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The Minds Behind Some of the Most Addictive Games Around

2009-11-09T13:54:38Z

The gaming industry tends to focus on the high end products, first person shooters that crank out a bazillion polygons a seconds and RPGs which spend more time developing the plot in cut scenes than in actual gameplay. But for every person playing Borderlands, there are scores playing casual games like Bejeweled and Zuma. PopCap Games has been at the forefront of casual game development, with a catalog that includes bestselling titles like Peggle and Plants vs Zombies, in addition to the two previously mentioned. I recently had a chance to talk to Jason Kapalka, one of the founders and the creative director of PopCap. We discussed the evolution of PopCap, how the casual gaming industry differs from mainstream gaming, and the challenges of creating games that can be engaging, without being frustrating.

James Turner: Could you start by talking a little bit about your background and how you came to PopCap and what you did before then?

Jason Kapalka: My career in computer games started back in the early '90s, when I was writing for the magazine, Computer Gaming World, doing various reviews and articles. In '95, one of the editors from the magazine left to join an internet dotcom start-up in San Francisco called TEN, the Total Entertainment Network. He invited me to come down there and work there, which I did. And TEN evolved over the dotcom boom and bust cycle, from a very hardcore gaming service into what eventually turned into Pogo.com around 1999. I worked there initially on hardcore games. One day, I was working on Total Annihilation tournaments, and then the next day, someone said, "Hey, design bingo." And I was sort of like, "Oh. Bingo? Okay."

That was the beginning of my casual game design career, I guess. And yes, I was there at Pogo. I helped design a lot of the structure for their casual games until around 2000 when I left, and Pogo eventually went on to get bought by Electronic Arts, of course. I left in 2000 and started PopCap with two other guys, Brian Fiete and John Vechey who are these guys from Indiana that I'd met earlier, around '97. They had made an internet action game called ARC that we'd produced on TEN, and we stayed in touch. In 2000, we all thought we wanted to try something different. So we all left our respective companies to start PopCap. As you might remember, 2000 was not the best year for internet companies. So we didn't really realize that the entire industry was collapsing. We had an interesting time initially. Luckily, our ignorance protected us, I guess.

PopCap started from there, just the three of us working out of our apartments. And over time, we'd say, "Well, I guess we need to hire an artist." And I'd say, "Well, I guess we need to hire maybe another guy here to program this stuff." And then eventually, maybe someone should look at the books or whatever, so we'll hire someone to take care of the bookkeeping. And it kept going like that until eventually we thought that maybe we needed an office. And from there, suddenly, we've got nearly 300 employees now in 2009. So it's been an interesting kind of experience. We never really intended PopCap to get anywhere near as big as it has today.

James Turner: How would you describe PopCap's place in the market today?

Jason Kapalka: I guess it's a bit odd. Casual game companies exist in these strange spaces where they're often the developer and the publisher at the same time. And then they also publish stuff with other guys, where they're sort of rivals, but also they're partners. There's a lot of this co-opetition thing going on. PopCap is obviously a developer, and we develop a lot of games. We used to publish other people's games. And we still do indirectly. in that we have SpinTop Games. which is a company we bought a couple of years back. They distribute a lot of other people's games through their site. But primarily, I think we develop and then publish titles. But we primarily focus on publishing our own titles. So we're kind of a self-publisher, I suppose.

James Turner: That's actually something I wanted to ask you about because one of your distribution channels now is Steam, which is another company's portal for their games and others. How do you see that relationship?

Jason Kapalka: Steam's been really good. We work with lots of different portals. Steam is one of many that our typical game would go out on. On Steam, on Real Arcade, Big Fish Games, Yahoo Games, MSN, WildTangent, a whole bunch of smaller channels. So Steam was just one of several. It's been interesting in that it was developed differently than a lot of those other ones. Steam is definitely much more of a hardcore game distribution channel than something like Real Arcade. So initially, when we started on Steam, it was uncertain whether our games were going to really fit in. Initially, a lot of the ones we tried on Steam didn't really work too well for their audience. Hidden object games don't do especially well with Steam users, for example.

The turning point for Steam was probably when we did Peggle Extreme with Valve. I don't know if you remember that. Peggle had just come out, and the guys at Valve really liked it. We were talking and we had some weird ideas. Someone had the odd suggestion to do sort of a miniature-themed version of Peggle that featured all of the Orange Box's characters, the Half-Life, MT Team Fortress guys. It was a really strange idea, because that was a fairly mature violent kind of franchise. And certainly, it didn't seem like the obvious fit for Peggle. But, on the other hand, we thought, "Well, what the heck? We can try it and it's only going to go on Steam anyway so it's not like it'll offend the soccer moms necessarily." So we tried that out, and it went up. And we were all kinds of nervous because we didn't know -- it had launched initially as a free download with the Orange Box. And even though it didn't cost people anything, we were still kind of wondering if there was going to be this big backlash from the hardcore community about, "What the hell is this cheap little pinball thing doing in the middle of my Orange Box product."

But actually, the response was really good. I mean, the Orange Box guys all really liked Peggle a lot. And ultimately, that led them to go and seek out and buy the regular versions of Peggle which made Peggle suddenly this fairly big success on Steam. Which a month or two ago, before that, didn't seem very likely that this game with unicorns and rainbows would be selling well on Steam. So after that, that sort of seemed to kind of be -- it sort of opened the floodgates a little bit. And now a variety of our games do very well on Steam. Obviously, Plants Vs Zombies was the last one that had quite a hit there. Not everything. There's still some of our games that are clearly more casual and that don't particularly work well on Steam. But the ones that do work there seem to really work well.

James Turner: There seems to be a fairly different expectation level for casual games in terms of graphics and such. Do you think that's a natural result of how they're produced and what they're intended for? Or could you see something like Plants Vs Zombies but with the graphics levels of a Half-Life?

