Reed Me : gaming

How high is your impulse buy threshold?

reedme — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:03:08 GMT

I think Jeff’s on to something:

While there's an odd aspect of race to the bottom that I'm not sure is entirely healthy for the iPhone app ecosystem, the idea that software should be priced low enough to pass the average user's "why not" threshold is a powerful one.

Coding Horror: Software Pricing: Are We Doing It Wrong?

But...

As usual, it’s a good, thought-provoking post from Jeff. He talks about a couple of games that were wildly successful at selling huge numbers of units after they lowered their prices... Which is the key concept that seems to be overlooked: Perceived Value™.

Jeff (like all of us in geekdom) seems to be thinking of finding the Perfect Price™, set it once and enjoy massive profitability. Unfortunately, marketing and economics don’t work that way because they overlap with the unpredictable, irrational “science” of human psychology. Like that country song chorus goes “... and people are crazy.”

Steam/Valve were wildly successful with these price cuts because the were able to LOWER their prices. If they started off at a lower price point, they might’ve front-loaded more sales on the curve, but they would not have the long, sustainable tail of moderate Half-Life or Left4Dead sales at the New Lower Price™ because they wouldn’t have the same perceived value to typical consumers.

People like Jeff and I who paid full price for L4D (the Reed Clan actually bought four copies at full price, but that’s a different problem) aren’t in the same buyer bucket as those people who got motivated when the price was reduced... and I doubt many game companies are going to be willing to start low and then go lower in the hopes of making more money without a lot more evidence than a table o’ speculative numbers.

Especially since the jury is still out on whether companies are going to win with the iPhone App Store’s race to the bottom strategy. Perhaps if the Xbox Live Arcade and Xbox Live Community Games starts producing some profitable companies built primarily on titles in those arenas, that might suggest starting low is the way to go.

My wallet wants him to be right, but I’m just sayin’...

If it wasn’t in California, this might have gotten me to choose UC Berkeley.

reedme — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 23:21:00 GMT

Well, besides the locale barrier (for politico-moral reasons of my own), there’s the teensy fact that I’m decades past being interested in attending university courses as an alternative to being gainfully employed. But places like FullSail and Digipen didn’t exist Back in My Day™, either, when I was newly-minted National Merit Scholar and “in the market” for a college ed-vacation. (The University of Houston has my undying gratitude for paying for the whole thing. Much obliged!) One of my young cousins-in-law is a recent FullSail graduate, and his curriculum (game programming for the Nintendo DS) sounded a lot more interesting than mine (Herodotus and COBOL).

College students get credit for Starcraft gaming (guardian.co.uk)

It hardly seems fair that nearly three decades ago I almost lost my full scholarship because I spent too much time playing games of all sorts. Games, which I must say, have come a long way since text-based MUDs of yore. And now we’re giving kids college credit for doing the same thing?! *pout* As my daughter (and oldest child) would say, “That’s not fair!!” (Despite many lessons to the contrary @ age 10, she hasn’t acclimated to the fact that it never is.)

Not that I want to go back to being a starving college student, mind you. I’m having too much fun now!! I couldn’t afford to pay attention, let alone feed myself, when I was in college. If I hadn’t gotten married at age 20, I might not have survived to graduation... Heh.

Kudo’s to Christian (with whom I spent five weeks locked in the same room a couple years back, but that’s another story for another day) for the link up. As I acclimate to Twitter, blogging seems so old-fashioned and slow now...

Pirates are customers, too?

reedme — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:17:51 GMT

Leave it to Valve to find the sunny side of piracy.

"We take all of our games day-and-date to Russia," Holtman said. "The reason people pirated things in Russia is because Russians are reading magazines and watching television. They say 'Man, I want to play that game so bad,' but the publishers respond 'you can play that game in six months...maybe.' " Valve Says Pirates Are Just Underserved Customers (1UP.com)

It would be interesting to know what additional costs they incurred to sim ship localized product and how it compared with the additional real gains/imaginary losses associated with piracy. Was it more of a schedule slip? Earlier spent loc cost? Just curious...

You’d think that this would already be available off-the-shelf...

reedme — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:26:13 GMT

I can think of three or four realistic first-person shooters that might already fill this niche. There are probably more...

