Noah Davis | The Verge

Money matters: why women founders struggle in Silicon Valley

2013-03-06T12:45:08-05:00

women funding

Last spring and summer, Kathryn Minshew, co-founder of The Muse and one of Inc’s “15 Women to Watch in Tech”, was trying to raise money for the female-focused job site that was growing 30 percent a month and reaching 250,000 dedicated active users every month by June of 2012. She pitched herself, her co-founders — whom she met while working at McKinsey & Company — and the Muse to any and every venture capitalist, angel investor, acquaintance, and friend she could find. The company had solid fundamentals, a strong story, and a passionate community, but the raise wasn’t going well.

At one point, the founder was introduced via email to the head of a VC firm and got a reply from one of his associates. “We were given explicit advice that if we were introduced to a venture partner in a certain way and they passed us off to an associate, we were supposed to respond with, ‘Thanks so much. I’d love to talk, but I’m heads down on a product right now and I’m only able to talk to people with decision-making ability,’” she says. She composed a reply saying as much. Before sending, she showed it to five different male friends who were also founders and they thought the tone was fine. But the response she got from the associate at the firm was shocking. “I got a massive slap on the wrist,” she says. “The tone of the response I received was, ‘Don’t get too big for your britches, little girl.’ And it happened a second time as well.” When she showed the reply to the male founders, they were amazed by the brazenness of the email. They had never received anything similar in tone and couldn’t understand why the response was so cold and angry.

In search of cash

After reaching out to more than 200 VCs, The Muse eventually raised $1.2 million with contributions from Y Combinator — where it was part of the Winter 2012 class — 500 Startups, Great Oaks Ventures, and others. But it was a long, arduous, and disenchanting process even compared to the struggles other companies have raising seed rounds. At every turn, Minshew found herself confronted by the unavoidable fact that she was a woman and, like so many of her fellow female founders, had to overcome additional obstacles to raise money. “When it’s hard, you think it’s hard for everybody. But going through it last year, there were a couple of situations where it was impossible to ignore that it would have been very different if I had been a guy,” Minshew told me in a meeting space at General Assembly where The Muse has its office.

While she was trying to fundraise, Minshew had to carefully temper her attitude. “The more comfortable I am being nicely, calmly, and sweetly aggressive, the better I seem to do,” she says. “But it’s a very difficult balance between coming off as strong enough to lead a company but not so strong that you’re perceived as a bitch.” The concept of being “nice” and “sweet” while also “aggressive” illustrates the limited area where women have to work while pitching the majority of VCs and angels.

Sometimes, the money men failed to grasp the concept Minshew and her co-founders were after. “I went into one meeting with a venture partner and he said, ‘yeah, I pulled up the site yesterday, but honestly, it just isn’t compelling to me at all.’ I wish I had been the person who I am now because I would looked back at him and said, ‘It doesn’t matter that it’s not compelling to you. It’s not built for you.’ He made it clear he had only taken the meeting because he’d be introduced [to us] by nine people [who thought he should meet with us].”

At one point, a trusted advisor even suggested she add a man to the team to add “credibility” to the small company. Although “he meant it well, you remember that [attitude],” Minshew says. This type of sentiment is all too common in the dog-eat-dog world of VC funds. A number of factors both systemic and overt combine to prevent female-founded companies from getting the same access to capital that their male peers enjoy. It’s not an unsolvable set of problems, but it is one that needs to be explored.

It’s hard out there for a startup

While female-founded startups have a few unique challenges raising money, they share something in common with male-founded companies: namely, securing venture capital is extremely difficult for almost everyone. The math works against the majority of startups. The rise of incubators and the decreasing costs of launching a startup create a growing number of companies that are fighting for the money. Fred Wilson told The Verge’s Adrianne Jeffries that, “we are seeing fundraising challenges everywhere, even in our very best portfolio companies.” While the overall amount invested in early stage deals is the highest it has been since the first quarter of 2001, according to a PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and NVCA study, the competition for that money has never been greater. A Dow Jones VentureSource study reported that funding for consumer Internet companies was down 42 percent in 2012. High profile failures — hey, Color — are hurting the market as well.

There’s also the issue of serial entrepreneurs. Successful startup founders frequently begin to build again after exiting their first venture-backed company. That limits access for first-time company founders – both men and women – because the VC game is very much run by tight networks. An angel investor or venture capitalist often feels more comfortable giving money to someone who previously built a company that was successful enough to produce a return.

The struggle to raise

Across the globe, the effort of women to start small businesses is hamstrung by access to capital. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton addressed the issue in a series of speeches and many organizations are working to help solve the problem. “[Women] raise 70 percent less money than men do because of their lack of access to capital,” Lesa Mitchell, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation vice president of initiatives on advancing innovation, told The New York Times last June.

The issue extends to the high-tech community. The Diana Project found that just five percent of VC-funded businesses have a women on the management team, while the Center for Venture Research at University of New Hampshire reported that just 9.4 percent of the startups that took venture capital in 2009 were women-run. Dow Jones Venture Source echoed the findings in another study, finding that only six percent of the startups that took one round of VC in 2010 had a female CEO and just seven percent boasted a female founder. Although women represent less than five percent of the CEOs at Fortune 500 companies, they made up 31 percent of business school students in 2012 (up from 26 percent a decade ago) and earned 18 percent of all computer and information sciences degrees in 2008.

Part of the issue is the structure of the venture community. “VC is a network-based process. You basically fund somebody you know or somebody who knows somebody you know. It’s a really tight connection,” Patricia G. Greene, a professor of Entrepreneurship at Babson College and current National Academic Director of Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses project, says.

“There’s a soft bias toward doing things that are familiar. That’s white male nerds.”

The reason to fund a company or to not fund a company frequently comes down to a gut feeling. Do you believe in this person? Money men look for people who are a younger, better, smarter version of themselves. It’s human nature. The typical funder is an old, straight, white male, hence the typical fund-receiver is a young, straight, white, male. “There’s a soft bias toward doing things that are familiar. That’s white male nerds.” Dave McClure, founder of seed fund 500 Startups, says, “I think we are making progress. Now it’s brown and yellow nerds that get funding.”

This isn’t overt sexism; it’s simple psychology. Alisha Ramos, who wrote an undergraduate honors thesis on female funding while a student at Harvard and now works as a brand consultant, agrees with McClure. While many of the women she interviewed were adamant that their gender was not an issue, Ramos did find that, “The whole ecosystem is very gendered male. In the end, I think there is always going to be some sort of gendered bias on behalf of males, even if they are not aware of it.”

The male-gendered tilt manifests itself in two ways. There are inherent differences between how traits are perceived. “I don’t want to blame men, but it’s almost like it’s a different language,” Laurel Touby, founder of mediabistro.com which sold for $23 million in 2007, says. “What they see as confidence in a male, they may see as charm in a female. They may see leadership in a man, but charm in a female. They would fund leadership, but they might not fund charm.” (Disclosure: I was an employee at the time of the sale.)

“If I were a guy, you’d call this charisma. If I were a guy, you’d call this leadership.”

When Touby was attempting to get funding for her company, she received a list of questions from a potential investor and realized that they were ones that a man would not have to answer. “If I were a male, he would say I had everything it took to be a successful entrepreneur. But because I was a woman he was considering those things as something different, something not quite up to snuff,” Touby, who did not want to share the specific queries, says. “I responded to him in male terms. ‘If I were a guy, you’d call this charisma. If I were a guy, you’d call this leadership.’ I ended with ‘I am woman. Help me roar.’ He recognized that he may have been trying to put me into a mold and was looking at me through the wrong filter.” Touby still calls her answers the “$1 Million Memo” because he eventually invested $1 million.

Cheryl Kellond experienced this likely unintentional bias first-hand when she was attempting to launch Bia Sports, which planned to make and market the first GPS sports watch targeted to women. She met with a number of VCs in an effort to secure funding, but they failed to see her perspective, which was that female runners were desperate for a device made specifically for them. “I was talking about sports and running, and everything I said was open to question,” she says. “One time, I stopped and I said, ‘You know what? You’re illustrating the gap in the market right now. Everything you just asked about is what Garmin is doing and it’s exactly why half the market is sitting on the sidelines. You’re proving my point with your questions.'” She continues: “If I had sent my tall, good-looking husband in to talk about the same market specifics, it would have been unquestioned.”

Furthermore, when Kellond did find an investor willing to listen, she ran into another problem. “We got a lot of ‘Let me show it to my wife and see what she thinks,’” she says. “I don’t want an investor who is going to gut-check everything with his wife.” In the end, she turned to Kickstarter, and more than $400,000 later, Bia Sports is in business.

Although it happens relatively infrequently, overt sexism surfaces, too. “I think the concern [from VCs] is that [the women] are going to get pregnant and go home with their families. That’s usually what we hear,” Greene says. “I really don’t think there’s a lot of ‘The little lady can’t do that,’ but I do think that there remains genuine concern that ‘If I invest this much money in you, how do I know you’re going to be around?'”

Solutions

There’s no single, easy answer, but rather a few parts. The first is awareness. Male VCs can’t see the world from a woman’s perspective but the simple knowledge that they don’t is the first step in overcoming unintended bias. This comes from conversations, stories like this one and many others, and other, more unusual circumstances. “I want to know who the VCs are who have daughters. They look at the world with a different lens,” Nemessanyi says.

Another step is an increase in the number of female VCs. According to the Center for Venture Research, 12 percent of angel investors in the United States were women in 2011. (In fact, more diversity is needed across the board. The same study found minorities made up only four percent of VCs.) A different report concluded that there were only two women on the 2011 Midas List and that the staff of the average venture firm on the list was eight percent women.

“They look at me and I get the sense that they don’t know what to do with me.”

But it’s a difficult road. Just as VCs tend to fund their own, they hire people who look like them as well. After selling mediabistro.com, Touby has been trying to find a fund to work for, but it’s proving to be a challenge even for the experienced and successful businesswoman. “I’m up against the top guys in America who want to do this. Firms have to really bend over backwards to let me in. I don’t look like them. I’m not a banker. I don’t have the same background. I don’t have the same orientation. I have different life experiences than they do. They look at me and I get the sense that they don’t know what to do with me,” she says.

Female angel investors are part of the answer. Natalia Oberti Noguera founded the Pipeline Fellowship for this exact reason. The six-month bootcamp, currently offered in New York City, Boston, San Francisco, and Washington D.C., teaches participants to evaluate companies and founders. At the end of the program, each woman commits to investing $5,000 in a women-led for-profit social venture.

Finally, women founders need both male and female champions. 37 Angels, Joanne Wilson, Ben Horowitz (who uses the female pronoun in blog posts), “The Lean Startup” author Eric Ries, and Dave McClure are some examples. “In some ways, I would say that Dave McClure having that conversation has pushed the envelope. It’s not just women talking about it. Getting more guys talking about it is helping make the business case more obvious. It’s not just gender and feminism,” Oberti Noguera says. Minshew says interest in The Muse picked up when Cathie Black signed on as an angel. The former chairman of Hearst Magazines started urging angels and other investors to take a look. It wasn’t too long before the founders had their $1.2 million.

Money talks

The biggest reason for investing in women-founded companies is opportunity. “There are definitely a lot [of companies] to choose from,” says McClure, whose portfolio includes roughly 20 percent women-founded companies. Ramos found more than 125 companies in the high-tech sector with women co-founders or officers that have IPO’d or had $50 million-plus exits in the past decade.

The change will come slowly, but it will come eventually. What really matters is success. And success means money: big rounds raise, big exits, big IPOs. There have been a few, but it’s not enough. “At the end of the day, there are so few women who pull it off that every single one is an exception,” Nemessanyi says.

That moment could be coming in the near future. More and more female-founded companies find success every year. After months of trying, Minshew raised a round. The tipping point? Growth and growing expectations. The Muse became something the VCs couldn’t ignore, no matter who was heading the company. For a venture firm, the only thing worse than making a bad deal is missing out on the next big opportunity. “It’s harder to condescend to three million people than 70,000,” says Minshew. The strength of the masses can help the female founders of the future.

