Tiny Subversions

I have reached a zen-like state in my playing of Rag Doll Kung Fu, where I no longer think about my moment-to-moment moves. I have my overall strategies, and I have my instant thoughtless response to immediate stimuli.

I fly like the wind. I never did air combos before, but now I do, without even thinking about them. I begin to master the art of blocking.

My chi is strong.

While I know many people who have reached this state playing, say, Quake 3, I think it's cool reaching a zen-like state while playing RDKF.

Note: This is part of a series of articles called Effective Networking in the Games Industry. I'm writing these articles in no particular order, so I'm sorry if this seems scattered. I promise I will collect it all and put it on my permanent webspace for future reference.

Some folks think that networking is about finding important people and befriending them. They couldn't be more wrong. Networking is about finding excellent people and befriending them. This makes the task somewhat easier than it's perceived.

Mr. Big Stuff

It's your first day at your very first Game Developers Conference. You are completely star-struck, because you've eyed the schedule, and who's on it but Mr. Big Stuff. Wow, you think, Warren Spector is giving a talk at 3pm! Will Wright the next hour! And Peter Molyneux tomorrow! I have a chance to meet these people!! Whatever will I do?

I can answer you dilemma: don't bother. I mean, yeah, go to their talks and hear what they have to say. But don't bother trying to talk to them. They will be surrounded by about 30 feet of admirers. You will have to wait an hour just for the chance to say, "Mr. Wright, I love SimCity," and then be booted out of the way by the guy behind you who had to wait an hour and five seconds to get his five words in. The big guys aren't worth talking to--not at this stage in your career, at least. This is because

• they won't remember you.
  
• they're going to be extremely tired from all the crap they're doing just to make it through the day at a conference like GDC.
• you will blunder, and say something unintelligible like "Buh... buh... blackandwhite. Thxbye."

This doesn't apply so much at an IGDA chapter meeting, where it's a much smaller meeting and Mr. Big Stuff (or Ms. Big Stuff) will probably already be friends with most of the people there. But that's an advanced topic, The Return of Mr. Big Stuff, something to be tackled once you've mastered the basics and already have a pretty decent network, grasshopper.

If by some miracle you do get a few minutes of Mr. Big Stuff's time, please do everyone a favor and shut the hell up and listen. Brenda Brathwaite has a nice article explaining why you should shut up.

(And, for the love of all things sacred, don't throw a game pitch at these people. They don't want to hear it. If you think you have a great game pitch... good for you. Now read up on the industry and find out why (1) it sucks or (2) you won't get around to making it until you've been in the industry for 20 years.)

If you want to find someone with a lot of experience to give you advice, here's a hint: there are people who have been in this industry for decades who don't have throngs of admirers. And they will be totally willing to give some words of advice to a young upstart, especially if you know your history. How will you know who these people are? You won't. But that's why your job is to talk to anyone and everyone, and to find out who they are. You might be surprised who the innocuous guy sitting next to you is.

Your Fellow N00bz

So with whom do you network, if not very important people? Aside from the generic answer of "everyone else," some of the best networking you will ever do in your entire career will be with a wholly unglamorous class of person. I'm talking about people just like you. Students. Newbies. People trying to break in. Don't believe how this could really help your career? Fine, I'll explain it.

First, and most obvious, your fellow newbies will be the easiest people to talk to at any event. You're in the same boat. You've experienced the same disillusions. You share the same hopes and dreams. You're probably the same age. Make friends with your fellow newbies. Form a posse. Hang out whenever you have no one else to hang out with.

So you can make friends with a lot of these people. But what's the benefit to you? It's simpler than you think. If you make 20 newbie friends, I guarantee you five of them will be working in the industry within a year or two, even if you aren't. For instance, I know two guys working as professional game developers who I met when we were all students. For the rest of my life, I will be able have drinks with these people and chuckle about the time that we were all stranded on a bus at GDC. Three years ago, we were a bunch of shmucks. Now, we are professionals who can swap industry war stories with each other.

It's Not About a Salary, it's All About Reality

In the end, all networking is about making friends with excellent people. Not necessarily important ones. If you talk to anyone and everyone you meet in the games industry, and you're filtering for excellence instead of a title or a company, you're doing the right thing. Actually, excellent people tend to become important people. Which is really great. I mean, everyone wants to be the person who was friends with Mr. Big Stuff before they were big, right?

An example. I befriended a woman at GDC this year. We just happened to be participating in the same workshop, sitting at the same table. I struck up a conversation, and we started talking. Not about games, but actually about our eyeglasses, of all things. After the workshop, we were chatting some more and I asked her what game she'd worked on. She'd been in the industry for almost 20 years, although I'd never heard of her by name. And because I know my history, I knew exactly the games and the company she worked for. Later, I even used one of my weak contacts to her benefit. I think it's safe to say we became fans of each other. She was clearly in the category of excellent people, but literally within four months of our meeting, she became an important person in her own right, interviewed in Wired Magazine and the Boston Globe and tons of other such publications.

