Scott Foe's Web Log

Opinion: Failure For Fun And Profit

2011-09-24T14:25:00.000-07:00

i.

In the 1980s, it was feared that the world’s economy would be controlled straight out of Tokyo and that those fearsomely inventive karate choppers would own our houses and maybe even our pets, deigning to lease Fido back to us once Reagan ratified the switch to yen. We would all have to play pickup sticks with our MakuDonarudo french fries. And we would all have to be conversant in the Japanese language, especially the onomatopoeia - the Japanese have an onomatopoeia for every. damn. thing.

Don’t believe me about the onomatopoeia? Let me convince you. Exhibit A-through-Z: In Japanese, the sound of “groping somebody on the subway in Ginza” is “momimomi” (“もみもみ”).

Luckily for us Americans, then-Senator Al Gore had the very potent foresight to first found the small village of San Francisco, nestled away by ocean and bay in the rugged northern reaches of California, and to there devise a distributed computer network for crowd-sourcing the coining of onomatopoeia, “ARPANET.” The race with Japan was on like majong. After President Gore’s impassioned plea to the nation, declaring a grand priority to before-the-end-of-the-decade beat those industrious karaoke crushers to the onomatopoeia for “masturbation,” we, as a people, came together in triumph, “Fap! Fap! Fap!”

And the rising sun faded …

ii.

One quick look at gamedevmap shows that the San Francisco Bay Area has twice as many game developers as Tokyo - the whole tally not being told, as some of the backyard monsters of the Bay Area games industry aren’t even listed. If it weren’t for vending machines that sold bottles of Suntory Whiskey, I would feel that my time spent studying in Kyoto was completely wasted.

San Francisco. The City That Bears My Initials. The Big Controller. Gameywood, California. A serendipitous alchemy of bridge, bus, BART, beamer, ferry, cable car, and Caltrain makes South of Market Area in San Francisco the nonpareil-universal capital for technology and gaming innovation, a place where two guys, a PowerPoint slide, and a six-hundred dollar desk-rental can conquer the future.

On the north-side of the city, I live across the street from a high school. Outside of my loft, students congregate, and, as I exit and enter, I am bombarded by loitering minors who beg me to buy them Swisher Sweets mini-cigars. I have often fantasized about mugging those students, as I am willing to bet that half of those kids’ parents packed USD 200K convertible notes in the kids’ lunches, just in case a good angel investment opportunity popped up on the way to class. Most days it seems that the streets of San Francisco are paved with cash and code and kids begging for cigarillos.

It needs saying that I ain’t scared of no yuan.

iii.

Have you ever failed so badly in your endeavors that you cascaded into a debilitating and existential crises of confidence? The kind of personal-bottom where empathy is amplified beyond the skulls of others and into the skulls of their friends and family? The kind of rot in your belly where you will not only tell a stranger the time-of-day, but also buy him a beer and listen to what he has to say, with no hope of reciprocity? Well, feel better: You still suck at failing.

There’s a saying here in venture capital, “You aren’t anybody until you have failed three times.” Which works out for me, because I am the most-spectacular failure in games industry history: The commercially flaccid Sega Dreamcast, the awesomely horrible Nokia N-Gage, the unfortunately overlooked second Nokia N-Gage, the always forgotten Pocket Kingdom (the first global, massively multiplayer mobile game), and, for extra measure, Reset Generation (especially frustrating, because, when you lose the Interactive Achievement Award, they send you a picture of the award that you could have won, encased in glass).

For years, the press had been applauding me as a rising star: Escapist Magazine named me as “one of the top-three game developers under thirty” - which inspired a deeply rational panic as my thirtieth birthday approached, until EDGE magazine saved me with “one of the eight talents that will change the future of gaming,” and then, a six-page feature-article (with my face on every page), entitled “Great Scott.” And still, consumers would be pressed harder-than-diamond to name even one game that I have designed or produced.

The next time you find yourself ravaged and remiss about dice not rolling the way that your bets were placed, look up “Games Industry Failure” in the dictionary and find a grin. You’re probably going to see a picture of me - and I’ll probably be featured wearing a tracksuit.

iv.

They say you can never go home from here, but, if I could go home from here, I would marry the year 2009 and have make-a-baby-sex all night long.

It was a time of violent market disruption: The minimum barrier to entry for the games industry had become barely minimum. Publishers were replaced by investors. Products were replaced by platforms and services. Price elastic and freemium muscled in on paid and subscription-based. Lean murdered agile. Data Science took its seat on Organizational Olympus beside Design, Programming, and Visuals. It could no longer be questioned that operational efficiencies rival intellectual property in value.

