Here's a whole bunch of new content that you can't see.

• I've written more than 10 articles that you can't yet read.
• I've finished a non-game project that you can't yet see, and that you will be fairly surprised I did at all once you do see it
• I've worked on a game for like a year and a half that you can't yet play
• I designed 20 new character cards in kongregate.com's Kongai that you can't play yet either
• I redesigned the Yomi card game decks to be all Fantasy-Strike based (my IP) with 10 character decks + an expansion of 6 boss decks, and you can't even see the playtest version of it yet.

From the outside, it must look a lot like I'm not doing anything, but sometimes silence is the sound of progress. All the items on my list above are in someone else's hands and going through the various phases they need to go through to someday finally get to you.

If all that stuff is mostly in other people's hands, you might be wondering what I'm actually working on.

• A small project I shouldn't talk about yet, but that you won't care much about anyway
• A large project that I shouldn't talk about, that will catch you off guard (not a game)

What I could be working on:

• Maaaybe another game for Kongregate.com...a real-time multiplayer competitive game, if only I can hook up with some flash programmers who can put up with me / compliment my skills. (I can supply the design and have access to artists.)

I nominate this for the least satisfying blog post of the year.

EDIT: The phrase "silence is the sound of progress" is wholly owned and thought of by Tony "Ponder" Cannon and by using it here, I'm simply standing on the shoulders of giants.

--Sirlin

Ken Hoang, one of the best Super Smash Bros. players, will be a contestant in Survivor: Gabon, which airs September 25th, 2008. Ken is a national champion in Smash at the MLG events (hmm, I guess those count) and got 2nd place in Smash Brawl earlier this month at the Evolution World Finals.

I think it will be pretty interesting to see how a gamer fares. The strategy of contestants on the show is often extremely disapponting, and anyone who's been through the competitions Ken has just has to know his stuff about when to press the advantage, when to hang back, and how to stay cool under pressure. You might say, "but Smash is different than Survivor and the skills don't transfer." Something runs underneath all competitive games, and that certain something is tested in both Smash and Survivor.

The main worry is really the physical aspect. Often, surivor is a test of how well you can hold up under conditions of exhaustion and near-starvation. My secondary worry for Ken is that anyone able win tournaments might be dripping with clues of strategy. Maybe people will easily realize that Ken, unassuming video game geek, is actually miles ahead of these other people in planning. Planning what? They don't know, but they probably know it's something. Or maybe none of that will matter if Ken has trouble with the whole starvation thing.

My advice to Ken is to make it through the first few rounds by not being the guy everyone hates. Usually the first to go are the people who manage to get into some huge debate over something really stupid, so both people who argued over whatever-it-was appear on the chopping block. This advice is totally worthless right now because Ken is already back from filming. He returned in time to compete at Evolution this year, even. It's also pointless to for me to wish that he would mention my book, Playing to Win, because again, he's already back. That would have been cool though!

If you want to read more about Ken, here's a few links:

http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor/bio/ken_17/bio.php?season=17
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=neO3lwWisGI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Hoang

Final thought: if Ken can have a rosy, propaganda-filled wikipedia page about himself, why can't I? Maybe someone will get that going for me. ;)

--Sirlin

One of the only visual arts sessions I ever went to at the Game Developer's Conference was one years ago given by Larry Ahern, the art lead on the Curse of Monkey Island (Monkey Island 3). He was great and explained that he chose 2D on purpose of 3D, that he undertook the herculean task of doing the line art for ALL the backgrounds in the entire game himself for consistency's sake, and that following the rules of classical composition guaranteed he would at least end up with things that "didn't totally suck."

And now, gamasutra interviewed Larry about his company. It sure sounds a lot like what Grassroots Gamemaster talks about. The people in Larry's circle are all contractors who come together for projects but don't all work in the same "factory." I'm getting used to the idea.

Meanwhile Jenova Chen is doing his own thing in this other interview. I will officially state that Jenova Chen has beaten me. He really is making things of his choosing, things that the rest of the industry isn't so good at making. Most of all, he really seems to lead a band of programmers and developers to implement his vision. Bravo, Jenova Chen.

--Sirlin

I went to a children's birthday party today (they were about 7 years old) and I arrived late so I missed the introduction of the performer. She had the patter of a magician and she appeared to be doing magic tricks, but I soon realized she is not a magician at all: she's a scientist. She dazzled the children (and the adults!) with super-absorbent substances, chemicals used in fireworks that burn bright colors, refractive lenses that give light sources a rainbow effect, a Tesla coil(!), and more.

During all this I thought maybe she is a UC Berkeley science student who did this stuff as part of a class project. But something was wrong about that notion, because she's just too damn good. It's rare to see someone so thoroughly excellent at performance AND knowledgeable about science. She has stage presence and she really connected with those kids.

Her name is Dora Wedekind, and she's the Operations Manager at Mad Science of Mount Diablo. And she's making a difference. I think I can summarize Dora's work by just telling you one small thing she did. She brought up the word "conductor" and asked the kids to say what they thought it meant. Eventually she gave her definition, that it's a material that lets electricity (meaning electrons) travel through it easily. She then took out her trusty Tesla coil (after having explained that it, well, has a lot of electricity at the tip!) and asked them what they think will happen if she puts it near a piece of plastic. (Nothing.) What about a piece of paper? (Still nothing.) What about a piece of metal, like a pie pan? Wow! A cool-looking arc of electricity.

But what will happen if she puts a piece of paper on the pie pan? Will the electrons from the Tesla coil go through the paper into pan? Or will the paper stop it? "Who thinks it will go through the paper?" she asked. "Who thinks the paper will stop it?" And finally, and most importantly, "Who doesn't know? It's ok not to know. That just means we have to try it to find out!"

Indeed. And there we have the character of science explained in terms that 7-year-olds can understand. Sometimes we don't know things, and that's ok. It means we have to really look at how the world works to find out the answer, rather than just sitting around guessing. These kids wanted to know. I wanted to know. We all wanted to do some science.

So, will the paper block the arc of electrons from forming? I looked around the room as she asked this, pretty sure that the adults didn't know either. I started questioning it, too. I'd think that paper would not be enough to stop the arc, but did I know for sure? Not really. Well, it turns out the paper doesn't stop the arc. And if she leaves the Tesla coil in one place for long enough, it even burns a hole through the paper. She then showed what happens if you try this with magician's flash paper instead of regular paper: you get a big exciting burst of flame as the flash paper is entirely consumed! And while we're at it, let's look at that happen through some refractive glasses to see the interesting rainbow effects that surround the flame!

Dora is the real deal. She's "sparking imaginative learning," and not just because that's the tag-line of the Mad Science company. She's getting kids interested in learning and science before they become adults and forget how to be curious anymore. It makes me wonder: are the rest of us contributing enough?

If you're interested in getting Mad Science to get your kids interested in science with after-school programs, workshops, camps, or whatever else, you can check out Dora Wedekind's branch (Bay Area, California) here:

http://www.madscience.org/locations/mtdiablo/

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Mad Science in any way. I'm just a random person who went to a birthday party. And an amateur scientist.

--Sirlin

After Capcom's Digital Day press event, I got the chance to talk with Max Hoberman for a while about game balance. He's lead designer of the newly announced Capcom game called Plunder, and he was lead multiplayer designer on Halo 2 and 3. I explained to Max that all I seem to do is balance things these days (Puzzle Fighter HD Remix, Street Fighter HD Remix, Kongai at Kongregate.com, and my own card games: Yomi and Spellblind). I asked if he had any advice.

His first advice was that no matter how great you are, you need a post-launch patch. Sounds good to me. I asked if he had anything general to say on the subject and he explained that he likes to focus on the fun first. Even in playing board games, if he can make a move that is suboptimal, but increases everyone's fun, he'll often do it. This prompted me to ask if he cares about balance at the highest tournament level, or only about pleasing the average player. He said that due to Halo's rise in various gaming leagues, he had to care about tournament balance in Halo 2 and 3, so yes he does shoot for that.

I also asked how much or little he relies on math and how much he listens to players. He explained a few math things he does, but mostly it's not about math. Even though I have a math degree from MIT, I use almost no math (on purpose) so it was nice to hear he had the same conclusion. *Why* we think this is deserving of an entire article, so I won't try to cover it here. On the subject of whether to listen to players, he was quick and firm in his answer that you generally cannot listen. He said players almost always lack the big-picture understanding of what they are asking for, are usually biased to buffing their own favorite things, and generally make suggestions that make the game more fun for them personally, rather than the larger view the designer needs to take. Listen to them all, understand what they're getting at, then come up with your own solution, he said. We both agreed that it's a strange situation that no matter what you decide, lots of people will feel you did the wrong thing. (This is because some people suggest doing X while other people suggest DON'T do X, so you always disappoint someone.) Them's the breaks.

With no prompting from me at all, he said that balancing a fighting game is far more difficult than balancing a first-person shooter. I said that while I agree, I think most people don't. He said, "Really? Why wouldn't they agree." I explained that I thought first-person shooter players feel their genre is somehow less exalted if it's easier to balance and they might not realize the extreme difficulty involved in balancing vastly different movesets to all compete fairly against each other in a fighting game. Max said it should be pretty clear to anyone that balancing fighting games is harder, and people should get over it. (And of course, play whichever games you find fun, rather than caring so much about which were harder to balance anyway.)

Finally, we zeroed in on the concept of symmetric vs asymmetric games very quickly. Max naturally understood this distinction without me having to even talk about it. (To the readers: in asymmetric games, players each have a DIFFERENT set of moves, yet they must somehow be fair vs each other. Symmetric games such as Chess maybe have many deep strategies, but both sides have access to (almost) identical moves.) I told him about my other blog post on this topic. Max and I agreed that balancing symmetric games is easier, almost by definition. He said it's fine in a first person shooter, for example, if one weapon is not as good as the others as long as it has some use. But it's not really so fine if a fighting game characters is not as good as the others.

