A juicy excerpt from billionaire Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen‘s new autobiography caused plenty of chatter around Seattle and the broader tech world this past week, and considering that he’s starting a book tour, I guess that’s the point. The stunning vignette, in the excerpt published in Vanity Fair, was a scene in which Allen writes that he caught co-founder Bill Gates and CEO Steve Ballmer conspiring to dilute Allen’s stake in the company while he was undergoing cancer treatment.

That blow-up, in Allen’s retelling, basically sealed his departure from day-to-day duties at Microsoft. Gates called Allen a friend in a reply statement, but did say he may remember events differently. In any case, I kind of thought the attention to that very noteworthy episode actually obscured the more nuanced, diverse portrait that Allen sketched of the two entrepreneurs’ relationship. Basically, it emerges as a complicated partnership—over the years traced in that writing, Allen is by turns amazed by, suspicious of, and angry at Gates. In any case, the whole book should be good reading.

—Amazon.com continued its march into new cloud-based businesses by rolling out a music player and storage service tied to Android devices. There was a lot of focus devoted to the spat that Amazon apparently kicked up by not securing licenses from the record labels. But the even more interesting angle may be that Amazon is leapfrogging ahead of other big-name competitors—especially Apple—by taking personal music collections up to the cloud for storage and playback in a variety of places. Basically, it looks like Amazon is trying to position its freemium service as iTunes for Android—which is a pretty nice market to pursue.

—I sat down with Don Merino from Intellectual Ventures, Nathan Myhrvold’s unique patent-licensing and invention firm in Bellevue, WA, to get an inside take on how the company went about setting up a first-of-its-kind modern, large-scale middleman market for intellectual property. Merino was a pivotal player in this tale, having personally purchased about half of the first 1,200 patents that Intellectual Ventures secured—the portfolio is said to number above 30,000 at this point. This topic gets more energy every week, it seems, particularly in mobile—just this week, Google announced it was going big in a bid for Nortel patents in a bankruptcy auction.

—We also checked in with the folks at Seattle’s Zipline Games, which rolled out its new Moai development platform and cloud-hosting service for professional game developers. Moai’s main selling point is that it tries to bust down language barriers in game building by letting developers use Lua, a familiar game coding language, and translating that work into the different formats needed to make mobile games … Next Page »

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It seems like the pace of mobile and casual game development is already pretty fast. But the folks at Seattle’s Zipline Games think it could be faster.

Today, the startup is unveiling the beta version of its new Moai mobile-game development platform. The idea is to take friction out of game-building by offering a single open-source platform that will allow developers to produce both the front-end elements seen by consumers and the back-end infrastructure by using a single familiar coding language. And after the game’s deployed, Moai offers cloud hosting to keep everything running.

Why is this noteworthy? As CEO and co-founder Todd Hooper put it, publishing a game can require mastery of separate coding languages for iPhones, Android devices, and the back-end architecture. Moai’s open-source platform is based on Lua, a common gaming language, allowing it to serve as a digital translator between all the other languages.

That could speed up game development by allowing even small companies to deliver their product without having to find someone with different coding skills to do the translating for another device or the cloud-based hosting portion.

Zipline’s attempt to help make game development even quicker comes at an interesting time in the growth of mobile, casual, and social games. There’s a bit of tension in the gaming world between bigger console producers and the smaller, startup-oriented mobile and social developers.

This was embodied by Nintendo President Satoru Iwata’s recent keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in March, where he questioned whether cheap, simple games would erode the ability of higher-end games to charge premium retail prices. Among his notable quotes: “Our industry has certainly expanded, but it also gives me concern because I feel our business is devalued … Next Page »

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[Updated 4:30 p.m. with comment from CEO] Seattle mobile-game startup Z2Live’s latest venture round is worth about $2.5 million, according to a regulatory filing today. Z2Live had previously announced a Series B investment from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, joining previous investor Madrona Venture Group, but hadn’t disclosed the amount. Z2Live is focusing on social gaming for mobile devices, with an initial game called “Trade Nations.” The company is led by CEO David Bluhm, a startup veteran previously of Medio Systems, and CTO Damon Danieli, a Microsoft veteran who designed some of the core features of Xbox Live. Madrona had previously invested a total of $4 million, including at the seed stage in 2008. Bluhm notes that the round was more for strategic reasons than operating cash, as Z2Live “turned very comfortably profitable back in November.”

