It has been a long couple months since the middle of December. A lot has happened for our company, good and bad. The challenges to health and wellness have finally started to sort themselves out. Marcus is now happily married, Nathan has a young one on the way, and everyone is getting into better shape and a better mental space after a lot of hard decisions.

Over the last three months we have had to shift our company focus a lot, snapping up contract work in web applications and web design. We have a major project coming on stream in the next month or so, a social job posting type deal. Once it launches we'll post some more info. It's been a fun project even with all the challenges we've faced lately, and the clients are fantastic. More importantly, it's brought us in some much needed capital.

A bunch of smaller contracts have helped us out as well, and given us some forward momentum again. It feels great to get something done and out the door, even if it isn't one of the games and gamesque sites we would rather be doing.

I hope all our friends at GDC are missing the heck out of us, we wish we could be there. Next year, honest!!

At the end of August our company ran into some financial troubles. Investment money did not pan out the way we expected, projects we had on the go such as http://www.wompum.com were running long, and a series of personal and health problems devastated our team.

We were hoping to pull out of this troubled period by now, but it looks like things are still going to be choppy for the near future. Because of that I am sad to announce that we have halted production on Verse: Tactics until such time as we have the resources to properly dedicate to the project.

Thank you to all the people who have expressed interest in Verse: Tactics, rest assured that if there is a way we will find it, and bring this game to your computers as soon as we can.

Marcus Riedner
CCO, Verse Studios

I'm going to assume you all know what Warbook is.

So this is the story of a game played by hundreds of thousands of people every day. A game of simplicity, elegance, and addiction that has a typical activity rate that ranges from 20% to 35% on any given day. Numbers to die for.

As with any good piece of software, it is constantly iterating on itself, growing and changing over time. New features added, old features tweaked. Bugs resolved and checked off the list.

But this weekend someone found a clever loop-hole in the Facebook/Warbook interface. Someone figured out how to take the link from the 'reset your kingdom' page and stick it into a 'tinyurl', letting you reset your kingdom just by clicking the link.

Then, like any good internet prankster, they promptly posted the link on the Warbook forum with the caption "YouTube Warbook Infinite Gold Cheat". Naturally, thousands have clicked the link, and thousands have found themselves without their kingdoms. The url has spread like the viral plague, not exposing a flaw in the game mechanic but exposing a flaw in certain methodologies used by the developer.

The community, thankfully, largely self moderates and every time the killer link pops up it is taken down pretty fast. Most people are not terribly upset, though a lot of people have been seriously burned. Compensation has yet to be discussed, solutions are still on the table, and the developer is... largely silent at the moment.

It being the weekend.

Now, I like Warbook, so I'm having a hard time being critical of their team. They do a pretty good job for a few guys building a Facebook application as a marketing vehicle for another company. I see amazing ways to monetize the application that are being missed, but that is a whole separate issue. What I am going to be really critical about is the very poor response time the developers are showing.

If anything, this event should be a panic button push. You have a situation where someone has, from the users perspective, created a hack that has deleted their account. You have a community up in arms, and divisions forming. You have the innocent newbies getting burned and grumpy. You have the dedicated who were simply curious now toasted. You have the clickers forming up on one side, and the non-clickers tossing insults and jokes on the other.

You have, in short, a very volatile community that is not seeing any guidance or explanation from the developer. You have rumor city and anger, and I'm unhappy, but not surprised, that the developers of Warbook are miss handling their community.

Will this be as bad as the Eve:Online scandals? Hardly. Does this point out that game developers need to hire community managers that know how to handle these sorts of nightmare events? You bet.

UPDATE:

You can now buy the T-Shirt: http://www.cafepress.com/themarcusshop

Everybody on the planet knows that starting a business is hard. You put huge chunks of your life on hold, or at serious risk. You go around trying to convince people that you are not insane, and not only are you not insane, they should give you some money. You have to go through hiring and training employees ( though if you are lucky like we have been you get employees who train you. )

And you plan. There is a ton of planning when you try to start a business, sometimes too much, sometimes too little. In the end though, luck plays as big a role as planning ever can.

