The questions I asked are as follows:

In the book Be Bold: Create a Career with Impact, the authors discuss the concept of a “moment of obligation” which is the defining moment when you felt called to a particular purpose.  Sometimes this is one particular moment in time, sometimes it is a build up of many things over time.  Could you describe your “moment of obligation” in creating socially conscious games?

What is important about the work you do?

What unique advantages do you feel games have as a medium for this type of message?

What has been your biggest challenge in creating a company around socially conscious games?

Is your company organized as a profit or non-profit?  What do you feel is the advantage of this approach?  (If you would prefer not to discuss your business, feel free to skip this question).

What would you consider the most important advice for beginning social entrepreneurs in the area of games?

The answers I got back showed people who are completely invested in what they do, and who truly believe that games are one of our most important paths to change for the future.

I will be dispersing my resulting interviews out over the next few months, at the rate of one a week.  Keep your eyes peeled for some really interesting stories and insights about what drives these makers of truly exciting game projects.

Twist identifies what she calls the “Toxic Myths” of scarcity, myths from our culture about how money works, and how we should relate to it.  She says these Toxic Myths are: There’s Not Enough, More is Better, and That’s Just the Way it is.  She states that these myths are not only deeply deposited in our consciousness, but they are ultimately destructive to ourselves, those around us, and the planet.

It occurs to me that these cultural myths, and others, are perpetuated in our media as well.  Including games.  Maybe ESPECIALLY games, because playing games calls on us to practice and perform these myths.    We learn best by doing, and games are all about doing.

Specifically though, the Myths identified in this book appear in games over and over and over again.  ”There’s Not Enough” is a common strategy utilized for gameplay — any game that has any sort of resource management, from Monopoly to Star Craft. “More is Better” appears as a winning condition for most games, a very common gameplay pattern in the form of “collecting” and is a driving force in MMOs and online social games as well.  ”That’s Just the Way it is” is intertwined with the very definition of a game — i.e. playing by the rules.

This has gotten me to think about how games participate in and further the myths of our culture.  But even more, its created in me an obsession for how we might design games to do things differently.  Part of  The Soul of Money is about how we can re-write these myths, tell a new story, in order to change ourselves and ultimately our world.  My game designer brain has been kicked into overdrive considering how one would make compelling games that could re-write these myths.    Twist talks in great depth about the concept of Sufficiency, that we all have exactly what we need.

What would a game about sufficiency look like?  What would the goal be?  Could we let go of “More is Better” as a way to win a game?  If we were going to get rid of winning as a concept, how would the game end?  Most (maybe all) collaborative board games rely on some scarcity of resource, often time, to create excitement and challenge.  Could we have a collaborative game that doesn’t rely on this gameplay pattern of “There’s not Enough” and still have a fun game?

Last quarter I started a card game design that I am still working on that begins to address some of these myths, but its a hard design problem.  Thinking about how to design such a game has forced me to really re-think both games and our cultural assumptions.  My brain sometimes has felt like its being pulled and pushed around like silly putty.

Do you want a game design challenge?  I challenge you to design a game completely in line with your values.  If you were going to create this game as a blueprint for how the world should work and present it to someone who had the power to remake the world as you wanted it, what would your game be like?

ps. still working on the site re-design.  Bear with me.

I am working on redesigning the site, and I have a skin I like but which definitely has some rough edges (as you may be able to tell).  Please be patient and everything will be under control here shortly.  Shortlyish.

Heather

So…Kickstarter.

Kickstarter is an amazing idea — ask people to fund a project, ala a PBS pledge drive.  At different pledge levels, the backers receive different gifts.  This allows for a respectable framework in which people can ask for money to pursue their various pursuits.  The backers can spread the responsibility among many many people, get neat gifts, and get to be a part of something cool.  Win win!

I was super excited to join Kickstarter with my own game project.  But what I didn’t realize when I posted my carefully-crafted profile was that its not enough to just show up.  You have to become a champion of self-promotion.  Here’s what I tried, and how its working out so far.

My game ( http://bit.ly/dreamgame ) is currently 31% funded.  I have 13 days to go to raise an additional $6000 or so dollars.  I knew my target goal of $8500 was ambitious, but I decided to go for it because that was genuinely the amount of money I thought it would take to be able to just make this game for two months.  It was also not the highest amount any successfully funded game project had asked for, so I figured “what the heck?”