Max asked which games my readers came up with in the asymmetric category. He immediately said StarCraft (everyone's answer!), but couldn't think of any other good examples (other than fighting games). I was kind of stumped. I couldn't remember anything good anyone had nominated, ha. Though I do still claim Magic: The Gathering, when treated as a battle of constructed decks.

The most interesting thing (to me) that Max said is that he thinks players really prefer asymmetric games (because it's a puzzle to figure out) but that game designers generally prefer symmetric games. Max himself says he strayed away from asymmetry all he could in Halo and where it does occur in some gametypes, the teams each switch sides to even things out. Considering the difficulty that all of us have even naming good asymmetric games, I'd say Max is right that game designers tend to not make them, and I also bet he's right that designers consider it too hard. And yet...that's all I do!! All FIVE of the games I listed at the start of this article are asymmetric. And 100% of competitive games I've ever planned to do and still plan to do are also asymmetric. I guess I'm way on the other side of the tracks from other designers on this one. One of the main interesting thing in competitive games is seeing how different characters/races/moves stack up against each other.

I hope you gained some insight from Max Hoberman in all of that. I'm literally going to go fill in spreadsheets of balancing information right now, ha.

--Sirlin

Ernest Adams is one of the most prolific writers about game design. He was one of the main reasons I started writing game design articles 8 years ago. In his recent article about video game patents, he said this:

"By far the best Gamasutra article on the subject [of patents] is David Sirlin's well-researched 'The Trouble with Patents.'"

Well-researched! Someone noticed, phew. Also, "by far the best." He probably wrote that off-handedly. Also I know that being motivated by external factors like what someone thinks about you is a bankrupt way to live, but it's somehow a gratifying full-circle feeling in this case. Thanks Ernest.

It's also amusing that he should call my patent article by far the best on the site when there have been *several* patent articles written by actual patent attorneys! And I'm just a guy who peeked into their world. I guess they aren't likely to point out that their own profession has spiraled out of control into a mess that now hampers innovation, rather than fosters it.

Anyway, check out Ernest's article about patents here, and also check out his older article about copyrights. The copyright article actually got me to reconsider my opinion on the matter, so I'm glad Ernest writes these things.

--Sirlin

Grassroots Gamemaster has stirred up a lot of trouble and almost everyone hates him. I'm really confused why people hate him, but I think it's because they are reacting to the surface level antagonism he has. If you look past that to his actual message, it's really good. As I said before, "Sign me up."

If you'd like to know what his message is, a week ago I would have told you to read like 50 different things he wrote. But now you can just forget all that and read one post where he sums everything up. He even wrote this one without the usual antagonism, so maybe people will be able to hear the message this time.

Even still, because this is the internet, we know many people will still hate him. Many of them will show up in the comments of this very post and hate him. Here is what an anti-Grassroots Gamemaster platform would look like:

1) No passionate advocacy. Games will turn out better if there's no one behind them who passionately believes in the point of the game and drives it forward. Better to follow the lead of, say, a shoe factory. (Note: there will still be shoe factory game companies no matter what, don't worry.)
2)  Geniuses really are mild-mannered and agreeable (or "we don't need the other kind because the supply of mild-mannered ones is plenty!"). Sure David Lynch and Isaac Newton are/were hard to work with, but we don't need their contributions.

3) Let's not get the best people for the job. You're going to say this is deep in the territory of straw-man argument, but it really isn't. GRGM says ignore who works which company and get the people from anywhere, in any field, who are most aligned in passion and skill with what you need. Don't have a system where you then expect them to work on whatever it is that happens to be the next project. To disagree with this, you'd have to say that it's better to use whoever you happen to have at your company for whatever project you happen to do. Or if you say you can recruit the geniuses who are exactly right, you'd have to then argue that it's fine to keep them on staff indefinitely (what if they are AI specialists or WW2 history buffs and your next game doesn't use their skills?) and that they will even accept the notion of you choosing their next projects for them.

I'm sure you'll come up with even more creative objections. Sometimes, though, somebody comes along and says some frankly obvious stuff and it's hard to say "yeah, that's pretty much right." Consider that maybe this is one of those times. And also know that even in the most rosy of futures, you'll have your movie tie-in games kicked out the door by someone, just like always. But there's money to be made by doing this this other way, too.

Discussions of how you hate GRGM are pointless. You should either discuss how he or the industry can make this happen, or just get out of the way. Don't be Fred Smith's college professor in 1965 who gave him a C on his paper a new idea called Federal Express. And don't be like Art Linkletter who in 1954 laughed at Walt Disney's advice to buy up property around a new park called Disneyland. Sometimes a new idea or new way of doing things really is good.

--Sirlin

A classmate forwarded this to me. As author of Playing to Win, I am strangely compelled to post it.

What would you do?.....you make the choice. Don't look for a punch line, there isn't one. Read it anyway. My question is: Would you have made the same choice?

At a fundraising dinner for a school that serves learning-disabled children, the father of one of the students delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended. After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he offered a question: "When not interfered with by outside influences, everything nature does is done with perfection. Yet my son, Shay, cannot learn things as other children do. He cannot understand things as other children do. Where is the natural order of things in my son?"

The audience was stilled by the query.
The father continued. "I believe, that when a child like Shay, physicall y and men tally handicapped comes into the world, an opportunity to realize true human nature presents itself, and it comes in the way other people treat that child."

Then he told the following story:

Shay and his father had walked past a park where some boys Shay knew were playing baseball. Shay asked, "Do you think they'll let me play?" Shay's father knew that most of the boys would not want someone like Shay on their team, but the father also understood that if his son were allowed to play, it would give him a much-needed sense of belonging and some confidence to be accepted by others in spite of his handicaps.

Shay's father approached one of the boys on the field and asked (not expecting much) if Shay could play. The boy looked around for guidance and said, "We're losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we'll try to put him in to bat in the ninth inning."

Shay struggled over to the team's bench and, with a broad smile, put on
a team shirt. His Fa ther ;watched with a small tear in his eye and warmth in his heart. The boys saw the father's joy at his son being accepted.. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shay's team scored a few runs but was still behind by three. In the top of the ninth inning, Shay put on a glove and played in the right field. Even though no hits came his way, he was obviously ecstatic just to be in the game and on the field, grinning from ear to ear as his father waved to him from the stands. In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shay's team scored again. Now, with two outs and the bases loaded, the potential winning run was on base and Shay was scheduled to be next at bat.

At this juncture, do they let Shay bat and give away their chance to win the game? Surprisingly, Shay was given the bat. Everyone knew that a hit was all but impossible because Shay didn't even know how to hold the bat properly, much less connect with the ball.

However, as Shay stepped up to the plate, the pitcher, recognizing that the other team was putting winning aside for this moment in Shay's life, moved in a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shay could at least make contact. The first pitch came and Shay swung clumsily and missed. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly towards Shay. As the pitch came in, Shay swung at the ball and hit a slow ground ball right back to the pitcher.

The game would now be over. The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could have easily thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shay would have been out and that would have been the end of the game.

Instead, the pitcher threw the ball right over the first baseman's head, out of reach of all team mates. Everyone from the stands and both teams started yelling, "Shay, run to f
irst! Run to first!" Neve r in his life had Shay ever run that far, but he made it to first base. He scampered down the baseline, wide-eyed and startled.

Everyone yelled, "Run to second, run to second!" Catching his breath, Shay awkwardly ran towards second, gleaming and struggling to make it to the base. By the time Shay rounded towards second base, the right fielder had the ball ... the smallest guy on their team who now had his first chance to be the hero for his team. He could have thrown the ball to the second-baseman for the tag, but he understood the pitcher's intentions so he, too, intentionally threw the ball high and far over the third-baseman's head. Shay ran toward third base deliriously as the runners ahead of him circled the bases toward home.

All were screaming, "Shay, Shay, Shay, all the Way Shay"

Shay reached third base because the opposing shortstop ran to help him
by turning him in the direction of third base, and shouted, "Run to third! Shay, run to third!"

As Shay rounded third, the boys from both teams, and the spectators, were on their feet screaming, "Shay, run home! Run home!" Shay ran to home, stepped on the plate, and was cheered as the hero who hit the grand slam and won the game for his team.

"That day", said the father softly with tears now rolling down his face, "the boys from both teams helped bring a piece of true love and humanity into this world".

Shay didn't make it to another summer. He died that winter, having never forgotten being the hero and making his father so happy, and coming home and seeing his Mother tearfully embrace her little hero of the day!

--Sirlin

There's a mysterious, secret guy called Grassroots Gamemaster. You can read about him here, and especially this post of his. He talks about how backwards the game industry is right now, and one of his best points is how people who know the most about the design of games are nearly never the ones who decide which games to make. Those decisions are usually made by people who wear suits. I laughed at his analogy of a money guy telling Thomas Edison that a lightbulb is not really what anyone wants but he'd like to hire Mr. Edison to be an inventor of something else (perhaps a genre platformer for the next kids movie coming out).

Dear Grassroots Gamemaster, I have a lot of positive things to say and one negative. The positive part is that you have exactly described me, I fully accept your arguments, agree with them, and would like to work in the environment you describe. To give you an idea of how true that is, it's hard for me to picture myself working as cog in someone else's machine where I get $0 for each additional copy sold for much longer. I don't care about job security, I care about doing something that has lasting impact and meaning, but those notions get lost in the shuffle as you described.

So when do I start? Let's do it.

I hate to give out jeers on something when I haven't really researched it, but at first glance I have to wonder what is up with the IGDA regarding Grassroots Gamemaster. He says someone threatened to kick him out of the organization for his views. Grassroots Gamemaster: what is the person's name who told you this? What is his position? What were his reasons? Also, I notice that the IGDA forums deleted pretty much all your posts. IGDA: Why did you do this? Deleting unpopular speech doesn't really sit well with me, especially when the message is so spot-on.

Again, I didn't look into this that closely, but that really worries me about the IGDA. I'm all for an organization that looks out for my interests by lobbying against insane anti-video game laws and that publishes whitepapers on the quality of life in the game industry, as the IGDA does. But really, deleting posts and threating to ban someone who is unmasking the game industry with such cutting accuracy makes me very, very uncomfortable.