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A little Tuesday catch-up following the holiday weekend (for us, anyway) in Seattle-area tech news:

• Amazon made its long-rumored Netflix challenge official with this morning’s announcement of a subscription streaming video service.

Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) already had an a la carte version called Instant Videos, which offers about 90,000 movie and TV titles. Today’s news is that a subset of those offerings—about 5,000 titles—can be streamed for free by members of Amazon Prime, the retailer’s premium shipping service.

The selection sounds like it will be familiar to Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX) streaming customers. Amazon noted that titles like “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” and “Amadeus” will be available, which I happened to skip over just yesterday on my Netflix-enabled PlayStation 3.

But Amazon is also making a point to compete on price.

As others have pointed out, Netflix streaming alone costs about $8 a month, or $96 annually. Amazon Prime—based around unlimited fast shipping for select purchases—costs $79 per year, and the streaming videos are a complementary addition.

Which makes me wonder: Is this about streaming videos to consumers, or about building a broader empire known as Amazon Prime? Sounds like a classic loss-leader.

• Microsoft had some media types over for a tour yesterday and revealed … Next Page »

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PlayFirst, the San Francisco-based maker of popular iPhone, iPad, and Facebook games such as Diner Dash and Chocolatier, said Tuesday that it has raised $9.2 million in venture and debt financing. Mayfield Fund, Trinity Partners, DCM, and Rustic Canyon Ventures provided a $5.2 million venture infusion, while Comerica Bank provided a $4 million loan. Playfirst president and CEO Mari Baker said in a statement that the company plans to use the funds to expand into the burgeoning social and mobile gaming markets and to “aggressively optimize the PlayFirst brands that consumers love.”

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Early Amazon investor and aQuantive founder Nick Hanauer is teaming up with Zillow co-founder and former Expedia CEO Rich Barton on a new social gaming venture, according to Brier Dudley of The Seattle Times.

The company, called “King of the Web,” will reportedly roll out in December. Until then, all we know is that the gaming startup will be part of the new wave of social gaming—a young canon that includes titles like FarmVille, and provides something of a hybrid experience between casual and metagaming.

Hanauer confirmed the plans for the company with The Seattle Times, but didn’t expand much on what the gaming startup will specifically be doing.

“Rich and I think it’s a really really cool idea. The space is really big and growing fast,” he told The Seattle Times. “Great content which entertains will for a very long time be a growth industry on the Internet.”

Nick Hanauer

Rich Barton

The Seattle-area has grown into a stronghold for casual gaming pioneers, such as like WildTangent, PopCap Games, Big Fish Games, and GameHouse (RealNetworks). But with the emergence of startups like Zynga (the maker of FarmVille and other popular social games), many casual gaming companies are struggling to stay relevant in the new social gaming space. In fact, even more traditional massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) have followed suit. Redmond, WA-based Novel rolled out the alpha of its first social MMO, Empire & State, last week.

As for “King of the Web,” Hanauer tells The Seattle Times the company is being started with the help of a group of aQuantive veterans, adding, “It’s definitely an idea where if it works it will be huge.”

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I have never played a massively multiplayer online (MMO) video game. Okay, that’s not entirely true. I played World of Warcraft once. In college. I was experimenting. But that was it, I never got hooked. I guess I failed to see the point of getting so invested in the virtual world, when I could barely keep up with all of my interests and responsibilities in the real world.

But what if you could use an MMO as a training ground for the real world? Would you be able to justify spending your free time in virtual reality if it provided you with the life skills needed to be a good business owner, financier, politician, CEO, or leader in your daily life?

That would change the nature of the game, right?. And that’s the idea at Novel (formerly Novel Interactive), a small gaming startup in Redmond, WA. The company’s new MMO, Empire & State, is being introduced online in alpha form today.

“I think games like ours that are going to take games out of the traditional orcs, and dwarves, and elves realm, are going to start opening up the game industry to people who didn’t define themselves as gamers before,” says chief executive Brayden Olson. “Maybe they’re in business, or are politicians, or Xconomists, or reporters.”

Unlike other games designed to mimic real life experiences, like The Sims, or Second Life, (which, it should be noted, are both single-player) Empire & State has a specific feeling to it. Creative director Mike Marr describes it as a “political and economic strategy MMO,” meaning rather than fighting and pillaging in a fictional fantasy world, characters develop within a society modeled after real life. Players, who start out as citizens of an empire, can own homes, develop businesses, and compete and collaborate with one another to build that empire. There are jobs for everyone as small business owners, politicians, presidents of empires, criminal overlords, military strategists, business tycoons—even bounty hunters.

