A week ago over 5000 people streamed through the foyer of the Brighton Dome to see and build hundreds of amazing things at the first Brighton Mini Maker Faire. Luke and I went along with 2 laptops, a scanner and a pile of pens, paper, glue and scissors to make a video game with what felt like most of those 5000 people.

We arrived at 9:30 in the morning and were still working out how to plug out laptop in to the big plasma screen when the doors opened at 10:00. From then until the doors closed at 17:00 our table was a tornado of cutting, gluing, drawing and colouring as dozens of children and adults dived in to the task of drawing bosses for our shoot ‘em up with wild abandon. For a while my picture scanning, data wrangling and game copying efforts kept up with the stream of submissions and people were delighted to see their creations flying around on the big screen within minutes of their creation. Soon enough though, the stream turned in to a deluge and by midday I had a sizable backlog of pictures to process.

Despite working non-stop all day with only a 20 minute break to grab a milk shake and have a quick look around I ended up with a backlog of dozens of pictures at the end of the day. At that point another problem emerged: the game is designed to slowly get harder at each level, but with so many bosses to add the game would get impossibly hard before half of the bosses were seen. Realizing that I had a lot more work to do before the game would be finished I released an initial version at the end of the faire and collapsed in an exhausted heap at the after party.

All of this is by way of being a long winded explanation as to why “You’re The Boss 2” wasn’t finished a week ago. Last night I finally got around to scanning in all of the remaining images, tweaked the difficulty curve to make it possible to get to the end and released “You’re The Boss 2 Extended” which can now be downloaded here.

Despite being one of the most exhausting days of my life, it was also one of the most enjoyable. It was incredibly rewarding seeing dozens of children and adults alike delighting in creating something fun together and watching Thomas Truax perform with his DIY instruments while talking to a professional gingerbread house maker made for a truly magical end to the day. I’m very proud to have been part of the first ever Brighton (not-so) Mini Maker Faire and look forward to taking part in many more (although I might bring along a friend to help next time!).

I hope you enjoy playing You’re The Boss 2 as much as we enjoyed making it.

The Brighton Digital Festival continued this weekend with BarCamp Brighton 6 which was super interesting and lots of fun as always.

I was a bit worried that my Terra Nova style talk on the philosophy of games, virtual worlds and magic circles would be too esoteric, but the room was packed and the talk generated some great discussion.

A video of the talk is now available at The Internet Archive thanks to @stevepurkiss and the slides are available on SlideShare. Thanks to everyone who came along to my talk and BarCamp and to @jaygooby and @profaniti for organising a wonderful event.

Back in 2005, while I was working on Second Life in Nottingham, before Linden Lab Brighton existed, I ran a workshop as part of the Screenplay “Boss Frenzy!” day at the Radiator Festival which allowed children to collaboratively create a computer game by drawing or making bosses with collage.

Dozens of people came to the Broadway in Nottingham and got busy with pens, pencils, paper, scissors, glue and magazines to design bosses for our “You’re The Boss!” shmup. We had an amazing time and created a charming and delightful game which I talked about on the original Second Life blog.

I immediately thought of it when we started planning the Brighton Maker Faire a couple of months ago and was delighted when the project was accepted. Unfortunately 6 years of bit rot had taken it’s toll and disaster loomed after discovering that I’d hosted the Game Maker files on the web space provided by an old ISP account and didn’t have them on my patchy backups. Luckily the ever amazing Torley had a copy of the executable and with the help of a decompiler I was able to recover the Game Maker files I needed to run the project again.

So, if you’re near Brighton on the 3rd of September and like the idea of collaboratively making an arcade game with scissors, glue and pens then please come along. If you have a Windows machine then check out the game we made in Nottingham in 2005. I think it’s still charming and delightful 6 years on. You can download it here.

This time round I’d like to make the game completely out of Creative Commons licensed works, so please suggest CC licensed books, comics and pictures that might make good source material in the comments, or bring them along on the day.

