Taking turns
One of the fundamental things kids need to learn to play games is how to take turns. This often does not come naturally but is a very important social skill that relates to how to wait in line and how to play fair and so on. But there are some down sides to taking turns. I remember watching my son when he was six years old playing soccer on a local team. The kids didn’t understand the nature of the sport – rather than running and try to kick the ball they were taking turns kicking the ball. They misapplied the “take turns” meme to the sport.

What about life? Should you always “wait your turn”? No. The life story of most successful people is not a story of someone who merely waited for success. The good news is that there are simple game mechanics that can teach kids that they don’t always have to wait their turn. There are many games with some sort of card that says “play at any time”. You can play these special cards even if it is not your turn. Most commonly these are defensive cards played in response to some sort of attack by another player. Occasionally these cards can be used offensively (let’s say proactively – sounds better).

The “play at any time” card is important because it is vital to teach kids that there may be opportunities or threats in life which require immediate action – even it is not your “turn”.

Follow the Rules
Games are defined by their rules. Rules are the bricks used to create games. If you watch kids play you will notice that rules are paramount even in pretend-play. Fundamentally games teach kids to follow the rules. This is a valuable social skill. If kids didn’t learn this then prisons would become even more crowded. On the other hand you don’t want kids to grow up to be sheep who meekly do what they are told. Kids have to taught to break the rules or to play with the rules themselves. How do you design a game that allows for rule breaking?

One simple mechanic is “shoot the moon”. The basic game rules may be that you don’t want points – but if you get ALL the points you win. That is: you can win by playing by the normal rules or by doing the exact opposite. This is beautiful! The existences of this mechanic allows for more creative strategies.

Early versions of Dungeons and Dragons were so poorly constructed that players were essentially required to create their own rules. This ethnic persisted in that gaming community for some time. Players played with the rules themselves. I don’t think that it is entirely accidental that many successful computer programmers were also D&D fanatics.

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Most video games have game levels: what does that teach kids? .. or boss fights, or power ups, or the grind required by most online role playing games? When designing games we should give a thought for what behavior the rules are teaching.

A few years ago magazines and newspapers were freaking out because they knew they could not compete with the web. It looks like magazines have figured things out. The combination of RIA, tablet devices, and monetization will mean magazines will thrive in the future.

The old web mantra was “information wants to be free” . . . and people would refuse to pay for content. If info was “free” and delivery was “free” then why pay? Magazines have remembered what they already knew all along: content is not king, presentation is king. People resist paying for text but will pay for a show. Give content a slick layout, add some bells and whistles like embedded video, or cool navigation, and people recognize that there the value.

It is sad to see how Catalyst 1.0 has not lived up to the promise it once had. When it was code named Thermo some of the early public demonstrations would leave a room awestruck but the actual shipping product is now met with an uncaring shrug. The poor app can’t even round-trip. *Sigh*. I hope it lives to see a 2.0 version and can become a real product.

When I was laid off from Adobe I took some tests from DBM which were supposed to indicate where my personal strengths lay. A few of these tests were to see if I had the entrepreneurial spirit. What surprised me from the results was the role “luck” played. Entrepreneurs know that hard work and opportunity is not enough to succeed – you need luck too. Eisenhower once said “I would rather have a lucky general than a smart general…. They win battles, and they make me lucky.”

So does this mean anything? Maybe it is just personal prejudice, but I think America is more favorable to entrepreneurs than Europe is. America is also more forgiving of failure. Is this because we feel that luck is a major factor in success and in life in general? Is this attitude around us at all time? Does luck play such a large role in “Ameritrash” games because Americans know that luck is part of reality and games without luck seems false and lifeless. I think so.

Now days a job posting often receives over 200 applicants, 800+ is not unheard of. So the employers is faced with the task of cutting this down to a smaller number. Each resume may first be processed through some computer scripts. These are programs which are looking for exact keywords and exact phrases. If the company inputs that it is looking for candidates that “think outside the box” and your resume claims that you are a “creative and independent thinker” then your resume is tossed. These scripts look for exact words and phases; close doesn’t count. You can think outside the box but you have to color within the lines. Maybe you assume that the person reading your resume is an intelligent human being, so you only mention a critical skill a couple of times – to bad, the scripts have just put your resume at the bottom of the list because other applicants have listed the keywords ten times and the system places them at the top of the list as a “good match”. Let’s say the scripts have taken 200 resumes and cut them down to 50: chances are actually pretty good that the best person for the job is not on the short list, her resume may never even be seen by a human being.

Companies who do not run resumes through these scripts actually do the same sort of thing with a human. An HR person, or someone else, is faced with a mountain of resumes and has to trim this number down somehow. They look for keywords and matching phrases. Odds are that the resume of the best person for the job is one of the ones pushed aside.

OK, so each job hunter eventually figures this out and tailors each instance of his resume to the job listing. I’m embarrassed to say how long it took me to really believe people when they told me this was an absolutely necessary first step.

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Quote of the day. I overheard a recruiter say “He only sent me his resume, so he doesn’t really want the job.”

Randy loves the Unreal Engine and encouraged me to check it out.

We talked about Adobe, Zombie, PopCap, Valve, and other companies we have either worked for or would like to work for one day.

Sounds like games is still an industry where your portfolio is king, and arbitrary certificates are not very important. Cool.

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I noticed that the Unreal Engine was used to create a Lazytown game – so it is not limited to only doing dark content.

What is with all the “edgy” content in games? Does Dark == Cool? Are most companies still making games mostly for adolescent boys?