Illustrations by Ed Nacional

Digital apocalypse: living through the death of virtual worlds

2012-12-20T13:59:37-05:00

end of mmo lead

In the middle of the night on November 30, 2012, Erin Palette’s carefully kept world ended. During the last moments, her City of Heroes character Silence Do-Good held a torch aloft in her bright red-gloved left hand as a spiderweb of broken concrete spread out below her equally bright red, knee-high boots. A blue and white unitard, accented by red shoulder pads and a yellow utility belt, completed the outfit the Florida-based Palette chose to wear to the apocalypse. Her friends – Violet Tigress, Betty Ballistic, and Java Juggernaut, a Super Group that called itself the “Buttkickers of the Fantastic” – stood close by in Paragon City’s Atlas Park. The foursome had spent the evening battling bad guys, memorably defeating the evil Malta Group and its 30-foot tall robot Kronos Titan, but they returned to a communal space to witness the end.

Others had the same idea. “We hung out in Atlas Park with a whole bunch of other people and, perhaps appropriately, night had fallen in the game,” Palette, whose name is a nom de plume that she uses for her blog, says. “This huge assembly of heroes was gathered there, using their powers, emoting, and chatting. We were heroically waiting for the end of the world, waiting for the end of reality. Then, about four minutes after 3AM, they booted us off the servers.”

The City of Heroes, already covered by the darkness of night, winked out of existence completely. All that remained for Palette, who had been playing CoH for hours on end since 2004, were the memories and the screen grabs.

Sticky TOC engaged! Do not remove this!

All MMOs must end, eventually

But City of Heroes is not the only massively multiplayer online game (MMO) to shut down recently. Glitch, a quirky one dreamt up by the team responsible for Flickr, called it quits on December 9. Others that failed to gain traction or disappeared for different reasons include Star Wars Galaxies, Auto Assault, Tabula Rasa, Fury, LEGO Universe Online, and dozens more. The very nature of MMOs means most of them will fail. Only a few can reach World of Warcraft status. The demand simply isn’t large enough.

“The problem with MMOs is that they take a lot of time to play, so most people cannot play more than one,” Jesper Juul, game theorist and author of the forthcoming The Art of Failure, says. “There is a very natural limit to the size of the market. People will keep launching these games in hopes of capturing some of that slice, but most of them are going to fail.”

Even if a game does find an audience and manage to turn a profit, there’s no guarantee it won’t be turned off for political or strategic reasons. NCsoft, the South Korean company that produced City of Heroes, simply decided they no longer wanted to deal with running and administering the game. That angered and upset the dedicated players, but they had little recourse beyond outraged forum posts and a passionate Facebook campaign. Three months after NCsoft’s late August announcement about the impending end, CoH ceased to exist.

The trauma of an end

“It’s like when you start watching a good TV show. You don’t know if it’s going to go on for eight years, or if it’s going to get cancelled after half a season.”

MMOs, understandably but also unavoidably, end. This can be traumatizing. Imagine pouring your time, your money, your creativity, and your energy into something, and then watching it disappear completely. MMOs aren’t like traditional games. They can’t be saved or played again. Once the server goes down, an MMO as a player knows it is gone. Frequently, the end comes without warning. “I knew that MMOs ended sometime, but it hadn’t occurred to me that most of them end relatively quickly. It’s like when you start watching a good TV show. You don’t know if it’s going to go on for eight years, or if it’s going to get cancelled after half a season,” Laura Blackwell, a writer for PCWorld and avid Glitch player, says.

A strong, and very real, sense of community develops within the games. Players are not in the same room — and will likely never meet in person — but they do form lasting, important, and viable relationships. Humans are social creatures, with or without physical, in-person interaction. “In a virtual world, you have the ability to make these relationships real. You’re engaging physically with a projection. You are interacting with other people, even though you might not know specifically who they are,” Dr. Pamela Brown Rutledge, director of the Media Psychology Research Center, says. “These experiences are very real. The loss of one of these worlds is like the loss of anything you do with a bunch of other people.”

Juul agrees. “It’s like being expelled from the nation where you grew up. It’s the distant homeland that you can’t return to,” he says. “MMOs are the kind of games that most clearly promise you a world or a home or a place to be. They appear to be very permanent and tangible, these concrete places. At the same time, they can very quickly melt into air. They are the most fragile of all the game forms, too.”

The worlds can disappear, but there isn’t anything psychologically wrong with mourning their loss. Rutledge believes a grieving period is important, appropriate, and sometimes even necessary. “Those are normal feelings and they should go through the same process anyone does when they miss something. Remember it fondly. Get together and reminisce a little bit. Celebrate the shared experience. Then, find other things to do to replace it.”

But first, they have to get over the loss. That takes time, especially when it comes suddenly and unexpectedly.

Cities destroyed

On August 31, 2012 NCsoft announced that it would terminate the Paragon Studios development team that created City of Heroes and close the game at the end of November for “strategic reasons.” After the initial shock, the community of players flew into overdrive to try to save their beloved game. They launched a @SaveCoH Twitter handle and a Save City of Heroes website, posted a petition on Change.org, and sent non-stop messages on the game’s thriving forums. Nothing worked. NCsoft was making a profit on CoH, but it didn’t matter: the game was going to end.

The last months of a virtual city had real world implications. “Imagine you have a favorite childhood toy, something that was very important to you growing up. Imagine that you find out that it’s been thrown away or burned in a fire. It hits you, or it hit me in a deep emotional place,” Palette, who frequently talks about CoH in the present tense even weeks after the shutdown, says. “I should have known it wasn’t going to last forever. It shouldn’t affect me like this, but it did because I had a connection with these characters. It’s that ‘You can’t go home again’ feeling, like when a playground is replaced by a 7-Eleven.”

(Perhaps the game’s faithful players should have anticipated this outcome: NCsoft doesn’t have the best reputation within the MMO world. In 2011, the company lost a $28-million lawsuit with Richard Garriott revolving around the end of Tabula Rasa and the termination of the game designer’s contact. In part, the “sordid tale of betrayal” involved a goodbye letter preportedly written by Garriott that was actually penned by the company’s executives. NCsoft said he left voluntarily, but the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled he was forced out while he was in quarantine after returning from the International Space Station.)

The players, realizing they couldn’t do anything to prevent the end, decided to continue functioning as heroes in the real world as well as the pixelated one. CoH players had a tradition of contributing to IRL charities. The Real World Hero campaign raised nearly $30,000 between 2009 and 2011. In the last month of the game, they raised $1,000 and gave it to the Paragon Studios staff to pay for a bittersweet celebratory dinner. They directed their fury at NCsoft, creating banners that they shared on Facebook and attached at the bottom of blog posts condemning the company. The CoH diehards alternated between anger and sadness, some joking about going through the Kübler-Ross stages of grief. But mostly, they simply tried to prepare themselves for a universe that lacked the City of Heroes.

“At first, it was like trying to save the victim, and then it became a matter of mourning. I think it’s going to be like this for a long time,” Troy Hickman, an Eisner Award-nominated comic book author who played frequently and wrote a CoH story arc, says. “Then, the pain of it will sort of go away and people will reminisce about the good times. Of course, there are going to be people who think it will come back.”

It’s not going to happen. City of Heroes is, almost certainly, gone. There’s a chance it could get sold or resurrected, but that’s very slim, and grows smaller by the day. The reality leaves CoHers with two choices: play nothing or find another MMO. The decision comes down to the individual. Hickman thinks he’s probably done with online games for now. He spent the last hours of CoH taking screenshots of his 116(!) characters – some of whom may end up in future comics – but sounds content to let his MMO obsession drift away. Palette is experimenting with Champions Online, almost entirely because the superhero game ran some “very classy” eulogy-type posts honoring CoH. They also timed a Double XP weekend to the the end of their former competitor in a smart effort to entice gamers to jump ship.

City of Heroes players are dealing with the loss in their own way, but they are united in one opinion. “I think about the only universal constant is that not only will they never, ever play a game put out by NCSoft, but they are evangelizing. They are spreading the gospel of ‘Don’t buy from these people. They will just cancel it,” Palette says. The heroes, it seems, found one final mission.

Testimonial of novelist Mercedes Lackey:

The players, realizing they couldn’t do anything, decided it was like hearing the diagnosis of terminal illness for a friend. I am not exaggerating here. Because of the community aspect of the City games (unique in MMORPGs as far as I have been able to determine), I get most of my social contact via the game. We can play and hang out nightly with my father in law. I have real world friends I met here, people I wrote fanfiction with, to whose homes I have been invited, and who I have had stay with us.

NeoConzell’s comment:

City of Heroes servers may be shutting down, but It will still live on forever in our hearts and minds, stand proud not in its passing but its existence for being, from the first day to the last it has been a pleasure. No matter the words stated by others of its being less then its praise, it is our words that stand the test of time, the negativity that falls at the way side forgotten. And when the sunsets the last day, I will salute its fall for I know City of Heroes will rise again,For We are the City of Heroes, and we shall forever be here.

Glitch’s glitch

City of Heroes came to an ignominious end, but the final few weeks of Glitch were exactly the opposite. Tiny Speck, the company that ran the proudly weird game and was founded by Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield and three colleagues from the photo-sharing site, kept the lines of communication open and honest. “We are really sorry. We failed you. And it is very, very painful: no-one wanted Glitch to succeed more than us. … We know that many of you are hurting too — many of you put enormous efforts into supporting Glitch, supporting the team, proselytizing, encouraging new players and much more. We are, really, truly, genuinely sorry,” the small company wrote in an emotional closing note.

From the beginning, Glitch was a long shot to succeed. Although Tiny Speck raised $6.5 million during two rounds of funding in 2009 and 2010 from VCs including Accel Partners and Andreessen Horowitz, the game that boasted few monsters and little fighting but plenty of quirks and character, was only intended to appeal to a certain small subset of the population. “The designs were so cute, but they were also off-kilter and quirky so I didn’t feel like I was in a kid’s game. There was always that little bit of bite to it,” says PCWorld‘s Blackwell, who wrote an excellent post-mortem.

Butterfield, who was working on an MMO called Game Neverending with his team when they stumbled upon the idea for Flickr more than a decade ago, explained Glitch’s audience more succinctly, telling CNET: “There’s not a better way to say [who we’re targeting] than people with above average intelligence and sophisticated tastes, in their 20s or early 30s… The intersection of NPR listeners and game players.”

Glitch Player, Phantasmagoria:

I feel so sad. I was having such a bad day, and then I saw this. I’ve been playing Glitch for just a couple of months, but it was such a wonderful outlet for me to escape from the stress in my life. I know how sad the staff are that they you have to shut it down… and I feel so selfish that I’m focusing on how upset I am about this. 🙁 I was looking forward to a long, long time playing this game…

Glitch player, Merry:

And my heart just cracked into a million tiny pieces. There are no words for how much fun and imagination this game has given me. No words. Thank you thank you thank you. Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

In a phone call with The Verge, the founder cited a number of reasons for calling it quits, including early architectural decisions and the difficulty of porting from Flash. Additionally, although the game developed a loyal following, it was not a large enough one to make financial sense to continue. Butterfield and his team made the difficult decision with enough time and flexibility to end Glitch in a “graceful way.”

Blackwell, who began playing in August, was crushed along with many of the other members of the community. “I was really sad, really let down. I hadn’t seen anything like Glitch. This world is going to end, and there’s so much I haven’t done in it,” she says. The message boards became a coping mechanism, with hundreds of comments and touching eulogies popping up soon after the announcement. While the Tiny Speck staff expected a mix of positive thoughts and “fuck yous,” the actual notes were almost entirely the former. Rutledge suggests that the company’s constant stream of contact and focus on communication helped players cope, turning what could have been a bad ending into one that went as smoothly as possible. The honesty and passion earned the respect of the players.

The Glitch players also weren’t left empty-handed. Tiny Speck staffers, who spent years and millions of dollars developing a game they loved, worked to make it easy to export characters, to have something to show for the hard work they put into the game. They also attempted to create real world objects that will outlast the virtual game. A book, “The Art of Glitch,” reached its IndieGoGo goal of $17,000 in two hours and continues to climb. There are also plans for an official music release.