Finally, Grassroots Gamer, since we're now going to work together and make great products and win the video game lottery and all, let's just get it out in the open now. I have one problem with you: you're a coward. People who post anonymously on the internet are cowards. Please put your real name on your site and keep saying what you're saying. Wouldn't it feel better to stand up and be counted for what you believe in, even though the people you currently work with might be mad at you?

There's a lot worse things to be than a coward. Being wrong is worse, and Grassroots Gamemaster is not wrong, so he's way ahead of the curve.

--Sirlin

Can games teach ethics? I think they definitely can, but my colleague Frank Lantz argued that I have it wrong. Before going on, I should define some terms such as "ethics" and "Frank Lantz."

Frank teaches game design at NYU and is the co-founder of an unusual game company called area/code. I see him about every year at game conferences. We have a shared understanding of competitive games and the culture that goes along with them. I draw from fighting games while Frank's drugs of choice are Poker and Go. (Yes I capitalized those on purpose.) We seem to disagree on things when we talk, but it's the "good kind" of disagreement where I think each of us learns some new point of view from the other.

Here's my side of things. Imagine a game vaguely like Oblivion, a 3D world where you control a character who can visit towns, talks to people, pick locks, and fight. Now imagine that the there's more of a diplomacy system in the game, the ability to sway politics (perhaps a voting system and the ability to persuade voters) as well as the ability to accomplish things by force. Actions have consequences, so you can break into houses and you can fight people in the streets, but you'll have to deal with the legal system and the police system if you do. So there's our world.

Now let's start with ethics. Stealing, lying, and killing are usually morally wrong things to do. Backing that statement up is beyond the scope of this post, so I'm hoping that can be taken as a given. The game world I propose is set up to reinforce those values. But, we would expose the player to a few extreme and unusual situations where stealing, lying, and killing become the morally correct thing to do. If you have the ability to save the life of a drowning person, but a thick-headed guard won't let you steal his boss's boat without a forged note, then it's probably good to forge that note. Saving a life is more important than a blanket commitment to "never forge." Perhaps you disagree, but it's definitely the kind of ethics I subscribe to and it's my game after all.

These extreme situations would be engineered so to make it obvious that breaking the usual rules can be a morally sound thing to do. This alone would be a big idea for some people whose thinking is stuck in the "lying is a sin, period" mode. (When a murderer with bloodied hands, stops and demands that you promise not to tell the cops which way he runs, and you agree, then the cops run up and ask where the murderer went...I think it's ok to break your promise, for example.) Anyway, this is not Earth-shattering stuff (I'd hope), which is why we then need to move into areas of gray. After we've established conventions (it's usually wrong to steal) and shown some exceptions (sometimes in unusual circumstances, it's wrong *not* to steal), then we can cook up a bunch of really gray areas where most people will disagree. Some people will make choice A, some choice B, and hopefully almost everyone will be confronted with the question "what is the right thing to do here?"

It's easy to go through life not asking questions like this, and getting stuck into one mode of thinking about ethics, but you can't have much a personal theory on things unless it stands up to tests...the very kind of tests we can create in a virtual world. The player would hopefully end up exploring his own view of things just as much as he'd explore the game world. It would also be very valuable, I think, to show that when you make a certain decision about stealing or whatever, that the local bartender thinks one thing, the distraught mother thinks another, the church thinks another, and the professor of ethics (he's definitely an NPC in here somewhere!) thinks another. And yes, the professor of ethics disagrees with the church on a great many things.

Now for Frank's side of the story. He says that one or the other is true: your in-game decisions about ethics have in-game consequences (meaning they manipulate various stats) or they don't. If they do, then no matter how clever your situations, the player will really just try to "game" the system. You'd just choose the path of least resistance and most power, or whatever other stat maximizing suits your fancy, rather than care about any "real" (or should I say "virtual?") issues. And if your decisions *don't* affect any stats or gamestate, then they are meaningless and that doesn't teach much either. Actions without consequences don't have lessons.

He says the entire approach is wrong, and that games he's learned the most life lessons from have no mention of ethics at all: Poker and Go. Here you learn about self-improvement, patience, seeing people for their merit rather than their skin color, and so on. Furthermore, he reminds me that *I* learned all those same lessons too, also from competitive games that don't concern themselves with explicitly teaching ethics. He says developers should care a lot more about just making good games (Starcraft 2, yay) and less about the authorial meaning I'm trying to convey.

Now I'll open it up to the floor. Is one of us right, or both of us? It's been three months since I discussed this with Frank, and while I still think the game I describe could be very effective if implemented well, it's hard to ignore his arguments. What do you guys think?

--Sirlin

This eight-year-old article from Scott Aaronson is thoughtful on many levels. Aaronson starts off innocently enough, with a "game" in which contestants must name the largest number they can in 15 seconds.

You have fifteen seconds. Using standard math notation, English words, or both, name a single whole number—not an infinity—on a blank index card. Be precise enough for any reasonable modern mathematician to determine exactly what number you’ve named, by consulting only your card and, if necessary, the published literature.

This exercise leads to a journey through human thought with unfortunate ramifications for our future.

One answer is to write down as many 9s as you can on the notecard. Of course, this answer would be shattered by anyone who wrote down a bunch of 9s raised to the power of a bunch more 9s. This is, in turn, blasted by anyone who writes 9^9^9^9^9^9, and so on. In fact, each of these improvements so far defeats the previous, that you could give your competitor some extra time, and still win. Instead of 15 seconds, you could give your opponent as long as the universe has so far existed, and you'd be plenty safe. Even 9^9^9 is vastly more than the number of particles in the known universe.

Aaronson goes on to show us that even these exponentials are child's play compared to strange entities such as the Ackermann series and, still crazier, something called "Busy Beaver" numbers that have to do the longest timea theoretical computer could work on a problem without working infinitely long.

All of this really gives perspective that the winner of this contest is the one who has the highest order paradigm. After you read about Busy Beaver numbers, you almost feel sorry for the poor saps who are still doing 9^9^9.
Aaronson also looks back through history, showing how far we've come. The bible said that pi = 3, and made numerous references to the number of stars and number of grains of sand on a beach being "infinite." That kind of thinking is what you'd expect from someone who just wrote three or four 9s on the notecard, lol. Archimedes came along and said the number of grains of sand must certainly be less than 10^63, therefore it is finite. Shocking stuff for his time. Incidentally, the church threatened death to Pythagoras of Samos for saying that the square root of 2 is an irrational number (its decimal form has infinitely many, non-repeating digits) and Galileo died for his scientific beliefs. Only in pockets of the world where reason had a chance to flourish did humans compute more and more digits of pi, and come up with higher-order paradigms of large numbers, and so on.

Why are people so afraid of large numbers? Why should anyone care in the first place?

Physics professor Albert Bartlett said, "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

He's talking about the idea that if the human population continues to double every 40 years as it has so far, that the mass of all humans in the year 3750 would equal the mass of the Earth. Clearly this will be stopped short by famine, disease, nuclear war, or something. But the notion of "sustainable growth" of only a few percentage points per year is the crazy-talk of someone who doesn't realize the math. Radiation levels, population levels, CO2 omissions and many other things operate at large scales and are very real problems. They can't be addressed unless they can be understood in the first place, and that means it's important for the average person to have some grasp of exponential numbers.

Aaronsons's article also has a very fascinating section about WHY people can't grasp large numbers. Apparently, when you are asked to just guess "which of these two answers is probably closer" in a simple math problem, this uses a different part of the brain than when you have to compute something exactly. The estimation part of the brain is great for telling if there are about 3 or about 6 enemy tribespeople attacking you. But it's useless at the scale of exponential numbers. Humans use the language center of the brain to exactly compute these types of numbers, because no one has the intuition to deal with them.

I'll close with this quote from Aaronson:

"If people fear big numbers, is it any wonder that they fear science as well and turn for solace to the comforting smallness of mysticism?"

--Sirlin

So I've been trying to learn Torque Game Builder lately. It's an engine that lets you create 2D games, and it seems pretty great actually. It has a visual level editor that's especially good at letting you set up where various objects are on various layers (sort of like photoshop) and also set up collision for those objects, and a million other variables.

It's all powered by a scripting system, and you can use an IDE like Torsion to do debugging on your scripts. (I'm having big troubles getting debugging to work though. When I F5 to start the game with debugging (so breakpoints will trigger), the game doesn't launch at all and instead starts this phantom process called TGB.exe in my task manager that doesn't do anything).

Anyway, the scripting, for better or for worse, is a lot like programming. The syntax is similar to C, but you don't have to worry about managing memory, defining variables before you use them, or making sure data types all match up. So it's easier than real programming in C, but it's still basically programming.

Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, wrote an article called Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years. That also jives with the Scientific American article I linked to earlier; both say that it takes about 10 years to really fully grasp a new subject, though that number can adjusted up or down based on how much coasting versus "effortful study" you put in.

Oh, before we get into that, I also like that Torque Game Builder is cross platform, working easily on Mac and PC, as well as on linux, I think, if you get some help from linux hobbyists. Even better, it can all be ported to Xbox 360 pretty easily, so you have an "end game" upside in case you make something awesome. What's also great is that scripting system and general approach in TGB also apply to Torque Game Engine (and TGE Advanced), the 3D versions of Torque. So if you want to make the leap from 2D to 3D, you still get to leverage a lot of what you've learned.

Anyway, back to the 10 years part. I am currently very bad at this, and it's just painful being bad at something. Going from non-programmer to someone who could create something at all worthwhile (even in TGB) is a big step, and I'm nowhere near it after only a few days. I'm a little torn whether I should continue down this road (for years) until I go have competence in implementing my own stuff. The benefits are obvious, but perhaps that road would never lead to anything as good as gathering some real programmers together right now, and working with them. Design is a full-time job and managing a company (Sirlin Games) is another full-time job, so I probably don't need a third one of being a programmer/scriptor, too.

So far, finding programmers who are competent and have free time and have remotely similar views on the wide variety of games I'd make--has been impossible. That middle requirement (has enough free time) can be fixed by simply paying them enough to quit their jobs. That's a big leap (for both sides here), but perhaps I should think about doing that. Or perhaps I should just keep learning TGB, lol.

