The answer is a qualified “Yes.”

You’ve heard of this thing called “open source” which many penny-pinchers translate as free. While this is not the place for a deep discussion on what open source is or is not, one thing that must be remembered is that when you work with open source, you should honor the ideals of the original programmers.

Please either release your revisions with a similar license (whether or not you can release it with a different license is a question for a lawyer) and/or make significant contributions to the community whose work you are building upon.  A corporation/business taking open source code and repackaging it as their own is the antithesis of the open source movement (and possibly illegal). These are people, honor their contribution.

That being said, building on an open source game can keep you from reinventing the wheel. Even so, there’s still a lot of work to be done.

The greatest failing I have found in most open source programs is usability. Most of the time, programmers will program for programmers and will focus on functionality rather than usability.

This is great in that you can find a program like Gimp that has 90% (or more) of the functionality of Photoshop without the thousand dollar price tag. The down-side is that the interface isn’t very intuitive and can be really hard to use (particularly for someone who has no graphics editing experience).

Most of the open source games that I downloaded and played while researching this blog had great graphics and horrible gameplay and/or a poor user experience.

A Note About Me: The following reviews/thoughts will be tainted by three factors (at least).

1. I have a Mac so I only looked at games that would work on Mac (not all that rare considering it’s usually easier to port a Linux-based game to OSX than to Windows).
2. I have a fundamental belief that I, as a player, should not have to work to play a game. I can work while playing a game, but not in order to actually play.
3. I only have seven fingers. (This sounds like a joke but it’s true. I only bring it up because it affects my ability to hit certain key combinations. And, just because you’re wondering, the story involves a bar fight, a ninja, and an ancient prophecy).

N.B. I found all of these games using Wikipedia’s list of open source games.

Super Tux Kart: This Mario Kart style game was by far the best game I downloaded and the one that I often decided needed more “research.” I wasn’t a huge fan of the left-handed controls, but that’s probably more my lack of fingers than a fault of the game. Graphics –  were on the whole -pretty good although many of the tracks are textured with repeated and low-quality patterns.

Nexuiz: This multiplayer first-person shooter had some of the best graphics, but I’ve never felt more “pwned” than by the “easy” bots who riddled my character with bullets and various projectiles during the training level. I don’t tend to be a fps man, but I’ve held my own on Halo and its first sequel (no, not on Legendary). This felt overly hard to me, but I’m not 13 anymore with endless time to learn how to misspell “owned.” The controls were less than responsive and were difficult to use (especially for me).

Project: Starfighter This 2D shoot ‘em up had pretty good graphics, and an in-depth story.  But, the way they forced you to watch slow animations made me hate the game before I even played it. Gameplay was ok, but difficulty in precisely navigating the ship made it less fun than I wanted it to be.

Yo Frankie I’m not even sure what kind of game to call this. It has pretty good 3D graphics and a world you can walk around in, but little to no gameplay and lasts about as long as a blueberry pie in front of my Aunt Bertha. Load times are horrendous and there’s no explanation as to what you’re doing or why. This was probably built as a starting platform so that users could build levels and fill out the content (at least that’s what I’m hoping). They are in the midst of a level design contest.  But, from what I can tell there’s no overarching goal of putting out a “complete” game.

Which brings me back to the “qualified” of qualified Yes. If you want to use open source to give you a jump start on creating your game, great!   But, you must realize that there will still be a lot of work in developing a story, refining gameplay, creating graphics that are appropriate, and making the game something you’re ready to present to the world.

That said, using an established game engine might give you more time to focus on those things rather than starting from scratch and building every part of the game.

A word to the wise, taking an open source game, slapping your logo on it, and calling it done is worse than creating no game at all. In so doing, you’ll anger the programmers who made it, and – depending upon the game’s usability – you may also frustrate your customers/potential customers.  Please don’t do this.

Happy gaming and beware of skin sores!

