i’ve been asked to speak at ICE 08 as a last-minute replacement. ICE, or Interactive Content Exchange, is Interactive Ontario’s major annual event. The conference draws broadcast, mobile, online and console delegates from as far away as Sudbury.

ICE is also an acronym for the International Congress of Entomology, and a trade show for the gambling industry. So if you lose your house in a business deal or you feel something unpleasant crawling up your leg, you may still be at the right conference. *drum fill*

If you came to the site from the conference and clicked on the Blog Monster, you most likely want to see what we’re all about. Our Games gallery is slim pickins these days, because all the interesting development is going on behind the scenes:

We’re creating five games for a Canadian kids’ teevee production company. The site will launch this summer.

We’re building two games that will be accessible to both deaf and blind players (that is to say, players with one disability or the other … Helen Keller would have a bit of trouble).

Additionally, we have been invited by two different companies to create two massively multiplayer online game demos. One of these companies wrote the book on the genre. We are extremely excited to be working with them!

If you’re here in the midst of a boring panel (hopefully not the one i’m on), here are a few Untold Entertainment articles for your interest:

The Democratization of Game Development

This year’s trend at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco was the sit back, relax, and let your players build the game for you. i approve.

Prince of Persia, Prince of Peace

A mercifully brief jog through the history of Christian video games, and why i’m thankful that Jesus forgives.

Ryan Creighton on The Agenda with Steve Paikin

Steve grills me on gaming for the elderly, mass market video games and how EA’s Rock Band will save the music industry.

Kids Eagerly Await Nickelodeon’s Next Shipment of Ass

How a supposedly legitimate children’s broadcaster shovels schlock to its young audience, right under parents’ noses.

Canadian Game Journalism: Not Worth It

A serious number-crunching leads to the conclusion that Canadian game journalism rivals a McJob.

Video Games Teach Kids to Gamble

Twenty hours into every Pokémon game, the (likely) pre-teen player walks into a full-fledged casino. At a time when bashing video games is en vogue, this topic is conspicuously missing its fair share of outrage.

i was interviewed last night on TeeVee Ontario’s serious current events show, The Agenda with Steve Paikin. Tony Walsh over at Phantom Compass recommended me for the gig. i couldn’t understand why he’d pass up the chance to sound interesting and plug his new start-up. Then i watched the show.

Freak-out time: it’s for old people. i don’t mean 30-year-olds, either, who used to be the epitome of old until i turned 30. i’m talking bona fide grey-hairs. Their sponsor is a company offering car insurance to the elderly. On Monday’s show, Steve was interviewing a very stodgy, well-spoken author and military man in Washington who wrote a book on the Iraq war. My heart sunk deeper and deeper into my chest as i fast-forwarded through the show. How was i supposed to follow this? It’s like hiring a clown at a funeral.

In the end, it didn’t go too badly. i couldn’t name the game industry’s third largest publisher, and i inadvertently told the host he looks like a troll.

i also acted like an anti-semetic Jew the way i bashed Nintendo, calling the majority of the Wii library “garbage”. i actually quite like Nintendo (and Jewish people, for that matter - no emails please). Still, there’s no denying that Nintendo’s game consoles constantly disappoint when it comes to third-party software support. You just have to pop over to Metacritic’s Wii section to see a list of yellow and red review scores ranging from “mediocre” to “horrible”, along with a long list of games that were too insignificant to review.

Anyway, here’s the interview:

We talked about gaming for the elderly, about the big business of electronic entertainment, and about how Guitar Hero and Rock Band could save the music industry. At the end of the interview, Steve asked what my favourite game was, and the supressed geek inside of me proved impossible to reign in.

Game Developers Conference 2008 is over and it’s time to return to the snowy North. Here are my picks for the best and worst of everything i experienced there.

Best Business Card

Gone are the days of E3 - the Electronic Entertainment Expo - when we could rely on people for such unsavoury and useless articles as “E3 Booth Bunny Wrap-Up”. Well, today i have something equally useless but with a lot less jiggle: my pick for the best business card i encountered at the conference.

