Category Archives: Design / Production

Organizational Processes

Posted on August 17, 2006 by | 1 comment

One thing that seems to be neglected at a fair number of game companies is the tuning of organizational processes (OP for short). OP relates to a wide variety of issues, including but not limited to: organizational structure, decision-making, corporate politics and culture, incentives and goal-setting, hierarchy, hiring, etc. Tuning OP isn’t simply a question of implementing, monitoring, or enforcing policies. and it is relevant to all managers, not merely HR professionals.

Unfortunately, I could write a few more paragraphs and you still might wonder what I was yammering about. So instead, I’ve decided to list some of my favorite readings from my old OP bschool course and summarize them for you. Hopefully, it will be immediately apparent why this stuff is useful! (Unfortunately, none of the readings are available for free — some are books, and some have to be purchased from Harvard for a few bucks.)

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Posted in Business, Design / Production

The MBA-Producer Debate

Posted on August 9, 2006 by | 13 comments

Recently, an interesting discussion regarding the value of an MBA ensued in the IGDA Production SIG mail list. Most of the discussion revolved around two issues: what do you get out of an MBA, and is it worth the time and money? One thread, suggesting that producers pursue a “personal MBA” (i.e. find 30 good business books and read them in your spare time), finally spurred me to write the following response:

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Posted in Design / Production

Another Game Idea

Posted on July 26, 2006 by | 5 comments

Ever since I saw the movie Ghost (how many years ago was that?) I’ve been idly musing about a game in which the player must avoid death’s agents. It goes something like this: at the start of the game, your character (along with several other people) has just died in a mysterious accident. Your ghost is standing over your body, in much the way that ghosts are frequently portrayed as doing so in popular film.

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Posted in Design / Production, Personal Stuff

Unconventional Game Ideas

Posted on June 7, 2006 by | 4 comments

Now that Nintendo has helped prove that there’s a market for unconventional games like Brain Age and Animal Crossing, I thought it might be fun to brainstorm (pun intended) other “semi-serious” possibilities:

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Posted in Design / Production, Serious Games

Reviving the Comedy Game Genre

Posted on June 1, 2006 by | 4 comments

Gamasutra recently published an interview with Al Lowe, creator of Leisure Suit Larry, one of the very few successful “comedic” game franchises ever developed. After many years, Al is jumping back into development with Sam Suede: Undercover Exposure. Yes, goofy sexuality has returned to the industry.  ðŸ˜‰

I’ve often wondered why comedy-centric games are so rare. After all, every other visual medium has its fair share of humorous content. When Henry and I last chatted about this, he offered the following insights:

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Posted in Design / Production

Add Contents of Package, Mix, Repeat…

Posted on May 22, 2006 by | 2 comments

I normally try not to get too swept up in the “creativity crisis” debate, but I read a couple of articles this weekend that got me thinking.

The first was an interview of Paul Lee, president of EA’s worldwide studios. In it, Paul is asked: Open-world gaming seems to be one of the buzz phrases of this E3 … But is there any sense that gamers really want that? His response: I think open-world elements of a game, where you’re not moving and reloading … is really compelling … And I think consumers are going to expect and demand that in this generation of machines.

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Posted in Design / Production, Marketing / PR

User-Generated Content: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

Posted on May 8, 2006 by | 3 comments

Via Joystiq, an interesting controversy: id co-founder John Romero has accused the modding community of hurting the game industry by exposing or introducing inappropriate content (i.e. nudity) in PC games. His post was in response to the ESRB’s re-rating of Oblivion (which happened after a nudity mod surfaced.) John’s exact words: “modders are now screwing up the industry they’re supposed to be helping.”

There are a number of interesting comments on John’s original post which you may wish to read. Meanwhile, this raises a couple issues that I’ve been meaning to write about:

Whose Side Are They On, Anyway?

When consumers decide to create content for a game (or anything else), they’re doing it to indulge their own creative impulses, and/or to share something with friends, and/or to gain notoriety, and/or other reasons that have little to do with “wanting to help the industry” (or the developer, for that matter.) Let’s not kid ourselves: the guys who made Counterstrike didn’t do it to make Valve rich… that was simply a nice side-effect.

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Posted in Business, Design / Production, Legal / Politics, Marketing / PR, Platforms, User-Generated Content

EOCS: The New Economics of Gaming

Posted on April 12, 2006 by | 1 comment

Back in January, Henry and I gave a talk at the Economics of Open Content Symposium on “The New Economics of Gaming”, which is basically a vague, grandiose way of saying “a talk on user-generated content and the video game industry.” A video clip of the entire session was recently made publicly available here.

On a fast connection, the video quality is great. Otherwise, you’ll get nothing but chop, but at least the sound quality remains consistently adequate throughout.

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Posted in Design / Production, Marketing / PR, User-Generated Content

The End of the Eye-Candy Arms Race

Posted on April 10, 2006 by | Comments Off on The End of the Eye-Candy Arms Race

Danc over at Lost Garden has an interesting post (in a multi-post series) analyzing the development model currently favored by most game studios. Lots to read in there; he does a good job of explaining how/why studios are pouring ever-more funding into licensed IPs, art, and “more of the same technologies”, why studios think this is actually a good risk-reduction strategy, and how this arms-race will hurt everyone in the long-term.

Juxtapose this with the latest unhappy news: a survey found that 80% of teens intend to cut back on time spent playing video games, and 70% said they are “losing interest” in games altogether. (Oddly, the survey-taker calls this a “stabilization”, since last year 75% of teens reported declining interest in games. Why does this fail to make me feel better?)

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Posted in Design / Production, Marketing / PR, Platforms, User-Generated Content

Wisdom of Crowds

Posted on April 3, 2006 by | 6 comments

If you haven’t already read it, I’d like to direct your attention to an absolutely fantastic book called Wisdom of Crowds, by James Surowiecki. In it, Surowiecki argues that the decision-making and predictive power of diverse groups of people greatly exceeds that of most individual “experts”. The book is remarkably comprehensive and convincing, and the case studies in it will inspire and amaze you.

Wisdom of Crowds opens with a nice example: 800 people at a livestock exhibition participated in a contest to guess the weight of a live ox (on display) after slaughter and preparation. Some of the 800 were butchers and so-forth; people who should make a good guess. Many contestants were ordinary people with less “relevant” knowledge. But no expert within the competing pool beat the average guess of the group as a whole, which came within one pound of the true weight (1,197 lbs instead of 1,198).

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Posted in Business, Design / Production