Reportedly, the army has had a great need for virtual training aids and initially wanted to get videogame training materials out to units before the money was available. Though the army has a large interest in watching the gaming industry for useful technology that could be adapted for military training applications, it doesn't plan to be go toe-to-toe with game publishers.
The Escapist : News : U.S. Army To Invest $50 Million In Gaming

It seems like DARPA needs to connect up with MSR:

Mobile Augmented Reality Games and Visualization
Steve Feiner and Sean White of Columbia University demonstrate prototype mobile augmented reality applications. The goal is to merge virtual information with the real world, leveraging our skill in interacting with physical objects to interact with virtual ones. Demos include hand-held games, user interfaces for an electronic field guide for plants, and visualizations of site data for urban designers. Work being displayed is implemented using the Goblin XNA 3D platform, running on top of Microsoft XNA. Demofest 2008

I saw a demo of Goblin a year or so ago, and it was pretty cool!

For some reason, this all reminds me of the silly reports when I was a kid about how many hours of “combat training” that we all received from watching G.I. Joe cartoons. Heh.

That’s not teen spirit I smell…

reedme — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 02:50:19 GMT

I’m not sure that I’m ready to smell my video games yet…

Researchers in Birmingham have been developing new technology to add smells to the virtual world of video games. Firm adds smell to video games (bbc.co.uk)

We’ve already got people getting nauseas from the visual input alone. I haven’t played the demo for Mirror’s Edge yet, but it sounds pretty cool even though Some People™ seem to have trouble keeping their lunches where they belong. I will admit that some of the game play in Prey made me a little queasy… and I’m a skydiver.

Although, I kind of wonder what Imulsion™ from the Gears universe smells like. Crude oil? Something more refined? Hrm. Makes you think of that sewer scene from the factory in the original Gears of War. I’ll pass.

Even though Mirror’s Edge is supposed to release on my birthday, it’ll have to wait. As soon as I’m done chasing achievements in Gears of War 2 and Dead Space, I’ll get there. Oh, wait. What do I do about Left for Dead? Talk about a game that I don’t want to smell!!

No, I’m positive that I’m not ready to smell my video games yet.

Meet the Reedz on Xbox Live

reedme — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 02:36:33 GMT

It’s always interesting to see how other people see themselves. Or want to be seen. Maybe it’s the latent social scientist training from decades gone by in graduate school. Who knows?

Giving them no specific directions besides “make an avatar for yourself”, I turned the family loose on the Xbox Live avatar creator… with interesting results.

Those of you who’ve met my family know that a couple of those bear little to no resemblance to the creator. Heh. Foex, my oldest son has many years to go before he can even dream of growing a beard… or pointy ears. I didn’t realize that the majority of my family picked camo pants until I tossed all the avatars up together. Interesting.

I have to “coerce” my wife and daughter to “hurry up” after watching them spend way more time trying on hairstyles, clothing and accessories than I was willing to give up on the Xbox 360. When I found them “shopping” among the hairstyles and jewelry, I drew the line… The boys and I were done in five minutes or less each. We’re not sure why the youngest zoomed to dark leisure suit plus sneakers, but he was the one who took the least amount of time “fiddling”. We weren’t able to get him to explain his choices to us.

It’ll be interesting to see how the kids’ avatars evolve over time. Mine? I want Gears of War 2 armor for mine. I want my COG armor!!

In other news, I broke down and bought Dead Space last night on the way home from the Halo 3 charity tournament for the Microsoft Giving Campaign and played all the way through Chapter 1 on normal. I’m likin’ it a lot!! It might replace Bioshock in my list of genre favorites. I tried to hold out for Gears of War 2, but... all the good reviews got the better of me. Definitely have to finish Dead Space before Gears arrives with my ceremonial commemorative Lancer. <insert obligatory chainsaw bayonet sound/>

Fictional characters with autism

reedme — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 23:12:02 GMT

Not exactly mainstream fiction, or even mainstream scifi, but it’s based on an Xbox game published by MSGS.

Mass Effect: Ascension

The central character (not the protagonist) is described as having autism and several parts of the book are from her perspective. I thought it was interesting and a generally positive treatment of a character on the spectrum.

Not sure how Drew came to the character or whether she will put in an appearance in the Mass Effect sequel, but I sent him an email to ask.

Drew's personal website

It was a pretty good book, but in the interest of full disclosure, since Mass Effect is my all-time favorite single-player game, bar none, I would’ve read the book any way.