“It’s not your traditional MMO like World of Warcraft that focuses entirely on role play elements of developing characters, beating monsters and gaining loot,” Marr says. “This game is more on the strategy side—politics, economics. There is some war, but that war is more on the territory side.”

'Wanted' poster from Empire & State.

This idea of an MMO for the average person across all demographics—not just the younger to older male audience—is something relatively new, at least to very casual gamers, like myself. But that’s the idea, according to the Novel team. Traditional old school MMOs like EverQuest, or World of Warcraft, although massively popular within their respective demographics, have never really caught on with the casual gamer.

But the morphing of casual gaming into a new arena—social “metagaming,” where game concepts are applied to real life experiences—has had ripple effects with MMOs. In fact, the definition of MMO is starting to change, to incorporate more asynchronous games like Zynga’s massively popular FarmVille, Mafia Wars, and other games you can often find people tapping into from Facebook or mobile devices. This new class of games has taken the social interactivity concept of an MMO, and repackaged it into a bite-size gameplay experience that casual gamers can dive into for a few minutes at a time, rather than a few hours (a time commitment more often associated with traditional MMOs). What Novel is hoping to do, is create a more traditional MMO in look and feel and gameplay experience that appeals to both casual and hardcore gamers on a level playing field.

“I used to be an avid MMO player in my 20s, but I don’t have the time to play like that now,” says Marr. “There are a bunch of other gamers who aged with me. We still want to play, but we can’t play for six hours a day. Empire & State’s goal is you can log in, play for one or two 20-minute sessions, and still play the game.”

That’s not to say you can’t play for six hours straight. What the new game will allow, according to Olson and Marr, is a world where characters can also progress in 20-minute increments, rather … Next Page »

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Two years ago our very own tech editor, Greg Huang, found himself questioning what exactly “casual” gaming was. That was before he attended his first Casual Connect, a three-day conference that draws over 3,000 casual gaming professionals to Seattle very year.

Back then the big news was casual gaming’s breakout from “core” gaming, the bigger of the two genres that attracted primarily boys and young men to action-heavy console-based systems. At the conference in July 2008, industry leaders began to see signs of change in the casual gaming sector. The lines between core and casual players began to blur. A whole new market sprang up for “omni” gamers, of people who wouldn’t buy a console but would play readily available games on, say, Facebook, or at a friends’ house. That was also the year the general gaming audience widened to include far more women and consumers of all ages.

At the 2009 conference, game developers and investors applauded casual gaming as the sector that “will save us all.”FarmVille, the simulated farming game that now attracts an estimated 80 million players on Facebook, the iPhone, and other technology platforms. The rising popularity of location-based “check in” applications like Foursquare and Whirl, is another example of an emerging sector born out of the intersection of casual gaming and social networking. Why? Because of the growing popularity of “metagaming.” This is the notion that when gaming concepts are applied to real life experiences, casual games can reach more gamers over a larger variety of platforms. One leader in this segment is

As if all that weren’t enough to keep you gasping for breath in your attempt to keep up with an industry that seems to be moving at warp speed—perhaps casual gaming isn’t so casual after all?—this year a new trend has emerged: social gaming. And this one, according to many casual game developers I listened to at the conference, may cause a sea change.

Although this was my first time attending Casual Connect, and I am by no means an expert, talk of social gaming seemed to seep into most of the panels and sessions throughout the week. “The Future of Social Gaming.” “How to Monetize Social Games Globally.” “Engaging the World through Social Media.” “Top 10 Social Game Metrics.” “The Next Frontier: The Future Beyond Social Games in the US and Europe.” “Metagaming: The Gamification of Life. Exploring Game Mechanics Outside of Games.” “Cloud-Powered Social Gaming.” “Competing for the Social Games Dollar.” “Casual Game Revolution.” “Going Social—How We Did It.” “The Year in Social Games: 2009-2010.” “Extra! Extra! Big Casual Game Distributors Go Social!”