Jason Kapalka: It's certainly possible. I mean in some cases, we're not intentionally trying to make the games low fidelity. We try to do the best art direction we can. Although the usual contradiction, or decision to be made, there is we also want to make games as accessible as possible. So we want Plants Vs Zombies to play on every crummy netbook and seven-year-old computer your mom has and all of these types of things. And so that tends to mean that we try to work and have good art, but usually make the technical requirements very modest. We've been working at making things that can scale well so that on a good computer, you'll get a really nice experience and it'll still scale down to play on a lower-end computer. But that can be challenging in itself. So usually, we err on the side of not worrying about the graphics being too high-end because our experience is showing that a good game with not very fancy graphics can sell very well, like Plants Vs Zombies. And I think that game has good graphics, but it's definitely limited. It's only got 800X600 resolution and so forth. But on the other hand, we've seen plenty of games in the casual space that have really good graphics and they sell very poorly if they're not a fun game. So accessibility and fun definitely, for us, end up being a first priority over graphics. And especially 3-D or technically impressive graphics versus just good art direction.

James Turner: You would think Nethack and Rogue would be the ultimate proof that you can have good game play without good graphics.

Jason Kapalka: Sure, I love Roguelike games. We have lots of Nethack fans over at PopCap, which seems a bit weird in that they're obviously not very casual in many regards. But yeah, they're good exemplars of that principle that graphics are not as important as game play.

James Turner: In a lot of your games, and especially games like Peggle and Zuma, the game play, to put it mildly, is pretty simple in terms of what the user can do. A lot of times, it's just a mouse click or two mouse clicks. How can you take what is fairly simple game play and keep it engaging so that people want to play it for hour after hour?

Jason Kapalka: Typically, the hard part is keeping it simple to begin with. Usually the problem is is that a lot of time, games become increasingly more complex as you work on them. And it's hard to resist that temptation and keep things simple. With Peggle, certainly one thing that everyone asked for was everyone wanted to have some sort of control over the ball once they'd launched it. So they all thought, "I shoot the ball and then I can't do anything. I just sit there and watch it bounce down. Why can't I have bumpers or a laser beam or something that I can do?" And on the surface, there's nothing inherently wrong with that request. But when you do things like that, suddenly it changes the game. And so the simplicity goes away, and it's no longer as compelling. It's kind of like bowling. If you can control the ball after you throw it in bowling, that doesn't necessarily make it a better game. Or golf. If you had a game of golf where you could change the direction of the ball after you shoot it, again, it doesn't necessarily make it better.

I think with computer game players, often they want all of this control, but I think a lot of classic games actually work well because they limit the amount of control you have. You have to really focus on these clear, specific decisions. And that's a very engaging thing to do. I don't think games like pool or golf will be going away any time soon, and they have fairly simple mechanics at the base of them. You're calculating angles and trajectories. And so that's the case of something like Peggle. It's a similar game. You're calculating angles and trajectories and then making one single decision. But I think that simplicity doesn't mean that it lacks appeal.

James Turner: This next question, keep in mind, is coming from a guy who's now spent three weeks trying to get through the last level of Zuma's Revenge. How do you decide the balance between too easy and too frustrating?

Jason Kapalka: That is quite hard. Obviously, I think I once said that no casual game has ever failed for being too easy. But that's not entirely true. I mean a game that is too easy, people don't perceive it as being too easy; they just perceive it as being boring. And so you certainly don't want to have a game that's boring. At the same time, it's much, much easier to fall into the trap of making a casual game too hard. That's certainly one of the hallmarks of computer game design is to make them very challenging because as a game designer and hardcore game player, that's sort of what you're used to. A lot of the DNA of video games comes from things like the arcade where they were very pure games of skill that they were intended to get very hard very quickly. That's some evolutionary development that's not really relevant in a lot of games today, and especially not in casual games, but it's kind of hard to get out of the habit of that. So with that in mind, trying to figure out how to balance things to be the right level of difficulty is quite challenging.

Sometimes people have a thing where you can select easy, medium or hard. We don't like doing that at PopCap. By and large, the problem I always have with that is it's really hard to calibrate what that actually means because obviously, easy, medium or hard are going to mean different things for different games and for different people. And so one game's easy might be ridiculously difficult on another one. And typically, you're asked to decide that at the beginning of the game when you don't actually know. So I'll start up a game of whatever, whether it's Halo or Ninja Gaiden and decide "Do I want normal or do I want easy? Do I want hard?" In various cases, it could be any of those things and you don't have any good way of knowing until you've actually played the game.

So I don't like having those choosable difficulty settings which means you need to have a game that has one degree of difficulty and that people can adapt to or it adapts to them as they go along. That was a big challenge of Zuma, to try to arrange the levels and so on in such a way that they provide an interesting scale of challenge going upwards without ever getting too insanely difficult. Although, as you pointed out, the later levels of Zuma can get quite hard. Zuma's Revenge is a bit easier than the original Zuma. The original Zuma was quite punishing in many ways. And Zuma's Revenge has gotten a little more forgiving than that. But we figured that it's okay on the later levels if it becomes difficult because by the time someone gets to level 60 in Zuma's Revenge, we assume that they've got the hang of the game and are enjoying the basic game play. Whereas if someone starts at the first level of a game like a Ninja Gaiden type experience and gets his ass kicked repeatedly, that's the sort of thing that may discourage them from continuing to try it at all.

James Turner: I'm going to go off interview for a second here and say the only problem with that is that almost all of the bonus play in Zuma's Revenge is locked to getting through the whole game.

Jason Kapalka: Yeah, and that's something that we've thought about and is actually on our list of things we would probably try to address if we have another Zuma sequel. If you ever see a third Zuma game, we'll definitely try to make some of that content more accessible before people complete the game.

James Turner: The other way that sometimes difficulty is addressed is through cheat codes. And it seems like you've gone out of your way not to have any of that backdoor stuff. Was that a conscious decision?

