Dan McCollum.com

So today’s post was inspired by a lot of things, but most importantly, my wallet and our rights.

Let me open up with a really quick story. A couple of years ago, I was up for a game design job at Namco Networks out in San Jose, CA. I was really excited about it- it was for their mobile and PC gaming division, dealing primarily with casual games and iPhone games, which are my purview. I asked a friend of mine for advice, and he hooked me up with a couple of people to talk to, one of whom was kind of down on the whole idea. He essentially said, “Well, if that’s your thing, have fun, but with Namco, you’ll basically be making the 18th iteration of Pac-Man…”

You know what? He was right, at least in a sense. Over the past 10 years, companies have been raiding their storage closets to find ways to capitalize on our sense of nostalgia from our childhoods. While this parade of re-issues wouldn’t be a bad thing on their own, they do combine with the fragmentation of platforms and intellectual property to create a situation where the consumer (read: YOU) becomes continually screwed.

Intellectual property rights have been a hot button issue in the last decade and a little bit before, starting when Napster began to distribute music between users, but one might even rewind a bit further to the controversy that circled when cassette tapes (both audio and video) became available to consumers. For the first time, consumers had an easy way to determine how and when they would consume content. Unthethering from needing to be attached to the TV at exactly 8 pm in order to see M*A*S*H was the first wave in consumers being able to control their own content, but big studios fought the move tooth and nail, to the US Supreme Court, and of course, most recently in the big brouhaha over SOPA last week.

At the heart of the Betamax case and Napster, and its current forms (media fragmentation) is the ability for large companies to dictate to you how you can control the content that they create. They do this for several reasons: first, most content that is given away for “free” is done so with commercial sponsorship – the companies that give the content to you do so with the intent that you will watch their sponsors’ ads. In the pre-VHS days, it was easy to make the argument that if X number of people were watching the show, that same X number of people saw the ads. In the post-VHS days, that argument became harder to make, and as consumers began to take more control of their media consumption via tools like TiVo and the internet, that link became more and more tenuous.

Reeling this back to video games, essentially the same thing has gone on, but due to the more rapid pace of platform development (in television, there was a fairly large gap between the invention of TV to the adoption of color TV, and a larger still gap between color TV and HDTV), and the myriad platforms available, the consumer is faced with many more decisions about how to consume their media. And the bad news is that they’re largely getting screwed.

Look at the game Angry Birds. Originally an iPhone game ($0.99), developer Rovio has had a runaway success with the game on its home platform. But you can also get Angry Birds on the iPad (Angry Birds HD, $4.99), on the Mac App Store for another $4.99, or on your Android phone for free. However, getting it on your Android tablet may cost you more – $0.99 if it’s a Kindle Fire, and $2.99 if it’s a nook Tablet. This is not to mention the major console ports of the game. Suddenly a game that cost you a dollar is now costing you $11 to load on your phone, iPad and computer.

Don’t get me wrong, developers deserve to be compensated for what they do, and Rovio should be proud of their game and port it to as many different platforms as they can. And I get that you could make the argument that prior to this console generation, two editions of, say Street Fighter II on Genesis and SNES would exist, not entitling the user to each version for the price of one. However, the difference is that the iPad and iPhone run on the same operating system, and the underlying system architecture runs on Mac OS X. While there is development time and porting that needs to occur between each system, these are virtual impediments put in place by Apple, not by users. PC developers have always had to deal with making versions of their application that will be most compatible with the billion possible iterations of PC architecture under Windows, and factor that into development time. What you’re getting is much more purely the same game ported to different systems that run the same architecture. Imagine if you paid a separate and variable cost to put Angry Birds separately on your netbook (Windows 7 Starter), your work PC (Windows 7 Ultimate) and your home laptop (Windows 7 Home Premium) with your single install disc.

What lies at the heart of all this is who owns the media that you purchase, and how far are we willing to let companies go in creating these fragmented platforms and titles, and essentially selling you the same content over and over again? How many editions of Angry Birds should you have to buy, if you’re getting the exact same content in different resolutions? How many times are they going to sell Star Wars to you before you say enough?

I will have more to say as this relates to SOPA, intellectual property and piracy in general in the coming days.

