Nine members

Well it's a start.

So far the activity in The Play Room has admittedly mostly been mine (come on members, get with the sharing) but some of those items have been quite interesting even if I do say so myself.

Two articles, for example.

• One is about piracy and Cliff Harris's call for pirates to speak to him directly about why they pirate (A mildly confrontational, but I suspect fruitless, challenge).
• The other is from Gamasutra and is about the hurdles that Johnathan Blow encountered with the Microsoft certification process for XBLA.

Both links are sitting in the room now. Come, join, comment, share. 

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The Play Room: Friendfear?

Something I hadn't expected.

I've asked a few friends, not many - people in games - to sign up to the room. A few have. But some of the reactions that I've had from those who haven't has been something that I hadn't expected: Fear of publicity.

Specifically, that they didn't want discussions, even light-hearted discussions, on the subjects of games in case somebody somewhere (from their jobs mostly) might Google them and find them.

It says a lot about what it is to work in games when even a link-sharing group strikes terror into the heart.

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The Play Room: 24 Hours later

Well things have gotten off to a good start: There are 7 of us in the room now.

I've had an interesting day talking to a few friends about it in fact, giving them a link etc. All but one of them didn't know what Friendfeed was at all, and there was a lot of suspicion. One friend kept badgering me and asking what was in it for THEM. It was hard to explain that it was one of those "what you put in, you get out" deals.

For those that don't know: This is a wiki page about what Friendfeed is.
It's not a spammy service, it's just a simple gathering tool, not a million miles away from a webforum or Facebook group, but it's really easy to pass interesting links that you've found on the web and start discussions etc.

Come, join in.

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The Play Room

I don't know about you, but recently I have become very very bored with the whole blogging scene. Games blogging such as it is had this really high wave of activity about 3-4 years ago when people like Greg Costikyan and Scott Miller and Daniel Cook were at the height of their powers. It was all big, serious-minded people writing big serious essays on every subject from how to manage a brand to very in-depth talks about game design.

But lately the scene has just gone to seed. We're not along in this either: Lots of the world's biggest blogheads are engaged in furious debate at the moment over why blogging has gone so damn boring. A lot of them are now talking about micro-blogging, life-casting and sundry other concepts which could be described as fascinating and horrendous all at the one moment.

I'm not proposing to start life-casting my day or anything of the sort, but what I am proposing is to get a conversation going and leave the blogspace to become more noteworthy and probably turn into Google Knol in the fullness of time. As with games themselves, this blogging lark should be fun, no?

Well here it is: The Play Room.

The Play Room is a room on the social meta-service called Friendfeed. It is a service in which you can share links and comment on them, share photos, embed feeds, all that good stuff. A room in Friendfeed is simply a sub-division of that space in which an administrator (in this case me) sets a very few ground rules (like staying reasonably on topic would be nice) and really just lets everybody else get on with it. Friendfeed is ridiculously easy to use. Just sign up, set up the things you want to embed in your own feed, and then click on the link above (or here) and join in.

The subject of the Play Room?

GAMES of course. And social media. And funny videos. And webcomics. And photographs of queues outside shops at midnight to buy Halo 4. And blog posts. And links to neat magazine articles. And deriding E3. It's basically a place to share, think, comment and enjoy. Share and enjoy.

That's it, that's the pitch. Come on in, tell your friends, get them to come on in too.

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Zero Tolerance: The new music in Zero Punctuation

I love Zero Punctuation, the mostly-weekly review video that The Escapist have been running for a while now by British emigré journalist Ben "Yahtzee" Crowshaw. For those three of you out there who may not know what it is, ZP presents 4-minute long animated reviews, mostly of one specific title at a time, and it does so with a calavcade of animated characters and a very distinctive speaking style on the party of Yahtzee. He literally fires through each of the points of his reviews in a mad rant that offers little or no chance for breath or full stops. Hence the name. It's the game reviewer equivalent of The Show with Ze Frank.

Aside from the machine-gun speed delivery, however, what makes ZP work extremely well are three things: Its visual invention, its analysis (which is sharp, witty and often brutally to the point) and its very British off-kilter tone. It has been the making of The Escapist also, which prior to ZP's introduction was a very dusty magazine full of intellectual pieces that seemed more at home in an academic journal trying to make some impact in the world of Gamespot and IGN.

But there's a problem and it is this. Someone in the editorial circle of the Escapist, whether it be Yahtzee himself (doubtful) or somebody at the magazine, has decided to jazz up Zero Punctuation with the introduction of boilerplate animations and music at the front and back of each of the new videos.

So where previously we had relevant and witty music choices.

Now we have cheesy metal and explosions.

This has to be stopped!
Letters need to be written!
Avengers assemble!

