I’ve been running an unconference called GameLoop with my friend Scott Macmillan every summer for the last two years. If you’re reading this, you should totally come to this year’s GameLoop on August 28, 2010 in Cambridge, MA, USA.

GameLoop is a day-long unconference. If you’re not familiar with the term, it means that it’s a conference where there’s no set agenda until the day of the event. It’s self-organizing: we show up and spend a couple of hours figuring out what the topics of the day are going to be. It generally goes like this:

• 9am-10am: We gather up in a big room, introducing ourselves by name and listing three game dev topics we’re interested in.
• 10am-11am: We informally vote on proposed sessions and put those up on the big board.
• 11am: The conference begins!

We had some amazing sessions last year. Some of my favorites were Designer/Player Trust Building, Illusionary Gameplay (audio), Meaning in Games & Interactive Metaphor (audio), and Procedural Story & Emergent Narrative (audio). We cover topics besides game design, though: I led a session on the future of the Boston game industry, and a session on the IGDA. There were sessions in marketing and business models for indies (video), diversity in games, hardcore iPhone programming (shaders, 3D), music, subscription models, project management, hiring, and more!

Not only do you get a chance to learn, but you’re encouraged to participate as well! Most sessions end up being about 10 minutes of setup by a moderator, and then 30 minutes of discussion. It’s a really great way to dig into a meaty topic.

At GameLoop you’re likely to meet any number of AAA devs, indies, bloggers, journalists, and so on. It’s not even limited to people from the Boston area; last year only 60 of our 90 attendees came from Boston. The rest came from NYC, Albany, DC, Philadelphia, and even Los Angeles!

The $40 to register gets you breakfast, lunch, and a T-shirt. (It also helps me and Scott support ourselves as broke-ass indie freelancers.) Trust me when I say it’s completely worth it. You can register here. I hope to see you at GameLoop in August!

What follows is the notes I took on Corvus Elrod’s panel discussion on indie obstacles at LOGIN 2010. Any mistakes are my own!

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Corvus Elrod, moderator: We have four panelists who are extraordinary in their own right. Andrew Stern of Stumptown Game Machine, released Touch Pets Dogs and also worked on Facade. Charles Berube has released an extraordinary number of quality Flash games, storytelling games, shmups, sidescrollers. Dylan Fitterer produced Audiosurf, available on Steam and on the Zune. Brian Green kept Meridian 59 alive for 9 years, bought the rights to an MMO that was being shut down and kept it alive for almost a decade.

CE: Andrew, what are some obstacles you’ve faced?

AS: one obstacle is the idea of staying indie in the first place. Actually my studio is in the process of being acquired so that’s an obstacle I’ve failed to overcome. There’s a whole host of challenges trying to make indie games. I began in the industry at PF Magic working on Dogz, Catz, in the 1990s. I learned how to develop games in a small startup kind of environment, and in 2000 I quit and went indie, self-funded, it was an ecstatic experience. Developing indie games and watching your bank account drift downward is an emotional roller coaster. One big obstacle for me was how to be able to fit indie dev into your life. I did a blend of consulting work as well as my own indie work. How you pay the rent is important.

CE: How does being acquired present challenges?

AS: One of the reasons we went along with the idea of being acquired was that it would give more resources to the group to build more stuff. Now the group is going to have to grow. I’m a designer/programmer DIY person. The idea of managing a team and being more hands-off is going to be a big adjustment for me. It remains to be seen how much freedom I’ll have although you definitely lose freedom once you start taking funding. It comes down to the relationship you have with the people who are funding you. I’m optimistic that we’ll be able to keep going in that indie mode.

CE: Brian, you’ve done development under non-indie positions at 3DO.

BG: It was different from being indie, although when I was at 3DO I was on a small team of one or two people. Since we were such a small team we were kind of ignored, but there’s still the hierarchy and the bosses and being given resources. It was a learning experience working for a publisher. When I went on my own I didn’t have a safety net. I know how things are supposed to work but there are lots of business details that I have to know about: taxes, payroll, etc.

DF: I had an acquisition offer before Audiosurf was released, and it was a good offer, but I didn’t take it. I didn’t want to be a manager and I needed to see the project through.

Audience question: So the acquisition offer was more than you expected to make on the game and you turned it down?

DF: Yes, but I knew that there was the possibility that I could have made more money.

Audience: Did you get advice from a lawyer on the music IP issues around Audiosurf?

DF: Yes, I did.

BG: Not that I encourage anyone to break the law, but a lot of times people get paralyzed by legalities. On some level you need to barrel forward and hope for the best. You run some risk but risk is part of running a business.

CE: Charles has done a lot of Flash games and has tried to turn that into a living.

CB: The whole thing is one long terrible obstacle. I want to focus on the terrifying pressure that’s happening in iPhone, indie, etc. There’s a pressure to not cost any more than $0.99 or be free, and to be the best game out there, and to provide new content every week, and customer support, all financed by NOTHING. I’m concerned from a point of view where I’m trying to make a living, but also from a philosophical point. It troubles me that games are considered less valuable than a cup of coffee. I don’t know yet how to overcome that. I think microtransactions are an option.

Audience (Kim Pallister): What pressure? If you’re indie you set your own price.

CB: It would be nice to believe that you can set your own price but to compete in the app store you need to sift through an enormous number of cheap apps.

Audience/KP: Differentiation is hard, but a majority of the top grossing iPhone games don’t sell for $0.99 so it seems like the price drop is a last ditch tactic.

BG: Well the race to the bottom is about getting more sales to get on the top selling list. M59 was one of the first monthly subscription fee MMOs. The going price for a lot of games was $12-13/month. We went for $10.95/mo and we had continuous feedback from players that it was too much. I think there is that pressure that if you’re making a game that isn’t AAA you should charge less and somehow magically make money.

Audience/KP: I get the pressure to make that top 10 and not be below the fold. But all the guys dropping to $0.99 aren’t magically appearing on the top 10 list either.

CB: I agree with that, some of this pressure is perceived and may not be real on final analysis. But it’s a difficult thing to overcome when your bank account is hang gliding towards 0 and you see a community discussion that nobody is going to get something for free. And that I’m deleting an app without a weekly update.

Audience/KP: The latter part of your argument sounds like an issue people haven’t been talking about enough, that you’re selling once and acquiring a relationship that you need to turn into a business model.