When I was growing up, there was an ever-persistent debate that had been raging on for generations before me and would rage on for at least a generation after me. I don’t mean human generations – I mean console generations. I hopped on board when I begged my parents for what must have been half of my short lifetime at that point, for a Nintendo Entertainment System. Knowing the system cost “only” $100, I even went to the trouble of collecting 100 pennies that I found around the house (and in change jars) and presented it to my parents as payment for the system (to this day, I can’t remmeber if I was being calculatedly cunning and precocious by thinking that 100 pennies = $100, or if I had just made the first of many arithmetic errors in life). And then it happened – December 25, 1988 – A shiny new Nintendo Entertainment System (with the Power Pad, orange light gun and 2 controllers – they just don’t sell consoles the way they used to…). This event, occuring 24 days after the birth of my sister, would form the pinnacle of my Christmas gift-receiving career, by the way.

But what was odd was that the Nintendo Entertainment System had a competitor, and a very worthy one, in the Sega Master System. I didn’t have a SMS – my neighbor Lacey did. I would go over her house before my NES arrived at my own and marvel at its graphics and beg to play Afterburner. After I got my NES, I decided that Afterburner was stupid and that Zelda was way better (and it turns out I was right – hey, it’s my blog, people). I had essentially received my NES banner and I was determined to carry it wherever it would go.

My parents were not without means but they also weren’t about to spend their entire savings on a child’s toy, so I completely missed out on the 16-bit era. My father always argued that I had a perfectly good video game system in the NES, so I sat on the sidelines and watched the war that raged on schoolgrounds and in the press (back then, magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro were the only source of information that existed about what was out, what was coming out, and how good any of it was). My experience with both systems was done in households of friends, coming in to play Mortal Kombat on my friend’s Genesis (which definitely had the better, more authentic experience) and playing Street Fighter II Turbo: Hyper Fighting edition (better than Genesis if you only had the 3-button controller, or more often, only one three-button controller) on my other friend’s SNES. I would play Super Mario All-Stars on my cousin’s SNES and Sonic and Knuckles on my other cousin’s Genesis.

The point is that we were kids and we were at the mercies of what our parents would buy us. And since kids are ridiculously competitive and petty, whatever we had was the best and whatever anyone else had was automatically the worst.

Now, I and most of the people I know who want one, have multiple systems. Even at $200-600, owning an XBox 360 and a Playstation 3 and a Wii isn’t really all that hard if it’s something we want to do. We are inundated with more information than we can possibly read about the details of each console. We can literally download demos of the games to our systems to play them, or cross-compare the different versions of each game if we really need to see how many polygons are squeezed into our 89th World War II simulation.

So, a lot of the competitiveness over consoles has ceased, at least among our generation. Which would mean that we don’t really have any of that silly competitive sniping going on anymore, right?

Au! Au!, I say! Au contraire, mon frere.

See, with our ability to own any console, we’ve had to move on to the arena where we really can’t own every version of that device, and that is precisely what’s going on in the mobile arena right now.

Video game consoles cost what they cost. There’s a one-time fee for entry. Maybe a $60/year fee if you want XBox Live, but you can get by without it. A mobile device is the gift that keeps on taking. The iPhone’s service plan will run you $100/month. Even adjusted for inflation, an iPhone is at least a new NES system every 2 months. Couple that with the lack of need to bother with having more than one phone and you’ve got yourself a recipe for a good, old fashioned system war.

And we see it all over the place. iPhone vs. Android vs. Blackberry is the war that should have been between the XBox 360, Playstation 3 and Wii. Even with Nintendo somewhat quietly winning the generation in terms of sales, the forecast on them is dismal because of their complete lack of any mobile or online strategy. As the 3DS’s struggle to gain marketshare shows, Nintendo isn’t just competing with the PSP (or whatever the hell it’s called now – Sony is in the same boat) but with the iOS and Android systems. The 3DS offers no functionality that an adult would need that they can’t meet or exceed with their phones – a device they must carry in their pockets. And the games don’t compete on the same level. A full-featured 3DS game like Pokemon Black is competing, ideally, with a console experience, but its platform is asking to be played in the mobile arena, where experiences are quick and to the point. And far, far less expensive.

For Nintendo and Sony to compete in the mobile playground, they have to give up the idea that users are looking for a single experience in their mobile devices. The Sony and Microsoft home consoles have proven themselves worthy home theater additions – most of the friends I have on XBox Live are watching Netflix, for instance. Sony is at least giving it a good ol’ large-corporation-try with the PS Vita (which I suspect will end up like the HP TouchPad), but none of the big companies are doing anything truly innovative to capture the mobile space’s attention. While Windows Phone 7 is a capable operating system, it is years behind both Android and iOS and its struggle to become adopted shows those scars. If Nintendo or Sony want to compete for space in my pocket, they need to offer an experience that eclipses both the function and the fun of the mobile offerings on the table right now. That doesn’t seem at all likely.

