Entries Tagged 'Practical information' ↓

Just now tens of thousands of highly educated and commercially savvy people are losing their jobs in the financial sector and are looking for a job. (Some say they cannot be too clever because of the mess they got us all into). There are very few jobs going for them anywhere in the economy, everywhere is hurting. Except for gaming, which is booming.

So here are some little tips and hints to help them with their future careers.

1. The game industry is about entertainment, it is a good idea to remember this as even some who work in the industry seem to have forgotten.
2. Management ability and management structures are often little evolved from lemonade stands. You will be shocked when you see just how bad it can be. And how many people there are in organisations who are not needed.
3. Marketing is mostly very poor, by rote with little innovation and excitement. They usually just burn through the budget.
4. Development is incredibly inefficient. Every studio continually re-invents the wheel. Too much time is spent on technology and too little on creativity. It is as if the movie industry had to design and build new cameras for every movie they make.
5. Big budget console games mostly lose money. It is the occasional hit that pays for the rest. Maybe 7 out of ten are losers.  And these days the budgets are not dissimilar to the movie industry.
6. The big growth areas of iPhone, XNA/XLA, Flash etc are crowded because of low barriers to entry. This crowding can often lead to low quality and poor marketing. So it is obvious how to differentiate your offering.
7. High street game retail is dying, do not go there. Unless what you are doing is online you will have a very bleak future.
8. MMORPG games are all the fashion. The rate of failiure is even higher than for boxed console games. And to create one vaguely competetive game costs a lot more than making a Hollywood blockbuster.
9. The industry is incredibly fickle and fashionable. Guitar games are all the rage this week. They weren’t two years ago and they won’t be in two year’s time. Which is fine till you remember that two years is about how long it takes to develop a mainstream game.
10. No matter how good and clever and hard working you are piracy can just suddenly appear and wipe you out. This has happened many times and will happen many more times.
11. The route to success is product quality and looking after your customers. This has been proven repeatedly yet most in the industry still ignore the lesson.
12. Here are a big pile of really good industry resources. With these you should have no problem getting up to speed.

Don’t be put off. If anything be encouraged. If the industry is booming now, imagine how it would be with an influx of competent talent.

The video game industry tends to be pretty interweb literate so, with the popularity of social networking, there is bound to be a fair bit of this going on.

Facebook is the mother of all social networks with more members than the population of the planet. Because it is Balkanised geographically it is difficult to search thoroughly. However there are some interesting groups.

• PC and Video Game Industry Professionals. 5,339 members. It features:
  • Articles, white papers and research
  • Links to helpful websites/books/community resources
  • Websites and companies of note
  • Features and interviews
  • Job listings
  • Message boards
  • Career-building tips
  • Videos, podcasts and more
• The International Game Developers Association (IGDA). 6,141 members. “The IGDA is a non-profit professional society that is committed to advancing the careers and enhancing the lives of game developers by connecting members with their peers, promoting professional development, and advocating on issues that affect the developer community.”
• Game Development. 1,751 members. “This is a group dedicated to the art of video game development. We encourage discussion of views on the industry and we are aiming to provide support for any questions people may have.”
• Video Game Developers. 1,318 members. “A video game developer is a software developer (a business or an individual) that creates video games. A developer may specialize in a certain video game system, such as the Microsoft Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, or the Sony PlayStation 3, or may develop for a variety of systems, including PCs.”
• UK Games Industry Massive. 1,239 members. “The folks of the very fine UK games industry.”
• GameDev and friends. 307 members. “A group for everyone who’s interested in developing video games and exploring the relevant technologies.”
• People who have had their souls broken working in the games industry. 515 members. “For people who have seen one too many sunrises, slept under one too many desks, eaten one too many takeout pizzas, been in one too many last-minute-design-change meetings, faced down one too many retarded publisher decisions, had their bonuses mysteriously vanish one too many times, had one too many WNF bugs bounced back to them… all in the name of a 6/10 review in Edge and bargain-bucket status two weeks after launch… this is for you.”
• Indie Game Developers. 361 members. “Independent Game Developers group for small companies and individuals designing and publishing their own games. Come join us and support and independent game community- get help creating and marketing.”
• Ex-Codies. 182 members. “A place for the haunted souls who were once a cog in the machine we know as Codemasters.”
• Bruceongames.19 members!. For industry professionals who read this blog. Please join.

Linkedin is social networking for professionals from all sorts of businesses. If you work in the games industry please link to me there. I am a member of four game industry groups on Linkedin.

• Electronic Entertainment Industry Network. 2,933 members.
• Game Developers. 11,696 members.
• Uk Games Developers. 516 members.
• Video Gaming Industry Executives. 2,925 members.

So there we have it. If you work in the industry and want to relate to other like minded souls there are plenty of options. And one obvious big daddy, Game Developers on Linkedin.

So I put my money where my mouth is and spent some of my own hard earned money buying a netbook. I put a lot of research into this, reading reviews, blogs, forums etc to work out which brand and which model best suited my needs. I chose the Acer Aspire One. In fact at the end of the day it looked like by far the best choice for me. So I bought it from Amazon at a good price and after a couple of working days it arrived, even at this busy time of year.

I had tried previously to use a notebook and bought myself a top end Dell. And it never got used. It is still gathering dust somewhere. It was just too big and unwieldy for the amount of utility it afforded me. The fact that I am writing this article on the Aspire means that it has already been used more than the Dell was. The size is absolutely perfect, any smaller and the keyboard would become a pain, any bigger and it would lose its fantastic portability.

