Indie Game Producer

What's it like to be a baby?

2011-12-06T13:48:00.001-08:00

"It's like being in love for the first time in Paris after you've had 3 double espressos. It's a fantastic way to be, but it does leave you waking up crying at 3 o' clock in the morning."
-- Alison Gopnik in her TED talk What do Babies Think?

Bethesda vs Mojang

2011-09-29T10:34:00.000-07:00

(If you don't know who Mojang and Bethesda are and don't know about the lawsuit, skip to the bottom to read a quick background on this.)

I write today to praise the noble Markus "Notch" Persson. Notch was already a hero and inspiration to me and to thousands of indie developers for making Minecraft, but he has elevated himself infinitely further in my eyes by making what could be a costly but ethical stand against Bethesda for levying a wrongful lawsuit against his company.

Ethics are rarely used as the guiding moral compass people use to make big decisions. They get cited all the time when it's debatable one way or the other which path is more profitable, but rarely does someone make a big decision where the ethical path puts him in the charging headlights of an oncoming legal department from a corporate giant, and that is what Notch has done.

He has responded to Bethesda's demands that he change the name of his game Scrolls with a simple refusal, and on threat of lawsuit, he has counter-suggested that they have a game of Quake 3 deathmatch to decide whether he can use the name. This was met with a lawsuit instead of a laugh, as well as the requisite headaches, costs, and time lost that this will mean for poor Notch and his company Mojang as they try to fight off this behemoth.

Notch has just published the scary legal documents he's received from Bethesda, and I can only praise him further for forcing that transparency. It should be seen exactly how Bethesda is bullying this heroic indie developer, and it is an even bolder act of courage. It's a move that's liable to make the petty egos that approved of this course and that drafted those docs feel cornered and all the more motivated to crush him. And it's those wrong-doers that I want to put the spotlight on, because it's not as cut and dry as saying "lawyers are evil."

Most people love the development side of Bethesda, the part that makes their games, and they feel this is a fight between their much less beloved legal department and Notch, but I disagree.

The development side of Bethesda is the money making machine that funds the legal department. They have the leverage, and they aren't using it. While I'm sure they've pointed out it's in poor taste, they haven't done anything beyond that. They could privately insist to management that they drop this wrongful lawsuit, but they haven't. If they did insist and management didn't listen, they could probably end it quickly by publicly protesting that management drop it, but they haven't. If that failed, they could delay the release of Skyrim from 11/11/11, their widely advertised release date, even a week or two, which would cost Bethesda far more money than the lawsuit, nevermind the imaginary cost of Mojang's Scrolls to their brand equity in Skyrim and its assured 20 sequels, but they haven't done that either.

Like every corporation does, the employees have been instructed not to discuss the case with anyone. So they're staying in line. They're cooperating. They're continuing along with Skyrim development, so that it can be released this November on schedule to keep the machine fed with ever-increasing revenues on their path to IPO.

The developers at Bethesda have ethics, too, but they have the kind most of us have, the weak-willed sort that melts at the first suggestion that stopping wrongdoing might cost them something, might upset someone, might reduce the inertia of a machine that is perceived to be unstoppable.

And that's fine. I'm sure many of them are concerned for their jobs and careers, their families, the usual concerns, and fear is a powerful motivator. But it doesn't absolve them. I hold them individually and directly responsible, particularly the leads and particularly Todd Howard, the producer. Together, they are funding this. Together, they can stop this. Together, they have decided not to. Instead, they're going to let the machine they're funding run over a hero and a fellow developer.

I stand behind Notch on this, and I'd like to propose a toast to his courage and offer a prayer that he wins the day in court.

----

Background: Bethesda, makers of the games Oblivion, Fallout 3, and the upcoming Skyrim is suing Mojang, makers of Minecraft and the upcoming Scrolls for using the name "Scrolls." They claim it violates their trademark Edler Scrolls, which is what they've named their RPG series of games, that most gamers know as Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, as this is how they focus their marketing, when in fact, the full names are actually Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The unreleased Mojang game, by contrast, is simply called Scrolls.

Bethesda is a very large developer based in Bethesda, Maryland and owned by ZeniMax, which owns several developers now, including id Software (Doom, Quake, Rage), Machine Games, Arkane, and Tango Gameworks. Bethesda's Elder Scrolls games pioneered the migration from overhead-view RPG games to first-person view RPG games. They are immense worlds you can roam freely, and they're much beloved by tens of millions of players. Their new title Skyrim is the latest in this series and a hotly anticipated visual feast. They are now one of the game industry behemoths, and each game release grosses many hundreds of millions of dollars for the company.

Mojang is much younger company than Bethesda and independent. It has only the success of Minecraft, a game written largely by a single developer, Markus "Notch" Persson. It is a little like Legos brought to life in a computer. It's a triumph of savvy design and technology over gee-whiz graphics, and it is one of the games you keep on a short list of counter-examples if someone should try to suggest to you that games are no longer innovative or that they've become uncreative or treadmill exercises. It also has millions of fans but news of Minecraft spread mainly by word of mouth and the press as they began to realize it was turning into a phenomenon.

2011-03-18T22:43:00.000-07:00

My grandma died today. She was 100 1/2.

Did you meet her? I loved her. She was quite a grandma.

She taught me to always walk on the street side when escorting a woman, to open her door, and to offer my arm for her to hold onto. She was an artist, and I loved her paintings. Everybody loved her paintings. I'm sure she taught me many other things, probably ingrained so deep I'm not even aware of them. I am sure that I am in part her now.

I loved the way she moved her hands, and I don't think anyone else noticed. I don't know how to describe it. By the time she was 100, her fingers were a little too large for the gestures she was unconsciously making, but I could see the elegance of their movements even then. I could see the artistic power in them. I've always been envious of that. I wish I could move my fingers like she could move hers. I think I have a sliver of her talent in my thoughts, but not my fingers, not like hers.

I don't like how she went. She had to give up her house, which was hard for her, her well-being was the source of a lot of unnecessary drama between my father and uncle, and she forgot her family in the end. I wish we had a better way to go, where we could pick our time and celebrate our lives and be surrounded by our family. I wish I could have spoken to her one last time. I don't like all of the unsaid things.

I imagine the negative space of whatever quantum remnants of her consciousness are mingling with grandpa's now. It makes me happy to know that I got to be in the same universe as both of them.

Freddy Ties One On

2010-09-24T09:25:00.000-07:00

Due to the excruciating coolness of their parents Tom and Julie, I had the pleasure of attending Burning Man this this year with my niece Madelleine (17) and nephew Freddy (5).

I worry however that Freddy might have had a little too much fun.

Iran's Bomber Drone Elevates the English Language

2010-08-22T23:19:00.000-07:00

I read this in the first line of a BBC story on Iran's new bomber drone and couldn't believe my luck:

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the plane could serve as a "messenger of death", but that its key message was one of friendship.

Some words when strung together are just far better than others.

Privacy is Bad

2010-08-10T11:09:00.000-07:00

I read this recent story on slashdot, which explains that WikiLeaks is being irresponsible by not redacting names from documents they leak:

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/08/09/2319222/Human-Rights-Groups-Join-Criticism-of-WikiLeaks

Releasing information does not put civilians in danger. Releasing information makes it easier for assholes to put civilians in danger. It also makes it easier for good people to reach and help endangered civilians.

Redacting anything is a giant waste of time and resources and reduces the collective knowledge and wisdom of the human species when considered as a whole.

That our culture and legal system are built around the need for privacy in an age where privacy is fast evaporating is a serious issue. It's not that we need privacy. It's that we need to adapt to not having it, to living like people used to live in small towns where nobody really had secrets. It takes getting used to, but we had better get used to it, because it is our future.

Mr. Assange is an international hero for having the bravery to do what he does, and my complaint with him is quite the opposite of Amnesty International's. That he redacts anything is a waste of his valuable time.