Audience: Hi, I’m an independent developer, me and my boyfriend are the two people in the company. We released our first app and it was successful but it’s on Facebook and customer support alone is a full time job. Has anyone found a solution for this?

BG: Yeah, that’s a big obstacle for indies is turning something into a real business. We hired a co-founder’s brother to work for cheap on customer service. You have to find people who will work for you. Find interested game developers at your local IGDA meeting who want to get into games or are tired of the corporate life.

CE: This is an uneven playing field. We have individual developers who see the potential to make quality apps on iPhone or portals, who are competing with companies that have venture capital and full staffs. They’re putting 10 $0.99 apps out there and supporting the ones that do well. It’s both remarkable and terrifying that a two-person team can compete with Zynga. I know an iPhone developer who’s developed a great puzzle game and can’t even get people to review it. It’s tough to get over that barrier of perception.

AS: Even though the iPhone app store lets you self-publish, these perception problems are still there. Innovation plus promotion are what you need to do to get noticed.

BG: Or just dumb luck. A friend of mine sent an email to Rock Paper Shotgun and the person who read that email happened to like it and get front page featured. For indies sometimes you can get in on the ground floor of a new platform and find success. Timing is really important, sometimes good or bad things happen to you that you have no control over.

AS: My motto is I’ll try and make stuff, work part time as needed to fund it, can’t worry too much about whether the game will make any money.

CE: Touch Pets Dogs was one of the biggest budget iPhone games. It was featured in the OS 4.0 announcement.

AS: Our marketing was handled by ngmoco, so we had a big venture funded company trying to capitalize on the same marketplace indies are trying to compete with.

CE: In the day when games were all PC-based there was a variance in price. With consoles there are only a few tiers. Is there some psychology where people on iPhone will want to see a flat tier?

CB: You have set values you can choose for most distribution channels, not the same flexibilty where you can charge $17.98 or whatever. You have to pick a price point which defines everything you’re going to compete with.

BG: There’s a whole field of pricing psychology. One example from M59 was we came out with a daily/monthly/weekly subscription thing and little CDs that you put next to the checkout at game stores. When the CDs were free nobody touched them. When we started to charge for them people actually decided to pick up the CDs.

CE: You were one of the earlier indie games on Steam. Now there are tons of indie titles there. What light can you shed on your price point decision?

DF: They advised me to sell for $10 when I wanted to do $20, and convinced me on that price point.

Audience/KP: It’s interesting that you say they’re probably right, because you might have been an experiment to see how you would have worked at $10.

DF: I think everything with Valve is an experiment!

Audience: Our game was free and we made tons of money. We gained a loyal community of people we know on a first name basis who like to throw in $5 or $10.

CE: You leveraged the culture of being indies to play on that ethos.

Audience: We are very active on our discussion forums, it’s worked really well with the personal relationship aspect.

Kim Pallister: There’s a book called This Band Could Be Your Life, about how SoCal punk bands created their own distribution channels. All the zines and so on were fans they enlisted to market their games.

Audience: I’m curious as someone who’s a complete newbie here. What do the panelists think is the importance of festivals? Any tips or war stories around this?

AS: Festivals are a great place to meet other indie developers and potentially get your game noticed.

Audience: Have you been to PAX? The Behemoth sells so much merchandise directly to fans.

BG: One problem I’ve found on the indie side of things is that it feels more lonely. There’s no office for you to hang out in. The more opportunities you get to talk to other indie people, the better. I have a blog that I keep at psychochild.org that’s a great opportunity to talk with people.

CE: I know several people who have been IGF winners. It’s more than just submitting your game to a festival. There’s a culture around people who submit to IGF and you have to be a part of that culture. You need to not just design a game, but also talk about your philosophy of design, etc, so that when your game gets to IGF people know the developer and what you stand for. You’re building outreach to an audience beyond the game itself. The indie games that go on to win IGF are invariably people the community already know about who have an awesome game.

Audience: How do you incentivize people who are working with you?

CB: You offer them giant boxes of endless ramen noodles.

BG: I had a terrible time with that. I had M59 and wanted to work on my own projects for a while. I tried to incentivize people to work on my stuff. You find people, everything looks great, they’re part time, you ask them to not drop off the face of the earth. Two weeks later you just don’t hear from them ever again.

CE: I know some small studios who use internships and work with local schools. But you want to find someone who will seriously benefit from being in your creative culture, so you need to enrich volunteers or interns.

BG: You need to be careful about volunteers, you can be sued for minimum wage pay if the work is intrinsic to the company.

What follows is the notes I took on Osma Ahvenlampi’s talk at LOGIN 2010 about the last two years of running Habbo Hotel. Any mistakes are my own!

Most people know us from Habbo which is an international community, 32 countries in the world. We’ve been around for 10 years and gotten a lot of traffic. 172M registered characters, 16M unique browsers/month, 2M visits/day, 45M hours of play/month.

I’m going to talk about a combo of: basics on why we’ve focused on one single product for 10 years, a technical transition we made converting between platforms, and measuring player economics and secondary markets. Mostly will be talking about years 8 and 9 of Habbo.

Habbo is an environment where teens create their own environments and meet there to play with each other. Centered around “social play” which we coined before the big social game rush. It’s something other than goal-oriented gaming.

Two years ago I was talking about how we converted the company to do Agile development. Continuous reinvention on tech, design, and business. There was one major problem: we required Shockwave Player at the time, so we had to switch technologies. Exactly two years ago we started the project to switch platforms. We evaluated platforms based on easy-access, easy-play, had to browser based. We also looked at developer productivity and labor available. Finally we did care about performance of the platform on modest computers.

We considered Java (which is our serverside), Unity, and others, but in the end we went with Flash because of its install base and penetration. Certainly two years ago Flash was the only really viable platform.

Then we asked: are we going to do something else or are we going to continue with Habbo? We decided to replicate Habbo Hotel with new tech and convert our userbase. But aren’t we just risking our entire business by switching away from something people are already happy with? At the end of the day we figured that improving what we already have will be a much bigger payoff even though it would take a while to develop. In the first year, sticking with Habbo has the best results since we don’t start with 0 users and high risk.

We measure conversion rate, retention rate, and monetization rate. Conversion rate is “new returning users / new traffic.” Typical conversion for a new user to becoming returning traffic is 10%-40%. This metric is simple to measure.

