2011-06-13: We’ve built a website with the current rules and progress updates at So Play We All.

Our Rules

1. “Fuck it, we’ll do it live.” Games are live as currently developed, even if they suck, starting from “but it’s just a login screen”. Develop on master, develop on prod box if you have to, but don’t hold any code back.
2. Each week we’ll collectively choose how many hours to spend on our games and a non-mandatory topic. Anyone who doesn’t spend the time (or cheats and spends more) funds the other games by giving a $20 gift card to each other player for game-related expenses (eg. ThemeForest, Linode, AdWords). If you finish early, you rock. Boast a little bit and make the others bow to your awesomeness. (Exception for suiting up: if you have to wear a suit to a funeral, a close family wedding, or a court date, you are allowed to miss that week. No other exceptions, not even dismemberment.)
3. Deadline is Wednesday at noon GMT to deploy code and publish a blog post, schedule it to make it happen.
4. A BBGameZone forum poll judges who won that week, 24h window.
5. By Saturday noon GMT, write a blog post to respond to others’ updates, talk smack, enjoy victory, critique game design, suggest improvements, etc.
6. Not just OK but encourage to find or buy assets: art, themes, libraries, modules. You can reuse your own pet library as long as it has been released publicly before that week, but outsourcing code is forbidden.
7. Whoever reaches $10k in profit first wins the contest. But whoever turns their game into a full-time job wins all the bragging rights.
8. Rules can change by unanimous acclaim.

So say we all. So play we all.

Week 0

We’ve already gotten under way, the goal for our first week was to pick a domain name, set up a blog, and write a blog post describing out game. Here’s my blog post about Oaqn, a game about trading. Please vote for it on bbgz if you’re on the forums.

And here’s Luke’s post and Jim’s post about their games.

Most of the questions are intended to start interesting conversations about the workplace, though a few (“Which source control do you use?”) do have wrong answers (“None.”) that end an interview as quickly as a candidate being unable to solve FizzBuzz.

Job

• What is your typical day like?
• What are the normal work hours?
• What is the office environment like? Can I see it?
• What is the job title?
• What is the employee review process?
• What benefits? (medical, dental, vision, 401k, transit, vacation, bonuses)
• How is the team at deadlines?
• Is there continuous learning?

Company

• Who are your clients?
• What makes the company special?
• How do you see the company growing?
• What are the NDA/NCAs?
• How long have employees been here?

Coding

• What is the codebase like? Can I see it?
• What tools do you use?
• Which source control do you use?
• Is your build and deployment process automated?
• How often do you build or deploy?
• What testing (automated + Q&A) do you have in place?
• What bug database do you use?
• Is your code great or good enough?
• Do you release open source code?

Manager

• What’s your personal management style?
• What books have influenced you the most?
• What technologies do you plan to use?
• Do you have any concerns about my application?
• Do you think I would be a good match for this position?

Do you have any questions you always ask?

That’s how the conversation started: no hello, no context, right to the heart of the matter. I love it when fellow geeks IM me.

My friend has a lot of experience in software and tabletop games, but has stayed away from the Privacy Destroyer. From the outside, online games didn’t seem to make any sort of sense – if it’s one free click to add a game to a social profile, how do you sell your game? How do you make any money at all?

The answer is that there’s a bit of advertising and merchandising, but by far the bulk of the profit is in virtual currencies. Pay $10, get 75 gold coins you can spend in-game on items, upgrades, downtime removal, etc.

It’s successful because it allows for perfect market segmentation. Some of your customers are willing to pay much more for your product than others, whether you price low or high you’ll lose some potential profit. Losing potential profit is deeply painful to entrepreneurs, so you sell a copy of the product at the low price and another at the high — and to keep it from looking silly, you differentiate them by calling one “premium”, or limiting quantities of one, or selling it in a bargain bin after six weeks, or selling in different venues (soda machine vs. grocery store); anything that lets you charge multiple prices with a straight face.

If you do this wrong, people will mock you mercilessly and the nerds will point out you’re really selling only one product. (But you won’t notice because you’ll be busy trucking your wheelbarrows of cash down to the bank.)

