Playing Around

SOE — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:03:05 +0000

Once I like a game, I tend to play the heck out of it. When I really, really like a game, I have been known to start it over from the beginning right after playing it through the first time.

It’s like reading books. The books I keep on hand are ones that I will read again and again.

That said, while I have read quite a lot, there are few games that I’ve managed to finish. It seems as though there’s always something new coming out to tempt me. Or, I put the game aside for a while when real life intervenes and by the time I come back to it, I have no idea how to play it any longer. As the weather warms up, I’ll probably spend less time indoors with more involved games and instead play a bunch of little casual games.

A couple of Facebook games I’ve been dinking around with lately are entirely different from each other…and I like them both!

First is My Fairyland by Play and Connect Ltd. You “level up” a garden by growing various adorable little plants. After they flower, you can harvest them, which will in turn support The Nature Conservancy’s Adopt An Acre program.

What I like about it is that you don’t have to spam your friends to play this game in order to advance. If your friends happen to play, they’ll be able to water your garden for you. If your friends aren’t playing, once your garden hits a certain level, it’s open to all the other players on Facebook. I’ve had folks stop by my garden and leave me messages from Australia, Italy and England!

And besides, who doesn’t want to see what bird will evolve from their Carmena Aviflora?

The other game I’m playing on Facebook is Bejeweled Blitz by Popcap. It’s a one minute timed version of the ever-popular Bejeweled 2, putting you and your Facebook friends into a team. There’s a leaderboard to show you how your score fits in amongst your pals, a way to smack talk them and drawings for various prizes.

Again, the nice thing is that you don’t have to spam everyone into playing with you. If they happen to play this app, they’ll show up in your team and on your leaderboard. Your “leveling up” is really just getting a higher score for yourself. Where it does make a difference is for the prize drawing, for which having a team would definitely help you towards a million points total in a week.

Unless you’re a much more dedicated gamer than I am (and that wouldn’t surprise me), where you can make that kind of point-age without anyone else’s help. In which case, I bow to your abilities!

Moment By Moment

SOE — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:47:21 +0000

The Twitter rush is on-going and SOE is rushing right along! It’s especially handy this week as many of our PR staff and developers are on the floor at E3, updating us constantly on what’s happening. Following along on Twitter is how I’m living E3 this year!

Here’s a list of some of our SOE product and people Twitter feeds…if you want to know the latest about any of our games, you’ll want to follow:

The Company:
http://twitter.com/SonyOnline
http://twitter.com/SOE_Podcast
http://twitter.com/soefanfaire
http://twitter.com/SOEArtWorld

The Games:
http://twitter.com/everquest
http://twitter.com/everquestii
http://twitter.com/eqoa
http://twitter.com/FreeRealms
http://twitter.com/planetside
http://twitter.com/poxnora
http://twitter.com/The_Agency_Game
http://twitter.com/vanguardsoh
http://twitter.com/SWG_Events

Obviously this isn’t an entire listing; lots of us try to keep our personal tweeting separate from work (although there’s always overlap when you just end up liking folks so darn much). Go ahead and follow us wherever you go!

Escape!

SOE — Fri, 22 May 2009 19:56:36 +0000

Games and books are my main escapes from real life. I knit a lot, and that relaxes me, but when I want to get completely away I need something more.

My mother has been visiting me for the past week and it’s been an interesting experience. Like a lot of baby boomers (although I am at the very end of the traditional boomer time span), I have an aging parent and children of my own. Fortunately, my little cherubs are old enough to care for themselves, so I don’t need to worry as much about them. And my mother lives with my sister, so generally speaking I don’t need to worry much about her, either.

This visit has been very illuminating and stressful. I find myself worrying over my mother, who has senile dementia, all day long. Is she eating enough? Am I entertaining her enough? Is walking from here to there too much? How much can she really handle? Is she forgetting to tell me that something hurts?

I would very much like to pop a game into the laptop, or bring her down the stairs to sit with me while I play something on a console, but I worry that I will escape so successfully from life’s little stresses that it will leave her feeling even more bored than she must currently be.

Instead, we’ve been watching a movie together in the afternoons. She must think all I ever watch are cartoons as I’ve been picking out anime movies. We watch them in Japanese since it’s a language from her childhood that she understands (with subtitles for me).

In any event, this is what being a woman in games sometimes means. It means you’re a woman in a real world with real issues and you’re just like a whole lotta other women in the real world.

Yay for Free Realms!

SOE — Mon, 18 May 2009 17:46:38 +0000

As those of you who follow various employee Twitter and Facebook pages already know, Free Realms hit a million registered users after being out for just seventeen days. That’s really awesome!

I thought of including some other fascinating facts about things that took seventeen days to achieve, but I can’t find anything off the top of the interwebs. You can, however, get lost in a boatload of interesting figures at The Mine of Useless Information like I did.

And I’ll bet some of those statistics aren’t all so useless. You’re bound to need one of those answers some day when you’re a contestant on a game show! Game shows are all about retaining tons of nearly useless bits of flotsam in your mind.

