Three Reasons Creators Should Never Read Their Forums

If I have learned anything from writing Indie games for a living for fifteen years (and there are plenty who would say that I haven't), it is that it is usually a bad idea for creators to visit online forums discussing them and their work. It doesn't lead to happy ends.

This is why big, smart companies with actual budgets hire community people who do nothing but deal with and sift through forums. Managing fans is real work, and picking out the realistic and worthwhile comments takes a ton of time and judgment. That is why smart companies put a layer between the fans and the creators. If you don't have this layer, you should keep a safe, respectful distance.

It's a pity. My company, Spiderweb Software, has a really awesome, active online forum. Been there for years. Always active, full of all sorts of discussions. However, unless I've just released a game and are looking for signs of early, evil bugs, I have to stay away from it.

Some of my fans really resent this and take it personally, and they haven't been shy about letting me know. But if you've ever wondered why the creators of your beloved games often avoid the forums (especially the Word of Warcraft forums, Yeesh!), this might help you to understand why.

1. It's Not Productive To Read How Much People Hate You

It's been said that, if you want a healthy marriage, you have to say five kind things for every unkind thing. It is in our nature to gloss over and ignore kind words, but to really fixate on and get affected by unkind ones. This is why Facebook will never have a Don't Like button. If you see "Joe likes your post," well, fine. If the average online denizen see "Joe doesn't like this," he or she will probably freak out.

Which brings us to forums.

A few years ago, I wrote an article for IGN about how I felt that Indie games were far from the only source of innovation, and the big companies don't get enough credit for trying to make innovative things. Slashdot was kind enough to link to it. Someone might agree or disagree with me. Fine. But someone wrote this ...

"This is the kind of commentary I'd expect out of a cynical independent ripoff artist in action, really. You know, the kind of person who is too afraid and closed-minded to try anything new, partly because he doesn't want to lose his money or reputation - a sound judgement - and partly because he just doesn't seem to want to try. ...  In other words, nothing to see here. Just near-mindless droning from another cynic with a rather skewed and defeated view of the gaming world."

WHOA! DUDE! What did I ever do to you? Did I run over your dog? Make out with your mom? Go to where you work and mess up the settings on the fry vat? Damn!

Now, I thought that one was pretty funny. I sent links to it to my friends, saying, "Hey! Look what people REALLY think of me!" Over the years, I've developed a pretty thick skin. And yet, if you read lots of people dumping on you, unless you have super-human emotional control, it's eventually going to get to you. Sometimes I'll get weak and look at a forum and see some nasty cheap shot and it'll throw me off my game for hours.

Remember, as Penny Arcade put it (in a far superior and NSFW way), anonymity plus audience makes assholes. (And, for what it's worth, the creators of Penny Arcade don't read their forums either.)

It's a little different on my company's forums. But only a little. Even though it is mainly populated by my fans, it is still full of shots at my design skill, game quality, virility, and facial complexion. Remember, there's a thin line between love and hate. Nobody will lash out at you like a disappointed fan.

When I read the forums for, say, World of Warcraft or xkcd, I'm always amazed at how nasty things get. It makes me think, "If you hate it so much, why are you there?" But that's just the way it is, and excess exposure to insults can really get under your skin, make you doubt yourself, and interfere with your work. It's very sad, but you sometimes need to just protect yourself by staying away. Keep your brain clean.

2. It's Not Going To Be Helpful

It seems like reading forums would be a good way to get design ideas and learn ways to improve your games. With the exception of learning about bugs, this is usually not the case.

It can be tempting, when you're stuck designing a game, to read forums and look for feedback. The problem is this. No matter what the question is, there are people who will advocate strongly for both sides of it. Many of these people reflexively hate change. Many of these people are only happy if the game is much harder (or much easier). Some of them will not, in fact, have a realistic idea about anything. Often, there are issues where intelligent people can come to opposite conclusions, and you can read thousands of furious posts on either side of the issue without getting an inch closer to an actual decision.

Forums contain a cacophony of people telling you to do diametrically opposite things, very loudly, often for bad reasons. There will be plenty of good ideas, but picking them out from the bad ones is unreliable and a lot of work. If you try to make too many people happy at once, you will drive yourself mad. You have to be very, very careful who you let into your head.

Of course, it is still very important for designers to get lots of good, constructive criticism. That is why I have built up an elite cadre of awesome beta testers and interested friends, and I listen to them very closely. And, I must point out, many of those testers were recruited from my forums. You just need to choose carefully the people you ask for advice.

3. You Might Get Suckered Into Getting Angry

Not much to say about this. If you read forums for long enough, you will read a lot of nasty comments and cheap shots. If you read enough cheap shots, you'll get angry. If you are angry enough, you will eventually lash out and flame back.

Snapping angrily at your customers never, ever leads to good results.

One Final Comment

I'm sure some of my fellow Indie developers are reading this and shaking their heads at my idiocy. A lot of developers do maintain close relationships with their forums. It works for them, for now. I'm glad for them, and I hope it keeps working.

Just bear this in mind. When you start out and gain your first following, you get a grace period. You're a fresh face, making awesome new things. Everyone loves you. And, most importantly, you haven't had a chance to start disappointing chunks of your fan base yet.

The longer you are active, the more of your fans will turn on you, justified or not.

And, if you are a member of my forums reading this, know this. I love you guys. The idea that anyone wants to discuss my work at all, even to dump on it, is insanely flattering. I just hope that this makes clearer the instincts of efficiency and self-preservation that lead me to keep a little bit of distance.

Edit: Changed "think skin" to "thick skin."

Sometimes It's OK To Steal My Games

This blog post is about the bright side of software piracy. It's about the times when not only is it OK to steal my games, but, in fact, I get something out of it. Perhaps an unusual topic for a blog post from a game developer.

I admit to being a little bit nervous about writing this. The sad truth is that, these days, it is so easy to pirate single-player PC games that most gamers only have to pay for them if they want to pay for them. And there is strong evidence (links below) to indicate that they usually don't want to pay for them. So giving people ammunition they can use to convince themselves that they shouldn't pay for my games seems perilous, especially since they are, after all, how I support my family. But I got into the blogging game to write about the reality of the game biz from the viewpoint of my shadowy little corner, and piracy is a huge part of it, so here we go.

Of Course, Piracy Is Almost Always Wrong

I think that the best way of evaluating the morality of an action is to ask, "What would happen if everyone who wanted to do it did it?" Littering and dumping toxic waste into rivers are wrong because, if everyone who wanted to do those things did them, our streets would be choked with refuse and our drinking water would be half benzene. And pirating PC games is wrong because, were it not for that minority of worthy souls who actually chip in, the industry that makes the games we love would descend into a shadow realm of tiny ad-supported Flash games and Farmville. Some people would be cool with that, but I'm looking forward to playing Starcraft 2, thanks.

And I've now set myself up for 50 comments of increasingly overwrought and implausible justifications for why pirating games is a good, noble thing to do. No. Sorry. You don't get everything you want in this world. You can get piles of cool stuff for free. Or you can be an honorable, ethical being. You don't get both.

Most of the time.

Because, when I'm being honest with myself, which happens sometimes, I have to admit that piracy is not an absolute evil. That I do get things out of it, even when I'm the one being ripped off.

Computers Exist In the Third World

Every so often, I get an e-mail in broken English from some kid in Russia or southeast Asia or India. He says how how he is playing my game in a cyber-cafe, for fun and perhaps to practice English. The disparity in the strength of the currency between our two countries makes it impossible it is for him to get the 25 or 28 hard US dollars to buy my game. (It's entirely possible in much of the world to not be dirt poor and yet to be entirely unable to scrape together a chunk of hard U.S. dollars.) The message ends with a sincere and heart-rending plea for a registration key.

Now, you're probably thinking, "Yeah, the kid is probably making it up." I doubt it. Remember, my games are easy to pirate. Anyone who wants to steal my games can grab them any time he or she wants. Maybe some of these pleas are fake, but I'm sure that most aren't.

