Being unemployed, I’ve been spending less and less time in front of the computer. I know that my days of being able to move around during my 9-5 are limited, so most of my web browsing is done through starring Twitter links that sound interesting for later review. Well I had some time to sit down and look through them, so without much comment here are the best ones I wanted to share:

- Chris Hecker did a writeup on his Achievements talk from GDC that is required reading.

- Jesse Schell has interesting, smile-inducing presentations even if you aren’t a designer. It’s part of what makes him a remarkable professor. This is his keynote from an AR conference.

- I am dumbfounded, absolutely dumbfounded that Steve Meretzky, who designed A Mind Forever Voyaging (and who I am meeting in a few weeks), would say that all games are Skinner boxes. I intend to ask him about that.

- This EA Louse guy and I have a lot in common. We were both shellacked by corporate infighting. The difference is that I addressed my anger at the event constructively and he went on an Internet tirade that will probably get him sued. I don’t know what exactly a shitfit gets you other than attention (both positive and negative). And if you are in the industry for attention, then you are in the wrong damn business. Apparently, this is a burgeoning trend. It’s time to act like grown-ups, folks. Do what we all do: bitch at the bar after hours.

Richard Bartle: “Designers working on games “must want to say something… if you’re a game designer, you have to have some of your soul in the game design. Because otherwise it’s just superficial, there’s no vision to it, no substance to it.”

- Excellent review of Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light by the guys at Semi-Secret (Canabalt) that I wholly agree with (or else I wouldn’t post it.)

- Numbersdump on Kickstarter donations. If I ever need to self-publish a board game, I’ll probably go that route.

- Ernest Adams shellacks Raph Koster in the first comment here. Also, Raph, saying that wall spam isn’t spam for the people playing the game is like saying that junk mail isn’t junk mail if someone actually signs up for that credit card somewhere. Lame.

- Sebastian Deterding does the best presentations on design on the Internet for non-designers period full stop. This one is called “Pawned” and is about the “gamification” efforts of other software developers. Read this and everything else on his site then everything in his required reading list.

- I love using my Kindle and I think the announcement of Kindle Singles is a huge step forward for writers. I’ve read so many business books that could have been done in half the length, but were obviously padded to get them to a more salable length. Kudos.

- Hockey super heroes. How could this possibly fail?

I actually still have a bunch more links in the hopper, but I will get to them later. Off to pub trivia and then a Big Time interview tomorrow!

I seriously had a post in drafts about this very topic when Clint Hocking posts a link to this article by Don Norman of the Design of Everyday Things fame. Always upstaged by better communicators than myself, I point you to go read it. It is everything I wanted to say in a better package. The analogy of local maxima is particularly accurate.

The reason I had a post brewing is that I had a pair of recent interviews that both included a discussion of “Quantitative Design” versus “Intuitive Design”. These are the words that both interviewers used. I do not endorse the terms. The reason I do not endorse “Intuitive Design” is that it seems almost pejorative. I’ve seen truly intuitive designers who made decisions by the seats of their pants where whatever came to mind was right. How can you question them? Their reasons for making the decision is simply that the decision “feels right”. The label of “intuitive design” conjures images of diva-like egos dictating on whim. Scientific minds reject gut feeling and glom quantitative design where you create an A/B test and count up the results. Numbers are concrete. They must provide truth, right?

Yet show me a breakthrough that has come about via A/B testing. A/B testing works in a controlled environment where there is no possibility of a C, D or E and where both A and B provide a similar level of familiarity. So what if the test itself is poorly designed? How do we determine that? By testing the test? Then testing the testing test? Turtles all the way down. At some point you need human creativity to step in and make judgements. That’s obvious, of course, but it is worth noting to those who think quantitative testing reveals the word of God.

Testing in many forms is absolutely crucial. It is the results of playtests that need to inform the decisions of forward-thinking designers. My objection from the start is in the “versus”. It suggests that these two camps in extremis are the only pure methods, that only Farmville and Crazy Indie Game can exist. There has never been an original game designed solely by quantitative design, nor will there ever be. All it can do is take two or more items that already have been designed and judge the merits in isolation. While there certainly have been games designed wholly by intuition, I’ve never had experience where one could not be improved by a little scientific playtesting.

Many designers feel threatened by the recent “social” game trend towards phasing out the opinions of trained designers replacing them with “designers” who simply run A/B tests and interpret results. I am not scared. Studios that value giving customers something new will, by necessity, need trained creative designers.

