Category: Uncategorized

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve been loudly encouraging independent game developers to begin playing with Facebook and social games. Out of 568 entries for the 2012 Independent Games Festival, a handful are playable on or with Facebook. And while this might seem paltry, I think it’s an important first step, and I’d like to bring attention to these few games.

(If I’m missing any, please let me know and I’ll amend the list).

• Age of Defenders, CUKETA, s.r.o.; Multi-Platform (including Facebook)
• Fighting Cube, GAMEWORKS, CO., LTD; Facebook
• Hero Generations, Heart Shaped Games; Facebook
• Nightmare Cove, Evil Plot Games; Facebook
• Potty Racers III, Gonzo Games; Facebook, Web
• Prom Week, Expressive Intelligence Studio; Facebook
• Snap Escape: The Epic Swing, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Game Lab, iOS w/ Facebook Integration
• Timeflash: Quest for Cogs, IBM Research for Social Business; Multi-Platform
• Timeflash: Shoot for the Moon, IBM Research for Social Business, iOS
• Transformice, Atelier 801; Web
• Triple Town, Spry Fox; Facebook, Kindle
• Tweetland: Route 140, Tree Interactive / Why Ideas; iOS w/ Twitter Integration
• Twirdie, Simple Machine, LLC; iOS w/ Twitter Integration

One of my goals for 2011 is to make significant progress towards publishing my first non-digital game. So as this year moves forward, I’ll be putting more and more thought into designing Billy Pilgrim, my tentatively-titled card game about love and unintentional time travel.

What feels like a hundred years ago, I talked about playing cards — ubiquitous decks of 52 which comprise the toolset of countless games. I’ve known from the beginning that Billy Pilgrim was meant to be a card game. As vehicles of widespread gameplay, cards are undeniably important. But I think it’s easy for us, as players and creators, to forget what cards do.

Cards and dice are both vehicles of randomness. But with dice, there’s no shift in probability as the game draws on. Dice represent a stasis in the degree of randomness in the world. And when we play with dice, we don’t seek to derive order from the chaos. We simply seek a means to represent unknowable factors.

Cards, on the other hand, are agents of turmoil. The odds change with every play, every turn. And most card games — at least those built upon a standard playing card deck — are all about creating organization from a disorganized pile.

So for making a game about a non-chronological character, there’s no better tool than cards. The question remains, however, as to whether or not as a player we seek to help Billy find order in his world, or whether we are merely observers of a scattered story, trying to find order for ourselves.

Been quite busy these last few months, but the fruit of my (and a whole lot of other people’s) labor has finally been revealed. I am quite proud to be Design Lead on City of Wonder, Playdom’s latest social game, which has been receiving quite humbling reviews.

Today I’m leaving for a very different kind of city of wonder to attend Burning Man 2010. I’ll be delightfully Away From Keyboard from 8/29 through 9/6. If you find yourself on the Playa, come visit me at 6:30 & Baghdad. I’ve designed two games in keeping with this year’s theme — they’re called MetaTropolis and City of the Phrase, and I’ve love to teach them to you.

Ian Bogost created Cow Clicker, according to this tweet, as “a Facebook game about Facebook games.” And I do get it. It’s funny. Ha ha. Okay now but seriously, it could be better.

Ian, if you’re paying attention, here’s how to improve your Facebook game about Facebook games.

1) Reduce the Click Window: Currently I can only click my cow once every six hours. MouseHunt lets me sound the hunter’s horn every 15 MINUTES. And I can cook cheeseburgers in Café World in only five. Procrastination and distraction operate on fairly tight cycles. How often do we refresh our RSS Readers? Our Twitter pages? Facebook? Try a 15 minute window. Let me click my cow every 15 minutes.

2) Make the Stream Stories Actually DO Something: You’re spoofing the infamous “Lost Cow” viral, but you’ve missed why it started a trend. People aren’t clicking cows for their health. They’re clicking them because they get something for it (namely, a cow). If a newsfeed is not incentivized, it’s only valuable as advertising to new players, and a reminder to those who haven’t played recently. When incentivized, every player has a reason to click it. Click click click.