In June 2004, not long after Cory had introduced me to Second Life, version 1.4 was released which added Custom Character Animations. In the accompanying press release Philip said “My fantasy is to be Uma Thurman in Kill Bill”, “I’d pay $10 for her yellow jumpsuit and sword moves and I’m sure other people would too.” I’d been looking for something to build in SL and also been thinking about melee combat systems in RPGs which traditionally just leave the tanks hacking away while the others get loads of different fun and interesting abilities to use. At the other end of the spectrum arcade fighting games give players lots interesting choices to make, but require twitch reflexes that require low latencies that are difficult to achieve over networks let alone in SL. Building a tactical melee combat game in Second Life sounded like the kind of interesting challenge I was looking for, so at the end of 2004 Doc Boffin and Jaladan Codesmith set out to build what would become Combat Cards.

The early versions of the game were built in to weapons and employed a simple llDialog interface for selecting moves, but the core mechanics were very much as they are now. HUDs were introduced In October 2005 with Second Life 1.7 and I immediately started thinking about converting the game in to a trading card game — a business model that seemed to fit perfectly with Second Life’s micro currency based economy.

A trading card game needed an artist and after looking for one on the SL forums I was very lucky to find the wonderful Osprey Therian who preceded to blow my mind producing amazing artwork and taking incredible pictures of the fantastic avatars of Second Life for what became Combat Cards.

Working on the game while working at Linden Lab gave me insights in to how Second Life felt from a residents perspective. Despite Second Life’s flexibility, it’s a lot harder to build complex systems than it should be. Building systems that can send out product updates is fiddly, error prone and something that should be in the platform, LSL’s memory limitations mean that I often spent more time cutting scripts up or trying to save memory than building features. When the number of cards and so data increased, Combat Cards ended up having to incorporate a paging system to load lines of notecard data in to memory asynchronously in order to continue to work. This hugely frustrating and time consuming experience led directly in to the discussions and design around Script Limits which will allow Mono scripts to request as much memory as they needed.

Learning about building businesses in Second Life was also incredibly valuable. As a multi-player only game, Combat Card’s biggest challenge has always been getting enough people together at the same time to play, something that has resulted in a series of wonderful parties and regular events often hosted by the amazing Kat Burger. It also resulted in the exploration of linking Second Life with social media that led to Combat Cards arenas tweeting game results and then the LSL Twitter OAuth Library that allowed players to tweet results from their own accounts without disclosing their Twitter passwords. When we finally found a print on demand service that allowed Combat Cards to make the jump to RL it also allowed us to explore the possibilities for linking RL and SL businesses that resulted in the system for buying gift certificates for L$ in SL that can be redeemed for physical Combat Cards in the online web shops.

Keeping my Babbage Linden and Doc Boffin identities separate for over 6 years has given me incredible insight in to what it’s really like to be a Second Life resident, but it has been exhausting. There was an awkward moment in 2006 when I had to tell Philip that I worked for him when he came to check out Combat Cards, Osprey only found out that I was a Linden in 2008 when I emailed her a version of the RL rules sheet that Word had helpfully annotated with my name and I had to come up with a dweeby Doc Boffin voice to disguise my identity when commentating on Combat Cards matches on YouTube. It’s a huge relief to finally be able to come out of the closet and talk about Combat Cards openly. I’m incredibly proud of what Osprey, Jaladan and I have achieved with the help of Kat, Comragh, Spin and our amazing player base, to whom I apologize to for sometimes not being able to devote as much time as I’d like to Combat Cards. My other Second Life as Babbage Linden often kept me pretty busy.

Now that I’ve left Linden Lab I hope to still find some time to work on Combat Cards and hope that it will now be easier to pursue the full publication of Combat Cards in real life that Osprey’s amazing artwork deserves. I’m very happy to announce that Combat Cards 3.0 and the long awaited Robot Series of cards will be launching on 31 October and hope to see you all at the launch party at 2PM Pacific (Second Life time) at the Combat Cards Arenas in Europa. I’ll leave you with Osprey’s latest amazing promo for the event.

On Friday I jumped on the train to London to attend Playful 2010, a one day conference put on by mudlark of World of Love fame. Despite billing itself as a day of cross “disciplinary frolicking” and featuring designers, podcasts, discussions of narrative, iphone augmented paper games and Disco Snake the thing that stood out for me was a thread running through the talks that addressed a fundamental of game design: meaningful choices.