When I get one of these message, what I want to respond is, "PIRATE MY STUPID GAME!!!" I mean, seriously, the time used drafting that e-mail would have been much more profitably spent figuring out how BitTorrent works.

But I don't say that. I delete the e-mail unanswered. Because, the truth is that these games are how I feed my family. Asking me for free keys is simply not a behavior I want to encourage.

But I really hope those kids pirated my game. And I am sure that, for every such e-mail I received, a horde of others in faraway lands pirated it on their own. Sometimes, thanks to the vagaries of the international monetary order, my games are just out of reach any other way. And, when people enjoy my work, it gives my life meaning, which bring me to ...

I Want My Life To Have Meaning

I consider myself a reasonably bright person, who works hard to make something people like. When I'm old and crumbling, I want to be able to feel that I had a successful life in which my work brought happiness to a lot of people.

I feel fully financially compensated for my time when one of my games (which usually takes a year or so to make) sells 5000 copies. However, from the game industry perspective, 5000 copies is nothing. Even the crappiest flop from a real publisher sells a ton more than that. So am I wasting my life? If I really care about the number of people I reach and the amount of happiness I bring, shouldn't I try to get a job somewhere where my work has a chance of reaching far more people?

But then I remember that for everyone who buys my game, dozens more just tried the demo. And a lot of those people will play the whole demo, have fun, decide they had enough, and move on. That counts as providing fun for people, sort of.

But, more importantly, the percentage of people who pirate PC games seems to be very high. It's possible that 90% of the copies of my games out there are pirated. There is definitely solid evidence that the piracy rate for PC games is that high, and believe me, there are a thousand ways to get my games for free. It happens a lot. And, if that figure holds, that brings the player base for each of my games to 50000. That is a number that can keep me from lying awake at night.

Of course, a lot of those people could have bought it but decided to pirate it instead. In other words, jerks. Which brings up a good question. Am I satisfied that my life's work went to make a jerk happy? Does that give me Life Value points? Is it a worthwhile thing to bring a jerk pleasure? This is generally the point where I force myself to think about something else.

But not everyone who steals a game has money. Some of them are legitimately poor. Which brings me to one final point.

The Recession Is a Thing That is Happening

These days, some people are legitimately poor. Many people, through a mix of poor fiscal choices and ill fortune, are in bad shape. Foreclosed on, or facing foreclosure. Trying to pay down a mountain of credit card debt. Unemployed for a long time. Lacking health insurance. Some people brush this growing population off, saying, "Oh, they brought it on themselves." And sometimes that is true. They made mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. I make mistakes. It's just that some people are unlucky enough to be savagely punished for their mistakes.

Someone who is facing long-term unemployment and bankruptcy probably should not pay for my game. And, in that case, if stealing my game gives them a temporary reprieve from their misery (and there's a lot of misery out there right now), I'm cool with that. I'm happy to help. These are my fellow citizens, and I want to help out how I can.

Now here is what I am NOT saying. If some kid has to actually save his allowance for a few weeks to buy the game, stealing it is instead of paying is not cool. I'm not OK with that. If you can pay, you should pay. But I understand that some people can't. It's reality. As for whether someone can truly pay or not, I have to trust them to be able to tell the difference. It's probably unwise to trust so many strangers so much with my livelihood on the line. But it's not like I have a choice.

How I Will Now Single-Handedly Solve the Problem of Piracy

I just have to add one thing, and then I can hopefully go without writing about this ugly topic for a good, long time. The way the economics of the business work right now, if you want good PC games, someone has to pay for them. You can't support a project like Starcraft 2 with ads. The money just isn't there.

If you like PC games but you usually pirate them, I want you to start actually paying for one game a year. Just one. Please. You should do it because you need to do it to help something you like to continue to exist. Sure, you might find that doing the virtuous thing feels surprisingly good. But, in the end, you should do it for the reason anyone ever really does anything: Because it is in your best interests to do so.

But what game should you pay for? It's tempting to say you should support some small Indie, like me, who is just working hard to support his family. But I don't believe that. The people who made Starcraft 2 have families to. No, buy the game that you feel most deserves to be rewarded. Who gave you the most fun, or carried the industry forward, or that you felt treated you fairly.

Maybe that game is Starcraft 2. Maybe it's Avernum 6 or Aveyond or Eschalon 2 or World of Goo or one of a million tiny games. It might even be Assassin's Creed 2. Could happen.

And, before you post flaming me because Piracy-Is-Always-Good or Always-Bad, remember that all I'm trying to do is pay a little visit to reality-land. And while I do get something out of piracy, all things being equal, it's better to pay for the thing you use. Again, with PC games, you can get cool free stuff, or you can be honorable. You don't get both. Once in a while, be part of the solution.

The Ugly American's Guide To Britain, Part 3.

(One more vacation journal, and then I'll go back to writing about games for a while. When I'm not making games, I love to travel foreign lands and write snarky and occasionally helpful journals about what I saw. This is the third article about my recent two-week trip through Britain. Some of the content is a little more adult that what I put on this blog. If you are below sixteen or so, you should go here. Anything offensive or misguided should be blamed on the dysfunctional American educational system.)

General Notes on Britain, Set the Third

Despite the island's reputation, we have eaten a lot of really delicious food here. That's not to say there isn't a lot of terrible food here. I'm sure there is, but that's true everywhere. I've eaten a lot of totally crap food in France and Italy.

But if you keep your eyes open and choose carefully, there is a lot of deliciousness, even in pubs. And it makes sense. Britain has excellent meat (most of it grass-fed), great fruits and vegetables, fantastic cheese, and really tasty candy bars. My advice if looking for good food? Look for a place that brags that its ingredients are "locally sourced." That means that at least its heart is in the right place.

Also, we have started each days with the legendary, much feared English Breakfasts. It's pretty much the default tourist chow at any B&B you care to name. It's an egg, a sausage link, a piece of bacon, a roasted tomato, tinned beans, toast, OJ, and the caffeine of your choice. And black pudding, if the place is awesome.

It sounds scary, but it's really not. Laid out on the plate, it is, by American standards, a pretty modest meal. Hell, I've picked less food than that out of my teeth and belly folds before I go to bed. But it's a jolt of protein and energy that's perfect for powering you through 12 hours of high-octane touristing. The one day I went without it, I was headachy and miserable by the end of the afternoon. So I am addicted.

Also, speaking of giant jolts of fat. I am very pleased to say that, after vacations being intimidated by the delicate and gazelle-like French, I have to say that the English are of a body build I am ... let's say, more familiar with. As a picked-last-for-sports tubbenheimer from back in the day, I feel very at home here.

Stop 3 - York

York is, even by British standards, old. It was a major Roman fort and local capitol. They built big walls around it. Then the Normans took it over and made the walls bigger. Then the English came along and made the walls bigger. Most of those walls are still there, albeit with big holes in them. But I met a Scot who knows a guy who knows a guy who can fix those holes for thirty quid.

When you're in York, everywhere you go, you can turn and see ancient walls and parapets and arrowslits and murder holes. So, for a Dungeons & Dragons goober like me from back in the day, being there was like a 36 hour orgasm.

York is very generously laid out for the sore-footed tourist, as just about everything an outsider would want to see is inside the city walls, in one small, easily traversed clump. There is the expected street after street of gorgeous old architecture. Wood buildings that somehow survived from the middle ages. Rows of Victorian townhouses. A working portcullis by the east gate. (Squeee!)

Visiting towns like this, it's easy to imagine that all of the British live like this, in gorgeous, architecturally interesting five story houses. They don't. Actually, a huge chunk of them live in cruddy flats, like we do, sitting on the couch, watching boobies on the lookybox (again, the British word for a "telly") and eating pie.

But then again, looking out the window of the train, I have seen countless developments of row after row of brick houses with heavy tile roofs, each of them built like a brick shithouse, if that brick shithouse was then expanded into a full house. Even their suburbs have great age-envy. Their 20th century houses haven't been around for 500 years, but they look pretty good for lasting the next 500.

