Andrea Phillips's Blog, page 20

Games and Romance: Made For Each Other

It's no secret that I have an enormous crush on Alistair from Dragon Age. Enormous. 

I've also developed a few secondary crushes on some of the characters in the Mass Effect series in recent months. Now that I've about run out of single-player Bioware games, though, I find myself longing for more: more banter, more awkward or urgent or heartfelt moments. More obstacles to overcome together, more emotional drama. More romance.

Unfortunately, the state of romance in games is pretty dreadful. The closest you get as a standalone genre are dating sims, some of which are more like sex sims. (The latter are almost invariably designed only for male players.) But whether you're talking about the mild Princess Debut or the explicit Ganguro Girl, both types of game follow a similar pattern: the player makes choices about how to spend time and money in order to develop a romantic or sexual relationship.

If there is any element of effort to these games, it is in solving the puzzle of what words or objects might be necessary to begin (or consummate) a relationship with the would-be object of your virtual affection. Mechanical elements of the game typically require minimal skill or knowledge. They're meant to be wish-fulfilment and not challenges.

On the surface, these love sims look like they're adequate at modeling how relationships are formed. You meet, you try your best to make a good impression, find out how to please your would-be love, finally bust a move, happiness. There's just one thing missing. But it's a pretty big thing: feelings.

Games and the Emotional Journey
As an art form, video games have the corner on an incredible and under-rated market. In the discussion about are-video-games-art (and peace be with you, Mr. Ebert), we talk about whether games can make you cry as if that were some unassailable and objective benchmark for quality. But that's selling short games and what they're best at. Games can do something books and film can't: evoke emotions of agency. These are feelings you only feel when you've had a hand in causing a situation.

Books, movies, plays, TV shows can make you laugh and cry. (Well, the good ones can.) But a game can -- and probably has -- made you feel frustrated or proud. Games can also make you feel guilty (Shadow of the Colossus.) Or betrayed (Dragon Age 2.) That's because you're the one calling the shots. You're the star, the protagonist, the hero. When there is a difficult decision to make about how to treat Little Sisters or which squad member to send to death or which suspect to finger for the crime... the one making it is you, and the one who has to live with the consequences? Also you.

When well-written -- and without a doubt Bioware sports some of the best writers in the business right now -- that also means that interactions with a character feel like an actual relationship is forming between the character and you, the player. You become teammates. Allies. Friends. And maybe... maybe more.

Romance Novels Aren't As Good
Don't get me wrong. I loves me a good trashy romance novel. Even a mediocre one, if I'm honest. My Kindle is full of 'em. There's something primal about the story of one human being making a connection with another, falling in love, making it work despite the odds. That story speaks to a desire in all of us to not be alone, the hope that no obstacle is insurmountable.

But video game romance is way, way better.

In a game, one projects the self into the avatar being controlled. You're more likely to say "I died," or "Hey, watch me get that guy. BAM!" than to say "Lara died," or "Hey awesome, Chelle knocked down that turret." For the duration of the game, you're not playing the game so much as living it.

And by extension, when a character tells you not to die because they love you and can't live without you... the one they're speaking to, the one feeling that poignant brew of resolve and regret, is you. Novels? Hah. No romance novel in the world has ever -- could ever -- make me feel like I'm the one embroiled in the love story.

But... that's not so different from a dating sim, right...? Is is just a matter of better writing and clever relationship-status algorithms? No, no, a thousand times no. The reason the Bioware romances work so well is a function of excellent writing, to be sure, but also the fact that the games aren't fundamentally about the romances at all. 

The straightforward arc of a successful romance is somewhat dull and small. That's why every romance novel printed has some other plot going -- stories of espionage, engagements to the wrong person, opponents in the courtroom, enemies by circumstance or culture or tradition. Conflict is the engine of drama, and a dating sim doesn't generally have much conflict beyond "how do I make this person like me?" 

But because Bioware's romances are just the B-plot, the emotional dynamic winds up feeling deeper and truer than any shallow dating sim can. You're not just hanging out with the object of your affection on dates or at parties. You're risking your lives together in fighting for a common purpose. You're sharing horrors and triumphs. You're bonding through shared experience, the way human beings are wont to do.

