Whicken's Blog

Welcome, Google

2009-08-18T17:33:00.000-07:00

Nine days after updating the Scorched Earth web site, Google is the first search engine out of the gate to start sending traffic to the new URL instead of the old page, which is now a redirect. Congratulations, Google!

Web Site Changes

2009-08-09T14:15:00.002-07:00

Just a quick note: the official Scorched Earth home page has moved from ClassicGaming to my own site, whicken.com. Thanks to ClassicGaming for hosting this for many years. I'm hoping to aggregate a bit more of the information scattered across a few locations into whicken.com over the next few months, but don't expect anything to happen too quickly.

Whicken's Greatest Hits

2009-03-10T19:22:00.000-07:00

From time to time, I check Google Analytics for the blog here. It's not too exciting, typically sitting around 20 visitors per day.

Although there aren't tons of posts here to wade through, there are a few posts which do attract the lion's share of traffic. Under the assumption that those are the subjects people are most interested in hearing about, I will dedicate the next several posts to further exploration of what I call my Greatest Hits.

Which is appropriate, since one of the most popular blog posts I've ever done was actually over on the Hear Here blog, back in December of 2006. This post covers the top 100 Christmas songs. Every year, right around Thanksgiving, traffic starts going up for this page - getting stronger and stronger until December 24th. On the 26th of December, the traffic goes back to zero.

In 2006, that page got 355 hits.
In 2007, that page got 4,095 hits.
In 2008, that page got 6,669 hits.

On this blog, the most similar item comes in ranked at number 7, my Valentine's Day playlist from Feb 2006. Although not nearly as popular, it does get a small spike every February (and here's a hint - don't play it for your Valentine's sweetheart unless you're breaking up).

So, what are the other Greatest Hits for Whicken's Blog? Stay tuned and find out. And just maybe I'll create some new favorites...

Let's call a spade a spade

2009-02-27T21:08:00.000-08:00

I've been following the new administration more closely than I have politics in the past, due to the new white house blog. Kudos for that. One bit of political double speak dribbled through today, though, from the Office of Management and Budget. At issue here is a proposal to limit charitable deductions made by the extremely wealthy. Regardless of how one might feel about the proposal, it's double speak like this that makes me unhappy:

Third, there’s a question of fairness. Non-profits play a critical role in our society (indeed, I have worked at several of them in the past). But let’s look at how the tax code treats two different contributors to a non-profit. If you’re a teacher making $50,000 a year and decide to donate $1,000 to the Red Cross or United Way, you enjoy a tax break of $150. If you are Warren Buffet or Bill Gates and you make that same donation, you get a $350 deduction – more than twice the break as the teacher.

So, let's unravel that.

Under the current system, if you donate to a non-profit, then you don't pay taxes on that money. It's more or less like you never earned it. In the first example, the teacher would pay $150 taxes on the $1000, and gets that $150 back. Warren would have paid $350 on the same $1000, and so gotten his $350 back.

While on a strictly numerical level you could say Warren got twice as much back as the teacher, it's only because he paid twice as much up front. Calling that "a question of fairness" seems to me completely preposterous.

If the real issue is that the country needs more money, and the only people that can afford to pay for it are the extremely wealthy, then let's just call a spade a spade, and add another higher tax bracket. Games like this just complicate the tax code, and serve no real purpose other than to create a shell game for government revenue.

Now with extra brains

2009-02-15T09:39:00.001-08:00

Just enabled a new widget for the blog: outbrain. This lets you rate your favorite posts, and find other stuff based on your prior ratings, and the content of the posts you like (or something like that). You can see the widget right under this post. My hope is this will help make the blog more useful to people who are just dropping in to look for a particular topic. Enjoy!

My Tips For Selling on Amazon

2009-01-07T14:06:00.000-08:00

Although I've only recently started selling things through Amazon, I think it's been a productive week. In this post, I'd like to pass on a few more tips.

First up, a quick status report. In less than one week, I've posted 134 items. Of those, 47 have now sold. This leads to the first tip on this post (which is an obvious one, but may be useful for new sellers).

Tip #1: If you are going to sell more than 40 items per month, sign up as a Pro Seller. Normally Amazon will charge an extra 99 cents per sale - paying 39.99 per month waives this fee. If you aren't sure, you can wait and play it safe - but if you're going for volume, go Pro.

I attribute most of my success to the quality of my collection (my CDs are all in very good condition), and to my method for listing. As mentioned earlier, I only list items where I can profitably list at the new lowest price. This keeps items which are worthless from cluttering up my store, and makes sure that people looking for used CDs will find mine first.

The interesting thing is that I'm not the only one doing this (naturally). After about a day, almost 30% of my inventory is no longer listed at the lowest price. The marketplace is actually more dynamic than it might seem from just browsing the Amazon site - there's a fair amount of competition driving prices down. If you want a used CD, but aren't in a rush, wait a few days and it might be cheaper. On the other hand, cheap items sell fast, so you may risk losing an item by waiting.

Tip #2: Review your inventory regularly to make sure your listings are competitive. In my case, I do so about once a day. Generally I'm perfectly happy to drop a few cents or a nickel to get the lowest price. For a high proft item, I'll gladly drop a buck. On the other hand, when I see someone competing with a price too low for my preferences, I'll review other offers, and sometimes bring my price up - once the competitor sells this puts me in a good position for the next customer.

I'd also like to note that Amazon has really excellent support for their sellers. Just push a button on the web site, and you will get a phone call from their support immediately. This bypasses the usual security questions since you are logged in to your account to initiate the call. All the support people I have talked to were very friendly and helpful. So, kudos to Amazon. If you have any questions, feel free to call them.

If you're interested in buying quality used CD's, please check out my store front.

Finally, I've found a new outlet for those CDs which I just can't get any value for no matter what - promotional CDs, overstocked junk, whatever. These are going to go to a local artist, and be recycled into various art projects. If I get a chance to see any interesting pieces created out of the donations, I'll try and post pictures.

The Economics of Selling CDs

2009-01-02T13:34:00.000-08:00

Hopefully someone out there is interested in these numbers - my hope is these details may be useful for anyone thinking about selling their own CD collection. With that in mind, here are some concrete numbers after my first batch of CDs was processed. This post will focus mainly on the associated overhead - at the moment, I'm only shipping in the US, so these numbers are all limited to that context.

When you sell merchandise through Amazon, you receive a credit to help cover the shipping costs. These are fixed by Amazon, so will not necessarily correspond directly to your own costs. At the moment, I'm getting a credit of $2.98 for each CD I sell, regardless of the CD.

My costs depend on the supplies I buy to ship, and the postage. In my first batch, I picked up the supplies from the post office. To ship a double CD set costs me $1.99 for a small box and $2.70 for postage - that means I'm losing $1.71 against my selling price. In other words, I want to make sure I'm charging more than $1.71 on those sets, or I'm losing money.

For a regular single CD in a jewel case, I pay $1.09 for a card sleeve, 16 cents for bubble wrap, and $2.02 for shipping. That's a total of $3.27 for a loss of 29 cents. On the cheaper side, for CDs which come in cardboard sleeves, shipping drops to $1.85.

After running the numbers, I decided to get some cheaper supplies. At Target, I can buy CD-sized padded envelopes for 65 cents each. This means I will actually be making a small profit against the shipping credit for most CDs, and only losing on the larger disc sets - which tend to have higher selling prices anyways.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments.

Selling CDs Online

2009-01-01T12:09:00.000-08:00

This is a follow up to my previous post, with some notes on my experience so far selling off some of my music collection. First off, it's amazing how many CDs you can buy on Amazon for 1 cent. Of course, there's shipping involved, which is where the margin is - but that's pretty much rock bottom for physical media. So competing in that arena is not something I'm interested in.

At the moment, I've gone through one legal box full of CDs. This is about 150 CDs. Of those, 35 were worth listing on Amazon at the new lowest current offer price. Withing 24 hours, 5 of those CDs have already sold, at an average selling price of $10 per disk. Of course those were some of the more collectible disks, but it's still a good start.

Of the remaining 115, I've decided to add another option to my process: SecondSpin. They are willing to buy most of my CDs, ranging from (so far) 5 cents to 5 dollars. Of the 18 CDs I've checked so far, I've decided 5 of them are worth going this route, which is a pretty decent percentage - getting me on average 2 bucks per CD.

I may post a list of whatever's left here on my blog - $2 each + whatever shipping is appropriate for the set. I wonder if that would get any traction?

One other point: a lot of these disks have upwards of 18 tracks. At 99 cents a track for a digital copy, that's 18 dollars to buy lossy digital copies versus 1 buck to get the physical media which can be ripped to get perfect, DRM-free copies of all 18 tracks. If I were a record label, I think I'd be all over the digital model in this marketplace.

Cleaning The Garage

2008-12-31T15:34:00.000-08:00

So, my next big project is cleaning the garage. I've got so much stuff out there accumulated over twenty years that it's just time to make most of it go away. While some of it will just get thrown away or given away, I'm hoping to recover at least a small amount of money for some of the stuff, particularly a few collectible items.

After poking around the various options, here's my current plan:

Amazon
I've set up an Amazon Storefront. This will be used to sell books, CDs, and DVDs which have moderate resale value. Anything I post will be the lowest value used item currently available when I post it, or it gets moved into one of my other "liquidation" piles.
eBay
I'll be using eBay to sell some more notable collectible items, like an original Thunderhawk model in the custom hardwood case. Also, if I can make bundles of items, like my set of L5R miniatures and rulebooks, those will go up on eBay as well. More on those as they show up.
BoardGameGeek
BoardGameGeek specializes in board games. I'm going to remove the part of my collection I never use, and hopefully trade for some games that I do want. Probably a 2-for-1 sort of deal, 2 of my games for 1 that I want, to help the inventory move faster. Click here for my current trade list. I'll be adding more to this list soon.
ComicBookRealm
ComicBookRealm is where I track my comic books. I'm hoping to liquidate a couple thousand back issues. Click here for my sell list. Prices aren't really set there yet - if you're interested, assume half off list price, and make an offer if you want to pay less.

Anything that falls through the above filters will turn into garage sale fodder, or donations.

