Artisanal Concatenations of Sentient Emanations

I think I have mentioned that I still play World of Warcraft a couple of times here. I enjoy being a raid-healer and helping to coordinate team activities.

I also enjoy seeing what they change year-over-year in the game. Every expansion the design team at Blizzard tries to improve on the game’s core systems in interesting ways. They balance these improvements with attempts to fix previous failures. Sometimes you get more improvements, and other times you get more failures.

I think that I am feeling some of the failures for this expansion acutely. In previous expansions they removed the raid tier system. Many of us really liked the tiered armor sets. They attempted to fix this by introducing something called “Domination Sockets”. In my opinion, this is the closest thing I have seen to an actual war crime in game design. I am not going to go into detail about this here.

I am also not going to go into the failures of covenants, especially since they are about to take away the majority of the pain that they inflicted on the player base, the likes of which has not been seen since the Aldor/Scryer system back in The Burning Crusade.

Between that system, the randomness of earning Archivist Rep in Korthia, and the removal of the tiered sets in the first place I do have to wonder if sometime in the past decade “not playing the game” has become an important feature for live teams. It is hard for me to accept that someone could be a well versed player in this game and make the design decisions they are making.

Regardless, most of these things are superficial and will pass by the time another expansion comes around. Release expansion, release patch, offer an apology patch and a pretty mount for six months of subscription monies, repeat. The system works™.

You might get the impression I think the game is limping along. You are very astute. I do think that. I often ask myself “what would I do if I was steering the ship at Blizzard and trying to figure out how to get myself unstuck from this predicament?”

My answer, which is probably a surprise to most of you who know me well, is “something something mobile”.

I was once asked the question “what could you do to make a WoW subscriber from a mobile game player?” I think that Blizzard themselves tried to answer that question by creating Hearthstone. To be honest, I liked the mini-card-game-from-a-fantasy-franchise better when it was called Arcomage.

My own answer for this is that you really cannot make a new WoW customer from a mobile game player. I think the effort there would be akin to trying to make water flow uphill. It is probably not advisable.

There is an interesting twist on this answer. It is hard to create a new WoW subscription customer from a mobile game, but you can probably reacquire a former WoW player through the power of nOsTaLgIa. You only have to look as far as WoW Classic to understand that this is a real thing.

There are enough fancy mounts in the game that you could repurpose into any manner of endless runners, flying games, or tappable tycoon games. The WoW polygonal assemblage of identifiable geometries is massive.

They are already granting mounts inside of WoW for playing hearthstone, and probably granting hearthstone things for playing WoW. They might be running one of these promotions right now.

I do think they are barely scratching the surface of what they ought to be doing. You know. Because metaverse.

There is an unfounded fear that if you go deeper than a mount here, or a card there, you are going to hear the players scream that you are making them buy mobile devices in order to be successful at the game. Anyone who thinks that you are not going to make a WoW player purchase hardware has never tried to zone into a dungeon or raid on a 7200 RPM hard drive.

We are now at the point where omni-channel and cross-platform are common-enough words for game content that it is useless to resist. You will be assimilated.

I am going to put on my armchair-product-owner hat for a moment and tell you How I Would Run Things™.

Resource-ification

Farming for resources in WoW is a painful experience. I pick flowers between raids to fuel my alchemy habit. There are multitudes of auto-following multi-druids that stand between myself and my weekly alchemical raid needs.

There are probably easy ways to calculate a reasonable velocity for gathering resources. It should be easy to grant these as rewards as resources per minute in other products. Should it matter if you are spending an hour on your tablet playing Hearthstone, or an hour chasing druids on autopilot? This feels like the easiest win to me.

World of Ultra-casual-craft

Building on the previous point, you can already play “match three” and “flappy bird” in World of Warcraft. You already have all the publishing and authentication pieces for Hearthstone and the Battle Net App.

Why not release a slate of mini-games for your daily quests as bundled or standalone games?

There are nearly a dozen different games inside of Wow that are easy to put into a mobile experience and generate the same rewards. There are also at least one hundred thousand to two hundred thousand thirsty mobile-game developers out there who would do this as a work-for-hire project in order to stave off the financial demise of their indie company. In fact, a good one third to one half of them would probably be interested in joining the team full time upon successful completion. The cost of doing the project would probably be in the same ballpark as  the cost of recruiting that many engineers anyway. Given how many “This is my last day at Blizzard” posts I see regularly on LinkedIn, I am reasonably certain there is plenty of work for fresh new developers to do.

Create Virtuous Cycles

The last thing that is worth looking at is to create virtuous cycles between games. I will confess that this is one of those things that I really feel strongly about.

Going back to the aforementioned broken parts of the current raid expansion, there are a variety of hard-to-acquire currencies that players need in order to be successful.

I am going to use Soul Cinders as an example here. Soul Cinders are largely acquired from Torghast. You can also get reasonably good Soul Cinders from doing two “Weekly Assaults”, and meager drips of them from your Covenant adventure table.

So why is this interesting?

I think that it would be interesting if you had the ability to craft “limited use” hearthstone cards inside of WoW. Not only would it be a good way to add intermittent patterns for players to collect, and an interesting sink for resources, you should go full circle and grant the player WoW Soul Cinders when you use these cards inside of Hearthstone.

This is what I mean by a virtuous cycle. There would be extra points awarded if you increased the complexity to generate recipes in “game 1” to create items in “game 2” and earn resources in “game 3”.

I will confess I thought we would be much closer to this with the launch of Hearthstone, and the subsequent acquisition of King and their mobile game development expertise. I do respect that integrating these things is hard.

I also think that it is high time to see this done. I mean, you know, we all have phones.

I am going to stop myself now before talking about what could happen if you added features that were Social, or Community. I can see a world where people ask their friends and family to play casual mobile resource generating games. I can further see a world where you could even give them some incentive to check out the online game for a length of time comparable to the size of resources they generated as a gift to the WoW player who has been on the receiving end of their largesse.