Jonathan Smith talked about the dangers of giving people too much freedom in his talk about the Lego Games. Lego is almost a shorthand for freedom: the easy to understand system of knobs and anti-knobs that allows 2 4x2 blocks to be combined in 9 million ways an ultimate sandbox aspired to by games and virtual worlds like Second Life. This open, free system led Travellers Tales to add lots of open, free features to it’s early Lego games that were largely ignored by players who need boundaries and feedback from the game to determine ‘what I want versus what’s expected of me’. Choosing freedom and rebellion is more meaningful when it is clear that I am exercising my freedom and not doing the expected.

Margaret Robertson talked about and in the current sandbox game du jour, Minecraft, which has enough terror and threat in its horror filled night to make the choices made during the day meaningful and to reward mastery of it’s sandbox — a sandbox that compelled Margaret to stay up until early in the morning carving her slides out of earth, building them out of wood and animating them with flowing water and flames burning down the assertion that “games = points”.

It was this misguided assertion that Sebastien Deterding talked about in his look at the ‘gamification’ of the world around us. When all that gamified web sites like foursquare do is allow the accumulation of points and badges there are no meaningful choices, no mastery, no way to rebel against expectations, no play and no fun. Gamification results in loyalty schemes that are no more meaningful than Progress Quest.

The importance of being able to rebel against expectations was echoed by Alexis Kennedy’s talk about delicious misery in Echo Bazaar, a social game that would be another meaningless progression to inevitable success if it weren’t for contrarian missions that allow players to opt-in to getting their characters exiled for scandal or driven insane by demons. These missions inflict real harm on characters, but when properly signposted are the most enjoyed and shared missions: allowing players to be badass. When a game makes success inevitable, misery and failure is play and meaningful escape.

Pat Kane, formerly of Hue and Cry and more recently author of The Play Ethic gave a fascinating talk about wordplay, humour and his journey from disillusionment at the comedy industry, to fascination with humour through the Old Jews Telling Jokes’ stories of Jews laughing in the face of persecution. When misery and failure is inevitable, humour and play is rebellion. An ultimate, meaningful demonstration of freedom and humanity when all hope of victory is gone.

While goofing around asking UK indie game developers for their top 5 games of all time at World of Love, I was very pleased to hear that the amazing ZX spectrum strategy game Chaos featured in multiple lists.

I love Chaos so much that I developed Law, a Chaos remake at university as a way to learn Java. It turns out that a bunch of other people love Chaos too: a year or so ago one of the administrators of the Chaos Remakes Wiki got in touch with me to say that he’d been able to pull a copy of my original web site from an archive and wondered if I still had a copy of the game itself. The reminiscing at World of Love was enough for me to finally wade through decade old backups looking for a copy of Law and I’m happy to say that I found a copy and that it still runs on modern Java runtimes.

If you remember the original Chaos, head over to the Chaos Remakes Wiki and indulge in some retro gaming nostalgia. If you’d like to tinker with it (please fix the yellow text on grey dialogs and add AI wizards!) the code is available under the GPL license from BitBucket.

Thanks to a tip off from David Hayward, I managed to snag a last minute ticket for the World Of Love independent games conference organized by Pixel Lab, sponsored by Preloaded and hosted by Channel 4. I’m glad I did.

The day kicked off with Chris Delay from introversion demonstrating Subversion, a typically minimal game inspired by Mission Impossible (the TV show, not the movies). It ticked a huge number of boxes for me as a game, but the most interesting thing about the demo is that the game is nowhere near finished and it’s not often you get to see a game this early in production. I suggested to Chris that the game should feature Sporty Spy, Posh Spy, Ginger Spy and Scary Spy. Look out for those in the final version.

