costik's blog

So as of today, I'm shutting down Manifesto Games.

We started in September 05 because we thought that a combination of trends made it feasible to create a market for independently developed games outside conventional retail. The spread of broadband makes digital distribution even of quite large games feasible; growing disenchantment on the part of developers with the conditions of the mainstream industry mean many are looking for any possible alternative path to market; and the casual game market had already shown that substantial businesses could be built around selling games online -- games with characteristics quite different from those offered by the traditional industry.

Clearly, we haven't succeeded in realizing that vision. There are a host of possible reasons why; perhaps we launched with an excess of naïve optimism, through of course a surfeit of optimism is an entrepreneurial necessity. We did not achieve the critical mass of support by independent developers that we had initially envisioned (some of whom, bizarrely, viewed us as a competitor), though we appreciate the strong and enduring support we received from some. We always knew that the essential problem we were trying to solve was a marketing one, but we never figured out how to crack the marketing nut, at least with the minimal financial resources we had available. We failed to raise substantial venture money, despite engaging with many VCs over time. And of course, the recession doesn't help.

In the years since we started the company, there have been hopeful changes in the independent games market; Steam has become a profitable and viable channel for some developers, XBLA and WiiWare for others, and the iPhone for still others. In addition, the casual game market has started to experiment with a small handful of titles that break the inordinately restrictive genre mold of that form. Attention paid to independent games by the games media has grown (though why is it that the Independent Film Channel covers the AIAS awards, and not the IGF awards?)

These are all positive signs, but they are dangerous ones, too; Apple, Microsoft, and Nintendo have complete, monopolistic control over distribution through their proprietary channels, and while they may, today, generously grant a high revenue share to developers who sell through them, developers are in the final analysis utterly at their mercy. There's no question in my mind that ultimately the channel owners will someday use their total control to demand an increasingly onerous share of revenues -- a pattern we've already seen in the casual game market, and through channels like IPlay/Oberon. The same is true, perhaps to a somewhat lesser degree, of Steam.

In short, if a viable business ecosystem for independent games is to be established, it needs to be established on the basis of open systems and open markets, not proprietary channels. And that, I think, is inevitable; the whole history of the Internet shows that open systems and open channels rule.

Perhaps we didn't figure out the right way to crack this nut; and perhaps we were simply too early. "Being too early" is, in fact, much of the story of my career; I designed the single most successful online game for its time -- in 1989; and founded one of the first North American mobile game companies -- in 2000. In both cases, four years later would have made a world of difference.

I suspect (and hope) that this will be true of independent games as well -- that within four years, it will be a large, fast-growing, and highly successful segment of the game industry. In other words, Manifesto may be dead, but in many ways this is an excellent time to be an independent game developer, and the potential we saw when we founded the company remains.

I am grateful to all of the many people who helped us over the tumultuous years of our existence, but in particular to the people who worked directly with me -- Bill Folsom, Nathan Solomon, Eleanor Lang, and Johnny Wilson, each of whom contributed literally thousands of hours, almost all of then unpaid, to the venture. And also to Eric Goldberg and Kathy Schoback, both of whom were generous in sharing contacts and advice; and to our lawyer, Don Karl at Perkins Coie, who took us on knowing we were an unfunded and highly chancy venture and stood by us stalwartly.

To those who cheered for us and shared our vision of a thriving game market that rewards creative vision instead of licensed drivel and repetitive 'franchise' remakes, a place for exploratory design to uncover the true capabilities of the ars ludorum, a commercial channel where imaginative game creators can make a reasonable living on a far smaller scale than the conventional market, a future for more than the handful of genres the major publishers deem worth funding -- don't give up the faith. It will happen. One company's loss won't change that. The creative heritage of games will endure.

N.B.: Play This Thing! will continue; and at least for now, the Manifesto site will remain up. Payment functionality has been turned off, however, and all demo download and buy now links lead to the developers or other places the games on the site can be found.

Spam seems to be as susceptible to fashion as anything else. I don't get as many offers to increase the size of either my tits or my pecker as I used to, and instead receive a great many opportunities to purchase knockoffs of expensive watches (my cellphone tells me the time, thanks), as well as requests to upgrade my copy of Outlook with malware (I don't use Outlook -- someday I'll resign myself to the fact that no one is still supporting Eudora and have to switch to something else, but possibly I'll wait for Google Wave.)

But this has made me wonder what happened to the viral memes of yesteryear. Like chain letters. How come they haven't mutated into the Web 2.0 world?

I was hardly at the Games for Change conference this year, largely because my sweetie, Karen Sideman, was one of the organizers, and had to be there pretty much for the duration, so I was tasked with getting Simona to and from school, and taking care of her in the evenings.

So this report isn't comprehensive by any means, but snippets of my experiences.

On Wednesday, I was among the judges of the Games for Change 101 pitches. "G4C 101" was essentially a day-long intensive workshop, aimed primarily at people from not-for-profits, to educate them about creating, distributing, and promoting games with social messages; at the end, they broke into groups and worked to come up with a pitch for a game idea. The "judges" wandered about and offered advice to different groups. Each group was given six minutes to pitch the judges, and we then voted on the "best".