Jason Kapalka: Yeah. Actually, there's a few Easter eggs and so forth we have in the games, but it really seems the opposite of casual to have these kinds of codes that you need to have the secret hidden knowledge, whether it's digging through the internet or magazines to find these special codes. It's the opposite of making the game accessible, by making one that you have to discover this secret information in order to play effectively. I think it's kind of fun, but only in the context of games where you expect the audience to be really so invested in the game that they're going to kind of go outside of it and seek out that kind of extra information, which is quite common in MMOs and other hardcore games.

James Turner: Is it easier or harder to do sequels to a casual game? Does the lack of a complex storyline make it more difficult in some ways?

Jason Kapalka: Obviously, I haven't had to make Uncharted 2 or anything like that so I couldn't say for sure about the challenges of dealing with a 300 person team. But the challenge that we find for things like Bejeweled 2 or Zuma's Revenge is that you have a very simple structure, and it's challenging to improve that without changing it. The problem I always had is the one that I saw with a lot of Tetris versions. They've been making versions of Tetris for years. And you see a new version of Tetris come up for a new system. You pick it up and check it out. And often, they'd have some new twist on it that once you played it was not very good. And you switched back to playing basic Tetris as soon as you could because whatever new gizmos they threw in there just didn't actually make the game of Tetris any more fun. It made it different, but not more fun.

So when we did Bejeweled 2 or Zuma's Revenge, my first priority was not to make the game less fun. For the sake of making it different so you can say, "Zuma's Revenge has this many different things in it," that helps with your bullet list of stuff if you're trying to sell it. But once you start playing it, we found a lot of the stuff we tried initially -- we put in a lot of things. We put lots of extra power ups in there and a bunch of different kinds of levels and different boss monsters and a whole bunch of stuff, mini games. You could sort of play Space Invaders type mini games with a frog shooting at tiki invaders and so forth. But none of them actually made the game any more fun. It was one of those things where the mini games, for example, you kind of felt more like you were playing Tetris and suddenly, you were forced to play a round of Bejeweled in the middle of it. It didn't make sense. If you're playing Zuma, most people kind of want to play Zuma. They don't want to be interrupted with some random other type of game play. Some of the power-ups, again, we had some extra ones in there that they were different; they just didn't add a lot to the game play and didn't make it any more fun.

So it can be challenging to add stuff and modify a game that has a lot of fans and that is very simple because it's not easy to change that without breaking it. It's like trying to make Chess 2. Many people have made up all sorts of different variant rules for chess, but I don't think too many people would claim that they had improved chess in any universal way. But in a sense, we feel like our job is to try and improve chess, some sort of game that's very simple. That's, to some extent, classic in that it's been out for a while and is loved in its current form by a lot of people. And so you don't want to mess it up just for the sake of saying you changed some stuff and made a sequel that was different.

James Turner: I'm going to morph together a couple of questions that came out of our editors because some of them were similar, and they all were on a theme. So I'm just going to read them all and then you can figure out how to amalgamize them. The first one was: Can you describe your development platform including frameworks and programming languages used and how that relates to target customer platforms? Someone else asked: How do you manage development for games that need to run on multiple platforms? Is that changing with the popularity of mobile platforms like iPhone, Android and Pre? What about mobile platforms like netbooks and Chrome OS? And then someone asked if you were still planning to develop for Web OS?

Jason Kapalka: Okay. Well, our usual platform we develop on is typically for PC and using C++ as the programming language. For a fair number of years now, that's been our default. So when a game is started, that's typically the way we develop it. And later on, we call that our reference build, if we do that. Typically, we'll figure out where to port to after that. And some of the ports are somewhat easy and can involve a lot of the same C++ code. If you're doing a port to XBox, for example.

Other times, if it's Flash, for example, or some Java or Brew mobile handset, it ends up being a fairly major rewrite. We don't have a magic button that ports Peggle onto every different platform available. Sometimes you just have to do it the hard way and do a lot of rewriting of the code and revising the graphics and layout in UI and all of that stuff. So we definitely think it's important to do other platforms, but we certainly feel like you have to take a lot of care to make sure that the game works properly on whatever that platform is. So we do spend a lot of time and effort on ports. I guess we think of them less as a straightforward port than as an adaptation because the challenges of doing Bejeweled on the iPhone, for example, are significantly different than doing it on XBox or some other kind of device.

James Turner: Mobile like netbooks and Chrome OS.

Jason Kapalka: We definitely are trying to keep netbooks in mind when we do games, so that even if we have a game like Zuma's Revenge which has some high-res options, it'll still scale down and run on a typical netbook. And that's unlikely to change. We certainly are well aware that a lot of our audience has lower-end computers. So in a sense, netbooks don't cause us any problems because we were already making games that played on that kind of computer. So we don't really have to do anything extra special to make our games work on a netbook.

James Turner: I was just going to say that I can tell you that I think your Mac port doesn't like running on Hackintoshes because I tried using Zuma's Revenge on a Hackintosh Del 10V and I think you probably didn't optimize your Mac version as much as some of the other ones.

Jason Kapalka: It may be true. Our Mac versions -- definitely our Mac ports, we've had some troubles with those over the years. And we don't yet have 100 percent reliable system for doing our Mac releases at the same time as our PC ones. So yeah, I wouldn't be too shocked to see that there were some issues with the Mac version being not quite as efficient as the PC one. I'm sorry to hear it, but I'm not entirely surprised. We're working to try and get out Mac support to be a lot better than it is currently.

James Turner: The iPhone, obviously, has had a lot of good and bad press about the App Store and how well you can actually make money on that. What's your experience been and how do you think it's going to go with the other platforms like the Android and Pre?

