How I Got Into Games, Part V: Networking Issues
Back to the plot. Sonja is now two months old. I’ve dragged Echo Bazaar into playable alpha, despite two weeks’ unpaid paternity leave (as distinct from unpaid full-time work) and Sonja’s best efforts to keep me from working, or sleeping, or thinking. Paul’s and my chat logs from the time give a flavour of how we were both feeling.
Paul: christ I’m knacked. Aren’t you knacked? Can’t draw straight any more.
me: Red bull, caffeine
me: and the smell of my daughter’s head.
me: heady smell.
Paul: arf
Paul: don’t burn out babe.
me: Don’t worry, after Fri I’ll calm down
What was happening on Friday? Paul and I were going to take Echo Bazaar, in our very small way, on the road.
Nowadays, if I launched a game into pre-alpha, solo or with a studio, I would announce it — hit my existing player base, push it through social media channels, email the gaming press. But in 2009, I had no existing player base, beyond the friends and friends-of-friends who’d tried the thing out — less than a hundred so far. My social media following was about fifty people on Twitter. And the gaming press with their ever-stuffed inboxes weren’t going to look twice at an email from an unknown with a mostly-beige, amateur-looking browser game.
So we were going to try to meet and greet, at the conference I mentioned earlier, Playful 2009, subtitled ‘A Day of Cross-Disciplinary Frolicking.’ I’d taken a day off work to go to the previous one, back in 2008, and that subtitle summed up a lot of things that were excellent about it, and a lot of things that were tooth-gratingly twee about it. I’d seen a tabletop game designer give a talk about the links between gamebooks and the French literary cabal known as Oulipo; a videogame developer demonstrating their procedural city generation algorithms; an architect who built custom puzzle box apartments for wealthy New Yorkers; some sort of digital producty gent using a custom hookup to play a Guitar Hero controller as an actual makeshift electric guitar; and an ARG designer who wanted to talk about how he’d started drinking to control his sleep patterns so he could play an online game with US friends in the small hours, and how later he’d decided that was a bad idea and stopped doing it.
Why had I chosen Playful? Firstly, honestly, for the same reason I’d gone the previous year: it was a hinterland rather than Actual Game Development, and inasmuch as I’d thought about going to actual games industry events — like the huge Game Developers’ Conference — I didn’t think they’d let me through the door. But secondly because Echo Bazaar didn’t really fit into any obvious category. It wasn’t really a video game; it wasn’t really interactive fiction; it wasn’t like most other browser games. I hoped that the kind of people who were as interested in custom game controllers as Oulipo might be the kind of people who’d be interested in Echo Bazaar.
(Now that I think about it, though, I realise there was a ‘thirdly’. When I’d gone in 2008, with the diffuse idea of looking for inspiration, I’d found plenty of it. Speakers had explained that old divisions between game and art were eroding; that gamification would change the world; that everything was multiplayer now; that ARGs and transmedia and interactivity were going to transform the way we told stories. A lot of it, with hindsight, was sales talk or comment-column platitude. Some of it was actual insight. But all of it, to me, had been electrically thrilling: I had wanted to be part of this neon dawn of ludic creativity, and now I was going back there with something of my own, maybe I somehow would be.)
I said ‘Paul and I were going’, but actually we would be three. Paul’s partner Jane had just lost her sales job in the recession… and consequently was especially keen for Paul’s and my business venture to do well while she brought her own new business up to speed. (“Alls I’m saying is,” she’d messaged me, “Echo Bazaar needs to fly… ;-0 No pressure.”) Jane was a charismatic networking extrovert, and I was bloody delighted when Paul volunteered her help. I was terrified of walking the floor at a conference, showing off our jerry-built game. I mailed Jane gratefully, with the hazy outline of a plan.