Butterfield spent the week before the end coping in his own way. Glitch was his baby. “I had to distance myself for the last couple of days,” he said when we spoke with three days remaining on the countdown clock. “At first it was quite difficult. I’ve been burying myself in the administrative stuff that needs to happen. When I do play, I get bombarded by players and it makes me feel super sad. But now that there is 71 hours and 46 minutes left, I’m starting to feel a little bit more urgency.”

He did, playing over the next three days as his character Stoot Barfield, a one-eyed, long-haired monster in a sharp plaid business suit. On the night of December 9, the creative team gathered in their Vancouver office with “a fine selection of mezcals and whiskeys for everyone, and some fancy desserts.” They entered the stunning virtual world of their own design for one final time. In the last moments, a Glitchen named DeliciousCake said, “What a beautiful dream this was.” And she was right. But all dreams must end at some point. Soon after her words, the servers went quiet. Glitch players around the world looked into the nothingness. Butterfield and his crew went out for drinks.

In a galaxy far, far away

“It was a confused mess, but it was really, really ambitious.”

If the end of Glitch went smoothly from a company-player relations perspective and the final weeks of City of Heroes couldn’t have gone much worse, the final days of Star Wars Galaxies fell somewhere in the middle. The game, launched in the early 2000s, was remarkably forward-thinking and totally flawed from the beginning. It gained a following, boasting more than 300,000 subscribers but slowly lost players and cachet, and never recovered after World of Warcraft debuted in 2004. Sony Online Entertainment tried to tweak SWG but never satisfactorily. It had a legion of supporters and many more who had trouble figuring out what to do. “I have fine memories of SWG. It was a confused mess, but it was really, really ambitious,” said video game journalist Alex Meer who wrote a touching post about the game’s final moments, says.

In the summer of 2011, SOE announced it would end the game on December 15 to make way for Star Wars: The Old Republic. Some fans pushed back, but the decision was made. “SWG was played and loved by millions of gamers around the world who were an integral part of what made this game such a success from both a gameplay and community perspective. An MMO game like SWG is truly made by its community,” Michele Sturdivant-Cagle, senior director of global communications for Sony Online Entertainment, emailed to the Verge. (None of the executives responsible for the decision were available to comment.)

The final minutes passed with many of the characters gathered in Mos Eisley, shooting off guns and fireworks. Moderators turned off some of the more complicated graphics engines to keep the game moving smoothly. The irony of the overly ambitious game failing up to the very end wasn’t lost on the assorted characters as the last few moments ticked away.

This is what it’s like when worlds collide

“It’s a blissful little moment of shared community and happiness. It’s very hard to drop the curtain for the final time.”

All worlds – real or virtual – end. When virtual ones do, it hurts in the same way as it would when a physical one does. And that makes sense, as MMOs become “real” for players, especially the hardcore ones who dedicate time and money. “The fact is the more attached you get to something, the more painful it’s going to be. But that’s life,” Juul says.

It’s impressive and important that players can become so involved with in-game communities. While some outsiders might think growing attached to a virtual character or community of gamers a player will never meet in person is strange, concerning, or an indication of poor social skills, Rutledge disagrees. “It’s reaffirming of the human condition that we can connect, engage, enjoy, and feel sad to lose that [bonding]. It’s great evidence that we can have these kinds of connections across all these kinds of media,” she says.

In late November, while Butterfield, Blackwell, and the rest of the Glitch crew were still creating connections, players in City of Heroes were preparing for the MMO’s sad, emotional conclusion. “It’s like the end of a play when the actors keep coming on for a final bow. No one quite wants to end that experience. It’s a blissful little moment of shared community and happiness. It’s very hard to drop the curtain for the final time,” Meer says.

Palette’s Silence Do-Good – red, white, and blue outfit and all – ran a few final missions, helping her friends reach the game’s level 50 cap. Hickman, meanwhile, signed on as the “Troy Hickman” avatar he created to attend in-game events. The CoH developers erected a in-game statute of Cyrus Thompson, a superhero in the IRL comics Hickman wrote, and he headed there.

“Every time one of my characters ran by the statue, I would stop and salute. I was really honored,” he says. “During the last half hour of the game, I went to the statue. I stood in front of it and had a moment. Another guy came up to me and asked if I was actually Troy Hickman. I said, ‘Yes, or as Troy Hickman as I could be at 2:30 in the morning.’ He stood there with me because that’s was he was planning to do as well.”

The end of CoH was scheduled for 3AM sharp, but the servers took a few extra minutes to shut down. Hickman and his new virtual friend, the one he would never have met were it not for a few final, random choices made during the dying moments of a world consisting of zeros and ones, “just stood there, waiting for the end, which was kind of cool and also sad. It was like waiting for the Mayan calendar to run out.” Then, somewhere between four and six minutes past the hour, the faraway servers turned off for good. Another world was gone, but not forgotten.

The Yes Men Kickstart a revolt

2012-11-30T13:00:19-05:00

yes men

During the 2000 Presidential campaign, the mysterious, satirical website www.gwbush.com appeared on the web. The criticisms of George W. Bush on it gained media attention worldwide, culminating in a mention by the Presidential candidate at a press conference. The Yes Men were born. Since then, Andy Bichlbaum (real name: Jacques Servin), Mike Bonanno (Igor Vamos), and an ever-revolving gang of comrades have created amusing actions like printing a fake edition of The New York Times in hopes of calling out entities ranging from Dow Chemical and ExxonMobil to the WTO and the United States Chamber of Commerce. They build websites, pose as company executives, and do anything else they can to draw media attention and point out hypocrisy while having fun doing so.

Some of these actions prompted change in policies. They also spawned two documentaries that showed would-be activists how to make an impact. After nearly a decade and a half, the Yes Men want to go further. They recently launched a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $100,000 and counting to fund a new documentary and something called the “Action Switchboard,” an ambitious attempt to help the 100,000-person database get more involved. In Yes Men spirit, USB secret decoder rings are also prominently involved.

Andy Bichlbaum spoke with The Verge about the rejuvenating effects of the Occupy movement, how social media changes the game plan, and the vital role of having fun in activism. As they say, “It’s certainly better than sitting on our asses waiting for the world to change on its own. Don’t you think?”

“What we do is galvanize people who are already on our side.”

This is an exciting time for the Yes Men.

I’m excited about the moment. What we’re doing is basically just giving away our techniques as much as we possibly can.

The Action Switchboard sounds like the next step for the Yes Men: “Here are the things we’ve learned, and here is how you can use it.” Is that a fair assessment?

I think so. It has the capacity to really take off. There have been quite a few projects that we’ve done recently that took off for themselves. All we have to do is give a few pats on the back and a little bit of advice here and there, but not much. Those things take off. Recently, some students at Middlebury College created a fake official welcoming committee for the Dalai Lama, and announced on behalf of the university that it was going to divest in anything related to war. We helped them a bit. They emailed us to ask how [the idea] seemed, and we gave them little pieces of advice about the press release. They had some legal questions. They wanted to know if they would be in big trouble, and we said no. So, they went and did it. It was a tremendous success. It got a ton of press. The university reacted in a really stupid way, and it all worked out. It got a lot of attention for the idea that universities can or should divest.

But for every project like that, we get a dozen emails that we can’t attend to. The Action Switchboard will be a way of systematically attending to these project ideas. People can contribute and help organize.

One of your goals is to develop and stage “media-getting actions.” That focus, the understanding that you need to actively court media, seems very prescient. If there’s no media there – if no one is paying attention – your action is not going to matter. Was the decision to focus on media-getting a conscious thing?

Sort of. It’s not really our idea. The Civil Rights movement was fully conscious of that. That’s what they did. They organized these things so there would be media. Gandhi first pioneered that. He did Salt March actions with media along knowing exactly what the result would be. It wasn’t so much the action itself that was really important, but media noticing that it was happening and reporting on it. The target, Britain in that case, was susceptible to public opinions and people thinking they were beasts. It’s a very old thing.

My initiation to this kind of work happened entirely by accident. I was a programmer on a video game, and I inserted some different boys into a video game on a lark. I made it so hundreds of boys in swimsuits would appear on the screen kissing each other. It was shipped to store shelves, and it became a big story. I didn’t really have a purpose in doing it, but when it happened, I got really fired up about doing that kind of activism. I really enjoyed seeing something I had done go out there and find an audience.

I think a lot of people feel that excitement about this kind of work. It’s not only that we should get attention for these kinds of things, but it’s really fun. But it’s just one way of doing activism. I don’t think that you need press for everything. Even organizing doesn’t require press, doesn’t require media attention. That just requires workers who change their minds. That’s kind of the meat and potatoes of activism. What we do is galvanize people who are already on our side. Changing the minds of people on the other side is something this work can do, and does do in extraordinary moments, but doing that is more of a face-to-face kind of thing. This is just one piece of the activism puzzle. It’s not the whole thing at all.

I would imagine that some people could be turned off by your antics as well.

Yeah, that does happen. At the same time, we’ve been getting emails from Republicans who say, ‘I disagree with everything you stand for but I appreciate the way you do things.’ Occasionally, we have changed minds. We have gotten people thinking about things they weren’t thinking about before. Students routinely come up to us and say that seeing “The Yes Men Fix The World” or the first movie opened their eyes to these issues, the fact that things were really messed up, and the fact that they could do something about it. On the other hand, students are predisposed to having those ideas. It’s one thing to get a student active, and it’s another thing to get a Republican blogger somewhere to change his or her mind. [Laughs]

How, if at all, has the rise of social media changed what you’re doing?

Not that much, really. It’s changed a few of details, but I really don’t think that it’s all that revolutionary. It’s another tool, but people have done really cool, fun projects in all kinds of ways. Before social media, there were pamphlets. In between pamphlets and social media, there were emails. [Twitter] is just short emails that reach a lot of people, instead of only the people they are addressed to. We’ve used it. We did a Shell project with Greenpeace that relied almost entirely on social media. It wouldn’t have happened without social media. Social media has permitted some new projects, but I don’t think there’s a difference in the amount of time projects take or anything.

Can social media make your job more difficult because there are more things out there, and you have to work harder to get through the noise.

Yeah, I suppose so. It’s really hard to tell what’s interesting if there is nobody curating it. If I read something by Paul Krugman in The New York Times, I know it’s interesting. The purpose of traditional media is to curate and help me find out what’s interesting.

Do you see yourself as facilitators who are trying to give people the tools to create their own movements?

Definitely. We’ve been moving that way for about three years since we founded the Yes Lab. There are some projects where the structure has helped organizations or individuals carry out projects on their own without our assistance or with only a little bit of assistance. We were doing that before Occupy came onto the scene, and then when Occupy showed up, it just seemed like, ‘Wow, that’s really, really important.’

We tried to participate in the Occupy movement however we could. We were kind of told how to participate five days after Zuccotti [Park] was occupied. I run a speaker series at NYU with revolutionary speakers and the speaker for the first one of the semester, which was on September 22, was Ivan Marovic, a leader of Otpor!, the Serbian movement that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic. Afterward, we all went to Zuccotti. He looked around, and after a few minutes he said, ‘Yes, this looks familiar, but these people are too worried about the police. These people need to have more fun. That’s how we overthrew Milosevic: We stopped worrying about the police and we just started having fun. You guys should try to help them have fun.’ [Laughs] We did do a few actions [with Occupy], and they were fun, but I don’t think they really needed our help at all. We tried.

That’s a good mandate: to try to help people have fun.

That’s an idea in itself, sometimes, especially with stodgy old activists, like ourselves. [Laughs]

“Before social media, there were pamphlets. In between pamphlets and social media, there were emails. Twitter is just short emails that reach a lot of people.”

Now you have a Kickstarter for a documentary and the Switchboard.

The documentary is called The Yes Men Are Revolting. It’s going to feature a number of actions that we have done with the Yes Lab and some that we have done separately. It’s going to be different from our previous films in that it will follow revolutionary people and their evolution as activists. It will show us doing what activists often do, like despairing and wondering if what we’re doing matters. Then, we discover that the things we do do matter. However absurd they might seem at the moment, and however enormous the obstacles, they actually do matter.