I would go so far as to say one more thing about this world. It is probably the only world in which you could get water to flow uphill.

Thank you for reading along. This post has been intentionally devoid of referral links and “punch the monkey” flash banners. You might see me return soon to the world of totally-may-shock-you click-bait referral shopping links. With as many kids as I have, I could use your Amazon referral dollars to offset the December beating that my American Express card gets. 

Stay tuned for John-Szeder’s-Top-Five-List-Of-Books-He-Has-Not-Yet-Read.

I am sorry this article is late.

I am now the proud owner of an assembled Uplift V2 standing desk. The reason this article is late is that prior to yesterday I was the proud owner of an unassembled Uplift V2 standing desk. You might sense the fragrance of a fine California whine here, and you would not be terribly wrong.

The Uplift V2 standing desk is hundreds of dollars of product that promotes workplace comfort and healthiness. One would think that they would take the “C-Frame and T-Frame Models” combined instruction booklet and better annotate the instructions that only apply to one of these models, so the person assembling the other one does not get freaked out and lost trying to find and assemble parts that do not exist. Or better yet, for as many hundreds of dollars just put one of two completely separate books into the product. I would not expect to find a “Pickup Truck and Sports Coupe” owners manual in a vehicle purchased from the Ford Motor Company. And yet, these products are scarcely an order of magnitude apart in price.

Setting aside my mental disassembling over assembling this desk, it is a great product so far. Five stars. Better than Cats™. Would purchase again but hopefully do not have to.

Since I was somewhat preoccupied with getting this desk assembled I thought I would take a moment and ramble about work idiosyncrasies. I have recently come into possession of a full-sized room inside my house as my oldest son has moved out to pursue college education. I have transported all of my various computers, work surfaces, and electronicals into this room and made it my own.

I have three different stations set up in this room, each with their own purpose. I have a primary workstation, a hobby-project work station, and “snobby pc gamer” setup. If you do some kind of hobbyist development, I have found that having a separate physical space has helped me focus on the successful outcomes of those projects. I heartily recommend it to anyone who is trying to do some extracurricular projects. I also have tried to persuade my remote-learning children to adopt the same habit.

Earlier in my career I used to commute every second week between northern and southern California. I was also raiding in an MMO quite profusely at this time. I started ordering keyboards and mice of the same kind by the threes and fives—having identical computer peripherals in multiple locations helped me stay consistent in my pursuit of raid-boss enmurderment. To this day I still attempt to keep the same peripherals for all of my devices. I cannot say enough how great it is to use computing machinery with a consistent man-machine interface.

Since I was preoccupied with building my desk this week during my regularly scheduled writing time, I thought I would take a moment to share some of the peripherals I used consistently—they have evolved modestly over the years. Yes, I have extra sets of all of these if I ever wind up in a situation where I would need to return full time to an office.

Ancient Dell Keyboards. I know many people are hot and bothered by clicky mechanical keyboards. I really got used to the phat spacebar on these bad boys. I do buy these in groups of ten and I am down to my last few spaces over the course of a decade.

Razer Deathadder Mouse. I grew up on a steady diet of Microsoft Mouses. Mice? I don’t know. When the last of them started to fade, and the replacement OEMed Microsoft Mouses started to break more frequently, I decided it was time to upgrade. Fortunately the Deathadder is reasonably close to the form factor I know and love.

IMAK Ergo… uh… thingy. I keep these under my wrists because: Old Person. I also pick them up and toss them around like a bean bag in meetings. I don’t care if people hate it—they probably read comic books and listen to rock-and-roll, so we have plenty to argue about.

Steelseries mouse mat. This is a big mouse mat that covers a lot of my desk. Whether I am stretching bigly browser windows or trying to move my mouse frantically in an attempt to keep a raid alive as a healer, these are my favorite mouse mats.

Belkin gel wrist rest. The final piece of my consistent assemblage of peripherals and ergonomics is this goofy squooshy bar of gel. They make them, someone has to buy them.

I could go on about ASUS WQHD monitors here but I will not. I am likely to start phasing these out in Operation Experiment With Curved Monitors coming soon™. Similarly, I have a few nice Sennheiser headsets that are just really nice headsets minus a gamer mic.

I could also go on about Secret Lab chairs. I am on my second Secret Lab chair. The first one is presently a family heirloom passed down through at least one generation of lineage from father to son.

Okay. There you have it. I have given you digital words this week. 

If you are doing multiple things with computers, I find it helps to have some separation of space between them. I also find that it is good to have decent ergonomic support items, and a consistent interface for all of your computers. It has been a decade since I have found myself using a different brand of keyboard or mouse between home and work and making these things consistent has brought me some measure of value, even if it is just perceived value.

Looking forward to writing to you again next week, probably on an actually interesting topic.

Author’s note: Blah blah blah Transparency. Something something Authenticity. There are referral codes in the links above. If you are offended that I would like see if I can earn some beer and pizza money off of your staring and clicking I apologize. I am not trying to get-rich-quick. I am experimenting with it for my own education and amusement and will share anything I learn.

Today I am going to be the wrapper on one of those drying agents put inside packs of beef jerky. Please stop reading this article if you dislike being told “do not eat”.

A lot of people got tingly body parts on seeing Netflix’s acquisition of the company that made Oxenfree. I would love to see the week-over-week sales for Oxenfree. I bet it went up noticeably based on game developers running out and buying this game based on the press release. “We made one game and got boughted out by the Netflix” says the press release.

I could actually feel a momentary surge of tears upon reading this press release. I was able to prevent them from pouring down my face like hot rivulets of seawater at low tide. The pangs of grief hit me upon the realization that the percentage of people who make bad studio management decisions is about to go way the fuck up.

I say this from a good place. I mean well. The problem is that the story is more complicated than it appears on the surface, and most people are looking at it on the surface and making decisions to figure out what got Netflix to buy the creators of Oxenfree. Every tired work-for-hire IP creator who dreams of shipping their own game equates themselves, true or false, to this team. They probably feel that they could be next in line if they put on the same fancy attire and sing similar songs to get on the same stage and have the same fantastic outcome.