Retention rate is a complex metric to measure because it’s not a ratio or a rate, it’s a flow metric. Superficially speaking it’s “of the people that visited your service in the last month, how many visit this month as well?” This helps you determine how many new users you have to get every month to replace who churned out last month. If the retention rate changes in a good or bad direction even a little bit it will make huge changes in your revenue. We expected to see a higher retention rate with Flash.

Monetization. We have ARPU which is average revenue per player, or per paying player (ARPPU). The bad thing about ARPU is that it reduces a number to an average, which hides the shape of your bell curve. In a free to play game your median player spends $0. Average revenue is higher than $0 since some people are paying. Anyway, changing the tech platform did not change our revenue distribution, but we didn’t expect it to.

Simple math: new traffic x conversion rate x (retention rate / months) x monetization rate = revenue. This is our forecasting tool for how much we need to spend on traffic acquisition. 2009 was a better year than 2008 for us in terms of a 21% traffic increase year-on-year. Our blog on sulake.com will have some numbers on revenue but 2009 was worse for us until we introduced some new monetization-focused features.

Transition to new tech was difficult. We had about 10 man-years on the client only, so we estimated about 6 man-years to write the new client. We usually only planned for a few months out so it was difficult to estimate for a year-long project. We had to do a new core client with a basic architecture in place, but it wasn’t so bad since we could copy the architecture from our old client. We had to write every feature again, create new tools for testing, a new asset pipeline that was compatible with our old assets, and a new deployment pipeline with new tools there. We expected to gain significant production efficiencies down the line from tool development.

We had a very small team for the core client, 3-6 people. Then we transitioned people out of the shockwave teams into developing more features in Flash. We left a small maintenance team for Shockwave during the transition period of a few months.

We decided to use the same server and protocol for both clients, which meant that we needed to rewrite part of the old Shockwave client. This wasn’t obvious at the beginning. There was seemingly a lot of waste in having to rewrite both clients just to ditch one, but the payoff was in testing. We had players in house testing on both clients playing on the same server, and we could verify that both groups of players could play with each other and that the clients looked the same and it didn’t make a difference which client was being used. We were able to test the Flash client against the live server as well.

Finally we decided to make no new features during the transition. Only UI improvements and some performance improvements (rendering scaled in high resolution). But no new game features.

Schedule-wise we were expecting 8-10 months of dev and launch in Q109. We shipped in 13 months launching in May 2009 on an invite-only beta launch. Open beta in June/July. At the end of October 2009 we shut down the old client. 18 month transition. At the end of the day it was the new features for the Flash client that sold things to the customers. We still do get complaints that people want the old version back. But they’re still playing and complaining, so that’s not all bad!

The final evaluation is that even though it took longer than planned it was a resounding success. This was due to deciding to do it iteratively and not planning it via waterfall, which allowed for many reprioritizations during development. We pulled devs off the Flash project onto Shockwave several times for needed work. Also, parallel development was very helpful. Of course, we had a skilled team as well.

We did another platform shift in addition to our tech platform shift.

What’s a social game in the FB context? People don’t spend a lot of time on Facebook — even if you have 100 friends logging onto Facebook every day you’re still likely to miss them. Successful social game on facebook is the parallel single player experience. You never see friends playing or play with them, you see the results of their play.

Habbo is a social structure with games created by the users. Showed us this Habbo room. Our users come up with the weirdest stuff. The cinema thing is extremely popular in Brazil and nowhere else.

Habbo was a walled garden, so we started taking steps to connect Habbo to the social graph. We have a Habbo FB application, but what we are doing on FB right now is really primitive. Most of the game companies succeeding on FB are way more sophisticated than we are. We’ve been focused on merging our international communities together into common language services so we haven’t had enough focus on the FB application. It does seem that FB is reaching a saturation point. We have about 400k-500k MAUs which makes us mid-sized, and even the big games aren’t growing much anymore. Also, if you’ve been following the news it seems like tying your game to someone else’s platform is not the best idea.

The real question is not how you host your game on FB but how you use the web to support your interactive experience? The most important thing to me is that you no longer need to register to play a game and play with your friends and have an identity. Games that use SNS identity responsibly are going to be better than games that don’t.

Economics of Player to Player Markets

In the early years we allowed people to transfer items between accounts. At first it was via premium SMS. Then we introduced Habbo Coins, but it wasn’t possible to move Coins from one account to another. What happened was people would invent their own currency. Some common item would become the currency of the world. We had a subscription feature that gives gifts to members where you’d get a sofa every month if you were a member. Players started trading for stuff using our subscription club sofas. It happened early on — google “habbo furni values” for some player economic analysis of furniture markets!

We introduced a marketplace where you can post for-sale notices and allow for unattended trades, so we’re training people to run shops. I hope that at some point we can publish enough data to even train commodities traders among our users.

There are business implications of a secondary market. The player-to-player trading volume is several times larger than our direct sales to players. We estimate that US$0.5B in goods are exchanged between players of Habbo yearly, internationally. Items stay in active inventory even after an owner quits Habbo. If traffic growth slows down, then the world “fills up” with old abandoned items that people can use instead of buying new items. This means we need to do some design tricks to account for this.

Three ways to deal with this: 1) don’t allow trading. But then there’s no economy. No collectible value for items, makes items less interesting. We do use this in very selective cases. 2) Make items wear out after use. Essentially renting items to players, destroys trade value. We use this a bit, we basically rent clothes to players. 3) For most of our items they are durable and ageless. We created a system that gets tiny fees out of the secondary trading. It could be a cost on a for-sale notice on the marketplace, could be a comission for secure trading. We take 1% of the value out of the system on every trade, and also manage inflation which is the really important bit. Now there’s friction moving items from account to account so we stop the “filling up” that happens.

We’ve found that your high-spending customers spend the most amount of time in game by far. A very small percentage of your player base does most of EVERYTHING in your game, not just spending but any activity you look at. Again, this is why averages are not good to look at.

Conclusions

If you’re doing big changes on your tech base, do parallel deployment and iterate.

If you’re doing a service model game, focus on conversion/retention/monetization.

If you have a secondary market in the system, try to model it and understand the economics of who your big spenders are. Look for emergent behavior you didn’t think of when you designed the system. Invest in analysis resources!