When I first showed up at Occupy, a couple people came up to me and said we were part of it. I wondered what they meant. Over the summer, when we were hearing rumors that people might try to occupy Wall Street, we just thought those people were crazy. [Laughs] We didn’t do anything to support them. Then, it really took off to our surprise and a lot of other peoples’ surprise. But what the Occupiers meant when they came up to me was that they had seen us and our films. The ideas entered their heads and entered the culture. We put across the idea that you can do something, that there was a place for this type of activism.

The film shows us despairing and then finding a place. It’s pretty autobiographical. It’s real. We think our story will be inspiring to viewers, and maybe to viewers who haven’t taken action yet because they don’t think it really matters. That’s why we are doing the Action Switchboard, to give those viewers who have been spurred to action a way to follow that impulse and get involved. After the last movie, we got a lot of emails from people who wanted to do stuff, but we couldn’t do anything about them. This time, it’s going to be different.

“When Occupy showed up, it just seemed like, ‘Wow, that’s really, really important.'”

Can you give me a moment when there was that despair?

I would say pretty much non-stop for a year or so when we were doing a lot of actions around climate change. We impersonated the Chamber of Commerce, which happens to be the largest lobbying body in the world. We were spreading the news that the Chamber would no longer oppose any climate legislation. The real Chamber spokesman burst in and the drama was seen by tens of millions of people in the mainstream media. It may have been part of what led to the Chamber of Commerce reversing its opposition to the cap and trade bill a couple of weeks later, but even if that action did contribute to that reversal, it didn’t feel very important. That trade bill sucked. What we actually need is a carbon tax or something like that, and we need it fast. We were doing this big action, and many other people were doing actions, and it resulted in the Chamber reserving its position, but it didn’t really matter because the position was on this bill that was awful. The bill was a step above horrible. [Laughs] If we want to have a hope of seeing a good future, we need to really take action.

During that same time period, there were a bunch of other actions that were successful in that they got attention, but the underlying situation is so bleak that it’s hard to feel optimistic. We went to the tar sands in Alberta, and it’s just incredible. People are literally dying. The culture is dying. There are enormous cancer rates. The landscape is permanently destroyed. There’s no way to fix it. At all. It’s a wasteland. It’s a great place to shoot a scene in Mordor for Lord of the Rings, but it’s not a great place to do anything else. That kind of fills you with despair. Even if we get everybody to leave the tar sands, which is a tall order, the bad guys win. They permanently disfigured the landscape, not to mention sent all that carbon into the atmosphere where it’s going to stay for a while. You look at all that and you despair. But then you look at previous struggles, and you think about how daunting things must have looked to people like the Egyptians. There was a highly entrenched regime that hadn’t changed in decades. Suddenly, it’s gone. Or for people in the U.S.S.R. Or, for that matter, the Civil Rights struggle in this country or slavery. For all of these things, it was people power that effected change. People took action, sometimes unexpectedly, at moments when you wouldn’t have thought they would. You remember that and things get much better. They feel a little bit more hopeful.

Where does all this movement go?

There are a lot of lines all over the place that are optimism-inducing. I think the kind of thing that we are doing will be more and more popular. It feeds on itself. Also, unions can make a difference if they get organized and do stuff instead of supporting the status quo or their own salaries. If they start to fight for ordinary workers, that could change things dramatically. Nobody really knows what’s going to happen. That’s why I have hope.

There are a lot of people right now who want to make a difference and think they can, partially because of examples like you.

There’s so much hope out there that it’s hard not to have hope. And this stuff actually works. That’s the thing. As people do it, it catches on, and people start to do it more. In real life, action can change things. Then, there’s a lot of hope. If human organizers can actually get a majority of people who want progressive change in this country, it’s definitely plausible. That could change things.

“People took action at moments when you wouldn’t have thought they would. You remember that and things get much better.”

Do you believe in Magic… the Gathering?

2012-09-20T12:00:10-04:00

magic lead

Showbox at the Market sits inconspicuously a couple salmon tosses away from the world famous Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle. Tourists and office workers alike, enjoying a stunning late summer day about which neither Eddie Vedder nor Kurt Cobain could complain, walk by the venue’s closed black doors, oblivious to the proceedings inside the concert space. A poster on the blood red walls of the men’s bathroom announces that The Summer Slaughter Tour, headlined by Between the Buried and Me, passed through the previous week. Bloc Party will play in late September. Everyone from Duke Ellington to Lady Gaga have strutted on that platform while patrons ordered drinks from one of two bars near the raised stage.

For the next three days, however, the Showbox has a very different purpose. The 73-year-old establishment plays host to the Magic the Gathering Players Championship, a late August event featuring the highest concentration of Magic talent ever assembled for one event. Jon Finkel, arguably the best player ever, is present. So is the charismatic Brian Kibler, 2011 World Champion Jun’ya Iyanaga, Luis Scott-Vargas – the man with the highest winning percentage on the Pro Tour – and pretty much anyone who is anyone in the game. Nine of the 16 men – they are all men – have Wikipedia pages dedicated to their MtG exploits. For more than eight hours a day over three days, they will battle for the title of 2012 World Player of the Year title and $40,000. In the growing world of Magic the Gathering, the Players Championship is Ellington, Gaga, and Pearl Jam all rolled into one.

Sticky TOC engaged! Do not remove this!

You remember Magic the Gathering, right? It’s the game you played a decade ago, except infinitely more complex. The basic framework remains the same as when inventor Richard Garfield and Wizards of the Coast debuted the game in 1993. Players have a deck of essentially two kinds of cards: “lands” that produce mana, and “spells” that use the mana. The loser is one whose life drops to zero or who runs out of cards — and each of these rules have various exceptions. The current version, however, barely resembles the game I stopped playing in 1997. A Wizards staff member in Seattle compared Magic to the Madden franchise. In the same way that each new Madden edition brings additional features (hit stick, hot routes, etc.), every new Magic expansion set — of which there are dozens — adds new powers, abilities, and rules. Each year, Wizards releases a flagship deck along with more cards at set points throughout the year. It’s a never-ending process. The Magic world is already eagerly anticipating cards and kinks what the next set, “Return to Ravnica,” will bring. One major component of being a great Magic player is complete comprehension of the rules. Yawgatog.com features a hyperlinked master list of the regulations, which is worth pursuing to understand the sheer scope of the game.

After struggling through the early 2000s, the Magic brand is stronger than ever. Nostalgia, high-quality expansion sets, and smart marketing fueled the current boom. “It’s become a more consumer-facing product in the past few years,” says Daniel Tack, who covers gaming for Forbes.com and other publications. “The biggest impediment to Magic is that people don’t know how to play.” To combat this flaw, Wizards released simplified decks that help potential new gamers learn the rules. The Duel of the Planeswalkers online game and app is popular with beginning players as well, since rules are built into the logic, so players cannot make a mistake. (There’s also Magic Online, which is for the more advanced players.)

“The biggest impediment to ‘Magic’ is that people don’t know how to play.”

The plans are working. Hasbro, which bought Wizards of the Coast for $325 million in 1999, claimed the volume of card sales doubled between 2008 and 2011 with the player base growing 80 percent to 12 million. The gamers — generally upwardly mobile men between the ages of 16 to 35 — are dedicated and well-financed. That’s an excellent market to own, and Hasbro is capitalizing on the love of the game by giving players ever more ways to spend money. “The average tenure of the Magic consumer is over eight years. And the more engaged the Magic consumer becomes in brand the more value they are to us as a business, as we migrate them toward successively deeper levels of engagement with complementary analog and digital experiences,” the company’s chief marketing officer John Frascotti said in 2011. Translation: The more hooked players get, the more cash they will trade for cardboard or digital goods.

Part of this strategy revolves around the Pro Tour, which debuted in 1996, and includes events like the Players Championship.

Day 1

Day 1: hurry up and wait

“It’s the bright lights. The cameras. The tons of money at stake. It’s crazy.”

Ninety minutes before the beginning of the year’s most important tournament, the world’s best MtG players sit around sipping coffee or Coke products, fooling with their phones, and chatting easily but nervously. These veterans of the circuit — 15 of them played in the Boston-Worcester Grand Prix the previous weekend — know and respect each other. But there’s also the issue of the big money and the big stage. They all want to win.

“It was pretty tense yesterday at the meet and greet. We tried to make small talk while trying to figure out what [type of deck] everyone was playing,” Owen Turtenwald, the 2011 Player of the Year, says. “It’s the bright lights. The cameras. The tons of money at stake. It’s crazy.” (A few days later, tournament director Scott Larabee tells me Day 1 was the most nervous he’s ever seen the normally brash Turtenwald.)

The tournament at Showbox is both unusually intense and unusually laid back for a high-level Magic event. The pressure comes from the cash at hand and the extremely high quality of play, while the intimate feeling stems from the small group involved. Normal Pro Tour events — there are three every year — feature upwards of 400 players. The Grand Prix, tournaments that anyone can pay to enter, routinely draw more than 1,500 contestants and are played in massive convention spaces. “The laid back feel is nice. It’s nice not to have to walk around a big event hall,” David Ochoa says of the Players Championship, although he and others will admit they miss being recognized by adoring fans.

After a photo op of the entire group, the day kicks off with a Cube draft, one of the many formats of the game. Individual players are better at different variations of Magic, so the tournament features three varieties: Cube draft, booster draft, and Modern constructed. For our purposes here, the specific details of each format are not really important. Basic ones include which cards are allowed to be chosen and whether the decks are constructed before the tournament or drafted in a fantasy football-esque manner the day of the event.

After drafting, the players get 30 minutes to build their decks, then the action begins. Except it doesn’t. There’s a problem with the audio on the Internet stream. The Players Championship is a spectator experience, but it’s an online spectator experience. Fans are welcome inside the Showbox, but there will only be a handful throughout the weekend. The event isn’t promoted as an in-person experience. There’s little room because the space is dedicated to creating the Internet experience. Seven thousand viewers consistently watch the stream at all times, peaking just below 9,000 on the final day. The stage holds three tables, while five tables sit stage right for the other games. Equipment for the broadcast takes up the entire left side of the venue. Staff responsible for getting the tournament online outnumber the players nearly two to one. Two announcers at a time — over the course of three days, six men total will offer play-by-play and color — provide commentary throughout the tournament, focusing on the on-stage “feature match.” A large boom camera on the floor and two other cameras offer the producers three different angles on the action, allowing commentators and the audience at home to see into the players’ hands. But the game cannot start until the audio is ready. Brian Kibler suggests the group “hurry up and wait.” An organizer responds, “That’s what an event like this is about.” Everyone laughs, then sits patiently at their tables while the techs scramble to fix the issue. Soon, they do. Game on.

The brightest, if not the best

Brian Kibler

If there are Magic the Gathering rock stars, the effusive Kibler is one. He has more than 13,000 Twitter followers and a happy, high-energy Southern California personality. The 31-year-old whose birthday is the week after the tournament quit playing Magic twice, once during his senior year in high school and again after college. He returned both times after getting “the fever.” Kibler is a legend who, if anything, has been playing better since his second comeback in 2009. On Day 1, he wears the same blazer and Star City Games tee-shirt combination he sports in his pre-tournament photo. “I like to try to present a good image,” he says. Kibler’s very pretty girlfriend is one of the only spectators. She brings to mind Vesper in Casino Royale, but only if she traded a dress with a “plunging neckline” for an outfit that’s more appropriate to the venue.

Kibler’s close friend, Jon Finkel, is the other man with a superstar personality. He’s likely the only MtG player to start a dating controversy and has won more than $300,000 during a career that’s spanned over a decade and a half. The 34-year-old former World Player of the Year spent time playing blackjack and poker and doesn’t play Magic professionally as much as he used to — he manages a hedge fund in New York — but he’s still one of the greats and held in the highest regard. His laid-back attitude and New York hipster outfit contrasts nicely with Kibler’s SoCal essence. Even in a room of 16 of the best players in the world, the cult of personality surrounding the pair is apparent. There may be better players in the game, but there are no larger stars than the two hall-of-famers.

