...And make big bux coming up with completely idiotic names for things and chuckling all the way to the bank as suits make fools of themselves announcing their new name. Hence Wii, which I will henceforth commence to pronounce as "vih-ee;" clearly it is an Anglicization of the plural of the nonexistant Latin noun "vius". Just as I insist on pronouncing Glu as "gluh." If it were "glue," after all, it would be spelled that way.

Revolution was a good strong name. Wii is... silly.

Almost as bad as "Verizon" (theoretically a conflation of "veritas" and "horizon", but equally pronounceable as "very zahn"); there was something wrong with Bell Atlantic? Or GTE, if you want to lose the regional association? And sure, "NYNEX" thankfully got lost in that one.

Or "Cingular" for that matter. Good Christ. And thank god they're rebranding themselves as AT&T.

Years ago, I had a friend who worked in the banking industry in New York, and had joke names for just about every bank then in the city. E.g., Citibank = Shittybank, Chemical = Comical. Perhaps we need to embark on this for our industry. Electronic Arts, whose first ads promoted actual game designers as artists engaging the artistic frontier in electronic media, might perhaps better be known today as Electronic Serfs, for their treatment of their employees. Activision might be better known as Passivision given their roll-over passivity in the face of the trend toward franchise and licensed titles. Given Nintendo's hubristic but unintended failure to maintain its control over the console market, perhaps Nonintendo would do. THQ's habit of quickly producing shovelware might make PDQ a better name. Atari can be dealt with by insisting on calling it Infogrames, which is funny enough in its own right.

I'm at something of a loss for Ubisoft, though. Boobiesoft, perhaps?

Update: Yes, Mike, we are going to talk about the foolishness of the name, you gormless 'tendo fanboy. Well, okay, I'm a Nintendo fanboy too, but do you really buy into the notion that that the fact the we can henceforth control games by waving our hands through the air is going to be the innovation that saves our field from publisher cowardice and risk aversion? And therefore we shouldn't devalue what Nintento is doing by mentioning that they are clearly idiots? Right, right, it's so important to support a future in which flailing arms replace joystick motions that we should suppress our instinct to make fun of something that is obviously ludicrous. Me, I think real innovation comes from design, not from a new peripheral.
posted by Greg at 10:49 PM

I have an article up in this week's Escapist.
posted by Greg at 9:15 AM

Woah.... Viacom buys Xfire for $102m.

If you're not an FPS junkie, Xfire provides IM/voice chat/buddy list/player matching software that's quite useful for minimally multiplayer games (as opposed to MMOs).

Sumner Redstone, who controls Viacom, has personally been plowing quite a lot of money into Midway, but Viacom is one of the few diversified media conglomerates that doesn't have much of a presence in games, at least since they closed down Simon & Schuster Interactive (which used to be a second-rank publisher).

Interesting.
posted by Greg at 9:06 PM

So Exile Gamers is running a petition asking publishers to release older and unavailable games not for free, but for modest cost as online downloads. Here's why this isn't going to happen:

1. Most of these games were coded to include some kind of copy protection--check disk, enter text from a printed manual, something. If you're going to make the game available as a download, you need to go back into the code and strip that out (and probably apply some other anti-copy scheme, although maybe you don't bother, because the market here is going to be small). Now--how many of the companies who own the rights to games from the 80s can lay their hands on the source? Or, for that matter, replicate the development environment that source as written in? And given the (likely) modest resulting sales, is the effort worth it?

Of course, there are presumably cracked versions of virtually every game available somewhere.... but if you grab and use one of these, there's at least some risk that the installer or executable contains a virus or other malicious code--and no publisher is going to want to be liable if it does.

2. In some cases, untangling the rights themselves is going to be a problem. Can you put your hands on the contract? Is any share of the resulting revenue owed the developer, and if so, what happens if they're now out of business? Can you find the original principles? It's going to be a problem...

3. Publishers are concerned about getting the next million selling game out the door--for almost all of them, any revenue they might gain by selling older titles will be trifling. And it's hard to make a case that it will provide a reasonable ROI, considering the development and legal costs.

Nice idea, but impratical, I fear. However, if it can be done, I'd be happy to host such games on Manifesto and handle the sale and payments.

As a counterpoint, Curmudgeon Gamer reports that he can find every older title he wants for legal purchase because of the number of retro game collections that have been published in recent years. Of course, he's talking about console titles... The situation is different for computer games.