Q: Is there a correlation between number of friends and amount of money spent?

A: Not a strong correlation, but there is an interesting correlation between number of friends and a person’s influence on what their friends purchase.

The LOGIN Conference is consistently one of my favorite conferences of the year. It’s held in Seattle each May and I’ve been speaking at it every year since its inception in 2007. It’s an online-focused conference — it started out as mostly an MMO conference but it now encompasses social, mobile, and browser games as well. I enjoy LOGIN so much that last summer I accepted an invitation to be on their Advisory Board.

And in the interest of disclosure, in addition to being an Advisor for LOGIN, we’re running a friendly contest to see which Advisor member can make the most referrals (I get an iPad if I win). Hence this post. If you want to attend LOGIN, I encourage you to:

use my discount code
KAZE001955
for $100 off registration

So as a good Advisor, this is where I tell you why LOGIN is the best show of its kind.

1. Great business environment. Because of the scope and size of the show (a relatively narrow topic with about 400 people present) it is very easy to get business done here. The attendees tend to be mid-to-high-level people at their companies and many people have the authorization to make business decisions. In fact, something like 75% of my clients in the last three years have been people I met at LOGIN!
2. World-class content. LOGIN features some of the best talks I’ve ever attended. A few that come to mind: in ’08 Todd Northcutt of GameSpy gave a fantastic talk titled “7 Cool Things You Can Do With Buddy Lists” (slides at the link), and Joe Ludwig’s augmented reality overview (slides and audio at the link, thanks Joe!) was the highlight of the 2009 show for me. And 2010 has some great content lined up, including Brenda Brathwaite discussing the move from AAA to social game development, and Corvus Elrod’s indie all-star panel discussing the obstacles that indies face in the online space.
3. Lunch keynote format. I usually hate keynotes. They’re often little more than veiled advertisements. And even when they’re good (like sci fi author Charlie Stross’ vision of the future at LOGIN 2009) I also hate being forced to see something. Fortunately, LOGIN does the lunch keynote: you get to eat lunch in a big room at round tables while watching the keynote. This does several things: it gives me something to focus on if I’m not interested in the keynote, it makes everyone have lunch at the same place and time, it forces people to sit together in a more social environment than a lecture hall, and it gives those people something to talk about (the keynote itself). It’s a nice way to format a keynote but even more importantly it’s a great networking opportunity!
4. Amazing food. I know the organizers of LOGIN are tired of hearing people talk about the food, but holy cow do they offer great food to the attendees! Far and away it’s the best I eat at any conference. Lunch is always amazing and even the snacks between sessions are wonderful. (I just about fell over when I saw them roll out the ice cream bar one year during the afternoon break.)
5. Beautiful setting. Seattle in May is about as good as it gets. It’s not rainy or overcast, it’s pretty much gorgeous outside the whole time!

So, yeah. You should attend LOGIN, especially if you’re an online game developer. Doubly so if you’re looking for clients! And let me know if you’re coming, we should hang out.

]]> http://tinysubversions.com/2010/04/why-you-should-attend-the-login-conference/feed/ 3 http://tinysubversions.com/2010/03/casey-monroe-on-gdc/ http://tinysubversions.com/2010/03/casey-monroe-on-gdc/#comments Sat, 20 Mar 2010 21:11:51 +0000 Darius Kazemi http://tinysubversions.com/?p=1518

Casey Monroe wrote up a nice overview of GDC, themed around the difference between T-shirt and sport coat types. In particular, he talks about a dinner we had which was kind of a sequel to last year’s dinner that I recorded on video. I met Casey’s brother Will at last year’s dinner, and this year Will brought along Casey too. In Casey’s words:

One night, something strange happens.  My brother and I are attending a dinner at a nearby wine bar, with some (old and new) friends in the game industry.  We sit and talk with Adam, an old bandmate who now does iPhone/iPad development.  I finally meet Daniel Cook of Lost Garden, and Darius Kazemi of Tiny Subversions, as well as five or six other designers, developers and game industry professionals sitting around the table, and the conversation is…different.  We’re not networking—we’re just talking.  We’re talking about our ideas, our love of the art form, our belief in the potential of the future of gaming, the insight that games offer into the human condition.  We’re just sitting and talking about games—and it feels good.  After days and days of making contacts, suddenly I am making friends.  It feels relaxed.  It feels natural.  It feels, in fact, just like changing out of my sport coat and back into a t-shirt.

I think he does a good job of capturing the feeling of what I love about GDC. I think that dinner lasted about three hours and I missed a bunch of parties as a result, but it was worth it.

I would take exception to one thing he says: making friends is networking. In fact, it’s the most effective kind.

Speaking of T-shirts — Matthew Wasteland and I have a few new shirts available at the store. I’ll post about them soon, but you can check them out here.

I got some great comments on my last post about business cards, and I’m going to highlight them here in case you missed them. But first I’m going to subject you to a little rant that I’ve given at conferences.

Corporate vs. Personal Cards

There are two kinds of business cards. There’s the card that represents you as the employee of a company, and there’s the card that represents you as a person. The key difference is that the company card puts the identity of the company over your own identity. Here’s an example of a corporate business card:

Notice how much space the logo takes up, and how small the font is for the person's name.

The logo and the address of the company take up most of the non-white space on the card.

Now don’t get me wrong: this is a fine corporate business card. It does exactly what it’s supposed to do. But it sets a bad example for personal business cards. I often see students (and even professionals!) emulate the design of corporate cards on their personal cards, sometimes going so far as to design a logo and make that the biggest thing on their card.

Your personal card should reflect who you are. I don’t mean that in the warm and fuzzy sense: it literally needs to tell me who you are so I can remember you. This means your name should be the biggest thing on the card by far.

Here’s an example of a great personal business card.

It's memorable because it's funny.

The card above is from an excellent article about business cards for musicians (although the advice applies to anyone). There’s nothing fancy about it in terms of card stock or font or color. It’s completely unremarkable except that it’s well-designed and memorable. The guy’s name is the biggest single information band on the card, and right under that it tells me what he does. There’s contact information below, and then in the corners there are some tongue-in-cheek descriptors of the guy’s services. (This is a great technique for someone to use — provided you remember that this card has a context. Specifically this is a card that will be given to other musicians. “Bad attitude” and “always late” are things that will make a fellow musician laugh. If this same musician were trying to get booked to play weddings, the joke would completely backfire.)