By the way, props to Jason Hall for his success in both the game and entertainment industries and for his discipline at the gym to carve the image of a real man, but if you want to see an actual real man in action, it's this frail looking dude with the grey hair:

http://www.ted.com/talks/julian_assange_why_the_world_needs_wikileaks.html

Help Starlight Win the Pepsi Contest

2010-08-05T22:32:00.000-07:00

My friend Jenny Isaacson helps run a foundation called the Starlight Children's Foundation (used to be called Starlight Starbrite if that rings a bell). It benefits seriously ill kids.

They're competing in a Pepsi contest to win $250k to help make scary hospital treatment rooms a lot more comforting for kids so they're not freaking out quite so hard.

If you could vote for them, I'd really appreciate it. You can vote every day in the month of August, if you want to help them knock it out of the park. At the time of this post, they're currently ranked #77 and need to hit #2. Just visit this link to vote:

http://www.refresheverything.com/starlight

You can login using your facebook account.

Thanks!!

Cat Torture

2010-07-26T11:01:00.001-07:00

I love cats as much as I love dogs, which is to say, a lot. It sucks that I'm allergic to both, but it's worth the sniffles to visit and play.

That said, I share genes with my grandfather, who enjoyed experimenting on cats, and my father, who reduced us to tears of joy by putting a sock on the cat's head, putting paper napkin booties on it, etc.

Particularly as a Los Angeles dweller, I still find something undeniably satisfying about poking fun at anthropomorphizing pet owners.

It is for this reason that reading this led to more actual LOL's than I've had in quite some time browsing the web:

http://webpress.posterous.com/why-never-to-ask-favours-from-the-designers-0

Caffeine as a Drug

2010-06-28T14:54:00.000-07:00

I quit coffee about two years ago. I drink a cup of green tea each day instead, which I've learned to love, and which keeps my teeth the English shade of yellow I've come to lean on to repel women and cameras.

However, as a treat, specifically in business meetings, I treat myself to a cup or two of coffee.

Turns out to be quite a treat. I've tried cocaine a few times, but cocaine has nothing on caffeine after a long withdrawal. Caffeine lasts much longer and has a far more productive, mood-improving result for me. I'm brighter, happier, and faster. There seems to be no down side except for getting addicted to it, which leads to tolerance, which leads to higher doses, which leads to GI tract issues, and eventually virtually zero benefit, all of which happens after a month or two for me.

If you're really into coffee, I recommend this as an insanely powerful recreational drug:

1. Give it up permanently.
2. Pick a day (no more than once every few months) to go nuts.
3. Have a small meal.
4. Pound a double cappucino.
5. Witness the joy.

Beakiez Blue Sky Patch

2010-06-19T15:03:00.001-07:00

This is what Beakiez looked like on Tuesday.

This is what the game turned into on Wednesday.

If you already have the game, just run it again, and it'll autopatch.

Otherwise, you can grab it from here: http://beakiez.com

My Favourite Students at the 2010 Academy of Art University Spring Show

2010-06-13T13:30:00.000-07:00

I serve the Advisory Board to the President of the Academy of Art University. Once a year, the school flies us up to see the Spring Show and give them feedback on the departments and how to improve the curriculum.

Although we don't have much time to see the show, I try to carefully make note of as many students as I can whose work really stood out to me. I thought I would list them here (alphabetical order):

Kristin Abbot
Jonathan Aguillon
Jonathan Ahn
Petur Antonsson
Benjamin Arthur
Debbie Bakker
Matt Beardsley
Sarah Bell
Hyun Bo Park
Miki Bong
Justin Bowen
Chris Carter
Gina Chang
Pan Chengwei
Alberto Contestabili
Leo Dasso
Laura Davis
Sam Filstrup
Paul Fletcher
Craig Fowler
Johan Friis
Liscelyn Grifal
Gak Gyu Choi
Chris H. Chu
Rory Hejtmanek
Greg Hinkle
Marquis Houghton
Steven Howard
David Hsia
Yunsung Jang
Kim Ji Won
Jenny Johannesson
Anton Kagounkin
Jeong-Yong Kim
Galina Korovitsina
Katie Kung rumford
Daryn Laborers
Manar Laham
Weishsuan Lai
Sungho Lee
Sunny Lee
Theera Leutkiattikul
Carlyn Lim
Yingjue Linda Chen
Karl Lindberg
Karl Lindberg
Rose Ma
Brittany Mclaren
Tiffany Moy
Roman Muradov
R.J. Palmer
Mario Para
Hans Park
Sagar Patel
Esteban Pecheco
Vorrarit Pornkerd
Tami Portman
Justin Promos
Ovetto Ray
Hye Ryung Pan
Marcus Sakoda
Brady Sammons
Josh Sanders
Lori Schkufza
Rishi Shah
Eddie Shieh
Cody Shipman
Eve Skylark
Angelo Soriano
John Staub
Louisa Surjana
Bryan Thompson
Emerson Tung
Wilfredo Valle
Jameekorn Varcharakomonphan
Diego Velasquez
Chris Vilchez
Mo Yan
Renee Yoch
Julia Yurtsev
Lylyan Zhen Li
Brian Zobel

Capitalism: A Love Story

2010-05-28T16:46:00.001-07:00

I have nearly lost the ability to walk because of a pinched nerve which is wreaking havoc with my left leg. I of course couldn't find an orthopedic to see me about it today and will have to wait at least a week to get an appointment. Perhaps that's why I thought of Michael Moore and the brilliant light he sheds on the inadequacies of our failing US government.

Whatever the reason, I hobbled over to my computer and watched Capitalism: A Love Story today. I was standing throughout the whole movie in order to avoid having to sit down or stand up, which is incredibly painful, so keep in mind, if the movie sucked even the tiniest bit, it was unusually easy to walk away, or hobble in my case.

It didn't suck. As a game designer, I've been crying foul about the incredibly poor game design of capitalism for years, but I thought what Michael Moore did by interviewing priests was sublime. They were straight up about it. Capitalism is evil. It's hard for me to even write that. I was raised on the American Dream, and when I'm flush with cash, it's a heady trip. I want to play the game, but I see how heavily the odds are stacked against indies because I work as an indie producer. Surviving without ethical compromise is very challenging.

Also not fond of most organized religions, but I have to say that as a pretty staunch athiest, it was super refreshing to be cheering for the priesthood in this film.

Unregulated capitalism is going to be the end of us. It needs to change pronto. Einstein was famous for saying:

"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."

The concept of unregulated capitalism has such a clean, simple sounding design to it, that I believe otherwise good people fell into the trap of thinking that unfettered free market capitalism was the answer. It obviously isn't.

See it. I think it's the most important film I've ever seen.

Beakiez made it onto The Needles!

2010-05-04T15:40:00.000-07:00

I'm afraid I'm stoked. Beakiez made it onto The Needles, Andy Chalk's popular column at The Escapist. It's an incredibly well-written article that talks about the game and some of the trials and tribulations we've been up against with Beakiez. Check it out!

The Wrath of Kahn

2010-04-17T11:57:00.000-07:00

I just watched The Wrath of Kahn again. Incredible movie. Incredible music. Brought me to tears once again.

Carefully looked at everyone driving that film to see what became of their careers. I thought surely the director and writer(s) would rise to meteoric heights from that, but only James Horner went on to be increasingly successful. Though I don't want to detract from the superb writing, directing, and much of the acting, this cemented just how important music is to the medium of film. I come away all the more convinced that music should tell the story and dictate the edit.

At a couple points, I realized I recognized some of the exact passages in Kahn were used in Aliens, too, even before I realized he did both. Horner does completely awesome things with horns, appropriately enough. Don't think I've heard any film composer top what he does with a horn section, but he's just all around incredible.

I also remembered that the new Star Trek film was released by tricking movie-goers in Austin into thinking they were going to see a showing of the Wrath of Kahn, and then surprising them with a sneak preview. They were ripped off. Kahn was the better film by far. They should have hired Horner.

