Erik Bethke and The World of GoPets

Make a real spaceship for $500 and have the pictures to prove it

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 21:48:24 GMT

This is really one of the most amazing things I have ever seen on the web...

Here is a guy that took a simply retail Canon PowerShot digital camera, a weather balloon and a bucket of wires and reached 30,000m or 100,000 feet.

All of this for about $500 of parts.

I just get chills thinking of what we are capable of - and I get anxious for us to get to space NOW.

Let's raise the tax on gasoline to $6 a gallon, get off of oil, fix the grid, install efficient appliances, eat locally grown food and use the surplus energy and resources to get off Earth, go to Mars and the asteroids!

Ad astra!

-Erik

3 Great Games - DefenseGrid, Age of Booty and Schizoid

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 23:34:48 GMT

So now that I have been back in the states for a few months I have had some time to play some XBLA games. There are a ton of great games out there. However, I have the great fortune to be friends with the guys that have created the 3 games that I have played and enjoyed the most on XBLA!

DefenseGrid by Hidden Path Entertainment in Seattle

Age of Booty by Certain Affinity in Austin

and Schizoid by Torpex also of Seattle

DefenseGrid and Age of Booty are also available on PC via Steam and other digital distribution methods, Schizoid is alas Xbox only.

If you like or even kinda like tower defense games, DefenseGrid rocks.

If you even sort liked Settlers of Catan then how could you deny a game inspired by those mechanics but includes cannons and pirate ships! My 7-year old Kyle and I played one Saturday for 10 hours straight.

And Torpex is a visual explosion that is simply a kick ass game to play in coop!

defensegrid.hiddenpath.com/

www.certainaffinity.com/ageofbooty/

www.torpexgames.com/index.php

-Erik

Server Virtualization saved us 90% off our total hosting costs

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 00:28:28 GMT

We have been able to cut our hosting costs of GoPets by 90%. In these times

I thought I should share how we did this? In short we got a lot of help and used VMware...

Chris Bradfield (chris at scribe dot net) started the project and identified ZeroLag http://www.zerolag.com/ as our new hosting partner and Michael Bell (mbell0218 at gmail) as our consultant to perform the VMWare integration

Greg Strelzoff is the CEO of ZeroLag and I have to say he has been a great partner, he has repeatedly found ways to help us reduce costs as well as freely helped connect us with other companies who we might be able to do some partnerships with

We were able to successfully virtualize 35 services that previously required the same amount of physical hardware into six VMware hosts running the Linux kernel with VMware server on each. The combination of ease of management, resource utilization, and ultimately MRC savings speaks well of the concept of virtualization. The additional benefits of moving to this model were clearly recognized when increased traffic levels required additional web services, which were built, tested and deployed within days instead of weeks. The reduction of physical servers also allowed savings in rack space and power usage.

I really cannot say enough good things about Michael Bell and ZeroLag. They have been fun and friendly to work with even coming over onsight to help us with the integration, and again I must stress saving 90% off of your fixed recurring costs has been a tremendous savings.

Boing boing said our RMT talk was creepy!

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 06:03:06 GMT

Hey how cool is it when Cory Doctorow says your talk is ... creepy at GDC?

www.boingboing.net/2009/03/24/real-money-trading-g.html

It generated some good comment flow over there. Much of it the normal gut reaction against RMT or item-based business models, that is common in the game design community and the digerati - but not so much in the actual players of online games.

Ironically, they way that you find out f you are providing value to players is when the value present is strong enough to actually support a secondary market. Free to play, item-based and RMT design in particular forces the designer to work the hardest to create system designs that work cleanly and solidly across all the major vectors: social, gameplay, simulation, monetization and markerting models.

Earlier this month virtual goods news carried a much more in-depth interview on the work LiveGamer and GoPets have done to integrate their RMT and auction system into GoPets:
www.virtualgoodsnews.com/2009/03/live-gamer-and-gopets-on-the-importance-of-training-users-for-marketplaces.html

Massively did a really nice long review of our talk:
www.massively.com/2009/03/28/gdc09-applied-rmt-design-with-gopets-and-live-gamer/
It looks like they really went to town in checking out our wiki and found lots of the cool limited edition huggable kitties that we have to illustrate the article.

