It's my turn to make fun of the N-Gage

You can't point to a single thing about the N-Gage and say, "This is why it failed." There are so many things wrong with it fixing just one of them won't help. For example, this Halloween discount promotion is not going to sell very many more N-Gage's: although it almost fixes the price problem, there are too many other problems to count.
Discounting is a loser move. It will sell a few more units in the short term, but if they return to their original price they won't sell any. Everybody will wait for it to go on sale again.
And it doesn't fix the price problem: one of Jack Trout's rules of pricing - it has to be in the same ballpark. $200 for an N-Gage when you can spend $75 on a GBA is still not in the ballpark.
But even if they sold the N-Gage for $100 they'd still be fucked by these two things:
1) It does not have a killer app. As you can see, there is only one game for the N-Gage that's even slightly above average. (70 approximately is the mean on Gamerankings.)
2) It's a swiss army knife. People do not want swiss army knives. They want specialty products. They want a game company to make their game machine. They want a cell phone company to make their cell phone. Convergence is a myth. It didn't happen with stereos and it won't happen with PDAs. (Note: right now, you're probably thinking "But I do want a toaster in my car. That would be very convenient." You say that, but you don't want a crappy toaster in a crappy car, and when the toaster car comes out, no matter how good its toaster and how good its engine you're still going to think that it's either a crappy toaster or a crappy car because how good could a toaster made by a car company or a car made by a toaster company possibly be?) Now, if you built a GBA into your phone...then maybe I'd buy it.

Videogame Production Newsgroup

This started over on Yahoo groups: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/VideogameProduction/. There were about a dozen messages in one day and then crickets. Here's your chance to participate and make it something other than stillborn.

Xbox and .NET are complementary goods

Now you know why Microsoft introduced Xbox: so they could require developers to update .NET. 6000 game developers * $1000 = six million dollars! 94 million and they've recouped their costs. BTW, I pulled these figures out my ass.

Ahh, Eudora

Going back to Eudora after suffering under Outlook for a while is like going back to my old broken-in Doc Martens after trying Kenneth Cole.

Jesus

The number of hits to this site went up 10x after the Gama article went up...I guess because I had Alex Dunne put the link in my bio on Gama.

Better To Be Ridiculed Than Ignored

The first article in my column on managing game development went up today. Martin Donlon came up wtih the title: Manager In A Strange Land. (By the way, there should be a name for blogs that have like, two-three entries in them that haven't been updated in months.) I'm nervous. When you put yourself Out There, some percentage of people are going to think you're an idiot. But such is life.

More Armchair CEO Goodness

I'm about to take potshots at my own company here, so I should emphasize: the comments and opinions on this website do not reflect the opinions of Treyarch or Activision. I'm a guy in the trenches; I don't get to see the P & L's; I basically don't know jack about the decisions made behind closed doors in Washington.

Anyway, pretty soon Activision is coming out with True Crime: Streets of LA, our attempt at a GTA killer, which will put us in the me-too ranks with other titles like The Getaway, Simpsons: Hit & Run, and Roadkill. Each of these products tries to differentiate itself from GTA a different way, be it "The Simpsons", or "A Post Apocalyptic Future", or "You're In A Movie" or whatever. How is True Crime differentiating? With one simple word: "truth." True Crime is going to be more True, that is, more Real than GTA. The driving, fighting, and shooting are going to be next level immersive stuff.

Sounds decent. GTA but better. I might buy that. I'll give this marketing effort a B.

But still, imagine Joe Sixpack Xbox owner walking into EB and saying, "I heard Grand Theft Auto comes out for the Xbox today." He'll see not only Grand Theft Auto, but also this True Crime game. "True Crime?" he'll say. "Supposedly like GTA but better? Well, how come I never heard of it?" And he buys GTA.

In Differentiate or Die, Jack Trout says if you're not the leading brand with the killer attribute - then you should go "opposite" the leading brand's killer attribute. Pepsi's answer to Coke being the original is "We're for the new generation." McDonalds owns "fast"? Fight back with "We take the time to do it better." (Or - McDonalds is for kids. Be for adults.) Avis's most succesful ad campaign was "We Try Harder"; when they gave that up, they started losing market share. When 3d Realms & Remedy looked at Tomb Raider and asked themselves, "How can we go opposite of this?" They came up with an ugly male cop game, where shooting was emphasized over climbing. They came up with Max Payne. Maybe not as succesful as Lara Croft, but still wildly succesful.

What attribute does GTA own? Crime. It is, hands-down, the leading crime game. How do you go opposite of crime? Law enforcement.

Activision, at some level, knows this. What is really hard to tell from the marketing for True Crime is that it's a law enforcement game! You play a cop who takes the law into his own hands. It really is the opposite of GTA, and it could own the word "Law" in the same way that GTA owns the word "Crime." When True Crime was greenlighted, Activision was taking a play from Trout's playbook. A genius play: imagine walking into EB, and seeing a poster that says, "Sick of being the bad guy?" And the game has some cool law enforcement name, like, Police Procedure or All-Points Bulletin. (Side note: the arcade game All-Points Bulletin, with its top-down mission based policeman-in-the-city gameplay, is the ancestor to GTA. Wouldn't it be fun to bring that title back, and have heritage on your side as well as your good-guy position? "Before there was Grand Theft Auto - there was All Points Bulletin.") And you can keep the "Streets of LA" subtitle, since it's evocative of The Streets of San Francisco. Now people walking into EB aren't making a choice between which is the better crime game. They're making a choice between "Do I want to be a bad-guy or a good-guy?"