Museum of the Moving Image Event

The event at the Musuem of the Moving Image went well, I thought; interested to hear Ralph Baer speak. I won't try to demo games while speaking at the same time again, however; I wasn't able to focus adequately on either task, so I didn't do a good job at demoing, and was doubtless less articulate than I normally am. If I do this again, I'll either have someone else demo while I talk, or put together a gameplay video and talk over it.

Games and Mobile Forum

I'll be speaking on a panel on casual games at the Games and Mobile Forum on Wednesday; the event starts tomorrow, but my panel is next day.
posted by Greg at 4:13 PM

We're plunging with headlong terror toward a May 32nd launch of the Manifesto Games site. One of the issues we're facing is that the guy working hardest on the site has been spending his time making the new version of the Drupal e-commerce module actually work (which is a good thing, and helps pay back the Drupal community), but the net effect is that there are a lot of niggling details that need to be resolved, and that this point, I'd be delighted to find a LAMP programmer, preferably one who is already familiar with Drupal, to work for the next couple of months--for pay. And of course for the warming feeling that you are contributing to the independent games revolution and working for that glorious day when all game geeks will live in harmony and freedom rather than laboring under the oppression of the evil corporate publishers. Contact me at greg +at+ costik +dot+ com for more information.

Incidentally, I will be speaking (along with Ralph Baer, Eugene Jarvis, and Eric Zimmerman) at the American Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens, tomorrow, and will be demoing Cloud, DROD: Journey to Rooted Hold, Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, and Braid.
posted by Greg at 8:40 PM

Years ago, the science fiction editor Tappan King told me something I hadn't thought of before: That games are the democratization of fiction.

His point was that conventional fiction media (prose, film, theater, TV and the rest) are essentially aristocratic in nature: the Artist creates, the audience consumes. Games, contrariwise, allow individual players to participate in the creation of their fictional experience. The developers still shape and constrain that experience, to be sure, but there is no experience without the active engagement of the player; the player may well do something with the construct that the developers had not anticipated; and the ultimate experience is a collaboration in which both sides participate, not something handed down from On High by the Great Artiste. It is, in other words, the antithesis of aristocratic; games are a way for everyman to participate in creating his or her own narrative experience. Games are a democratic artform for a democratic age.

Mind you, some games are more 'democratic' than others; many, perhaps most, games are highly linear in nature, with players' freedom of action tightly constrained within individual nodes. But at the extremes--say, with a tabletop roleplaying game, or in a virtual world like Second Life--the player's experience is extraordinarly freeform. And even in a tightly constrained game, no player's experience will be identical to another's.

Thinking about this recently, and about what Manifesto is trying to do, it occurs to me that the video game industry has, in some ways, betrayed the democratic nature of the form it sells. The game industry, even if the product it promotes is democratic and interactive in nature, is structured virtually identically to entertainment media that predate it. Creators contract with publishers, who do their best to screw them financially; marketing is "top-down," broadcast-style, with a carefully crafted message disseminated via PR and advertising to consumers; publishers, console manufacturers, and retailers jointly act as gate-keepers to narrow consumer options; and gamers are viewed as little more than sheep to be fleeced, induced by a glut of advertising and manipulated press attention to go to the store and buy the next game in the franchise.

Now, let's think about this a little. There are essentially two groups in this value chain who love games: the people who create them, i.e., developers; and the people who consume them, i.e., gamers. Everyone in between is a necessary evil, a means of getting games from developers into the hands of gamers. But it's also everyone in between who basically doesn't give a rat's ass about games, and indeed, would probably be happier selling detergent, or working in film. For developers, and for gamers, games are something special; for the intermediaries, they're just another SKU in a packaged goods industry.

But... Maybe the Internet gives us the opportunity to change all that.

Just as games are essentially democratic in nature, perhaps the way in which games are sold should also be democratic. That is, gamers should be the gate-keepers and taste-makers, not intermediaries; and the two sides of the equation that actually love games should talk and communicate directly. Rather than the industry being structured in a broadcast, top-down model, it should be structured in a many-to-many, networked model.

Gamers should be able to "bubble up" cool stuff; developers should talk to their fans, and purposefully shape their development to respond to the enthusiasm of the people who love what they do.