Gamasutra also made a transcript:
www.gamasutra.com/blogs/OlivierLejade/20090326/997/GDC_09_Applied_RMT_Design.php
I still get goosebumps when I think that gamasutra picked the AGC 2007 panel on RMT where I debated Marc Jacobs with Raph Koster and we go into Gamasutra's Best of 2007: Top 5 Most Significant Moments in MMOs!
www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16758

Just a quick notice at Lightspeed - but I will plug the blog anyways because it is a cool blog:
lsvp.wordpress.com/2009/03/28/erik-bethke-on-game-balance-in-free-to-play-games/

-Erik

Illegal company manifesto over at T=Machine

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 08:47:25 GMT

http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/02/manifesto-for-a-game-development-studio-or-any-creative-tech-company/#comments

I failed in the security certificate process at T=Machine, so I will post my comment here to Adam's very thoughtful piece on how he will design his next game company...

Adam,

Great post, great ideas here.

But you are breaking the law...

The amazing thing is what you have designed here with the manifesto is actually illegal in the United States. I am not sure about Europe's interpretation of corporate laws (I suspect they are very similar to US at their root).

Let me explain why it is illegal - Dodge vs. Ford

This Supreme Court case established that the only purpose of a company is to produce profits for the shareholders. Any acts of good that benefit employees, management, customers or the community MUST Be by-products of making even more money for the shareholders.

All corporate charity is at its core a marketing & PR program.

The Google 20% was established to enhance the profitability of the company.

Your manifesto was actually LEGAL until you responded to Osma. The manifesto itself you would have to argue will result in better, faster, cheaper products that will decrease costs, or increase revenue or both for the shareholders.

However, you screwed up by saying that you don't care about the sustainability (and even more important) the profitability of your company and that you hold your values to be more important than the shareholder's interests.

So, going forward with a very straight face, say earnestly that the manifesto will create a ferociously competitive engine for shareholder wealth due to the superior organizational structure.

Of course, you do not have a company yet, or even profits that a minority shareholder could sue over yet. But conceivably if an employee was a shareholder they could bring a suit to the directors and charge that they have failed their fiduciary duty by not running the company in the shareholder's interests. As a result their property rights have been damaged etc...

While this main seem esoteric, it does explain the gut, blink reaction that investors would shy away from your manifesto and back someone who says she will squeeze the most value out of their teams.

At the end of the day, like anything this is a marketing problem. You need to find someone with the cash to fund the company who believes that they will make more money by sharing this manifesto.

I agree with the general step back and ask what are we really trying to accomplish? My ideal would be that everyone is free to work as few or as many hours that they want. And that their pay would be directly proportional to the value added to the project... Working 80 hours a week and coming up with crap is crap. Working 1 hour per week and yet getting Walmart to pre-order a million copies of your packaged $19 client is quite a bit of value for an hour.

So it is a game design problem - how to measure the value of work? How to transparently report that? How to empower the team itself to iterate, find their own process flaws and rapidly increase value? As part-owners the employees should then be naturally driven to be aligned with the shareholder...

-Erik

Stop killing trees to wipe your butt

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 06:46:08 GMT

Okay so we really do not need fluffy toilet paper:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,502444,00.html

So where to get eco-friendly paper?
http://www.letsgogreen.biz/pages/paper.html

I have almost gone down to 0% use of disposable plastic cups now - I just carry around a big refillable plastic thermos...

But check out these pseudo plastic cups made from corn-has anyone tried these?
http://letsgogreen.biz/pages/utensils/cupsmain.html

-Erik

Coolest Geek Week!

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 06:38:26 GMT

Okay so I had an extremely cool week - and all of it in Seattle...