Anyway. York. Like Bath, much of the fun was just walking around and gawking. Seeing a six hundred year old building slumping lazily toward the street is always amusing. But the two name-attractions for us were York Minster and the Castle Museum.

York Minster is a gothic cathedral, the largest of its kind in northern Europe. Apparently, there are people out there who get super-excited about cathedrals, but I'm not an aficionado.

York Minster was started in the 13th century and only finished 250 years later (isn't that just like contractors?), full of cool art and medieval stained glass. It's also full of history. For example, it's where Edward the First ("Longshanks" to you, because nicknames were awesome back then) convened parliament to figure out how to kill Mel Gibson before he could impregnate his daughter, or something. I don't know. All the kings and wars and sieges are starting to get a little bit tangled for me. At this point, whenever a tour guide shows me a wall or alley or something, I just say, "Did dudes get killed here?" and he's, like, "Totally!", and I nod and take a picture and we move on. There's a gorgeous shard of ruined abbey wall sticking out of the ground, from when Henry the 18th destroyed it to save Catholocism from the Huns, or something. I'm sure that's what my guide said, but I think the English breakfasts are giving me ham-hallucinations.

If you're going to England, you should know that at no point in the last thousand years has a week gone by without a civil war or beheaded queen or pope-stabbing or Celtic insurrection. Do not, under any circumstances, try to keep any of it straight. If you try to figure out the difference between Henry the Third and Richard the Twelfth and Edward the Umpty-Tumpth, you will go mad, and anyway all that intrigue was made up to sound good for the tourists. Mary, Queen of Scots actually has as much historical reality as the Loch Ness Monster. In reality, from 1000 AD to 1900 AD, Britain was ruled in constant peace and tranquility by a secret circle of elves. So, now that you know that, you can let all the stabbings and dethronings wash over you without letting them worry you too much.

Anyway. York Minster. Almost every day, they have a free Evensong service (a lot of cathedrals do this, by the way), where you can sit in the grandeur and listen to a gorgeous sung service. Now, it's officially church, so you have to be respectful and stand and sit when they tell you to and pretend to pray, but it's very cool and it'll make you feel in touch with the centuries of violent crazy people that came before you, and I highly recommend it.

Oh, and it's free. They don't charge admission for church, which kind of makes sense.

The other stop we truly enjoyed was the Castle Museum. It's in a castle, not about castles. It is a museum dedicated to displaying every detail of life in Victorian and 20th century times. There are displays about housework, and mourning, and the home front in WW2, and the sixties, and so on, complete with antiques and highly detailed recreations of rooms from the times. This sort of thing can be horrible, but the place was completely fascinating.

I also found it very helpful. Most of my fun comes from sitting around and listening to adorable accents. After listening to adults for a while, I felt that listening to small children talking in their cheery little pip pip tally-ho voices would be the living end. So I considered hanging out outside a school when it lets out, but then it occured to me that any plan that begins with "Hang out near the school when it lets out" might be ill-considered.

But the Castle Museum was full of flocks of British schoolchildren, walking in lines in their uniforms and being educated and bored. It was adorable. So that was covered.

One of the big reliefs on the trip has been that, even in very touristy cities, unless you are actually in a museum or other attraction, the vast majority of the people on the street are locals. People live here! I went to a great deal of effort and expense to go somewhere and be a foreigner. I see Americans' fat, slack-jawed faces all the time, thank you very much. When I travel, I want to see the dull, pallid faces of unappealing strangers from all around the globe.

Fun British Fact #3

The U.K. currently has a huge problem with alcoholism. This is an actual true fact. However, this does have the happy side-effect that the drunken idiots who paraded shouting past your hotel room at 3 in the morning were probably locals, not ugly Americans. So don't be ashamed!

The Ugly American's Guide To Britain, Part 2.

(When I'm not writing games, I love to travel foreign lands and write snarky and occasionally helpful journals about what I saw. This is the second of five articles about my recent two-week trip through Britain. Some of the content is a little more adult that what I put on this blog. If you are below sixteen or so, you should go here. Anything offensive should be blamed on a hormonal imbalance caused by too much haggis.)

General Notes on Britain, Set the Second

People in Britain have an accent. And, by that, I mean that they have about 400 accents. While watching the telly (or, as they call it, the "Looky Box"), I saw a comedian do a bit about how everything sounds more reassuring in a Manchester accent. So there is a Manchester accent, and that means something. Societies that develop on islands can get a little bit odd.

Still, just listening to people talk is one of the funnest things about coming here. I simply can't get tired of it. My main attraction is going to a pub (which is not difficult, as every building is a pub) and listening. I also try to talk to people, but I have to be careful and not say any of my opinions about the ridiculousness of soccer or how cute it is that they have, get this, a queen. Otherwise I might say the wrong thing, and someone might hear me and be feeling all drinky-punchy, and I'll hear someone behind me shout, "Oi!" Which is British for, "Pardon me, but I am about to give your ass a truly extensive kicking."

The language on this island is an intriguing dialect of English. They have lots of funny words for things. For example, the primary currency is the "pound", but they will often refer to it as a "squid." A sample conversation might go: "Can you give me change for this squid?" "Sure, luv. Here are one guinea, three farthings, two bob, a crown, six ha'pennies, a half crown, a mega-crown, a mecha crown, and a pennywhistle." "That's not enough! There should be another farthing. You have cheated me, m'lord." "Oi!" "(Sound of face being punched.)"

Also, the British, like most of the rest of the world, love a sport called soccer. I got to watch them watch a World Cup match where their team fought Algeria to a scorching, hard-fought 0-0 tie.

I know. I know. While I'm there, I'm supposed to call it "Football." But, if you live in the U.S. and are in the U.S., calling soccer "football" is truly affected.

Also, football sounds like it should be the name of a cool, kick-ass, exciting sport. Any sport where a 0-0 outcome is not only plausible but, in fact, common isn't sweet enough to have an awesome name like Football. Soccer isn't even cool enough to be called Soccer. I think it should have a more appropriate name, like "Fancy-pants grass-prancing."

I also got to be there when Germany beat England 4-1 in what was, based on the media reaction, the worst thing to ever happen to anyone anywhere. Apparently, England scored an unquestionable goal that would have tied up the game, but it was disallowed because the referee wasn't close enough to get a good look at it and there is no goal referee and no instant replay review. Hey, just because it's the most popular sport in the world doesn't mean they should drop a few extra bucks to actually get the thing officiated properly. After a couple weeks of exposure both to the alleged entertainment of World Cup soccer and to the people who love it, I've come to the conclusion that I could like soccer, except that I don't hate myself enough.

Stop 2 - Edinburgh

Before I start, I have to send a quick message out to the Scottish people.

I can't understand a goddamn word any of you are saying.

This is not to be taken as a criticism. I love ya', baby. Don't ever change. I am instead saying it as a way of fostering greater understanding between our peoples. I would only point out that the Scottish crime thriller Sweet Sixteen, which came out in 2002, had to have subtitles, and it was entirely in English.

I may be exaggerating here slightly. Most of the time, I could kind of understand what Scottish people were saying. But there is something about that accent that just lends itself to being dialed up to 11.

But I still completely love listening to it. I could listen to Scottish people talk all day, and since all of them that I met seemed inclined to talk all day, we were a good fit. For example, when my wife and I were sitting in the park, a crazy old woman just in from her tiny village in western Scotland, sat down next to us and started telling us all of her racist terrorism conspiracy theories, I just sat, back, relaxed, and let her brogue wash over me. Sure, her thick accent made it impossible for me to tell exactly what she was saying about the Jews. (My guess? Not a fan.) But it was still lovely until she started explaining how Barack Obama was a secret Muslim terrorist. Then we lied about our urgent dinner reservations and ran off. Sorry, crazy Scottish lady. We get enough of that particular shit at home.

