Clark covers most if not all of the bases. (I also think he discards the sponsorship and patronage model too easily.) Here are two other possibilities he doesn’t really mention:

One that is somewhat subsumed by his “infrastructure” model in Part Two (fund the production in part through revenue generated by licensing the underlying technology), is a distribution play. I think there’s a really interesting opportunity here at the moment. There is as yet no good channel for the promotion of transmedia projects and properties (nor a good word to refer to them yet). They are discovered virally, or as part of a marketing campaign around a more traditional narrative property, or around a single thread of the transmedia property. But as the games and app industry already knows, acquiring an audience member can mean more than just having that person’s attention for the duration of a single experience. Once you’ve built an audience, there’s a great opportunity to cross-promote other properties to those people — whether they’re your own productions, or those of others (in which case you’re taking a cut of the revenue that flows through you to them). This strategy is generally underleveraged outside of games, and could be of great use to transmedia producers.

The other way transmedia productions could benefit from the experience of the games industry is in relation to “freemium” models. Just as free-to-play mobile games now make more money than paid apps, we may find that ticketed events produce less revenue than experiences the consumer can get involved with for free, but that require a payment (or payments) to unlock additional content of whatever kind. This could take the form of story threads that are not available to everyone, virtual goods for use in games or in character customization, access to premium live events, etc., etc. The thing not to miss here is that consumers are still paying for content in droves, they’re just paying for it in much smaller chunks.

All that said, these models are not entirely in line with Clark’s series. It occurs to me that what he’s really writing about are (very important) financing models, rather than trying to ring the changes on all of the revenue models that are possible. Taken together, these create a much larger number of possibilities than the ten scenarios he describes. That’s not to take away from his series, though, which is very valuable reading for anyone considering a venture of almost any kind in today’s media, trans or not.

Bored on the home front

“The basic shooting and combat mechanisms in Homefront are standard fare,” Schiesel writes. “What makes Homefront stand out from all the other shooting games is its setting and its ambition to grapple with a vision of what could happen in the real world if absolutely everything were to go wrong.”

Sounds good, thinks I, I’ll have to pick this up once it’s a bit cheaper. But then I dial in Rock, Paper, Shotgun: “Homefront is barely a game,” writes John Walker. That sounds fair to me too. John is hardcore(-ish) and historical-minded (where games are concerned); he’s fully qualified to make that call. If his judgement of the gameplay is a bit harsher than Schiesel’s, I put it down to beauty being in the eye of the beholder — and keep in mind that John’s is perhaps the more discerning eye.

His judgement of the story, however, makes for more interesting contrast:

“Wow, the commentary is ghastly,” John writes, calling it “clumsy and downright insulting ‘horror of war’ rhetoric.”

“The game loves war,” he says. “It relishes in gory headshots and atrocities, feverishly wanking itself into oblivion every time it thinks it’s Saying Something. The final third’s epic set pieces have all the sensitivity of a Roland Emmerich film. So don’t start preaching to me about the terrible ways of mass graves. Especially if you’re going to follow that up with a scene in which I have to lie inside one with an arm draped over my head. You might call it having their cake and eating it too. With a cake made of shit.” (Of course, that should be a John Milius film, shouldn’t it?)

Schiesel is more sensitive: “When you see images of bulldozers pushing around mounds of American corpses, citizens in an internment camp in what used to be a high school football stadium and the twisted wreckage of a suburban White Castle or Hooters restaurant, you feel an emotional connection to the action that simply doesn’t accompany a science-fiction game set on a faraway planet.”

I’m sure that’s true. But I wonder how much of his reaction is down to his being American (I assume), while John seemed clearly to be a Brit the one time I met him. Still, it’s hard to imagine that a game that’s as bad as John says it is could be redeemed for American audiences simply by its story’s impact on the homefront. Is this the old narratology / ludology split rearing its ugly (and fictitious) head? Or is it just a very mediocre game, getting two reviews that are maybe over-zealous at opposite ends of the spectrum? And has anyone else even played the thing? The world — or maybe just me — wants to know.

What’s interesting to me is the question of where a combat system might lie on the spectrum from transparency to obfuscation (through complexity or by other means), how that stacks up against the combat results you as a designer want to produce, and whether a game is any the better or worse for your equations and calculations being deeply buried, or riding on the surface of play.