First off I got to hang out with my friends at Hidden Path Entertainment, and especially cool is Mark Terrano's Tiny House. Every time I stay there it is amazingly comfortable and I sleep so well. It always makes me think about how to get smaller in footprint.

Next off, i got to meet Jordan Weisman the creator of FASA (Shadowrun, MechWarrior, etc)... got him to sign my first and third edition Shadowrun pen and paper RPG books that I have been carrying with me from place to place since 1989! Oh crap that is 20 years now. Anyways Jordan is a very cool and creative guy and is up to creating some very neat new products and I had to chance to see what he is up to.

Magic the Gathering. Seiously, I am so lucky that I finished college before this game came out. If I was still in school I would have filled out every student loan application I could grab a hold of and buy massive amounts of booster packs. As it was I think I spent about $4k out of my first $24k a year game job buying magic cards. So I got to meet Richard Garfield at the DICE convention in Las Vegas, and then as a follow-up meet him again in Seattle.

There I got to go to his home (a castle as if it was designed by a hyper modern Scandanavian) that inlcudes geothermal electrical power generation. His brilliantly active and funny home-schooled kids demanded a house visitation tax. So I handed them some very nice hotel soap that I couldn't leave behind from one of the countless trips that I take.

Their son demanded that I play him a game a magic. I carefully selected my favorite Thallid deck (a mono-green deck that involves scores of counters of fungus creation). The son's deck? A random collection of 300 cards that included many rare alphas and betas signed by his Dad and many other early MTG founders and artists. Well, lets just say that the boy came learn respect for the lowly Saproling.

After that we played a variety of board games, Richard like many of us is a local hub for a weekly game night that turned out to be super cool for all involved. Especially fun was the game of Werewolf. Later we played St. Petersberg and that was cool but Richard showed off way too much his superior PhD skills...

At the end of the night i got to play Richard 1v1 MTG. He gleefully ran downstairs and came up with his own totally hand-written deck. It was super cool. It was an agnostic deck that had a touch of blue but other than that it was like an alien creature. It had crads like The Exchange Student, 1 blue and 3 colorless sorcery, when brought into play exchange for a creature of your opponents. The old Switcheroo, takes a card at random from your opponent and switch with this one. I played a mono-black deck but I took 20 points of damage by the time I could deal just 6 to him - from no creature damage, simply tool cards that caused me damage from the number of HIS cards that I had in my hand or in play!!!

But the coolest part is after I asked him to sign 5 basic lands - he ran downstairs again and came back up with another hand-written card - a Secret Achievement - I accomplished by asking for the signing of the 5 basic lands - very cool huh?

-Erik

DICE 2009

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 06:53:31 GMT

DICE 2009

The DICE Conference was a good one for me this year. It was truly great after 5 years in Korea to be back living here in LA again and catching up with so many people that I have not seen for years. I also got a chance to meet a lot of cool people for the first time. I met Richard Garfield of MTG fame, and I am looking forward to having a chance to play some games with him in Seattle this week.

When playing in the poker tournament was very cool to be seated between Greg Zeschuk of Bioware and Mike Mohraine of Blizzard. Greg and I chatted affably and I enjoyed hearing what are the things that Greg is thinking about lately (it has been over 5 years since he co-edited my book on game development), Mike on the other hand had to suffer my fan boy shock of sitting next to him and I think he had decided a while ago he just did not need to add any more friends.

I had time to sit in only three of the sessions: Gabe Newell from Valve discussed Steam and service; John Ricatello talking about EA and Bruce Shelley’s post mortem on Ensemble.

Easily the more interesting talk was Gabe’s talk on steam. He broke ranks with the normal executive approach and showed actual numbers behind their sales and promotions. He had a chart that declared on average a game with a 25% discount would generate about 250% more sales volume, a game with 10% discount something like a 35% increase in sales volume and a game that has a 75% discount has shown on Steam a whopping 1500% increase in total dollar volume!