I say this because I was probably one of those kids once.

So let’s dig a little deeper and drop a stinky poop all over those excited dreams for a few minutes.

Let us start by taking a look at the release date of the game. Netflix made this announcement in Q3 of 2021. Oxenfree was released in Q1 of 2016. That is a long time to be paying people’s salaries on one royalty stream. If you do a little digging on the Googles, you will find a wacky wiki page that talks about work-for-hire deals and partnerships with other companies to pay the bills—one of which almost tanked the company. I am lazier than you in not providing links: dO tHe ReSeArCh!

Assuming you feel like you can keep your company afloat for five years, let’s look at what else makes this company special.

If you read about the creation of Oxenfree, it is a Very Different Game™. Disclaimer: I own a copy via Epic Game Store, but I have not played it so I cannot confirm or deny these claims. It looks like they had some sort of partnership with another company to do some kind of transmedia bullshit. I confess I do not understand it. You probably do not either. We will come back to this.

This game has some unique selling-points on narrative and storytelling. It also has paid voice actors, and a soundtrack from an audio person that has more links to fancy audio references than I have the time to click on. So while the art style matches a lot of random low budget indie games (like yours!!!), they clearly snuck in some high budget items that you might not be able to afford. This added to the game ambience I assume. So while it does not look like a fancy, high-production game, remember that half of the other games out there have their brothers and sisters doing the voice acting for the heroes, and Dad reading out the lines of the villain (too Freudian?). These details matter.

So we have some random media hype that came out of somewhere. We have some fancy sound effects and voice overs. Someone somewhere spent some money on this game. That also means they probably have a good PR person to help orchestrate this and put it together. They have a game that talks about different elements of storytelling but pretty much followed the industry script for talking about that story. I am smirking smugly over here at my own cleverness, and I hope you can look past it because most of us cannot make it past the second article on how to effectively do PR without getting tired and wanting to go sleepy times.

I promise to only make you sadder for a few more paragraphs. I am going to say something positive and nice to try to scrape your feelings off of the floor by the end. Stay with me. You will be okay.

So we have some money for PR. We have some money for paid voice actors. We have some company doing media stuff to bolster the project and we have a Unique Selling Point that earned some industry awards.

Some of you are probably doing work-for-hire and can solve the money problem with your split-focus studio. I have lived this life. Binge on licensed game projects for other companies. Purge on building your own IP. This is the cycle of indie life.

The Unique Selling Point comment appears more than once in this article. It is almost as if it is important. It really is. While many of you have “get my studio acquired” as step three in your plan to jillionairehood, step two should not be “make an Oxenfree clone”. Please cross that off of your 2022 list right now. This game has a Unique Selling Point. If you want to really stand out, please do not attempt to Xerox this product and wonder why the streaming companies trying to slide into the games publishing business are not frantically offering you briefcases of money.

There is one last nugget I am going to drop here. Some of the founders came out of careers at TellTale games. Some of the founders came out of Disney. This is a veteran team with track records that check a bunch of the M&A boxes much like you need to enter your PIN to get 20 dollars from the ATM.

So if you are doing some kind of analysis of this deal, and think you deserve a similar payout, ask yourself some questions:

• Do I have good PR?
• Do I have revenue streams to cover my original game development and five years of not getting acquired?
• Do I have a Unique Selling Point for my game?
• Do I have a track record that gets me into a slide deck by a fancy M&A person?
• Bonus points: Do I have relationships/games/random-whatever to do whatever the hell Skybound Interactive did to augment all the other things above?

This is where I apologize for the hot mess I just made of your dreams.

Now I am going to try to fix it because otherwise I will feel like a shitheel for the next week.

You should pick one or two of these things to work on. Be prepared for it to take years. The more time you can invest up front in solving those problems, the shorter your path to “step three: sell the company” will be, and it will already be a five-year journey if everything is in your favor.

So what is the important thing to fix?

For me, I will argue that pedigree is pretty important. The best way to be a successful indie is to spend three to five years in the salt mines on someone else’s IP. The bigger the better. If you can show the world that you have a track record of dealing with eight- and nine-figure projects, things will go better for you. When I say “the world” here, I do not mean Cathy Customer. I mean Patty PR, Veronica Venture Capitalist and Denise the Designer.

It is worth it to invest five years in career building to help bolster the width and depth of your portfolio opportunities as an indie. We sensationalize the folks like the Popcap founders and Notch, but those are extreme outliers. If you think you are that person, then best wishes to you. I will remind you again that I said “do not eat” at the start of this article. You do you.

The next thing to look at is the Unique Selling Point. When I was looking at career plans in 2016, I was playing a lot of Summoners War. I  did some napkin math and looked at their release notes dating back to launch and calculated how much it would be to build a mobile viable MVP to compete in that space. I am not going to depress you with the number. It was large. It would probably be hard to raise given that it is an also-ran opportunity. Some people like to write those checks—they are not in my twitter DMs.

And that is front and center the reason that we are here. Their unique take on dialog and story probably factored heavily in the acquisition. Netflix squeezed out Bandersnatch, and visual interactive stories that resemble 1980s young adult “choose your adventure” products with such similarity in simplicity that it actually merited a lawsuit. I cannot make this stuff up— if I told you to turn to page eighteen.

Netflix wants to have its own flavor of Unique Selling Point for content. As well they should. Their CEO correctly identified Fortnite, and all things like Fortnite, as competitors for his billion- dollar jet-setting lifestyle.

So he is coming to do 1v1 with all the publishers out there.

Is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? It is hard to say. It is a nice paycheck if you can get it. 

Movies and books spawn their own games. Games spawn their own movies and books. Something something metaverse.

If you think about the problem intelligently, it is a pretty good time to be alive as a game developer. In order to think about the problem intelligently I recommend diving deep into each of these acquisitions and understanding what problems are being solved by them, and what that means they will need next.