Thus the quality of romantic drama on offer by Bioware winds up feeling richer, more complex, and truer than games that are supposed to be about love through and through. The relationships have more complexity and texture to them because the characters are all bigger than the love story. They have a place in the world that doesn't revolve around how much you want to date them.

It feels more genuine, more really real. It feels more sweeping and epic. Dating sims simply don't create the kind of romantic drama that makes you feel all of those powerful feelings. 

Bringing It Home
There is, alas, a stigma to simulated relationships, both in making them and in desiring them. No doubt some readers are speculating by now that I am a sad, lonesome spinster, probably homely and without prospect, whose only chance at true love lies in pretending. Hah, no, don't shed any tears for me, I'm OK over here.

It's true that I feel a little uncomfortable playing through romantic story beats with my husband in earshot. But regardless of embarrassment, I'd venture that a good romance subplot in a game has a halo effect that benefits him and our own very real and meaningful relationship.

Let's back up. I, at least, consume stories because of the emotional journeys that they allow me to have. I like to feel things, you know? Odds are I'm never going to save the world. I'm not likely to be initiated into an elite society of dragon-hunters, either, or be run through potentially fatal "experiments" by a crazed AI. But in a game I can pretend. I can feel all of those amazing things, those fears and hopes and so much more. I live those lives, and when the game is over, I put the memories safely away and happily carry on with the real business of living. (And I measure the success of a game's narrative based on how well it evoked those feelings... or any feelings, really.)

Romance is the same. I certainly hope I never fall in love again, because I couldn't be more delighted with my life and my marriage. But oh, those feelings when you first fall in love! The excitement, the uncertainty! It's nice to feel that again, for a little while, just to pretend. And later -- the dark moments when you have to make a difficult choice that decides the fate of your digital beloved. I'm just as happy for that to always be pretend, but the act of going on that emotional journey opens me to be more compassionate to the real experiences of others.

Yeah, it's dorky to have a crush on a video game character. But it's also a safe way to experience a dynamic range of emotions that are either unavailable or just a really, really bad idea in real life. This is something video games are uniquely suited to do among all media. Here is where we will earn our merit badge declaring that Games. Are. Art.

When a game is over, the drama ended, I return to my real life and relationship, and I am grateful for all of the feelings the game has let me experience -- and doubly grateful for all the ones I don't have to feel for real, because drama is fun for pretending, but it's a terrible way to live. And back in the real world, with my real and wonderful and safely drama-free husband, I fall in love just a little bit more.

Some Thoughts on Games Addiction

Some weeks ago, the phenomenal Mez Breeze interviewed me on the topic of games addiction. The full article, which ran in The Next Web, is available here, and I hope you'll click through and read it. Some great stuff there.

A lot of her questions were incredibly thought-provoking and I responded at much greater length than she could ever have hoped to use. Rather than let all of those words and thinky thoughts languish in the deeps of our email, I thought it might be interesting to let you have a peek at the full text of the interview. So here goes!

Can you briefly outline your professional background and how/if it relates to the concepts of addiction or gaming?



I'm a writer and game designer, with a particular emphasis on transmedia and alternate reality games. I'm also a lifelong gamer who has engaged in some addictive behaviors in the past.

Do you think contemporary game production companies are deliberately producing computer and Internet-based games that are geared towards compulsive or unhealthy game play?



Yes, at least some game developers are intentionally trying to induce addictive behaviors, without question. It's common for a game design spec to talk about making a game "more addictive" in positive terms, as shorthand for "highly engaging and fun to play." There's also rampant and intentional use of the compulsion loop, which is a term ultimately derived from Skinnerian psychology: You train a rat that something nice will happen when it presses the lever, in order to get it to keep pushing that lever again and again.