Meanwhile, Backbone has lost 8 designers in the last year. 3 were fired and 5 quit. Maybe we lost more that I'm forgetting. I think that's something like twice as many people lost as are currently even still in the design department. So the current leadership there has seen something like 200% turnover rate and a string of games rated 60% on metacritic (or 70% at best) all with low sales, as well as a high profile game cancelled. And I'm personally not even classified as a designer there(ha!) because it's thought that I don't "play ball" with the right people in management. Well, maybe you can see why! The team needs a new coach, but it would be far easier to start a new team if the goal is simply to create good games. But no programmers, no team.

Ok, back to reading Torque documentation for me.

--Sirlin

Some academics showed off what they considered to be the top 10 findings from game research this year. One of them involved the "playing to win" type player, and how even that type of player seeks to even the playfield by self handicapping or teaching the opponent. Another involved a bunch of data showing that a huge percentage of players spend a huge percentage of time playing World of Warcraft alone. It even used the phrase "together alone" as opposed to the phrase "alone together" that I used in my infamous article. A third finding had to do with ethical and moral exploration in games being a big, fertile, and unexplored area in games.

So, uh, I guess game researchers tend to talk a hell of a lot about what I write.

A panel moderated by David Edery (Microsoft) which included Raph Koster, someone from The Sims, and someone else from Neverwinter Nights talked about facilitating user generated content. Raph, always amusing, challenged the title of the panel "sharing control" saying that the users have almost all the control anyway, and that we're mostly along for the ride. The Neverwinter Nights guy agreed saying that maybe the players will share some control with us game developers. There were really interesting examples of players using content in crazy ways that were never remotely considered by the developers. As one example, Raph talked about how little development time was spent putting in dancing animations in Star Wars Galaxies, yet players made endless dancing videos on youtube and even orchestrated 150 person synchronized dancing scenes. He pondered "why didn't we just put in more dancing stuff and ship that? It would have been cheaper and we would have been on MTV." ha.

The creator of Castlevania talked about the advantages and disadvantages of 2D games. He said that 2D games are really good at capturing: 1) distance, 2) timing, 3) position, and 4) direction. In 2D, distance between objects and their facing directions are very, very clear. It's also pretty easy for the player to understand where a good position is in a 2D game and how to get into it. Finally, because those other things are easy, 2D games are able to focus on timing, rather than fumbling around in 3D space.

He also talked about how 2D, in some ways, is a great help to the team making the game. One person can be in charge of all the background in a level, such as "foggy village." In a 3D game, you'd have one person doing textures, one modelling just one room of that village, another fog programmer, and so on and so on. The fragmentation of the 3D team means each person feels like a cog in a machine, while the team member on a 2D project is responsible for a big chunk and feels more ownership, so he tries harder. 2D teams are also generally able to be smaller, which helps greatly with management and communication in the team. On the flipside, so much emphasis is put on 3D games that some team members feel they have no career advancement opportunities if they work on 2D games.

He also offered the interesting opinion that because of all the advantages of 2D listed above, that it's easier to create a 2D game that has the features you want and delivers the experience you want to the player. BUT, it's much easier to create a 3D game that has a presentation that impresses the player and gets him excited, as opposed to a 2D game where that is very hard. He thinks 2D games are unfortunately mostly for hardcore players who can appreciate the advantages, but that 3D games are inherently better at presentation because of camera movement, so they will remain the dominant form of game. That said, he also thinks 2D games will never die and that nintendo DS, Virtual Console, XBLA, cell phone games, etc all show many opportunities for 2D.

Chaim from Maxis gave an excellent presentation on the design of the editors in the upcoming game Spore. He talked about the difference between tools that let professionals create content and tools that seem to magically create awesome stuff when you hardly do anything. Photoshop can create great stuff is you know exactly what you're doing, but even a child can create interesting stuff with finger paints. Photoshop requires all sorts of technical knowledge to use to even a medium extent, but if you just put your hand in a paint bucket, then drag your hand over some paper, you get all sorts of interesting forms and shapes.

Spore wants to be more like finger paints. They want it to give you disproportionately great creatures/items/whatever for how much effort you put in. This way, your grandmother and other non-gamers can see what it's like to CREATE something, and once they do that with some success, they will be excited to try a little more complicated tools.

Imagine a large circle representing the set of all possible things a tool could make. The 3D program Maya, for example, has an enormous circle of possible things to make, as it could make any object/character/environment in any currently existing video game. Now imagine a much, much smaller circle representing all the "good" things one could make in 3D. Pretty much all of those are inside the first circle, meaning pretty much all the good stuff you could ever want to make, could be made in Maya. Too bad that the "good stuff" circle is damn tiny compared to all the really bad stuff you could possibly make in Maya. Even worse, imagine a third circle representing the content that an average users is *likely* to make. Unfortunately, there is zero overlap between what a new Maya user is likely to make with the set of "good" things that could be made. You are about 100% likely to make crap.

Spore wants align these three conceptual circles. They want the set of all likely things you'll make to be smack in the middle of all possible awesome stuff that you might want to make. Furthermore, they want as much of the awesome stuff you can think of to be inside the "possible to make" circle. At any given stage of their progress, they could look at the catalog of all the items made by various average people who get to play with Spore and see how "awesome" the resulting content is. It took a lot of iteration on the tools to get where they want to be.

One of the examples shown was the character creator tool. It was a hard problem because if you give the user the ability to make, say, *any* body for the creature, then players will tend to make very terrible bodies because the space of all possible bodies is so large. Furthermore, if the players could somehow assemble a bunch of polygons into some type of creature body, the animation system would have no clue what to do with it. So this very open system would be confusing to both players and the animation system.

Chaim (the prototyping master) asked one of the artists for help. This artist had a lot of drawings of creatures that Maxis hoped could be made in Spore (so they represent that circle of "good" things that we hope are all possible to create and even likely to create). Anyway, the prototyper knew that the artist had some kind of pattern he followed that let him always make good creature body shapes, but he didn't know what the secret was. The artist explained that all his bodies start out as a bean shape, and are then modified in only three different ways of extruding or bending or whatever.

The next creature editor prototype gave the player a 3D "bean" and a few controls to modify it in exactly the way the artist described. This structure, though very limiting relative to all the things you could make in Maya, turns out to pretty much always make good stuff. It is also very clear to the player what to do, and it's clear to the animation system how to animate anything that comes out of this structured system.

He also gave many other examples along these same lines. Quick notes are like, if you want to add legs to the creature, then allowing the set of all possible ways to put legs on would be difficult (how to place them in 3D space using a 2D screen and 2D mouse), it would lead to mostly bad placement of legs (the set of all bad places to put legs is way bigger than the set of all reasonable places) and furthermore the animation system would have too much trouble dealing with these wacky legs. So, what really happens is that all legs have feet that touch the floor. If you try to add a leg, the editor automatically puts the foot on the floor, and you move the leg around on that plane, which is very easy with a 2D mouse. It's fortunate that this gets rid of tons of bad places to put legs by not even bothering you with them, and the animation system is very happy too. They applied this same principle to many, many aspects of the editor.

I heard some people muse that creating doesn't mean anything if every choice is "right," but I think the overall approach is very good. It really will lead to empowering people like grandmothers who don't know they can create things at all, and will lure them into the experience. If they want more power, there are a couple levels of extra layers in Spore with more advanced features. If they want TONS of power, they can use Maya.

Next up, Ernest Adams talked about how he sucks at games and he wants more games for him and other people who suck but have money and want to play anyway. He talked about how a goal-oriented game can still allow diversions and sandbox stuff that is fun. Yeah we all know that but he's saying designers can take the sandbox activities more seriously and embrace the idea that it's perfectly valid to play around without a particular goal and not treat the notion as a second-class citizen.

Adams talked about FarCry takes place on this beautiful island with sandy beaches and blue water with fish and how he'd like to explore the game. But FarCry is, he said, allows you to explore that island if-and-only-if you want to be in a world entirely based on quickly shooting people before they shoot you. Of course, FarCry is simply not the game for him, but his point is that apparently MOST games aren't for him, which is a narrow state of affairs.

A game that offers a series of moral choices was an example of giving the player meaningful choice, but not requiring "skill" or challenge obstacles. I happen to be very interested in this exact type of game, but I guess that's for another time.

Oh, Ernest had a good line when he talked about how first person shooters have some of the most beautiful environments in the game industry, so "we have awesome nouns...and yet we have hardly any verbs." Rather than just shoot, he wants to ride a horse, climb a mountain, scuba dive, explore caves, go fishing, and other various activities involving tourism and exploring. He's saying that this style of play--that is play without gameplay--is way too uncommon. The reason, he says, is obviously because game developers are obsessed with games having to be hard challenges, which is less and less true as the market expands.

Everyone I've mentioned said a lot more than what was noted here, but I think I'll call it a day and get some rest. Game Developer's Conference 2007 is now over.

--Sirlin

CliffyB lamented that Gears of War is really the same game as Bionic Commando. Instead of jumping from platform to platform, the game is turned on its side so that you run from the cover of one "platform" to the cover of the next. Instead of a grappling hook, you have that strange running feature that basically functions like a grappling hook to the next platform. Interesting, ha.

I don't know what words can even do Miyamoto justice. He is a king among men. He told us how important it is to take risks, as is a corporate philosophy of Nintendo. He also told us that tenacity is important, because there are some ideas that it has taken him like a decade to really get. He showed us his original try at "build a face" software from some really old platform that I forget what it even was. Then he showed all the tries he's had over the years from gameboy, to N64, to GameCube about various "making faces" software that never went anywhere. Most of Nintendo thought it was all horrible, but he kept trying it. Finally, with Miis on the Wii, he got it right. I just said "Miis on the Wii."

One random interesting line from Miyamoto was that he proposed that game reviews include an extra score for how much that game appeals to non-gamers. That really put some things in perspective, as Brain Age and Nintendogs would get a 10 in that category, while Gears of War (good game as it is) would get somewhere around a 0.