Also, I have pretty much fallen in love with Scottish women. Bear in mind I am only writing based on my own personal observations, but they are all completely punk and scary and thoroughly tattoed and hot and ready to cut you at a moment's notice. I'm not saying I want to be 20 and single again but, if in some horrible Twilight Zone future I was, I would save up my pennies and hop a flight to Edinburgh. Then, in a bar somewhere, I'd catch the eye of some pierced lass and we'd talk and I'd swoon and the next three days would be a blur and I'd wake up in a bathtub full of ice with a broken heart and no kidneys.

Yes, the northern half of this island is pretty scrappy. Their women all look ready to get to it and breed the next generation of Scottish warriors. And yet, Scotland's birth rate is very low. Perhaps, inspired by the arachnid, they eat the livers of those they love in moments of unguarded coital enthusiasm. The theory sounds crazy until you see these women. They're pretty awesome.

And believe me, the Scottish don't mess about. Edinburgh Castle isn't just some frou frou toy castle where nobles ponce about at each other. That's one of those ancient occasionally-razed-to-the-ground spires where the shit gets real for real. And the National Museum of Scotland is a glorious and unapologetic monument to all things Scottish. Not just Roman artifacts but plants and stuffed animals and the curling stone they used to win a gold medal but also plenty of swords and thumbscrews and The Maiden, a big alarming pre-guillotine contraption used to behead people for several productive centuries. See, if you're going to build a big shiny expensive history museum, by God it's going to be full of the remains of Pictish human sacrifice and machinery used to kill hundreds of dudes. Scotland is a serious place.

Fortunately, I passed three days without referring to anyone as English. The Scots and the English have a ... complicated relationship. I'll put it this way. One display in the National Musuem mentions that Scotland's largest immigrant group is the English. Think about that one. Look at it this way. When someone moves from California to Seattle, they're not considered an
immigrant.

(I might want to call them that, but that doesn't make it true.)

The guy who ran our B&B was a loud, boisterous, opinionated Scotsman straight out of central casting. We were the only people staying there, so, based on the odor in the hallway, our innkeeper divided his time evenly between looking after us and smoking joints the size of my forearm.

Scotland's primary scary local delicacy is, of course, haggis. Based on what I could tell from those I talk to, it does get eaten. Not a lot, and often with other things (chicken stuffed with haggis is a common dish). I mean, they're not dumb, and they know Pizza Hut exists, so they aren't eating it every day. But it does get eaten, and the canned haggis I saw in the supermarket proudly proclaims that it is 45% lung.

We ate at one truly superb modern fine British cuisine type restaurant, where I had Scottish venison with venison haggis. I asked our loyely young waitress what parts they use in the haggis. She looked at me like I'd just asked her what the color blue smells like. "So what is in the haggis?" "It's ... haggis." "I mean, what organs go into the haggis?" "It contains haggis." She then braced herself for me to ask what the ingredients of the salt were. I guess, when you mince all of an animal's internal organs and boil them in spices for long enough, they are transmuted into a new, indivisible base element.

(And, in case you were wondering, haggis tastes like boiled, heavily spiced meat with that unmistakable tinge of organ meat flavor. Whether you would like it depends entirely on your opinion of organ meat. But, considering that they have no shortage of McDonalds, their willingness to tolerate lung meat in any form should be taken as an inspiration to us all.)

Also, you can walk into any pub and get a shot of 16 year aged single cask whiskey that will blow your face off with its awesome for four bucks. That alone would be enough to make me completely fall in love with this city.

It's gorgeous and the food is good and the people-watching is great and the accents are gorgeous. Pretty much took dynamite to blow me out of that place. But I had to go back to England, the only place on this island where you can say anything nice about England without getting beaten up.

Fun British Fact #2

The British words for 'crisis' and 'opportunity' are the same. And that word is "cripeitunity."

The Ugly American's Guide To Britain, Part 1.

(When I'm not writing games, I love to travel foreign lands and write snarky and occasionally helpful journals about what I saw. This is one of six articles about my recent two-week trip through Britain. Some of the content is a little more adult that what I put on this blog. If you are below sixteen or so, you should go here. Anything offensive should be blamed on jet lag hallucinations.)

In June, my wife and I went to the United Kingdom for a two week vacation. We did not take our two young daughters with us as we wanted to, you know, have fun.

Whenever we tell people we meet on the road that we left our two girls at home, we get a funny look, a mix of sympathy and harsh judgment. How, they wonder, could anyone leave adorable little moppets at home, when they could be here, costing lots of money and keeping us from ever focusing on anything for one minute without squealing, "We're bored!" in perfect unison. It is a mystery. But I digress.

Though we have visited many foreign lands, going to Britain is a unique pleasure for two reasons. First, my wife and I were exposed to Monty Python and Doctor Who at an impressionable age and are thus lifelong anglophiles. And, second, Britain has not, for the most part, subscribed to the irritating and pernicious affectation of speaking languages other than English.

We are writing these journals as a way of sharing our experiences, to teach the reader something about this mysterious and exotic land. And, of course, to make fun of it.

General Notes on Britain, Set the First

First off, we're going to Britain. Or the U.K. It is not a vacation in England. That is because we are also going to Scotland, and the Scots can get rather tetchy when you refer to them as English. And then they will punch you, because they are drunk.

We are traveling using the Rick Steves philosophy, as described in his Europe Through the Backdoor series. According to him, we are supposed to strive to have a "backdoor experience" when we travel, where you meet with the locals and bond with them and understand their ways. I don't know why I'm going along with this, as I do not, in fact, like people. I think it's because, try as I might, I just can't stop giggling whenever he says, "backdoor experience."

Heh. Backdoor experience.

Anyway. Britain. They drive on the left side of the road there. This scares many tourists into not renting a car, even though the really scary part of this isn't the driving. It is the walking. Already, several times, I have, in my practiced city way, reached a street, looked to the left, saw no cars, stepped into the street, and thought, "Oh. I could have just been killed." Both driving and walking are insanely dangerous. Just hide in your B&B and try to digest your pork-laden British breakfast. It's for the best.

Stop 1 - Bath

Pronounced "Bahth."

Bath was, in Roman days, a religious and leisure center, and Romans came from miles around to bathe in natural springs there. They went to take baths. Thus, Bath. A literal-minded people, the British are.

Then, in the 1700s, it became the fashionable place to be, and kings and lords, mistresses in tow, came to wear fashionable clothes and take the waters and prance and gad about. About this time, many gorgeous buildings, houses and shops and whatnot, were built. Time went on, but the buildings remain, because if you live in one of the pretty tourist-friendly buildings, you can't change anything inside or outside without official permission.

It's a gorgeous city, really lovely and fun to walk through. And Bath is determined to keep everything beautiful so that five hundred years from now, humans (or radioactive cockroaches) will be able to come here and feast their eyes (or chitonous sense-appendages) upon their beauty. It's a huge tourist destination, and, like Venice, it's lousy with tourists all the time.

The people of Bath seemed to have a real pride in their city and a desire to show it off, which I found really charming. Apart from the ruins of the Roman baths, the main tourist attraction is the free two hour walking tour, where the city gets explained and shown off by an elite cadre of local volunteers. They walk you around, explain the architecture, and get hilariously angry over some plate glass windows that got installed in the 1860s, or a few oak trees that got planted well over two centuries ago.

It's really not like the US, where a 30 year roof is considered a serious investment. Everything there, even new stuff, is built out of huge blocks of stone in the 1700s style, and made to last, like, forever. When I asked the guide about it, he got a little defensive, as if he thought the Yank was going to pick an argument about it, but I totally wasn't. All of the buildings there are held in trust by the residents, and they want the citizens of Bath centuries from now to be able to have the same lovely town/tourist destination. You may buy a house, but you're only borrowing it from posterity. It'll be here long after you're gone. If you paint your 18th century townhouse purple, you aren't just being an idiot now. You're screwing the tourist trade for centuries to come.

But I can't work my head around your town being this eternal thing. When you move in, you're just the next tenant in a long line, and you'll be there in that stone shell until you die and they scrape you out and someone else gets slotted in, and so on forever. Having grown up in a disposable world, it's a really fascinating thing to see, but a place where every single window and fence is older than my entire country is very unnerving.