If you make a second Oxenfree, Netflix already has one of those and it is very nice.

Try to figure out what someone will write a check for in five years, and be prepared to be a little hungry for some of that time.

If you are trying to figure out what you can sell tomorrow, understand that you are already five years too late.

And that is my story. I hope that last part helps give you some ideas. If you have a friend in the industry who spent the weekend playing Oxenfree, you might want to send them this article. Try to play dumb so they do not hate you forever. Rather, ask them “hey is this guy making any sense?” If you can downplay it successfully, then they can be mad at me for being the person who told them “do not eat”. If they take offense that you are telling them they are doing the wrong thing, then offer them an apology because you were just trying to help.

Will they accept that you are helping them with their Netflix acquisition dreams? I don’t know.

I have certainly seen Stranger Things.

There is a bunch of crap in the news right now about how Instagram is super horrible and everything. A week before that, I think everyone was still super excited about how it was a rags-to-riches story from an overnight success by a pair of stalwart product developers who stumbled into a Zuck-quisition.

I actually hated Instagram from the very beginning, but not for this reason.

I hated Instagram because of the death of meebo.

Let’s back the truck up for a moment because I am sure you are confused.

What the hell does meebo have to do with anything?

What the hell is meebo anyway?

Meebo was a hammer in search of nails. I was one of those nails, as a software developer `spending time as a consultant inside of a hardware company. Their firewalls were for serious and when I wanted to be all up in people’s Socials, meebo was a great tool that brought all the power of instant messaging into the browser.

I also think it is where the Instagram founding team cut their teeth on making great products—and Instagram was acquired because it was a great product.

Meebo was also a great product. It just had a very limited use case and certainly not one that would merit spending significant money on. It is a great example of how fucking hard it really is to make a successful venture-scale business because at the end of the day they had the majority of what they needed to be successful, plus or minus a few million customers willing to spend “not zero” dollars.

It is hard to write about this because I really loved using meebo. They did so many clever things. They were so smart they even put a string into the bottom of their web page as a breadcrumb for recruiting. If you were interested enough in their product to use the “view as source” button in your browser, they put an email address in there for recruiting purposes. How clever is that?

The reason I want to talk about meebo, aside from the obvious need to grieve its loss, is how it applies to software development and success today.

I am in the process of iterating my way towards an MVP. I talked about it a few weeks ago. I am in the process of going through all of the cosmetic UI/UX things that are needed before I trot this product out in front of a limited test audience.

As we have iterated our way towards acceptability, I have found myself looking for an appropriate lens to describe this process.

I have settled on the need for this experience to feel as good as I felt when I was using meebo.

I am pretty sure that helps almost nobody to understand what I am looking for in my MVP.

So I have attempted to figure out what that looks like for a web application and how to express that as a set of PWA rules.

Here is where I have so far:

1. Every button must have a clear purpose. If you do not need to press it when you are a new user, you probably do not need to see it. Disable it at a minimum, hide it more ideally. The less you need to teach your new customer, the better off you will be. If you have 1 page of data and you have buttons to take you to page (n – 1) or page (n + 1) you should probably hide them at the start, no one should click on a button that takes you from page 1 to page 1.
2. Pixel perfection is a minimum. If you have multiple tabs of windows, or multiple panes of data, make sure they line up perfectly every time. If you have a window that is even a single pixel off when you are tabbing front and back between windows, you are doing something horribly wrong. Line up the tops and bottoms of all of your windows and change those sizes at your own peril.
3. Concurrently resize as few things as possible. If you have two columns of data and you are resizing the window, do not resize both at the same time. Keep one of them consistent and resize its width on your own.
4. Minimize a column on mobile if it is unnecessary, and add a button to slide it in and slide it out as needed.
5. All of your operations need to possess symmetry. If you have a button to set the number of entries per page to 50 from 10, make sure you can set it back to 10 from 50 if you want to. If you are starting with 25 entries on that page, and you can set it to 10 or 50, but not return it to 25 entries, you should probably remove 25 as the default starting value or add it as an option to your pagination.
6. Put something interesting and helpful in your tooltips. I know you don’t get the benefit of mouse-overs on mobile devices. You can do tooltips on a long press event if you really need it.
7. Resize the shit out of your window. When I look at an application now, I drag it around the screen like a crazy person. Make sure the resizing looks really good in realtime and that you don’t have some screwy resizing code that winds up breaking your screens.
8. Be ruthless in eliminating scrollbars. Keep them internally consistent. There are expensive books on UI/UX that tell you to avoid horizontal scrollbars—I do not know that there are enough books telling you to make sure you are controlling your vertical scrollbars. If you have too many scrollbars, your application will feel awful. I especially despise the scrollbar on the absolute right of the browser, indicating there is more for the whole page. You are better served by dynamic pagination or by keeping scrollbars inside your content panes. When I see three scrollbars on the screen, I get filled with furious outrage that exceeds the searing hot intensity of a thousand suns.

I apologize if I have triggered any design people with my eight random angry rules of designeyness. They come from a good place—my desire to make an application that feels good to use.

I want to make sure that my MVP feels as good to customers as meebo felt to me.

If that also means that I sell my next startup to the Zuck-inator for umpteen jillion dollars, hey that would also be okay by me.

Thank you for reading along! I apologize I am not able to show off my interesting little tool for solving tedious creativity yet. It is giving me some anxiety that it is not quite ready for a select few users to kick the tires. I am hoping that it will be ready in Nov-tober. I am supremely confident I can continue to regale you with interesting stories that have nothing to do with my MVP product until then.

I am going to continue to pop the clutch over the next few weeks and talk about a few different random things. You might get the sense that I am stalling in the middle of telling a significant story. You might be correct. Please accept my apology and try to enjoy the side-quest we are now on.