The session names don’t lie. This year the hot topic at Casual Connect … Next Page »

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As a newly recruited tech writer here at Xconomy Seattle, I feel I have to be straight with you and reveal a potentially career-threatening secret: I have never been to a gaming conference, “casual,” “core,” or otherwise. Now I know what you’re thinking—how could that be? Well, I’ll tell you, I’m not quite sure. I’ve been known to enjoy playing Wii Fit at home or Words with Friends on my iPhone. But all you gamers and game developers, don’t worry, I’m eager to take my gaming knowledge up a few notches this week at my very first gaming conference, Casual Connect.

Casual Connect is a three-day conference full of seminars, video game exhibitions, business meetings, lectures, and networking opportunities for the people who play and develop casual games. The event occurs three times a year—once in Seattle, once in Kyiv, Ukraine, and one more time in a rotating European location. Run by the Casual Games Association, an international casual games organization, the conference will bring more than 3,000 gaming professionals and fans from all over the world to countless events at Benaroya Hall and the Triple Door from Tuesday, July 20 to Thursday, July 22. And from what I hear from last year’s coverage, the conference is quite a spectacle.

Though not quite as big of an event as the Penny Arcade Expo, which draws gamers in the tens of thousands, Casual Connect is a must for those who run in casual gaming circles. The schedule is jam-packed full of events covering topics ranging from game design to emerging trends, mobile gaming, game development, social gaming, and games for gamers.

I’ll be dropping by some of the events throughout the week (though I wish I could spend three whole days delving into the casual gaming world) and tweeting live coverage from the conference, which you can follow at Twitter.com/XconomySeattle. In the meantime, here are my top 10 interesting sessions (and trends) to watch for:

—The Future of Social Gaming: Lessons Learned to Date and the Choices Before Us (Tuesday, 10 am)

Playdom CEO John Pleasants discusses the how companies choose the right path to success amidst the rapidly growing industry, from game innovation to third party publishing deals, branded content, and multi-platform games.

—Browser Tech Smackdown! (Tuesday, 2 pm)

Jim Greer (founder & CEO, Kongregate), David Helgason (CEO, Unity), Danielle Deibler (Engineering manager for Flash platform, Adobe), Mark DeLoura (game developer advocate, Google) discuss how the web gaming industry has changed over the last five years, and where they think the technology will go—Flash? 3D? Something new?

—Playing God! Creating ‘God Games’ for a Broader Audience (Tuesday, 3 pm)

Last Day of Work founder and lead designer Arthur Humphrey on the increasing popularity of ‘God Games’—from core gaming to mega-hits—the pros and cons of the genre, innovations in game design, and the design and implementation considerations needed to make these games more accessible to casual gamers.

—Why Friends Matter: Designing Social Emotion (Wednesday, 10 am)

Playfish general manager Dan Fiden talks about designing meaningful social … Next Page »

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Seattle-based Big Fish Games, a leading casual game developer and distributor, has teamed up with Z2Live to add new voice chat and multiplayer capabilities to Big Fish’s iPhone and iPad “Big City Adventure: San Francisco” applications. Z2Live, a social mobile gaming startup, first unveiled its multiplayer voice chat feature, which will allow players to talk to each other while playing a mobile game on devices like the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad, before the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco back in March. However, Big Fish’s hidden object game is the first to actually use the feature, which also enables players to send push notification and e-mail invites to friends. Seattle-based Z2Live raised $3 million in funding from Madrona Venture Group last August.

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I don’t care whether I’m good enough at Dance, one of the online games that’s part of the new music site Loudcrowd, to impress other users. What I want to know is whether I dance better than Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick.

As part of his January 30 tour of the Cambridge Innovation Center, the Govinnovator stopped by the offices of Conduit Labs, the software startup behind Loudcrowd. Co-founder and CEO Nabeel Hyatt sat Patrick down at a computer and invited him to try Dance, a simple video game where you try to click on directional arrows at the exact moment that a rotating marker passes over a symbol. Your performance determines whether your avatar dances more like Fred Astaire or Jerry Lewis in a little video that’s shown to your game partner.

I was in Patrick’s press entourage during the visit, but I couldn’t see how well he danced. Given that the tour was a bit rushed, he couldn’t have been too fleet-footed—nothing close to his impressive performance in a table-tennis match against Google’s Steve Vinter during a visit to the search giant’s Cambridge office last May.

