Pickstr Goes Alpha

What a week!

One of my many side projects, Pickstr, went to public alpha this week, and my days and a lot of my nights have been filled with chatting with alpha testers and integrating their feedback. It's good to reach this point in development.

If you haven't been to the site or are too lazy to click the link and check it out, Pickstr is a web-based game. In it, players select the outcome of such real-world events as sports games, and compete with others to be the most accurate and achieve Guru status. Players also get to wager virtual currency on matches for added fun.

The alpha is all about testing the concept, mechanic, design, technology, etc. and soliciting user feedback before we take the concept to a public Beta some time in the summer. We're collecting data on user preferences and will use the information to improve the product.

One thing I've been reminded about repeatedly this week is how valuable it is to listen to users. The development process comes with a set of blinders, and hearing people new to the experience talk about what they like and dislike is incredibly helpful in understanding the potential of what is being built.

Furthermore, I was surprised to find that working on and playing Pickstr made me more interested in sports. It could have something to do with the number of bad picks I've made and virtual currency lost. I hate to lose.

Next steps for Pickstr include deployment to social and mobile platforms. The prospect of being able to compete in isolation with friends makes Facebook a likely early target. The Twitter angle is also developing, as we explore how to capitalize on the platform's strengths.

I don't wish to make this into a Pickstr development blog, but after almost a week of silence, I felt I should mention what I've been up to. If you've taken the time to try Pickstr, thank you! Be sure to let me know what you think of it - I'm very interested to know.

Thanks again, and enjoy your weekend.

© Jeremy Buehler and Rogue Tendencies (www.roguetendencies.com) 2010.

iPhone OS4 Means New Opportunities for Game Developers

After watching the iPhone OS 4 media event live blog coverage I realized the definition of what goes into a gaming platform is becoming fairly standardized for this generation of technology.

As I've written before from a slightly different perspective, developers and designers need to develop for platforms that are going to be profitable and technologically viable.

Here's what Apple is making standard-issue in their iPhone OS4:

Multitasking. This addresses the reality that mobile users are likely to be interrupted, and will want to switch out from game to phone call to text message as the need arises.

GameKit. An integrated social network linking friends and their games. While I've not seen details on GameKit, the theory is sound. It certainly worked for Xbox Live, and it's something I've always encouraged in my game and metagame designs.

iAd. A revenue stream for developers. Developers will earn 60% of the ad revenues. And the ads themselves are supposedly game-friendly, in that they will leverage the multitasking abilities of the platform to maintain the game behind the ad. The ads themselves are supposed to give ad designers the ability to leverage HTML5 to create rich media experiences such as in-Ad games and in-Ad purchasing. All very cool, although I find myself wondering if developers get a cut of the in-Ad purchases.

Background GPS Support. While still accompanied with the warning that GPS is battery intensive, the ability for a game to leverage GPS, and an iAd to leverage GPS while spawned from a game, means that Location Based Services will see an upsurge. Again. Smart advertising tailored to where a user is playing their games should make the advertising more relevant and attractive to users. For example, playing a game in a coffee shop spawns an ad for the coffee shop, opposed to some random store nowhere near the user. Pretty cool stuff, as far as crappy advertising goes.

While critics of iPhone OS 4 will have a field day with the iPhone 3G not supporting multitasking, the platform is becoming well-rounded and will continue to appeal to users and games developers alike. The iPhone will be a center for innovation for the next year, and I'm excited to see what developers do with it.

© Jeremy Buehler and Rogue Tendencies (www.roguetendencies.com) 2010.

The Internet of Things Will Improve Augmented Reality Games

After reading this article about big network players talking-up the 'Internet of Things' I got thinking about how awesome it could be when more everyday things get connected to the internet. In some ways, the more mundane, the greater the potential... not just for the thing itself, but for how all other things interact with it.

Here's an example to clarify what I mean:

The newspaper box. They are found on train platforms, many street corners, basically anywhere that makes sense in terms of having enough pedestrian traffic to make them convenient. Today, they are pretty dumb machines. But in the future where they are part of an internet of things, someone will put a cheap cellular or wifi transmitter in them and a CPU. And they will begin to broadcast information to the world.

