To Wiki and Beyond

To Wiki and Beyond

<o:p> </o:p>As this is the first issue of 2006, I thought it would be appropriate to reflect on where we are going with game development, but first where are we now and where have we been?

<o:p> </o:p>I am typing this column up on my notebook computer that is connected through wireless to all the (fortunate) people on the planet.  From here in the coffee shop through GoWiki – our company's intranet deployed on a group-work sharing software platform called Wiki – I am able to see at a glance the schedule of our 60 employees, the real-time login concurrency and payment transactions of our players, as well as dozens and dozens of other information sources that we keep and add to every day.

<o:p> </o:p>I have never felt so alive or power-enabled as a developer in my career.  Let me share a bit of the tools we had when I started working in the games industry in 1994.  At that time small and medium sized business were just beginning to really get connected with LANs.  This included game companies – in fact at that time game shops didn't yet network up the machines or use source control.  Source code and assets were manually walked around the office on 3.5 inch floppy disks we called the sneaker-net.  It was also the last days of DOS games, and so we used DOS based Deluxe Paint and text editors like Multi-Edit and compilers from Watcom.  Being a young guy I was not important enough to carry even a pager, and mobile phones were still not common.

<o:p> </o:p>Team sizes were from 6 to 15 at most, and the scheduling was never approached professionally.  Most teams had a passionate creative leader that would iterate until a great game was shipped.  The financial stake was much lower so I think projects slipped and were late a lot more comfortable than they are now when some teams can grow to the point of consuming now $3,000,000 USD a month.  There were no true game designers or planners at that time, only programmers, artists and the business types.  While every game had a lead designer that person almost always was an active member of the programming staff.

<o:p> </o:p>It was the beginning of the glory days of America Online, and the game Doom really drove game companies to network their offices.  There were no books printed on game programming, game design, game art or game production as there is now a whole sub-industry.  We did have the San Jose Game Developer's Conference.  It was there, once a year that we traveled to our Mecca to learn what is happening with the state of our craft in other studios.  For at that time if we wanted to stay in touch with our friends at another game company we would have to give them a call on our land lines to reach their land lines.

<o:p> </o:p>Now fast forward 12 years, and things have changed dramatically.  The games industry from online to console and mobile to casual to hardcore globally is an industry generating revenues on the order of $50 billion excluding the online gambling.  Team sizes have now reached 300 people on the mega Electronic Arts PS3 teams.  We now have dozens of titles to name ourselves – Game Planner, Associate Produce, Technical Director, Software Engineer, Audio Engineer, Executive Producer and so on.

<o:p> </o:p>Look my Company, I am an American who is married to a Taiwanese woman who I met through Match.com in Los Angeles.  We moved together to Korea to be at the center of the online game industry.  At GoPets we have employees that speak natively Korean, English, Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and even Swedish!  We have key contractors based in Los Angeles, Austin Texas, New York state, and even Alaska.  We also have marketing partners across East Asia, South East Asia, Europe and quite soon North America.

<o:p> </o:p>We have our main server cluster here in Korea with satellite caching servers in Tokyo, Manila, Bangkok, Shanghai, San Jose and London.  While Korea is the most amazingly developed country in terms of domestic adoption of internet technologies we have recently decided that we made a mistake with our core server cluster here in Seoul and are now in the process of moving the cluster to California.  Why is that?  Well California is hyper connected to Asia, North America and Europe – in short it is the peering center of the world.

<o:p> </o:p>So how strange is that?  I am an American, who moved to Korea to setup a Korean company where the intellectual property and international licensing is all done through this Korean entity to take advantage of the better business environment here than in California, yet I am subcontracting our main server cluster back to the states in a pure cost model.  Crazy.

<o:p> </o:p>My like is now all about communication.  Email, Wiki, mobile and in person.  In that order.  I respond to about 100 emails a day and spend probably about 2.5 hours on my mobile phone.  I so rarely use a land-line I do not remember the phone number of our business line or our home phone number.

<o:p> </o:p>Our users are paying in real-time using Japanese convenient stores, mobile phones in Thailand, Korea and Japan, online banking, PayPal, and of course the credit card.  

<o:p> </o:p>And all of our back-end is written on top of Open Source software such as Apache, MySQL, Bugzilla, Twiki, and Cerebus.

<o:p> </o:p>This business – GoPets not only could I have not created a business with these methods in 1994 – the very idea of having virtual pets to connect the world just was not possible in 1994.

<o:p> </o:p>Twelve years is the length of the Chinese Zodiac Calendar.  What will game development be like in 2018?  I would hazard a guess that all of us will be connected to the net 24x7 in some fashion or another.  We will have an intimate circle of friends that will have constant IM-like access to our minds.  New forms of etiquette will evolve to handle why you chose not to answer an incoming IM.  

<o:p> </o:p>The projects themselves will be fully open at every level from newbie to experienced player to professional developer.  Intellectual property rights will have evolved to the point that people no-longer feel the need to attach “virtual” to virtual objects and move to calling them digital objects to simply objects.  For in the future we will spend nearly all of our conscious time online and connected to the net and due to technological advances our mundane concerns such as food, energy and manufactured goods will fade from dominance to merely a background awareness.

<o:p> </o:p>What we are doing making, playing and experiencing games is actually being the beta testers for our our future culture.

<o:p> </o:p>I am excited about 2018!

-Erik <o:p> </o:p>

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Originally posted on LiveJournal