But! I’m even more excited about where I’m going to. Sifteo is making some really cool things, and I’m psyched about helping them explore new kinds of gaming experiences.

But! Before I can dig into my new job, I have to get through GDC next week. I assume it’s going to be good times, but I haven’t had a chance to look into where the good lectures or parties are going to be happening. So I guess I’ll be winging it, schedule-wise.

Life is good, but kind of hectic.

I’ve got a dozen little projects I’d like to be working on right now: small games, web toys, essays, etc. The problem is, I can’t get started on any of them, because I keep fiddling with the zillion half-finished “practice” projects I’ve got lying around on my computer. Why subject myself to blank canvas syndrome and the stress of starting something new when I could just kill time refactoring old functions, or learning a bit about AS3, or tweaking some parameters on a game that’s already been overworked half to death? Basically, my hard drive has turned into the front yard of a weekend mechanic: lots of half-finished stuff up on blocks, but nothing that you can actually pull out of the driveway and take into town.

It’s starting to look like the only way to move forward will be by forcing myself into a ship-it mentality: get these practice projects to a finished state and out the door as quickly as possible. It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to be done. Twagnetic Poetry was the first of these fire-and-forget releases; there are some annoying bugs in it that I’m probably not going to fix, because the whole purpose of putting it out was so that I could work on something else. I should probably feel bad about releasing half-assed work, but life is short, and I’d rather spend my time thinking about things that I’m really excited about than continuing to poke at something that’s only mildly entertaining to mess with.

At any rate, some of the half-price things they sell at Half-Price Whatever-you-want are video games; they’re mostly boxed versions of casual games that digital cool kids like you and I already downloaded and played through a year ago. One of these games is Diner Dash, which I have fond memories of, since: 1) I really enjoyed it; and 2) I wrote a review of it a long, long time ago. (Well, it feels like a long time ago — it’s been a busy four years.)

Anyway, I’m walking past this “collector’s edition” of Diner Dash, and one of the blurbs on the box catches my eye: “A Momentary Escape From Your Dreary 9-5.”

“Hey,” I think to myself. “That sounds like something I would– waaaait a minute!” The blurb doesn’t just sound like one I would write, but is, in fact, the one I did write for PopMatters.

My words are being used to shill warmed-up video game leftovers. That’s kind of awesome!

It makes me think: If I’d gone down a different road four years ago and kept writing about games instead of making them, would I be the Jeffrey Lyons of the gaming industry by now?

The big downside to working on the Peninsula isn’t the commute so much as the lack of food options. There’s a café in the building, and a few other fast-food places a few blocks away, but all in all, the prospects for decent takeout are pretty grim. I ate my fair share of junk food in SOMA (where most of the really good lunch places are sit-down restaurants, painfully expensive, or both), but at least I had a nice variety of junk foods to choose from.

The silver lining to this culinary cloud is that I’m much more motivated to pack my own lunch than I used to be. None of the rational arguments for packing a meal — saving money, eating healthier, controlling portion sizes so that I don’t spend all afternoon in a food coma — ever seem to get through to me, but as they say, necessity is the mother of sandwiches. Luckily, I like sandwiches. I’m switching up breads, fillings, and condiments to avoid monotony, and eventually, I may even branch out into non-sandwich foods that travel well and can be prepared by a kitchen tyro like myself. If anyone’s got tips, do let me know.

If nothing else, having a bit of time off after a year of solid crunch will give me a chance to get some long-put-off basics taken care of, like getting a California driver’s license and maybe putting some furniture in my apartment. Not to mention the Pacific Northwest tour I’ll be taking next week to visit people I’ve done a terrible job of keeping up with lately.

This isn’t a full-on, capital-Q Quit for me anyway. I’ll be starting a new job at the end of the month, one that will be a bit of a change from doing AI design on revivals of arcade-style console franchises — that’s a pretty narrow niche to let myself get stuck in, and I’m eager to push myself in a different direction. After the vacation, of course.

> 1. It seems that gaming is gaining an increasingly wide audience,
> particularly in the past few years. Are there reasons that it’s attracting a
> wider audience, in terms of age/gender/socioeconomic status?

There have always been computer games that are aimed at a general
audience: adaptations of traditional games like Hearts and Backgammon;
interactive stories like Myst; simple distractions like Minesweeper
and Tetris. Unfortunately, big, explosive blockbusters like Doom,
Grand Theft Auto, and World of Warcraft make a lot more noise and a
lot more money, and consequently grab a lot more attention, to the
point where the popular image of what “video game” means has gotten
narrower and narrower.

Gaming is a maturing industry, though, and realizes that it won’t
continue to grow by selling to the same old group of adrenaline
junkies. As the industry widens its view of what its audience is, it’s
shifting its focus towards genres that previously only got a small
amount of its attention.

As a result of increased attention from developers, games that are
made for the general audience are becoming more creative and
sophisticated. Of course, offering your audience better games to play
only increases that audience, which encourages developers to raise the
bar even more. What we’re seeing now is a feedback effect, where the
successful games like The Sims and Diner Dash are not only selling
well, but are drawing popular attention away from the Maddens and Gran
Turismos of the world.

