I’ll give impressions when I’m good and ready. But my wallet sure feels lighter this time of the year. Good thing we are in a fundamentally strong economy.

I’m working on a long post in spare time of reviews of all the iPhone games I have. By the numbers, it is a huge market, yet very few sites talk about iPhone games, let alone have reviews. Touch Arcade has good coverage, but they keep their posts fairly opinion-free. Fingergaming covers the same ground. When downloading, I usually have to hope and pray that the game is any good. This is fine with $1 and $2 games, but I start to balk at $5 and $10 games.

In other news, gamesindustry.biz has the most obvious headline of the day: “Square Enix LA Studio to focus on digital titles”. Well at least we know they won’t be working on a game for a difference engine.

What does the Launch Box do? When its keys and levers are turned and pulled in sequence, it emits clouds of dry ice, fires off klaxon noises, and finally, when you press the red button, releases games. And, because it’s kept in Gabe Newell’s tool shed and nobody ever bothers to check it for bee hives, bees. (If there’s one thing that makes those things angrier than klaxon noises, it’s dry ice!)

You can’t thrill your customers until you thrill yourself first.

That’s something I generally lose track of in the endless Sisyphusian task of making a very mass market game. It’s very easy to get thrilled over little ideas only to have them scuttled because they are odd or time-consuming or something we haven’t done before. We can’t quantitatively measure what is best, but we can measure what is cheapest. It’s so easy to poo-poo an idea. And so we go with what we’ve done before because it is familiar and measurable not because it is the best.

We settle. It’s like when one person wants pizza for dinner and the other wants to just skip dinner and have ice cream. The best compromise is not to have pizza ice cream. No one is thrilled by that, but it is standard compromising technique that we all use. And we have to settle because there generally isn’t time to figure everything out.

If it is important, make time.

It’s hard being the squeaky cog in a giant, otherwise well-oiled machine, but I have to keep reminding myself to squeak. Because if I don’t squeak when I believe in it, I may be like the people I see here who have simply lost their voice. But how to squeak loud enough? That’s really the question.

Sorry for carrying that metaphor so far. Uncalled for.

The moral is that if you aren’t thrilled, figure out what has to change until you are. Sometimes it is just a matter of perspective. Sometimes it requires a whole new plan. But I can tell when I’m playing a game made by people who were loving what they did and I bet you can too.

- Here’s a related point. If you want to branch out to new customers, how do you do so without being contemptuous of your core? I don’t know if it can be done. The core wants more of the same, but better. (I originally wrote “more of the same, but butter” for some reason and I think that works too) But to get new audiences, you have to give them a vastly different experience.

Look at Tony Hawk. Neversoft kept churning out a game that did really well with their core. And they listened and made more insane tricks, jumping off of a giant eyeball, etc. But when Skate came out the EA team eschewed all of that. Skate had a fraction of the tricks that Hawk did, but they hit an aesthetic Hawk couldn’t.

And it took some damn bravery I bet when designers or executives said “But Tony Hawk does it this way and they sell a million copies a year!” to implement a mechanic that hits a completely different aesthetic.

It’s risky to try to get new customers. Look at Castlevania: Judgement. Or Prince of Persia: Warrior WIthin. But it’s a waste of talent to churn out the same experience but a little better each time around. It’s why I could never work on an MMO.

-I finished Dead Space yesterday. I have nothing bad to say about it. It wasn’t the revival of survival horror I was looking for, but it was still a lot of fun and relatively polished and bug-free. I give it two dismembered thumbs up. What to try next? I’m a big iffy on Mirror’s Edge. Fallout 3 will consume me for months. Left 4 Dead is out very soon. Oh, the holiday glut!

-In other news, I got to watch the last night space shuttle launch from a park near my home. It’s a shame that we have to give all our money to failing banks, investment firms, credit card companies and automakers instead of building new shuttles because watching that really makes you believe in America. A community pulled away from their sitcoms to have a picnic by a lake and watch the most beautiful reverse shooting-star you will ever see ascend to literal heights few will ever reach? That’s fantastic. It was so clear that you could easily see the booster seperation. And eventually the shuttle became a point of light like a star and faded into the black. I could watch that every night.

MTV’s Multiplayer Blog has pics of people lining up for the World of Warcraft expansion pack release. What do you suppose the odds are that these folks will spend more time outside waiting in line than they have in the entire previous summer? Or just more time outside in a two-day period since the Phantom Menace premiere?  I kid because I love.

But come on people, it’s an expansion pack.

Is it being digitally distributed as well? If no, why the hell not?

Once you are in [the industry] you should ship as many titles as possible.

