First a quotable quote from me in case anyone wants the soundbite:

LucasArts in the 80′s and 90′s helped shape me into the interactive media artist I am today. My time at Telltale Games was as close to working in that environment, and I hope shaped positively the careers of future men and women of interactive media. – John “Seg” Seggerson

I am the product of the adventure gaming genre of the 90′s and squarely in the SCUMM engine camp. Besides Myst, Sam & Max and Monkey Island titles are the most influential titles in my life. They shaped how I created my career and thus my life itself. The news of the closure wasn’t unexpected, so I have already made peace with the fate that occurred. But this is a time to reflect on the importance LucasArts has made in my life.

My love for video games is rooted in an interactive narrative. I’m not one for shooting at things a lot. I’d rather be a part of the storytelling process than a hired gun. Growing up with the SCUMM engine games, I had a lifelong goal of working at a place like LucasArts with the likes of Dave Grossman, Tim Schafer, and Ron Gilbert. When the Star War prequels came out, the slow burn to the end of LucasArts began. The shutting of the successor of Sam & Max titles was a solid push in that direction.

However, I was able to find a home at Telltale Games, which in my opinion was a place for LucasArts ex-patriots like me to come to. Only Double Fine (and for a brief time Hothead) shared in that distinction. While working at Telltale, some of my coworkers who previously worked at Lucas would refer to it as “the other place,” mentioning stories of the slow and eventual demise to the very heart of LucasArts which fans and developers aspired to.

I guess it is poetic that my layoff at Telltale occurred within a year of LucasArts closure; a bookend of a chapter of my career as an artist in the wings of the people who came before me. Now I can state my own ground with my own endeavors. Still, there’s a large part of me that mourns the downfall of the company that inspired me so many years ago.

My hope now is that the rest of the back catalogue be re-released. Especially Grim Fandango. I don’t want our history to fade.

EDITS: Editing by Cyn.

The live broadcast is at 6PM PDT, with a recording posted sometime later. Hope you can listen in!

It’s all done in Javascript and HTML. Did it all in about 10 hours, though there were a few iterations in the process. Could spend a bit more time for a better ending, but whatevers.

You can get the whole thing on GitHub if you’d like, showing how I code when I have 10 hours of working time along with writing time. There’s also the Global Game Jam page for the project as well. Later this week I’ll dive a bit more into the development.

My Background

My work as an artist is narrative based interactive fiction. I grew up on SCUMM era games like Sam & Max and of Live-Action Video (LAV) titles like Tex Murphy. I explored the ages of Myst and the saved the time-space continuum in Buried in Time. Art to me is exploring the space between the audience member and the work of art itself. Good art allows the audience to fill in that space by giving enough information to make the experience owned by the audience. I’m constantly perfecting my skills in this craft to explore this space.

The Current Serious Space

While and establishing myself in fiction works, I started to think about the other areas of thought this art form can tackle. I’ve mused about this before with topics like “The Corporation for Public Gaming” for the Serious Games space. Loosely described as games that have a real-world purpose. While there are great works, I find the space lacking. There’s a series of toys created to find the quickest way to illustrate a narrowed concept. They’re not rewarding experiences for the most part and at best a sense of guilt that you *must* play this game rather than wanting to.

A browser based LAV game called “Bow Street Runner” has stuck out with me in what I want from non-fiction works. Done by Littleloud as a commission for a Channel 4 show called “City of Vice,” the game is arguably more rememberable than the show. The player is a Bow Street Runner, the pre-cursor to our modern police system. While the game is historical fiction, it is still taking history and only filling in gaps to make it approachable in our history. Different from the attempts that Assassin’s Creed takes where a completely alternative universe is created with our existing understanding of history.

Non-Fiction Gaming

For the better part of my career, I’ve worked on making games that fit within the universe of an existing IP. While some were more restrictive than others, the titles I help to realize had a certain degree of rules mandated by the franchise. The question I ask: How is this different from a non-fiction topics? How difficult is it to follow the rules of the universe of a fictional franchise to the universe we exist in?

Non-Fiction Gaming is my approach to close this gap. Non-fiction gaming is taking the same approach of fictional game development to non-fiction topics. Instead of deep-diving into a fictional world, I choose to dive into our own world. Gaming needs it’s Maus and Persepolis. It needs it’s NPR: Planet Money and This American Life. It needs it’s Cosmos: A Personal Journey. I choose to take the same love and care I approach an existing fictional universe to the world of science, history, art, and anything else I care to talk about though my art.

In the end, what I care about is the space between the work of art I create and the player themselves. That part where both sides come together and only the player can create. A space that isn’t restricted to works of fiction. This is why I started my studio.

Edits: Added headers and corrected grammar. (1/15/2013)

When your project gets funding, there’s the matter of reward fulfillment. Right now the process is creating a survey for each tier asking the info you need to deliver the reward. You can only ask this survey once. As a backer, you can only submit this info once and after 10 minutes  it’s locked in. Need to change it? Manual contact and update for both sides. Change of address? Contact project directly for manual update. You’re asked to wait till you can make send the final award to users, but what if you a digital package to devlier sooner than a physical package? It’s horrible support mess.

In the absence of Kickstarter making better tools, is there anything to prevent me from making a separate system? Say once a project is successfully funded, I e-mail every backer with a unique code. They take that code and make a new account at myprojectwebsite.com, making an association with their backer info. All further interactions occur on my website. From forums access, to direct communication and reward fulfillment. I can go even further and make a system where if someone wants to upgrade to a higher reward tier, buy extra copies, or become a backer from the start, they can do so with ease.

While some projects have done parts of this, I haven’t seen an example where a project is completely reliant on their own website in that manor. Am I missing something in the Kickstarter project agreement? If not, who wants to make this tool with me? Maybe we’ll Kickstarter it.

Update: Just as I posted this the backer survey for Unexploded Cow was sent out, so I included a screenshot.

This year we had a new host for the event: Tim Schafer. Growing up with the SCUMM era of games, never would I thought I’d be introducing him onto the stage of a show I’m putting on. Certainly a highlight of my life.

This year I’m getting a lot fewer complaints about how the show went. Sure, there are still improvements that need to be made, but we’re starting to actually know how to do this show now. Moving forward, I hope we can expand the team even more and thus become a better production.

I’m still processing all of the things that went on with the show, hence this rambling of a blog post. One thing is clear for me. After all the bad things that happened to me this year, the show shined a very bright light into a darkness. There are many people to thank for that, which will be the subject of another blog post.

My next steps: Employment via employer or myself!

I am developing my own game: A project about the art of video games.

One of the very few textbooks for my BFA at Emerson was Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. The text looks at the aspects of visual communication in which comics work. It’s a comic book explaining the art form of comics in a comic book. I want to make a video game explaining the art form of video games in a video game.

This is an idea bouncing in my head for few years. Now I’ve decided this will be my first independently developed project since Antidote. The goal is to create a foundation and language for interactive media at a high level. While individuals working in games will hopefully appreciate this project, I’m including people who want a deeper understanding of interactive media concepts.

This isn’t a project to learn how to *make* video games. Nor is it a project to take current topical issues. It’s about how the form of interactivity has evolved though the years and the foundations that have survived though the years. Told in a narrative which invites the player to directly experience the concepts outlined. If my project can stand the test of time just as an art criticism book published in 1993 can, I have done my job well.

My first steps are creating the outline and design doc, which effectively amounts to an academic paper. I hope to work with a number of people working in net art and interactive media to help tinker with. There will reach a point where the project moves to actual implementation once the outline itself is solid.

