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1. kids don't know they are learning.
2. kids do things they find fun, and as much as we might try, they will learn from other kids that "reading isn't fun, playing games is fun" no matter how much fun reading really is or how suck the games really are.

so to that end I encourage having your kids play some of these games if they want to play games:
1. Typer Shark
2. Bookworm

And if you can find some old-school "Number Munchers" you're on your way to gaming-learning fun. I've placed these two games on desktops I've built for younger cousins and family friends, and the response has been quite good. They learn to type (Typer Shark, duh) and spell (Bookworm) in a creative and fun fashion.

(Me? I... uh... waste my brain away playing World of Warcraft, personally, but "I'm allowed to decide for myself, being 27" just don't tell the wife... ;)

1. kids don't know they are learning.
2. kids do things they find fun, and as much as we might try, they will learn from other kids that "reading isn't fun, playing games is fun" no matter how much fun reading really is or how suck the games really are.

so to that end I encourage having your kids play some of these games if they want to play games:
1. Typer Shark
2. Bookworm

And if you can find some old-school "Number Munchers" you're on your way to gaming-learning fun. I've placed these two games on desktops I've built for younger cousins and family friends, and the response has been quite good. They learn to type (Typer Shark, duh) and spell (Bookworm) in a creative and fun fashion.

(Me? I... uh... waste my brain away playing World of Warcraft, personally, but "I'm allowed to decide for myself, being 27" just don't tell the wife... ;)

well, to name an example, some of the games on popcap require ActiveX to play. why exactly, I have no idea, but i do know that when you click somewhere outside the browser window the game automatically pauses. comes in kinda handy when one of those silly customers decides to interrupt a good game.

Mostly to cell phones and PDAs, though you can still play them online at places like PopCap. I'll also double another poster's suggestion about the GameBoy; WarioWare is a good example of simple game play for the new millenium. Simple game design seems to have been shunted to the "puzzle" genre of gaming.

Actually I believe "Independant" as far as the IGF is concerned, just means that the company hasn't had anything published by a game publisher.

Three years ago a game called Shattered Galaxy won four of the six awards from the IGF. It was a game created by Nexon, a huge game company in Korea (second to NCsoft). Shattered Galaxy had a budget of just under 1 million dollars. I know that because I worked on it. Last year Savage was entered into the IGF. Savage is a game developed with a multi-million dollar budget. I know that because I talked with some of the developers, but you can read about it, as well as some of the controversy here or here.

Whether you feel that these relatively high budget games should be considered "independant" is your decision. I'm happy that my game won the awards that it did, and I don't feel that the budget of a project should have an impact on its inclusion into the IGF. Small games with excellent gameplay, such as Insaniquarium or Bontago, have shown that they will get their deserved spotlight.

"Can you play Fantasy Football at Google.com? Can you play chess online?"

No... but I can find other, specialized, Fantasy Football and specialized games sites. Since most of Yahoo's Games were just taken from PopCap anyway I'd rather go to the source and let them get money for the advertisements. So they can continue to develop these, and other, games.

Are first generation Java games that far behind?

• Send/receive mail using POP3S/SMTP-TLS, via SnapperMail.
• SSH via Mocha Pocket Telnet.
• Play MP3s stored on my SD card, via pTunes.
• Use it as a wireless modem for my laptop, via PdaNet.
• Play various time-wasters from PopCap.

As Audio Director for Flashbang Studios, I have been happy to grab some fame and recognition by taking precisely the approach so opposed in this article. In Beesly's Buzzwords, we managed to receive a nomination to Finalist in the Audio Innovation for Web/Downloadable at the Independent Games Festival at Game Developer's Conference 2004.

While one can never truly get in the minds of the judges, I believe we made it to Finalist precisely because we made our music sound MORE like a symphony orchestra and less like $20 Casio-tone keyboard. The web/downloadable category in large part represents the emerging "casual games" market. The audio budgets, both in cash and file size, can often be quite tiny. As such, synthy, repetitive pseudo-techno is often the norm. A similar game, Pop Cap's Bookworm, has a single in-game loop that's maybe two minutes long. It's synthy and happy and kind of nice, but after playing, I mean "researching" the game for an hour, I wanted to scrub my mind clean of that song.