My first stop on my self-promotion bandwagon was the Friends and Family tour.  I posted to Facebook, I tweeted, I let all my friends know.  I had an immediate outpouring of love and backing, and it was euphoric.  It felt so good to know that my friends wanted me to succeed, and believed in me and my project.

Next, I posted a forum post on Adventuregamers.com, figuring that the adventure gamers who frequented that site might remember me from the Telltale days and be interested in what I was doing now.  This did garner a bit of interest and I got a few more backers from it. I also wrote to another big adventure game news site to ask if they were interested in writing about this, but never got a response.

Then I made a huge mistake.  I let it sit.  More backers came in here and there in a trickle, but the numbers were small.  I see now that what I SHOULD have done is keep up the self-promotion.  I was distracted by other things, and mistakenly thought that if the Kickstarter funding was meant to be, it would take care of itself.  Yeah, right.

In December I contacted the alumni list for my graduate program.  Some of my fellow alumni stepped up in a big way.  I also tried a clever ploy to encourage people to fund the project on behalf of other people as a holiday gift.  I got no responses from that.

This month, I started getting concerned and started finding ways to push the project again.  A friend and mentor of mine, Sheri Rubin, posted on my behalf to the Women in Game Development List.  I got some tweets out of that and a handful of new backers. I contacted a couple friends who have blogs that I believe people read and asked them to post about the project.  One of them did, but I’m not sure anything came of it.

I started reading Get Slightly Famous. I decided to hold a live chat, and was deluged with new ideas for promotion.  I made a list.  I started by fixing up the game’s proposal page to incorporate some suggestions, then made a fan page on Facebook.

Then came the break I had been waiting for!  Except so far, it hasn’t been.  I was super excited that I got to be featured in an Ars Technica article on alternate funding for independent games.  I thought “Yes!  This is it!  I am going to have a ton of exposure and everyone in the WORLD will come pledging me money!”  But that’s not what happened.  I put the article title in Google last night to see how many times it had been re-printed, and its all over the place.  But I got one backer out of it, as far as I can see.  I am incredibly grateful for that backer, don’t get me wrong!  I think the reason the results were so low for me has to do with something very key to self-promotion that I read in Get Slightly Famous.  You have to find the audience that wants you.  I think the Ars Technica readers, especially if you read the comments, are not my ideal audience.   (But big thanks nonetheless to Mike Thompson for helping get my name out there.)

So what have we learned?

1. Either name your project something short, or else get a bit.ly url right away.  The url Kickstarter gives you is based on your project name, and mine was way too long to easily put in tweets.  I didn’t understand how you got bit.ly urls.  Now I do.  Good to know.

2. Promote the hell out of your project, even if it makes you uncomfortable.  I hate the feeling that I am cramming something down people’s throats.  But I am slowly (slooooowwwwly) learning to be more comfortable with self-promotion.  The people on Twitter and Facebook are my friends, and want me to succeed.  Other people might be interested in what I have to offer and have no way of knowing if I don’t tell them.  As a good friend of mine recently told me “think of it as you enlightening them.”

3. Self-promotion is HARD.  Its hard to come up with places and ways to pitch your wares.  Ask for help and suggestions, and don’t try to do it alone.  Also help out other people when they are trying to self-promote something of theirs.

4. Self-promotion takes alot of time!  I started earnestly pimping my project way too late in the game I think.  I believe that if I had worked harder at it from earlier on, I would be in better shape right now, funding wise.

5. Find your audience and put your efforts there.  Think honestly about who is MOST LIKELY to be interested, and focus on getting the word out to those people.

I still have 13 days to go.  We’ll see what happens.  And if you can, spread the word to those who would like to be enlightened!

Since January I went into business for myself as an independent contractor.  I started a company.  I went to multiple conferences up and down the West Coast — my first Casual Connect and my first E3 being among those.  I was on a panel at IndieCade.  I wrote a workbook for game designers (its not available yet).  And I put my thesis project up on Kickstarter for people to fund. I even went back to Georgia Tech and talked about my life so far (and doled out plenty of advice to future game developers).

