gameslol

I recently recorded a new Idle Thumbs UK podcast with James Spafford, in which for the first 40 minutes or so we talk about the MMO genre. I love MMOs because they arguably have the most potential of any game genre, but I’m sometimes frustrated when certain aspects of MMOs seem limited, repetitive or aren’t capitalizing on the unique properties of the genre. We discuss a variety of MMOs including World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, Star Wars: The Old Republic, EVE Online, Ragnarok Online, Planetside, and more. If you are interested in MMOs or online games in general, you might enjoy listening to our talk. The discussion also continues in the associated forum thread.

(After the break, we also discuss Metal Gear Solid 4 and Pokemon along with Rusalka Clarke, as well as some other randomness.)

What I guess I didn’t explain well in the podcast is that even though I enjoy the cooperative and community aspects, I think the primitive core gameplay and grinding prevalent in MMOs is pretty much horrible. MMOs have, on many occasions, turned me into one of those hamsters trained in a lab to pull a lever for a little bit of food. It’s easy to get in the habit of just clicking away, killing enemies one by one, hoping for a little bit of loot. I even get that when I’m playing together with friends. Though, to be fair, I may have just played the bad bits in MMOs (i.e. generic quests/raids) and not made it to the good stuff often enough. For instance, I haven’t experienced any of the high-level content in WoW first-hand. 

Still, I’m hoping that in the future more MMOs will dare to cut some of the fat from their gameplay, discourage grinding, and pull new players into the community and multiplayer aspects as quickly as possible.

When I join a new MMO I usually start out alone, or with just one or two buddies in my friend list, and unlike real life I’m sort of people-shy when exploring an online world. Sometimes I wish an MMO would really grab me by the hand and force me into a guild or otherwise take the plunge into the social and online aspects of the game, because those are really the unique fun multipliers of the genre. I think there are many little tricks designers can use to get players more easily connected with other players straight away. There’s also ways to avoid players getting stuck in a rut as easily.

As a designer, my fascination with MMOs is mainly in the social architecting opportunities they provide, of which a few examples are also given on the podcast. As a player, I often wish you could just skip half of the leveling, forget about the solo-ing, and get to the cool stuff straight away… does that make any sense? Or am I horribly out of touch with the genre?

ICO Partners blogged some nice tips on how to pitch a game to a publisher (part 1, part 2). I was going to share some of my experiences in a comment there, but it got kind of long, so instead I’m posting them here.

From the perspective of a designer, there were two things I really had to learn:

• A pitch should be the key to unlock the door, not a presentation of all conceivable aspects of your entire game. If the publisher likes what you had to say, there’ll be opportunities later to show and tell them much more.
• A pitch is primarily a business proposition. It shouldn’t just talk about “what” (the game is) but really about “how” (you are going to make it, and how it will make the publisher lots of money).

These may seem like extremely obvious points, but as a designer you are generally so focused on the game itself, that it’s easy to slip into the idea that if you just shock & awe the publisher with your amazing designs you’ll get the funding. That’s not quite how it works. 

I did pitches a few years ago where I just filled slides with information on various subsets of the gameplay, the storyline/universe, and then souped it up with lots of buzzwords. I guess my reasoning was that the more you tell, the more it shows how you’ve thought about everything. I since learned that it’s much more effective to cut most of the details and instead focus on your two or three top level goals for the game, with maybe a few examples of how they will be accomplished. If you’ve got the publisher hooked with your core vision, you can give them more details later, or show them concept art or prototypes.

The rest of the pitch should really be about product positioning, the market, the team, budget / sales projections, etc. To a designer this may seem like the boring stuff, but it’s key to giving the publisher confidence in your ability to produce the game. Of course, it’s important that you know these things about your project anyway.

What also affects your chances of success is the way the information is presented. When I use PowerPoint, I try to minimize the text in each slide, and add as much visuals as possible. (Presentation Zen is a great blog about slide design and presentation techniques.)

The way you talk about the game is also a key factor. Facts and bullet points are definitely the way to go, but if you tell the publisher something that will allow them to really visualize the game, it will increase the impact of all those facts and bullet points. In a pitch I helped with last year, one of my coworkers started by giving a one minute story about a group of adventurers exploring a dungeon, with an unexpected twist halfway through. This was only illustrative of one aspect of the game, but when we subsequently zoomed out and switched to bullet point presentation mode, the listeners already had something in their heads to anchor the information to.

The way you talk about the game to a 3rd party can be very different from how you talk about it internally with the team. It can be difficult to switch into that other mode of thinking, but it’s vital when having to communicate about a game to a potential funder or publisher.

Coming up with a good concept for a game is one thing, but selling that to a publisher is another issue entirely. Thomas Bidaux and Diane Lagrange (formerly NCsoft, now of online game consulting company ICO Partners) have posted some nice tips for pitching to publishers. “Good publisher-side Biz dev people should be the ones able to recognize the awesome product that is very badly pitched. However, if you are the pitcher, it’s probably safer to assume that you are developing a good product and that you want to pitch it well.”

Update: Part 2 is here.

“Freedom”, “open worlds” and “endless possibilities” are commonly heard buzzwords in gaming. The Peter Molyneux playbook of hype relies entirely on painting a picture of a world in which you can do anything. 