Introversion software is notable for their win of last year's Independent Game Festival award, where they said at their acceptance speech that they funded it all themselves because "we didn't want any publishers fuckin up our gaime!" (Trying to capture his accent there.) At this years awards (last night) they were presenters, and reminded us that publishers will still fuck up your gaime. In their 1-hour session, which was great, they talked about how publishers will fuck up your gaime. They say that many of the things publishers used to do are now obsolete. Interoversion is doing just fine selling Darwinia on Steam, and you don't need a publisher to get on xbox live or sell directly on the web, either. In many cases, they claim that publishers are adding zero value, and taking 70%, while Xbox Live takes only 30%. Yeah, yeah, publishers can foot the bill for huge games and pay for QA and marketing that you can't pay for, but his point is well taken for small games made by indie studios. I guess you really don't need a publisher if you can someone manage to fund the first game yourself. Publishers would just fuck up your gaime anyway, right?

Keiji Inafune is head of Capcom R&D, making him the highest ranking creative person in Capcom, and he's been there for over 20 years. Rockman (Megaman) is his character. I've heard Inafune is a little crazy, but I was totally unprepared for how shocking his lecture was. It was a question/answer session with questions written by--I forget who--but they were damn good questions. Almost all the questions were highly critical of him and Capcom, even to a surprising degree.

The negativity of the questions didn't even phase Inafune. I think he's far beyond even caring what anyone thinks about anything, so he just says whatever crazy thing comes to his mind, with even less self-ceonsorship than I have. Within the first one minute of him talking, he told us how Japanese developers are "cowards." They are cowardly and don't have bravery. Also they are cowards. He was very clear that they are cowards.

At one point, an answer to who-knows-what question had him rambling about how we fight zombies and monsters in games, but he fights zombies and monsters and other evil creatures in Capcom management. We all have our zombies to fight, and must keep fighting, he said. He mentioned how Capcom was against doing Resident Evil and even wanted to cancel it when it was almost finished, but Inafune pushed them to release it. The moderator then asked "What did the...uh...zombies and monsters in Capcom's management say after Resident Evil was released?" Inafune said that it did really well so of course they suddenly liked it, but that they don't know anything in the first place. I swear I am not making this up.

Another question: "The xbox did very poorly in Japan, coming in at last place and getting nearly zero traction. The xbox 360, in Japan, is doing even worse. Capcom decided to release two expensive, high-profile games, each with new IP on Xbox 360: Dead Rising and Lost Planet. Why did you do this? Was it a tough sell at Capcom?"

I couldn't follow Inafune's answer about why this was a good idea, but the part about it being a tough sell blew my mind. He said he told them it would cost X amount, and "They said no. They said no very quickly." So then he told him some lower number, but they said no again. So then he had the two teams start working on the game, even though he had no authority to do so. He had them keep at it "for six months...maybe longer." He then showed Capcom management and said "Look, aren't these games fun?" Capcom management still said they could not sell these games. He  kept fighting them and somehow eventually convinced them. Again, I'm not making this up.

A prominent game designer later told me that Inafune told Capcom management he was working on a driving game during this time, to hide Dead Rising and Lost Planet, but Inafune didn't a mention that in the talk.

Another question: "The save system in Dead Rising met with much disapproval and bad reviews. If you could go back in time and change it, would you?" Inafune said that people cannot go back in time, so it doesn't really matter. If he could though, he would not change it because he has no regrets and the player should just accept it. He then told a story about how in that game, you must save the game by going to a bathroom (inside the game). He originally told the team that he wanted the game to be more realistic by requiring the player to sleep and use the bathroom. He thought you should have to do that. The team hated this idea, refused to implement it, and ignored him. Later when they made the save system, they put it in the bathrooms as a way to give an inch on the whole bathroom idea.

I knew Clint Hocking (Splinter Cell) would give a good lecture, but I didn't expect it to be possibly the best one of the Conference. He talked about how some games explore a physical space (we have lots of those!) while others allow us to explore a system. He even quoted my book with the line "Playing to win is exploring." It's exploring the system of a game to find effective strategies. Anyway, he went on to say that one system we never really seem to explore is a system of morality. 22 years ago Ultimta 4 kind of tried to do this by measuring your valor, humility, etc. It also tried to do some fake 3D. It sort of sucked at both, but it tried. 22 years later, we have iterated the hell out of 3D to the point where it's awesome. We're nowhere on exploring moral/ethical spaces in games. KOTOR doesn't count.

He even went as far as to say that the game Spiderman 2 (a game he really likes) did a big disservice to the license. Spiderman's premise is that "Great power brings great responsiblity," but that the game only offers great power with zero sense of responsibility. That isn't even Spiderman, Hocking says.

Games are accused of teaching things like murder, mugging, rape and so forth. Hocking says games aren't teaching those things because they aren't teaching much of anything, on the whole. They aren't SAYING anything. He proposes that games actually start to clean up their act, and he didn't mean by not having GTA anymore. He meant by starting to explore what a game about exploring morality would really be like. This is exactly the topic I am interested in, so this really, really caught my eye. I had the fortune of having dinner with Clint and discussing this further.

It's late and there's more tomorrow, so I'll sign off.

--Sirlin

Game Developer's Conference, Day 1. (Well, I suppose it's technically day 3, but I like to call wednesday the first day of the event.)

In a session about protecting your IP, the speaker (a patent lawyer) mentioned offhandedly that patents are great to protect new game mechanics. The ghost of Thomas Jefferson was in attendance and he shed a single tear.

Sony unveiled its now Home thing for PS3. This is to be part of the PS3's OS and lets you create a (realistic) avatar and wander around a shared space where you can talk to other players, and also set up and decorate your own room, which is private to you and any friends you invite over. The graphics look really nice, and the whole thing is pretty cool, if you are joe gamer.

If you are me, you have a lot of questions. Why does every piece of software have too much loading time? (Why does God of War, also by Sony, have the least loading time of any disc-based game ever?) Do I have even the semblance of free speech in the shared areas? All the media I can download is wrapped in DRM and even if I *buy* it, I can't play it on any other platforms (including pc, ipod, etc), right? Why do I need a forum to communicate where I don't have free speech and I do have heavy DRM restrictions? Especially when it's restricted to only hanging out with other PS3 owners. Btw, Second Life was already made, and it's free, and you have rights. (Though I will say again: Sony's Home does have significantly better graphics than Second Life).

Warren Spector gave his talk about story games. I would really like to talk to Warren about this stuff as I like the area he's trying to explore. He wants to make story games that don't tell a linear story (God of War, every other game ever) yet don't give ALL the control over to the player (The Sims, Spore), but instead search out a middle ground. To use a simple, stupid example, he wants to give you the motivation and drama for *why* you want to go through that door, but all the expressive gameplay options that let you choose how you will do it. The more physics-based stuff behind this the better. That example is maybe too simple though, as he also emphasized he wants to give you real choices, not just a game on rails, so perhaps he'd throw in another door or two as well. ;)

Warren, if you stumble across this, I think very highly of you. I have these minor criticisms, though. First, the slides in your talk are really horrible and you know it, lol. Maybe rethink that huge red font with a white drop shadow. Second, you are too obsessed with story, and you know it. There is nothing wrong with making the kinds of games you talked about. Almost no one is making them the way you describe, and you really are leading that charge, which is great. But there is a lot of merit to games that have no story at all and there always will be. I learned a lot from playing competitive games, and I'll tell you right now, "story"--the kind created by an author--had nothing to do with any of that. Tetris, electroplankton, The Sims, Virtua Fighter, Mario Kart, and Tony Hawk are all examples of games (and non-games) that are not *about* stories at all, nor should they be.

That said, Warren showed a quote from Susan Sontag (that I can't find right now, ugh) where she said that a writer a really a student and judge of morality who expresses this through story. I happen to agree, which is why I have newfound interest in story games, if only they could shed their archaic trappings.

A lot of crazy things were shown in the experimental gameplay workshop. Too much to explain, and even if I did, some stuff is weird enough that it would take too many words to describe. I'll quickly mention that one person showed a quick game that simulates game development. This development is done by a legion of tiny slave-creatures who work in an old, broken down warehouse. You can click on them to kill the slower ones so the rest work faster. A dialog box asks if you want to try an innovative idea from one of the lower slaves, and the audience all yelled "no!" and laughed. So he didn't let the slave use his idea, and he killed more of the slower ones. But then some slaves stopped working and held up anarchy symbols.

Then the presenter showed a screen of options the player can set such as how much graphics vs. gameplay vs. marketing he wants to have. If you set gameplay to 100%, then the other two quantities go to zero, and so do sales. There are also other various settings, such as the wage of a slave, which defaults to $3. Anyway, he clicked on more slaves to kill them, but then he got the entire rest of them to stop work. The game popped up a message saying that no further work can be done because the slaves revolted. He can either cancel the game or ship it as-is. He decided to ship it. Then we saw the results screen showing 201% ROI (return on investment) and pretty good sales, but all the slaves died.

This game is really quite something, because when a game actually SAYS something--I mean anything--it's like water in your face. Games don't usually have much of anything to say. A game like this clearly could not be made inside the normal game industry, which again demonstrates how important it is to have any indie voice.

In a *very* packed session about MMOs, we have panelists Raph Koster, Rob Pardo, Mark Kern, Daniel James, and a couple others. They all had really good comments about where the genre is going, how to compete with WoW and how not to compete with it, and how large the genre really is, even without WoW being counted at all.

At one point, Daniel James (Puzzle Pirates, Bang! Howdy) said something close to "I'm not sure if I should move my company offshore now, or in a few years. Who knows what the US government will say about any MMO such as mine...will they say my players are gambling? That they are engaging in virtual sex that they don't like? Or some other ill-informed thing? I probably need to move my game to a jurisdiction that is more into the idea that people can do whatever they want than America."

OUCH! Our founding fathers just rolled over in our grave, because that country was supposed to be America. I don't doubt anything James is saying though, and he went as far as to say that the innovations in MMOs (and he didn't mean MMOs that look anything like WoW) will not come from the US, because our regulations are not conducive to, well, freedom.