But as terrible as this sounds when you put it this way, there is a core moral dilemma for a game designer. Even if you don't want to be predatory, you want to produce the best, most fun, most engaging game that you can, right? So let's say you make an amazing game, purely as an exercise in art. People love it, they play for hours a day, they don't shower, they skip meals, they stay up all night. They fail tests, they get divorced and fired. Surely there is a point where you can't be held culpable for the behaviors of your players, who are, after all, responsible for their own lives. But at the same time you're not clearly NOT responsible, either, because you left the loaded gun lying around, so to speak.

It's a quagmire with no path through. No side of this debate about gaming and addiction is entirely right or entirely wrong. The solution can't and shouldn't be "stop making fun games," though.

In your opinion, are certain gaming platforms more addictive than others? What types of computer, console or device-based games are the worst offenders? Eg. First Person Shooters, App-oriented Social Games (such as those produced by companies like Zynga), MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games), Strategy Games, or Transmedia/Alternate Reality Games.



All of these are offenders, but the problematic behaviors each are likely to provoke can manifest differently. FPSes and MMORPGs tend to maximize length of play session; whereas Zynga-style social and casual games maximize number of sessions -- returning to the game as often as possible.

I do find the Zynga-style social, mobile games more evil, if you will, just because many of these games are very close to compulsion loops and nothing else. Not a meaningful sense of community or competition, not a narrative, not a sense of exploration. I'm playing a game right now called Jetpack Joyride (not a Zynga game!). In this game, you do the exact same thing every time: You ride a flying jetpack down a hall and avoid traps like lasers and missiles. The game keeps you playing by offering minor variations in the mechanic. After you play enough times, you can upgrade to gadgets that will make it easier to avoid some of the traps, or collect more coins along the way. And if you don't feel like playing that many times to get the next gadget you want, why, they're happy to take your money instead of your time. And the game is constantly giving you missions to fulfill to "level up": having close calls, going a certain distance with a particular vehicle, and so on.

But really, every single time you play it's the same exact thing: One or two minutes of the same randomly-generated hallways. There's nothing there but the loop.

Still, even games with nothing resembling an overt loop can produce compulsive behaviors. The Beast, an alternate reality game meant to market the film A.I., was my first step into transmedia gaming. And at the time, for all that I played and loved that game so much that it changed the path of my career, I wrote an essay lamenting how all-consuming it was. 

Playing that game was essentially an unpaid part-time job for me. The amount of content created for it was overwhelming -- but I don't think anything since has produced quite the same volume, and so as a result the perceived intensity declined, as well. These kinds of games tend to have limited active lives now, usually not more than a few months, and usually only a few hours a week (at most!) of new material to engage with. That's probably because it's expensive and difficult to make content at that pace, and not because of any moral superiority, but it's interesting to see that trend toward requiring a lower commitment from your players.

Do you view the immersive nature of computer games as similar to that encountered when gambling? If yes, what are the similarities?



The core appeal of gambling is the compulsion loop, too. And indeed, when B.F. Skinner was studying how to reinforce behaviors -- such as pressing the lever on a slot machine -- he found that a variable reward schedule resulted in much more compulsive behavior than a predictable schedule. So if you won every other time you played the slots, it wouldn't be as much "fun," and you'd be less compelled to keep playing.

It's that tension of knowing you might get the treat, but not knowing exactly when, that keeps you playing. The player develops an unshakeable faith, after a while, that THIS will be the time I hit it big. THIS is the time it will all pay off, no matter how many times it hasn't so far. Just one more turn. One more minute. But it's really never just one more.

From a game developer/game theorist perspective, what do you consider factors that contribute to compulsive or addictive game play?

A number of factors all combine, of course. Low perceived effort and high perceived reward are the foundation. At any moment, the ask has to seem fairly modest; just a few minutes, just a few dollars. You don't tend to rationally step back and recognize that the cumulative cost to you in time, money, or energy is much, much higher. Another factor is a steady flow of easily attainable goals; that's why you see missions in Jetpack Joyride, or various kinds of badges and achievements in most other kinds of game. They create the feeling that you can accomplish something if you keep playing that one... more... minute.

Zynga and other Facebook games in particular add on the feeling of opportunity cost. You get so many action points per hour, but you have a cap on how many you can have at once. That means if your action timer completely fills up in four hours but you're spending eight hours at work -- why, you're losing four hours of potential play! So maybe you should check in from work at lunch, just for a minute, just to use up all of your action points... It's one of my least favorite game innovations of the last several years.

