Some Tips for the Incoming Community Manager

In case you haven’t heard, Richard Watson (aka RAWA) has been appointed to fill the spot of Community Manager, a job temporarily filled by Chogon after Greydragon left. Recent community relations have been a sore spot for a large section of the Uru community and I think there are several simple ways RAWA can remedy that.
1. Communicate. Many probably wouldn’t care if it’s simply an inventory of Cyan’s refrigerator, just as long as some signs of life are coming from Spokane. Not just for the first few days of your employ as CM, but for the whole time. Get to know as much of the community as possible. Know your audience.You cannot afford not to.
2. Don’t be friendly. “Getting to know” is not the same as being best buddies for life. The fans are neither your friends nor your enemies. The fans are your clients, your patrons.
3. Reconcile. Just like patrons of a restaurant, you need to know what your fans want and find a way to incorporate that into what Cyan wants to do. Even if some people in the fanbase (or Cyan) are against it, you need to be able to say “this is what our fans want”. This doesn’t mean Cyan needs to put blood and gore into the games just because it’s popular. Common sense rules.
4. Go beyond Uru. Uru is no longer Cyan’s flagship. The surprising sales of Myst for the iPhone are evidence Myst is at least coming back to that role. Your fanbase is shifting back to Myst and, while an iPhone app is hardly a proper flagship, any ship that navigates you out of the storm is the right one.
5. Rebrand. Despite that success, Cyan cannot thrive through Myst Era tactics. Cyan needs to take a look at what it does well and translate that into a variety of niches modern gamers are going to recognize. Cyan needs to modernize its catchphrase. Myst won’t appeal purely on the “books that take you to another world” concept. People today have hundreds of games that take them to another world so that concept can no longer excite people as it did in the past. If you can find a concept or theme that directly ties into Myst or Myst-type games (such as the steam-punk theme) you can find the key to attracting a new generation to your products. If not, you face the prospect of your fanbase literally growing old and dying. With the old guard getting older and the new blood being discouraged by rigidity of your brand.

Good luck.

Hex Isle and Continuity

News has been circulating that Drizzle, the current Uru fan Age manager/Cyan game-converter, has added Hex Isle to the list of games it can reasonably convert for use in Uru. This has brought up worries about continuity. Let me just say this: There is no Uru continuity.

When you get to the core of it, continuity is keeping everything in the proper order. It’s what you notice in a film when the main actor has his hair parted three different ways in three shots of the same scene. It’s what you notice in a television program when objects on a desk change positions during the scene. And, those who say this has ended Uru continuity, it’s what you notice in a game when an Age suddenly appears with no history and the walls are made of cheese.

Except, by that definition, Uru’s continuity is riddled with more holes than that cheese. Consider this: How is it continuous that we can jump some of the barriers in the city and not others? Why can we only vault ourselves over he one small portion of Teledahn railing by the buckets just because it’s bent down? But those are gameplay mechanics, you say? Fair enough. Most people who cite a degradation of continuity, canon, etc. usually cite the mystical evilness of Until Uru, the User KI, flymode, etc. This is utter nonsense, and should be labeled as such. The many shards of UU are cited as a corruption of Uru’s canon since, obviously, there couldn’t be dozens of caverns with conflicting histories. However, before the many shards of UU, there were the many (Three? Four?) shards of Prologue (Atrus, Achenar, and Katran are the ones I recall hearing about). While someone who was around then could give a better account of it, I believe Cyan tried to “simulcast” the storyline events onto the official shards. Still, people were exploring in separate servers. If Until Uru’s multiple existences was a threat to Uru’s continuity, then Prologue and Cyan itself was a threat to that continuity. But I am moving too far away from the point. Uru’s continuity is not, and has never been, this shiny perfect thing to be defended/ended.

Now, let’s assume Hex Isle’s Ages suddenly appear in Uru. Break in continuity? Perhaps. Possibility for stories? Yes. See, there are plenty of Ages, Cyan Ages, that require more than a little imagination to find continuity. Take Jalak, for example. To go through the continuity breaks in this age would take too long. For starters, how did crowds of D’ni view the games though those tiny windows? If the D’ni fell from the top to the bottom, how did they survive? Did they survive? How much did they pay the janitor? Why do the bamboo plants seem to not grow farther out? And the big one (next to the ever-present “where’s the toilet?” question): Where’s the sun?

