With music by Tay Zonday.
Screenplay by Rick Astle.
Gotta love the Internet.
Categories
Category: Geek / Technical
That’s right, Ludum Dare, the 48 hour game development competition, is back! Currently the themes are in voting, but the game development competition begins August 8th.
And if you need some incentive to join this time around, check out Phil Hassey’s LD#8 entry…now on an iPhone! Wouldn’t you like to be able to make a great game in a weekend and then take it farther?
I’m still working on my LD#11 entry, Minimalist, and I hope to have a better version available before the end of next month. I can’t wait to find out what the theme for LD#12 will be.
[tags] ludum dare, game development, compo, indie [/tags]
Categories
Happy Birthday, Tim Schafer!
Today is my birthday, and according to Wikipedia, besides sharing it with George Bernard Shaw, Mick Jagger, Carl Jung, Sandra Bullock, Aldous Huxley, Stanley Kubrick, and Kevin Spacey, I share it with Tim Schafer. Seems like I’ve got great company.
Happy birthday! I’m going to have some cake and celebrate with friends!
I’m off to Boston for the Software Industry Conference! It’s my first time going, and I’m sure it will be a blast.
I’ll be at the Association of Shareware Professionals luncheon, and I will definitely attend the Shareware Industry Awards banquet, so if you plan on going, look for me.
The presentations sound interesting, and I hope to meet many of the people from the ASP member newsgroups in person. I intend to come back to Chicago heavily inspired and motivated to make games.
They better have orange juice in Boston.
[tags] business, marketing, sic, conference, shareware [/tags]
July 4th is the day that Americans celebrate independence from England and the decision for the United States to find its own way in the world.
For revenge, GirlFlash decided to host Mini LD48 #2.
also, sorry if I am interrupting anybodies Independence day plans, but I’m English and this is how I get even =p
I won’t be participating. Well, maybe I’ll participate. It feels like a challenge.
Anyway, Independence Day is not only an excuse for grills, a day off from the day job, and time with friends. It is also a great time to reflect on what it means to be an indie game developer. Indies exist in many industries. Indie film, indie music, indie TV shows, indie books, and indie poetry all exist. Indie games are a natural addition. What drives people to forgo steady incomes and decent benefits and go indie? The urge to create something can be quite strong, and an indie might know that that something won’t get created unless he or she does the creating. The major Hollywood studios won’t green light all films, and the major game publishers won’t make all games. For quite a lot of people, these aren’t hurdles. The film or game will get made anyway. Funding comes from MasterCard and Visa. Sleep can be optional on some days. Poor substitutes for the high quality production equipment can be used to great effect. And the film or game will be finished.
The indie life. It’s exciting, it’s emotional, and it’s full of drama. There can be lean times. There’s the potential for great success, and there’s the risk of losing it all. But would you trade it for anything else?
If you’re already doing your own thing your own way, you probably have your own independence day to celebrate. If you’re still supporting your efforts through your day job as I am, then perhaps you’re looking forward to creating your own independence, and hopefully sooner rather than later.
Happy Independence Day!
Linux Game Publishing, the company that ports games from Windows to Gnu/Linux, has announced that it is introducing a copy protection system. Naturally this news resulted in quite a bit of speculation, and rumors were flying about how invasive this copy protection will be.
LGP sent out a press release to explain why it was introducing copy protection now after years of avoiding it. Similar to Reflexive’s claims of a 92% rate of piracy, LGP estimate that more people downloaded illegal copies of the games than paid for them. The estimate is based on the number of support requests for a known bug introduced into LGP-seeded copies of games on download sites. While such a practice is controversial, I’m still surprised that people who download illegal copies have the audacity to request support from the company. I wonder how many more people downloaded the games and didn’t request support. I also wonder how many of them concluded that LGP’s offerings were buggy, which is the risk with seeding purposely-bugged downloads to dilute the illegal download offerings. According to CEO Michael Simms, the seeded downloads were meant to dilute the illegal downloads with bad copies, and the requests for support were not expected at all.
Adding copy protection will give us benefits as a company. Firstly, it will allow us to recover some of the lost revenue, by means of additional license sales, either via online vendors or direct through the copy protection system. Secondly, it will allow LGP to show a solid revenue protection system that will increase our credibility as a porting company in the eyes of licensors, allowing us to attempt to obtain higher profile games.
The press release also explains how the online verification system will work. While there seem to be some advantages, including the ability to download the games in case your original CD was damaged, many people will understandably feel put off that the game is trying to phone home. LGP has responded by allowing people with no network connection to continue to play since the game has internal checks, but if you did have a network connection and the system found your copy to be invalid, then you won’t be able to play until you connect to the servers to prove that you should be allowed to play.
It seems that LGP is taking great pains to ensure that the copy protection system won’t cause problems for legitimate customers. Still, now that copy protection has been introduced, there is a difference in value between the legal copy and the illegal copy. Copy protection systems are just software, after all, and software solutions will always be circumvented. If the downloaded copy can be played without the player worrying about connecting to the servers, and if most people are downloading the illegal copies, what’s really changed? The people willing to pay will be inconvenienced, even if only slightly, and the people unwilling to pay will have a superior offering, even if only slightly.