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This is one area where MMO developers get screwed. It takes at least three and possibly as long as six years to build an MMO. In that same amount of time a console game developer could ship 2-4 titles.

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You can improve your title count by picking what projects you work on carefully. All other factors being equal, you should prefer the project that is closer to shipping.

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If you have an opportunity to work on a mega hit (like GTA, Rock Band, Bioshock, Halo, Half-Life, etc.) you should take it. Getting one of these on your resume is worth at least 5 other titles.

Here are my thoughts.

If I am in the business of hiring developers, a wall of credits will look impressive on a resume. But that sets expectations higher. If once you land an interview, you can’t talk about each title and what your role was in a way that meets those expectations, then you are going to look sub-par.

All else being equal, I would (and have) chosen titles that are further from shipping. Why? Because the longer you spend on the project, the more you can impact it. Who has the better experience? A programmer who worked for three months on the Halo team or one that worked through the whole Iron Man game? You mean to tell me that someone who worked on four shovelware DS titles in a year has a more impressive resume than someone working on Warhammer for the same year? You mean to tell me name-dropping Bungie is worth five times the value of someone who had meaningful experience on a game that wasn’t successful?

I’ve learned the most and grown the most when I was on titles that weren’t successful. That isn’t to say that you should go out there and try to find doomed projects, but I don’t want someone leading my army who hasn’t seen war.

And if a company is hiring just on name recognition, what kind of team are you going to get hired into? Are they all going to be people who hitched themselves to the right wagons or people that actually have the requisite skills? I’m a big believer in that you hope everyone else in the room is smarter than you. What better environment is there to learn and grow? But you want to be hired in a place that values excellence, not pedigree.

I have an XM Satellite Radio that displays the first sixteen characters of an artist’s name or a song title. Most often, I have to guess at what the name of the song is from listening to lyrics that match the first sixteen characters. It’s quite annoying. Why do they do this? I don’t know. Perhaps earlier screen models could only fit sixteen characters. That’s fine. Why didn’t they broadcast the full length of the name and then scroll it? Future-proof your tagging for displays like mine that can clearly display more than sixteen characters.

We do this all the time in designing interfaces for games. We make decisions based on ease of implementation over more customer-facing metrics. We design screens where your character can only have a name five letters long. Or we let it be as long as you want it to be and then we truncate it into some abomination of the name you entered when we decide it doesn’t fit. Or we don’t let you enter special characters or numbers when they really wouldn’t hurt.

Etrian Odyssey 2 only lets character names be eight characters long. This is mildly annoying when you want to name a character Aristotle and he can only be Aristotl. Character naming is important in Etrian because you can have dozens of characters that you need to tell apart by name. A smartly designed UI could have allowed for longer character names when there was room (menus) and truncated names when there wasn’t (battle screens). All this would take from the user’s POV is showing the user what the name will look like when fully displayed and abbreviated before they confirm, thus avoiding truncation surprises like in the shot above. But doing this takes time.

Or they could assume that it isn’t important and take the easy way out. With so much involved in making a game, we usually take the easy way out whenever it is presented. But if you don’t know your data, how can you weigh the importance of losing flexibility?

The point is: If you think you will only need five characters, think again, you’ll probably need ten. If you think you will only need sixteen characters, think again, you’ll probably need thirty-two. If you can’t fit more than sixteen, then figure out how you will handle situations with more than sixteen characters. Will it happen? Does it matter? Do you have a plan?

In XM’s case:

• Will it happen? Yes, many bands and songs have names longer than sixteen characters. Get an engineer to do a quick study of all the songs in your database and see how many are longer than sixteen characters.
• Does it matter? The purpose of displaying tags is to let the user know exactly what he or she is listening to. The farther away you get from showing the full title, the farther we get away from that goal. Yes, it matters.
• Do you have a plan? Truncation is a plan, but if XM knew their data, they would have easily understood that it is insufficient. Truncating leads to frustrated users who don’t know what song they are listening to (and isn’t that the fundamental reason for the display? Can you imagine someone looking for a band called “The White Stripe” after listening to this song?) and gaffes like “The Hardest Butt*”.

*I wonder what kind of Google keyword hits I’ll get in the next month with that phrase.

Specialization and hierarchy are the norms in film production, and are antithetical to what needs to happen in the games industry. The reason for that distinction is that the game industry is more focused on invention than on repeatability/measurability.

That may be true at Valve where they can release whenever the hell they want, but here it’s all about measurability and specialization. I don’t know whether that is a sad fact about the rest of the industry or just a valueless distinction. Specialization helps measurability. If you know upgrades to System X take 100 hours because you’ve been doing upgrades of that type for the last six cycles, then that is valuable to reducing risk.