I was a bit surprised that when I asked if the increase in new users

Even more exciting is that after the sale is over the new floor on the sales of the game stays up at about 2x-3x what it was before the sale. We ended up “having to do” a sale at GoPets for about a week in GoPets and saw a great spike of sales and after the event we have seen a steady 2x on sales. So it was very interesting to see the same sort of numbers happening at Steam. The reason why we “had to do a sale” will be a full blog post in a follow up article.

Ricatello’s is getting grief in some blogs for his frank discussion of “junk” but I think he did an okay job. It was yawn boring to me. It was not inspirational, it was not really edgy, it was just corporate. That is the problem when you are at that level, it is very hard to think of something that would have given true value to the audience and worth listening too without having non-trivial possibilities of causing the stock to jitter.

Bruce Shelley’s post-mortem was moving, for not only is a he a great game designer and a great guy – he was also one of our first angel investors in GoPets so I have come to know him over time. He is truly one of the most thoughtful and decent of the people in our industry and there are so many good people here.

He talked about what they did right and there were no big surprises there – build a great place to work, hire great people, and then make great games – and kill the merely good games (and bad!) But getting on to why did Microsoft shut them down you could see real emotion from Bruce. Despite his words he still could not believe that a studio that developed more than $600m of revenue for Microsoft would be shut down. If you assume that from 2001 to 2009 they had an average of 70 staff and if you assumed fully burdened they cost of each head was $25k per month (huge gross MS overhead amounts) at worst, worst case they consumed $170m of that $600m, with retail taking 33% there leaves a clear $230m. A quarter of a billion dollars of free cash flow added back to MS. Enough to pay for at least 6 weeks of Xbox 360 hardware cost overruns (read with dry humor) why would they not keep these guys?

In the end, Bruce shared his belief that fundamentally it was because Ensemble got relaxed – a sense of entitlement – no need to prove themselves again to Redmond after delivering the cash. But as new management came into Redmond – they should have taken the time out to “You. Me. Drink. We Friends” as my friend Won Il Su would advise on just about any business situation.

There were second order issues like having probably too many extra heads after cancelling projects, or an unnecessary new building but none of that would have counted if there was a solid line of communication back in Redmond. So Ensemble was shut down and the free cash flow of at least $30m a year erased off of the P&L books to save some managers the air miles down to Dallas.

Of course it seems like a colossal error by the new Don Mattrick led management team, but instead I see it that business is done in the Asian manner everywhere. Contracts do not matter, even profits do not matter – people will pay you and do business with you only if they really want to. Communicating with other people and other entities is phenomenally expensive in overhead of time, flying, wear and tear. In these tougher times, besides all of the thoughts of trimming costs – all of us geeks have to work a bit harder on our network maintenance…

PS:
*cough* I think that means more blogging on my part…

Thank you so much for the kind words Jussi!

Way too long since I have posted

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 04:14:01 GMT

It has been a long, long time since I have posted...

So many changes in life... here are a few updates:

OBAMA!

I loved the sour look on W's face as he watched true greatness sweep him aside onto the pile of bitter ashes of history.

So after 5 years living in Seoul Korea - I am back!

Thank you Obama for accepting the challenge of leading us back from the darkness...

Switching gears....

The ShamWoW sales guy Vince is one of my new life heros:
http://skepchick.org/blog/?p=5490

I was already convined about the towels, Kyle and I nod at each other every time he pitches the towels, and I have been thinking he is much better at selling paper towels than I will ever be selling anything. On top of that he if fighting the good fight of attacking the Church of Scientologists!

Adam martin over at T=Machine has just written a very valuable post on Tabula Rasa - it is a must read - he should be making money off of every read:

http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/01/16/we-need-to-talk-about-tabula-rasa-when-will-we-talk-about-tabula-rasa/

He raises so many important issues, but the biggest central issue is why do we not talk about the failures of our games? He gives many solid reasons, I agree with all of them. One of the most crazy things about our industry is how game development teams usually make between 2 to 10 different games at the same time and passively aggressively refuse to work together.