On the one hand, they could broadcast private information to the company that owns them. For example, the current state of newspaper supply. Or how much money is in them. And the advantage to the company would be to ensure they are never empty, or never carrying too much cash. In the case of newspaper boxes offering monthly publications, or weeklies, this could ensure no reader finds them empty. Thus, the newspaper box is improved.

On the other hand, the same newspaper box could broadcast public information. For example, it could broadcast its location, what publications it offers, etc. to nearby mobile phones or mobile computers. Very handy for advertisers and so forth, and for people looking for something to read.

And here's where the concept of connected things gets fun. If an object broadcasts its existence on the internet, then other systems can take that information and do something with it. This has great potential for things like augmented reality games.

Augmented reality games are today limited to things like global positioning systems, accelerometers and input via such tools as barcode scanners to add relevance to a user's surroundings. But in the future of the internet of things, the number of inputs available to augment a user's reality skyrockets.

Back to our newspaper box example. A user wears an augmented reality device such as a pair of display glasses. They start the game 'Super Ultra Crazy Zombie Shooter' (I made that up. I think.) and sit down on a park bench. The game immediately picks up their location via GPS, and facing via the built-in accelerometer. Then, it takes into account all the broadcasting things in the area and cross references their type with a master database. One of the things it 'sees' is our broadcasting newspaper box.

It loads up a zombie, and hides it behind the newspaper box, occasionally having it stand up to through zombie bits at the user. The user, in turn, targets the creature with its zombie shooting gun and fires. The game takes into account the standard dimensions of the newspaper box, applies some line-of-sight physics analysis, and if the newspaper box isn't in the way, allows the user to hit the zombie.

Then another zombie appears from behind a park bench across the way, and from a store doorway, and from a manhole cover, and, and, and...

Very soon you have a very cool game environment made to come to life through the internet of things.

Can't wait!

© Jeremy Buehler and Rogue Tendencies (www.roguetendencies.com) 2010.

Social Games Offers: All That Glitters...

I found this article published on Techcrunch about a Comscore study concerning giving gamers the chance to perform marketing actions in exchange for virtual currency in social games. Here is the gist of it:

35% of the survey respondents said that they engage in "marketing actions" to earn virtual currency (such as watching a video, filling out a survey, etc.), and 53% said they be willing to consider marketing action for currency if given the choice.

Studies like this really bother me. First of all, the study was sponsored by Offerpal, one of the companies with a product that lets social game developers integrate marketing offers into their games. Let's gloss over the blatantly obvious conflict of interest here and, for a brief moment, take the results at face value.

To the author's credit, from a gamer's perspective marketing offers are a more appealing solution to getting game currency than handing over a credit card and making a real cash purchase.

And I suspect that such companies as Offerpal will continue to provide evidence that yes, users do in fact use offers to get game currency if they are available.

But what they won't ever make public is any unbiased analysis - an audit, if you will - of what value the offer sponsor gets from these offers.

Every gamer is predisposed to game an existing system, i.e. learning a system and taking advantage of it. That's what makes them good gamers. Whether it means clicking on a link to get currency and immediately closing the opened page, providing a fake or spam email address, switching browser tabs while an ad plays, or clicking random answers on a survey, a gamer will get their currency using the path of least resistance.

Ergo, there is very little return on marketing investments made through these offers. But that won't stop Offerpal, and companies like it, from selling the fake ROI for as long as they can milk it.

© Jeremy Buehler and Rogue Tendencies (www.roguetendencies.com) 2010.

Five Things I Learned About Communicating as a Community Manager

Not long ago I worked as a Community Manager on a difficult Web product. Each day was a new crisis. The product was a gaming platform and the users were very comfortable with communicating on-line. They had no qualms about pointing out faults, highlighting company shortcomings, and telling it like it was.

And I loved every one of them.

The community kept me aware of things happening with the product to which I'd otherwise be oblivious. And its members presented many (remarkably well thought-out) ideas on how to improve the product and our business. I was also responsible for site retention activities and they made my job significantly easier.

The goal of any community manager should be to facilitate two-way communication between a company and its customers, in order to improve the business and its products. In the process of doing so, I learned a lot about communicating with them.

In order to make communicating with me easier I ran a discussion forum, posted my email address, allowed users to chat with me directly using instant messaging tools and I made sure I was available for on-site communication at scheduled times.