This one isn't used as intentionally, but there's also some element of peer pressure. When you're playing a multiplayer game with a bunch of friends online, you dont' want to be the first one to leave to break up the party. And in an MMO, if you play four hours a week but your friends play forty, pretty soon you're not going to be on par with your equipment, ready for the same areas, or looking to accomplish the same things anymore. This was my problem when I played EverQuest, long ago; in order to keep up with my friends, I had to commit an unreasonable amount of my life to playing. In the end I just gave up playing entirely.

Do you see any ways to prevent gaming addiction, or have suggestions as to how to best deal with the consequences of compulsive game play?

In order to check my own problematic behaviors, I really prefer games that you can win, so there's a clear-cut end point to them. That means a lot of narrative-based games, like Dragon Age. I also like shorter and episodic games, like Journey or the Telltale Games list. No matter how much you love a narrative game, they're harder to pick up and fool yourself it'll only be for ten minutes... and eventually the game is over.

For the most part, I steer clear of multiplayer situations, MMOs, and so on because I just can't trust myself. With narrative games with an ending. I know I'll binge-play them, so to avoid the fallout of missed sleep and deadlines, I don't even start a game like that unless I have a good solid week with no serious commitments.

Casual browser and mobile games are easier for me to put down, but probably because I went clean through a very heavy Farmville phase some years ago. Nowadays I play a casual game only really until I feel like I understand it, I've seen all there is to see to it, and then they're no fun anymore. For a game like Angry Birds that might be "seen all the levels." For something like Jetpack Joyride, it's hard to say; I think I have the flavor of it in just playing for a couple of days, and I don't feel like I need to actually buy all the gadgets to feel like I've gotten everything I could out of it. Once you see the naked compulsion loop for what it is, it loses most of its appeal.

Are there any positive ways to harness the potentialities of addictive games?

There have been some interesting efforts in that direction, particularly in the way of fitness games. It's interesting to note that Dance Dance Revolution absolutely incited compulsive behavior in me -- and along the way, I probably became the fittest I'd been in years. Usually, though, the effort involved in actually getting exercise makes the loop harder to invoke. I can play just one more two-minute song on Dance Dance Revolution, but a mission on Zombies, Run! is going to take me at least half an hour. It's engaging, to be sure, but not in the same way.

There are also a number of habit-forming or breaking games out there. Health Month is one, and it aims to create a gamelike shell around things like flossing your teeth and eating less sugar. Again, though, this fails the effort-to-reward ratio to create an active compulsion loop. It would take a lot to make flossing your teeth an addictive behavior for your typical person.

Frameworks like Rock Band could be used to teach real music skills, too, so there are definitely educational applications lying untapped. Skinner himself was looking for educational applications of his research, you know. And the compulsion loop isn't a bad thing in and of itself. It's a fact of human nature, and we use the force of habit and patterns of rewards to do everything from teaching toddlers to use the toilet to studying. Sticker reward charts are a recommended tactic in parenting!

So the underlying issue here isn't "games are bad because they create addictive behavior." It's more like "humans are susceptible to having their behavior shaped by these frameworks of incentives." And now we know games are an effective way of creating those frameworks, whether we mean to or not, and we have to decide what we can do to make sure the lives of our players are left the better for experiencing our games, and not worse.

Future of Storytelling Google Hangout

Remember that one time I participated in the phenomenal Future of Storytelling conference? This might jog your memory.

On Wednesday March 20, I'll be leading an online panel on Google Hangouts, and I'd be delighted if you'd join in! You can RSVP and submit questions for the event on the Google Plus event page. It's at 12:30pm Eastern time; the link to the Hangout proper will be available on the event page tomorrow, plus I'll update here and on Twitter once I have that information.

Hope to see you there!

The Economics of Lucy Smokeheart: Part 2

A couple of weeks ago, I did some math and showed my work on how much time I expect to spend executing the project, and what my expected payoff will be. The upshot: Writing and designing Lucy Smokeheart will optimistically make me the delightful sum of $6.52 per hour. Probably much less; possibly as little as half that, depending on how fast the writing goes.