Conventionally, retailers have contact with consumers, and understand their behavior best; they talk to publishers, and publishers decide what to commission on the basis of what they hear from retailers. Developers operate in the dark, trying to feel out what consumers want, in a bizarre game of blind-man's-buff, seeing what pitches get shot down by publishers and what do not. It's all--well, fucking insane, given the existence of the net. There's no need for this three-distance-removed signalling.

Gamers and developers need to find a way to talk--and to get the intermediaries who, when you get down to it, are useless and overpaid overhead, out of the equation.

Manifesto is, well, another intermediary, I guess; but part of our mission has got to be to facilitate that conversation, to provide a way for developers and gamers to connect. To that end, we'll be doing a number of things. For one, we won't be pretending that these are "our" games (the way publishers claim credit for everything they publish); we'll provide links to developers' sites, we'll list the top-level credits (lead designer, art director, tech lead, lead producer) for every game we carry. Player reviews and comments on almost everything on the site will be enabled; we'll provide forums (linked to individual game pages) for more detailed conversations. We'll have scheduled chats with developers and, down the road, hope to poll our customers regularly on new game ideas. Probably other ways of facilitating that dialog will occur to us down the pike--but still, that has to be our objective.

The most democratic of artforms deserves a democratic conversation between the groups who love it most. Developers and gamers are important, and anything that gets in the way of the connection between them should go away.

Manifesto expects to be in between them--and if we hope to survive (and prosper), it had better be by serving their needs, and facilitating their conversation--not by getting in the way, or trying to control the conversation.
posted by Greg at 5:12 PM

The baby is up by six, but I've been awake since five thinking about things.

Sign onto the IRC dev channel, check the email. File recently received company and game information from developers who've sent it. I sent out a writeup of how to add such to the site to people yesterday, and Bill wants to be assigned one company's games if only to get a feel for it; forward him one. Some other random email.

Check the issues tracker for sitedev.

Get out the final DRM contract, email my lawyer to advance the paperwork on the friends&family round. Ouch, he's out until the 15th. Email his associate about a phone call to discuss the PlayFirst and Reflexive contracts.

Call Len; we have to find a hosting solution soon. Managed hosting or colo? Do we serve demos and games through a partner like Gigex or Limelight? We're probably going to consume more bandwidth than I care to think, if you assume 20 megs per demo and a 2% conversion rate. Len says he'll look into it. But my contact info for the fellow at Limelight is at home, and anyway Roadrunner tells me that my disk space is full (all those screenshots from developers), so I go home to work.

Email one of the sitedev guys to see if he's available more hours for paid work.

Today is the last day to register for E3 before prices go up; Bill suggests conference hotels that are way far away at the airport and $150+ a night. Check the LA conference center site, and see that they're a block away from a Blue Line station. Spend a good 20 minutes before I find street addresses for Blue Line stations, go to Google maps and ask for hotels near stations not to far away from Pico. First few hotels are booked, but I find a motel that you can't book online, figure this is good. Call them, they're $55 a night, it's probably way nasty, but they're a block from the 7th St station and a mile walk to the convention center. Bingo.

Call the associate lawyer, explain to her that the mark-up on the PlayFirst contract is admirably thorough, but that they're good guys, and I don't want to send them something this changed, all I really want is the one to three issues that might cause us considerable liablity so I can negotiate on those points. She agrees to take a look at it again in that light.

I have a credit with Jetblue because I cancelled a flight for one person to GDC; they fly into Long Beach, which isn't ideal, because the Metro goes to LAX but not Long Beach. But the Long Beach airport site says it's a $12 cab ride to the Wardlow station on the Blue Line. This is good, I can avoid a car rental for E3. Book the ticket, just out another $30.

Flying in Monday to be there Tuesday for the IGDA party, and because I figure I can have meetings on a less hectic day before the show floor opens. But this means I need a somewhat pricier E3 membership to get something that lets me be there on Tuesday. This also requires me to register for a bunch of workshops I will probably not attend, but that's okay.

Ellie interrupts me to talk about Bacon's, which wants $7k for access to their publicity database, but will stagger it in three payments. I ask to see the contract, which she emails me. Yes, we probably need to do this, but I'd sure like the f&f round finished first. Might not happen, though... email the associate asking who I should talk to about that, given that my primary lawyer is out.