I was in three conversations this week where we talked about meaningful games, purpose, and transformational play experiences. There is no doubt in my mind that Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar was the most transformational game I ever played. I think it is probably unparalleled even today for its depth and sophistication. If I am wrong, please let me know. I am happy to reschedule a few afternoons of chasing kids off of my lawn to enjoy transformational play.

I am going to attempt to summarize what I think is so special about this game.

Character Creation

The standard character generation for most games around this time consisted of rolling and  re-rolling (and re-re-rolling) stats for your starting adventurers. Many roleplaying games inherited the pencil and paper re-rolling methods.

Ultima IV had you fill out a virtue questionnaire. Your answers took you down a decision tree to pick the virtue that you most identify with. For a game that is not about the stats, or the min-maxing, I am somewhat conflicted when I say that you want to pick Humility, and start off with the shepherd. Otherwise when you do get around to recruiting poor Katrina of Magincia you will have a real hard time leveling her up. If you wind up with the shepherd, you will be able to level quickly since the lead character gets 100 experience points for each “quest item” you find in the game.

Character Dialog

I love the dialog system in Ultima IV. Every NPC has a set of keywords that they wait for. Some people will tell you about the dungeon stones. Some people will tell you about the mantras. Some people in the game will sit there and wait until you learn from someone that you need to talk to this person about the skull, or the wheel, or even one of the spells that is not in the game’s documentation.

I really like that you need to understand who to talk to and what to ask them. This kicks the pants off of choosing option A or option B in the dialog tree. I refer to this as “meta-knowledge” in games. The knowledge that you need to have, as the player, which is not represented in the game.

Party Progression

You have eight slots for characters and there are seven non-player characters scattered throughout the world who will join you. You get to add a character to the party each time you level up. If you are not yet able to add them, they at least will tell you that there will come a point that “I would be honored to join thee”. It is nice to focus on a few characters when you begin the game, and be able to layer in additional characters over time.

The Virtue System

I almost wanted to talk about this first, but the most important part about Ultima IV is the virtue system. The point of the game is not to slay a specific dragon or to take down a powerful wizard. The point of the game is to strive to be elevated to the status of “Avatar” through eight virtues of enlightenment, which are Honor, Humility, Honesty, Sacrifice, Spirituality, Valor, Compassion, and Justice.

Everything in the game rolls up into these eight virtues.

There are eight shrines to meditate on each virtue. There are eight cities, each of which has a virtue as their raison d’etre. Each member of your party represents a class that is associated with one of these virtues. There are eight dungeons, which are generally the homes for the eight stones you need.

The best part about it is that there is a set of eight numbers in the game that tracks your status in these virtues.

If you attack evil monsters, your valor goes up.

If you pay the blind reagent vendor correctly, your honesty goes up.

If you kill non-evil monsters, your compassion goes down.

There are very clear actions throughout the game to increase all of these virtues to the level they need to be. In order to win the game, you actually have to do these things instead of running around town being a giant murder hobo. This was probably the most impactful part of the game because it was so different. 

I do not think there is a game out there today that captures what the virtue system did in Ultima IV.

The Pretty Colors

The next really interesting thing about the virtue system is that they were all color coded. There are three “principals” in the game that represent Truth, Love and Courage. Courage is red, as is valor. Each virtue can be broken down into one, two, or even three principles, and the color of its stone matches the principles it stands for. 

The white stone for Spirituality, for example, shows it is the embodiment of all three principles.

The orange stone for Sacrifice shows it is the embodiment of Love (yellow) and Courage (red).

I played this game early enough in my life that this is how I learned about primary and secondary colors. My mind was totally blown!

The Window Dressing

Let’s set aside that Ultima games meant cool cloth maps, funky stones, and necklaces.

The spell book was incomplete and some of the spells needed to be learned by tracking down people in the game to ask them questions.

The shrines in the game gave you visions that correspond to runic letters to spell out a word that you needed to win the game.

There were a series of magic gates that took you from city to city based on the moon cycle. The moon cycle was also needed to enter specific shrines and find specific items.

Not all of the magic reagents to cast spells could be bought. Some of them could only be found at midnight in special places on the map.

There were optional items like the Skull of Mondain, and the Wheel of the HMS Cape that you could find and use at various points. 

If you used the Skull at the wrong place, you would lose all of your virtue. If you used it at the mouth of the abyss, it would destroy it.

If you learned the coordinates of the Wheel of the HMS Cape, you could use it to beef up your ship.

I don’t even know if I can remember all of the cool things that you can find in the game—Hot air balloon, mystic armor, the list goes on.

The End Game (spoilers question mark?)

After all of the cool things you need to learn and understand, almost none of which have to do with combat mechanics, the last thing you need to do is to enter into the final dungeon that is the holding place for a magic book of virtue.

You collect the book—and you win the game.

This was so vastly different from so many games with an end-boss who spends most of their time sitting in a room doing very much nothing.

When you do complete the game, it does one more thing that I really appreciated.

You get a little “chef’s kiss” narrative that amounts to Bill and Ted’s wisdom to “be excellent to each other”.

The boundless knowledge of the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom is revealed unto thee. The voice says: 'Thou has proven thyself to be truly good in nature. Thou must know that the quest to become an Avatar is the endless quest of a lifetime. Avatarhood is a living gift. It must always and forever be nurtured to flourish. For if thou dost stray from the paths of virtue, thy way may be lost forever. Return now unto thine own world. Live there as an example to thy people, as our memory of thy gallant deeds serves us.

Some pretty deep stuff!

I appreciate a good twist ending as much as the next person. Bard’s Tale II and Diablo, I am looking at you.

I do not know that any other game out there has moved me so deeply. I cannot help but wonder why this game is the exception, and not the norm.

What other games have you played that weave such a rich, profound personal tapestry?

PS: This game is available as a free download on GOG.com.

I think I have said before that making games is hard. I know there are many people out there who love playing games and think that will translate into making games. You will never find a group of people who will work harder for less money than game developers. The amount of work that goes into a great experience is hard to fathom until you have gotten to the 90% mark. Quite often, at that point, you have just begun to ship your product.