This is so powerful that Facebook games (and a growing number of other games with low distribution costs) are “free to play” (f2p) or “freemium”. You can play as long as you like for free and buy virtual currency if and when you see something interesting.

Virtual currencies allow for perfect segmentation. If Alice thinks your game is worth $5, that’s what you’ll get from her. If Bob thinks it’s worth $5,000, you’ll get it from him for the exact same game. I’m not exaggerating; last week a payment processor shared data on their top five spenders:

From a traditional gaming perspective, Facebook games look like the purest kind of bubble, a lunatic asylum dosed with crystal meth. Don’t charge for your game? Don’t sell expansions? Get everyone to bother their friends? Offer gold coins for taking surveys?

It’s not insane, low distribution costs and efficient capturing revenue so efficiently means a fundamentally different business model. And a great environment for making games.

Name didn’t warn any customers this was coming and didn’t email customers about it, which is funny because they’ll send a half-dozen warnings if a single domain name nears the end of its registration. They know very well the effectiveness of sending emails, so instead they made a brief blog post (who knew they even had a blog?) to announce the price hike as quietly as possible. The post doesn’t mention the new price is $8/year (laughably saying “While some registrars charge as much as eight or nine dollars per domain for this service”) and falsely claims pre-existing domains will continue to receive free privacy protection (the control panel shows that this will expire when the domain is up for reregistration). Unsurprisingly, the comments have filled up with comments from angry, shocked customers and Name is only responding to the few people who had billing problems with the related pricing promotions.

I’ve got around a hundred domains registered, mostly because I handle domain registrations whenever I give a friend hosting. It’s worth the $800 per year to take a few minutes this morning to survey competitors and maybe get better customer service (besides this unpleasant surprise, I’ve never seen Name respond to a support request in less than 36h).

In the table below, domain cost is the highest cost I could find on the site for a .com, I’m not interested in dancing around promotions and “restrictions may apply” loss leaders. The “upselling” column is whether I was disgusted or confused by the amount of upselling of related domains and products during the registration process. Survey was taken on 2010-05-03 and prices ending in .95 or .99 were rounded up.

I didn’t include Fabulous because it has great prices but is primarily (only?) for domain parking and requires customers to have >750 domains. I didn’t include GoDaddy because I don’t like their support of torture and their habit of deactivating/deleting/holding hostage domains in response to any outside complaints.

If you’re not familiar with domain names, they’re a perfect commodity. Except for customer support issues (easy bulk management, quick responses to questions, downtime), every .com domain is exactly the same and costs the company the same $6.86 to register with Verisign, the .com registry.

Anyone have a registrar I should add to the list? Any stories, good or bad, about managing a lot of domains at any of these?

(I chose The 4-Hour Work Week and Hacker News because they’re two very popular resources, but there’s dozens I could’ve chosen.)

I read quickly, I’m endlessly curious, and I have a completionist streak. I wish this formula worked, that somehow the process of absorbing and evaluating lots of different sources of information would make a successful business appear. I wish it more than you do. Last year I read scores of business books and blogs, screened dozens of hours of podcasts and videos.

These things contribute to business success, but there’s a point of diminishing returns that’s much nearer than I’d like to think. I’m glad I’ve read about prioritizing, delegating, and goal-setting, but The 4-Hour Work Week and No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs are 90% the same material dressed in different writing styles.

Reading about a topic I already know something of is seductive. It’s easier to connect with other concepts in my head, I get the satisfaction of judging whether the author is proficient, I’ll cross another book off the list faster. And it’s sure as hell easier than fishing another case out of the issue tracker to fix a bug, add a feature, follow up with a contact.

The equation feels true but is a lie. It doesn’t much make my work better to keep reading instead of building. So in 2010 I’m building more and considering this business ‘research’ as the entertainment is is. We’ll see how it goes.

Game designer and thoughtful critic Ernest Adams (his Designer’s Notebook column at Gamasutra is good reading) mused about an F2P developer’s presentation:

Zhan Ye explained in his lecture that in F2P game design, every feature must be measured by two metrics: is it fun, and does it make money? The designer is no longer free to concentrate purely on creating a fun game; the designer must be a businessperson. [...] The F2P business model seems a bit weird to me — it distorts what I think of as the designer’s main role — but it’s not wrong in and of itself, just different.

