The first art book released by French MMORPG team Ankama has been a staple in our collection since we were lucky enough to snag one at E3 a few years ago. According to Worlds in Motion.biz, Ankama has launched their closed beta for Wakfu, the follow-up to Dofus.

Due to my addictive personality, i’ve avoided the more “hooky” or “hardcore” MMOs, and have likely saved a lot of pennies over the past few years. But when Wakfu is released, regardless of whether it’s even a good game or not, i may shell a few coppers for a chance to stare, goggle-eyed, at their horribly gorgeous artwork:

Be sure to visit the Wakfu site for full-screen shots that will make you weep!

i was just reading an interview on the Worlds In Motion biz site with Jamie Ottilie, whose studio is set to release a kid-targeted MMO called Freaky Creatures.

In the interview, Ottilie crows:

The initial creatures come with 50 different parts, 20 powers and 4 objects that can be placed into the creature’s lair. The variety of parts and powers will allow players to create more than 3 billion visual combinations.

This is an extremely common attempt at impressing people with your virtual product: calculate all the possible permutations of your avatars based on the number of their component pieces. Ottilie is not the first person to try to dazzle the press with big numbers - this tired hack stat is dredged up again and again by designers desperate for something impressive to say about their work, and it betrays a lack of confidence in what could turn out to be a very lacklustre product.

What’s the appeal of 3 billion visual combinations when every kid picks the red dragon wings because they look the coolest?

A few years back, i worked with a service provider who said the very same thing about their avatars … there are FIVE body zones with TEN pieces per zone, which works out to ONE POINT FOUR ZILLION avatar combinations. (Math police: it doesn’t really, i know - but you get the gist.) They even went on to say that the colour pallette allows players to choose from over 16 MILLION colour hues.

16 million, eh? You don’t say. Are those the same 16 million colours we’ve been enjoying in every computerized paint program since 1993? (And aren’t 4 million of those colours indistinguishable variations of black, white, and bleh?)

Boasting about your avatar permutations is like a vacuum cleaner salesman proudly proclaiming “Our SuckMaster 5000 can pick up SEVENTY FAJILLION dust particles in a matter of minutes. FAJILLION, ma’am. That’s one hunnerd thousand herpillion.” If a salesman tried that line on me (aside from taking him out for calling me “ma’am”), i’d seriously doubt the efficacy of his product. The most impressive thing he could say about it was that it could suck up an impressive number of atomic particles. Suspicious.

How can i be so sure this is bona fide flimflammery? i’ve used the line myself in trying to trump up an otherwise weak product. i admit it. But i’ve seen the error of my ways. From now on, if i need to jazzercise up a feeble game, i’ll sing the virtues of its Blast Processing.

A day after i railed against invoking Coke in discussions of in-game advertising, Massively writer Shawn Schuster predictably invoked Coke in a discussion of in-game advertisting, in his post The Eve of In-Game Advertising.

And (as a few of his readers were quick to point out), if Schuster thinks that in-game advertising is just now dawning, i’d really like to take a trip back with him in his time machine to whatever previous decade he’s writing his articles from.

One of the questions the moderator asked during our panel at ICE 08 was whether or not the virtual world/MMO racket was a bubble. i said “no”, emphatically, and i’m sticking to my guns.

i do believe that interest and expectations are inflated beyond what the market will bear, however. Just as investors sunk millions of dollars into dotcoms on or around 2000 and that bubble burst, the virtual world/MMO gold rush is sure to turn out a litany of bad projects, and the bubble will burst.

But look at us now: eight years later and the Internetz are still around. That’s because it’s too good an idea to just die off. Likewise virtual worlds and MMOs, which triumphantly return gaming to its multiplayer roots. The idea won’t die, but once this first spate of me-too projects launch and flop and a great many people lose their jobs and their money, i expect investors to become much more gun-shy of the genre.

Then, as i mentioned on the panel, once companies produce the proper tools to lower the cost of development, we’ll enjoy a much normalized multiplayer game industry. But believe me, before all that happens, the apparent end will come, and with it much tearing of robes and gnashing of teeth. Ultimately, i blame Coke.