Back to what is likely to be an educational but dull weekend migrating and debugging server code, but I am at least inspired and energized.

West and Zampella vs Activision, Part 2

2010-04-11T05:33:00.000-07:00

From Page 11 of the Activision counter-suit:

39. Knowing the wrongfulness of their actions, West and Zampella took steps to keep their actions hidden. West and Zampella sent and received the following messages in an apparent effort to covertly copy certain materials, reading in part: "Dunno how to scan secretly [sic]... [IW Employee's] computer down... [IW Employee] did it for me last time... Really. No paranoia about it being in [IW employee] user folder? Her comp down anyway now... She had a secret area it scanned into... Probably better to just photocopy and Fedex... Can scan or photo- your call... Boom boom pow. Away."

Looks like Activision has been reading emails and IM's. There are a lot of other allegations in there, some of them quite specific like the above, suggesting they have concrete evidence to support them.

The bulk of Activision's argument is focused on Jason and Vince's duty of loyalty and fiduciary duty to Activision shareholders. They have an employment agreement, they feel it's in breach. It's a pretty simple argument, not unlike the argument Jason and Vince are making that Activision is in breach of their MOU.

What's conspicuously missing is the explanation that Jason and Vince were warned that their behavior was unacceptable and that their jobs were in peril as a result. The reason that doesn't look good for Activision is that Activision is asking for reimbursement of everything Jason and Vince have been compensated since they first demonstrated the alleged disloyalty and insubordination.

If the insubordination was so dire and obvious, then they could have fired Jason and Vince long ago, or at least warned them. Instead, they kept them on, and Jason and Vince delivered the best-selling console game of all time. Woops. It appears they did the shareholders a solid, despite Activision's arguments in this counter-suit that Jason and Vince haven't acted in the best interests of the shareholders.

But Activision isn't alone in making shaky arguments. This was a part of the response from Robert Schwarz, the attourney representing Jason and Vince, in his statement to IGN:

"Activision's inaccurate and misguided allegations lose sight of the reality here: None of the false claims of insubordination or breach of duties had any negative affect on Activision -- none. Modern Warfare 2 has been the world's most successful video game," Schwartz added.

If the allegations are inaccurate and misguided, then you don't say that the things which didn't happen didn't have a negative effect. That's equivalent to saying they did happen, but they didn't have a negative effect.

I'm noticing the broken logic, the mis-used "affect" above, and the typo in this statement below, as well:

"The conversations with IW employees, talent agents, and others during these negotiations with Activision were conducted in disrespect of Activision but to see if Activision's proposal could work."

I think he meant "were conducted not in disrespect." Getting this wrong is bad enough, but getting it right yields another dangerous double negative. You lose either way with a statement like this.

I hope Mr. Schwarz was either having an off day or that IGN did an unflattering job of transcribing this from a phone interview, because it's inviting the scary. Activision wants to protect not only one of its most prized IP's but its ability to prevent employees from shopping themselves for better deals. There are billions at stake for Activision here, but as a percentage of their net worth, a lot more is at stake for Jason and Vince.

Were I Mr. Schwarz, I would not play the outraged denial routine quite so loudly. It's trite and not particularly convincing, which is undermining his otherwise valid points.

Beakiez Sneak Preview

2010-03-30T18:40:00.000-07:00

We've been working hard to make Beakiez prettier. Someday (I hope soon) when you next run it, the game will automatically download a patch, and you'll get this new, much prettier version of Beakiez automatically.

We just released a sneak preview video of the new look. You can see a before-and-after effect by comparing it to our launch trailer.

Our new GameTrailers website with both videos is here:
http://www.gametrailers.com/game/beakiez/12913

Beakiez almost made this article in USA Today. I'm about seven paragraphs in, and the guy on the other end of that skype chat I'm talking about is Kevin Depue, who is the co-founder of opGames, the team behind Beakiez.

Will keep at it. The world must hear our cry to pop the bubbles to get the fruit to make the gas to fart more bubbles to free the beakiez with! Help greatly apprecaited! :)

"I Play W.o.W." video

2010-03-23T17:17:00.000-07:00

Jason Hall just released the "I Play W.O.W" video. My friend Anorei Collins (look for the gravity-warping decolletage) and I are in there briefly as dancing WoW addicts starting shortly after 3:30.

Jason West and Vince Zampella vs Activision

2010-03-04T10:27:00.000-08:00

This is from paragraph 32 on page 10 of the court docs regarding the lawsuit between Jason West and Vince Zampella and Activision:

Activision conducted the investigation in a manner to maximize the inconvenience and anxiety it would cause West and Zampella. On little notice, Activision insisted on conducting interviews over the President's Day holiday weekend; West and Zampella were interrogated for over six hours in a windowless conference room; Activision investigators brought other Inifinty Ward employees to tears in their questioning and accusations and threatened West and Zampella with "insubordination" if they attempted to console them; Activision's outside counsel demanded that West and Zampella surrender their personal computers, phones, and communication devices to Activison for review by Activision's outside counsel and, when West and Zampella asserted their legally protected privacy rights, Activisions counsel said that doing so constituted further acts of insubordination.

Obviously creepy, but also odd. Why does one interfere to this degree with the goose who lays the golden eggs? Makes me wonder what ATVI's hidden agenda is. It's not like the bonuses they owed Infinity Ward were all that significant compared to the bottom line that Modern Warfare 2 is generating. Something isn't adding up.

And this is from Activision's 10-K filing with the SEC:

The Company is concluding an internal human resources inquiry into breaches of contract and insubordination by two senior employees at Infinity Ward. This matter is expected to involve the departure of key personnel and litigation. At present, the Company does not expect this matter to have a material impact on the Company.

Neat! They've figured out how to keep the departure of key personnel from materially impacting the company. Should definitely patent that trick!

On the bright side, I'm pretty sure Activision is going to lose this one. I think even their management must be keen to lose at this stage. I've been talking to lots of serious cookie AAA developers. They're uniformly appalled by what is happening and in complete solidarity with Jason and Vince.

If I were Activision, I would be apologizing and trying to find a graceful way to wriggle out of this, because the alternative, which is committing to winning the suit, means they need to launch a smear campaign against two of the most respected developers in the industry, and it's just frankly not going to work.

This is a link to Jake Simpson's post on the matter, which goes into detailed analysis of the personalities and backstory of what is involved in the suit. Jake was one of the lead developers on the Sims and is well-known for not being afraid to speak his mind.

Game designer Scott Jennings, one of the authors of Dark Age of Camelot, also weighs in with his post on the dark turn that publishers have taken.

Matthew Colville, a designer at Panic Volcanic and one of the folks who brought us Mercenaries 2 uses this sad tale of Modern Warfare to explain how publishers come to the creepy conclusion that games are seen as little more than vehicles for launching brands.

Dean Takahashi, who has consistently proven to be one of the most balanced and professional journalists in the game industry, has put up a great piece that details the entire history of Infinity Ward, leading up to this sad conclusion.

Veteran game industry attourney Dan Offner predicts part of the outcome at the end of this CNET article on the IW/Activision lawsuit.

Never disappointed with ex-lawyer/now-super-agent Keith Boesky's awesomely informative, knowledgeable, and colourful posts, I have to admit it's killing me that he's delivering the responsible adult position of waiting until we know more. Nevertheless, absolutely worth the read.

One year without a car in Santa Monica

2010-02-11T17:19:00.001-08:00

We're coming up on one year without a car, but in reality, I stopped driving it almost 16 months ago. These are 10 things that I've learned about life without a car in Los Angeles:

1. The metro.net website has a service almost exactly like mapquest, and it'll give you multiple alternatives for how to get between any two points. It can take some work to get used to it, and you have to carefully check the results. It includes Santa Monica buses.