Possibly the most inspiring session of the day was Terry Cavanagh’s talk on game jams. Setting the scene with a description of his stalled over ambitious uber project, Terry the rattled off an amazing list of games he made at game jams like Sinewave Ninja which ultimately morphed in to the amazing v six times. I’ve had a ton of fun building mashups at Hack Days so I can imagine adding games to the mix would be amazing. I predict game jams will be coming to Brighton in the very near future…

Definitely the most amazing talk of the day was by Eskil Steenberg who was delighted to be talking at the first conference dedicated to his game, Love. After a brief tour around a beautiful procedurally generated and fully dynamic world, Eskil showed off the amazing tools that have allowed him to build an on line game on his own. A suite of networked art tools allowed him to model then procedurally UV map and texture a 3D model and then demonstrate how altering the model would result in updated UV maps and procedural textures in real time. It was like being given a tour of the future and when Eskil ran out of time I fully expected him to pull out a time machine to allow him to keep going.

The rest of the day included lots of really useful advice for indie game development including talks on business, finance, law and marketing which ended with the Frozen Synapse developers bursting in to blast the attendees with water pistols to demonstrate Kieron Gillen’s last marketing rule — you’re creative, so be creative with marketing.

Overall I prefer the many tracks and everyone gets involved format of GameCamp and at times the talks devolved in to extended biographies, but mostly it was a fun, thought provoking and inspiring day. I spent the evening asking the attendees for their top 5 games (it felt like it was that kind of event) and was very pleased to hear Chaos featured in multiple lists (it’s one of my favourites too, I developed a remake at university. On the strength of the UK indie scene demonstrated at World of Love I’m sure we’ll be seeing more indie games in top 5 lists in the near future.

A couple of years ago, Aleks Krotoski and a group of friends spanning the web, games and technology fields decided to bring the FOOCamp and BarCamp model of unconferences to the world of games and invited me along. I had a great time at the original GameCamp and missed it last year, so when I heard about the return of GameCamp a couple of months ago I jumped on a ticket and eagerly got on the train early on Saturday morning to participate in another inspiring mind expanding day. I wasn’t disappointed.

The cultural differences between the worlds of games and the web we touched on in a couple of sessions. “The PC Is Dead, Long Live The PC” quickly turned in to a discussion of open platforms like the PC versus closed, console like channels. While the long term view was that in 50 years open will prevail, the present sees controlled channels like XBLA, the various Apple stores and Steam in the ascendant. Some people will wait until titles are available on a particular channel, suggesting that they offer some advantages in terms of convenience, support or peace of mind. While this may be OK where there is competition between channels, games cannot be as easily distributed via multiple channels, with platforms like Steam requiring relatively invasive changes to be made to allow things like overlay menus to be displayed over game UIs. Where choices between channels is not possible the whims of platform controllers can make development extremely risky when policy changes or simply under staffing can delay or scupper a release.

Steven Goodwin asked why open source can build Linux, but not games. While the first answer is that Linux is a platform that can be shared by anyone whereas games are more individual expressions of creativity, that still begs the question why aren’t there more open source game platforms? Games seem to slowly be moving towards more shared and open infrastructure, but still lack the equivalent of the LAMP stack, HTML, CSS and JavaScript provide a shared web platform that allows web developers to share tips and tricks at BarCamps.

Luckily, the inability for game developers to give talks on the equivalent of squid configuration leaves room for lots of interesting talks on higher level game design concepts. 2 of the most interesting were hosted by Margaret Robertson, the first was on Curiosity — an urge which is hard to explain in classical or behavioral economics, and which is more powerful when the unknown is close and definite, a closed box on a table that must be opened, than when the unknown is distant and amorphous. The session turned in to an interesting comparison between risk, where outcomes are known and curiosity when the outcome is unknown, how both can be manipulated to make games more compelling and whether that manipulation could be a force for good as well as evil. The second of Margaret’s talks was about a forthcoming audio only binaural iPhone game and the challenges of navigating a world without light, which sounds fascinating, if hard.

Tom Armitage hosted a session which asked “What Do Cows Call Thermodynamics?”. The answer is, probably nothing, but it still affects them. So it is with games, which are ultimately defined by their rules and mechanics which can be used very creatively. The rule that Yorda is afraid if you don’t hold her hand dramatically shapes your relationship with her, the rule that you aim better while doing a stunt is what turns action quake in to a John Woo simulator.

