So… long story short is that I’m not going back to Gameloft. Looks like I can hire out my services to any progressive company that will have me.

If you are looking for a designer/producer/TF2 spy, here’s my card:

No, really, that’s my card. If you see me in person, I’ll dig one out of my wallet for you.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a lot of time to work on my prototypes and writing! Door closing, window opening, cliches inflating.

Don’t do it.

Darius has a great post on why students looking to get into the industry should blog and I whole-heartedly agree. Even though the archives here don’t go back that far, I’ve been continually blogging since college. (My first was hard coded and sloppy so I couldn’t figure out how to shift the posts when I joined WordPress and so they have been lost to the ages and archive.org. Moral: Use WordPress.)

An anonymous blog still gets you the benefit of writing, interacting with readers and stresses the critical thinking parts of the old noggin’ but it doesn’t allow you to make closer relationships with people, it can’t help you get a job and it is less likely someone will take an anonymous blogger seriously. Why? If he won’t put his/her name behind it, how do I know it isn’t a professional shill or troll? It’s so easy to lob hand grenades on the web. It’s much harder to criticize in a way that you would criticize if that person was right in front of you, face-to-face. I have very little respect for anonymous bloggers, but I can see why people would want that safety blanket. Hell, if the guy from WikiLeaks isn’t anonymous, what the hell are you afraid of?

Back to blogging. If you want to start, you have to commit to post regular, interesting content and you have to commit to doing a little bit of self-promotion until people actually start reading regularly enough that if you say something catchy enough that it gets linked somewhere. These are the hard parts, especially before you are not in the industry and cannot connect news items to personal experience.

There’s only one other thing I want to add because Darius’ post is sufficient. There is a non-zero chance you will get flak for having a blog with any sort of opinion on it. I had two separate instances when I was at EA where a manager pressured me to remove a blog post. I did in both cases because my job was more important even though I said nothing in the posts that was unfair, represented the company poorly or was a thing I would not say in person. A certain vice president has a Google alert on his name and I guess he spends time reading blogs that mention him and making sure the bloggers aren’t EA employees, so he put in a call to my EP saying WTF. (The post wasn’t about him. It was about tuning, but I used a quote of his and attributed it.) I still believe what I said, that it certainly wasn’t unfair (history has proven me correct) and thought it was a useful point to make for making design decisions, but in retrospect I probably should have kept my digital yap shut.

If you are not comfortable with feeling some fraidy-cat with managerial powers breathing down your neck, then censor yourself to never say anything that could be taken as a criticism by anyone. I, unfortunately, cannot do that. I’m a very speak-my-mind type. People came up to me at work and said essentially “Nice knowing you” after my Mario post because they thought it was critical of my employer and that I’d be fired. It wasn’t meant to be critical of my employer at all (fool me once) but to the whole industry, myself included. Nothing happened, of course, but cowards like that will try to make your life harder if you try to make any interesting statements. Roll with it.

I’ve met so many interesting people thanks to Twitter and this blog and I hope every other aspiring game developer can have the success I’ve had with the practice.

When I was in Jesse Schell’s Game Design class back in the dawn of the century, he had an interesting final project – form a team and together pitch an imaginary video game concept to a board of real game industry professionals. At the time, I found that to be an odd project. The whole semester was spent teaching us how to think like a designer in order to make something that was fun (or at least interesting) and the final project was about public speaking and less about actual ideas.

Two years later, we are mopping up the disasterous Superman Returns handheld games and I’m assigned an opportunity: we need a Game Boy SKU for Superman. It needs to be done in four months (!) and it only has the budget for two devs and an artist. Pitch me something. So there I was, a complete greenhorn pitching a concept. While the end result was low-risk, we did go forward with my idea and it made it to store shelves, completely unnoticed since the GBA was in its death throes at the time and the other SKUs were so disappointing that only one review of the game was ever posted on Metacritic (and I think the reviewer didn’t play the game, only read the back of the box – I digress. For it’s resources, I’m proud of it.) So there I was, as far down as you could go on the seniority totem pole, but still pitching projects. At least I had practice.

From there, I’d have more chances. Every designer who is trying ends up pitching features, but I ended up pitching whole titles – first in the Design Forums we had set up at EA as an extravocational endeavor and then later as part of a new IP group. I certainly wouldn’t have thought that four years prior the things I started to learn in Prof. Schell’s exercise would put me in charge of proposing ways to spend more than a million dollars.

This past week I was at Gen Con in Indianapolis trying to gain some interest from board game publishers on some things I’ve been working on in my spare time. The stakes couldn’t have been much lower, yet here was this same tension in my chest that I first had when I was pitching the game in Schell’s class (which, btw, was essentially Crackdown two years before it would be announced. Not that the premise is that original, but it was a fun coincidence.)

