Ten months and countless hours later, I’ve finished my book. There are still a round (or two?) of edits to be made, but the bulk of the writing is finished. It’ll be in stores in October. I’m looking forward to when I’ll be able to post an Amazon URL here. :-)

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I still can’t seem to summon the energy to write a long and thoughtful blog post about, well, anything right now. All I really want to do is work in my garden and hang out with long-neglected friends and family. However, this experience has taught me a few things which I think are relevant to Arcade games (not just books) and which I’d like to share while the memories are still fresh:

From what I’ve gathered, less than 1% of published books turn out to be hits. The odds for a first-time author (who isn’t a big name, like Bill Clinton or Alan Greenspan) are so incredibly low that even if your publisher loves your book, your marketing/sales forecast is unlikely to exceed 20k copies at best. At that level, it simply doesn’t make sense for the publisher to do much in the way of marketing until the book has already proven itself. Even though the Arcade console game space isn’t nearly that tough, there are parallels. After all, because of the economics of the Arcade space today, most publishers aren’t willing to spend more than $100k on marketing their games (and usually far less than that.)

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I’m sorry I’ve been posting less frequently than usual, but I’ve been devoting every minute outside of Microsoft to finishing my book, which is due to the publisher in 10 days (!!) It turns out that writing a book is a lot like developing a video game — i.e., you can never have too much polish. Ethan and I have revised each chapter as few as 6 times and as many as 24, and it still doesn’t feel like enough. All I can say is, thank goodness for deadlines. Otherwise, I might be obsessing over every word five years from now.

When this is over, I’m going to spend the summer totally decompressing. Do some travelling. Play some of my favorite old video games. Buy some new board games. Do some gardening (I thought I’d start this weekend, but I don’t have time and even if I did, it’s snowing outside. Yeah, in late April. I took some pictures, but then I realized that they were just going to make me angry. California is sounding better ever day.)

Oh, and I think my family — and most especially my wife — justifiably expects a serious make-good. How exactly does one go about compensating for six months of consistent neglect?

PS. The photo is of my backyard cherry tree, pre-snow. It was a lovely Spring for a few days. :-)

When games give way to interactive art. (Cryptic description, I know. I’d also thought of calling this “the most unique reason to purchase a game I’ve ever seen.”)

Everyone should read this post on email communication. Long story short: 78% of email senders believe they are communicating clearly, 89% of email receivers believe they are interpreting the message correctly, but only 56% of receivers correctly interpret the message.

Good article by Bill Fulton on reducing anti-social behavior in online games. I took my own stab at this about a year ago. I couldn’t agree more with Bill - our efforts (as an industry) to address anti-social online behavior are insufficient and not proportional to the damage caused by that behavior. Too many developers are willing to throw up their hands and say “it’s a hard problem” or “jerks will be jerks.”

First the news that Stormfront is shutting down, now the news that Mad Doc has been acquired by Rockstar. Soon Valve and Epic will be the only big independent developers left.

Some research indicating that people seek more game-like (or perhaps “curated”) experiences in the virtual worlds they frequent.

Danc writes a thoughtful theoretical piece on how to leverage your player community for tasks like localizing your online game. (It’s a long article, but worth reading!)

Another long article, but a nice read for those of you interested in community management.

I received such good feedback the last time I revealed part of my upcoming book, For Fun and Profit: How Games are Transforming the Business World, that I figured I’d try again. This time, I’ve selected a very small piece of a much longer chapter on how games can be used to train employees. I hope you like it.

Games and Training: Everest

One game-based approach to teaching teamwork skills is to focus on very specific problems that are usually hard to identify and correct. For example, one such problem is that teams often prove dumber than their individual members. This is caused by a phenomenon known as “process loss” — the opposite of the “wisdom of crowds.” Process loss happens when teams fail to share information, get trapped by various conflicting goals, lose themselves in unproductive argument, and fall into a pattern of groupthink. A game called Everest, which was designed by Harvard Business School and Forio Business Simulations, forces players to grapple with all of these issues and overcome them as a team.