Raph Koster repeatedly made just about everyone in the room feel dumb by rattling off subscriber numbers about 9 different times for a bunch of MMOs no one in the room had heard of. He listed a couple that he said had higher subscribers numbers in north america than World of Warcraft. Many of these are web based. Many are originally from countries outside the US. Many are not even for gamers, and a couple are for kids. He reminded all of us over and over that we our perceptions are way off, because the mainstream gaming press doesn't cover these games, but they DO have the numbers and small budget MMOs are taking off...and it's not the ones being sold in retail stores.

The Game Developer Choice Awards had better production values than ever this year. Huge, huge thank you to Tim Schaefer for doing part of the presenting. Tim showed us all how much impact and humor you can get out of just a few words between awards. He obviously wrote his own lines and has great comic timing in delivery. It almost makes up for the first 15 minutes of Psychonauts. Thanks Tim!

The Lifetime Achievement Award went to Shigeru Miyamoto, who was actually there to accept it (he speaks tomorrow). I felt genuine happiness to share the honor of giving him a standing ovation. He said that the name of the award seems to imply that we think he's done making games. He then said that he hopes to keep doing this for a very, very long time. The crowd gave thunderous applause.

Ok, that's enough summary for now.

--Sirlin

When I wrote that opinion piece for gamasutra about World of Warcraft, I listed that "time = skill" was one of the "wrong" lessons of the game (or any rpg, even). I can understand someone debating whether that lesson is really taught or not, but it never even occurred to me that hundreds and hundreds of people on many messege boards would say, "time really is skill, because you need to spend a lot of time on anything to get good at it."

Oh my. I'm telling you otherwise, and so is Scientific American:
The Expert Mind article

It's possible to spend a very long time at something and still not be good at it. It's also possible to spend a short time on something and be extremely good at it. This is especially true in a competitive game (where you can bring the lessons of other competitive games with you into the new one) and it's double-triple true in an MMO, where mastery of pvp has little-to-no connection to the 400 hour grind to level 60. The 400 hours of leveling up doesn't convert your time into skill; it's simply a way to gate your progress so rpg's take a long time. Replacing actual skill with your character's simulated increase in "fake-skill" makes rpg's accessible to anyone (anyone with lots of time, that is).

Philip Ross's Scientific American article also explores the idea that "effortful study" is what really makes you improve at something. That's why people who practice something a few years (such as chess, but I think it's true of many skills) can overtake someone who has been "grinding" away at it for 10 or 20 years.

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but "effortful study," which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one's competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time. It is interesting to note that time spent playing chess, even in tournaments, appears to contribute less than such study to a player's progress; the main training value of such games is to point up weaknesses for future study.

Measuring actual merit, rather than purely time invested, is a nice thing to do in the real world and in games. The trouble is, developing mastery in something is hard and not for everyone, so simply rewarding time allows a game to offer "easy fun" and be enjoyed a wider audience. I wonder, though, if we could devise some new rpg mechanics that better reflected what learning things is actually like in the real world without restricting our audience to hardcore gamers. Spending time would count for nothing, but actually accomplishing things would. The closest thing I can think of to this is the Zelda series of games. These games are somewhat like RPGs in that they have a story, lots of characters to talk to, etc. And yet you have no XP bar or level, you don't grind monsters, and you only get things when you actually complete a quest or defeat a boss in a dungeon or whatever. A game like Zelda could be adjusted to have a stronger emphasis on story (imagine the rich and varied storyweaving in Oblivion) without resorting to leveling-up mechanics.

Anyone else have any ideas for how to do a story based rpg that is accessible to a wide range of people, does not use grinding or leveling at all, and is still actually fun? Getting rid of the addiction cycle of "kill monster, get +2 sword, kill better monster, get better item" is a tough one, becuase it's such a powerful system. But it would be nice if we had a story based game that *wasn't* based on increasing the "fake-skill" of your character by attacking the same monster 1,000 times. (Again, see the Scientific American article for how people actually increase their skill in things.)

Another sad note for me, apparently the game industry isn't about just putting in time, either. I've been at it a lot longer than a) the combat designers on God of War, b) Jenova Chen, who made the game Flow and now has a 3 game deal with Sony, c) a friend who's now an executive at Capcom, and d) another friend who's now a manager at Xbox Live Arcade. All of those people are doing great things and deserve every bit of their success. It seems that I made a wrong series of decisions or a wrong turn somewhere along the way though, as I still have little to show for all my grinding.

--Sirlin

Games teach things and/or make statements, whether they mean to or not. If you have 51 minutes of spare time, you can see Carnegie Mellon's Luis von Ahn talk about games he designed to specifically solve problems. He's interested in using "human computing cycles" (time that people "waste" playing games) to solve problems (such as labeling objects in images) that computers are not yet good at solving.

I hope this video is somewhat embarrassing to the entire game industry, as it took someone outside of the usual sphere of game-making to demonstrate the extreme power of games, and that they can be used for useful purposes. The games presented in the video are simple (and probably fun), but it's more about the radical shift in thinking about what a game could be used for that is notable.

(Thanks to Eric Williams for telling me about this in the first place, even though I'm now 8 months late to the party. Or three years late, if we count the release of the first game mentioned in the talk.)

This whole thing reminds me of a lecture given by 42 Entertainment, makers of the "i love bees" alternate reality game that surrounded the release of Halo 2 and "The Beast" AR game surrounding the release of the movie A.I.. Anyway, they also talked about how they could give out extremely difficult puzzles/problems, all of which would be solved nearly instantly by the hive mind of the world. They even started giving out problems to which they did not know how to find solutions, and even these were solved by the vast network of connected minds, organized across various chat rooms and forums.

Someone from 42 joked, "If we made a game that focused all this brainpower on solving world hunger, we'd have it solved in two days, tops."

Everyone laughed.
Except me.

--Sirlin

Did anyone notice that Netflix started offering online movie rentals a couple weeks ago? Their service is an interesting snapshot of what media industry dinosaurs think consumers want. Here's some highlights:

--No HD content
--Windows-only
--Internet Explorer-only (IE had known, unpatched secruity problems 284 days during 2006)
--Streaming-only (no downloads)
--Wrapped up in DRM to make sure you can't watch it how you want to

Didn't someone in charge ever take a step back and look at how crippled the whole thing is? This service is a significantly worse value proposition than me downloading movies off peer-to-peer netowrks (no drm, yes hd, any OS works). It just doesn't make sense to sell me a product that is significantly worse than the bit torrent alternative, especially when it would have been so easy top bit torrent and actually sell me something.

Here's a simple guide for Netflix or anyone else who wants to sell me digital media (I'm looking at you too, Apple). All I'm doing is ripping off DreamHosts's File's Forever idea:

1) No DRM. I will not buy any content with DRM period.
2) Sell me the rights to download the (no-DRM) media file unlimited times forever from any number of computers.

That's it. Could I illegally get content under my proposed system? Yes I could. But I can also get illegal content now, so that doesn't change much. What does change is that my proposed system offers a real value to the buyer over bit torrent:

a) I don't have to worry about d/ling viruses (the files come from a legit source, not from peer-to-peer sharing)
b) I don't have to worry about a file having bit torrent seeds or not
c) The ability to download the file again later in case my copy gets corrupt, or in case I want to watch it on a different device is worth paying for
d) Legal downloads

Right now, I have to make the choice between a legal product that is highly crippled or an illegal one that is better in almost every way. It's painful waiting around for media sellers to figure out that they can offer a product that is legal, that is better than the illegal option, and that I will actually buy...and gladly buy, even. Sell me the service unlimited downloads of the piece of media I buy.

And then we have Netflix, oh my. You're still talking about renting? Renting?! That's an old-world notion that doesn't make sense in the digital era. The genie is out of the bottle. If more people would flat out refuse to buy DRM content, we could get past this troublesome phase even faster.

www.defectivebydesign.org

--Sirlin

I read Warren Spector talking about this (whether games have to be "fun") in The Escapist. Warren is a good guy. Anyway, since it's such an easy question, I thought I'd take a crack at it.

No.

Well, what is meant by the question though? It could have two meanings:
1) Do games have to be "fun" to sell well? (not exactly)
2) Should games be fun? (not necessarily) 

Should Games Be Fun?
I'll take the second (easier) question first. Should games be fun? Certainly we have fun playing games and we can mention many games that are fun that we like and many games that aren't fun that we don't like. But fun is only one narrow state of mind and interactive entertainment has far more potential than just that.

There are some other states that exist in games already that we tend to lump into "fun" whether the word fits or not. The word "relaxing" or even "contemplative" might describe some games. Occasionally, there is a glimmer of being emotionally moved in story-based games. That might not be "fun" but it's perhaps even better.

Consider the movie Schindler's List. I would call it moving and important. I wouldn't call it fun. It's hard to imagine our culture if we were to remove all the films that were not "happy" or "funny." Some day in the future we might call the sphere of interactive entertainment something other than "games" and there will be entire genres of interactive entertainment that are moving or sad or romantic. Games would be just a subset of that sphere. Phew, I wrote a couple sentences without quotes around random words.

Do Games Have to be Fun to Sell Well?
Games are memes: non-genetic information that is copied/imitated and passed on amongst humans. You could say that the act of playing a game is the meme rather than the game itself, but there's no sense getting caught up in that yet. Memes--like genes--get copied if they...well...have properties that get them copied. There is the mistaken notion that genes and memes get copied because they are good and useful. Being good and useful is one of many, many reasons that a gene or meme might be successful.

Consider the folding of paper cranes that occurs in many elementary schools. It's relatively easy for one child to teach another the process of creating such a paper bird. The instructions are passed on (rather than the product being copied), which keeps the integrity of the copies pretty high. Imperfections in one child's crane aren't necessarily passed on to another child's. Anyway, there are elementary schools that have been making cranes for 30 years or more, and I don't think it's because it paper cranes are solving some big human problem. For whatever reason, it's a successful meme.