This reminded me a lot of a complaint from a graphic designer leaving Google a few years ago:

Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. I had a recent debate over whether a border should be 3, 4 or 5 pixels wide, and was asked to prove my case. I can’t operate in an environment like that. I’ve grown tired of debating such minuscule design decisions.

The industrial revolution – and especially the concept of scientific management – replaced the concept of craftsmanship with the efficiency of repeatable production. You can’t manufacture the creative work of ad copy, game design, or graphic design, but metrics allow businesses to know with industrial precision what works and doesn’t.

Every formerly creative decision is now an opportunity to be unambiguously wrong. Efficiency replaces autonomy.

Where it used to be possible to design things for design’s sake to meet a designer’s personal standards for quality, it’s increasingly easy for businesses to analyze the effects of even very small aspects of those designs. The designer is used to relying on personal taste, gut instinct, or professional standards to deal with the thousand small questions that crop up in every design, and it feels good to intuitively know the right answers.

The first thing everyone writes about metrics (like A/B tests) is that you’re going to be surprised how often your intuition is wrong, even on questions that seem obvious and easy to answer. The new (or newly accessible) metrics are immensely frustrating to designers for three reasons:

1. Analytics tools are one more damn thing to learn
2. that often reveal experience to only be assumption
3. and transform personal decisions into business decisions.

The valid argument I see against the intrusion of metrics is that they’re short-sighted, eg. a green button may increase sales 8% now but introduces an inconsistency in overall site theme that won’t be measured in the future. That’s hard to make when the web’s cheap distribution can give you millions of new opportunities for revenue in a matter of a few days or hours — or allow you to earn more than you thought off the very few you do have.

Designers are going to have to live with metrics trumping their professional experience and personal taste, at least whenever they work for a boss or investor. it’s not that this is a new awful trend, it’s that capitalism is redefining what it means to do design. The pursuit of profit isn’t strangling creativity, it’s changing what it means to be creative from achieving a singular artistic vision to experimenting and improving iteratively.

As thanks, I’m giving away a $40 Amazon Gift Card to one randomly-selected participant. The drawing is open until October 16, 2009 or until 500 responses have been collected.

I’m exploring the design of a potential related product and trying to learn more about people’s experiences with backchannels. I’ll write a follow-up blog post when I have some results to share and determine whether or not I’ll be building a product.

And please, please: if you have a moment, share the link to this blog post with anyone you know who might be interested in taking the survey. I would really appreciate help in getting a lot of responses.

One of the things I like about programming is that it’s as difficult as I can make it. Programming can be tedious sometimes: filling in values for a config file, looping over another array to edit its values, schlepping data from raw input to database.

But anything that can be done by rote can be done automatically, any shared logic can be drawn up into higher-level abstractions, any duplicated values can be generated from a canonical reference. I can slack, or I can move up through abstractions so I’m not wasting my time writing filler code again and again. Software development should be as difficult as possible. If I’m not pushing my limits I’m not writing the best code I can.

I’m learning that running a business is a lot like programming in this way; maybe it’s even a level above the software development. Instead of writing code I can hire people to write code to my spec. Software development becomes a meta-game, instead of writing code to loop over some data or execute a database query to update a set of rows or use an ORM to mass-update a gaggle of objects, I’m instructing a person to do all of those things. It’s not as deterministic, but the parser is a lot more flexible.

Of course, this clashes with my programmer’s impulse to write every line of code in every library used by every project for myself. I’ve learned to compromise in my programming: not every library API matches my mental model, not every data structure fits my performance needs, not every line of code I write will be bug free. Because I sometimes revise code to improve it multiple times I know that quality isn’t binary, it’s a range. If outsourcing development means I end up with lower-quality code (which is mostly means its not written in my personal coding style), that’s OK as long as I’m advancing my business goals rather than coding for code’s sake.