It’s not a good time to be looking for a job: the last time the unemployment rate was this high, consumers were buying up the Atari 5200 and Nintendo had just released Mario Bros. to arcades. Studios are either churning employees to cut expenses (which is actually good news for new graduates) or freezing hiring unless someone knows someone who knows someone.

That said, getting a nibble on the line can be exciting. Deep down you are so tired of being unemployed and so excited to be creating again that you may have the tendency to throw yourself at any employer who shows the slightest interest. Interviews are a two-way street. If you care about what you will be doing, you should be trying to learn just as much about the studio and how you will fit as the HR person on the other end is trying to learn about you and your skills. Otherwise, you could find yourself miserable in an awful fit situation, unable to execute on a good job offer out there somewhere.

Here are some things about which to consider finding out more which you may not have considered:

• Brainstorming Methods. This can tell you a lot about the creative culture of a studio. How do they structure brainstorms? Where are they held? How often? Who leads them? For instance, I once worked in a place that had one white board in the whole studio, shoved in the corner of a conference room. Knowing that would have been a sign that brainstorming really didn’t happen there, which tells you volumes about the creative process.
• Conferences. You have to be careful as to how you phrase this one because you don’t want to seem like you are interested in the position to travel the world. The real meat of the question is how the studio treats ongoing education. Do they hold classes? Bring in guests? Send people to GDC, Siggraph, etc? If a studio focuses on training and educating its employees, then it tells you about how the organization sees its contract with those employees. Are they a resource to be spent or an investment to be curated? You may never want to actually go to GDC, but knowing the answer to this is still valuable.
• Genre/Platform. Consider the tough position of the HR person. He or she wants to make sure you are a fit for the future, but can’t actually tell you what the requirements of the future are. Either he or she doesn’t know them or is not allowed to talk about it. So many games have been revealed simply because of a too strictly worded job posting. But that doesn’t mean you have to go into the situation blindly. By asking about the studio’s plans for genres or platform expansion you can easily read between the lines. Is this a studio ready to expand and change or are they happy doing what they do? Neither is the right answer, but you need to know what you will be working on in the future in general terms to get a hint as to whether or not the place will be a good fit for you. When I was at Tiburon I saw many people who didn’t want to be working on sports games. I’m pretty genre agnostic, but even I tired of sports after a few years. It’s good to know the general trajectory you face.
• Advancement – For the love of God, never ask this directly in an interview, but you can ask around it. How does advancement work at the studio? If you are looking at a junior position, are people promoted to more senior positions? Is there a formalized system for this? How long does it take? This, like the conferences question, lets you know about how the studio sees its workers – stratified cogs in a machine or adaptable parts of the whole.
• Autonomy – Autonomy is really tough to get a hold of in an interview, but wholly important to get a handle on. Autonomy is a function of two variables: position and studio culture. There’s nothing you can do about the first–more junior positions will have less autonomy. But the second is what you want to know. Does the studio trust its creators with creative decisions or are these decisions dictated from outside sources and to what degree? After all, what is the point of being a designer if you aren’t allowed to actually design? You can usually get a grasp of this simply by asking someone in a design role (if you get to speak with them) to talk about the process of how ideas get into the game. If there’s a lot of experimentation there, then the level of autonomy is likely pretty high. Also, you may not be looking for autonomy. Creativity is hard work. Maybe you want a place where you are told what to do down to the finest detail? I don’t, but know people who are more than happy to be a part of that relationship.
• What Came Before – Again, this is impossible to ask during an interview but you can ask around it. Is this a new position or are you replacing someone? If you are replacing someone, why did they leave? Was it voluntary? I personally prefer to come into new positions because you can more easily define the role yourself–expectations aren’t set by a previous employee. But more importantly, did the previous employee leave because the job is insufferable? There’s no easy way to find this out. If you do a site visit, you may be able to talk with team members and get a feel for it, but even then it is hard to know.

It’s tough out there. People say you can’t afford to be picky. Is that true? I think you can’t afford to not be picky. You will likely have to pick up your life and move, work 50+ hours a week (you did ask about crunch periods, right?) and naturally while you are there you cannot execute options that may be better fits. Why would you take the first thing that shows up? My opinion may change when my unemployment checks run out. We all have necessities. But life is too short to not be happy with what you do with over half of your waking life.

Hitting the nail on the head:

Want to resell your game? With all the one-time use codes included with new games, resell value has gone down.

