Tiny Subversions

It's Gonna Get Weird

2009-11-19T15:49:00.001-05:00

Folks, I'm attempting a migration of this blog. Stand by!

Schools That Use My Articles?

2009-11-17T17:56:00.002-05:00

Hey folks, I need a favor. I'm compiling a list of schools that use my articles as reference material. It's useful for me to know. For example, I might use it to reach out to schools if I'm in the area to see if they'd like me to drop by and give a talk.

So if you are an educator who uses my Effective Networking in the Game Industry articles in a class, or you're a student who's been assigned them, please let me know! Commenting here is fine, and if you could tell me the school and maybe the name of the class, that would be great.

Messing With Spelunky

2009-10-18T15:20:00.002-05:00

Should I Completely Change This Blog's Layout?

2009-10-06T20:02:00.004-05:00

I am thinking of completely nuking the layout of this blog and starting fresh, possibly using pre-generated themes that are already available. I've never been all that happy with the way this blog looks, and there are actual professional graphic designers who have made themes for Blogger that I can use. Plus the new Blogger themes are easy to tweak and you can add neat gadget thingies.

(Really I would just like to migrate this blog to tinysubversions.com and switch to Wordpress, but my search engine ranking is just too good at this point to do that. Plus there are so many pages out there that link to my Effective Networking articles I wouldn't want to mess with them.)

What do you, my readers, think? Obviously I will just be changing the look of the blog, the content will still be here (and it's all backed up, just in case).

Spelunky's Procedural Space

2009-09-29T12:07:00.012-05:00

The following is my first entry into Corvus Elrod's Blogs of the Round Table. I've been meaning to participate in BoRT forever, and I'm pleased to finally get around to it. To make things interesting for myself, I decided at PAX that I would participate in every BoRT for the next year, and that I would write every single BoRT entry about Spelunky. Because I am that much of a fanboy.

This may backfire.

This months' theme "invites you to explore the ways games have represented the spatial nature of their storyworlds and what this does for the audience experience."

Room Generation

Spelunky takes place in a series of two-dimensional platform levels. Each level is divided into a 4x4 grid of 16 rooms. Each room consists of 80 tiles, 10 tiles wide and 8 tiles high. In the source code, rooms are structured as 80-character strings. Here's an example:

"00000000110060000L040000000P110000000L110000000L11000000001100000000111112222111"

If we add line breaks every ten characters, we can begin to see the way rooms are laid out:

0000000011

0060000L04

0000000P11

0000000L11

0000000011

1112222111

"L" signifies a ladder. "P" signifies the ledge near the top of a ladder. 1's and 2's signify varying chances that a basic brick tile or a block tile will appear. That 6 floating in midair is essentially a trigger that says, "Put a series of random tiles here. Or perhaps nothing." (It's funny, if you look at the 10x8 block of characters and squint your eyes, the game starts to look like Rogue, its most illustrious predecessor.)

The experienced Spelunky player begins to notice and anticipate these blocks. Although there may be a slightly different layout each time thanks to the 6, I look at that block and I say, "Oh yes, that's the ladder next to a vertical wall with a pushblock at the top of the ladder. I often see that on the ground floor of a level in the game's first tile set." My muscle memory is ready to traverse this room in about two seconds flat. Any given Spelunky level consists of 16 of these rooms. There are only about 50 basic room layouts for every tile set in the game. After 500 playthroughs, it is possible for a player to recall each one.

Obstacle Generation

But space in Spelunky is more than just a layout of ladders, walls, and blocks. Space is rudely interrupted with traps and monsters. Whereas the physical layout of each room is something like 80% hand crafted and 20% randomly generated, the layout of traps and monsters is 100% procedural, based on rules like:

If we are in the first cave tileset, then for every brick tile that is not the ceiling of the level itself, and is not in a shop, and is not in the starting room, and is not on the bottom half of a room, check to see if we have a two by two block of empty tile spaces below this brick. If there is a two by two block of empty tile spaces, and we're allowed to generate a Giant Spider in this level, and we have yet to generate a Giant Spider in this level, then there is a 1 in 40 chance that we generate a Giant Spider and some cobwebs right beneath this brick. If we do generate a Giant Spider, make sure not to generate another one in this level.

The above works out to about 30 lines of code, simplified somewhat. The code for monster and trap placement is so thoroughly procedural and random that unlike the case of room layouts, no Spelunky player, no matter how experienced, can begin to anticipate the placement of these obstacles.

Spelunky is a Series of Interesting Obstacles

When we speak of Spelunky as a procedurally generated platformer with high replayability, we are speaking of the obstacle generation code far more than we are speaking of the room generation code. Yet when we look at the (excellent, brilliant, fascinating) TIGSource procedural generation thread, the focus is on the generation of rooms and terrain. For the first time, I'm starting to think that they're barking up the wrong tree. The space that they should be focused on generating is the space of obstacles, the topology of which is tied inextricably to the mechanics of the obstacles themselves.

Please visit the Blogs of the Round Table's main hall for links to all entries.

Rands on Soft Networking

2009-09-22T13:05:00.002-05:00

Rands (AKA Michael Lopp) has a new essay about networking. In particular, it's about the kind of "soft" networking that I'm always talking about. It's the kind of networking that isn't directed, where your goal is just to meet interesting people. Rands takes that idea of meeting interesting people and applies a bit more focus, where it's about meeting "Your People."

I have a lot of My People in my life. I just got back from GDC Austin and it was one of the best conference experiences I've ever had. I think now that it's because the evenings were full of My People. Rands is right: My People will question what I'm doing with my life and push me in often unexpected, sometimes uncomfortable directions. But that's part of the fun.

The part that really resonated with me is the bit about stories. Rands says that all day long, there's a story being written in our own heads.

It’s your inner dialogue and it’s often full of shit. [...] We see the world how we want. A carpenter sees all problems as a nail. I see problems as finite state machines.

As we edit our days into these stories, there is always a risk of fiction. [...]

You tell these stories to Your People without reservation. Your People love your stories — fiction and all. They love how you tell them, they laugh about the lies you tell yourself, and then they stop and they tell you the truth.

Networking is the art of finding those who are willing to listen to and critique your stories.

Spelunky 1.0

2009-09-02T12:17:00.002-05:00

Since its original beta release in late December 2008, Spelunky has quickly become one of my favorite games of all time. Probably #2, right behind Jagged Alliance 2. Anyway, if you haven't played Spelunky now is the best time yet to pick it up. As of last night, the game officially hit its 1.0 release, along with the exciting announcement that there will be an XBLA version in 2010! So go grab the new version.

The PC version will remain free, and will be open-sourced in late 2009, at which point I will resurrect SpelunkyTweet!

Coda: Intuition Tries the Public Patronage Model

2009-08-26T16:41:00.004-05:00

Greg and Mike (I wrote about their Flash game funding earlier this week) are experimenting with Kickstarter to see if they can get their platform game Liferaft funded by the public. Definitely worth checking out the video, and throw them some money if you'd like to see the game made!

