Excerpt of a letter sent to a grade-school friend in September 1993. I was 16.

I got a new computer...an IBM 386. It's a beauty of a computer, but I sunk all of my money into it and my parents still had to help pay it off... It has an 80 meg Hard Drive, a Super VGA card (not a monitor though, still stuck with VGA...), a brand new keyboard and mouse, 4 megs expanded memory, a High Density 3.5" and 5 1/4" drive. Cost about $800 but it was worth it. I consider it an investment for college. I plan to major in Computer Science in college with maybe a Psychology minor.

Have you ever heard of Virtual Reality? Of course you have... If by some odd chance you haven't, take a look into it. I'm telling you, it WILL be bigger than TV. I hope to get into it as soon as I can. Come to think of it, you should too.

This is the danger of keeping a digital record of everything you’ve ever written.

ForumWarz is my newest obsession, a web-based game like nothing I’ve ever played. In short, it’s a parody of Internet culture in the form of a real-time role-playing game. You play as one of three Internet archetypes — the camwhore, emo kid, or troll — and try to disrupt message boards any way you can, using your sexuality, bad poetry, cross-site scripting attacks, or simply banging your head on the keyboard. In the process, you’ll meet a large cast of strange characters who will send you on missions in a very funny microcosm of the Internet.

Among those parodied: Furries, Google, script kiddies, Boing Boing, Apple Computer, ricers, 4chan, Ron Paul, gamers, Bill O’Reilly, Tubgirl, otaku, and the Church of Scientology. Also, it’s almost certainly the only game to include a text-adventure minigame based on R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet.” This game isn’t for everyone.

Before reading any further, I’d highly recommend trying the first two or three levels. Warning: If you’re easily offended, this game is not for you. And don’t worry about getting stuck with the Jimmy character during the tutorial; you get to choose a username, avatar, and class when you hit level 2.

Continue reading “ForumWarz Postmortem: Interviewing the Game's Creators” →

At the risk of turning Waxy into a Jonathan Coulton fan site, he performed a short set at the Valve Software’s Steam Party capped by a finale of “Still Alive” performed on Rock Band, backed by the Harmonix developers on guitar and drums.

I’m pretty sure this is the only published photo of their final score, a 5-star performance:

And yes, Coulton sang his own song on “Easy.” (Afterwards, he said the Harmonix guys lowered the difficulty because thought the crowd noise would mess it up.)

Shortly after the set, I saw a tipsy geek hop on stage to copy the unreleased song from the Xbox 360 with a USB key before a Harmonix team member tackled him. I discovered he wrote up the story this morning, which was a fun read.

I’m mostly a casual spectator of the gaming industry, with my experience limited to being a fan, so it’s been a delight to meet the people behind the games I love at GDC. At the same time, I’ve felt a kinship with these indie developers, having worked as a developer (and accidental entrepreneur) in the web industry for the last ten years.

One of the most jarring and frustrating differences I’ve seen between the web and gaming worlds is the dominance of middle-men: publishers and platforms trying to control the distribution of games. In the web industry, there’s nobody controlling distribution and I don’t need anyone’s authorization to launch a new project. But the gaming industry is dominated by gatekeepers. For consoles, you can pay through the nose for the privilege to be on Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network or the upcoming WiiWare, and then wait months to be released into the pipeline. On PCs, there’s no clear monopoly, with distribution fragmented between a handful of game download portals and distribution frameworks like Steam.

Or you can go it alone and sell directly to your fans through your own web presence but, for the moment, this is very rare. Why? There’s no clear answer.

The gaming industry today feels like the music industry of the recent past. Bands were desperate to get signed to a label, and financial success was elusive without a record deal. Record labels provide the funding to record an album, the marketing to promote it, and access into the well-established distribution pipeline of record stores and other retail outlets. In the last five years, these gatekeepers have lost relevance as musicians like Jonathan Coulton, Radiohead, and Trent Reznor have started selling directly to their fans through their own sites, or adding them directly to iTunes or Amazon.

Small indies like Bit Blot (Aquaria), 2D Boy (World of Goo) and Invisible Handlebar’s Audiosurf are like the Jonathan Coultons of gaming — bootstrapping their game development, doing their own promotion, and cutting out every middleman to deliver games directly to their fans. And it seems to be working, at least well enough for them to grow and keep doing what they love.

Clearly, this route doesn’t work for everyone. I talked to Jonatan Söderström of Cactus Soft, one of the most creative and prolific game designers working today. He releases an interesting freeware PC game nearly every month, but is struggling to survive at home in Sweden. In desperation and “on the brink of extinction,” he recently added ads to his site and asked his audience for $1 donations so he could eat. Talking to him, he reminded me of many other brilliant programmers I’ve worked with — motivated and talented, but almost pathologically uninterested (or incapable?) in self-promotion or business.