Related posts:

1. Video Games as a Marketing Technique Part 3: What Do I Do Now?
2. Video Games as a Marketing Technique Part 4: Pitfalls
3. Video Games as a Marketing Technique Part 1: To Play or Not to Play?
4. Video Games as a Marketing Technique Part 2: Those Who Have Gone Before?
5. Planning For A Scripted Video, pt. 2

The decisions you make here can make or break your game.  At the same time –  this is a process.  If you treat it like an experiment (which it is), you’ll be able to make changes as development goes along and seek the best possible game/user experience rather than succumbing to other, perhaps monetary, factors.

Don’t get me wrong.  You should never throw money at a problem.  You just end up with money out of your hand and all over the floor.  But, you should also never decide to use an element/ingredient just because it costs a lot of money.  If the gargantuan-ly expensive element detracts from user experience and thereby the game overall, it will discourage users from the game and your product/service.  You’ll lose more money keeping it in than if you dropped it in the first place.

At the end of this grand experiment, you’ll either have invented the light bulb or learned something almost more important: how a light bulb doesn’t work.  Here are just a few of the decisions you’ll need to make on your journey towards play-marketing (as I like to call it):

1. Audience.  Just because you have a large audience for your product/service doesn’t mean you need to include all of them.  Just because you have a small audience for your product doesn’t mean you need to limit the game to their demographic.  Choose an audience that you want to target and build the game around them.  “Everyone” is not an option.  It’ll be much easier if you’re more specific, but you don’t need to say “women between 30 and 35 with cats named Stella.”  Hey, if that’s your audience great, but something too specific may be limiting to your creative process.

Once you’ve chosen your audience, learn about them.  Find out what they like and dislike and how you can better make a game that they will enjoy.  A gothic horror game probably wouldn’t go over well with the Hannah Montana-obsessed tween crowd.

2. Genre.  Many people like to hold their nose up and say, “My game transcends mere Genre.”  That may be true, but I feel the genres exist for a reason.  We should definitely try to break out of genres with new and interesting games/books/movies/stories, but it’s the true artist who creates a new genre without telling anyone.

If you’ve already got an idea that doesn’t fit neatly into a genre, great!  Go ahead and pursue it.  But if you’re strapped for ideas and don’t have the next flOw up your sleeve, it’s best to just pick the genre you feel would appeal most to your audience.

3. Tone.  Although many genres have a built in tone, putting a new spin on the genre by using a different tone e.g. a World War II comedy or a dark puzzle game could help set you apart from the crowd.  Sean of the Dead, for instance, mixed zombie and comedy to a moviegoer’s delight.  Don’t make this choice lightly.  A comedy WWII game done poorly could at best not create any interest, but it could also offend veterans and military personnel in general.

4. Gameplay.  Determine how the game will be played.  Is it a 2D side scroller, is it a 3D shooter, is it a click-and-match puzzle game?  How will the user interact with your game?  This covers both the buttons a user pushes as well as how the character/avatar/block/thing reacts on screen.

Of all the decisions you make, this is probably the most important decision because it is the crux of the game.  Your game would not be a “game” without it.  A great concept with awesome graphics and a good story will fail if the gameplay is clunky or difficult.  A mediocre concept with mediocre graphics and a mediocre story that has great and interesting gameplay will do much better.

5. Platform.  Choosing a platform often will come down to money.  If you have gobs of money you might want to consider one of the high end platforms like the Wii, Xbox 360, or Playstation 3.  But then, you also have to deal with game publishers and many other headaches.  Other platforms like the iPhone, Flash, or Silverlight have a much lower cost of entry.  Your choice of platform will help determine your revenue stream i.e. if you can monetize the game directly (probably inadvisable) or use advertising/licensing to defray costs or simply give it away as a freebie.  It can also determine development costs, and will most of all determine where and how your game will be viewed and played.

6. Goals.  Set realistic, measurable goals for how you (and your boss, and his/her boss) will classify this experiment as a success or failure.  Do you want to increase traffic to your site?  Do you want direct revenue?  What does your boss want?  Answering these questions on the front end will save lots of headaches (and possibly your job).

So, go ahead and get started making your game.  If nothing else…Solitaire can now be classified as “Research.”