Right now my goals are desktop platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux [hopefully]). I’d love to go into tablets (iOS, Android), but that is a technical specification and I don’t want to limit the project to that just yet. Consoles would be awesome, but way too much work for little return at this stage.

Funding is going to be the tricky bit. While I’m sure there’s a Kickstarter in my future, a few people I know make a good case that more traditional funding could be procured. A hybrid between wouldn’t be out of the question either. If an established studio came along for supporting the project, then sure! This is a project unlike any other, so I don’t feel there’s an established outfit that would support this project. Loved to be proven wrong, but it’s not likely. So I’ll just make one.

In all, this is a rather exciting decision for me, if not also scary. I’m launching into the realm of non-fiction gaming and starting the first art criticism game ever. In the process  I’m forming my own production house. No pressure. I feel confident that there’s a place in the world for this kind of project, and I’m confident that I can find an audience willing to support this endeavor. My hope is that I can make this all work out and continue my career in the games industry.

Again, no pressure.

Instead of the more narrative based product announcements like the TF2 “Meet the…” series, it’s purely product presentation. Almost has a vibe similar to a Google product video.

The video isn’t bad. The thing that stands out for me is the human voice-over that represents the Steam and Valve, rather than a character in a game. Prior, the identity of Steam consisted mascots rolled out for the community pages and seasonal sales. Now there’s a voiceover and presentational framing of product without voiceless cartoon characters.

Combine this and the expansion to non-entertainment apps on Steam, it looks like our little Steam is growing up!

The story is about a dying man who’s last wish is to visit the moon. Two doctors are commissioned to make this wish a reality by using a technology that supplants a second lifetime to the patient, giving them a second chance to make the dream a memory before they pass on.

What follows is one of the deepest interrogations of a character I’ve seen in a very long time. One that left me teary a few times while layers of the old man’s memories are pealed away one by one. It’s one of the best science fiction stories I’ve experienced in a very long time.

This is the point where I say you should buy this game on Steam or direct. Maybe a few weeks from now I’ll talk about it. For now, save yourself up to 4.5 hours to play this wonderfully written game!

The problem Greenlight is trying to solve is approving titles for sale on Steam. Previously (and currently), titles would have to be manually vetted and approved by Valve in order to be distributed on Steam. This is OK for more established outfits, but there’s an increasing volume of titles that aren’t represented by established publishers/developers, flooding the system. Some titles were rejected even when released on console platforms.

Greenlight gives a different avenue for vetting title submissions. A developer/publisher posts information about a title they want to release on Steam. If enough unique registered users of Steam vote up the title, Valve will release the game on Steam. This allows Valve to process more submissions with smaller effort on their part. Ultimately reducing the risk of a title slipping though the cracks.

At release, the barrier of submission was simply to fill out the submission with a valid Steam account. This created a flood of fake, copied, or obscene submissions. As an attempt to create enough of a hurdle for submissions, Valve now requires a $100 submission fee for enabling an account to submit. To be clear, it’s a fee for any number of submissions from one account and not reoccurring. This fee will go directly to Child’s Play (which I also have a connection with via Ümloud!). For the sake of this discussion, how the money is used is irrelevant.

Ben Kuchera of The PA Report wrote an editorial about the $100 fee as exclusionary and wrong. It’s the value amount that he expressed his concerns:

If the fee were lowered to $10, the effect of weeding out the trolls would continue, and the amount of people that could participate in the process would be exponentially widened. It’s still a long shot, and you still have to muster community support and have a good game. In fact someone emailed me to suggest a mandatory playable demo would do much to help remove the trolls, share more information about games, and remove the financial barrier. Even if they could raise the $100 fee, it would be better spent on rent or equipment.

The $100 price point is pretty common across other gaming platforms, but Steam is actually cheaper in the long run. Apple requires a $99/year fee for iOS, another $99/year for Mac Store. Xbox ‘Creators Club’ charges $99/year. Steam is $100 period. As far as platforms to sell games on, Steam pretty accessible and inexpensive. The real trick is the cut you get per sale, which I don’t have all the numbers available on Steam. Though it’s hard to argue with a one-time fee vs. an annual fee. Can this fee be lower? Sure. I would also think that Valve used the metics from banning players of multiplayer games and recreating accounts.

The question posed to users is “Would you buy this game if it were available in Steam?” The “Yes” button figuratively would be a buy button. Greenlight is not Kickstarter and no money is transfered. A developer would do better to present later in their schedule to have screenshots and the important video for the submission. Greenlight is geared towards the later end of a production schedule. After you figured out a budget, even if that budget consists of an game engine licensee.

A developer using Greenlight developer is asking to sell a product, regardless of your background. With all due respect, this isn’t Newgrounds.com. Submitting to Greenlight is during your work into a commercial product. Of all the venues out there, Steam Greenlight is the least expensive storefront to place commercial games. The $100 may have been a quick fix for the over-flooding problem — and I hope it’s continued to be re-evaluated as time goes on. What I can say is that Steam Greenlight is lowest bar of entry for commercial game stores. And that makes me happy for the state of independent development.

Bosco as a Frenchmen in Sam & Max with subtitles.

A few weeks ago Jonathan Blow talked about his incorporation of subtitles into his next title The Witness. He brought to light one of the fundamentals of gaming that is sometimes treated as foregone conclusions: Subtitles.

Originally I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to implement subtitles or not. It’s important to me that the game have an overall aesthetic that contains no visual language. I was worried that if we were to draw subtitles for people who don’t speak English, it might ruin this. But, a year ago, I was talking to a friend who has experience in film, and he convinced me that people just understand that subtitles are a different thing, that they are a layer on top of the game or movie or whatever.

I’m totally in agreement for steering away from becoming a novella. I grew up on point-n-clicks, but I also agree that subtitles with a voice recording becomes distracting to players at large. With a player capable of understanding the recorded audio, the text distracts from the environment the work is presenting. A fictitious construction placed upon a space that is (usually) meant to present a believable universe.

What concerns me is an implication that the hearing impaired aren’t considered a part of the equation. A comment from Jonathan Blow on the above linked blog post:

If such a player is perceptive he will figure it out. Consider it a bonus puzzle.

I can see his reasoning. The work Blow does is to create an environment that strips away the interface — the distractions — from the piece. He is also making a bet that the design and gameplay do not depend on the voice work in the piece. You experience the world as you experience the world. And maybe that’s a valid choice in some contexts and maybe that’s worth exploring.

Regardless of the ability to create a piece that doesn’t require voice work, I can not agree with this position. The tools and ways the hearing impaired navigate the real world aren’t afforded or available in the context of a screen and human interface devices (keyboard, mouse, gamepad). While I haven’t played The Witness, it’s clear that the audio diaries are key parts of the narrative world in the title. Maybe not key to solving puzzles, but are a part of the narrative environment. To exclude them from the work is to discriminate against physical limitations beyond a player’s control.

I live by the mantra: Accessibility is accessible to everyone. Elevator access in a building not only helps people with mobility concerns, but also when you need to move a heavy thing around a building. While there’s a balance to strike between resources and output, I feel that the availability of subtitles is one of the few core requirements in interactive media. It helps the hearing impaired, it helps non-native speakers, and perhaps more than can be predicted. I don’t feel subtitles need to be on by default, but subtitles should always be made available.

My strengths are creating strong narrative environments. This can happen at large institutions, but I also have a wide enough T stance to be great at either small teams or start-ups. I’ve worked and submitted games on every console/PC retailer and make games on most consoles.

Now leaves the question: What opportunity awaits me?

For anyone inquiring, here’s my resumé to start the journey.

This is the e-mail I sent to the studio and is what I also want to share with all of you.