Bit Blot and 2D Boy both understand that while game design comes first, marketing can’t be ignored. They work with the media, speak at conferences, keep visible blogs, and connect directly to their community online. For example, Bit Blot’s “Seven Days of Aquaria” campaign offered new information and gameplay videos each day until its release. The result? So much anticipation and demand that their servers died on release day. It was a brilliant campaign that cost them nothing but their time.

As an outsider, it seems obvious that the costs (monetary and otherwise) of going down the publisher/platform route are too high. Like a record label, the publishers take a cut and try to own your intellectual property and distribution options. Developing for Xbox Live Arcade, WiiWare, and Playstation Network all have their associated costs and royalties too. Between 30-50% of revenue goes to the platform and the development costs for localization and testing are much higher. Even if your overall sales are 20% lower by skipping the distribution channels, it seems like you’d still make just as much money, with the benefit of more control and more time to focus on actual game development. (If you’re interested in the topic, Simon Carless wrote an interesting editorial earlier this month that ran some of the numbers.)

Whether you work in music, gaming or web development, the ultimate goal should be to do what you love without compromise, get recognized for your work, and not starve to death in the process. If your primary motivator is fame and getting your game in front of as many people as possible, regardless of the cost, it seems the only option for game developers is going to a major publisher and working with the big platforms. But if you’re happy making a healthy living with a more modest audience, the DIY route is more viable every day.

I’m already overwhelmed at my first GDC, and from what I’ve heard, things don’t even really get moving until tomorrow! The first two days are dominated by a number of excellent summits and tutorials, but apparently, the real action doesn’t start until tomorrow when the game competitions, expo floor, major announcements, and big keynotes all begin in the morning.

I’m very interested in the parallels between gaming and web, and how the lines have blurred between game-like social software and social games. With that in mind, several people told me Worlds in Motion summit would be most relevant to my interests with sessions that “delve into online worlds, social gaming and media and player created activity, providing insight for developers of all backgrounds into how the game industry is collectively building socialization into games and integrating personalization and player-generated content into gameplay.”

Instead, I’ve found the most inspiring and innovative talks have been in the Independent Games Summit. Unlike the companies in World in Motion, these tiny two-person startups and student projects are operating on a shoestring budget and exploring territory that the big guys aren’t.

It seems like most of the interesting new projects are happening on the web or as PC/Mac downloads, partly because they don’t have the funding or support to acquire dev kits for the consoles and partly because it gives them more control over their own fate. (For example, Xbox Live Arcade costs a minimum of $125,000 to create a game. The overhead for a Flash game, like starting a website, is mostly your own time.)

And because they have so many resource constraints, they’re developing gameplay that’s often experimental and completely unique. The IGF finalists are a laundry list of intriguing gameplay ideas (many of which I’ve mentioned on Waxy before):

• Audiosurf, a rhythm/racing/puzzle game that analyzes and visualizes your MP3 collection to create a dynamic 3D racetrack with characteristics pulled from tone, tempo, and volume.
• The Path, a horror game based on Little Red Riding Hood, with ambient music by Jarboe. If you follow the path before you, you lose the game.
• World of Goo, a construction game using physics to lift blobs to great heights
• Crayon Physics Deluxe, an adorable game that instantiates anything you sketch to solve puzzles.
• Poesysteme, breeding words with Darwinian evolution.
• Goo, like Go with liquid dynamics.
• Fret Nice, a platformer that uses the Guitar Hero guitar to control the character in time to the music
• Fez, the 2D character stuck in a 3D world

Several speakers have discussed how the art and design are more important than the technology, that games are more about conjuring emotion than showing off graphical effects. Aquaria co-creator Alec Holowka described game development as a Zelda Triforce, with three parts of Art/Design, Business/Marketing, and Technology. Some games, like movie-licensed games, are led by business but have poor technology and design. Others, like many big-budget games, are led by technology. Indie games need to support their work with honest marketing and solid technology, but it’s the creator’s voice, vision, and passion that ultimately make the game resonate with an audience.

Anyway, I’m looking forward to playing and meeting this year’s finalists tomorrow when the IGF Pavilion opens tomorrow.

Some notable quotes from the first couple of days of the show:

Gabe Zichermann on Facebook and eBay as MMOs: “I think we need to acknowledge there are things in life that are fun that game designers didn’t make… People are engaged in playing all the time — they’re not fake worlds a game designer made… Everybody plays games all the time, whether we as game designers make them or not.”

Raph Koster on virtual worlds: “We’re building theme parks instead of parks.”

Tracy Fullerton from USC Game Innovation Lab: “Indie’s not about finding a backdoor into the industry or building games on a shoestring budget. It’s about tearing down walls to create a new culture.”