Stonehenge

Several companies offer day or half-day bus trips from Bath to nearby sights. We took one to Stonehenge, because you have to. We dutifully got the audio tour and walked around the big mossy rocks and got sunburnt and there were sheep everywhere and it was very nice.

Nobody knows why Stonehenge was built, but the audio tour helpfully gave a full selection of theories. One of them was, I swear to god, that Satan built it because Merlin asked him to. I feel that even bringing up this nonsense was a violation of the sacred trust between an audio guide and my ear. Look, I don't want to come across as Mr. 21st Century Super-Rational Know-It-All, but, while I don't know who built Stonehenge, I am reasonably confident that it wasn't Satan.

Also, the bus tour showed us many houses that still have actual thatched roofs. This is taking the history preservation thing way too far. Once the roofing material of choice for the seriously poor, thatched roofs are now insanely expensive to maintain. And yet, they do. So pillory me for having a closed mind, but I going to draw the line here at living under a shelter of black, rotting, delightfully flammable straw.

Our bus tour also went to a small village called Lacock, which is being preserved in as close to its original, charming, medieval appearance as possible. They can't have satellite dishes, but the houses all have cable, so they don't have to live like animals. It's very scenic, and lots of TV and movies get filmed there. There's a million old buildings on the isle of Britain, but very few of them ever got to be Harry Potter's house.

I should have appreciated the village more, but I was too busy giggling, in my unendingly juvenile way, over the pronunciation of the town's name. It's Lay-Cock. Heh. Anyway, the town is very pretty, and you should drive there. It's on the A350, between Ballmouth and Oralshire.

Fun Britain Fact #1

The British are completely addicted to tea, but they don't call it tea. They call it "skag." Just say, "I am really desperate for some skag," and everyone will nod knowingly.

The Outgoing Goblin's Guide to Gaming Etiquette

(This is a slightly updated article I wrote for the late, lamented Dragon magazine back in the day. It is a humorous summary of all I learned from many years of playing Dungeons & Dragons. It is also darn funny. I haven't checked to see how many of the rights to this article I signed away when it was published. However, since they never bothered to pay me for the article, to Hell with them.)

The Outgoing Goblin's Guide to Gaming Etiquette

Etiquette is the art and science of living together happily. It is the set of rules which maintains the peacefulness of civilization. It is the salve which soothes society when it becomes chafed.

Have you ever been in the middle of a long, happy session of D&D, with everything going great, when suddenly you said the wrong thing, and your whole party suddenly ganged up on you and killed you?

Wow. Me too.

Fortunately, I've learned from all the times this has happened to me. This guide is a way of giving something back to the community from which I have taken so much. Follow the advice within, and you will shine as a beacon of politeness to all your fellow patrons of the geekly arts.

The Outgoing Goblin Says: Just because you're playing a chaotic evil thief doesn't mean you should be rude. Read on and follow my advice, even when every ounce of common sense tells you you shouldn't! You'll be glad you did!

Do's and Don'ts of the Proper Role-Player

It is a terrifying thing to play a character, massively outnumbered by monsters, surrounded by huge forces you can't understand, trying to keep your dice from mingling overmuch with the dice of the player next to you. Here are some simple rules to help hold off your inevitable, grisly death a short period of time.

• DON'T stand up, point at the DM, and shout "You're not the boss of me!"
• DO regale your friends with tales of high role-playing adventure. What's the point of having Frodalf make 3rd level if you can't tell your pals about it in intense, soul-crushing detail?
• DON'T ask the magic user how much mana is left in his pool.
• DO give your characters classic fantasy names, to help get people in the proper mood. "Bilbo" and "Mel Gibson" are excellent choices.
• DON'T blow cigarette smoke in the DM's face after casting a fireball, no matter how much it helps him to "feel the fantasy."
• DO adopt a special voice to use when your character speaks. Your fellow players will feel much more immersed in the fantasy after thirty minutes in a room with "Squeeky, The Gnome With A High-Pitched Voice."
• DON'T try to get an automatic rifle for your character. The DM will be forced to give the orcs rocket launchers in the name of game balance.

The Outgoing Goblin Says: Well, this may not be so bad. In my games, the ogres tend to come equipped with energy pistols and canisters of the bubonic plague. But then, my campaigns tend to be more lively and fast-paced than most.

Good manners are, of course, not for the player alone. Believe it or not, sometimes the Dungeon Master should play nice too. Not too much, of course, or the players will take advantage, shifty vermin that they are. Never trust them for a moment.

• DO blow cigarette smoke into a player's face after an enemy throws a fireball at him or her. It will help that player "feel the fantasy".
• DON'T give the ogres canisters of the bubonic plague until a character in the party can cast Cure Disease. Fair is fair.
• DO make fantasy speech mandatory. Common use of phrases like "Prithee, my liege." and "Huzzah!" create an environment that makes the players feel blissfully adrift in time and space. (Example: "Prithee my liege, but if mine +1 dagger doesn't end up back in my pack on the nonce, I will have to kick some serious elven butt, huzzah!")
• DON'T forget to encourage serious thought. Try making your players have to answer a riddle before they can leave the dungeon. Nothing builds the self-esteem like coming up with that brilliant answer after a mere three hours of saying "It is the sun? No? Then how about a snail?"
• DO encourage role-playing by enforcing an "If you say it, your character says it!" rule. In the middle of a dungeon, do you really want your elf to say "Hey, Jason, get me a coke?" Or "Arrgh. My chest. Aaaghh! Where are my nitroglycerine pills?" Certainly not.

See? Nothing but good, simple, common sense. If any of this seems strange or inappropriate to you, well, it's a good thing you read this article before you really embarrassed yourself, isn't it?

Helping Build a Balanced Party

Remember, the central element of every great drama is conflict. When creating your character, be sure to do so in a way that maximizes conflict! Keep things interesting! Does your friend plan to play a shifty, untrustworthy thief? You must play a Paladin. Is Erik playing a laser gun toting alien hunter? Then be an alien in human disguise, and lay your eggs in his torso as soon as possible. Is the DM's girlfriend in the game? Then do something to tick her off, by all means!

The Outgoing Goblin Says: Any campaign in which the DM's girlfriend plays is destined to be rich, exciting, and complicated. Especially after they break up.

There is no better time for exciting role-playing and intrigue than when splitting up the loot. Look at is this way. Think about how important it is to get paid at your job. This of the loot as your character's salary. Imagine working hard at, say, McDonalds, cleaning the grease traps and mopping the floors and waiting for the end of the month when, finally, you will get that Girdle of Hill Giant Strength you've been busting your butt for. But then, when the time comes, the shift manager tries to stick you with a lousy +1 Glaive-guisarme instead! And you're not even proficient in Glaive-guisarme!

I'll tell you what, that is the time for some serious, noisy role-playing.

The Outgoing Goblin Says: Remember, if your party is created with enough conflicts, you will be able to have hours of wild, noisy action without even making it to the city gates.

Creating a Proper Gaming Environment

All right. The game is at your house tonight. Everyone will be coming over in three hours. You look around your living room. Everything is neat and clean. There is no debris on the couch. The carpet is freshly vacuumed. There are no strong odors of any kind. So everything is perfect and ready for the game, right?

No! You dunce! What were you thinking?

Remember, we are trying to imagine ourselves in a fantasy environment here! Were the middle ages sterile and clean? No! They were pretty stinky, actually. So, before your players come over, you must provide a fantasy-like gaming environment:

• Pens. Pencils. Paper.
• Spare dice and rulebooks.
• Tortilla chips.
• Comfortable chairs.
• A fair amount of grime, lint, and dirt.
• Open flames.
• Live snakes.
• Ethereal, fantasy-themed music on the stereo. I recommend Rush. Or Jethro Tull, in a pinch.
• Numerous copies of Dragon magazine. We can't stress this one enough.
• Mysterious "blood stains" on the floor. If you can't figure out a way to create realistic looking blood stains, I recommend using blood.
• A large pot of suet, organ meat, or other appropriate medieval food.
• A rich, musty, dungeon-like odor.

And remember ... science has shown that if something is good, ten times as much of it is ten times better, at least. Thus, you should strive to provide everything on this list. That way, if the screams caused by the presence of snakes distracts you, you can always just turn up the stereo.

Follow the Standard Rules of Etiquette

When we spend a happy evening gaming, we create a new, fantastic world in our caffeine-addled minds. However, our corporeal bodies, sadly, remain in this world, growing older and rounder. This means that, since we remain in this world, we have to live by the rules of etiquette everyone else lives by every day.

Your mother was right. Please and Thank You are magic words, just as capable of opening doors as any magic spell. There are lots of other magic words, too. Like Critical Hit, and I'm Bleeding To Death, and Huzzah! These are phrases which make every gaming session run a little bit smoother.

When your host has you over for a gaming session, be a gracious guest. Compliment his collection of Star Trek novels. Don't spill Mountain Dew on the Firefly DVDs. Don't point how lame he was for buying a Wii, when Playstation III has much better graphics and plays Blu-Ray. Instead, compliment his taste in furniture and wall decoration, and, if he has crusty dishes stacked in the sink, just think of it as his effort to create a "dungeon-like" atmosphere.

The Outgoing Goblin Says: How can you role-play exploring a gruesome, dungeon-like atmosphere when you're not actually IN a gruesome, dungeon-like atmosphere? You think goblins fold and put away their laundry? No!

And, finally, after a good session of gaming, one should always send a proper thank you note, hand-written on some sort of lovely stationary:

Dear Mr. Dungeon Master,

Thank you very much for having us over for that lovely adventure last Saturday. Also, thank you very much for the lovely +1 longsword. It was exactly what my character needed, and the experience points I received for getting it really hit the spot. Ha ha.

Also, I'd like to apologize for that little misunderstanding that we had. I was mistaken. You are, in fact, the boss of me. I'm sorry for any upset my loud and unexpected outburst caused you.

- Warmest Regards,

Jeff Vogel

The Importance of Timeliness and Understanding

It is a sad fact of our role-playing lives that most campaigns are killed by indifference and the absence of players.

The Outgoing Goblin Says: Well, actually, most of MY campaigns are killed by a natural 20, an orc, and a rocket launcher, but, as I mentioned earlier, my campaigns are a bit more lively and high-spirited than most.

If you are the DM, it is important to be flexible when players miss sessions. If Sue can't make it, let another player play Sue's character. Give that player one of Sue's magic items as a gratuity for the extra work. Or, you can run Sue's character as an NPC. Playing Sue yourself will give you a chance to humorously satirize some of Sue's more notable personality traits and verbal tics. This will help you work out frustration over the time Sue spilled Mountain Dew on your Firefly DVDs.

If you are a player, on the other hand, try to meet the DM halfway. Suppose that the gamemaster for the evening, Frederick, walks in carrying a copy of the module Scum Orcs of the Hills. He sets out a box with twenty carefully painted Scum Orc miniatures. An issue of Dragon magazine drops from his pack and falls open to the well worn article "Ecology of the Scum Orc." For the sake of realism, he has carefully cultivated a personal scent very similar to that of a Scum Orc. He lays out a map of the hills surrounding your village. And he asks you, "What do you do now?"

This is NOT the point where you say "We go to the lowlands and hunt kobolds." Not unless you want to find yourselves face to face with kobolds wielding rocket launchers and canisters of the ebola virus.

A Helpful Example

In closing, I would like to present a transcript of one of my recent gaming sessions with four of my friends. It was a pleasant experience for all concerned, and everyone was so polite that I could barely stand it. Read, and learn.

The group for this session consisted of Player A (chaotic-evil thief), Player B (chaotic-evil thief), Player C (lawful-good paladin), and Player D (chaotic-evil fighter/thief). The DM was, as is ideal, me.

(Note that this is a near-perfect group for the creation of exciting role-playing. A group like this can have hours of enjoyable treachery and intrigue over the discovery of a single healing potion.)

Me: OK. The gnoll is dead. Unfortunately, your attacks damaged its kevlar vest too much for it to be of use.

Player A: OK. We head west.

(I bend down behind my screen to see what comes next. As I look, someone slaps it with the palm of his or her hand, smacking me in the nose. I jump up.)

Me: Who did that?

Player B (pointing at C): It was her!

Player C: You sneak!

Player D: Huzzah!

Me: OK, Player B. You get 500 experience for helping.

(Always be polite and reward people who help you.)

Player D: Prithee, my liege!

Player C (to Player B): I'll get you for this.

Me: And Player C, your character catches tuberculosis.

Player C: I'm breaking up with you.

Me: OK, done. You also lose your paladin-hood.

Player C: OK. I become a chaotic-evil thief.

Me: Excellent! Done.

Player A: OK. Like I said, we head west.

Player C: I backstab Player B.

(All right! Now we're getting some interesting conflict! Now none of the players will find out that I forgot to design an adventure.)

Player B: Ow. Dang. I drink my healing potion.

Me: You look in your pouch and realize that it's gone.

Player B: OK, who has my healing potion?

Player C: I run behind player B and backstab her again.

(And so on. This goes on for about an hour of pure, scheming fun.)

Me: Suddenly, you are distracted by an explosion. You look up and see a dozen scum orcs on the crest of a nearby hill. One has a rocket launcher, and the rest are holding small metal canisters of some sort.

Player A: I pull out my wand and shoot a magic missile at them.

Me: Your wand is gone.

Player D (stands up, points at me, shouts): You're not the boss of me!

Great, huh? Like I said before, there is nothing like a little bit of good manners to create a lively, non-stop, action-packed gaming session. See you in the dungeon! Huzzah!

Indie games: Still Too Cheap. Getting Cheaper.

I wrote a couple of articles not long ago about how the expected price for Indie games is becoming really cheap. Too cheap to support a thriving, innovative Indie scene. I thought that pricing all games below 10 bucks on Amazon and XNA Community games, sets a dangerous standard and steals the freedom to influence prices that developers need. I got a reasonable amount of abuse for this, because, of course, people hate being told that the things they want are unsustainable.

Which brings us to the new development at Big Fish Games, one of the larger casual games portals ...






Their current pricing scheme, as I understand it, is that you can get any of their games for $6.99. This subscribes you to their service, which charges you that amount per month and gives you another game in return. Of course, you can pay the $6.99, get the game, and immediately unsubscribe from the service, which is what I suspect a number of people do.

So I decided to poke around for a bit and find out how standard this sort of pricing is. At Yahoo games ...










... and MSN games ...











... and GameHouse ...











and so on. $6.95 is currently the magic price. Generally, to get that price, you need to buy a subscription. In other words, use the developer's game as a loss leader to win their private route into your credit card.

So let's run some numbers. A typical deal on these portals is that the portal keeps, say, 10% of a sale for expenses and then pays a 40% royalty. (This is pretty close to what I generally get.) Which means each sale of a game on Big Fish would earn you roughly $2.50. You better hope you're earning more per copy elsewhere because otherwise, if you want a pretty meager payout for your work (say, $100K before expenses), you have to sell forty thousand games. You know how hard it is to move that many copies? PRETTY DARN HARD.

Now, this is the point where generally some Internet knucklehead says, "Well, they have the right to do whatever they want." Yeah, of course. And I have the right to point out the gruesome consequences of their exercising that right.

To have a chance of not getting murdered at those prices, you need to sell a monster pile of copies. This is exactly the situation that punishes serving niche markets, taking risks, and doing new things. And those are exactly the roles people are supposedly looking to Indie developers to fill.

I have been arguing that these low prices will result in a desolate and uncreative Indie games space. Look at the offerings at the casual portals, and I think you'll see that I have a point. PopCap provides some cool, innovative games (they're basically the Pixar/Blizzard of casual games), but otherwise the casual portals are a dry expanse of Bejewled/Zuma variants, simple puzzle games, and milking of established properties. Much like in Hollywood, the need to get a blockbuster to survive delivers a harsh blow to creativity.