In the sitedev chat, neclimdul mentions that Drupal 4.7 release candidate 2 is out. Should we upgrade? Probably... he says he'll download it and see what it breaks. Which is fine, but I'd rather he be working on the fact that the demo block isn't working properly. Oh well, will probably solve more problems than it causes.

Ellie interrupts again to talk about launch titles. Will we have Fireball? Maybe, maybenot. Should we feature Tribal Trouble? Will Danish developers stay up to an ungodly hour to do drive-time phone interviews from California? Probably, Scandinavians drink til all hours anyway... Who of our developers are smart and personable, and who are assholes? Who knows? Guess we'll find out.

Review the MMO contract boilerplate, which has some problems. We get a bounty on subscription, not registration. And the developer probably can't warrant that the "game" is "free of libel" or other violations of the law... maybe the client is, but any asshole can start shouting libels in chat... Write up suggested changes, send it off.

Read over the Bacon's contract, which looks okay. May just have to put the first month charge on my credit card.

Betsy gets home, really likes Tribal Trouble, wants one of our reviewers' activation codes so she can keep playing. Well okay... if I can get her to upload some game and company information in exchange.

Go out and get toilet paper and cat food, which we are out of, and something to cook for supper.

Take a look at the speaker's list for the two conferences I'm speaking at this month, trying to figure out if there's anyone we want to connect to. Send off a couple of emails.

Email exchanges with Bill about setting up meetings at E3.

No, sorry, I can't review a book for MIT University press... wish I could. I'm already late on a chapter for another book that I promised to write... No more outside projects, please. Unless they have serious dollars bills attached.

Damon has got Fantasy War working, sorta kinda, and wants my next move. I do it. My, the client is sucky and retro, but it's still a good game. Wonder if we can figure out how to get it up again.

Rich emails saying that Steve Jackson is getting UltraCorps back online.... Yes, I know, we're talking about promoting it.

Blog? Okay, I have a few minutes.

Have to go cook for Karen and the baby now. Tomorrow, I have the baby so Karen can work on the graphic design for the site. But maybe I can get Vicky to babysit for a while and work on that chapter. Or do my laundry; I am out of socks. Who has the time for that crap? Argh, two seders and a full-day conference next week. When am I going to do my taxes?
posted by Greg at 5:12 PM

...which was originally a log of the websites you'd browsed and thought interesting. So here's a list of recent stuff that struck me so:

Raph Koster on why MMOs and MUDs are the same thing, which of course strikes me as blindingly obvious (just as text and graphic adventures are essentially the same thing), but seems highly obscure to most people, who still seem to think that online games began with Ultima Online. Which is obviously fallacious.

These days I try to blip over esr's political posts (because our politics are actually remarkably similar but I think he's way completely fucking offbase on Iraq and this annoys me a whole lot more than it would if our politics weren't aligned in other regards) and focus instead on his thoughts on software... this one on why closed-source software development breaks down when a certain level of complexity is reached is quite interesting. You must read the comments, which discuss the matter in more detail (and contains as a digression an excellent bit by Peter Bessman that provides a useful recap of the console wars).

Which led me to rpg's article on why worse is better in software development, which no doubt if I were a better geek I would have read years ago, but am glad to have read now.

Patrick Dugan posts about why games will save the world which, you know, I don't actually buy, but hey, it's nice to see enthusiasm.

Steve Davis challenges the conventional wisdom about online gaming (that "the client is in the hands of the enemy and all important data must be verified by the server"). A short piece that doesn't really make his argument cogently, alas--he does believe distributed approaches can be rendered secure, but you need to poke around a bit more on his blog to understand why.

GameTap recently slashed it's monthly sub price from $14.95 to $9.95, which engendered some discussions among Manifestians (Manifestoites?) about how we respond to the inevitable challenge from VCs along the lines of "If Turner can't make online sale of games work, why can you"? So I was interested Kim Pallister's post on the subject in which he argues that, in essence, GameTap has no clear positioning, no clear message to consumers about why they might want what they have to offer. We surely don't have the financial resources of Time Warner behind us, but we for damn sure have a message.

Sean Ryan has an interesting 3D online avatar servince named Meez... but of course to me "meez" means your "mise en place," meaning a sous-chef's set up in a kitchen restaurant.

Johnny has an interesting post on level design, and Eleanor on the media's portrayal of games.
posted by Greg at 12:44 AM