There are some general lessons that I’d like to share from my experience that maybe can help someone out there the next time they have to sell an idea:

1) Agreement
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book-everyone-carries-around-at-the-airport Blink, he speaks about one of the fundamental rules of improv comedy, that of agreement:

“One of the most important of the rules that makes improv possible, for examplem us the idea of agreement, the notion that a very simple way to create a story – or humor – is to have characters accept everything that happens to them. … Bad improvisers block action, often with a high degree of skill. Good improvizers develop action.”

Pitching is a lot like improvization. You are trying to tell a story, but you don’t know where that story will end up. If you have a prototype in front of you, then you have some basis of what the final product will be, but every single gap has to be filled in the mind of the audience. Agreeing with the audience’s perception of reality means that they will understand the gaps a lot better than if you are constantly stopping them to try to shoehorn them into your predefined view.

Back to Schell’s class for one last time. I performed what I would call an Critical Fail as the CEO of my imaginary company, so much so that Jesse would recall the story to his class the following year (I was his TA at that time). My game took place on a moon base. One of the members of the board asked if you would have to change the architecture of the buildings since the moon has low gravity. Eager to deflate a problem of having to explain odd architecure, I said: “No, it has artifical gravity generators so it is just like Earth.” Whoops. The questioner had visions of doing awesome jumps in low-gravity shooting space-mafia in slo-mo displays. Now the setting was nothing like he was interested in and he was pretty much set to be bored for the rest of it. There wasn’t even a good reason for me to say that. I just thought I was being decisive.

In future meetings, I learned to agree – to roll with the punches. In the end, whatever game you make will be wholly unlike whatever your vision was for it during the pitch. So why stick to your guns at the cost of alienating your audience? Agree with them and you can adapt. Their ideas will often be pretty good. If you deny them here, then you are hurting yourself. Sometimes they won’t be. But if they aren’t, they will likely be ironed out by the end.

There really is no reason to deny anything unless it fundamentally changes what you are presenting. I am not saying that if you present a shoot-em-up and someone asks if it is a kart racer that you agree. What I am saying is that you entertain all possibilities as to what the idea could be. The truth is you really don’t know what the idea will be either, but you want to convince someone to let you ride it to the end.

The best purveyors of this technique can make the audience believe that his ideas are actually the audience’s. That is really the pinnacle of the agreement principle.

2) Audience and Focus
You absolutely need to know who your audience is and what they want. Every presentation book tells you this because it is the God’s honest truth. Very few presenters take this to heart which is why you get presentations that are sixty slides of text and no central theme. The presenters don’t like sitting through those kinds of presentations either but they have no idea to whom they are presenting or what they want to hear so they figure if they say everything, eventually they will hit something valuable.

Hogwash. Who has time for that?

Unfortunately, I failed that test at Gen Con this past week at the first publisher I showed to because I was so focused on polishing the little bits that I didn’t realize what he cared about was the big picture. He wanted a strong theme and an original mechanic. I focused on cleverly interlocking mechanics to create a fine balance. Of course that is needed in a game, but not until later. I was like the guy presenting the sixty text slides. I didn’t tell him what he wanted to hear. Two minutes in, we started talking about why the theme didn’t work. We never got to the gameplay dynamics, which I thought were the most important. Only designers care about dynamics.

I knew the theme wasn’t strong. But look at all the other games that don’t have a strong theme: Ticket to Ride, Dominion, Puerto Rico. Some of the best games in history don’t have a strong or consistent theme. They all have strong mechanics. But that’s irrelevent because my audience was looking for something with a strong and consistant theme. Not being prepared to talk about that sunk my battleship.

It would be like pitching a fantasy MMO at EA Sports. There was a guy back at Tiburon in our design forum that had a really clever idea for an adventure game about possessing statues. How do you think that pitch went with execs? It is hard enough to get people to buy into ideas. Don’t make it harder on yourself by sending a message the audience isn’t equipped to hear.

A subpoint to this is to have a focus. The concept of the elevator pitch has been around for quite some time. To paraphrase Blink again, people make their decisions about you VERY quickly. Thus, front-load your pitch with whatever makes your idea stand out. Start with “Roll Through the Ages is essentially Civilization meets Yahtzee“. I imagine that was the opening of Matt Leacock’s pitch if there was one. Blam. The pitch both sums up the idea and is compelling on face. Civilization is extremely complex. Yahtzee is incredibly casual. How will his idea meld the two? If the audience “gets” the idea by that point they are hooked and will listen to the rest of what you have to say, building and tweaking their mental models of it along the way. If not, then they will have to work to create their mental models and who likes to work? Plus, theirs will be different, much different, than the one you want to create in their minds.