I know what you're thinking: "People these days, they all want to be bad." I might be willing to accept that most people want to be bad. I want to be bad. I went the dark side of the force route in Knights of the Old Republic, for example. The thing is, as long as some significant percentage of people would rather be cops than robbers, that's sales for you, almost regardless of which is the "better" or most popular game. Not only that, but you pull in the people who refuse to play GTA because they don't like the moral connotations (I have friends like this. Really.) and you pull in the large segment of mothers who would rather have their kids grow up to be cops than criminals and you get the T-rating instead of the M so you're more likely to get on the shelves at Wal*Mart. Finally, I think a significant percentage do root for the good guy. Consider Bad Boys 2 - by all accounts an atrocious movie, still a box office smash.

Believe me, at it's core, at it's inception, the theme of True Crime - you're a cop who takes law into his own hands - is genius.

But then Activision went and called it True Crime! And buried the law enforcement angle so deep I can barely even tell from the ad copy that's what it's about. All those people who want to play cops, and their mothers, are going to go into EB and they're going to think it's just another GTA. What the hell happened? I'm reminded of the scene in Dr. Strangelove: "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!"

Here's where I pull theories out of my ass. Theory 1: nobody told the advertising/PR department what the plan was. Although a shrewd marketer came up with the idea for a GTA-like game about law enforcement, he may have been part of development, or an executive, and therefore not actually, technically, part of the department that does our advertising and PR, which we call marketing, although that is somewhat of a euphemism, as they don't actually get to pick what products are greenlighted. So when they got their hands on it, they wrote down a list of its features, ran it by a focus group, which probably told them that crime was cooler than law, but realism sounded good, and there you have it. True Crime.

Theory 2: we lost our nerve. It sure looks like crime pays, doesn't it? Hard to argue with those numbers. Are you sure you want to make a cop game in this climate? It sounds risky. If I push for a cop game, and it doesn't sell well, I might lose my job. But if I go with the flow, hey. At least when the game doesn't sell it won't be my fault. I was just going with the numbers.

I wish there was some way to prove that I'm right, and Activision marketing should have pushed the law enforcement thing. No matter how well True Crime does, I'm going to believe it could have done better if we'd pushed the law enforcement thing.

The only way to prove me right will be if somebody makes a law-enforcement game where the marketing rides that angle, and spends a similar amount on marketing it. If it does better than True Crime, then I win, and I should switch careers from programming to marketing. If it does worse, than I should stay in the trenches and keep my mouth shut.

Notes on System Shock 2

"Your weapons fail. Your ammunition runs low."

This is the voice of the Many as you crawl inside them, and it could well be the motto of System Shock 2: unlike Halo and Doom, this is very much an FPS about conserving resources. You start with nothing, and will probably find yourself using melee weapons to conserve your precious ammo. And you save-crawl, doing segments over and over until you get them perfect, because that ammo and health is too valuable to squander. The result is a game that encourages mastery, but I'm guessing it's not for everyone. In fact, the first time I tried to play it, I wasted my resources two hours in, and gave up. This is what Rob Fermier, one of the developers, calls a "Shelf Level Event": it goes back on the shelf, never to be played again.

But one day I ran out of games and did play it again.

In the family tree of video games, System Shock 2 is the mutant love-child of Quake and System Shock. System Shock, in turn, is a descendent of Ultima Underworld. Ultima Underworld sprang fully-formed from the head of Zeus. No it didn't. UW is, I believe, the first first-person realtime RPG, and therefore a child of the Ultimas and...I don't know...Wolfenstein 3d?

Excuse me if I ramble. Too much coffee tonight.

Computer role-playing games bring with them, almost by definition, some fundamentally sound game design principles. I mentioned some of them in my Notes on Zelda. These include:

Continous, expanding world: System Shock 2 all takes place on the connected bulkheads of the starship Von Braun and the connected sister ship, The Rickenbacker. Up until the final two levels of the game, you can always backtrack.

"Parallel challenges with mutual assistance": (thank you Noah Falstein) almost all RPGs have side gameplay that allow you to develop your character so that the mainline challenges become easier. System Shock 2 has an exploration element like this: you don't have to thoroughly search the Von Braun, but if you do, you'll be rewarded with powerups that you can use to improve your character. Another side quest is "research": you find certain items that you can bring to chemical storerooms and study. Studying them gives you various advantages.

Token Based Economy: Although you're alone on an effectively deserted space ship, there are vending machines that take the currency of System Shock 2: the nanite. This currency can be used to buy goodies, hack computers, and repair or improve your weapons, and is used by the developers as a small reward. System Shock 2 actually has two economies: the open-ended and ever inflating nanite currency, and the zero-sum (am I using that term right?) Cyber Modules currency, which allow you to improve your character. You can only improve your character so much in System Shock 2, because there's only so many Cyber Modules available. Which leads to:

Meaningful choices with perceivable consequences: there are many axes on which you can improve your character, but once you've chosen which axes to improve on, you're stuck. Also, a very interesting element in System Shock 2 which I don't think I've seen anywhere else is the Surgical Key. Throughout the world there are incomplete surgical beds. You can attach a surgical key to these to become active, at which point they give you close to free healing for the rest of the game. The surgical keys are very rare. I used one on an out-of-the-way surgical bed and regretted it for the rest of the game. The next surgical key I got, I was very careful about where I finally placed it: I made sure to put it near an elevator, so I'd always be able to get to it quickly from wherever I was.

