Jesse Schell’s presentation of himself combines the manic energy of a salesman-turned-CEO with the flat affect of a professor in calculus class. It’s an interesting stylistic choice, one that immediately makes him more watchable than most of the presenters at conferences like DICE (who, for some reason, year after year, insist on choosing “smug” and “self-important” as the key color components of their presentation glamors). I think it is his presentation style, as much as anything else, that has made this video into the linkbait that it seems to have become. That, and the dire part at the end (but, again, it’s the presentation of that dire part — ah, but I get ahead of myself; we’ll talk about that later).

Some facts I did not know:

There are more Farmville players than Twitter accounts.

I find this difficult to believe.

I wish he’d handed out actual numbers, and sources for same. Googling the phrases “number of Farmville players” and “number of active Twitter accounts” is useless. You get data from all over the timeline, much of it conflicting, even more of it from random sources that aren’t necessarily any more reliable than a DICE presentation.

On top of that, there’s ambiguity in the words Schell uses, at least on the Farmville side of the equation. He uses the word “players” when talking about Farmville, but the word “accounts” when talking about Twitter. That’s the kind of very careful language choice that you’ve got to watch out for when it comes to these dotcom types (myself included). That he uses two different nouns is telling: the two groups are probably not exactly the same in terms of their engagement with the respective services.

Most specifically, how is Schell defining Farmville “players” here? Is a “player” somebody who logs into Farmville every day? Or somebody who has logged in several times? Or somebody who has actually spent real money within Farmville? Or just anybody with an account (I’m thinking no on that last one, since he’s so careful to use the word “accounts” for Twitter, but not for Farmville). I played with Farmville for one day, because the whole offices needed to play it and understand it a little bit, so that we could incorporate whatever we learned into our own games. People still send me requests to do stuff, and sometimes my friends go in and do stuff on my sadly neglected farm, even though I don’t ask them to. Does that mean I count as a Farmville player, or not?

Either way, Twitter comes off looking bad compared to Farmville, and even worse compared to Facebook itself (of which Farmville’s user base is only a subset). Note, by the way, that I said I found this difficult to believe. That doesn’t mean I don’t believe it. Ultimately, despite the difficulty, I do.

Club Penguin is completely free to play.

I don’t have a Club Penguin account, because I’m not a kid, and I’m not a parent. It just feels creepy to go on there and set up account under false pretenses, so I haven’t. That means that the subtle variation on “freemium” that Schell ascribes to the Club Penguin business model (you play everything for free and earn virtual money, which virtual money you can’t actually use for anything unless you spend real money to get a paid account) had escaped me entirely. I like it, though.

Wii Fit has earned more than one billion dollars.

That’s not as surprising as the other stuff above, but it is something that I did not know.

One major quibble:

Forget the sensationalistic Big Brother stuff at the end. That stuff will happen or it won’t, and if it does, our children and grandchildren won’t mind it (our great-great grandparents were concerned about automobiles causing people’s legs to atrophy away — if they had, I doubt we would care). What I’m interested in is the on-the-ground stuff that will help, or not help, those of us interested in earning a living making digital entertainment. Schell’s most important thesis in that regard is that videogames (or digital experiences) that have an effect, or a presence, outside of the game itself, that span into reality, are currently making billions of dollars, and represent a strong trend for the future.

He cites Club Penguin, Guitar Hero, Xbox Live Achievements, Wii Fit, the Wii itself, Webkins, and Mafia Wars as examples. Some of these “reality spans” are obvious (Wii Fit, Webkins); he explains others pretty well (Xbox Live Achievements don’t span out into “real” reality, but they do cut across the individual realities of specific Xbox games; Mafia Wars uses your “real” friends to perform imaginary missions, etc.); but others are not as clearly “reality-spanning” to me. How, specifically, does Club Penguin affect reality? How is Guitar Hero evolutionarily different from any number of peripheral-driven videogames from the past, even the distant gaming past, like the steering wheel I bought for my ColecoVision in the 80s? Schell doesn’t make any case at all for Club Penguin’s reality-spanning characteristics, and he makes an unconvincing case for Guitar Hero (“You’re playing a real guitar,” he says, which you’re very obviously and specifically not doing).

Which, again, is not to say that I don’t believe him.

Somebody put this little fellow on the fire alarm switch outside our office. It’s a good thing, because he keeps me from pulling it whenever I get an uncontrollable urge to cause chaos. I hope and expect that if there were ever a real fire, he would relent and let somebody pull it. Maybe not. I should ask him.

This weekend Joe and I went to the Casual Male Big & Tall on 86th Street in Bay Ridge. I bought myself a light canvas-colored jacket for Spring (can’t wait!) and some shirts. It’s nothing for me now to go there. I even like the place. Truthfully, aside from the actual largeness of the clothes, I find that they’re better put together. These clothes hold up! They’re also expensive. I think maybe fat people are rougher on clothes than other people. A fat person just sitting down and maybe rolling a little left and right as the subway jolts probably puts more pressure on the seams of a pair of pants than a skinnier person’s pants would have to put up with, right? So that’s the difference in going to an actual Big & Tall store and just shopping in the Big & Tall section of a regular store: the clothes are industrial strength. Or maybe I’m imagining things. Joe thinks I am.

