Tiny Subversions

I just wanted to say thank you to all the (dozens!) of folks, especially the students, who came up to me and said, "Hey! Networking guy! I like your articles."

Vindicates what I do here.

Labels: gdc

GDC kicked ass, as usual. I'll update a lot more later. For now, you can check out these pictures of my lecture. In Japanese! (Scroll down, I'm the one dressed in orange.)

Labels: gdc

Well, tomorrow I fly out to San Jose, CA to attend the Game Developers Conference. I'm still a little weirded out that I will be speaking.

GDC is always, without fail, my favorite week of the year (professionally speaking). A lot of developers I know say, "I went one year. I didn't learn much from the presentations." I take issue with that on about a billion levels. I'll outline a few.

I will be the first to admit that a lot of the sessions suck. Many of the presenters fall flat because they assume the audience knows close to nothing about the topic at hand, and so they spend 15 minutes giving background. This is fine for the sessions labeled for beginners, but I've seen this happen on supposedly intermediate and expert sessions too. You have to know who's worth seeing. Ask a friend who has been to GDC before what they would recommend. If you don't have a friend who's been to GDC before, show up to GDC and make a friend who's been to GDC before.

Futhermore, if you find yourself going to programming sessions and not learning anything new... go to a session that has nothing to do with your field of expertise. I guarantee you'll learn something.

The presentations are nice, but ultimately you will learn more from your peers at parties, in the halls, and during meals. I like to say I go to GDC to learn the second biggest trend. The biggest trend will be beaten to death by all the keynote speakers. The second biggest trend lurks in the dark corners of the convention center. It's the buzzwords you hear from other developers but not from the keynotes.

The way to get the most out of GDC is to be social. Network. Make friends. Make tons of friends.

If you're not prepared to do that, then don't waste your money on the conference. Be a mindless drone and go to E3 instead. Go get your head filled with lies and half-truths. Believe the hype.

Me? I'll be corresponding with my conference buddies, taking part in a quiet revolution...

Labels: gdc

Gamasutra has a fantastic article about a talk that Harvey Smith gave at SXSW called Counter-Intuitive Creative Design. The best bit?

“The first thing you do is write your values on the wall,” Smith states. “Here's what we're into. ‘We don't teach the player by death.' At Midway Studios Austin, we have this big bible of high concepts. We have literally written down our values, and when designers are in arguments, we often tell them, ‘Is there a principle you can fall back on? You guys are arguing this one very specific point, but is there a larger principle at work here? '”

This relates specifically to my favorite idea espoused in Richard Rouse III's Game Design: Theory and Practice: whenever you start a project, you need a focus statement. It's a short paragraph, maybe 3 sentences, that explains everything that is essential about your game. In other words, if you modified that paragraph in any way, it would be a completely different game. At my mythical future game company, this focus statement will be printed out on one of those large banners and hung in an appropriate portion of the office. This way, when the designers are having an argument, I can walk in, point to the giant banner, and effectively end the argument. Much like what Harvey Smith is talking about.

According to an IGDA press release, Alex Rigopulos, Eran Egozy, Mike Dornbrook, and Greg LoPiccolo of Harmonix are going to be honored with the Maverick Award at the Game Developers Choice Awards. The Maverick Award "recognizes those who take risks by experimenting with unconventional methods." They're Boston-area guys, so I've met all of them, and each one of them absolutely deserves the accolades.

Congratulations, guys! Boston represent!

Labels: boston

Hey, Boston people: tonight is the Boston Postmortem! There won't be a speaker, but there will be board games.

Hope to see you there.

Labels: boston, postmortem

I'm not the biggest fan of Scott Miller's blog, but I have agree with his post about EA's move to original IP:

Poor EA! Brokeback Mountain, Crash and Munich just aren't game material. And so they'll have to actually think of their own game ideas!

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.

In order to effectively network, you must have a website.

Allow me to explain this further. In fact, I'll explain by example. Because throwing a bunch of examples at you and allowing you to draw your own inferences is a lot easier than constructing a sound logical argument.

Let's say you're looking for a job. One of my rules of networking is to never ask for a job while networking. If you want to ask someone for a job, you should go through the appropriate channels, usually HR, at whatever company you like. The best you can do is convince somebody you are a really awesome person that they would like to hire, without ever mentioning the "hire" part. This means that, no, you are not handing out resumes to people. Here, let's make this super clear:



Resumes are for job fairs, interviews, and emailing to the HR people at jobs@companyxyz.com. Not networking. Okay? Okay.

So let's go back to the example. Say you're schmoozing up someone at an IGDA chapter meeting. She works at the coolest development studio in the area. This is somewhere you want to work. Instead of giving her our resume, you impress the crap out of her because you are educated. And then you give her your business card. Your business card which contains the URL of your website. This enables her to say a few days after the event, "Hey, that person was really impressive. I wonder what more I can learn about their fascinating life." And then she'll type in your URL, and go to your website, where she'll be astounded by the wonders of...