I love software development, but it’s turning out to be a smaller part of this business every time I step back and evaluate my progress. As long as I don’t turn into a full-time manager, I think I’m OK with that.

I’m not as good at managing as developing, so it’s easy to fall back into developing it myself every time I want to get something done. But that doesn’t work. I need to keep the job difficult to succeed. I need to get as much done as quickly as possible to reach my goals, and I’m not going to do that if I just do what’s easy.

This is, in a way, the point of the excellent E-Myth Revisited. I read it a few years ago, but it’s one of those books that cause me to sit up every few months and realize that I’m re-discovering things it’s already explained and expounded on.

I built a site to read mailing list archives because of the list MUD-dev. It’s a high-quality, all-signal discussion of online game developers. The authors are some of the creators of the current crop of massively multiplayer virtual worlds, and the archive collects their wisdom.

I really wanted to read through the archive, but I wasn’t happy with the other presentations I’ve seen of it. The basic unit of other archives is the message: a page contains a message and links to its parent and replies, you can click between them. On ListLibrary.net, the atom is the thread. When messages are short and quote each other, it’s easier to skim and or read the entire conversation than on other sites or in mail clients that only show a message at a time.

The site uses JavaScript to allow keyboard navigation: j/k to move between messages, q to toggle the display of quotes, and n/p to move between threads. This is the first graphic design I’ve created that I’m pleased with, but my goal was to strip away as much as possible so the content dominates. I rethought a lot of the standard presentation of archives. For instance, most present threads like:

As mentioned yesterday, the ListLibrary.net display is:

The difference is stark: instead of dominating the display with the repeated subject, the subject is highlighted once and the authors and structure of replies are the focus. It’s easy to see when conversation happened or pick out messages by particularly interesting authors or number of replies. The screenshot doesn’t show it, but hovering over my thread list shows a subtle vertical line to make it easy to pick out sibling responses.

So far I’ve only loaded a few lists I had handy archives of (about 1.3 million messages): mud-dev, its successor mud-dev2, some Ruby lists, some local Chicago programming group lists, and theinfo.org lists. I think I may also have the largest contiguous archive of the Linux kernel mailing list, a very busy mailing list that’s been an excellent stress test during development. I’ve found a few dozen mailing lists of other open source projects I’d like to archive as well, so the site will continue to grow.

Of all my projects, ListLibrary.net has the least potential to earn money, but its goal is to maintain a public resource. Hosting a few gigs of text is cheap. The site will display text ads on the first page of a visit from a search engine to offset the expense, and I’ll explore other options if it becomes a serious drain.

I’m sad to be leaving the Post, it’s been a great experience to work on the news and I’ve had some amazing coworkers. I even had firsthand proof of the hitherto-mythical “good boss”. And the work goes on, they’re looking to hire two more to work on the team I left (mail me for details if you’re curious).

But I’m excited about the future: tomorrow morning I head back to Chicago for a while, and on Monday I’m working full-time on my mailing list archive project.

There’s a lot to that high-level description, so let me unpack it one piece at a time:

web-based

You play in your browser, no plugins or downloads. This opens the game up to the widest possible audience, but imposes a lot of restrictions: no fancy UI, no 3D graphics, limited animation. So the game must be more cerebral than action-oriented, and a turn-based game is a natural fit.

5-20 minutes per day

In a day’s typical session, you’ll issue commands in ongoing operations, give base construction orders, and check the mail and forums for news from your allies. It will fit into your life rather than taking hours to play, though if you particularly enjoy it you could spend more time.

roster of secret agents

You’ll begin with a small team of two or three agents under your command. Agents aren’t like characters in an RPG, they don’t “level up” or have innate skills — what you choose to equip them with determines what abilities they’ll have available for use in…

operations

These are the heart of the game: equip and deploy your agents with and against other players. Make tactical choices and know the mind of your opponent to succeed. Turns are simultaneous, so you make your move anytime during the day and all the action occurs when everyone’s done so.

bases

Base construction works in real-time: you give the command to expand the barracks and construction will finish in a few real-life hours or days. The facilities you construct will let you collect and store resources, produce equipment for your agents, and reach out into the world.

online world

The operations you undertake will influence the world that all players (who speak your language) share.

friends

Form alliances with your coworkers or fellow students, or with players from halfway around the world. You’ll work together on both operations and bases.

hundreds of thousands of players

Typically web games end up sharding to cope with the volume of players. By careful game and system design, I think I can build a single vibrant world split only by language.