Anyway, remember: you are not an anonymous drone. Your business card needs to reflect that.

Comment Roundup

I got some great comments on my business card post.

While I recommended Scribus for those designing their own business cards, Noah Kantrowitz pointed out Businesscardland, a website where you can design a card from templates for free. It’ll even render a PDF that you can take to a print shop.

Jeromie Walters asked whether he should put a head shot of himself on his card. Brenda Brathwaite once told me that she tried putting her head shot on her card, and the only thing it did was make her feel like a real estate agent! Bottom line: don’t put a photo of yourself on your card. Consider a cartoon or an abstraction of your face. It’s what I do.

Ian Schreiber talked about the backpack he always brings to GDC.

As for running out during the day, personally I always carry my backpack with me. In it I have:
* All of my cards, so I can “restock” in a few seconds rather than having to head back to the hotel;
* Notebooks and pens, both to take notes myself and to offer to the people sitting next to me if they need it;
* Laptop computer and power cord, also for taking notes and in case anyone needs one to show a software demo or something;
* Emergency snacks and drinks, so that I’m never in a session where I’m distracted from a brilliant speaker by something mundane like bodily hunger signals (and likewise, headache medicine in case my skull picks a bad time to vasodilate);
* Board games, because I want people to think of me when they’re trying to find the fun 
* Any swag or random stuff I pick up along the way.

My shoulders are usually sore by the end of the week from walking around like a pack mule, but the convenience of having everything I need in reach at a moment’s notice is too great to give up.

Alex Forsythe asked how a student should communicate their area of expertise on their business card, since a student can’t really claim to be a level designer if they haven’t really designed many levels. I responded that “Aspring Level Designer” or “Student of Level Design” would be fine. Ian Schreiber gave the following response:

I’ve seen some pretty clever student business cards. Darius wrote his tagline “a generally useful guy to know” which, aside from being accurate, was more memorable than “aspiring game programmer/designer” or whatever.

I saw one student card, I still have it somewhere, that introduced the person as “the mythical female programmer”… again, more memorable than “aspiring.”

I suppose you need to be careful with this, though. It’s easy to cross the line from “memorable” to “cliche” or “cheesy”. So maybe that kind of thing is best for your second year at GDC, after you’ve already seen what other cards are out there.

As always, thanks to everyone who commented for their good questions and helpful answers.

Update, June 2010: Erin Hoffman has additional advice:

Ian’s point is a great one. It’s the one thing I would add to Darius’s advice… I suspect for first-timers the words on the card are actually more important than the card’s visual design, though it’s certainly possible to excessively advertise non-pro status by having a business card that looks out-of-date, is too busy, or has poorly printed graphics. The worst one I saw from a student was glossy and black with a grainy graphic of something on it — I’m not even sure what. A classy but plain non-glossy white card with Times New Roman on it is much safer.

When I was a student I had “Creativity for Hire” on my card, which got comments from most of the people I handed it to. I didn’t really even expect that reaction — I just had an assortment of things I wanted to do and needed a broad phrase that would capture them. And I didn’t have that card very long. :) If I had to do it over again I would stick to the same — keep it simple, put your web address on the card, and aim your thought energy at a memorable (unique) phrase that encapsulates what you have to offer

Someone recently asked me, “How many business cards should I take to the Game Developers Conference?”

The short answer: 300, but you should bring up to 500 if you can afford it.

Longer answer: the one time I ran of out business cards at GDC was my first year. I brought 200 and ran out by my fifth day. You should assume that you’ll probably give out 50 cards a day at GDC, especially if it’s your first year attending. (When you come back a second year you don’t have to give a card to people you already know, so your first year will probably be the most demanding in terms of card usage.) I think 50 a day is about average, but it’s very possible to give out 100 cards in a day.

So if you’re going to be there for five days, bring at least 300. If you’re going to be there for three days, bring at least 200. Honestly though, you might as well bring 500 cards. If you have a few hundred left over, hey, use them at the next networking event you attend!

Tips for Printing and Designing Cards

Vistaprint is probably the best-regarded online business card service (they serve both the US and EU). I tend to use Staples to print my cards by going to the store and placing an order in person — of the national brick-and-mortar chains that print business cards, I think their quality-to-price ratio is the best. As I’ve said before, you should print your card on non-glossy stock, as it’s hard to take notes on a glossy card.

You can design your business card in any software you’re comfortable with as long as you can create a PDF file in the correct dimensions. If you’d like to design your own business cards and don’t know where to begin, I recommend Scribus. The dimensions for an American business card are 2″ tall by 3.5″ wide, and you want to leave at least 0.25″ margins for printer variation. For some nice fonts you might want to use, check out this article and this website.

Update: there’s a followup post I’ve written.

Here are my raw session notes for RJ Mical’s Game Forum Germany 2010 talk, “The Intertwined Nature of Game Hardware and Game Design.” This is my best attempt at a transcription of what he said. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine and mine alone. My comments are in square brackets.

—

RJ Mical

Today I’m going to talk about the history of the gaming systems that have been out there. In the course of writing this I’ve learned a lot of things I didn’t know about the history of our industry. Then I’m going to relate various genres that are out there to the hardware that spawned them. Then I’m going to show how the demands of devs ended up driving the development of hardware. Last I’m going to attempt to look into the future of hardware and design.

But first, a story. I had an odd experience recently. I was playing Motorstorm on the PS3, a high action driving game. Then shortly after I got into my car and drove down the highway and got the same feeling, like I could run over and smash things! It was funny for a second, until I thought, “I wonder if I crash will I have an extra life?” It helped me remember my passion for how real and engaging games can be and why I do this.

So where did we start? The first games were on oscilloscopes. The first patent for a computer game goes back to 1948 for a missile combat simulation game made by some engineers. But the first real playable game was Tennis for Two in 1958, ran on an o-scope and entertained people visiting the lab. [Willy Higgenbotham, see here for bio and here for some criticism]

Mainframe computers at univiersities hosted hobbyist games. When I was at Univ of Illinois I got involved in this. The IBM computers supported something called Plato which ran a bunch of interesting games, and started the process for me of looking into myself to figure out why I found games so compelling.