I’ll probably never be a good dancer, but after playing about six games of Spin, another game on Loudcrowd, I can report that I’m the proud owner of one virtual goodie—the track “Underwater” by Mock & Toof. (Never heard of them before.) Alas, I haven’t earned enough decibels—i.e. credits—to play my track for other Loudcrowd users.

As you may have guessed by this point—or as you may have read, if you’ve been following the news from the South by Southwest Interactive Festival, which just wrapped up in Austin, TX—Loudcrowd is a music-driven casual gaming community, finally launched this week after about 18 months of behind-the-scenes labor at Conduit Labs. In technical terms, Loudcrowd is a Flash-based website with a continuous shared soundtrack, where registered users create social networking profiles and customized avatars and then play music-related games. Playing the games wins users points that they can eventually use to become DJs and choose the music other users hear.

At least, I think that’s the goal. But it may be that the competition is beside the point. In the language of Web marketing, Loudcrowd is designed to keep users entertained, engaged, and on-site, the better to sell them Loudcrowd points (the site’s virtual currency), iTunes and Amazon tracks, and other products that Conduit may have up its sleeve. In fact, the company boasts in a press release distributed yesterday that “user engagement on the site has…been over twice the average session length of leading online music sites such as Last.fm, Project Playlist, and Pandora.”

Back in August 2007, when Conduit announced that it had collected $5.5 million in venture funding from Prism VentureWorks and Charles River Ventures, Susan Wu, then a partner at CRV, told me she liked the market Conduit was entering, because “it marries the design philosophies of creating lightweight, zero barrier applications that are geared towards mass market audiences with very emotionally engaging, immersive environments.”

Wu wasn’t able to describe Conduit’s plans in greater detail at the time, but she did say the startup hoped to build on the growth of social networking sites like Facebook by making online socializing more shared and synchronous. “Like the Wii and Guitar Hero reinterpreted what it meant to experience social entertainment in a living room environment, there’s a new type of entertainment waiting to be invented using a Web-based form factor,” Wu said. (She has since left CRV to start her own company, a stealth-mode massively multiplayer online game company called Ohai.)

Now that Loudcrowd is out, it’s finally becoming clear what Wu was talking about. The site is obviously aimed at teenage and twenty-something music fans—a slightly more MySpacey crowd than a Facebooky one, from what I can see—and makes use of cartoonish avatars and line-drawn graphical settings reminiscent of the cover art for the Grand Theft Auto video game series. The artists Conduit has signed up to supply songs for the site’s music stream are on the indy side, meaning … Next Page »

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“Countercyclical” is a word you’re probably going to hear a lot in the coming months—from entrepreneurs professing that their businesses are not only recession-proof, but will actually fare better during lean times. It’s a word that the leaders of the casual games industry, which has a strong presence in both Seattle and Boston, have been using a lot lately. But in their case, so far, it seems to be true. Seattle-based Big Fish Games and Newton, MA-based WorldWinner both tell Xconomy that in October, while stocks were swooning and unemployment was swelling, they earned record revenues.

Casual games is the gaming industry’s term for break-time online games or small downloadable games like “Bejeweled” or “Diner Dash,” as opposed to console-based video games or all-absorbing multiplayer games like World of Warcraft. I’ve written about the Boston casual gaming cluster here, and Greg has covered Seattle-area gaming companies extensively.

Not all of the regions’ gaming companies are likely to be immune to the downturn. From talking with executives at gaming outfits in Seattle and Boston, it’s clear that there’s pessimism in the industry about Web advertising as a source of revenue, and about the prospects for survival for companies that get the bulk of their revenue from display ads. “For ad-based casual gaming companies, pretty much everyone agrees that it’s going to be tough for a while,” says Christopher Cummings, senior product manager for Gamesville, a gaming site owned by Waltham, MA-based Lycos. “Some startups probably won’t survive, and for others it might be lean times.”

But casual gaming companies with more ways to make money, such as charging customers for downloads or tournament play or licensing their games to other companies, may fare better—especially as computer owners turn to casual games as a less expensive diversion than going to a movie or eating out.

“One possibility in a downturn would be that people would have an aversion to games, because it’s discretionary spending,” says Jeremy Lewis, CEO of Big Fish Games, which gets most of its revenues from purchases of the downloadable games designed by its community of 650 freelance contributors. “But a second possibility is that people see it as an attractive alternative to other more expensive forms of entertainment. And a third would be that people who are out of work have more time to play games. We are certainly seeing the second effect, and maybe also the third.” Lewis says Big Fish’s October revenue was up a whopping 23 percent over September levels.