Of course, it's easy to say, "But they're casual game fans. They don't want anything challenging. Scrabble and hidden object games are the limit for such simple creatures." I personally think that this is nonsense. But the way we're going, we'll never find out.

So What To Do About It?

First, support and encourage portals that don't force developers to sell their work for a pittance. Like Steam, Greenhouse, and MacGameStore.

Second, if you are writing a game of your own, don't let anyone steamroll you into giving your work away. If a portal is going to sell your work for $6.95, make sure you've written a game that can compete in that market. If not, at the very least, don't give them your newest freshest stuff. I'll let them sell an older game for that price for the advertising and exposure, but only after I've already made good money off of it.

What I care about is having a marketplace where a wide variety of Indies can write a wide variety of games and make a living. The casual portals have their place, but, if you aren't prepared for how little they're going to pay you, they're a trap.

Edit: I should have also mentioned Reflexive games, who are also being admirable in pricing Indies at a level where they can actually make money.

About Addiction-Based Design, Part 2.

Last week, I linked to my last View From the Bottom article about addiction-based game design. It was originally meant to be a two part article, but most of the second half had to be lost to fit everything into one part.

This is the original second part of the article, which gives more examples and clarifies the sort of design elements I'm trying to isolate here. A tad dry, perhaps, but worthwhile. I think that World of Warcraft grindy addictiveness can be found in a lot of more games and systems (like achievements) than it first appears.

About Addiction-Based Design, Part 2.

In the last article, I wrote about addiction-based game design. This is game design that encourages players to experience the same content again and again (often referred to as "grinding") in return to obtain a series of little rewards. These constant positive reinforcements (money building up, skills increased, experience bars filling) are very satisfying, to the point of being mildly addicting.

It's a powerful design technique, and there are a lot of good examples of it being used (and pointedly not being used). Some of the examples are quite surprising.

Massively multiplayer games are probably the best example of encouraging addiction. When character advancement is frequently referred to as a "treadmill" and gold farmers earn money playing the game for other people's behalf, that should tell you something. Every level or nice piece of loot results in a feeling of satisfaction and achievement. If you play these games any amount of time, you will see players get into passionate arguments about who gets the nice treasure a monster just dropped. Of course they do. They are junkies fighting for a nice hit of their drug of choice.

However, there are other excellent examples that don't involve MMORPGs at all. Consider the Lego games (Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones, etc.). The gameplay in these games, when you use adorable Lego people to reenact their namesake movies, is fairly simple and repetitive. Much of the fun comes from playing the levels over and over again to gather money, characters, and hidden treasure. Lego games encourage grinding the levels to earn cash to buy a stunning variety of rewards. Oh Legos, when did you turn to the Dark Side?

Games in the tower defense genre also use repetitive gameplay, accompanied with rewards, but in a far more benign way. In these games, you generally defend against waves of increasingly powerful but otherwise similar foes. You use the money from the victims to buy stronger defenses. It is the entire grinding/reward cycle, compressed pleasingly into a few minutes. The free Flash game Desktop Tower Defense is an excellent example of the genre, and it also shows that games can create that satisfying illusion of achievement without necessarily eating up huge chunks of time.

Another amusing example is the free game Progress Quest. It is a brilliant parody of the RPG genre, a game that plays itself. You just run it and watch your character gain levels. It's quite funny, and yet it is worrying how satisfying watching that bar fill up can be.

One of the best and most interesting examples of addiction-based game design, in my view, is Achievements, that metagame that can lay a layer of grinding and reward-gathering on top of even the most innocent game. Even World of Warcraft has them now, a move of awe-inspiring cruelty to its already fixated player base.

Addiction-based design is a powerful tool, but it is not necessary to create a fantastic game. There are games at the other end of the spectrum, that completely resist addiction-based design in their quest to provide fun. Tetris is a classic example. Left 4 Dead is another. You start a game, play for two hours, and you are done. Music games like Rock Band have a few grinding aspects (like gathering stars and fans for your band), but the bulk of the fun simply comes from picking a song you like and noodling along to it for three minutes. You can grind out fans, but it's completely incidental to the point of the game.

Here's a good rule of thumb: If a game doesn't need to save your progress or scores to be fun, it's fun isn't addiction based. It might be addictive, but it is that way simply because it's fun.

And, now that I've done as well as I can illustrating this aspect of game design, I have to ask the big question: Is it bad? Is it something that "good" designers resist?

No. We should understand what is going on and notice it when it's happening, but trying to addict your players is not inherently a bad thing. In moderation, the grind/reward cycle is like alcohol ... Pleasant, in moderation. The sense of achievement when gaining a level, or, you know, an Achievement, is real. It is odd that it's so satisfying, but it is satisfying, and we designer would be foolish to ignore it. Heck, I write role-playing games, a genre that is almost entirely founded on the grind/reward cycle.

But, like Spider-Man, we should use our powers for good and not for evil. If we want to write innovative games that further the genre and take it more in the direction of an art form, we have to make games that are more than just examples of some experiment where a mouse hits a lever and makes food pellets fall out. In my ideal world, it would be one color in our palette, nothing more.

But, then again, World of Warcraft has eleven million subscribers. So what do I know?

Why Nobody Should Ever Change Anything, Ever.

One of the biggest criticisms leveled at me over the years is that I only write the same game over and over again. This fills me with bitter, ironic laughter, because of one thing. Whenever I change anything, I get lots of angry E-mail asking me to change it back.

I've learned a lot running this business. Many lessons, most of them learned painfully. And I have gained no more aggravating bit of knowledge than this one:

There is no change you can make to your games, no matter how clearly obvious or beneficial, that will not anger some of your fans.

And a brief corollary:

If the change doesn't make someone angry, it didn't matter.

A Visual Example

My first game, Exile, released in January, 1995, looked something like this:













(Actually, Exile v1.0 had charming creature graphics drawn by my ex-wife and horrible button and interface graphics drawn by me. But it was about the same.)

Our newest game, Geneforge 5: Overthrow, looks like this:











As you can see, I have changed just about everything. Repeatedly. Graphics. Style. Interface. And the game system underneath. Everything has been redone, and, as I learned more, redone again. And while not all of the changes have been beneficial (and were then re-changed in later games), the process has been one of evolution toward betterness.

And every change earned me angry e-mails and lost customers. I've gotten more, "Why have you forsaken me? I am lost to you forever." E-mails from customers than I could ever count. It's a depressing thing to happen when you've been really busting your butt and your budget to bring about improvements. But you have to live with it. You just have to steel yourself and always remember this:

People hate change.

Case Studies From My Own Experience

Here are some hugely beneficial (and profitable) changes I made which earned me fury and lost customers.

• Switch From A Flat View to a 3-D Isometric View - My first games were completely flat, as seen in the first illustration. I switched to a far, far nicer pseudo 3-D isometric view in 1998. It looks better, and it enables me to do more things with the game. (Like elevations.) But, over a decade later, I STILL get complaints about it. Lost souls, out in the wilderness, wanting me to return to a design I got completely fed up with in a previous century.
• Switch From Hand-Drawn To Rendered Graphics - Oh, wow. There are a lot of people still angry about this change, made in Avernum 4 in 2005. My old graphics were hand-drawn instead of rendered, which made any sort of animation extremely painstaking and expensive. Using 3-D models to render creatures and terrain enables me to have a wider variety of much nicer icons without crushing my budget. But it changed the look of the games that people were used to, and a lot of customers never forgave me for it.
• Removing the Need to Identify Magic Items - A smaller but highly instructive example. Once, when you got a magic item in one of my RPGs, you had to take it to a sage to get it identified. This was busy work, confused new players, diluted the excitement of collecting lewtz, and just wasn't fun. Dropping it was a total no-brainer. And yet people complained. Why? Oh, why?
• Removed the Need to Carry Around Ammunition For Bows - This is a recent change, part of my desire to eliminate busywork. When you shoot a bow, you just shoot it. You don't need to shop for arrows. I can see why this would break immersion for people, but it seems a neutral change at worst. Not worth the angry complaints I've gotten.