I am not sure how much of a benefit the copy protection system will be to converting more sales, but the idea that LGP can convince developers to port their higher profile games might be the greatest benefit. If EA isn’t dealing with LGP because there is no system in place to prevent copyright infringement, then having some system, even if it only works as badly as EA’s own systems, might convince EA to negotiate. Higher profile games might result in increased sales in general.
What happens if LGP ceases trading
LGP has pledged that should we, for any reason, cease trading, and our keyserver is removed, then we will, using any means possible, provide patches to remove the copy protection from our games, or provide back doors, or other such methods to allow games to be played. All LGP employees have the authority to produce, on their own, and without the order of the company, such patches, should the company be unable to produce them or to request their production, on the event that LGP ceases trading.
I suppose this part should make me feel better, but if a company is going out of business, I’m curious when anyone will find the time or the incentive to provide these patches. Then again, LGP has always had front-facing employees who interact with the community, and if Loki’s demise produced an icculus, perhaps LGP’s will as well. Now, if your illegal copy is already missing the copy protection, you don’t need to worry about LGP’s health as a company. Of course, if you do download the illegal copies, you’re not concerned about rewarding LGP’s work in the first place.
More discussion is taking place on the LGP Copy Protection Mailing List.
I’m surprised that copyright infringement is such a problem with Gnu/Linux users. I would think that they would be the ones who respected and understood copyright better than Windows or Mac users in general. After all, the GPL and similar licenses use copyright to ensure Free and Open Source Software stays that way. I encounter claims that Linux users don’t respect intellectual property, and learning about the extent at which LGP has had to deal with these kinds of people, it makes it very hard to defend the general user.
I still want to believe that most people are honest. In light of the evidence provided by LGP, Reflexive, and others, am I being overly optimistic? I definitely don’t want to turn into the kind of developer who assumes everyone is guilty until proven innocent. They always seem so angry all the time, as if people want to rip them off if given half a chance. That definitely doesn’t seem to be a healthy outlook on life. Still, I suppose we’re finding that if a person has the incentive and the opportunity with little concern for the consequences, it seems more often than not he or she will take the opportunity. And then in a company’s efforts to reduce the opportunity and increase the consequences, the honest customer gets burned.
There has to be a better way.
[tags] indie, gnu/linux, games, copy protection, LGP, Linux games, piracy, copyright, customer service [/tags]
Video Arcades’ Last Gasp from the Chicago Tribune is a well written article on the end of the video game arcade. Home consoles have been providing less incentive to go out for your video game fix, and it is expensive to own and operate an arcade. The only people who seem interested in going to them are older people hoping to reminisce.
“See, it’s not that the industry is gone,” said Mike Rudowicz, president of the American Amusement Machine Association, which represents manufacturers and distributors. “It’s that we’re a cottage industry now. We have around 3,000 family entertainment centers, but those are mostly not arcades. A vestibule in a movie theater—that’s an arcade now.”
Growing up, I didn’t get to spend too much time in an arcade. My first experiences with games like Pac-man, DefenderI, Donkey Kong, and Berzerk were playing them on my Atari 2600, all of which I still own. I didn’t even know that the Berzerk cabinet talked until a few years ago, and I got a chance to play the original when the Game On! exhibit passed through Chicago. Now the Buckner and Garcia song makes a lot more sense.
Kiddie Land had an arcade, and that was where I first played Star Wars, Popeye, and Pole Position. I went to the arcade so infrequently that each time I tried to play a racing game, I always had someone remind me that I needed to step on the peddle at the bottom of the machine. I also used to try to help people who were playing. My uncle once got upset because I helped him eat a power pellet when he was trying to wait for the ghosts to get closer, and a friend of mine was upset at the bowling alley when I helped him throw all of his limited and precious grenades. I learned quickly that you do NOT help people play their games.
I do remember going to the Fun Zone near my house with a friend after high school was over, and it was a great way to pass the time. I was a bit sad that all of the classic games were stuffed off into a corner, such as Pac-man and Donkey Kong, most of them off or silent. I wasn’t too big of a fan of the fighting games or the racing games, and so my choices were fairly limited. Then the Fun Zone got turned into a bookstore for the nearby community college. Dave and Buster’s and Gameworks each have their own collection of classic arcade games, but they’re clearly not the main attraction anymore. To compete with home consoles, arcades tried to provide unique experiences by becoming bigger and more elaborate, but there hasn’t been as much interest, partly because the atmosphere changes.
I’m planning on getting a group together to go to Nickel City in Northbrook. According to the article, the classic games cost nothing to play, and I hope they have Ms. Pac-man there.
[tags] arcade games, video games, business [/tags]
Categories
Monday Meme: Zombie Attack
Corvus had a fun post today about a hypothetical zombie attack.
You are in a mall when the zombies attack. You have:
1. one weapon.
2. one song blasting on the speakers.
