Curse

Fril Estelin · Jun 01, 2009, 03:42 PM // 15:42

I can't find the order, so I'll just post the ones I found again:

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cf...re/3095/page/1

Quote:

Jess Lebow's MMO Story Hour: E3, All Grown Up
A look behind the curtain at some stories from the biggest gaming event of them all: E3. The expo returns hopes to return to its former glory next week.

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he Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, is happening next week at the L.A. Convention Center. Over the past several years, this show has gone through more than its fair share of ups and downs. When I first learned about it, seven or eight years ago, E3 was the end-all, be-all behemoth of all shows. Everybody who was anybody was there. For three days it was the wild west meets Las Vegas in a “how much money can you spend on your booth” showdown. The noise was outrageous. The exhibition area overflowed onto other floors and into a full second building. Lights flashed. Booth babes posed for pictures, dressed as everyone’s favorite impossibly proportioned game characters. Cars were crashed. Guns were fired. Movies were made, and a good time was had by all.

The first time I went to the show, we were in the early stages for Guild Wars. There was very little game play, really only the basics for three of the classes. We did have good art, and the characters looked fantastic. But the game design was still being iterated and the sound design had only just begun.

We spent two straight weeks working 16+ hours a day, getting the demo ready for the show. Now, it wasn’t just the people on the show floor who were going to see and play the game for the first time. The founders at ArenaNet had too big of balls to do something so small. So instead of doing a controlled demo to a limited number of press and game industry professionals, we instead planned to release the game to the world for a weekend preview.

The idea was called E3 for Everyone, and basically we let anyone download the client, log on during show hours, and play the game—whether they were at the show or not. One part marketing ploy, another part stress test (and I stress the stress in stress test), we were either going to make a big splash, or we were going to die trying.

We’d set up several hours worth of game play and a little arena where players could compete head to head. Every one of us, every last soul in the studio, spent every waking hour (and some not so awake hours) polishing that piece of the game. It was hard, grueling work. We brought in people who had never played the game and asked them to simply play. We watched, diligently noting where they had trouble, running back into another room to make changes for the next batch of testers. Then we did it over again, and again.

I remember one night, I was severely sleep deprived, and we had a new group of testers in from one of the nearby colleges. The new attack animations and accompanying sounds had just been put in for the first creature that would actually make it into the game. The monster looked kind of like a very tall, web-footed gargoyle. None of the polish or fine tuning had taken place yet, so if someone encountered more than one of these creatures, all of their animations would be in sync with each other—which of course happened.

Collectively, six or eight of these little guys would run up to a player and begin their synchronized fireball routine, in which they raised their hands over their head, stood up nice and tall, and heaved an orb of fiery magical energy at an enemy. Each time they did this they would make a noise that sounded roughly like someone violently puking—though only for one second. BLEH.

They would pause then sound like they were puking twice. BLEH. BLEH.

The first time I witnessed this I was so punchy from the long nights, I couldn’t help myself. I just started repeating the sound.

BLEH . . . BLEH. BLEH.

I walked around the office, giggling and repeating to myself. Bleh . . . Bleh. Bleh. Pretty soon, other people heard me. But instead of giving me a good ribbing for my ridiculous behavior, they started following along. It wasn’t long before nearly half of the office was busily working at their computers, chanting little puking noises.

Anyway, the long hours were worth it, and E3 for everyone went off without a hitch. The show was long, and entertaining, and the best part was I was able to see what all the other studios had coming down the pipeline. It’s nice to know what you’ll be up against, but even better to be able to plan your game purchases for the next 12 months.

The next year, the show got even bigger. The NcSoft booth had a huge stage in the middle of it. We had “shows” scheduled every hour. The Guild Wars team flew in the top Korean guild to play, live, against other seeded teams on our tournament ladder. Another studio had hired a band with a lot of drums to play behind a group of fire jugglers.