2. The following things were a significant source of grief in my life before, and they are now completely gone now: finding street parking, parking lot / valet fees, parking tickets, speeding tickets, registration, insurance, visiting the DMV, inflating tires, rotating tires, general maintenance visits, repairs for unexpected malfunctions, gasoline, fighting traffic, and car washes. It's a longer list than I thought, and I'm thrilled to be rid of it all.

3. I am very afraid of dying and killing while driving, because I know what kinetic energy is, and I know that it grows linearly with your vehicle mass (mine was 3600 lbs) and with the square of your vehicle's speed. I was also constantly appalled at the inefficiency of transporting a payload of under 200 lbs with a vehicle that weighed almost 20X as much. If you aren't already, you should be afraid and appalled as well.

4. I have an Enterprise rent-a-car over the hill. When I have an important business meeting in a part of town which is hard to access, I will rent a car, and I will try to schedule other meetings and errands that day which are not easy to get to via bus. I priced zip cars, which I thought would be more effective, but it turned out that renting a car for the day was cheaper overall. It's about $50 for an economy car with liability insurance. I can go for weeks without needing to rent a car, and savings, even at $50/day is huge.

5. The Santa Monica Big Blue Bus system is great. For $0.75, it'll take me to Malibu, the LAX airport, UCLA, and anywhere in between. The Rapid 3 route is particularly yummy for airport flights. For $0.50 more, I can get a transfer to a metro bus, which would otherwise cost another $1.25.

6. I love living locally, but some of my friends are still pressuring me to get a car. I don't expect that to let up, but I'm so much happier without one that I am happy to bear a little peer pressure.

7. The best parties are often in inaccessible places, and this is a big weakness of not owning a car in Los Angeles. If you go by bus, then if the party runs late, you run the risk of the buses stopping. Even if they don't stop, they're running very seldomly late at night, and you can easily spend 30min or more in the cold waiting for the next bus. My solution so far has been to crash at a friend's place either at the party or nearby, and then buy breakfast. It's working out so far.

8. Dating is more challenging. I need my date to come here or for her to quickly become comfy with me staying over. I'm so selective, however, that I have flown women in from other countries, so whereas this is a pain in the butt, the bigger issue of finding the right girl dwarfs it.

9. I work primarily out of my home. If I didn't, I would have to work somewhere that was on a convenient bus route. I am definitely noticing a tendency to want to close deals with accessible locals, now, and I think this is a healthy pressure.

10. I moved to a neighborhood near Main St. where almost everything I need is within walking distance, and I have developed relationships with local businessmen because of it.

Overall, I heartily recommend selling your car. When I pitch others to do this, I invariably get push-back saying that they won't be able to get to hard-to-get-to places. Indeed, they won't except when they occasionally rent/borrow a car, but by analogy, I like to point out that Cortez burned his ships, so that they would be forced to press ahead and would be unable to retreat. It is a very similar sort of thing. It sounds scary, but it helps you commit to living locally. I now know what that is viscerally, not just in concept, and I find it's definitely a better way to go.

I love music and can't help you

2010-02-11T16:32:00.001-08:00

If you're a music composer looking to break into the game industry, please read:

I'm not going to reply to your email. It's not because I don't love you. It's not because I don't love music. It's because of all the jobs that need doing in game development, music composition is the one with by far the most competition. There are tons of music composers out there, and worse, now that the music industry is collapsing, you're competing with big names who are looking for work in games as well.

Plus, I'm generally not the guy who makes that call. I raise money to get games in development, I do game design, I look for teams and people, help with publicity. Music isn't a part of that process, and when it does become part of the process, it's usually the dev team's call, not mine, and most of them usually already have a relationship with someone they like to use.

If you're trying to break in, start with small, small teams. Research the mod community. Find out who is doing cool stuff, find peeps you like, and give them music for free. Stick with them. Help them make the game.

Also, get your hands dirty in the level editor. Learn how to make your music more procedural and responsive to the game mood. Learn to work within the feature and real-time performance limitations of the playback system. Learn the level editor also because frankly, you're not going to be able to feed yourself reliably on what the game industry pays composers.

It's a very different kind of composition these days. Gone are the days where you send out a *.wav file with the final score. You may have to say goodbye to your beloved DAW and learn to work with wobbly, incomplete game development tools.

Most of all, I encourage you to get involved in the process of making games. It's a very different beast musically, depending on engine technology and platform, and practice makes perfect.

SSD Drive in my MacBook Pro

2010-01-10T19:45:00.001-08:00

I upgraded the hard drive from my 15" MacBook Pro (2.16Ghz) to a 160Gb Intel X25-M SSD yesterday. It has completely overhauled my computing experience. Applications open nearly instantly. Big fatty apps that eat a lot of memory return the desktop to full functionality as soon as you quit. Loading any files is nearly instantaneous. The giant dog of a proggy, Mail.app, now loads instantly.

Ironically, the last computer I owned that was this responsive was my 1MHz Apple //e with a 5Mb Sider hard drive.

At just under $500, it's not cheap, but it is a much more dramatic improvement on my computer's overall speed than any big upgrade I've ever done, and at thousands of dollars less. I recommend it to anyone.

The Psychology of Video Games

2010-01-07T14:12:00.000-08:00

Makes haste to The Psychology of Video Games blog. It's educational, funny, and all win.

Happy 40th Birthday time(2)!

2009-12-31T16:12:00.000-08:00

The Unix time(2) system call is "over the hill" at 40 years old today. The time(2) system call has dutifully told us how many seconds have passed since January 1, 1970. I use the day as my "birthday" on public websites in tribute. Please raise a glass of champagne tonight with me in celebration!

Rivals

2009-11-17T18:33:00.000-08:00

Read this article. It's quick.

The connotation of the word "rival" is two fierce competitors, bad blood, a grudge, fighting over a beautiful woman or a limited market share where each purchase steals a sale from another. Intel and AMD are rivals. You pick one CPU for your system, so they steal sales from each other. The history of lawsuits against one another is another tip-off. Ford and Toyota are rivals. You pick one truck for the farm.

But this is super not the case here.

Gearbox and id Software aren't rivals. Gearbox and Crytek aren't rivals. Crytek and id could conceivably be rivals, as they both derive significant revenue in the form of technology licensing, and you only license one engine for your game. Gearbox isn't in this space at all. Gearbox has largely specialized in more story-focused FPS games. With Borderlands, they've started to adopt some Diablo-esque RPG features. Id Software has never released a title as focused in these areas. On the flip side, Gearbox has put nowhere near as much focus on technology to sell their product.

They just aren't rivals. Colleagues is more like it. And if you replace "rival" with "colleague," you're left with Randy making an insightful point by paraphrasing what folks at id Software and Crytek have already publicly said. And he's wisely paraphrasing them on this subject, because he's talking about bleeding edge engine technology, and he's obviously acknowledging that this is their domain, not his.

I don't like that Mr. Pereira has framed them as "rivals" just as a lay-up to describe Randy's comments as "harsh". We don't need that kind of "journalism" in the game industry. Randy has a track record of being refreshingly straightforward, as does John Carmack, and it's behavior like Mr. Pereira's recent example which is just going to convince people to keep their mouths shut, for fear of being spun like this to make perfectly innocent comments look like they're trying to smack someone down.

As a disclaimer, I consider Randy a friend, and I consider John Carmack a friend. None of us are butt buddies, nor are we overly concerned about each others' public persona, as we have lives, but Randy just isn't the dickhead Mr. Pereira is making him out to be.

I believe Mr. Pereira is singling out Randy because he has been forthright on other issues, and I don't like what smells like a disturbing trend of picking on him, just for the sake of it. This isn't doing anybody any good. It will only serve as a chilling effect which hurts us all.

Golgotha pitch video

2009-11-10T15:35:00.001-08:00

My friend Trey just scanned in and posted a pitch video we used for Golgotha.

Watching the vid was super nostalgic for me, brought all kinds of memories back, and even made me want to finish the game. :)

If curious about the dev story of Golgotha, Jonathan Clark wrote a great article about it here.