DRM? Ubisoft now requires you to have a constant Internet connection to play their PC games. And EA’s recently released Command & Conquer 4 has the same requirement.

The most recent mind-blowing announcement was that EA is planning to release “very long” game demos (3-4 hours, apparently) and charge $10-15 for them, then sell the full game later at full price.

All together now: holy shit.

Can anyone give me an example of one of the big gaming companies providing more value to the consumer in the last year?

Absolutely.

I desperately want to tell the story of why EA’s demos (Skate as exception) are so awful, but I shouldn’t because it is Inside Baseball and I don’t want to name names. Here’s the moral of the story though. Consumers see demos as a “try before you buy” that can help persuade you or dissuade you. Fairly reasonable. Some publishers see demos as another reason to issue a press release. If the demo could just be the Press Start screen, that’s what they would do. Any gameplay someone gets for free that they could be paying for is theft. If the demo provides no value to the consumer, that is irrelevant. If one person tries the demo and decides not to buy the game (FREELOADER) it is not worth it if two potential people who weren’t going to buy the game convinced by a satisfactory demo.

Why? To them, demos are for people who are already going to buy the game. That’s why they are going to charge for them. Some folks at EA see demos as accessories, ways to monetize existing fans. Not everyone in the brass is that shallow, but they get the most press. Some of the smartest people I’ve met at EA are in those echelons, but they don’t get the attention of the Intermob.

Generally, we designers hate that mercenary approach. We want to create art and get it into people’s hands. And if they enjoy it, it is only fair that they pay for the full experience. Anything that treats the audiences we respect as breathing piles of money is generally seen as sketchy, hence the recent backlash against Skinner Box Game developers.

But you know what? It will backfire. Because AAAs have been making culturally empty things for so long thanks to the suits that a second-tier game these days only has a few hours before it wears out its welcome. Many of us will gladly pay the $15 to get a few fun hours out of Generic Shooter X rather than a few fun hours and a lot of slogging with the $60 version.

It will just take a few iterations of the big publisher Prisoner’s Dilemma with one of them releasing a string of big budget flops to really shake things up. Which will happen first? This? Or the bubble bursting on the studios doing Skinner Box games? Or will they happen simultaneously? I for one am thrilled at the prospects of the aftermath.

You know, his heart is in the right place when Brandon Sheffield complains about EA’s Dead Space 2 promotion:

It’s in this climate that EA has chosen to launch its Design a Kill for Dead Space 2 contest, which to me runs second only to Acclaim’s attempt to buy ad space on tombstones in terms of irresponsibility.

But I find it hard to sympathize. There was zero outrage over the first Dead Space game whose main innovative play mechanic was, in fact, dismemberment. Sheffield attempts to draw some sort of moral line between professional creators and fan ideas:

Yes, this is what many of us do every day – there are those of us who design combat and combat scenarios for a living. But asking fans to do it is just too much. First, it’s acknowledging that games can inspire fans to think of ways to kill.

But it seems Sheffield has more of a problem with the promotion of the game than with the game itself, which confounds me. Are we okay with a game about dismemberment but not okay with people knowing it is a game about dismemberment? Would it be better if we continued to deny what is patently obvious? Some games are schadenfreude-filled escapades of murder-porn. The same is true of movies or books in the horror field. Horror is about the shocking and it has been since Poe. To just go “shhhh” and not draw attention to it in the hopes that the enemies of the medium will not notice is wishful thinking.

I think there’s an underlying issue here. Sheffield just isn’t comfortable with schlock in our industry. I think all of us in the ivory tower that is Game Design with capital letters would like to see more “literary” and “meaningful” games, whatever that means today. But entertaining schlock is also valuable. Should Martin Scorsese wince when someone mentions Halloween because they are in the same industry? I don’t think so.

By getting in a tizzy over something over-the-top like Dead Space 2 is to play into the hands of the socially conservative enemies that radicalize our industry. It’s accepting their premise that what we do is to debase society when we shy away from fun ideas because they might offend their razor-thin moral sensibilities. Being on the defensive will block off our creativity. Will Dead Space 2 be a title that moves our industry forward? I’d bet no, but does every title have to be to have worth?

Contrast this:

Pincus has acknowledged not being vigilant enough with the automated ads that appeared on Zynga games during the company’s early days.

With this:

So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I dont know, I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it. *laughs* We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business.

Zynga’s done the right thing since then and I’m having issue more with CNN’s reporting than anything. I have to give them their kudos for their huge success.