Try awarding one Click to each player who clicks a Cow Clicker Stream Story. And while you’re at it, award one Click back to the poster for each player who clicked. All your newsfeeds do right now is breach the platform policy (VI.A.1, if you’re curious).

3) Prime the Mooney Pump: Paying players are a little like vampires. Once they’ve tasted blood, it’s hard to stop. Wet their fangs with 15 Mooney — enough for one low-level cow, and enough left over to make them want to reach for cooler cows.

You can then keep priming the pump with small amounts of Mooney awarded to players. Create a low instance in which upon clicking, a cow in your pasture will, ahem, “drop” some Mooney. More cows in your pasture means higher chance of Mooney droppings, means more of a reason to invite friends.

4) Send me a Highland Coo: I guess this won’t actually help you in any way, but they just look so fuzzy.

In a recent video, Zero Punctuation’s Yahtzee Croshaw described Nintendo’s 3DS — first introduced at E3 — as “a concept that is literally impossible to demonstrate in picture or in video, which rather shoots the advertising potential in the foot.”

A snicker-worthy comment, but one that touches upon an interesting problem that’s been increasing in relevancy over the last decade.

The earliest I remember it was on some of my favorite VHS tapes: ads “showing” the impressive sights and sounds available on those fancy new DVD things.

More recently it’s television commercials “showing” us the superior color and clarity of High Definition Television — as viewed on our inferior standard definition TV’s.

And now, it’s Nintendo trying to “show” us their new 3D technology, and Apple trying to “show” us their impressive new Retina Display. But how do you advertise a feature that’s beyond the spectrum of what your advertising medium can do?

The Nintendo 3DS is reportedly quite a thing to behold, but unless you’re actually beholding it in person, you have no way of witnessing the portable’s magical no-glasses 3D effect. Nintendo’s solution? Hundreds of women with 3DS’s tethered to their persons, to give the audience at their E3 keynote an opportunity to see the devices up close.

Likewise, Steve Jobs remarked during Apple’s unveiling of the iPhone 4 that they had to install a special digital projector just to give the WWDC keynote audience a better idea of the clarity and depth of the phone’s “Retina Display” resolution.

It’ll be interesting to see how Nintendo chooses to approach marketing the 3DS when it’s closer to launch, and I’m very curious to see if Apple ever plans on making a bigger deal of the Retina Display in their ads (thus far, only one iPhone 4 ad has aired, focused entirely on their FaceTime video calling feature).

In the meantime, enjoy the short spec ad I threw together for the iPhone, in a posthumous collaboration with John Hughes.

Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love the link-bait.

I worked alongside Dennis Crowley at area/code over the summer of 2007, so it’s been fun for me to watch the meteoric rise of Foursquare. From its debut at SXSW in early 2009, to its $20 million Series B round announced just last week, I’m incredibly happy for Dens and his growing Foursquare family.

(I also feel slightly vindicated for all those times my friends poked fun at me for “checking in” wherever we went last year. So there’s that.)

Foursquare is an incredibly fun service, improving dramatically over the experience offered by Dodgeball — Dennis’s former startup. But it’s also a service somewhat at odds with itself.

At its core, Foursquare is both a competitive location-based game, and a collaborative location-based communication service. That’s a little wordy, but here’s how it plays out in user stories:

Foursquare the Game:
As a player, I want to check in, and become the Mayor of, as many places as possible.

Foursquare the Service:
As a user, I want to let my friends know where I am, and find out where my friends are.

There’s obviously a great deal more to the service (the incredibly helpful Tips and To-Do’s, and the increasingly promising promotional deals and venue specials), but in both instances Foursquare is fundamentally about the relationship between the user, her social network, and the venues.

So here’s the rub: As a game, Foursquare is easily exploitable. Users can create venues (like their own apartments), check in to locations without even walking in the door, and capitalize on Mayorships in places in which they might have an unfair advantage (like a place of employment).

Foursquare could crack down more heavily on these “game exploits”, but those restrictions would work against the service.

At the end of the day, this makes Foursquare less a game, and more a game-like service. It’s an interesting and quickly-growing category, and Foursquare’s proudly paving the way for a more playful and game-like approach to social media. I just can’t wait to see what’s next.

Sorry folks. In the midst of a transition to a new blog template. Apologies for the rough edges.

