game business

  • GDCO2011: It’s All Games Now

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 6 Comments

    Title slide for "It's All Games Now"Here are the slides for the talk that I gave today at GDC Online. I have to warn you that more than usual, you needed the performance, I think. So keep an eye out for when the video shows up on the GDCVault — I’ll be sure to let you know. 🙂

    It seems to have gone very very well. Lots of positive feedback on Twitter and in the hallways afterwards.

    If I had to summarize my message, I suppose I would rattle off this set of bullet points:

    • We are losing (or changing) some qualities of games because of the contexts in which they exist now, particularly social media. We let the real world invade more — such as microtransactions and RMT — and we also let the real world shape design decisions — for example, giving up on the notion of not having global chat in you virtual world.
    • We’re understanding games better than ever thanks to both design theory and real-world science. And also understanding ourselves as people better.
    • That understanding is going into applying gamelike features to real life. Not just stuff like gamification, but also common features of social media that clearly draw heavily from game inspirations, such as quantified reputation systems, achievement systems, and even how our profiles look on social networking sites.
    • This is made easier because we’re in a “cloud phase” in the evolution of computing. The pendulum always swings from cloud to local.
    • But our local machines have gotten more accessible, but a lot less open over time, and the net result is that we don’t really control the cloud or our local devices now.
    • The rub there for the game industry is that we have essentially ended up recreating the console ecosystem, only with iOS and Facebook instead of Sony and Nintendo, which doesn’t bode well for several segments of the industry.
    • Instead, it just increases the odds that the process will accelerate, as we will be the product. Indeed, already our perception of reality has been greatly filtered by social media, and is less objective and inclusive.
    • But we shouldn’t forget that we are the ones who define the rules here; we’re the wizards of the game world. Games are fundamentally social media and always have been.
    • We will be OK, as long as we don’t forget that the point of games is not the points structures, but the people we played with, and the lessons we learned.

    But summarizing it that way skips the fairytale I told, and the rapid-fire science-fiction story I told, and my brief Jonathan Coulton musical quote, and much more. 🙂

    I ended on this hope from Ted Nelson:

    I hope, that in our archives and historical filings of the future, we do not allow the techie traditions of hierarchy and false regularity to be superimposed to the teeming, fantastic disorderlyness of human life.

    You can read Gamasutra’s write-up here. I think it captures the essence pretty well!

  • 10 Game Design Lessons for Games-as-Service, my CC2011 talk

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 11 Comments

    Title slideThis was my talk delivered yesterday at Casual Connect Seattle — somewhat shorter than my usual, as it was a 25 minute slot. The topic was designing for games-as-a-service; a lot of folks are migrating from casual games into social games right now, and need to know more about what the design best practices are.

    I ended up reaching back to the Laws of Online World Design and many other older materials both mine and of others, on the grounds that it was likely to be new and perhaps educational for many who have been doing fire-and-forget software in the casual space.

    I am fairly sure that the conference will be posting video of the presentation — they normally do — so keep an eye out for that. In the meantime, here’s the deck in a few formats:

    I did try uploading it to Slideshare, but boy, did it mess up the fonts. I take a lot of care with the graphic design of my decks, and it was just too ugly to tolerate. 🙂 I am sure I could figure it out given time, but I don’t have said time. So if someone else wants to take the PPT and get it uploaded in a way that actually resembles the PDF, go for it.

    The slides should be pretty self-explanatory, but the core message is not unlike the much more detailed version of things I put forth in my recent blog on on Marketing.

  • Marketing

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 13 Comments

    Warning: giant (4700 word) post on basic marketing principles, prompted by some recent discussion on a forum about what makes for a well-retaining game.

    A lot of folks, especially in social, seem to use the word “retention” when they should think “conversion.” I tend to think of this as an emotional journey.

    You can think of this sequence as going something like this:

    1. Sampling
    2. Converting
    3. Retaining
    4. Re-engaging

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  • Not an MMO anymore

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 64 Comments

    Dusty Monk has a thought experiment up where he describes an MMO of the future. Core bullet points:

    • a single-player or co-op multiplayer campaign you can play through that is heavily narrative
    • a matchmaking lobby where you can select between types of games to play with other players
    • games include group PvP matches or co-op matches against the AI
    • A UI screen where you purchase upgraded gear and character attributes for real money

    As he describes the game, it of course sounds like an FPS game with matchmaking, and that is exactly his point.

    He’s not really advocating the evolution of the MMO in this direction; he’s merely saying it is inevitable.

    But I think that it is also important to note that this isn’t a virtual world at all.

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