With the Warm and Fuzzy team here in Los Angeles (great to be back home) and with collaboration with Neowiz Games we have created and released a very solid puzzle game that has been a big hit with anyone I know that has played it! It is a mystery and puzzle game with jogsaw puzzles, find the differences, hidden objects and all together 100 different puzzles with 7 chapters (first chapter is free $20 for the full game)


www.puzzlesmash.com/BookOfSecrets/purchase

Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 09:17:28 GMT

Hey!

I have a new book out... this time I had a LOT of help! Erin Hoffman did the heavy lifting on the editing and book design, and together we pulled in 15 great contributors! Check out the list below...

Who wants to be the first to get a review up on Amazon??? ^^

But, seriously... this compilations of essays discusses in depth the state of thinking on how we manage this awkward transitional period of virtual property and human rights in our online worlds.

Today's users of virtual environments -- estimated to number 50 million by 2011 -- invest huge amounts of time, money, and heart into their online homes. But modern license agreements do not accord them any ownership over this investment. This book explores the complex relationships between virtual world inhabitants, creators, worlds, and the real-world law that now is closing in to mediate between them.

Joining editors Erik Bethke and Erin Hoffman are contributors:

Julian Dibbell
Bill Fulton
Laura Genender
Andres Guadamuz
Link Hughes
Sean F. Kane
Raph Koster
Heather and Susan Logas
Pétur Jóhannes Óskarsson
Russ Pitts
Cat Rambo
Chris Rettstatt
Ren Reynolds
and Allen Varney.

Settlers of the New Virtual Worlds

Great event & post by a player who left WoW

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 04:59:46 GMT

A very thoughtful post...
http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/08/05/15-minutes-of-fame-retiring-player-goes-out-with-a-boom/

Full story here:
http://www.twentytotems.com/

-Erik

Wow, this is the coolest game I have seen in a long time!

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 05:52:59 GMT

This one from Lance:

This rocks!

Great great idea for play liquidity...
-Erik

Decent interview with Rob Pardo

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 04:22:38 GMT

Here is a fairly good interview with Rob Pardo. I thought what was especially interesting is the practical discussion of partioal group consensus driven design. I think that is how most of the more functional groups work, but since it seems so sloppy I don't think we like to talk about it much! But hey, now that its out in the open with Pardo, Blizzard and WoW, it must be okay for us to come out of the closet now!?

Cheers,
-Erik

Fly like a Dolphin

Wed, 30 Jul 2008 04:18:31 GMT

Link from my Dad... check out this crazy new personal sub!

You can buy one here:

Cheers,
-Erik

Sweet, sweet victory

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 17:16:46 GMT

So I won a federal suit in the 9th circuit. Nice.

www.gopets.com

4 years.

I'll post some select delicious bits from the final judgment over time...

But what I really want to say is thank you Michael Firestein and Tanya Forsheit and the rest of the team at Proskauer Rose.

So many delicious parts, but the best moments came in my deposition actually!

"We'll take it to the supreme court if necessary", declares Sturgeon (Hise's lawyer).

"...oh yeah? Well I have argued twice at the Supreme Court.", full and total smackdown from Tanya.

Many, many cheers
-Erik

P.S. Winning a long battle tastes so good!

WoW UI Extensibility as a Required Feature

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 06:08:54 GMT

This is probably an old and tired topic to many people. But I still think that WoW API for both the client and the web functions is a giant step forward. Think about the humility of Blizzard. Basically they said we are not sure if our UI is the best, or even the best for you. So we will ship to you our best efforts that we have created in house, but we will also ship to you an API so that you could customize your own.

