Reality Panic

Wow, I’m shaking from eating too much meat!

Went to dinner with local indies Ken Schachter (Trapdoor) and Vander Caballero (Blue Lizard) to talk shop. Ken suggested Le Milsa, a Brazilian churrascaria style restaurant. Of course, we took the “rodizio” option… Too. Much. Meat.

There was even a carnival style samba dancer that come out to get the crowd revved up. Ironically, when I was in Rio last year, I meant to hit a churrascaria, but never got the chance..

Vander and Ken and lots of meat!

Ken and Vander attacked by the samba dancer!

One of my more popular lectures is on the need to fail in order to reach success. So many concepts and stories play into this, and I keep collecting new material to incorporate… I’ve made two recent additions.

First up, a book on fighting. The Fighter’s Mind: Inside the Mental Game by Sam Sheridan is a fascinating look into the mental game of boxing, martial arts, wrestling, etc. For one, I find it personally interesting given my fighting background (eg, be sure to ask me about the time I got thrown through a window during Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu sparring while in Rio next time you see me). But, there was surprisingly a lot of mention of failure and defeat. That great fighters need to accept that failure is possible and/or that many great fighters first had to fail before they kicked themselves into high gear.

Second addition was this mini TED Talk by Autodesk fellow Tom Wujec about the “marshmallow challenge”. Key here is using prototyping and rapid iteration to fail often and experiment in a hands-on manner to reach success. Well worth the 7 minutes.

Finally got around to watching Jane McGonigal’s awesome TED talk. It’s an expansion on some of the key ideas she presented during the GDC’08 rant session, essentially leveraging the problem solving power of games/gamers to make progress on real-world issues.

The second best part of the talk is when, at 1 minute 38 seconds, an audience member let’s out a nervous laugh of disbelief (ok, more like a cackle), when Jane proposes we have to collectively play 21 billions hours of online games (a dramatic increase over the current 3 billion). The best part is the standing ovation she receives at the end. Check it out:

Kind of ironic given the story that’s currently circulating about how folks from the White House asked Microsoft to create a game to help solve the budget/deficit problem.

I’ve got a drawer full of USB thumb drives. Some are really oldschool (big and clunky and only have 32MB of memory) others are more recent, pretty much given away as freebies/swag (slim ones with upwards of a gig or two), used as a cooler alternative to handing out printed brochures at a tradeshow. To say that these little storage devices have become a commodity is an understatement.

Then, my Mimobot drive arrives in the mail, and I’m all googoogaga for it. There are a ton of cool designs, and I chose the “Holybot”:

Of course, the concept of turning a commodity into a luxury via design is not new. Hmm, I seem to recall the classic story of some famed designer holding up a toilet plunger or scrubber from Target as the prime example - anyone got a reference to that?

Admittedly, I thought Martin was crazy. A charity driven publisher? It was crazy enough that I wanted to get behind the idea, and I’ve been an advisor for OneBigGame since the start (though, I say that while at the same time not taking any credit for what’s been accomplished).

Anyway, OneBigGame’s first game, Chime, has been released on Xbox Live Arcade, with 60% of proceeds donated to various children charities. The game was developed by Zoe Mode out of the UK. Massive kudos goes to the Zoe Mode team for making this happen.

Chime is a mesmerizing little game that absorbed me for a few hours the first time I booted it up. Definitely reminds me of Lumines, and related beat/block matching games… Very polished and fun overall.

Admittedly, my favorite part was getting the 50 point achievement “gift” when starting the game for the first time. A truly nice gesture, especially for GamerScore whores like me ;)

Divide By Zero’s James Portnow recently visited Brazil to scope out the game industry and whipped up an excellent analysis for Gamasutra.

Having visited Brazil recently myself (to keynote at the annual SBGames conference), I share many of the same observations and conclusions. Though, sadly, I wasn’t able to make it out to the Oi Futura Nave school.

Of all the challenges and obstacles listed (ie, piracy, taxes, lack of funding, etc),  the most potent problem in my opinion is a complete mismatch of creative vision and business opportunity.

As James mentioned, “game makers in Brazil expect to jump in and start making AAA experiences like those they play.” Indeed, it was amazing how many indie/amateur/student developers I met who wanted to create the next Halo, WoW or GTA.

I kept telling them to stop looking towards America/the West for inspiration, and rather look to Korea. While the variables/conditions were obviously different, Korea had similar challenges. And yes, perhaps more so through business innovation, the industry evolved and prospered.

There are many opportunities to be had in Brazil right now, in spite of the current obstacles. It’s just hard to see them when you’re trying to code up your epic Halo killer idea.