Each time the group came on stage, the neighboring booths would turn up the volume on all of their audio equipment to compete with the music, but they didn’t ever turn it back down once the music was over. The end result was that every time the drummers would come on stage, they would have to crank it up another notch. The neighbors would retaliate, and eventually several companies got fined. Seriously, it was so loud on the show floor that ear plugs were mandatory, and many booths were giving them out as swag—some companies even had their logo printed on them.

I didn’t go to the show for the next couple of years. Neither did a lot of people. I’m not sure exactly what happened, but all of the big sponsors pulled out. I think it was just getting too expensive for them. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo were constantly trying to outdo each other. The booths got bigger and bigger each year. The level of ridiculousness grew to outrageous heights, and there just wasn’t enough return on the investment to make it worth their time.

I did get to go again in 2007. E3 had been revived from the dead, but only just barely. The show floor had been moved to a hangar in the Santa Monica airport, which was, honestly, smaller than some of the game studios I’ve seen. I don’t mind telling you, it was a sad, sad sight. Tiny little tables set up on strips of carpet that barely covered the concrete floor. One, maybe two people sitting at each booth, but they could have gotten by with even fewer. Nobody bothered to come to the show floor. Publishers and studios had taken it upon themselves to set up private press suites at Santa Monica-area hotels. All the demos took place at scheduled meetings, most of which had been set up before the show.

I was in the Sony booth, demoing Pirates of the Burning Sea. For me it was actually nice. I talked all day long, which was par for the course with trade shows, but I didn’t have to compete with the massive, pounding wall of sound that had been so prevalent on the show floor during previous years. Still, I was more than a little saddened by the turn of events. In only a few very short years, what had been the most important industry event had been reduced to a shadow of its former self. Sure, I understand the reasons behind the change, and they make perfect sense. But somehow the loud obnoxious, mind-blowing cacophony and accompanying freak show was a comforting sign that everything in the industry was okay. As long as we could still muster the energy and resources to make that much noise, the future ahead was sure to be bright.

I’m going again this year. I’ve heard that things are slowly coming back into equilibrium. That the show this year will be somewhere between the highs of 2001 and 2002 and the lows in 2007. Maybe it’s just a sign that the industry is maturing. Maybe it was time for us to collectively grow up and stop trying to blast out our neighbors with our high powered toys—I mean audio acoustic equipment.

Then again, we make games. Why should we have to grow up?

Fril Estelin · Jun 01, 2009, 03:44 PM // 15:44

http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cf...re/3038/page/1

Quote:

Jess Lebow's MMO Story Hour: Got Game... Demo?
A tale from the tenches of a high stakes whirlwind press tour through Manhattan. This week, Lebow's column gives us a first hand account of the press demo from the developer's perspective.

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As I’m sure you’re aware, there is actually a lot more to developing an MMO than simply sitting around, playing games, and bullshitting about what would be cool. Okay, so we do a fair amount of that, but designers and writers have other duties as well. We have meetings. We create and update internal wikis. We proofread. We put together design documents. You get the picture…

And, things go wrong in these arenas as well.

One of those other duties (which I must admit I really quite enjoy) is showing off your game for prospective publishers, potential investors, and interested (and sometimes not-so-interested) press.

While I was working on Pirates of the Burning Sea, we did a one-day whirlwind tour of some of the major press in New York. These were serious new outlets—AOL, CNN, Newsweek, Playboy, etc… Big players who reach millions of viewers/readers/players—and they only give space to the top handful of games.

I can think of two other meetings over the course of that development cycle that were as big as this trip. One wouldn’t happen for another four months—a surprise pitch to the head of Sony Pictures at E3, back before SOE became part of SCEA. The other was almost a year earlier, when we were shopping the game to prospective publishers, before we had agreed to work with Sony.

In other words, this press tour was important for us, and we knew it.

By “us” I mean Rusty William—the CEO of Flying Lab Software and my stalwart demoing partner through every one of these tough meetings—and Susan Lusty, our PR juggernaut. (Yes, that is her real name. And yes, she is a juggernaut in that she is very, very good at her job.)