There are a lot of words that come out of me right now. Many stories of great people and the great work produced together in the over five years. Too many to detail for any one e-mail, but it speaks to the many accomplishments that this studio has afforded all of us. I developed as an artist and storyteller though this place. I developed as a producer and a programmer though this place. Now I am off to find my own voice as an artist. To find new ways to engage an audience in this art form we all love.

Telltale is a success story in developing rich narrative environments. It is that belief that kept me working hard all of these years and though all the titles I’ve had. And even as I depart, it is a belief I still carry with me.

So to all of you, thank you for allowing me to be a part of this work. It is truly an honor to work with you and being apart of greatness.

I close with one line from a video game that’s always been very dear to me and is perfectly fitting:

“… and so I close, realizing that perhaps the ending has not yet been written.”

We wanted to create a similar event to Sundance for independent game developers – and that’s just what we’ve succeeded in doing with the Independent Games Festival, which has awarded hundred of thousands of dollars in cash prizes (and brought major exposure and a much higher profile) to a multitude of indie and student game developers who enter.

Fast forward a decade later and the landscape of independent game development is vastly changed. While it’s by no means a small feat to create a game, it is also very possible to release a title on your own. Sure, not for all platforms, but there are many distribution models with a low bar of entry and numerous funding options as well. And if a title is good enough to be nomitated for an award, wouldn’t the attention brought to them give enough exposure to get titles sold?

So I ask: Do we really need exposure for publishers to pick up a title? Could IGF do better by focusing on bringing attention to completed titles for audiences to obtain/purchase? Where do indy developers get rewarded for completing and releasing a title?

This drives to the heart of my uncomfortable feelings towards the IGF lately. IGF should be a celebration of the work being done and I trust the organizers do have that in mind.

I did a bit of research with the nomination list for the 2012 awards for all categories EXCEPT audience and student. I defined released as available to the public in the platform submitted for. Splunky was released as PC in 2008, but was submitted this year as an unreleased XBLA title, thus it’s unreleased. Dear Ester was released before, but signifiant enough changes occurred for a new release.

• Released in 2011:
  • 12 nominated titles
  • None won an award
• Released in 2012 but before the ceremony on March 4, 2012:
  • 4 nominated titles
  • 2 of them won an award
• Released after the ceremony:
  • 3 nominated titles
  • 2 of them won an award
• Unreleased as of May 18, 2012:
  • 9 nominated titles
  • 3 of them won an award

I’m sorry I don’t have the time to look into the previous years, but by design it’s similar to that. But again I pose the question, what value does one have in an awards ceremony where your rewarded on not shipping before submissions are due? I think the Indy game ecosystem would do better to reward accomplishments, rather than a vehical for promotions.

I would like the IGF to be a celebration of independent developers whom after going though the trials of final release, still are able to preserve the high quality to warent a nomination or award.

To be clear, I’m not blaming the developers for the way things are. That’s the rules of the current game and I can’t blame them for it. What I’m asking for is to change the rules of the game. To that end, I would propose is a modist but significant change in the rules.

Currently there’s this line in the 2012 IGF Rules that state:

• State of Development: All Entered Games must be in a “beta” state or better (i.e., Entered Games must be feature-complete). At least one (1) level of each Entered Game must be complete and fully playable.

I would propose changing this to something like:

• State of Development: All Entered Games must be in a “released” state and publicly available by the end of the Entry Deadline period. Entered Game must be complete and fully playable.
• Submission Limit: All Entered Games can be submitted only once, regardless of platform, and cannot be submitted in future Independent Game Festival submissions.

This way your submission must count and be available to the public. Thus the notoriety gained from the awards ceremony returns to renewed interest in the title, rather than a release marketing ploy. Or worse, the feedback loop of a title winning more than once as the rules don’t prohibit the practice outright. Yes, this is the case with Fez, but frankly I can’t blame a developer for doing that. There’s nothing in the rules against the practice. My problem is that it shouldn’t be that way in the first place.

The nature of Independent development has changed with less dependence on traditional publisher models, and for the better! I feel that the IGF needs to reflect these changes and make adjustments accordingly.

Showing my Work

• Released before 2011 on different platform.
  • Spelunky [PC] (2008, Dec 21)
• Released in calendar year 2011.
  • Frozen Synapse (2011, May 26)
  • Wonderputt (2011 ??)
  • Realm of the Mad God (2011, Jun 20)
  • Atom Zombie Smasher (2011, Mar 14)
  • English Country Tune (2011, Nov 25)
  • Pugs Luv Beats (2011, Dec 19)
  • To the Moon (2011, Nov 1)
  • ASYNC Corp. (2011, July)
  • At a Distance (2011 ??)
  • GIRP (2011, Mar)
  • WAY (2011, Oct (?), as ‘Alpha’)
  • Lume (2011, May 9)
• Released before awards ceremony (Jan 1 2012 – March 3 2012)
  • Dear Esther (2012, Feb 14)
  • Prom Week (2012, Feb 14)
  • Beat Sneak Bandit (2012, Feb 16)
  • Fingle (2012, Jan 12)
• Released AFTER awards ceremony (March 4 2012 – May 19 2012)
  • Fez (2012, April 13)
  • Botanicula (2012, May 7)
  • Waking Mars (2012, March)
• Unreleased as of May 19, 2012
  • Johann Sebastian Joust
  • Spelunky [XBLA]
  • Mirage
  • Antichamber
  • Gunpoint
  • Faraway
  • Ridiculous Fishing
  • Proteus
  • Storyteller
• Notes:
  • Dear Ester
    • Previously released on Windows, but significantly expanded for submission.
  • Spelunky
    • The IGF 2012 submission is for the XBLA version.
  • WAY
    • The developers have publicly stated their builds are ‘Alpha’, in direct contrast to the IGF rules.

Download Now for Windows & Mac!

When this first started, a few people I know had concerns that a ‘big’ company was doing the Kickstarter thing. The fear that it would drain from smaller efforts. But it seems Double Fine shed light to the investment model to a wider audiences, and now they’re more comfortable with a Kickstarter project.

With a group of people who grew up on the concept of pre-orders, Kickstarters aren’t much of a stretch to gamers. Add in more value to the investment than GameStop, and not actually paying GameStop, it’s a win-win for everyone!

Posted above my desk at work.

When the ending of the game started to get some traction, I was in a deeper focus to finish the game. Not just research at my own pace, but the contribute to the discussion about the ending. At first I was going to stick to just the narrative analysis. Then I got introduced to a different take which I agree with, and lead me to ponder what a ‘unit’ of art is.

Needless to say, behind the cut is the way to Spoiler-town.

I had written up some thoughts on the ending. The analogy I was going for is the ending of Contact (1997) in which the alien race is her father personified. Then leaves the player with a choice of what color the beam-o-destruction is. This tosses away the 121 hours as unimportant to the fate of the universe. There were other things that were just odd. The reversal of red and blue colors at the end where blue is usually on the right side.

As I was looking around for videos of the other endings, I stumbled upon this theory (via Paul Tassi of Forbes) which it’s main thesis I agree with. It’s long, so you can either watch it or skip to my tl;dr.

tl;dr: Shepard is in process of indoctrination in Mass Effect 3. Subtle at first, then ramp’ed up during the final scenes of the game. Once Shepard is hit with the Reaper beam running to the Citadel entry, the narrative takes place inside Shepard’s head. The conversation between Anderson and Illusive Man are Shepard’s will and indoctrination respectively. The ending ‘decide-an-ending’ machine a choice to either give in to Reaper control or not.