John Sharp and I adopted a group working on an environmentally-related title; we thought the concept was excellent, and as the pitches began, John said to me, "We win." We didn't; the idea was good, but the pitch was not. The winner was an idea for a Flash game portraying the problems of waste water treatment during rainstorms, implemented as a time-management title; it was the best -defined- and presented game idea, but by no means the one capable of producing the greatest impact. One possible flaw of this framework: the presenters were mainly non-game people, and the judges primarily game geeks. Naturally, they gravitated to the clearest game conception, rather than the most potentially impactful idea.

On Thursday, the highlight was the "Iron G4C Designer," a takeoff on Iron Chef, of course. Three teams, each wearing headbands of a different color, were asked to design a game on a topic chosen by the audience (in this case, torture), using a "secret ingredient" supplied by the emcees (Karen Sideman and Eric Zimmerman), in this case a t-shirt.

The team led by Brenda Brathwaite chose to try to get across the humiliation of torture by dressing three non-volunteers (Jesper Juul, Mary Flanagan, and myself) in t-shirts, and asking the audience to submit humiliating statements by email, then writing those statements on the t-shirts. Thus, I was shortly standing before the audience wearing a t-shirt saying "I am a big geek poser" (true, sadly). The magic of the Magic Circle protected me, however, and I didn't feel particularly humiliated.

The middle team tried to do somethingorother with a torture victim in a t-shirt and interrogators with scissors, which didn't seem to make a lot of sense, and the third team, led by Frank Lantz, came up with euphemisms for torture techniques (e.g., waterboarding is "water massage for relaxation and open information exchange"). The judges selected them as winners of the challenge.

All good fun, but a fairly incoherent experiment, IMO.

Following was a tedious panel by industry suits on the subject of "Money and Meaning," which, as is typical for panels by industry suits, tended toward the anodyne and upbeat. Sort of "money comes from lots of places! It's all good! All is for the best in this best of all possible worlds!" You know the drill.

The last bit of the day was an "expo" at which a slew of social action games were displayed, some of which I'll be reviewing over the next week or two. At the same time, attendees played a conference game called "Card Sharp," designed by Karen and Eric Z, which involved asking questions of people, collecting business cards for those who answered positively, and putting stickers on the back. By this time, I was on my bike downtown to pick up Simona, however.

On Friday, I didn't clock in until after noon, at which point Frank Lantz and Karen were talking about non-game but game-like stuff of interest and potential starting points for advocacy games (including, oddly enough, 4Chan and the fiction of Terry Pratchett). Following them was Lucy Bradshaw of Maxis, once the industry's most creative studio and now a mechanism for EA to exploit and extend three of its brands, who said obvious things (gamers aren't geeks anymore! games have something to do with play! etc.) at great and upbeat length, which was for me enormously tedious but may have had some utility for the bulk of the audience.

While I was not there, the Knight News Game Award was given to Play the News (more of a prediction market than an actual game, but developed by Impact Games of Peacemaker fame). A "lifetime achievement award" was granted to Gonzalo Frasca's September 12th. Honorable mentions to Tempest in Crescent City and Budget Maze.

This book, to which I contributed a chapter (on Europa Universalis), is now out; the editor is Drew Davidson of Carnegie Mellon.

"What makes a game good? or bad? or better?

"Video games can be 'well played' in two senses. On the one hand, well played is to games as well read is to books. On the other hand, well played as in well done.

"This book is full of in-depth close readings of video games that parse out the various meanings to be found in the experience of playing a game. 22 contributors (developers, scholars, reviewers and bloggers) look at video games through both senses of 'well played.'

"The goal is to help develop and define a literacy of games as well as a sense of their value as an experience. Video games are a complex medium that merits careful interpretation and insightful analysis."

More about the book.

You can read it:

• on the Web
• As a free plain text download; or
• By buying a print copy

I've made a minor change to game suggestions that I hope will make them more useful. The default list is now by creation date, so the most recent suggestions are listed first (rather than, as before "In Progress" ones followed by "Published" then "Suggested" then "Won't Do".) So you can more easily see what's been suggested recently. They're still sortable by status, and title, and so on, of course (click the relevant column headers).

If you're interested in attending the Games for Change conference this year, they've very kindly offered a 10% discount to Play This Thing! readers.

Register here, and use the discount code "125489PTT".

It's May 27th through 29th, in New York at the Parsons School of Design in Greenwich Village.

Speakers include Ian Bogost, N'Gai Croal, Mary Flanagan, Tracy Fullerton, James Paul Gee, Henry Jenkins, Nicholas Kristof, Seth Schiesel, Kurt Squire, Alain Tascan, and Eric Zimmerman.

For our coverage of last year's event, which was excellent, see here and here.

...My new favorite web comic.

Once in a while, I sometimes doubt my dour and despairing view of the game industry. Perhaps I'm just a depressive. Perhaps our cheerleaders are right, and perhaps everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. Dollar gross rises year by year, the fastest growing entertainment medium in all creation, yada yada yada.