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Kim writes a thoughtful post about EA’s Battlefield: Bad Company, and the rumor that it will enable players to purchase more advanced weapons with MS points. Kim makes a comparison to paintball (i.e. some players have an advantage because they can afford to purchase more paintball pellets) that had never occurred to me.

Via Raph, news that players of Eve Online will have the opportunity to elect the members of a player council that will dictate in-game policy. Seems like an exciting experiment in MMO democracy — looking forward to hearing more about it.

I just heard about Grand Theft Childhood. which appears to be a rare, thorough, and balanced look at the issue of violence in games. And it has a great pedigree (its co-authors are co-founders of the Center for Mental Health and Media at Massachusetts General Hospital, and are also on the psychiatry faculty at Harvard Medical School.) Check out the book’s website — it’s full of interesting information that could be useful in combating stereotypes about video games.

A “Club Penguin-like” virtual world called Handipoints, which rewards kids for doing chores, was apparently launched in beta form back in November. When kids complete activities such as cleaning their room, they gain either “handipoints” that can be redeemed for real-world toys (distributed via Amazon) or “bonus points” that can be used to buy virtual items. Parents decide which type of point is rewarded. Handipoints as 150k users (don’t know what percentage of those are active), with 3.5 users per family on average.

Now this is really cool: a company called Brand Experience Lab has developed AudienceGames, which are basically advergames that get played in movie theatres before a film begins. Audience members play the game by waving their hands to the left or right; a camera captures the activity and majority rules. An AudienceGame created for Volvo enabled theatre-goers to steer a virtual car around obstacles, scoring points when they did so. (Via Ilya.)

In response to the recommendations made by a commissioned report, the UK will require all packaged games to display BBFC ratings in addition to the now-standard PEGI ratings. The BBFC ratings are described as “cigarette-style health warnings.” A step backward for the game industry, but at least the BBFC has shown itself to be a thoughtful organization in the past, re: games.

McDonald’s is sponsoring an ARG called The Lost Ring in partnership with the Olympic Games. It may prove to be the most diverse ARG ever launched (no surprise, given the context.) Lots of puzzles in different languages and set in different countries, requiring international cooperation. Cool stuff. :-)

Accenture Careers, a Second Life-based employee recruiting initiative, launched this month. It offers “fun tests” that visitors can take, and it is implied that Accenture’s HR people might well be watching and reaching out to visitors who catch their attention.

BuildABearville.com hit one million users after its first month, and has now surpassed two million. The toy-turned-virtual-world trend continues. I wonder how many toy brands will NOT have virtual worlds associated with them five years from now? (I also wonder how many will flame out in the face of such intense competition, given that many of these virtual worlds won’t do much to differentiate themselves?)

Apparently Xbox 360 sales have jumped 36% in the UK since March 14th’s price cut. Hooray for us. ;-)

I just finished reading Ernest Adams’ latest Gamasutra article, “Damn All Gameplay Patents!” It’s a well-intentioned piece that argues passionately against gameplay (as opposed to technology) patents, and contends that developers should not pursue them under any circumstances. I genuinely appreciate the sentiment that drove Ernest to write this article and agree with much of it, but I feel that some nuance is in order. Consider the following:

Patents are Somewhat Like Nuclear Weapons

In many ways, gameplay patents are like nuclear weapons. They’re expensive to develop, and they engender feelings of fear and mistrust. Put plainly, most of us would prefer to live in a world without them.

Unfortunately, like nuclear weapons, many gameplay patents already exist and are in the hands of many different owners. No matter how passionately we write, those owners will not simultaneously and universally revoke their patents tomorrow. Which means that some companies have nuclear weapons (I mean, patents)… and some don’t.