Abuse abuse

2009-08-14T14:14:00.000-07:00

Little back story. I was the producer on a game called Abuse back in 1996. It did really well for us, became sort of a cult classic side-scroller. We dumbly reinvested our winnings into a game called Golgotha of so large a scope we couldn't finish it and had to close shop, but we closed it in the black.

Somewhere in there, we decided to release a goodly chunk of Abuse to the public domain, basically everything but the registered levels, the sound effects (which we didn't own, so we couldn't give away), and the Abuse trademark, which Jonathan and I transferred to ourselves before we closed the company.

Jonathan has since moved onto other adventures in the world of virtualization at VMWare, and I have been working on a myriad of things, from processors to games to videos.

I've always wanted to make an Abuse 2 someday, all deliciously updated and new, super money, the works, but I'm biding my time because I want to fund it myself, so that I can have final creative control. I feel that's really important, because if I didn't have that, Abuse would have been Alien Grue, the first game we attempted to make and botched horribly, and we wouldn't have necessarily had the freedom to fix it and do it right. I also want to hire the right guys. Jonathan Clark and Duong Nguyen in particular were the uber-mensch superheroes of the project.

I don't have that kind of money handy to do it right yet. I think it might be $1Mish, which is a damn sight more than the $60k I spent on the orig, so it might be a while.

However, in the meantime, someone fun came along and decided that Abuse was now fully public domain, including the trademark, sound effects, and registered levels that we exempted from the public domain submission. I guess he figured that proximity to public domain seeps into other things, or that time somehow erases ownership, or that licenses to some people to distribute it for free means anyone gets a license to distribute it for profit, or that seeing the exempted assets in the original tarball meant that like piracy, because you have a copy, it's free... or something. Not sure of his reasoning.

Unfortunately, there are pricks in this world. This fun fellow is named Stephane Portha, and he appears to be one of them.

We learned about this magical man a few weeks before GDC. He said he was about to release Abuse for the iPhone, and that he wanted to use the name, but he seemed to have no question about the copyrights, pricing, etc. It was just a foregone conclusion that he was going to sell it.

I was immediately appalled but too slammed with party prep and biz dev on four games to give it attention. Just figured I'd get to it when I found a breather. Instead, he waited two weeks and released the game about a week before GDC. Started getting congratulations from respected peers for having just released Abuse, but woops, I didn't. Nice and embarrassing.

Learning this, I very politely asked this mystery man to take a meeting with me at GDC. He acquiesced, and then the night before, he sent a creepy email making it super clear he doesn't get it and has no intention of backing down. So I scrambled to find an attourney to come with me. Got lucky, managed to get Jim Charne, who is fantastic peeps.

The meeting got unpleasant fast. He proceeded to share his theories on intellectual property law with us, tried to explain that the game was "abandoned" and therefore his to do with as he pleases. Jim and I tried to explain how IP law actually works, but you know the type. They don't admit to being wrong. They just swerve to some other topic to try to find some other issue with it. This quickly made me angry, and I started yelling. Not proud of it, but there you go. Don't like my baby being shaken.

Anyhoo, I said look, what's done is done, they can keep 20%, which is decent for a port and particularly considering how I found out about it, and he flatly refused. Stunned, I asked why, and he claimed it was because they had spent a lot of marketing money on it. Only half-believing that I was about to negotiate with a guy who had started exploiting our IP w/o our permission, I said OK, deduct marketing, and we'll split half. Still nothing.

Totally stunned but realizing that with his game climbing the charts (it quickly got into the top 100, peaked at 20-something), he was not going to be in any hurry to come to an agreement with us, I gave him a deadline, which he ignored.

Instead, he pretty staunchly stuck to his theory that we didn't own these things we that we said we did, and that we had to prove to him that we did.

So we sent a DMCA takedown notice to Apple, showed that the sound effects were binary identical, and an affidavit confirming ownership. I believe they forwarded all this stuff, or at least the grief associated with it, and it finally did come down conveniently almost exactly when we submitted Abuse Classic to the App Store.

There's an interesting story behind Abuse Classic. I honestly thought the little fellow was going to do the rational thing and settle, chalk it up to woops, might want to get permission next time, kind of a thing, but this wasn't to be.

What surprised me is that when we started getting on the horn with Apple about it, they too stalled. We actually shipped Abuse with every iMac for a while, did the deal through Bungie. Maybe my head is just swollen, but I didn't really think anyone out there questioned who owned or made Abuse. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Big companies forget deals and people. I had heard that they weren't super organized there, partially from being overwhelmed with work from claims such as these, many of which are apparently bogus.

Prolly serves me right. I have all my Crack files deep in storage, and I had let the trademark registration at the US PTO lapse because you're supposed to do this update thing at the 6 year point. Doesn't mean your trademark protection itself has lapsed, just the registration. However, when you've got a duder claiming ownership to your stuff on the other end of things, it's wise to have such up-to-date docs handy. Let that be a lesson, kids. Might have accelerated things.

So anyway, as we sensed the looming bureaucracy behind the injustice, we started developing Abuse Classic because we realized that Apple might not take the game down until they realize that they have two of almost the same game on there and would have to pick one. It's the first time I've ever made a game to make a point. Completely weird.

Anyway, sure enough, foot dragging continued, but Alien Abuse came down somewhere around our submission of Abuse Classic to the App Store. Stephane said he took it down himself in email, but now he's saying Apple took it down. Whatever.

The fun part is that I promised the wee one that I'd go public with this story. I think it sucks and should serve as a warning buoy to others who want to do good gestures unto others.

I got frank about it in a thread on toucharcade.com.

In retort, he put up this neato site to explain his side of the story.

It's grossly inaccurate of course, 5% instead of 20%, leaving out the contexts of conversations, trying to spin it as greed and control, all that good stuff. Not worth getting into detail, as this has been his consistent approach- a mixture of distraction and consistent attempts to project an image of evil and unfairness on me. I would be more upset, but it's just not very well done. Happy to forward a copy of all the actual emails to a professional journalist who would like some of the source material he's drawing from if this is deemed newsworthy, but that's not the neat part to me.

The neat part is that he omitted a rather stunningly important link to our FAQ directly addressing his original theory about the wisdom of undertaking this project without our permission in the first place. The FAQ directly answers the salient question "Is Abuse Public Domain?"

And this brings us back to the beginning. We released all the shareware bits of Abuse to the public domain back in the day, but we kept ownership of the Abuse trademark, the registered levels, and Bobby Prince kept ownership of the sound effects.

That's really the beginning and end of the discussion, but it's been taken for a very long, stupid ride over the course of five months now.

His rationale was apparently that it's OK to get your game started with someone else's stuff, and then you can just patch it up later and don't have to worry about taking it down or those initial sales, brand damage, market damage, any of those annoying aftermathy details.

A friend of mine asked me whether I've been burned on open sourcing from this experience. I haven't. I still believe in it thoroughly, and I would have done it exactly the same way again.

I think to be honest, sometimes you're fated to come head to head with an asshole, and I don't know how much I really want to prepare to stave off future assholes. Life is short, and I don't think preparing for that is any kind of way to live. The vast majority of the contracts I've signed, folks I've met, it all works out great, but you essentially need to do a lot of extra work for the handful that make life suck. If this were some inconsequential game I didn't care about (and I've worked on a few of those too), I just wouldn't have bothered with any of this, but when it's your baby, it's your baby, you know? I know this isn't going to pan out for me financially, but love is like that...

We got some pseudo-justice, I guess. Not expecting to see a penny from The One Who Can't Possibly Be Wrong, and I won't blame those who bought Alien Abuse if they don't want to repurchase Abuse Classic, because they're very similar games, but I'm glad to see it taken down and to at least have an opportunity to pay the actual authors of the game what they're owed, however modest those revenues may be.