I’ve learned alot in the last year.  Mostly about business, some about myself.  I’ve worked on lots of projects — mostly for kids, which has been fun.  I’ve even found space for personal pursuits — taking some classes, painting.  And I think my social life (outside of the workplace) has also improved.

It’s been a really fun year, but hard too.  Lots of uncertainty about money.  Lots of stress over “am I taking the right path in my life?”  I have gotten to spend alot of time with my family, which means more to me than I can say, but the big career questions can at times be crippling.

Looking forward to 2010, I have plans galore.  Most of them revolve around making space for me to work on my own projects without going broke.  Its a scary world right now in terms of money, but its also a very exciting time to go off on one’s own.

The thing I am most excited about right now is that the IGDA will be offering health plans through a partner organization come January.  This has been a big hole in our lives.  Last night, my daughter (now 2 and alternating between charming and exasperating on a second by second basis) stuck a bead way up her nose.  My husband and I were freaking out that it was emergency room time.  I was terrified of what that would cost us.  Fortunately he was able to massage it out, but I’ll feel much better when we have health insurance and medical emergencies aren’t also financial emergencies.

I have no doubt that I have had a much richer year, in terms of learning, variety of projects I’ve worked on, and especially family life than I would have had working for a company somewhere.  The scariest thing is the question “How long can I keep this up?”

I had previously played Culdcept on the PS2.  Culdcept (both games) is a quirky combination of Magic the Gathering and Monopoly.  You do laps around a board, play creatures to defend your properties, cast spells on your opponent, and invest in your properties in the hopes that your opponents will land there and pay up.  There is also a collectible card aspect to it.  It’s a great example of how to moosh two types of games together and come out with something new and really fun.  The PS2 version had some very light journey-quest type story.  It was all the game needed, and provided a nice framework for moving from level to level.

Then you get to Culdcept Saga.  All of a sudden there is this epic destiny for your character, the Gods created these cards for some higher purpose, something about the world ending and starting anew, etc etc.  In the meantime, your character is obsessed with this one woman who is a princess who betrays her family and then she joins the bad guys but maybe she doesn’t mean to…..

There is also an endless parade of “Bad Guys” whose motivations are to rule the world.   Of course, they want to be the ONLY ones ruling the world, so they wind up fighting each other as well as your own character.

This got me to thinking. Just WHY do so many bad guys, in all forms of media but particularly video games, want to rule the world?  Seriously, what advantages would this give them?  If anything it sounds like alot of work.

Now, I can imagine why good guys might want to rule the world.  After all, there are probably many wrongs they would want to address, social programs they might want to implement, and endangered animals they would want to save.  But what possible use could the villain have for this responsibility?  Do they just want the ego-stoking satisfaction of knowing that they are the masters of all?  Do they just plan on delegating all their actual work and laying about sprawling in their harem eating chocolates filled with run and the blood of virgins?  This seems like it would be a hard transition to make after the dedication and drive needed to take over the world.  I suspect these evil-doers would soon become bored with the sedentary life style and it wouldn’t be long before they were building rocket ships and trying to expand their control to other planets.

There is a point to my rambling, and its this: Can we please have some different bad-guy motivations?  Enough of this “taking over the world” business.  Maybe your bad guy has a terrible fear of penguins and wants to eliminate them from the world?  Maybe your bad guy and his friends have some odious habits that civilized society doesn’t approve of, and so they want to carve out a little place of their own — but don’t care who is in the way.  Maybe your bad guy has some strong beliefs that cause them to do bad things to certain people in the name of promoting their own cause?

Or how about at least having a strong motivation for taking over the world?  What exactly does the bad guy hope to gain?  What are his/her long term goals and aspirations?  Do they want to convert the world into a giant penal colony and sell it off to aliens who have overcrowded prisons?  Are they an alien themselves who needs to take over a world as a prerequisite for joining a fraternity back home?  Or maybe they do just want to save the whales and they don’t care who gets hurt while they try to take over the government for the purposes of making permanant changes to environmental laws.

I feel like the “Pinky and the Brain syndrome” is perpetuated by a common shortcut in game writing.  It is, let’s be honest, a little lazy.  I think that there is a good deal of room for exploring alternative motivations for video game villains.  The most interesting game stories I remember, the ones that stick in my mind, don’t feature anyone trying to take over the world.