Going pro

How do you go pro?

A Brief Chat with Pro Tour Philadelphia Winner Samuele Estratti

The goofy 26-year-old Italian economics major, who first qualified for the world championship in 2008, spends the first day sipping Pellegrino and trying not to show the effects of the cold he’s battling. At one point, he profusely apologies to opponent Tzu Ching Kuo for coughing on him during their match. Of all the guys in Seattle, Estratti, wearing a soccer shoes, a Euro satchel, and what can only be described as jean capri shorts, is the happiest to simply be part of the proceedings.

What makes someone good at Magic?

You have to always think of playing better. You can’t rely on luck. You need to have a team who can help you, make suggestions, share tools. That’s enough.

This is a relaxed group. Do you know a lot of people in the game?

I have many friends. Magic is good for making friends. I have made friends in Italy and outside Italy. When I go to their cities, we can party. I sleep in their houses. It’s good.

How do you think you’ll fare at the Players Championship?

I am surely an underdog because there are so many champions. It will be hard for me, but I can make it if something goes wrong for them. [Laughs]

How did you prepare for the tournament?

I’m Italian, so we don’t test. We say “I will test tomorrow, tomorrow.” I built my deck yesterday. I played an hour a day for the month before the tournament, probably less.

The short answer: by playing a lot and winning. The long answer is, like everything in the game, complicated. The Magic ecosystem has multiple levels, from the casual player to the 16 young men battling for $40,000 in Seattle. Each level of play has its own rules, regulations, and ways to get involved. The most informal, just above the people who play at home with friends, is Friday Night Magic (FNM). Held at local card stores, these tournaments are the entry point into competitive Magic. Players earn Planeswalker Points, which can help them gain free entree to the next two levels: Pro Tour Qualifiers (PTQ) and Grand Prix (GP). Players can also pay upwards of $40 to play in a PTQ or GP.

There are dozens of PTQs before each of the season’s three Pro Tour events, with the winner of each receiving an invitation to the next Pro Tour tournament. (The weekend of September 1, PTQs were held in Mexico City, Syracuse, and Singapore.) GPs arrive more infrequently, but there are still more than three dozen during the 2012-2013 season. Wizards’ hope is that a player will progress from FNM to PTQs and Grand Prix, then, possibly Pro Tours, having fun and spending money along the way. The company altered the rules in late 2011 to encourage more players to try to reach the highest levels of the game.

Wizards says around 30 players earn enough between tournament winnings and sponsorships to support themselves solely from the game. “I’ve made a decent living the past few years. I wouldn’t have to have another job, especially if I didn’t live in Southern California,” Kibler, who founded Gary Games, says with a laugh.

But even those who don’t make a living by playing the game can derive financial benefit from improving their standing within the Magic universe. The cards are expensive and building a competitive deck can cost upwards of $500, significantly more for tournaments that allow cards from older sets. The constant release of new sets forces players to continually to spend money. Doing well at GPs and PTQs can mean free cards or a help with travel to the next event.

“I’ve been in an airport about one out of every seven days for the past year.”

Once a player “makes it,” however, it’s not an easy life. The tournaments come frequently with few breaks in-between. “I calculated something like I’ve been in an airport about one out of every seven days for the past year,” Alexander Hayne, one of the 16 players in Seattle, says. “Wizards pays for some of it but a lot of it comes from me, appearance fees, and my sponsors.” Playing Magic for a living is an unusual job, but it is a job.

That anyone could make a living playing Magic is surprising; Finkel says he never expected to be playing events 16 years after his first one in 1996. Neither, it would seem, did anyone else. Few players, if any, plan to go pro. They simply enjoy the game, are skilled, and progress from that point. How long the run lasts is up to the individual. “Magic is definitely my favorite thing to do, and I’m glad that I can make enough money to keep doing it and support myself. But I was never like ‘I’m going to go pro.’ I just played as much as I could, and then it turned from a hobby into something I was making a little bit of cash at, so I kept going. We’ll see how long I keep playing. As long as it’s not crazy irresponsible, sure,” 2011 World Champion Turtenwald, who is barely of legal drinking age, says with a smile.

Turn on the bright lights

More than 7,500 spectators see Wednesday’s first feature match between Finkel and Shouta “Showtime” Yasooka. Seven of these people are present at the Showbox, the rest of them watching online. Wizards made the very intentional decision to focus on growing its presence on the Internet. “I think that’s where any type of coverage for any type of game, maybe even sports, is going. The Internet is the new thing. That’s how everyone wants to ingest their information. It’s fast. It’s accessible. Why shouldn’t everything migrate there?” Rashad Miller, one of the half dozen talking heads who will appear on the broadcast, says.

He has a point. Not everyone can make it to downtown Seattle — in the middle of a work day, no less — but the entire world can watch the action unfold online. It’s no different than office workers sneaking the NCAA Tournament on CBSSports.com. And ask yourself: Would you rather watch an NFL game on television or in person? Increasingly, the answer is the former. This shift is even more dramatic in the case of Magic, where high-level, intelligent play-by-play dramatically enhances the experience. This cannot be provided out-loud in-venue because the players need to concentrate. Having someone effusively deconstruct the last play doesn’t work. Online, however, it thrives.

If fans of the game can’t watch live, they can catch up and learn later with the archived feature matches, drafts, and Modern Deck techs, during which the players break down their decisions. All 20-plus hours of coverage available for your viewing enjoyment whenever you want.

“It’s changing how people learn Magic. In the past, the path was you durdle around with your friends and make a bunch of mistakes. Then you maybe go to FNM and play some more. You learn from the better players. Then you decide you want to go to a PTQ and you get better there. There was this whole arc of learning how to play Magic well. You didn’t have access to watch the best guys do it. Now you do,” Sheldon Menery, another broadcaster and the “Godfather of Magic,” says.

It’s an impressive effort. There are fair complaints on the live chat about the stream, which lags at points throughout the tournament, but Wizards puts together a strong, mostly professional broadcast. The men calling the action are enthusiastic and knowledgeable. The production adds value. During games, a large image of the card the commentators are discussing pops on-screen almost instantaneously next to the action. Between rounds, interviews with the players are informative and fun. It’s easy to see how Magic players around the world would enjoy the stream and use it for motivation. It could be them in the feature match.

David Ochoa, a Mustachioed Magician

The quiet pro wears a fedora and a mustache in Seattle. They fit him well. Ochoa is a character, but he lets his play, his appearance, and his skill do his talking. (He also writes wonderful, witty prose about the game.) The combination works.

When did you get into Magic?

I started back in 1995, but I didn’t start playing professionally until 2009. I played in a few tournaments before then, but I wasn’t trying as hard

What changed? Did you decide to take it more seriously?

Yeah. I started traveling to Grand Prix. That was a major step. I didn’t do that before, but you have to go to a lot of major tournaments to give yourself a chance to do well. I started to perform better and one thing led to another.

Are you surprised by how far it’s taken you?

Oh yeah. When I first started playing, this wasn’t exactly where I thought I would end up playing. It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster.

Why are you so good?

People have said that I’m very calm and analytical. You could interpret from that that I stay focused and don’t let my emotions cloud my judgement. I won’t let the setting of the tournament fluster me. Some people might realize they are playing against Brian Kibler, for example, and do a play they wouldn’t do if they were playing someone who they weren’t intimidated by. That’s not something that bothers me.

The mustache is a nice touch.

It’s a few months old. I put a bit of work into it.

Are you going to keep it after the tournament?

I don’t think so. I might, but I’m leaning towards not.

Why’d you do it?

It was something that I wanted to do for this. I thought it would be funny.

The stream also gives Wizards time to advertise products and tournaments. These range from understandable to ridiculous. There are calls to attend FNMs, specifically “Magic Celebration” on September 8 (free, while supplies last) or a bigger tournament near you. Need to protect your cards? Get Ultra*Pro game sleeves. If you really want to show your love of the game, there are always Magic-themed iPhone protectors or — and this is a stretch — Red Monkey leather bags decorated with Magic symbols.

If you stream it, they will come?

That said, occasional advertisements are a small price to pay for the quality of the coverage. And who knows, some people surely want Red Monkey’s “unique leather goods in the spirit of rock and roll.” The fact that in-person spectators inevitably find their way to an adjacent room where a television streams the coverage offers proof-of-concept for the broadcast’s success.

Still, future Players Championships might have more space for spectators. Tournament director Larabee hopes to find a balance. “It’s tough. We can’t really let spectators near where we are filming, but I hope in the future we’ll have a little more room,” he says. “Because of the names involved, I think wherever we end up holding it, there will be interest and people will want to come in and watch.”

Regardless of future space considerations for live, in-person viewing, the online experience will continue. If you stream it, they will come? “They will,” Larabee offers. “And they are.”

Day 2

Day 2: get that money

The mood inside Showbox on Thursday remains friendly, but it’s a little more tense than 24 hours prior. At the end of day two, 16 players will become four as the quartet with the best records advance to Friday’s semifinal. The difference between first place and fifth place is $35,000, so there’s a serious financial incentive to do well. But, at the end of the day, it’s still dudes getting paid to play a game. The competitors understand both sides of this reality.

“There’s definitely added pressure [because of the setting and the money], but you have to get into the mindset where you’re not bothered by it. You’re playing Magic. You’re playing an awesome game. You don’t have to worry about the money or the competition. I know how to play Magic,” Hayne, who labels himself as an underdog but sits in second place after Day 1 with a 4-2 record, says.

Expert ‘Magic’ players have a chess savant’s ability to visualize three and four moves ahead

It’s quiet, almost silent as play begins. The only noise is the cards slapping down on the table, and the players nervously and continuously shuffling their hands. They rarely talk. They know the game. They know the cards. They know what their opponent is doing, sometimes before he does. In addition to knowing the rules and understanding how to apply them, expert Magic players have a chess savant’s ability to visualize three and four moves ahead. They know what cards an opponent has in his deck, realize the situation on the board, and see the possibilities. When played well, it is, well, rather magical to observe.

The multiple nationalities — in addition to seven Americans, there are four Japanese contestants, and players from Brazil, Italy, Canada, Chinese Taipei, and the Czech Republic — lead to confusing situations. At one point, someone plays a card in a foreign language. There’s a brief pause while his English-speaking opponent requests an English translation. One of the other players, watching since his match already ended, searches his deck and pulls out the card. Problem solved.

Fans, including a pair wearing matching Harry Potter-inspired Hufflepuff shirts, infrequently wander into Showbox, but this is about the players and the live stream. The final round of the day features six players battling for two spots in the semifinal. (Showtime Yasooka, boasting a nearly impossible 10-1 record over the first 11 rounds, and Finkel are already through.) The three matches onstage are all relevant to the final four, and the show’s producers make sure the players understand the situation. “If you get to 1-1 [of the best of three matchup], tell us and stop playing,” one of the broadcast managers tells the six men before the 12th round begins. “We’ll probably put you on camera.”

Kibler’s match against Yuuya Watanabe goes to a third and final game. They stop playing, waiting for Finkel and Shuhei Nakamura to finish their game at the center table. Kibler uses the downtime to subtlety chug a Five-Hour Energy. Nakamura defeats Finkel, and the boom cam swings over to show the Californian battle his Japanese counterpart. A spot in the final four goes to the winner, but the drama is over quickly as nearly 8,000 watch Kibler succumb.

After a brief check of the standings, the announcer reads off the semifinalists. There is polite applause from the other players, the Wizards staff, and the half dozen fans for Yasooka and Watanabe, which grows louder for Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa and peaks for Finkel. Four men fighting for $40,000. It has a nice ring.

Yes, you have to pay for those

Paulo Vitor Damo da Rosa, the Brilliant Brazilian

Paulo, PVDDR or simply PV for short, starts out the Players Championship 0-3 but storms back to earn a spot in the final four. The 24-year-old, who’s majoring in International Relations at university in his hometown of Porto Alegre, made his professional debut at the 2003 World Championship. He’s the youngest player to reach 300 Pro Points. He’s also kind of a big deal in his native country.