Jason Kapalka: Well, we've been doing pretty well on the iPhone. Bejeweled has, I think, been pretty consistently in the top ten or twenty since launch. And Peggle's done well. And Bookworm's done pretty good. So we've done okay with it. It'd definitely an interesting and challenging platform in that the sheer number of apps out there means that unless you have some way of standing out from that crowd, there's a very high risk with it. I mean, if you're at EA and you have the ability to get big brands out there, or if you're like PopCap where you have a couple of games like Bejeweled that people recognize and will seek out, you have an advantage there. But if you're a brand new developer working on an iPhone game, it's a little scary. One hears about the stories of the guy who wrote a game in his spare time for two months and then put it up on the iPhone store and made $250,000 and quits his day job and all of that. But there's a lot of stories that don't end like that in the same way when you hear about guys going to Vegas and betting their last 20 bucks on a slot machine and getting rich. That does happen, but it's not necessarily a typical story. And it's easy to overlook the risks when you only hear the sort of success stories.

So I think the iPhone is a really cool platform. I think it's a risky one, even for small developers. And I think for large developers, they've already started to realize that it's hard to justify a large development budget for an iPhone game. So they might do it as a marketing tie-in with another game or occasionally if they have a very casual, friendly title like EA with Scrabble. But, for example, right now, not too many people are going to think about investing $1 million making an iPhone game because the risks are just way too high that you'll never make any of that money back. That may change in the future with Android and other platforms that are similar to iPhone, if they start having more touch screen App Store type devices. That might suddenly multiply the potential audience for some of these games by a large amount. I mean the iPhone is cool, but compared to other mobile phones, it's really still owned by a small percentage of people. That might change. In a year or two, you might see iPhone-like devices in a lot of people's hands and if the UI and the App Store experience are similar to the iPhone that might have a huge impact on the way games work. Suddenly, you may find that audience not just growing by a small amount, but doubling, tripping, quadrupling overnight if some new phones in that category become popular.

James Turner: So I have a question from Tim O'Reilly. He wants to know, how do you go about getting new customers? And he says, "Be specific."

Jason Kapalka: How do I go about getting new customers? Well, I'm going to mention two things. One is the not very exciting answer, which is we do what a lot of people do in the casual game space do, you do search engine marketing. That's the most common way on the web to drive people to download games from a casual game site, search engine marketing largely through Google where you buy keywords for various things and people search and blah, blah, blah. You pay a certain amount and they click through. And it's fairly mechanical now because we have metrics to know if this many people download the game, you'll sell this many on average and so forth. So that's kind of the non-interesting way that we get new customers.

The more interesting ways -- well, one example would be Facebook. We've been looking at social networking games for a while. And there've been some interesting things going around there, but we weren't too sure if it was a good idea for us to get into it. It wasn't really our forte. But at the same time, it was a very different kind of crowd. A very different space for us to try something with. So that was the idea behind Bejeweled Blitz, to get into a completely different market than the ones we were in at the time. And sure enough, it has done quite well on Facebook in terms of getting Bejeweled out in front of people who otherwise have not maybe seen Bejeweled very much. And it is a very different crowd on Facebook. The players there are not the types who -- most of them don't play very many games at all. So even by the standards of casual games, they're not the type who even download a game. They don't do any games whatsoever. So that's been a way of expanding our user base to a whole different crowd.

James Turner: One of the ways that you market your games is through one of our editors called teaser apps. What's your conversion rate like on those? Is it an effective way of marketing the games?

Jason Kapalka: If he means the web sort of Flash games and so on on the web, yeah, that is pretty effective. It's less effective than it was when we started about eight or nine years ago when that was, by-and-large, the primary way that you drove people to get interested in games. There would be a flash game on some website or, at that time, a Java game. The player would play a bit of Bejeweled or whatever it was, and then there would be some sort of ad saying, "If you want the deluxe experience, download Bejeweled Deluxe." And then they'd download that, and then they would hopefully buy that. It's less important nowadays. More people are willing to download a game directly, and fewer people feel the need to play the web game first before doing that.

Also, there are a lot of flash games out there that don't have any sort of downloadable component. So people who are playing a lot of flash games are not always in the market for downloadable stuff either. That said, it is still useful. And the conversion rates, they vary a lot for different types of things. Once someone downloads a game, the typical conversion rates are usually in the range of one to five percent. So if you can get somebody to download a copy of Peggle, for example, the typical conversion rates are in the one to five percent range that those people will actually end up buying it.

James Turner: You've mentioned Flash a couple of times. There are some players out there who are pure Flash players, like Armor. Do you see them as a serious competitor to what you're doing. Or are you seeing the same thing as what newspapers are going through, if people are giving it away, how do you make money at it?

Jason Kapalka: I don't think, as far as we've seen anyway, the pure Flash game guys don't really seem to be competing for the same audience that we are. Sites like Miniclip and so on, they do okay with their own business model. It doesn't seem to be crossing over with ours. The problem with developing Flash games for those kinds of sites is that it can be very difficult to turn a profit on them because there's so many Flash games out there. So a site like Miniclip or some of the other ones like that, they pay a pretty small amount of money for a Flash game, between maybe $500 to $5,000 basically, and that's it in most cases. So if you're a Flash developer, that's a pretty small amount of money, unless you're making the game in one or two days.

There are few larger outfits, like Armor Games that you pointed out, that do actually produce games of a higher level of polish and so forth. As for how they make money, I don't know. It's a good question for them actually. I'm kind of curious. I suspect it's a fairly tough business right now because of the massive commodification of Flash games. And so I definitely have heard from a lot of Flash game developers who, despite turning out lots and lots of games all of the time, like some of them are doing a game a day or whatever, they still have a hard time making ends meet just because the prices and so on are just not good for the pure Flash plays.

James Turner: How international is your development effort? And how do you manage it technically and logistically?