The once evergreen Game Boy didn’t really count anymore and San Francisco defiantly punked the now obviously naked emperor cities of Los Angeles, Seattle, and Montreal by saying, “You fools couldn’t hold my bridge.”

I am too entrepreneurial-minded a manager to be working for Fortune 100 companies, both in the Drukerian sense of shifting resources from low-yield activities to high-yield activities, but, also, I just love tracksuits - they’re like pajamas that you can wear outside. (Once you go track, you’ll never go back.) Leaving N-Gage in 2009, I launched my home office with the help of a few close friends to whom I gave very simple request, “Get me consulting gigs: Any consulting gigs.”

In any industry, it’s not who you know, but who knows you. From speaking with people who knew me, quite quickly it became apparent that failures are securities: Much like debt, failures can be packaged and sold, and, unlike other much-maligned securities of recent years, failure is an investment that pays buckets.

If it can go wrong in games, I have seen it go wrong: My Geiger counter for failure is so sensitive that I can tell you from what horse came the hair on which the Sword of Damocles hangs. I’m a god damned Foestradamus, the walking and talking and smoking tail of the experience curve. And, when it comes to starting up, what are first-in investors buying if not the value byproduct of failure?

v.

Turn around a social game production that has come way off the rails. Design a location-based alternate reality game; design a location-based augmented reality game. Design a dating game. What are best-practices for Facebook games production? What should our Minimum Viable Product be? Do our monetization design. Can you help us staff up engineering? Staff up design? Can you fix our design? Design our metrics and analytics. Adobe Flash developer audits; mobile developer audits. Can you polish our pitch deck? Help us set up our studio. Design our operations and production systems. Plan our P&L. Be our game director. Be our executive producer. Sit on our Board of Advisors. Sit on our Board of Directors.

Trust me when I say that you can trust me. We’re going to have to recapitalize. Sorry, we just can’t make cash flow this month. We’re pivoting out of gaming. Can you get the team to crunch even harder? The investors are pulling out. A new investor came in and he wants to wipe the board clean. When we said we had seven hundred thousand dollars, we were really counting on more investment coming in. The CEO and the COO have decided to part ways; when can you talk to the lawyers? We can no longer afford catered lunches!

Sega and Nokia were both amazing experiences in their own rights, however, both were insulated experiences. Over these wooliest years, I have worked with thirty-plus mobile or social gaming startups, some backed by Americana entertainment mega brands, and others backed by nothing but a pitch and a prayer. If you had told me three years ago that today I would be an advisor to an investment bank, I would have flicked you in the shaft - unless, of course, you were, at that time, a girl.

While the failures have not been so spectacular as in my past-life of big companies behaving badly, the failures have been much, much faster - also unlike my past life, I have many offices peppering the peninsula, some of which sell coffee, some of which have free Wi-Fi, some of which are like the opposite of a nudist colony - tracksuits only.

vi.

The human brain is intrinsically tuned for optimism. No child grows aspiring to become an addict, a prostitute, or a games middleware sales rep. Even my mother, who is the most pessimistic person on the planet Earth, could not bring herself to name me after a Bobby Goldsboro song called “Watching Scotty Fail.” But, had dear mom been so uncannily prescient, she would have sent me to Mega Startup Weekend long before I was recently invited there to judge a pitch competition.

MEGA STARTUP WEEKEND

Mega Startup Weekend is an event for get-it-done-type people, expertly assembled and run like a multi-core processor by the cleverly named Startup Weekend company. In the conference organizers’ own words, Mega Startup Weekend is “an intense 54 hour event which focuses on building a web or mobile application which could form the basis of a credible business over the course of a weekend. The weekend brings together people with different skillsets - primarily software developers, graphics designers and business people - to build applications and develop a commercial case around them.”

In my own words, Mega Startup Weekend is, “Tits. It’s the startup experience compressed into three days, and it has the word ‘mega’ in the title. One of the very best games events that I have ever attended.”

(There were actually three conference tracks, “Health,” “Education,” and the exact-opposite of “Health” and “Education,” which is “Gaming.” The big winner for the weekend would be awarded a spot on stage at DEMO.)

Day 1: Attendees get right to business, pitching game ideas to each other, in pecha kucha-style short-form presentations. Attendees select the best ideas and form teams around them: A designer here, a couple of engineers from over here. (Pro tip: You don’t need five biz dev guys on your team.) Once the teams are formed, they get to work on building a pitch deck for their new business and a prototype of their new product or service.