Soon after we had early arcade systems, Pong etc, which then led to the development of game consoles and full and proper arcade systems (platforms, not dedicated hardware).

The idea of game systems caught on with the public so well that there was a demand for people to have consoles in their own homes. There’s been a history of rising and falling success of home console systems, where the market gets filled with junk and crashes. 1977 and 1984, I got pinched in both of those crashes! The 84 crash was almost devastating for the Amiga computer that we were developing at the time. When the bottom felt out we changed course and turned the Amiga from a game platform to a full computer.

While there were the C64, the Apple II, the Atari ST — the IBM PC was out there but it was not very good for games at first (text only, then modest graphics, and very expensive). Turns out that the PC helped usher in home game consoles more than any other machine — a lot of businessmen would say “I need a PC for the home for work” and then just play games on the IBM PC instead!

In the 1980s we started seeing the early handheld games. Nintendo and Tiger LCD games [man I LOVED Tiger games]. In the middle of the 80s, Mattel brought out Microvision, which was remarkable because it was a simple cartridge-based handheld system, which became the norm for portable systems. At the time this was radical and we were puzzled thinking about what it meant.

But in 84 the industry crashed, and out of the ashes, the first real serious game consoles arose. The NES was the most popular one of all — [speaker interrupts himself for anecdote :) ]

The first time I saw an Intellivision I played it at my friend’s house. The pixels were about the size of my head, but they managed to create the most amazing games. I went home after playing Intellivision games and got out graph paper and started drawing how I would make an airplane or whatever else. As a student today, it’s hard to imagine when you look at a console that it has the kind of capabilities that they do these days. But it was just as engaging in the 70s. It is true that hardware is so superior today that its performance is magnificent, but none of that stuff finally matters because what really matters is gameplay. All the fancy graphics and audio in the world isn’t going to make a core game better. I recommend that everyon get out a piece of graph paper and draw a tank in 64 pixels!

I believe the NES won based on the price tag: low cost and simplicity made it attractive to people.

In the 90s there was a big roar of handhelds that came in. I did an informal survey of my game industry friends, and 100% of them had played Tetris on the Nintendo Game Boy! It was such an important moment seeing such a simple system and such a simple game like Tetris be the greatest thing ever. I still hang on to these simple examples that bigger does not necessarily make better. Mid 90s started seeing simple games on mobile phones. Finally the 3D consoles came, the PlayStation, the N64. This gave us a taste of the amazing performance we would see in the future. I think it was the PS and the N64 that drove developers to start engaging with hardware companies to give us what we wanted to see! I’m leaving out a lot of systems here and I am going to hurt your feelings when I don’t mention your favorite system, sorry. But the real PS vs N64 battle of cartridge vs CD-ROM; kind of like DVD vs Blu-Ray today. Blu Ray has 27 GB of storage and you know that devs will expand to fill 27GB! We used to laugh that games would cost $1M to develop eventually. Nowadays that’s just the animation cost of a single game! $100M to develop a game is no longer outrageous. Sigh. I’m glad I’m not an accountant.

If I were a gambling man I would have put my money on the N64 in the beginning because I would say it would have kept development costs down. In doing my research and talking to friends in the industry, what helped the playstation be successful was that it could support richer content even though it was tough to develop for. I LOVE the N64. I gave so many hours to GoldenEye.

Then in the late 90s, the PC struck back! Where it had been behind the consoles, it started to catch up with advances in hardware to be a contender. Consumers wanted our PCs to be able to have better capabilities so the PC manufacturers encouraged graphics card companies to step it up. That turned around to getting the game companies to develop games to use that hardware, of course we had to upgrade our new pcs, and that was a snowball effect that turned the PC into a major player in the modern game industry. PCs always had the ability for players to customize their content, mod the games, and host your own games with levels you created yourself, sharing with others. It created a sense of community that consoles did not have in the 90s.

This eventually drove consoles to have these capabilities.

In the 2000s, we see more hand helds: GBA, DS, N-Gage (which was never meant to being a gaming system!). And finally the big consoles started using the internet: PS2, Xbox. And don’t forget the PC: it’s still a major contender these years.

In the present, we have more handhelds: DS, PSP, Apple iPhone/iPod. Big horsepower machines make it very difficult to tell the difference between console and PC. I don’t think there’s going to be much of a difference anymore.

When we worked on the 3DO, one of the guiding principles that Trip Hawkins had was that when he was at EA, when you had to develop for the PC you had to develop for so many PC configurations. Very expensive and difficult. What he envisioned was that everyone would buy a 3DO and that would be it. Sony had a different idea and brought out the PS, of course. But at least now with Xbox 360 and PS3, there aren’t a lot of variations anymore. Of course don’t forget Nintendo. I found out to my surprise that the in the beginning when the Wii came out the analysts thought it was dead in the water! Of course the Wii has sales numbers that the 360 and PS3 combined don’t reach. But Nintendo keeps bringing out these little one-cylinder cars that chug down the road and their pockets bulge with money! THe reason it’s successful is because that’s what consumers want: is it because Wii is good enough for most consumers, or is it because of the price point?

Now I get into the real meat of my presentation. I spent a lot of time thinking about the question of why we play games. Perhaps we have an innate desire to organize and groom — Tetris, Populous, SimCity. But I don’t think that’s it. Maybe nurturing? Nah, that’s baloney. We don’t play games to nurture, we play games to make war! Hunting, gathering, fighting. I found out something interesting. Cubs or puppies play fight with each other, which for me is an example of what playing is really about. I was going to use that example and found out that the only animals that have baby animals that play fight are the predators. There’s something there — it’s part of our instinct to play, to learn, to hone those skills. But I think there’s also an element of story-telling. I do love telling stories. And there’s a socializing element as well. We want to eat and we want to be loved. Games taking advantage of the net to allow for communities has become a really important part of it. EverQuest was remarkable for the large number of female players. I think it might have been due to the socializing content, just being able to hang out with your friends. [Hmmm, not really buying much of this. I wonder if he's read some of the theory about this stuff. Talking to him afterward he did say that he maybe pushed the war aspect a little too much!]

I think our need to socialize is going to really influence the direction of hardware in the future. [Now THAT I agree with!]

