Tiny Subversions

Sometimes I'm in a game store and I wish I could quickly look up a game's average review score to help me decide if I should buy the game. So I just set up a service where you can send a game name over SMS from your phone and you can get its Metacritic scores. The short version is that you can text 265010 with a message formatted like this:

metagamebot: "name of game"

And you'll get a text back with the top 3 Metacritic search results for that game, along with their dates of publication, their average scores, and platforms. See below for more detailed instructions.

How This Came About

So Jeff and I were in a video game store yesterday, and I said, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if there were a service I could text message and it would tell me the Metacritic score of a video game?" About three seconds later, we decided that we'd both try to implement it, although slightly differently.

Jeff didn't want to use SMS, because his phone plan charges per message. Because he has a Windows Mobile Treo, he wanted to build an MSN bot to do it. But I say screw MSN.

I have an unlimited SMS plan, so I don't care about text charges and it's more convenient than signing on to the Internet. The easiest way to set up an SMS service is to write an AIM bot (be careful to use the OSCAR protocol and not TOC or TOC2). Then you can text the AIM bot from your phone by texting the number 265010 with a message formatted like

AIMScreenName: message goes here

So I modified a Perl AIM bot that uses OSCAR (BudgetBot). Of course, I had to learn some Perl first, but I already knew a lot about regular expressions in other languages, so I was pretty good to go.

Instructions For Use

All you have to do is text message the number 265010 with messages like

metagamebot: psychonauts
metagamebot: "advance wars dual strike"
metagamebot: "oblivion ps3"

What it does is search Metacritic Games using the string you provide, and then it gives you the top 3 search results. So for example,

metagamebot: oblivion

will give you

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, The 2006 94 PC Games
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, The 2006 94 Xbox 360
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, The 2007 93 Playstation 3

But let's say you were actually looking for the Turok game. You could then try

metagamebot: "oblivion turok"

which would give you

Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion 2000 77 Nintendo 64

Pretty neat, huh? The important thing to note is that if your search term is longer than one word, you should put it in quotes. Also, nothing is case sensitive.

Now that I think about it, you could use this service on your computer by just IMing MetaGameBot. But... why would you do that?

Disclaimer

This is just running on a server of mine somewhere. It may crash and I won't know about it. So, I make no claim that this thing will work forever, or at all!

Labels: games, hacking, project, reviews

This is sketchy and gross.

Blazing Angels 2, an arcade WWII dogfighting/bombing game, is being marketed on the Ubisoft website with a 2D shoot-em-up where the longer you survive, the more you get to see a woman strip her clothing off. What the hell? I was actually considering buying the game because the demo was fun. Not anymore.

Now I just feel embarrassed for all my friends who work for Ubisoft...

Labels: marketing, women_in_games

I was looking around at places that had been linking to the Orbus Gameworks site, when I stumbled upon this description of someone's attempt to get MegaZeux running on the Nintendo DS. And then I remembered, oh yeah, MegaZeux!

MegaZeux was a fan-made upgrade of the ZZT game creator, which was the first project by Epic MegaGames, now known as Epic, that company that makes gears and war and stuff. ZZT provided Epic with the cash to make Jill of the Jungle, their first "real" game. But I've posted about this history before.

Anyway, MegaZeux was pretty cool, and pretty much top of the line for game creation tools back in the day, especially for overhead adventures. Modding first-person games like DOOM was just barely starting to catch on in 1994. I remember in 1993 I used to download all the crazy Wolfenstein 3D editing utilities from a local BBS and create my own levels. But that was all cloak-and-dagger stuff. It was only when DOOM came out that the developers officially encouraged fan-made levels and mods.

Looking at all those old editors is a real trip down memory lane.

Labels: know_your_history

So, let's get this straight.

Gamespot reviews old games that are being re-released on the Virtual Console.

They review Super Metroid and say it's effectively a perfect game that they can't find any flaws with, except that "Nintendo waited 13 years to let us play" it. It's even perfectly emulated, no flickering or artifacts or anything.

And they give it an 8.5.