>A lot of times, people have ideas for apps or games that ultimately will rely on a lot of actual content. This generally is user-generated content, which is a smart model, as it has worked for tons of Web 2.0 companies such as Blogger, MySpace and Facebook. These sites work by providing potential users with rich content that they can access just by joining in, and existing users the ability to add to a content base that they can claim ownership of (this is my profile, these are my blog posts, or these are my friends).

The problem, of course, is that these potential apps don’t (yet) have any users, and thus, they have no content to draw new users in with, and nothing for anyone to yet take ownership of.

I have some ideas for how new applications can overcome this hurdle, but to protect client ideas, I’ll throw out a mythical application. Lets give it a really Web 2.0-y name, “CHECKR”. CHECKR is an application that let’s you scan product bar codes and write/share quick reviews of the product with people within the CHECKR universe or your friends on social media outlets.

Now obviously, when CHECKR first launches, it has 0 users and 0 reviews unique to CHECKR. How would you, as a user, feel if you downloaded this promising new application, only to find that there’s a vast wasteland of content? This dearth of content must be hidden at all costs!

One way to get started is to link your application up with a set of already-there data. Many services have APIs that would let you pull location data or information from them, within their guidelines. For instance, a similar database to what CHECKR is attempting to build can be found on Amazon.com, when a product is pulled up. Amazon has done a fantastic job of cultivating a culture of reviewers at the ready, and all of that data is sitting there on Amazon’s servers, hopefully waiting to be exploited with an API. Even if Amazon doesn’t allow that data to be mined, it’s almost assured they have competitors who do. Services like Yahoo! BOSS allow you to aggregate and shape your own custom search engine using data already mined. Parsing and presenting this data (initially) or using it as a “Reviews from Web” button (after version 2) would help ensure your users can use the app.

Second, sites like Amazon, but even more importantly, applications in this generation, generally do a very good job incorporating game elements into their review processes. Giving users virtual currency, badges, differently-colored usernames, special titles, and other minor rewards helps integrate them into the community you’re building.

Finally, a lot of applications (a LOT of applications) are ultimately drawing some marketing data from it’s users. The demographic data that would be required is hard to get… If you had an app you’d never heard of, and they suddenly asked your first name, last name, a photo, gender, home address, etc, what would your reaction be? For most people, it would be to run, but I bet many of you have shared that much and perhaps more to Facebook. The difference between your idea and Facebook is that Facebook has already demonstrated value. It’s like a pool party that you’re invited to where you can see everyone’s already jumped in and is having fun. It’s rather natural to want to join in.

Once CHECKR has demonstrated a use, and if I design it in such a way that people naturally want to give it good data instead of garbage data, people will populate it with rich analytics data. When people put their high school yearbook photos on Facebook, they are thinking that they’re sharing it with friends, not with Facebook. No one wants to tell Foursquare where they are, but they don’t mind telling their friends where to find them. If your users need to input their real names to ensure their friends can find them, or want to put their address in so they can find the hottest local reviews, then you’ve succeeded in rolling in the analytics into the application’s design naturally.

However, one thing to note is that as you move along through the process, that you roll out features that might “expose” your application’s lack of early content. While it may be cool a year down the line to have a badge for people who have done something in the application 25 times, to make that a search filter criterion in the application’s first iteration is to both put a feature that’s impossible to use, but also a feature that gives away your application’s newness.

Another way that you can avoid this is by building a scaling function directly into your application from the start: to say that when you have 0-10,000 users, the application is more forgiving with when it, say, leaves a posting active or how long it leaves a spot on a map marked. When it has 10,000-100,000 users, it can be less forgiving, and when it has more than 100,000, the application can assume the info is essentially in real time. In CHECKR, for instance, maybe I put a little pin on a map where someone has submitted a review “recently”. When I have only a few users, “recently” could mean within the last week. When CHECKR is a household name and verb, I can let reviews only stay on my map for a few hours. My goal, either way, is to hopefully ensure that the application looks the same to a guy who found it on day 1 as the guy who found it 3 years after it launches.

And ultimately, that’s my goal- I want to appear to be a tightly formed system that users will trust and populate. While I have moral qualms about harvesting analytical data from users, most app makers don’t. Yet, if they force users to give that data, they will end up with unsuccessful apps from at least one standpoint (either they get garbage data, no users or both).

One of the issues I have a fairly big stake in is the intellectual argument about video games as art. I seriously doubt that in this short blog post, I’ll even scratch the surface of my thoughts on this subject, but I feel like I should get something down.

