Well, my last article got some attention and was featured on Gamasutra. A number of comments sprang up, and it seems like Kickstarter is a bit of a hot-button for indie game companies right now.

In general, it seems like the people commenting did not agree with my assessment that War Balloon’s lawyers were getting unwarranted bad press for the 4K (approx.) that the company paid them for handling their legal affairs. A lot of them made references to cheap online services and assumed those would be sufficient for the needs of a small indie looking to put out a single title. I must note, however, that none of the comments actually cited using such a service. I’m not suggesting that the people leaving comments don’t know what they are talking about, only that they did not actually give an example of they themselves using the services they were recommending.

And most certainly, no people leaving comments cited needing to defend their IP following using a bargain-service.
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I’m not sure this post is going to be received well. So let me buffer a bit.

I love games. I particularly love indie games. My first experiences with a computer were making games, and that’s how I figured out how to program. It was all indie games because there weren’t really big publishers then. So I hope folks will take the following in the right spirit.

The Kickstarter Thing

Everyone knows about Kickstarter by now – it’s crowd-sourced funding. On the surface it seems like a dream come true for indie game publishers, and lately there has been a raft of great titles revived by the people who want to play them and will vote with their money. Yay the choke-hold of the big publishers is broken!

But there is a down-side.

Recently I came across an article posted first on Kotaku, then ScrewAttack, with a link to the Kickstarter page of War Balloon, makers of Star Command. The game premise is based closely on Star Trek, and it’s an RPG that will appeal to a lot of gamers. At the post, the game studio went on to reveal details of what their funding (about $36K) went towards. As it turns out, they greatly underestimated what it takes to make a game of the type they proposed.
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I’m certain you appreciate order, common sense, a happy neighbourhood and good neighbour. But in 2012, you should resolve to break the law.

But not just any law, rather Parkinson’s Law. That is the one that states that any work swells in significance and requirements to meet the amount of time allotted to it. In other words, if there is a job that should take a day to complete, but you have four, you’ll bulk up the job to take four days instead of the one. It’s a weird phenomenon, but it’s true. Parkinson wrote his law to be funny in an article for The Economist back in 1955. Funny or not, his words just got more and more correct in the information age.

So how will you break the law? With a razor.

To be precise, Occam’s Razor, so named for William of Ockham, sometime around 1310. This principle states that the simplest solution is usually the best. But it’s hard to see the simple solution today – the price of being constantly connected with limitless options. It’s hard to wield the razor when we’re being eaten up…by information.
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I have finished up my 15 part series on media production in Canada, and the comparison to the U.S. industry. The series draws a parallel between the early days of Hollywood and the online video revolution, by looking at many of the factors involved from the political to the personal. It was a lot of fun to write, and even more fun to present at the FITC Screens conference, and in conversations at the OMDC New Finance think tank. It’s time to move on to the next subject, but for those interested, here’s a compilation of links for the whole series.
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Following all the research for the fifteen blog posts of this series, I had the opportunity to present some of my findings at the FITC “Screens” event November 15, and also get some really great personal perspectives during the OMDC sponsored “Alternative Financing Think Tank” that I participated in.

FITC Screens

The Screens event is what has replaced the “mobile developer’s conference” of previous years, updated to reflect the multi-screen nature of content today. It’s a better description than “mobile” as our content finds digital ways of being distributed from theaters to web-enabled televisions.

So where were the film and television guys?

As I often find, the event was fantastic but polarized. I encountered all manner of interactive content producers and developers, but not a single person from traditional. Anecdotally, in conversation at the Oddly booth with my friend Kathleen Webb (a media consultant) I’m not the only one who has noticed this. The interactive and traditional people are still not mixing. At the start of my presentation, a show of hands confirmed a mix of agency people, freelance developers, and interactive consultants – but no television producers or anyone from film or print publishing.
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