What makes someone good?

You have to have a certain mindset, which is similar to the mindset you use to be a good chess player, bridge player, or poker player. If you don’t have what it takes, then there’s a threshold you won’t reach. But if you are somewhat talented, then practice means a lot. But not just playing. Reading, watching people play, and playing in competitive events.

What makes you specifically so good?

I look at the entire game as a whole pretty well. I can deviate from normal standards of play.

What is the scene like in Brazil?

Brazil doesn’t have a lot of players. We have maybe three PTQs and maybe one GP a year. But there are a lot of Brazilians who play online, especially since they started Magic Online PTQs.

Are you well-known there?

Yeah, in the Magic scene. I got recognized at the bus once. It was great.

Magic, it would seem, is ripe for expansion online. It attracts the type of people who are comfortable spending endless hours tinkering in front of a computer. Plus, the Internet version doesn’t require players to be in the same physical location to play each other. Wizards, which first released an online game in 2002, is trying to take advantage of the market. Magic Online is a growing revenue stream for the company. It features nearly everything the cardboard-based one does, including cards that need to be bought, often for high prices.

“I’ve been playing since I was five years old.”

Online PTQs, though, have been huge: they level the playing field, giving people who can’t get to a Tour Qualifier in person a chance to reach the Pro Tour. Reid Duke, the 2011 Magic Online champion, credits his success in the game almost entirely to these tournaments. “I’ve been playing since I was five years old, but I only made it to the Pro Tour in 2010,” he says. “It was finally when Magic Online started to have PTQs that it became an actual possibility for me. Rather than having to take time off from school and travel just to play PTQs for the long-shot first place goal, I could just schedule things so I could play in every online PTQ. Once you have 16 chances for every Pro Tour, then your odds become real good.”

Magic Online also reduces the intimidation factor — players can play in the comfort of their houses. While the game interface is far from perfect, it’s improving. Magic is still best when played in the flesh, but the Internet version is gaining popularity even among the oldest guard. Take it from Finkel: “Magic is much better to play with your friends. I’m lucky enough that I live in New York, and there are a lot of really good Magic players there… but playing online is fine. It’s a good game, especially when it’s a really good format like Innistrad block. If I have a couple hours, I’ll get in a draft. I’ll probably end up going to sleep and feeling like crap the next day.”

Day 3

Day 3: the final four and the future

By the time I arrive on Friday, Yasooka is already issuing a beatdown on Finkel. (The day’s semifinals are played one at a time in order to maximize the livestream.) In the Showbox’s Green Room bar — the ceiling is actually green — roughly 20 people, including a number of competitors who didn’t make the final four, casually observe the action or just hang out. Some watch the television in the corner that streams the game on stage in the next room, while others chat with each other, only occasionally glancing towards the unfolding match. Luis Scott-Vargas is the focal point of the five or six fans who found their way into the space. Vitor Damo da Rosa paces, preparing for his upcoming match against Watanabe. Ochoa eats a sandwich.

In short order, Finkel arrives in the room after the sound defeat. He stays to watch the second match for a few minutes, before citing exhaustion and leaving for his hotel room. He’s clearly mad at how quickly he lost, momentarily unable to take solace in his $10,000 winnings. In the main room — which now has fake trees, large toadstools, and other decorations for Saturday night’s Return to Ravnica party stashed in various corners waiting to be deployed — Watanabe beats PVDDR 3-1, setting up a final showdown with Yasooka.

Although the watching world expects Yasooka, the 2006 World Player of the Year, to win easily as he’s done all tournament, Watanabe (PoY in 2009) holds his own. He prevails in the first and third games, losing the second and fourth. Three days, more than 20 hours of Magic, and the $40,000 first-place check comes down to one final battle. This is, no matter what you think of Magic, a compelling and satisfying conclusion. As they’ve done all tournament, Zac Hill and Rich Hagon provide the call with skill. I don’t understand many of the details, but it’s fun to watch nonetheless. “This is the opening act of a little bit of ballet,” Hagon offers when describing a move in the middle of game five.

“This is the opening act of a little bit of ballet.”

Eventually, Watanabe gains the upper hand (though not by pirouetting), completes the upset, and walks away with first place. He grins and celebrates. Everyone claps. Presumably the nearly 9,000 people viewing the stream do as well. Some of them, undoubtedly, are already watching the replay, determining what they would have done differently if they were in the same situation. At some point in the near future they could be.

After the trophies are handed out, the photo ops are done, and the interviews are conducted, the Wizards staff nicely tells the three members of the press that it’s time to go. The crew needs to pack out the A/V equipment before setting up for tomorrow night’s party. The company is inviting true Magic fans to come, to talk about the game, and to hear teasers about the highly anticipated Ravnica. It’s a celebration of Magic.

As I’m walking out of Showbox and into the cool Seattle night, I notice one of the Wizards employees approach a few of the pros milling aimlessly about. “Anybody drafting tonight?” he asks hopefully. “Anybody need another?” The game goes on. The game always goes on.

Neal Stephenson interview: Kickstarter, swordfighting, and the big novel’s staying power

2012-08-21T11:02:01-04:00

neal_lead

The first line in any story about Neal Stephenson will reference his massive, massively complicated, and massively successful novels. And for good reason. In Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle, and others, the author has written genre-defining (and genre-busting) fiction. But Stephenson is more than a novelist; he’s also a thinker and a doer.

Two recent projects exemplify these qualities. Some Remarks, a remarkable collection of essays, interviews, a brief work of fiction, and a single new piece, finds Stephenson delving into his archives – something he rarely does – to highlight older pieces that tackle the topics of today: the coolness of geeks, the relevance of science fiction, the ambition of politicians. One of his other current endeavors is CLANG, a video game that hopes to reinvent a longtime Stephenson obsession, swordfighting interfaces. In a sprawling interview with The Verge, the author offered up some of his many plans and thoughts, including a new “research-heavy” novel, his trouble with Twitter, and why Kickstarter might be superior to venture capital.

You seem like you’re constantly working on different projects. You’re writing in the morning and tinkering in the afternoon. Now you have CLANG, which just raised more than $500,000 in a Kickstarter campaign. How do you keep it all straight? Is it a product of your personality that you’re doing so many different things?

The last year or so, since I finished REAMDE, I’ve been working on some projects so I haven’t been doing a lot of writing. That changed now because I’m under contract to write a book so I have to refocus things and get back to work. When I am in that normal work mode, it’s pretty simple. I get up, eat breakfast, write for a couple of hours, and then I have to go do something else to get my mind off it. That something else can be a lot of different things, but it’s usually something more of a geeky, technical nature.

Can you talk about the book you’re working on now?

I’m not ready to say much about it.

You’re just at the beginning stage?

Yeah.

“I think it’s healthy to bring writing some kernel of story pretty early in the process.”

You write about things that interest you. Are you surprised by the level of success you’ve achieved doing so?

I am. I was sort of oblivious to what was going on about 20 years ago when Snow Crash came out. I was aware that it was doing better than my previous books had done but that was it. It was a slow building book because it wasn’t launched with a huge book tour or lots of publicity. It was more viral, I guess. It took a little while for it to become clear that it was going to be a game-changer careerwise.

How much research do you do before you start writing a book?

This one is going to be comparatively research heavy. There will certainly be a few months where it’s almost all research and little to no writing. But I think it’s healthy to bring writing some kernel of story pretty early in the process because that immediately focuses the research effort. As soon as you start doing that, you can prune off a whole lot of unnecessary research that might have been done if you were taking a shotgun approach to it.

I can only imagine what this is going to be if you’re describing it as “research-heavy.”

Compared to REAMDE, which I had to travel for but it wasn’t research-heavy in the sense of familiarizing myself with a different historical period or anything like that.

Some Remarks is an anthology of sorts. Do you go back and read your older work on a regular basis at all?

Never. I absolutely never read any of my stuff once it’s published.

Was Some Remarks your idea or someone else’s, and how did you decide what you wanted to include in the book?

It was suggested to me that it might be time to do this. I rely on people who know more about the publishing industry to tell me when it is time to do this sort of thing. They said it was, so we went around to scrounge up all the old stuff. It took awhile to remember all the pieces because a lot of them have fallen through the cracks. We slowly put together a list of everything that I’ve published. Some of them seemed palatable. Some of them just didn’t make the cut. Some of them needed to be cut down and excerpted because they were really choppy. We put the book together that way, and I wrote a new piece about walking while you work.

Was going back through your work an interesting or fun process, or was it more a thing you had to do?

I think it’s more a thing I had to do. I mean, it’s not about me. [Laughs] We’re trying to put something together that the readers would enjoy. I hope that people will enjoy finding all this stuff in one place, browsing through it, and reading the bits they want. In general, I’m always a little superstitious about going back and devoting too much attention to older material. On some level, I suspect I’m like a shark: If I stop swimming I’ll suffocate.

CLANG hit its Kickstarter goal of $500,000. What was your reaction when you put the project up and throughout the process?

It was fascinating. The part I didn’t anticipate was the level of interactivity that was going to be involved. If the thing had just completely failed, then that would not have been the case. If it had blown through its target right away the way some of these things do, it wouldn’t have been the case either. But when you’re slowly building towards the goal and you don’t know whether you’re going to hit the goal or not, you end up paying a lot of attention to the thing and kind of gardening it. You’re interacting with the community of donors quite a bit, trying to figure out what works, and answering questions. It ended up being a full-time job during those 30 days to try to keep it moving and find ways to push it over the finish line.

I thought it was really interesting that in the Kickstarter video you said something along the lines of, ‘We’re just using me as the figurehead to help the promotion but the gamemaking will be handled by professionals.’ You were so upfront and honest about lending your starpower, for lack of a better term, to the project.

I think the process forces total honesty and full disclosure. In order to make this work, we needed to make a case that would pass muster with people who are very sophisticated about games and how games are developed. Anybody who knows anything about developing video games knows that it’s a very significant engineering challenge. It would make us look foolish to have a novelist, even if I am a geeky novelist, asking for money to make a game. Everybody would know to some level that that’s not real. Our approach was to tell it like it is all the way through and let the chips fall where they may in terms of whether people wanted to fund it or not. In the end, it worked, and we were able to make it work without committing to stuff that we wouldn’t be able to deliver.

Did people say they had heard about the project because you were involved, but they wanted to know how your group as a whole was going to pull it off?

Well, that’s obvious. We don’t need to hear from people to know that. A lot of the feedback that we got was clearly from intelligent, skeptical people who were in effect doing a kind of due diligence. When you raise money the old fashioned way – through a VC or whatever – there’s a due diligence process there, which can be pretty thorough. Looking at the Kickstarter process, you might think that it’s people throwing their money away, but I believe that the community there does a better job of actual due diligence than actual private investors might.

I was just reading an article about Curt Schilling, who burned through some number of millions of dollars trying to make a video game. If a geek novelist has no chance to make one, I can’t imagine a baseball player would.

I read about that. I have no idea what their failure mode was, but we figured that the best way to avoid a big failure like that was to pick a very small kernel. To pick a narrow goal and keep it narrow. We heard from a lot of would-be donors who said, “If you make it run on such and such operating system, if you make it work with the hardware that I have, or if you include my favorite weapon, I’ll donate more money. It would have been very easy for us to say, “Oh sure, we’ll do that.” It would have gotten us to the goal sooner, but we would have made a bunch of promises that we wouldn’t have been able to keep. Instead, we said we were only going to do one thing, take it or leave it, and that worked. If we can do what we said we were going to do, maybe we can go back to the well later and raise another round. For me, this way is a much saner and more comfortable project than raising a vast amount of money from someone and then trying to execute on an incredibly big and complicated project.

“I believe that the community there does a better job of actual due diligence than actual private investors might.”