The film analogy I’d go for here is Fight Club (1999), but stopping the movie just before the Tyler Durden reveal. Then releasing the rest of the movie via the Internet at a later date. This poses a very peculiar situation that rases questions. What defines a unit of art? Is the self-contained unit at initial offering? Does DLC count under the orignal unit, or must it be treated differently?

Since I’m making up a new term, let me share what I propose as known ‘units’ of art. A film is a unit. The other stuff on a DVD, be it deleted scenes or interviews, live outside of the unit of the film. For Television, each episode is a unit and a season is a collection of units. For art, it’s the piece presented on (or around) the canvas or space the art occupies. For performance art, the time between the start and finish of the piece. Obviously there’s cases that challenge this which is the whole point of art.

For video games, there’s some cases where a unit is clearly defined. Dear Esther (2012) is a unit. Centipede (1983) is a unit. Even with episodic games, each episode is the unit with the season being a number of units. Where things aren’t so defined is when DLC is introduced. For Alan Wake (2010), the main game was a complete unit, and DLC continued the story as different units. Then there are not so clear cut examples of DLC as a unit. Do the DLC items in Team Fortress 2 (2007) change the unit? LA Noir (2011) posed the more questions by altering the main narrative structure with DLC. You can complete the game without DLC and get the same results, but the DLC  altered experience if played from the beginning. With or without the DLC, you only missed content in the middle, not altered the ending.

Assuming the “Indoctrinated” theory is true in some form, then Bioware didn’t end the game called Mass Effect 3. The end of the game is DLC. I feel this is worse than a just a bad ending. It’s saying that a unit costing $40/$70 needs an add-on costing $0-25. I hate to reduce this to a cost, but there’s a valid argument that the agreed upon level of consumption of the media is a contact to have a complete experience. The complete experience of the unit at an additional cost. I feel this breaks the agreement between artist and audience to have a complete experience with the initial agreed upon offering.

I reserve judgement to weither the DLC would be free or paid. We don’t know what the plans EA / Bioware had before the fan movement occurred. I also don’t believe that the current response would be so calculated to anticipate the “Hold the Line” movement. It’s brilliant to be having this discussion of what defines the expectation of a complete core experience. On the other, the result would be milking money out of an audience. Is this then the artist statement: Resolutions can be charged as DLC?

The next few weeks will be interesting, that’s for sure.

Since then I have moved on to Chrome as my primary browser, but I still use Firefox for the Something Awful forums extension, various HTML developer extensions, and my Ümloud! logins (preventing acidental personal posts). I also started using 1Password (a future post!) for better security across all my browsers. The key component to my Firefox use are the extensions (also known as Add-ons).

When Firefox first rolled out extensions, the API asked developers to limit what version the extension would work for. An extension for Firefox 3 wouldn’t work on 4. This forced developers to test the new browser and for users to update when needed. That way extensions wouldn’t soft-fail on users, causing them to think the browser is broken when the fault was the extension. This process was fine when major Firefox releases were around a year or more.

Recently Firefox started going on a version number release schedule similar to Chrome: Release early and very often. Major version number updates occur in a span of months or weeks. This is fine, but flies against extensions. An extension that got updated for the shipping version won’t work on a beta. The updating messages aren’t removable; just “ask later”. Now I have to pick between seeing update messages every time I launch, or break extension support.

So we need two things to happen here:

• Make a third “wait till it’s released, not beta” option.
• Extensions move away from version numbers and more to capability testing.

While the “not beta” option should be there in any case, we’re starting to see a change that the old versioning system isn’t paired with the change of development schedule. Without knowing too much about the extension system, I can’t help but think of the disastrous history of using User Agent strings to assume capabilities. The better approach is using something like Modernizr¹ which tests what a browser can do, rather than the name/version of a browser. That way when a browser with a different name, but capable of the require actions, can still work. Past, present, and future.

Sadly, I can’t wait for these things to happen. Which sadly means on my Mac, I’ll be using Safari as my Ümloud! browser and only venturing into Firefox when I absolutely need to use an extension, assuming it still works…

¹ Shout out to Faruk Ateş!

For the past few weeks, I’ve noticed my trackpad was super sensitive to clicks. I haven’t notied it that much, but the bulk of my laptop use in the past three months is via Synergy and not using the trackpad. Now that Puzzle Agent 2 shipped, I’m back to working at my coffee shops. Today the clicking got so horrible I couldn’t do anything and had to shut down the computer.

Flipping it over to the back, the hood was bent out of shape a bit. I noticed this before, but I thought it was just use. Popping the hood, I remove the battery and see what’s under it. Didn’t see anything out of place, so I thought I’d see if there’s something wrong with the lid. Putting the lid back but without the battery, the lid clicked in place normally.

Looking at the battery, the “bottom” side which should be flat was bowing out:

Keeping the battery out, I started my computer up again and things were working fine. Who knows what would have happened if I didn’t look at that sooner…

No more battery power, but I can click again! The Internet says it’s covered by Apple Care, which I have till Nov. Figuring out when I can make an Apple Store appointment.

My music collection is roughly 22GB of music I’ve purchased in the past 15+ years; Moving to digital when it was easy to buy digital. I wasn’t much of a file sharing person in the days since I just didn’t have the time. Course with that large of a library, I’ve had to make some choices between all the devices I use for music play. While it’s changed over the years due to technology, my current layout works for me.

Central storage of music is important for me as it helps to keep things consistent between the devices, unless the device can’t store that amount. I also concerned about backups of this music data. While I still own physical CDs, the digital purchases can’t be re-download (except new Amazon.com purchases). So here’s my system I’ve established for myself. I’ll explain it in a typical workflow.

Obtaining Music

The only time I buy physical CDs is when they are signed by the artist or some preorder bonus is included. The rest is all digital. I do this for a number of reasons. Physical items are expensive to everyone in comparison to the delivery of bits. For me, physical media that doesn’t have a more meaning for me is largely wasteful. (I’m proud of buying MC Frontalot CDs from the man himself.) There are exceptions for when an artist is selling directly on their own service. Otherwise I prefer Amazon, followed by iTunes. I will admit that the Amazon cloud service makes that buy more attractive, but I’ll get to that later.

Where ever the source, the first place music goes is my MacBook Pro’s iTunes. This makes my laptop the most up to date storage of music. It’s my primary listening device by far, but I still have other places to play my music.

Home Storage

When I get home, I’ll do one manual copy from my MacBook Pro to my Windows 7 iTunes. While this is a manual step I haven’t been able to automate completely, I have added some things into that step that add a lot more bang for my buck.

My Windows 7 Music folder (which is essentially my iTunes music folder) is actually a network disk provided by my Network Area Storage (NAS) device, a Synology Disk Station 207+. This step alone enables the music to do the following:

• Interface music though iTunes GUI.
• Broadcast my music via the NAS’ iTunes Server (without my Win7 box turned on).
• Broadcast my music via DLNA.
• Stream music to my iPhone via DS Audio.
• Stream music to a web browser player.

While I admit I don’t use most of the other functions as much, there are times when I use the PS3 to play music and keep my computers closed down. It’s also great for guests staying at my place and have the music available to them. I confess I don’t use the DS Audio app much, but the places I want to listen to music with a solid 3G or WAN connection are times when I have my laptop.

Playing Music

My portable Mac is the main place of music, followed by my iPhone. I work a lot with my laptop and there’s no need to stream when I have my devices with me.

On my iPhone, I don’t do the streaming as much. The times I’m without my laptop and play music are usually the dead zones of cell service. Which means I’m listening to podcasts, of which iTunes is still the best solution for. There are times where I’ll plug in my iPhone directly to my AV receiver to listen to podcasts and don’t want to turn on my Windows box.