Related posts:

1. Video Games as a Marketing Technique Part 4: Pitfalls
2. Video Games as a Marketing Technique Part 1: To Play or Not to Play?
3. Video Games as a Marketing Technique: Part 5 Standing on the Shoulders of Open Source Giants
4. Video Games as a Marketing Technique Part 2: Those Who Have Gone Before?
5. Making Cents out of Marketing Data

Of the reviews I’ve read, most do not speak highly of these games. But, at the same time, very few speak ultra-negatively either. One review at gamespot.com summed up Sneak King with - “Sneak King isn’t a good game, but it’s so crazy and so cheap that it still manages to be weirdly compelling.”

Match that with the fact that during the 5 week promotional period, they sold more than 2.4 million units.  And as of June 2007 (the latest numbers I have), it was tied with the third best selling Xbox title of all time. 

Its estimated media impression was equivalent to thirteen Super Bowls and helped drive record traffic and sales.  Hence, not surprisingly, Burger King considered this a success. (Numbers and success analysis courtesy Coloribus.com)

We can learn from this…that reaching the upper echelons of perfection is not so much the goal as producing something of interest to your customers. The low cost of entry (particularly compared with the normal cost of a game $30-$50) and the novelty of stuffing hamburgers into the mouths of unsuspecting citizens (the premise of Sneak King) added to the luster and success of the games.

I surprisingly had a hard time finding failures. You might think this bodes well for video games as a marketing technique, but I wonder if most of the failures have been so small that the media took no notice of them.

One failure I found was Viagra’s “Viva Cruiser” Game.  But, this seemed more due to a lack of explaining the side-effects of the drug rather than a problem with the game.

So, what can we learn from this? Video games can be a very lucrative tool for customer engagement.  And, they are a largely untapped market as I could find very few examples to include here. But, even if you do everything right, somethings such as legal worries or other unforeseen problems can sink the ship. Tread carefully.

Related posts:

1. Video Games as a Marketing Technique Part 3: What Do I Do Now?
2. Video Games as a Marketing Technique Part 1: To Play or Not to Play?
3. Video Games as a Marketing Technique: Part 5 Standing on the Shoulders of Open Source Giants
4. Video Games as a Marketing Technique Part 4: Pitfalls
5. Video is Social Media, Too. Hot Social Media.

This four part series will discuss To Play or Not to Play i.e. whether you should embark on this perilous yet rewarding journey (Part 1); those who have gone before i.e. companies who have succeeded and failed at this endeavor (Part 2); What do I do now? …or the types of decisions you need to make on how your game is going to look, feel, play, operate, and perform (Part 3).  And finally, The pitfalls (Part 4)…or the things to look out for along the way.

So let’s get down to it: is this a good idea?  Here are seven things to consider:

1. Know your audience.

Rolex should probably not make a video game.  Why?  Because their target demographics are generally not the type that would be interested in games.  Worse yet, a Rolex game would probably be a catastrophe as it would juvenilize their brand - making it irrelevant to the high-end customers they cater to.

So, make sure that your audience is one that would be interested in a game.  At the same time, do some research before assuming that your audience wouldn’t be interested.  The Entertainment Software Association in their 2008 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry states that “women 18 or older represent a significantly greater portion of the game playing population (33%) than boys age 17 or younger (18%).”

2. Know your product.

Not every product should have a video game based around it.  Mortuary services seems to me a rather bad idea for a game.  Cotton swabs too seem like a bad idea.  But, if you can build a character or story around the cotton swabs, then it might be the perfect way to add depth and interest to a dull product. (No offense to any cotton swab makers who might be reading.)

3. It’s expensive.

Even with advent of Flash, Silverlight, and other technologies that vastly cut costs on design and development, it’s still no cheap beast to tame.  With artwork, programming, and interactive design, even the smallest of games will take time and money to produce whether you do it in-house or have an agency do it.  That being said if customers enjoy the game, it’ll be worth it.

4. Don’t expect direct revenue.

Directly selling the game is generally a bad idea.  Although, if you go so far as to create a console game, there’s probably room for a low-cost price tag to help reclaim some costs.  The best idea is to give this game away to your customers and perhaps, more importantly, to your potential customers.  This push of authenticity and good will can pay dividends for years to come.