As of yesterday afternoon, Lucy has funded and all that fat cash will be mine! But what happens if I hit my first stretch goal, $7500 for cover illustrations? Well! Let's have a little more fun with arithmetic, shall we?

The objective of the stretch goal is to allow me to commission Heather Williamee, my delightful illustrator, to help me with covers for all twelve installments of the story. Possibly also a few more odds and ends that I am choosing to be secretive about at this time. I expect illustrations are going to cost me about $1500, given the hourly rate Heather has charged me and the number of illustrations I'm hoping to commission.

But -- o-ho! That still leaves me with an extra $1000 in my pocket! ...Uh, sort of. I'm still losing Kickstarter fees and self-employment taxes off the whole extra $2500, remember, which knocks it down to $2125 out of the gate. Minus the illustrator fees, that additional $2500 for the stretch goal only really ends up as $625 lining my pockets.

So my total earned income for Lucy Smokeheart in the event that we fund to $7500 and no further will be $4005, spread over the same 518 hours of writing, design, and production work.

That brings my hourly wage up to... wait for it... $7.73 an hour. We've hurdled the minimum wage bar! ...But I could still do a better getting a part-time job at Target, if money was the main objective here. 

Not that I'm against money, mind. Heavens, no. That extra $625 would come in handy, and I'd really love to be able to create superior cover art. So will it happen? Ten more days to wait and see!

Veronica Mars and Me

I had a conversation with Twitter not long after the Veronica Mars Kickstarter launched, in which I observed that my funding for The Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart would probably dry up for a few days. That's because the pool of people willing to fund me and the pool of people who freaking LOVE Veronica Mars are pretty close to being the same exact thing. These people having only so much money and enthusiasm to go around, I reasoned, would result in my not particularly getting backers for a couple of days.

Now, it's not clear what actually happens in the Kickstarter ecosystem when a big project like Veronica Mars shows up and makes everyone excited. Kickstarter is on record saying that a big project results in more money overall going to smaller projects (like Lucy Smokeheart.) They're probably right -- they know their internal metrics better than I do -- but I speculate that it only really helps other projects in the same category in the short run. When you fund Veronica Mars, the "you might also like" suggestions are a bunch of other film projects. I expect other film projects right now are experiencing a delightful uptick in funding.

Publishing projects like mine, maybe not so much.

Yesterday was tied for my second-worst funding day on record; I got a single $25 backer. My only worse day was March 4, in which I got only $20. (This is still admittedly better than no-backer days!) So it's clear that the thousands of people pouring into Veronica Mars aren't benefiting me any.

But it's also not clear that Veronica has hurt me any. Yesterday was a bad day for funding, to be sure, but it was also an off day for me in terms of promotion -- I spent most of the day out of the office and more or less off social media. And I've learned there's a pretty clear relationship between Tweeting about your project and reminding people you're out there, and those people actually clicking over to give you money. Fancy that!

So the bad day is almost certainly my fault, not Veronica's.

And in fact I did get a significant bump in funding a few hours after the Veronica Mars project launched -- though that was almost certainly a response to my prediction that I wasn't going to see much funding for a while, as a supportive group of friends went out of their way to promote Lucy Smokeheart right then. The more noise you can make, the more money you get. It's like science all up in here!

So my conclusion is that Veronica Mars hasn't sucked all of the air out of the room, so to speak. I am competing with her for dollars -- but only in the sense that I was already competing with the whole of the entertainment industrial complex to begin with. And if I can't compete with the entertainment industrial complex enough to get a couple hundred people excited enough to give me money now, that's my sign that maybe the thing I'm talking about isn't something that people actually want in the first place. Better to know that now, and not after I've spent a year writing.

Oh, and of course I funded Veronica Mars, and you should too. That thing is going to be amazing. And if you have a few dollars left after that, maybe fund Lucy Smokeheart, too?