Keeping that in mind, we gave Beesly four distinct songs, taking a cue from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. Winter and Spring are light and airy piano songs on sampled grand piano, and Summer and Fall are full (sampled) orchestrations that sound a bit like Copland if I want to be generous. Which I do, since it's my own project. At the time, my friends Paul and Jon and myself were working on a shoe-string budget. We couldn't afford an orchestra (if we could I would have gone for it), but we could afford a few hundred dollars of sampled Akai CDs. The majority of people who commented on the music for Buzzwords said that they find the it "soothing" and "nice". Some have even gone as far as to say it's the first casual game they haven't simply turned off the music in a few minutes.

There's a reason many people like the sound of the symphony instruments more then synth-phony instruments. (Zing!) That reason is that the mainstays of the symphony orchestra, the brass (Trumpet, french horn), the woodwinds (clarinet oboe bassoon), the strings (violin viola cella bass) are all time-tested in a brutal darwinian competition for survival. For centuries composers have competed for funding and commissions, and in that competitive environment, only the sounds with waveforms and harmonics most naturally suited to some kind of average human ear have survived. Different cultures might find different timbers more appealing, but the surviving instruments have had centuries to settle upon overall pleasing sounds. (I am drawing heavily on a book called Music, the Brain, and Ecstasy here by Robert Jourdain. Slashdot is having trouble with the Amazon.com link.)

Synth instruments are relatively new, having mere decades of darwinian refinement by comparison. Let's take food and wine as an example. Not everyone knows how to cook, but everyone knows what they like. Chefs have had thousands of years to study what human neurology will like in the way of food. Now let's add in the metaphor for synthetics. Tang is vaguely like orange juice, but few people would say it is somehow as tasty or as rich as the real organic thing. Grape Kool-Aid can be tasty in its own right, but wouldn't most people with refined tastes would prefer a fine wine or at least real fruit juice?

Someday artificial foods may somehow surpass real foods, but they'll have to do really well to fool our highly evolved tastes. Take the Replicators on Star Trek- they could in theory replicate any food anyone could want or imagine. Thousands of tastes all at once that leave your taste buds reeling. So what do people usually replicate? Simple and familiar things. Steak and potatoes, coffee, or their old favorites from whatever planet they're from. And we'll use our cheap, flexibile digital hardware to try and make the best symphony sound we can for our next games. With luck,

I think Bejeweled is the game you are thinking of. I have it on my palm, and it's a great game.

I think Bejeweled is the game you are thinking of. I have it on my palm, and it's a great game.

Mother will hate me if she can't play Zuma. Since it requires ActiveX to be played, it's a minor problem.

What about on-line Java games like these from Pop Cap?

No, the future is not in massive online games, it's in those crumby little puzzle games they put on cell phones.

See, the way I figure it is that human culture has come up with all sorts of games throughout it's many cultures and periods. The requirement for obscenely complex and expensive computer hardware is only a recent footnote in history. Ultimately people just want to play games and not subscribe to a Game Playing Lifestyle like Sony's marketers would like to sell us. When the technology becomes transparent and convenient enough like a deck of cards you can keep in your pocket is when you start to really make progress. Geeks like to think because they have obscenely complex GPUs and RPGS that they are authorities on gaming. That just simply is not a reason why or the reality.

Civilization certainly is a good choice, cause (at least in the first version) it had a built in encyclopedia where alot of info about the advancements can be found.

Another personal favorite of mine is colonization, it's less extensive as Civilization, but it will teach you something of your heritage (if you're American or European).

Of course they are still games, and are supposed to be fun. But some general pointers:
Learn about economics and strategy with real time strategy games or simulation games (sim city, starcraft, age of empires).

Get a good hand eye coordination, quicker reflections by playing a first person shooter. Learn something about guns (apparently that's not as bad as nudity according to some cultures?) at the same time. And learn something about history playing a fps in a historical war. (Medal of Honor, Call of Duty)

Also alot of board and arcade games can be found at sites like www.popcap.com. They are downloadable for free trials but you can also buy them. Examples are learning to type fast to get rid of sharks when deepseadiving, or traditional games like Mahjongg.