Gaming executives are also encouraged by surveys indicating that Americans plan to retrench during the recession by spending more time at home and less on activities like travel and theater-going. “Consumers are looking for entertainment options that they can enjoy at home with their families,” says Christian Meyer, chief marketing officer at WorldWinner. And that means “home entertainment is well positioned to withstand the downturn.”

Here’s a closer look at five major trends the gaming executives I spoke with are observing or predicting as the industry confronts changing economic conditions.

1. Game Players Spending More Time Online

Meyer says WorldWinner, where players pay a small fee to compete against other players in a variety of skill-based games, had more visitors in October than in any other month in its nine-year history, and is on track to set another record in November. But even at sites such as Gamesville, where traffic hasn’t increased as much, the people who do come are staying longer.

“The user base for Gamesville has been mainly flat, with a little bit of growth over the course of this year,” says Cummings. “But the amount of time that people are spending on the site has increased dramatically.” Not so long ago, the typical Gamesville user played for about … Next Page »

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Pangea Media, a Watertown, MA company that operates a network of casual gaming sites including QuizRocket.com and Quibblo.com, said yesterday that it has acquired LaughNetwork, a Kentucky startup whose network of entertainment sites attracts more than 1 million page views per day. Pangea didn’t say how much it paid in the deal.

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There’s nothing like three straight days of a massive video-game expo to get your mind off work. OK, I didn’t go to the whole thing, but I got a decent sample of the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) at the convention center in downtown Seattle—North America’s biggest trade show for computer and video games and a self-described festival of gaming, which I previewed last week.

Once I made it past the huge lines and the PAX “enforcer” who made me print out my gaming industry-related clips in order to get a media badge—ironic for the digital-media industry, isn’t it?—there was a lot on offer. Loud, flashy shoot-em-ups, all kinds of game-playing tournaments, and booths galore. Most of the people, gamers and industry insiders alike, seemed to be there to try out weird new games, see what the competition was up to, and generally hang out with like-minded folks.

My main take-away—other than that gamers tend to wear black T-shirts, play handheld games at any time, and dress up in all manner of futuristic robot and warrior attire (see photo below)—is that small game developers have a real chance now to cash in on the fast-evolving market. That wasn’t always the case, and I wondered whether gaming is following the trend of small Web-based software startups. “A few years ago, the only way to get your game out was via PC or console games,” says my friend Dan Schmidt, senior software developer (and employee #3) at Cambridge, MA-based Harmonix Music Systems, maker of Guitar Hero and Rock Band. “Now with casual gaming and Web-based tools, there are more and more ways to get your game out.”

What’s more, the big gaming companies are looking to small developers for new ideas and talent. Take Microsoft’s Xbox Live Arcade, which offers cheap, downloadable games for the Xbox console, typically made by indie developers or small groups who might work for a year to build a polished but small-scale game. A recent example that went big: Braid, an interesting time-manipulation game built by indie developer Jonathan Blow, which has become a huge hit on Xbox 360 in the last few weeks.

On Saturday, I caught a particularly telling panel entitled “Democratizing Game Development,” which included Michael John, senior creative director at Electronic Arts, Mark DeLoura, VP of technology at GreenScreen Interactive, and Will Kerslake, creative director at Radar Group. Kerslake showed a rough demo of a foosball video game he said he made in about 15 hours over a weekend, using Microsoft XNA game-development tools. “You can build something simple and small on your own, and now you’re starting to see distribution channels,” Kerslake said. “So give it a shot!”

But the panel cautioned that it’s important not to take a demo like that too far. “You build a prototype to see if it’s going to work. Then you throw it away and start again,” said DeLoura. “Don’t let it grow.” (Too often, apparently, game developers grow attached to their initial demos and try to build whole games around them, when they contain fatal shortcomings.) As for advice in what to show in a game demo, the panel agreed it was most important to convey the emotional experience of the game. Later, EA’s John added that in general, “Usability isn’t what matters, it’s how it makes people feel.”

The strongest feeling I got all weekend was one of nostalgia, when I found a room in the convention hall dedicated to classic, old-school video games like Pacman, Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, and, of course, Pong (see photo, left, courtesy of Mara E. Vatz). After all, who needs flashy visuals and storylines—isn’t that what real life is for?

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