On writing…

‘I wrote when I did not know life; now that I do know the meaning of life, I have no more to write. Life cannot be written, life can only be lived–I have lived.’ – Oscar Wilde

It’s a lot easier to write as a bystander. When you’re in the midst of it, weathering the infinite daily (hourly, minute by minute!) battles, you don’t have as much luxury to write. We’re building, we’re fighting for survival, we’re in the thick of it.  All that time I could spend writing, I want to use to build and push forward and evolve and iterate instead.

A thought: All of the compulsion to change, and change, and change again – how does that impact my ability to live in the present moment?

CRV and GDC partner to revolutionize gaming industry

We at CRV are producing a new program at GDC called Startup Launchpad.  Essentially, it’s a way for game developers - indie to amateur to professionals within studios - to learn how to become entrepreneurs and to become unshackled from the confines of the traditional game industry structure.

 As I’m sure many of you know, many game developers/designers toil long and hard for game studios, only to receive very little if any equity for their efforts.  It’s an inequitable system.  I was an indie game developer for many years (MUDs, Mods) but I never wanted to join the traditional studio system because of what I perceived to be very inefficient employee management practices.

 The gaming industry is at the cusp of major structural change.  Traditional retail channels have left industry power in the hands of the few who could create scale to distribute across retail efficiently.  Now with the advent of open platforms such as such as XBL/XNA and web platforms like Kongregate, MiniClip, Areae/Metaplace, Facebook, etc, there will soon be numerous channels for game devs/designers to leverage to help them build their own profitable businesses.  And also, as players become more accustomed to playing games online or purchasing via online channels, there will be more venues for building new platforms and experimenting with different business models.  More importantly, many of these new games that will emerge will be much more lightweight social games, and so entirely new genres of gameplay will emerge. 

Bottom line: the gaming industry is at the cusp of dramatic structural overhaul in the next several years.  Some of this innovation will be driven by the large game companies (XBL, EA Blueprint), but I expect a bulk of the exciting new developments to come from a crop of startups yet to emerge. 
Anyways, I am hoping that these series of events at GDC will foster innovation, creativity, and a sense of what’s possible in the gaming industry.  At the very least, I want to introduce game industry folks to the possibility of being an entrepreneur or working for a startup.
You can read more about these events at GDC Director Jamil Moledina’s blog:
http://www.gdconf.com/news/directors_cut/

or at Gamasutra:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17370
 

The first series of events takes place tomorrow, Friday February 22 – you can read about the 3 Startup Launchpad sessions here.

• Raising Venture Financing for your Startup: Tips, Tricks, and Hacks – 9:00-10:00am Room 2004 West Hall
• The 1st Annual Startup Showcase – See the 5 most exciting and innovative startups of the year – 12:00-1:00pm, Room 132 North Hall
• Lessons from the Front Lines: Startup CEOs share their insider stories – 4:00-5:00pm Room 2007 West Hall

Thanks for reading! I hope to see you there. And keep a lookout for the business plan contest we will be launching for Austin GDC in the next couple of months.

Random stuff in my brain

I’m heading off for the Austin Game Developers Conference this afternoon.  I’ll be there through Friday evening, if anyone wants to meet up.

I realized recently that I speak mostly in conclusions. That is to say, I am really bad at exposing my thought processes to other folks.  It’s one of the reasons why I blog so infrequently.  I only feel comfortable blogging fully formed thoughts – ones that have relatively well tested hypotheses.  But so much of relationship formation and bonding – the good stuff – happens in the in-between spaces.  I decided I need to actively work on exposing these thought processes.  

So I guess I’ll try posting more casually to my blog. I don’t have a lot of faith in this yet, but I suppose it’s the kind of thing that takes practice.  =)

I had a very enjoyable conversation yesterday with Byron Reeves.  Byron’s the Director of Stanford’s Language and Information Program.  In his spare time, he does a lot of consulting and startup work in the area of virtual worlds and virtual economies.  He told me about some fMRI work he’s done, studying people’s brains while they play World of Warcraft.  And the difference in people’s brain responses depending on whether you tell them the other characters they are interacting with are other people or NPCs (computer AI.) 

One of the companies he’s working with is Seriosity.   They are basically creating a platform to allow companies to create virtual economies by assigning currency values to different types of interaction and communication.  They are coming up with all sorts of very interesting, unique data about how virtual currencies drive behavior and group dynamics. 

Anyways, a few random thoughts have been percolating in my brain:

- What does it do to a [company's] culture if all interaction can be boiled down to some quantitative representation?

- Isn’t a company’s culture really just some expression of a collective utility function?

- And, has anyone done any studies measuring what type of correlation exists between the rate of change of a [group|country's] economic growth and the rate of change of its language? I guess I’m curious if various Chinese dialects are changing more quickly than languages in more static socioeconomic conditions.  I feel this must be true to some extent, but I wonder to what degree.

Vote for my SXSW panels please!

Dearest Readers,

If you enjoy reading my blog or liked any of the panels and conferences I put together this past year, I would greatly appreciate your vote for my proposed SXSW panels:

Virtual Goods: The Next Big Business Model! 
What’s Wrong With Today’s Major Social Networks?
Human and Property Rights in Virtual Worlds

I haven’t put together who the rest of the panelists are yet - I’m waiting to see if any of these panels get selected, but I guarantee any panels I put together will be interesting, fresh, and relevant.  Why? Because I really hate wasting peoples’ time. And I really enjoy being a catalyst of enlightenment, in whatever small way I can.

SXSW is my favorite conference of the year.  It’s just a really cool mix of product oriented people: creative people who build stuff.  These are the kinds of people I love to spend time with.  Plus, it’s in Austin and Austin is a super fun town. 

Greatest thanks,

s

update:

p.s. To all of you lazy folks who are reading this post but not voting (e.g. most of you), because SXSW uses awesome Ajaxy Web 2.0 technology, it only takes you 1 second to vote.  So you have no excuse.