One of the marks of a great game for me is good storytelling. I appreciate good storytelling in games and in movies. I would love to do more storytelling in games. I have at least one person who tells me I should not be thinking about making games for my storytelling, that I should go and write books. I try not to be hurt by the aforementioned statement. I also run a tabletop game off and on and I get told by some of the players over the decades of being a tabletop game master that I should write books. When they say it, I actually feel humbled by their praise. Go figure.

I have a Sunday project I have been working on for a while now. It originally started in 1997 as a tool I built for myself for my own tabletop campaign. I wrote a clever tool in C++ and I was a test audience of one off and on for about five years. I dusted off the codebase in March and ported it to a web service. It was somewhat fun to move my early project into “ThE cLoUd”.

Somewhat ironically, I suspended my tabletop game to give myself some time to build tools to help make my tabletop games more interesting. That is probably the most programmer-ey thing in the world.

Over the past few months I have had someone helping me build an MVP out of my little tool. It is nearly complete with a few tweaks here and there. I am almost at the point where I can test it out as a Progressive Web App (PWA). This means it is a website that has application functionality and it is usable on the phone, and on the browser.

I think this is important for a few reasons.

The first is that it means I can set up some kind of revenue stream around this without having to pay Tim Apple or Larry SearchyPants a 30% tax. It also means I can update my project and release a new version without needing to wait 12 to 100 hours depending how close it is to Christmas.

Setting aside the pain of making new things, and the excessive tax, I think that making PWAs is the future. We are about to see a resurgence of people experimenting in the open web for a variety of reasons and I am super excited about that. I understand “Does It Scale?” is easier to answer if you can point at a link to the Platform Thirty Percent Tax Store. The tides are turning and being able to build and deploy quickly to the web will be a really important thing for the coming five years.

I am going to stop talking about my excitement for the un-App-ening that is happening. It has nothing to do with what I want to talk about today.

Today I want to talk about Joe the Elf.

Running a tabletop game is hard. It is almost as hard as making games sometimes. I will confess I am one of those “make shit up” kind of game masters.

I make the world into a tapestry, and I have a series of agents acting in the world behind the scenes.

I do not care if the players stay on the rails of the story. There isn’t one. I give them hints and teasers to stuff happening in different places at different times. I have played in tabletop games where the game master has tried to take control of the story and force the players into the tavern, or make them enter the dungeon. It is tedious and frustrating when that happens because it breaks the fourth wall.

I do my best to do things to keep the fourth wall intact for players. You can look up the fourth wall if you like. Googles has buttons for you to click on without my lovely links. 

It is hard to keep the fourth wall intact when you are making shit up. If you are adding random things to the game world on the fly, you might find yourself in a situation where you have the players coming for a stop at a roadside tavern, and inside sitting at a table near the hearth are five elves engaged in deep conversation.

I generally add window dressing to the campaign with elements like this. Of course, invariably you have that player who asks you two questions:

“What is the name of this tavern”?

And

“I introduce myself to the elves and ask for their names”.

This can be a difficult moment. It is one thing to quickly reply “This is the Roasted Apple Tavern”.

The next question gets more difficult.

“The elves introduce themselves as Gilthaniar GoldBow, Shaellisti Oakleaf, and uh…”

Here is where you can hear the shattering of the fourth wall.

You have so much spontaneity in storytelling and so much stuff that matters in the back of your head you have hit a momentary mental stack overflow.

At this point you gesture lamely and add:

“Joe the Elf”.

If you were running your tabletop game on Yelp you just lost two stars.

Naming five elven NPCs in realtime is hard.

Unfortunately, it is sometimes very important.

This ties into game development here. Sometimes you will find “Joe The Elf” manifested into game development. You have too many cities, taverns, and agents in your game to name effectively.

I have decided to label this problem as Tedious Creativity.

Tedious Creativity is the need to deliver multiple creations that are thematically sensible over a short window of time.

Fortunately for us, computers are very good tools for helping us solve this problem. I started monkeying around with my own solution decades ago.

I am going to be shipping that as a product for game masters Very Soon™.

If you are running a tabletop game and are interested in kicking the tires on a tool to help solve Tedious Creativity, drop me a private note on any of the socials.

I would love to give you early access in the coming weeks and get your thoughts and feedback!

With deadlines, back-to-school, and poor local air quality, I was unable to write anything significant last week. I apologize. I am hopefully more consistent going forward.

Speaking of consistency, I want to continue talking about Spotify. Spotify is one of those businesses you expected to help bring about a beautiful universe for all creators. Instead, people make jokes about the money they make from the platform and it is so bad that artists have intermittently attempted to create their own competitive service.

I should add that I use Spotify as a free customer. I do so out of spite. My Google phone will let me use YouTube in the background to stream music randomly, and constantly reminds me that I can pay Google extra money for a service that a music platform gives me for free. Considering how many business gmail accounts I use, I am insulted that I can’t get one complimentary premium YouTube music account to let me stream music using software provided to me by the people who made the operating system.

I digress.

So how can we get from Spotify-as-a-deeper-circle-of-hell to Spotify-as-a-force-for-good for creators?

There is a path.

It involves moneys, and giving said moneys to the people who create the content. I don’t know who this guy is, but for that net worth from Spotify, I feel obligated to attend his first concert.

One of the fun parts of being involved in high tech over the years is meeting people with amazing ideas.

One of the most interesting ideas I have seen is the notion of the “sliding royalty”. Creators should have some means of saying “I wish to dedicate X% of my income to promotion, via the host platform, to increase discovery” and being able to modify that in real time.

I hardly think that artists like Miley Cyrus need Spotify for discovery purposes. Miley Cyrus and artists like her should command a generous revenue share from them.

Implementing a sliding royalty that can be used by artists to decide on how much to commit to marketing their content vs profiting from it is a good first step towards fixing this problem.