I was a big board game player when I was young. SSI, air combat games, big boards and tiny pieces of cardboard, I played those for hours. My kids play board games once a year: on FATHER’S DAY! That being my one wish. But why is that? Why are video games more attractive to kids today? It’s interactive, but there’s also no setup, no need to learn the rules ahead of time. You don’t think, you just do, don’t get bogged down in details. The other side of it is, when we played board games we had to use our imagination. We’ve lost the element of pretend play. Is that a bad thing? I’m worried that it is. We’re taking that away from kids, much in the same way kids would rather watch a movie than read the book. I don’t want to sound like an old worried guy — but in fact I am!

The first games that came into existence were war, sports, then war. Missile War (1948), Tennis for Two (1958), Space War (1961). No surprise there. Interesting thing about Space War is that Nolan Bushnell took Space War and turned it into a collossal flop of an arcade game, nobody bought it, they’d already formed the company so they made Pong as a simple alternative. Space War sold 1500 units.

Early computer games. Airflight on Plato (1974). Played on an IBM mainframe. It was originally just a flight sim, but soon converted into a shooter. “This is great, but give us some guns!” I was there and I was one of the guys begging for guns!

Text adventures, D&D-like games, text-based Star Trek games on teletype, etc.

All these early games were just for hobbyists and nerds. The fact that it was clumsy and crude didn’t matter to us, we were having so much fun it was okay. In the beginning it was a rare talent to create these games and get the time on the mainframe! Playing games was technically against the rules of mainframe usage at University.

Once PC came out, anyone could be a programmer to make games. You could get games printed in hex in magazines and transcribe them into your own computer! Distributing games by putting discs in plastic bags, walking into stores, and asking them to sell your game.

But although anyone could program, pretty much nobody was a good designer! So many early games were just bad. There was such a glut of bad games that everyone lost interest and the market died out pretty badly for PC games in the late 70s.

Finally the consoles started roling out in the 70s. Still war and sports and board game reproductions. But they started giving us the opportunity for unusual, different games. I think of it as a golden age as we went into the 80s, when it felt like anyone could think about it hard enough and come up with a brand new genre that nobody had done before! We saw more than a dozen unique genres of game come into existence. Now the storytelling part could kick in. Simple storytelling, even Donkey Kong counts. At one extreme there’s Dragon’s Lair. But what had started out as text adventures and maze-solving puzzles turned into a genre like Pac Man, where you’re trying to figure your way through a maze of obstacles or puzzles in real-time. The platform jumper arrived in the 80s as well!

Sigh, I look at these titles and it makes me so happy. Mario and Zelda: kill bad guys, get around barriers, solve puzzles, collect treasure. Simple and massively enjoyable. Racing games became popular in the 80s. Earlier arcade racing was not very satisfying. Now we get into Road Rash, etc. The racing game took off as a genre.

Also 80s: action puzzle games. Dig Dug, Lode Runner, Jack Attack (Atari 400). Rhythm games began: Dance Aerobics for NES, had to buy peripheral. The start of realizing that you could make additional peripherals to make games more engaging. On the Amiga we had a device called a joyboard, which is a joystick you stand on and tilt! [ie Wii Balance Board] Rhythm today is not only DDR but also Guitar Hero and Rock Band, etc.

What 80s games were not: they were not 3D. Some modest attempts: Battlezone, F-18 Interceptor on the Amiga. Simple flat-shaded triangles. 18 triangles for the jet, 20 triangles for the aircraft carrier.

80s games were not online yet. Not social. Early attempts were mostly text-based (MUDs). Didn’t really occur to the industry until consumers requested it.

The 90s became the consumers’ “give us what we want” decade. We want more realism, better graphics, online multiplayer, portable, etc.

3D hardware was the biggest advance in the 90s. Manufacturers made better hardware for both console and PC. The advanced hardware did spawn a few new genres, but there wasn’t the same explosion as in the 80s. By the 90s it’s died down, and in the 00s it’s been even more sparse for new types of games. 90s brought us the first person shooter. Castle Wolfenstein with textured surfaces. Real-time strategy games, C&C-like games. Finally enough horsepower to take the load off the CPU for graphics so you could use the CPU for real-time game logic.

90s: more detail. We demanded more realism so we switched to CD-ROM for richer media. But there’s a problem with more realism. There’s a real hard limit to adding realism to games. It’s like trying to reach the speed of light: the closer you get the harder it will be to reach that last inch. More interestingly, the closer we get to real, the worse experience consumers are gonna have. [Uncanny valley] The CD-ROM + more memory gave us stuff like Myst. Design-wise it was just a text adventure type thing but with extremely lush graphics.

90s: give us the internet! Give us love, friendship, community! Unreal/Quake created online gaming in a very real way, created whole communities.

90s: portable HW. Surprised that it took off as early as it did, also surprise that it kind of slowed down as soon as it did.

2000s. Now consoles are almost as powerful as PCs. What new genres have come out in the last 10 years? [Is genre innovation really a sign of health? Do we have new genres in film every decade?] Well, we have sing-along games like SingStar, play-along games like Guitar Hero. The Sims took off in the ’00s too.

What about the future?

Alternate controllers will be big. Been around forever: light guns, foot pads for dancing, instrument controllers, motion controllers, microphones, even newfangled things like keyboards and mice you can add to a console :). Possible future tech: augmented vision, haptics. There will be an abundance of controllers now that they’ve proven successful.

In terms of realism, 3D displays are coming at 400Hz or better. They’re pretty astonishing even today with their crude tech: cutting a 60 Hz game into two stereoscopic 30 Hz signals. We’ve pretty much reached CPU speed saturation so there will be lots of multicore processing going on which will affect the way we program games. Students take note: learn good multicore programming, you will have an edge in getting a job. I believe we’ll have better graphics, higher density color. Experts say we can’t perceive better than 24-bit color, but I disagree. We’re going to see more cinematic experiences as part of our entertainment. There will always be room for Tetris, but stuff like Uncharted 2 sets a new standard of excellence. I had the pleasure a week ago of seeing Heavy Rain in its current state, and it is a game that doesn’t give you a fixed storyline, and I really felt like I was living inside a movie. I got badly beaten up at the beginning of the game, and was told that if I kept playing through, those bruises and the scar I got would last with me through the game.