When buying these things selecting Windows XP adds about £50 more to the price than using Linux. But for my needs XP is still the best operating system in the world, so I had to bite this bullet. And having specified XP it made sense to have a hard drive. So now I have this small 1Kg device that has similar power to my desktop machine and puts the sum of all human knowledge in my hand anywhere I go. Remarkable.

The Aspire came with minimum documentation, which is admirable. Looking for a wireless connection from my house it found a total of 8 of my neighbours’ setups, compared with a desktop PC with an aerial on the back which could only find 3. The first thing I did was to remove Exploder and replace it with Firefox 3. Next I will have to remove McAfee, which is a pain of pop up madness, and replace it with AVG Free.

Now I can travel the world and run my online empire exactly as if I was at home, so long as I can find a hotspot. So the next move will be a 3G telephone dongle to use anywhere in the UK, especially on trains. These are free with a 12 to 15 month account which costs £10 to £15 per month for all the capacity you are going to need. In fact some companies are giving the netbook itself away for free when you take out an airtime contract, just like they do with mobile phones. All I still need is the for the Logitech wireless optical mouse, on order from Amazon, to be delivered and I will be in clover.

Regular readers of my articles will be very familiar with gaming in virtual worlds, who the players are and what the issues are. So it is hardly surprising that next week I will be at the Virtual Worlds Forum in London where many of the key players in the industry worldwide will be speaking on most of theses issues.

Mel Guymon will be there from Google. He is Head of 3D Operations and Product Manager for Lively and is giving the opening keynote talk. It is excellent that he is out and about explaining Lively because with Google’s weak marketing this must be one of the most misunderstood products out there.

Geoff Iddison from Jagex is giving a talk on day two titled “Choosing the right business model-experiences in adapting a business to embrace technology”. He will be coming to the forum on a high as the Guinness Book of Records has just accepted RuneScape as the world’s largest free MMORPG.

Timo Soininen from Sulake Corporation will be presenting a case study “Habbo-the continuously evolving teen virtual world”. Which, with their experience, should contain many gems of wisdom.

There is an interesting panel discussion on “Harnessing social networks, virtual worlds and MMOs to create community”. With, amongst others, Raph Coster from Metaplace. He then goes into the closing plenary discussion with, amongst others, Ginsu Yoon from Linden Lab.

So far I have just mentioned companies that have featured in articles here. Other speakers are from so many of the world’s leading players. The BBC, Electronic Arts, Endemol, NC Soft, Walt Disney and Dizzywood amongst others.

The congress is over two days, the 6th and 7th of October and is pretty much essential for anyone with any management responsibility in this space. If you see me there don’t be shy, please come over and have a chat.

Everyone knows that this is Microsoft Windows Solitaire, installed on hundreds of millions of PCs and being played by hundreds of thousands of office workers and airline passengers right now to relieve the boredom. Intended originally by Microsoft to humanise the Windows interface, literally “to soothe people intimidated by the operating system”, it grew in importance as a training tool for the then unfamiliar WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointer) way of doing things that today we take for granted. 

There are now three different Solitaire versions installed with Windows. In fact they are the first, second and third most popular games in the world in their own right! In order of current popularity they are Spider, Klondike and Free Cell. Many major corporations now de-instal these games, so great is the productivity loss attributed to employees addicted to playing them instead of working.

Spider is a two deck version of the game and is a relative newcomer to Windows, first coming with the Plus pack for Windows 98 and now with Vista, ME and XP. (Unsuprisingly the Vista version has several major bugs.) Played with real cards it was, famously, the favourite of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Klondike (the original and most famous Windows version) was developed in 1988 by then intern Wes Cherry, who famously received no financial benefit from his work, half the card backs were designed by his then girlfriend Leslie Kooy. The card deck itself was designed by Macintosh pioneer Susan Kare. It was release as part of Windows 3.0 in 1990.

Freecell as a game is much easier to complete. It was invented in the 1960s by a then 10 year old Paul Alfille, in 1978 he had coded it on to a mainframe. And then it went viral. Alfille sold the rights to Freecell to the University of Illinois, but Microsoft never paid the university any royalties. It was first included with Win32s, then with Microsoft Entertainment Pack Volume 2 and then the Best Of Microsoft Entertainment Pack before it was made a part of Windows 95 and has been a fixture in Windows ever since.

So Microsoft never paid a cent for the IP rights to Freecell, Spider has no IP rights to buy and they acquired the code for Klondike for free. It is amazing that the most played game in the world has this history. Especially compared to the many millions that game publishers still pay for celebrity and film rights to brighten up otherwise lacklustre games.

And now there is a gold rush of companies putting solitaire on the latest darling of game publishing, the Apple iPhone. Ambrosia Software’s Mondo Solitaire, Acid Solitaire from Red Mercury, Gameloft Platinum Solitaire, Maverick Software Yulan Mahjong Solitaire and four more. Yes, the Apple App Store is launching with no fewer than eight different publisher’s take on solitaire, with doubtlessly many more to come. And it is hardly surprising that so many people have had the same good idea at the same time. It is the world’s most played game.

So now it is fixed and none of the scans can find any more nasties. The computer is working better than it has for ages as the whole process fixed a lot more issues than just the Virtumonde. But I am not convinced, all these scanners are only as good as their databases, which inevitably lag behind the real world.

So why don’t you try it on your computer? Run all four scans and see what you find. You will quite possibly be in for a nasty surprise. And always update the scanner database before using it, without the latest definitions you are wasting your time.

If you work in the video game industry please feel free to connect with me on Linkedin. I am an OpenLink networker and welcome all such connections. You can find my Linkedin profile here.