One thing that isn't necessarily an RPG staple, but that System Shock 2 benefits from, is systemic design. They mention this in their post-mortem. ("Use of simple, reusable game-play elements.") The elements include gun turrets, videocameras, a handful of different kinds of enemies, security computers, hackable crates, e-mail logs, ghosts, and not a whole lot more. They are able to get a surprising amount of gameplay and story out of these few elements. System Shock indeed.

I mentioned that I was playing System Shock 2 to a friend at work and he said he thought there weren't enough open spaces in the levels. I think this was by design: the narrow corridors of the Von Braun are purposely claustrophobic, which sets it apart from the wide corridors and spaces of Quake and Halo.

System Shock and Myst pioneered, at roughly the same time, a new kind of interactive storytelling: the kind where you're dropped in a world and you have to piece together the backstory from information in the environment. The reason for doing it this way in System Shock was simple: they were so unhappy with the state of NPC interaction in videogames that they decided to not have any living ones. (http://www.gameslice.com/features/spector/index4.shtml) But it creates an interesting side-game; you're exploring a story. You're piecing together a mystery. In essence, with System Shock 2, there are two stories: the backstory of how things got the way they are, and the current story of trying to cope. This technique was later borrowed for Metroid Prime.

System Shock 2 is well balanced. You're struggling for resources in the beginning, you get to cut loose in the middle, and you struggle again at the end. This is partly due to the tireless efforts of Dorian Hart, but they also have some techniques that make the game self-balance to an extent: during the middle game you discover both healing stations and energy recharging stations. Returning to these stations allow you to fill up your ammo and health. In the second-to-last level, there is no healing and recharging, and you feel it. Another technique is when looting the bodies of dead monsters, they are more likely to have good stuff if you are low on ammo and health. Clever, eh? Finally, parallel challenges with mutual assistance smooths out rough areas: if you're not good enough to take on a challenge, you can research / explore in other directions until you're powerful enough.

Should I dis on the game at all? I can't help it: for me, the game was just too damn long. My save game alone recorded 16 hours of gameplay; that probably represents around 30 hours of actual play. You can play different types of character, so in theory I could go back and try one with Psi powers, something I wanted to do after ten hours of play but couldn't possibly take after twenty.

Also, System Shock 2 feels like a game without a focus. Like Deus Ex, they empower you to play the game the way you want to play, but that was the focus of Deus Ex, and with System Shock 2 it seems like yet another of the many features the game provides. (System Shock 2 even has mini-games: you can find a PDA that plays games like Minesweeper and simple RPG's.) So System Shock 2 is a jack of all trades and master of none. There's better shooting in Quake. Better AI in Half-Life. Better player empowerment in Deus Ex. Better character development in most RPG's. Better hacking in Uplink.

Lately I've come to realize that lacking focus isn't just dangerous from a design perspective; it's also bad marketing. When people ask me, "What's System Shock 2?" I don't know what to tell them. You should be able to say what's special about a game in a short, sticky sentence. "It's *The Sims* for children." "It's John Woo style gunplay." "It's gravity-defying snowboarding." "It's being Spider-Man."

I dunno. Maybe it's this:

"Your weapons fail. Your ammunition runs low."

Here I go again with the e-mail

Got this in my inbox today:


I'm at the source of all game-degree-rumors itself, Full Sail. I'm not asking for some kind of critique of this school in particular, but just your general opinion of video game design/programming being taught.

On the 'outside' you always hear rumblings that many people think it's sad. That anyone who's serious would teach themselves how to program and by creating an 'assembly line' mentality there'll be subpar workers who just thought it would be 'cool'.

I'm one of the folks that think having an area where people can experiment without having to worry about the financial side is great.

Obviously getting a degree doesn't make someone better by default, or vice-versa. But I was curious about your opinion on the topic.

That, and they need a 'search' feature on blogspot. Oh, if you feel strongly enough to bother feel free to make this a part of your blog or whatever.

Jeffool.


Well, Jeffool . . . I said consummate v's. Consummate!

I mean, um, once Matt Rhoades and Tomo Moriwaki were having a conversation about "game schools." It went something like this:

Tomo: Game schools? That's silly.

Matt: You're part of the problem, Tomo.

I agree with Matt.

Game schools are just as good an idea as film schools. You'll get your Martin Scorsese types out of Full Sail, and you'll get your Quentin Tarantino types out of Electronics Boutique. Treyarch has hired at least one employee from a game school, so it's not a horrible career choice, although we're definitely more likely to hire someone with a computer science degree from a reputable university.

But check your teachers' credentials before slavishly adhering to their dogmas! Have they made good games? All you have to do is write some shit down and people will think you're more of an authority on games than you really are. Wink.

If they've made good games, slavishly adhere to their dogmas all you want.