These aren’t trivial questions. If we’re going to get so picky about something as easily (and enjoyably, in my opinion) created as a history or a backstory, why aren’t we protesting the lack of a sun in some ages, or the constant daylight in most others? Why does Tsogahl’s 24-hour noon get nothing more than a passing glance, but the Catfish Canyon not having a “written in the year x DE” stamped next to it causes some people’s livers to immolate? For that matter, why does Tsogahl not having a “written in the year x DE” get nothing more than a passing glance? Simple, because this isn’t about canon or continuity. At its core, it’s about appearance.

Change the rock in Tsogahl into blobs of cheese, and you have the same relative world as the Moldy Mansion (or Cheesy Castle or whatever that level’s called). The issue here is one of style and appearance. Some people just do not want to accept that anything goes in Uru. They like the “infinite worlds” idea up to a finite point.

It has to have a history, I’ve heard it said. But most of the Uru Ages, including some of the original Prologue Ages, have just as much backstory and history as the Dessert Desert. Kemo has little more than a vague history of “it was a rest Age”.  What history does Tsogahl or Delin have. Beyond simple descriptions, what history do most of the Ages have?

It can’t have anything weird, I’ve heard it phrased. But what’s more weird than an island fused to a ship? Or a rocket randomly placed in a crater island? Or a spinning fortress? Or a walkway in a submerged forest? Or a world with stars in the ground? Or a world with a giant beehive? How about an island made up of an inverted tree? Or an ice-ball roller coaster? What about a world of naturally-formed castles floating over plasma? The piranha birds in Laki, the bird statues in Noloben, the obese trees in Tahgira? How about a giant bird with baleen, or a giant pelican that eats dirt? Gira’s glow in the dark rays, Gahreesen’s spinning fortresses, Teledahn’s giant mushrooms. A giant blue bean that doesn’t fry your brain? A race of people living under Carlsbad writing books to zap them across time and space during their 300 year long lifespans? If that isn’t weird to you, my friend, you need to stop drinking so much. The entire Myst series, and indeed any fantasy series, is a little weird. I don’t have that hard of a time making room for foodstuffs substrate in-between the giant dimension-hopping killer ants.

When a continuity problem arises, those in the community who are concerned with that rise up and reach a general consensus on the issue. There have been storyless Ages, sunless, nightless, reasonless Ages. In the end, Uru’s continuity has been imperfect from the start.

Philanthropic Urges

These days I usually only write when something stirs me. Whether it be a great development or a despicable act, it takes something special. This occasion is no different.

If you subscribe to Mystblogs or are on Twitter, you have no doubt seen a link for Help the Hamiltons. Asking for help on the internet is certainly nothing new but, while it is not the most eloquent plea for help, it is clear they are facing challenges I have blessedly only briefly experienced in my life. Sadly, this post is not about a hope for charity.

This is short, and quickly done, and does not nearly do justice to the post. My time to write is short, but to leave this alone feels to me akin to condoning it. I just recently saw this post. It reads:

I’m a college student who has no income. I live in a destitute area. I have six years of college ahead of me so that I can teach High School Science. A very noble profession, in my opinion.

I’m not begging for money.

…

…

Oh, while I’m not begging, I really need one of those new $2,500 17″ MacBook Pros. I get really bored between my CHEM 1211 Lecture and Lab… I could write papers for my ENGL 1101 class and annoy my POLS 1101 professor with it! So, satisfy your philanthropic urges, and donate to my cause!

This is wrong, Hoikas. This is beyond wrong. Your About page says you are eighteen. So perhaps you haven’t yet felt the agony of struggling with a friend or family member who is un-endingly sick. Perhaps you have not yet had your life up-ended in this way. It is a horrible, daily struggle. Who taught you this was right? Who told you this was anything other than a low and cruel attack? You have a personal disagreement with Eleri? That’s fine. I’m sure both of you could have endless arguments over who did what, who is worse, and on, and on. Go on to the end of time arguing over it. But let it be when someone is asking for help.

Perhaps you will realize this and apologize for mocking another family’s plea for help in a recession.

Andrew Keen

Some years ago, when Cult of the Amateur had just come out, I read Andrew Keen. I disagreed strongly with him then, but I was confident that he was, at least, no fool. He was, in my opinion, a member of a previous generation bemoaning the loss or degradation of said generation. Every generation has one. The phrase goes something like “every generation thinks it’s better than the ones it descended from and the ones which descend from it.” It was a simple debate and, at the time, it was often debated. Mr. Keen had the rare argument which at least appeared to be solid and he articulated his points well.