Where are the small games? the puzzle games and simple shooters? Here they are.

Popcap

Wild Tangent

The browser has become the defacto platform for 'small' games. Wild Tangent's web driver in particular is available for license as well. It's helping bring accessibility for designers back to where a couple guys in a garage could churn out something fun in less than 3 years.

not a plug, just informational cuz everyone's asking.

What do you mean lack of games? Yahoo Games and PopCap seem to work fine on my Linux box. You mean there's something else?

All joking aside, to most people solitare and sites like these are computer (PC) gaming. At least that is the case for my wife and my mother. I'm sure they are not all that much different than many others.

Almost anything from PopCap Games. Titles like Diamond Mine, Bookworm, Alchemy, and of course, any japanese politicians favorite, Bejeweled, are enough to keep you occupied for months.

Of course, none of these types of games are particularly innovative since Mavis Beacon has been doing this since at least the 80's.

• Garage Games
• Free Lunch Design
• Black Eye Software (check out Eternal Daughter)
• PopCap Games (Bejeweled)
• Dexterity Software

Oh, who am I kidding? Anything released to the console market without 3D graphics, genuine B-list actors providing the voiceovers, and 16.7 zillion colors is doomed to failure.

DecafJedi

My wife plays Animal Crossing quite a bit. Course, it's like the Sims meets Playmobil, but still :) She even has an eReader, a bunch of cards, etc for it.

The wife also plays RPG's sometimes (though as someone that reads a lot of classic literature, the juvenile plots and terrible writing drives her nuts sometimes) and she loves PopCap games too. She enjoys Bust a Move as well.

She doesn't like playing the "M" rated games, but she enjoys watching me play them (NGC Resident Evil, Vice City, etc) and yell encouragement like,
"Honey, grab the katana and gut those fuckers!"

She's a great woman =)

Bravo! Women don't want to work on that kind of nonsense either -- so the people that decide on what games to be made for women (and don't have a clue) have to take part of the blame, too.

I understand that the popcap games particularly BookWorm are doing extremely well with women, particularly women over 35. These are extremely addictive, cheap as they come, simple, do not require special hardware, and give your brain a bit of a workout.

PopCap's Mummy Maze and Psychobabble have the same properties.

It's like the myth that says women only want romance and girls only play with dolls.

The facts are really simple: women share most of the same neurology and physiology as men. They can enjoy games - voluntary challenges full of interesting choices - just as men can. However, they also hate the same things - they hate feeling like a failure, feeling stupid or embarrassed.

Most games today are designed for male neurology and skill level; that is, high degree of spatial and hand-to-eye coordination, navigational skills, and logical puzzles. The core gameplay is right, but the reward/punishment mechanisms are not accounting for the gender difference.

If you look at Bejeweled, it's easy to see why the logical yet forgiving gameplay appeals equally to both genders. It's built around reward, not punishment. Even if you didn't know what to do at all, you get rewards just by clicking around on the screen. You will never be embarrassed or humiliated by the game regardless of what degree of skills you have. And on the second go, you will probably better your score.

Another great example is the city building series by Sierra, which allows you to choose between the path of the warrior or the path of the builder. Almost always, you can pay off your enemies by running a successful economy instead of fighting the war.

This pattern of non-punitive, positively rewarding gameplay is core to almost all titles that have enjoyed high degree of success with women.

Making games for women is not rocket science. :-)

Jouni

It's a tough time in the games industry, and anyone contemplating getting in should do the research thoroughly. While the risks are high, I believe game development could be refined into long term sustainable, profitable business by re-thinking the process of game creation.

Meanwhile, even government organizations like TEKES in Finland have started to seriously support the development of games and related technology and IGDA has already networked thousands of game developers together. Individual developers may fall, but game development is still a growing industry.

And we all heard about the return of shareware. PopCap's Bejeweled may not turn the heads of VCs with it's content, but a million copies sold is no peanuts.

Maybe if I finally updated my Palm games (/shameless plug) I could get rich quick, too. :-)

Jouni

Oh but they can be! I do art for a company called PopCap Games and I can tell you firsthand that there is a big market for game software on mobile phones.