Day 2: The teams work together, building prototypes, surveying potential customers, compiling market forecasts, and becoming more than strangers.

Mentors (one of whom was me) help the teams refine and strengthen (or even abandon) their strategies and tactics, their products, their services, their pitches. This was like a year of my career in one day: I visited with all of the teams and offered the boons of failure. (I also gave one of the teams from the Health Vertical a little nudge with my own brand of amateur dentistry.)

Day 2 Party: It is important to note that Microsoft hosted the weekend, and, just to give the newly zygotic startup teams something to aspire to, Steve Ballmer dropped more coin than some companies get in Series A funding on a boozey bash that featured a defiantly entertaining 90’s cover band that covered Save Ferris covering Dexys Midnight Runners - don’t think too intensely on that point as I don’t have liability insurance for this web log.

Day 3: The teams have five minutes to pitch and demonstrate their new product or service, and two minutes to answer questions from the judges (one of whom was me). The judges deliberate and a winner is chosen.

The Gaming Vertical Winner: "Frennzy," the truly-social winning team from the gaming vertical, was offered a spot in the YetiZen Accelerator program, should they choose to stick together as a corporate entity following the event. YetiZen is a San Francisco-based gaming-focused startup accelerator program that offers class companies insanely networked capital introduction and sage and veteran mentoring from all walks of the industry. (Being an advisor to YetiZen Accelerator, I know that hundreds of companies apply to YetiZen each class, and only a small handful are chosen, so, this is quite the prize.)

vii.

They should call “Mega Startup Weekend,” “Mega Failure Weekend,” but they wouldn’t sell as many tickets: I have never seen so much failure in one room and it was uncompromisingly glorious! Take it from somebody who lives in this world: As much of the terrific and as much of the tears of the San Francisco startup experience as can be, they are all there, they are all in three days. (The only thing that could make the proceedings more authentic would be if teams were forced to hire the founders’ completely inexperienced relatives at $200K-a-year salaries and 20% equity stakes.)

Even if you are allergic to lightning-fast execution … even if you cannot consider using the bathroom without sign-off by your business unit vice president … even if you could not go a day off of your massive corporate intranet without being weaned by methadone, go ahead and use that expense tool from the accounting department to buy a ticket to Mega Startup Weekend.

Mega Startup Weekend should be near the top of every game developer’s bucket list. Oh yeah, while you’re expensing stuff, go ahead and grab a tracksuit; the three days just wouldn’t be the same without outdoor sleepwear. And, if you are so lucky as to fall flat on your kisser, do keep in mind that the onomatopoeia for failure is, “Whaaaa Whaaaaa!”

I don’t allow comments on this blog: There’s just no way to control the quality. Besides, if you have something to say, you can easily obtain your own blog. In the absence of comments, I’ve gone out and solicited the opinions of my three fellow Mega Startup Weekend judges - also, as a bonus, I grabbed an opinion from the winners of the Gaming Vertical at Mega Startup Weekend.

Joseph Gilby
Joseph is a former games publishing exec who turned angel investor; currently, he serves as director of the Silicon Valley chapter of the International Game Developer Association and as a member of Keiretsu Forum's Software Committee.

It is said that a key advantage to the Silicon Valley startup scene is the ability to fail and be forgiven, as long as you've learned from the experience. Failure in Silicon Valley has been refined to an art form, as adopted by Lean Methodology. (Study It!)

Break your fallible endeavors into bite sized chunks. Fail early and often. Measure and understand each failure, learn to fail better each time. One success can balance a multitude of failures.

A bountiful supply of failure is always near at hand, closer than you may realize.
One of the best ways to learn from failure, is to study the failures of others. This removes the personal sting from the lesson, but lessens the imprinting of it.

Learning from the failure of others is complicated in that they are seldom advertised by the original practitioner.

There are one hundred and one varieties of failure, try not to learn them all first hand.

One certain way to fail is to become arrogant in success.

Never forget that failure is not an end in itself, unless you leave it that way.

Sana Choudary
Sana's bio is longer than this article (if you can believe that) - so, short and sweet, Sana is a scary bad ass who has spent her entire career in startups and entrepreneurship. Sana is a leading member of Women 2.0, Startup Weekend, founder of UltraLight Startups, and co-founder of both SF Game Developer's Workshop and YetiZen gaming startup accelerator program. (Also, if you're wondering if Sana is egging my face with her comment, the answer would be, yes!)