Memes can be harmful and still be copied. Consider the memes "copy this and pass it along" and "make money." There's not much reason to do the first and no clear instruction on how to do the second, but when the two ideas found each other, the meme for chain letters and pyramid schemes were born. These things are frauds and don't help anyone, but they are popular memes that live on today.

A meme needs some tricks to stick in your brain. It needs to be easily copied. It needs to stand out from other more boring memes like the story about someone's dream last night or jury duty. Memes compete against each other for space in your brain, and have no regard for you--other themselves. If they can be copied, they are copied. Survival of the fittest memes gives us some wildly popular ones. But again, memes don't care about helping you. Being helpful is just one trick to get copied, but there are many others.

So do games need to be fun? The property of fun is one reason why a game would be copied from player to player. Another reason would be that the game is addictive. That is, the game is specifically designed to tap into the so-called irregular rewards schedule that psychologists know is one of the most powerful behavioral trainers. (That means that you do x and you have a fairly low chance to get a reward. It's an addictive pattern because you don't know when you'll get it, but you know will get the reward if you stick with it long enough, and maybe you'll get two rewards in a row if you're lucky!)

Anyway, a game that was purely addictive but no fun might not sell well. A game that is incredibly, highly addictive and has just enough fun might sell very well. It's not simply "the more fun the game is, the more it sells." I could go into marketing or whatever else, but I think the design pattern of addiction illustrates that there are other things than pure fun that could make a game a big hit.

Final analysis:
We already have unfun games that perpetuate themselves.
Hopefully there will be games in the future that are not fun in the way we mean it today, but have even deeper importance--and don't use the addiction trick (much).

--Sirlin

This topic is out there, I admit, but perhaps you have some ideas.

What would a game look like that could be created today that would also be played in 100 years or 1,000 years. As a side issue, I wonder if there's any difference in a game that would last 100 as opposed to 1,000 years.

It takes an awful lot of effort to create a video game these days, and most games end up being played a few hours at most. A life of 6 months would be considered very long. That's unfortunate considering all the work involved.

StarCraft is about 8 years old and still popular.
Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo is about 12 years old and still played in tournaments today.
Poker in its modern form is about 100 years old.
Chess is about 2,500 years old.
Go is over 4,200 years old.

1,000 years ago there weren't airplanes, cars, computers, electricity, or the United States of America. Ironically, 1,000 years from now, there won't be any of those things either. (Airplanes are cars are terrible forms of transportation, we'll be way beyond that. Electricity might be replaced by a better technology, "computers" will be woven into clothes and hiding in paint molecules on the wall or something, not in big boxes that sit next to a desk. The United States will have been disbanded somehow, its fall traceable to all the way back to George W. Bush's decisions.)

So what do we have to work with here? Card and board games seem safest, because it's too hard to even imagine what a "computer" game would be like. Would it run in a crazy resoultion that's like 2,000 dots per inch and on a display the size of a wall? Maybe everyone's walls will be used as giant "computer screens" in 1,000 years. Or maybe 3D will really mean 3D with hologram technology (that will hopefully look better than R2D2's "help me Luke, you're our only hope.") This "3D" stuff we have now will probably be a joke.

2D on the other hand is more likely to stand the test of time, especially on a card or a board. Now, cards and board games of the future will surely not be printed on cardboard but instead on super thin, light computer displays.

Anyway, back to the question. What properties would a game have if it is to last 100 or 1000 years? What kind of thing could it be and what kind of thing could it not be?

--Sirlin

The major publishers decided that E3 costs too much for too little return. I don't blame them, since I always thought the same thing. Anyway, looks like there will be no more E3, but the E3 officials are attempting a media spin to say that the event is downsizing.

Another way of looking at this is that Nintendo's booth at the last E3 was not merely the most popular booth in the history of E3, but the most popular booth there will EVER be at E3. ;)

--Sirlin

Last year's E3 was probably the worst I've ever seen, so I was reduced to giving out backhanded put-down awards. This year, I only have genuine good things to say.

Best Game of the Show: Spore.
Spore is really on another level from everything else. The high concept looks like it's starting to gel into a cohesive experience. There are 6 different phases of the game, each one of increasing scale. Each phase has it's own editor. If I remember right, the 6 phases are cellular, creature, tribal, city, civilization, and space. The transitions between these modes are looking seamless and great, especially the transition of zooming out from the surface of a planet to seeing the whole planet and rotating it around, and the transition of flying around in space and landing on a planet and going to the surface view.

Spore showed off an even better looking creature editor than ever this year, and a new twist on the "sporepedia" that's basically a pokemon-style catalog of which creatures/buildings/whatever you've seen so far. You can click on any item in there (such as a creature) to see a trading card of that thing. They said you can print out the card and maybe play a trading card game based on the creatures (wow, I'd love to design that for them, hehe). Also, every item is labeled with the name of the person who made it. When you make a creature, it gets uploaded to Maxis's master database and other players can see that same creature (or building or whatever) in their world. You can also see how other creations by a creator you like, and you can see how many other players have seen or used your creations.

Spore is an amazing thing both technically and conceptually. It's a game that can only exist when the following 3 things collide: 1) the extremely unusual intelligence of a game designer who looks mostly outside the game industry for inspiration (go Will Wright!), 2) a team of great, solid people to support him and and believe in him because of past success (Sim City, The Sims), and 3) the infinite resources of EA, both in terms of money and in the power to contact any expert in any field that Will needs to talk to. A Magnum Opus game like Spore might a one-time event in our lifetimes.

Best Action Games: God of War 2 and Heavenly Sword.
Two wins for Sony, here. God of War 2 has great graphics for a PS2 game, and the same deep understanding of visceral gameplay and well-timed combat as ever. If it weren't for Spore, this might be this year's Game of the Year.

Heavenly Sword has amazing graphics. It's one of the best looking games at the show for sure. It also seems to have a handle on good combat, partly because it's a blatant copy of God of War (it should be called Goddess of War) and partly because the game's combat designer admitted that his he has a good background in playing Virtua Fighter and an even better grounding in Street Fighter. Considering God of Wars combat designers are also veterain Street Fighter players, it seems foolish for any game company to invest millions of dollars in a melee combat game without hiring expert Street Fighter players to guide it. Yes, I'm serious.

Best Peripheral Game: Eye of Judgment
Yeah Guitar Heroes 2 is nice. No one cares about PSP peripherals. But Sony did get on my radar again with this "enhanced reality" card game. Contrary to popular belief, it does NOT use the EyeToy. It will use a proprietary camera that will ship with the game, and that camera doesn't even have an actual product name yet.

In Eye of Judgment, the camera points downward at a game board with 9 squares. The squares start unowned by any player, and the first player to own 5 of the 9 squares wins the game. You place physical cards on the board (kinda like Pokemon cards). They represent monsters that will fight for you. The novelty is that when you look at the TV screen, you you can see that the cards are summoning 3D monsters that sit on top of the cards. The 3D monsters fight each other, adding a lot of flashiness to the card game genre.

The technology was a bit buggy, but that's understandable for an early prototype. Also, all those flashy monsters interactions took waaaaaay too long. The game itself looks like it's shaping up not to be fun. I would love to design a game for that system if I were in any position to do so, but I'm not. "Enhanced Reality" games like this could be a big new category someday, though.

Best Presenter: The Girl Who Gave The Spore Demo I Saw
I don't know who she was, but she was one of the best presenters of anything I've seen in a long time. She was a blonde woman with a ponytail and a chisled, pretty face. She had a thorough understanding of what she was presenting, was clear and articulate, and had to roll with the punches in a very unpredictable demo that involves interacting with AI that has emergent behavior. She was able to deliver a whole lot of information in a very short time without it seeming rushed. Whoever she is, I hope her boss sees this.

Best Proof of Concept for Why the Nintendo Wii Will Reach a New Market: Nintendo Sorts: Tennis
The tennis game used no buttons. You flick the controller up to toss the ball up so you can serve. You swing the controller to hit the ball. That's it. If you swing in a wimpy way, you'll get a very weak stroke. You have to really put some effort into it and move around. Everyone I saw play this game understood it immediately and had fun.

Interlude about the Wii
Note that I played the following Wii games: Tennis, Wario Ware, Pointing Demo: Shooting (aka Duck Hunt), Dragon Ball Z, Metroid Prime, Zelda.

Wario Ware is great (as is every version of that game) and I'd definitely buy it. The duck hunt demo illustrated using the device as a precise pointer. Pointing and shooting large baloons is easy, and aiming at tiny targets is pretty hard, for human reasons more than software reasons. Dragon Ball Z seemed overly designed with confusing controls, just like always. Metroid Prime illustrates that a solid first person shooter is possible. After having actually played it, I can say that it has a pretty good interface that could perhaps rival mouse and keyboard. I was personally clumsy at it though, and people who aren't "core gamers" are going to have just as difficult a time coordinating one thumbstick and one freehand controller as they would with a dual analog. Metroid is very good, but it's a gamers game. Moving the Zelda character through the world is just as easy as any other game that uses a fixed camera angles and a single analog stick (aka: easy). The various free-hand actions and weapons/combat were all implemented well. It will of course sell 10 zillion units.

Most Crowded Booth of Anything Ever at Any E3: Nintendo
I have never seen anything like the mob scene at Nintendo. Lines for DS games like the New Super Mario Brothers and Starfox were pretty damn long. The line to get INTO the area with the Wii was absurd, with something like a 2 hour wait. On thursday, Nintendo closed the line at about 1:30pm becaus they already reached capacity. I was there on Friday, and inside the Wii area (after the crazy line), every station had massive lines. Nearly an hour wait each for Metroid and Zelda, and at least 10 minutes for most other games, probably more. The sheer number of people in and around Nintendo's booth and in the many and various lines was just staggering. It was pretty clear who owned the show.

Also of note: the total number of PSPs I saw in use by actual real people (not paid workers) was ONE. That's right, in 3 days of being on the show floor almost all day, I saw one. One of my friends saw 3 PSPs in that time and another saw zero. Meanwhile, the number of Nintendo DS's was too large to even count, certainly in excess of 100. Every line at E3 seemed to feature multiple people with DS's. Some joined in impromptu games of Mario Kart, several were playing Brain Age, a few were playing Tetris, and some used the Picto-chat to communicate with each other on the very noisy show floor where cell phone reception is spotty at best. I guess a 100:1 ratio of DS's to PSPs is a pretty interesting indicator of the state of the industry.