Now the more contrary among you might be thinking, "Well, maybe people complain because your so-called improvements actually suck. How about that? Huh? Huh?" Not likely. Historically, when I made major augmentations to the engine, I've seen increases in sales. If the changes I made sucked, I would not still be in business. So give me the benefit of the doubt.

And I should point out one more thing. if someone doesn't like a change, well, you can't win an argument with a customer. If they don't like it, that's their right. They'll have to find their bliss somewhere else. It is your job to make sure that your changes bring in customers to replace the ones you lose.

So What Should I, a Game Developer, Do?

Forewarned is forearmed. You can't do anything about this phenomenon, but you should steel yourself for it so you don't suffer shock, self-doubt, and potentially catastrophic second guessing.

Be sure the changes you make are worthwhile. Be sure that your community of fans is warned about them, so that the culture shock is lessened. Be apologetic but firm to the people that complain about improvements. And be confident. Remember, evolution is necessary. Making the same people happy forever is a surefire route to stagnation and burnout.

One More Thing, For Those Who Are Angry At Me Changing Things

Despite what some people think, I am constitutionally incapable of writing the same game again and again. Writing more than three games without major changes in the engine or system or setting would drive me out of my mind. I need to change the system so that I can open up new design spaces. I need to change the graphics so I don't go loopy staring at the same icons day after day.

There are some people out there who claim they would be honestly happy if I just rewrote Exile, again and again, year after year. But I can't do that. Nobody can. You should always be looking for ways to evolve your work. It'll keep you from going crazy.

Indie Games Should Cost More, Pt. 2, The Expensening!

Last week, I wrote about how Indie games are becoming too cheap and what factors we should use to price our games in the future. This post attracted some attention and the occasional explosions of misplaced rage. A quick summary of the article:

• There are an increasing number of Indie game outlets where low, low prices are expected or enforced.
• Not all Indie games, for a variety of reasons, can profitably be sold for so little.
• Thus, the new markets are going to choke what Indie games can accomplish, not encourage it.

This isn't good for anyone. Developers. Customers. Distributors. Anyone.

This week, I talk about the reasons I've been given to make my games cheaper, why I ignore them, and what I think should happen now.

One Quick Point

Some people on forums criticized what I wrote because they mistakenly thought I was trying to repeal the law of Supply and Demand. This is unbelievable nonsense. I LIKE the idea of pricing according to Supply and Demand. It is our outlets to the marketplace setting arbitrary price caps that is countering the good work of economics, not me.

Refuting nonsense on Internet forums is such a Sisyphean task that I hate spending even a moment at it. But this particular misrepresentation was so common that I had to say something.

Why Do You Charge So Much? You Suck!

In the last fifteen years, I have heard just about every reason why my games should be cheaper. These arguments refute infallibly the old maxim that "The customer is always right." I prefer the much more accurate "You can't win an argument with a customer." Which is why complaints about my prices tend to go unanswered. So, without further ado, here is the litany of shame ...

"Your Games Are Too Crude and Old-School To Justify the Price"

Then dude, seriously, don't buy them. (And, if I may ask, why are you playing them?) I have my pride. If you don't think my games are worth it, don't give me money.

But consider this. I write plot-heavy old-school, turn-based RPGs. Almost nobody else does. I provide a quality niche service few others provide. Some people LIKE the crude, old-school thing I got going on. The scarcity of the service I provide justifies the price.

"If You Charged Less, You Would Sell More Copies"

This is true. The problem is that I won't sell enough more to justify the lower prices.

Microeconomics tells us that as we charge less, we sell more, but we make less per sale. At some point, there is a best price, a point where (number of sales) * (profit per sale) is at its maximum. The question is, where is it? Based on my experiences shifting prices up and down, I think I'm actually at the sweet spot.

Suppose I charged a World Of Goo price, like $15. This would roughly halve my profit per sale. (Because of the way credit card fees work, the less I charge per sale, the smaller percentage of profits I make.) To make up for this cut, I would have to double my sales. Double! That is a huge increase! Doubling would be big!

Based on data I've received from distributors, I believe that about 3% of my downloads turn into sales (this is called the Conversion Rate). To make up for the price cut, I would have to increase my conversion rate to 6%. This is a HUGE rate, pretty much impossible to get for a niche product like mine. If I had a more casual-friendly product, I might manage it, but that's not my niche. I have to set a price to reflect the nature of my niche.

"Steam Cut Their Prices Way Back, and Their Sales Went Up"

True. But their brief sale got a lot of press. There is no reason to believe this would result in an increase of profits over the long run, for the reasons given above.

We have sales too. They got attention and an uptick in sales. Then that increase petered out and sales returned pretty quickly to the old levels (but with less profit per sale). If sales had stayed high, we would probably have lowered prices permanently by now, but that's not how it worked out.

"I Can Buy Better Old Games At the Game Store For Far Less"

This is, honestly, a pretty hard charge to answer. When someone says, "Why should I get your game when I can get Baldur's Gate 2 for $10?" what I think is, "Dude, you haven't played Baldur's Gate 2 yet? Go get it! It's awesome! And you know something? In a few weeks, when you're done with it, I'll still be here."

I can't compete on price with old classic. Nobody can. To expect me (or anyone) to match price with a handful of old games is completely ridiculous. Can't happen.

But my games have an advantage. They're new. Go ahead and play the old classics, or at least the ones you haven't played already. Go play Fallout or Planescape: Torment. They're SWEET.

You'll be done soon enough. And, when you are, I'll still be here.

"I Can Play Games Just Like Yours For Free on Kongregate Or Whatever"

No. You can't. I make sure to write games that aren't already being done by everyone else. That's why I can charge so much for them. And, prospective Indie developers, if there is a similar version of the game you're writing already available for free, write a different game.

"You Don't Deserve That Much Money. Period."

Then don't pay. The day nobody thinks my games are worth the price, I will fold up shop and go get a real job. But I will never, ever be shamed into charging less than what I feel is a fair price for my labor. I work hard, and I have earned a living. The service I provide to my fans is worth the ability to keep food on my family's table and a roof over their head.

If you disagree, that is your right. But I am not going to send everything I've built over a cliff to appease your wrongness.

What Should Be Done

After all this griping and ranting, I should offer some actual suggestions for what should happen in the future. You shouldn't complain without suggesting a better alternative, amirite?

If all of us (developers, customers, distributors) want a healthy Indie scene in which we can all make money, we should all want the people who make the content to be able to make a living. If you agree, there are things each of us can do to help this happen.

Customers - Don't pirate Indie games. Sure, it's wrong to pirate any game, but not all crimes are equal. But when the game is the direct source of the cash that puts food on a family's table, that is an extra-intense level of Bad.

Anyone who would deny the two guys who made World of Goo their lousy fifteen bucks deserves a good, sharp kick.

Developers - Figure out the right price for your game and stick with it. Don't let anyone shame you into going lower. It stings to pass on distribution on Amazon, sure. But if you can't get the price you need to charge, swallow hard and move on. Maybe if they aren't able to sell more of the titles they want to sell, they will change to a wiser path.

Distributors - Don't set arbitrary price ceilings (like at Amazon or XBox Live Community Games). If you are setting the price yourselves, use the developers price as a guide. Then let the magic of the marketplace do its work, punishing the foolish and rewarding the smart. If a game is too expensive, the price can be lowered later. But if your overly low prices don't support the people who make the products that make you money, well, that is not in your simple, dollars-and-sense best interest. Don't cut the developer off at the knees before his or her product even reaches the market.

None of this is unreasonable. I'm not being all idealistic or hippy-dippy. I'm just using hard, simple business sense. This accelerating rush to give our products away is simple craziness.

So go ahead. Try it. Charge what you're worth. See what happens. You might as well. Because we'll all have to do it sooner or later. You might as well do it while you're still in business.