But sometimes having too much choice can be bad. Malcolm Gladwell (author of Blink, and more recently Outliers) often talks about a study which tested whether offering more choice in a store would lead to more people buying a product, i.e. making a choice.

[Researchers] wanted to see whether the number of jam choices made any difference in the number of jams sold. Conventional economic wisdom, of course, says that the more choices consumers have, the more likely they are to buy, because it is easier for consumers to find the jam that perfectly fits their needs. But [the researchers] found the opposite to be true. 30% of those who stopped by the 6 choice booth ended up buying some jam, while only 3% of those who stopped by the bigger [24 choice] booth bought anything… If you are given too many choices… than your unconscious is comfortable with, you get paralyzed.

Another psychological experiment often cited by Gladwell measured people’s happiness with choices they’ve made. It turned out that people were actually less satisfied with choices they make if they were selected from a larger set of options. The more alternatives are presented to us, the more we worry about whether we made the right choice, and the more likely we are to have regrets.

Of course, in a game maybe you do actually want players to have countless choices so that they can experiment, explore and discover. On the other hand, you clearly want to avoid making players too uncomfortable or, even worse, paralyzing them with choice. Read the rest of this entry »

The Idle Thumbs Podcast continues to be win. Lately it’s been garnering acclaim and receiving many spoonfuls of GAF love. Some people are now calling it the best gaming podcast, which is amazing.

What you can expect from the podcast is basically some very intelligent and broad discussion about gaming, but it’s not up its own ass, and doesn’t shy away from random banter or, well, an occasional poop joke. The podcast may even introduce you to games you hadn’t considered playing before. On top of that, the Idle Thumbs community has been totally meme-ing it up with domain names, and the podcast spawned a Game of the Year site at GOTY.cx.

Basically, you need to listen to Idle Thumbs. New episodes are posted every week, usually on Tuesdays.

I’m a bit biased of course, because the guys who host this show are my friends (and I was a co-founder of the Idle Thumbs site). For me one of the best things about going to GDC or E3 is actually hanging out with these guys and talking about video games, and if you’re a follower of the podcast you’ll know why.

James Spafford and I have occasionally been doing a UK edition podcast as sort of a bonus to the US edition, and we’re expecting to publish a new installment to that soon.

I’m visiting my family for Christmas and in the attic I just randomly found something mindblowingly cool. Well, at least to me. It’s my long lost copy of “Elektroniks: An Electronic Game”, an old Russian LCD game that I used to play obsessively as a kid. My grandfather once bought it for me at a Russian farmer’s market when we visited my family in Poland. Since I couldn’t communicate with anyone there (I could only speak Dutch, my mother tongue) this game often served as a great distraction. I played it for hours and hours and hours.

It’s clearly a classic. Just check out that winning box art, with a picture of a wolf, a bunny with balloons, and a monkey. On the side of the box it says MADE IN USSR. Or “CAEAAHO B CCCP”. Man, this game is so win. I love this feature mentioned on the box: “with an alarm-clock”. Say what you will about modern games but none of them are also an alarm-clock. Where’s your alarm-clock, Fallout 3? Games used to be so much better.

I’m hoping to find some new batteries for it. When I get back I’ll have to find an appropriate altar for this game in my apartment. 

This is a great presentation given by David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals to an audience of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in April 2008. The title, “The secret to making money online”, genuinely reflects the contents but is also deliberately used as a flashy lure. The talk actually seems intended to have a ‘cold shower’ effect against the typical high-flying Silicon Valley attitude. It points at the many startups trying to become ‘the next Facebook’ or ‘the next Google’ with no business model in place, and suggests they do simpler things that actually work. Watch it and draw your own parallels to gaming:

Okay, so one of the messages here is that it’s cool to be a modest entrepreneur with a small company that serves a niche, but to me that’s definitely not the main takeaway from this talk.

While the talk is focused on Web 2.0 startups, it obviously also applies to the online gaming space, where everyone wants to be McDonald’s and no one will settle for anything less… even though “less” could actually be profitable, and pursuing a portfolio of non-humongous properties may actually be wiser. I believe that companies often don’t even realize what they already have just because they are so focused on wanting it to be something else. Of course, some Free-To-Play game businesses exhibit the same symptoms as some of the Silicon Valley startups hinted at in the presentation, which are focused on user acquisition and short-term gain but haven’t fully thought through their business model beyond ‘we’ll probably sell them some different colored hats for their avatars later’. The segment on viral spread reminds me a lot of what all the stupid FaceBook apps are trying to do, which I just blogged about.

By the way, David Heinemeier Hansson is a great speaker and evangelist. Back when I was working on a browser MMO at Woedend! our lead programmer sent me some of his  presentations for Ruby On Rails, and they quickly convinced me that we should build the game in RoR (it was a largely unproven framework, but it worked amazingly well for our purposes). Some say Hansson has a Reality Distortion Field similar to that of Steve Jobs, or don’t like that he’s loud and opinionated. I prefer to focus on what he says and not how he says it, because there’s a lot of vision and common sense wisdom to be found in his talks.