That said! I know I speak for myself and the team in saying that we'd really appreciate your patronage and would be thrilled if sales were a titch more than modest. :)

Abuse Classic is selling for $2.99, which is rather a discount on the original, which went for $35 once upon a time.

Abuse Classic released!

2009-08-14T01:12:00.001-07:00

I am very excited to announce that Abuse Classic for the iPhone is now available on the US App Store! :)

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=326397227&mt=8

Beakiez Released!

2009-07-09T21:41:00.000-07:00

We've just released Beakiez Alpha! I'm so happy. Please check it out at beakiez.com.

There's a free demo, lots of levels, and no time limit. When the game exits, please leave any feedback or suggestions. We love feedback.

Actually, we love it so much that if you buy the game and leave really specific, constructive feedback, we may select you to get credit as Assistant Producer in the game. :)

Neat Geeky Texture Map Video

2009-07-07T13:09:00.000-07:00

Allegorithmic just released a video detailing a new feature of Substance Air (their procuedural texture map tools and runtime) which makes it so that sort of like crazy bump, you can generate the normal, bump, spec maps, only you can do it at runtime, and you can automatically tile them too, or make your own "crazy filter":

http://www.dailymotion.com/user/Allegorithmic/video/x9qfk5_fast-bitmap-to-materials-with-subst_creation

Goes without saying you shouldn't be wasting away with traditional textures anymore, but I figure it's a good methadone to help you slowly kick the PhotoShop drug.

Peopleputing

2009-04-13T19:40:00.000-07:00

If you look carefully at this article, specifically under this typically unfortunate and ironic Microsoft advertisement suggesting that we "Team better" on the Once-Upon-a-Time-unsullied bastion of geek news, Slashdot, you will see the word "waaambulance" as the first of the one-word summaries of the article.

I think I've read that word before, because I am feeling the sensation of vague recognition. However, I believe I've never said it aloud.

Today, I said it aloud while reading it. With feeling.

I laughed aloud. While alone. This distinction is important, because I've noticed that I sometimes laugh uncontrollably while in the company of others, as an automatic response out of embarrassment for the poor soul trying to make us laugh.

However, I've noticed that with age and while alone, fewer things can get me to laugh out loud. My standards in humour are climbing without my permission. Stephen Colbert these days is rarely sufficient, and I need to revisit his always-in-character White House Correspondents Dinner performance to regain the faith. Jon Stewart tickles something fairly consistently, but true LOL moments are rare even with The Master.

Though my first uttering of waaambulance was sufficient for the LOLage, it was not without some pain of self-awareness. Even as I laughed, and I would guess it was only moments into it, perhaps only hundreds of milliseconds, I became self-aware of my role as a computer, programmed to laugh at the utterance of that word.

That took some of the joy away, but I was at least left with some satisfyingly poignant truth.

I am supposedly quite bright. I think it's mostly to do with using long words and growing up on a consistent diet of dry wit, but I am happy to play the role as long as it pays the bills.

Nevertheless, I felt something very ... monkey ... in me laughing at waaambulance. It was machine language laughter, the stuff of low-level and fundamental funny sauce.

I've often felt that if you want to make video games, you should first learn how to play people. People are a game like any other. They are either addictive and fun, or they are sadly flawed.

The inventor of the word "waaambulance" played me today. I'm the Dave Taylor corner of the earthly population game, and by playing me, that inventor forced me to spew forth this post. It was not voluntary. I am drowning in work and rarely post on this thing.

Your peopleputer salutes you, sir, wherever you may be.

Hungary Demonstrates Clue

2009-04-12T22:27:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to learn that the Hungarian government has decided to put open source software on equal footing with proprietary software. (I'm a mutt, but I'm mostly Hungarian by ancestry)

id Software 1993 video

2009-04-08T16:53:00.000-07:00

This is some footage of my typically stooped form staring slack-jawed at an Aladdin sidescroller while I was at id Software back in 1993. Also features Bobby Prince being his extremely charming self while deployed in the conference room to crank on sound and music. John Romero is doing what he's always been brilliant at, demoing the game. Jay Wilbur does a great Jay-greeting at the door. Seeing all those peeps, the pool table, CD collection, and John's office is incredibly nostalgic for me. Wish we had more video time capsules around like this.

Skype Customer Support

2009-03-09T11:59:00.000-07:00

What a pain in the butt.

Skype refused both my personal and business debit card numbers, and of course, I use skype all the time for business calls because the cell phone reception in my neighborhood isn't good. My debit card used to work just fine with them, none of the information changed, and they just decided one day to stop accepting payment from it.

Instead of explaining why they refused both debit cards, they said it could be one of several things, including mistyping (I checked multiple times) and other nonsense. Contacting customer support the first time yielded "check with your bank". My bank had no record of the transaction attempt, much less denying a transaction.

I reported back to Skype customer support, and of course, I was assigned to someone new. Strike 2. She followed up with "try another payment method." I wrote back that this smacked of them trying to get me to divulge my bank account number or switch to paypal. No reply, just "try another payment method" again. Strike 3.

So I switched payment methods to paypal today after deciding I'm done feeling pissy about it. Worked fine, even though my paypal account is attached to exactly the same personal debit card.

I'm willing to bet money that paypal simply has a better deal with VISA because of the bulk transactions, so they want to route it through that and save some money. However, the method by which they have inspired the new payment method was complete bullshit. Give me some kind of incentive to switch, a temporary discount or a small credit, some portion of whatever it is they're saving on the back-end by my switching. That is how good business is done.

I am not a lawyer, but I wouldn't be surprised if that kind of nonsense is actionable. It reflects poorly on VISA and my bank as being the purveyors of a widely-accepted payment method. If not, and it is legitimately a failed transaction, then where is the evidence? Give me the damn reason so that I can do something about it.

This is a really poor way to do business, but I have to admit, it was a good refresher for me on how not to deal with people. I run a mailing list of over 500 people, and I am consistently tempted to do things by the numbers, because the work in hand-holding each request and issue can be overwhelming. But that right there is why doing support by the numbers sucks ass.

Obama Inauguration

2009-01-20T20:58:00.001-08:00

Congratulations, Mr. President.

May you be the John Carmack of US Presidents!

An Ebay listing

2008-11-23T12:11:00.000-08:00

Today marks the 15 year anniversary of the release of Doom.

I'm celebrating by selling Doom stuff, starting with the NSX that Doom bought, a Doom sweater I had made, a Doom "wrote it" t-shirt, and an original mail order box of Doom.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=180313018560

OddGulp

2008-10-15T23:37:00.000-07:00

This is a critically important video.

http://www.oddgulp.com

It's about what happens when you eat scorpion.

2nd Presidential Debate Summary

2008-10-07T20:18:00.000-07:00

I'll sum up if you missed the 2nd Presidential Debate.

Not Obama's most glib evening, but the content of what he did manage to work past his awkwardly pausing sentences was usually intelligent, insightful, and charming. McCain was blinking like a seizure victim but verbally far smoother and more self-assured than Obama. Some of McCain's policies were downright grounded, but on foreign policy, he frothed at the mouth like a true nut job.

The big surprise here was that Obama pwned McCain on his own turf of foreign policy. Just thrashed him. Took McCain's "talk softly and carry a big stick" quote and clubbed him to death with it.

Obama also thrashed McCain on just about every attempt to twist claims about Obama's stance on taxes.

McCain actually said out loud that victory, honour, and saving face are what matter in Iraq, and he said it with the clear, wide-eyed commitment of the clinically insane. The audience had a responsibility to boo this man and failed in their duties as Americans horribly. I think they were picked to fill those seats for their sheep-like complacency.

They were both colossal, exploiting-the-oil-pump-drama assholes by insisting on offshore drilling and prioritizing energy over heathcare and education. Both of these chumps need to learn how to play an RTS game. I know 12 year olds with a better grasp on sustainable strategy.

Hope this saved you some time.