This is because, despite the fact that incompetence often gets promoted, excellence pays off. So I'll say it again: look for excellence and not fame when networking. You'll reap the benefits.

Labels: networking

Labels: networking

Note: This is part of a series of articles called Effective Networking in the Games Industry. I'm writing these articles in no particular order, so I'm sorry if this seems scattered. I promise I will collect it all and put it on my permanent webspace for future reference.

Taking Notes

Let's say you're already okay at meeting people and holding a conversation, but you have a hard time remembering names and faces. Note taking is an incredibly important way to boost the effectiveness of your memory for people, which in turn helps you make connections between your connections (which in turn makes you into an expert networker).

My System

First off, I've known a few people who practice the most basic form of note-taking. After meeting someone, they go off to a corner and, on the back of the person's business card, they jot down a few notes to help them remember things about that person. For most people, this is where it ends. But that's really just the beginning. What you write on the back of the card should only be enough to jog your memory six hours later. Because that's when the real note-taking happens.

Whether I just crashed in my hotel room after a 15-hour day at GDC, or I'm coming home from 3 hours at the Boston Postmortem, or even returning from an interview at a game company, I always do the same thing. I sit down and either in my paper notepad or on my Palm, I write. And I write. And I write.

The first thing I do is I stack all the business cards that I collected that day. Going through them one by one, I copy down all the information on the business card. This has the benefit of making permanent the information that I could easily lose on my desk or in my wallet or whatnot. Once I've copied down all the information from the card, I jog my memory with the notes on the back and write a few sentences about

• what they look like (so I can remember them next time)
• under what circumstances we met
  
• what we talked about (including their non-games interests)
• what their personality is like

and then I move on to the next card.

A typical entry might look something like this one, which is a composite from notes I've taken on several real people:

John Doe
Programmer, Company A
www.blahblahblahwhatever.com
email@address.goeshere
AIM: johndoegameguy
Tall, shaved head, wearing a leather jacket. Rimless glasses. We met over dinner at that Japanese place near the conference hall. He's friends with Jane, who introduced us. He programs Serious Games stuff, but would like to get into the more traditional entertainment sector. He really liked the Game Developers Rant session this year, and he also read and liked Chris Crawford on Game Design. He's from Tulsa, OK and thinks it's too damn hot in CA. Also, he likes to curse casually, so next time I talk to him I should do that. Very laid-back. He likes Guinness.

After compiling notes like this for everyone I've met you'd think I'd be done.

You'd be wrong.

Every few months, I go back to those permanent records, and I read them all. At this point in my networking career, it means I'm looking at notes from three years of Game Developers Conferences, IGDA chapter meetings, interviews, lectures, etc. Still, it only takes about 30 minutes for me to read over everything, and it's a real joy sometimes to relive these conversations and memories in my head. In fact, I make a point of doing so when I'm feeling down.

The Benefits

By constantly refreshing and reinforcing this list of people I've met, I gain several benefits. First and most obvious, it's easier for me to remember names and connect them with faces and accomplishments. Just the other month at the Boston IGDA chapter meeting, I saw a guy who looked familiar. I instantly remembered his name, the company he works for, and the project he does in his spare time. I'd met him at GDC 7 months earlier! But the only reason I remembered him was I had read my list the previous week. Otherwise it would have completely escaped me. I was even able to introduce him to my friend who does similar work.

Which leads nicely into my next point: the list helps you make connections within your network. This is extremely powerful. I am in no position to offer jobs to any of my friends. But when I meet someone at a conference who likes rhythm games, I make a note of that. Two days later I'll see him in the same room as my other friend who is a high level manager at a company that makes rhythm games. I cut across the room and introduce them. Bang. Even if my manager friend doesn't end up hiring this guy, the hopeful hire is grateful to me for helping him out, and the manager is impressed that I'm such a good networker.

You can look at your network of people like a computer network. In a computer network, you want maximum connectivity between computers. Ideally, every computer is directly connected to every other computer. That way, if one link gets disconnected, it's only two hops to bridge that gap. You should strive to make your personal network equally connected. A connected network is a strong network.

Taking notes is a great way to get extra oomph out of your weak ties.

Added Bonus

I used to keep my list of contacts in a paper notepad, but last year I migrated everything into my Palm device. This has the added bonus of portability of my contact list. I can access it any time, any place. I was at an interview at a game company, and I saw someone working there who I recognized as "the guy I had Mexican food with who went to school in Texas." Right there I discretely checked my Palm, found "Mexican food, from Texas" guy, the name rang a bell, and I called out his name. He was happy to see me, and mortally embarassed that he didn't remember my name. I didn't hold it against him.