Nowhere in the world does the economic principle of ceteris paribus, "all other things being equal" come up more than in Silicon Valley views on how startups succeed. In the discussion of startup failure we are using the same principle - if all other things are equal investors are more likely to invest in those who have failed than those who have not. If all other things are equal you are a wiser entrepreneur from having learned through failure than being born right or being a genius in an island of his or her own.

Like in economics all of us use ceteris paribus to help explain benefits of startup failure because the real world has a lot more greys and variety. If we were to explain all of those this blog post would continue for ever.

Over the last few years we have taken startup failure and ceteris paribus to new heights. Probably as a response to the many conferences, blog posts, networking conversations that are all focused on sounds bytes of how businesses, founders are smarter, bigger, leaner, meaner. Heck my close friend Cassie Phillips even started a conference focused only on talking about failure that is expanding globally (must check out if you are doing a startup).

As always it is helpful to talk about situations where ceteris paribus does not hold true because that is where progress lies. Glorifying failure does not lead to better startups, founders, strategies or better anything for that matter. What matters is what have you learned from the failure. How does that change your thinking? Can you demonstrate that in your startup plans and execution?

Don't just fail and wear it like a proud badge. Don't just tell me about your failures. Tell me what you learned from it, how you are changing your business for it and what checks do you have for being closer to similar or new failures in the future. How will you handle that.

Got those answered? Now I'm interested. Let's talk.

Japheth Dillman

Prior to co-founding YetiZen startup acellerator and SF Game Developer's Workshop, Japheth served as Executive Producer and Lead Designer at studios the likes of Digital Chocolate, Flying Wisdom Studios, BigPoint, Chugulu, Aftershock Innovations, to name just a few. If I were writing his bio, I would include the words, "Awesome Dungeon Master."

Badge of Honor. That's what investors call failure. Without this badge, you are a risky investment. Without this badge, one can not truly find success in either gaming or the Bay Area. Why is real success elusive to those who haven't failed? Without struggle entrepreneurs will not learn the lessons needed when they face real conflict. Real success comes when entrepreneurs surmount giant mountains. Getting up that mountain you will slip. If you are not prepared to find reassured footing after you slip, you will fall all the way down that mountain. Investors know you will face conflict and you WILL slip. This is not a question to an investor. But do you have the lessons learned from previous failure to not slip back to the bottom? Do you have the failure experiences to know where to catch yourself when you fall? This ... this failure ... is your badge of honor. To get through the investor door you will need to show your badge of failure at the check-in.

Aaron Cammarata
Aaron was the designer/leader of the team that brought us the Mega Startup Weekend-winning game "Frennzy" - a hot-potato mobile title that can give you and your friends something to do in bars (besides black-out drinking). Before spinning up his own company, AJC Games, Aaron was a sixteen-year veteran of the games industry, most recently serving as Executive Producer at Total Immersion.

As the biggest failure at failing in the Failure-at-Educating-or-Healing-Anyone category, hear me say - failing rocks! Hell, on Mega Startup Weekend Friday night (heretofore known as Day 1), we found almost no interest in the idea, looked one another in the eye and said "Screw it, let's ditch the competition and just hack. I don't even want to compete. You cool? Cool." Yay! Our first team fail!

That freed us to do whatever felt cool, and let us focus on the product rather than the competition. The company we failed to dissolve at Mega Startup Weekend is continuing to fail to dissolve, and we are excited at the chance to spread the fail at YetiZen next year! Since we failed to achieve failure during the weekend, we are pivoting to build mass, aiming to make a spectacular lightshow on re-entry; a meteor so bright WaWa is going to hand out branded pinhole-in-cardboard things like they gave you in elementary school to watch the solar eclipse, but you couldn't help it and looked directly at the sun anyway, and those teachers lied and it didn't make you go blind.

If we fail to burn up on impact with the atmosphere, we are aiming for a crater of fail at least 8 digits across. (Cue Slim Pickins.)

To anyone on the sidelines, get off your ass and do it. You either a) own the shit out of a completely new industry, b) get acquired, or c) throw off the yoke of oppression, meet kick-ass people, and have fun. Win win win. Now get out there and whoop up some epic fail!

Post: The Paula Abdul Of Games

2010-10-17T21:54:00.000-07:00

I know that I've been called the "Quentin Tarantino" of games in the press, and while that's truly flattering, I've now got steeper accolade: This boy's lifelong dream of becoming the "Paula Abdul of the games industry" has finally come to be! Thanks Activision, for asking me to sit as a judge on America's Next Top Game Maker, or The Activision Indie Games Competition, or whatever you call this incredibly large stack of games that's sitting on my desk here.

Note to Activision: There's a certain incongruousness in ringing my doorbell with a box of indie games at 8:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning. Ms. Abdul needs her beauty rest - and then she needs some "really cheery ohs" - a bowl of Oxycodone drenched in Screaming Eagle Cabernet, eaten with a spoon. (I'm suddenly in the mood for breakfast-for-dinner.) Also, how am I supposed to seduce the contestants if I don't know who they are?

xOXo The Paula Abdul of Games

Video: Games Convention Asia 2009

2010-09-30T20:57:00.000-07:00

Here's an oldie and a goody: My keynote from Games Convention Asia, "The MBAAA" - a talk about some of the economics of big-project mobile game development and a tutorial for entertainment property development. Now, please keep in mind that the first half of the talk references numbers from over a year ago, and time marches on as numbers drum upward. (Heck, we didn't yet have "six-cent-per-daily-active-user" stories to tell ...)

The second part of the talk is timeless, platform-less, and something that every developer, publisher, student, and scandalously good-looking public relations flack should see (if only to pound with virtual tomatoes). Entertainment Property Development should be mistress to entire business units at organizations everywhere.

When watching part two, you might find it helpful to know that people were booing and moaning when the Disney slide came up ... that doesn't really come through from the audio in this recording.

To borrow from "Yahtzee" Croshaw, I was positively stonked during the Q&A for this talk: Every question asked included the phrase, "Entertainment Property." Wish they had gotten that on film ...

Video: GameHorizon 2010

2010-09-22T11:46:00.000-07:00

As I say in the keynote, it's hard to give a talk about the future of gaming, as anything - and I mean, "anything" - is possible. (Also, on a side note, I was shocked by just how much fun the town of Newcastle is: If you get a chance to attend GameHorizon, stay and play.)

Opinion: Social Games Not Really Social

2010-09-12T16:43:00.003-07:00

If you were to travel back in time to find a fifteen-year-old me, if you could distract him from his Sega Genesis long enough to interview him, fifteen-year-old me would tell you that his favorite video game is “Gain Ground,” because, “It’s more awesome than girls and you can play cooperative multiplayer with your friends.” (To be fair, his girlfriends from those days - the ones that were not growing out of his wrists - weren’t what you’d call “lookers.”)

Halo, Gears of War, Left 4 Dead: Today, it’s not unheard of for cooperative multiplayer to be considered a scalar-multiplier when forecasting sales potential for many a game title. Today, more people than ever before buy games specifically for playing together with their friends and dorm mates, with their lovers and their spouses (though not always the two together), and even with their children. (God forbid I ever have children: While we were growing up, my little brother could actually hold his own when fighting for the Nintendo, but, today, I’d knock a mother-fucking ten-year-old out like Social Services’ Most-Wanted.)

If you were to travel back in time to find a twenty-one-year-old me, if you could distract him from his Sega Dreamcast dev-kits long enough to interview him, twenty-one-year-old me would be more shocked than an electric urinal to discover that thirty-three-year-old me is totally over cooperative multiplayer. (Twenty-one-year-old me would also be shocked to discover that the original Gain Ground is available for download on the Nintendo Wii, as fifteen-year-old me had to buy his copy sans box at a garage sale.)

Indeed, thirty-three-year-old me’s favorite game is not even a video game: It’s a “sport,” if you can call it that. Thirty-three-year-old me’s favorite game is a reality show called Survivor.

The game of Survivor starts with two teams of ten people each, cordoned away from the civilized world with not but the clothes on their shapes and some basic supplies with which to sustain themselves. Every three days, the two teams compete against each other in both physically bruising and mentally straining challenges, which, when lost, send the defeated team to vote out of the game one of their membership.

When the number of Survivor players has been winnowed to near-half, the two teams are merged into one group and individual play begins. From here, the once-every-three-day challenges reward one victorious player with immunity until the next challenge; challenge losers are rewarded with the threat of being voted out of the game and onto the “jury” by their peers. On the 39th day of competition, when only two (sometimes, three) players remain, the “jury” of defeated players votes to determine the winner of Survivor, the recipient of one million US dollars and an extra couple minutes of fame.

“Outwit. Outplay. Outlast.”