There it is, folks: a real-life, metal business card, courtesy of Mark Morris over at Introversion Software in the UK. (”UK”, as i recently learned, is an acronym for “United Kingdom”, and is not actually pronounced phonetically.)

The first question, of course, is “holy crap!” This is usually followed by “how much did it cost?” Mark tells me the cards came in at around one US dollar apiece, at which point i proceded to mug the man and plunder the spoils of his cash-stuffed pockets.

Back at the hotel, and while rolling around on my bed strewn with Mark’s money a la Scrooge McDuck, i thought about the adage “a fool and his money are soon parted.” i mean, metal business cards? Really?

The next day, at the conference, i was eating lunch with some strangers and i said “Hey - get a load of this. A metal business card!” The crowd gathered around and i explained who the card belonged to, and what he did for a living. i repeated this process about five or six times throughout the day, before realizing what an amazing promotional piece the business card is. And here i am, actually blogging about it.

Damn you, Mark Morris at Introversion Software! i refuse to play into your wily plan.

Introversion Software, the scourge of the UK video game industry, is known for routinely murdering puppies and babies. They may also be behind those missing socks that don’t come out of the wash, so be on your guard.

There. Take that, Morris. A metal business card indeed.

This may also be a fine time for some shameless self-promotion. The Untold Entertainment business cards may not be made of metal, but they do have one thing going for them: they were paid for by money i nicked from Mark Morris at Introversion Software.

The concept is that i am dumb, and i took the standard card template and hastily threw my logo on top of it. This gag is lost on most people. That’s okay. i’m used to telling jokes that no one laughs at. Case in point: this entire entry.

What i realized from attending two Game Developers Conferences is that Americans seem to really have their heads in the sand when it comes to gaming trends and the “next big thing.” Companies like Blizzard have flat-out rejected the lucrative microtransaction payment model for online games, while Far East companies like Nexon and QQ are making a killing on them.

Kid-targeted virtual worlds like Club Penguin and Webkinz were already making a killing by the time Raph Koster shocked the room at GDC 07 and said that Club Penguin does more business in North America than World of Warcraft.

It’s unlikely that many Americans, with their freedom fries and their hatred of the French, have heard of France-based studio Ankama Games. My colleagues and i in Canada have been following their work for years. They have some of the most eye-popping 2D artwork i’ve seen in all my life. While at E3 2006, i was able to snag a hardcover book filled with their artwork, and it remains a source of inspiration and drool to this day.

But who knew they could animate? The exciting news is that Wakfu is being made into a teevee series. Buckle yourself into your chair and check out this Wakfu teaser video:

i split my time between MMO talks and entrepreneurship sessions at this year’s Game Developers Conference. The conference had a fair number of sessions featuring CEOs who discussed how they went from owning small startups to riding around in limousine hot tubs. i also attended a series of roundtable discussions called “Start-up Survival Stories”.

These talks actually turned into “Start-up Horror Stories”. Here’s a sampling of the hair-raising tales people told:

My receptionist embezzled tens of thousands of dollars from me and moved to a different State.

i licensed and localized a game from Korea, and my North American publisher went bankrupt. i couldn’t do anything with the game because i didn’t want my publisher’s creditors to take the license away from me.

After we’d built our studio and hired our staff, our investor pulled out and took off with the money.

And so on.

What i found really interesting were the rags-to-riches stories told by successful CEOs in other panels. It was neat to see the common threads running through these sessions, which i present presently as a present to you:

Equity does not mean equality. Four successful CEOs were assembeled for Lessons from the Front Lines: Startup CEOs share their Insider Stories. 4/4 CEOs agreed that when starting a company, it’s not always the best policy to give everyone an even split. What happens when, in a year or two, Founder A is doing 20% of the work, but enjoys 50% of the company equity? Crabby and opinionated Erik Bethke, founder of Korean virtual world startup GoPets, suggested that a keen lawyer can help you set up your company so that shares are handled more fluidly. Shares can be redistributed as time wears on to more accurately reflect the contributions of the founders.