> 2. Games like The Sims and Spore — where it’s unclear exactly what it means to
> “win” — seem to be (or seem likely to be) pretty popular. Do these represent a
> new way of thinking about games? Are there other examples of games that
> break out of the mold of shooting/sword fighting/racing games that you think
> represent an alternative to what most people traditionally think of when
> they think of video games?

Virtual pets are very popular these days: Nintendogs on the Nintendo
DS, Web-based games like Neopets and Webkinz, and the continued
presense of Tamagotchi on children’s keychains. (The Sims can also be
thought of as a virtual pet game in its own way.) These games aren’t
about “winning” in the traditional sense of defeating an opponent.
Instead, success in these games is achieved by keeping your pets
healthy and happy, and the reward isn’t a high score, but the
affections of a simulated animal. Games about nurturing, growth, and
affection are a far cry from the fast cars, big guns, and growling
monsters that we usually associate with video games.

> 3. In your opinion, what’s the most interesting development in the video
> game industry that’s going on right now? Do you have any sense where it
> might lead?

Online gaming is becoming the rule rather than the exception: all
three of the major consoles have significant online functionality, and
gaming on the PC is dominated by Web-based casual games and massively
multiplayer games. As this trend continues, the online experience will
become about more than just competition or cooperation, but about
building communities and personal expression.

There are already thriving creative scenes organized around games:
marketplaces for custom-made Sims objects, strategy guides penned by
expert players to help beginners out, parody videos that cut up
recordings of gameplay and set them to music. Games are just starting
to explore the ways in which they can harness this creative energy,
help players to express themselves, and allow them to share their
expressions with others. Massively multiplayer games and virtual
worlds like Second Life are currently making the biggest steps in this
direction, but as games like Spore and Little Big Planet come to
market, we’ll begin to hear even more about the idea that games don’t
have to provide a strictly defined play experience, but can be a
platform for players to create new experiences for each other.

Why the hell am I not making games about “nurturing, growth, and affection,” or helping players “create new experiences for each other”? I need to put my money where my mouth is.

So I spend a lot of my work days doing both design and programming, which is fine, except that the two disciplines are very different. In fact, they’re downright contradictory at times, which leads to a lot of conversations like this between some of the voices in my head:

Programmer Josh: We are in the business of making systems that are consistent, regular, testable, maintainable, and stable.

Designer Josh: And boring, apparently. The business that we are actually in is that of making magic boxes that surprise, delight, and entertain people.

P.J.: Don’t bring your hippy-dippy talk of “magic boxes” in here. Every one-off feature or special case that you introduce makes things that much harder to keep track of and fix.

D.J.: That may be, but I’d rather deal with a difficult system than a bored player.

P.J.: What about consistency? Doesn’t a strong pattern make the game more learnable?

D.J.: There’s a difference between being learnable and being monotonous. And don’t forget that games are all about repetition. What seems like a one-off when you’re developing the system will still be encountered by the player dozens, if not hundreds of times.

P.J.: But… how can you stand to look at all of those stray if() statements? The mysterious timers? The dodgy event interceptors? The HARD-CODED VALUES?! *breaks down weeping*

D.J.: There, there. It’ll be all right.

In the end, Designer Josh almost always wins, because when you boil it all down, the programmer’s job is to advocate for the safety of the system, while the designer’s job is to advocate for the richness of the player’s experience, and the player always comes first. When I was a programmer, I called this “scope creep,” but now that I’m an ex-programmer, I call it “making the product not suck.”

Of course, both Designer Josh and Programmer Josh usually end up getting overruled by Schedule-Watcher Josh, who notices how little time we have left before Alpha and starts cutting scope like there’s no tomorrow. But that’s another conversation altogether.

And then someone reminds me. (Warning: May be dangerous if you are sensitive to large doses of sweetness.)

Bunny/Pig/Robot/Monster/Ninja.

While I was writing up my notes on Excite Truck and EOD, I was trying to figure out how to dig up screenshots of the games to use. Grabbing screencaps off of my TV would be a pain, and most publicly available shots have huge logos plastered all over them. Besides, few of those screenshots really illustrated the specific work I did on the games, and besides besides, still images can never really do justice to the kinetic nature of video games.

But we’re well into the age of YouTube now, and when they say that you can find clips of anything on the Web, they’re not exaggerating. Replay videos of a three-year-old game that was completely ignored by the press and didn’t sell peanuts? No problem. In fact, the kids out there will do you one better: this video of some guys playing EOD even shows off a level I worked on, and was pretty proud of to boot:

Mankato Red Rover: yar!

The fact that the video has the voices of the players enjoying the game makes it an even better representative piece for my work. It’s like the Internet is trying to help me find work!

At any rate, I’ll be able to sit on my couch and play video games for a while — maybe a couple of days! — before I have to settle down for some hardcore job hunting. If you know anyone who needs a game designer, web developer, or writer, have them give me a holler.