Jason Kapalka: Oh, international? Well, we have a development office in Dublin, in Ireland, of about 40 people. And they handle the bulk of our internationalization. So we take it fairly seriously. It's work. It takes time and money to do a decent job with it. The majority of our games, we try to end up eventually internationalizing. Usually there's some kind of decisions. There's EFIGS, which is English, French, Italian, German, Spanish. And that's the basic level for doing European coverage. Beyond that, the typical next steps would be to maybe do some of the Asian languages, Japanese, Korean and Chinese. And we do that as well. We have an office in Shanghai, and they do some of that. Those markets are a little more challenging right now. Some of the reasons are that that Japan is very much a console market and has not got into PC, downloadable stuff very much. China, on the other hand, has big problems with piracy. There's just a lot of piracy out there. And Korea obviously has a lot of MMO kind of focus. So casual games are challenging to get done over there. But yeah, we're trying our best to have a global reach for all of our games.

James Turner: That's a good answer. But I was actually asking do you have international developers? Or is it pretty much all done out of one area?

Jason Kapalka: Yeah, the majority of our developers are all in the US. I mean we do have some developers in Ireland and Shanghai. But in terms of the games that you'd be familiar with now, the majority of them have been developed in North America, either in Seattle or in some cases in Chicago or Vancouver or San Francisco.

James Turner: What these days would be the career path for someone who wants to get into game development?

Jason Kapalka: Well, there's a variety of different paths. There are a number of schools that have some kind of game development programs now. I don't know too much about them. And although I think some of them are very interesting, they're certainly not a requirement. Certainly at PopCap, we don't specifically look for anybody with a game design school background to hire. In many cases nowadays, the best way to get into the game industry is just to do it yourself. The barriers to entry are not what they might've been even five or ten years ago. If you want to make a game now, as I said, you can make a Flash game easily enough yourself. You may not make a lot of money with it, but you can certainly produce it and get it out there in front of people easily enough. And in many ways, the experience of just actually making games is more valuable than any amount of training or books that you can read.

So for someone who wants to get in the gaming industry right now, my personal advice would be to just do it. And whether that means a Flash game or yeah, there's lots of student collectives or just independent guys making a variety of things. It's entirely possible to just make a game. You don't have to go to school for it. You can do the traditional path like ten years ago, get a job as a QA guy at Electronic Arts or Activision or something like that and then work your way up. And that certainly can work. Or go to school for programming or art and then get an entry level job at a big developer. And those methods are still entirely valid. But if you want to get into game design and the creative side of things, I think you can actually just go ahead and do it now which was something that ten years ago was a lot harder to do because there just weren't as many venues for getting your work out there.

James Turner: So two fan boy questions to end things. First of all, are we going to see Plants Vs Zombies 2?

Jason Kapalka: I don't know. We'll see. I'd like to see it myself. We have the same challenge with that as we do with some of our other games in that the guy who made Plants Vs Zombies, George Fan, is hard at work on another game. And so it's a tough one in that we like his new game. We'd like him to work on that. We'd certainly like a Plants Vs Zombies Two as well as that. But it's challenging in that no one besides George would really do as good of a job on Plants Vs Zombies. So we don't necessarily want to just hand it off to a B team and produce something that's not as good. So it's a challenge. I'd like to see it happen, but we'll see what we can do.

James Turner: And finally, do the words in Zuma actually mean anything?

Jason Kapalka: The words, the various chants and so forth?

James Turner: Yeah.

Jason Kapalka: Yes, actually, they do mean something. The chants in the original Zuma are -- well, they're mangled Aztec. So as much as people know of what Aztecs actually talked like, the words in there are very badly grammaticalized versions of that. I think some of the things say stuff like, "Too bad little frog," when you die and so on. And in the second one, Zuma's Revenge, there is actually, again, a very badly mangled version of the Easter Island dialect, which is in existence still and known by Easter Islanders to some extent. So yes, it's possible some people out there in Easter Island, if they played Zuma's Revenge, might recognize a few of the phrases.

James Turner: All right. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

Four short links: 9 November 2009

2009-11-09T11:00:00Z

A Battery-Free Implantable Neural Sensor (MIT Tech Review) -- Electrical engineers at the University of Washington have developed an implantable neural sensing chip that needs less power. Uses RFID's induction technology which means the power source can be up to a meter away. Proof of concept was implanted in a moth to sense central nervous system activity.
New Microsoft Interface Technology -- videos from Craig Mundie (Chief Research and Strategy Officer) on the MS Campus Tour talking about the future of UI using a sexy glass prototype that features tablet PC, gesture, speech recognition, and even eye tracking. Lustable.
Adding Usability to Print -- detailed description of a failed pitch to reinvent a newspaper, to bring web sensibility to print. Make the paper more usable, think cross media instead of separate media, while using the strength of the paper (pictures, info graphics, nice text) to the max… Make a product that people want to buy because it is more usable that the competitor, not because it wins graphic design prizes. (via Evolving Newsroom)
StressAppTest -- Google-created open source project to pound the living crap out of hardware by maximising random traffic to memory from processor and I/O, with the intent of creating a realistic high load situation in order to test the existing hardware devices in a computer.

Unlikely Group Working Happily Together To Solve Patent Problem

2009-11-08T16:21:58Z

People following the issue of open sourcing the U.S. Patent Database might have been surprised to read an announcement in the official business opportunities web site of the U.S. Government: Synopsis for Public Data Dissemination Sole Source Contract to Google, Inc.

While the first reaction of many might be "OMG, WTF, how could they," this is actually good news, with an unlikely cast of characters working together including Google, Intellectual Ventures, and the Internet Archive.

In September, the Patent Office announced a rather strange "Request for Information" (RFI). Under this proposed scheme, the Patent Office would receive a substantial (upwards of $10 million!) donation of equipment from a vendor. In return, the vendor would get to be the official distributor of the patent database to the public, and would get to sell "value-added products." Among other things, the vendor would get access to the patents before the public does, allowing them to mine the database, and would be allowed to sell a variety of bulk products.

While the RFI makes a nod to public access, like all these Zero-Dollar deals the government cuts, there would be a lot of limits on what is "public" data as the vendor tries to recoup their investment by selling the so-called "value-added" products. Readers may remember a similar fiasco with the General Accountability Office where the Federal Legislative Histories were given away to Thomson West and now even the U.S. Congress has to pay to access this material.