My next game post will be about my goal in designing a game about (of all things) commanding a secret agency. Also, I’ve avoided cluttering this with references to the all the games I was influenced or inspired by and will be posting about the most important half-dozen.

And, yes, I badly need to come up with a name for this game.

What I plan:

Performance Improvements

Despite what I did in November, some parts are still laggy; on the Internet if it isn’t instant, it’s slow. I’m aware of FireRuns Manage and NewRelic’s RPM for production performance monitoring. I’ll almost certainly end up with Manage (30-day trial) because RPM’s trial (30 minutes of data, useless for a small/young/low-traffic site) is so weak, but I’d really appreciate comments if anyone knows of other good tools.

News Aggregation

There are a lot of tabletop gaming/board game/RPG blogs and hand-edited news sites, and I think NearbyGamers would do well to aggregate those similar to Reddit/Digg. It’d bring gamers back to the site more regularly (rather than the common ‘signup, leave for a few months until someone new messages you’) and drive discussion, which is the best way to meet folks.

Groups

One of the biggest uses of the discussion forum is folks trying to organize gaming groups. Now that I’ve seen this happen a few times, I can build proper support for groups: a marker on the map, a dedicated forum per group, and advertising open slots for gamers, to start. Then there’s the next obvious feature for them:

Events

With or without a group, it should be possible to display upcoming events on the maps. List date and time, attendance information, link to a homepage if one exists, maybe have a dedicated forum.

Stores

It would also be good to list gaming stores on the map, which are oddly often difficult to find. This especially relates to the previous; I’d love to see what events my local stores have on their calendars. I also think gaming stores are nicer for browsing than websites, I’ve found so many interesting random games at stores that I wouldn’t have glanced at online. I’d like NearbyGamers to help stores stay in business and grow because they incubate local gaming communities.

After I finish with the small projects, I think these features will probably take me a solid month to implement. NearbyGamers is developing a regular community, and I have a responsibility to help it thrive. What I’ll do afterwards is its own couple hundred words for tomorrow.

Next: The Startup Project That Lacks Even a Working Title

I have three smallish website projects I plan to finish in this time. They’re in various stages of completion now.

The first is a mailing list archive. I’ve been tinkering with it on and off for about 18 months, and it’s the closest to a finished state. I really enjoy reading mailing lists, but haven’t been impressed with any of the sites out there. Often each message is its own page and threads are broken up. So I’ve done a lot of work on threading above and beyond the basic In-Reply-To and Re: matching, and the site is designed to show a thread per-page with lots of keyboard controls to make it easy to skim. Depending on free time this weekend, I may actually launch this before I leave town.

Second is a site cataloging Ruby gems. When I was searching out Rails forums I realized there’s a related problem in finding libraries that I could address. I’ve done the work to collect basic info on gems, it remains to collect news and blog posts and combine it into a nice presentation.

The last small project is my RailsRumble project (which I didn’t finish): a site for collaboratively producing transcripts of conference presentations. I’ve let this one simmer in the back of my mind in the four months since that failure and I’ve given it a better name and planned which features to finish, redesign, or drop. It needs a few days of solid development, a graphic design, and some seed content.

I plan to finish and launch these three projects by the end of March, and I’ll post more as I work on them.

The commonality in these three projects is that once I’ve launched them they require minimal ongoing attention from me and can grow at their own paces. I’m doing them first because small and well-defined projects fit well with the interrupted and distracted time I’ll have. I’d also want to make sure I start out with some successes.

Next posts: NearbyGamers and The Big Project That I Really Need To Name Already.

I wasn’t exaggerating when I called the Post my best job. The work is rewarding and my coworkers are excellent. There’s interesting projects in progress or starting soon, but I have to leave. I have projects I need to build because I can’t stop wanting to put my hands on them, I want to earn the rewards of taking my own risks.