Of course, if you want to be truly avant-garde, you could create a video game story with no villains at all….

But if all our games turn out digital, why paper prototype at all?  There are lots of good reasons for it:

• It’s cheap
• It’s fast
• It’s easy to iterate
• Anyone can do it (no programming required!)
• It can be a fun collaborative excercise
• It opens your creative synapses in a way that staring at a screen doesn’t

When I was at Telltale, I used paper prototyping for just about any “mini-game” type of puzzle I created.  Originally, I actually prototyped most things in Photoshop with clever uses of layers. (I would turn them on and off to represent different states of the puzzle). But I found that paper prototyping had some huge advantages.

First of all, when making things with paper, I was less attached to making things “pretty”.  We are used to seeing pretty things on a computer, and this can actually be a big hang-up to people like me who enjoy pretty things.  I would spend too much time trying to visually represent the puzzle in a clever way, fiddling with this filter or sorting out how to do something specific in Photoshop.  It could be a mental hang up for other people as well, for my “playtesters”.  Artists especially can take things on the computer screen way too literally and get stuck on how the prototype looked rather than whether they understood the puzzle.

Another advantage I found to making a prototype on paper is that I could pick it up and carry it all over the office.  I could place it in front of someone, tell them the rules, and then watch them try to solve it.  This was incredibly less disruptive to my playtesters than either having them come to my desk to try it or to sending them the files and asking them to open it on their own computer.  Even if they don’t have to leave their desks, asking someone to stop what is happening on their computer to put my prototype in front of  all their other windows feels like a hard switch of gears.  It’s a disruption, an intrusion, on what they were doing.  If however, they can just pause by turning from their screens for a moment to look at the paper version, it feels more like a break.  As a result, folks are much more amenable to helping you by playing the prototype.  I also could keep the prototype at my own desk and invite the office (via email) to come try it when they wanted a break.  When players showed up at my desk I didn’t have to disrupt what I was doing on my own computer and when the players left I could easily go back to what I was doing.

The most surprising discovery (at least to me) when I started making all my prototypes with paper was that it helped me think better.  There’s something about turning your back on a computer screen and making something with your hands that really opens up the creative synapses.  With crafts (funny enough) anything is possible.  Sometimes figuring out how to properly represent something in paper is a creative exercise all unto  itself, which in turn works and refreshes the creative parts of your brain.  Within the freedom of paper and the action of physical activity, new possibilities to the problems you are trying to solve can come tumbling like a waterfall.

Just about any system or puzzle can be represented on paper, with some pretty basic supplies.  But to elevate it to a rough and tumble art form of experimentation, I recommend the following tool kit:

Blank white Index Cards — I find lined ones to be hampering to my creative process

A pad of newsprint — Cheaper than printer paper, plus you won’t annoy your co-workers with a perpetually empty paper tray

Colored Markers — Colors are VITAL!  You will need different colors to differentiate between different players or characters, to draw UIs, and to make things clearer for your play-testers.

Scotch tape — Super useful

Some kind of counters — You can make these out of paper as needed, but it is nice to have something like poker chips or those little glass gaming beads around.  I have also used paper clips.

Some kind of little dudes — Helpful to represent locations of player characters, enemies, etc.  I always used my old “Muscle Men” but you can get little plastic army guys or farm animals from a drug store or five and dime.*  In a pinch, coins of various types can work.

Regular Post-Its — I could write a book called “101 uses for post-its in game design”.  Keep a big stack nearby.

Tiny Post-Its — Keep some of these around too.  They are very nice to have for certain things.

Mailer envelopes — Have a bunch of these to keep the individual prototype bits in so you don’t lose them all over your desk.  This is experience speaking.

Scissors — Buy a decent pair and then hide them at your desk.  Scissors are prone to accidental theivery.

This is sort of a minimal list.  Depending on what you are making, other things like glue-sticks, a good (scrap-booking) paper cutter, colored sharpies and many other things might become helpful.  I tend to haunt craft stores and office supply stores, grabbing anything that I wished I had had when I was making a previous prototype.  But you can also be extremely resourceful and frugal if you prefer.