Ad Nauseum

i get nervous whenever anyone new to the game says that his or her virtual world or MMO will be ad-supported, as if advertisers are knocking down the doors trying to snatch up banner space near (or overlays within) these properties. i’ve been building web games for eight years, since the crash, and they’ve almost all been ad-supported. i have war stories to tell.

The debate over in-game advertising rages, and the questions that pops up run along the lines “How much advertising will players accept in your game?”, “Does advertising cheapen the player’s experience?”, and “How can advertising best be integrated into your game without ruining it?”

i’ve seen industry “experts” debate this topic on numerous different panels, and they invariably involve Coke in the debate. Someone will say “For example, if Coke wanted to advertise in our world”, or “i don’t really think our players would tolerate the presence of Coke in our in-game tavern …”

i heard Coke invoked most recently at ICE 08 during the Worlds @ Play panel. The speaker was Barbara Lippe, whose company Avaloop is behind the virtual world Paper Mint. i’ll have to paraphrase her because i don’t have a transcript of the session, but she said something like this:

Players don’t like in-game advertising. If we were to do it, we’d do it tastefully. For example, if Coke wanted to advertise in our world, we wouldn’t want to have Coke actually represented in-game, for example by having Coke logos everywhere or by giving the player actual Coke product. It’s too intrusive. We’d do something much more subtle. The player might find himself on a Coke-sponsored island, but he wouldn’t know it until he walked the entire periphery of the island, and the little fog-of-war mini-map at the top of the screen slowly revealed the shape of the island, and the player would see that the island was in the shape of a Coke bottle.

Ms Lippe earned a doctorate, so i don’t want to suggest she’s out to lunch or anything, but come on. The attitude - and she’s not alone - is so naive that i can actually hear the moving trucks pulling up to offices around the world to repossess all those Herman Miller chairs that virtual worlds start-ups bought with their investors’ money.

News Flash: You’re Not Gettin’ Coke

Coke is invoked so often, of course, because it’s an incredibly strong brand, and probably one of the most recognized brands in the world. Why, then, would this brand behemoth be interested in advertising in your brand new virtual world to which you’re struggling to attract players? Coke has sponsored virtual worlds, sure, but by my count they’ve come in when the numbers were high enough and the opportunity was interesting enough to make it worth their while, as when Habbo Hotel was pulling in millions of visitors at its peak.

You should be so lucky to get Coke. And if you ever did land them, you wouldn’t dare try to sell them on a subtle campaign where a player would have to spend an hour walking the peripheral of an island to reveal the product-shaped outline on the mini-map. Coke would ask you to drop an enormous logo on the busiest screen in your world so that it obscured all the exits, and they’d ask that the word “the” in all chat phrases be replaced with “i like Coke because it is delicious and wonderful to drink”. And you know what? You’d do it.

You wouldn’t wax philosphical about how you’ll dilute the intellectual property or how the fanbase will criticize you for selling out. You’re running an advertising-based world, and as far as advertising goes, Coke is the holy grail. You will relax your muscles and allow the Coca-Cola corporation to ram its fistfuls of hot, sweaty cash wherever it so chooses.

But realistically, that’s not going to happen. You’re not gettin’ Coke. You’re not gettin’ Pepsi. You’re not even getting Fanta.

You’re getting V-8. And not the V-8 vegetable drink that everyone knows. That brand is plenty strong. No - V-8 is branching out into vegetable crackers to take on category leader Mr. Christie. That’s who wants to advertise in your world. V-8 Vegetable Crackers.

You’re not getting Nike. You’re not getting Reebok either. You’re getting Dr. Scholl’s. And not the Dr. Scholls insoles that are adored by millions. No - Dr. Scholl’s wants to market their new vegetable drink to take on category leader V-8. (And due to category exclusivity, you actually have to cook up a creative way to promote Dr. Scholl’s Vegetable Symphony without pissing off V-8.)

You’re not getting the latest Harry Potter movie. You’re getting the latest Cuba Gooding Jr. family comedy. You’re not getting Grand Theft Auto IV. You’re getting DS Barnyard Friends. You’re not getting Mr. Peanut. You’re getting NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts, now in a resealable pouch.