This week, thanks to Simon Carless at GameSetWatch, I’m going to the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco this week. I’ll be writing about the conference daily and guest-publishing over at GSW.

If you’re going, let me know. I’ll be updating my current location on Twitter intermittently if you want to get together.

Also, if anyone out there works at Valve or can otherwise get me into the Valve party on Wednesday night, get in touch! You’ll be my new best friend. Thank you, kind anonymous insider. I owe you cake.

It didn’t take long for online sleuths to identify the man behind the shootings at Northern Illinois University yesterday. Early this morning, before the police or the Associated Press released his name, online sleuths identified the 27-year-old man as Stephen P. Kazmierczak. Online, he went by “Steve Kaz,” “Kazmier,” and “StatisticsGrad.”

Working from there, a few blogs went to work at discovering his online accounts and other trails he’s left online. Here’s what we know so far, and I’ll be updating this entry throughout the day as I find more.

Academic

As mentioned in several news articles, he was the vice-president of the school’s Academic Criminal Justice Association. Their executive officers page lists one of his email addresses, [email protected]. Searching for that email address shows some discussion list activity from 2004 related to his work, but nothing recent.

Here’s his biography for his Vice-President position. (Via Steve Huff from True Crime Weblog.)

Steve served as an undergrad teaching aid for Sociology 388 (corrections) and 488 (juvenile delinquency) in spring, 2004. He has strong interests in justice reform and, as an older sociology/criminal justice major, he brings experience and ideas to the group.

My name is Steve Kazmierczak, and I’m a 3rd year student here at NIU. During my sophomore year I served as an aid for the SOCI170 web-board and last semester, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to be a team leader for SOCI488-Juvenile Delinquency. Since attending NIU, I’ve worked very hard as a student, and I know that I would be able to forth the same effort as an officer of the ACA. I feel that I’m committed to social justice, and if elected as treasurer I promise to serve the NIU chapter of the ACA to the

best of my ability.

The following information was retrieved from the University of Illinois – Urbana-Champaign’s student database before it was removed. (Found on Odd Culture.)

alias: skazmie2

name: Kazmierczak Steven Phillip

pretty_name: Steven Phillip Kazmierczak

email: [email protected]

sudent_department_name: School of Social Work

student_program_name: MSW:Social Work -UIUC

student_level_description: Graduate – Urbana-Champaign

student_major_name: Social Work

phone: (815) 508-2416

office_address: 1207 W. Oregon, M/C 140, Urbana, IL 61801

title: ACADEMIC HOURLY

department: School of Social Work

type: person phone student staff

The NIU staff is removing pages where he was mentioned, but you can see in the Google cache that he won the 2006 Dean’s Award and the Sociology Honors Society.

Here’s a very short video of Stephen in class, taken by a professor in January 2004.

Personal

True Crime Weblog also discovered that he had problems with Paypal in this PaypalSucks thread from March 2007. He wrote, “Somebody please help me out, as I am desperate. I need this money to survive, as I am a poor graduate student just trying to make it by, which is why I started using Ebay in the first place, (to supplement the income I made through an assistantship).”

Testimonials

On a few sites, anonymous commenters that reportedly knew Kazmierczak have stepped forward to tell their stories. These are mostly anonymous, so it’s impossible to verify their accuracy.

From Odd Culture, posted today:

I knew this kid, friend of a friend type deal. He was odd, quiet always gave me a creepy vibe, but then a lot of people give me that so I didn’t think anything of it. Last I remember seeing him was in early jan. he showed me his tattoo’s. They were all graphic an gory, but thats what guys like as tattoos. One was the doll from the Saw movies. I found that a little weird, why would a guy this age have a tattoo of some terrifying doll that signified nothing but a crazy serial killer. It scared me. But whatever floats your boat I thought. Then they started talking about his guns, he didn’t bring it up, but just sat there and said a few things here and there jokingly, but quiet. I immediately thought why in the hell does this kid have a gun? He doesn’t look like a hunter and didn’t live anywhere I would consider dangerous enough for a gun, let alone two. The only thing I could think of is that he needed to prove something to himself or to someone else, since he was tall and gangly, and didn’t look like he was mr popular. It’s scary knowing that I hung out with that kid, that I sat there and discussed these things with him. He is one of those guys that you just know something is wrong with him the first time you meet him, but he’s nice so you figure he is just a little odd. As for a motive goes, I do know that he had some issues with his sexuality, maybe it has something to do with that.

Also posted today on Odd Culture, by someone named “William”:

I can’t believe some of you, I grew up with Steve. I don’t know what happened after we graduated high school to put him down this path but the kid I grew up with was a decent kid. I sat and ate lunch with him from grade school on up, we were in the same classes.

No matter how terrible his last acts I can’t reconcile this with the adult I knew graduating high school, and the kid I grew up with.