And on the search thing, try "yoursearchwordhere site:gamedevleague.blogspot.com" on Google. This works great with Metacritic, too. Much better than their slow-ass search engine.

Multimillion dollar idea

I've always wondered why The Sims Online wasn't as big a success as I thought it should have been. I was so sure. If I had a pile of money free, I probably would have put it in EA before the launch, and been a little bit poorer for it. Anyway, last night I was reading Positioning by Al Reis and Jack Trout, and the answer is in there.

It's the name.

First you have to accept Reis and Trout's thesis, which is: people are stupid. Once you've accepted that, you can see the problem. The history of the American marketplace is filled with stories of companies that had a succesful product, introduced a similar but different product with the same name, confused the consumer, and then some upstart introduces a nearly identical product with a new name, and that's what everybody buys.

You and I know the difference between The Sims Online and The Sims. But Joe and Mary Sixpack don't. Electronic Arts realizes this, now. If you go to http://www.gamasutra.com/resource_guide/20030916/lewis_01.shtml, you can see this quote:

"Part of the reason for this price drop was that players and potential players told us that they didn't understand the game's value. (That isn't exactly what they said, but that is how we interpreted it.) People were used to seeing Sims products on the shelf for $29.99 to $39.99, without an added monthly fee, so when the apple green TSO box appeared with a $49.99 sticker on it (plus subscription) players probably reached for one of the less expensive Sims expansion packs instead."

Which is one of the things Reis & Trout say about line extension: you don't broaden the market. You just suck away customers from your established product. (At least they're paying subscription fees now, but still.)

Still, EA isn't about to change the name of their product. Which means a company like Mythic, the kind of company that can make an MMORPG in 18 months, could come out with a TSO clone, market it as it's own new thing, and become the market leader. Especially if they marketed it smarter than EA. Your first hit's free and all that. And don't call it "Dark Age of America" or "Modern Day Camelot", for Christ's sake.

Caveats: Al Reis and Jack Trout like to pile a mountain of anecdotes on you and twist the facts. Diet Coke, supposedly a line extension and therefore a bad idea in their book, is still the leading diet soda as far as I know. They tell you that "Vaseline Intensive Care" isn't in fact a line extension, because people supposedly think of it as just "Intensive Care", and that's why it succeeded over Jergen's Dry or whatever. And they predicted that Microsoft would be the next IBM, as more and more people, disappointed with products like Project and Sourcesafe and Outlook and the Xbox, pull away from cash cows like Word and Excel. They'll tell you that we're just seeing "the short-term gain" from using an established name to sell a new product, and eventually Coke and Microsoft will pay.

Also, I don't play MMORPG's. To me, the very idea sounds like an excruciating chore. I gave *Tale in the Desert* a whirl, and when I got to the part where I was supposed to spend twenty minutes watching flax rot I uninstalled it. So how much can I possibly know about the market?

So nothing is certain. This is a risky proposition. I wouldn't use my own money to fund this hypothetical Sims clone. But if I was a CEO at a publisher, I might think that the opportunity justifies the risk.

I'm assuming that games should be marketed like products in a supermarket, rather than like movies. Should they? I'd say it depends on the game. If the selling point of the game is some cool intellectual property - characters or a world that are popular - a Lara Croft or Max Payne or Matrix (is there a world born in videogames that's popular because it's a cool world?) - then cross-marketing is a decent idea, although it has the side effect of turning something that could be a long-lived trend (James Bond) into a passing fad (Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.) Still...I think most of us would rather milk all the blood out of a fad as quickly as possible than wait for what might be more money to slowly roll in on a trend.

On the other hand, if the selling point of your game is that it's the best in a category, and your characters and world are incidental: don't line extend. Don't make TSO or Command & Conquer: Renegade or a Wing Commander or Final Fantasy movie.

Let me throw out some predictions. In a few years we'll see if I'm right.

StarCraft: Ghost and Worlds of Warcraft are going to weaken Blizzard. "XCraft" used to mean RTS.

Lords of Everquest is going to weaken Everquest. "Everquest" used to mean MMORPG.

The Matrix is a fad. They're going to milk it dry this year, and nobody's going to want Matrix anything for a long time.

Deus Ex, the movie: won't be half as succesful as the first Tomb Raider movie. The point of Deus Ex is player empowerment, not J. C. Denton and his dark future.

Abandonware Binge

It all started when Cathy said, "So why don't you order this Monkey Island game you've been telling me about?" There's one copy left at Amazon: it costs $154. Ok, so it comes with Monkey Island 2 & 3 as well, but still. Sticker shock. Grim Fandango costs $10, so I don't see why I should have to pay more than $20 for the first two Monkeys.

So I decide to break the law, something I normally don't do because downloading ISO files is a huge pain in the ass. (Although I've just discovered that with BitTorrent it's much easier.) I come across an abandonware site. www.freeoldies.com. And it feels like I've struck gold! All those games I've misplaced the CD's...or better yet, the floppies...of. I start downloading like crazy...because who knows when somebody's going to start cracking down on this stuff? I still regret the day I deleted my Bilestoad ROM for Apple II emulation...because I was never able to find it again. I'm probably never going to want to play Alone in the Dark -- the father of survival horror -- again, but it's nice to have it around, just in case.