Got any useful experiences trading or selling stuff online? Leave them in the comments. I'll post updates on any experiences if people are interested.

Giving Thanks

2008-11-27T06:38:00.000-08:00

Today's Thanksgiving, the holiday of giving thanks. Even with all the crazy stuff going on around the world, I've still got a lot to be thankful for - right now, it's raining, and I love the rain. I want to say Thank You to all my friends out there, for all you've done for me over the years.

Along with Thanksgiving, there's another "holiday" called Black Friday. This is a commercial event/tradition of sales kicking off the holiday shopping season, so named because it's anecdotally the day where many companies turn a profit - being "in the black" as it were. I expect Black Friday will not be quite as profitable this year, as many people are feeling the pinch of an economic crisis.

So I have a suggestion.

This weekend, as you consider all you have to be thankful for, visit the Kiva website. Here's a blurb from their homepage.

What is Kiva? Kiva lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur in the developing world - empowering them to lift themselves out of poverty.

It works like this. Kiva partners with local micro-lenders, typically offering loans of less than $1000. These lenders identify people in their communities who will use this money to support themselves. The loans are typically repaid over a few months, with repayments starting after just 30 days. The money might be used to buy wheat to make bread, or repair a car to deliver goods. A small amount of money can make a big difference in the ability of many less fortunate people to support themselves.

Here's where you come in.

From the Kiva site, you can read the opportunities to help, and choose any you would like (they are all worthwhile). Contribute a small amount, typically $25, and when the full total required has been collected, the money is loaned directly to the individual or group of entrepreneurs. As the money is repaid, it goes right back into your Kiva account. You can then either take your money back, or reinvest it in another entrepreneur.

The only cost to you is that there is no interest repaid, and if the loans are faulted on, then you will only get a portion of your investment back - proportional to how much money was collected. The risk levels for each investment are clearly marked, but most loans are repaid in full, as the field partners work closely with the entrepreneurs.

So, if you're thankful this holiday season, consider investing in your fellow human being. These are hard working people who just need a little nudge to materially improve their own conditions.

Thanks to Rand for turning me on to Kiva.

Even More Customer Abuse

2008-10-24T22:11:00.000-07:00

Sigh...

I was hoping to have an end of my phone bill problems, but this story, regrettably, has a sequel.

New month, new phone bill. This one's even higher than the previous month. And not only that, the extra fee which was allegedly waived last month, as it turns out, wasn't. So they said they took care of it, and they didn't.

And the new charge? Well, last month, I reviewed all the subscribed services, and made sure nothing was turned on. It seems the web site neglects to include an extra internet plan (which we don't use, and specifically asked them not to enable when we signed the contract), to the tune of 15 bucks a month for two of the phones. There is no way to see that you are subscribed to this (automatically when you start a new contract) when you visit the website, except for the bill.

On the phone again, sorting this out - they will now (allegedly) take the new fee off, but I'm going to have to pay it first (it's not even due for another week), and have a credit show up the following month. Why? According to the service person, because "it's really complicated" to do with an immediate credit. In the meantime, Verizon gets to sit on 50 bucks and collect interest for another month (20 from the previous month, and 30 from this month). Multiply that across several million subscribers, and it's not a small amount of money.

Verizon, you should be ashamed.

How to Abuse Your Customers

2008-10-07T22:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a lovely example of how not to treat your customers.

My son, a typical teenager, is a text messaging fiend. His plan was set up for unlimited "in network" texting, and 500 "out of network" messages. About six weeks ago (two weeks into a billing cycle), he noticed he was approaching his 500 limit. So, he decided to upgrade to the 1500 out of network for an extra five bucks a month. Through the rest of that billing cycle, he ended up with about 950 out of network messages.

Come billing time, we've got a $20 fee for 200 messages over the limit. No matter how you slice it, that doesn't seem to make sense - we paid an extra five bucks to get 1,000 more messages.

Here's how the phone company justified it: when the plan was upgraded, they canceled the old one, and pro-rated the time. With half the time, he only was allowed 242 messages, and hence was 192 over. Those were billed as overages instead of rolled over into the upgraded plan (which ended up alloting another 823 extra messages, only 518 of which were used).

So, somehow upgrading our service to cover more minutes (surely the desired goal of the phone company), turned into a penalty for doing so mid-month.

The only silver lining is that after calling the phone company and explaining the issue, they did eventually waive the extra fee, although they tried hard to convince me their billing was correct first. As I said to them, "I understand why a computer would do such a thing, but surely people can be smarter than that."

Amazon Love

2008-04-18T19:53:00.001-07:00

Nothing breeds customer loyalty for me better than free money. I just got this delightful email from Amazon:

You are receiving this e-mail due to your purchase of an HD DVD player from Amazon.com before February 23, 2008. As you may know, manufacture of HD DVD players ceased February 23, 2008, and major studios in the U.S. have ceased production of HD DVDs. In recognition of this development, Amazon.com is providing all customers who purchased qualifying HD DVD players a credit for $50...

This certainly eases the pain of having bought one of the devices on the losing side of the format war (which may still turn out to have more than one loser...).

Kudos to you, Amazon.

Official Scorched Earth T-Shirts

2008-04-14T19:56:00.000-07:00

Thanks to the mad design skills of my friend Richard, I'm happy to introduce the first ever Official Scorched Earth T-Shirt.

Echoing a popular sentiment, this all-black classic features an exploding funky bomb and the slacker slogan

I wasted my education playing Scorched Earth

(also available in military green, naturally)

This shirt is now available at the Official Scorched Earth Cafe Press Store. If you have ideas for shirts you'd like to see, let me know in the comments. We have a few other ideas, but we'd like to know what you want to wear.

P.S. As an official Scorched Earth product, you are hereby absolved from any guilt of having never registered your copy of Scorch, once you buy a shirt. Doesn't that make you feel better? :^)

Are You An Overachiever?

2008-03-01T20:17:00.001-08:00

Late last year, I introduced my notion of an A,B,C rating system to determine how much value you're getting from the games you purchase (or rent, for that matter). After building this system into my own personal database (which I hope to blog more about at some point), I've found a few areas which deserve revisiting.

First, some games get played well past their C lifespan, and it seems fair to note this fact if I'm using the data to draw any conclusions. Thus, the obvious notion of an extended D rating (played the game to death). This covers games which I continue to play well after they've earned their C ranking. In fact, a decent ballpark metric for a D game is that I've at least doubled the playing time since the game was marked as a C. This includes my recent favorite, Rock Band (which I hope to review soon).

Second, some games have a notoriously difficult to mark C goal. In my earlier post, I defined C as "completed", while leaving that term loosely defined as "getting the core entertainment value." In practice, I've often been linking it to the credits - if a game has an ending, with credits, that marks the C point. Or if I beat all the levels, or reach the "standard" ending. For Burnout Paradise, I've chosen the Burnout License as my C goal, even though there's an Elite License to be earned after that (a possible candidate for a D goal).

The most difficult edge case for me lies around many XBLA games - these tend to be shorter, arcade-style games, often with no clearly defined ending. In something like Galaga, you can try to get all the achievements, but there's no real ending as such (at least none that I know of).

A possible solution now enters in the form of MyGamerCard, one of the mashups I mentioned in a much earlier post, and which brings us to the title of this post. I quote from their home page, describing a new feature they've just launched.

Recently, we added indicators that gave an at-a-glance view of whether you were ahead or behind the curve based on the Community's average GamerScore.

If you have more achievements than average, you are given an overachievement rating. An in the opposite case, you get an underachievement rating. This nicely indicates when you've played a game more than the average person, and are either madly in love with it, or the game simply sucks so badly that no one bothered to play it very much. This gives me a new alternate goal for achieving C rank - when I pass the overachiever threshold, the game changes status.

Regrettably, a rigorous approach to this method would mean that a game might drop from a C status to a B status if the community collectively starts getting more achievements - in practice I'm not really worried about this. Once a C, always a C. As always, my own judgement prevails when rating my own games.

Some quick examples before wrapping up this post - you can see my full overachievement list at mygamercard.net. My biggest overachievement so far is for Overlord, and I was definitely achievement farming that game for a long time. Next up is Rock Band, unsurprisingly, assisted by the marathan Endless Setlist, which pushed this game into D, and threatens to introduce the E ranking for "endless" gameplay. My most recently overachieved game is GripShift, which would otherwise have a very difficult C definition. (beating every level? unlocking every vehicle?)

The underachievements indicates games where I probably have lots of interesting things left to do. My list has over 30 of those, although some of those are games which I'm simply no good at, and am unlikely to make much more progress (I'm looking at you, Bejewelled). Such games will perpetually remain B's unless I come up with a new definition.

The $50 USB Port

2008-02-25T20:25:00.000-08:00

With the recent death of HDDVD, Microsoft's add-on drive for the Xbox 360 has now dropped to a scant $50, which includes six free movies. And hey, if you don't need the HDDVD drive (cause who does, anymore), they nicely point out

Provides an additional USB port for your Xbox 360 and includes USB 2.0 cable

So, there you have it - for just $50, you too can get an extra USB port for your Xbox 360. And a USB cable.

The historic HDDVD drive is just there for the ride.

Whoops!

2008-01-15T22:24:00.001-08:00

The new iPhone firmware (1.1.3) came out today. While I generally applaud the new features (although the faux gps can frequently provide highly dubious results - many miles off course), I luckily ran across a notice of one key change which is easily overlooked.

Gmail accounts which were set up to use POP will be automatically switched over the IMAP. This seemingly obscure technical detail means that users who are used to deleting messages harmlessly on their phone, are now also deleting the originals on Gmail.

Yikes!

Luckily I found this out before doing any irreversible damage, and recovered the files from my Gmail trash. For more info, check out this tech note from Google.

Self Publishing with Kindle

2007-12-24T17:18:00.000-08:00

I haven't really blogged about the Kindle yet, as I didn't have anything particularly relevant to add to the many discussions going on about this device, and I'd rather comment after seeing one first-hand. In case you haven't run across those many discussions, the Kindle is Amazon's new e-reader, an electronic book with tight connectivity to the Amazon store.

I'll leave specifics about the device aside, as I still have yet to see one in person. However, I came across this fascinating tidbit - anyone can self-publish e-books to the Kindle, using Amazon's new Digital Text Platform. Books can be between .99 cents and 200 dollars, and the author gets 35% (read the legal contract before signing up, the terms may change). One interesting tidbit is that you must agree to allow Amazon to sell your book without DRM, even though they do not currently do so.

In order to try this out, I e-published my earlier story, WishBox, affordably priced at one dollar. (Not so affordable if you are counting per word price, but hey, you can read it here on my blog for free, so nothing to complain about, right?)

If there's interest, I may publish the old Scorched Earth manual as an ebook - that's officially out of print now (a collector's item if you happen to have one) - although I doubt the demand is very high.

The Comic Value of Entertainment

2007-12-10T21:36:00.000-08:00

Comics as Collectibles

In this post, I will revisit my value of entertainment article with respect to comics.

Let's start with a comment by RwP:

Unfortunately, you have served to highlight just what a bad 'deal' comics are in the entertainment scale of economy. ;-) Won't stop me from collecting them, though.

In my graph, comics had the second worst cost per hour, at about $18 per hour. (The worst was a cd, if you only listen to it once - but that's a topic for another post). I think one of the keys to the cost is the other phrase RwP used: "collecting". More so than most other entertainment media, comics strive to present themselves as collectible. There are entire websites and magazines dedicated to tracking the prices of back issues - speculators may "invest" in comics, hoping to turn a profit. I think this is intended in part to justify the higher price.

Let's do a quick test and search eBay for Conan, my example in the earlier article (chosen more or less at random). Issue 46 has a cover price of $2.99, and is still readily available at most comic shops. It looks like there are 858 listings for Conan categorized under Comics. A bunch of single issues from 1975 are at a starting bid of $1.00, still with no bids. (And of course, the $2.50 shipping extra cost.) The cover price is $.25 for that issue, which gives us a 4 times increase in value over a 32 year investment. But it's not selling. At the moment, quite a few of the current series (issue 19 for example), are listed with starting bids of $.99 (and no takers), (with $3.41 shipping). That's a 66% loss over something you just got off the shelf.

So, at best, treating comics as investments is a fidgety business, particularly recent releases, which more often than not can be bought 6 months later in bargain bins for $1 per issue. Real value lies in significantly older issues, with the accompanying effort to maintain high grade issues. If you build old issues in quantity, you can often get them for pennies on the pound.

Nevertheless, in order to maintain the market as much as possible, the current big two publishers often release runs as close to the initial demand as possible, so they sell out, and create a short term bubble of demand, driving up prices very temporarily. As a reader, this creates a rather significant nuisance - you can't always rely on being able to follow a series.

Comics as Art

A further argument for the value of comics is that they are works of art, and should be appreciated in same way as a Picasso or a Rembrandt. Maybe. The reality of big publishing is that it's much more of a business. You may be reading a perfectly good story, when some fill-in artist creates an issue to meet some deadline. Then you've got some potentially mediocre drawing, with a churned out by-the-numbers story, with the same cost as your best artwork by your favorite artist. Artwork quality can be dodgy, and writing quality equally so, especially since meeting a fixed schedule over a long period of time can challenge even the best writers.

Comics as Marketing

There are some interesting trends in comic marketing worth noting. Traditionally, comics have been published as individual issues, perhaps 32 pages - if you miss an issue, you have to hunt around conventions, local shops, or perhaps go online to find them. Sitting on top of a large pile of content, though, publishers have realized there's a bigger market for that content. Most books can now be bought in collections (trade paperbacks), often collecting 4 to 8 issues in a single nicely bound volume. Generally these cost about the same as the equivalent single issues, with the benefit of no ads interspersed in the story, although they don't lie flat.

A market for premium versions is also evolving - with hardcover editions, or my personal favorite, oversized hardcover editions. For example, Absolute Sandman contains 20 issues of material, with extra bonus content, in a deluxe oversized edition for $99 (about $5 per issue if you break down the price). These are indeed closer to art books, and generally only popular or quality content gets this treatment.

One of my favorite series, Invincible, provides a wide spectrum of buying choices - once per month, you can get the single issue. Every 6 months, a softcover TPB is released with 6 issues. Every year, an oversized hardcover is released collecting 12 issues. Every other year, a limited super-oversized hardcover with more premium hoo-hah (the technical term) is released. You might end up buying the same content multiple times, depending on what you want, and how often you want it.

And sometimes, the TPB will contain extra material not in the issues, or vice versa. All of which can detract from the core entertainment of reading a story, but feeds into the collectible mindset of comic collectors.

At the other end of the spectrum, you can get 500 issues of Iron Man on CD for the low price of $49.99. And Marvel recently started a subscription service for all you can read comics online.

Free Comics

If you want to read some online comics for free, you can try the new Zuda website by DC, an experiment in online publishing which I hope to participate in. Or, there's my favorite web comic, Order of the Stick. Also, the online version of Dark Horse Presents has a monthly series featuring the same quality of talent as their offline offerings.

Are You Getting Full Value From Your Video Games? (3 of 3)

2007-12-07T08:46:00.000-08:00

The A,B,C Rating System

In the two previous posts in this series, I covered the idea of using achievements to figure out how much value you're getting out your Xbox 360 games, and showed how to compare your progress to that of other users. As promised, this post will bring things a little closer to home. How much value do I get from my video games?

Since getting my Xbox 360, I've been trying to be much more careful in what I buy - checking reviews, deciding whether I'm likely to actually play a given game, or whether it will just sit on my shelf. Partly this depends on how attainable the achievements are (i.e. how accessible the game content is), and partly this depends on how likely I am to play the game in question. As a rule, I don't really enjoy the traditional sports titles - even if it's the best Football/Baseball/Basketball title on the market, I probably won't get very far. And my favorite genre, best exemplified by games like Jak and Daxter or Ratchet and Clank, isn't very well represented on the 360. But I have been enjoying combat racing games, first person shooters, and a variety of other games.

After all of the previous, relatively complicated analysis, I decided to break it down to the A, B, C's. Each game I purchase is given a very simple ranking.

A: An "A" game is one which I haven't started playing yet, or I popped in and ran through the opening setup, but haven't gotten any farther.

B: A "B" game is one which I have played through for at least an hour, often more, but for one reason or another I stopped short of completing the game, or getting far enough in a game without a solid conclusion that it felt incomplete.

C: A "C" game is one which I have completed. This doesn't need to mean I'm done playing it - maybe I want to squeeze out a few more achievements, or just play more because I like it so much. But in terms of getting the core entertainment value, these ones are done.

Using this simple scale, I was able to quickly sort my games into three piles. As it turns out, I have the following ratios:
A: 38.8%
B: 27.7%
C: 33.3%

While creating this list, a few things popped out.

1. I have a lot of games I haven't started playing yet. Some of these I bought on sale, and others I just haven't gotten around to starting.

2. 33.3% completion, for me, isn't bad. I've gotten this far because I've been focusing on completing games - rather than bouncing between titles, I find it more rewarding to focus on one title, with a specific goal. I won't let myself move on to the next game until I reach that goal. Achievements are a big help in setting and tracking these goals, however you use them.

3. Of the games labelled B, the issue is occasionally one of difficulty. If I reach a point in the game where it's too hard to progress, I'm stuck. Sometimes you can get past this with the help of an online guide, like GameFAQS. Don't be ashamed to get help to move past an area where you are stuck - this is entertainment, and if you aren't having fun, you're doing it wrong.

4. Of the games labelled C, I do have a fair amount of DLC (downloadable content), which I've purchased, but not played. I should either make an effort to use that, or stop buying it.

5. I've got a bunch of games I want to play more. Looking at the games I still have to complete makes me want to go back and work on them some more. For the most part, I'm pretty happy with my collection of games.

Enough blogging about games... time to get back to playing them!

This wraps up my look at video games for the moment - I've got some more ideas related to the family of topics I've been covering recently, but if there's anything in particular you would like to see discussed, leave a note and let me know. Ideally we could have some more open discussion here, even though it's "just a blog".

Are You Getting Full Value From Your Video Games? (2 of 3)

2007-12-06T06:10:00.000-08:00

In my last post, I described the Xbox 360 achievement system, and shared some thoughts on what works and does not work about the system. In this post, I will go over more specific examples.

My360Stats

One nice thing about the Xbox 360 is that there is an API to interact with Xbox Live (a not so nice thing is that access to this API is limited to a very small number of services). At any rate, one of these services is My360Stats. This site tracks data from a large sample of gamers. Using this data, you can learn all sorts of interesting things about how people are responding to a given game. In particular, you can see how many people are actually completing any specific game.

One of the simplest reports available is the Completed Games report. This shows what percentage of people who have played the game have earned every possible achievement. The highest completion ratio goes to Avatar, with a whopping 97.5% of users who've played the game having earned every possible achievement. Close behind is TMNT, with a 72.5% completion rate. These games are generally considered easy, since most people can beat them completely. These are the games people like to play during challenges to earn achievement points quickly - five hours of King Kong, and you've got 1,000 points for relatively little effort.

At the bottom end of the scale, we have Guitar Hero 2, with a dismal .3% completion rate (108 of 33,341). It's safe to say you are unlikely to get 100% gamerscore for this game. Let's look at this game more closely. The average completion rate (by achievements) is 46.6% (by score it's 34.9% - this is a common pattern for games which give big rewards to the hardest achievements, and is the reason I'll only be using percentages for number of achievements in the rest of this post).

If you look at the graphs for how many people have completed how many achievements, you can learn all sorts of interesting things. Looking at Guitar Hero 2, you can see a very large hump, centered around 25 achievements (the half way mark). This means that most players get to about 50% completion, and stop playing the game. What's interesting about this game is that the hump is so broad. This means there is a lot of variation about how long people play the game, well spread out. The end of the graph is always interesting - it indicates how likely you are to be able to get 100% of the points if you really try. If there's a large spike at the end, it means a good number of people who were trying for the end were able to reach it. If the end is very small, it indicates people tended to give up before getting that far. Guitar Hero 2 has a pretty small spike, so you can count on it being a hard game in this sense.