5. It will be fun.

The whole point of this is to inject fun and entertainment into your brand/company.  If you don’t have fun making it, no one will enjoy playing it.

6. Thinly veiled marketing sucks.

Don’t make a game so you can stuff your product/service down your customers’ throat.  You seem manipulative and customers feels used.  No one wins.

7. They’re already interacting with you.

If customers take time to play your game you’re – by the nature of gaming - interacting with them.  Slap on a forum or game player blog and you’ve got a community of engaged people who are loyal to your brand.

***Warning*** Do not just tack on any portion of this experience.  Everything must be intelligently measured and decided on before you take any steps toward adding features.  Blundering through a campaign adding every Web 2.0 buzz word you can think of only makes you look bad.  Promise quality and deliver quality – just like you do with your products and services.

So, you’re cautiously optimistic about creating a video game.  Good.  Next time, we’ll discuss the trials, travails, and triumphs of marketing games in Those Who Have Gone Before.

Related posts:

1. Video Games as a Marketing Technique Part 3: What Do I Do Now?
2. Video Games as a Marketing Technique Part 4: Pitfalls
3. Video Games as a Marketing Technique Part 2: Those Who Have Gone Before?
4. Video Games as a Marketing Technique: Part 5 Standing on the Shoulders of Open Source Giants
5. Effective, Integrated Multi-Channel Marketing

2. Nobody Wants to Hear Your Life Story: Well, they might, but they usually prefer to ask for it. When you meet somebody new, you don’t want to scare them away by over-sharing. In the same way, don’t over-share on your homepage i.e. edit your text down to a minimum or use bullets to present it more visually. Use text more heavily on back pages so that users can “ask” you for more information by clicking on those links.

3. I Love You, But I Cannot Navigate Your Psyche: Sometimes we’re our own worst enemy. We make a new friend, but our personal quirks and fear of intimacy causes us to push that person away. Similarly, a new user can be impressed by our home page, but if they can’t find the links to get more information or to buy your product/service, they will get frustrated and move on. So, make your site navigation easy to find and even easier to use.

Related posts:

1. Lessons from Google’s Landing Page
2. Don’t let your 404 page get indexed!
3. Where the Heck is it?
4. 5 Ways to Make Your Web Reports Less Boring
5. Have you seen any Suspicious Activity?

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

That’s a fairly common expression that’s fairly true. How many times has your company bought pizza for the staff, only to find out that you have to sit through a presentation by the CEO, or it is used as an excuse to let you know that you’ll have to work much later for the next 3 weeks?

The same can also be said in the online world. When someone offers you something for free, you have to question why that is. It could be:

• a loss leader for branding purposes
• a tool for upselling purposes
• a way to generate links
• something insidious

Hmm? Insidious? How can that be? Well, let’s take the example of Wordpress Themes. Doing a search on “Free WordPress Themes” pulls up quite a few sites. Now, I’m not going to target one in particular.  But, let’s just say that I did click through to a few of the first page results and witnessed the same behavior.

All of these sites give you the option to look through their portfolio and pick out a theme to use for free – even giving you the instructions as to how to load it onto your site. It’s only after you load it that you notice (if you’re observant enough) that there are some links in the footer of every page.

Ok – links to the company that designed it and gave it away for free – that’s one thing (which is why I list that separately above), but links to spammy MP3 download sites, and so on, that’s just bad.

And, don’t think that the authors don’t realize that.  If you try to look through the code for those links, it’s not there… how can that be? Well, what they tend to do is encrypt the links in the footer so that you can’t find them there.  And of course, that makes it harder to take them out.

Some developers have taken to hijacking the 404 page of ‘free’ themes with redirects, which then transfers page equity over to the developer’s site. Very sneaky, and not something that you’ll necessarily notice unless you go looking for it.

Now, on the other hand, there are plenty of free things that are worthwhile, with anything open source being a great example of communities banding together to create content and tools for each other.