Not a particularly efficient or innovative way to run a company, but more realistic.

• Did you see that the new Banjo Kazooie game is coming out not only to a whimper of marketing fanfare but at a $39.99 price point? That smacks of desperation that the game won’t see any sales in this crowded holiday season. A vote of No Confidence from the publisher is never a good sign for the quality of the product.

• A great weight was taken from my shoulders when I beat King’s Bounty yesterday. That game had a raw, uncut form of gamer RPG crack that I couldn’t shake. They ship the game wrapped in clear plastic and sealed with duct tape. You buy it by the ounce. Do you get my simile here?

Just a taste, man.

• I also got to play Buzz over the weekend with the complimentary cadre of eight players (not included) and it was a load of fun. I was a bit disappointed by the variety of game modes, however. It seemed to be the same format over and over again, where a game like SceneIt! (the sequel of which just hit and I also recommend) mixes up the format every time.

• As a big fan of the “Metroid-Vania” style Castlevania games, I’m sad to say that Order of Ecclesia suffers from “Hyperactive Art DIrector” syndrome. I’m having such a hard time separating the detailed characters from the detailed environments. There’s no restraint there. It is causing eye strain and I think I am going to give up on it.

  This is common in situations where the same developer is iterating on a title. It gets tough to see the game with new eyes and things like being able to tell the difference between enemy and furniture become assumed.

  From other screens, it seems like this clears up eventually or maybe it is only confusing in motion. Anyway, back burner for now. Too many non eye-strain games that require my attention.

And it isn’t: “When the world doesn’t turn into a utopia and everything remains roughly as corrupt and wasteful as before, will folks use cognitive dissonance and blame all the reasons the administration blames or will they be honest and lose their starstruck hero-worship eyes?”

Such a cynic, I know.

It is this:

When Obama plays basketball, how is he defended? This Big Picture photo shows him playing hoops with some NBA folks.

Yes We Can Defend

So do they let him win? These guys play basketball for a living. Certainly they could embarrass him if they played at full strength?

I mean, let’s say you spot an opportunity for a big juicy block in the paint. Do you jump up there and slam it down in his face? Or would that mean you become the new exercise ambassador at Gitmo?

Do you elbow him for space when going up for a rebound? Or do you fear that letter that comes on January 20th with the IRS insignia that says you are being audited for tax returns dated back to when you were in your mother’s womb?

God, and what if you injured him? Stepped wrong and broke his ankle? Papers across the country would be linking you to various basketball-related terrorist organizations.

No, thanks. I’ll just ball with McCain. He can’t lift his arms over his head, so it should be a little safer for all involved.

I wonder if Obama is a ball hog. Does he call “pussy fouls”? Does he take an extra step? I mean, you don’t argue with the Man in Charge of Nuclear Weapons. Never.

Anyway, hoops is much more interesting for news-clips than the jogging that Clinton did or the kitten strangling that Bush did.

Well, it was a close race, but it looks like McCain won in the end. 51-48% is a pretty tight spread, but past the margin of error. Okay,everyone go to bed, stop using Twitter. The world will still be here in the morning. That’s it. Nothing more to see.

Posted by email from Zack’s Posterous

Posted by email from Zack’s Posterous

I’m pretty thumbs down on fantasy MMOs, but it sounds like they are drafting an excellent squad up there, if you will excuse the pun.

So I voted earlier today. Woo. ::twirls finger in air:: There was a very short line, contrary to early voting reports. So if you feel that it is worth your time, don’t let the spectre of long lines stop you.

Things I don’t understand:

• The nonstop plastering of the VOTE VOTE VOTE NO MATTER WHAT people. VOTE VOTE VOTE. IT DOESN’T MATTER IF YOU DON’T KNOW THE ISSUES! JUST PULL THE LEVER! IT DOESN’T MATTER THAT YOU GET ALL YOUR NEWS FROM COMEDY CENTRAL, JUST FILL IN THE OVALS. GO! GO! GO! I’d rather only the people who do the requisite research and care enough to wake up in the morning actually come out to vote. I’ve worked in customer-facing jobs. I know how rock-stupid and gullible the general populace is. Not that I am some epic genius, but I did some basic googling on the ballot measures.
• I moved in September, so I’m voting at a new location. In this location, there were two sets of registration tables. “Ok,” I reasoned, “This is to make the lines go faster.” So I waited in one line only to find out at the front that each table was a separate precinct and that I was in the wrong line. Thank God lines were not as ludicrous as reported because I had a double wait.
• I don’t understand why my ballot said “Fill in one oval for President/Vice President.” That’s misleading. It should say: “Fill in one oval to see who’s in charge of fucking you in the ass for the next four years.”