I follow Roger Ebert’s twitter feed, and I really appreciate his commentary on film and his opinions, but one place we absolutely differ is when it comes to video games as art. Mr. Ebert recently tweeted a writer from his site, Michael Mirasol, and the discussion that his defense of video games had generated (read it here). Given that I’m usually surrounded dally by like-minded opinions at work all day, it hadn’t really occurred to me how the “mainstream” feels about the video game/art debate. Mirasol reminded me that Ebert’s himself has said that video games will never be considered art. I don’t think I can, in the space of this particular post (and while I’m on my iPad), explain why he’s wrong, but what I can do is probably provide a bit of framework for the debate.

I graduated from UC Santa Barbara with a degree in film and media studies. The reason I chose to pursue a film major is not because I love film or because I wanted an easy major (prior to majoring in film, I’d finished 3/4ths of a pure mathematics degree), but because the educational establishment has not yet recognized video games as a legitimate field of study. Yet film and video games are essentially one and the same beast.

Even a cursory analysis of the history of film shows that it grew from idle children’s distractions (like the zoopraxiscope, a “flip book” on a wheel) to inventions that combined the best technological advancements (and minds- Thomas Edison had a large hand in the birth and popularization of the medium) of a generation to provide… What content? 5 second salacious clips of two relatively old people kissing? A 30 second staged film of a train arriving? No sound or color…? Hammy overacting…? People rail against violent video games, but film can claim such minor shames as reigniting the Ku Klux Klan within 20 years of its inception. Video games are approximately 40 years old and have yet to reinspire an entire generation to hate again.

Any scholar looking at this upstart medium in the early 20th century: the lurer of children, the domain of Jews (when being a non-Christian was anathema – and yes, I’m familiar with research that showed there was not any real disproportionate ownership of Jewish cinemas than other groups, but we’re talking about perception here), the purveyor of moral turpitude, the vehicle of pornography and cheap thrills, would be hard pressed to say that by the end of that century, that it would be cemented in the minds of the upper echelons of the educational establishment that film is, of course, an art.

Of course, it would be unfair to judge cinema by what it was at it’s start to what it became. But the visionaries of the day certainly saw it’s potential. And scholars saw the way human subjectivity was expressed through the medium- how a story told by this director or acted out by that actress was different than the story expressed by another director or actress, and how meaning was made by that transaction. Scholars saw how the audience surrendered themselves to the screen, and imagined themselves as the camera, their eyes becoming the objective lens that swept through scenes. Scholars, as they are wont to do, saw penises where there were only spires, great communist struggles where there were only bored office workers and patriarchical oppression in Rudolph Valentino in a bathing suit (newsflash: Rudy was a dude)… The point is, they saw themselves in it. They saw the mirror that is art.

To make a one-to-one comparison between film and video games would be illogical, though. Each is a medium that has different potentials, different means of achieving that. Film purists (who I will define as people who believe film to be an art to the exclusion of video games) will mention that video games embody a competitive aspect that forces it away from a representation of reality, for instance. Yet they do not point to the fact that the narrative structure of (nearly all) film is in no way reflective of reality, which is not always parceled out into neat heaps of acts. Film purists also tend to be largely ignorant of the massive body of theory in game design, which sets up a relationship between the audience and the game designer, who is communicating the vision not just of his or her self, but the vision of hundreds of creative professionals who work incredibly hard to craft an experience. Whether that experience is the thrill of completing a goal or the melancholy of loss (both of which are typical abstract goals in both film and video games), it is a focused experience intended to invoke a real reaction in its consumer. If there was another point to art, someone’d better inform me.

So I haven’t been able to write for a while. February was a tremendously busy month for me. At Appiction, we both closed and finished off the biggest single-app deal that we’ve ever done in a project that… I can’t talk about yet. (But I was happy to be the lead designer of it!) Another one of our Appiction apps that I designed has been getting some major ink, but I don’t think I’m officially allowed to say anything about it yet either. And earlier this week I was happy to do the dev handoff for another project I designed that I’m not allowed to talk about (but honestly, I should be able to… it’s the coolest little application for its niche ever).

And my friends at OAK9 have been putting in some of the best work in that I’ve ever seen on an iPhone video game for an upcoming action title that… I can’t talk about yet. (But I was happy to be the lead designer of it, too!)