GameLab shut doors the other day. Zimmerman says it's not dead yet, but I'm reminded of the parrot sketch. They sold off office supplies and fixtures -- Karen went down and snagged their stock of card games (someone had already snagged the boardgames, darn it). Multiple IGF nominations, Eric is a major fixture in the field, their game Diner Dash made PlayFirst's fortune, but of course not GameLab's, since developers are required to sign away rights to IP in this best of all possible worlds.

Today, Dean Takahashi is reporting that 3D Realms is out of business. Confusingly, Apogee claims to be still in business, and still working on the next Duke Nuke'm game -- I thought Apogee was the name 3D Realms used before it became 3D Realms, but who knows what the actual status is. No wonder Scott Miller hasn't blogged in almost a year.

Meanwhile, Big Huge Games is still being shut down by THQ, and although there was a flurry of news about possible purchasers a while ago, nothing yet has been announced. THQ are, of course, blinkered idiots, and are presumably shutting down the studio on the grounds that it's "mostly PC" (Rise of Nations being RTS, and RTS not working worth a damn on console) and conventional wisdom being that PC sucks, console is now and forever shall be the one true faith. Never mind that they have a Ken Rolston-led RPG under development (Xbox title, I assume), which, you know, might sell a few copies. Oblivion and all. But "bankable talent" somehow isn't a concept that's caught on in our industry, despite its ongoing and unattractive Hollywood envy.

I have this idea in the back of my head -- a fool idea of course -- that one day, people with the power to do something about it might stumble across the notion of "a stable business ecosystem," and conclude that actually, to sustain industry growth and survival, you might conceivably, you know, want to let developers potentially make a buck from time to time, even if publishers and retailers have the power to strangle them. That rewarding development success breeds more development success, and gives heart to those who want to create good games.

Silly notion, of course. Developers have little to no bargaining power, since they depend on publishers for funding, access to market, and every critical success factor other than, you know, actual game quality. And surely that matters less than bankable IP. So why deal them in for a dollar more than absolutely necessary?

I have a perhaps naive view of our readers, and it's something like this: You love games. You sometimes despair at the conventional game market. You look to the fringes -- to indie games, to tabletop, to serious games and game for change, to anything outside of the industry mainstream -- to try to recapture the sense of wonder and bliss that games once wrought in you.

In other words, there is hardly an audience more "indie" than ours.

But are we to make of such as this?

The old punk* in me says: Right on, yer!

But only for about two seconds.

What this video is suggesting is that indie, as it connects to games, has something to do with, if you will, the punk aesthetic. The punk aesthetic is relentlessly anti-intellectual. It evolved in response to the pretension of groups like ELO, and prized the famous "three chords" of the Ramones. Stripping things down to the essentials produced kick-ass rock and roll. Fuck pretension.

And here I am: the advocate of pretension.

Just a couple of glancing points: The Ramones themselves proved remarkably articulate and intelligent. And the punk revolution was equally fuelled by art-house poseurs, like the Talking Heads, who treated the anti-intellectual pose ironically.

"Fuck you if you're not indie?" Well, yes. But no cross-cut against the jaw, surely. If you are a gamer, you've already made an important step: you understand the cultural and phenomenological importance of the game as the most vital modern medium. If you are not yet "indie," then, well, you have not yet grasped the intellectual and creative bankruptcy of the conventional retail form -- but you can be saved.

We will not sock you across the jaw.

Instead, we will seek to reason with you. Or, we might patronize you a bit, or mock your tastes, but violence really isn't an option. Except in boss battles, of course.

Really, what do that makers of this video think is "indie?" And are they really indie themselves, or are they simply mocking us?

It's kind of cool that a meme like this it out there at all; nothing like it existed, say, three years ago. A threnody of hipness, a note of confident self-justification, self-righteous rage at the smarmy self-satisfaction of conventional games: Good! 'Ere we go, 'ere we go, 'ere we go!

But really. The East Village, 1973, is not gaming in 2008. And Jonathan Blow, say, is not Joey Ramone, despite a certain similarity in Brechtian cool.

I, for one, promise never to slug you for failing to be indie.

*I refer to myself as an "old punk" above. I base this on the fact that in, say, 1973, I was within two blocks of CBGBs, where the Ramones first played. This is a total load of bollocks. I was within two blocks of CBGBs, because I was at a long-departed NYC institution known as "The Battleground."

Where I was playing D&D.

"Old geek" might be a better categorization. But of course, that depends on whether you think it would be cooler, in 1973, to hear the Ramones, or play D&D. Brown box edition. At the very inception of the revolution.

And where you come down on that divide may well say something about what "indie" means in our context.

I just spent four unannounced days incommunicado -- and thanks greatly to Patrick to picking up the slack here while I was gone. My sweetie has a house in Woodstock; she's rented it out for several years, but the tenants recently left. She's also been paying several hundred dollars a month to store stuff pulled out of her parents' house -- her mom died a few years ago.