Another idea here would be to modify the revenue share based on the source. For example, I am a free Spotify listener. I do not know the unit economics of the ads I hear. It makes sense that the advertising revenue be largely owned by the platform. I dislike the notion of paying Spotify knowing that the revenue that comes from my pocket will largely go to “Not Miley Cyrus”. For the record I don’t really listen to Miley Cyrus, but I think you get the idea.

If Nissan Pathfinder wants to give Spotify some money to try to persuade me to buy a Nissan Pathfinder, I am fine with the ad sales team at Spotify making a generous portion of cheddar. To be fair, the more ads I hear from a particular company while listening to music, the more irritated I get with the brand being advertised. In this particular case I am talking about Nissan Pathfinder because the amount of Nissan Pathfinder ads I get makes me very much want to never own a Nissan Pathfinder.

That is somewhat beside the point and perhaps a conversation for another day.

The big point is that Spotify ought to try to fix this problem and start experimenting with revenue models. I would be happy to give them some of my money if I thought it was going to the right people—namely the creators.

They could put in some tools to work with creators to give them control over royalties and promotion.

They could even add in controls for superfans, who wish to support specific artists, Patreon style. If you had a 30 dollar per month offering that included a monthly digital exclusive package, and perhaps an annual physical goods drop that included VIP t-shirts and (gasp!) Compact Discs, there are people willing to give you their hard earned moneys.

I guess by now you might realize that I am not just crapping on Spotify. I am crapping on just about every platform company out there. I have directly offered the sliding royalty idea to just about every major platform out there.

They have all shrugged and gone back to their existing roadmaps because ensuring that the value chain works for everyone doesn’t help them hit their OKRs.

Some famous person somewhere said “Content is King”. I believe that to be true. I am excited that there are companies out there pushing for platform-level change. This includes things like the Epic Games lawsuit against Apple, and Tim Sweeney’s statements about committing to dropping exclusives if Steam matches their revenue share.

We are on an evolutionary path towards an increased revenue share for people who make things that other people love. I watch companies struggle against it and try to furiously stuff as much moneys in their pockets as possible while they can.

I am hopeful that this touches a nerve for a platform decision maker somewhere, and that they will wake up tomorrow and look at themselves in the mirror REAL HARD and ask “at what point did I turn into Spotify?”

Thank you again for reading along. I apologize for the gap in ranting last week. I will do my best to keep to my schedule going forward.

One of my guilty pleasures is to be a part of a raid team in World of Warcraft. I have played the game since The Burning Crusade, which launched in 2007.

When I purchased the game, I recall seeing that there were three boxes beside each other each with a different sticker. The first sticker said “3 million copies sold!”. The second sticker said “4 millions copies sold!”. The third said “5 million copies sold!”. I was greatly amused that they were selling so fast that they could not print the stickers fast enough.

World of Warcraft is a very popular game, and it dominates the MMO genre. I do not really think that is a good Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO). I recall having a conversation with David Maynard years before where I talked about Massively Singleplayer Online games. I think he can still verify that I used this term before Will Wright tried to make it popular. I believe WoW is a very good MSO, with some multiplayer elements.

We can quibble later about what is and what isn’t an MMO. I have been watching for innovation in the genre without any reward for that effort for many many years.

A few weeks ago I made a note to write an angry rant about a quest in the most recent zone added to WoW; A quest called “Think of the Critters”.

I am somewhat amused to see there is a change in the patch notes from last week:

Quests

• Resolved an issue with Gromits during the “Think of the Critters” quest in Korthia. Hungry Gromits now anxiously await your delicious treats!

You can find some interesting notes on this quest at the following link.

I think that they made a directionally positive change on this quest.

I still think it is one of the worst quests created in the game.

It has me asking myself some very profound questions.

How did this quest get through any kind of QA?

Who created this quest?

And most importantly to me:

Did the person who created this quest ever play this game… ever?

I can generally feel the invisible hand of designers in many of the games I play and online products I use.

There are a few quests in the most recent expansion that left me feeling a little frustrated, and a few systems that are so incredibly obtuse that it made me wonder what they were attempting to do.

This one quest has so many different stages to it and uses so many friction-inducing mechanics that it stands out as the worst of the crop. It has no peer for the amount of steps to take, the complexity of mechanics, and the amount of failure per attempt. It sounds like they addressed the failure rate (the last part of the quest) in an attempt to address player’s issues with it.

The good news is that these quests are randomly generated. That means you will not get this quest every day.

The Korthia daily quests also have random rewards. This has been frustrating because many of these quests drop uninteresting rewards. I have had days where I get 100% of them dropping Anima versus the new currency that matters. That is a silver lining here because if it has bad rewards it means it is one less quest for me to pick up on my pursuit of collecting currency items for the zone. The random rewards here are an anti-pattern that helps me cull pointless activity out of my day in a way that ought to make data analysts at Blizzard afraid that I might self-select into the churn bucket.

So why am I raging about this terrible quest?

I love online games and playing with other people.

WoW has a very strong community and has a lot of great content. You can set aside that the current story tends to focus on how you, as “The Champion”, are generally chosen to save the world (much like everyone else logged in around you). It is the clear king-of-the-hill of the MMO genre.

I have played many betas and early launches for MMOs over the years. It is why I took a job making games. Twenty years ago I sat down and crafted a half a dozen cool systems I would love to see built that would take us from MMO 1.0 into MMO 2.0.

Unfortunately everyone trying to compete in this space has to replicate MMO 1.0, or at least at a minimum try to make MMO 1.1 due to WoW.

So why do I still play WoW?

I still play WoW because I want to see how it ends.

This game is a technical marvel in many ways, and a design marvel in many others. People debate “the end of WoW” quite frequently. The people that have been in the industry the longest or have some of the best insights have generally said “the only thing that will kill WoW is WoW itself”.

This ridiculous critter quest is one of the positive proof points that we may be nearing the end of an era.

I had an interesting conversation based on last week’s article about the meta-worse. Someone asked me to review a very interesting technical demo and see if I could offer them some assistance bringing it to market.