Except for dating sims, mahjong games, a lot of the dancing type games other than DDR, Vib Ribbon, a lot of strategy games, a lot of the RPGs other than Final Fantasy (and even those are only gradually improving from a really spotty porting record) and i'm sure there are a lot more that i'm not thinking of.

You can't blame people for not buying what isn't available to buy. The few rhythm games that have made it to the U.S. have done pretty well.

Mahjong isn't popular here, but you'd be surprised at the pervasiveness of some computer versions. You can play Ningpo Mahjong right now at PopCap, for instance.

I can't think of a single dating simulation ever seeing major release here in the U.S. The closest I can think of is the dating portion of the PSX game "Thousand Arms".

I didn't really understand what you're trying to say about RPGs. Seems as far back as I can remember, the American market has been flooded with RPG games of all types, from all over the world. Furthermore, both linear and open-ended RPG games have enjoyed great success here.

Where do the new ideas go if we can't have games like...Shenmue...?

In the case of Shenmue, hopefully into the garbage. Someone at Sega seems to have confused "innovative" with "boring," "pointless," "repetative," "plot-free," and "wildly unrealistic."

Anyway... back on topic...

The editorial is off base. As any creative industry grows the core of the industry becomes conservative, unwilling to take the risks necessary to create truly innovative work. But just because the core does doesn't mean that everyone will. Some companies will realize that you don't need to sell millions of copies to be successful and will happily make modest profits with smaller markets making truly innovative games. The original Counterstrike was just such a case, it popularized the modern SWAT style game and refined into the basis of many multi-player games. Pop Cap Games has done phenominally well with their little games, most notably Bejeweled Something genuinely original? How about surprisingly addictive game about building bridges, Chronic Logic's Pontifex . How about a hard to explain that can only be inaccurately described as action puzzle play matched with turn based stategy, Moonbase Commander . Check out the Independent Games Festival for bunches more of genuinely new and interesting games.

Of course, certain genres are completely unreasonable for small publishers, like massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Or are they? How about a MMORPG without any combat? A Tale in the Desert . A puzzle based MMORPG? Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates .

Thanks to internet distribution, it's becoming more and more economical for a smaller company to reach out to a global audience.

So, there is lots of great new game ideas. Sometimes they even escape from big, conservative companies. So why don't we see them? Why aren't more people aware of them? The problem isn't that a lack of new ideas, the problem is the journalists themselves! By focusing on the big budget rehash games, spending time giving us pointless "preview" coverage over and over ("We still haven't actually played the game, but boy, it sure does look neat. We look forward to its release in forty-eight months") instead of seeking out and publicizing great stuff from small companies. It wouldn't take much to get the general public looking for these games, helping to encourage further innovation. Because the journalists hype them so, the game industry is still stuck in the idiot "Big budget, big payoff" gamble that the movie industry is. With a few small budge success stories we could see big companies realizing that quarter or half million dollar risks don't have huge rewards, but they also lack the possibility of becoming catastrophic failures.

If you're worried about the lack of innovative games, go looking for them, they exist. Point them out to your friends. And if you're a journalist, don't just bitch, tell your readers about what gems you do find!

Where do the new ideas go if we can't have games like...Shenmue...?

In the case of Shenmue, hopefully into the garbage. Someone at Sega seems to have confused "innovative" with "boring," "pointless," "repetative," "plot-free," and "wildly unrealistic."

Anyway... back on topic...

The editorial is off base. As any creative industry grows the core of the industry becomes conservative, unwilling to take the risks necessary to create truly innovative work. But just because the core does doesn't mean that everyone will. Some companies will realize that you don't need to sell millions of copies to be successful and will happily make modest profits with smaller markets making truly innovative games. The original Counterstrike was just such a case, it popularized the modern SWAT style game and refined into the basis of many multi-player games. Pop Cap Games has done phenominally well with their little games, most notably Bejeweled Something genuinely original? How about surprisingly addictive game about building bridges, Chronic Logic's Pontifex . How about a hard to explain that can only be inaccurately described as action puzzle play matched with turn based stategy, Moonbase Commander . Check out the Independent Games Festival for bunches more of genuinely new and interesting games.

