game industry collectively in the foot.

Not my problem, I guess, since Manifesto isn't doing console games.
posted by Greg at 5:34 PM 3 comments

Recently, Jonathan Blow wrote:

You spoke of [Moore's Law] as an ongoing thing, but -- actually, Moore's Law failed sometime around the year 2000, and CPU speeds have been relatively stagnating since then.

And recently, on his blog, Mark Cuban noted: "Has anyone noticed that we have been stuck on 3.xghz speed equivalency from CPUs in PCs for going on 2 years now?"

Boing!

They are right. Something has happened, and other than these two, I don't know that anyone has noticed. The doubling-every-18-months paradigm has failed.

Now--maybe it's at temporary glitch. Maybe 3D silicon or strained silicon or nanotechnology or quantum computing or something will come to the rescue and put us back on the exponential curve we've been on for decades. And certainly the end of Moore's Law has been predicted in the past, and failed to occur. But at the moment, we do seem to have at least a pause--and maybe an ultimate end.

That end almost certainly has to happen someday. Technologies tend to follow an S curve--a long period of development, a rapid take-off, a flattening out. And we've been following up the "rapid take-off" curve for so long that, by now, we take it for granted. But perhaps there are limits to how fine a current path you can etch on a wafer, and perhaps we're starting to reach the point where improvements are incremental at best.

I grew up in the 60s, and as a child, remember the firm belief of virtually everyone in the tech community that space was within our grasp. Basically, that's because the S curve of aerospace had been on the upswing since the Wright Brothers. Biplanes to aluminum-shell craft to jet airplanes to supersonic aircraft--all you had to do was project that a few decades into the future to see that we'd all be vacationing on Mars by the year 2000.

And all you have to do is project Moore's Law a few decades into the future, and bing! Accelerando!. The Singularity is nigh!

But... Maybe not. Maybe it really is over.

But then again... What about the Cell Processor, heart of the Playstation 3? Massively parallel computing, eh, dude?

If you look at it, it's a 3.2 Ghz core with 7 "synergistic processors" each also operating at 3.2Ghz. And the Xbox 360 has three processors, each also operation at--wait for it--3.2Ghz.

In other words, we seem to be hung at 3.2Ghz, and both machines are trying to push performance instead with a multi-processor design containing multiple 3.2Ghz CPUs. Three for the Xbox 360, eight for the PS 3.

So maybe one way around the slowdown is to increase the number of processors in the device. But actually, this only gets you so far. Some things can be parallelized well, so that you can get noticeably better performance out of the system--graphics processing, for example. But if you look at most game code, you typically have maybe three main threads running at any given time (and those three typically have locks and wait states that depend on each other), so that the actual performance gain from adding additional processors is far less than additive.

In other words, there's definitely a limit to how much you can gain from a multiprocessor architecture. Yes, it lets you get beyond the 3.2Ghz barrier we may be facing--but by a multiplicative factor, not an exponential one, and each additional processor provides a lower incremental gain.

If we are indeed facing a sudden, drastic lowering in incremental processor speed gain, what does it mean?

For one thing, it means the programmers suddenly have to become a lot less sloppy. Here's an example. Back when I had a Mac +, I upgraded (IIRC) from Word 3 to word 4, which had a new feature: tables. I liked this a lot, because I was working on a desktop publishing project (the SPI Compendium which ultimately turned into a web publishing project). But I quickly discovered that tables were incredibly, frustrating, stupidly slow. Just scrolling a doc with tables in it too forfuckingever. Sure, my Mac+ was outdated even then, but there was no excuse for code this inefficient.

I very much doubt MS has ever optimized that code; they didn't need to. Processors continued apace, and in a year or two, nobody even noticed.

Or here's another example: When I first started Civ 4, and the start screen told me it was starting both XML and Python, I cringed. Just think of the processor overhead involved in supporting both technologies. They are inefficient as hell. Mind you, there's a good reason to use both of them: XML makes providing a reasonably intuitive modding interface a whole lot easier, and Python is a pretty easy "glue" language for highlevel application control that will ease a lot of development issues. But the overhead involved in supporting both is large, and even five years ago, I would never even have considered using them.

Mind you, my first attempts at programming home computers (as opposed to mainframes) were on an Apple II, when you had to use assembler to get even half-way adequate performance out of the machine. It's great that we have machines that sneer at the overhead involved with Windows and wave a nonchalant hand at the inherent inefficiencies of unoptimized C++ code.

But even on my 2 gig machine, Civ 4 can run a little slowly, particularly in a large world, in a late-stage game.

In general, programmers have gotten used to not having to worry overmuch about code optimization--and about being able to go to languages and systems at a higher and higher level of abstraction and divorce from the ultimate machine language. We will not, of course, ever have to go back to assembler (except maybe for critical-path algorithms), but if I'm right, and Moore's Law is over, we also cannot rely on ever increasing levels of abstraction, either.