“We’re there for three purposes: to encourage any media or bloggy types to visit and mention us as ‘a social game that’s a little bit different’; general networking, in case we meet someone worth knowing later; and to solicit investment if any VC types turn up. I have literally no idea how likely the third would be […]I, and by his own account Paul, are not great at working a room. I have done nothing of this kind of [thing] before. So Paul suggested you know how to meet, greet and engage, and we can drill you on the details and relevance of the game itself. “
We were going to take the game with us on a laptop (not a tablet: this was still six months before the iPad launched). I’d got Paul to draw something that looked like the back of a playing card, with the Echo Bazaar Exceptional Hat in the centre, and I’d had business cards printed on nice glossy cardstock with rounded corners so they looked like playing cards until you turned them over. Jane gave us a crash course in networking. Swap business cards, she said, let ’em know what you do and find out what they do, and then if you don’t have anything in common, move the hell on. That sounded a bit cold-blooded, I offered. It did, she said, but they don’t want you to waste their time either. She had a point, but Paul and I were still a bit diffident about it, so she proposed a game: we’d try to give away all our business cards, and the first one to do that would win. Paul and I seized on to that gratefully: it sounded a bit more fun, but more importantly I think we both realised that if we managed to give away all the cards, we were officially off the hook for any more networking. It was the light at the end of the tunnel that we needed.
By Friday morning, I’d worked myself up to such a pitch of terrified excitement that my recollection of the actual day glitches in and out like staticky TV. Most of what I remember is standing around in the foyer, trying to distribute business cards and clutching a cup of coffee so I had something to do with my other hand. Of course this meant that every time I needed to shake someone’s hand I had to put either the business cards or the coffee down, and every time I would make some self-deprecating joke about how I should have remembered how that worked by now, and then I would forget until the next time, and it would be the same except possibly this time I’d slop the coffee over the edge of the cup in my haste. Worse, I had that laptop, but I had no spare hand for it, so I had leant the case against the wall and kept looking down at it in panic in case someone had nicked it. They didn’t, but I don’t think I got the laptop out of the case for the entire day: the intricacies of juggling coffee and cards and an unstable browser game on a shonky wifi connection in a crowded room were way beyond me.
But I met people. Everyone liked the cards. But few of them seemed particularly impressed with the stammering, coffee-spilling gent burbling enthusiastically about underground cities, and obviously we didn’t — as I’d secretly hoped and pretended not to hope — run into any incognito billionaires looking to fund quirky startups. Paul and Jane and I listened to the last few talks (something about prototyping, something about digital art installations, and something about following the route of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped in real time), and then followed everyone to the pub but left early. I said goodbye to Jane and Paul at the station and went home feeling deflated. I’d taken us to Playful more as a sort of general optimistic act than with any very specific goal. In hindsight I realised that this meant I was always likely to come away disappointed.
The next day was a Saturday. I got an excited message from Paul saying that one of the speakers had followed him and Jane on Twitter. When I looked, I seemed to have picked up new followers as well — names I vaguely recognised, people who worked in technology and the media. Then I checked the database to see how Echo Bazaar was doing.
We’d picked up a couple of hundred new registrations overnight. Our numbers had almost quadrupled. It seemed that quite a number of the politely smiling attendees who’d taken a card to shut me up had gone home with the card in their pocket and checked the URL on the front. And then they’d told their friends.
“Wow, this is really kicking off,” Paul mailed me. “I have major stage fright. These are real game designers!” I responded. “And artists! Oh fuck!” he added.
Echo Bazaar had gone from being a spare bedroom hobby with an audience of our friends to being a public project with fans. By Internet standards — I now realise — it was still microscopic. Our numbers were hundreds, not thousands. And we still weren’t making any money. I don’t mean that we weren’t making any appreciable amount of money — I mean that the game was still completely free and there was no way to generate revenue. But now we were getting messages from new players asking us to implement a way to let them buy more actions, which was encouraging. Although also alarming. I’d already implemented Fate, the virtual currency which let you get more actions, and I’d put in some ways for players to get it in the game, but I’d been putting off actually adding the payment page, because there was no urgency but also because I was unnerved by the leap to offering an actual service, for actual money. I was also alarmed to see how quickly the new players were burning through the game. I was terrified that they’d run out of content and leave as quickly as they’d come. And finally, my shakily coded prototype site was suddenly running very slowly, and I needed to fix the performance and stability issues pronto.
But I knew this story. This is how overnight successes were supposed to work. You laboured in silence for months, then unexpectedly the project took off, and the servers caught fire and you had to hire support staff and venture capitalists turned up and asked you to sell out, and in a year you were giving a self-deprecating interview to Wired in a new office with Kentia palms and beanbags and a big glass wall overlooking the Thames.
Except, of course, that wasn’t how it worked out at all.
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This is a draft excerpt from my upcoming book, Sex, Lies, and Videogames.
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