These are my notes from Scott Jon Siegel’s GDC session, “City of Wonder: Postmortem.” Any mistakes or misinterpretations are my own.

Feels odd to give a post mortem on a social game, especially one that’s still live and active. This is more of a post mortem of the dev process leading up to the launch of the game.

CoW is an entry in the city builder genre of social game, modeled after Playdom’s own Social City. Released Aug 2010, 6 months of development time by Studio 24 in Mountain View and Bangalore. It has monetized very well, exceeding expectations. 10.7M MAU peak. Studio 24 also did Tiki Farm (6.4M MAU). Also did Fish Friends (1.2M MAU), shut down earlier this year.

Like a lot of Playdom projects, started with a pitch. The game as originally conceived was about expanding the city across military/economic/cultural power, guiding technology, and interacting with NPCs. That was a little grand. We were building off the Social City engine. We wanted to incorporate PVP and maximize on monetization through customization and PVP.

Social City helped establish Playdom’s post-RPG game titles, but we wanted to exceed the success of Social City. The problem is that we didn’t know if the CoW direction was good. I considered the pitch to be a crazy idea when I first heard it. I had very little interest in working on it. Social City defined a genre, and many other city games popped up with high-quality competitors. The market was saturated on city games.

Studio 24 learned about market saturation the hard way. Fish Friends launched to a saturated market of aquarium games and did not do well.

The concept itself was also pretty niche; not widely accessible and the original pitch sounded like a pretty hardcore game. We knew from Social City that city builders appeal to a nice, even, wide demographic. If the average gamer is a 43 y/o woman, I like to ask myself: would Nicole Kidman play our game?

So why did we go ahead anyway?

Well, the first reason was that we were combining the PVP of text RPGs and isometric builder games. In RPGs people buy stat boosters for player on player combat, but they don’t appear in game so they only really appeal to PVP players. In builders, people buy stuff to customize, but it’s only for the kinds of people who want to make pretty cities, the rest of the people stick with the free content. So CoW was a chance to do both of those things in one game.

The second reason was why I got involved in the first place: we can casualize the more “hardcore” elements. It meant making PVP almost optional, and that complex features scale with the player’s own interest.

The key mechanic of Social City was its city building loop. For SC, three metrics matter to the player: currency, population, and happiness. Currency increases population, but to expand you need more happiness which means you buy leisure buildings, which lets you increase population, etc. The core is a virtuous cycle.

We took the base mechanics of SC and made one tiny change: instead of gating the unlocking of new buildings by experience points alone, we added a technology tree that you needed to research.

Research as a mechanic was not arbitrary based on the source material. Tech tree lets us create additional long arcs for the player, and a path of progress for the player. Branching paths allow players to create diversity in their city layouts. The problem is that tech trees are very complex, usually. Balancing and tuning our tech tree was AESTHETICALLY driven just as much as it was SYSTEMICALLY driven. We designed the tech tree with different varieties of buildings in mind, with fewer options available at a given time, and and untangling the web of dependencies.

Still, even a simple tech tree visualization could incude panic in a player. We made the tree a power user feature, and we made the tech tree look like a standard purchasing UI. And if that was too much, we created advisor NPCs who would recommend specific research with some flavor text. For players who wanted depth, they could run research directly from the tech tree if they wanted to.

Tech tree gives a sense of progression to the player. It goes left to right, and you see the evolution of your tech. We also added events that trumpet the oncoming of the Bronze Age, etc etc. The thing is, many players didn’t understand that the game was about progressing through time. Most people thought it was permanently set in the stone age, so adding the events was an important way to get people clued into the fact that this game is about time progression. Even our loading screen shows the progression of time.

The most important thing we did was a “back of the box screen” that pops up and tells you what the game is about, complete with a slide show that shows the city evolving through the ages. But that animation wouldn’t work if the buildings themselves didn’t change. We drew inspiration from Children of the Nile (PC game by Tilted Mill) and how it changed the flavor of buildings between the ages. We kept our post-launch buildings adhering to the same flavor guidelines.

About the name: we ran tests to see what names got clicked on more in advertising scenarios. We were called Social Civ internally for a long time, but the clear winner was always City of Wonder. It’s not rhyming, it’s not a pun, it’s not clever… turns out there’s a Rihanna song, Disturbia, that says “city of wonder” in the lyrics. My new theory: name your game after a Rihanna song.

