Congratulating DEVELOP magazine

I guess it doesn't matter, but nowhere on the list of jobs did the DEVELOP annual salary survey of the game industry include "Writer," "Narrative Designer," or anything of that ilk. Not that it's the most important role, but you'd be surprised how many dev studios do actually use writers. Apparently, some players (those crazy guys and gals!) actually think that having professionals craft the plots and people improve a game.

What will they think of next?!

Seriously, I realize that adding that kind of thing just makes a complex survey more difficult, and after all a writer can just call his or herself a "designer" because it's like, you know, all the same thing, right?

In fact, I'll be petitioning the BAFTA and the WGA to stop those goddam awards and get their noses out of our industry, because everyone knows that the only thing that this writing stuff does is make a developer's job more complicated. And who needs writing anyway when you have such great graphics and destructible environments?

I mean, Michael Bay clearly doesn't have any use for writers on his films, and look how much cash he rakes in!

So I just though I'd be the first to congratulate DEVELOP for their refusal to kow-tow to the Chris Avellones, Eric Wolpaks, Marc Laidlaws, Rhianna Pratchetts, John Gonzalezes and Andy Walshes of the game world who just add a lot of stuff that none of us really need.

Way to go, guys! Keep up the good work!

Managers pissing me off, part 367

Guillaume de Fondaumiere, founder of the studio that did Heavy Rain, just gave an interview where he complained about the used game market and how it was eating into his profitability. In fact, he said that the one million used game sales represented a loss to him of between €5 and €10 million.

Wow. There is so much "gaaa!" there I'm not sure where to start.

Dude, 3 million people played your game. 2 million of them paid a price you yourself say is "...probably too expensive..." to do so.

So, with a little clarity, let's ask the real questions:

1. How many of those extra million players would have paid full price if there was no other option?
- If my understanding of royalty rates is correct (~15% to the studio), de Fondaumiere is claiming that at least half if not all of those million players would have purchased it new at a €60 price point.
...okay, raise your hand if you believe that. And in Santa Claus.

2. What is better, 50% more people enjoying your product, talking about it, and wondering about the next one, or thinking about draconian measure to try and maintain a price point and margin expectation that is clearly out of line with what your customers are willing to spend?

Did de Fondaumiere stop for one second and think, "Maybe at €40 we could have sold 4 million? Or 6 million at €20?" In a business that has essentially zero variable cost and enormous network effects that is a serious question. Yet he shows no indication whatsoever that he is thinking about the price/reach/community trade-offs. In this day and age, that seems to be a critical question for a studio director given the evolutions in game distribution and pricing.

Clarion West Write-a-thon

Today marks the beginning of another Clarion West write-a-thon. For those of you who don't know, Clarion West (and the 2-3 other Clarion workshops) are six-week intensive courses dedicated to helping promising authors write speculative fiction. Admission is through application, and the workshops are taught by famous authors from the spec fic world.

The write-a-thon is an event that pulls together workshop alumni (around a hundred of us this year) with several goals in mind:

1. Get us energized and writing

2. Provide moral support for those in the program

3. Raise funds for the workshop (the most important part)

I'll be doing the write-a-thon this year (in spite of a hellacious schedule) both in order to get my own writing back on track and to try to raise money for a great cause and community. So please stop by the web site if you're curiuos (or if you want to give):

http://clarionwest.net/events_page/write_a_thon

I'll be doing updates over the next six weeks as the words begin to flow.

Geek Dad

I just found a very cool infographic, so I 1) tweeted it, and 2) sent it to my kids. Here is the link in question:

http://www.ouramazingplanet.com/infographic-tallest-mountain-to-deepest-ocean-trench-0249/

Any time I run across science-made-understandable, or cool-Earth-facts, or science-made-entertaining, I like to share it and send it on. What I am beginning to understand is the importance that I attach to my kids also being touched by this bug. Because these things release happy brain chemicals for me, I assume that they might for others and should for my children. As a result, I am in a constant dad-struggle of trying to pique their interest and fire their imagination with lots of ideas and recommendations, but without being overbearing.

So...why?

Because I believe people should never stop learning. Because I believe that knowledge should be shared. Because I believe that we must constantly strive to accept and understand and challenge ourselves. Because, most of all, I want my kids to believe this as well.

We'll see how it works with Zoé and Louis. There are promising signs; they both devour good YA SF literature, and Louis decided on Monday that he was going to learn to start programming in QBASIC. They both ask a lot of questions, and they don't let me get away with half-answers.

On the other hand, they often roll their eyes when I do things like send them cool infographics about the topology of the Earth.

The good fight goes on...

Visions 2020

 
M-Brane SF, an excellent speculative fiction site run by Chris Fletcher, has put together an anthology called "Visions 2020." The point of the anthology is not some impossible, space-opera SF future but realistic, near-term visions of where we may be a few years from now.

The editor, Rick Novy, accepted a story I wrote for the anthology called "teh afterl1fe" (spelled *exactly* like that). If you know me, and what I'm doing, and how I spent a lot of my leisure time in 2009, you'll have a pretty good guess from the title about the content and the point of the story. Hopefully, however, my twist on it in my words will bring some unexpected thoughts.

You can pre-order the book here, and given that most of the writers in the table of contents are far better than I am, it's not to be missed.

"Short Games, Long Stories"

I wrote a brief article for the IGDA Newsletter (link below) about writing stories for casual games. The point of the article was to toss out some ideas about ways to approach casual game writing, rather than try to write a "how to" guide.

Basically, I recommend (against my better instincts) using traditional story structures and stereotypical characters in order to simplify the player's task of digesting the plot. The analogy that I used in the article, and that I really like, is the "gutter" in comic strips. That white space between two panels has nothing in it, but the human imagination fills in everything that could have been written there. In much the same way, all you need to do to create a story is to suggest where you are in the story arc and what the characters are thinking; there is no need to be more explicit than that. The player's imagination is more than capable of connecting the links and filling in the details.

Hope you like it.

Short Games, Long Stories

Clarion West Write-a-thon

I'm in it again this year, with hopes of a somewhat more productive effort than last year (when pretty much the only words I wrote were in the e-mail requesting that they sign me up).
The idea behind the Write-a-thon is that alums of the workshops write, and donors offer whatever they can based on the goals that the writer achieves. Donations can be for the whole effort, or for the weekly goals, or whatever else seems appropriate. The money goes to Clarion West, a non-profit organization that runs a yearly six-week intensive speculative fiction writing program.
My plan is to complete one short story per week, just like the workshop participants do. So far, with week 1 down, I have finished re-edits on a piece I did for an anthology. The title is "Teh afterl1fe," based on which you can probably guess a lot about the story.