Sadly, that is all gone. Mr. Keen appears now to have turned into something rude and insulting. Not simply insulting other people by calling them childish, insulting also to the dignified and principled (even if I believed those principles to be wrong) debate. One moves to insults to gain attention, and Mr. Keen seems to need it. One comment on the entirety of the articles on the front page.

Mr. Keen has said he dislikes people who insult other anonymously via blogs. As one comment notes, however… one cannot find ID of Mr. Keen. He has shown no photo ID, social security card, nor listed his home address or any other identification when making his posts, thus making him anonymous and insulting people who merely have a different viewpoint than his. There is a larger lesson in this. One’s principles should never lead one to blind faith or thoughts of superiority. If they do, they are no longer principles. They are enablers of arrogance.

Edit: To clarify, the part on principles is referring to the Uru community and NOT to Mr. Keen.

Also, the part on identification is meant to illustrate the problem with arguing against anonymity on the internet.

And lastly, despite all this, I still respect Mr. Keen. I simply wish he would return to the (more effective, in my opinion) debate style he had before.

Gamecock and SouthPeak

The story of what happened with Cyan Worlds and others is finally coming to light. In an article on Joystiq, Ludwig Kietzmann reports that Gamecock, the company with which Cyan was doing testing work, suddenly found itself short on cash and over-tasked with releasing big indie games, forcing Gamecock to find a new investor, and fast.

Enter SouthPeak, which bought up Gamecock as well as all its liabilities, the debt it owed to a whole host of companies, which former Gamecock CEO Mike Wilson described in detail “These ranged from our testing house, Cyan Worlds, who ended up doing huge layoffs because of non-payment, to the big magazine and website publishers, to the smallest of companies and individuals hired for webwork, video production, packaging, you name it. 800 dollars to 800,000 dollars, they were all given essentially the same treatment.”

What “treatment” is that, you ask? The treatment of not being paid. And, at least according to an annonymous Gamecock producer, being lied to about payment– with the cliche “the check is in the mail” apparently actually being used. All of this, too, defended by SouthPeak saying that it is debt because of the acquisition of Gamecock. And yet, their own financial statements tell a different story.

February 18th, the site GamesIndustry.biz reported that, in the fourth quarter of 2008 (during and after the acquisition), SouthPeak’s income rose to $17.3 million, up from $4.2 million the year before. Their net income, their profit, was up to $1.2 million compared with just $281,000 of profit the year before– a 76% jump.

Or again just three months later, May 18th, Gamasutra reported the company had revenues of $13.5 million. While the article did not mention profits it did say SouthPeak was going to dramatically increase its investment in IP and game development. This payment would be to the tune of $14 million, more than their revenues.

So what do we make of this? Workers not being paid, yet profits up more than 76%, revenues in the millions, and dramatic boosts to future game development using up more than aforementioned revenue. No small wonder then, perhaps, that the company’s stock is down more than 45% this year.

The story is becoming clearer and yet is still obscured. Why did SouthPeak stop the contract with Cyan Test when, according at the very least to comments in the Gamasutra article, Cyan Test was an exemplary group? Why did they try to negotiate to not pay and/or pay only “half or less” of contracts or essentially take the attitude of “screw off, sue us” with their contracts when they appear to have had ample revenue with which to pay them? All unanswered.

There is more to this story, of course, and I encourage anyone who is curious to check out the articles I have linked to here, including the interview with Gamecock’s former CEO to get a glimpse of what may have happened. In the end, it would appear that SouthPeak gets to join Ubisoft.

Correction: SouthPeak’s 2008 4th quarter profit was up 76%, not its income. Their income was up more than 130%.

A Call

If any of you have watched the Mysterium footage (seen HERE) you know there was news of Open Uru.

To boil it down, Open Uru has been set aside for the moment in favor of an unknown paying project. Mark “Chogon” DeForest, who was working primarily on the project, is busy with that. The question came up (almost at the end of the above video) about whether talented volunteers could do the required work of stripping plug-ins and other pieces of software Cyan cannot legally distribute as open source. And Rand replied, essentially, yes– that such a deal would be fun.

So this is a humble request for those volunteers. While I have no training (or knowledge what-so-ever) in the technical aspects of the server and world-creation code, I do know that the fans here are supremely talented. From back in UU when fans were able (with Cyan’s help) to resurrect Uru and begin to unlock the ability to add new worlds to it. Through Uru Live when development continued behind the scenes. And finally to the present day when I can still explore not only the original Ages, but Myst V ages, Live’s Ages, and fan Ages beyond anything that was around even a few years ago. If that can be done, this can be done. So I urge those with knowledge and talent to take up the call. There has never been another moment for the fans in which your action could impact the future of Uru than now. If you are interested, I urge you to contact Chogon or another representative at Cyan. Times there are tight and I am positive that they would welcome the help.