You can make just about anything with some paper, a good pair of scissors, and colored markers.

Following are some very simple guidelines to making a paper prototype.  Remember the goal: to make something that adequately represents the puzzle or game  system to play-testers in a way that makes sense to them.

Guideline #1: Keep it quick!

Make something realtively quickly that is easy to adjust.  This way, you can iterate easily if you see some problems when play-testing.

Guideline #2: Make it Clear!

You will have to explain some things to the player, but the less you have to explain and the more they can infer from the prototype themselves, the happier and more engaged they will be.  Therefore, make sure the aspects of your prototype you want them to figure out are pretty clear.  If you can’t draw at all, and the player is going to interpret a set of pictures, go ahead and find some images through Google, adjust the size properly in Photoshop and then print and cut them out.  Write legibly. Utilize colors.  Find creative ways to represent the prototype as clearly as possible, making it as much like the digital experience as you can.

Guideline #3: Keep it fun!

Sure you could cut little circles out of paper to represent the bad guys, but your tester is going to respond much better to your protoype if you have a handful of plastic chickens instead.  This is a place where paper prototyping really can shine, and where it pays to be arts and crafty.  If it is fun to interact with the pieces you put in front of someone, they will be more interested in helping you test your system or puzzle.

I hope this introduction gets you intrigued and excited to try some paper prototyping.  You might be surprised at just how much fun and useful the medium of paper is.

*Although little cheap plastic dudes are amazingly hard to find in an actual TOY store, as I discovered when prepping for my improv game design workshop recently.

Back in the glory days of adventure games, there were basically two companies that were the genre.  LucasArts and Sierra On-Line.  And like anything bipartisan, there were two respective camps of followers:  LucasArts fans and Sierra fans.   While the games from the two companies had a lot in common, there are certain things that Adventure Game historians can easily point to that separate them.  The biggest, mechanics wise, was that in Sierra games your character could die, sometimes in very sudden and annoying ways.  In LucasArts games, you never died, but your interest could die as you wander around and around trying everything possible to get through the obscurely silly puzzle solution.  (To be fair, Sierra had its occasional weird and painful puzzles too).  Sierra games also tended to be more likely to include mini games to mix up the gameplay, while LucasArts games stayed straight on course with pure “find thing put thing in right place talk to guy for clue” adventure gameness.

But the biggest difference between the Sierra and LucasArts styles had more to do with tone and story than with gameplay.  Both companies were prone to put in silly jokes and plenty of puns.  But while LucasArts games, for the most part, seemed to have been written by people with the random senses of humor of sophomoric 9 – 11 year old boys, most Sierra games felt  more satisfying in terms of goals, story, and theme immersion.  In other words, the story wasn’t just about the jokes.

I think this is why I always gravitated towards the Sierra camp.  In fact, two of my favorite games of all time were the Sierra adventure/RPGs Quest for Glory: So you want to be a hero, and its sequel: Quest for Glory: Trial by Fire.  I also was a huge fan of Gabriel Knight, and there were several other games that I always wanted to play but just never got to: The Laura Bow mystery games, Quest for Camelot and Robin Hood: Quest of the Long Bow were all on Christmas lists of the past along with my Cobra Raven.

Coincidentally (or not) the above mentioned games were all designed or co-designed by women.  I don’t know what the difference was between Sierra and LucasArts as companies back in those days, but Sierra employed several female game designers.  LucasArts games were mostly (with apologies to former co-workers and their friends) written and designed by guys with the random senses of humor of sophomoric 9-11 year old boys.  Sierra also promoted its designers by putting their pictures on the back of the game boxes, and seeing those women there was very inspiring to me as a young person.

Roberta Williams
I have a strong memory of picking up a King’s Quest box at Electronic Boutique in Stonestown shopping center and seeing Roberta Williams on the back of the box.  I thought she was a lot younger than she really was and I said to my mom “Look!  This kid made this game!”  My mom informed me that she was actually an adult but I was still impressed.  I felt a surge of ambition and maybe something like jealousy.  But it definitely was a sense that I could do this too.

Roberta Williams designed an amazing 20 games while at Sierra.  She was the brain behind the King’s Quesst series and the Laura Bow mysteries.  She was a co-founder of the company.  Her games always had a lot of heart, and many of them featured a female protagonist (still unusual at this time).

