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.”