Labels: networking

Networking is key to getting involved in the games industry, and I could fill a whole book about it (and I probably should). So I think I'm going to start a series of articles on effective networking in the games industry. In fact, I might call the series Effective Networking in the Games Industry. [hastily changes post title] This is going to be an experiment in writing for me, since you're effectively going to be reading a bunch of first drafts that I'll change later on. So humor me here.

I'm writing this series of articles mostly for high school or college students who want to break in to the video game industry, since that's where I came from. There are lots of books out there that give you good advice about skills you'll need to have, but as much as I hate to say it, skills won't get you everywhere in this industry. Personal connections are every bit as important as competence. My number one disclaimer is that you need to be competent. These articles are written on the assumption that you've done the basic legwork: made games in your spare time, poked around a few programming languages, learned a little bit about 3D modeling. Chris Hecker and Jon Blow wrote up a great list of New Year's Resolutions for Game Industry Newbies. Follow that advice and learn to walk the walk a little bit before you talk the talk. Doesn't matter if you're not an expert in any of this, but you have to show the intellectual curiosity or you will fail at pretty much any further advice I give you.

There are books that will put you on the path to competence. There aren't very many books out there that will put you on the path to confidence. And I've found that in the game industry, confidence is earned, chiefly, by being around game developers all the time. Once you've been around a few dozen of them, even as a student with no industry experience, you'll realize they're mostly decent, normal folks. They get demystified, turned from these crazy People You Want To Be Like to just plain old People. Folks that you can deal with. And maybe if you follow my advice, they'll be folks who like you, remember you, and respect you.

Here's a very basic outline of what I think the ordinary gamer needs to do in order to effectively network with real professional game developers. My subsequent articles will refer to these steps.

1. Read up. Become educated about the industry: what are the development roles, what is the vocabulary, and, most importantly, what is the history of the industry.
2. Meet developers. Attend IGDA chapter meetings, or, better yet, a conference like GDC.
3. Make friends. People think that networking is all about being fake and kissing ass and whatnot. I find that the most effective networking happens when you're being absolutely genuine and making very good friends with people. It's about sharing a beer over dinner, not talking shop.
4. Take notes. An easy step that almost everyone misses.
5. Go home and read up some more. This is the second tier of the education process.
6. Keep in touch. This is part of that whole "make friends" thing, and it will ideally come naturally. You should genuinely like the people in your network. If you don't, then why are you taking the time to get to know them? Because you're mercenary? Believe me, they can smell it on you.
7. Repeat.

This is a very rough outline. Each one of these steps will be expanded out quite a bit in the future. While I could maybe write 5 pages about step #4, the most complex step, #3, could be 30 pages in its own right, and I'll probably break it down into substeps.

And please, if you have any comments on my stuff, all of this is in draft stage! Be my editor so I don't have to.

EDIT: I'm adding a list here of all the articles in the series so far, since some people are being directed to this post.

• Early Advice
  
• Taking Notes
• Make Yourself Memorable
• Your Fellow N00bz
• Weak Ties
• Know Everyone
• Be Educated
• Profiling
• Bathe. Seriously.
• GDC Guide Pt 1
• GDC Guide Pt 2
• Get a Website
• How to Work a Room Pt 1
• The Pitch
• Don't Badmouth People
• Fan From Hell
• Behaving in Lines
• Community Service
• Be Selfless
• Focus on the New
• Make Mistakes
• Talk Around the NDA
• The Art of Finding People
  
• When Not to Network

Labels: networking

While I've previously discussed on this blog how much I like The Escapist magazine, one of its major problems has always been its complete illegibility at resolutions above 800x600. Their web design made resizing text impossible, and this always really pissed me off.

Fret no more! Every article on The Escapist now has a "text" link at the bottom, that lets you read the whole damn thing as black text on white background. You know, like one of them Internet pages the kids are always talking about. For example, check out this wonderful article on black culture and video games.

So I have to admit: I watch a lot of Law & Order. While it's mostly because I happen to be sitting with my girlfriend, who enjoys the shows far more than I do, there's one exception. I absolutely love Law & Order: Criminal Intent. And that's for one reason only: Det. Robert Goren, played by Vincent D'Onofrio, is the most creepy, intelligent character on TV.

As a result of this, I'm really psyched that there's going to be a game based on the series where you get to play Det. Goren. There's an interesting parallel here between my gaming habits and my TV viewing habits. I've never played any of the other Law & Order games, because frankly they all looked like uninteresting budget adventure games. But I'm psyched to play CI based on the strength of the main character. Likewise, I'm never really interested in watching Law & Order on TV, because they look like cookie cutter police procedurals. But I go out of my way to watch CI because I love the main character.