I'd just read Chris Crawford's book, and wanted to play some of the games he worked on, and here they are.

And here's another great thing: old games I worked on are in there too, listed right alongside the greats (and losers) of yesteryear. Some of them decently regarded: http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=134. Nifty. I downloaded those too. Now I can play them again without damanging the shrinkwrap on my trophy copies.

Notes on Grim Fandango

When I played Grim Fandango a few years back, I only made it halfway through and then it crashed and I never got around to downloading the patch. I've been playing it -- and watching my wife play it -- again this weekend. Cathy is not a gamer, so every time I find a game she's even somewhat interested in it's a triumph. Grim Fandango was one of those games, joining the ranks of Animal Crossing and You Don't Know Jack. At least, at first. After a while she got to puzzles she didn't find interesting, and she abandoned it. I kept playing, and when I would get past puzzles she'd hear the sound of a prerendered cutscene and she'd come back to watch and advise.
Tomo Moriwaki has a theory that a certain amount of madness is essential to good game development, both because it inspires creativity and because it gives you that feverish drive to press on during crunch time. And by madness he means things like putting a single Prodigy song on infinite repeat, listening to CD's at double speed, engaging in acts of wanton destruction in the office hallways, or simply saying a single annoying word over and over. I have a feeling that Tim Schafer and crew had the madness during Grim Fandango. Where else do you come up with stuff like that? A mixture of Mexican mythology and noir movies? As just as an example, there is a moment where Manny Calvera visits the world of the living -- our world -- but in Manny's eyes the land of the living is a fifties diner with cubist patrons. Again, how do you come up with that stuff? You have to be mad. Good thing madness on game dev teams is usually plentiful.
The puzzles in Grim Fandango almost never fall back on Fed Ex missions. Although we ocassionally fell back on trial & error to solve the puzzles, afterwards I always had the feeling that the solution made sense.
One thing the puzzles frequently rely on is functional fixedness. Some psychologists did an experiment where the subject was asked to use some string to do a task. One group had string given to them; another group didn't, but there was a sign in the office hanging from string. Most of the subjects didn't think to use the string from the sign. (The function of the string was fixated for them.) Duh. Somebody probably got a Ph. D. for that. Anyhow, you see this in Grim Fandango all the time; an item is introduced as part of the current story/environment - later you discover how to use that item for something other than its intended purpose.
I once wrote about how you can (artificially) make a game longer without much additional cost by reusing terrain. Grim Fandango does this in a couple of ways: multiple puzzles in the same area, and returning you to places you've been before later in the story. It doesn't feel totally cheap; it gives the game a feeling of unity.
It doesn't seem like people make adventure games anymore. I guess they weren't profitable enough for LucasArts to keep doing them. I think there's an opportunity here: there's a category of game with no leading brand. You could be number one. Remember when RPG's were dead and Diablo resurrected them? Okay, maybe RPG's were only in a coma. Still, I'd be scared of jumping into the genre, because of this:
The writing in Grim Fandango is excellent. It has to be, for a story-based game. One of the things that drives you on, other than the feeling of accomplishment when you solve puzzles, is to see the story unfold. I laughed my ass off in more than a few places. It's better than most of the movies and television I've seen lately. And where do you find that kind of writing talent, and would you be willing to hang your success on them?

What Do Publishers Know About Marketing?

I'm just a dumb developer. Marketing strategy is handled by people much higher on the corporate ladder. I assume they've read the same books I've read, and they have access to the important data that I don't, and they know more than me. Also, the books I've read have all the logical rigor of a collection of anecdotes. For example, in the same book they said MCI was a failure because it was the #3 long distance company, but 7-Up was a success because they started competing in the cola category and earned the position of...#3. Still, from where I stand, it seems like publishers are not doing the right things.

Mistake #3: stupid IP

Greg Costikyan already covered this one, but I wanted to add a few cents:

Currently, a medium marketing effort on a decent game can get your mindshare (using Raph Koster's number of hits on google measurement) to at least 70,000. Check True Crime: Streets of LA, or Battle Realms, or Freedom Force. Don't work on IP that has fewer hits than that. Definitely better to invent your own. Starsky & Hutch is at 80K right now, but that was probably after the videogame announcement.

If you want a game to sell millions regardless of how crappy it is, buy IP that has at least a million hits on Google. And even that isn't a guarantee: Activision's Star Trek titles aren't doing as well as we might like, and they're not even crap, they're good games.

Mistake #2 - diluting your IP

The games industry isn't the only industry that does this, happily. Al Ries & Jack Trout say that 'line extension' usually gives you a short-term gain for a long-term loss: everybody buys your Coca-Cola clothes, or whatever, when it first comes out, but then they stop, and you've weakened your core brand as well. (Although Coke does seem to still be going strong, eh?) I've noticed that Altoids has started doing this. I predict Altoids will no longer be a thing in ten years.

We saw this at Activision with the "so-and-so's Pro X" aka "O2" line. (Opinions on this blog do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Activision, btw.) Not only did nobody buy the less-good "Somebody-Other-Than-Tony-Hawk's Pro Something" games, sales of Tony Hawk have been slowly decreasing as well. Maybe they would have decreased anyway. Who knows.