Carnegie Mellon students have it right. In every student election, Optimus Prime gets in at least the top five. Students scan the full results not to see who won, but to see who came up with the funniest write-in candidates. They realized that government is a farce and they made the best of it.

There HAVE been some pretty funny tweets out there from the people I follow, particularly @badbanana:

He’s extremely white. Was shot down behind enemy lines. And can’t lift his arms above his head. Good lord, John McCain is Snoopy.

Under Obama’s plan, taxes will be raised on trick-or-treaters earning more than two and a half 100 Grand Bars.

I hope Obama’s plan will spread the apple butter around. That stuff is goooood.

I want Joe the Plumber to get to the princess.

So at least whoever loses, we know that comedy wins.

This fills my cold black heart with something akin to glee.

For anyone growing up in the nineties that had the game design bug, ZZT was where it was at. On a diskette somewhere in my closet exists all my ZZT modules. I’m sure today I would look at them with disgust moreso than nostalgia, but I went from stupid stock shooting games to stupid fully scripted and hex-edited worlds in relatively little time. With the mechanics so limited, the community really reached deep to eke new ways to leverage the tools. And we learned from each other.

If memory serves, the standard engine didn’t come with a random number generator, but it did come with a behavior that would move objects in a random cardinal direction. So you could create a random 1-4 by placing an object that moves in a random direction and surround it with four objects that sent a different message out (1-4) when collided with. This could be done twice to generate a number from 1-16 by doing (4 x firstnumber-1 + second number). And so on if you wanted something more complicated. But an issue that would come up is that you needed to reserve five tiles on the screen for this “machine”. So buildings were often made out of tiles that were hiding the objects that made the events on each screen work. To a seventh grader, that was really clever and inspiring.

The last game I ever tried to make with ZZT was essentially a tech demo. I recreated a Final Fantasy style boss fight with magic animations and branching events. It was really time-consuming to create and you could only one-off the battles, which was really probably why I gave it up. It was fairly technically impressive, I remember.

It was really the first online community I ever felt a part of. I may just download some of the titles on that list.

Kids these days have Game Maker and rich level editors and LittleBigPlanet. But this old codger still has to yield to the beauty of the limitations of ASCII characters and sixteen colors.

Played more King’s Bounty last night. The game is avoiding adding new characters by skyrocketing the difficulty. Not sure I agree with the direction, but I’m still playing it. It’s distracting me from the end of the world that is the election and financial meltdown.

Let me repeat myself: The New Yorker, which I may remind you is a serious publication, has done a profile of someone who likes to go by “Dude Huge”. I don’t mean to hate, I’m just jealous. The article is insightful and well-written.

But it trumpets up game design into something much more glamorous than it is for this particular designer,  because profiling the “rock star” of the game design world gives this impression that we are all the result of an extended Revenge of the Nerds epilogue where we all drive Ferraris, hang out with celebrities and pose for photos in elaborate costumes.

From the article:

[T]he photographs of him on his MySpace page alongside the splatter-film director Eli Roth and the porn stars Jenna Jameson and Ron Jeremy—qualifies him as exceptional in an industry that is, as he says, widely assumed to be a preserve inhabited by pale, withdrawn, molelike creatures. There is some truth to this stereotype: most game designers are not like CliffyB.

But my main problem is that the media takes Gears of War so seriously. It’s the same unintelligent male adolescent power fantasy that we see over and over and over again. Yet it’s considered the hallmark of our industry? I’m no Braid indie-gamer wonk, but even though Iron Man made a killing at the box-office, we don’t see hero worship of Jon Favreau. He isn’t in the pantheon of directors that we venerate as the gifted industry-definers.

There are designers pushing the industry forward, even if their games aren’t as popular. Look at David Cage at Quantic Dream. Look at Kim Swift at Valve. Look at Keita Takahashi. I’d like to read about them. Cliff, while putting out a game that was extremely commercially successful, really just hit the nerd lottery by attaching to the right company at the right time. I don’t mean to denigrate his work. It’s not that it is bad by any sense of the word. It’s just… standard.

The writer of the article seems almost surprised that Bleszinski doesn’t drag his knuckles on the floor as he walks. He referenced the overrated indie comedy Garden State in one of his levels? How literate! Puke.

And I’m certainly not of the class of game designer that I want to see profiled either. I make sports games, which are, in a way, the same adolescent power fantasy of which I grow tired.

Plus, I am boring. I went to college. I drive a Civic.

The article does make the most poignant observation about game designers that can be made and which pretty much invalidates any articles about rockstar game designers:

[M]odern game design is too complex and collaborative for any individual to feel proprietary about his own ideas.