30 Days of Piracy

In support of Lucy Smokeheart, I've been releasing a video every day in which I do a piratey thing or unleash some pirate true facts. We're up to Day 11 now, and I've learned something. It's a lot of work! Good grief, I'm spending hours a week on staging and make-up and recording and editing!

Why, you may ask, am I bothering with such a thing? It's a cunning cover story, basically. To get a Kickstarter funded you have to do a lot of reminding people that it exists. But daily Tweets and Facebook posts "Remember! I still want ALL OF YOUR MONEYS!" are sleazy, spammy, and not the energy I want present in my community or my social interactions.

With my 30 Days videos, though, I'm putting a little bit of free content out there into the world and hoping they put a smile on someone's face. Giving and not just asking. It's a subtle distinction, but a meaningful one. As the Wendig would say, "Be a fountan, not a drain."

In Which I Fail At Something Important To Me

So. Sooooooo. SO! I have this Kickstarter running.

When I set it up, I wanted to find a way to say "we are going to try to go about this in a way that is not sexist and racist." Because I am Like That. But, you know, just saying it outright can sound sort of dry and humorless, rather than jaunty and piratey. So I referenced a bunch of awful tropes I planned on devotedly not using, and said I wasn't going to do those things: the damsel in distress, the noble savage, the magical negro.

I screwed up real bad, you guys.

I'm used to talking to people who think about these things all the freakin' time, and who know that when I say I'm not using magical negroes, what I mean is "I am not planning on throwing in people of color with no inner life or motivation who exist only to dispense wisdom to white people."

Buuuuut it turns out that not everyone is familiar with this terminology, and if you don't know what that means, it sounds really, realllllly bad.

I've already edited the Kickstarter to try to be more clear and less clever. I'm hoping someone can tell me whether I've fixed it enough or not. Any feedback on this front would be very welcome indeed.

And meanwhile, gosh, I'm so sorry. I talk all the time about the ethics of context, and I should have thought a little more about context here when I was writing my Kickstarter copy. I hope nobody was hurt by my words, and if you were... my deepest apologies. I screwed up horribly. I didn't mean to, and I'll try not to do it again.

The Economics of Lucy Smokeheart

They say that running a Kickstarter is a full-time job. That's a pretty big overstatement as far as I can tell, but running a Kickstarter does in fact take a big investment of time, and sometimes of money, as well. Since I'm all about transparency all up in here, I thought I'd lay out for you all the time and money I've plunked down just to get the Kickstarter for The Daring Adventures of Captain Lucy Smokeheart up -- and where the cash will go if and when it funds.

Anchors Aweigh

Before the Kickstarter even launched, I already had about $140 of skin in the game. That money went to the illustrator for her brilliant rendering of Lucy Smokeheart, registering LucySmokeheart.com, and that beard for my promo video series, 30 Days of Piracy.

That's not including the time sunk into it, which was pretty significant. Here's a rough estimate:

14 hours - breaking story and some experimental writing and sketching
10 hours - writing Kickstarter copy and asking for feedback
 6 hours - planning a promotion strategy, administrative tasks
 8 hours - planning, recording and editing video 

In total that's about 38 hours of thinking, planning, soliciting advice, writing. This isn't including all of the time I've spent in the shower, on airplanes, and staring out train and car windows, unable to get Lucy out of my head, nor the time I've spent enthusing about Lucy to hapless victims who asked me what I'm up to these days.

Lucky me I had that time available, huh?

All Hands on Deck

Now the Kickstarter is up, it would be easy to ignore it, but that's a bad way to fund and a bad way to go over goal. And I really, reallllly want to at least hit my $7500 stretch goal, so I can afford to commission cover illustrations from Heather for each episode (and maybe a few extras, too!)

That means a steady stream of promotion during the Kickstarter. I've already spent another $15 or so on props for future videos; I'm not 100% sure what else I have planned, but I'm hoping I won't be laying out much more than another $15, so let's call it $30 cash.

As for time: I'm spending probably six hours a week recording, editing, and uploading video and Tweeting links. (It may get faster as I get better at video editing; or it may be that I get progressively more ambitious and spend more time on video. Time will tell!)