Let's look at it another way. One of the holy grails of gaming, virtually since its inception, has been the ability to create, if you will, the interactive movie: cinematic quality visuals created on the fly. Today, pre-rendered 3D graphics have gotten good enough that Disney has cancelled its drawn-animation productions in favor of computer-generated 3D (an extremely stupid decision, IMO--I have to believe Disney upper management has neither sense nor taste). But even so, things like the Final Fantasy movie and The Polar Express have failed, largely because of the immobility of the faces of the human characters therein. They've fallen afoul of the uncanny valley, the theory that people can readily anthropomorphize relatively crude imagery, and can easily identify with highly polished imagery, but somewhere inbetween, inadequate representations of humans looks weird and disturbing.

Pre-rendered 3D graphics, of course, are the end product of long periods (typically hours) of processor rendering per second of animation. Games must genereate 3D images on the fly--that is, one second of animation per second of realtime--and consequently can render images with far less resolution and detail than pre-rendered film. In other words, whatever 3D animated film can do, 3D games can do far less well--and if film fails to provide us with cinematic realism, games cannot possibly hope to do so.

Now, quite possibly the root problem here is algorithmic, rather than fundamentally processor speed-dependent. That is, if we can create algorithms that can create flexible, detailed, realistic, and emotionally impactful human expressions in real time without requiring a vastly greater number of polygons, it's not inconceivable that we can product 3D generated human avatars to which people have intense emotional responses without any drastic increase in processor speed. However, Moore's Law has, in the past, essentially allowed us to depend on the ability to throw brute force at this kind of problem, because the expectation has always been that we will have a lot more brute force to throw at it in the future. If we actually have to start to be clever the whole game changes.

Or to look at this issue in the way that, say, Greg Costikyan might: You poor blind fools! You've been chasing a chimaera from the start! The problem with digital games isn't that we can't create imagery as detailed as the movies. Let the movies do that! Concentrate on our own damn strengths! And now, you will clearly never be able to do so, either. If Moore's Law is at an end, we will never have "the interactive movie." Try to figure out what games do well, instead of venting your envy of cinema.

But looking beyond games--if Moore's Law is at an end, what does that mean for the culture as a whole? For the last two decades, we've experienced productivity growth across the economy that has been far higher than the historical norm. That productivity growth has, in the final analysis, been driven by Moore's Law. Integration of computing technology into business processes and everyday life--at a rapidly improving rate--has allowed enormous efficiencies to be implemented. Naturally, those efficiencies have come more slowly than the techology, because adaptations of that technology to everday needs, the retraining of people to use them effectively, and the changes in organization structure required to deploy them effectively, have been processes that operate at much slower timeframes than Moore's Law. And those processes are still in progress, and doubtless there are still many efficiences to be wrung out of our society, even if progress stalls at the 3.2Ghz barrier.

But if Moore's Law really is at an end, we face a sudden slowing of productivity gains back to the historical norm--which, over the last 150 years, has been more like 3% than the 5-6% we've experienced lately.

And in the absence of a growing population or increasing access to resources, the other main drivers of productivity--well, it's going to feel a whole lot like recession.

There are many ways in which I could be wrong, here. But if I'm right--don't be prepared for Web Boom 2.0. Be prepared more for the 1970s.

(Oh, yeah... And... uh... Invest in my Web 2.0 venture! hem.)
posted by Greg at 10:17 PM 5 comments

I first moved to Jersey City in 1983, when I was a freelance boardgame designer and earning maybe $10k a year. I did so because Tom Gould, my apartmentmate, moved out, and basically I couldn't afford the $700/month rent that our roach-invested hovel on Amsterdam Avenue cost, and I could get a two bedroom in Joisey for $500 a month. I wanted two bedrooms, since one could serve as my office--possibly a pointless extravagance, since shortly after I moved there, I went to work for West End, and didn't really need the second room any more.

(In fact, I was already doing freelance work for West End, and gave them as a reference to the landlord. Curtis Smith took the call from them I think, and did me a great favor: if I recall, his line was "Don't tell me he's going to park the Porsche there!" Not that I had any kind of car, to be sure.)

At the time, I had a friend who lived in Hoboken, and at one point he invited me to a gaming session at his apartment. I had a map of Hudson County, with which I was then pretty unfamiliar, and figured out how to walk between our apartments. It was maybe a forty minute walk, and I figured what the hell. It was in the evening, though, and getting there meant passing under three dark railroad trestles, and crossing the tunnel toll plaza.

Along the way, I passed--to my astonishment--what had been the SPI warehouse.