Of course, certain genres are completely unreasonable for small publishers, like massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Or are they? How about a MMORPG without any combat? A Tale in the Desert . A puzzle based MMORPG? Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates .

Thanks to internet distribution, it's becoming more and more economical for a smaller company to reach out to a global audience.

So, there is lots of great new game ideas. Sometimes they even escape from big, conservative companies. So why don't we see them? Why aren't more people aware of them? The problem isn't that a lack of new ideas, the problem is the journalists themselves! By focusing on the big budget rehash games, spending time giving us pointless "preview" coverage over and over ("We still haven't actually played the game, but boy, it sure does look neat. We look forward to its release in forty-eight months") instead of seeking out and publicizing great stuff from small companies. It wouldn't take much to get the general public looking for these games, helping to encourage further innovation. Because the journalists hype them so, the game industry is still stuck in the idiot "Big budget, big payoff" gamble that the movie industry is. With a few small budge success stories we could see big companies realizing that quarter or half million dollar risks don't have huge rewards, but they also lack the possibility of becoming catastrophic failures.

If you're worried about the lack of innovative games, go looking for them, they exist. Point them out to your friends. And if you're a journalist, don't just bitch, tell your readers about what gems you do find!

Once you start playing PopCap games, you're going to be hooked.

...great little 5-30 minute diversions that didn't require reading a user's guide...

PopCap Games

Thank them, not me.

For some reason, women of all ages where I work love this stuff. I'm waiting for the inevitable "can we block this" call.

And it is addictive. I went there to check it out and ended up being stuck there for over an hour. I downloaded alchemy as part of my .Mac subscription and hence now can't get my wife off of the family iMac.

Maybe they will predict that NetHack will die as well.

These games are just being published by smaller developers. The ones that can't afford the extraordinate fees to buy a chip so that there programs work on the consoles. These games are usually more affordable as well.

Check out some of these sites:

Game House

Pop Cap Games

Llamasoft

Shockwave Games

Doom 2 was a retail release, not shareware--and it sold something like 10x as many copies as there were registrations for Doom 1.

Quake was released as retail as well, although it was a little more complicated than that.

For recent examples of successful shareware games, I'd look more at things like Bejeweled and such from PopCap, or the Exile/Avernum games from Spiderweb Software.

Of course, there's still plenty of unsuccessful shareware these days; I've written some myself, but I'll spare you the link.

Yes, that's what the market needs, another $60 video game. Otherwise people might have to buy a console to play their $50 games on, or they might only have 100 choices of games to play instead of 101.

Of all the things the market "needs" right now, a game is the lowest on the list.

Heck, if you want a AAA game go play a popcap game. If you like it, it only costs $20.

I played the WC3 demo, really the only reason I like it is because it runs well under WineX.

But I'm not gonna pay $60 for it.

This is what our studio is attempting to do, and though it's too early to tell how successful we'll be, we believe it's the best route to a self-sufficient indie studio. Successes like Popcap and GameHouse are inspiring, and give one roadmap to being self-sufficient. Another good example is Small Rockets.

In our case we are working very closely with GarageGames as our primary publisher/distributor. Between their help teaching us how to handle PR and marketing, their willingness to give advice on how to be successful, and our own attempts at networking, we think we will be a successful indie in the not-too-distant future. A good example of such cooperation was last week's MacWorld in San Francisco, where we helped run an arcade station for GG showing their title Marble Blast and our title Orbz (small, shameless plug). By joining them in SF for a few days, we were rewarded by making several contacts for future game development work and possible OEM deals.

This is how indies can "compete" with the big publishers.

Dave Myers

21-6 Productions, Inc.

Better graphics, better sound -- no spy-ware... Dynomite rocks...
No I do not work for PopCap games, I'm just addicted to Dynomite -- which means my carpal tunneling syndrome has a carpal tunneling syndrome.

You may be wondering why Snood is so much more popular than the game it poorly rips off, Bust-a-Move (aka Puzzle Bobble). I mean, BaM was around for years, appeared on many more systems, enhanced the gameplay over the generations, always had multiplayer , etc, etc. So why Snood?