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The conference ritual

There's this ritual that I have: Every year I log onto whichever of the gaming news sites are showing webcasts of the E3 conferences, and in another window I click open British gaming forum rllmukforum.com, wherein live commentary is provided. It's a real treat for two reasons: 1. The conferences are usually dreadful, full of flash graphics and music around some of the worst presentation giving you have ever seen. They are legendarily awful unless there's some totally awesome hardware launch. 2. The commentary on the forum, on the other hand, is fantastic. They literally tear it apart in a super-lively babble of reality up until the point that the forum keels over for having too many users. Things we've shared over the years:

• Fist-pumps to no applause
• Timid voices trying to sound exciting
• Everybody using the words "opportunity, "experience", "innovation", "compelling", "exciting" blah
• Fake thanks on stage
• People clearing throats
• Bored bored bored journalists
• The "one more thing" thing which is so tired even Steve Jobs doesn't do it any more

It's great fun, but not really what the interested parties are trying to do, surely? It strikes me that if you're going to do the conference thing then surely the thing to learn is some stagecraft? Don't put the timid exec on stage if he's not good in front of a crowd, for instance. Find someone to do it for you with confidence, even a celebrity if you have to. Don't talk about how exciting things are: show how exciting they are. Don't trot out lists of features as a replacement for content. In the end of the day, there are better ways to present this stuff but ultimately what it comes down to is charisma, and most of these people doing the conferences are no doubt very talented at their jobs but they comes across as nerds talking about their science project at the head of a bored class on a hot summer's day. "Exciting!"

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A question of value

If I were to ask you what you think the value your game's content was, what would your answer be? I think most developers would answer somewhere between 10 and 25 pounds (or 20 and 50 dollars US). It's what they would likely consider a fair price for their services rendered, and that's perfectly understandable.

The problem is that they don't set the value of their output, the public do. And the public have always placed the value of content at one number:

Zero.

When paying for entertainment, the public are always paying for one of three things: Tickets, memorabilia or convenience. Tickets as in entry to an event. Memorabilia as in merchandise. Convenience as in the ability to use their content as and when they choose. So, for example:

• A ticket to go see Led Zeppelin
• T-shirts for the event
• An album of greatest hits that they can pop on and listen to whenever they choose

It's not the actual thing that they'll pay for so much as the toll to get to the thing, in otherwords. This is largely born out by the radio and television industries' realisations back way whenever that people wouldn't actually pay to listen to radio shows or watch TV shows. Instead they developed the first business models that gave content away at the value which the public perceived (i.e. for free) and instead made the toll a business-to-business transaction in the form of advertising. And I think we can all agree that that model has been nothing short of a roaring success for those companies that could scale that model appropriately. Add in the extra ticket incentive of cable television and there you have it.

So, to games.

Currently most games sell themselves on the convenience model. The discs that the people buy to put in their Xboxes represent the equivalent of the album. Except not all discs will fit all boxes, a situation that fragments the market in a bad way and keeps games effectively on the sidelines culturally. While the industry wrestles over which format to support (and these are especially uncertain times in that regard), it effectively produces a natural cap for the consumer that does not want to be confused and suspicious.

The convenience model for games therefore has its limits, because the prices for new games are quite high compared to other forms of entertainment, and the selections are small. Thus the only predictable course for the industry overall is to continue building self-enclosed toy empires that extract value as much as possible from each step of the chain. The Nintendo model, basically, of which the only step that's still missing is for Nintendo to bite the bullet and open a set of retail stores. As things stand I can't see why they wouldn't.

Another fairly popular model is the ticket approach. In this model, the game is kept away from the player until he pays a toll to access. World of Warcraft is an example of this model in action, as is arcade gaming or interactive TV "pay to play" services (small disclosure: I currently work in that end of the industry). Ticket models have a significant advantage over that of the convenience model in that they can encourage repeat or continuous purchasing form the players. For their £8.99 a month, players play as much as they want, and Blizzard eventually make out extremely handsomely as the players eventually end up paying far more than they would have had they been individually purchasing the game plus updates.

Aside from the fairly small trade in gaming merchandise such as plastic figurines and cross-media applications like Halo novels and the odd movie tie-in, the main kind of memorabilia sale in the games industry is through the exclusive edition, in-game property (i.e. micro-transactions) and that sort of thing. People like a sense of ownership, particularly of something tangible.


The key thing to understand from all this nugget-wisdom above is that regardless of your feelings (as a developer or would-be developer) about piracy, your sense of self-worth, your feeling that things should have a value and so on, the public essentially doesn't care. A game is essentially the same thing to them as an album or a movie. It lacks a tangible quality and, being ephemeral, doesn't feel like it has any intrinsic worth.

Don't be depressed, because this is something that you can use to your advantage. It's just about realising that just because they think it has zero value does not mean that it is worthless. Here are some ideas:

• Build a game based on ticket sales
• Build a game based on sponsorship and promotion
• Build a game in which the basic PC version is free, but you charge for the convenience of an iPhone version
• Build a game in which tangibles mean something
• Build a game which you distribute freely, but charge extra for support, etc
• Sell a premium version of your game in a box with quality tat for 50 pounds a box

And so forth.

Particleblog's comments have moved to The Play Room.