And meanwhile, production has kicked up on my desk as I’m working on the iPad (read: HD/enhanced) version of a game that has been bumping around at Appiction since I’ve been here (back in September). I was able to join the design team for the iPhone version, but the iPad version? I’m developing it myself. So believe me, I’m super excited about it and would love to talk about it, but I can’t yet.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to lately. Informative, no?

I’m really busy at work but I wanted to throw out a quick shoutout. Have you ever noticed how, on average, about 23 of the 25 top Paid applications in the App Store are games? I tend to gloss over the games now (since I’ve played most of them) and gun straight for the apps that have cracked the top 25. In this case, TuneIn Radio caught my eye and I had to try it. Well, the verdict?

It’s amazing.

I don’t really listen to the radio much anymore, partly because I have an iPod (and have had one, or something similar for 10 years) but also because radio is so fragmented. I have lived in 8 cities in 2 states over the last 10 years and each one of them has their own local radio culture. There’s also a bit of homogenization that goes on in radio, where there are so many “Power” stations or “Star” stations out there that it tends to lose its meaning behind the Clear Channel facade. But, there are invariably a few gems out there among the crowd, which you lose when you end up moving 20 miles down the road.

With TuneIn Radio, though, I have been able to hook up with my favorite talk radio station in LA (even though I don’t really share their politics anymore). I’ve been able to find the Phil Hendrie show on any of his affiliates whenever it’s on. I’ve been able to get around ridiculous media restrictions that happen in ESPN Radio’s app to listen to hear the local Lakers broadcast even though I’m in Austin. And I imagine I’d have been able to listen to any local NFL broadcast as well during the regular season.

But the best thing about TuneIn Radio is that it’s good. It’s not one of those apps that presents a list of features that sure would be nice if they all actually worked. They actually do! When it plays in the background, I can pause the stream and pick back up right where I left off. I can record shows, make phone calls, store up commercials and generally use it like I’d use a DVR, all with the local radio stations that I used to listen to when I lived in Santa Barbara, or Oceanside. It all happens without the static or signal problems that can happen with a regular radio (I used to have a job where I couldn’t listen to my favorite AM stations in the building I was in because of all the other tall buildings around).

So serious kudos to Synsion Radio Technologies. TuneIn Radio is the real deal, and well worth the 99 cents they’re selling it for. Go get it.

[link]

The Mac App Store launched last Thursday to some fanfare from Apple but to more confusion from users as to what its purpose ultimately was.

What I’ve seen personally has been a lot of issues with exactly what a platform like iOS seeks to solve – diversity. People were reporting on, for instance, Angry Birds’ page that the application was functioning poorly on certain Mac Books. Cnet has talked about how there are some issues with the Mac App Store on NTFS partitions.

Then you get into the issues that happen on any more open platform than iOS – piracy. The Mac App Store appears to include a similar anti-piracy scheme as used on the iOS App Store, which would be fine, except that there are many more tools available to someone to look into the schemes utilized on an actual computer. Is that going to effect the willingness of companies to put their applications through the hoops required by Apple rather than use their own anti-piracy measures?

So, it’s been a week, are you still using the Mac App Store?

I’m basically locked into my AT&T iPhone contract, for a few reasons (not the least of which being I am the beneficiary of a hefty employee discount – Thanks mom!). So today’s announcement that Verizon will be carrying the iPhone 4 starting on February 10th doesn’t really affect me, nor does it affect those who are going to be tragically left behind — At least, not in the negative.

While AT&T may suffer among its investor base for losing its exclusivity, and an estimated 6 million customers over the next year, its customers might be able to see an increase in service and offers from a desperate AT&T who wants to maintain its lead in iPhone sales. Read more…

A funny Tumblr blog is making the rounds in the office today – Read The Fucking HIG. It’s full of horrible examples of developers trying to reinvent the iPhone interface, and with the new Mac App Store launching yesterday, a clusterfuck of terrible designs given a virtually unlimited development space for application UI.

I’ve talked about the Human Interface Guidelines in this very blog before, and they’re incredibly important. At Appiction, the first thing they had me do was read the HIG and get acquainted with its requirements and guidelines and I’m a better designer for it. A lot of people think restrictions tend to inhibit their creativity, but at a certain point, the fact that actual people are going to use the app, and are going to come into it with a set of assumptions about how an app works, becomes more important than needing your special “two-finger swipe backward to go back” design.

It’s not about what the phone/OS is capable of, it’s about what’s reasonable to expect people to deal with before they close your app and move on to one of the other hundred solutions that could probably also solve their problem. The less impediment you put between your user and their enjoyment of the app, the better. Period.

[link Read The Fucking HIG]

[link Or just read the actual HIG! ]