At home, I mainly use my Windows box for music listening, which is connected to my receiver. I have the flexibility to move to either my PS3 or Xbox360 and access the same music. Usually it’s the PS3 as the interface is better than the Xbox.

My car however is in the past. It’s a Ford Focus 2007 I got when I moved to the bay area. My father and I knew that in six months the Focus would include the Ford Sync system. This allows my iPhone to play though the car. Sadly I couldn’t wait that long for a car and settled for the 6CD changer. Thankfully it will read MP3 CDs so I can store more music than a Red Book CD. Slowly I’m moving to MP3 CDs of music I’d like in the car. I tried the FM transmitter thing, but it’s not the best with a phone physically connected. Once it’s available, I do plan on getting the BlueTrip DualConnect which should solve my iPhone as music player issues.

Long-Term Backups

While this adds a level of backup to my media files, it’s not the Final Solution™ for backups. For this I use another feature on the Synology and backup to an Amazon S3 Bucket; All automated on a weekly process.

S3 is a network storage service that’s more advanced than a service like Dropbox and much cheaper depending on your volume. You’re charged for the storage you keep and the bandwidth you use. The rates can very depending on what location you want the data stored, but for anyone in North America, US East (Virgina) is fine. My bill for last month was $1 to store the 22GB. Once my music is on my NAS, everything else falls into place.

Enter the new thing: Amazon Cloud Drive & Player. This service does what my NAS already does – A steaming music player and cloud storage of music. For me it’s reduced features to what I’m used to with my NAS. Not to mention extra manual steps to make it all work. The only benefit is redundancy from failures of my local devices. But that’s what my S3 bucket is for. My current plan is also much cheaper than Cloud Drive. I’d have to pay $4.25/month to upload my existing music manually at the 50GB tier.

Cloud Drive does allow you to redownload Amazon music purchases without counting against drive quota. Makes sense as Amazon simply links to the existing music download server and storage and fully recommend people do this. You can always download your music off the drive at a later date. The alterative is a one-time download so you’d be silly not to use Cloud Drive. The big bummer is I can’t re-associate my music I payed for on Amazon to the drive without Quota. They still have purchase history and could in theory. I suspect it’s a licence issue, but who knows.

But is this for you?

My system setup is this way as I know what I’m doing and don’t want to worry about it as much. While I’m not trying to sound like a product placement for the Synology, it’s a system that does a lot of things that are helpful and just plain work. I also use the device for a bunch of other things like Time Capsule and other features. The device is pricy in comparison to other NAS systems (current model at $300 without disks). Unless you’re doing security camera stuff, there’s no other costs besides the drives. All the iOS apps are free. I’d recomend a Dynamic DNS name service like DynDNS so you can always phone home, which is free. You’ll also need to poke holes for ports on your router.

With services like Cloud Drive and what ever rumored and future services from Apple, Google, and et all, there’s a simplicity that doesn’t require a hardware purchase like a NAS. We’ll see what these services offer, but I feel my current setup will end up being cheaper as I’m rolling my own services. So long as I don’t make the downloading of my library public, I don’t need to strike licensing deals to do it either.

Thank you to the many people who helped me Antidote! While I wish the project met the expectations I and others had, it still provided me and others the experience that helped all of us to become talented and successful practitioners of interactive media and beyond.

I would not be where I am today, making video games for a living, if it wasn’t for Antidote and all the people who helped to make this happen. For this I am forever grateful. Now, to formally announce the release in my traditional manor:

Please enjoy this game.
It was made for you, with love, in Kalamazoo, Northville, Ann Arbor, Boston and Berkeley.

Child’s Play, Ümloud!, PAX East Panels

For PAX East 2011, I reprised my role in the Child’s Play Charity panel. This time it was extra special as Kristin revealed the first full-time hire for Child’s Play, Jamie Dillion! You can see her interview process on PATV (Part 1, Part 2). Her roll with Child’s Play is to help expand upon the org and deal with community fundraiser people like me. I’m really excited about working with Jamie and see a lot of cool and awesome things in the future for Child’s Play.

For the panel, I wrote this document as an extended outline for the panel. It will soon be expanded upon and made into a Child’s Play publication with a lot more info soon.

Antidote

The other panel I was on was AJ’s “The Sorting Workshop”. It started out with a game “preview” in which attendees had to write about the game for 10 minutes. From there, the other panelest would read the writings and comment with notes on how to write for journalism, marketing, pr, etc. AJ asked me to be the dev to preview a game. She was expecting something of MSPaint quality — Something with little effort to use. Instead, I used a live-action video game called Antidote.

This got me thinking that I should release the thing, though I am nervous about it. I’ll just go out and say that this isn’t a good game to play and I don’t plan on fixing it. I don’t worry about people trashing it in reviews, but I worry a little that people think I’ve at that level with the art form when I’ve grown well beyond that in the years. So the website’s going to have notable disclaimer setting the exceptions low and pointing them to better games I’ve worked on like Puzzle Agent.

On the tech side, I was glad to see that the Mac build was able to run on an Intel based Mac. This is especially key as the version of Director that I used was before the Intel business and thus a PowerPC executable. The saving grace is the Rosetta layer on Mac OS X. It’s technically an optional install with a “just-in-time” download and install when the user first runs a PowerPC executable. However, Rosetta will be removed from Mac OS X 10.7 “Lion”, so the time is now to release the thing. For the curious, it would cost me $300+ to get a version of Director to make the Intel version — which I don’t plan to spend.

The Windows version runs without problems on Win7. I did remake an installer last night using Inno Setup so the install process flows better. There is the requirement of having Quicktime installed, but if you have iTunes you have it. I also have the Mac installer redone, but still need to make the DMG background for it. From there, I’m going to clean up the website and make it pretty. I’ll be using Amazon S3 to distribute the builds as straight downloads and Bittorent. The download is big at 240-260mb, but bandwidth is much cheaper these days than five years ago.

I plan to get everything ready and released by the end of April, if not sooner.

This GDC, I talked to a super majority of non-art entry level and students that came to GDC. The Telltale jobs booth is one of the most attended job booths at the convention. I took great pains to be kind and give career counseling to people who are working the right direction but don’t have a fit to what my employer is seeking. I hope I gave the right kind of direction to help them grow. The kind of advice I wish I had when I was in their shoes.

When people see my business card, there’s a wide eye reaction that the met someone from Telltale. It is humbling to me that I have earned such respect with my work to incite this kind of reaction. I hope that I impress on them an openness and kindness when they meet me. I hope that I live up to and surpass the expectation from the work my fellow artists and I have created. I hope that the impression I left with the people I met at GDC this year

I hope that the impression I left with the people I met at GDC this year is that kindness and hard work do indeed lead to great things. I can not live in a world in which my success came exclusively by luck alone and that hard work and adaptiveness lead me to where I am today. That is why I will do what I can to give the kind of support to the people who came to the other side of my table the past few days. Four years ago this week, I was one of them.

Very few game developers work with non-profit organizations (NPOs).

As with any overly broad statement, there’s nuance here. I’m setting the bar to beyond monetary donation, but committed infrastructure involvement. I don’t have hard facts to prove or disprove this statement; Believe me, I wish I had hard facts. There are some developers who do great NPO work out there, some even volunteer with Ümloud!, whom do count and are doing good things.

What is clear to me is an overall lack of willingness from developers to work on NPOs. I’m trying to figure out is why I’m the only developer involved with these projects. Of the Child’s Play community organized events I know of, I can’t think of any developer that’s founded any (please tell me if I’m missing something). I see involvement on a corporation level, which is awesome, but I’m trying to find individuals acting on their own. I should not that I’m not limiting the argument to only Child’s Play, that’s just where I’ve done my research though the years.