...of what, exactly? What goes on your website?

Really, the number one most important thing to have on your website is a list of projects that you've worked on. Even if it's spare time stuff, as long as it's remotely relevant. Wrote a few game reviews for your friend's zine? Put it up there. Made a mod that replaced all the gun sounds in Half Life with farting noises? Put it up there. You can look at the projects page on my website for an idea of what I've done with it.

While we're looking at my website, you'll notice it's ugly as crap. Your website does not have to look good. It has to be functional. Unless you're an artist. Then your website's design had better look damned spiffy, because it reflects something about your professional skills.

Actually, if you're an artist, also need a "portfolio" page. For an example, check out Shaddy Safadi's website. He's an old conference buddy of mine, and I really like the way his website is set up. It's minimalistic: resume, contact info, portfolio. And it lets the art speak for itself. Which is a fantastic thing, because it's very good art. (Did I mention that you have to be really good at what you do in order for any of this networking stuff to work? Hm. Maybe I should have covered that earlier.)

Even better, artist Jon Jones wrote an article called Your Portfolio Repels Jobs, describing the things you should and shouldn't do on your portfolio site. The bottom line: make it usable, identify yourself, and give a clear path to the reader so they can hire you on the spot if necessary.

The other things on my website are a reading list, a woefully incomplete list of writing I've had published, and a page with some bad songs that I wrote. This is merely flavor to show people that I'm a fairly well-rounded individual, which is especially important if you are into design or prodcution. I also include a resume, just for the hell of it, but I'm seriously thinking of taking that down and replacing it with a few paragraphs of prose biography.

Another benefit of having a projects page on your website is that it allows you to fit a lot more stuff than you normally would on a resume. This is why, in cover letters, I say, "Check out the projects page on my website for more game-related work I've done."

So your website is like a resume that you don't cram down people's throats. That's really the key, because networking is about subtlety, and a resume is about as subtle as, uhm, a bright orange shirt.

Labels: networking

I was browsing through the July 2003 issue of Game Developer Magazine, reading through the postmortem of Big Huge Games' Rise of Nations. There are two things in their "What Went Right" section that I want to talk about in particular.

The first thing is my faaaavorite topic in the whole wide world: rapid protopying. This one's worth quoting at length.

Part of the core vision for Rise of Nations involved introducing gameplay innovations [...] We had 10 to 15 "wild" ideas about what might take real-time strategy in new dirrections, but we knew that only some, maybe only a small few, were going to work, and we didn't know which ones. It was essential that we find out as soon as possible which ideas were worth implementing, and we knew from experience that the only sure way to accomplish this is to throw the ideas into a playable prototype right from the beginning.

We got a playable solo prototype running within the first month [...] We could throw new ideas in and see the results almost immediately: some concepts needed a little tweaking to be fun, while others got trashed almost as soon as they went in. The value of prototyping is that core concepts ended up being continuously refined over the years, while providing lots of time to balance the game.

Word of wisdom, people!

The other really important bit of that Postmortem discussed how they used a program called Incredibuild to speed up their build times from what I assume was about an hour to just under two minutes. And of course, building incremental prototypes is made much easier when the build cycle is reduced significantly. (This is why I like to prototype games on paper. Build time is reduced to how quickly I can draw boxes with my pencil.)

So, the developers of one of the best games to be released in the last five years had "prototype often" as their mantra. Big Huge, Maxis... I'm not the only one preaching this!

I've always held that the main reason we see so much anti-video-game legislation is that we (gamers) are largely perceived as nonvoters.

Do something about it. Sign up at the newly formed Video Game Voters Network (which was founded by the ESA as part of their pro-game lobbying initiative). There's a nifty form that sends an email to your Senator if you want.

I wanted to draw your attention to a fantastic piece of information visualization, courtesy of Game Revolution: the Gizmondo Bizarro Flow Chart. Experience the thrill of traversing the strange history of the Gizmondo!

There's an article up on O'Reilly containing a bunch of really excellent proverbs about entrepeneurship. My favorite one was about the importance of rapid prototyping to the process of building a business or a product.

Momentum builds on itself -- just start. Do whatever you can. Draw a user interface. Write a spec. Make something, anything, that people can see and touch and try. A prototype is worth ten thousand words. One you start moving, you will find that people start to carry you along.

Rapid prototyping is not only important from a pure development standpoint--it's an excellent tool for getting investors and executives on your side. That's something I have missed in the past when talking about the benefits of rapid prototypes.

Just added the following link to my Be Educated networking article:

A Hole in the Desert. A free excerpt from Michael Rubin's history of LucasFilm. This chapter contains a very nice history of the rise and fall of Atari, and then examines Atari's relationship with LucasFilm. Then it goes into some early LucasArts history. This is the story of the first important era in the American games industry. Read it!

Labels: networking