Don’t thank me now for this invaluable resource. Just send me one million dollars in hundred dollar bills; that apparently weighs just 20.4 pounds and is cheaper to mail than a million one-dollar bills would be.

Free Realms and You

SOE — Mon, 11 May 2009 22:48:48 +0000

Or me, as the case may be. Also known as: where have I been lately?

A couple of years ago, I was one of the handful of Free Realms designers, sitting in meetings with artists to look at where we wanted this thing or that pathway. And while the lure of returning to Seattle was too strong for me to resist, I still have a soft spot for Free Realms.

It’s a cute game. I like running around and finding collection quests. I like playing the mini-games. When I’m waiting for something-or-other to build on The Agency so I can playtest, I do a bit of mining in Free Realms. I defend those poor penguins from hordes of critters in a variety of tower defense games. I think how different my life might be if I’d stayed in San Diego.

If you haven’t played it already, give it a shot. It’s a pretty painless download while you’re fiddling with character creation. The card game (which I am going to try out this week) is getting rave reviews.

And if you’re really lucky, you don’t live anywhere near where Brenlo shops. Apparently his first time running into Free Realms cards at Target, he scooped them all up and dashed to pay for them, cackling the whole time. He says he didn’t tackle a little cherub to get to them first, but who can say?*

Additionally in the news: G.I.R.L. is now on Twitter! Feel free to follow some of the happy game developing women at SOE: http://twitter.com/SOE_GIRL

* No cherubs were harmed in Brenlo’s shopping frenzy. Honest.

Making A Game

SOE — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:50:29 +0000

Sometimes, a game isn’t picking up the latest release on whatever platform you prefer. Sometimes, it’s making a game out of whatever you have handy.

In my case, it’s a cool and apparently new thing with Zappos.com a map. And not just any map, a map that shows where shoes are being bought from them in real time. That’s about all it does.

And yet, it’s a mesmerizing glimpse of what people are doing as things happen. Each little item shows up in a cute little bubble. You click on the bubble and are whisked off to the main website, where you get all the details about the make and model of that item. Maybe you have been looking for a cute pair of shoes for a while (and who amongst us has not?) and none of your searches has found one. Suddenly, you’re looking at this map and there it is! Bought by someone in Duluth! With a couple of clicks, you can get a pair of these shoes shipped to your house, too!

A potential downside is that you can zoom in to see a much closer view of where the item is going. So, say you see a cute pair of shoes going to Duluth, you can zoom in to see approximately what street it’s going to. On the other hand, if you’re scrolled all that way in and someone in Miami buys shoes, the map will move you to show you that location instead.

I like watching the shoe trends. It’s a game to me. Guess who just bought those Crocs in Puerto Rico! What’s the story behind those beribboned pumps in Detroit? Why are so many running shoes bought in the same minute, followed by an absolute shower of sandals?

That’s one of the gifts of being a designer: everything is a game with a story. The person on the bus each day who seems upset. The store clerk who’s overly attentive. A crying baby in an airplane. Your mind fills in a ficticious reason for their behavior and then solves their problems by moving blocks, dropping things on their head or having a portal to a new world open beneath their feet.

Huh. Someone just bought a pair of white sandals while in the ocean off Liberia. I’ll bet they have a cool story.

Post-GDC Recovery

SOE — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 21:32:18 +0000

Silence last week due to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco … and while I’d love to say recovery is needed due to self-induced overindulgences, it’s not.

I was bitten by bedbugs.

You may have heard how bedbugs seem to be making a come-back in our post-DDT generation. They aren’t the province of cheap flop houses, sadly. Bedbugs, spurred on by lack of high speed insecticides and relatively cheap global travel, are found in all sorts of establishments, including the nice boutique hotel in which I stayed.

Thank goodness the pesky little critters decided not to snack on my face, content with munching on my arms and legs instead. After all, I can cover up my arms and legs; I cannot cover up my whole face (much as some folks might want me to). Still, between the antihistamines (to reduce the itch) and all, I feel as though I have been partying like crazy and am now suffering the consequences. If only!

Otherwise, GDC was up to its usual tricks of informative sessions and socializing. I spent a lot of time haunting the IGDA booth with its comfy sofa and fellow IGDA members. We had our book signing event there and I got to chat with some of the other chapter authors as we signed away for over an hour.

And I also got to teach some knitting basics during a different session. Muahahahaha!

In case you missed the announcement amongst the rest of the GDC hoopla, SOE’s G.I.R.L. scholarship is taking applications for this year! You can read all about it at our Website!

You have until April 24, 2009 to send in applications! Let’s see what you’ve got!

In Other News…

SOE — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 16:17:39 +0000

Social networking has been growing over the last couple of years. We’ve gone from MySpace and Facebook to even simpler formats such as Twitter.

After moving from Seattle to San Diego and back, plus growing up somewhere else completely, I know folks spread all over the place. Social networks allow me to keep up with what’s going on with my various friends without feeling as though I’m intruding on their personal lives and time. They update their own information, telling all their friends what they’re doing or thinking and everyone knows at the same time…or at least at the very next time we check our electronic universe.