For those who don't know, Kickstarter is kind of a formalized version of the patronage stuff I've written about in the past (indie game patronage and patronage in general). The idea is that you ask for pledges and if you reach your target pledge amount you take everyone's money. No money changes hands until and unless the target is met.

Like Daniel Benmergui's system, you get more benefits from donating more money. Here's what they're offering their different pledge levels:

$5+: get all episodes of the game plus exclusive demos and updates on development.
$15+: original soundtrack, mp3 format
$35+: original soundtrack, signed CD
$75+: poster-size print
$100+: special thanks in the credits
$250+: character named after you with a line of dialogue you've supplied (only 10 of these)

They just announced this and have two backers so far. 73 days to go in their drive. It's worth checking out and I'm anxious to see if it works.

More on Flash Games

2009-08-25T10:36:00.002-05:00

In case you didn't see it, I added a few updates to yesterday's Flash game funding post. First and foremost, I didn't realize that Fig 8. was developed not only by Greg Wohlwend, but also by Mike Boxleiter. So I had to divide some numbers in half!

Also, Joel Gonzales pointed out his excellent analysis of FlashGameLicense.com where he breaks down Sponsorships versus Licenses, and kindly provides the Excel file of the source data that he manually collected.

Flash Game Funding Data from Intuition Games

2009-08-24T11:04:00.009-05:00

In light of Jeff's recent article delving into funding models for indie game developers, I'd like to draw your attention to what I think is an excellent community resource. Greg Wohlwend of Intuition Games explains the process of selling a game to sponsors, and breaks down the bidding timeline for their game Fig. 8.

Greg used FlashGameLicense.com to sell his game to the highest bidder. I've been very interested in FGL since they first launched. They're good about publishing their monthly sales statistics, but I'd never before seen a timeline breakdown like Greg's. (Kudos to him for getting his sponsor to agree to have the details published!) I learned a lot from his posts. For one thing, I didn't know that in addition to a basic bid, that sponsors could add bonuses for a certain number of plays or a certain average rating on Kongregate or NewGrounds.

His final, accepted bid for Fig. 8 was $3700 with an $850 bonus for a 3.8+ rating after a month or a $1250 bonus for a 4.0+ rating after a month. According to Greg he spent 2.5 full weeks developing the game, and then spent about a week on polish. How does this compare to the numbers in Jeff's article?

Let's assume only gets the base $3700. Now we factor in time: while he spent about 3.5 weeks on the game, I'm assuming that some more time went into the whole marketing push that he talks about on his blog. Maybe it wasn't full time, let's say he spent 4 hours a day for two weeks on that, so that's an extra 40 hours or 1 week of work. So let's call it 4.5 weeks of work.

In theory, if a person could make a Flash game every 4.5 weeks and sell it for $3700, you could make about $42,755 in a year, which is right about at Jeff's $40k I-am-not-incredibly-poor benchmark. But the catch is that it's incredibly hard to make and sell a game in 4.5 weeks. The Intution devs are immensely talented at both development and marketing, and even I would be surprised if they could keep up a punishing schedule like that year round. (Edit: per the comments, this game was made by two people, Greg Wohlwend and Mike Boxleiter! So divide that in half: $21377/year, which is about the equivalent of working a $10/hr playtesting job with no overtime. In Mike's words: "Bottom line, if you don't have a family, this can keep you afloat. If you have any more expenses than rent, electricity and food then you're gonna get into trouble.")

Let's move this into non-virtuoso territory. The average accepted bid for an action game on FGL is roughly $2000, so let's say you can sell a game for that amount. And let's say you spend 6 weeks making and selling that game, which seems to me to be far more sustainable long-term. That only comes out to about $17,300/year. Even if you're a good marketer and you consistently perform better than average in getting bids at $2500/game, we're still only talking about raking in $21,600/year. Let's say you get a $500 bonus on every other game you make, so you average an extra $250/game on top of that. We are still looking at $23,800/year. Which ain't much.

It seems like a key factor in getting a high bid is playing off the success of your previous games. So if you can be smart like Intuition Games and consistently release a bevvy of excellent games under your brand (and I do love me some Effing Hail!) it might be a sustainable way to make a living.

(Edit: Also of note is Joel Gonzales' analysis of FGL. Among other things, he breaks down Sponsorships versus Licenses, and kindly provides the Excel file of the source data that he manually collected.)

The Cost of Being Indie

2009-08-05T16:53:00.002-05:00

I mentioned this on Twitter but forgot to post it here: Jeff has a great article up on Gamasutra about cost margins for independent game development.

Games I'm Playing

2009-07-31T14:50:00.003-05:00

Wow, it's been a while since I've posted here. I guess I will list out the games I've been playing recently.

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (DS). I'm a huge fan of the Advance Wars games, and DoR is more of the same. I mean that in the best way. Fortunately, they got rid of the "earn points to unlock maps" conceit. Now you just get all the Free Battle maps from the start. It's a nice touch.
Bomberman (Sega Saturn). Yeah, that's right. I finally got the Saturn in the office working. This import-only Bomberman game is highly regarded by fans of the series, and 10-player melee mode makes it easy to see why. This is the game of choice for unwinding for ten or fifteen minutes after you've closed out a nasty bug.
Dragon Force (Sega Saturn). This is a really interesting game. "Interesting" meaning "not necessarily great, but worth playing." There are two basic game modes. In one, there's this over-arching story that pretty much boils down to uniting a fragmented kingdom against a big evil guy. You pick one of the seven factions to play, and there's a kind of castle-capturing wargame that happens on a world map. In addition to the wargame, there's the actual battles, which are these highly abstracted fights where you pick a formation for your army, and the enemy picks a formation for theirs. Then the fight just happens automatically. At the end, your two generals will typically duel to see who wins. It's very strange, but I'm finding it pretty compelling overall.
Tales of Monkey Island (PC). My sister got me this for my birthday! I'm excited to play it but I've only had a chance to get through the opening scene so far. Controls seem a little wonky (read: console-centric) but so far, so good.
Bejeweled Blitz (Facebook). When I started playing this I thought, "Hey, these guys are ripping off Puzzle Qu -- err, wait, I've got that backwards." Totally addicting.
Spelunky (PC). Duh. I get at least a few games a day in. Go download it. Now.

Next up, I'm going to try my hand at Armageddon Empires again. I gave it a shot around the time it came out and it was too complicated, but now I see there's a pretty good "getting started" guide made by an enthusiast. If I can learn Dwarf Fortress, surely I can learn AE.

