Tag: Gaming

To those folks that follow professional baseball and multiplayer online games, it should not be a surprise that Boston pitcher Curt Schilling is an avid gamer. Sony even organized an event with him in their EverQuest II game (a game that Mr. Schilling is an avid player of).

In early September, Schilling and others formed Green Monster Games to create “industry changing games”. Good for him — it’s good to see online gaming and wargaming fans are not just avid sci-fi readers and nerdy IT types.

Schilling hasn’t sat back idly, either — he’s even reached out to the MMOG community, and I found that he has posted quite frequently on the web site of the Fires of Heaven guild (a World of Warcraft guild).

Side thought: Those Fires of Heaven guys are hard-core — they raid seven days a week, 6+ hours a day, and expect members to participate in 90% of the raids. I guess I won’t be sending in an application. 🙂

Perhaps Mr. Schilling would be interested in what I’ve done with my online baseball game, CSFBL? Sure, it’s not MMORPG in the MMORPG sense, but it’s got staying power, and has done quite well considering it was built with no budget in my spare time. Let’s not forget to mention the significant work currently underway in rewriting it (an effort that will launch as ComputerSims Baseball), or the vision to branch out into multiple sports using a core league-based sports engine that is already being developed…

What do you say, Curt? We share common interests — baseball, MMORPGs (I’m the guy who developed EQ2Craft, a hugely popular resource for crafters in EQ2) — and a common belief in the power of online games to mold commerce and the community… Of course, you’d have to forgive me in one respect: I’m a life-long Yankees fan. I did, however, root for Boston in the 1986 World Series…

The Online Games Special Interest Group (SIG) of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) recently published their second Online Games Quarterly, which focuses on casual gaming and who the casual gamer is. Among the articles include:

• Understanding the Casual Gamer, a round-table discussion with executives from leading casual gaming companies;
• MMOG Demographics: Perspectives From Industry Insiders, another round-table discussion with representation from companies such as NCSoft (City of Heroes, Lineage II, Guild Wars) and Mythic Entertainment (Dark Age of Camelot). [Ironically, I owned the domain name guildwar.com a number of years back and sold it for about $200. I should have held out for more…]

A worthy read for anyone with a vested interest in casual gaming (as I have).

If the graphics in the old arcade games were bad (as I talked about in a past blog post), the graphics in text adventure games were, well, horrible. Actually you can’t judge them because there were no graphics.

Text adventures for me, and for many others, started with this:

You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door.
There is a small mailbox here.

That was how Infocom’s Zork I started. This game started what was to be a good run for a company that wrote good games without graphics – imagine that! We had to think, type our commands in plain english (no l33tsp33k). Ah, the days when command of our language meant something to gaming.

Infocom is long and gone (Activision bought the rights to their games a while back). You can still buy the Infocom games in shrink-wrap packaging through Amazon, but there’s other ways to enjoy them.

The gaming genre for text adventures is interactive fiction (IF). Most are built using something called a Z-machine interpreter. Z-code is a programming language which is perfectly suited for interactive fiction, and just about all Infocom games were written with it. There are many different versions of Z-code, and many different versions of interpreters, for just about every OS and platform.

If you want to know more about the history of Infocom, it’s games, and it’s people, go to the Infocom home page. Well, maybe not the Infocom home page, but the closest thing you’ll find to it. It includes links to download Zork I, II, and III (the only three Infocom games that Activision does not hold the rights for, and they are freely distributed now); a history of all the games, images of box covers, and so much more. I got lost in here for about an hour in an enthralling walk down memory lane.

Once you tire of the Zork trilogy (you did download it and play them all, right?), you have to buy the games… well, not really. I’m not condoning this, but…

http://infocom.elsewhere.org/ is actually a service where you can play 29 different IF games (and most of the most popular Infocom games) online via a Telnet connection. Simply telnet to infocom.elsewhere.org, sign in with username zork (no password), and play the game you want to play. What better way to waste time at work – and your boss will think you’re coding some obscure programming language when he sees the archaic text-only interface on your screen!

For those that want to play the games when offline, you need to do two things. The first is to find, download, and install a Z-machine interperter. Then you need to download the Z-code files, which you open from the interpreter. Then you play.

There’s one place to find out how to find all items you need: http://www.latz.org/infocom/. This site is nothing short of fantastic. In addition to links to Z-code interpreters, it includes links to download Z-code files for the most popular Infocom games. And it includes the full content of the Invisiclues books for many games. (Invisiclues books were old cheat guides written in the form of FAQs. They came with a highlighter pen that would “reveal” the hidden clues. So high-tech! How I yearn for them. Damn parents made me throw out everything good.) And it includes a walkthrough for most games (if you just want to enjoy reading the game like a book).

Beyond that, if you want even more, go to The Interactive Fiction Archive, which includes hundreds of articles, FAQs, and – most importantly – downloadable IF games.

So plug in your CGA graphics card, unplug your joystick, and nuzzle up to your PC in a way you probably haven’t done for a decade…

[This article is largely copied from a post I made on the International Game Developers Association Web site. The original post can be found on the IGDA’s Online Games forum.]

Is a successful Web-based game something that pays for itself (bandwidth, infrastructure, etc.)? Is it something that provides adequate financial reward compared to the development effort? Is it something that generates enough popularity to generate marketing awareness for some other entity?

The answer really depends on the intent of the developer. A hobbyist may want a game to cover his expenses. An independent may want the game to generate some amount of revenue to justify his continued effort in it, ignoring the initial development effort (which was most likely done in spare time without any initial working capital). A traditional company will certainly measure success by the total return on investment, considering development and operating costs, but may consider a Web game a "success" if it exists more as a marketing toy to bring awareness to other products or services offered by the company.

I haven’t done serious research, but my experience is that most Web-based games are developed by hobbyists or independents, making the need for a "true return on investment" an afterthought when defining the game’s success.

But what of the intangible costs? What of the experience and knowledge obtained while developing and operating a game? Does this not have value?
A personal example:

I’ve probably spent somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 hours working on my game, CSFBL, since late 1999. It’s impossible to nail down an exact number, because I do it in my spare time. There have been weeks where 40 hours dedicated to it is an understatement, and weeks where 5 hours is stretching it. How do you quantify those hours? At a measly $25 an hour, that’s between $50k and $100k. It takes a lot for a Web-based game to generate that kind of revenue, and I’d bet most of those games that reached a "production" stage don’t accumulate that in their lifetime.

I’ll confess: CSFBL hasn’t brought in anywhere near that kind of money – and when you consider the expenses of the server and bandwidth, it has probably operated at a loss throughout its entire history [i]before you consider any compensation for my time[/i]. But, the knowledge I have gained from this has catapulted my ability to do other work (though not the work I’d like to do, which is Web games!). Has the indirect benefit of my game been enough to call it a success? Only I can judge that. Some days, I feel it has.

It would be interesting to hear other people’s experiences in this area.