I was quite impressed with the technology and feel like it has some great potential. It is extremely early augmented reality technology. The only thing I could reasonably do is add more conversations about technology to an already technology-rich environment.

One of my biggest problems is that I am generally two to seven years too early professionally. I start making products and platforms way before someone with better investor relationships writes “gib munnies” on a napkin and slides it to his friend over breakfast somewhere near Sand Hill Road. I also do not have the phone number of the person who can give me a Hasbro board game license. These are things I am okay with. I accept that I did not yet sell a company for a hunnert million dollars in order to raise another five million dollars. We can obsess over the biases at work there at a later date.

What I did do is outline where these fine technologists should look in order to get their product better positioned to be successful.

Let’s rewind twenty years or so.

When you had really cool technology prototypes there was a high likelihood you could add some goblins or some spaceships and start marketing your gimmicky gadget to the Hardcore Gamer. Does it have cool spells? Are there amazing laser blasts? Someone will throw a couple hundred dollars at that and talk about it during their tabletop gaming night over pizzas and Jolt cola.

In looking at their technology demo, and thinking about what I would do in their shoes, I thought about my first failed attempt to raise venture capital in the early-to-mid 2000s.

I had some reasonable success in the early 2000s making little mobile games for feature phones. The more games I worked on, and the more phones that were released, the more it was becoming clear to me that there was going to be a transition to a higher-end phone that would be a genre buster. Keep in mind this is 2004 to 2005 or so.

I reasoned that we will probably see this device in a few years and that there was an opportunity to create franchises that players would love if we can get someone to co-fund the development while we were generating revenues off of the existing feature phones. That is right. I was trying to “pivot”. I heard that is what all the cool kids are doing.

The idea was reasonably solid. The iPhone showed up pretty much around the exact time that I thought it would. Unfortunately, I raised zero million dollars because no one believes Al Gore invented the internet. I am okay with that comparison because he has really nice hair.

I told this woeful tale because there were some interesting shifts in the marketplace happening and I was not really processing them fully.

The consumer barriers for owning fancy gaming hardware were falling and the price for phones was on a downward trend. Admittedly it leaped up when Steve Jobs started peddling his touchable surfaces, but if you inflation-adjusted that a little and squinted it at it, somehow people felt that it was a cheap-enough price that everyone should now go out and buy one. The smartphone revolution (evolution? iVolution? whatever) had arrived.

There were a few other things happening at the same time that are noteworthy.

The first is the creation and subsequent demise of the casual games downloadable business. Companies like Popcap and Pogo created awesome little casual games (“Easy To Learn, Difficult To Master!”) that became exceptionally popular. These were pretty easy targets to migrate to cheap feature phones and eventually to smart phones. The casual games downloadable marketplace subsequently ate itself due to the tulip-bulb phenomenon. Everyone released a dozen hidden-object games and stopped making every other genre. It is ironic that they could not see the problem that was created by shipping too many hidden object games.

The second is that these games became very popular on mobile.

I was not the only person to realize that there was awesome stuff happening in the world of mobile. I was also not the only person to come up with a terrible plan to Make Money Fast.

Let’s talk about the first seven years of instant overnight sensation Rovio.

Rovio was a company founded by former Digital Chocolate alumni. The word is finnish for “bonfire”. I will let other historians provide context for why they needed to start a bonfire after leaving Digital Chocolate—it is not my story to tell.

They created the company to create seriously cool stories and deep experiences for the mobile audience. They published deeply interesting, super serious IPs like “Darkest Fear” and attempted to engage core gamers on mobile devices. This is pretty much the same playbook I was attempting to use, but I was several million dollars less successful in raising money for it.

I had chances to meet the leadership from Rovio over the ensuing years as they pivoted repeatedly through fifty-ish games and wandered around in the wilderness until they threw one last thing at the audiences.

Welcome to Angry Birds, and one of the first genre-defining experiences for the smartphone era.

So what does any of this have to do with anything?

Let’s go back to that technology demo I was talking about. Without getting into too many details, it showed off some elements you might expect to find in a really cool RTS game. The problem with their demo was that we are many years away from the last successful RTS game coming to stores near you. You could make the argument that Clash of Clans and its subsequent Nanostars Siege derived variant game are essentially distilled from the core RTS mechanics.

They actually share something in common with Angry Birds and also with recent mass media sensations like Among Us, and to a lesser extent, Fortnite.

If you are paying attention to the trends in gaming and also in gaming investment, you might find that there are some strong correlations that are worth thinking about.

The first is that you are seeing more and more funding available for games that are midcore-to-casual. In the extreme case, you could go the hyper-casual route and essentially just zero out your art budget (As A Hyper-Casual Game Developer I Will Buy All My Assets For Ten Dollars In The Unity Store), but that does not endear you to creating a sustainable defensible business because all of the hyper-casual publishers are ultra-cannibalizing their own market to death.

The advice I gave to these really swell technologists is to go back to the drawing board with their technology demo and to revamp it to take into account the consumer aesthetics that will attract mass-market attention and subsequently investment dollars.

If you look at the aesthetics of Angry Birds, Among Us, and to a lesser extent Fortnite and Clash Royale, you will notice they do not go deep into high poly counts or edgy, real-life, 3d graphics.

In order to succeed in the games marketplace today with new technology, you need to pair it with an aesthetic that delights mass markets, which will also be more likely to attract investor dollars.

I suggested they take a page from these games and reduce their characters to simple blobs and focus on finding a game designer who will craft an experience that accentuates the technology’s benefit. Angry Birds did this quite well with touch screens. Among Us did this quite well with group-voice-inspired play.

These games did not require high poly counts to become successes. In fact they were pretty much just shapeless blobs on the screen, which is why I advised that they should consider removing the edges from their prototype characters since they are already on the cutting edge with technology.

It sounds pretty clever doesn’t it? I sure thought so.

If you are in the business of creating mass-market content, I recommend you take a look at your art direction and desired audience.

You might find that you need to remove some edges too.