Achieve360Points

To see all the achievements, check out the site Achieve360Points.com. This lets you see all the achievements for any game, often with guides on how to get them. Note that this may include spoilers, as some games have secret achievements you are only supposed to figure out during game play - the names and goals of these achievements may give away certain elements of the game. (Unfortunately, I know of no way to determine what the success percentage is for any specific achievement - that could be an interesting number.) For Guitar Hero II there are a number of Online Mad Skillz achievements (Get 1,000,000 points on a song in Cooperative), and some other offline Mad Skillz (Earn five stars on all songs in the Expert tour). I expect these are the source of the low completion rate.

Overview of Recent Games

Some quick analyses of a few other games mentioned recently in this blog:

BioShock

Average completion: 57.4% (Only 5.85% score 100%)
My score: 94% (47 achievements)

Here I've pretty thoroughly trounced the game, and I hope to still earn the last three achievements.

Looking at the graph, we see:
9 indicates the first "give up" point.
29-31 indicates a point where some people tend to give up
43-45 means "completion" for many gamers
50 shows a nice spike, indicating %100 is reasonably possible

It's interesting to see the game abandoment happening around 9 and again at 29-31. These problem correspond to completing specific areas in the game, and losing interest.

Halo 3

Average completion: 46.9% (Only 7.08% score 100%)
My score: 24% (12 achievements)

Here I've beaten the game in co-op, but done essentially nothing else. This has only scored be a fourth of the achievements.

12 - first give up point
27-29 - second completion point
49 - big spike

Here I am, clearly at the first give up point. The second spike likely applies to playing a reasonable about of multiplayer, and 49 is probably getting most of the doable achievements - leaving the remainder as serious Mad Skillz goals.

Gears of War

Average completion: 39.1% (Only 1.56% score 100%)
My score: 12% (12 achievements)

I beat this game in co-op, and only got a meager 12% of the points. Clearly I still have work to do if I want to earn what this game has to offer. It's an awesome game, but how many times do I really want to play it?

1 indicates the first give up point. (wow)
10 indicates second Casual
23 indicates third Hardcore
30 indicates fourth Insane
48 indicates fifth (Co-op, Online Play)
relative small bump at 57, hard to complete

The give up points here map fairly well to achievements. Looks like a lot of people get stuck early one - one achievement. The other give up points seem to correspond fairly well to the difficultly levels, each of which have their own achievements. Note that the Co-op and Online Play achievements wouldn't necessarily break out exactly as shown above.

That concludes this part of my analysis - you can easily pick your own favorite games, or games you are thinking about buying, and see if you can guess where you will lie. In the next post of this series, I'll conclude with a final set of more personal observations about how much value I get out of a typical video game.

Unintended Consquences

2007-12-05T18:03:00.001-08:00

The recent Xbox Dashboard update included one easily overlooked minor change. When you play a trial of a game, that information no longer shows up in your play history. Now, when you look at the games you have played, those games (which cannot earn you achievements) are treated as though you had never played them.

As a side-effect, services built on top of the Xbox APIs no longer have access to this information either. So, my Xbox no longer counts these when it blogs - previously this would show up in the blog, and count as activity it could discuss and consider in the very simple AI. On the bright side, services tracking statistics can now get more accurate information on zero achievement cases, because that now means a purchased game with zero achievements can be distinguished from a simple trial game.

Minor point, but interesting how a small change like this can trickle through the API and affect a variety of third party services.

Are You Getting Full Value From Your Video Games? (1 of 3)

2007-12-05T05:52:00.000-08:00

This is the first of many follow ups to my earlier post about the value of entertainment. Actually, noodling on this is what inspired my earlier post - I wanted to lay a basic foundation before I started digging into some of the areas more specific to video games.

So, my basic observation is this - of all the entertainment media that I personally interact with, the one format I'm most likely to not get the full value of is the videogame. What do I mean? Well, once I start watching a movie, I'll probably finish the movie (unless it's really bad). It's a relatively small investment in time. Video games, though, require heavier investments in time, and tend to have less well defined periods of play. They may also require, to be frank, some skill on the part of the person playing the video game.

Defining Completion

Some games are story-driven, and have natural arcs. These games tend to have natural conclusions to the story (even if they are open-ended to leave room for the inevitable sequel). If gamers are not following through with the story, does this mean the game was not compelling? Does this limit how likely game designers are to try to tell compelling stories? Do you have to be playing an RPG to get a story?

Other games are more gameplay driven (or focus heavily on multiplayer, for example), and may not have the same kind of natural arc. These games may have an end goal of reaching a certain skill level in the game, and often require heavy investments in time, performing the same tasks and perfecting certain skills. These are generally not the kinds of games I enjoy, even if the gameplay is otherwise excellent.

Short games can be "beaten" in 5 hours. Others may take 80 hours or more. Some games have no real notion of what "beaten" even means. I tend to favor the current trend towards games which last about 10 hours to complete the main experience. That's long enough to enjoy the basic ideas and story, but not too long to require a lot of time, especially if you don't have endless hours to sit around and play games. I like co-op games, too, since it becomes more of a way to spend time with the kids. I recently finished Halo 3 and Gears of War with my son, and that was a lot of fun - it's not clear if I would've bothered to play through those games completely if it wasn't for the co-op. I did beat BioShock by myself, though.