What’s Going On

With Maw, Fens, Toroolbah, and Bimevi in pretty much their final form, my Age-writing focus is now on a larger project I call TCOT. Depending on a variety of factors, I estimate a release late 2009 or early 2010. While I’m not releasing any hints on the project now, I will say that there are a few hints tossed about.

The Beauty of Modesty

I have noticed an interesting phenomenon in the Age-writing community. It’s a phenomenon which may point out one of Cyan’s less noticeable, yet critical, deviations from traditional gaming.

Indulge me, if you can. If you have Uru and Drizzle/the Uru Age Manager installed, load it up and link to nearly any Age. Load my Age of Fens, or the spectacular Age of Rell-Too. Load up almost any Age you see and I will bet that it is grandiose. Over the top, giant, staggering, etc. In Fens, there are massive trees in a massive swamp with massive mushrooms and massive sail-caterpillar-half-circle-roundy things all sitting in a massive basin. In Rell-Too there are massive spires on massive islands dotted with massive diamonds with a tiny cable car spanning massive distances etc.

Now load up a Cyan Age. Kadish or Teledahn or Gahreesen or Minkata. Look at them. Sure, they’re massive. hey have large forests, mushrooms, fortresses, sand, etc. But notice that there is a different feel to the size. They’re not attempting to impress you with the size of the cliffs, they’re having you run around solving puzzles or otherwise interacting with your surroundings. Now load up Gira or Kemo or Delin and Tsogal if you have Drizzle. Or the pod ages. They’re small. They show off the beauty of their surroundings, the plants or animals.

Now think back to Myst and Riven. The Ages in them were fairly small with only a few truly grandiose items amongst them (mostly in Riven with the Golden Dome and Survey Island). There is something spectacular in being mediocre and it is something Cyan seems to do quite well.

I’m not talking about things that are breath-taking, the views are almost always good at that. And I don’t mean that the spires in Selenetic aren’t spectacular, but they simply aren’t the size and mass at which I see fan Ages inflating their objects. The emphasis seems too easily moved to showing off an Age with mile-high canyons and cliffs. This isn’t just an Uru fan-based phenomenon either. Think of all the traditional games. They all have their giant towers or their giant swords or their giants bosses. In the end, the little guys are the minions and the little boulders are just the pebbles on the beach.

If you look at Cyan’s most popular games, you see that they (and the franchise) are best when things are modestly breath-taking. When you get to the end of Channelwood and you’re sitting in a bland room with just the book in it. It is a more difficult kind of spectacle which holds an audience.

Robyn Miller Buys Cyan Worlds, Announces New Games

From CNN:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/04/01/cyan.worlds.takeover/index.html

By Sally Sparrow

CNN

In a surprise move today, Robyn Miller, co-creator of the popular computer game Myst, announced that he was taking over operations at the Spokane, Washington game development company effective today. Robyn, 42, takes over from his brother Rand Miller, 50, who has headed the company since 1997.  Signs of the change in leadership were obvious even this morning when the younger Miller hand-painted Cyan headquarters vibrant rainbow colors at approximately 4:30am Pacific time.

In addition to the changes to Cyan headquarters, Mr. Miller has allegedly added a number of rules to the company. According to an internal memo, all employees of “Cyan-Mauve-Fuchsia-Worlds” are to wear “brightly-colored suits and ties with the Lord Robyn’s face on them,” and “Employees are encouraged to co-ordinate with others so that no two employees wear the same color suit.” Company etiquette is also apparently changing at Cyan. Mr. Miller has announced that all current employees will be referred to by their choice of suit color. Future applicants will no longer be given job descriptions, instead they will be shown a color and Mr. Miller will determine if they are worthy of the position based on their description of it.

Mr. Miller has also come to the company with a number of games already being worked on by Cyan. One game, mentioned in the takeover news, is Captain Woogle and the Star Spackler. The game, from its description on the Cyan website, will lead players through a colorful and confusing world as Awesome Space Captain Woogle in his quest to find the Star Spackler to patch holes in the universe.

Mr. Miller also addressed the suddenness of the buyout in a podcast on the Cyan website. He read, in part, “Cyan Worlds is a critical part of the Robynanian economy and so we must provide the capital it needs to stay afloat in these difficult times. Never since the Great Spongecake Shortage of 2002 has Robynania seen such a crisis.”