The result of this of course is a great number of fantastic mods like Auctioneer that have dramatically changed how the game itself is played. Here is a typical review of a user of what UIs do they use and do not use:

The result of this UI mod activity is innumerable variations. The WoW UI itself is a long-tail marketing phenomena:

Various WoW screenshots:

http://konni.evil-geni.us/wow/UI.png

http://tweakers.net/~kees/wow/ui.png

http://hem.bredband.net/tetsubo/wow/wow-ui-1.jpg

http://www.clockwork-epoch.com/gallery/wow_ui_02.jpg

http://i185.photobucket.com/albums/x143/Justanotherdruid/wowUI.jpg

So the question I ask myself now when thinking about online game design is what did Blizzard do in WoW? I think about Burning Crusade vs. the original Azeroth. I think about the upcoming Lich King. When looking at Age of Conan, or Huxley why did they do X, and is it better than WoW?

Being different from WoW is not very interesting to me. I think you should simply copy WoW or improve on it. Why? Because WoW itself simply copied from everyone else before or improved on it. In short WoW currently represents the best sum-total of humanity’s development of MMORPGs.

So is the WoW UI API the best? Why not simply copy it? It has been used and extended by more game modders than for any other MMORPG, and probably second or third only behind the great FPS mod communities in overall development efforts by mods

http://www.wowwiki.com/World_of_Warcraft_API

When you are creating your own UI for your new game; why not just simply start with all of these functions as stubs for a LUA/XML system? Why not?

What game does not need some random numbers between low and high?

RandomRoll(low, high) - Does a random roll between the two values.

Determining if something is PvP or not always seems useful to me…

UnitIsPVP("unit") - Returns true if the specified unit is flagged for PVP, false otherwise.

WoW even has a separate API for just making the UI controls called its widget API:

http://www.wowwiki.com/Widget_API

1) In Review:

1) You have to have a UI for your game.
2)      You have to have some programmers code it for you
3)      The first (100) iterations of the UI will suck, and your programmers will get tired of re-making UI for your design team
4)      Why not make an API to start with so you can rapidly iterate until you have what seems shippable?
5)   Different people have different needs and tastes from their UI...
6)      Why not expose it to the community to get even better mods?
7)      Why not think less and just copy the WoW API and just fine-tune to taste?

-Erik

PS. and just as an afterthought with 10 million players used to these slash commands, why not implement them as-is?

http://www.wowwiki.com/UI_beginner%27s_guide

Video Game Academia

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:09:45 GMT

My Dad sent me this link:

http://www.utexas.edu/news/2008/07/17/information_digital/

Last fall I was at the Garriott event to raise money for the UT video game archives, and now these two grants...

It would be really cool if we had giant wikis of game development design notes, sketches, production schedules and stuff from real live games - that would be very cool.

How does it work? Give them boxes of paper & the students sort it out? How do we do this in a world of negative time balances?

I would love to see the original production milestone plans for SWG, or WoW...

Cheers,
-Erik

Sam Lewis's 2006 GDC Talk on Player to Player Sales

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 05:04:55 GMT

Erin Hoffman pointed me at Sam Lewis's write up from 2006:

http://www.flyingscythemonkey.com/GDC_2006.htm

I was struck by how relevent that talk was then, and frankly still is now.

Great work Sam. Sam himself has a cool career I guess the part that I find most interesting is as the president of Fasa way back in the days of Shadowrun! Right on!

-Erik

Why I am happy that I have had food poisoning for the last 4 days?

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 17:11:45 GMT

So yesterday I felt like crap. That was because on top of running around doing just a *few* jobs, I had lets just say gastrointestinal technical difficulties for the previous 3 days.

Last night I could not sleep. Second night of fevers and headaches, and so I dragged myself to a local doctor. He charged me $3.50 to tell me that I had better get to the emergency room with my unexplained fevers.

So I get to the emergency room; hand them the old doctors scribble of unexplained fevers, and in just moments I have a whole crew of doctors around me.

That surprised me for there was a guy missing most of his lower jaw that was being worked on by just a couple of guys. And a lady holding up a cutoff finger who was looking more than a bit irritated that she did not warrant more than one person minding her.

My stomach was super queezy and killing me, my headache was pissing me off, and it was pretty damn hot in Seoul yesterday. So what I really wanted is some stomach medicine - quick.