So, what I’m saying here, is be careful.  Make sure to look at what you’re getting to make sure there are no surprises, after all…

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Related posts:

1. Is Social Media Really Free?
2. Have you seen any Suspicious Activity?
3. Blogging 101
4. Process Donations Free with Google Checkout
5. Free Project Management Software

1. Make navigation headings clear, concise, and descriptive. But, you just said be concise, how can I be concise and descriptive? Use strong words that communicate rather than words that could mean almost anything. Just like moving, it’s easier to find something in a box when the box is well labeled.

2. Role play. Pretend you are a customer and try to find some pertinent piece of information using only navigation headings. (For double points, count how many clicks it took you to find it). If you can’t find it, how’s your customer ever going to?

3. Get someone outside your company to review the site. Who knows less about your company than a new client? See what that person says, but take it with a grain of salt. What did or didn’t work for them might be different for another person.

4. Take giant categories and break them into smaller, more refined categories. Make it easier for someone to find the content they’re looking for by making the boxes smaller. It’s easier to search a shoe box than it is to search a refrigerator box.

5. Put tiny categories together into larger categories. This and #4 are a balancing act. Breaking everything into small categories gives you a jabillion categories and makes it harder for a user to find the information, but only having two categories creates refrigerator boxes.

Happy Moving!

Related posts:

1. 3 Ways to Improve Your Home Page
2. Spending more money doesn’t always make you the best
3. Designing an Effective Company Blog
4. Why Analytics is a Discipline
5. Online Shopping Sites — What Makes a Good One?

Now, I have nothing but respect for anyone who can run 26.2 miles straight.  I’d be hard pressed to run 26.2 feet – let alone recreate Pheidippides’ historic run.   But, that doesn’t mean that I’d like to spend 2 hours watching someone else do it.  I’d have been fine with watching the first ten minutes, cutting back to it every twenty minutes, and then watching the end. 

But seriously, why would you televise the entire race?  Show me something, anything else!  Watching linoleum curl would have been more interesting (if nothing else for that cool/geeky science aspect).  Plus, commentators run out of interesting things to say in an exciting sport so you can only imagine what they came up with during this riveting spectacle.  “Look they’re at a water station.”  “It really cools them down when they pour it on their heads.”  “Yeah, they sure like water, Bob.” or “These runners are really… running…”  I was on the edge of my seat.

So, why would NBC in its infinite wisdom show such fascinating TV during prime time? (Granted it was on Saturday, which is not a historically high-rated TV night).  I can only come up with two reasons:

1. They thought live-and-boring would trump taped-and-interesting or…

2. They didn’t think it through.  In either case, I think number 2 applies.

So, the moral of this story?  When you spend billions (or just hundreds) of dollars on a marketing campaign, think through how the audience will see it/hear it/understand it.  Throwing  money at anything only makes you poor.  Make sure your campaign is thoroughly thought through (say that three times fast). 

Try to look at it from the perspective of your target audience.  If I was X target audience demographic, how would I interact with Y marketing materials whether it’s a print piece, a Web piece, or a TV/Radio piece.  Don’t assume they’ll jump through whatever hoops you’ve laid out. 

Think about how you would react to the same sort of materials if you were in someone else’s target demographic.  If you take the time to think through every aspect of the life cycle of your campaign, you’ll see better responses, happier customers, and possibly a blacker bottom line.

Remember slow and steady (and thought through) wins the marathon (sorry, I just had to).

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1. How to Build Links Offline
2. Deer in the City

Well, there’s no easy answer and any true troll who really wants to mess with your site will always find a new and inventive way of doing it. So, how do we stop these hairy beasts from harassing your users and causing civil unrest? There are a few things you can do.

The general wisdom on the Internet is that you should not “feed” the trolls, and this is usually the best course of action. A true troll is only there because he’s getting a rise out of you or your users. If his (or her) antics/attacks don’t register any emotional reaction – then, he will probably move on to a site that will let him cause mayhem. This can best be demonstrated by using the old saying: “Never mud wrestle a pig, you get dirty and the pig likes it.”