The patent database is no ordinary database. This is the only database specifically called out in the U.S. Constitution as being the responsibility of the U.S. Executive Branch to run! A lot of people think this Zero-Dollar deal the Patent Office is contemplating kind of stinks, and I'm really pleased to announce that a broad coalition has come together to make this data more broadly available immediately:

Intellectual Ventures, the IP group founded by Nathan Myhrvold, is donating several terabytes of the back file to Public.Resource.Org, the Internet Archive, and a variety of other groups to make available to everybody.
Google asked for permission to crawl the public application system (known as "PAIR"). The announcement by the Patent Office of a "sole source contract to Google" was the government's way of saying we have permission to crawl their system and bypass the CAPTCHAs. This is good news, because the PAIR system contains the "binders," which is all the material that supplements the basic applications and grants.
The Internet Archive has set aside a boatload of disk drives to serve this data. In addition, Public.Resource.Org will provide the usual rsync and FTP, and we expect a variety of other groups to provide mirrors both for bulk access and end-user systems.

It goes without saying that Google, the Internet Archive, and Intellectual Ventures are 3 groups that don't often work together, and I think this illustrates the compelling public interest in making the patent database more broadly available. We announced this Section 8 Task Force in a letter to Congressman Mike Honda. And, we also sent in a FOIA request to the Patent Office, putting them on notice that we expect any responses to their RFI $0 boondoggle to be made available to the public, as required by law.

In the long-term, Patent Office just needs to fix their system instead of resorting to silly $0 deals. They have 600 staff in Information Technology and spend hundreds of millions of dollars. Surely, they can find a way to serve the public as part of that? Putting a lien on the Patent database in return for $10 million in hardware instead of fixing their 70's-era mainframes just doesn't make sense.

In the meantime, we should have the first 8 terabytes of data up pretty soon. Those interested in learning more about the issue are urged to consult the paper trail on our PTO page which includes letters to and from Congress, and pointers to the Patent Office procurement docs.

Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age - Part Three

2009-11-07T18:44:57Z

The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control.

Social technologies are cloaked in a rhetoric of liberation (customers are in control, the internet fosters democracy, social technologies propagate truth etc.) that tend to obscure the fact that never before have we handed so much personal information over in exchange for so little in return.

As we move from the “web of information” to the “web of people” (aka the Social Web) the output of all of this social participation is massive dossiers on individual behavior (your social network profiles, photos, location, status updates, searches etc.) and social activity.
This loss of control over personal information is on a collision course with the law of unintended consequences: MIT’s Project Gaydar can spot your sexual preference by your social ties, Facebook checks are occurring customs and every quiz you take on Facebook delivers a shocking amount of personally identifiable information to third parties.

Amidst this barrage of good news for how much power we wield in the transaction of commerce one has to wonder if we are giving away something quite precious in the bargain.

Here are links to the previous posts in this series:
One: More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.
Two: Individual perception of increased choice can occur while the overall choice pool is getting smaller

What are other paradoxes of the Internet Age? What did I get wrong above?

Four short links: 6 November 2009

2009-11-06T11:00:00Z

Red Laser -- "impossibly accurate barcode scanning". Uses Google Product Search to identify products that you scan using the camera on the phone. I remember Rael and I talking to Jeff Bezos about this years ago, before camphones had the resolution to decode barcodes. The future is here and it's $1.99 on the App Store ... (via Ed Corkery on Twitter)
The Art of Community For Free Download -- Jono Bacon's O'Reilly book on community management now available for free download (still available for purchase!).
Gov Hack -- Australian government ran a hack day with their open data, this is their writeup.
Android Mythbusters -- slides for talk by Matt Porter at Embedded Linux Conference Europe. A (long) catalogue of the kludges in Android.

Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age - Part Two

2009-11-05T14:00:44Z

Individual perception of increased choice can occur while the overall choice pool is getting smaller

This gem from Whimsley makes the point - with extensive statistical modeling supporting the argument - that our algorithm-obsessed, long tail merchants are actually depleting the overall choice pool despite the fact that as individuals we may be experiencing a sense of more choice through recommendations engines...

Online merchants such as Amazon, iTunes and Netflix may stock more items than your local book, CD, or video store, but they are no friend to "niche culture". Internet sharing mechanisms such as YouTube and Google PageRank, which distil the clicks of millions of people into recommendations, may also be promoting an online monoculture. Even word of mouth recommendations such as blogging links may exert a homogenizing pressure and lead to an online culture that is less democratic and less equitable, than offline culture.

In short, the long tail has gangrene at its extremity - the niche. More disarming is the conclusion that it isn't just the output of our recommendation algorithms that is leading to what the author calls "monopoly populism"and the end of niche culture:

"The recommender "system" could be anything that tends to build on its own popularity, including word of mouth...Our online experiences are heavily correlated, and we end up with monopoly populism...A "niche", remember, is a protected and hidden recess or cranny, not just another row in a big database. Ecological niches need protection from the surrounding harsh environment if they are to thrive. Simply putting lots of music into a single online iTunes store is no recipe for a broad, niche-friendly culture.

The network effects that so characterize Internet services are a positive feedback loop where the winners take all (or most). The issue isn't what they bring to the table, it is what they are leaving behind.

here is a link to yesterday's post: More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.

Tomorrow: The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control.