Instead, they were bending my neck around, lifting my knees to my chest, and asking me many questions about the headache.

Next thing the lead guy of the crew told me is that there is an epidemic of meningitis going around Seoul. He asked me if I knew what meningitis was all about. I said no, I did not want to know. He shrugged that off and continued to inform me that, there used to be 1 per month, then 1 per week and now they were seeing 1 per day there at the emergency room. And that if it was not diagnosed and treated my head could swell up and I would die sometime apparently quick.

He tells me he needs my blood and urine - no problem. A chest x-ray and a brain CT scan! Okay all that sounds crazy but cool sure.

But then he says he needs to put a needle in my back and drain some spinal fluid. Okay that's it. Needle into my spine. F that I feel.

I hit my quota for bullshit for the day. I told the doctor in my broken but very serious Korean, that if he wants to stick a needle in my back he is first going to have to get some drugs into me first to bring me back down from wanting to destroy him.

Being Korean he jumps on the task and readily agrees to drug me up. So he sends over this new guy to put this huge freaking needle in my arm.

I have no problem with needles, blood or any of that. I could tell you other stories. But this needle did not look like a needle for humans. It seemed like it was 3/16ths of an inch thick, I must be exaggerating, maybe it just a fat 1/16th going on an 1/8th. But it was fat, with a solid dark maw that I could see into.

This guy clearly would rather be anywhere than to be putting that needle into my arm. He tied me up with the rubber tubing and spent at least a solid 6 minutes thinking about my veins. Then he squatted down, put his shoulder into it and started digging in. Now even though it was going to be a big hole, I was cool with this because I had a bag of narcotics waiting on the other side of this hole digging deal.

What started to piss me off more is his lack of confidence in the direction that my vein traveled in. I could tell as he kept pulling the needle back and then pushing in again at 10-15 degree rotations. After a bunch of whimpering and yelping and one large fat tear on my part, he decides to abandon that hole and go on to make 3 more in different locations on both arms.

After a while he and I agree that we both need someone else digging holes in my arm. So he calls in a nurse. She takes in my bloody arms in one glance, tells me to lie down, and then she just slides that big needle in - and I swear I almost do not feel it.

She is my new best friend. I tell her so in Korean. She smiles. It is all cool now.

The drugs are rolling in.

I am feeling fine now... so I lay over. And now comes a nice happy nap.

Excellent.

...an hour or two later...

Chest x-ray no problem, urine cool (well actually warm), brain CT first one ever - strange taste in the mouth, but with the drugs very relaxing actually. I like the spinning magnets.

So then later comes the neurologist. She tells me that it is very unlikely that I have meningitis because I am coming back together so quickly. Nice.

My wife is there and she wants the needle in the spine just to be sure. Not Nice.

Whenever my wife is not looking, the neurologist is shaking her head no but saying, it is my choice. Reminds me of the time in vegas when I kept asking for a hit holding a 16 vs. a dealer 9, and after 5 times asking for the hit he pealed up the corner of the top card showing me a hand busting face card.

I went home.

I was so happy it was just 4 days of food poisoning!

-Erik

29 Business Models for Games

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:57:07 GMT

Jeremy Liew at LighSpeed has a great blog on the game & social media business... but here he has a nice tight taxonomy of game business models from David Perry... nicely done.

http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2008/07/02/29-business-models-for-games/

-Erik

Riding out the Bush Presidency in Korea

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:21:26 GMT

This cool onion video explains the #2 reason that I moved to Korea!

Now that this disaster will pass in January I can begin to think again about the net benefit of Mexican food, beaches and nice weather in California!

Cheers!
-Erik

Big Worlds Kill

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:40:58 GMT

I have been doing a ton of thinking lately. Well I would like to think, that I think most often, so that first sentence is a bit lame. Instead I should say, tt is hard for me to explore what I want to say on a public forum, but I do feel a calling to explore the academic side of what we do for a living.