I just hate, hate, that they and everyone else uses the term “social gaming” for what is essentially a solitaire experience. WoW is a social game. Parking Wars is a social game. Actually, I’d call Parking Wars the definition of a social game. It can’t be played without your friends and the mechanics are based on the actions of those friends.

From the first link:

[Pincus]: “A great social game should be like a great cocktail party. If you want it to appeal to absolutely everyone you invite, it has to be broad in its content so that everyone gets it.”

If his cocktail parties are everyone sitting by themselves while occasionally getting their friends a drink or a snack, I probably don’t want to go to his cocktail parties.

Facebook games don’t all need to have Parking Wars levels of social engineering, but “social gaming” is awful (and almost ironic) nomenclature for the genre.

Since moving to New York City, I’ve been reading a hell of a lot: waiting for my elevator, waiting for a subway train, on the train, waiting to meet people, etc. I’m pretty surprised at how much I’m getting through. And since I’m a big huge tech nerd, when I see people with e-book readers on the subway, I am drawn to rudely look over their shoulders. Those are precious little devices. And normally, I’d want one. But e-books have this problem that I can’t currently reconsile and it’s the same dynamic that makes buying a game at Best Buy better than buying a full-priced digital download on Steam.

My cost to play a game is not simply the price tag at retail. Physical copies come with a call option. I can always sell the game on half.com or eBay or, god forbid, a Gamestop.

Let’s take a recent example. I bought Brutal Legend back in October at a Toys R Us sale. With tax, the game ended costing $42.80. I played through the game and beat it fairly quickly. At that point, I could sell it or keep it. I ended up selling it on half.com for $39.99. When you add the shipping surcharge and take out the site fees and packaging fees, I received $35.38.

The cost to me of the experience of playing Brutal Legend was therefore, $7.42. This, of course, ignores the time value of listing something on eBay or Half, but I find that to be easy and quite negligible. I had the option where I could have kept the title in my collection, but then the price of the experience would have gone back up to the original $42.80 I paid. I passed.

These economies kill digital sales and its why publishers seek to kill it in any way they can. See EA’s recent shift to adding DLC to every game to force secondhand folks to pay in.

So when you compare the $7.42 to the $49.99 the game would be on Steam or some-such site (if they made a PC version, of course), you can see how the scale is weighted towards those that would take a few minutes to sell games they are completely done with to other gamers.

Some games, like sports titles go down in value on the secondhand market fairly quickly. This makes the total experience usually more expensive and the option to keep cheaper. Some games end up being rare and keep their value very well. This makes the total experience quite cheap, but the option to keep expensive. I bought the limited edition of Bioshock when it first came out and ended up selling it for a profit secondhand. Playing Bioshock made me money.

To simplify, the cost of the game isn’t the retail price, but the total price you pay minus the money you can get back from selling it after fees times some probability that you won’t sell it back.

COST = RETAIL + TAX – SELLPROB*SELLINGREV

So back to the topic at hand, e-books. While I love the cutting-edge tech, it would vastly increase the cost of books for me. I bought Hespira on Amazon recently for $17.93 including tax and shipping. I could turn around today and likely sell it on half.com for $16.74. After fees, it’s $14.23, assuming that the shipping surcharge equalled your shipping costs. My total cost of experiencing Hespira would be $3.70 if I chose to resell it. This is versus the $10 + tax for the Kindle and Nook stores or $13 for the iBookstore in addition to an amortized cost of the reader itself. This ignores the other issue – that Hespira isn’t even available yet for Kindle or Nook. I expect that to change if these devices get popular.

Now, if you plan to keep all of your books and games, if no matter what the title is your SELLPROB is close to zero, then it doesn’t matter. Pick the cheaper retail price (probably the digital option if you buy a lot of titles) and rock out. But if you are willing to put in a minimal amount of work, gaming and reading is much cheaper with the real physical objects.

Publishers hate that fact, understandably, but it is great if you want to consume a lot of media.

Isn’t spring supposed to be the quiet quarter?

Now – Bayonetta

2/2 – Star Trek Online
2/2 – White Knight Chronicles
2/10 – Bioshock II
2/23 – Heavy Rain (!!!)
3/7 – Dragon Age Expansion
3/10 – Final Fantasy XIII
3/31 – Singularity
3/31 – God of War III
4/27 – Red Dead Redemption
4/?? – Splinter Cell: Conviction