One could say that development life is too demanding. To that I say bullocks. The first Ümloud! event was done in 8 weeks for both event and organizational setup while I was build engineer at Telltale Games. A crunch mode in the NPO and perpetual crunch mode as my game dev job. This earns me the right to say this argument doesn’t hold weight. If there’s a cause you believe in, I can’t buy the argument that you’re too busy for it. Nor does that argument hold with others who also have jobs and lives to live and still work for NPOs.

I don’t know why I’m the only game developer I know that works on NPOs. I don’t want to be the only person. Seriously, it’s bloody lonely doing this work. It’s frustrating when I try to get the game community together to work on these projects, the community that gathers contains very few game developers. I’m trying to demand better for my fellow artists in the game industry. I want this to change, but I don’t know what do so differently. The only thing I can think of doing differently is saying:

Get involved with something!

Synergy is a software KVM switch (Keyboard-Video-Mouse) but without the video. Instead, it allows you to work on one computer, move the mouse to one side of the screen, and start working on the computer next to it. All of which connected by the local network to control mouse and keyboard.

It doesn’t matter what OS the computers are using. Once they’re set up with Synergy, you use one keyboard and mouse to run as many computers as you wish. Have one computer with more than one screen? Synergy adjusts flawlessly. Even more amazing is that text-only copy and paste works across the computers!

The bugger is getting the system set up. Right now the project is recovering from a bit of neglect as well as a lack of user-centered focus on design. As you’ll read on, we’re now at a point where the setbacks are worked on. I invite you to use Synergy now as it’s stable. Just a bit curious to set up with Windows as the “server” (the computer with the physical keyboard & mouse).

As wonderful this software is, the development story was questionable in the late 2000′s. The maintainer for the original project at Synergy.sf.net went AWOL. New operating systems, namely Windows Vista & 7, required maintenance on the software. There were a few groups trying to make the software work, but a project named Synergy++ came out on top as the successor to the project providing a good chunk of maintenance to the Synergy code. Eventually the project moved to it’s new home, Synergy-FOSS. In the past few days they released the first release under FOSS, brining Synergy back to awesome status.

They’re far from done however. The biggest problem Synergy has for usability is a huge interface problem. As it stands, Synergy’s configuration of screens depends on either hand-editing a text file, or a GUI interface that didn’t take human beings into account.

“0 to 100% of the ‘left’ of ‘Screen A’ goes to 0 to 100% of ‘Screen B’” is the language you needed to figure out for arranging screens. Meaning you have to set up the reverse of what you intended to configure. When I set up a server on a Windows box, I have to draw out the screens on a sheet of paper to get it working. It’s a nightmare as someone who’s done it before and almost impossible for someone who hasn’t.

A while ago someone developed a Mac GUI to Synergy called SynergyKM. It uses the Synergy binaries but wrapped in a GUI and other tie-ins to make it work as a native Mac application. This includes a menu bar allowing you to switch profiles and turn it on and off. This is a boon to me when I have a home and office configuration. Most importantly, the server configuration is easy once you know the machine names of your computers.

Put the computer screen where you want it to be and hit “Apply Now”. Done. While the screens are all iMacs, it’s just cosmetic as one’s a Windows box.

The bad news is that SynergyKM as a project isn’t developed anymore. The good thing is that there’s a workaround to update SynergyKM with newer Synergy binaries. I use this with the new 1.3.6 Synergy-FOSS binaries.

Synergy-FOSS is planning on a Mac GUI for 1.4.1. I can’t find screenshots or early copies of this, so I can’t comment on how that’s going. But I’m hoping they took some pages from the SynergyKM playbook, using it for the PC as well. Still, using 1.3.6 is great with a few minor but recoverable hangups.

Once the 1.4 Synergy comes out of beta, Synergy will hopefully realize a level of usability for more people to use!

There are a few things that Google makes available to non-profits in their range of products. Some don’t need to check your non-profit status. One requires extreme but understandable scrutiny. Then there’s this middle ground which for a company such as Google, is surprisingly more complex and resource intensive than it should be.

Of all the programs and services Google offers, there are three levels of involvement to use these products. These are terms I made up since Google doesn’t classify products this way.

• No Application/Approval Needed:
  • Google Apps (Standard Edition)
  • Anything anyone uses personally (Gmail, Search, Analytics, etc).
• Non-Profit Status Clearance:
  • Google Checkout (for donations)
  • Google Apps (Non-Profit Edition)
  • YouTube (Branded Channel; Donations button)
• Full Evaluation & Decision:
  • Google Grants

No Application are products that work once you set them up with no need to confirm non-profit status. Besides Google Apps, these are products that are no different to anyone, individual or organization.

Non-Profit Status Clearance are products that require a non-profit status check, but not discerning beyond established rules. Checkout falls into this category as Google wants to make sure the entity has the non-profit status for tax and legal reasons. The idea being any valid non-profit gets clearance.

Full Evaluation is on the other end of the spectrum. It’s not enough to be a non-profit, but Google making the decision to go beyond what they do for any non-profit. For Google, it’s the Grants program which goes beyond free product and is a direct partnership with the company. High bars of entry are expected here.

The difficulty I’ve had with Google is in this middle category, status clearance. The problem with these Google products is the lack of centralized application process. When you apply to any one product, the forms are similar enough as far as status clearance is concerned. The prerequisites are the same which all focus around having an entry in GuideStar to validate status. However, each product goes though each step from square one, regardless if you have already established a relationship with another product.

I would like to see Google have a one-stop shop for this middle ground. As a non-profit, I want to establish and register with Google once. Where I as the non-profit admin go to one place and have Google recognize the entity of Ümloud! as a non-profit. Then when I go to other status clearance products, the process is simply setting up the tool, rather than a human being checking if I’m a non-profit again.

Besides the reduction of time for staff to go though applications for every product, it should be easier for current and future Google products to latch onto the status clearance. Then a non-profit set of features wouldn’t need to reinvent the approval process for that product.

I could see an expansion of this with the Grants program. The first step being on the non-profit clearance list, then an organization can apply to Grants. At least then the applications to Google won’t require basic validation and spend more time on the premium standards Google has for Grants recipients.

If this can happen, then non-profits can spend more time doing their work, rather than waiting on procedure. Not to mention Google having a better handle on the organizations who use their services.

If by the off chance someone from Google reads this, I would love to talk and consult with you and your staff about this. I’m in the Bay Area and wouldn’t mind stopping by for a chat!

Since I moved to San Francisco, I always end up backstage the first time I visit a concert venue. This comes from being a vegan baked goods delivery service for Jenny Owen Youngs. This was a favor for my friend Lynn, baker for the Rockstars. This time I didn’t have brownies in my hands, but I would have an audience with Amanda Palmer at the Filmore.

Meeting with Internal Staff

The morning of Sunday May 18th, I met with Margot Cannon, who would be my co-conspirator for this project. While I was planning the ARG assets to be completed by the Palmer Art Army, I needed someone to help me with the writing, planning, and general ‘I know a guy/girl’ task assignments.

While we had talked quite a bit before that morning, this was the first face to face about the project. We got a few things put together, but it’s extremely hard to plan this out when you have no access to the source material, regardless of its status. We were flying blind, thus our plans were pretty wide open.

Time was also the big issue. This was late May and the album’s street date in mid-September. These things usually run with 8 months of planning for a 4-7 month run time. While the ARG would run after the album release, we had less than 4 months to plan and implement. As a product of episodic games, we came up with a plan to break content drops in episodes. The Rabbithole (initial contact) in mid-July lasting two weeks, two content drops every two weeks, then a content drop each week after and though the release of the album. Still a very aggressive schedule, but spacing out the content to allow development to catch up on itself.

This patten is a little less organic than I would like. Structured more on media drops which result in specific calls to action, rather than giving more flexibility to the players on the flow of the game. Not ideal, but this way the game would be accessible to players who aren’t used to ARGs and more accommodating to the very short schedule.

Waiting for Palmer

Beth told me Amanda would meet me sometime after sound check. Having worked as in-house tech and psydo roadie a few years, I’m fully aware this means ‘unknown’. After parking near the venue, I hang out at a Starbucks around the corner as the only place I could chill out near by. The few hours here allowed me to think about this project, and more importantly why.

If I was approached this project any time before March 2007, this would have been the priority in my life. This project would be grand exposure for me as a game designer and lead into other high profile projects or employment at a major studio. This is the thing I went to Emerson College for. In March 2007, I got hired at the best independent studio in the world and working with people who’s work got me in this art form to begin with. I’m at my career path and don’t need something else to accomplish this goal. For the first time in my life, I can say no to a large opportunity and not be that regretful.

I still wanted to do this project! What has changed is the reasons. I wanted a project to call my own outside of Telltale to keep me current. Also, I wanted to get a few more people on my contacts list. Did I mention Neil Gaiman was writing the book companion piece?

There’s also a large moral reason for this project. Which, if I’m going to be taking on a second full-time job as this project would mandate, it needs to be for something more than money and fame. In part one, I talked about the Detroit Dream: Get the fuck out of Detroit. What I want to do is change the Dream. Give inspiration for people to create their own Dream, independent of an outside and physically distant force. It’s not just the money or the credit, it’s being able to make a change in someone’s life by showing them what they are capable of.

Meeting Beth

The call came in and I went to the stage door of the Fillmore where Beth greeted me at the door. She gives me a hug as I walk in and tells me that the sound check was about to wrap up. We walk into the venue and I sit down stage left on the wall. Palmer was onstage working out the rest of the sound check, followed by placing some flowers around the venue for one of her songs.

In my mind I’m figuring out on how to approach this meeting. I had all these ideas and conceptions, but the deficit I had was what the client wanted from the project. I needed to hear from her what she wanted and make a project everyone wanted to be apart of.

While waiting, I saw a fellow Emerson alumni, Jenny. Both of us were surprised to see each other so randomly as we haven’t seen each other since graduation. Though seeing someone I know from Emerson working for Palmer isn’t exactly a stretch. Caught up on what we’ve been doing since graduation and getting caught up.

The Artist will See You Now…

Finally it came time to talk to Palmer. There was a bit of a rush to start as I was being penciled in between interviews and other things Palmer needed to do. She introduced me to Brian V. and got to shake his hand. Being in rushed mode, I quickly told him I enjoyed his work and wish I could spend more time talking with him, but time was very short.

We walked up to her dressing room and told me to wait there for a few moments. I took the opportunity to take a photo, marking the occasion.

Palmer shortly returned and we started the discussion. I started by asking what were her intents with the project; Where did she want to go with it. She started explaining how she liked the concept with Zero Year from Nine Inch Nails & 42 Entertainment. Zero Year included a tight integration between the album (the primary product) and the game itself. The album was made for the album was made for the game. This kind of project involves a lot of time to plot and prepare, and most importantly integration with the album. It was also clear that no one had really sat down and talked to her on what an ARG was, what it meant, and the practices in the art form. Not that she was misguided, but I she was trying to grasp for a vocabulary to express what she wanted. Something I we could work out, but not in a 10 minute span before a concert. Certainly not while she was touring.

Where things started falling apart for me was the lack of access to the development of the album and/or book. I asked where the status of each of these objects were, and she responded that she wasn’t ready to share them yet. I tried to impart on her that I can’t make a project with the title “Who Killed Amanda Palmer?” and not have access to the album and book I’m trying to promote.

Then the 10 minuets were up. We said our goodbyes and that we’ll continue talking though e-mail with her people. After saying good bye to Beth and Jenny, I walked out waiting for the concert itself to start.

Met up with Margot and Tara for the concert. Briefed Margo about the conversation which left both of us not too enthusiastic of the prospect. Time was not on our side, nor was the lack of access to the stakeholders. Still, the Dolls put on a wonderful show, as always. I also got introduced to a band that started the concert. In a place somewhere between the Squirrel Nut Zippers & the Dresden Dolls are The Vermillion Lies.

The E-mail Trail

After that weekend, the e-mail trail was short and not too communicative. Palmer was on tour and starting the Europe leg of it. While Palmer was being positive about the project, there was simply more important things on her radar. Finally, I sent an e-mail cutting my involvement in the project.

I don’t believe that Palmer was dis-interested in the slightest. The problems were between what I required for me to create a project and what the Palmer camp was able to provide. I could have produced something, but it wouldn’t be something I would be proud of giving my own resources and time limits.

Reflections

It’s been over two years since this interesting story happened. In that time, Palmer released the album, followed by her public wishes to be dropped from her label and then granted. She also got engaged to that Neil Gaiman. I’m still working at Telltale having released over way more games than you can imagine on almost every platform that isn’t portable, and two that are.

I also found my way of creating a venue for people to be creative themselves, and in a way that also helps children & families around the globe deal with illness. With Ümloud!, donators take to a concert stage and perform a song using Rock Band. Some of them go beyond simply singing, dressing up as various rock stars and making the performance their own. It’s truly amazing what these people do for the charity concert. So in a way, I’m accomplishing my initial goals with the Palmer ARG, but in a way that also benefits sick children.

What I walked away from all this was my ability to pass on projects of high notoriety. If this project reached my door before I started working at Telltale, I would drop just about everything to do it, even with the tough conditions. That’s just it; I didn’t need to take the Palmer gig to showcase my talents. I do that now with monthly video game releases and with Ümloud!. Don’t get me wrong, I would love to work with Palmer. I just don’t need to work with her.

Amanda Palmer (the person, not the idiom) gave this same opportunity two two people I know: Beth and BriAnna Olson. Palmer took a risk with them to create wonderful art. Both of which have grown stronger in their work by working with Palmer. For this I will still feel a debt for making my friends better artists.

This is why I still wear a “Who Killed Amanda Palmer?” button on my jacket. When people ask why I killed her, I respond:

“Well, I almost killed her, but that’s another story…”

This is the story of “Who Killed Amanda Palmer?” – The Alternate Reality Game (ARG)
The unrelased version by me, Seg.

Photo by kReEsTaL.

This will be a two or three part series of posts. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and one 3000+ word post isn’t good for anyone. It may take a day or two between posts, but I’ll get to it. This would be a good time to subscribe to the Seg On Media RSS feed…

Before I continue, I want to make crystal clear that there is no ill will between me and Amanda Palmer & associates. Things didn’t work out and it was nothing personal. Incidentally, the album is available pretty much everywhere. I also want to note that I’m not going to comment on the ARG that was released for the album as it’s simply not my place to comment. That said, I am glad that a project did happen when I was unable to produce the project.

Context

To give some context, I need to start this story when I was living in Boston and going to Emerson College. During my time there, a musical duo by the names of Amanda Palmer and Brian Viglione started their rise to fame as a punk cabaret duo called: The Dresden Dolls. I found out about them as I had a number of classmates at Emerson working for them in various capacities. Specially BriAnna Olson who was to work on my thesis Antidote, but other conflicts came up that prevented us from working together.

When I finally got to see them perform at the Avalon, I certainly became a fan. I have a soft spot for a woman who sings and plays piano (see: Amanda Rose Smith, Regina Spector). I also found myself watching Brian intensely. As a former jazz musician, let the record show that I would want Brian to be my drummer. He intensely listens and observes the other musicians in his work. I can put more words to this, but I’m detracting from the point of this post.