If you want to grow a brand over the long term, be more like Nintendo: a new title every year or two.

Sony is making mistake #1 and mistake #2 at the same time with Lords of Everquest. Way to go, guys.

I suppose you could think of The Sims Online as being a mistake #1 & #2 combo, but it's sufficiently different from Everquest that it's really not the same category.

And now, the big one:

Mistake #1 - competing in established categories instead of inventing new categories

Ask a typical publisher if they want StarCraft with higher production values or something new, a whole new category of PC strategy game, and they'll tell you StarCraft with higher production values. In a heartbeat. Here's the thing with me-too titles that we all know from experience: 99% of them only do a small fraction of the sales of the market leader. This makes sense if what Al Ries and Jack Trout say about marketing is true: you can't position yourself as the market leader if there already is one. Your mark (they call it 'prospect') isn't going to believe you when you tell them your product is better than StarCraft. They already know that Blizzard is the leader when it comes to making science fiction or fantasy RTS. Are you going to spend Blizzard money only to come in second place with Blizzard?

Except the publishers don't even spend Blizzard money. They spend as little as they can get away with and still get a title out. So not only is the game not going to compete with Blizzard in the mind of the mark, it's not going to compete with Blizzard...at all.

The best time to do a me-too title is actually when the first title didn't sell that well and you know why. When WarCraft, the Dune 2 clone, came out, Blizzard captured a ton of market share from Westwood. What Blizzard knew (or lucked into) was that Dune 2 was a great game that didn't sell as well as it could have...for whatever reason. Because it was tied to a limiting license, or because it wasn't marketed enough, or because it didn't have online play. I don't know.

But that's not how publishers think: they see a title not do that well and they all shy away from that title. I, personally, think there's a great opportunity here with the failure of Sims Online. I thought it should have been a success. Something went wrong. I don't know what. Whoever figures out what went wrong has an opportunity to be huge.

Another good time to do a me-too title is if you can be second place. Even though you'll work harder for less return than the first place guys, there's a good chance you can still be very profitable, and play Pepsi to their Coke or Sprint to their AT&T or whatever. Sony did this with The Getaway. Activision is trying to trump Sony with True Crime. We'll see how it shakes out. My prediction is that GTA will remain the market leader for at least a decade, but True Crime will be profitable, and if GTA falls from that perch, it will be because Take Two screwed up--they're ripe for committing Mistake #2--not because somebody outsmarted them.

You know, I think it would take so little to invent a new category of RTS. My friend Ed Del Castillo at Liquid has ideas for strategy games for your PC that could easily be just as fun, if not more fun, than the current RTS formula but also be marketed as something Completely Different.

Side Note: a publisher might say that there's nothing in the mark's mind to grab onto when marketing a game like this. That's why you don't market the game, you market the category. You do a PR/marketing effort saying "What the world needs right now is a new kind of tactical simulation, one that has X," and then later you mention, in passing, that YourGameHere has X.

Anybody know a literary agent?

I've given up trying to get my novel published through traditional channels. This is your last chance to get a piece of the action before I break down and publish it on xlibris! Your loss!

Notes on You Don't Know Jack

Cathy and I used to play YDKJ when we started dating. Lately she'd been missing it, so we ordered a used copy of volume 3 from Amazon.com and have been playing it.

There are many great things about YDKJ:

The quality of the graphic design is excellent. The fonts are big and clear. They don't look pixelly. The screens aren't cluttered. They obey the rule of three. Unlike other game show games, where there's full motion video, animated sprites of contestants, or other sorts of cheesy graphics, here we just have voice-over, text, and the occasional cute icon. "If you can't do it well, don't do it all," seems to be their motto.

The experience is finely tuned and gratifying. I once did a Wheel of Fortune game, and I can tell you that despite the animated sprite of Vanna it didn't feel like you were on a game show. The voice-over that sounds like it's coming over bad speakers and the background television-land chatter "heightens the emotional intensity of the metaphor" as Chris Crawford puts it in his latest book. Chris Crawford might also point out that because play is metaphorical rather than simulational, when they say "Kill the desktop" at the beginning of the game, reminding you that you're playing a computer game and not actually on TV, although it compromises the simulation it just doesn't matter. Oh yeah, and it's funny.

The game belittles you when you screw up. And sometimes when you don't. That must have been a tough decision for them; I'm *certain* there are people out there who told them this is a bad idea, if you make fun of people they will quit playing your game. Hell, one of the first bug reports I ever saw was one about Magic Candle II: the playtester was offended that a character made fun of him. "I don't play games to be insulted," he said. That guy needed to lighten up.

The game is not antisocial. Very few games out there are the kinds of games you can play with your wife. MULE is the example most people raise but MULE scores quite low on the usability front; my wife and I are both baffled by its interface. YDKJ is completely clear.

Like Tetris and Counter-Strike, YDKJ proves that you can make a great game with a low budget in a small timeframe.

And what does Volume 3 bring to the table?

One of YDKJ's strengths may also be a weakness; we played it for a long time and never got to the point where it was repeating questions. If it wasn't for the fact that we got a new computer and didn't want to start all over from the beginning, we would have had no reason to purchase a new version. So the YDKJ people succumbed to the pressure to add features. The obvious features of YDKJ are the "Three Way" and the "Impossible Question". Both of these 'improvements' are only marginal additions.