Embassies were way to deepen the relationship between neighbors in social games. We wanted adding friends to not just be a one-time bonus, but something that is a long-term benefit.

PVP expeditions: we have a second major system in our PVP game. There’s cultural, trade, and military “attacks”. A player is aided by the buildings they had. We had to think about ways to convey to the player how different buildings affect PVP but there were a lot of variables so it had to be very communicative. We went through a huge number of iterations (about a dozen major ones) until we landed on our final version. We did a clear visual/audio distinctionbetween win and loss. Prior to the player attacking, the advisors chime in to casualize the expedition experience.

Legends system: we added these originally because we wanted consumable item boost. We found that tying boosts to historical figures helped add personality to our game and tie it history more closely. Some legends affect reasearch, population growth, etc. As we grew the game’s features, we added new legends.

I’ve had the privilege of being in the social game industry for a “long” time, about as long as it’s been an industry. CoW has been the best experience I’ve had in this industry. But no project is without its low points as well as high.

What went right: the decision to be casually focused. We had a very even gender split in the game (53/47 M/F in the first week). I think we democratized our game like Apple democratized the MP3 player with the iPod. Steve Jobs insisted it would be the flattest user experience possible, fewest button presses to find a song. We democratized by minimizing the number of clicks you need to access the core features. More complex features were kept optional.

Iteration went very well. For example, we iterated a lot on the starting configuration of the city, using a lot of A/B testing immediately after launch. We had a system of continuous integration which made iteration possible, instant deploy of new features. We don’t have to wait until the end of the day for QA to test. You should also always have a stable build available for people to play. We did a lot of scrubbing on the builds: every single day we’d sit down and critique the build. As time went on these meetings went from long (3 hours) to short (<1 hour) as the game got better and better. We also ticketed every single issue that came out of the build scrubbing.

The team was great too. We’re called Studio 24 because development occurs 24 hours a day between Bangalore and Mountain View. CoW was blessed with some of Playdom’s best resources.

Things still went wrong, of course.

Our legends system was not the huge win that I hoped it was. Because the characters were so engaging, we were asked by executives to double down on the feature. We wanted to expand legends into a baseball card style system: collect, trade, redeem your legends for exclusive objects. On paper it looked great. Unfortunately the collection feature was implemented last minute. It lacked the iteration we were able to give to the other core features, so collections were poorly balanced and difficult or impossible to complete at launch. And only counted a legend as collected once you’ve USED it rather than OBTAINED it, which just confused players. The feature also didn’t have the same UI polish time. Many players didn’t realize we had a collection system. Our most successful legends were ones that we offered at certain pinch points in the game and popped up in players’ faces. Obfuscating boosts with charm may have done more harm than good in the end!

Another feature that could have used more love was embassies. These were one of the last features we implemented, a side effect of putting off platform integration and virality into late in development. The feature was solid but there was a side effect that we could have predicted: embassytown. People with tons and tons of embassies cluttering their city because they were really great buildings from a systems perspective. The problem was widespread, especially for the people who really liked our game and were active players! We added bulk embassy buildings to solve this problem.

We iterated very heavily on the PVP interface, but even then things weren’t perfect. People didn’t like that the system puts very heavy preference on the culture system because the rewards keep you gated by cultural points. We did like the idea of players coming across the gate and having to build their city more, but if it makes users angry, it’s not ideal. Also, PVP awards don’t really scale, not with overall experience, nor with risk-taking on the player’s part. There’s also no narrative to PVP so more casual players may not be interested.

Lucky for us, social games are a live service. So the problems addressed here we’re able to improve. Our roadmap is robust. We’ve introduced a colonization aspect where players can explore an island and find new buildings. It allows us to grow the game without changing the core. It allows us to reevaluate the PVP with things like naval expeditions, etc. This is a way for us to iterate on a feature without upsetting players who might like it just the way it is.

These are my notes from Naomi Clark and Eric Zimmerman’s GDC session, “The Fantasy of Labor: How Social Games Create Meaning.” Any mistakes or misinterpretations are my own. This was my favorite session at GDC so far. Essentially they posit a third addition to the usual games of skill/chance dichotomy: games of labor, which reward persistence above skill or luck.

[I arrived at the talk a few minutes late. They were discussing the limitations of metrics and A/B test-driven design: you need to know the right questions to ask, and beware local maxima. I missed some, I'm sure.]