Mr. Miller has also apparently gained the support of the United States in this endeavor. U.S. President Barack Obama this morning ordered Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to set aside $20 billion in bank rescue funds after Mr. Miller showed him some of the game concepts Cyan is working on. Asked about the large amount of support, the U.S. President had this to say, “Look, I went over a number of the proposals Robyn’s dreamt up and I think they could help turn this economy around within a month of their completion. I promise you, once you see them, you’ll agree they’ve got a lot of color in them.” President Obama is reportedly planning on encouraging other countries at the G 20 economic forum to commit additional capital for the production of the games.

Spiders and Starfish

From Eleri

There’s no room in the gaming industry anymore for games that have “beautiful, strange, immersive worlds and a compelling storyline”. No one wants to publish games for people who want to explore, think, learn, discover. Players brains must not be challenged with anything deeper than finding the right combo of spells/weapons/power.

It’s frustrating, really, to see Cyan sink so low, while the games that get the fanfare are just another FPS clone, just another kill-loot-level MMO. It’s all about the marketing and the numbers anymore. No one cares about making an original game, just one that’ll make money.

This is a sadly-true look at the present day gaming industry. An endless line of shooting games which only successfully entertain by way of slight variations and some genuinely-interesting new features. It all seems very gritty brown and gunmetal gray out there, doesn’t it? However, I think one should emphasize the true and rational issue with the gaming industry. It’s not that FPS games exist, but their predominance that leads to this despair over Uru’s plight. It doesn’t seem very fair that Uru struggles to find proper funding and muddles about in obscurity, while big names enjoy massive profits and large budgets to produce unending sequels each blander than the one before. It doesn’t seem right for people to peck at Uru’s defects, lift their noses, and begrudge the game because of its commercial failures while, at the same time, playing the latest Resident Evil game with glassy-eyed wonder at the guts and gore. It strikes us as bizarre that it’s only the non-violent games that lose customers when they find fault with it. With a traditional FPS, a user might say some part “sucks” or make disparaging remarks about the circumstances around the developer’s birth, and yet they still play because they need their blood.

But let’s not get too focused on the worst of the genre. There are games which try new things, which don’t just focus on you shooting things, which give far more than a passing glance at puzzles and exploration. Half-Life is one where the focus is not entirely on killing and where brains can save your life. And, of course, there are other types of games which are gaining in popularity. For example, Portal, which has enjoyed quite a lot of fame for both its gameplay and technical achievements. The rule is thus, FPS games should have their place just as puzzle and casual games should have theirs. The world would be just as lacking as it is now if the roles were to be reversed, if Uru were to swap with World of Warcraft and Spore for Halo 3. And one begins to see the seeds of a shift taking root. People are bored with playing the same game over again with new textures and bigger guns. To use an economic term, we’ve been in a FPS bubble, and there are signs that it’s ready to pop. The gaming landscape appears to be changing yet again.

And that brings me to what the title of this post means. I read an article which touched on the subject of leadership and control of organizations. It revolves around the neural organization of a starfish versus a spider. If you cut off the spider’s head, it is dead. If you cut a starfish in half, you get two healthy starfish. It is the difference seen in many aspects of our lives. From the music industry to the evolution of the news industry, everyone is trying to become a starfish, a nearly-invincible force with which to profit. If Cyan and the Uru fan community can pull it off, a starfish is what Uru can become. What is often argued by the genius businessmen this community is suddenly filled with, the crutch I always hear, is the idea that the fans just can’t do it. It’s too expensive to run a server, they cry and wring their hands. The fans can’t produce content in sufficient quantity or quality, they say. We must remember, however, that this is nothing new to us. Uru was somewhat open source back before it was fashionable to do so. It was Until Uru, the fans running servers out of their generosity, which propelled Uru through its first demise. What it lacked in general was new and interesting content. With the exception of a few spots, Uru was stagnant. And yet, that was where the seeds of the Age creation tools first sprouted.

In the end, we’re going through a drastic shift in Uru’s management. From a spider, with Cyan at its head, to a starfish. No doubt this change of species makes some distraught. After all, you can’t claim a starfish is a spider no matter how well you disguise it. Some people won’t like it because it’s not what they liked and there’s no dismissing that. This freedom comes at the cost, at least short-term, of no Cyan content. But with this freedom comes the benefit of being able to make your own home, to make your own perfect version of Uru. We’re pioneers of a new possibility for online gaming and I, for one, relish at the prospect of testing this new ground, no matter the outcome.