Mind you, I got my start in "the SPI warehouse." I was hired at the age of 14 to assemble and ship games in the SPI backroom. My first job involved taking maps, counters, rules, a catalog, a cover sheet, and whatever other minor materials were involved in a game, collating them, slapping them into a box, and slamming a cover onto it. Or taking a mailing label printed out by SPI's IBM System 3 minicomputer, interpreting the three-letter game codes printed thereon, locating the relevant assembled games, wrapping them in cardboard, and pulling the lever on machines that shot paper tap out over a wet brush and sliced it when you ceased pulling on the lever, then using this gummed and wetted tape to seal the box. Then slapping the mailing label onto it and throwing it onto the pallet for the UPS man.

But that was back in the mid-70s, and by the early 80s, commercial rents in New York had risen to the point that it no longer made sense to have the shipping operation in Manhattan (even if manned by teenagers earning minimum wage), and it had been moved to Jersey City, in a dismal, tiny little warehouse crammed under the Jersey Turnpike overpass.

By the time I moved to Jersey City, SPI had been out of business for several years. And on the day I walked past it for the first time, I was astonished--firstly, because I'd never been there, and was surprised to see the SPI logo on this grungy industrial structure--and secondly, because the company had even then been out of business for years, yet no one had seen a need to overpaint the logo.

I believe (but am not sure) that TSR continued to use the same warehouse for several years, to serve East Coast accounts.

And I recall having a conversation with Lou Zocchi at once point, in which he talked about taking a truck to that warehouse, and frantically loading old SPI games onto his truck even as the employees were tossing what remained of the SPI inventory into dumpsters.

I moved back to New York in 1985, when my then-sweetie went to Columbia business school and we had university housing--but when she graduated in 87, we moved back, buying a row house in the Hamilton Park area.

And for years afterwards, I remember driving past, in our minivan, taking my small children to school, and seeing the SPI name still painted on that warehouse.

Until one day it was gone.
posted by Greg at 11:58 PM 4 comments

AAAAHHH! NOOOOOO!

My first WorldCon was 1974. The Hugos mean something to me.

And now there is a (on-time, pray God) Hugo for "Best Interactive Video Game".

Let's parse this.

1. It's for "best game." Not "best design." It's not for an individual, the way the fiction awards are. It's an award to--who? Publisher? Developer? "The game" in some abstract way? So some publicity flack from EA is going to show up to collect it? What purpose does this serve?

2. Tell me... What sort of game is "non-interactive?" So what does "Best Interactive Video Game" exclude?

3. The stfnal community overlaps far more with the hobby games community than it does with the digital comes community. So why is there an award for "video game" (I prefer videogame, btw), rather than for "game"? Is this a purposeful snubbing of the tabletop community? And frankly, wouldn't it be a whole lot cooler to see the likes of Steve Jackson or Richard Garfield at a Hugo awards ceremony than some fucking publicity flack from EA?

4. I assume this is restricted to fantasy/SF titles... but the game industry doesn't divvy up genre that way. This will be open to Age of Mythology but not Age of Empires? World of Warcraft but not World War II Online? Doom III but not Call of Duty 2? Is there a logic to that?

5. This is--just dumb. I'm sorry. It diminishes the value of the Hugos without providing any benefit to games. Please, for the love of god, WSFS, never do this again.
posted by Greg at 6:55 PM 5 comments

Here's a mockup of a sample games page for the Manifesto site. Comments and suggestions are solicited.

Description:

A: Usual header and nav links

B: Product illo--since many won't have a boxed version, might be a screenshot or such.

C: Sell copy (this is a fictional game).

D: Player ratings. Ratings are 1-10, players must be registered and signed in to rate, a player may rate each game only once. (This is to avoid the obvious forms of exploitation, although nothing is perfect.) At present, we're planning on rating only "overall" and by complexity (~=difficulty of getting into the game), but might add different ratings over time.

E: Demo downloads. Drop-down list is for use when there are different demos for different OS versions or platforms. Text below the button describes how the demo is limited (since this can vary a lot from title to title).

F: ESRB rating--though it's been pointed out that different countries have different rating systems.

G: Developer logo, name, and link to that developer's web page.

H: Price, platform availability. "Buy now" actually leads to another page that allows you to select platform/OS (if multiple versions available) and whether you want a box shipped to you (if available), an immediate download, or (for slighlty higher cost) both, so you can play now and also get something for your shelf.

J: "Our review." "The Zine" is "professional content" (reviews, previews, strat articles, thought pieces, whatever); our policy is to maintain editorial independence between the "editorial" and "marketing" side, but with the right of developers/publishers to respond to reviews, as and when they choose to do so.

K: "People who bought this also bought..."

L: A screenshot, links to other files related to the game.

M: Links to offsite reviews; this is editable by users (so they can add reviews we haven't caught).

N: Top-of-the-line credits (typically these four: lead game designer, tech lead, art director, lead producer).

P: Player reviews.

Q: System requirements

R: Related links.

S: Most recent forum post in the topic devoted to this game.

T: Copyright notice and other legal crap.
posted by Greg at 10:55 AM 6 comments