Verse Studios has had a very difficult month. Pretty much everyone in our company has had some personal emergency, from family trauma and drama to trips to the ER to non-fatal motorcycle based accidents. Add into that the stress of pushing towards a product release, challenges with investment money ( both refraining and obtaining ), and a period of comedic bug fixes that generated new errors in a sequence that would fit in a Monty Python skit.

If it could go wrong, it has. All in the last 4 weeks.

The last four weeks have seen us making some of the hardest business decisions we have had to make yet. Make no mistake, right now Verse Studios is a wounded animal. But we adhere to the advice printed on every copy of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: Don't Panic.

We are taking a moment to regroup, do a bit of deep thinking, and execute on a new strategy. We have a couple projects on the go, one just about ready to launch, and we are determined to see it pushed into the market. Life changes, stuff happens, and what ever doesn't kill us... hurts. For now anyway.

This month's 'Blogs of the Round Table' asks us to examine the silly line in the sand between Casual and Hardcore gamers and games. Bare with me while I head down what may turn into more than a bit of a rant.

Once upon a time there was pong. You hooked up this plastic and fake wood veneer device to your television, and you and a friend twiddled a big round dial to make a bar of white light move up and down, bouncing a block of white light about your TV. Thus was born the gamer, in the soft glow of the cathode ray tube.

Then came Atari, the arcade, the Apple IIe, Zork, Oregon Trail...Mario. I think Mario is when everything really started to go wrong. This was the point where people started drawing a line in the sand, to define themselves as a 'gamer'. Up until Mario, people did not really seem to care if they were hard core or soft core or no core. They just thought these video games were silly, and they were. After Mario things changed. Nintendo Power magazines giving tips and tricks, and we all of a sudden have elites. People who knew the tricks, and people who found them.

We had hardcore gamers, and then everyone else. I blame you Mario, and your high scores and times and horrible maze-like last levels that still confound me to this day!

Over the last few years clever business people and marketers have realized that the audience they so loved to take money from are now in jobs where they do not have time to sit around for hours a day, let alone a week, playing video games. I can honestly say that I, someone in a company that makes games, spend less time these days playing them then I ever have before. Thus is born the casual game, and the casual gamer. More lines, more sand.

Now that the industry has drawn all these lines in the sand, their are those who want to smudge them out again. Their are those who want to turn those lines into World War I style trenches where technoliterate 13 year olds ( and the 30 year olds who haven't grown up yet ) hurl vulgarity at each other. The whole thing smacks of a pointless semiotic and semantic debate to me.

Of all the problems and concerns in the video game industry ( and there are a hell of a lot of problems ) the debate between Casual and Hardcore products, customers, play styles, and development practices reeks of dancing shadows on a cave wall to me.

Should we even care? Does it matter if people are using a product for 15 minutes every day? Does it matter that 'Casual' gamers are statistically shown to put in way more time playing games than expected? Or that they play for longer periods than expected?

Should we care that hardcore gamers are getting fewer and further between? That the hardcore gamer, once the bread and butter, is shrinking into a niche as the video game industry expands it's scope?

I think the whole debate is a bit of a red herring. I think blurring the lines between hardcore and casual is a pointless task because the lines themselves are not important.

The real problem is not that people are playing for a certain amount of time, or play in a certain manner, but rather they are looking for something FUN to do. We are in the ENTERTAINMENT industry, yet when I look at the top tier products flying off the shelves, I really do not see a lot that is entertaining.

Big budgets, yes. Beautiful graphics, yes. The occasional novel theme, yes. Fun? Not very often. If developers are spending their time looking for the ultimate casual game, the ultimate hardcore game, or the ultimate game that grabs everyone and gets better numbers than Halo, Habbo Hotel, Secondlife, and WoW combined they are wasting their time.

They should be looking to entertain and to make things that are fun. If it is entertaining, and fun, it doesn't really matter whether it is hardcore or casual. People will play it, and that is really all that matters at the end of the day. Leave the market demographics and MBAisms to the venture capital firms and business plans and get down to brass tacks, making something people want and like to play.

Making a game is a lot like giving birth while cooking dinner for 20,000.

You gotta keep a ton of processes working in both synchronicity and harmony with the intent of reaching an audience of 20,000 people in a very intimate and personal manner.