Article on Spelunky in The Escapist

2009-07-07T10:31:00.003-05:00

Anthony Burch wrote an article for this week's The Escapist articulating why Spelunky is so great:

By mixing the randomly generated levels native to roguelikes with a familiar 2-D perspective and intuitive, decidedly un-roguelike game mechanics, Spelunky becomes something completely new: a perpetually fresh, challenging experience that is as accessible as it is complex. Since you navigate the environment via platforming, Spelunky's procedurally generated maps actually impact your overall strategy more than almost any other game to use similar randomization. While you can easily conquer every randomized dungeon in a game like Diablo II through brute force and determination, Spelunky forces you to constantly make meaningful decisions in order to progress. Do you risk making a blind leap down a chasm, hoping that water rather than spikes await you at the bottom? Do you save your bombs for bosses, or do you use them to blow holes in the level topography and create a more direct route to the level exit? These are not binary, one-off decisions that exist independently from the gameplay - the entire process of playing Spelunky requires you to make new and interesting choices like these, over and over again.

Games of My Life

2009-06-27T15:34:00.006-05:00

I've decided to copy Shane Liesegang and do a list of the 10 "most impactful" games, and try to find some trends in the games that I pick.

Unordered 10 Impactful Games

Jagged Alliance 2
Amplitude
Deus Ex
Spelunky
Super Mario Bros 3
Fallout
Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle
Grand Theft Auto 3
Alpha Centauri
Scorched Earth

I chose the games for this list by thinking of games that are personally "impactful" to me. They either changed the way I think about games, or changed the way I think about the world. Like Shane, I'm interested in finding any trends between these games, so I'm subjecting them to a set of metrics that might possibly be completely meaningless.

Note that I'm limiting it to video games here, otherwise I'd have backgammon on the list. But comparing video games to board games or to folk games is in many ways an apples-to-oranges thing, especially considering the comparisons that I want to use to examine them.

Chronological Order

1988: Super Mario Bros 3
1991: Scorched Earth
1993: Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle
1997: Fallout
1998: Alpha Centauri
1999: Jagged Alliance 2
2000: Deus Ex
2001: Grand Theft Auto 3
2003: Amplitude
2009: Spelunky

It's not surprising that while the list spans 21 years, half of the games I chose were made between 1997 and 2001. For me, those are the golden years of gaming. I'm also not surprised that there's a big gap between 2003 and 2009. While there haven't been a whole lot of AAA titles that affect me the way titles from the late '90s did, I even struggled to think of an indie game that really truly affected me in the way that Fallout or JA2 did. Spelunky is the obvious exception, but while there have been many fantastic indie titles that I think about all the time, I think they're often just too small in scope to really affect me the same way that the other games did.

Of course, now that we're talking about scope, let's look at play time.

Play Time

Jagged Alliance 2: 200+ hours
Amplitude: 100-200 hours
Super Mario Bros 3: 100-200 hours
Scorched Earth: 100-200 hours
Deus Ex: 80 hours
Grand Theft Auto 3: 80 hours
Spelunky: 50 hours playing, 25 hours modding
Fallout: 40 hours
Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle: 30 hours
Alpha Centauri: 30 hours

In this list I'm attempting to remember how many hours I spent with each game. This ties back into the whole indie games thing: no matter how much I like a game, it's probably not going to change my life if I don't spend a lot of time with it. So Spelunky averages about 3 minutes per play session, but I have spent as much time with it as I have with GTA3. Whereas Passage and Execution are very important games to me that changed the way I think abotu games, but somehow they don't seem so impactful because I played them once or twice and felt like I was done with the experience.

Fun fact: I played through the Jagged Alliance 2 demo about three nights a week for a year before the full game came out.

Metacritic

97: Grand Theft Auto 3
94: Super Mario Bros 3
93: Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle
92: Alpha Centauri
90: Deus Ex
89: Fallout
86: Amplitude

Some of the games did not have metacritic scores, and are not included. Some of these games had multiple SKUs, in which case I picked the highest score. It looks like the games that matter to me are also games that the critics love.

Genres and Demographics

Jagged Alliance 2: tactical combat RPG
Amplitude: rhythm action game
Super Mario Bros 3: action platformer
Scorched Earth: turn-based artillery
Deus Ex: action shooter / RPG
Grand Theft Auto 3: sandbox action
Spelunky: procedural platformer
Fallout: RPG
Maniac Mansion 2: Day of the Tentacle: adventure
Alpha Centauri: strategy simulation

Various stats about the list:

2 platformers
3 RPGs
4 turn-based games
1 first-person game
2 games where you navigate an avatar around a 3D space
5 action games (relying on reflexes to any degree)
9 American games, 1 Japanese game
2 games with puzzle elements
1 game where the puzzle elements are key to the experience
4 "open world" games, including Deus Ex
1 game that must be played multiple times through
3 strategy games
7 PC games (were primarily released for PC)
3 console games: 2 PS2, 1 NES
5 games that are continuing titles in a series
2 games that kicked off a series
3 games that stand alone
1 game that loses a lot of value on replay
6 games with strong story elements
4 games where the story is absolutely central to the game
3 games with multiplayer (Deus Ex had a patch but I don't count it)

Manifesto No More

2009-06-24T12:43:00.003-05:00

It's sad that I now have to remove my Manifesto Games button link from the left hand bar. As Greg Costikyan explains, Manifesto is now shut down.

RIP Manifesto Games.

MeggySeqSynth Improvisation

2009-06-07T22:57:00.002-05:00

I was messing around with my MeggySeqSynth tonight and decided to record my improvisations. Here you go:

Rhythm and Rhyme on The Escapist

2009-06-03T13:16:00.003-05:00

I have a piece up on The Escapist this week called Rhythm and Rhyme. It's about hip hop and video games, particularly how I think there's never going to be a wildly successful Rock Band style game based on hip hop. Then I go into examples of the kind of non-simulationist gameplay that hip hop can inform. Here's the first paragraph:

Music games have exploded in popularity in the last five years. While PaRappa the Rapper may have been the first hit rhythm game, modern music games are practically synonymous with rock music. Rock Band alone has revolutionized digital music distribution, giving small bands previously unimaginable amounts of exposure and introducing a new generation of music listeners to older songs they would not have heard otherwise. Which raises the obvious question: Why hasn't there been a similar game for hip hop? It would seem a straightforward challenge to take the Rock Band formula, apply a few tweaks and make it work for a different genre of music.

Check out the full thing at The Escapist.

Game Maker and Twitter, United In Spelunky

2009-06-02T08:36:00.005-05:00

I love Spelunky. I've been playing it almost every day for the last six months, and I never get tired of it.

Sometimes Jeff and I will be at the office, each of us playing Spelunky -- inevitably, one of us will say, "Oh my god, you'll never believe what just happened!" and then proceed to regale the other with a story of our latest randomly generated adventure.

A couple of weeks ago, I got an idea in my head that wouldn't go away: what if I could make Spelunky update Twitter with these stories I love so much? And so I started right in on the project. (You can see the end result here: @darius_spelunks.)

The first step was decompiling the Spelunky source code. Spelunky is written in Game Maker 7, and so decompiling is pretty easy if you follow the instructions on the Spelunky wiki.