Survivor is the ultimate game - physical, social, mental - a multidimensional human go board, the complexity of which is beyond bafflement. In Survivor, you have to last until the very end, but the people that you beat have to like you well enough to award you the victory. Like most games, Survivor is a metaphor for something: Survivor is a metaphor for modern life; we want our neighbors to do well, but not better than us. Survivor is coopetition: We’ll work together, until we work against each other.

For twenty-thousand years, coopetition has been as much a part of the human condition as affinity for crappy dance music. We all know of the oldest profession, and we all know that some members of the oldest profession shared street corners. More recently, the Industrial Revolution ushered in winner-takes-most tournaments for lofty Aeron chairs.

So where are the video games built around coopetition? I can really think of but a handful of interactive entertainment experiences devoted to coopetition, only one of which appeared in digital form ...

Diplomacy - 1954
Game design legend Greg Costikyan chides me that no discussion of coopetition in interactive entertainment is complete without mentioning Alan Calhammer’s Diplomacy. So there: I mentioned Diplomacy.

Paranoia - 1984
Paranoia was the first game dedicated solely to coopetition that I can remember getting amped about. A pen-and-paper role-playing game (think, Dungeons and Dragons), Paranoia allowed for groups of player characters to team together for post-apocalyptic adventure. In the world of Paranoia, mutants and members of secret societies were to be executed on-sight, the twist being that every player character was secretly both a mutant and a member of a secret society. Players would sit around making their best attempts to out each other and then slay each other - thus the game’s name, “Paranoia.”

Magic: The Gathering “Star Variant” - 1993(ish)
“Star” was a popular multiplayer variant of the Magic: The Gathering trading card game. Five players sit in a circle; the player to your left and the player to your right are your allies; the two players opposite you are your enemies (which means that your two allies are trying to kill each other). The first player to conquer his two enemies is the victor: Wacky good time, thine name is “Star.”

Big Brother - 1999
The reality competition Big Brother is much like the individual competition-portion of Survivor, in that players vote each other out of the game until a “jury” of losers dictates the winner. Unlike Survivor, the competition takes place for nearly 80 days, with players sequestered in a mansion that boasts over 50 cameras (which can be viewed from the Internet 24-hours a day) - also, Big Brother contestants have access to booze.

The element that truly separates Big Brother from Survivor, and the reason that I mention Big Brother here, is that all but two players are safe from elimination for the week - alliances of players can be easily broken, making the social dynamics of the game of Big Brother extremely fluid. Also unlike Survivor, the Big Brother audience can influence the progression of the game via electronic vote - in some cases even by completely eliminating one of the players.

Not in the least bit legal, Big Brother Archives links to every episode of the United States version of Big Brother - check out the All-Star run (7) for the greatest season of reality television ever filmed.

SiSSYFiGHT 2000 - 2000
The only video game dedicated solely to coopetition (that I can think of), SiSSYFiGHT 2000 puts the player in the Mary Janes of a grade school girl who must find playground victory by teasing, scratching, grabbing, and tattling on the other girls - should two (or more) girls tattle at the same time, they will be punished worse than had they let the other girls tease, scratch, or grab them. SiSSYFiGHT 2000: Six girls may enter the playground; only one girl may leave with self-esteem.

An industry colleague once asked me why Survivor does not work in digital format. I would have to say that the cardinal reason that Survivor cannot be captured satisfactorily by source code is that we can’t force people to dedicate 39 days to a video game to the exclusion of all else. (Yes, I did once die because I played StarCraft: Brood War for 72 hours straight without eating and without going to the bathroom, but, to be fair, Blizzard Entertainment didn’t force me to do that.)

The constraints of the physical world prohibit us from doing a perfect, digital Survivor. At the same time, the beauty of video games is that video games free us from the constraints of the physical world!

Why vote people off the island when you could eat them instead? Imagine a Survivor-like game where your team is without food: In order to maintain energy, you have to cannibalize each other, but, at the same time, the more (uneaten and energized) players on your team, the greater your advantage in challenges. Or, you could be less imaginative (and less twisted) by doing a one-frag-elimination first-person shooter where, once your team is victorious, they must then frag each other.

Think of the possibilities that social networking platforms like Facebook bring to the table of coopetition! Imagine playing Survivor with your friends and frenemies. Social gaming is all the rage: But social gaming won’t be truly “social” until players can harm each other as easily as they can help each other.

I don’t allow comments on this blog: There’s just no way to control the quality. Besides, if you have something to say, you can easily obtain your own blog. In the absence of comments, I’ve gone out and solicited games industry expert opinions on the subject of coopetition - also, for you student readers, an expert challenge.