Measuring Achievements

So, how can you evaluate whether you are getting the full value of your games? One way is to calculate how many hours you are spending on each game, and divide the cost by the number of hours, as I did in my earlier post. Not all games will take the same amount of time to enjoy fully, though. It's also a bit of a nuisance to try and track your game playing time down to the hour.

Xbox 360 games provide an alternate means of determining completion: achievements. Each game is (typically) worth a total of 1,000 achievement points, broken down into (typically) 50 or so goals. You can rate your completion percentage either in achievement points, or simply the number of achievements earned. Looking at some sample games, I believe measuring percentage in achievements is a closer measure of the game's completion - many games tend to stack up later achievements as being worth more points, to provide a juicier reward for earning them.

I tend to broadly group achievements into four categories:

Core Game: Core game achievements occur naturally as you progress through the game. You don't need to seek these out, you just need to move forward. Typically, there is an achievement for "beating" the game, however that is defined. There may be different sets of achievements for different difficulty levels of play.

Side Quests: Side quests are achievements for things off the beaten path. In Crackdown, you can get achievements for juggling cars with explosives, or performing a variety of optional stunts. These achievements are most effective when you know about them, so you have a goal to shoot for - they encourage you to explore the game more deeply, but can be ignored by people only looking for the core experience.

Online Play: Since Xbox Live is a big part of the 360 experience, many games have achievements that specifically relate to online play. This encourages people to get online and work with (or against) other players. People who do not have online accounts are often unhappy that these achievements are effectively unreachable for them.

Mad Skillz: Basic achievements that are rewarded for particular excellence in game play. These require mastery of the game in question, and will only be earned by dedicated players.

The above categories can be combined - for example, Online Play Mad Skillz achievements may require you to win 1,000 online matches.

Different games will combine these categories in different ways. For example, King Kong has very few achievements, all of which are earned simply by playing through the game. Geometry Wars effectively only has Mad Skillz achievements - despite many attempts, I still have failed to earn a single achievement in that game.

Side Quests can either be easy (perform a specific unusual but simple task), or almost impossible (collect all 300 orbs hidden across a city). Garnering points for the latter is a task only for the OCD gamer. YouTube videos can help track down some of these. For my money, extremely difficult side quests, like collecting all of a group of hidden items, work best in combination with some way to get clues about where the items are. For example, in earlier Spyro games, you would get clues late in the game to help you find secret gems. Without these clues, or an online guide, I have very little interest in completing such quests.

Proper use of achievements can increase the entertainment value of a game by providing clues on how to play the game. Not in the sense of "move this box, to reach a higher platform", but in the sense of "try exploring different combinations of weapons", or "try playing in cooperative mode". Badly designed achievements fail to encourage or reward the player appropriately - often because they are either too easy, or too hard.

In my estimation, achievements work best when you can get approximately half of them by completing the core game, with a reasonable number of basic side quests. An additional 25% can be alloted for online play, and the final 25% divide between trickier side quests and mad skillz. For the most part, I don't care if I get %100 of the achievements for a game, but I do like to get a reasonable reward for beating the basic parts of the game.

Next up, some more detailed examples.

Blogging About Blogging

2007-12-04T22:42:00.000-08:00

In talking to a few people reading this blog, it appears my new update schedule may be generating a bit too much content. So, rather than shooting for my twice per day update schedule, I'll slow it down to once per day. If there's a second post, I'll try to keep it to something fairly terse, like this one.

As part of the ongoing blog overhaul, I've added a custom Google Search box to this site - this lets you easily find old posts or related posts if you are only interested in a specific subject. I've indexed my friend Richard's blog as well, since our topics often overlap. If you know of any other sympathetic blogs which might be useful in the custom search engine, let me know, and I'll consider adding it.

Old Spice Strikes Again

2007-12-04T07:47:00.000-08:00

Just a week ago, I was posting about the Xbox Rewards program, wondering if there were going to be any more challenges. Well, it turns out that Old Spice, the sponsor of the original Xbox Rewards challenge, is indeed sponsoring more challenges - but not, apparently, through Microsoft.

Their new partner is 360Voice, the site which powers my Xbox's blog. You can read about the new Old Spice Experience Challenge on the 360Voice blog.

It's been in beta for awhile, but apparently the official launch is December 5th, the day after the Dashboard update. I may be a bit fuzzy on the details, but here's what it looks like to me: These are smaller challenges - one user will propose a challenge, and invite some of their friends to participate. The lowest tier requires 5 gamers, and the highest requires at least 20. The duration ranges from 7 to 30 days. Whomever wins within that group will receive actual prizes ranging from $20 gift certificates at the low end, to year long GameFly subscriptions and Xbox HD DVD Players at the high end (prizes sponsored, of course, by Old Spice).

In other words, this is more of a way to sponsor small scale events - sort of like what Wizards of the Coast does with Magic: The Gathering, where local stores are given prizes to run small tournaments, hoping to promote a community of fans. Here we've got that model opened up to a more virtual community, with an outside sponsor.

If you're interested in participating, leave a comment. Maybe we can have an official "Whicken's Blog" event.