Give me a character I truly love (and of course, don't mess up the writing), and I will follow that character across media. It worked for me with Hannibal Lecter (read the books, saw the movies), and it is working with Robert Goren.

Chris Butcher, a very excellent person and Indie Game Jammer who works at Bungie, gave a talk at GDC05 entitled "The Networking and Social Infrastructure of Halo 2". Well, he mostly covered the networking part, since that's what he did. But anyway, you can watch it.

So I finally played Rag Doll Kung Fu last night. And I gotta say... holy crap, was it everything I hoped it would be. I'm going to write more about it soon, but for now, check out these skins I made of... me. Click the pics for the big image.

So today I picked up a copy of Rebelstar: Tactical Command today. For those of you who don't know, Rebelstar is a tactical RPG for the GBA designed by Julian Gollop, the lead designer of the X-COM series of games. (Rebelstar was the name of a game he worked on in the late '80s that provided inspiration for X-COM.)

While the game is playing quite nicely, I have to say that the game's production values are severely lacking in many places. Particularly in the cut scenes, it just doesn't have the "polish" that I like to see in a quality title. The screen flickers when updating graphics during the cutscene. I'm not sure if this is a vertical synch problem, double-buffering, or just really bad planning, but when there's a ~20ms blank while switching between speech bubbles, that is a huge problem.

Furthermore, I think the interface is a bit clunky. Granted, this is a GBA game so I'm not expecting miracles, but I'd like to be able to switch equipment out on the fly and not be caught in Menu Hell. Also, they switch to a distracting splash screen when your turn ends. Why not just put the text on the screen and not break my immersion? On the other hand, they got a lot of interface stuff right, too. If I move my character and he spots an enemy, he stops in his tracks and awaits further orders--but if I want him to carry on, all I have to do is press "A" and he keeps going. Well done, guys. That would've broken the game for me if you'd messed up that one.

The consumer in me says, "How the hell do they ship a game with such obvious faults?" But the developer in me says, "It's a lot harder and more complex than it looks, kid." Sigh.

While I'm only just out of the training missions, I'm enjoying the actual gameplay very much, and because this game bears a low, low price of $20, I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes strategy games. I'll probably write more about this as I play through it.

Okay, apparently the strategy game publisher Strategy First is offering free 3-hour demos of most of its games. When checking out the website, I discovered that one of those games is Jagged Alliance 2, which is possibly my favorite game of all time.

JA2 is a true classic. It's squad-based tactical combat in the mode of X-Com, except I like it even better. It takes place in a modern setting, and you control a team of mercenaries charged with liberating a small country from their ruthless dictator, one Queen Diedranna. The combat system itself is great, but the real gameplay feature that shines is the overhead map. Basically, you are dropped off in a sector of the country and told: neutralize the queen. Any way you want. Have fun.

You can take the suggestions of the townspeople and do the sane thing by taking over the easier cities and sectors first, gradually working your way up to the country's capital. You can, on second play, totally tweak things and try to send one badass merc into a tough sector early on to hopefully win and collect all the awesome weapons, giving you an early game advantage. Hell, if you think you're tough enough, you can blaze a trail all the way to the queen (good luck with that).

And yet the open-ended gameplay isn't what makes this (possibly) my favorite game of all time. The best part about JA2 is the game's personality. And man, does this game have personality in spades. You can control up to 18 mercenaries in 3 teams of 6, if I remember correctly. You get to hire mercs from mercenary employment agencies, via the brilliant mechanic of your in-game laptop. You have about 50 mercs to choose from, and each one has a very distinct and memorable personality.

For example, all of a merc's stats are out of a possible 100. More experienced mercs generally have better stats, but they also cost a lot more money. As a new player, you might be surprised to see a very cheap merc with not much experience and an explosives score in the high 90s. If you hire him, like I did, you'll see his profile wasn't lying when it said that he learned all his skills in the classroom. The moment he sees his first dead body, he's horrified, his morale drops significantly, and he becomes morose and almost useless. I was floored the first time I saw this level of character depth, and the game maintains this depth consistently across almost all its characters. Some mercs work better with each other: they will shout compliments when their friends do well, and they'll get depressed when a friend dies. Other mercs hate each other (notably Buzz and Lynx, ex-lovers) and will sometimes refuse to work together on the same squad.

Anyway, while the game has great combat, long-term strategy, and story, it's the characters that make this a game that you should try out. So go on. Download the demo.

Labels: jagged alliance

Since Craig reminded me: word verification is now enabled and required for all comments. Sorry everyone. I had to do it.