Greg Costikyan (blog)
Game Developer’s Choice Award-winner and Adventure Game Hall of Fame-inductee Greg Costikyan is the co-creator of Paranoia (and one of the absolute smartest dudes that I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with). For a glimpse of the future of gaming, read Greg over at Play This Thing ...

“Coopetition” is, of course, a repulsive portmanteau word that should be nailed to a post and left to die. However, Foe is correct that, oddly, most digital games are purely cooperative, purely competitive, or team-based with no ability to change teams. So-called "social" games, by contrast, are essentially single-player games transpiring in a universe with many other players, but in which player interaction is minor. To be truly "social," a game must foster communication and interaction among the players, which is best done when players may both injure and benefit each other -- so that negotiation, alliance formation, and backstabbing are critical elements of play.

Eric Zimmerman (blog)
Game Designer Eric Zimmerman is the creator of SiSSYFiGHT and the host of the annual Game Developer Conference Game Design Challenge* - can you say, “total gaming bad ass?”

In a sense, every competitive game is also cooperative: If you and I are going to take part in the contest of Chess, we both need to speak the same language - of playing Chess by the rules - and collaborate in order to make our game happen. Some game designs do emphasize the tension between competition and cooperation. SiSSYFiGHT was inspired by classic Game Theory problems like the Prisoners Dilemma, in which two players have to outguess each other, deciding whether or not the other player is going to collaborate or not. SiSSYFiGHT combined this core game tension with the angry mob / flame war / trash talking of the internet, making for extremely entertaining games. Sadly, SiSSYFiGHT did not survive the closing of Gamelab last year and ended its ten-year run online in 2009.

Brenda Brathwaite (blog)
When she’s not busy getting her butt kicked by me at Ticket To Ride, Vanguard Award-winner Brenda Brathwaite is the absolute master of non-digital challenges for game designers (and so you should check out her must-have book, Challenges for Game Designers). I promised Brenda I would take it easy on her if she would provide a non-digital challenge to the tune of coopetition, and here it is ...

You find yourself at the very edges of a criminal empire. On the one hand, you are tasked with infiltrating it and bringing it to its knees. On the other hand, you have to work with the others already in the empire to build a case against them. Doing so requires you walk a delicate line, simultaneously working with criminals and against them all the while hoping they will implicate one another (and seeding opportunities for them to do so). Craft a set of rules which would allow for such a game.

* For those not in the know: Eric Zimmerman’s annual Game Design Challenge is one of the two ultimate feathers for a games professional’s cap. Past winners include Will Wright and Alexey Pajitnov. The other ultimate feather is the annual DICE Summit Poker Invitational. Past winners include Ray Muzyka and ... me. No person has ever won both, so suck it.

Challenge: The Automyth

2009-08-05T12:39:00.001-07:00

In Challenge: The Automyth, I've swung the white glove at the faces of Gamasutra readers everywhere. SMACK!

Post: Made By People!

2009-07-21T12:06:00.000-07:00

It's not everyday that one gets mentioned alongside the likes of Will Wright - not that there's anybody else out there "the likes of Will Wright." Head on over to The Escapist and check out Made By People!

Editorial: Passing the Porch

2009-06-29T13:16:00.001-07:00

The editorial staff over at Pocket Gamer requested a "valedictory address" - and here it is, Passing the Porch.

Post: Claps And Singing Along

2009-06-28T18:17:00.000-07:00

Friday was my final day heading up game production for Nokia San Francisco. I had joined Nokia in 2003, about a month before the launch of the original N-Gage, and let me tell you, going from Sega to a Fortune 100 organization (whose market cap is bigger than the entire games industry) is the kind of experience that leaves you at first fearing that you will die, and at second fearing that you will not die.

Two platform launches and two hero games later: I'm still alive, thanks in part to the platinum advice of Ecco the Dolphin creator Ed Annunziata, who would always chide me during times of stress, "Good lord, Scott: We are making toys, not nuclear weapons." (Ed also talked about my no-no parts in an interview, once - what can I say, the guy's a character.)

To be perfectly frank, many friends in the core gaming space were not supportive of my move to Nokia - and to be perfectly kind, strangers in the industry were less than "not supportive." But Nokia provided resources that most can only dream of, and our work carried both the challenge and the excitement of pioneering. (A harsh reality when it comes to pioneering: Sometimes, "the second mouse gets the cheese.")