Empirically based A/B testing incorporates models of humans that are embedded into that methodology. One way of understanding design is that is an investigation of what it means to be human. As we design we model and react to ideas about what people are and how they behave. As we sculpt and create we don’t want to fall inlove too much with our creations like Pygmalion and lose sight.

When we talk about fun we mean engagement or motivation — in other words, desire. Neuroscience can tell you what part of the brain activates during excitement. Psychology can tell you about basic motivations. Economics can be useful though models are simplistic at times.

But we’re game designers, creating meaning and understanding within interactive systems. What does a player’s action mean within our game system and how do they understand that meaning? At the formal level we are desigining actions and their outcomes. Formal quantification is the level at which A/B testing happens. Formal models can give us mechanics, interactions, and tools to measure.

We have to put those interactions inside the model of a human being’s brain. We can apply theories from psychology about intrinsic/extrinsic rewards, reward schedules, etc. But psychology also tells us about the interaction between the formal and the inner world of the player. But also individual players do not exist within a vacuum. Even softer science doesn’t offer much to tell us about this; we need to start to analyze on the cultural level and become anthropologists of fun.

Games work on the level of desire because they frustrate desire. The friction between desire and what the game gives us is the heat that makes games good. In the gap between what we want and what we can’t have, that’s where desire springs up. It’s not something that simple A/B testing can explain.

Let’s talk about the desire for chocolate cake. Okay, humans want sugar because it gives us certain energy reserves so our taste buds evolved, etc. But that doesn’t explain excessive chocoholism. Maybe it came from a childhood experience, or the taboo of chocolate that causes the desire. There’s an idealized version of chocolate out there that causes a deep bottomless pit of desire for chocolate. Anyway, this goes way beyond biological needs.

Some players use Farmville to make pixelated art. But would this be more fun if it were a paint program? Part of the virtuosity is that it takes so much time to acquire the raw materials to paint with.

Bernard Suits has a term for the state of the mind of the player: the lusory attitude. Players take on obstacles just for the pleasure of taking them on. Suits uses the example of golf. I have a desire to put a ball in a cup in the ground. If I really had that desire, I would just put it in the cup. But instead we go really far away and hit the ball with a stick. It’s an interesting relationship to desire. [But I think golf players realize it's not "about" getting the ball in the cup, right?]

The idea of what desire means forms the context for these engines of desire that are games. So these cultural fantasies that lie outside of the game and the player that create meaning.

So now we talk about the cultural fantasy of labor. If we think about game mechanics,we may divide them by chance and skill. We propose a third category: games of labor. We’re not just doing this to talk about mechanics, but the cultural fantasies that power the mechanics.

Chance: what is the promise of chance? It’s a very ancient idea that you can submit yourself to supernatural forces from beyond; that fate will smile on you on by virtue of that you will be successful. You’ll be the lucky one, not all the other folks.

Skill, whether physical or intellectual, means that the game eliminates everything but the skill that is being tested. And players come in on a level field and have a contest with each other, and your own virtuosity results in your own success.

Obviously many games cross both of these categories, like Poker.

Labor: games that rely on labor mechanics are tied to the industrial fantasy: keep working hard and eventually you will earn your reward. Put in hours of work so you can get something out.

RPGs: the level grind is going through the motions of combat, laboring to level up.

Some designers see it as a pernicious trend. Dave Sirlin doesn’t find it fair that a skilled player who just started WoW can be defeated by an unskilled player with a lot time invested. The sim genre is driven by time investment; there’s skill involved in budgeting and strategy, and there’s a fast-forward that allows you to kill the time investment. In Facebook the game IS the time investment, with no fast forward button. The investment of time is attenuated, you don’t need to babysit the game, you can do other things and come back and collect your reward.

Back to games of chance. They tend to rely on extrinsic rewards to keep htings interesting: real money. But you also need to have money to put up. Skill games are also elitist: there are very few people at the top and there are few people who can compare to them.

The fantasy of labor is a completely level playing field; as opposed to real labor where there are class differences, unpredictable disasters, etc, that make it hard to even make a basic living.

Why is there a rise in games of labor? It is linked to contemporary culture. In industrialized 21st century cultures there are new lifestyles that are mirrored in these games of labor. We are taught to want and to work for the fantasy of labor. You don’t really have a desire to make a virtual farm until the game explains to you that that is what you want.

