Jonathan Grant

VentureBeat and Learning to Love Being Co-Opted

I admit to having a reflex bias against outsiders working/covering the game industry. While this knee-jerk has a foundation in valid experience, it’s something I struggle to suppress – coming from an outsider doesn’t make an opinion invalid, it just makes it orders of magnitude less likely to be valid.

Outsider opinions are critical in any entertainment medium, and especially hard to digest given the subjectivity involved. The dynamic nature of digitally-generated media can make this worse; Jar Jar Binks proves that limitless possibilities aren’t automatically a virtue. Add limitless opinions dispensed via the Internet, and you’ve got the beginnings of an explanation as to why the game industry is so insular.

While today’s influx of new bodies into the industry will undoubtedly produce some gems, sometimes I’m overwhelmed by the proportional stream of turds it’s simultaneously raining on us all. Today’s example of these wages of inexperience is the game coverage over at VentureBeat.

First off, let me state clearly that I’m a daily reader of VentureBeat. I’ll explain why in a second.

Dean Takahashi generally writes all the game-related posts over there, and rarely do his entries fail to make my jaw clench at some inaccurate / fuzzy detail. Some examples:

May 18th (On the exercise gaming trend):

“In video games, Nintendo starts the trends and then the copycats pile in.”

Sure, as long as you don’t consider First-Person Shooters, MMOs, music performance games, open world roamers like GTA, or multiplayer games “trends”.

May 15th (On investment dollars continuing to flow into gaming):

“Why should you only be able to get rich -– or lose your shirt — at a Web 2.0 company? Or at an investment bank? Or a cleantech company? Games are a haven from the storm.”

I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen people from outside the industry stumble and choke on their external assumptions about game development. This is equally true for investors. Look at Hollywood’s rich history of fleecing external investors as an example of how an entertainment product with demographic-driven attributes (like “fun” and “excitement”) can confuse and muddle an investor.

These are a couple of examples just from the last few days. As I said above, in spite of these kinds of stumbles, I continue to read and enjoy the VentureBeat blog, and that’s the reason for this post.

As game developers, we’re witnessing a generational shift happen in our industry. It’s not uncommon to see young sweethearts list “playing video games” as something they enjoy doing together the same way their parents liked “going to the movies”. This shift is just starting to surface, and the waves it will generate will destroy many of the common assumptions the industry has held to as bedrock. Certainly, you can see this future written in the rise of casual gaming – a huge market most hardcore developers are still willfully blind to.

This kind of blindness is why the fresh (if shaky) perspective of outsiders like the VentureBeat guys is a daily read for me. For game developers, listening to outsiders about the future of the industry is just as critical a discipline as listening to players about the quality of our games.

Bubble Town Gamezebo Interview

Gamezebo, a popular casual games blog, recently posted an article on Bubble Town based on interviews with myself and Cara Ely. Cara and I worked on the original Bubble Town together, with Cara acting as the producer. It sounds like sales of Bubble Town are still going strong!

This article lead me to the Play at Work blog, the “unofficial community blog for employees of Oberon Media”. Here’s what they had to say about the Bubble Town Gamezebo post:

“It’s a terrific look at how I-play resurrected a dying game through re-branding and better understanding of its target market.”

Hmmm. I’d say this is some pretty aggressive spin on what actually happened, but close enough. :)

Funnily, the Play at Work post mentions Peggle as another “niche” game that could be successfully re-marketed for the casual market. The questionable nature of this statement aside, one of the key developers on the original Bubble Town (Jeremy Bilas) is also behind Peggle Nights. If you play both games, you can really see Jeremy’s fingerprints all over them.

Bubble Town for the iPhone Released!

iPlay released Bubble Town on the iPhone today. I’m pretty excited - finally the game is being marketed to an audience that it was designed for!

If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod touch, you can download the game by searching for “Bubble Town” in the iTunes store. It’s a steal at $3.99.