The Battle for Wesnoth, for instance, which is a really impressive (and free!) turn-based strategy game, is exceedingly clear about the math behind its combat mechanic. At any given moment, you know exactly what your chances are of winning any given encounter between two units, and you can discern, with hardly any poking around, why your chances are what they are (because Undead are highly resistant (60%) to most Physical attacks, for instance).

Others, like the Total War combat system analyzed in this 2006 forum post, take pages to explicate and are difficult to understand even with extensive documentation provided by the developers.

The system I’ve been working on lies somewhere between the two, though certainly closer to the transparent/Wesnoth end of the spectrum. If it survives in anything like its current form, it will be relatively easy to understand with perhaps a bit of calculation on the player’s part, though in many cases not so simple that you can do the math in your head. Note that the choices I’m making definitely do not grow out of a desire to make the system more or less transparent; they are driven by the kind of gameplay I want to produce, and the immediate and tangible questions it raises. E.g., how do you resolve combat between two stacks of units with various advantages and vulnerabilities, without requiring the player to make any additional decisions after sending his or her units into the fray? There are more answers to questions like this than at first meet the eye.

The questions I have about questions like those are these: What does it mean for a game to have a transparent mechanic, versus one that’s more obscure? Do players (those who are paying attention, at any rate) feel better knowing how they’ll fare before they go into battle? Does having a mechanic that’s too obscure to figure out (if there is such a thing) mean players will be less engaged? Does it take away some of the challenge if you know beforehand whether you’ll win or lose? Do transparent mechanics provide clearer paths through the content? Or do they lead players to reduce the number of alternatives they explore, since much of the exploration has already been done for them?

Or… do these questions apply to such a small portion of the player population that they’re not even worth considering? I’d argue that even if it is only a few who are so engaged as to do the math, this is still worth thinking about, for a host of reasons I won’t get into here. In any case, it’s interesting stuff to ponder. What do you think of it all?

G.MAPW = 1 + G.HEXA + (G.MAPSIZE * (G.HEXA + G.HEXSIDE)); // DIMENSIONS OF THE MAP ITSELF

The map itself. Probably more poetic if you’re the one writing the code, I’ll admit. Especially so if you haven’t written any code in a while and are rediscovering the man-machine integration one occasionally feels in the process. I have done a lot of things in life — freelance journalist, book author, software engineer (years ago), startup CEO, tech blogger, world traveler, international man of not much mystery — so it doesn’t feel terribly awkward to extend the dimensions of the map now to include gamemaker. In fact, given everything I’ve been up to for the last five or six years and how deeply all that has been involved in games, it doesn’t seem out of step at all.

Working the kinks out of my engineering skills is proving salutary, and I’m gladly putting in a fairly huge amount of hours (much to my wife’s chagrin). Happily, the work progresses faster than I thought it would, though it’s not without many of the same vagaries and vicissitudes of any software project:

• I spend less time designing and planning, and more time coding, than I should
• I spend more time than I should in reinventing wheels
• Without a close inspection, I sometimes don’t understand why the code I’ve written works
• I probably spend an hour refactoring for every four I spend writing new code
• I experience a strong urge to leave a trail of technical debt in my wake (countered, fortunately, by the point immediately above)

Despite all that, I’m making rapid progress toward what will be a semi-playable prototype / early alpha version. It won’t arrive anytime in the immediate future, but it should get here well before the summer. The prospect excites. Already there are tiny little people scurrying around the map and occasionally shooting each other! If you squint, that is: what’s actually happening, though symbolically it represents what I’ve just described, is still hideously ugly at this point, heh.

The project itself is actually somewhat ambitious, and I’ll most likely seek some help with it before it’s in any kind of shape to release on the world. (The art I will probably just hire out.) The skeletion description pegs it as a real-time strategy game — with some secret Wallace sauce thrown in, of course. I’ll blog / Tweet about that later, although the sauce, and the market it’s designed to serve, are things I plan to build a company around, if all goes well.