A couple of years ago, I signed up for Twitter and immediately wondered what the heck was the point of it. Space is limited to a certain number of characters, so the verbose have to break their messages into chunks. After a few messages, I stopped tweeting entirely.

Even so, I was tickled to hear about KPBS using Twitter to update news when the October 2007 fires in San Diego took out power lines to its tower and it could no longer broadcast. That’s smart, progressive thinking…but it wasn’t enough for me to pick up my Twitter account and use it.

More recently, Cuppycake posted about the reasons she found Twitter useful. She made a lot of good points, including the fact that Twitter becomes more conversational as you follow (and lead) with more folks. Instead of the handful of folks that I saw everyday, I can follow passively or participate in conversations with people from all over.

And so I picked it up again. And she’s right; it’s more of a community conversation when you are following more of your friends and they are following you.

For example, from today…even as I have been typing this blog post (with their names redacted to protect something or other):

==
FriendOne: Trying to figure out how to make MSWord put Name/Title/Page# at the top of every page. Failing.

Me (owlchick): @FriendOne Headers and Footers are your friends.

FriendTwo: @FriendOne what owlchick said!

FriendOne: @FriendTwo @owlchick Thanks, guys! After Owlie IMd me and edumacated me, it’s working. After a month of frustration. Stupid MSWord.

Me: @FriendOne @FriendTwo I didn’t help at all other than to be saying, Did you try this? how about that? But glad it did…something!

FriendOne: @owlchick @FriendTwo What she said was, “Then type that in this box” and I said, “Oh duh.” I R dweeb. And sure, go for it.
==

If I hadn’t seen FriendOne’s tweet of frustration, I wouldn’t have known she was having trouble, nor would I have asked out of the blue, “Ever used Headers and Footers?” Thanks to Twitter, she’s now can get on with her busy schedule!

And Twitter’s still a great resource for passing along information that the sender wants to reach a wide audience in a short amount of time, just as KPBS had done.

Example: Woot.com. Maybe you’ve gone to see what’s today’s deal. Maybe you’ve abused your F5 key while refreshing during a Woot-off. Well, they’ve got a Twitter feed, too, so you don’t have to keep watching the website; you can get it tweeted right to you!

But they haven’t just used it to push $9.99 Woot-off Lights with Screaming Monkeys. They also sent out an alert when one the daughter of an employee went missing. And a month later, when she was finally located.

While it would be grand to conclude by saying it was a Twitter re-post that helped locate her, it was really exposure on America’s Most Wanted and an alert Washington State trooper that did the job. But still, I’m convinced that using these sorts of social networks is changing the way people communicate today.

In Like a Lion

SOE — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:05:56 +0000

March…and it’s snowing. Maybe that’s not unusual in your neck of the woods, but here in the Seattle area it’s uncommon for it to snow very often or this late in the year. Although, that said, I lived here when there was a particularly long cold snap in a March. Each day’s snow melted slowly across tree limbs and power lines, then froze again overnight into a beautiful and dangerous enrobing of silver ice. It’s not so bad (for now) this time.

All the California transplants are wondering what the heck they’ve gotten themselves into by moving up here!

And if we were all in California, specifically in San Diego, we could get a front row seat at the City Council when John Smedley is presented with the official proclamation that March 10, 2009, is Sony Online Entertainment Day! Huzzah!

While we can’t make it down there, if you’re in San Diego maybe you can:

Date: Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Time: The meeting starts at 10:00 a.m. The proclamation will be shortly thereafter; arrive early to find parking and get through security.

Location: 202 C St., 12th Floor Council Chambers

Since I can’t be there myself, I will celebrate in my own peculiar fashion by playing games. In particular, I am working my way through The World Ends With You. Now, while I enjoy playing games or even just watching other people play games, there are few that I will stay up past my bedtime to play. The last one was Civilization Revolution, which kept me up past 1AM (yes, yes; I’m a lightweight).

This weekend, instead of grabbing extra sleep due to Daylight Savings changes, I was up until 4AM (technically 3AM…but you get the idea). Thank goodness for the little screen protector thing, for I have been mashing the heck out of the DS touch screen!

The game play is interesting, but what’s keeping me up so late is the story. It’s really cool! I keep wondering what’s going to happen next, which to me is a the sign of a good story. It’s a game that’s a page-turner, with interesting mechanics and sound. I rarely play games with the volume turned on, but I do with this one. And what’s also interesting is that you are rewarded for turning the DS off…your items gain points while you’re not even touching the thing.

Can’t wait to see how the story plays out. Maybe by the time I finish the game, it won’t be wintry any longer up here.

Keeping It Real

SOE — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:12:08 +0000

Launching an MMO takes a lot of time and hard work. Hundreds of hours by dedicated team members, putting their heart and soul into making a good game. These days, MMOs are not just massively multiplayer, they’re massively spendy. It’s not an easy decision to close one down. I can only imagine what choices must be made before the final hour is selected for a project’s life.

To all my friends who worked on Tabula Rasa, I salute you.