The next step was figuring out how to get Game Maker to update Twitter. It doesn't come with native support for HTTP Post requests, so I had to improvise. I ended up going with a real kludge of a solution. There's a user-contributed Game Maker DLL called SilentDOS, which lets you run stuff on the Windows command line in the background of your game. (There is a native GM7 function called execute_shell(), but the problem with that function is that it opens a cmd.exe window and disrupts your game.) To initialize SilentDOS, make sure that the DLL is in the same directory as your .gmk file, and then run this at the start of the game:

global.nnn = external_define('silent_dos.dll','RunSilent',dll_stdcall, ty_real,2,ty_string,ty_string);

I put it in the create script for the oGame object in Spelunky.

So now I could run Windows command line stuff. This meant I could run wget, which is for making HTTP requests on the command line. Fortunately, it's pretty easy to update Twitter with wget. I ended up making a file called tweet.bat, and put it in my C:\Windows\System32 directory:

IF %1==DNT (echo %1) ELSE (wget --http-user="username" --http-password="password" --post-data="status=%1" -b -q http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml)

This uses a couple of tricks. First of all, it accepts a command line argument, and "%1" is just the argument you pass to it. In this case, it's the update you're sending to Twitter:

> tweet.bat "Test!"

The IF statement just says that if the string I send is "DNT" ("Do Not Tweet"), don't send an update to Twitter, just print DNT to the console. Assuming I didn't send "DNT," it runs the wget command. The "-q" command runs it in quiet mode so it doesn't write any log files as outputs. The "-b" command runs it as a background process, so that it doesn't block Spelunky while it's trying to run. When I run it without "-b", the game will pause for three seconds every time I tweet while I wait for the Twitter server to verify the post.

So now I can tell SilentDOS to run tweet.bat with an arbitrary string as an argument. The problem is that if I try to pass it a regular string:

external_call(global.nnn,"tweet","This is my status update.");

the Twitter post ends up saying only "This". It's because the command line argument assumes that "This" is argument 1, "is" is argument 2, etc. So I wrote a helper function called format() to replace all spaces with "%20", which is the hexadecimal URL encoding for the space character. The function also replaces commas with "%2C":

message = " " + string_replace_all(argument0," ","%20");
message = string_replace_all(message,",","%2C");
return(message);

So here's the actual call to update Twitter from Game Maker:

external_call(global.nnn,"tweet",format("Your Twitter update goes here, with commas and everything!"));

At that point it was just a matter of experimenting with where in the code I could put the Twitter calls. My standard script for generating the text bits looks like this:

if (global.LastTweet == "scrTEnemySacrifice") return "DNT";
else global.LastTweet = "scrTEnemySacrifice";

rInt = floor(random(4));
if (rInt == 0) return("Kali had better enjoy this here " + string_lower(argument0) + ". I work hard to bring her these sacrifices.");
if (rInt == 1) return("I slave all day to bring you this " + string_lower(argument0) + ", and what do I get? A random prize determined by a favor counter? Please.");
if (rInt == 2) return("Oboy I love sacrificing a nice " + string_lower(argument0) + ".");
if (rInt == 3) return("Sometimes, life is tough for me. But then I sacrifice a " + string_lower(argument0) + " on an unholy altar and I remember that others have it worse off.");

The first two lines are there because I had a lot of problems with updates that were too repetitive -- who wants to read, "I whipped a snake" "Take that, bat!" "Oh man I just whipped a caveman" all in a row? I wanted more variety in the tweets, so those first lines ask: Did we just tweet about this kind of event? If we did, then don't actually update Twitter with this. If we didn't, then we pick a random phrase to tweet about. The argument0 in these functions is usually the "type" field of a given object, which is the English language name of the object. It's formatted like "Caveman", which is why I call the string_lower() function when appropriate.

So there you have it: a brief tutorial on how to get Game Maker updating Twitter.

Dave Edery's Networking Tips

2009-05-20T09:33:00.004-05:00

Dave Edery has a short but substantive post on his blog with some networking tips. I agree with all of them. Here's the high-level, though you should visit his blog to see the detailed descriptions:

Recognize that there is more to people than their business cards.
Resist the temptation to punt “less important” people when someone “more important” walks by.
Don’t waste time maintaining relationships with people who don’t deserve your time or friendship.
Don’t forget the magic of reciprocity.
Perhaps most importantly: don’t expect other people to be good about staying in touch.\

Again, go check out his blog for the details!

Speaking at LOGIN in Seattle, 5/12

2009-05-10T12:51:00.001-05:00

I’m giving a talk at LOGIN in Seattle this week, called It’s 10pm: Do You Know Where Your Players Are?

In 2008, Orbus Gameworks carried out a study for IGN Entertainment where they investigated the metrics that IGN has collected on player behavior over hundreds of thousands of player hours in games such as Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars and Unreal Tournament 3. This talk will cover some of their more interesting findings, and also go over best practices for gameplay metrics collection.

It’s Tuesday morning at 10:30am. Come heckle!

Looks Like It Works

2009-05-09T17:24:00.005-05:00

Readers of my previous post on Daniel Benmergui's patronage experiment might be interested to know that someone donated the $1000 to customize their own ending to Daniel Benmergui's I Wish I Were the Moon or Today I Die.

This is very, very cool.

An Example of Indie Game Patronage

2009-05-06T10:42:00.004-05:00

A while back I wrote a massive post offering my thoughts on patronage models for video game development. I noticed this morning that Daniel Benmergui's new game, Today I Die, comes with a notice:

This game is ad-free thanks to an unusual individual.

I emailed Daniel to ask if this was a patronage situation, and he said yes, so I pressed a little further.

It seems like this is the timeline: Daniel emailed an early build of the game out to some of his trusted associates. I was on this list, and I remember playing and loving the game, and I also distinctly remember that Daniel was looking for advertisers to support the game.

Apparently one of these people liked the game and made Daniel an offer to support the game. "He wanted to see the game ad-free in a clean website," said Daniel in an email to me. There were no other demands beyond that. The patron did offer some creative input, but he didn't demand final say on anything. And to be fair, everyone seeing the early builds of the game had creative input; Daniel specifically asked us to critique and contribute.

"I shared the betas and alphas of the game with a sizable chunk of people," he says. "This is another reason why I believe it's a good idea to share your early work with people you trust... things get moving even before you release a game."

This is an interesting precedent for a patronage model of game development, although Daniel himself isn't sure it's a repeatable occurance.

Which brings me to the next bit of interesting news: Daniel is pursuing a variable patronage model for his next game. This is the kind of stuff I examined in the "Patronage and the Internet" section of my article on patronage, and is very reminiscent of 20x200.

If you haven't heard of it, 20x200 is a website that showcases the work of visual artists. They have prints available of the art, in different stages:

an 8"x10" print for $20, in a limited edition of 200
a 17"x22" print for $200, in a limited edition of 20
a 30"x40" print for $2000, in a limited edition of 2

This creates scarcity, which encourages patronage. As a patron, you want a unique work of art to call your own: knowing that you own one of only two prints in the world of a particular piece is a great motivator for dropping $2k on a work of art.