What does feeding a troll mean? It usually deals with responding to the troll in kind. Getting angry or aggravated at the troll will only make him happy (like the pig in the mud). If you’ve labeled a user as a troll, you should have already contacted them several times to explain the proper norms for your site in a polite and friendly manner. If they continue to deviate from those norms, then it is best to ignore them or at the very most, send them canned responses that you have vetted for tone through a colleague.

There are, however, (at least) two instances when ignoring the troll might not be in your/the site’s best interest.

1. …If the troll posts wildly inappropriate content like porn on a kid’s site (to state the most obvious example of wildly inappropriate) or content that could mislead new users. Then, you should not ignore the troll and leave the content up, but rather remove it, isolate it, or correct it so that it cannot continue to harm other users. If the content is merely aberrant and unharmful, then it’s probably best to just leave bait where it lay and stay out of the troll’s trap.

2. …If your site is large enough or has enough turn-over that the troll could easily bait other users, particularly new users, into feeding him – you may need to take steps to prevent him from harming those users. These steps could include banning his user account or isolating his comments/posts in such a way that only he or a limited number of people could see them.

The danger here is that you may aggravate him into stepping up his efforts to disturb you. It’s also quite easy on most sites to set up new accounts under a different name/email making the account ban less effective than one might hope. Used judiciously, this can be an effective way of deterring trolls.

The long and the short of it is…you cannot always stop people from being evil. All you can do is try to protect yourself and your users and give them the best online experience you can.

For further reading, check out the Wikipedia Essay: What is a troll? which thoroughly discusses trolls from a Wikipedia editing point of view.

Related posts:

1. Things That Go Bump in the Internet: Identifying and Dealing with Trolls Part 1: UnMasking the Trolls Among Us
2. The Internet is not Anonymous
3. Facebook’s New Terms of Service: “We Own You”
4. Facebook and Grass Roots Mobilization
5. The Birds and the Bees of Online Reputation Damage Control

So, I walked out the front door of our building and around the side to cut across the back lawn on my way to the mailbox.  Pretty much as I entered the back yard, a deer crossed my path.  Now I don’t live in a rural area, I live in the nation’s capital. Not near it, in it.  Washington DC. The Seat of Power. The Capital. District of “We-apparently-have-Deer” Columbia.

I tried to document this occasion with a picture of said deer using my stellar 1 megapixel (excuse me, 1.3 megapixel) camera phone.  Lets just say the results were the kind of thing they use to prove aliens exist.  So I photoshopped a deer into a city street so you could see an over-exaggerated version of what I saw.

After I watched the deer trounce through some lawns and wonder further down the road into the urban jungle – I continued on my walk to the mail box.  All the while, I waited for a stag to run out of the shadows and maul me for looking at his doe (or for poring concrete and asphalt all over his natural habitat, whichever seemed appropriate to him at the time).  Finally, I reached the safety of the mailbox and deposited my letters. 

Once there, I happened to see a passing police officer, apparently on a similar nighttime errand to the mailbox and flagged down her car.  I clearly and eloquently explained the situation, “Uhhh, Deer!  Over there!”  She then calmly and politely extracted further information from me:  The deer was alive and as far as I could tell unhurt.  Unfortunately, she explained that there was nothing she could do, due to the lateness of the hour and the fact that animal control would only come out if the animal was dead or hurt.  I thanked her for her time, and she continued on her way to the mailbox.

This story got me thinking about design and how to grab people’s attention.  If you can bring a streak of the wild to the domestic you’ll grab the attention of anyone watching.

What does that mean?  Well, it’s different for every design and in many cases it’s more of a feeling than a hard and fast rule, but every good design should take some risk.  It should have something wild and untamed, something that grabs your attention and cannot be categorized.

It is a tenuous balance, however, for if the design is too wild then it could easily go astray and miss the target audience.  The converse is also just as bad.  If the design is too “corporate” or safe then it will not interest or, worst of all, will bore the audience and turn them off to the product or message.  It’s important to keep your design balanced so that it interests and engages the audience.

So, take your lessons from the deer and push toward something a bit more wild in your designs and campaigns because, if you succeed in striking that perfect balance, there won’t be a thing the style police can do.

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