the99th's blog

Jesse Schell has gotten a lot of attention lately for his snake-handling about extrinsic rewards devouring the surface of planet earth like so many nanomachines. However he took the opportunity at GDC, like so many controversial DICE speakers, to clear things up. He painted a very nice categorization of game designers, and being a game designer, I like to play with categorization schemes. According to Schell designers fall into 4 groups of intent:

I've ranted on about the dark-side of platforms, and elsewhere I may have ranted about the Federal Reserve, but you've got to admit that draconic control of the currency is better than feudalism and that even egregious or inconsistent policy on a mostly open platform is better than the retail game biz. Maybe things are getting better, win-win-win (not to be confused with its non-buzz-worthy little brother: win-win). Take for example platform competition in social games, where hi5 is trying to frame itself as the friendlier, less capital-intensive girlfriend developers have been looking for. You just have to win their approval first.

The terms of Apple's developer agreement were leaked in a manner which I'm sure resulted in at least one assasination and the smuggling of at least, by conservative estimates, several dozen Ukranian and Palestinian child slaves - such is the price of evoking the Freedom of Information Act.

In a nomenclature reminiscent of George Costanza´s fake charity, "The Human Fund (Money For People)", comes something genuinely good and authentic, the Indie Fund. The creators of some of the most commercially successful, independent games to rake in six-digit unit sales and six-to-seven-digit revenues on console-downloadable platforms (with PC sales often making up a large minority) have banded together and pooled funding in an ostensibly for-profit venture capital fund for independent games. Like a traditional publisher, they will give people cash to spend while developing games, and will benefit from a share of the net revenues on said games, but unlike a publisher they´ll refrain from owning the resulting intellectual property and from holding veto power over creative decisions.

Here's a write-up if you want more technical details.

Apple is targeting 5000 - not 5, not 50, not 500: five fucking thousand - applications for removal from the iPhone's App Store due to "overtly sexual content". This is the developer equivalent of a pogrom set in the town from Footloose.

No picture, no review, just a link and a caution that a funny cartoon, as "spot on" as it may seem, is not an actual procedural criticism of a game - though to be fair neither is a text-based review. Here's Passage in 10 Seconds, and here's a sort of masturbatory juxtaposition that perhaps eclipses it in irony.

So Google slipped a feature that combines some of the nicer features of Facebook with the sole feature of Twitter into their Gmail experience, which has 150 million users. In some meta-referential twilight zone of accelerating time as experienced by half a billion pampered twenty-somethings with ADD, this constitutes earth-shattering news. So let's dig in.

When you watch this video I want you think substitute "cult leader" for "game designer", and "cult member" for "game player" - particularly in the context of online, free-to-play games.

Sorry for the paucity of precociously porous posts peoples, been busy writing copy for B2B and earning US dollars, loving the exchange rate. My good friend and spiritual advisor, Paul Eres, sends me interesting stuff over GTalk from time to time, and today he topped himself for all-time. I present you: a site dedicated to testimonials of WoW addicts. Some of this stuff makes you want to either puke or, the classic reaction to this kind of insanity, put your house on the market and flee to the Andes. The New WoW Order isn't coming, it's here.