Happion Labs GameDevBlog

I own some IP!

I published a novel. I published it under a pen-name. Why? Maybe I've been reading too many of the marketing books that Scott Miller recommends (they're down at the bottom of the page - the all-time best). These books say that line extensions are bad: they get you a short-term gain for a long-term loss. In other words, if I used my real name, maybe a handful of the people who read this blog would buy the book, but nobody else would; they'd all say, "Fiction by a videogame developer? No way."
So this is my way of trying to have my cake and eat it, too. You should read this book. If you're like me, the kind of geek who got kind of sick of science fiction and turned to "contemporary literature" but still found yourself responding most to books with a geeky bent, this book is for you. It's geek literature: literature by a geek, about geeks, for geeks. If you liked Microserfs or Plowing the Dark or The Ice Storm or A Separate Peace or The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time...what are you waiting for? Topically, it has a lot in common with these books: coming of age, computers, comic books, autism, videogames. And it has sex, drugs, and violence as well. Buy it already. If Amazon runs out of copies you can get it here.

Ever since fourth grade, fiction and videogames were my two loves. In fourth grade, I wrote my first short story - a story about aliens taking over Venus and piloting it on a crash course for Earth - and programmed my first videogame - on my 8k PET computer, a game in which two players piloted two circles and tried to shoot each other with horizontal and vertical dashes. I would switch back and forth between wanting to be a novelist and a videogame developer as I grew up. (Although at one point I wanted to be a psychologist...) As my videogame career moved along, I didn't want to give up writing. I attended writing classes; I participated in--and eventually ran--the Beyond Baroque fiction writing workshop in Venice; I published my short stories on the web (and even in print).
But after a while, I had to face facts: my career as a writer was not going anywhere, and my career as a videogame developer was doing pretty good. I took my fiction off the web, devoted myself more to videogames - and my videogame development career rocketed even higher. (My boss at the time even said, once he noticed that I had started writing about videogames instead of fiction on the internet, "I can see you've made a choice." Is that why he gave me these promotions? Maybe. More evidence that people love a specialist.)
Still, I couldn't quite give up the fiction writing bug completely, and the novel that I had been working on for many years was almost done. So I started taking individual writing lessons from one of my instructors, and he helped me get the book finished. And now it's published. Did I mention you should buy it? And recommend it to all your friends?
Will I write fiction again? Other than storylines for games? I don't know.

So, how does it feel to own some published intellectual property, to know that I own these characters and story? Kinda neat.

New Manager In A Strange Land is up.

Enjoy.

Notes on The Sims 2

I didn't play that much of The Sims; I hit the point that a lot of people hit - why am I spending so much time trying to get my Sims' lives in order when I could be doing it with my own life? Later - after hearing some friends stories about its emergent behaviors - I regretted spending so little time with it, and thought I should explore it more deeply, but never got around to it. The Sims 2 gives me that opportunity.
The Sims 2 creates that same sort of addiction that certain RPG's do - it's only a little ways ahead to the next food pellet, I'm going to keep playing until I get there. Whether it's having sex with the maid or having a baby or seeing the baby grow up, it's kind of hard to stop playing.
The Sims 2, even more so than the Sims, comes the closest I've seen to being a Holy Grail of games - the neverending story, where the player is part author, part participant. Although The Sims could have moments of player-driven drama - see the comment in yesterday's blog about the guy who would marry women for their money and then drown them in his pool - The Sims 2 encourages it, by giving each Sim short-term goals. If the Sims in a household have different long-term strategies, their short-term goals may cause conflict. For example: I had one of my Sims sleep with the maid - just to see if the game supported that - but then that Sim's sister had, as a goal, to have sex. The maid was the most convenient person around, so...it wasn't long before the sister married the maid, but the maid was pregnant with the brother's child. The brother and sister hate each other but still live together. The sister gets old and becomes a sugar mommy figure. It's as if the game is exploring themes of class, gender, the secret perverse lives people lead...
And then there's the addition of aging. Kids grow up and adults grow old and die. If you play long enough, the game starts to feel like One Hundred Years of Solitude or some other epic novel spanning multiple generations.
Chris Crawford would say, "That's not story! A story has a dramatic trajectory. A clear beginning, middle, and end to the conflict!" I have to agree with that. But I'm not sure it matters. There are some novels that explicitly get away from that - Cannery Row, for example. Also, Earnest Hemingway, with some of his books, got away from standard plot structures and tried his best to let the characters interact as realistically and naturally as possible, no matter where that would take the drama. Hemingway was a simulationist.
Chris Crawford would also say, "In a real story, people aren't going to the bathroom all the time!" Well, yeah, okay, but in a real story domestic details do help to paint a more vivid picture. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, what's-her-name was mortified by her upset bowels when she first met Tomas. Not too far from having a Fear in The Sims 2 about losing control of your bladder at a party...
You see? The Sims 2 accidentally aspires to be art!
Or maybe it's just a Rorschach blot that I'm projecting this onto.

More on trajectory, the beginning/middle/end of a story. Suppose you had a book that never ended. Would you say, "Great! I never have to buy another book again." I'm guessing not. I'm guessing you'd get bored of that book. Whatever it is that makes that book what it is - the characters, themes, whatever - you'd get sick of eventually. And you'd stop reading. And you'd be a bit dissatisfied that the book never resolved. And your last impression of the book would be that it was boring. And that's a problem with The Sims: at some point, you just lose interest. And when someone asks you about the game, you say, "I enjoyed it for a while and then it got boring." So maybe my Holy Grail isn't much of a Holy Grail after all - maybe the neverending story is something we just don't want or need.

Observer Changes Observed

I once spied on people playing Spider-Man 2 at a demo kiosk. What they most wanted to do was to see if they could kill Spider-Man by jumping from a high enough place. Eventually they succeeded, got a good laugh out of it, and went about their business. Funny, nobody did that in our focus tests.
Likewise, something I've devoted a fair amount of energy to while playing Fable and The Sims 2 is getting my characters laid. Would I do that in a focus test? Probably not. Not even if the observer was behind a mirror.
Focus testing is a good tool for finding shelf-level events. For measuring 'fun'...not so much.