In a World Policy essay you wrote the following: “‘You’re the ones who’ve been slacking off!’ proclaims Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University (and one of the other speakers at Future Tense). He refers, of course, to SF writers. The scientists and engineers, he seems to be saying, are ready and looking for things to do. Time for the SF writers to start pulling their weight and supplying big visions that make sense. Hence the Hieroglyph project, an effort to produce an anthology of new SF that will be in some ways a conscious throwback to the practical techno-optimism of the Golden Age.” Can SF save the world?

It would be saying a lot to say that SF can save the world, but I do think that we’ve fallen into a habitual state of being depressed and pessimistic about the future. We are extremely conservative and fearful about how we deploy our resources. It contrasts pretty vividly with the way we worked in the first half of the 20th century. We are looking at a lot of challenges now that I do not think can be solved as long as we stay in that mindset. This is more of an “if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail” kind of thing. My hammer is that I can write science fiction, so that’s the thing I’m going to try to do. If I had billions of dollars sitting around, I could try to put my money where my mouth is and invest it. If I did something else for a living, I would be using my skills – whatever they were – to solve this problem, but since I’m a science fiction writer, I’m going to try to address it through the medium of science fiction.

I would imagine the billion dollar “Save the World” Kickstarter is a little ambitious right now.

Well, you never know. There are worse ideas.

Do you feel like your fans have grown up with you?

More and more frequently, I’ll meet a reader who will mention a book that to me is a pretty recent book, something that I just finished writing, and he’ll say, “I read that when I was a kid.” It would seem that that is happening. I’m not as conscious of the passage of time, but that seems to be happening.

You originally wanted to make Snow Crash an interactive graphic novel but it was too early. Is the Mongoliad project the next step?

I wouldn’t say next step, but I have been interested for awhile in trying to figure out how new tech is going to change the way we tell stories. My ideas about that change along with the technology. The Mongoliad was the pilot project for a larger effort that we hope will make use of the Internet and a lot of modern media production technology to tell stories in a big world in a number of different media. We chose prose first because it’s the easiest and quickest thing to produce. We chose the Internet as the distribution channel for the same reason. The other stuff we’re working on including CLANG are efforts to expand that into other mediums, in this case video games. We’re just going to keep picking away at that, sort of like the guy in The Shawshank Redemption with the little hammer. Eventually, we may hit a stone wall and have to give up the project, but as long as we’re allowed to keep tunneling, we’ll keep doing so.

Do you think there will always be a place for the big novels that you write?

Oh yeah. There’s no doubt that the medium is here to stay. People like big stories. You get unmatched bang for the buck writing stories. The bang in this case is being able to plant a big universe and a lot of powerful images inside a reader’s head. The buck in this case is that there’s one person working alone without needing any special tools. That’s not going to change. They may be delivered in different ways, on e-readers or whatever, but they will be around for a long time.

How do you prefer to read?

I go back and forth between e-readers and paper. If I’m at home, I tend to prefer paper books. There’s no logistical hassles, and they can be read in any light, except total darkness, of course. If I’m traveling around at all, I’ll use an e-reader.

You have 25 tweets since 2010 on your Twitter account. It seems like you start, you stop, you start, you stop. Why do you keep coming back?

We set that up when The Mongoliad got started. It seemed like we should have that social media presence. I didn’t take control of it and start writing my own until a few months ago. I’ve put up maybe half a dozen tweets of my own since then. From now on, anything that shows up on that channel is going to be written by me, but I’m just not a habitual checker of it. It may be that I’m following the wrong people but all the stuff that I see is just gibberish. It’s big, long strings of links to things that I don’t really feel like clicking on because I know it’s going to take me off to some website and I’m going to lose a bunch of time browsing that website or watching that video. If all it’s doing is giving me links to other places that I might be interested in, it’s not useful to me. I prefer people who tweet funny or interesting remarks of their own without embedded links. There are a few people like that. Matt Ruff does a nice job. I just don’t go to Twitter that often, and because I don’t go there that often, I don’t tweet that often.

Are there other social media sites that you use more?

I follow Facebook. I have a number of people who I hear from on there, but I don’t really use it. I don’t have many outgoing posts.

Do you still read reviews of your books?

I tend to wait until a long time after the book has been published. Then, I go back and read a few. A lot of times, the publisher will put a bunch of them together and send them to me. I tend not to read them at the time the book comes out.

Alvy Ray Smith once said of you: “He’s on the shy side. A strong ego, but nicely hidden.” Is that a fair description?

[Laughs] I think that you have to have a certain kind of strong ego to be a writer. If you write things with the expectation that other human beings are going to read them, that’s a certain kind of statement of self-confidence in and of itself, right? I think it’s necessary to have a little bit of that in order to write at all, or in order to attempt difficult things. I would say I have a certain kind of stubbornness that causes me to do difficult things or things that make not work, and I guess you could think of that as ego.

Do you think you hide it well? It sounds like you do if you put that much thought into it.

Well, I mean, I guess that’s for other people to decide.

Tetris: can a Cold War classic evolve for the touchscreen?

2012-06-12T13:38:04-04:00

tetris_lead

The game couldn’t be simpler. One of seven shapes falls from the sky. As the “Tetrimino” inches down the screen, the player rotates it and moves it into place among other similar objects. Build a horizontal line across the board and the entire thing vanishes. Create four lines at once, and they all disappear as the gamer earns massive points. Rotate, drop, explode. Rinse, wash, repeat. Again. And again. And again. A simple and repetitive task, but one that’s beautiful when performed correctly.

Tetris, created in the mid-1980s by a Russian computer engineer and marketed to the world with the help of an affable Netherlands-born, New York-bred, Hawaii-based video game designer, is arguably the most recognizable computer game on the planet. Hundreds of millions of copies exist on every platform from ancient PCs and NES consoles to smartphones and Facebook. Tetris can be played in 50 languages and 185 countries, spanning roughly 95% of the world.

Sticky TOC engaged! Do not remove this!

More than 100 million people paid to download the game on their mobile phones. The game can help eliminate traumatic memories. A cadre of elite “professional” players conjure on-screen magic the casual gamer can barely comprehend. Tetris is expanding into a lifestyle brand, with pillows and stress blocks, lotto tickets and sleepwear. Techno Source publishes a board game called Tetris Link that the American Mensa organization gave the 2012 Mensa Select Award. Electronic Gaming Monthly called Tetris the “Greatest Video Game of All Time” in its 100th issue, while it ranked 2nd behind Super Mario Brothers in a 2007 IGN poll.

How does Tetris, designed at the tail end of the Cold War for systems with multiple button inputs, translate to a world of touchscreens and tablets?

Despite its popularity and classic status, the game finds itself at a crossroads. In a gaming landscape where downloadable content and add-ons provide vital revenue streams, how does virtually perfect Tetris generate continuous cashflow? More importantly, how does Tetris, designed at the tail end of the Cold War for systems with multiple button inputs, translate to a world of touchscreens and tablets?

History Lesson

A Brief History Lesson

Alexey Pajitnov did not set out to create one of the world’s most recognizable games. In fact, it’s impressive his creation made it out of the Soviet Union at all. The Moscow-born engineer developed Tetris on an Electronica 60 in 1984 while working for the Computing Center of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, an R&D center funded and controlled by the Communist government. In an interview with Joystiq in 2009, Pajitnov said with his thick Russian accent, “As soon as the first desktop [computer] appears, I needed to start playing with all my puzzles, riddles, and stuff.” Pajitnov drew inspiration from the Russian game “Pentominoes,” a puzzle game consisting of shapes made from five congruent squares. But there are 12 possible pentominoes, and Pajitnov realized that was too many for the fast-paced version he envisioned. The solution lay in the seven possible permutations of Tetriminoes.

Tetris was an immediate success, capturing the imagination of the Soviet Union in 1985 and jumping to North America and Europe two years later. The attraction was obvious. Tetris was different from most games at the time. “It had a broader appeal because it’s not about a cartoon character or a spaceship killing things. It was seen as slightly more mature. It felt more like chess, checkers, or backgammon,” Adam Cornelius, director of the documentary Ecstasy of Order: The Tetris Masters that focuses on the 2010 Classic Tetris World Championship, says. “It’s very pure. And most importantly, in its classic incarnation, Tetris has an endless difficulty curve. There’s really no end to how good you can get at it, which I think is the sign of every great game.”

Pajitnov created a winner, but the Soviet government owned the rights to the game. Therefore, the creator did not see a single ruble from his initial efforts. Enter Henk Rogers. The University of Hawaii-educated, Stuyvesant High School graduate had already created The Black Onyx, Nintendo’s first turn-based RPG, by the time he saw Tetris at the 1988 Consumer Electronics Show. After falling in love with the game, he secured the rights and his company, Bullet-Proof Software, released it for PC and NES in Japan. Tetris rapidly sold more than two million copies. A year later, Rogers and Pajitnov met for the first time, bonded instantly, and began a working relationship that lasts to this day. In the early 90s, Rogers helped his colleague move to the United States where they established Blue Planet Software as the exclusive agent for the game. The rest is gaming legend. “I was just trying to help Alexey in 1993. The ex-Soviets were trying to screw him out of the rights. I said, ‘I’ll help you.’ and I’ve been helping him ever since. It did become a career, not by choice, but by circumstance,” Rogers says, happy he followed fate’s path.

As the years progressed, Tetris jumped from platform to platform. The Gameboy edition was hugely popular, followed by editions for increasingly sophisticated systems as well as graphing calculators and other simpler devices. SNES begat Gamecube, which led to PS3. The game also expanded to new categories. As of April 2011, EA — which purchased the worldwide mobile rights in 2005 — had seen Tetris bought 132 million times, making it one of the best-selling mobile games ever. For comparison, the free, ad-supported version of Angry Birds boasted 140 million downloads by August 2011.

The sustained success of such a simple game surprised almost everyone. “I’ve been at this since 1989, and everybody back then thought it was going to be a dead issue by 1995. It was anything but a dead issue by 1995. It was a huge issue by 1995. It’s gone on to become the biggest issue on mobile phones,” Rogers says. “There are a couple of ways of looking at that. One is that in its simplicity, it hits a nerve that other games don’t because they are more complicated. The other way of looking at it is that we’ve done a pretty good job keeping it alive by adding bells and whistles over the years to keep it relevant.”

One essential development occurred very early. Rogers says Pajitnov’s original game revolved around the number of Tetriminoes a user could play rather than clearing lines. The first version Rogers helped design included bonus points for clearing two, three, and four lines — known as a Tetris — at once, a change that fundamentally altered the game forever. Later editions added moves such as twists like T-Spins and L-Spins that allowed gamers to maneuver in tight spaces and earn more points for doing so. (See sidebar for other variations.)

The latest in the long line of innovations is the one-touch system. The Tetris Pajitnov invented required seven buttons: left, right, rotate left, rotate right, hard drop, soft drop, and hold. That system doesn’t translate to touchscreens, nor would it work for the mouse-based game that Blue Planet’s engineers envisioned for Facebook. So the company developed Tetris Stars for Facebook and worked with EA to create Tetris One-Touch for mobile devices ($.99 for iPhone) and tablets ($6.99 for iPad). When they were building the games, the discussion centered around how much to change the core game. The answer: as little as possible.

“There was some back and forth during the design of whether we were going to focus on multitouch to let players use two fingers to pinch or rotate. We decided not to support multitouch because that would eliminate compatibility with mouse-based games. We iterated on a number of different prototypes before we ended up with the one-touch,” Jared Eden, a Tetris Stars producer, says. “You go out and try all sorts of different things. Some are really complex, and as you’re iterating, you distill down to the most basic, pure essence of the design to something so simple. That’s where we ended up, and we’re really happy with it.”

The key to the one-touch solution is the AI. It offers the player a few choices for piece placement, and he picks one by touching or clicking the on-screen silhouette. (If the player waits too long, the Tetrimino falls straight down.) As with regular Tetris, the speed of the game increases as the player clears more lines and levels up. The AI is not perfect—a player can get a new set of choices by clicking or touching elsewhere—but it provides a new playing experience that works well on a touchscreen or Facebook.

“You have to move a block over three rows, rotate it, then drop it, and do that in a matter of seconds. You can’t do that on a touch device. It’s impossible.”