Lori Cole
Lori Ann Cole, along with her husband Corey Cole were the designers and writers of some of the best games ever made — the Quest for Glory series.   I remember falling in love with the first Quest for Glory game long before I ever played it.  It was called Hero’s Quest: So you want to be  Hero (before the game series was forced to change its name).  I remember looking at the box and WANTING it.  When it appeared under the Christmas tree that Christmas, I was ecstatic.  This was the game that caused my sister and I to literally fight each other to get up the stairs of our house so we could claim the computer first.  Even to this day, Quest for Glory with its unique hybrid RPG/adventure game mechanics whets my appetite for design.  When people ask me what my “dream game to make” might be, my answer always starts out as “Something like Quest for Glory….”

Jane Jensen
Jane Jensen, in addition to writing work  on a handful of Sierra games,  was the design and writing brains behind the Gabriel Knight games. Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Father was an awesome game.  It had a lovely dark voodoo theme and a rich mystery to solve.  The writing was stellar.  I never got to pick up the other two in the series but always looked at them fondly in the stores.  Jane Jensen is still making games, and designed the really intriguing BeTrapped! Which is a nifty cross between an adventure game mystery and mine-sweeper.  She has a new game, Gray Matter, coming out later this year.

Christy Marx
Christy Marx was the writer and designer of Quest for Camelot and Robin Hood: Quest of the Long Bow.  These were two games I salivated over but sadly never got to play. I was a subscriber to the Sierra magazine/newsletter and read with excitement about both of these games.  I especially loved the inclusion of narrative-appropriate mini-games and Nine Men’s Morris in the Robin Hood game.  Christy is an active freelance writer.  She worked on the first Telltale CSI game, as a matter of fact, and continues to inspire women in game development through her contributions to the IGDA’s women in games mailing list.

There is no doubt to me that all these women served as inspiration to me on my path to become a game designer, and have deeply informed my design sensibilities.  And so, on this post-Ada Lovelace day, I just want to say thank you to all of them.

Personally, I had a really awesome and productive GDC.  I went to  a couple talks about money.  I talked to all my favorite awesome advice people.  I met many very cool new folks, and reconnected  with some people I haven’t seen for awhile.   Some very cool potential businessy things came out of it.  None of which I’m ready to talk about until I get a better sense of what is actually going to happen.  So let’s move on.

One thing I found really intriguing about this year’s conference was the diverse international presence.  At least on the Expo floor.  There were booths from all kinds of countries, telling you why you should start a studio in the Netherlands, attend a conference in Dubai, or relocate to Canada.  Especially Canada.  Our Northern neighbors took up the whole left-most row of the floor.  They demoed games and talked about how awesome Canada was for developers.  They even brought along their Olympic Mascots.  Some neat projects were on display.  There was a great Facebook arcadey Pirate game, and a hillariously Candadian (and very fun) curling  game for the Wii (I’ll try to dig up the links for these later).  One of the neatest and most ambitious looking however was a game called BotColony from a company called Northside.  Check out this demo video to get an idea of what this natural language, AI driven adventure game is capable of.

I cannot write a post-GDC post without mention of my good buddy Chaim Gingold’s talk, The Human Play Machine.  It was amazing and very inspiring.  I only took this very short video clip because I wanted to pay attention to the talk and not taping.  Chaim discussed the ways in which we, as human play machines, are wired and built for play and what this means to people who make things for humans to play with.  It was philosophical but very salient and directly  applicable to my life as a game developer.  My favorite part of the talk however was the last five to ten minutes which was Chaim’s addendum of sorts.  In it he turned his attention to the question: Why do we do this?  Why do we make make games at all?  Is there good in what we do?  Chaim had a couple answers to this question but here’s my favorite: Science has shown us that when we are at play, its one of the few times when our brains truly feel joyful.  Therefore, if all we are doing by giving people fun and engaging things to play with is to “improve the global happiness quotient”, then we are providing the world with an incalculably positive service.  I left this talk feeling awesome.  Thanks Chaim!

You can see his slides and notes here.

Well that’s it for this year’s GDC wrap up.  See you again next year!  (Hopefully before that though…)