Hire good people. “i only hire people who are smarter than me.” So said Paul Wedgwood in his lecture Splash Damage: From Amateur to Triple-A in Five Years. This was echoed in a few different sessions as “‘A’ people hire ‘A’ people, but ‘B’ people hire ‘C’ people.”

Fire bad people. When the same four CEOs were asked what one mistake they learned from, they all said the same thing: they let poor performers stay at the company for too long. Get rid of people when it’s obvious that they aren’t a good fit for the company. There seemed to be a lot of untold, painful stories as the panelists winced and grit their teeth, imploring the audience to keep good personnel policies. Craig Sherman, adopted CEO of hit online community Gaia Online, said that this was tough to practice. He suggested paying outgoing staff more than their due to keep everything amicable, and to prevent ousted employees from bad-mouthing your operation.

Game Developers Conference 2008 is over and it’s time to return to the snowy North. Here are my picks for the best and worst of everything i experienced there.

Best Panel or Lecture

There were so many amazing sessions that it’s hard to pin one down. Last year, it was Damion Schubert’s “Writing Great Game Design Documents”, which i thoroughly enjoyed. It actually turned out to be the highest-rated lecture last year, and i can understand why. Unlike most of the other sessions, i used the information in Schubert’s lecture all year long since that last conference. Here’s an example of the wisdom imparted by Mr. Schubert:

5. Limit your use of the phrase “Man, this game’s gonna suck” in your GDD.

i keed, i keed.

The first two days of GDC are home to the summits - clustered lectures strung along a certain theme. i chose to attend the Worlds in Motion Summit this year, because i had already been to the Casual Games summit. Anyway, it looked like the Casual crew were getting comfy. Their schedule listed the same speakers talking again and again throughout the two day Casual Games Summit. And get this: the first session was called “Intro to Casual Games”. The second session was “Intro to Casual Games Part II”. Puh-LEEZE. Get a job, guys.

The Worlds in Motion’s chair, Leigh Alexander, was a self-aggrandazing egomaniac (it takes one to know one) who had to introduce herself before every session, although the room’s turnover rate was low. Despite this, if Leigh was the one responsible for booking the summit’s speakers, she did a great job (with some exceptions).

Get On With It

This year, two sessions stood out in my mind: Treat Me Like a Lover by Margaret Robinson, and Let Me Win! Best Practices for Approachable Game Design by Katie Stone-Perez.

Katie’s “Let Me Win!” talk began with a provocative opening volley befitting a Microsoft-sponsored session: if the player doesn’t finish your game, he’s less likely to buy your sequel. The speaker backed her point up by showing the kind of data-mining MS does on its XBox 360 players:

This is Joey. Joey played Call of Duty 3 on his XBox 360, but as you can see from his player profile, he didn’t get many Achievements in the game. He also hasn’t played the sequel.

Meanwhile, he got all 1000 Achievement points in Viva Piñata, AND he bought Viva Piñata Party Animals (poor, poor Joey - ed.).

If you didn’t realize that Microsoft is carefully scrutinizing its Achievement infrastructure like this, i hope you’re enjoying your latest adventure in Gullible’s Travels.

note: In Joey’s defence, let me point out that the speaker likely chose a Viva Piñata because it sounds easy. If you’ve ever played the game, you’ll know that Viva Piñata is a very complex and challenging simulation. If Joey actually did get all 1000 points with no help from GameFaqs, frankly, he’s a bona fide badass.

Easysaurus Rex

The speaker went on to talk about ways to make your game easier. For example, if the player tries three times and can’t defeat your T-Rex boss, maybe the T-Rex picks the player up and throws him over the wall into the next level.