I'm also identifying and emailing people who I think I can con into shilling Lucy for me, to the tune of another, say, four hours a week. People such as the legendary Ron Gilbert, creator of Monkey Island! Alas, in that particular case, I was unsuccessful. 

 

No @andrhia, refuse to tweet about your pirate kickstarter project: kickstarter.com/projects/andrh…

— Ron Gilbert (@grumpygamer) March 1, 2013

 

(But if you have a blog and I could persuade you to let me do a guest post on Lucy Smokeheart... I'd be extremely appreciative!) 

In all I'm spending probably another ten hours a week -- around two hours a weekday -- working various promotional angles. By the end of the month, I'll have spent another 40 hours running the Kickstarter.

That brings us up to a total of 78 hours of work and $170 of investment... even if I never fund. I figure that comes out to -$2.18 an hour.

Battery - Fire!

But let's be optimistic around here and say that I do fund. Huzzah!

In that case, the work is only beginning. I still have to write the episodes, design puzzles, set up the answer payoffs online, edit and proof it all, design covers, turn the episodes into ebooks and send them out, publish to the various e-bookstores, do the Google Hangouts. Assuming I can write 1,000 words an hour every hour I work on Lucy Smokeheart (hah! as if!) the hours break down like this for a 10,000-word episode:

10 hours - writing 
 4 hours - editing/requesting feedback
 6 hours - puzzle design and testing
 2 hours - cover design
 3 hours - ebook conversions and uploads
 4 hours - modifying the website for puzzle payoffs (creating assets, etc.)
 1 hour - notifying mailing lists/emailing episodes to backers
 2 hours - Google hangouts per episode (the hangout itself plus prep for it)

So I estimate each episode will take an additional 32 hours of work to turn around. Given that writing a slam-dunk thousand words per hour is exceedingly unlikely... this is extremely optimistic. Forty or even 50 hours per episode is more plausible. It's also possible that each episode will wind up shorter than that aimed-for 10,000 words, though, and things like the ebook conversion process may become much faster in later episodes, so let's call it a wash for now.

And then the requirements of fulfilling the Kickstarter: Every hardcover book being ordered will probably cost about $20 to print, plus another $5 or so to mail out again. I'll also have to make some more investments to make a hardcover book happen -- though hopefully not a $700 purchase of InDesign. I'm tentatively confident I can use a free trial or else persuade a friend to let me use their computer to make the book happen. (No, I will not pirate a cracked copy, because principles.)

The layout process will probably take a solid two work days -- call it sixteen hours -- if not more, simply because I'm out of practice with laying out print pages and it's going to take a lot of fiddling to get it right. Signing and mailing will probably take another day, so we're up to 24 hours just fulfilling that one reward level.

Let's do a little forecast here: Let's assume that I fund at exactly $5,000. Let's assume that includes 20 orders of the hardcover but none of the higher rewards, or about the ratio we're seeing already.

That $5,000 isn't actually $5,000, of course. I'll immediately lose 5% to Kickstarter, and another roughly 2.5% to Amazon Payments. I'll also owe the composer about $200 -- he graciously did the music for my videos as spec work for me.

I'll also be paying self-employment taxes on that money, so I'll have to send about 25% of it in to the Feds come June. But everyone pays income taxes, so let's not include all of that.

However, because I'm self-employed, I have to pay both the employee and employer's share of FICA (that's what you pay into social security programs). That means I wind up paying about 7.45% more in taxes than someone who's drawing down a salary.

So let's shave off 15% straightaway for taxes and fees. That $5,000 is now $4250.

Those 20 hardcover books at $25 a pop will cost $500. That brings us down to $3750.

Minus the cost of music, the illustration, and what I spent in the promotion phase: Now we're at $3380.

That $3380 is covering my wage for at least 32 hours of work for 13 episodes -- the 12 routine episodes plus the extra backers-only origin story. That's 416 hours. Plus the 24 hours fulfilling rewards. Plus the 78 hours of work just running the Kickstarter, independent of the project. 518 hours of work to make Lucy Smokeheart happen.

Optimistically. There are always fires to put out.