Daniel is doing something very similar on his site, combining it with the model we see at Wolfgang Baur's Open Design. He is offering Moon Stories Pack for free (a collection of all his free games plus some extra goodies), and is asking for a donation to support the creation of his next game. Depending on how much you donate, you get to put your stamp on his next game in a unique way:

Donations up to $26: congratulations, you've helped Daniel out!
$27-$74: you get your name in the credits along with a link of your choice. There are 19 of these available.
$75-496: you get a portrait of yourself (or whoever) in the style of the Moon Stories games. Nine available.
$497-$994: he'll make you a custom version of one of his games, modeling the characters after anyone you choose (a great romantic gift, I might add). He will make only two of these.
$995+: you get a version of Moon or Today with an ending customized for you. There is only one of these available. [Edit: someone snagged it!]

I think this is a fascinating experiment, and I hope he publishes a post mortem of how it goes. I would love to know if anyone donates in the upper range for any of the custom work!

Writing a Resume for a Game Company

2009-04-20T15:16:00.007-05:00

Whenever I get a resume from a student looking for an internship, I end up giving them an impromptu resume critique. I give the same advice over and over, so I decided to just write it up here. Next time I get a resume from someone I will just send them a link to this article.

Forget What You've Been Told

I know you've probably read your college career center guidelines on writing resumes. Understand this: college career centers are designed to get you a job at a giant faceless company doing something like, I dunno, paper distribution or enterprise databases. These career centers generally know nothing about getting you a job in the game industry. Most game companies are small. Almost all game companies have fewer than 1,000 employees. In fact, most game companies employ fewer than 200 people, and many game companies are in the 30 to 100 person range.

Your college career center tells you to include a clear objective at the top. All of your contact information. Your complete employment history. Your education with relevant coursework. Honors and awards. Activities and special interests.

Your college career center is giving you mostly bad advice.

So throw that out the window. Pretend you never learned any of that stuff.

What a Resume is For

Remember this: the purpose of a resume is to get you an interview. That's it. That's all it's for. I don't care what is on your resume, if it intrigues me enough for me to want to set up a phone call or an on-site interview, your resume did its job.

Length, and Use of Space

Your resume should not be longer than one page, for a couple of reasons:

Many game companies get scores of applications for internships and jobs. Imagine being the person screening all those applications. Brevity will be appreciated.
If you are a college student, you have not done enough interesting stuff to merit a resume that is more than one page long. Once you've been in the industry for twenty years -- yeah, you've earned it. Go wild and make it two pages!

Because you're keeping it to one page, you have to view the resume as a game of limited resources, where the resource in question is space. When I'm reviewing a resume, I often look at it in terms of number of lines of text taken up by something.

I see resumes all the time with entries like this:

Work Experience

Yoyodyne Corporation, Boston, MA Summer 2008. Intern under John Smith and Jane Doe. Fixed computers, diagnosed network problems, maintained IT ticketing sytem.

Extracurricular

Baseball, Winter 2002 - Present. Awesome University: varsity team member. Hometown High School: team captain, led team to fifth place in regional championships.

This resume dedicates the same number of lines to baseball as job experience. What you are telling me is that your experience playing baseball is every bit as relevant as your experience working in IT. This is not a very good way to position yourself on a resume.

Here's a much improved example:

Work Experience

Yoyodyne Corporation, Boston, MA Summer 2008. Diagnosed computer problems in both hardware and software, assisted in data recovery, placed purchase orders for office computers, adminstered a network of 200 computers including
routers/switches/hubs, maintained our RT ticketing sytem, trained new IT interns on proper use of RT.

Extracurricular

College and High School Baseball, Winter 2002 - Present.

It's the same number of lines as our previous example, but now you've managed to tell me more about your relevant work experience and reduced the baseball stuff to the only part that could be possibly relevant: you play baseball. I get it. (Also note that I got rid of the names of people you worked with. If I want to know who you worked with, I'll ask.)

Formatting

I had a conversation with Jeff Ward about formatting. He thinks you should put your work experience in bullet point format, because it's more readable that way. I happen to like a comma-separated list, because I like the information density. I think formatting on that level just comes down to the particular person reading the resume, so I wouldn't sweat it.

I will say this: keep your resume clean, make good use of negative space, put your name in pretty big font, and cram all your contact information into the top inch of your resume. The reason for the last one is I often see resumes where the contact information takes up literally half the vertical space on the page. Again, it comes down to what's important enough to use that space.

Here's a quick example I just threw together of how the header might be laid out in my resume. Note that my name is big, and right below it is a short summary of why you might care about me. To the right of that information is my fake contact info, and to the right of that is my personal avatar to give you something to remember me by. Note that I built this in five minutes with Scribus, I did not pay any attention to alignment or font or sizes or whatever -- this is merely to show you a general layout of elements on a page:

If you don't want to use a package like Scribus to lay out your resume, you can use tables in Microsoft Word to the same effect -- setting the tables to "invisible" will get you the same effect of stacking text in columns.

Stay Relevant

For the love of all things holy, recall that you are applying for a job in game development. I do not care that you were a sandwich artist at Subway. I do not care that you were a waiter.

The stuff you include doesn't have to be game development per se, it just has to be relevant. I might care that you worked part time for your dad's accounting firm, but only if you include specifically that you know a lot about Microsoft Excel from that experience. If you worked as an artist on an animated film, okay, now you're in the realm of complete relevancy, even though that isn't a game job per se.

And if you don't have enough experience and can't really fill all the space in your resume... maybe you should be spending your time doing things relevant to game development. Work on a game in your spare time, for example. That's way more helpful than anything you'll do for a random summer job.

Also, if you are in college, I don't care about what you did in high school, unless it is very very specifically game related. So if you made some games in high school, let me know about those. If you ran a game review website in high school, by all means tell me. But I don't care about other stuff. Your SAT scores? Useless to me. Student activities? Useless. Even your AP courses are useless -- if you're applying for a programming job, AP Computer Science is irrelevant because I would hope you've taken higher level computer science courses in college.

Include a Projects Section

Game developers don't care about your credentials. Where you graduated from, what classes you took, that only matters a tiny bit. What we care about is what you have done. So please include a section for projects you've done. This includes games or mods you've made on the side, as well as non-trivial school projects (final projects for classes and the like).

I looked at a resume today that said the following:

Projects:
(Name of Game 1): A side-scroller game built using XNA 2.0
(Name of Game 2): A platform game built using XNA 3.0

That nice, and I'm really glad you're letting me know you've built games in XNA. But could you be more descriptive? Maybe tell me some of the stuff you implemented for those games? Better yet, just include a URL to a web site where I can download the game, or see its source code, or even just view a video of some of the gameplay. That would all be excellent.