Game projects are almost always late and over budget and most of them have problems with design specifications, mis management, over ambitious goals, or under capitalization. It is a problem that I have written about in my book game development and production. It is a problem that I have wrestled with at Taldren and at GoPets.

It is a problem across the whole industry. It is so pervasive that it is somewhat accepted. I know giant publishers with great piles of cash with great people that have projects that are dead walking and everyone knows it.

I think there is something in our blood. The people who yearn to create whole worlds out of nothing. There is something about us that drives us to reach deep, far, high and into the unknown and try to make something wonderous and magical that no one has ever seen before. We want to make great beautiful places for people to live in. Online game projects take all of the problems of regular off line game projects and take it to a whole new level of scary.

Without this energy and passion these worlds will never exist - never can exist. But it is this same boundless energy and passion that causes these worlds to be so often plagued by wounds of execution that are often irreparable.

How can we simultaneously have the drive to create a new world and make it small?

I want to make the smallest online cooking game! How?

How can we develop the desire for small?

It seems to be so against our nature... we want huge houses, huge pickup trucks (at least until last year), we want huge aircraft carriers, big freaking swords, bad us super fortresses.

If big kills us, why can't we start loving small?

-Erik

5 weeks later - banning lifted

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 05:30:18 GMT

After waiting 5 weeks and multiple faxings of identity cards Blizzard has un-banned my wife's account on the US servers.

They never did explain what it was in the first place that caused the ban - even with the dire last and final warning never to do *that* again. Whatever that is.

With the un-banning email, they just told her to keep her password safer and used the form letter as if her account had been hacked.

She of course is thrilled and everything is basically good. The point of all of this is that the automated software robots that look for behavior that is contrary to the essence of the game:
1) failed to notice our activity when we did it on the Korean servers
2) erroneously picked up on something on the us servers

Since Blizzard executes far better than anyone else in general in the fields of MMOs. It really begs the question how can it be done better?

My wife has been banned from WoW...

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 15:28:58 GMT

So as I have blogged here before we as a family play a bunch of WoW. We have leveled up our fair share of characters (my wife more than me!) We have bought gold, we have bought characters, we have even paid for power leveling. Heck, I even bought some gold for some Blizzard Korea employees that were afraid to buy their own!

But a few months ago we started off absolutely fresh on a US server with some friends where we had no upper level toons to help out, and it was actually very cool to earn gold from scratch again. Even simple things like an 10-slot bag was cool as a drop.

The days pass by and soon enough my wife has finally finished doing the tortuous quests involved in getting her epic mount. It took until she was 61 to find some people to help with all the segments of the quests.

The very next morning she woke up and wanted to ride that fiery horse only to find out that her account has been banned. After she wrote to blizzard they returned the terse reply that he has been given her last warning and was given a 72 hour ban.

She was devasted, she wracked her mind to think of what she could have done. There was a PuG from teh night before that went AFK and she kicked them from the party in a dungeon run. And there was also a moment when she was helping another friend with her mage and there was 2 rapid logins and logouts.

She could not figure it out, but anyways 72 hours later the ban was lifted - for just 18 hours. Then she has now since been re-banned. We still do not know the cause or the issue that triggered it. To help resolve the matter Blizzard has demanded a fax of her photo ID.

So it is outrageous to me that they arbitrarily ban at will and NOT even tell you what you did. But on TOP of that, they do not even get you WHEN you do do things that is against the "essence" of play.

I admire WoW deeply and study it carefully. But on the Customer Service side they do not even come close to acceptable. I finally got a hold of a live GM and he said there was absolutely nothing he could do and told us to simply wait.

After searching around on the net it turns out some people have waited as long as 1 to 2 months to hear a reply. We are now coming up on 3 weeks.

This is obviously an opportunity to plug Better EULA: www.bettereula.com

-Erik

Best Wingsuit Video Ever!

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:17:36 GMT

So lately I have been obsessed with watching wingsuit videos on YouTube.

Below is the coolest one ever, check out how close Espin comes to the rock walls and the road at one point.

We really can fly.

-Erik