Is this because Gamespot's duty is to let consumers know whether something is worth their money, and they believe that most modern gamers wouldn't consider an old SNES game to be a perfect 10? That seems unlikely, since the game costs 800 Wii points, also known as $8.00.

Is it because they feel that most gamers who'd be interested in the title have already played some of the many games that do a pretty good job of cloning the Super Metroid experience, like the Castlevania series? And thus Super Metroid is, to the modern day gamer, less shockingly great than it was back in the early 1990s? I don't buy that, either. The idea is predicated on the notion that the game's brilliance relies on novelty. Most people who have played the game would disagree.

So what is it? Why do you give an admittedly perfect game an 8.5?

Labels: games, reviews

I'll be giving two talks at Austin GDC. One is part of the main conference on Thursday at 1:30pm, and it's called Gameplay Metrics For a Better Tomorrow. You can read the description at the link, but it's about MMO metrics and how they touch not just on design, but also on customer service, quality assurance, network operations, and other aspects of MMO development and maintenance.

The other talk is going to be the latest version of my networking talk, which I'm giving as part of the Game Career Seminar. While I've given a bunch of networking talks in the last two years, I try to change my talks up every six months or so. This one will be updated, although to be honest I'm not 100% sure exactly how it's going to be focused. Come and find out!

Labels: speaking

Jay Barnson, AKA Rampant Coyote, has written a thought-provoking piece on his blog about how he's solving save game abuse. The gist of it is that he has a drama meter which fills up as the player does interesting (read: risky) things. When the meter's full, you can buy special powers. But if you save and reload, you lost the meter--it's not saved with the game state! This encourages lengthy play sessions without reloading.

I'm very guilty of abusing save/load all the time. I think if I were playing a game with a mechanic like this, I would be far less likely to say, "Hmm, I took 2HP of damage from that encounter. Let me reload and finish it so I take 0 HP of damage instead." Instead I'd say, "Ehh, I'll keep on going. I'm almost to the point where I can buy Diplomatic Immunity."

Labels: design, games

So at last night's Boston Post Mortem we featured a great talk by Ken Levine of Irrational 2K Boston, along with two of his leads. It wasn't a formal presentation, there was no PowerPoint or anything like that. Just three guys and a mic. Yet it was not a hip-hop freestyle battle.

Ken and crew talked about how BioShock went from a basic idea, just a high-level concept, through its various iterations while the game was being pitched and prototyped, to what it is today. He also covered the way that they pitched the game to journalists early on, and how that changed over time as the pitch became less targeted towards a hardcore three-year-early preview kind of audience and more towards a hopefully multi-million selling blockbuster audience.

Here are a few tidbits I remember from the night. I kind of wish I took notes! (Funny hearing that from me, right?) Please correct me if I've mis-remembered any of this stuff.

• Early on, the team built a very small, 45-second, one-room demo that was super polished and conveyed the atmosphere of the game moreso than the gameplay. Ken stressed multiple times during his talk that building a shippable-looking demo of extremely small scope focusing on one or two things really sharply is way better than attempting to do an entire vertical slice too early.
• The Little Sister started out as a sea slug, but focus testers had no idea why the hulking Big Daddy would be protecting a sea slug. When they realized that this was a problem, they went through a whole bunch of different ideas (including a dog in a wheelchair!) before settling on the creepy little girl. Once they switched, people instantly understood the relationship. Big strong man protects helpless child.
  
• As many game publishers and developers do, they used GameSpot Trax, which basically measures how much hype (page views, commentary, etc) a given game is receiving. When they did their initial unveiling of BioShock including the 45-second demo (I believe this was the resulting article), they got huge numbers on Trax. When they had their awesome E3 demo in 2006, the Trax numbers didn't change that much, even though everyone at E3 was talking about their game! To me, this seems to support the fact that even an awesome demo at the old E3 would get lost in a sea of game news.
• They made sure to focus test with random John Q. Popcorn off the street, the kind of person who owns an Xbox but only has Halo and Madden. That really helped them with the direction for their game.
  
• Ken Levine on pitching a game: "You don't want to see yourself having weird sex, and you don't want to see yourself pitching games." Amen to that.
  