Christian Infiltration

2008-10-07T00:08:00.000-07:00

I am reposting this at the behest of a friend. I recently posted this on a private forum. The thread was about the new film Religulous by Bill Maher, and this was my response to a friend's recent taunting of a pair of Mormons who came to call.

I just had two wonderfully nice Mormon's knock on my door with the intent of getting me to consider their religion. I decided to do my best Bill Maher impersonation, and I asked them, "But, if I go with you guys, how do I know I've made the right choice, after all their are over 2000 religions to pick from and only one can be right, right?" Next time I'll be nicer, I was just in one of those playful moods.

I can one up that.

I joined a moderated Christian singles chat group a few years back on one boring Friday night. It was filled with holy rollers. They were all milling about, chewing the fat, typical sort of chat group banter but with more "amen"s and "bless you"s sprinkled in, lots of capitalized words that oughtn't to have been, and this one twat who would spam ASCII art of fish as regular as clockwork.

Their courting rituals were studies in frustration and compromise. Most of these peeps were horny Luddites quietly keen on sin and clearly frustrated that their religion was chafing their nethers.

What I keyed in on though was that there was no swearing allowed. They were very strict about that. I decided that was my goal, but I knew I would have to corrupt them gently.

I started with, "Do we have any scholars in the house? Got a good one for you. How many times does the word cucumber appear in the Holy Bible?"

All conversation stopped. I had their attention. I got a lot of "None! Don't be ridiculous." type responses. The moderator immediately threatened to ban me for being blasphemous.

I chastised the moderator for not knowing his Bible and pointed out that it actually appears a few times in the KJV, and I got a lot of denial and incredulity, so I cited the references accurately with the help of an online Bible search engine, but quietly not mentioning that part in order to appear scholarly.

My initial success was encouraging, so I decided to go for a loftier goal, to get away with saying "God damn it" and "cocksucker" without getting banned by the moderator. It was surprisingly easy.

Their skill with logical, persuasive argument had of course been rotted to the core by their own faith, which I find is really the genius behind religion. It rewards the faithful with faith that they'll be rewarded and a side order of soggy, pliable wit, and it rewards the handful who see through it with considerable power over the rest. So I was shooting ASCII fish in a barrel.

The channel alpha male was starting to engage me in conversation, seeing his dominance threatened by the plucky new scholar. I got in a pretty spirited conversation with him, my online Bible reference always at the ready to back up any point I wanted to make with the appropriate reference. I treated it as a dictionary-based compression algorithm, and man, you can justify just about any point you want to make with the Bible. It's awesome.

It didn't take long, and his aggression and testosterone paved the way. He laid me up with, "Look, God damn it, you can't say it isn't so. Would He have besmote with such wrathful vengeance the <>..."

And I got a warning from the moderator, but by then, it was getting harder to challenge me. I was it in the channel. They were genuinely impressed with my Bible knowledge and hadn't the faintest that there might be such a thing as an online concordance.

By the end of the evening, a button-down substitute teacher in the bay area was sending me a torrent of private messages speaking of love, chastity, and similarly veiled eagerness to spend naughty time in the rectory with me.

I called it a night shortly after they nominated me as moderator of the channel. That was the second time I would fall out of my chair laughing that night. I apologetically declined, dabbed away the last tears of joy, and slept like a baby.

I strongly recommend infiltration over argumentation with them. Arguing logically with the faithful is just bludgeoning rubber toys with a bat. Feels good, but everyone knows they can't retain the meat of your argument in their bouncy rubber heads. So who is the fool, the rubber toy or the grown man who tries to reason with it?

They really are more fun to play with if you treat them like a flock of sheep, just as their leaders refer to them.

Dawkins does a brilliant job of illuminating how the most successful politicians exploit this in his TED talk on militant atheism, and discusses the direct correlation between higher education and atheism: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/richard_dawkins_on_milita...

The Gamed Pew Study

2008-09-16T20:18:00.000-07:00

There has been a recent Pew study that speaks favourably of how games affect children. Yields more civic engagement is what a lot of people are taking from this. I know this has made a lot of indignant gamers and game developers thoroughly thrilled. Their lives have now been justified, nay vindicated, after all the FUD about games spread by politicians and the media.

However, stop for a moment to consider that the study found this was the case for kids playing games with "civic gaming experiences," moments that mirror civic behavior. So do you think games with such experiences motivate kids to go out and have those experiences? I don't. I think games deliver more endorphins than the reality of civic engagement.

They do show a correlation that kids having these gaming experiences are definitely doing more civic things than kids who don't, but my question is what is the absolute value of time, not the relative amount. Their time is disappearing at an alarming rate into games.

What disturbs me is how often kids are playing games now. The study points out that 99% of boys and 94% of girls are playing games now. It certainly beats TV, but unfortunately, it is also far more addictive.

Gaming as a form of entertainment no longer comes in the half-hour, hour, or two-hour chunks afforded by shows and features. A single game can soak, days, weeks, months, even years of your life now, because the gameplay mechanics are getting so compelling.

And this is going to get worse. Procedural content is getting more and more mature. This means games are going to have near limitless potential for exploration, or put another way, will be able to completely dominate a child's life with little danger of getting stale.

Games have become replacement baby sitters, and I think this, coupled with our poor education, poor parenting, poor diets, and poor healthcare, means that our gross domestic productivity is going to be in trouble as this generation attempts to flail its way into the workforce without any marketable skills that might have blossomed, had they developed a hobby more useful to society.

I really like ambitious people and kids in particular, and I am always excited to hear their dreams. What depresses me, however, is the typical kid who is excited to talk to me about game development, because he wants to be a game designer someday. When I ask what sorts of things he's done to prepare for that, the answer is usually, "I play a ton of ." This is usually followed by the pitch for their dream game, which is a largely unproducable amalgam such as Grand Theft Auto meets Halo meets World of Warcraft.

I believe there is hope, however. I would welcome government programs incentivizing developers to embed educational material inside of addictive games. Games have proven that they can engage people more consistently and often more powerfully than most any other medium. And it's true that they help educate systems, tactics, strategy, reflexes, puzzle-solving skills, but this is a pretty inefficient education, considering the vast amount of time they're spending playing games.

Gamer

2008-08-26T15:26:00.000-07:00

It seems a picture of me at a blonder time made it into Scott Foe's talk. Can skip to roughly 16:00 to see it. It's a pretty solid talk and teaches some important things about marketing.

Grace Under Dresser

2008-08-26T09:07:00.000-07:00

This is the story of the Grace game design.

Feel free to check out the game design doc at davetaylor.name/grace_concept13_large.doc

Grace has not been made, but it is nevertheless one of my favourite game designs. It's based on the hateful, mean things girls do to each other, particularly from grades 6-12.

It's an interesting design to me for a few reasons:

I think it's one of the only game designs in history to intentionally feature concept art of girls that aren't uniformly gorgeous.
It is ultra low-tech, which is unusual for my designs.
It is one of the few designs I've done where product tie-ins make a lot of sense and would be appropriate.

A part of the game involves buying clothes (that was the obvious product tie-in) to get yourself into certain cliques, and those cliques act like character classes, giving you super powers. The popular clique can make someone popular for a week, the geek clique can raise someone's grades for a week, the goth clique can worsen someone's mood for a week, etc.

More importantly, the cliques give you access to different people to make friends and enemies with, or boys to date. Your entire class starts with pre-existing friend/enemy connections, and when you change your relationship with one person or a clique, it can have ripple effects throughout the network.

On top of this is an RPG-like system where you allocate resource points to your character, like intelligence, fitness, beauty, charm, wealth, etc. It had an exponential back-off system featured in classic RPGs like Fallout, so if you maxed out a particular facet like wealth, you'd probably be ugly, unfit, etc.

Speaking of ugly and unfit, I spent grades 6-12 largely in front of computers. I never went on a date with anyone that entire time, and I didn't have many friends at all, much less friends who were girls. Girls were a complete mystery to me, so this was a wonderful catch-up education. It seemed to me like an opportunity to explore an alien species that lived secretly amoung us.