Speaking of which...

Link Me to Your Website

You should have a website with lots of interesting, relevant stuff on it. And then include the link in your resume. You can read more about this in my article about what your website should contain.

I am Not a Moron

It's true. I'm not an idiot. So I can tell when you're padding. Stop doing it, it makes you look like a desparate liar.

I Have Friends

Also true. If you claim to have worked at a game company, you'd better damn well have worked at that game company. Because I know people who work there, and I will call them and ask them about you. And if they say they never worked with you... woe betide, my friend. Woe betide. (And yes, this has happened before.)

Do Your Research

Look up information about the company you're applying to. In the case of a small company like mine, look up information about me. About once a month I get a resume from a 3D artist looking for a position at a game company. I write them back to let them know that if they'd read our company's website, they'd know that we essentially make database software for game developers and as such have no possible need for 3D artists.

This is a two-way street: if you research my company and send me a resume that's chock full of all the database development work you did in college, I am almost guaranteed to get in touch with you.

There Are Always Exceptions

Be clever and think for yourself -- my advice may not be right for you. For example, I said that I don't care about stuff you did in high school. But if you look me up you'll find out that I am really interested in hardware hacking. So if you did some robotics stuff in high school, you should throw it on the resume you send me, because I'll probably find that interesting. That's just smart. (But don't include it on resumes you send to other people.)

Also, if you have made like a dozen games, and worked four different game development internships, and have done a ton of other relevant stuff, your resume doesn't have to be one page long. It can be two pages long. But that's only once you've cut everything that is not specifically game-related.

GDX 2009: Jason Rohrer's GAME and Other Four-Letter Words

2009-04-17T08:49:00.002-05:00

Here are my raw session notes for Jason Rohrer's GDX talk, GAME and Other Four Letter Words. This is my best attempt at a transcription of what he said. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine and mine alone. My comments are in square brackets.

--

This talk starts off from a place a lot of my other talks launch off of: an acknowledgment that we need to look in the mirror and understand that games exist in kind of a cultural ghetto, a line in the sand. Above the line you have established media (novels, film, theater, painting, rock and roll). Down below we have stuff like Shadow of the Colossus, Legend of Zelda, Metal Gear Solid. We talk about these three games in particular a lot, but it's hard to take those games and compare them to Nabokov's Lolita. Part of this is an external image problem. You get guys like Ebert: games will never be art. A lot of people dismiss him as a crusty old luddite, people say they're waiting for that generation to die. But partly it's an internal problem: even as designers we need to realize we haven't been doing stuff that will get us across that line.

I've spoken about how we might try to design games with expressive values that can make games more culturally relevant, but this talk isn't about that at all. This talk goes back further and examines the problem itself in more detail. These thoughts are structured into two analogies, ridiculous analogies. I brought up one of these with my friend Frank Lantz, who said: "That analogy is shallow, misleading, and banal."

Analogy 1

First observation: in our culture as gamers and reviewers and developers, the value of a game is often measured by the number of hours of gameplay a game provides. IGN, for example, has a lasting appeal category in their ratings, but it often just means how many hours it takes to complete the game. Short games are sort of worthless to us -- Katamari Damacy, which is an amazing game, debuted in the U.S. for $20 because it's maybe at most a 10-hour game. Braid is like a 5-hour game, and it was priced at the top price point on XBLA at $15 and people complained like crazy that they were paying $3/hr for a game! Despite the fact that Braid stands as one of the most artistically important games of the last decade. But people are complaining about spending $15 on something like that. So what do we want from games? I think Braid got a bad lasting appeal score on IGN. Yet we're going to talk about Braid for years.

Maybe people are seeking escapism. The more hours of my miserable life I can kill away, the better a game is. But think about this: is 30 hours a good thing? Or even 10 hours? That's a long time to spend with a work. In what other medium is value so tied to total duration? Most mediums value conciseness instead. In movies, a director is heckled for making a 3+ hour movie for being self-indulgent. The shorter film is just considered tightly-crafted. The only thing that compares to video games for length is a book. But a 30-hour book would be like 900 pages long which is still considered self-indulgent. Even in the world of books conciseness is valued.

Second observation: we value games by which are most addicting. Even as a designer we ask if a design can keep you coming back for more. A game like Fable isn't addicting in the same way as Desktop Tower Defense. Fable's a long story you want to see unfold. DTD is 5 or 10 minutes, and then you want to play again, and you might spend even more than 30 hours with it. It's a big compliment to call a game addicting. That leads us to the next observation.

Third observation: parents fear games. The Immersion Projct by Robbie Cooper of the New York Times. This guy took a camera and hid it beneath a TV and got pictures of people's "game faces." The glassy-eyed stare scares parents. This is trashy sensationalist journalism to underscore every parent's worst nightmare. Some of this stuff has to do with the addicting and timekilling properties. One of my cousins, when he was 12, he was playing Runescape for $5 a month. He was absolutely hooked on this thing, and his parents would always talk to me about this: is his life going to amount to anything? He'd always want to show me stuff he'd done in Runescape. From his parent's point of view, they screwed up and his life is over. There's this creeping sense that games are bad for kids. Think about how gov't keeps flirting with age restrictions on game sales, etc. Once we get out from under our parent's careful eye, watch out!

Fourth observation: we all play way too many video games when we go to college. When I was in college we played Quake and had a T1, unique IP addresses, back in the utopian glory days of being on the internet for real. We could connect in a deathmatch on the network at school, run through the halls, start a Quake game. Taunting each other, chest puffing, etc. We played many late night marathons, and then my roommate, who was valedictorian of his high school class, got so into playing video games late at night he got such bad grades he was kicked out of Cornell. I have another friend who was kicked out of two different grad schools because of his obsession with Everquest. And it's probably a preexisting problem being channeled into video games, but still.

Fifth observation: an overdose can kill you. "Korean drops dead after 50-hour gaming marathon."

Analogy 2

First observation: there are these places out in the world where you can walk in to the establishment and play the video game for $0.25. Normal people don't usually go into those places.

Second observation: if you want to buy a video game, there are special stores you go to and you feel a little weird and it smells funny. Normal people don't go into the store.

Third observation: video games appeal to teenage boys. That's the main marketing demographic, their girlfriends don't understand the continued fascination. But they still appeal to these 30-something-year-old married men. If you go on flickr and search for "gamer dad" or something, you see so many pictures of a dad with a baby while he's playing a video game. Their wives don't understand this either.

Fourth observation: games are the center of a censorship debate that has been going on for a long time.

Fifth observation: come back to that Ebert guy. You know what he used to do? He wrote a review of the Cosmology of Kyoto. He liked it a whole lot. Ebert no longer reviews video games.

Sixth observation: our attempts to be serious with throwing in acting, we know the acting is really terrible.

Seventh observation: The games that try to have a serious streak put in a cutscene that interrupts the action. We try to fast forward to get to the good part.