That works out to $6.52 an hour, which isn't even on par with the New York State minimum wage of $7.25/hour. If I were a full-time worker at the wage I expect to get from Lucy Smokeheart, I'd be bringing down a whopping $13,040 a year.

We've Been Hit

It's a good thing this is just a side project, huh?

Don't get me wrong, this isn't a complaint -- I just want to lay out the plain facts for someone else who might look at my funding target and conclude that it's a good way to turn a little cash around. Trust me, you'd do better dropping off your application at Starbucks. That way can even get you health benefits!

When all of this is done, I will still be left with a tangible product -- the Lucy episodes will be available for sale basically forever online. However, given my experience with Shiva's Mother... I don't really expect much in the way of sales of ebooks after the Kickstarter is over. Maybe enough to afford a nice dinner out at a national chain restaurant once a month. Maybe.

But my reasons for doing Lucy aren't all about money, anyway. Part of it is a cunning career move to establish a wider audience; I'm really hoping Lucy sounds awesome enough that I get funded by people who know nuts about transmedia and have never heard of me a day in their lives, and that these people love Lucy enough to stick around and see what I do next.

That's not it either, of course. This is also about doing something for the joy of it, something that's just between me and an audience. I don't have resources, but what I do have is creative freedom. That's not just something that money can't buy -- it's something money can actively take away from you.

Up sails, amigos. We're going on a long, long journey. I don't know about you, but I'm planning on making the most of it.

Walking the Plank

I talk a big game about indie creators and the need to strike out on your own. Oh, sure, it's an amazing time to be a creative person, because you can actually make something and put it in front of the whole world now. But it's easy to find excuses not to actually go through with it. Not enough time! Not enough money! Blah blah blabbity blah reasons logics whatever.

The truth is, it's terrifying to put the stuff you make out there. There's a chance you'll find out nobody actually wants it.

You guys, I am so nervous right now.

 

Games, Story, and An Extended Metaphor

There's a thought out there that all games have a story, because even in a game without an authored plot, you're constructing a narrative in your head of what's going on. This is what is the most important part, say its adherents; the experience you come away with is the story.

This has never sat well with me. To my mind, this is nothing but a semantic argument intended to obfuscate a real and meaningful difference between games that do, and do not, have an authored narrative. I maintain this is an important distinction, and trying to erase it on vague philosophic grounds does us all an enormous disservice.

But I've been hard-pressed to explain why. On the face of it, these semantic arguments aren't wrong, not exactly. And yet agreeing with the idea that you still get a story even out of a game without a plot misses an important point.

Inspiration has struck! So here I have an extended analogy to explain why I find that way of thinking so insufferable, so dismissive of authored narrative, and why there is a qualitative difference between the two kinds of experiences.

A game with an actual story in it, like Mass Effect, is like a restaurant. A game without, like Minecraft, is a grocery store. They both have the same net result: You get a meal (or an experience). But the process by which that meal arrives is so markedly different that you simply can't elide the two experiences under the banner of 'eating' and expect everything you say about the one to hold true of the other.

Look at how this analogy plays out: In a restaurant, you get fewer choices about the meal you're going to have (but not none!) In return, you can expect the chef to provide you with a certain baseline quality of cuisine -- a story with good pacing, characters, internal consistency. In a grocery store, the choice you have is vastly larger, but you're also going to have to put a lot more work into the experience to come away with an actual meal -- or a story that compares to what a chef might prepare.

As with games, sometimes the home-cooked meals will be the most meaningful to you; the holiday dinners with your grandmother, for example. But few of us are professional chefs, and so if we're looking for a sublime and surprising culinary experience, heading to the grocery store is not our best bet.

But there are also hybrids; buffet-style restaurants, if you will. These are games like Skyrim; series of authored pieces, where it's up to you to determine whether and how to fit them together into a proper meal. Not quite an authored story, not entirely a sandbox.

And there is no value judgement here, either. Both are valuable and necessary components of the food economy. But they are not the same thing, no matter how many surface similarities they have. You would never mistake the one for the other.

The experience isn't the story. The story is the story.