Games are defined by the edges of their worlds. In GTA you hit a wall at some point where you can’t do things. Labor games are defined by the moments where you have to stop and do real work, or when they make demands on you extrinsic to the game. The most common form of friction: come back later, you have nothing left to do. There’s no more work for you today, we can’t pay you overtime. There’s the rotten crops mechanic, and in the fantasy of labor this is what happens if you fail to show up for work on time. The need for help from your friends: you need people to click a button to make your labor driven enterprise a real success.

What about some alternative forms of friction? Some are classic, like chance. The fantasy of chance is different than of labor. The idea that you are going to be selected, the special one. Skill mastery is another thing that is left out of the fantasy of labor. Even the PVP mechanics you see in some FB games are less about skill and more about perserverance and optimism. But what else is there?

There are games that combine chance and skill, with a risk/reward scenario. How about rule-breaking and misbehavior? A hoax is a game where not everyone knows they’re playing. One of Frank Lantz’s favorite sayings is that a good game should make you feel like you’re cheating, that you’ve figured out how to slip your own strategy past the watchful eye of the system (which goes back to the chocoholic taboo). We can break the level playing field of the game. Give players asymmetric roles (SpyParty). Then there’s the idea of players as creators. Players make intensely interesting design decisions about their decks in magic. Not just user generated content but giving players the ability to be designers in a deep design space.

We want to dive deep into a particular mechanic: gifting. Gift giving is an ancient part of human culture. Gifts are expected as part of relationships and they come with expectations and pressures to reciprocate. Western culture gifting is one example. A potlatch of NW coast native Americans is competitive gift-giving to redistribute wealth. Honor goes to the people who can give away the most. This is not just about gifts themselve but it’s about status and special relationships and honor that you get through being a gift giver. Can we use these ideas to deepen gift giving?

These are not just alternate game mechanics. They are alternate fantasies and desires that we are offering players. The danger is that like a pickup artist, we instrumentalize our players and get results that impoverish what it is to be human. Both the pickup artist and the person being picked up are instrumentalized. It does not leave to long term relationships. (Some maxima are more local than others!)

When I think about cultural traditions like the potlatch and compare them to gifting works on FB where you can shotgun gifts to friends and you get hundreds of requests, clicking “yes yes yes” to give things to them. We are impoverishing something that could have more meaning and value and hooks to compel and engage our players.

We need to expand the vision of the way designers think of desire beyond the formal level. If we don’t do this, games will not become the predominant cultural form of the 21st century. We are architects of new social systems using technology that carry with them forms of social meaning that draw on things from the past. But as designers, what are we going to do with these systems? How can we make them more meaningful? Let’s not choose to be pickup artists. Let’s choose love.

I just got this success story from Jeff Edward Ball explaining to me some of the stuff he experienced at GDC after reading my networking guide. I think Jeff really took the right lessons from my articles. I particularly love his “don’t talk about video games unless someone brings them up” rule and the phrase “sweaty guy,” with which I was previously unfamiliar and will absolutely use in the future. From Jeff:

A short background on me is that I’m a pretty quiet, easily forgettable, analytical type who has a hard time initiating conversation, and I’m horrible at remembering names. I’m awesome at one-on-one conversation, but I suck at groups.

My first GDC was actually 2006 and I was still in college. That GDC was pretty much a total failure. I wasn’t prepared, and didn’t make any connections at all. I only had an expo pass, so I basically ran around the expo floor filling my bag with all the t-shirts I could find. I got a total of 19 that year, including 3 man-purses, and other various things, so at least I came out with my money’s worth. I remember being kinda shocked about the expo floor booth people, after finding the guts to talk to them, that they were actually stand-offish and bitter at my questions about hiring composers. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

My friend Will, who’s a composer at Lucasarts now, eventually recommended your blog. A lot of what you wrote was good general preparation for things, like social etiquette, how to think of people, how to REMEMBER people, how to present yourself, stuff like that. All of that was excellent and I learned a ton.