Eigth observation: designers and players are really obsessed with the money shot. Check out the head shot, etc.

Not a lot of game designers consciously think in terms of these analogies. There are advancements being made in the indie/art scene, a lot of these games think about how to get rid of cutscenes, use game mechanics to express unique things, and they've made a lot of progress. They personally detest addiction as a goal, don't pander to teenage boys, no money shots. Most of these games take between 5 minutes and 20 minutes, you play them once or twice, you think about them, it changes your life in a little way, and you move on. It's not about consuming 30 hours of your life. In a sense they're anti-games in the mainstream sense. NPR is starting to pick up these games as something to cover seriously. Seems like a good approach to start inching our way over that line.

But this approach raises some really interesting questions. It seems like we hate our own medium: I want to do something that doesn't even feel like a game anymore. Are we throwing away something unique there, the baby out with the bathwater? For example there's a really fine line between something addicting and something compelling. Frank Lantz said at GDC that games are not media to be consumed and finished, they're cultural objects some of which have been with us for thousands of years. Think of board games: have you played X, no I haven't, or yes I've played it ten times and I'll play it again. Games are cultural objects that often demand a lifetime of study for full appreciation. Think of old guys in the park playing chess, the dude who just stands and looks at the baord watching people play, studying the moves. It's just as interesting to watch as it is to play, and they appreciate chess on a deep level. You only read a novel or see a movie maybe 5 times even if it's your favorite game ever, but I've played chess a dozen times and I don't even really like it! You get something like MGS4 with cinematic technique that's trying to hop over the line and land in the area of movies, but we need to look at what sets us apart. Things like chess that contain an infinite intrigue, standing with your toes at the edge of the abyss peering down into a deep space. At the heart of our medium that's what games are about. They are inherently obsession-inducing artifacts, maybe that will prevent us from ever being in that club. Maybe our legitimacy quest is misguided in the first place and we'll come full circle. Maybe it's not even a medium but a cultural phenomenon. So it's exciting to think aboutu what the future of games may hold.

Q: You're bringing up the same questions we're raising in our classes here (I'm a professor here). It's interesting that we haven't looked at the transformative properties of games or edifying value.

A: It's similar to what's going on with those indie games. If you play Braid and think it all through, you're going to have an experience that will blow your mind. I came out of Braid thinking about the world in a different way, it's been a year since I played it and I think about it almost every day. Most of these games leave you with questions: is marriage really like that? Was that game really right? A lot of people have played Marriage and thought about their own relationship differently, so it's possible to use games for an uplifing purpose. When we talk about timeless works in other media, that's what these games are doing. Whatever it is that Sgt Pepper's does when you hit A Day in the Life, we need to figure out how to make games do something like that. Each medium does it in a different way -- instrumental music is so much more abstract than a book or a movie. More abstract than a Pollock painting but we don't thinka bout it that way because we're so used to it. But all these media engender the same transforamtive experience. So there are people who say that games are so different they're going to do something totally different, but I disagree, I think there's so much diversity in those that we just need to figure out how to get games to punch you in the heart in the right way.

Q: What determines legitimacy?

A: A lot of people say we're waiting for the old guard gatekeepers like Ebert standing on the line so we need to wait for them to die. But it doesn't really matter what these people think, we need to come face to face with it ourselves. Chris Hecker says we're constantly writing checks we can't cash, making promises to people about our works and then on inspection we don't provide that. Lolita's not riddled with typos, Guernica was not half-finished due to budget constraints. Games are reaching so far into technology, we don't even have the craft down pat yet. We need to tackle this internally.

GDX 2009, Ian Bogost, Bone of My Bones and Flesh of My Flesh: The Genesis of Ms Pac-Man

2009-04-16T16:06:00.002-05:00

Here are my raw session notes for Ian Bogost's GDX talk, Bone of My Bones and Flesh of My Flesh: The Genesis of Ms Pac-Man. This is my best attempt at a transcription of what he said. Any mistakes or misinterpretations are mine and mine alone. My comments are in square brackets.

---

Platform studies: looking at the hardware systems that underlie software systems and how the hardware influences creativity. Been thinking about this era of '77-'82 in general, and Ms Pac Man is a game I have been interested in for many years now and after my recent book came out I have time to focus on it now.

What i'm going to do is tell you a little about the game and how it came to be, some of this will be old hat, but there are some new observations I'd like to cover in the course of collecting old research before it gets lost to history. After I talk about the machine and the game I'm going to do some crazy shit.

This is Ms Pac Man, popular arcade game from 81-82, similar to Pac Man from 1980. Pac Man is a game whose popularity literally launched a hysteria (one might even say a fever) when it came out. If you approach this as a player might approach a cabinet, and it would be tempting to think that Ms Pac Man is sequel or followup to the immense success of the other. But it's not exactly true.

It's commonly said Ms Pac Man is a mod. But mod is an unfair characterization to apply to Ms Pac Man. It would be like calling CounterStrike a mod -- it came out of one game, but it's so different from what modding means today that it would be dangerous to call it that.

In order to understand how MPM came about we need to look at two factors: coin op platforms and arcade enhancement kits.

COIN OP

By 1980 there were several home game consoles: Atari VCS, Intellivision, Fairchild Channel F. These platforms were created to let the player buy one piece of hardware and play many different games on that hardware. This would exert constraint on the person making the game because they'd have to take into account the system's design. I'm mentioning this to highlight that way before Pac Man people were thinking about consoles.

Coin ops were one-off design affairs. Machines that played one game. It's a big piece of wood, metal, chips that played one game. But it's not exactly right. Platform thinking in the coinop world began very early on. Pong was a game that was all TTL logic, no microcontrollers. Coin op is a very easy way to launder money, so they were subjected to regulations. Ownership regulations around businesses like arcades, so Nolan Bushnell decided he would spawn a fake competitor to Atari called Key Games (Nolan was on the board). They kicked over their best programmer who took the knowledge of what he did at Atari and made games at Key. Tank, which is like Combat on the Atari 2600, is in some ways from the TTL logic standpoint, similar to Pong. Bouncing balls and stuff.

So there was still reusable design thinking going on.

If you look at the design of a machine like pac Man it's worth digging into its guts. Not just what's inside but how it was built on other designs. Worth noting: Z80 chip, 16k ROM (huge ROM compared to Atari carts), 2K RAM, 16 colors paletized, and 8 16x16 sprites. From a visual perspective, the way the ROM and RAM was divided was RAM was just video memory, what we would call a tile map but they called characters. 244x228, 28x36 tile grid of 8 pixel tiles. It's remarkable how the visual design hides how much of a grid the game really is. Already there was reuse of the hardware.

Pac Man and Rally X are the same game in certain ways. They are both mazes, but they also use the exact same hardware architecture. What it suggests is the idea that there's a porous underlying system that changes in small ways from machine to machine. In a somewhat ad hoc way, coin op boards were inching towards a platform (eventually we got straight up standardized coin ops like the Neo Geo).

