Save Me!

Wohoo! I’m safe!

Few things annoy me more in a game than having to replay portions that I’ve already done. It’s redundant and no fun. Of course, even worse is when you THINK you’ve saved your progress only to find out you really haven’t and have to re-do a level. 

My Love/Hate Relationship with Elder Scrolls

Stupid bugs. It’s such an obvious statement that it doesn’t really need to be said, but I’ll say it anyway: video game bugs are annoying. Of course, most mainstream games are of pretty high quality and manage to avoid major bugs that greatly hinder the experience. Unfortunately, that’s not really the case in the Elder Scrolls series, which just happens to include some of my favorite games of all-time.

Bugowulf

Bugs suck. Before I proceed any further, I feel I should warn you that this is just a rant about a game (Beowulf) that I’ve been playing recently and the evil glitch that I encountered.

A week or so ago, I picked up Beowulf for Xbox 360. The game has been out for a few years now, but I like fantasy games, have been looking for something short to play, and I enjoyed the movie… so why not give it a shot right? Aiding in my decision to make the purchase was the fact that the game was only around $4. Win!

A Xeko Revival?

One of my earliest jobs within the gaming industry was serving as the Community Manager for Elf Island, a virtual world that encouraged players to make a positive difference in the real world. Elf Island players embarked on “GoodQuests” to help build REAL houses for those in need, and save REAL polar bears, among many other great causes.

My Rise as a Casual Gamer

Some of my favorite games of all-time include Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Final Fantasy IX, CastleVania: Symphony of the Night, Vagrant Story and StarCraft, to name a few. Despite how much I adore these classics, I find myself playing less and less of these types of games. I still consider myself to be a hardcore gamer, but at this point, nearly everything I play could be classified as “casual.”

So how did casual gaming win me over?

Zombie Mosh Beta

For those that don’t know, I work for Metaverse Mod Squad and am contracted to Menue Americas as their Community Manager.

Menue has developed two Facebook games, Roman Taxi and Zombie Mosh. Our second game, Zombie Mosh, just launched late last week and is currently in the early days of open Beta. We’ve got a lot of big things planned for Zombie Mosh and there’s still plenty of development to finish up. However, within a few minutes of starting the game I’m sure you’ll agree that it has plenty of potential.

Zombie Mosh allows players to create their very own undead hangout, rock out to music, zombify pesky humans and mosh their brains out! If I were to compare Zombie Mosh to another game, I’d call it the zombified child of FrontierVille and Nightclub City.

I encourage you to give it a try. Hope you like it!

How to release a game

I recently came across a poll asking “How should a buggy game at release be handled?” The poll was targeting an audience of gamers. The results are something that I think game developers should pay attention to. As a general rule, I think we gamers would rather wait a few weeks (or months) if it means we’ll get a better product when launch day comes.

Sure, there comes a point where you can’t keep delaying and you just need to release your product. But first impressions are huge. Make sure your game is ready to go before you do a major release.

Thanks to www.gamertagradio.com for the poll.

Community Management: Thou Shall Not Lie

I recently attended SIEGE 2010 in Atlanta, GA and one of the reoccurring themes I was pleased to hear from public relations professionals, marketers and community managers was the importance of “being genuine with your users.” This includes not only being honest when you’re caught red handed, but also means you have to be open with your users about potential issues.

As Sanya Weathers recently explained, sticking your head under a blanket and hoping nobody notices your mistakes isn’t good community management. You have to be open with your community: apologize and address the issues. Expanding further, it’s not enough to just address the issue; you have to honest about it too. Trying to cover up your mistakes with excuses and lies is only digging yourself deeper.

To anyone that has worked in community management, this probably seems like a no-brainer. Unfortunately, some companies find it easier to fabricate a story as opposed to trying to explain their way around mistake or uncomfortable situation. It makes sense that the temptation to lie would arise. After all, you don’t want to reveal something that could tarnish your company’s image. But lying to your community is actually significantly more dangerous than telling the truth.

You think you can lie and get away with it? Don’t count on it! Never underestimate your community. Your most hardcore users are watching everything you do and somehow manage to find even the smallest, most secretive updates to your site. And in this time of exploding social media, your secrets will spread like wildfire through Twitter and Facebook they’ve come to light. You can’t contain it. The obsession and dedication that you typically value from your community will be the very thing that brings you down.

There’s always a chance that you’ll be able to get away with your dishonesty, but is it really worth the risk? Of course not. It’s disrespectful to the people that you depend on for your product’s success and it’s setting you up for drama if (or when) they find out. When your secrets come to light, you risk angering your community, damaging your reputation and losing users.