In the blue-collar culture of north Alabama, where I grew up, a successful man is supposed to be a fattie. I’m only two generations removed from tenant farmers, after all, who worked off every calorie and then some in the fields. I’ve seen pictures: gaunt, blank-eyed men in ragged overalls. To have enough surplus food to get fat on them would have been a privilege. I know that this is no excuse for me to be as fat as I am. It does explain my grandmother, though. For years and years I was annoyed by the way, every time she saw me, she’d laugh and rub my belly and say I was getting fat. From her perspective, that was a compliment.

It’s different, of course, in the gay community. I was sixteen when my best friend Marc (then fourteen) started telling me that I looked fat. I’ve got pictures from then: I wasn’t fat. I was kind of a hot husky football player, actually, now that I look at myself with creepy old middle-aged man eyes. What I wasn’t was model-thin. The “bear” subculture didn’t exist then, so that easy category wasn’t available for Marc to put me into, and he was very interested in putting people into categories, especially gay people. So was I, actually. I knew better than to listen to Marc: he was the kind of boy who curled his eyelashes with his stepmother’s eyelash curler and obsessed over Vogue Magazine. He was a “queen.” I didn’t have any problems with queens, but I knew I would never be one of them, and I was glad of it. I just wasn’t sure what kind of gay boy I was. I wasn’t a bear, either, by the way, and still am not. I was/am just a redneck. In New York, in gay circles, that gets you mistaken for bear. But I guess, in the gay community, it’s better to appear to be part of a category that others can fetishize than not. Maybe? I dunno.

What I do know is that I love my new clothes. I can’t wait to wear them. Joe and I are going to a Broadway dance show next Friday (I forget the title — it’s Twyla Tharp’s dance company’s interpretation of Frank Sinatra songs). Even though it’s probably still too cold for this jacket, I may just wear it anyway. I mean: come on. I may not know what kind of gay I am, but I am gay after all, and a new clothing item just burns a hole in my wardrobe until it has actually been worn.

Joe and I went walking around in the snow. It was a weird thing for us to do. Back home, one inch of snow means you stay inside for weeks!

What it is:

Rocketbirds: Revolution! is a browser-based sidescroller with very high production values, considering the platform (see video above). You play as Hardboiled Chicken, the self-styled “Cock of War,” a grizzled, fearless piece of poultry dressed like a biker and armed to the teeth. If chickens have teeth. And even if they don’t, as a matter of fact. Gameplay consists of platforming, shooting bad guys (many of whom are clones of yourself, for story purposes, and also perhaps for budgetary purposes), and solving rudimentary puzzles. You don’t have to pay to play the first “episode,” but the rest of the game, nine “episodes” in all, costs about $10. Paying doesn’t buy you a download, though, just a login. There is a downloadable client that allows you to play at fullscreen, but it’s just a skin for the remotely-hosted Flash app. You still have to be online to play.

What I liked:

Visually, the experience is seductive: confident and attractive and nice. The juxtaposition of the eurocartoony (Trondheim-like, really) characters and the gritty “realistic” backgrounds, in particular, works very well. The stages have been put together in interesting ways. I had fun solving the puzzles (though I must admit they were all pretty easy, at least in the first episode). So, yeah. I enjoyed the sense of walking around and adventuring in this world while I was there. The controls are responsive and completely intuitive, rare for a Flash game, possibly because they are tutorialized to you in-game at exactly the moments you need to learn them, just like in a triple-A console game. And possibly because they don’t make any use of the mouse (Flash games that require a mouse are a pain in the ass, or at least in the fingers, to those of us who spend most of our time on laptops with trackpads). Even the cutscenes are fun to watch and professionally put together, except for quite a bit of less-than-awesome voice acting, but what can you do? You can do nothing, that’s what you can do about voice acting in indie games. It was not as terrible as it could have been, by a long shot. The character designs, especially the main character, really pulled me in. Overall, Rocketbirds: Revolution! is a sleek and impressive package.

Problems with it:

I expected an award-nominated indie game at this level to have gameplay concepts I’d never seen before. This isn’t that kind of game. Rocketbirds: Revolution! is more about serving up polish and shine on a shoestring, and in a usually-clunky browser environment, than about pushing the subtle art of game design forward on any conceptual level. It’s more Astro City than Asterios Polyp, I guess. Which is fine, and I can certainly understand why they nominated it. It’s just not what I was expecting.

Will I buy it?