What affected me the most about the blog was a sort of pervasive attitude that I got from it as a whole, and I decided to make it an experiment. When I went to GDC that year, I prepared myself properly with good clothes, business cards, demo CDs, Resumes, and a rule that I made for myself: “don’t talk about anything video game related, unless someone asks me.” I went in and came out with 50 business cards by the end of the week, and most of these people are still pretty strong connections. I appealed to the composers I met with my violin skills, and that lead to working with some relatively big-name composers providing them live session stuff. That really helped me stand out, as well as telling stories of commercial fishing in Alaska, since I do that too. The rule I set up also helped me avoid something that I’ve heard called being a “sweaty guy.” Sweaty guys are the guys who are at GDC trying to get work, but they’re super star-struck and intimidated. So they walk up to talk to people who are chatting in groups, but they just stand there and get nervous and sweaty instead.

It’s so hard to point out any one situation where I took your advice, because it was kinda like everything I did was somehow influenced by the blog. I remember being at a party and randomly joining a conversation just because everyone in the group was named Jeff. By the end of it, I had made an impression at the very least, and I had all of their business cards. I remember DRAGGING myself out of bed to get breakfast at 7:30am, because there was a group of guys meeting for breakfast burritos. I remember showing a French CEO to Office Depot because he needed to make copies. Showed my friends how to get to a party using Google maps since nobody knew where to go. I made friends with people, and didn’t view anyone like a business connection. I didn’t change my persona to appeal to people I probably wouldn’t like in the first place. It didn’t matter who they were, I gave people the respect I would give myself, and I feel like I’m starting to become more integrated and part of the industry because of it.

And hey, if you need a composer, arranger, or violinist, you should check out Jeff’s professional work as well as his demo reel of original compositions. I like the arranging he did for Monkey Island 2: Special Edition.

So GDC is and always will be very important to me. It’s where I learned to be a game developer, at least in terms of learning about the culture of game devs (learning game development itself was a totally different journey).

GDC 2011 is GDC’s 25th year (at least if you count from the first meeting in Chris Crawford’s house), and I am delighted to report that they have named my friend Jason Scott as their Official Historian. He’s collecting stories, anecdotes, pictures, and video, and is looking for your contributions! I can’t think of a better person to do this. Send anything you have over to gdc25@gdconf.com. They’

I’ve already sent in the GDC 2003 nVidia Bus Incident, my random-ass GDC/San Jose psychogeography, and that one time I caught the fleeting magic of an amazing GDC dinner conversation on video.

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.

As I mentioned before I decided to once again make an entire game on a long flight. I invited other people attending GDC to do the same — whether or not they did, I guess I’m about to find out!

Anyway, B6 631 (named after the flight number) is a run-and-gun platformer. The game procedurally generates a level and you have to play through with the object of getting all the coins. As the coins are often pretty high up, this might involve being clever about using momentum from jumping off of enemies. You have a gun but it’s not that useful unless you want to get a high kill count or a streak. You lose your streak if you get hit by an enemy or a a bullet.

All the art, sounds, and programming are by me. Everything was made in the five hours I was allowed to use my laptop on the flight from BOS->SFO. I used Game Maker, and started off with Matt Thorson’s Grandma Engine.

I’ll probably polish it up a little more and release a post-jam version, but I’m really happy with this one. Download the game here. (Windows only.)

Instructions: arrows to move/jump. WASD to shoot. Collect the coins to win. R button restarts.

Darren Torpey and I are going to attempt a game jam on our flight to GDC. Recently I’ve had really good experiences jamming on planes, creating AF337 and a few other prototypes that are going to become long-form games. Airplanes are  a great place to force creativity, particularly if you don’t have wifi on the plane.

• Being on a plane means you’re bored senseless and making a game is a great way to pass the time.
• No wifi means no internet distractions.
• No internet means you’re forced to use what is on your computer: make your own art, hack the code any way you can, don’t rely on other people’s tutorials or example code. It forces creative problem-solving.
• You literally have nothing else to do, so even if you’re only on the plane for a few hours, that is a few hours of directed, productive time.

So with that, I encourage anybody going to GDC to join the Going to GDC game jam! If you do participate, please post your results online somewhere and leave a link here. I’ll compile everything into a master list and put it on this blog.

Happy jamming, and see you at GDC!

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.

I’ve uploaded a three-part video I took on Tuesday at GDC. This is a dinner conversation between Corvus Elrod, Jeff Ward, Eric Robinson, William Monroe, and Darren Torpey. I’m also there, but I was sick and had no voice at the time, so I’m the silent videographer. It’s about 18 minutes long, all three parts combined.