Four short links: 5 November 2009

2009-11-05T11:00:00Z

Heat Maps in R -- We used financial data here because it's easier to access than the airline data, but it's actually a pretty interesting way of looking at a financial time series. Weekend and holiday effects are a bit more obvious, and it's a bit like being able to see the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly closes all at once (by scanning your eye over the calendar in different directions). Includes source code. (via migurski on Delicious)
BlackHat and EC2 -- Theft of resources is the red-headed step-child of attack classes and doesn't get much attention, but on cloud platforms where resources are shared amongst many users these attacks can have a very real impact. With this in mind, we wanted to show how EC2 was vulnerable to a number of resource theft attacks and the videos below demonstrate three separate attacks against EC2 that permit an attacker to boot up massive numbers of machines, steal computing time/bandwidth from other users and steal paid-for AMIs. (via straup on Delicious)
Funny Characters in Unicode -- I never get tired of the wacky stuff in Unicode. I love the thought of a Unicode committee somewhere arguing passionately about the number of buttons on the snowman .... (via Hacker News)
Statistics to English Translation -- The terms sensitivity and specificity generally refer to diagnostic or screening procedures, such as an HIV or allergy tests. The sensitivity of a test is its true positive rate; the specificity is its true negative rate, although it can be more intuitive to think of specificity as the complement of the false positive rate. This matters. Bandying around numbers with misleading labels, or misinterpreting numbers that have a precise and defined meaning, does not further understanding. (Said 78.4% of statisticians, with a 20% confidence factor probability of false positives)

Twitter Approval Matrix - October 2009

2009-11-04T23:39:51Z

This is the fifth post for the Twitter Approval Matrix with data that spanned the month of October and different sources such as tweetsentiment.com, scraping archives, and observations. This month I received help from Joe Fernandez the CEO of Klout.com. Joe continues to provide some great 'hard' data that allowed me to better place more items on the grid this month.

A quick refresher, the matrix shows four quadrants used to describe trends found on Twitter. The Y-axis is partly analytical and shows popularity (mostly through scraped numbers) or perceived popularity (in the future nominated by you). The other part of the grid is more curated and subjective. The X-axis has been plotted based on my personal opinion. You may agree or disagree with my placements and that's all good to me. After all, this is partially about taste and numbers. The matrix and plots do not represent a thorough analytical treatment, but rather a view of the trends that could be found in data sources allowing me to plot with some sense of relevance.

For this post, I've limited the data and activity to the month of October. Again, I'll continue with this project as long as I get enough feedback/help. So, if you are interested in contributing, you can comment here, or read the original post to figure out the best way for you to submit your plots.

I hope you enjoy this and see it as a potentially useful tool to monitor trends that your fellow readers are both contributing to and tracking.

Three Paradoxes of the Internet Age - Part One

2009-11-04T15:30:42Z

In the circles that I travel the Internet is often breathlessly embraced as the herald of all things good; the bringer of increased choice, personal empowerment, social harmony...and the list goes on. And yet, as with any powerful technology, the truth of its consequences eludes such a singular and happy narrative.

Here is the first of three paradoxes of the Internet Age. I would love to see Radar readers point out others.

More access to information doesn’t bring people together, often it isolates us.

Elizabeth Kolbert has a piece in this week’s New Yorker reviewing Cass Sunstein’s new book, “On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done." In the review she lays out the concept of "group polarization"

People’s tendency to become more extreme after speaking with like-minded others has become known as “group polarization,” and it has been documented in dozens of other experiments. In one, feminists who spoke with other feminists became more adamant in their feminism. In a second, opponents of same-sex marriage became even more opposed to the idea, while proponents shifted further in favor. In a third, doves who were grouped with other doves became more dovish still.

The Internet is becoming a vast petri dish for the group polarization phenomena. As Sunstein puts it “The most striking power provided by emerging technologies,” is the “growing power of consumers to ‘filter’ what they see.”

(Thanks to Jim Stogdill for surfacing this link via email)

Four short links: 4 November 2009

2009-11-04T11:00:00Z

ChipHacker -- collaborative FAQ site for electronics hacking. Based on the same StackExchange software as RedMonk's FOSS FAQ for open source software.
Democracy Live -- BBC launch searchable coverage of parliamentary discussion, using speech-to-text. One aspect we're particularly proud of is that we've managed to deliver good results for speech-to-text in Welsh, which, we're told, is unique. I think of this as the start of a They Work For You for video coverage. I'd love to be able to scale this to local government coverage, which is disappearing as local newspapers turn into delivery mechanisms for real estate advertisements.
InfiniDB: Open Source Column Database -- hooks into MySQL, uses MySQL for SQL parsing, security, etc. The commercial enterprise version has multi-server support (parallel scale-out). (via Brian Aker)
Massive Online Analysis -- MOA is a framework for data stream mining. Includes tools for evaluation and a collection of machine learning algorithms. Related to the WEKA project, also written in Java, while scaling to more demanding problems. . (via joshua on Delicious)

Following Lists

2009-11-04T04:17:35Z

Guest blogger Brian Ahier is a City Councilor in The Dalles, Oregon, and he works in Information Systems at Mid-Columbia Medical Center. He is passionate about healthcare reform, government 2.0 and health IT.

One of the interesting things about the new Lists feature is the expansion of the asymmetrical nature of relationships on Twitter. I use Twitter Lists to control the flow of the fire hose of my data streams into manageable list streams. But another important aspect is the ability to create lists composed of accounts I don't follow. This is radically changing relationships and the way we build communities on Twitter.

As Mark Drapeau pointed out it will become more important which lists you are on than who is following you. You could actually follow no one at all and have lists for each group of accounts you want to follow. You can create listreams to follow rather than following individual people. This is also going to add a new dimension to some of the social aspects of twitter. People will share lists, recommend lists, and get bent out of shape when they are not included on certain lists.

But you don't have to go out and find all the accounts to create great lists. You can subscribe to lists created by Twitter superstars such as Robert Scoble's fascinating lists, Tim O’Reilly's great resources, or Muck Rack’s list of journalists lists. A new service called Listorious will point you to some useful lists to follow. I have created some lists and my best so far contains most of the Twitter healthcare community. Companies will create lists of employees like the Twitter employees list and you can follow their tweets without having to follow every employee.