More important than the performance of Palmer/Viglione was the spectacle off the stage. Many members of the audience themselves were performers in their own right. Mostly along the lines of a dark circus performance acts, but creating an atmosphere transcending beyond the concert performance itself. This is what I love about Dresden Doll concerts; The audience becomes apart of the performance. At the end of each concert, I feel a lacking that these individuals will mostly hang up their traits until the Dolls perform again. This I find the most depressing part of a Dolls concert.

The participatory nature of the audience and my college buddies working with her illustrates a trait I see between Palmer and myself. We both share the gift of seeing the potential in people. Palmer has better success in turning what’s inside of people to the exterior. When I was living in Michigan, the general despair of the area made this goal much harder. Sadly, the only way of success is living the Detroit Dream: Get the fuck out of Detroit. I wish I could do more, but ultimately the best thing for me was to leave Michigan and hoping that my Journey greats hope for others to live the Dream.

I made these conclusions well before I graduated from Emerson and well before recent events. Interestingly, these thoughts would prove useful when I was called to work on the project.

“I know a guy…”

In March 2007, I left Boston for a job with Telltale Games in the San Francisco Bay area. I started working with people who created titles that got me into the business in the first place. In order words, I landed a job with my Dream company. No longer was I working to get into the industry of my chosen art form, I was now getting paid for it and working with the best people in the art form.

In Jan 2008, my close friend Lindsay realized a mistake she had made for the past few years. She had never introduced me to Beth Hommel. This was a mistake as we had been living relatively close to each other (Boston vs. NYC) and certainly would have benefited from each other as being artists and both of us play/screen writes. There are few people in this world that I will trust blindly, and Linsday is one of these few special people. For Lindsay, I trust Beth.

During this time, Beth ends up meeting with Amanda Palmer and all of the sudden Beth is her filthy assistant. Thus another person in the long line of friends that work with Palmer. I’ll let her tell her own story (Beth: Link!).

Shortly after, Beth asks me if I knew anything about ARGs. I give her the skinny and a few quick examples. Causally pass that it’s part of my realm of work, though I have not done an ARG myself. A few weeks later she tells me about Palmer’s solo album “Who Killed Amanda Palmer?” and my thoughts on an ARG based on that title. Like most things in the entertainment biz, the proposal needed to be done yesterday and with no prior context. There would be an album, and after some Internet sleuthing I found out a book by Neil Gaiman would also be penned. No context beyond that.

Killing a Rockstar

With little content to go on, I resorted to my existing convictions of Amanda Palmer and of her celebrity. The death of Amanda Palmer is not about the real existing person, but of the idiom of Amanda Palmer. What did this death mean then? For anyone familiar with the book American Gods by Neil Gaiman, I took a page of the mythology presented, blended with Clay Shirky‘s theory of the collective cognitive surplus. What I call the Clay Shirky Gin theory.

In practice, I would fashion the plot as ‘something’ killing Amanda Palmer, releasing the collective cognitive energy created by her fans. Her death creating a surplus and someone wanted that power to themselves. While the game progresses in figuring out who killed Amanda Palmer, it’s really about enacting justice over the killing by taking back the surplus. In other words, the players take back their own part of the surplus and invest the creative abilities in themselves; Not the celebrity.

After talking with my cohort Margot Cannon, I wrote what can be counted as an academic paper on the Amanda Palmer Idiom. A risky move, but I had no access to the originating material this game is to be based off of. Instead, I wanted to focus on what I knew, this construction of the idiom. Hoping that I would be given tangible elements to work from.

As for implementation, I would make good use of the Dresden Doll art army. There are a large number of artists on the rolodex of the Dolls, and I could not single handedly produce an international ARG. Nor would I think to quit Telltale to do this gig. My roll would be as ‘puppet-master’ or lead designer, then make art requests. This way costs will be low for the Palmer camp by using ‘internal’ labor and my small team (Margot and I) as primarily consultants. Time was also against us. These things usually take a year to plan. We had 4 months till the album drops.

Selling the Drama

Mistake #1: Way too academic of a proposal. I was on the phone with Palmer’s manager Harvey Leeds who said it was too cerebral. The talk I had with Harvey gave me some grounding with the client I was pitching for and the practical I should be aiming for. It’s Harvey’s job to make sure the album and concerts tickets are sold. Which shouldn’t be read as a sacrifice to artistic decision, but it is a parameter to keep in mind. More importantly: Keep. It. Simple.

I made a bad choice, and lucky to get a second chance. That weekend, Palmer would be performing at the Filmore as the Dresden Dolls in San Francisco with the Vermillion Lies. I would finally meet Beth in person and have an audience with Amanda Palmer for ten minuets.

Continue to Part 2…

Not pictured: Plastic casing; Shipping

For Xbox360, any online communications beyond buying/downloading digital products requires a subscription to Xbox LIVE. I don’t find this a problem outright (subject for another post). What I do find is the mixed signals in the costs of the subscription. Buying a physical object for the service ends up cheaper than renewing a subscription.

Here’s the costs of a the same product: An Xbox LIVE subscription for 12 months.

• Buying via Xbox.com:
  • $49.95 (automatically applied)
• Buying via Amazon.com:
  • $49.95 (No physical thing; E-mailed code)
  • $39.96 (Physical thing; Free Shipping)

For $10 less, a physical object is being manufactured and shipped to you. Even at Amazon.com having the option to e-mail you the code, it costs more to e-mail a set of numbers and letters.

I don’t expect an abolishment of the physical cards. I don’t expect online retailers not to carry them. What shocks me is that even when Amazon.com offers a non-physical and immediate delivery option, it’s the most expensive option. Can Microsoft, Amazon, and other online retailers work on a less wasteful way of selling this service?

Update (1/26/2012): As reported by Destructoid, it’s still happening.

In 8 weeks we rebranded, filed as a non-profit, and made a successful event for our first year. $7000+ to Child’s Play successful. We certainly learned a few lessons this year which we’ll implement along with our ‘for next year’ list. Right now I’m compiling my thoughts, specifically for a panel I’ll be moderating for PAX-East this year.

Oh, it looks like I’ll be talking with Chris and others at PAX-East this year in March. While PAX will always be in Seattle around Labor Day, a second one for the East Coast in Boston is happening. I’m gathering up other panelists from other events and Child’s Play itself. The direction I plan to take is illistrate the ‘empty box’ of doing a fundraiser, rather than listing specifics of any particular event. I hope to inspire others to do events with their own flavor, rather than copy/paste existing events.

For me, this is about how and why to file for non-profit status on our own. We wanted to do a local event, enlist sponsors, get a venue, and spend money on an event. We were ‘touching’ the money. We had to be a non-profit ourselves for our protection and the ability for donators/sponsors to count their contributions as charitable. It’s been a process, let me tell you! But most of it is start-up stress which will be much easier next year.

For the Internet based fundraisers like the wildly successful Desert Bus for Hope, the money earned went to a Chip-in button directly to CP. Sponsors (to my knowledge) donated mostly physical objects, so there wasn’t money taken in by the operators. Thus the operators were protected as they never ‘touched’ the donated money.

In addition to getting back to using this blog, I’ll be covering my process on creating this panel in the next few weeks. It will be mostly me and Chris developing the Ümloud! (a local event) section.

If you’re in the Boston area March , I highly recommend you come to PAX-East! The full 3-day pass is $45 if you order by Dec 31st. $55 after that, but there’s a cap at the amount sold.

Hope you all had an awesome holiday! Have a safe and fun New Years!