The Next Big Gaming Platform: SQL Server?!

reedme — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:27:47 GMT

I realize that I'm normally off-topic, so it's weird for me to actually be blogging about SQL Server on my vacation... Figures.

I've blogged before about the Real Reason™ that most guys my age (at least in the USA) got into software development: video games. Back in my day, they wasen't even much "video" in our games. MUDs, MUCKs and MOOs were all text-based multiplayer games (think Zork over the internet)... But that didn't stop many guys I knew from flunking out of college for playing games instead of going to class, even guys on full scholarships like me. Not the outcome most people expect for National Merit Scholars. Needless to say, there's a lot of passion around computer games of all kinds for my generation.

I took some vacation time earlier this summer to attend the XNA Gamefest on my own dime, which was entertaining and educational. I've always want to write and play video games for a living, so I'm sort of a game developer fanboy extraordinaire. I even forced myself to play all the way through Braid last weekend, but that's another story for another day... Back to SQL Server.

One of the cooler sessions (to me) at Gamefest 2008 was delivered by Steve Jackson from XNA Live Server. (No relation to the game company Steve Jackson in Austin of GURPS and Paranoia fame that I know of.) It was titled SQL – The Next Great Gaming Platform, which is what caught my attention. Although I'm not a fan of Itzik Ben Gan's sudoko-in-sql puzzles and logic games of that nature, I figured that's what Steve was going to talk about. (Personally, I like my games with BIG EXPLOSIONS in 3D and cool music.) I didn't have high hopes for the kinds of games that run in SQL Server, but out of sheer curiosity I made room in my full conference schedule to go. And I was very surprised.

The session Steve gave was a good introduction (as much as you can get in an hour) to using SQL Server as a back end for Xbox and PC games ranging from MMORPGs to racing games to casual games built in Popfly... The message was simple: You guys are good at making great games, so focus on that and don't try to reinvent the wheel -- use an established RDBMS that somebody else who is good at it has built already.

It was an entertaining session given by a good speaker, but I didn't really learn anything new about database architecture or design. For my part, I thought it was somewhere between a 100 and 200 level session… but the rest of the audience apparently learned a lot and many thought the session was too deep! Which surprised the heck out of me. I always knew that game development was a pretty isolated niche of the software ecology (most of us have to don't worry about a few extra CPU or GPU cycles in the course of development), but I never realized that things that business software developers take for granted (like transaction logs, record locking, transaction isolation, fault tolerance, disaster recovery, etc) were totally outside the experience of the mainstream game developer.

I'd like to go on the record: if any game developer out there wants help with their SQL Server databases, I'd be happy to contribute database expertise and code in exchange for free games. Heh.

It may not seem related to SQL Server, but...

reedme — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:36:56 GMT

In the dim and distant past, I picked up the 5±2 thing rule. I'm sure it has a fancy, academified name... but Tribal Video Game Knowledge™ has edged it into the recycler in my brain. My oldest son is trying to convince me to buy enough copies of Sins of a Solar Empire that the "whole family can play." (Which really means that he knows he can beat his sister and his mother, and for some reason he thinks he can beat me.)

Anyway, I think the tendency toward deeper and deeper specialization of technical professionals (which came up during the MVP dinner last night) is rooted in our human limitations to retain focused knowledge much like people tend to "specialize" in one particular kind of game, whether that's as narrowly focused as "chess, only chess and nothing but chess" or more broadly as "action/shooters." Hrm.

SQL Server as a product has grown so enormous at this point that even people who work here are blissfully unaware of all its features. Myself included! It's always fun to get asked when we're going to add X Feature™ that's been around since 7.0 or 2000... or find a new feature that I was ignorant of - or forgot about. Try remembering some time whether It™ always used to do that or not.

To the outside world, we might all smell like SQL Server geeks, but inside the circle there are database engine geeks, spatial data geeks, XML geeks, and on and on! There are even Service Broker geeks and MDX geeks, I'm told. Heh.

That this 5±2 fact of life bleeds over into gamer preferences, game play and game design shouldn't come as a surprise, but it does to some people... I read an internal paper recently proposing a New Game Idea™ that was a fun read, but, well, the following article would be good advice to the author!