No, I won’t be buying it right now. I liked what I played while I was playing it. I just felt like I’d had exactly enough of a very good thing when it ended. But I dunno. I can still see myself deciding to buy it at some point down the road. Maybe I’ll reach for it on a rainy day. Maybe. I’ll let you know if I ever do. If it ever comes to Xbox Live Arcade, I will almost certainly buy it, because I prefer to play games on my big TV, while lounging on my couch, than crouched over my keyboard, and I’m so close to sold on this that even that little bit of betterness would do it for me.

More info …

Here’s an interview with the creators, and here’s another. And Gamers With Jobs offers up a more-professional review of the thing than I am able to provide. Or you can just skip all that and go play it for yourself.

Running across the avenues, though, are the streets, slow and sweet, comprised of smallish, nicely-tended houses that have not been subject to a mortgage payment for decades. Old Irish and Italian people raise their grandchildren here, or their Pomeranians. You rarely see a “For Sale” sign unless somebody dies. Somebody has always died, though. So there’s that. When they have block parties, only people who actually live on the one strip of street between avenues are invited. This world doesn’t extend to the avenues, only between them.

The other day while walking back home (to 4th avenue) from the grocery store (on 5th) I saw a chubby kid, maybe fourteen, practicing his bagpipes on the front porch of his house on 81st street, cheeks red from puffing. Whenever a strange pedestrian from the Avenue (like, for example, myself) walked by, he politely stopped and waited. Then he started back up. After I passed him, a family of four crossed the street, and the dad started singing along with the pipes, something about a hero attempting something difficult, with the help of some large number of “wild hearts strong behind him.” They laughed and waved and the dad moved his arms like a conductor. The kid, abashed by the attention, stopped playing and waved back, but they told him to start playing again. “Play, play,” they said. But they didn’t stay around to listen. They kept walking after he started playing again. And they didn’t sing anymore, either. But they knew him, and he knew them — even if they had never met.

This interaction reminded me of home, and of my childhood, without actually possessing any characteristic features of my actual home, or my actual childhood.

I went ahead and subscribed to all of them (the ones that still exist, anyway), and exported the subscriptions into a Google Reader bundle for those of you who’d like to subscribe to them all at once. From there you can export an OPML file for importing into any RSS catcher, if you don’t use Google Reader.

[Corrected the link to the bundle, and added the link to the OPML file.]

[corrected misattribution of list compilation]

Dramatica Pro is weird. I feel like, after using it for several days now, I don’t understand what it is yet. This is probably a very bad thing for any software (especially software whose evaluation trial expires after five days). And yet, I keep thinking there might be some kind of there there.

Notes:

The software is designed to walk you through what they call “The Dramatica Methodology” or somesuch, which is apparently a set of theories about story construction. Consequently, the language they use to describe the writing process feels cult-like. They acknowledge this, in a way, by providing a menu option to use “layman’s terms” instead of “Dramatica terms.” Which begs the question: why are they insisting on using these bizarre terms anyway, if layman’s terms are available. Also: laymen? Really? They do know that that’s originally a religious concept, right?

I have only worked through the tutorial to the point where you start “building characters,” which means you drag little (ugly) clipart representations of the people in your story on top of tiles with labels like “Faith” and “Hope” and “Thoughtfulness” and so on. They’ve got this complicated map set up where diagonal tiles have one kind of relationship (I think it’s oppositional) and straight-across tiles have another (I think it’s complementary). Scott McCloud would love this shit! Ha! Me, it confuses — but also titillates.

Speaking of Scott: I think he wrote in one of his books that using randomizing processes to help him get started on a story was one of his favorite tricks. This reminded me of when I was in creative writing class in college, and we were told to use the I-Ching to come up with story ideas. Which, by the way, works. I think Dramatica Pro may have the same effect, because I do find myself coming up with ideas as I work through this weirdness. For example, dragging a character onto a tile generates a set of sentences about that character: “Ba Noi’s struggle for knowledge is in opposition to Dan’s acceptance of the way things are,” and so on. Meaningless, ultimately, but … well, suggestive. Maybe this is the reason behind the cult?

The software is ugly, and uses its own strange interface conventions. Not at all what I’d expect from a Macintosh program designed for creative professionals. Aside from the general ugliness, it’s also not fully functional in the way that I expect contemporary software to be. For example: little niceties like being able to insert my own clipart for the character faces would be welcomed. Dramatica has a hard-coded set of generic GeoCities-era pixel art you’re supposed to use for this purpose.

More thoughts later (yes, I paid for the software). I’m guessing I’ll either toss it aside or actually subscribe to the cult at some point. So yeah, like I said in my previous post introducing this series, I hope you weren’t expecting a full-on review. I’m of several minds, still. For now, I’m moving on and will play with something else for a while.

So far, I’ve downloaded:

Scrivener
Dramatica Pro
Storymill

I’ll probably pick up a few more downloads over the course of the day, but these three seem to be the ones I’m hearing the most about. Any others you recommend? Oh, I should mention: I’m on a Mac. If you’re not, then much of this won’t be helpful to you, probably.