I have too many friends who are unemployed, or otherwise occupied by occupations beneath them. The thing is, they’re all awesome. These are talented, brilliant people whose paper CVs fail to properly convey the whole of their skills.

We recognize that there is a vastness to one’s expertise that easily exceeds the bounds of an 8.5×11 page, which is why I suppose interviews are conducted. But the market is so flooded that even qualified candidates are being phased out before the interview stage. The window in which to impress has gotten smaller, which is why the resume/cover letter combo have an unrealistic amount of weight placed upon them.

The only recourse is to redefine the new candidate experience. Deliver more info in less time. The key to all of this is your online identity. It’s what happens when an employer sticks your name in Google, and I’m calling it the Real-Time Resume.

From: Kathie Lugo «siphono@redvips.com»
Subject: Springtime for Twitter
Date: April 23, 2009 3:21:12 AM PDT

and that made me think of all the insomniatic nights that she stayed up with me and mirrored my every move and snuggled me right out of my anxiety into dreamland long after grant and cate had drifted off

what do you look for in a best friend

the girl loves a project i mean LOVES it was like so fun to her to print them off plan how she wanted to present them go to the store for candy sign and put them together she just bossed me around and made sure i tied the string right

1 luce 2 Untitled 3 Working 4 Stove Top

i couldnt find a video of him performing it but listen to the lyrics

ten months after we were married i was a stay at home mom living the student life again while grant went back to school a few months later another unplanned event- my mom passed away suddenly

me um we didnt have disney games when i was five
we lived on a corner in a typical oc tract neighborhood

i really really need my bedroom to be simple and uncluttered and white for calming purposes you know what i mean
from toast

all the sudden im 30 i thought id be driving a mini van full of kids and happily decorating my own home but life has shown me again that i am not in control and as i wait for more children and a sense of being settled

what im listening to this morningagain

my room is clean and im knitting

like this one for instance my older brother uploaded it while reminiscing about the old buggie he rebuilt in the 80s

cate and i went through some of the free options around the web for valentines to download and print

breakfast i always have two eggs and salsa always i dont really get sick of it and it would really stink if i did because theres not a lot out there for breakfast actually when you are at your ideal weight and ovulating regularly you can have any kind of whole grain hot cereal without a problem you know steel cut oats etc i am not quite there yet berries and grapes are pretty low on the glycemic index and i have those too oh and i love cottage cheese with fruit
snacks NUTS i would die without nuts i love roasted almonds cashews peanuts i also love those roasted edamame they taste like nuts even though theyre not and nuts taste really good with a few slices of swiss cheese also deli meat slices celery with peanut butter on it a few whole grain crackers with cheese beef jerky sugar free snack packs stuffed mushrooms hard boiled eggs string cheese protein bars crudites and more NUTS

plan to be surprised

off to the kindergarten valentines day party

i never thought life would then take me to utah to attend byu and then off to serve as a missionary for a year and a half but it did and it was hardest most surprising most rewarding experience of my life

Within a day of posting both tirade and tweet against them, Simplenote’s devs contacted me directly via Twitter reply, blog comment, and personal email apologizing for the password change user-experience, and pledging to fix it for the next build. It’s already been fixed, and I’ve been using Simplenote non-stop ever since.

Fact is, Simplenote’s devs did exactly the right thing. They addressed the problem directly, and humanized themselves. And they did it using Twitter, the humanizing service.

I like referring to Twitter as a “flattening” kind of platform. It’s the type of site where Shaquille O’Neal can have the same banal posts about sandwiches as this person. It proves that celebrities are (spoiler alert!) people too, and it’s where people go to interact with other people, on an uninteresting, sammich-eating level.

So when a company tweets at you — and especially when they @reply to you — it doesn’t feel like a company. It feels like a person. And the weird thing is that it happens a lot.

On my account alone, I’ve gotten replies to complaints/concerns/questions lobbed at game studios, ISPs, software devs, WWDC party hosts, business card printers, and even, erm, artsy erotica sites. Every time, the attention paid on a single-customer level is surprising, and even frustrating experiences and lame parties just feel better when someone makes that tiny effort.

What does Twitter do for customer service? It makes it not feel like customer service; it makes it feel like people. And that’s kinda cool.