In April 2006, Jim Schaffer posted a very long rant mentioning Kazmierczak on an Aphex Twin fan forum. Radar Online confirmed that Kazmierczak worked at the Elks Grove Pirates Cove children’s theme park in 1995, so this one’s definitely real.

steve motherfucking kazmierczak. yes thats exactly the problem here.

i was working at pirates cove in late 1995 and i was you know $4.50/hr child labor laws be damned and like i remember steve kazmierczak, the kind of kid who engaged in odd acts of fellatio with his dog, the kind of kid who’d go and masturbate in the bathroom while you were over at his house, the kind of person who injured kids on the train ride cuz he was mental and he shouldn’t be given domain over kids on little faux-traincars with an aluminum baseball bat… when steve fucking kazmierczak ran up to me in late 95 early 96 proudly boasting his brand new copy of “i care because you do” like he was finally in with the cool kids.

both me and my friend joe died a little bit that day.

This morning, an anonymous commenter on The Copycat Effect wrote:

I attended just about every position with Steve at NIU. My senior year he was my Teachers Assistant for a quantitative research methods course. I would have never expected Steve to become involved in such a massive tragedy. He was always very nice, helpful, and a scholar. It is really a shame that he went and did something like this.

Updates

February 16: Some excellent digging by the commenters at True Crime Weblog revealed Kazmierczak’s Photobucket account. Inside, there’s a Get Well Soon card sent to “Jessica.”

According to this Chicago Tribune article, “[Kazmierczak] moved to Champaign with his girlfriend, also a graduate of NIU’s sociology program. The couple had both been officers in the school’s student chapter of the American Corrections Association.” The only other female member of the Academic Criminal Justice Association is Jessica Baty, the group’s Secretary.

So, Jessica Baty is almost certainly Kazmierczak’s girlfriend. The commenters also found this Myspace page belonging to Jessica, with an unpublished photo of the couple together. (I cached it, just in case.) Her profile is private, but currently has this status message: “Jessica is missing SK.”

February 17: An anonymous commenter below discovered this weblog from someone who lived next door to Kazmierczak while he was growing up. This entry and this entry are both fascinating reading.

Looks like Digg found a copy of the Tetris valentine I’ve been hosting on my server since February 2006. The original was created by Mitch at the wonderful 4 Color Rebellion gaming blog, but when I tried to redirect the requests to their original entry, the traffic shut down their server in a few minutes.

So if you’re looking for the valentine, here it is. Click it to see a full-size, print-quality version on 4 Color Rebellion’s site, and see their other 2006 Geek Valentines.

And if you like those, don’t miss 4 Color Rebellion’s geek valentines for last year and this year! In 2007, they made adorable Phoenix Wright, Nintendo DS, Wii, and Metroid Prime valentines. This year, it’s a set of valentines for Dr. Mario, Mario Galaxy, and Wii.

In case you’re 14 years old, relatively new to the Internet, and/or coming from Digg, here are a bunch of other two-year-old links you might have missed: Halo Babies, Ze Frank’s On Valentine’s Day, A Very Star Wars Valentines, All Your Heart Candy Are Belong To Us, a set of vintage 1980s Valentines including Mario, Zelda, and TMNT, vector art of Ralph Wiggum’s valentines, more original Nintendo valentines, and nothing woos a lady like romantic Perl poetry. Want something more fresh? New this year are the Team Fortress 2 valentines, Ironic Sans’ Scientist Valentines, Jacks of Science’s Science Valentines, Diesel Sweeties’ E-Cards 2.0, a DIY pulsating LED heart card, interlocking Moebius strip hearts, and Woot’s superhero comic anti-valentines.

Reading Rex Sorgatz’s commemoration of Wired Magazine’s first issue for its 15th birthday, I was reminded of the very first mentions of Wired online. Not on the web, which was only just getting started with the release of Mosaic 0.5 the month before, but on the uber-hip Northern California BBS, The WELL.

I love deep-diving the WELL archives for research. It’s an amazing glimpse at the tech and media scene of the late ’80s and early ’90s, but especially for anyone interested in Wired. Many of Wired’s founding staff and contributors were active on the WELL, and executive editor Kevin Kelly was a WELL co-founder, so it was natural that the BBS hosted the official Wired forum.

Below, for the first time on the public web, I’ve reprinted some of Wired’s early history on the WELL, including the first call-for-feedback from May 1992 (9 months before the first issue), the first press release, and some of the more interesting responses.

Continue reading “WIRED and The WELL” →

As I mentioned yesterday, I got slightly obsessed with researching oscilloscope hacks yesterday, after seeing this jaw-dropping graphic demo released at Assembly 2007:

The author released the audio files (FLAC and WAV), allowing other people to try it on their own hardware or software scopes and post the results.

Continue reading “Oscilloscope Fun and Games” →