One of the primary duties of a community manager is to handle communications with your user base. This relationship is necessary for helping you gain feedback about your product and keeping your users informed. A community manager needs have earned the respect of the community, be able to relate to the users and talk to them at their level. If your users don’t trust your community team, then your community manager is totally worthless to you. Even a small lie can severely damage the relationship between your community team and users, so I can’t emphasize the importance of honesty enough.

Everyone knows that some information can’t be shared with your community. Your users might not like it, but they understand the concept of confidentiality. However, there’s a big difference between withholding confidential information from users and outright lying to them. Whatever you CAN tell your community, you SHOULD! There’s no need for secrets. As an added bonus, having an honest and open community team allows you to control the release of information and keep rumors and exaggerations at a minimum.

Lying might seem like the easy way out of a tough situation, but being honest, apologizing and admitting to your mistakes is the best way to keep the trust of your community. Not to mention, if your company truly values their users, then the least you can do is be upfront with them. A good community manager should be able to handle a community crisis and should be empowered with the ability to be truthful when these situations arise.

StarCraft II Choices

I finally started playing StarCraft II, which is obviously an amazing game. I’m addicted to playing and loving the new units and story so far. Anyone that knows me probably also knows that the original StarCraft is my favorite game of all time.

Although, I admit I have one complaint – the choices. As an RPG fan, typically I love being offered alternate paths and having the freedom to impact the game, but this isn’t really one of those cases. I hate permanently missing out on a potential upgrade just because I chose to research a different upgrade. As a strategy game, shouldn’t I be given both options and allowed to strategically decide at the time which best suits me?

I’m also not a fan of how the story progresses. I don’t really need several options about which mission to do next. I’d much rather KNOW which mission comes next both story-wise and difficulty-wise. Giving players the option to jump around and choose how they progress just seems to break the story up. Ideally, I’d like to have various options about how to proceed, but I want enough direction to make a decision about how to do it.

Still, I’m not done with StarCraft II so I’ll reserve my judgement. And either way, I’m thoroughly enjoying the experience so far.

Facebook Game Addiction

For the longest time I had avoided playing any Facebook apps. After all, I’m not really a big Facebook fan in the first place (The site is unorganized and confusing if you ask me and I’m just not super social anyway).

Despite my efforts, I was apparently just putting off the inevitable. Everyone I know seemed to be playing SOMETHING on Facebook and they were constantly encouraging me to give it a try. And as a gamer, I found myself growing more and more curious what the fuss was all about. I decided to give it a whirl and test the waters. I wanted to see what was out there, why people liked it so much, and why the gaming industry was going insane over it!

Naturally, one of the games I started off with was Farmville. I mean, over 70 million people are playing Farmville, so there must be something to it, right?

I made an effort to limit the number of Facebook games I played so that I could still keep some sort of a life. Of course, that didn’t last long. I started logging in multiple times per day and made sure that checking the status of my Facebook games was one of the first things I did in the morning and last things I did at night before bed. I even dished out some cash to purchase virtual currency for some games.

The more I played the more time these games were stealing from me. I would login and waste hours doing monotonous tasks such as feeding my fish or harvesting my crops. When I was only spending a few minutes per day playing, it wasn’t so bad… but as your game expands to new levels you end up killing more and more time. Easy to see how people end up blowing HOURS in these games.

Making it all worse, what was I gaining from this whole experience? No, these weren’t real fish I was feeding or real crops that I was harvesting, so there’s no ‘real world’ benefit. And unfortunately, I wasn’t even having fun playing these repetitive games any more. I finally came to terms with this and decided to stop wasting my time playing a game I don’t even like. My test was complete!

It’s really easy to become addicted to these games. All of your friends are constantly harassing you to play them through Facebook requests, they’re easy games to pick up and play, they prey on your instincts to care for things like plants and pets (you’re always thinking “oh, I had better water my crops!” and “I bet my virtual pet is hungry”), it allows you to compete with your friends and work on achievements, and they’re attached to Facebook… and everyone is on Facebook.

Of course, this is all severely exaggerated. I was never one of those crazy people logging in at 4AM just to make sure my crops were still alive and I never dropped my offline life to make sure my virtual fish were healthy. But the point remains the same – these games are easy to get addicted to and many people continue to play them NOT because they are fun… simply because they are addicted. Sadly, this takes the enjoyment out of gaming and turns it into a chore!

Don’t get me wrong, there are some really fun games out there and the social gaming trend is leading to some really great breakthroughs in the industry. I’m still exploring the realm of social gaming and will keep on enjoying what it has to offer. But I think I’ll avoid the addictively un-fun games for a while. 🙂