Twitter wasn't popular when I started the job, and my superiors elected to have the social networking sites handled by someone else through an office in another country - a major mistake - as a unified voice and response mechanism is absolutely vital for successful community management.

Here are the top five things I learned about communicating while doing the job:

5) Be Patient Everyone who contacts you is taking precious time from their lives to do so. Respect them by making time to understand whatever point they're trying to make. If that means writing back to clarify, DO IT. Respect builds respect - and that pays off for the company in the long run.

4) Be Fair Always try to put yourself in your community's shoes. Try to understand how they see your company and your messages. This will help immensely when trying to understand why they are saying what they are saying, and how.

3) Be Funny Humor is tough but very useful. Never use it at someone's expense (except, perhaps, your own). Our product at the time was an entertainment product, and people were using it for a good time. Occasionally using humor helped keep the mood light. As Mary Poppins said, "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down," especially when rolling back a release or those rare times when you have to infringe on your user's behavior when changing a company policy.

2) Be Fast Speedy response times are important because as an official voice, you can kill rumors, correct incorrect assumptions and address problems as soon as they surface. A situation that festers is significantly harder to control. It makes community management a 24/7/365 job, but it comes with the territory. Yay for Blackberrys and laptops!

And finally, the most important thing I learned about communication:

1) Be Honest Like in any personal relationship, lying begets more lies. And unlike any personal relationship, as community manager you have thousands of eyes watching what you write and listening to what you say. Lying about something is an invitation to disaster because YOU WILL GET CAUGHT. Quickly become an expert in making the best of the worst situation, but never lie about what's happening.

Finally, remember that what you write and what you say in your role as community manager will live on the Web long after you've left the role. To this day, Google searches for my name list forum posts I made as Community Manager. I am comforted by the fact that I took the above lessons to heart and communicated responsibly, because what I wrote became my digital legacy.

© Jeremy Buehler and Rogue Tendencies (www.roguetendencies.com) 2010.

On Time Spent Playing Online Games

Yesterday an article was published on Gamesbeat quoting an NPD Group report outlining January statistics about video game sales and the amount of time people spend playing online games. The gist of it:

Market researcher NPD Group said that the average number of hours spent on online gaming has risen for the third consecutive year. That bodes well for this fast-growing segment of the game industry, which includes everything from casual online poker games to hardcore multiplayer online matches on the game consoles.

The statistic is promising for the games industry, but how much can online gaming change society?

World of Warcraft, the most successful PC-based Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game of all time boasts in excess of 11.5 million subscribers, a small number compared to the world's current population of 5.6 billion people. It's a number that doesn't carry a lot of weight until you start doing some good old fashioned math.

First get statistics from Xfire, a game community and chat program that tracks the time its users spend playing games. Warcraft is their top game in terms of time spent for the last 1,615 days. Daily, 57,572 people using their service spend 15,790,298 minutes playing the game. That's 4.6 hours per person.

It's not accurate to apply these numbers to all 11.5 million subscribers, but it's fair to compare the 4.6 hours a day spent playing to the more than four hours a day the average American watches TV. Then take into account the thousands of other online diversions available, from Farmville to Poker, and it becomes easy to see how powerful online gaming is and how it is infiltrating society.

I believe that power will result in cultural fallout and societal change. The trick is to pick what the 'tipping point' will be: the point at which that power manifests in society.

I think it will be when virtual achievements gain status in the real world. This can already be seen in game communities where top gamers get hero status, but it will be a tipping point when online achievements change the real-world status of the average Joe.

Put another way, anyone can play an online game, and become notoriously good at it inside the game world. But the tipping point will have occurred when that person feels no societal restriction on wearing a t-shirt with his gamer name on it in public. Another sign could be that it becomes acceptable and preferable to use ones real name instead of an alias when competing online.

It's hard to imagine the world after the tipping point because the gap between the real world and the virtual world is significant. As time progresses, and as technology evolves, the gap narrows. I don't think my generation will see it, or even the next. But their children will grow up in a world so vastly technologically different that its possible, and even probable.

© Jeremy Buehler and Rogue Tendencies (www.roguetendencies.com) 2010.