We never made anything as useful as a nuclear weapon, no - we didn't even aim to create the opposite of a nuclear weapon, like an Alternate Reality Game that encourages homeless people to help feed and care for other homeless people. Still, I am exceedingly proud of the work that we did and the games that we achieved: Pocket Kingdom: 0wn the W0rld and Reset Generation were both world-beaters, defining connected handheld entertainment.

I am strongly grateful to Nokia for all of the amazing opportunities that I was offered during my residency: Responsibility and authority for game P&Ls in the millions, the hats to manage title marketing in addition to production, speaking opportunities and academic lectures, travel to exotic (sometimes frozen) locations, lots of face-time with the press, coursework at the UC Berkeley Center for Executive Development, and that's just off of the tips of my typers.

In April, I gave a "Ten Questions" interview with the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, where I was asked about the "biggest challenge facing the games industry" ...

Q: What's the biggest challenge you see facing the industry?

A: I seriously question how heavy games publishing organizations need to be to compete effectively in the current and future markets? Is there a true advantage in the publisher owning the developer? Does worrying about (and investing in) creative activities dilute the publisher's focus to market and distribute? One of the biggest challenges facing the games industry will be that facing publishers to both renovate and innovate organization, processes, and practices for tomorrow.

... and my sentiment has not changed: I guess that the best way to start my sabbatical is to wish Nokia luck in renovating and innovating organization, processes, and practices for tomorrow. And I hope that Nokia, in-turn, will wish me luck in making it to the beach in time for first-person frisbee - sabbatical, here I come.

Opinion: Girls Fart

2009-06-23T10:43:00.001-07:00

Whoa ... What's that smell? Better hop on over to Gamasutra to check out Girls Fart.

Post: Touching You, Touching Me

2009-06-15T18:52:00.000-07:00

That Burn Your Resume opinion piece must have reached somebody in corporate gaming America, 'cause Epic Games can be seen here quoting me (with attribution) in a job description, of all things:

::: Director of Special Projects :::
We're looking for someone to report directly to the president to take on projects at Epic and its international subsidiaries, and drive them to completion. In the immortal words of Foe -- "to execute shit like shit was a mass murderer in Texas."

Even better than being quoted in a job description, today I received word from Andrew Dovichi, one of the game designers of Sega's Alien Syndrome for Nintendo Wii and Sony PSP, a person whom I have never met, a person who had, after having been for months frustrated by games industry interview process, stumbled across the Burn Your Resume piece on Gamasutra ...

So after I read your piece, I decided to craft my own CV in a style that is more indicative of my personality. I also cribbed some inspiration from your posted CV but that was the point of posting it right? I've attached my CV in case its the sort of thing you'd care to look at.

I sent that CV to one, that's right 1, company. Did the phone interview, took the design test, got the job.

I am, of course, completely amused: If everybody copies the style of the CV which I put with the Burn Your Resume piece for illustration, then we are back at square-one for getting noticed when our papers hit the desk. I am also completely heartwarmed: Touching lives is the reason that I pursued a career in the games industry to begin with!

Recently, a friend reminded me of the story of the Businessman and the Poor Fisherman. To make a long parable short, the Businessman must work his entire life to save for retirement so that he might live the very same pleasures that the Poor Fisherman lives everyday: Fish in the morning, play with his children in the afternoon, sip sangria and strum guitar in the evenings. The moral of this story being that we should put less effort into our work and enjoy what youth and money we have, when we have youth and money.

That's hooey, I say: The Poor Fisherman never made an awesome videogame that was enjoyed by millions of people, which means that - though he may everyday have relaxed to lazy pleasures - the Poor Fisherman probably went to Hell when he died.

Opinion: Be A Wiener

2009-06-14T23:20:00.001-07:00

Find out what's wrong with your boss in my op/ed piece on Gamasutra, then, go ahead, be a Wiener.

Opinion: Burn Your Resume

2009-06-14T23:06:00.001-07:00

In my first opinion/editorial piece for Gamasutra, I encourage you all to burn your resumes.

Video: Edinburgh International Festival 2008

2009-06-14T22:26:00.000-07:00

It's a rare and beautiful occasion when conference organizers give no direction as to the content of a talk: EIF 2008 was just such an occasion. This is a talk of which I am particularly proud, and not just because my futurist musings popped an entire page in Edge Magazine ("A Scott with a plan"), but because I got to eat breakfast that morning bubblegum-punk-humming to myself, "Fuck it! Here's something I believe in!"