The one problem with having a focus is that you necessarily have to exclude possible ideas, which feels counter to the concept of agreement. It is not. It is only a method to create the mental model in your audience closest to your own to work with to minimize the amount of agreement you have to do explicitly. It really is the most important thing you can do for your presentation.

3) Learning
When designers hear feedback the inner voice starts talking really loudly. Either it starts saying: “Oh yeah, that’s good feedback but that would affect the healing rate of such and such or I’d have to change this system to do this thing” or it is “This guy has no idea what he is talking about. Look at his tie and how stupid it is.” The problem with both of these things is that while your brain is subvocalizing, you aren’t listening to additional feedback. Listen now. Process later.

Most pitches will fail. A pitch is a total waste of time if you do not understand why it failed.

Friends and acquaintances don’t give you too much worthwhile feedback. Everything is tainted by the fact that they know you and generally want you to succeed or just want to make suggestions. The best feedback comes from strangers or folks disinterested in your future and those are generally the folks that are your pitch audience. If you can convince someone who doesn’t care to care, then your idea is probably ready to fly from the nest.

People who don’t listen during these kinds of feedback sessions generally don’t get any better and generally keep making the same mistakes while thinking they are the best designers in the world and that nobody appreciates their genius.

Ask yourself: is the point of the pitch to sell an idea or to sell yourself? Boards and publishers aren’t interested in you, they are interested in possible project ideas. If you want someone to tell you what a good job you do and how creative or smart you are, your mother is probably a better audience.

It’s pretty damning for a blogger to not post for more than two-weeks. I’ve lost the link that showed a study between post density and traffic, but rest assured that quantity is indeed a component. So I apologize for being quiet recently. Work is busy and my free time is spent gearing up for GenCon.

I’m bringing the Airport game I blogged about recently to show to publishers and also quickly adapted a design I had shelved in 2009 after randomly coming upon a novel theme and scoring mechanism for the whole thing. It’s tenatively called New York Minute. I rudely threw that together with Gloriana’s help and so I’m bringing two well-tested (I got a lot of reps with NYM in its previous incarnation. It’s a pretty good game that lacked a theme and felt a little arbitrary. It was surprisingly easy to fix.) games to the show and hope to get some useful feedback from the publishing folk.

When I come back, I’ll post a full recap of the goodies of GenCon and then I’ll be back to my regular posting schedule. I’ll leave you with a link to a very hyped new blog that posts the tired and I thought defeated argument that you can divide price by hours and get some sort of enjoyment metric, as if enjoyment was measured in hours and not something more flighty like utils. These articles are inevitably written by college kids or people who generally have the time to fully appreciate 100+ hour titles where people with demanding jobs or kids or a life really appreciate getting a full experience in a digestible amount of time, even if that makes the price/hour metric all outta wack.

Since I linked to it the other day and since I am filling my wall with posts on it, I thought I’d draw more attention to Ian Bogost’s brilliant distillation of social games called Cow Clicker and his subsequent explanation of the inspiration for it on his blog.

In short: you click on a cow to get points. Why do you need points? Well… you can compare with your friends! And you can buy cutely named Mooney to get different cow types!

I was talking to my fiancee yesterday who is a huge user of all these social game doodads and she was distressed that her dog in Farmville had ran away because she wasn’t there to click on it or feed it or whatever you do in that game these days. Cow Clicker is very lax in that particular interpretation of the “Social” Dogma. If you don’t click your cow, nothing bad happens to you, which is one of the key psychological footholds of the genre. You don’t lose anything and you don’t let your friends down. It’s the sense of obligation, of slavery to these mindless activities that makes me find Facebook games so insidious, especially after having worked on one. Not only are your friends not human beings but resources, but conversely you are a cog in their machine. It’s surprising for me to say that Cow Clicker isn’t insidious enough. Maybe that is the point? Maybe because we expect it to be more insidious that just shows how miserable the state of affairs truly is?

Cow Clicker is more interesting satire than, say, Progress Quest simply because instead of making a statement that looks like the antecedent (as in the latter), it attempts to fully emulate its target and strip it down enough that its internals show but not so bare that it fails to emulate the same mechanics and dynamics.

Whatever this school of design is that eschews the fuck-the-users mentality, it needs a name and a little badge that I can put on my profile and level up.