Oh, that reminds me:
Award for the Games I Will Actually Spend the Most Time Playing: Brain Age 2 DS and Clubhouse Games DS.
These are two unassuming little titles. The new Brain Age is even better than the last, and I'm sure I'll mess around with it quite a bit. Clubhouse games has 38(!!) games on one cart, that I counted at least. Half are card games such as poker, hearts, and rummy. The others are various board games such as chess and backgammon, and there's also random stuff like darts and bowling on there too. I'd probably buy it for chess alone, so I consider the other 37 games to be a bonus. There's a difference between flashy games that look good at E3 and the games I'll actually spend time playing. I'm sure I'll end up pouring hours into both of these games.

MMOs: There were a lot of MMOs. They all seem to involve aiming a reticule, which means I have zero interest in them. Guild Wars builds on it's very strong base of good ideas with even more new good ideas, more classes, more pve missions and story, and more pvp game modes. It reamains in my mind a "theoretically wonderful game." It has the exact same interface problems as it had ever since the alpha test: interface. It's still too interested in making me click-to-move even when I supposedly turn that off. It's still too awkward to pivot the camera without affecting my character's movement. When you click on an NPC or PC, you still get that totally ugly rectangle with only a name in it, instead of something reasonable like a nice border and a portrait. Guild Wars **NEEDS** to drop whatever it's doing and give me UI that functions like World of Warcraft. That is it's number 1 problem, and I wish that would be solved and announced so I can get on with actually buying it and playing it.

And finally: Game that Will Make the Most Money: World of Warcraft: Burning Crusade
Although it has a great art style (much better art direction than Guild Wars), World of Warcraft looks technically dated compared to every other MMO at E3. The expansion will have two new races (who cares?), level cap increased from 60 - 70, flying mounts (at 70), jewelcrafting and socketed items. It also will probably have tons of new raid content and more half-hearted attempts at small group and solo content that will ultimately keep the game focused on it's current elitist group-only time-ocracy mentality. I *want* to be this game's biggest spokesperson, if it would only stop mimicing EQ, embrace the concept of inclusiveness for all (skilled players and time-sinkers alike, solo and small group players and raids alike), and stop treating the player base overly aggressive Terms of Service.

Anyway, I just wanted to remind everyone that it doesn't matter that World of Warcrft is looking graphically worse than its competitors. It doesnt' matter that it can't show much of anything flashy gameplay-wise at E3. It's well crafted, it's addictive, and it's has fun locked up in it, and it will sell. The power of Warcraft will go toe-to-toe with Halo 3 and GTA. Blizzard please come back to us and stick with the original promises the game made during beta.

Final Summary:
Nintendo owned the show.
Sony had a few very strong titles, but the PSP is looking shaky. The $600 price tag is mostly irrelevant anyway because they'll only have 2 million units available (if that) by the holidays, so only that hardest hardcores will get one then, and after that the price will drop.
Microsoft didn't have much of anything inspiring to show, but Gears of Wars looks great of course. Halo 3 and GTA will make tons of money, and Xbox Live is still the best online experience in town. Also, Xbox 360 will probably reach 8 or 10 million units before PS3 even *launches* so Microsoft is doing just fine...but we didn't need to go to E3 to figure that out.

Long report, but I hope you find it useful.

--Sirlin

I just got back from the 2006 Game Developer's Conference, and there is just too much to write about. Xbox 360 magazine (in the UK) wants two articles from me about Street Fighter, Game Developer Magazine (US) wants one about certain game design topic, plus I should write about all the great things at GDC for all of you.

The roundtable discussions about MMO economies were all good (I went to all three of them), Will Wright is on another level as always, Nintendo's speech about disrupting the market was a direct hit, Bungie's founder outlined the business model of his new comany that outsources nearly everything except the core gameplay, Ernest Adams had an interesting new take on story games, Raph Koster left Sony Online Entertainment (after being there 6 years), Linden Labs explained the importance of giving property rights to your players, and there were many other interesting ideas floating around, too.

I have so much to write, that I feel like playing Brain Age on Nintendo DS instead of doing any of it, lol.

--Sirlin

Gamedaily has a very interesting interview with Marc DeForest, co-founder and lead designer at S2 games. They've decided to self-publish Savage 2 and sell it directly from their website for $29.99. That means they don't have to deal with all the control issues (both creative and business-wise) that publishers introduce.

Most interesting is that even though Savage 1 sold only 20% of it's copies online (compared to 80% at traditional retail), S2 made more money from the online sales! Wow!

Mini-marketing 101 lesson. The "4Ps" of marketing are Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. The "Place" refers to the channel of distrubution used to sell the product. Usually, a game publisher takes a very large cut in exchange for providing services such as funding, getting the game on retail shelves, testing, and promotion.

In S2's case, it sounds like they are able to fund themselves. They are better able to create a good Product without a publisher (rather than worse able). They are able to offer the product at a lower Price by cutting out some of the channels of distribution. They are doing Promotion themselves. The only question here is the "Place," and Savage 1 showed them where the money is.

With online distribution, one of the main benefits of the traditional game publisher starts to fade. In 5 years, what will the role of a traditional game publisher be? In 10 years? In 50?

--Sirlin

For some reason I like to review controllers, so here we go. I got the new Dead or Alive joystick (made by Hori) off Ebay recently because I couldn't find it anywhere near me. It has exceeded my expectations in several ways. I've been pretty happy with my Soul Calibur stick (also by Hori), and it doesn't even have an R2 or L2 button.

The DOA stick has:
1) All the buttons, including triggers, start, back
2) Even that crazy Xbox Live button, and even the four lights around it, telling you which player you are
3) A nice input on the front (toward you) for the headphone jack.

The game DOA4 even recognized that I had the DOA stick, had an in-game picture of the stick, and automatically set the buttons for me to something reasonable. Plus, it's USB, so you could even use it with your PC (though I haven't tried that yet.)

Meanwhile, the official 6-button game pads for Street Fighter Anniversary Edition were set so that by default, Fierce punch and Roundhouse kick were reversed when you played Street Fighter Anniversary Edtion!

Are Hori parts as good as Sanwa parts (e.g. those used in the Real Arcade Pro stick)? No, but Hori's are still damn good. I'm totally satisfied with the product. All they have to do now is make a wireless version.

--Sirlin

I can't even update my website anymore. Hopefully servercentral.net will straighten this out soon.

I appear in the Fall 2005 issue of Game Developer Magazine's Game Career Guide. I wrote an article on "A Day in the Life of a Game Designer." Check it out, it's dangerously close to the truth.

I'm going to the Evolution Fighting Game Championships tomorrow, both to compete and help run the event. www.evo2k.com. NOTE: I am brining somewhere near 100 copies of my book, Playing to Win, to sell. This is a special print run, individually numbered and signed, with the Evolution logo on the cover. The regular run of the book won't be available for another 60-90 days.

Ok, see you guys later.
--Sirlin

First off, despite my sore throat, I was the guest host of a 3-hour internet radio show on Team Sportscast Network yesterday. They should be rebroadcasting it today, but I can't find the link. Here's the link to comments on yesterday's show though.

http://www.tsncentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=530

Also, I went to the Game Developer's Conference. There was one topic that permeated the whole conference. There's been a link going around about the rants at the "Burning Down the House" session, but I'm not going to post it. That was merely *one* place this topic was discussed at the conference, and not even the best place.

Daniel Arey's short documentary that interviewed top game developers on their views about making AAA games was the best treatment of this big subject. Dan is Creative Director over at Naughty Dog/SCEA, and I thank him for all the work he did to put those interviews together.

So here's the big issue everyone was talking about: the economics of making games are spiraling so far out of control, that the next generation of consoles (ps3/xbox2) will probably spell disaster for lots of game developers. The interviews featured Mark Cerny, Will Wright, Dave Perry, David Jaffe, Warren Spector, Niel Young, and others. It was striking that every single one of them said that to be one of the 20 top selling games of the year, you *need* huge production values. Great gameplay alone is not enough. Cerny put in that some of the top 20 games of 2004 are really only mediocre games, but they have amazing production values and amazing marketing. But every single game on that list is bursting with production values. You need that to even be "in the game" of getting to the top 20.

So how much does it cost to be one of these top 20 AAA games? Daniel Arey showed poll results from top game companies that estimated $15 million at the minimum, and possibly as much as $25 million. Most respondents said $20 million. When ps3/xbox2 comes around, the estimates went up to $25 million mean and as high as $30 million. Other charts showed that the top 6 games made 50% of the dollars of all game sales last year. The drop-off after that is big. Once you get past the top 20 games, the dropoff is HUGE, and those games make very little money.

With those stats, we can now restate the problem more clearly. Either you are shooting for a AAA game or you aren't. If you are, you need a crazily huge amount of money to even have a *chance*. Publishers will be forced into even more risk averse activities which means funding even fewer risky titles and more of the same old boring fare. There will be a racing game, a football game, a first person shooter, etc. We're already suffering from lack of innovation and it's about to get worse. These huge budgets will lead to even more consolidation of companies, which is another pointer towards fewer games and less innovation. Failures in the next gen are going to spectacular, $25 million failures.

But the story for B quality games is even worse, and is the heart of the problem. We can see from the sales charts how much B quality games will make. We know how many units they sell, we know they retail for about $50 and we know that a publisher sees about $25 of that per box. Given the budget of current B quality games and their return, we can see that B quality games are barely a break-even undertaking right now. Companies that are in this category are surviving, but barely. Next time around when there's more tech required than ever, more art required than ever, their costs will go up by about 50%, but there's no way the revenue will go up that much. Every single person interviewed touched on this point. B games are not feasible to make on next gen console given the current business model.

Everyone was calling for a new business model to solve this, but no one really knew what it was. Niel Young (of EA) su