In addition to doing a lot of interviews, a lot of my research was based on the books Odd Girl Out and Queen Bees and Wannabes. The latter book was made into a film called Mean Girls, and the former was optioned by Imagine, if I recall, but I don't know if it was made into a film. I even interviewed the author of Odd Girl Out.

I wrote this design while at Carbon6. Carbon6 was an independent game production company, one of the first in the game industry, that I formed with American McGee, Scott Faye, Paul Rosenberg, and Rick Jacobs. American is a celebrity game designer, and Scott, Paul, and Rick are film producers.

As I was writing this design about the gameplay mechanics of dark, feminine politics, my relationship with American was deteriorating fast. American has a reputation for being rather darkly competitive, but I had always turned a blind eye to this and felt I was exempt. It's a long story, but by the time I was ready to take the Grace design out, I was being repeatedly excluded from both external and internal meetings, teased for not being able to handle the cigarette smoking in the car on the way to the few remaining meetings I was invited to, for my ever-present engulfing English robe, even for masturbating. American's taste in women had changed seemingly overnight from petite Asians almost exclusively to the extremely busty (my type).

To make all this properly exquisite, we lived in a house together that featured its own financial drama. I was paying most of the mortgage instead of our agreed-upon 50/50 split, and unbeknownst to me at the time, he was describing it as his house in the press.

I was extremely inept at these sorts of politics and would respond by alternatively trying futilely to placate American and retreating to beat myself up for what seemed like my endless litany of issues. This is precisely the sort of things girls do to each other at those ages, and that is actually a classic example of an extended campaign against a girl as well as a classic reaction of the ostracized. Here I was doing research on it while completely unaware that I was essentially living it.

No one was entirely innocent of the brutality, either, another hallmark of girl politics. American and I were busy ostracizing Paul, Scott, and Rick well before I would become the next target. In fact, in forming the company, before they had even met me in person, I took it upon myself in a colourful phone call to negotiate a dramatically smaller stake in the company for Paul, Scott, and Rick. I did manage to reduce it significantly, but not without getting my relationship with them off to a horrible start as well as insulting them by comparing their role to that of agents. I would learn later that this is considered an extremely impolite thing to say to a producer.

It turns out "do unto others as you'd rather not have them do unto you" is not exactly how the saying goes, so there's your poetry.

Anyway, during this prolonged (and perhaps karmic) campaign against me, one of the many things American found fault with was the Grace design, and towards the end of this excitement, we came to an ultimatum-like agreement. I would pitch it to Sony, and if there was love, I could continue. Otherwise, I had to abort it. I was very fond of the design and was quite certain it would do well at Sony.

It didn't, and I was surprised by some of the reactions. They fell into three camps:

Women who were insulted that a man would dare make such a design.
Women who were appalled that someone would make a game design about such a painful period in a woman's life.
Women who thought it was brilliant and wished they had the game available when they were growing up, so that they could try some of these politics in the safety of a game instead of with actual people, where feelings get hurt.

I guess camp #1 amounts to sexism? Not sure. If so, I didn't much mind. Was happy to take my name off the design and ghostwrite it under my friend Laura's name.

Camp #2 actually got me excited. The controversy seemed like a very good sign to me that the game would create its own publicity, but controversy wasn't serving me within Sony itself. It basically killed the deal.

Obviously, camp #3 was where the party was at, and this was the general impression I got from most women I interviewed as part of my research for the game design.

I should probably have pitched Take 2 first, as they are clearly much more comfortable with controversy, but I didn't really have a sense for how controversial it was until I got that reaction. Turns out the reaction to the design disembodied from me pitching it was a lot more offensive than in context. Here endeth that lesson.

We had a really neat team attached at the time, appropriately called Exile Interactive. They were good with sports games, which meant they had a strong sense for doing human characters, a rare talent in the game industry. You can see some of their notes and concept art attached to the bottom of the design doc. I approached them after doing the game design doc, and I suppose attaching a dev team to a design is a big part of what indie game producing is.

As a footnote, I ended up taking the Grace IP with me from Carbon6. I would still love to see it made someday and am surprised to note that the design has stood the test of time fairly well. I would welcome feedback, and if something should develop, I will update this post.

Karateka

2008-08-23T02:58:00.000-07:00

Jordan finally spilled the beans at a panel at Comic-Con 2008. Karateka. Woot!

A direct link to a search for "Jordan Mechner Karateka" on Google News.

Producing Tutorial

2008-08-05T23:59:00.000-07:00

If you're thinking of becoming an independent game producer, some tips on getting started:

1. Keep your day job. It's best if it doesn't involve emailing, phoning, doing meetings, or writing/editing documents. Even better if it pays well and you can go part-time.

2. Carve out your IP. If you're in an industry where the word "IP" is bandied about, you're going to need a carve-out agreement so that your employer doesn't own what you're doing on the side. Be up front about this.

3. Experience designing games. I'm assuming you've already designed games and made them. If not, do it, even if it's a board game. Start small and go bigger slowly. Flash games, cell phone, mods, etc. All producers should know how to design.

4. Analyze yourself. Ask yourself what your superpowers are, what your weaknesses are, and analyze what kinds of people you know and what sorts of things they need. You do not have to know game industry people. Your networks are key.

5. Ask for money. Get in the habit of asking people for money. Ask for a dollar, then $10, then $100. Always do something interesting with it, and let them know. Pay it back with interest, if they'll let you, or give them a gift that is worth even more.

6. Follow your passion. Don't waste independent producing on doing crap to pay the bills. That's why you're keeping your day job. Do something you're passionate about.

7. Close a marketing agreement. Before you go to money, cut a deal where you swap back-end for exposure through some kind of portal or distributor. This mitigates risk for the investor.

8. Load match. Make sure your marketing matches your game design matches your target demographic matches the capabilities of the team you've selected.

9. Big fish, little pond. Dominate a niche market then milk it. If you go head to head with the heavies, you won't get funded. If you do get funded, the game will fail in the marketplace. Either way, you're dead.

10. Get a piece of everything. Equity, points, producing fee, whatever you can. The best way to profit off a game is rarely clear. Get a little of everything, and you won't have to worry that you are motivated to create lopsided deals.

11. Get experience negotiating. Negotiate everything, even little stuff. The more experience, the better. And find your style. Are you a bluffer, warm, cold, professional, colloquial, serious, funny, terse, verbose, hostile?

12. Make friends with an attourney. Starting out, you're going to need to cut deals before you have cash. Offer an attourney time and a half but deferred until first money in exchange for helping you draft and negotiate your first deals.

13. Save money. Spend your money very carefully. Lower your burn rate. You can produce while renting a cheap room and eating in. The longer you can make your money stretch, the better your deal terms will be.

14. Prep your pitch. You need IP (licensed or original), team, design, pitch, co-marketing agreement (if any), budget, and schedule before you go ask for money.

15. Be as nice as you can be. People try to cut producers out of deals. And your job is to find the best deal you can. People are going to get upset. Be as cool as you can be. Don't be passive-aggressive. Apologize when appropriate. Take insults as compliments.

16. Set expectations. Unless you're the type of person who consistently rises to the challenge of overcommitting yourself, set expectations about what you can/can't do.

17. Pester. End calls, meetings, IM's, and emails with ETAs on deliverables. Pester people if that ETA has come and gone. Commit to your own deliverables so that you can broach the subject of their deliverable by giving them yours.

18. Focus. It's better to focus on fewer projects and to do each one extremely well. Particularly starting out, you should put 110% of your focus into one project.

19. Keep track of your time and money spent. If you spent more money on producing something than you made, then you are not ready to go independent yet. Keep your day job. Ideally, you should be figuring out what % of your deals actually turn into money, and what they make.

20. Do due diligence on people. You will meet a lot of super cool, nice people who are going to screw you later, knowingly or not. Do homework on them. Odds are you weren't the first.