Technology: The back end of the game I’m doing in Python/Django, and the front end in JavaScript, jQuery, and HTML5, with a MySQL database behind it all (which is fine for now). I’m not making HTML5 do anything particularly staggering at the moment, although I’m quite impressed by it, and particularly interested in pushing the cross-platform portability it brings. I’m sure the code I’m writing on the back end is not terribly Pythonic, but I think I’m bringing it more in line with each revision. (Book recommendations are welcome, by the way.) I’m also resolutely stuck on a development server; deploying Python and Django to a shared hosting service (DreamHost) has so far proved too much for my attention span, which constantly snaps back to the business logic of the game itself (much more interesting). Sometime soon.

So I have struck out on a new and highly cool path, and for some reason thought the blogosphere should know about it. Advice, brickbats, and tl;dr’s welcome in the comments.

Of course, it isn’t real. But what’s interesting about it to me is that it’s the real-world version of a gamers’ mod that’s existed for years. Both World of Warcraft and The Sims (as well as other games) have seen their versions of the “nude skin patch,” alternately delighting players and disgusting critics, both in the press and on the internets. It’s a very durable kind of pre-teen humor, but it’s also an example of how technology is making the world more and more like a video game. Nude skin iPhone apps aside, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

If you want a shirt, email your address to me at themetaverse at gmail dot com and I’ll get one off to you. The design is essentially the same as the cover of the DVD, but in green instead of red.

PK is fairly straightforward, giving you simple mobs to hunt down and resources to collect, within half a mile of your GPS-determined or tower-triangulated location, whether you’re on an iPhone or an Android handset. One note: I got the game going on my iPhone for about a day, but haven’t been able to get it launched since. According to a recent interview with the developers, however, there are about 70,000 more or less active players, which sounds fairly respectable to me, given the nature of the game.

Things get interesting when you notice that PK shows you the location of other players near you, and lets you interact with them, either in duels or by grouping up to go adventuring together. There are few ways to venture far outside your current location on the map without physically getting up and moving, but your contacts can invite you to join them at their real-life location, which is a nice touch. You seem to be able to plant a flag when you’re across town, then visit it from your home location, and you can stake a claim to real-life plots of land, which is interesting. A new version of the game (no longer free), is apparently due out very shortly.

Games like Parallel Kingdom are important, for a couple of reasons. (Here’s Wikipedia’s somewhat random list of location-based games. I’ve also been checking out Sphericle, which seems to have at least a small community of players.) Expect to see more of these kinds of games qua games, as powerful mobile devices become more widespread and people and become more accustomed to having information streamed to them on the go.

But location-based games are also going to be part of what gets people used to location-based services in general. Apps like Foursquare are already using game mechanics get people engaged, giving users points for “checking in” at the establishments they frequent. These and others are already giving us a taste of what life may be like when we’re streaming our locations to our friends all the time.

One thing that’s interesting to note is that this could well mean a return to the time when relationships with the people you actually knew and saw every day had a different status than those you just kept up with online. Needless to say, we never really left that time, but when you’re Facebook “friends” both with your significant other and with people you’ve never physically met, it begins to feel that way. Will we soon have Facebook “acquaintances” as well as friends? You can create cohorts using the broadcast and privacy tools of a service like Facebook, of course, but when those services start to offer such labels explicitly, you’ll know we’ve moved on to the next stage of their evolution.

I’ve written plenty about Eve in the past, so I won’t go into too much detail here about the game itself. What’s remarkable to me is how the game’s narrative, the “story” of one’s time in Eve, is driven more by the dynamics among players and corporations than by the mechanics of gameplay itself.

I was going to write that the narrative is driven “as much” by personal dynamics as by gameplay, but on reflection, that just isn’t true. In Eve, the game mechanics — the intricate systems of paper beating rock beating scissors beating paper — seem designed to drive people into either conflict or cooperation. You could play the game without ever interacting meaningfully with another player (this would be difficult, in fact), but it would be a boring slog. There is no “solo” game in Eve: even when you’re alone in space, the environment and the economy and almost all the other aspects of the game are affected by what other people are doing, to a much greater extent than in most other MMOs.

That’s one of the reasons that many Eve players become so strongly connected to the people they fly with in the game. The closest analogy that’s occurred to me is to a hardcore but amateur softball or soccer team. The results of your efforts are meaningful only within the confines of the softball league (its own virtual world), and yet are no less meaningful for that. And the relationships that form there are those fed by the experience of striving together for a common goal — just as they are in Eve (and many other contexts). Nearly the only difference is that softball players tend to be in the same physical place much more often than gamers. They may occasionally get more exercise as well…