3. one famous person to fight alongside you
- As anyone who has played the indie title Zombie Smashers X2 knows, the best weapon in your arsenal besides the magic uzi is your enemy’s spine. Just remove it ever so uncarefully and you have a wonderful weapon that also lets you regenerate health!
- I think out of all of the music I listen to, I would have to choose Underworld’s Rez + Cowgirl. Yes, that’s technically two, but they did put them together on one track so it counts. When fighting off unrelenting zombies, you need an unrelenting beat. Or, if I was in a really campy mood, Frank Sinatra’s The Way You Look Tonight. I think that would be fun to have playing as I stab and beat zombies into submission with their own spines.
- I was thinking about that scene in Mad About You when Paul couldn’t get to Jamie in the hospital because Bruce Willis was there and the place was sealed off. So Paul had to sneak in, and it turns out that Bruce Willis had been hit in the head and escaped, and so they teamed up to sneak around guards and nurses. Bruce Willis would be fun to team up with…but so would Paul Reiser! We need some good humor during these dark times. But then I thought, “Wait a minute! We might be the only two people left!” Sorry, Paul, but I’ll have to go with Christina Ricci. In a zombie attack, I imagine she’d either be hysterical, providing more incentive for us to survive or at least get to a (probably temporarily) safe area, or she’d be cool and collected, allowing us to plan our strategy and tactics. And of course I think it would be fun to hang out with Christina Ricci, so a zombie attack seems like a good enough excuse to do that. We’ll just have to make sure our last stand isn’t in the florist’s shop.
So there you have it. If I was in the middle of a zombie attack at the mall, I would choose a spine, Underworld, and Christina Ricci.
[tags] zombie attack, indie, meme [/tags]
Categories
Happy Memorial Day!
I’ll be spending today at a particularly geeky barbecue. We’ll be playing Dungeons and Dragons.
From The Day the Music Died, I learned that Microsoft is pulling the plug on the servers used for verification of their MSN Music service. Even Wired repots that Microsoft is pulling support for MSN Music DRM.
So what happens on August 31, 2008? On that day, Microsoft will turn off the servers that they maintain for the sole purpose of validating that the songs that people have already “purchased” through MSN Music are still theirs to play. Those people (hereafter “the victims”) will not notice the change right away. The victims will only notice it when they purchase a new computer, or when they upgrade the operating system on their current computer, or when the hard drive in their computer dies and needs to be rebuilt/reinstalled. At that point — transferring the music files they have “purchased” to another drive or a new computer — the Microsoft music player running on the victim’s PC (like iTunes, but all Microsoft-y instead of Apple-y) will make a call to Microsoft’s validation servers to verify that the music files were legitimately purchased. This call will fail, since the servers are not responding, since Microsoft has intentionally turned them off. The Microsoft music player will then conclude, incorrectly but steadfastly, that the music files were downloaded illegally and that the victim is a filthy pirate, and it will refuse to play them. In this case, the left hand knows exactly what the right hand is doing: they’re both giving you the finger.
One of the arguments against so-called digital rights management is that if the software developer goes under, you no longer have access to your supposedly purchased products. As a counter argument, it has been suggested that companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Valve won’t be going away anytime soon.
And we can see that it doesn’t matter if they are still around. You are paying them and hoping that they don’t just decide one day to cut you off. In this case, Microsoft has given up the old and replaced it with the new, but hasn’t given you a way to transfer what you already paid for.
What should you do if you want to keep your music? As Sony advised its users to do when it closed down Sony Connect, you can burn CDs of your purchased tracks and re-rip them. Of course, this degrades sound quality because it forces the music through the encoding process twice.
When the only legitimate sources for music and software are saddled with DRM, is it any surprise that people search for a better product from illegitimate sources? I know that the people selling me music, movies, and software would love for me to pay them again and again for the same product, but where is my incentive to do so? What value do I receive in return for being a paying customer, doing things the right way, especially when illegal sources are providing a superior experience for me? And dealing with the hassles of DRM would make so much more sense if it actually prevented such illegal sources from existing. Since it doesn’t, it sounds like it is more about control of the customer than anything else.
Will we see a similar thing happen with Valve’s Steam? There are already anecdotal reports that people have been wrongfully banned from the service, cutting them off from access to the games they paid for. Will Valve come out with Steam 2.0, offer up the same products on the new service, and then cut off the old service with no way for existing customers to transfer their existing purchases? I doubt it, but then, you would think Microsoft wouldn’t have done it either. Regardless, the customer finds out who is in charge of his/her machine soon enough.
The EFF sent an open letter to Microsoft about this issue.
While this announcement has directly affected MSN Music customers, users of other Microsoft products (particularly current and prospective Zune customers) are deeply concerned as well. Your customers are forced to ask, “If Microsoft treats its MSN Music customers so shabbily, is there any reason to suppose that it will treat other customers any better?”
World famous chef Gordon Ramsay commented about British chefs who expect praise and awards for just showing up, “but don’t give enough attention to anything to do with the customer. But it’s really all about the customer. No one should ever forget that, no matter how great their sauces are.” Why should it be any different for any other industry?
[tags] digital rights management, msn music, business, video games, steam, valve [/tags]