Advergaming is Nuts

And what’s more, whatever ad overlay you develop for your deeply serious medieval fantasy strategy collectible card game MMO has to specifically promote the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts resealable pouch, and you must convey the brand attributes “portable” and “snackalicious.”

This means that one of the food items you offer in your game has to be NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts. And it’s not enough for the players to voluntarily buy them - you have to make the offer more appealing by ensuring that the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch, when eaten, instantly jack the player’s hitpoints up 300%. And the item has to be reusable, because the sponsor is concerned the player will forget about them once the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch is consumed.

And just to make sure that as many players as possible buy them, the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch appear in ye olde item shoppe for free. And to push those numbers over the edge just a leeetle bit more, you end up auto-inserting the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch into the inventory of all active players. And you qualify “active players” as being anyone who has logged into the game at least once since launch. And the beta.

There - that takes care of exposure. Now, to convey the brand attributes “portable” and “snacktastic”. The “snackalicious” one is easy - whenever the player consumes NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch from the magically-refilling resealable pouch, the avatar shouts “SNACKALICIOUS!!” at the top of his lungs, so that the chat line is broadcast to every player within a 10-screen radius.

You argue to the client that the “portability” of NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch is obvious, since the players can take the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch with them anywhere. But the client is not convinced, so you slap a NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch logo on the front of ye olde items shoppe and add the tagline “You can eat em anywhere!”

In your final round of revisions, you’re only asked to change two things: upsize the ye olde items shoppe logo 250%, and do something about the fact that players can’t see the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch logo because the inventory item graphic is so small. You say that nothing can really be done about the inventory item size, because that’s just how the game works, but just to appease the client, you build a special case into your code so that whenever the player rolls over the NutFun™ Brand Mixed Nuts *now in a resealable pouch item, it enlarges to reveal the product logo at a reasonable size.

And all this work is worth it, because it will help you run your game for another month.

One question that often arises is whether or not there are enough interested players to support the coming glut of virtual worlds and MMOs. i think a better question is whether or not there are enough advertisers to support all the supposedly ad-supported projects. i hear a lot of companies bragging about this or that license, or this or that merger that will help them bring Virtual World X to market with all the splendour of Jesus riding a cloud and blowing a trumpet, but i don’t hear any of them boasting about their investment in a strong sales team. i’m talking about a kennel full of guys who all drive Jaguars and work on a high-octane blend of 100% commission and cocaine, who can sell the shit out of your virtual world. These guys bring in the dough it takes to maintain the game and grow the audience so that bigger advertisers - like Coke - come calling.

It’s not enough to have your cousin Larry pick up the phone and cold-call Duracell. You need a sales team. You need a vicious, snarling sales team that can either close the deal or rip out prospective clients’ hearts with their slavering fangs. You need this guy:

And if you think, as some virtual world owners apparently do, that you can implement some magical rule where only advertisers whose products make sense in your game are allowed to advertise, i’d kindly ask you to crawl back into your sparkle-tree in Fantasy Land, and give my regards to your marshmallow pixie pals.

i await you all on the auction floor! i could use your purple-felt pool table and a few Aeron chairs if they’re going for a reasonable price …

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.

Kids’ entertainment juggernaut Nickelodeon announced this week that it will blow out its already 5000-strong game library by 1600 more games, including three more kid-based MMOs, according to Joystiq. Pursuant to my admittedly unprofessional rant a few weeks ago, Nicktropolis Looks Like Ass, i have to wonder whether the newest projects in development over there will follow suit, or if they’ll pay closer attention to quality.

Certainly, Viacom/Nickelodeon’s acquisition AddictingGames.com isn’t exactly a bastion of quality. i was actually astounded when a supposedly reputable corporation like Viacom, with shareholders n’ everything, and a reputation for making quality kids’ entertainment, picked up AddictingGames. Let’s take a quick tour through the library shall we?

i dip into the Action game category and come across two gems. First up, there’s Light People on Fire, where your goal is to run around setting as many people on fire as possible. Innocent bystanders include (naturally) mothers pushing baby carriages.

A few icons down i notice Cannon Crotch, by “F****N Amazing Games”. In it, you must destroy Adolph Hitler’s reanimated corpse with your crotch-mounted cannon before he uses a laser to blow up the moon.