In order to actually demo an MMO, you have to run both a client and a server. You can do this with a dual-core machine (and we do a lot of developing this way, so we can test our changes before we check them in to the real game), but with a laptop this often produces less-than-ideal results. Oftentimes there is a lot of lag, so to remedy this, we bring two laptops and run one as the server and the other as the client. On this particular trip, to save space, instead of bringing two full-fledged laptops, we brought one bad-ass machine and this tiny little UMPC, a 9-inch touch screen laptop that has most of the functionality of a regular laptop. We used the UMPC as the server, and it worked like a charm.

Inside MTV, we set up in a conference room overlooking the Hudson River. Posters of Sting and Madonna looked down on us as we began our pitch. Everything seemed to be going fine. The guy was an avid gamer and pirate fan, so we were all getting along well. Everyone was smiling and having a good time, when suddenly the screen started to wobble.

The video card had gone out, right in the middle of our pitch. If you’re old enough to remember what it was like to try to tune your television with rabbit ears and having a difficult time getting your favorite channel to come in clearly, then you have a pretty good idea what our game looked like. We had managed to get through character creation without a problem, then this. If we’d had another laptop, we could have just swapped the two and run the client on the other one, but the UMPC didn’t have a keyboard and Pirates hadn’t been developed as a touch-screen game.

We had scheduled some time for lunch between meetings, which we instead used to run to the local electronics store and buy a new laptop. That accomplished, we still needed to put the client on the new machine, which was going to take some time.

Our next appointment was with Newsweek, so we made our way to the tiny, stark marble lobby of their high-rise building, sat down on the floor, and got to work. Now remember, this was only a few years after September 11th, and New York was still on high alert. They didn’t really take too kindly to a couple of guys with a bunch of high-tech equipment camping out in their lobby and poking wires into things. And we were asked, politely but firmly, to “please leave.”

That’s when Susan “juggernaut” Lusty got on the phone. With a bunch of quick talking and a fair amount of effort trying to calm the security team in the lobby, we were eventually escorted to a storage closet inside the Newsweek offices, where we were allowed to finish our file transfers. While Rusty was busy doing the technical work, Susan and I made conversation with the columnist we had barged in on nearly an hour early.

This is the part of game development that they never list in a job description. How to entertain someone—whom you’ve just met, who knows you’re stalling, and in this case was one of the smartest people I had ever encountered—long enough to let your boss, who’s in the storage closet, fix the laptop so you can give a successful demo and hopefully get an article written about your game.

Try summarizing that for your resume.

The final appointment of the day was supposed to be at AOL. But the person we were meeting had a lunch appointment that went long. Our options were to cancel the meeting, or come find her in downtown Manhattan.

We met her at the restaurant, and I actually had to get on my belly and slide under a table in order to plug the laptop in, which was only slightly more fun than having a cavity filled.

The woman we were demoing for didn’t seem at all interested in the game. She barely raised an eyebrow at character creation (something that had received a great reaction from nearly everyone we’d shown the game to), and to be honest I wouldn’t have pegged her as someone who knew the difference between an Xbox and a Playstation, let alone someone who would be interested in an MMO.

But other than having to rub my body all over the high-traffic floor of a New York restaurant, covered in who knows what, the demo went off without another hitch. And to our surprise, she wrote a terrific preview piece. I guess you can’t judge a gamer by her cover, eh?

All told, I think we gave eight pitches that day. A couple of them went off perfectly. Most of them had some sort of minor emergency we had to overcome. In the end, we did all right. These sorts of things happen all the time in this industry, but it’s difficult to translate the skills necessary for survival into line items in a job posting. Then again, how do you know you’re going to have to ask someone to climb around on the floor to plug in a demo machine? Or, perhaps fend off a surly security guard who thinks your bundle of wires may be a bomb?

I guess you don’t. So instead, you advertise for people to come play games and bullshit about cool design ideas, and you hope they don’t mind getting their hands dirty.