Immediately, the blue-blooded gamer in me raged “Yeah! And why doesn’t the T-Rex chew up the gamer’s food and regurgitate it into his mouth for him, huh? WHY DOESN’T THE GAME SUCKLE THE PLAYER AT ITS WARM COZY VIDEO TEAT?? HUH????”

i calmed myself down by hyperventilating into a paper bag. When my ire had settled, i thought through it calmly and rationally. She’s right, of course. i can count on 400 hands the number of games i’ve had to abandon halfway through, either because i reached a stopping point, or because i’m a weak sissy girl-baby and i can’t play video games worth a damn.

Here’s my latest unbeatable T-Rex: i’ve stopped playing the original Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney because i’m stuck in an endless line of questioning with one of my witnesses. She states a series of truisms like “the sky is blue” and “water is wet”, and i’m supposed to object to one of them and show the court evidence to the contrary. i have no idea where i’m supposed to speak up to further the plot, and the judge keeps saying “Why don’t you repeat your infallible witness testimony, ma’am?”

Stupid game. i actually do wish a T-Rex would pick me up and throw me into the next courtroom, where the guilt is a little more obvious. An OJ trial, for example.

Gettin’ Sexay with Margaret Robinson

For her part, Margaret Robinson opened with a provocative tale of sharing a bath with her new lover, which turned out to be the DS version of Advance Wars. Meh - it was still kinda hot. i’m ashamed to admit it, but for the whole first half of Maggie’s talk, i sat there wondering if she was a good kisser. It was probably her UK accent.

When i snapped out of it, i found she had a few profound things to say. i’ll paraphrase:

Imagine a game where all of your cut-scenes and story exposition were available to the player right off the top of the game. Any new player could watch the whole story from start to finish without actually playing your game. (Pause for effect.) That idea makes many of the developers in the room uncomfortable, and yet we’re somehow not uncomfortable with a game that the player might never finish. The player might never see those cut-scenes or experience the story that we put so much hard work into, but that seems to be okay with most of us.

An excellent point.

During one of these two lectures, a lady stood up and introduced herself as the site manager for an online women’s game review magazine. She said that if one of her readers can’t finish a game and see all of its content, she should return it to the store as a defective product.

It’s an entirely new way of thinking for me, but i’ll give that a tentative … amen?

You’d never rent a movie or pick up a book and expect to miss the ending because you’re not smart or crafty or skilled enough to get through it. Why should we endure that kind of punishment from a game? i’m all for rewarding the players who were smart or crafty or skilled enough to experience all of the content without my help, but after attending these two sessions, i’m a changed man.

i am a reformed game developer. i will forever strive to make my games forgiving, loving, accessible and approachable to the throngs of hot young women who clamour to play them.

Game Developers Conference 2008 is over and it’s time to return to the snowy North. Here are my picks for the best and worst of everything i experienced there.

Best Party

i’m not a party person, but i can be astoundingly frugal when the mood takes me. That’s why i went to the Game Developers Conference hoping to catch a few free meals of hors d’oeuvres (the best part of the hors) before leaving for home. That’s why my pick for best party might not be status quo.

Last year, the best “partay”, in the strictest (and sleaziest) sense of the word, was thrown by local game dev team Three Rings, the folks behind Puzzle Pirates. That party was bona fide out of control, with plenty of free booze and a mad science theme, with a Doc Brown-inspired deejay inviting guests to spin the Wheel of Mash-Ups, from which he’d choose two songs to blend on his turntables. i was also floored at the amount of decoration going on in the Three Rings office until, nearly a year later, i read this article about how Three Rings’ workspace was custom-designed.

Apparently, the party got a little out of control. Something about a bloody stairwell and an angry landlord - the folks who work there tell the story sheepishly.

This year’s most outrageous party was thrown by CCP Games, who make the backstabby space-themed MMO Eve Online. i didn’t actually go myself, but apparently it was held in a San Francisco fetish club, with midgets in plasma backpacks and topless women flogging people who were tethered to a central whipping post. Erm … sounds like “fun”, but i can’t imagine how i could polish off a whole tray of free crabcakes with a topless lady going at me with a cat o’ nine tails. And believe me, i’ve tried.