Power Planets is a great example of theme matching dynamics and a rare example of a Facebook game worth your time. You control a one-dimensional planet with limited resources and attempt to build up a civilization hopefully without fouling up the environment. You do this by unlocking tech in a nicely sized tech-tree and placing buildings and power plants in tactical locations.

The reason Power Planets works so well where loads of civ building games have failed is simply because it has a theme that is strong, but isn’t heavy-handed. You are free to muck up the world in the pursuit of luchre and the game makes little moral objection to the choice with the exception of animation of coughing and dying residents. It doesn’t lead you down a path of eco-righteousness – it lets you decide what that is through the mechanics.

For instance, I wanted to research to get Universities because they provide a lot of points per hour. But to do so, I needed a good chunk of money. So I built some fume-spewing Upgraded Factories powered by cheap, abundant and dirty as sin coal power. Completely within the so-called “Magic Circle”, I justified this – yeah, it is dirty and all, but it’s for the greater good. I need the Universities.

Renewable resources are hopelessly underpowered until you get the research to unlock more futuristic technologies. But the only way to unlock those technologies is to have a lot of money and the only way to have a lot of money is to essentially build a lot of polluting buildings. The parallel lessons to real situations, while neccessarily simplistic, are striking.

But the clever twist in Power Planets that makes it unlike every other building sim out there is that you hand off your planet to someone else every two days and receive a stranger’s. How many times in polluting will you look at your coal reserves, see 40 hours of coal remaining and know that it is someone else’s problem, plunging ahead not worrying about the future?

One building you can create is a Monument that houses your Facebook picture. Future caretakers of that world cannot remove or move the monument and it takes up a valuable space on the planet. Putting it on a useful resource or in a valuable power plant’s range is the ultimate in narcissism, but the game makes no value judgment on its own.

In a genre full of contrived mechanics (Why can I only click my cow every six hours? “Well, because we want you to come back” doesn’t fit any theme but manipulation), Power Planets strives as simple, fun and full of meaning.

I’m not going to continue my posts about Airport Rush for the time being. I had a fantastic playtest session with some very talented designers at Eric Zimmerman‘s playtest group yesterday and I think I am going to make some major changes. While this is dangerous to do a month before I take the game to GenCon, I think it is absolutely necessary.

It highlights what I’ve known to be a problem with my process for some time now and that is the unfortunate necessity of having the same people playtest your games. Since you can’t take them out back and format their brains to see everything as a blank slate, they are forced to compare a new version with an old version. If the new version fixes problems with the old version, then the fixes must be good, right? Well, no, not exactly, because those fixes might make no sense to someone coming into the game raw.

There are problems in Airport Rush with the alignment of theme and mechanics. While I am no slave to theme – Why are there n identical San Juans in Puerto Rico? Why can only one type of good fit on a ship? Why in Ticket to Ride do you need special colors of track? What do the tickets represent? And so on – there is much to be said about congruency insofar as it helps people understand the rules and mechanics. If people are distracted by incongruent rules, then I should work to fix it. Some incongruencies will remain (to the chagrin of nitpicky designers), but I was looking for feedback, not orders.

It’s actually been a long time since I’ve received feedback that was in the form of: “Why did you do things this way?” “Because such and such.” “Oh, I see. I think that’s too slow. Wouldn’t such and other such be better?” It’s refreshing.

I’ll be typing up part three of my board games post sometime later this week when I have time. I had friends come up over the holiday and we went to Central Park, MoMa, the waffle truck, played Dominion, Puerto Rico and Le Havre,  played at Dave & Busters, went shopping for Chinese junk on Canal Street, saw Avenue Q, saw the 4th of July Fireworks on the Hudson, went to Liberty Island (I took a great photo of the Statue with my phone that I am using as my wallpaper now. I’ll upload it later) and had delicious food in a number of places. It was a busy weekend!

This short post is to tell you about a gem of a game I played through on Thursday. It is Telltale’s pilot of Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent. If you like the Professor Layton games, then Puzzle Agent is familiar. It is a point-and-click adventure game sans inventory management, where the challenges come from brain teasers, logic puzzles and riddles that are interspersed with the story.

The pilot was great, but leaves on a bit of a To Be Continued note, so I’d be very sad if folks didn’t scoop it up in enough quantity to merit a whole season. I felt that the puzzles were more fair than in the latest Layton game (in that, some puzzles could be interpreted in multiple ways leading to incorrect correct answers). But the real draw here is the ridiculous writing and voice acting. I’ve found the voice acting in the Sam and Max games (of what I have played, at least) to be a bit monotonous. Plus there is a wonderful surprise that breaks the veil of puzzle and story that I will leave for you to discover.