Project Horseshoe 2012: Kickstarter and Training Designers

I'll report to you about two topics discussed at this year's Project Horseshoe conference.

Defense Grid 2's Kickstarter

So, I went to business school at MIT a long time ago, and one of the main methods of learning about business is carefully going over and discussing case studies. A case study is business situation where a company has one or more challenges, and decides what to do about those challenges. They usually have a bunch of data that that helps point the way toward what a good decision would have been.

Jeff Pobst of Hidden Path Entertainment presented what I think is the "perfect" case study about his company using Kickstarter to raise money for Defense Grid 2. They had a clear goal, they had a very large number of possible ways of going about it, and they had a mountain of data before, during, and after the Kickstarter campaign. We get the benefit of hindsight to see exactly what ended up mattering in all the confusion, and it even makes a good story because of the punchline.

If I understand things correctly, I think they were probably going to make this game no matter what happened with the kickstarter, but by doing a kickstarter they could potentially make a much bigger scale of a game. That makes sense, and I do think it's a fair use of the fundraising platform.

They asked for $250,000, but I think the REAL goal was to hit $1 million. What makes this case study so interesting is that they treated it like it was going to make $1 million, and they invested heavily and did tons of work to make that happen. They did so much work and tried so hard, that it created even more data for us to look at, to see what really ended up mattering and what didn't. While publicly, the project appears successful because it raised $271,726, Jeff's presentation showed that the real story is it wasn't as successful as it appeared. They really made less than $50k (that can be put toward development) on the kickstarter after subtracting all the costs they put into it. It was sure a good try though, and it meant they got to take a good solid swing at the $1 million mark, but not lose money in trying for it. It's also generous of Jeff to share this data with developers, so that we can all learn from it. Most companies consider it way too private to share.

Jeff Pobst seems to know everyone, so he was able to talk with Tim Schafer, Jordan Mechner and other big names about their experiences. Everyone says the video at the top of your kickstarter project is really important. Having a well known figure pitch the product also helps, and they felt they didn't have that so they put twelve different famous game industry people in their video, endorsing their product.

You have a lot of knobs to adjust in a kickstarter project. How many tiers of rewards should you have, what exactly should each one be? How important is the reward structure compared to all the other things going on? Is it super important to have some rewards that are really really expensive? Or does that only matter like 1% in the end? What about upselling people? That means getting a person who pledged to later decide to change their pledge to a higher amount. Jeff had heard that this was actually the single most important factor of anything: how good you are at getting that upsell.

There's a whole bunch of other things you might focus on too. Using Facebook and Twitter to make sure your current fans know about the kickstarter. Also, getting mentioned on various news sites. They hired a PR firm who was relentless in following up many, many times with every gaming site they deemed important to their cause. You can also used paid advertisements to get the word out: google ads, facebook ads, or ads targeted on specific sites like Penny Arcade.

Hidden Path also did some less traditional forms of promotion. They made new content in their current game that was designed to hype people for the new game. They even had the opportunity to work with Valve by putting some Portal 2 ARG (alternate reality game) stuff into their game, in order to promote Portal 2, and this also helped promote their own stuff.

Finally, Jeff had the clever idea of approaching companies too big to participate in kickstarter, and made them an offer. He said if those bigger companies would give him free stuff to give away, he could promote them and their brands through kickstarter. This also gave these companies reason to mention his particular kickstarter project. It took months of negotiation to pull off, but Jeff finally got 100 gaming mice from Razer and 600 video cards from AMD. He pulled it off.

And now for the look back at it all. Of all this stuff they spent all this time on, what really did anything in the final analysis?

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Project Horseshoe 2012: Conference Design

I was a speaker this year at Project Horseshoe. Horseshoe is an exclusive, somewhat secret, intentionally small conference about game design. It has a code of secrecy and a code of blabbing. I hereby invoke the code of blabbing in order to share knowledge with all of you. I'll cover some of the ideas discussed in another post, but here let's address:

The Design of Project Horseshoe Itself

A conference is like a game, after all, where the creators design "mechanics" which then result in certain "dynamics" amongst the players. The goal is for those dynamics to meet the "aesthetic" goals of the creators. That's called the MDA framework in game design (mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics).

My initial reaction to Project Horseshoe was that the conference was poorly designed because it didn't produce what I assumed the goal should be. But along the way, I saw that I was using the wrong "lens" to look at the problem. By changing lenses (a term from Jesse Schell), I realized the "aesthetic" goals were something other than I expected. With the right lens, you could say the conference achieves exactly what it wants to in a somewhat magical way. There is perhaps a lesson there when it comes to the design of any community (such as your gaming community or forum community).

What I was originally looking for was to maximize the exchange of good information. That's the lens I looked at the NYC Practice conference conference through last year, and that conference did very well at it. If that's the most important quantity, then you want presentations that convey as much information as possible in the most efficient way possible. I don't really mean the amount of data per second, but more like the number of ideas per second. The meat, the real substance. I was looking only for substance and nothing else. Anything that took time away from that—even fun diversions—was a loss. By having presentations (at the NYC Practice conference last year) that gave lots of detail on exactly what people are doing, working on, struggling with, etc, it lead to spontaneous hallway conversations of very high quality. Even at the start of a conversation, you know all sorts of stuff about the other person's beliefs and experiences. This leads to finding kindred spirits and it leads to heated arguments as well. It's intense. It's a crucible of ideas.

Horseshoe, by contrast,

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An Evening with Jane McGonigal

Jane McGonigal spoke last night as part of the California Academy of Sciences lecture series in San Francisco, at the packed Herbst Theater. Come along on my journey of contempt and redemption.

Expectations

My expectations of this presentation were extremely low. I remember her GDC presentation several years ago on the top 10 findings in games that year that covered such breakthroughs as some players "playing to win" and how they actually seek an even playfield of fair competition rather than wanting to buy in-game advantages. Another involved a bunch of data showing that a huge percentage of players spend a huge percentage of time playing World of Warcraft alone. It even used the phrase "together alone" as opposed to the phrase "alone together" that I used in my infamous article. Since so much of that presentation was rehashes of my own articles from YEARS earlier, I had to wonder what Jane is really bringing to the table here.

The Format

Rather than a lecture, the format here was actually an informal interview, so the host and Dr. McGonigal sat on stage with a coffee table between them. I think this format is good, and allows information to flow more freely than in a prepared lecture. There is more room for adaptation, for tailoring answers to go with the flow the conversation, and for the speaker to let their personality come through a bit more.

The host opened by having Jane discuss her controversial statements that the world needs to spend more hours gaming. She said that currently the world spends 7 billion hours (per year? I forget) gaming, and that she thinks it should be more like 21 billion hours. This is a delicate subject because it's so easily taken out of context and misunderstood. I think Jane was only able to explain part of why she believed this in her actual answer to this question, and the rest of why she believes it wasn't clear until much later. The first clarification is that she doesn't mean people who play games now should play them more, but rather than more people should play games. She would like everyone on Earth to play an hour a day of something. She includes even playing a word game on your phone while on the bus, so this isn't all about sweating bullets in Starcraft matches, or whatever. Ok, but why should people play an hour a day?

A Waste of Time

What follows was painful and boring. There was some promise in the initial part of the answer to the above question. The answer is that gaming brings about all sorts of positive emotions. She then listed the 10 positive emotions that gaming has been shown to elicit, from gaming research. Joy, awe, wonder, love, satisfaction, and so on. At this point I would have expected some sort of support for this, like some examples so we know what she's talking about. Instead, a lot of time was spent on this terrible "massively multiplayer thumb wrestling game,"

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