ENHANCEMENT KITS

A coinop game is a weird object. It's a major investment, not just for the dev who makes the game, software, hardware, etc. You don't sell the game to consumers, you sell it to operators. It costs thousands of dollars to buy one of these. But more importantly, they are huge and take up a lot of space. You can only have so many of them in your arcade, hard to haul out the failed games and replace.

One way to address this problem was through enhancement kits. They would attach to an arcade machine and give it some slightly new behavior, sometimes changes to graphics or game logic. Sometimes small changes like an update the scoring system.

Asteriods enhancement kits could extend the number of digits in the scores and save the scores after powering it down. In the original Asteroids, high scores were huge, so this feature refreshed Asteriods significantly without doing a lot of changes. The enhancement kits were simple to install, just yank out a chip, plug in the enchancement board.

Pac Man Plus from 1981 speeds up the play of Pac Man and changes the maze color. In addition the fruit and bonuses are changed, etc. You'd also get a new marquee for your cabinet. Cheap easy way to renew your existing game.

This would have been really useful if you only had a few machines in a bowling alley or tavern.

My favorite enhancement kit is for Dragon's Lair called Super Don Quixote!

This leads back to Ms Pac Man. There were students at MIT who started messing around with coinop boards. They messed around with their own enhancement board, started a company General Computing Corporation to sell enhancement boards for existing games. What's interesting about the boards is that they're meant to physically draw in new players (new attract mode and sounds, etc). Companies used to publish the circuit boards for repair but that made them too easy to hack so they stopped doing it. By this time the games were running largely in software. The hackers would reverse engineer everything. The MIT guys would use microprocessor emulation systems to do tests and figure out how the existing code worked, and find a minimalist way to change the code.

Maybe they'd change 5%-10% of the code itself. There were a few ways to distribute the kits. One is to distribute ROMs, but people could copy the ROMs. There were interesting questions about selling a 10% modification on 90% code other people wrote, apparanltly it was legal. GCC did a lot of hardware extensions to the Atari consoles eventually and even designed the 7800.

Pac Man was a good target for enhancements. There was a game called Crazy Otto, sometimes called Pac Man With Legs, looked basically just like Ms Pac Man with a different protagonist.

For major gameplay changes: four different mazes in four different colors. A feeling of progress. Different, more random monster behaviors (Pac Man had deterministic monsters so you could memorize a way to beat each level). Bonus objects such as fruits moved around the screen. And then narrative intermissions. Otto had Anna chasing him around on the screen. Crazy Otto was entirely Ms Pac Man.

Pac Man had 16K of ROM split into four ROMs of 4K each, ROM A B C D. The Auxilary Board would modify some base code, rom D was removed, a ROM E was added, a ROM F, and then 40 8-byte patches were added so if you hit a place in memory, it would do a jump to new code, and then jump back. So GCC went to Midway who distributed Pac Man. Midway was mad at Namco since Namco was not moving on making a sequel.

10/9/81: GCC shows Otto to Midway, almost entirely done at that point.

10/29/81: GCC signed contract, added Midway logo.

11/81: Midway calls GCC, and they settle on female pac man

Nov-Dec 81: Going back and forth to finish things up. Final title was established at this point. Initial title suggested: Miss Pac-Man. Then, Pac-Woman. Then Mrs. Pac-Man, because there's concern over baby pac man in the intermissions. Eventually they settled on Ms. Pac Man.

01/82: Deliver the final code to Midway.

I promised you weird shit, though. The title of my talk is the genesis of Ms Pac-Man. Two weird things.

One is the notion of the genesis of the machine, the other is the concept of Ms.

When I say "genesis" I mean it, Biblically, the creation of man and woman.

Gen 1:26, let us make man in our image. Man in the image of God, man and woman in the image of God. There's a lot of discourse about the language in hebrew Genesis. The word Selem "image" can refer to form or ideal, or idols false idols. Comes from the root of carving. Another word meaning more "likeness" or "appearance". Makes man according to ideal of God and God's appearance. Mankind is a representation of a higher form, and that likeness suggests that man appears like god as well.

Gen 2:21-3, man's ribs used to create woman. Man: "This now at least is the bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh." Hebrew word Selam: means rib, but can also mean a side, a plank, a BOARD. Yet simialr to the word for ideal or idol, this board.

This is demonstrating an equivalency of origin, woman and man are instances of mankind.

I'm using the analogy because it helps us create a metaphor for how Pac Man and Ms Pac Man are related. One can say without hyperbole that Ms Pac Man was created from the rib/board of Pac Man, but almost reversed: a chip removed, a daughterboard added. They are two instances of common underlying hardware structure. The "god" is the platform, the abstraction of the integrated circuits that makes this possible.

The second thing that fascinates me is where the Ms. came from. In the interstitials you see Act 1: PM and PW are being chased, the ghosts bump together, the two are joined. In act 2, both are chasing each other. In act 3, they are together at the bottom of the screen and a stork drops off baby. Common conflict, love affair, creation of child. But if you look at how Pac Man was advertised, Ms. Pac-Man was a vampy femme fatale! On the cabinet itself she's got her legs all up. How do we reconcile this?

It's in the concept of "MS." Mrs and Miss are abbrevations from the 18th century "mistress". We don't use it anymore but it used to just mean the female form of Mister. It was neutral like Mr. In 1950s, we see it reappear as a convenience for writing business letters. By the 1960s it was used as a title of a woman who did not belong to a man (women's liberation). By the 1970s it took off and it became Gloria Steinem's magazine. By the 1980s, Ms. was a standard cultural practice to refer to a woman without refering her marital status.

Ms as a concept introduces ambiguity: decouples a woman's professional life from her personal. A lot of the ambiguity is performed in the game. We have the vampy seductress in the marketing, but she's the wife and the mother in the game movies. And then in game, she's a working girl who just does what Pac-Man does, but better (it's a harder game). For another part she's a traditionalist, family woman, a mother. These world are mechanically separately in the game between the gameplay and the movie: the challenges of work itself bring the two together, the common struggle around the work brings her together with her family.

Another ambiguity is the circumstance around which the Ms Pac Man name was created. Was this iteratively arrived at in the halls of Midway?

Ms. Pac Man is not only a game with a particular game, but is a game that is performing this notion of "Ms." if you look at the way that it's a pop cultural icon, she's still capable of performing these roles.

To finish up, tehre are two major cultural revelations thorugh Ms Pac Man: it shows us two takes on a common platform in which each take sheds a different light on the underlying hardware. In some weird way this is how the God of Genesis described how man and woman mirror equally the likeness of God. Similarly games that are built upon the same form invite us to envision each of them individually but also the common machinic form.

It's also the apotheosis of the feminist video game, through and through. It's a woman who triumphs over a man by playing his game better than he ever could, captivates by being more challenging, manages to balance the many sides of being female.