Microserfs

7) "There's an endemic inability in the software industry to estimate the amount of time required for a software project." (*TRUE*!)

8) Networked games, like where you have one person playing against another, are hot because you don't have to waste development dollars creating artificial intelligence. Players provide free AI.

9) The 8 Models of Interactivity (as far as I can see)

i) The Arcade model

Like Terminator: kill or be killed.

ii) The Coffee Table Book model

Enter anywhere/leave anywhere; pointless in the end; zero replayability factor.

iii) The Universe Creation model

I built you and I can crush you.

iv) The Binary Tree model

Limited number of options; reads from left to right; tightly controlled mini-dramas.

v) The Pick-a-Path model

Does our hero smooch with Heather Locklear, or not - you decide! Expensive. Unproven entertainment value. Audiences don't pay money to work.

vi) RPGs (Role-Playing Games)

For adolescents: half-formed personalities roaming (in packs) in search of identity.

vii) The Agatha Christie model

A puzzle is to be solved using levels, clues, chases, and exploration.

viii) Experience Simulation models

Flight simulators, sport games.

10) I wonder if we oversentimentalize the power of books.

11) Studios in Hollywood are trying to sucker in writers by burying multimedia rights into the boilerplate of contracts. It's intellectual gill-netting. They say they've "always been doing it historically" . . . assuming "since July" means historically.

12) The extraordinary cost of producing multimedia games theoretically is supposed to exclude little companies from entering the market, but it's the little companies, I'm noticing, that are coming up with all of the "hits." Hope for Oop!.

13) Karla and I met this cool-looking woman at lunch, Irene, and so we had coffee with her before the afternoon session began. It turns out she's a makeup artist for multimedia movies, and she wants to get into production herself. Karla said, "Gee, you look really tired," and she said, "Oh - I've been working double shifts every day for two weeks."

So I asked her, "What kind of things are people filming for multimedia games?" and she said, "It's always the same . . . Sir Lancelot, Knights of the Round Table, thrones, chalices, damsels. Can't somebody come up with something new? My Prince Arthur wig is getting all tired-looking."

I suggested she use a Marilyn Monroe wig.

14) Ideally in a game you have hardheaded adventures, but at the end you get a glimpse of the supernatural.

15) In Los Angeles everyone's writing a screenplay. In New York everyone's writing a novel. In San Francisco, everyone's developing a multimedia product.

16) There's a different mental construction in operation when you're playing tennis as opposed to when you're reading a book. With adrenaline-based competitive sports, the thought mode is: "I want to kill this fucker." It's the spirit of testing yourself; accomplishment. You are gripped. Suspension of disbelief is not an issue.

17) A multimedia product has to deliver $1 per hour's worth of entertainment or you'll get slagged by word-of-mouth.

18) The great Atari gaming collapse of 1982 (*sigh* I remember it well).

19) Games are about providing control for nine year olds . . . "the bigger and neater the entity I can control, the better."

20) Multimedia has become a "packaged goods" industry now. The box copy is more important than the experience. But how do you write cool sexy box copy for a game like Tetris? You can't.

21) Cool term: "Manseconds": (Ergonomic unit of measurement applied to keyboards, joysticks).

22) "Embedded intelligence": (Intelligence buried in the nooks and crannies of code and storyboard design).

23) Last year at a Christmas party up in Seattle, there were all these little kids - all highly sugared and on the brink of hysteria - but instead of screaming, they sat complacently by the TV playing SEGA games. The games were like "Child Sedation Devices." It was spooky.

Susan was there. She said, "Just think, in 50 years these same kids will be sitting at the switches of our life-support systems figuring out a way to play a game by biofeedbacking our failing EKGs. Me, I seem to remember that when I was younger, overly sugared brats were sent down into the basement to fend for themselves, like Lord of the Flies."

24) How will games progress as 30somethings turn into 50somethings? ("Cardigan: The Adventure")

25) Flight Simulation games are actually out-of-body experience emulators. There must be all of these people everywhere on earth right now, waiting for a miracle, waiting to be pulled out of themselves, eager for just the smallest sign that there is something finer or larger or miraculous about our existence than we had supposed.

26) "The replayability problem" (Engineering a desire for repetition).

27) I think "van art" and Yes album covers were the biggest influence in game design.