Indie gamemaker Zach Gage, who admits he’s never loved Tetris but respects the game, thinks Eden and the Blue Planet crew made a smart decision when updating the game for touchscreens. “The difficulty of Tetris is when it gets fast and you have to make these mechanical motions. You have to move a block over three rows, rotate it, then drop it, and do that in a matter of seconds. You can’t do that on a touch device. It’s impossible,” he says. “I think that’s why they were smart. They looked at it and said, ‘This is impossible. We’re going to have to change it, so let’s make the minimum number of changes that we need to make to completely change it from that mechanical aspect. We need to make people interact with it.'”

Gage’s thoughts are accurate: Tetris Stars and EA’s One-Touch are elegant solutions for the masses. (The mobile version also features Marathon mode, which plays much more like traditional Tetris and fails for the mechanical reasons Gage describes, as well as Galaxy mode, which requires player to perform challenges for coins. The rewards are similar the gamification elements on TetrisFriends.com, an online repository where players earn ranks, rewards, tokens, and stars.) The huge number of paid downloads indicate that it found a large audience. which was exactly the intention of the gamemakers. “We need to reach out to the casual gamer market that has gone the way of the casual gamer,” Rogers says. “That’s where the market is and we have to shape that market.” One-touch Tetris achieves this goal. But in attempting to attract the casual market, did Rogers and Blue Planet go too far?

Thinking for Yourself

On thinking for yourself

The two opinions pictured above sum up the wide variety of responses to touchscreen or click Tetris. Some love it, some hate it. Take this from a person who spent far too much time playing One-Touch Tetris on an iPhone when he should have been writing this article: It is fun and addicting, but it’s vastly different from the traditional game. The touch system is a necessary innovation, but it makes game play almost entirely speed-based. Relying on the AI to provide options is another massive difference. It does most of the thinking required. Then, you touch a spot on the screen, and the computer performs the mechanical manipulations as well. You are constantly aware of the “controls”—in this case, the touchscreen—in a way you are not on the arcade or console version. As a result, getting into the glazed eye zone where you are almost one with the game is difficult, if not impossible.

Getting into the glazed eye zone where you are almost one with the game is difficult, if not impossible

Growing up, I was a casual Tetris player, logging more than a few hours in offshoots like Dr. Mario, but wasn’t what you’d call a hardcore player. I went through three distinct phases after buying the app. The first one, which lasted the first 10 plays or so, was mostly the confusion of getting used to the controls. The touchscreen is simple to understand, but it takes a while to master. Then, I really started to enjoy playing. It was challenging without being too hard or too easy. I played pretty much constantly for a week or two. Now, I find myself somewhere in between. I still enjoy the game, but little details bother me. At higher levels, it’s almost impossible to get a new set of options if the AI doesn’t have the one you want. The speed overwhelms the touchscreen. If you’re too slow and the piece falls to the middle of the screen, it’s pretty much game over. It’s very, very hard to recover if the pieces get too high on the screen. Since the AI does so much work for you, One-Touch Tetris is repetitive in a way the console-based game isn’t. Overall, it’s fun, but I haven’t been playing nearly as much.

In engineer Eden’s mind, the game is changed, but not diminished. “It’s not that it dumbs it down. It’s a different thought process. With traditional control input where you’re discreetly managing the location, movement, and the drop, you’re using that spatial orientation. With the one-touch method, you’re choosing options that have already been decided for you. It leads to different ways of thinking and different styles of play,” he says.

All valid points. And yet, another opinion is also understandable. Alex Kerr, one of the only Grandmasters (more on that below) from the United States and a star of Ecstasy of Order, says, “Tetris Stars [and One-Touch] comes down to clicking the mouse really quickly [or touching the screen] and the game does a lot of the thinking for you in terms of how to make the piece fit. As long as you’re clicking around where you want to go, you can get the pieces down quickly. You still need to set things up—you can’t randomly do it—but it does change the possibilities a lot,”

Essentially, both Eden and Kerr argue that the game had to change, but draw different conclusions about the benefits and costs of those alterations. The opposing viewpoints result from their positions in the Tetris universe. The producer is looking toward the future with an eye on pleasing the growing casual gaming market. Kerr, who has spent thousands of hours mastering the old arcade games such as Grandmaster 2 and 3 and the NES version, takes the position of an expert. The good news is that the opinions are not mutually exclusive. The truth: There’s enough Tetris out there for everyone.

Grandmaster

Kerr played Tetris throughout his life, but seriously started around the time the game came out on Nintendo DS in 2006. The San Jose State computer programming major hones his skills in the college’s arcade. His Twitter feed is full of tweets like: “First game of TGM2+ Master today was 8:11.11 GM Green. Lost an idiotic amount of time in 900.” He loves and respects the game. (His “real quick” emailed explanation of how one reaches the rank of Grandmaster extends on for six detailed paragraphs. Basically, it requires being really, really good at Tetris.)

Tetris Grand Master 3 is brutal. Some players started to doubt the Grand Master rank even existed in the game. There are less than ten worldwide, but as of the past year we do have a couple of representatives from the United States in this camp. Again, there are various subsystems that are generally evaluating “play quickly, make tetrises,” but the game gets much faster — it’s comparable to Death mode from the previous game. If you can still perform to the same standards in spite of the speed hikes, you unlock an invisible credit roll. Now, it’s not just pass or fail — you also need to continue scoring tetrises and playing quickly throughout the ~55 second credit roll. Even still, the highest grade that can be attained through normal play is MasterM (the highest of several new oddly lettered Master level ranks in TGM3). You see, the game is keeping track of average performance using your account on the machine and, without giving you any indication of your improved performance, viciously demoting all of your “GM-worthy” performances to MasterM. Over half of your past handful of attempts must be “GM-worthy” before you assigning a Promotional Exam for the title: “Make another Grand Master performance. Now. This game.” If you fail to earn the grade this run, you’re back to wondering when you’ll be assigned another attempt. If you manage to pull everything together, then you’re truly world-class.

But more importantly, Kerr is a member of a small, passionate, and highly skilled group of Tetris aficionados who feel like they are being overlooked as Blue Planet and other licensees reach for an increasingly casual gaming audience. “If they release a new game for the handheld or mobile, a lot of people are going to buy it regardless because Tetris is an inherently interesting game. I think that’s a little bit unfortunate. Since it’s so successful, they can do whatever they want. They don’t necessarily need to listen to feedback about some things, which will hold them back in certain areas,” he says.

Kerr wants to see consistency for game aspects such as speed settings, controls behavior, and spin detection. (He does credit the companies with making some important changes to the multiplayer games on TetrisFriends.com.) There are some basic guidelines across titles, but few hard and fast rules. For the casual gamer, these inconsistencies won’t matter. For example, they likely won’t notice the “low fall speed and lack of increasing difficulty in the semi-invisible section of Tetris Friend’s Survival,” or even know what Kerr means when he expresses this frustration. A player with the grandmaster’s skill, however, will find himself playing some versions of the game for hours on end without losing. The hardcore community doesn’t ask for much. They simply desire new ways to compete that are challenging yet not endless. They don’t find these options in the newer games.

There have been a huge number of different versions of Tetris. Some were faithful adaptations. Others featured strange, sometimes terrible, sometimes brilliant, innovations. Here are some of the highlights (more here):

Hatris (1990)

Pazhitnov designed this versions that requires a player to line up five identical hats. It also spawned Hateris, a version in which an algorithm delivers the worst possible Tetrimino for that situation.

Tetris 2 (1993)

Different shapes, different shades, and this time, there’s bombs in it. That about sums this debacle up.

Tetris & Dr. Mario (1994)

The game brought the two games together into one package. Two-player mode was a hit.

3D Tetris (1996)

A failed attempt at adding another dimension. It did lead to this enthusiastic promo.

Tetrisphere (1997)

The Nintendo 64 game from H2O Entertainment Corporation took the flat board and turned it into a sphere. Players stacked pieces together in an effort to reach the center. It looks strange to say the least.

Magical Tetris Challenge (1999)

What Tetris really needed at the turn of the millennium was a story mode featuring Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy. Or not.

The experts also hope to create some type of formal professional circuit, which requires a universalization of standards. It is a work in progress, but movement is slowly gathering steam. There are certainly reasons to think it could succeed. “Tens of thousands of players have dedicated the time to truly mastering the game on a level that the casual players doesn’t even realize exists. There’s this whole unheralded world of elite Tetris playing that I think has the same value as Scrabble tournaments, spelling bee tournaments, or crossword puzzle tournaments. In that world, games as sports, Tetris has a place,” Cornelius says.

Videos of Tetris tournaments depict a scene that is simultaneously hugely dorky and massively compelling. It is not for everyone, of course, but really, what is?

While Blue Planet is actively courting the casual gamer market with some of its newer games, they also say they are encouraging the experts to show off their skills. “We have supported the efforts of that community in sponsoring tournaments, where master players such as John Tran and Jonas Neubauer have walked away with world championship titles,” Rogers says. (Neubauer’s victory over Harry Hong is here. He’s the one wearing a football jersey.)

Tetris tournaments will not be as big as spelling bees, but they don’t have to reach that level. There’s no reason to think a small group of pros and their supporting cast couldn’t find a sustainable model. And maybe, just maybe, Tetris tournaments will gain traction with the masses. No one thought Texas Hold ’em would sweep the nation. And millions more people have played Tetris than the previously obscure version of the card game.

Future of Tetris

Due to its remarkable success, Tetris won’t disappear. It’s too well ingrained and, to be blunt, brilliant. “At its core, it’s not just an activity. It’s something which is a pleasure center. Whereas other games you play with your friends or you play to get a high score, Tetris you just play even if there is no friends or high score involved. People play it as a Zen meditation exercise. Then, you can play it with your friends and that’s a bonus,” Rogers says.

“At its core, it’s not just an activity. It’s something which is a pleasure center.”

For Gage, the success is even simpler: “The draw of Tetris is that it has that easy curve. Even if you’re not good at Tetris, you can make a line. There’s nobody out there who fails to make a line. That makes them feel good about what they are doing,” he says. While making games, he learned that people will play and enjoy difficult games but only if the strategy is built upon an easily achievable task, for example clearing a line. (He attributes the success of his game Spelltower to his understanding of this phenomenon.)

But there is undeniably a push and pull between capturing the casual gaming audience and not alienating the experts who serve as the best ambassadors for the brand. “[The game developers] are spicing it up, but at the core, it’s really the simplicity that is the appeal. There’s a balance between adding new features and keeping something that’s not broke the same,” Cornelius says.

While One-Touch and Tetris Stars filter through the ecosystem, Blue Planet continues to move forward. According to Eden, future developments could include arcade games where each button is mapped a choice or a Kinect version where players can reach out and grab the pieces. They will continue to advance the quality of the AI, eventually offering multiple ones with each focusing on a different type of play. Rogers likens these to tennis coaches or caddies, who advocate for alternate strategies in similar situations. The one-touch future offers a slate of new input options limited only by the designers’ imagination.

But the one-touch future also means the gaming world will continue to evolve past Tetris. It is a game rooted in the technology and limitations of the 1980s and 1990s. The move to touchscreens and gesture-based systems like Kinect will take future versions of Tetris further away from the core of the game. BPS, EA, and the rest of the licensees are attempting to shoehorn something that relies on buttons into a touchscreen world. (It’s not just Tetris; think how many beloved games from the past don’t translate.) They managed to make a fun and reasonably faithful version, but the fact remains that while One-Touch Tetris shares some DNA with the original, it’s an entirely different species. New developments in technology are making the old game just that: a thing of the past that doesn’t quite fit in the future.

“I think the one-touch is really successful, but I think at some point, it’s going to be hard for them to continue. It will survive because it’s Tetris and everybody knows it. But in 30 years, people are not going to grow up playing Tetris on touch devices. They are going to grow up playing games that were designed for touch devices,” Gage says.

“And hopefully that won’t be Angry Birds, but we’ll see,” he adds, laughing.

Noah Davis (@noahedavis) got much better at Tetris than he intended while reporting and writing this story. He is still pretty bad.

Photo credit: Giuseppe Licari