June 2009
1 post
I eat your good ideas →
Nice little abject lesson in how corporate culture effectively dilutes vision. I would assert that the issue is not decentralization in hierarchies (as implied in the article), but rather an inward focus on the enterprise, rather than the customer. The average person is motivated to create & maintain an environment at work that is comfortable, predictable, and secure. This leads to the kinds...
May 2009
1 post
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...
January 2009
2 posts
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”....
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...
November 2008
1 post
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...
August 2008
2 posts
Interview with Paul Sams, COO of Blizzard... →
Typically, executives at video game companies are just retreads from other industries. For whatever reason, business executives often view the C-suite jobs as interchangeable across different markets, and that’s how end up with a guy who ran operations at a retail chain suddenly parachuting into your company and mucking up its structure from the top down.
That’s what makes this...
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...
July 2008
6 posts
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...
Drunken, Singaporean Girls Love Scrubbles →
Oh Google Alerts, how I love your joy-filled daily emails.
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....
Sandy’s Theme, by Aaron Jasinsky
One of the...
Alley Insider names the five most addictive... →
And Scrubbles (Bubble Town) is number two.
Witness the power of my fully armed and operational score: (183115)
Scrubbles (aka Bubble Town)
Over the past few weeks, a little game called Scrubbles (also known as Bubble Town) has been getting a lot of buzz on sites like Facebook and MySpace. Scrubbles has an interesting history - developed as a game for college-age adults, released to a market dominated by 50+ year old women, condemned as a failure, now finally released to its market and reborn as a hit.
Developing Scrubbles was...