I like entreprenuers and betting your business model on greed is usually a sound idea, but I’d bet money (heh) that World Gaming will fail.

Why?

• After three accusations of cheating, your billing address is banned.
• The difference between elite players and cheaters is very difficult to discern.
• One would rather assume someone kicked your ass and stole your money because they cheated, not because they are better.

Unless you can empirically verify that someone is not cheating, then gambling is impossible.

Well, not impossible, but unsustainable.

It’s odd when I find an article that causes me to pump my fist in a “preach it, brother!” manner and also shake my head in violent disagreement, yet that’s exactly the case in this GameSetWatch piece on how to hire a good designer.

Game designers must be gaming fanatics, not just playing them, but making them in multiple mediums. Beware any game designer that doesn’t play games every spare second of their time or have an extensive history of game making.

This is terrible advice.

People who play games every second of every day are bound to only find inspiration in the games that already exist. I guess this is fine if you want to create the same things over and over and over again (hello industry!) but if you are looking for someone to bring creative inspiration to the team (part of the designer’s role) then this candidate will be woefully unqualified.

While a wide gaming vocabulary is indeed extremely helpful, those who cross the line from gaming enthusiast to gaming fanatic are much more likely to roll with the common fanboy opinions and much less likely to design to an audience besides themselves. At some studios, I imagine this is okay. But the designers I have the most trouble with are the ones who are so in-tune with the gamer zeitgeist that they necessarily tune out anything that doesn’t agree or is different.

Look for a wide variety in gaming taste: A real designer should have a wide interest in games, not just a single format.

Maybe. At our studio, we make sports games. Should it disqualify an applicant if he doesn’t play point-and-click adventure games, but he does have wide experience in broadcast presentation or in social gaming? A real designer (No True Scotsman…) shouldn’t necessarily have a wide interest in games, but a wide understanding of what makes a particular experience (the experiences you want in your titles) worthwhile.

Any designer should be able to describe mechanics in a way that is understandable. If you ask the designer candidate to come up with a sample feature for your game, ask them to describe how the feature will work mechanically. A real designer can describe mathematically and mechanically how a feature will function and be implemented with other game systems, down to every detail.

The obession with mechanics is keeping our industry stagnant. What’s just as important as mechanics are how they influence dynamic systems (as hinted in the quoted piece, sorta) and how and why this affects the aesthetic response from the player.

It’s fine to ask an engineer to explain in mechanical terms how they would implement such-and-such a system, and while it is extremely helpful for designers to have that knowledge, their main objective is to craft an experience for the players. Everyone from a random tester to the CEO has ideas on how to change mechanics and those that are particularly tech-savvy can usually describe them in algorithmic terms. But the great designers can explain how mechanical changes work within the aesthetic models that the team desires the player to have and why those mechanical changes are the best approach.

The how is so much less important than the why.

I agee with pretty much everything else in the article.

Yeah, I guess the DSi is neat. But what intrigues me most is the downloadable game store.

Even though DS games are fantastic, the system has a ridiculously high piracy rate since piracy for the device is pretty simple. As such, games targeted at the hardcore teenage male (the ones most likely to have the means to pirate, but also the ones with the most disposable income for games) don’t sell nearly as well as they should.

Luckily, Nintendo has a gargantuan “casual” and kid demographic who don’t pirate games. Otherwise we would have seen the Dreamcast 2 in short order.

The questions I have are: Will the online game store be fully stocked with interesting titles? Will it be easy to purchase games on the handheld? Will the service be promoted enough that a critical mass of users are able to support the momentum to sustain the service?

In the case of WiiWare, the answer is no on all three counts.

In the case of the iPhone App Store, the answer is yes on all three counts.

Whichever model the DSi’s game store draws from will likely reflect on its eventual success or failure.

There’s an interesting thread on Gamasutra. Here’s the summary: The Tiberium game has been cancelled. Some extremely vocal opponent of the status quo at EALA starts venting, other anonymous people start freaking out about practices.

But the interesting part to me is that since the majority of informative posts on the thread are done anonymously, there is no way to vet anything that is being said. But if the forum did not have the opportunity to post anonymously, this thread would have never started.

After Superman Returns shipped, I saw a lot of forum threads in various places with disgruntled Tiburon (no relation to Tiberium!) folks. Some of them I could identify via little dropped nuggets of information along with cross-referencing who was loud about various issues to what posters were being loud about. But I also noticed people who either were posing as people who worked on Superman Returns (good God, why?) or were so misinformed that they had this vast conspiracy network built in their heads that they were displaying to the Internet world as fact.

From the outside, it is impossible to determine if any of these Tiberium posters are just disgruntled ex-employees, complete trolls or are simply misinformed. Thus, it’s also impossible to tell which ones to believe as people actually telling the truth. You would like to think that these would be the posters who seem to post in the most calm, reasoned manner. But from my Superman Returns history, that simply isn’t necessarily the case.

It would be nice to know what happened to Tiberium so that we can avoid making similar mistakes. Was it bad people, bad culture, bad ideas, bad process, and/or bad management? No one outside can know. The postmortems that run in GameDeveloper are always milquetoast: we should have decided XYZ sooner. Yeah, hindsight is nice. What we need in cases like this is independent postmortems. Get someone tangential or external to dig around and find out what went wrong. Then, let everyone know.

But that won’t happen.

Because: 1) Investigations cost money. 2) Blaming people (if they are the problem) opens one up to legal problems and 3) Boards want investors to assume that every team at a huge corporation is perfectly run. It’s less important to them for our teams to work better than it is for the investors to have proof that there is a team that isn’t working at its zenith. “That may happen at Electronic Arts, but it certainly doesn’t happen here!” Bull. Shit.

I’ve seen projects cancelled for a half-dozen reasons. From the ones where I only got an internal email that was filled with vague hand-waving about “persuing opportunities in other areas”, I learned nothing. From the ones where I had intimate knowledge of the knock down, drag outs that went on, I learned volumes.

We’d probably have less epic failures if we didn’t bury them like a cat at the litter box.

I’m going to send a copy of The Elements of Style to espn.com headquarters: