Tiny Subversions

So I travel around the country to conferences and schools, giving talks about how to break in to the game industry, and more specifically, how to network with people.

I like to give a new version of the talk every year. In 2006 the main talk that I gave was mostly a narrative version of my networking articles. In 2007 I've been giving a talk about how to make yourself memorable, how to make your own luck, the power of networks, and a 10-minute rant about craptastic business cards.

What should I talk about in 2008? I think one of the questions that I get asked most and don't really have a good answer for is, "What do I do if I'm shy?" I'm not sure if that would constitute an entire presentation on its own, but I think I want that as part of the talk I put together.

So, warning, I'll be rambling about shyness for the rest of this post with little or no direction. This isn't being listed as one of my official networking articles because eventually I'll write something that actually can help people. For now this is just a very public piece of scratch paper.

There's a pretty good definition of shyness I found in this article about shyness: shyness is "a feeling of discomfort or inhibition in social or interpersonal situations that keeps you from pursuing your goals." According to some sources, shyness affects about 40% of American adults.

The poorly thought-out answer that I usually give to people who ask me how they can overcome shyness is to bite the bullet and embarrass the crap out of yourself so many times that eventually it doesn't bother you that much anymore. This isn't terribly useful advice. It's like telling a depressed person that they should just be happy, and then they won't be depressed anymore.

On the other hand, people often ask me after a talk how I learned to be a good public speaker. And the answer is that I ran so many clubs when I was in college that I ended up addressing meetings of 10 to 20 people three days a week, and presenting to meetings of 50 to 100 people about twice a month. Not counting class presentations. So I just put myself in situations where I was forced to be a public speaker, and after four years and roughly 300 speaking occasions ranging from small to quite large, I got good at it.

So I think there's some merit to the idea that getting over shyness takes practice. But what are the individual things you can do to get over shyness? One thing I used to do was practice in front of mirrors a lot, before going to parties or gatherings or giving a talk. Just practice being social. It kind of helped. I also find that being extremely knowledgeable helps curb shyness. If you're going into a social situation and you know that you're going to be able to contribute to the conversation, that really helps. I'm incredibly outgoing at game industry events, obviously. But the one time I went to a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, I knew I was clueless about baseball so I actively avoided people who might want to start talking about sports--i.e., everyone.

It occurs to me now that if you're shy, that might not be such a bad thing at the beginning anyway. It's kind of a natural instinct that helps you shut the fuck up and listen, which is a very important skill to have. Is it your first game industry conference? Maybe you shouldn't be talking to people, but rather just politely listening to conversations. You can listen to people's conversations (as long as they're being held in a fairly public place) without even saying a word to anyone. You just sort of enter the circle, put a look on your face that makes it clear you're listening intently and should not be interrupted, and then quietly leave. Then you're equipped with knowledge that can help you at your next event.

Labels: networking, psychology

So a number of bloggers are posting their top scariest moments from video games, in honor of Halloween, I'm guessing.

I'll do something a little different here.

You see, I'm a big wimp when it comes to video games. I get scared playing almost any game. Halo 3 is not terribly scary most of the time, but it scares me because the simple idea that there might be an enemy ambush up ahead is frightening. I get afraid playing Civilization 4 when the balance of power is tenuous. Advance Wars DS is scary during a fog of war map when there might be an enemy tank hidden in the trees.

Why haven't I finished BioShock, or for that matter, System Shock 2 or Thief 2? Because those actually are mildly scary, and I'm fucking terrified when I play those. Even in a room with all the lights on and the windows open at noon. There's a reason I don't even touch survival horror games, people.

The only two games I've played recently that haven't scared me are Skate and Wii Sports. Yeah, I'm a wimp.

Labels: games

Because my work email address is more or less public, every now and then I get an email from some entrepreneurial guy saying, "Hey, I have this great business idea and I'm looking for a game industry partner. But I can't tell you more about it until you sign an NDA."

I usually respond to these letters along the lines of, "Tell me as much as you can without making me sign an NDA and then I'll decide. If you can't tell me anything, you can go talk to someone else because it's not worth my time." What I really want to tell them is that business is not about ideas, but rather, about execution. For example, I'm not afraid of my competition learning about my philosophies on metrics because ideas are cheap and execution is everything (edited June 08 to add: notice how their competing product doesn't exist anymore?). I'm sure there are a bunch of smart people working there who have already thought of all my great ideas, but they can't implement them because they're a giant company and they have a million other things to do and things move at a snail's pace.

Today, though, I got one of those dumb letters and it begged a different response. Mostly because the email, addressed solely to me, opened with

Hello, Tom --

*cough*

Here's my response:

My friend,

A word of advice: the next time you send out a form letter to every industry email address you can find, please take care to change the name at the top of your letter to match the recipient's.

Cheers,
Darius (not Tom)

Labels: business, entrepreneurship, networking

I'm going to start using an acronym I made up: WINAL, meaning "Wikipedia is Not a Lawyer."

I give the following context as an example:

Jeff: I need something that will explain the difference between LGPL and GPL in layman's terms.
Darius: Well, WINAL, but I bet Wikipedia would have something like that.

Google only returns three unique hits on the phrase itself, one Slashdot post from August '06 and two instances from Wikipedia Talk pages from September '05 and May '06. And there's no hit on the acronym anywhere, only the word "winal," which is a Mayan unit of time equaling 20 days.

I gave a guest lecture a few weeks ago at WPI (where I got my degree). My friend and former professor John Sanbonmatsu teaches a course on critical theory and video games, and he invited me to be a guest lecturer--I suspect mostly to mollify student's suspicions that no real world game developer could actually give a crap about all this Adorno and Horkheimer stuff. Well, I certainly do.

Anyway, here are the notes that made up the first part of the lecture I gave. It's all over the place, but I think it's worth putting up here.

---

One of the unique qualities of capitalism is that it's about the domination of use value for exchange value. That is, instead of valuing the intrinsic qualities of a thing in itself, we instead care about its market value. This simple statement actually encapsulates two of the biggest complaints that your hear from within the game industry.

One complaint is basically that art games won't get funded. That is, if you want to make a really interesting game that stands on its own as a work of art, you either have to do it yourself and nobody will know about it, or you get a publisher and venture capital and you spend millions of dollars and end up with a derivative piece of crap that's nothing like your original vision. This is because the publishers, the capitalists who control the means of production, care about profit more than the overall increase of human happiness that could be caused by making a thoughtful, moving game. It's actually pretty soul-crushing when you claim that something you're working on is art, but what you're really producing is a cheap commodity. At least the folks toiling away in the stapler assembly factory don't have any delusions that they're making people's lives better.

Another big complaint is that game journalism sucks. Some people want interesting analyses of video games. Let's look at games in a critical way, tease out their influences. Yet when you read a review of a game like Team Fortress 2 (which I love, by the way), everybody's talking about graphics and art and does it get an 8.5 of out 10 or a 9 out of 10 and whether the medic/heavy combo is a dominant strategy. Almost nobody notices, to cite a pithy example, that TF2 and all games like it are actually a modern recreation of Valhalla, the Norse warrior heaven where dead soldiers fight endless battles and are resurrected upon death to continue their ceaseless fighting. (Which is an observation I stole entirely from Ernest Adams, in his semi-famous lecture "The Philosophical Roots of Computer Game Design".)

Most game journalists defend their writing by saying that all they're doing is helping consumers make an informed decision about whether they should be spending their money on X, Y, or Z game. But who's to say that's any more important than the Valhalla assessment? I mean, when I am playing Team Fortress 2 I get lost in the strategy and the adrenal viscerality of the game, I forget that I'm just logging on to a server and fighting a bunch of guys for no particular reason whatsoever. And then I have to think: is this truly making me a happier, better person? And after some reflection, I come to the conclusion that the only reason that I play this game is that my best friend Darren also plays, and I enjoy playing with him. I rarely get to see him in person, but we can spend one or two nights a week playing together and talking over voice chat, and it really does strengthen my friendship with him. And that's why I play Team Fortress 2: the friendship. (Cue rainbows and puppies.) And I wouldn't have known that if I hadn't actually taken a step back and thought about the game for a few minutes.

So I'll go back to my earlier question: who's to say what's more important, consumer reporting or qualitative analysis? And the answer's simple, again: the capitalists who control means of production. They're the ones who have the final say, they're the ones who run the magazines and the TV networks and so forth, and so people are only going to be exposed to the shitty consumer reports. Yes, there's been some democratization with the internet, and you can go to certain websites and get good game criticism, but it's still an uphill battle because 99% of the population has been indoctrinated to believe that being informed on HOW to spend your money is more important than being informed on how to THINK about what you're spending it ON. Your average gamer is literally insulted when you ask him (or possibly her) to think instead of to consume.

And there's another problem. As gamers, we think of ourselves as consumers first and foremost. We fetishize commodities, we stand in line 20 hours for a Nintendo Wii, and our self-worth is reflected in our Xbox Live Achievement scores. And that's dangerous. I was just watching a 2004 lecture called "The Tragedy of Suburbia" by an architectural critic named James Howard Kunstler, and he said something that really resonated with me: people need to stop thinking of themselves as consumers, and start thinking of themselves as citizens. And not "citizens" in the sense of the word where you're an obedient servant of the government. Citizens have responsibility to their fellow humans. You need to look at everything you do and ask yourself how you're increasing the general welfare. And as long as gamer culture is focused on consumerism, that won't happen.

There's a great quote from Adorno's essay on "free time," where he's lamenting the idea of having hobbies. To paraphrase, he says that every time someone asks him if he has any hobbies, he has to say no. This isn't because he's a workaholic who can't enjoy himself, but rather that a hobby is merely something to pass the time, and he doesn't lower himself to passing time. He reads and makes music and listens to music with his full attention, and to call these things "hobbies" would be to degrade them. And the gamers that I really admire approach video games the same way: they are extremely mindful of their play. They really truly think about it.

And that's all I can ask of you. Be mindful of your play.

Labels: design, games, philosophy, theory

So tonight we're having our Boston Post Mortem meeting co-located with an event that the ESA is having to expose legislators to the game industry. If you're in the area, I recommend you check it out!

Labels: boston

I'm going to be giving a talk at CMP's Game Career Seminar, which is being hosted at E For All in Los Angeles this week. My talk will be about... networking. Surprise!! But it will also be about internships and interviews. If you've seen me give a talk about networking before, this one will be somewhat different. I promise.

Also, if you attend, you may catch me doing something silly like this:

They had to pick a two-second clip of me making a weird gesture to put in the Austin GDC Game Career Seminar highlight reel. Here's the whole reel:

Labels: conferences, networking, speaking

So Gamasutra published an interview with Greg Zeschuk and Ray Muzyka about EA's acquisition of BioWare/Pandemic. As I was reading, I kind of got the feeling they were repeating the same message over and over. I did a word frequency count of their responses, and got these top results:

51 the
44 and
39 to
24 in
24 a
22 we
21 of
20 that
20 really
16 think
15 we're
14 it's
14 great

Hmm. Throwing away the incidental results: "We think that it's really great."

Gee, guys, you could've saved me five minutes of reading and just cut to the point!

Take a look at this picture. It's a pretty unassuming location, right? Deserted plaza, couple of benches, some ugly-ass corporate mixed use zoning.

But it's part of a rich tapestry of game industry memories for me. Because this crappy plaza is in downtown San Jose, CA where I attended the Game Developers Conference for many years, and as a result built up many close friendships which last to this day.

I was in San Jose last week for the Virtual Worlds Conference, but I was walking around and reminiscing about all the cool stuff that happened to me in these different places. There's actually an entire discipline centered around this phenomenon called psychogeography.

This is the light rail station where I met up with certain friends of mine, back when we were all students trying to break in to the industry. They had been partying all night and were incredibly drunk, and one of them vomited all over the rail platform. Classy! I'll avoid naming names since I'm such a nice guy, but that was definitely a nice bonding event.

Here's a great Thai restaurant that was the first place I ever really hung out with the MIT CMS games folks (now of MIT GAMBIT), including Matt, Clara, and Philip. I actually ended up eating dinner here a few times a few different years with them, so I always associate this place with them. Good memories, and they're definitely good friends.

Wow. This one takes me way back. The 2003 GDC was my first GDC, and I didn't know anybody and also didn't know where to get cheap dinner in downtown SJ. There were plenty of expensive hotel restaurants but I didn't see anything affordable (I now know that there's plenty affordable to eat in the area, I was just a n00b). On my first day I made friends with Jeff and with a gal named Lauren who actually kind of dropped off the face of the earth after GDC '03. We went to this Johnny Rocket's together that night. So even though Johnny Rocket's is kind of a despicable chain theme restaurant, I have fond memories of this one. I think I ate here at least once every year that GDC was held in San Jose.

Ahh, the Fairmont. The networking heart of the old GDC in San Jose. This was the first place that I was ever truly star-struck by the game industry. Because it's one thing to see Will Wright or Warren Spector or John Romero or whoever on a panel in a convention center. It's an entirely different thing to hang out in a swank lounge with them while you're all drinking and carrying on. At GDC, if you didn't know where to go, you'd head to the Fairmont and within 10 minutes you'd hear about three different parties and have met five interesting people. (As long as you worked the room.)

The Fairmont lobby is set up like a pit, so it would literally be a teeming pit of game developers. Sounds disgusting, and come to think of it, it kinda was. But... the NETWORKING, man!

It's a damn shame that there isn't something similar to the Fairmont at GDC in San Francisco. It looks like the Marriot is shaping up to be the place to meet. But as CMP found out, you can't dictate this kind of thing, it has to arise naturally over the course of years. Just one of the pitfalls of moving a long-standing conference location.

I recall that this particular corner of the Fairmont bar was always taken up by one clique or another and it was always a pain in my ass to join their conversation. In fact, I never managed to successfully do that. Just goes to show that some places are physically configured for networking (like the Fairmont pit in general) and other places are conducive to shunning outsiders and new people (like this corner).

Whenever I would tire of hanging out at the Fairmont and felt the need for some fresh air (it did get pretty hot and loud in there), I would leave the hotel and head for one of these pillars out on the sidewalk. And then I'd just perch there, like some kind of networking gargoyle. Undoubtedly, cool people would be walking by because, well, it was on the way from the convention center to the Fairmont. There would be throngs of people walking by, and usually within 5 or 10 minutes I'd see someone I knew and hop down and tag along with them. Once, a friend actually stopped by and joined me perched on the next pillar over. We had a nice little pillar chat, from what I recall.

I will always remember this innocuous piece of sidewalk, because it was here that I was walking along and who walked right by me but Reggie. Now normally I'd say, big deal, some famous dude walked right by me. Happens all the time at GDC. But this was different. This man exuded an aura. He walked by like a god damned force of nature. A laser beam of singular purpose and focus. Like his briefcase was fucking handcuffed to his wrist. I have never in my life been so impressed by someone just from being near them for a few seconds. I knew right in that moment that Nintendo of America was in good hands, at least when it came to marketing. (Of course, now he's the NoA President.) That man BLEEDS executive.

Ahh. The Agenda. In 2003 this was the site of my first big GDC party. It was also the site of my first GDC party shenanigans. Microsoft rented the whole club for a night and through some friends I got an invitation which came with the goodie bags for folks attending the MS Developer Day session at GDC. I didn't actually attend that session, so this level of cleverness was a big deal for me as a n00b. I also had a few friends who didn't have a pass, so I got into the party, found a grate that I could slip my invitation under, and passed the invite out to them. We repeated this trick to get about three people into the party.

Also, this was actually the first place I ever had a drink in public. I was underage at the time, and until then had been completely dry. I looked around me and saw 300 drunken game developers, and I was holding two free drink tickets. At which point I said to myself, "Well, screw it. If there's a time and a place to start drinking, this is it." And I had a single glass of wine because I didn't know WHAT to order, much less HOW to order it.

This was also where I had the first of many extended conversations with my friend Rich Stein. We talked for about two or three hours about game clubs at universities, game development education, and our prediction that most university game development programs built top-down were doomed to failure.

Anyway. Yeah. A brief tour of my personal psychogeography of San Jose, filtered through the lens of GDC.

Labels: gdc, networking, travel

I'm part of a panel at Virtual Worlds 2007 in San Jose this week, on managing social interactions in virtual worlds. I'll be pushing a metrics angle during the panel, but it should be pretty interesting. If you're attending the conference, drop me a line!

Labels: conferences, speaking

Andrew pointed me to a nice hack to get Skate videos embedded into my blog. Here's my video:

Thanks, Andrew!

I have a confession. I haven't gotten very far in BioShock yet. This is because, as Craig has pointed out to me, I've been playing BioShock as a turn-based game. I literally pick up the Xbox controller, play through one, maybe two encounters (i.e., get past a trap, kill a splicer, hack something) and then I turn off the Xbox. Obviously such a play style kills any sense of immersion. And I've been progressing *very* slowly, I play about a turn a week, so I'm only at Neptune's Bounty right now.

Now, part of the reason is that I only have access to the Xbox when I'm at work. Which means I only play in half-hour bursts. This is part of the reason that Skate is a great game for me, because it's designed as a series of two or five or ten minute missions plus a lot of fun freestyle play. Meanwhile, I feel like I'm not doing justice to BioShock this way. I think I may actually put the game down and just take a crack at it some time when I can devote a three hour chunk to playing it.

Labels: bioshock, play, skate

So, in news not related to the Bungie/Microsoft breakup, there's a great eight-page interview on Gamasutra with Harvey Smith. This is one of the best interviews I've read in a long time, and I think the reason is that Harvey is discussing what it takes to make a game that means something, but within the day-to-day constraints of game development. This part stuck with me:

I was recently adding a buzzard to BlackSite, and I wanted buzzards that wheel in the distance in the desert, and when you're driving along, I wanted, 20 yards down the road, buzzards around roadkill. As you get closer, they turn and flap and ascend into the air, and as you get closer, you realize it's a wrecked Humvee, and the roadkill is an American troop. That worked for me on many different levels. Some producer will look at that and be like, "Ambient Animal: Priority Four." And I'm just like, "You don't understand. This is really fucking important. I can't explain to you why." And he's like, "Well, is it more important than fixing this bug in our animation system?" Technically, no! It's a nightmare.

Read the whole thing. Harvey gives great insight on the quotidian life of the game developer who strives to be excellent in a AAA environment.

Labels: design, industry, interview

I've been playing EA's skate recently. I'm actually enjoying it way more than the Tony Hawk series of games. I just uploaded some footage of me (1) getting hit by a car, (2) landing a sick gap, and (3) running into a wall face-first. And to answer the questions before they're asked: yes, I'm not wearing an orange shirt in that video. I haven't unlocked any orange shirts in the game yet!

I only wish there were a way to embed the videos in HTML! It sucks that I have to send you over to EA's website to see my videos. All part of an idiotic content funneling strategy, no doubt. If I do figure out a hack for it, I'll post it here.

Labels: skate