Another arc that ran through GameCamp 2 was a discussion about creativity. Pictionary and Scrabble were used as examples of games that foster creativity while players of World of Warcraft show amazing creativity despite the game in a session that had many echos of the Playfish talk at Develop last year. At the other end of the spectrum, a session on procedurally generated content asked could algorithms create good content and if they could, how would they know?

My “Social Music Composition Games?” session at the end of the day continued this arc. I first played Rock Band at the first GameCamp and since have played it so much that I ended up starting 100 robots with Max. Since then I’ve been playing with tools like Ableton that have very game like interfaces and games like Lumines that have very sequencer like interfaces. Could you use interfaces like these to build games that do for music composition what Rock Band does for music performance? If so, how would you judge the compositions? Something that combined the interface of Lumines or the Tenori-On and Digg like filtering and tagging might be very interesting here…

As usual I headed down to the Metropole on the sea front last week to attend the annual Develop conference in Brighton. Unusually, this time I was attending the Evolve day which shifts the focus from console development to online, mobile and social games, which I had helped create as part of the steering commitee. I was very impressed.

The first talk I attended was not strictly part of the evolve day: I switched over to the Games:Edu track to listen to Alice Taylor talk about her work building games for Channel 4. In a previous era, Channel 4 spent £6 million a year on public service programming for young people which ended up being shown in the mornings when the only young people at home were off sick. In order to reach a wider audience all of that money was switched to online programming and, because 14-19 year olds love them, games. Since then, Alice and Matt Locke have toured the country commisioning small developers to develop games like Sneeze, Routes, 1066 and future games battling STIs in privates and making science fun for girls with Ada Lovelace. It all sounds like loads of fun and a great fit for Second Life (which already has a fair amount of sex and science adventures of its own), but the key here is availability. Alice is going where the kids are. Millions of people play the Channel 4 games using technologies like Flash which are ubiquitous: an order of magnitude more people than use Second Life regularly or used to watch the telly from their sick beds.

Next up was “Browser Based Games Past Present Future” which sounded perfect: which of the competing technologies is going to win the battle for the 3D browser canvas, which should we use to make Second Life more accessible to some of Alice’s teens? Unfortunately the retrospective and predictive parts of the talk were extremely limited and the talk was mostly a plug for Pirate Galaxy: an online Java based Eve. Luckily it looks incredibly well done. In particular the in world economy which allows either time or money to be converted in to energy and from their in to experience and eventually space ships looks very slick: to begin with energy is plentiful and little is needed. Slowly the screw is turned making the urge to invest in energy ever more inticing. There are also limits on the amount of short cutting that can be done by investing money, with game play still required to gain experience which is needed to buy the best ships. It’s all a long step forward from the experiments with economies and mudflation we grappled with at AGC, SIGGRAPH and on Terra Nova.

The highlight of the day for me was the talk by Kristian Segerstrale, CEO and co-founder of Playfish who make some of the most successful games on Facebook, including Pet Society: a game which allows you to collect rainbow poos and is as popular on Facebook as Rhianna and the Simpsons. Kristian talked about how social games are different: no longer focused on creating paths for solitary players to experience fear, horror, wonder and suspense, social games are toolkits for cooperation, competition and expression for friends. Social games have been responsible for most of the growth in the games industry over the last year and while the Wii and Rock Band have let friends gather and play together, games on social networks let friends play together online. Where traditional games spend years and millions in development and then launch with marketing splurges and shelf space negitiated with retailers, social games might intially be developed for 10s of thousands, sit on an infinite shelf and are marketed virally through recommendations from friends. Where traditional games rely on the intuition of a games designer who hopes to get it right, social games rely on feedback. After launch social games are deluged with information. Marketing is driven by numbers, buy buttons are A/B tested with users, designers analyse play, further investment and development desisions are based on usage, the skill is not in intuitively knowing what players will like, but by mining and filtering a slew of data to find out. Kristian’s talk felt a lot like Raph Koster’s dinosaurs talk from a few years back: it even used a similar meteor strike slide, however, this time around the small mammals weren’t micro user generated virtual worlds but pets doing rainbow poos and restaurant sims where you can hire your mum as chef.

It will be interesting to see how the small furry mammals evolve over the coming years.