Labels: bioshock, boston, development, marketing, postmortem, prototyping

I just played through the BioShock demo. A little short (40 minutes, maybe?) but other than that: awesome! I can't say it changed my mind about the game or anything. I already wanted to play it. Now I want to play it more!

Labels: games

As I posted over on the Boston Post Mortem blog, Irrational Games is now known as 2K Boston. Its Australian offices are now 2K Australia. I'm sad to see the Irrational name go: I remember it fondly from the days of System Shock 2. Seeing the Looking Glass and the Irrational logos one after the other always made me happy.



I wonder if something similar is going to happen to Firaxis, which was similarly acquired a while ago. 2K Maryland?

Labels: boston, industry

MTV just posted a long-form interview with Jon Blow about his upcoming game Braid. I have posted about Braid before, and I had the very good fortune to get a chance to play a pretty recent build of the game. It quickly became one of my favorite games: Jon definitely met his design goals in giving the player a high density gameplay experience. You never solve the same puzzle twice, ever. Retrying puzzles (and oh will you retry them) is made as painless as possible through the rewind mechanism. Once I got into the groove of things, I was retrying a particularly difficult timed jump about once every two seconds. The feedback is just incredible.

Labels: games

Peter Carlson, Senior Systems Designer at Surreal, posted a cool article examining breaking in to the game industry: what it was like in the '90s, and what it's like now. I myself broke in during the transitional period, where game programs at schools were just starting to come into existence. Maybe this is why I still tell high school students who want to make games that they should

• get a degree in CS, or art, or business, or whatever at a reputable four-year school
• work on lots of games in your spare time while they're there, preferably with a game development club (start one if it doesn't exist)
  
• and network the hell out of every conference or IGDA meeting they can get to

I guess I'm old-fashioned, but I still think it's the best way. Because believe it or not, you may change your mind about making games while you're in college. And it would be nice to just say, "Okay, I'll just stop making games in my spare time and going to conferences," as opposed to having to change your major, maybe change schools, and worry about all those extra credits you took that are not going to help with your new degree.

Labels: breakingin, education

Game credits are a prickly issue. Often, when I bring the topic up with developers, they cringe visibly. Many a developer has worked on a game for years, only to not be credited in the end for one pretty unfair reason or another.

Now, the question of whose name goes in the game credits is usually left up to developers (less often publishers). I'm going to skip over the many flaws in the current crediting system, although I will pause to note that the IGDA has been working to improve the state of crediting. Instead I focus on something that has typically been a shining example of game industry crediting: MobyGames. MobyGames is a user-contributed database of game information, and the most important piece of game information they collect (in my opinion) is credits.

The way this works is that you go out and buy a game, and then you log into MobyGames and you transcribe the entire credits for the game. This earns you points as a contributer, and there's a big moderation system in place in case you screw up or don't know what you're doing. It's all pretty low-tech.Anyway, this typically works well. People enter the names of folks who end up in the manual. For example, if you take a look at my MobyGames developer profile, you'll see that I'm credited on D&D Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and... The Truth About Game Development. The neat thing is that I didn't enter any of this information. Someone else cared enough to do it.

The problem is this: the MobyGames credits for D&D Online don't match what's in the manual. And the reason's pretty simple: MMOs usually have two teams of people that work on the game. There's the launch team, which are the folks who worked on the game up to launch and are in the game manual. And then there's the live team, which is responsible for the content updates we all know and love. These teams often have overlapping developers, but they're usually pretty different in their makeup.So the MobyGames credits at the moment consist of the live team. Which I suppose is accurate in a sense: who is working on the game right now? It's the live team. But that's different from the people who worked hard for many years and have their names in the manual. Check out Justin Quimby's developer profile. He's credited on every Turbine game except for D&D Online. Which is weird, because he was the Director of Game Systems Engineering for DDO, and it says so in the manual!


I'm not saying that live team shouldn't be credited on MobyGames. If anything, they deserve it more than the launch team, since at least the launch team gets a printed manual--the live team gets squat!

What I'm getting at here is that maybe MobyGames should revisit their crediting structure, because it doesn't work for ongoing games. Why not have two credit sections for an MMO? I sent them a nice email about this, and didn't hear back, so I'm deliberately making some noise on this blog in hopes that I can at least get some people talking about this issue.

Labels: credits

This article is part of Effective Networking in the Game Industry, my series of articles on, well, I think you've got it by now.

A huge mistake that a lot of newbies make when talking to game developers is to press the developers about the project that they're currently working on. Odds are that any given game developer is under NDA (non-disclosure agreement) concerning their current project. While it's a good idea to ask questions of developers, the NDA means that there are some questions you should avoid.

Bad questions:

• So, what game are you working on right now? (very bad, it will be awkward if this can't be spoken of)
  
• What platform are you developing for? (sorta bad, sometimes the actual target platform is under NDA)
• What genre is your project?
  

Good questions:

• Are you working on a PC or console title? (safer than asking specific platform)
• Are you working on an announced project?
  
• How big is your team? Do you like working on a (big/small/medium) team?
  
• What's your role on the project?
• Maya or Max? (or any other tools question, really)
  

In the case of a developer who is working at a company where their major project has been announced, you can certainly ask, "Are you on Announced Project X?" That way, the developer can either say that she's on that project or not.

Here's a typical conversation. I almost always have a conversation just like this one with developers I've just met.

Me: Hey, my friend tells me that you're working at Flabberjet Studios. How long have you been there? What do you do?
Dev: I'm a programmer. Been with the Flab' for about six months now.
Me: Nice. Are you working on something announced?
Dev: No, it's not announced yet.
Me: Oooh, exciting. So is it pretty early in the project, then? Are you out of pre-production?
Dev: We're almost out of pre-pro right now.
Me: That's cool. How big is the team?
Dev: We're up to about 30.
Me: Wow, I can tell you're close to the end of pre-pro. That's a lot of people. Do you think your team is adjusting okay to the new size?
Dev: Yeah. It's definitely different than it was three months ago. We've been hiring pretty aggressively. But I'd say we're doing okay.

...a-a-and so on. Notice how I manage to carry on a relatively meaningful conversation about game development without actually talking about the game this person is working on. Also notice that I'm not just asking a barrage of questions. My follow-up about team size shows that I did some rudimentary listening, and I do contribute a little bit of my own experience with development as part of that follow-up, so we have a nice talker/listener thing going on.

The thing you want to remember is this: most developers do want to talk to you about their project. They're just legally obligated not to do so. Which means that if you talk around their project, you're not only satisfying your curiosity, but you're letting them fulfill their own wishes, too.

Labels: conversation, networking

Speaking of Activision, it seems like The Onion's game industry analysts have come up with a pretty good prediction of Activision's future plans for the Guitar Hero franchise.

Labels: humor

So, Raph Koster just posted some intriguing stats about Kingdom of Loathing. In speaking with them, he discovered that they're pretty much entirely funded by donations, but they didn't make clear what percentage of their user base has donated. However, we do have some data that enable us to make some educated guesses.

They say that there are 194,000 active accounts: accounts are considered inactive if they haven't been played in over 60 days, unless that account belongs to someone who donated. They also say that roughly 38k played on Saturday, 73k played last week, and 118k played last month. So let's extrapolate from those numbers to see how many people have played in the last 60 days.

About 2.0 times as many people played in the last week as they did on Saturday alone. About 1.5 times as many people played in the last month as they did in the last. This is about the standard rate I've seen from my experience in MMOs. Anyway, I would estimate that probably about 168k accounts played in the last two months, or 60 days. Don't ask me exactly how I came up with that number, it's just a guess from experience. It does, however, equal about another 50% jump from one month to two months.

So that means that, by my rough estimate, KoL has had at least 194k-168k=26k people who have donated. That is not including the current active players who have donated. I will arbitrarily double that amount to account for those folks, to come up with about 50k people who have donated to KoL. Assuming an average donation of $5 to $10 (at $10 you get a Mr. Accessory), that comes out to about $250k to $500k in revenue. Over the course of a few years (KoL started in 2003) and considering that they do actually pay people to work for them, that figure more or less makes sense from where I'm standing.

Of course, I could be completely and utterly wrong. But hey, it was a fun mental exercise.

Labels: business, mmo