Simple: Snood was (is?) available in the America Online games section.

Yep, we have another thing to curse the "drooling AOL hordes" for - popularizing an inferior puzzle rip-off. Oh, and for a good non-spyware-riddled version, try Popcap.com's Dynomite, or at least go out and one of the many versions of Bust-a-Move (not all versions listed).

Is there still the chance for an individual or small team to strike it rich writing a game like this

Yes. Bejeweled was made by one individual in a course of only a few days. That man and a few of his friends formed a small games studio called popcap and are doing very well with their java and PDA games.

When your in the games industry with a small budget, you have to pick your projects accordingly. Do not work on a massive game that will take over a year. Your first project will most likely not be a big hit, so don't count on future sales to keep you afloat. Work on quick turnaround projects that will generate enough so you will stay afloat when (not if) one of your projects bomb.

Treat your company as a business first, or you will find yourself over budget and out of V.C. or your own savings. My friends John and Brian of Popcap started out with little; and became the java games powerhouse of the web because they made smart business decisions. They also knew how to make games for their target audience, not just making games they themselves think are fun. There is still room in the java/pda market for other small teams to do this as well.

I'm not convinced it has to be this way. The problem as I see it is that every game is made as if its going to be the number one hit game of the year. Which it never is, because it looks exactly like the number one hit game of last year, and there are now 10 different titles that look exactly like it. The business people who run everything are simply looking at other successful companies and doing what they do--but doing exactly what your competitors have already done is a recipe for failure in video games (and probably most software) as the economic picture you describe proves.

The solution is to start making cheaper games that appeal to fringe, niche groups. The game of the year may require the latest graphics technology and oodles of expensive artwork and massive marketing push--but a great game can still be made without the absolute best visuals. How much do you think these games cost to make? How much do you think the Pokemon games cost to make? How many units does the average GBA game need to sell to break even? Cheap, successful games are possible, and I suspect we'll see way more of them in the future.

And we're all guilty of it, even the die-hards amoung us. Have any of you ever played a Pokemon game? Do you truely, HONESTLY know what it's about? Do you care? Probably not. Given a choice between being given the next Pokemon game for free, or BUYING the next installment of Grand Theft Auto most of our minds are already made up. It doesn't matter if the Pokemon games are fun or not. I wouldn't know, personally, and I doubt many of you do, either. That just illustrates my point further.

I'm not disputing your main point here, but to me at least, there isn't much difference between free and $50 relative to the true cost of the game, which is the time I invest in playing it. I'm sure if I took all of my Pokemon or Grand Theft time and worked at something productive instead I'd make enough to make actual cost of the game meaningless. If you like console RPGs, I highly recommend Pokemon. It has the depth of PC RPG with the simplicity of the console RPG. The battle system is much better thought out than, say, any Final Fantasy game. There isn't really any serious story, but its pretty fun to collect and build up the Pokemon.

Skaven did the music for Bejewled (Windows Version).

Palm version here, but I'm guessing it lacks the tunes :)

After it was mentioned a couple of times on Penny Arcade, I got into Bejewelled, first the Java version, and then the Windows one on my laptop. It has the same sort of evil 'one more go' deal that tetris and freecell have.

Other things that have had the same effect for shorter periods are: SSX, Wipeout (all three), Cannon Fodder, Mr Do!

After it was mentioned a couple of times on Penny Arcade, I got into Bejewelled, first the Java version, and then the Windows one on my laptop. It has the same sort of evil 'one more go' deal that tetris and freecell have.

Other things that have had the same effect for shorter periods are: SSX, Wipeout (all three), Cannon Fodder, Mr Do!

some of the greatest apps are not complex and weigh under 1.44 mb...
check out this addicting puzzle game, youll be hooked, guaranteed :)

I'm sorry, but what you're saying makes absolutely NO sense to me.

It really bothers you that much that people are using the web for more than text? Who ever said there was anything wrong with eye candy? Especially finding the eye candy I want to see when I want to see it. You should have fun browsing around on all your favorite text-only pages and not complain about what the rest of us sight-enhanced folks are doing.

-Richie
www.PopCap.com