[Okay, I'm stopping here, the rest of the future predictions are pretty much bigger/better/faster with some interesting anecdotes that I'm a little too tired to transcribe. Bigger environments, more nonlinear stories. A lot of the stuff he's talking about like it hasn't been done but a lot of it was pretty much already there in Deus Ex (2000), GTA 3 (2001) just with more power behind them. More merging of technology. Movies/TV/music on game consoles, VOIP, online stores, ad integration. It's sort of interesting to hear these predictions from someone fairly entrenched in the traditional games biz, where the near-future recommendations remind me of things that we were already innovating on 10 years ago.]

Will portables replace consoles? I hope not. I do want big complex games.

Will consoles replace PC? We’re almost there. I don’t think they will but I woudln’t mind.

Someday will I have a jack wired into my nervous system allowing my body to wither away from inactivity while entertainment is projected directly into my brain? MAN I HOPE SO! [Laughter] Seriously I do think we’ll eventually get there, and it will be creepy, creepy day.

Q&A Session

Q: What do you think of services like OnLive and Gaikai that are trying to make consoles obsolete?

A: Oh, I forgot about the cloud computing systems! Instead of buying a console you buy a box that plugs into a remote server farm that delivers the experience to you. In theory they keep their hardware updated so you don’t have to. I think it’s brilliant, but I’m not convinced that it’s actually going to work. In both cases the demos I’ve seen were in a pretty controlled environment where the servers were a few short miles away from the console. And it was over a dedicated ethernet line. There wasn’t any latency, and it felt great, but I can’t imagine it working in a real internet environment. I do wish them all well!

Q: You also didn’t mention new motion controllers from Sony/MS. What about new genres for these controllers? Will there be a revival of the RTS due to this, or new genres?

A: [RJ works for SCE Worldwide Studios so it's touchy for him to discuss this stuff right now, so he's kind of dodging the question.] Wii has proved motion controllers work. I’ve seen at least one very good PS3 sixaxis bowling game. There’s another game under development where you can use two controllers to do a bow and arrow effect [Wii Sports Resort, Twilight Princess did this, yeah?]. But I don’t remember what Sony has said so I don’t know what I can say or not. Some of the tech I’ve developed for Sony at Worldwide Studios gets put into the SDK for the PS3. We’re a separate org under the Sony label so I get to see 3rd party games in development. Seen some interesting sports combat games, some interactive motion controller 3D puzzle games, so there are some new genres. Some existing genres are being reworked to use motion controller. FPS can work really well.

Q: [This guy seems to be asking a question founded on wrong data. Although he's pointing out that major consoles are basically graphically inferior PCs with horrible copy protection, which is kind of an amusing viewpoint!]

A: I think you’re right that the line between PC and console is going to shrink, and I personally don’t care about who “owns” the living room. You’re right that you simply can’t make hardware for less expense than they’re making it now. We’re going to see multicore GPUs in addition to multicore CPUs, but the price will keep going up while PC prices will keep going down. I think it would be a good idea if I didn’t have to make a disctinction between my PC and my console. The other part that you didn’t mention in your question which is significant is that we’re running up against the heat limits of advanced computing components. I saw a display in the lobby of the sony building in japan, and they have a display where they break apart the PS3 and show you the parts. The most astonishing thing you learn is that fully half the inside of a PS3 is for heat dissipation. Heat sinks, fans, etc. That is going to be a huge limiting factor for the next generation, especially from a price perspective.

Q: Do game designers or consumers have more influence over the direction of the industry?

A: It used to be just the game designer, but from my little experiences at Williams Electronics where I was involved in game design, it was not a question of “what are people looking for” but “what can we dream up that people will like.” Now game designers are highly conscious of what consumers want. I know at least two teams that playtest their game concepts before they even start developing a game as part of the approval process. We’re just going to see more of that. But I don’t want to ever take away the small shops and their innovation. You get Fl0w and Fl0wer from ThatGameCompany which are amazing and are built more with the old philosophy of what players might find fun, not what players are asking for. And they are great games!

Q: [This isn't really a question. I hate this shit. Please do not espouse your philosophies in fake-question form.]

A: Guitar Hero is a fresh take on the rhythm genre, Max Payne was a fresh take on the FPS, so even though you might be working in an existing genre there are still places to innovate.

Q: You’ve talked about the difficulties of dealing with cooling more powerful hardware, and it’s hard to make money on selling the hardware. What does that say for the PS4 and its release? Is it going to be a later release so you can get more money out of the PS3 for the next 5 years? [The emcee is asking this question. This is a question that RJ cannot answer. What the hell.]

A: I don’t know exactly what the engineers are working on, but I do know they’re always inventing new stuff. I do know that I personally am hoping that whatever decision Sony makes is a decision that is way out in the future in terms of schedule because it’s just now that devs are getting comfortable with the current generation of hardware!

I’m giving a talk at Game Forum Germany (English translation, which for some reason breaks the page formatting) on January 29th, titled “Using Data to Argue Effectively in the Workplace.”

This session covers strategies for using empirical data from player behavior as a political tool in the workplace. Player data can be used to end arguments, or it can be used to refocus arguments on something worth discussing (i.e., the data itself). Developers have data they don´t even realize is useful; they can use that data to make convincing arguments and there is an effective way to make those arguments.

The first half of this talk will discuss different types of data that exist that developers may not even be aware they have at their disposal. The second half of the talk will cover practical tips gleaned from the long history of rhetorical studies, reinforced with personal experience using such rhetorical strategies in the workplace. After laying down the basics of presenting a persuasive argument, the rest of the talk will demonstrate how to use Stephen Toulmin´s model of argumentation to sidestep time-wasting theoretical arguments and craft clear, concise, persuasive arguments quickly and easily.

I’m excited because this is something I’ve wanted to talk about for quite some time. The most important part of doing gameplay metrics is not the actual collection of the data. While that is important, data does not exist in a vacuum — it’s only worth something if you know how to use it.

This is also exciting to me because it’s my first time giving a talk at a conference outside of North America!

I’m giving a talk at LOGIN in Seattle this week, called It’s 10pm: Do You Know Where Your Players Are?

In 2008, Orbus Gameworks carried out a study for IGN Entertainment where they investigated the metrics that IGN has collected on player behavior over hundreds of thousands of player hours in games such as Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and Unreal Tournament 3. This talk will cover some of their more interesting findings, and also go over best practices for gameplay metrics collection.

It’s Tuesday morning at 10:30am. Come heckle!