Games are always just systems waiting to be understood. Fun is in the learning, and the payoff is in our influence over these systems. But a player wields influence only through game mechanics. Anyone would agree that by adding mechanics we inevitably complicate the player's influence over their world. But while game mechanics always add complexity to player input, they rarely alter game output. Gamasutra - Fewer Mechanics, Better Game

The Kitchen Sink Game™ as a special case of Second System Syndrome™ comes up a lot during lunches with Rob. He's a wealth of interesting information nuggets, since he spent years in the game industry before he came to SQL Server for new and interesting fun... He hasn't convinced me (yet) that I don't want to try my hand at game dev when I grow up (defined as "when the kids move out"), but we'll see. I'm still having more fun than the law allows inside SQL Server!

Although it will probably never happen in my career, there's a lot to be said for splitting highly complex products into separate units... <wink_wink/>

Regardless of what you do (technologically-speaking) for a living, it's good to be reminded to focus on what you're good at most of the time and worry less about bringing your shortcomings up to code. Which reminds me, I need to pick Jenifer Fox's book back up and finish it. Right after I crush my oldest son's empire. Heh!

The synchronicity is frightening...

reedme — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 18:44:49 GMT

The synchronicity is frightening, especially considering that I just made time last night to finish all 45 achievements in Mass Effect for another 1,000 points...

It almost like Randall's always there: just watching me. <insert_scary_ghost_noise />

Randall routinely channels my life @ xkcd.com. It's just weird. It adds a lot of weight to Scott Adams' theory that this life is really just a simulation based on [my] previous life aeons ago. (Of course, Scott thinks the simulation is based on *his* previous life, but the evidence clearly proves otherwise.)

XNA to the n-th power trumps Gears of War 2 trailer?

reedme — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 02:19:25 GMT

I've been a closet XNA fan for a while. I've been lurking and watching to see how they plan solve some really hard user-generated content problems...

“The time has come for the games industry to open its doors to all game creators, enabling anyone to share their creations with the world,” said Schappert. “Our goal is to drive a creative and social revolution in games with the same transformative power that we’ve seen in digital music and video sharing.”
Microsoft looks to 'community' for new games (msnbc.com)

It seems like they've got some great solutions. Time to dust off the game proposals that I made my kids write* and actually sling some code under them...

Watched the GoW2 trailer last night on XBL. Several times. Since we couldn't see the lunar eclipse for all the freaking cloud cover!! I hope the new "chainsaw uppercut" is a move they're modeling for the actual game. Very cool.

Both are great new announcements!

In unrelated news, I'm still trying to get excited about Too Human, but I'm still chasing all the Mass Effect achievements (almost done with Medal of Valor on insanity; just got Krogan Ally and Sentinel Ally on the insanity playthrough) and I'll probably get distracted by Lost Odyssey if I can get my copy before the company store runs out today. I'm frightened by the fact that Too Human is already planned to be a trilogy. But since I already know that the first DLC for Mass Effect called "Bring the Sky Down" is scheduled for March 10, I'd better hurry up and snag all the achievements this week. So much for that plan to get to the gym and get back in shape some day, the webernets keep getting in the way... Ooh, shiny object!!

* Being a mean, ogre-type parent of homeschoolers, I treat everything as a "teachable moment" or a "learning opportunity." Heh! They wrote pretty good business plans for what they wanted to spend their allowance money on, considering the older two are 8 and 9.

Internet vigilante justice?

reedme — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 19:04:54 GMT

I'm not advocating mob justice generally; however, this is the *only* case in which I can remember the media even coming close to a retraction of it's horribly biased, agenda-based drivel. "They" put up unresearched stories full of unnecessary ambiguity and emotionally-loaded 'nonsense' (to put it mildly)...

As one Amazon user put it: “I know all about this book but have never fully read it. Why? Due to the overwhelming backlash, I have no choice but to agree with the 1 star ratings. The rumors are rampant that this book was poorly written and poorly researched. So without verifying the contents myself — I give it a 1 star. Good thing video games aren’t judged in this manner — whew!!!”
Mass Effect - Video Games (New York Times)

Protests and political activity never seem to change media misbehavior. This time, though, gamers fire back and score on the pocket book of the ignorant talking head.

<insert_ironic_but_comical_tune />

In completely unrelated news, the SQL Server Business Unit snowball fight is scheduled today (20080128) from 12:00-12:30 Pacific Time in the common area between Buildings 34 and 35. There's more than enough snow for everyone!