The team that created the original game was very talented - I wish we’d had a cool audience & platform like the iPhone to develop for before the team was broken up. Now people from the crew who created the game work all over the place; PopCap games, GameHouse, Section Seven, iPlay, and of course Smith & Tinker.

Scrubbles Officially Renamed “Bubble Town”

Much to my regret, Oberon Media has re-branded Scrubbles as “Bubble Town”. While I dislike this name, I’m really happy to see this game for sale again! You can already download the game from Big Fish, and hopefully more sites will carry the title again.

Marketing this game was always a challenge - since this game was intended to be for college-age players we went for a “cute but foul-mouthed” thing. Think South Park meets the iPhone. Of course, this kind of a treatment is a dud in the conventional casual market. The confusion on who this game is for is evident in the copy on the game page - it’s not a kid’s game!

I haven’t downloaded it yet, but let’s hope it’s the version with the cut-scenes! Heh.

Casual Games Bubble - Bursting Soon?

The other day I was talking with some friends about the overuse of games as a marketing tool by non-gaming companies. It seems like every large company is creating a casual/social games portal, no matter how irrelevent it might be to their core business.

I imagine that the internal plan for these sites goes something like this:

• People love games
• We make some games
• ???
• People buy airline tickets from us
  

Post Casual Connect ‘08 Post

Our panel at Casual Connect was a pretty fun time – Teagan Densmore for RealNetworks organized and ran the session, with myself, Cara Ely from iPlay, and Tony Leamer from Oberon Media filling out the panel. The topic of our session was game design pitching – specifically, how non-designers can pitch ideas inside their organization. Cara, Tony, and I all used to work together, so we had fun ribbing each other on our past pitches. Cara specifically was the perfect person to talk about this subject, as she’s successfully pitched an idea (Dream Day Wedding) which she then built into a multi-million dollar franchise.

I was able to set the tone for the panel early by dropping the f-bomb in the first five minutes of the panel. Everyone thanked me for this clever ice-breaker.

Cara and I had a funny moment while waiting for our panel to start – we were sitting in the previous session watching a speaker walk through their slides. The speaker was talking about Seek-&-Find-style games, and mentioning that it was going to be difficult for indie developers to compete with monster franchises like Mystery Case Files and … Dream Day Wedding! This was a pretty big thrill for Cara since she created and championed DDW, from a few sentences in a concept word doc to a series of games that a stranger referred to as a “monster franchise”.

The real difference (besides the hard work of the development team) between the success and failure of a new concept is your ability as a designer to both personally believe in the idea and create that belief in other people in your organization. This process can often feel like building the top stories of a high rise before the foundation has been poured – a lot of times you’ll go home filled with doubts about your concept after a long day of hyping that same idea to your team and upper management. This can lead to unfortunate late night drinking sessions.

Of course, if your idea is a hit it’s common to find that people who had doubts about your idea are instantly converted into advocates for it. Many of these people will remember themselves as supportive of your concept all along. This is human nature – we all remember our successful “calls” in the past, and forget our many mistakes. The ephemeral and abstract nature of fun exasperates this effect, and the only test of a game that matters is in the marketplace.

To the point; it’s more and more clear to me that belief in both yourself and your product (without arrogance) is one of the hardest challenges you can face as a designer. While this effort is common across industries and professions, the nature of game design again makes this goal very difficult to consistently achieve. I’ll be exploring these ideas in later posts.

I’m Speaking at Casual Connect

Ok, a non-Scrubbles post.

I’ll be on a panel at Casual Connect Seattle 2008 on July 24th. The panel’s name is “I’m a game designer … and so are you …”, and we’ll be talking about collaborative game design and how non-designers can pitch their concepts internally.

Creating a concept pipline inside an organization is a pretty hard thing to do. Examining & envisioning methods to create fertile creative ground inside a studio is one of the themes I’d like to explore on this blog. I’ve got my own theories, but I’d love to hear from other people who’ve had experience in this area.

Send me an email to jonthangrant <at> gmail <dot> com.