There’s High School Cheerleader, where your scantily-clad character pulls off dance moves in a low-cut top while pervy students watch from the background, and Blood Car 2000 Delux, which has you running down as many pedestrians as possible with your car. Blood Car 2000 Delux proudly states that it’s “Rated M for Awesome”.

No Ratings for Young Gamers

In all my time on the site, i didn’t see a single bona fide ESRB rating or content warning on any of these games.

Addicting Games is one of these online kids-only havens that adults don’t really know about. In every user-focus test i ever did with a room full of kids, we’d let them surf wherever they wanted, and inevitably they’d end up at Addicting Games. The site’s acquisition by Viacom/Nickeloden certainly ensured that adults heard about the site, but honestly: how many adults have actually played the games there? i assume most grown-ups who have visited Addicting Games have followed the link after reading about the acquisition in the trade papers and, after seeing the overwhelming array of icons, promptly left.

i worked at a teevee station that received regular viewer complaints about its programming, most of which came straight outta CrazyTown. One father was very upset that some characters in a show were pretending to be pirates, because pirates “rape and murder people.” Over-protective, i think, but somewhat fair. But imagine the gasket this guy would blow if he found his kid poking around on Addicting Games.

It’s a lot like the fact that Video Games Teach Kids to Gamble. No concerned grown-up ever bothered to drill 20 hours into a Pokémon game to find the full-fledged casino. Likewise, no adult seems to care that while teevee adheres to some pretty tight moral standards, the kid-targeted online world is packed with crap. What’s worse, the people behind this site aren’t shadowy, hard-to-find folks like pornographers - they’re bloody Nickelodeon. It boggles the mind.

Concerned Parents Gotta Step Up Their Indignation

i suppose that concerned parents can only be concerned about what they see, and they’re not bothering to see all aspects of kid culture. Maybe parents can only be so concerned?

Or maybe it’s another symptom of media dinosaur thinking, where somehow the teevee rules don’t apply to the Internetz? (see Building a Coffin for Nielsen) Who knows? You could even chalk it up to the old habit of thinking that certain kid-associated media are “safe” (cartoons, video games, etc). That mode of thinking has proven particularly tenacious.

Fed Up

Don’t get me wrong. It’s not that i think playing Light People on Fire will turn kids into raving mad pyromaniacs, or that kids can’t see that the cheap autocidal thrills in Blood Car 200 Delux aren’t a great idea in real life. i just get a little peeved that parents like the Pirate Dad get so irmy about the slightest breach of ethics on teevee, yet Viacom is hosting this overboard, lurid junk-culture free-for-all online and no one says a word.

i worked for Big Media creating advergames for kids. i’ve had my fill of feeding junk to children; i feel the need to purge. The next product i create for children, if i ever hoe that row again, will uphold a solid value system. It will affirm the sanctity of childhood. And it will be a restorative, detoxifying experience for the kids fattening themselves on the trash fed to them by Nickelodeon and Viacom.

Joystiq has a report from one of the South by Southwest sessions by Corey Bridges, one of the people behind Multiverse. Multiverse is a tool enabling small development teams to make big games. i talked about a couple of Multiverse projects in my interview on Teevee Ontario last week. LunarQuest is the University of Florida’s virtual world for astrophysics training. Another Mutliverse application enables new hires to explore a virtual office tower identical to their real-world place of employment. There, they can get the lay of the land and fill out all their paperwork before setting foot in the brick-and-mortar workplace.

Bridges made some bold claims about the indie developer uprising during his session:

The talk turned out to be surprisingly inflammatory as Bridges predicted the death of the traditional video game industry in favor of near-universal adoption of virtual worlds.

Click to read SXSW08: Virtual worlds and indie games to dethrone publishers.

i can totally get behind the democratization of game development that ran rampant at this year’s Game Developers Conference, and i’m very interested to see where all of these game creation tools are headed. That said, i’m not very impressed with the Multiverse demos so far. They look dated and wanting.

Habbo Hotel visionary Sulka Haro puts it best when defending his game’s retro pixellated graphics: 3D is destined to look dated in a few short years, but 2D graphics have reached the point where an attractive 2D game is always going to look like an attractive 2D game.

… and then there’s Club Penguin.

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 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.