Twitter Lists also eventually means the death of the Suggested User List. At the Web 2.0 Summit Tim O'Reilly asked Ev Williams if it wasn't time to move past SUL. Tim admitted that he has benefited from being on the list, but implied that it did not reflect actual authority and suggested it may be time for it to die. Ev Williams said, "It has been time to retire suggested user lists for a while... once we get lists rolled out we can retire the Suggested User List and make that, as we like to say, much more Twittery and democratic." Since you can follow other people’s lists, others can follow yours, and you do not have to actually follow an account on your list, Twitter Lists is a game changer.

Games Top the Charts in the iPhone and Android App Markets

2009-11-03T12:00:00Z

While it might be true that the number of Book apps is growing at a faster rate, Games continue to dominate the list of popular U.S. iTunes Apps. Games accounted for about a fifth of all iTunes apps over the past week^†, but the category continued to have a disproportionate share of the Top 100 charts, accounting for 52% of the Top Grossing, 56% of the Top Paid, and 50% of the Top Free apps:

Since most Book apps are actually individual e-books, the Gaming category would have a hard time keeping up with the ever increasing number of Books. Once publishers figured out how to turn their titles into iPhone apps, the number of Book apps started growing faster than Games. Nevertheless Games continue to rule the Top 100 charts.

A similar story is playing out on the Android platform: the most popular Android apps are primarily Games. (In the Android taxonomy, most Books are in the Reference category.)

Returning to the top iPhone apps, the price of the Top Grossing apps stabilized somewhat last week. Except for the top decile (rank 1 through 10) for which the median price was about $7, the median price across the other deciles was around $5.

Over the last week, the Top Paid Games were slightly more expensive than apps that made the overall Top 100 Paid list. iPhone Game developers will tell you that (visually) compelling and engaging iPhone Games are far from trivial to design and market^††. So it's no surprise that the creators of the most popular Games are starting to charge a little more for their software.

(†) Data for this post was for the week ending 11/1/2009.
(††) First, designing for such a small screen poses a major challenge. Secondly, the sheer number of Game apps (close to 20K last week) makes it hard to create something that turns into a long-running top-seller.

Four short links: 3 November 2009

2009-11-03T11:00:00Z

First Test for Election Cryptography (MIT Technology Review) -- The first government election to use a new cryptographic scheme that lets both voters and auditors check that votes were cast and recorded accurately will be held tomorrow in Takoma Park, MD. Founder of the company behind the technology is David Chaum, who ran the first electronic currency company in the 90s. That was ahead of its time (Internet faced a credibility problem, not a convenience problem), but his timing for this seems spot-on. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
Do I Have The Right To Refuse This Search? -- a former police officer questions the efficacy of TSA screenings and is doubly worried by by the lack of data collected. For years in policing, we relied on random patrols to curb crime. We relied upon this “strategy” until someone went out and captured some data, and did a study that demonstrated conclusively that random patrols do not work (Kansas City Study). As police have employed other types of “random” interventions, as in DWI checkpoints, they have had to develop policies, procedures and training to ensure that the “random” nature of these intrusions is truly random. Whether every car gets checked, or every tenth car, police must demonstrate that they have attempted to eliminate the effects of active and passive discrimination when using “random” strategies. No such accountability currently exists at TSA. Trend I see lately is a return to quantitative decision making, reality-based data-directed system interventions. (via BoingBoing)
Visualising Transport Data -- It can be hard to make meaningful information from huge amounts of data, a graph and a table doesn't always communicate all it should do. We have been working hard on technology to visualise big datasets into compelling stories that humans can understand. We were really pleased with what we came up with in just one and a half days. Like many places, the UK data.gov ran a dev camp to jumpstart people using their data. These appear to be successful, but I'm not aware of studies into the longterm effects nor the "value" of different types of developers.
Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do -- there's a numerical optical illusion at work here: count your friends, then ask them to count their friends. If you average the friend counts of your peers, it'll probably be higher than your friend count. The reason for this is also why (on average!) your sexual partners seem to have had more sexual partners than you, and why previous generations seem more fecund than current generations. It's because connectors (with large numbers of friends) distort the average, so unless you're the connector (and if you're reading this, you might well be!) the average will be bigger than a normal person's friend count. Left unmentioned is what kind of person would count the number of friends they have, then ask their friends for their counts .... (via Hacker News)

Four short links: 2 November 2009

2009-11-02T11:00:00Z

Your Botnet is My Botnet (PDF) -- 2008 USENIX Security paper analysing >70G of data gathered when security researchers hijacked the Torpig botnet. A major limitation of analyzing a botnet from the inside is the limited view. Most current botnets use stripped-down IRC or HTTP servers as their command and control channels, and it is not possible to make reliable statements about other bots. In particular, it is difﬁcult to determine the size of the botnet or the amount and nature of the sensitive data that is stolen. One way to overcome this limitation is to “hijack” the entire botnet, typically by seizing control of the C&C channel. [...] As a result, whenever a bot resolves a domain (or URL) to connect to its C&C server, the connection is redirected or sinkholed. This provides the defender with a complete view of all IPs that attempt to connect to the C&C server as well as interesting information that the bots might send..
cartographer.js -- build thematic maps using Google Maps. To be precise, you can build a choropleth, which is my word of the day. (via Simon Willison)
Making Privacy Policies Not Suck (Aza Raskin) -- interested in developing a standard set of privacy policy components the way that Creative Commons has created a standard set of copyright license components.
Scamville: The Social Gaming Ecosystem of Hell (TechCrunch) -- many of those games on Facebook that your friends play are evil. To get in-game money or objects, they'll let you take a survey but at the end you're signed up for crap you never wanted. Related: this article on monetizing social networks which talks about social gaming's business model.

Ignite Show: Andrew Hyde on The Posting Economy

2009-10-30T18:27:29Z

Andrew Hyde runs Ignite Boulder and works for Techstars. In this week's episode he shares his thoughts at Ignite ATL about the rapid economic shifts that can be caused by user-generated content. Andrew calls this the Posting Economy.

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