There are always going to be good reasons not to work just for myself: personal difficulty, family problems, moving, good work, wanting a bit more savings or surety. Well, the clouds will never part and no voice will ever boom forth that now is the right time. There is no right time, there is only how I choose to spend my time.

I’ll post more in the next few weeks about what I’ll be working on. Please stick around.

But the playing field has gone from this:

to this:

It’s far from level, but the big change is that it’s linear. A linear playing field is great for the little guy. Things are still tilted in favor of the big rich guy as they always are in capitalism, but linear gives the little guy a fighting chance to claw their way up the slope if they have the grit for it.

Some people, when asked to jump, ask “How high?” The VC says “Dance!” and they say “What style?”

VCs want their startups to take huge risks in growing fast because their own risk is spread across a large portfolio of companies: it’s fine if most crash and burn as long as a few succeed huge. If you are an individual startup, this strategy sucks. You don’t have a partnership when your goals are in opposition; at best you have a boss and a job. At worst, the VC is an organ grinder and you’re the monkey.

A few months ago I bought from Amazon Merchants for the first time, getting three things from three different merchants. Everything arrived fine and within the same two days, so I went to leave feedback for all of them. They were all small, easily shipped, reasonably-priced, and they arrived fine, so I just gave them all three stars and got on with my day.

Within the next few days, all three vendors contacted me and asked me to remove my “negative” feedback. Well, not so much negative as “average” when I could have chosen “superb”. One looked like a form letter. All of them offered to refund my shipping if I’d delete my rating to stop pulling down their average rating.

It sounds like Amazon Merchants believe that even the smallest amount of feedback that’s not a 5-star rating hurts them significantly. I don’t know if that’s correct, if they’ll be explicitly punished by Amazon or just don’t want to risk having a lower total rating than their competitors, but they would all pay to remove my imperfect ratings. (I didn’t mean to harm them, so I just pulled the reviews without getting refunds.)

Perhaps it’s just chance that all four vendors offered to refund shipping to remove less-than-glowing reviews, but I have to wonder if Amazon’s feedback system is too strict. Buyers won’t see real negative feedback because Merchants are paying to have it removed. If Merchants can’t shrug off a few reviews now and then, unscrupulous buyers could leave negative feedback to bully Merchants into giving discounts after the sale.

This reductio ad absurdum would be appropriate if they argued generally that reducing the work week would be good. They don’t: they’ve tried an experiment and they’re reporting that they’re pleased with the results.

A good criticism would be that the improvements are just the Hawthorne Effect at work, that the improvement is due to the attention of the experimentation rather than a 4-day week being objectively better. 37signals didn’t control for it, but there’s no reason to because they’re not trying for empirical results, they’re trying for improvements.

If you want improvements, you can just use the Hawthorne Effect directly. Ask people their thoughts (a good idea anyways), tinker with something visible to them, and look to see an improvement. You can see this in online communities, if you start a discussion about the community, make sure everyone feels heard, and implement any change, overall morale will go up. It doesn’t matter if a web forum increases or decreases the number of subforums, changes the color scheme, or adds or removes minor features: the forum will be happier and busier afterwards.

The caveats: This can’t be used too frequently, people just get fatigued of changes. It hinges on giving people positive attention, if they feel unimportant it’ll only hurt things. And it’s not a substitute for the real, deliberate changes that give you large and long-term improvements.

Let’s break out the back of the envelope and estimate:
150 attendees * $1,395 – (9 * $5,000 speaking fee) – $20,000 space rental =
$144,000

(I’m not familiar with running a conference, so my guesses at speaker and venue fees could be hideously wrong.) I’m not trying to imply that BoS isn’t worth the money; I wish I could attend. The closest thing I have to a point is:

Now I get why my dad lectured me for an hour on You Should Put On A Conference when I first told him about NearbyGamers.

I’ve been poking around and the registrars I can find are wildly overpriced ($9-20 per name), charge for private whois (which costs them nothing), or simply don’t support bulk operations.

Don’t say GoDaddy. I don’t support torture.