The "three way" is a little like a diet Jack Attack with lower production values. The "impossible question" at first seemed like "sandwich gameplay" (Clint Hocking forgets where he first heard the term 'sandwich gameplay'; maybe one of the Ion guys?) - i.e. you go and get a sandwich - but then Cathy managed to win two of them, so it actually seems like a pretty cool thing.

The smarter thing for Sierra to do might have been to release more games with fewer questions, and resist the featuritis. This, of course, is a problem that consumes all of software development. A good product, such as Microsoft Word, is made, and everyone buys it, and has no reason to buy any more, unless we add something to it. The only way to keep making money off the line is to add features. Most videogames don't have this problem: they get boring quickly, as you finish all the levels or missions, and you need another installment to keep playing.

So I give MS Project a shot. Here's what I discover:

If I use Standard levelling, and I have tasks that look like this:
Task X Priority 1
Task Y Priority 2 Predecessors 1
Task Z Prioirty 3
Then it does task X first, then task Y, then task Z,
instead of Task Z (the highest priority), Task X, Task Y.

If I use Priority, Standard, that situation works, but then this situation doesn't work:
Task X Priority 1
Task Y Priority 3 Predecessors 1
Task Z Priority 2
This should do Task X, then Task Y, then Task Z, but it
goes: Z, X, Y.

If I set the priority for task X to 3, accepting that Project doesn't understand that being a predecessor to a high-priority task implies that you're just as high a priority, then it works, but I'm trying to migrate a project from Excel that has about two-thousand tasks in it, and I would need some way to automate the process. Is there some way to automate the process so that priorities are 'correct'?

Or is MS Project fundamentally broken? The Outlook / SourceSafe of the Project Management Software world?

I'm posting this question in 4 separate places; my apologies if you end up reading it more than once.

Project Management Pattern Wiki

Came across this today and got lost in it. http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?ProjectManagement

A whole lot of: "We're at our most productive when we work 30 hour weeks at home with a view of nature and two hookers." I want to believe.

Depressing Thought For The Day

Read a very nice article on a couple universal design principles at Mark Barrett's site. He's been quiet for a long time, and then wham!
He doesn't have a comments section, so I'll post my comment here:
My depressing thought: I was asked the other day what some of my favorite gameplay sequences of all time were. Although none of them were machinima, most of them were highly scripted sequences where the player only has the illusion of choice - those first ten minutes of Half-Life; the first five minutes of Unreal, and the section in Unreal later when you're locked in a corridor and the lights go out one-by-one before the monsters attack; a few moments from Out Of This World, such as when you're running down a corridor and doors are slamming shut behind you; the opening level of Prince of Persia 2 where you run, swashbuckle, and then jump and hang on a retreating galleon. I could go on. Although occasionally you come across a game where cinema is built into the systems (shooting out a light in Splinter Cell) - the most memorable moments for me are usually tightly scripted *unique* sequences. And I'm something of a game designer, so it's doubly sad that I'm suckered in by fake interactivity - if I'm fooled, Joe Sixpack will be doubly fooled.
It seems to me the main reason to encourage systemic game design that leads to emergence is not because it's going to sell you more copies but because the cost of scripted sequences is enormous: it takes weeks to tune a scripted level so that the bulk of players get the experience you intended for them (assuming you don't fall back on non-interactive machinima) but it takes nowhere near that time to populate a level that just reuses consistent elements. The amount of gameplay you get out of developer time is much larger when you take the systemic/emergence route. But it's not necessarily 'better' gameplay - in fact, as far as Joe Sixpack is concerned, it may be worse.

One thing we can all agree on: cut-scenes where interactivity is taken completely away from the player suck.

In other news, saw a Bjork concert last night. She's still got it. Damn. What a show.

Tight / Aggressive

Mark Nau says I call too often. I'm tight / passive.

In case it's not clear, I'm talking about playing Texas hold 'em.

A good strategy for novices, according to him, is tight / aggressive. Rarely call. Raise or fold.

Right now, this is also the strategy that the big game publishers are employing. Take EA's *Return of the King* as an example: they know this one is a winner, and they're throwing money at it to make sure it ships on time. Last I heard, there's 175 employees on the team. If you use $10000 / employee / month as a rule of thumb, that's $21 million dollars. Match it with marketing, that's $42.

*Two Towers* sold 4,000,000 units, I'm told. I'm guessing that's $80 million for EA. So all *Return of the King* has to do is match it, and they've doubled their bucks.

So there's the aggressive. As for the tight: games are getting cancelled left and right. Full Throttle 2 got the axe just the other day. I'm not particularly sad; I didn't want to see Tim Schafer's masterpiece soiled by another director.

I realize metaphors - particularly poker metaphors - are dangerous, but it sounds like good business to me. But with only a few "hands" being played every year, the landscape of the players can be quite volatile in the long term.

Also, Greg Costikyan is right. There's little room for innovation on this landscape. Backing a crazy wild idea is like drawing to an inside straight.

Write a blog, get a free book!