And just like in the real world, asking the countries without nuclear weapons to avoid developing them rarely works — even with economic perks or threats as incentive. More often than not, the countries that couldn’t afford to develop nukes anyway, or that don’t feel threatened, play along, while those that can/do proceed with development. Witness India, Pakistan, and North Korea.

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Too much “big news” broke over the past week. I can’t keep up:

Sony announced its own internal in-game ad unit, but says that PlayStation Network will remain open to other ad firms.

Phil Harrison, president of Sony Computer Entertainment worldwide studios, resigned from Sony and joined Atari.

EA seeks to acquire Take-Two for $2.0 billion. And Take-Two’s board of directors has rejected the offer, seeking more cash. Is it petty to keep quoting John “no longer ripe for mergers” Riccitiello at times like this? It is, I know.

Nintendo has announced Wi-Fi Connection Pay & Play. Players will use Wii points to pay for undisclosed Wi-Fi services (such as paying for online multiplayer time in certain games?) I’ll reserve comment until I know more about this, but it seems quite strange to me.

It seems that the number of active monthly Second Life users has not grown significantly since July 2007. That’s going to put one hell of a dent in the SL hype engine. Time to fix that crappy SL UI…

The Sims Online is reborn as EA-Land, a free-to-play game with virtual object sales (natch.)

Every year, one of my friends inevitably leads me to Berkshire Hathaway’s annual report and letter to investors. This year, it was Kim. As always, reading the letter makes me want to give Warren Buffet a giant hug. If there was ever a more intelligent, honest, charitable, and humble person, I don’t know of him. Good lord, do I have a crush on Warren Buffet??

As always, GDC was a great experience. I highly encourage those of you who have never attended the conference to do so next year. This is especially true for students who are looking to break into the game industry — the educational (as well as networking) opportunities at GDC cannot be overstated. And with that, here are just a few examples of the great stuff that GDC had to offer:

The IGF winners were announced, and — no surprises here — Crayon Physics scored the grand prize. Petri Purho, the guy behind Crayon Physics, writes about it (and more) on his blog, Kloonigames. Keep an eye on Petri. As I’ve noted on this blog in the past, he’s always cooking up interesting ideas. The man is going places.

The annual Rant is always fun. Clint Hocking wins my vote for best quote: “Why isn’t Medal of Honor about honor? Imagine what it would be worth to you if you could put honor in a box and sell it. What if you package the experience of what it means to be honorable?”

I missed David Jones’ session, and I’m sorry I did. He presented one of the few upcoming “big budget” MMOs that I’m actually (semi-)excited about.

Plenty of Microsoft-related news. Community-created XNA games will, sometime in the future, be made available to all Xbox Live users. Games will be processed via peer review, not a managed portfolio process. Very, very exciting stuff — I’m glad the news is finally out! Other interesting revelations: XNA Game Studio can now be used to build games for the Zune. And last but not least, Fable 2 is blazing trails on XBLA — earn virtual gold in a related XBLA game, and you’ll be able to spend that gold within Fable 2 itself. For the record, I think there are so many cool ways that XBLA and retail games can be linked — this is just the start. It probably doesn’t make sense for the vast majority of XBLA games, but for a select few, there’s great potential.

Another session I wish I hadn’t missed: Game Studies Download 3.0, liveblogged by Raph Koster and revealing “the ten most interesting research findings of the year.” Some real gems in there.

Thanks to everyone who happened to attend my GDC lecture. I’m really very flattered that we had standing room only, despite something like 25 other sessions taking place at the same time (several of which I would personally have liked to attend!)

For those who asked, please feel free to download my slides here.

Next-Gen did a brief writeup of the session, which is nice. They focused on the “in-game-ads” portion of the talk. One point that didn’t make it into the Next-Gen writeup, which I’d like to clarify, is that while highly-integrated ads are indeed very effective (when done right), non-integral ads (like virtual billboards) can also be effective when done right — just in a different way. The influence of non-integral ads is more subconscious, and is limited to “low information” messages (like logos and images.) Anyway, it’s all there in the slides. :-)