Instead of basking in the unholy delights of an open bar (i don’t drink) or a loud club atmosphere (how can you network if you can’t hear each other?), my nod to Best Party goes to the Autodesk shindig thrown on Suite Night, where a few companies deck out some ballrooms at the W Hotel and invite the whole conference over.

The Autodesk party was really great. They had a candy bar filled with bonbons, flavoured popcorn and big bowls of Skittles. That’s what i’m talking about. The room was filled with inflatable couches in front of teevees hooked up with Atari 5600’s. One of these was playing Yars Revenge, which is only the best Atari game ever made, thank you very much.

i spent an hour parked on a plastic sofa eating Skittles and daring all comers to beat my Yars Revenge score. It was glorious. The deejay played nothing but the hottest late-70s tunes like The Hustle and Le Freak. i was in my element. i was eventually dethroned when someone beat my score of 49312, but it didn’t matter. The Autodesk party was a groovy reminder of why we were all gathered at the conference in the first place: the rec rooms of our youth.

Just after i left, Hair Supply, an Air Supply cover band, played a nostalgically horrible set. i’m both sorry and relieved that i missed it.

Game Developers Conference 2008 is over and it’s time to return to the snowy North. Here are my picks for the best and worst of everything i experienced there.

Best New Game Announcement

i was pretty impressed with APB, the new multiplayer game announced at a keynote by Realtime Worlds. Realtime Worlds also developed Crackdown, one of my most favourite games from last year.

Expectations fell flat when i realized that APB was all about driving and shooting. The real hook in Crackdown was the Agility feature. You could ignore all the gangland violence like i did, and instead collect little green orbs that made you run faster and - most impressively - jump higher. Once your Agility rating was high enough, you could leap to the top of a nearby building and rain down bullety justice from above. This feature turned Crackdown into a platformer game - a sort of Super Mario Bruthas.

The game that really piqued my interest was Recoil: Retrograd by Zeitguys. Recoil is a third-person time-travelling game with a solid steampunk style. Steampunk is a “what-if” motif inspired by Jules Verne and HG Wells where steam, rather than electricity, became the dominant driving force behind technology. Steampunk style touchstones include brass goggles, wood, ornate trim, zeppelins, knobs, and wires. The high technology is always wonderfully low-tech. i’ve only seen a select few games that have achieved commercial sucecss using this style, most notably the Dark Cloud series and the huge hit Bioshock.

Neither of those games, in my opinion, went as far as possible with that style. Recoil takes it to amazing new levels; i stood staring at the demo, my mouth half-open, with the sheer volume of steamy goodness pouring out of the game. Their hype mission was helped along a little by the actors they hired to run around the expo floor in the most ass-annihilating steampunk costumes i’ve ever seen.

i just came out of the second GDC 08 keynote by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is an acclaimed inventor instrumental in creating scanner technology, text-to-speech and optical character recognition.

Last year, i made the mistake of suggesting i was going to skip a keynote speech. The guy i was talking to gripped me by the lapels and, wide-eyed and frantic, said “you DON’T MISS THE KEYNOTES.” i asked him why, and in reverent, hushed tones, as if we were sitting around a campfire, he recounted the legendary tale of a Microsoft keynote a few years back where they gave out free HD-teevees to a quarter of the audience.

There were no free teevees at Ray Kurzweil’s keynote, but one could argue that he gave away something much more valuable: the promise of immortality for those of us who could hang on long enough.