I knew this blogging thing would pay off. I was just sent Game Coding Complete by Mike McShaffry and all I have to do is write a review of it, something I usually have to buy the book to do.
A quick visit to MobyGames shows that "Mr. Mike" has some serious titles under his belt, and in this one case, the adage "Those Who Can't Do, Write" is disproved. (Good thing, otherwise I'd be in trouble.)
First off: I wish I read this book a year ago for the advice on page 560: how to archive your final build. It would have saved my team several man-days.
Second off: this book, like no other I've read, captures what it's really like to be a professional videogame programmer, covering not just some of the basic coding practices unique to games but also hitting asset control, directory structure, resource management tools, middleware, testing, and scheduling. For someone just starting at a game company, it would be a really good way to prepare for what they're about to experience.
Third off: Mike develops games for the PC. If you develop games for the PC, I'm pretty sure this book should be in your library for Chapter 11 alone, where he covers the requirements for getting your Windows Logo. (If only someone could do the same thing for the console manufacturers' technical requirements without getting sued.)
His advice is particularly suited for PC development, but not suited so well to developing for consoles: he's big into templates, and STL, and writing your own memory managers, and cacheing resources, and although he warns against the use of inheritance he dives right down and uses it anyway. All of these things are things which you can (usually) get away with on the PC, but you need to think long and hard about using when you're developing for a console.
Reading this book I can almost imagine why Ultima VII and VIII turned out the way they did; they're imbued with Mike's personality. (Or he's imbued with theirs?) These were incredible, ambitious games, way ahead of their time. But you needed a top of the line machine to run them, and even then you'd encounter occasional performance problems, and bugs. You could just tell, somehow, playing these games, that they were using C++, that the various objects in the gameworld were instances of C++ classes, and there was inheritance and polymorphism going on, and the games both benefited from this practice and paid a price for it.
My favorite setions were the "Tales From The Pixel Mines", where Mike tells war stories from titles he's worked on. Some of them were educational - so that's how Origin used to do things - and some of them were nostalgic. (In particular one on page 449 involving Borland's 3.1 C++ compiler. After reading it, I had to go share it with someone, but I couldn't find anyone around actually old enough to remember that compiler.)
There's a spiel from project management I never get tired of reading. It goes something like this: "Almost all projects come in late and require egregious overtime, but if you plan in great enough detail and schedule thoroughly, you can avoid this." Chapter 13 is Mike's attempt at the spiel, and of course I found myself nodding my head and saying, "Speak it, brother." Then I snapped out of it. Only clones and ports and casino games (I did a casino game once, too, and shipped that one on time also) can really be planned in this manner. If you're making an original game, your plan will not survive contact with the enemy. Mike knows this, and even points out that despite having a schedule, Ultima VII still came in late.
I'm sounding like one of those chaotic, seat-of-your-pants developers right now, and I'm not. A plan is good. A schedule is necessary. Mike's advice in this chapter is all very sound (except when he suggests using Project instead of Excel to do your scheduling) and mirrors the advice of Eric Bethke and Joel Spolsky. (All three of these developers point out that the worker needs to estimate their own schedule. I concur. That makes four of us.) On my project, we're not currently scheduled with the same rigor Mike suggests...but I may just up the ante after reading this.
And some final, random, last comments: he's got a technique for a pseudo-random traversal of a set that's very cool. Pete and Don did this on Magic Candle II to make a sparkly Star-Trek-like teleporter effect and I never understood it. I still don't understand it, but now I have sample code. On the other hand, he's got a template for an "optional" variable for building validity right into a variable that I don't like at all. I'd much rather write a brittle system - fail if someone uses it wrong - or use what he calls the "first dumb method to return an error code" (although I'd have it pass to a pointer instead of a non-const reference. Steve Maguire doesn't think is so dumb) then use his Optional class. On the gripping hand, (yes, I'm a geek) he describes how a resource management tool should ideally work, and I wish ours worked in just that way.
So that's that. Free book earned. If you're making PC games, read the book. If you're making console games, it wouldn't hurt to take a look at it.

Up in San Luis Obispo this weekend, visiting old college friend Lewis Call. His girlfriend recently got a job at Oddworld so she showed us the place and took us to a barbecue thrown by some of the Inhabitants. Had to sign an NDA first, so I'm not going to divulge what I learned. Me, personally, I haven't yet played Abe or Munch all the way through but I really liked them: simple elements combine into interesting puzzles. I admit it, I like puzzles. The very fact that you don't have a gun and you have to find nonobvious, subtle ways to get past each encounter pleases me greatly, much like the people who play Quake "naked". But I think my aesthetic may be in the minority; as Neal Hallford says, one of the most common types of player is the guy who just wants to frag shit.

Visiting postmodern history professor Lewis Call exercises a different part of my brain. Here's my latest half-baked theory: in the seventies and early eighties, the media--particulary movies--portrayed robots and computers as evil, but that changed in the early eighties and nineties. (The change was best illustrated by the transition from Alien to Aliens and Terminator to Terminator 2. Suddenly the simulated human is the good guy.) In the seventies or eighties, the majority had yet to experience the benefits of computers and were afraid of what they didn't understand. Similarly, right now, we see anti-simulation movies: The Matrix, Existenz, Dark City, The Truman Show, Thirteenth Floor, representing the majority's fear of videogames. As more come to understand and accept videogames, we may start seeing films where simulation is good, where people enter the Matrix voluntarily and aren't considered to be betraying their species.