Keep reading »

The over-arching theme this year at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Francisco is the democratization of game development. i can’t escape it. At least two sessions a day feature companies opening up their software and platforms to the unwashed masses so that they can create their own games. Here are the examples i’ve spotted. i’m sure there are scads more:

Microsoft’s XNA Framework for XBox 360

The not-so-big news at the Microsoft keynote on Wednesday (aside from the Gears of War 2 announcement - whatta shocker!) was the removal of the membership wall to their XNA Game Creators Club. You’ll still have to be a Club member to push your game from your PC to your XBox 360. But now, once the Club members have vetted your creation (handily removing the burden of policing content from Microsoft’s plate), XBox owners at large will be able to play your game.

i say that this is not-so-big news because it falls in with the likely “what if” scenarios that Microsoft has been discussing for its XNA project all along. The next step, predictably, will be the integration of the Creators Club games into the marketplace, so that XBox 360 owners will be able to buy the indie games with their Billy Bucks, with Microsoft naturally taking a cut.

Kongregate

i caught a small panel with a Kongregate member early this week, having attended a much higher-profile talk by site head Jim Greer at last year’s conference. Kongregate is a site where Flash designers can upload their games and get a cut of ad revenues based on the popularity of their creations. Kongregate also funds developers a lot of money in limited doses to create products that integrate with their multiplayer API.

Sims Carnival

The people behind the outlandishly successful and ubiquitous Sims series have released a series of tools enabling players to build their own games and upload them to the Sims Carnival site. The complexity of their tools ranges from prefabricated formats where you choose a game genre and adjust variables to change gameplay - gravity, number of enemies, etc - to a much more complex tool that uses hierarchical nodes to manage gameplay elements.

Metaplace

This is the flagship product from Raph Koster’s Areae startup. i don’t know anything about it. Wikipedia says, cryptically, that worlds and games created with (in?) Metaplace will be accessible by any device that connects to the web.

Multiverse

One of many create-your-own-MMO tools, Multiverse is a mediocre-looking tool with very a permissive rights structure that enables you to create your own virtual world. The 3D worlds that have been created with the tool range in utility, from a straight-up shooter MMO to a virtual office simulation for new hires and a game that teaches astrophysics to graduate students in Florida.

The artwork in most of these projects rivals mediocre-looking 3D games from 2002, which is more than a little disappointing. Sulka Haro of Habbo Hotel fame always extols the virtues of his project’s retro-pixel art style by arguing that time is not kind to 3D artwork. i’m with him all the way on that. 3D does not age well. 2D has far longer legs.

Whirled

Puzzle Pirates microtransaction millionaire and all-around crazyperson Daniel James apologized that his newest project, which he announced last year, was still in closed alpha. Whirled is a very post-modern approach to virtual worlds, enabling participants to tool up basically anything in Flash to integrate in a visual space that includes mermaids, moustaches, mech suits and talking jars of marmalade. i can’t see it appealing to all tastes, and i’ll be interested to see if “design cliques” form, where fans of the medieval content band together, while the furries stick to their own corner of the virtual space (as furries most definitely should).

Like Kongregate and Sims Carnival, Whirled team Three Rings is hammering out revenue-share model for its creators.

Everything Else

That’s to say nothing of all the games that support player-created content, including but by no means limited to

Lego Universe
IMVU
Lord of the Rings Online
Second Life
Little Big Planet
APB

Admittedly, that’s not much of a list. The point is that there are many, many games doing this. i can’t seem to remember them all. After four days at GDC, i think my brain is full.

Game Creation Tools Even Mom Can Use

The key tip i’ve heard for creating tools that anyone can use is to build them with simple interfaces like household appliances. In other words, building an object should be as easy and straight-forward as making toast.

While it takes a lot more time to build a creation tool like a level builder that’s friendly and intuitive enough for all the toast-adept out there, it’s well worth the effort. Suddenly, you have a community of people willing to do the heavy-lifting of content creation for you. i can’t be bothered creating the game - here, YOU create the game. Sounds alright to me.

i wish other jobs were perceived to be as enjoyable as game design. Cab drivers could sit in the back seat while their fares drove themselves around. Students would throw themselves into their studies while their teachers kicked back in the staff room. Dogs would scoop their own poo into little baggies. What a utopia.