All the while you're sweating and straining, pushing and breathing, literally suffering through the pain of trying to get this creation, which long before it's birth has taken on a life and agenda all it's own, out the damn door... kicking, screaming, covered in sharp edges, and dragging a loose tail of bubble wrap from one foot.

Even with the simplest of concepts and the most minimal execution your team can possibly get away with, it's still a life changing experience: One that leaves you in awe and wonder, having both learned a series of valuable lessons, and having caught a glimpse of just how much longer you have to go.

Our buddy Corvus asks for this month's Blogs of the Round Table: "AI: Beauty or Beast? This month’s topic is artificial intelligence. What does it mean to current games? What should it mean? How far have we come? How far do we have to go? Does what we call AI in games bear any resemblance to AI as understood by other industries? Should it? Are we currently using AI to its fullest advantage? Are we using it for the right things? No matter your approach, whether technical, historical, tragical, comical, artisical, musical, tragi-comical, or techno-tragi-comi-arti-musical, use this month’s topic (artificial intelligence if you’ve forgotten already) to grab AI by the lapels and shake until you just can’t shake anymore."

And I thought about it.

I thought about it in terms of my experience with Machine Learning, pattern recognition, neural networks and liquid state machines, cognitive sciences, behavioral conditions and test, perfect checkers games and games of chess I'll never win against a computer.

I thought about NPC's that ducked behind crates in first person shooters (does it have to be a crate?), and the first time I gave the goons in my Shadowrun games families and friends, and how they started ducking behind dumpsters in firefights too when I did that.

I thought about it so much I even forced myself to watch Stephen Spielberg's movie of the same name (I had forgotten how truly awful it was). I downloaded Facade, and did everything in my power to keep Grace and Trip together (although I failed each time). I kept thinking about it and thinking about it, and wanting to write something intelligent to say about the proper application and the unexplored frontiers of Artificial Intelligence in games.

Last night I was thinking about it again in an empty blog post window at around 1 in the morning when I fell asleep and had a dream.

In the dream I was in a room with mechas from Stephen Spielberg's movie: Mechanized humans which when you look at them are completely indistinguishable from the real thing. I remember being excited at the chance to test their limits, and see what these things are really capable of. So I went up to the first male mecha, a smartly dressed English looking chap in a suit with an emblem on it classifying him as the smartest mecha alive, not entirely unlike A.I.'s Dr. Who, so I asked him what would be required to travel backwards in time (I figure we got forward figured out pretty well), and we embark on a rollicking journey though the annuls of relatively and special relatively and tachyons and extra dimensions and string theory and M-theory and so on and so fourth.

After a bit I tired of the depth of the topic, and with a wave of my hand I dismissed it, flowing effortlessly to, "What is the reason for life?" upon which he instantly started down the whole carbon cycle only to have me interrupt him, and say, "Let me rephrase that, why is the reason for life?" to which is had a rather surprising answer, one I could only really describe as a mixture of religion, science, and philosophy as distilled from all the great theologians, scientists, and philosophers in existence.

I was bored.

So I left.

I walked away from the mecha, and over to a door that had a sign on it that said, "You can't ever go back." (another line from A.I. I believe, Jude Law said it to the girl before he boinked her), and after pausing to read it I pushed through the door, which slammed shut behind me with a muffled slam.

I found myself in a new room where my fiancé stood. I looked into her beautiful eyes, and she smiled that genuine smile at me...

I woke up. And that's when it dawned on me what I had to write about with regards to this topic.

What place does Artificial Intelligence hold in games as far as Verse Studios is concerned?

None at all.

At least not in the way it's meant here. As far as we are concerned, there is no substitution for Genuine Intelligence, and trying to remove the human aspect, the human condition from the equation is a fallacy into and of itself. AI is another way of modeling the very thing that we ourselves bring to a game when we play it: The human condition. That fact that we are imperfect, that we play a game knowing full well that it will end in an unsatisfactory "Game Over", or that there's a wrong way to do something that will lead to failure or lack of success dictates that the human condition is actually a vital aspect of the experience. Humans create games for humans to experience them, and to date, that has not changed, and it's not looking likely to any time soon either. Trying to model a machine as "thinking" is still inappropriate, even in situations where deductive and inductive logic is applied, because in the absence of new stimulation, there's always a finite set of deductions to be made.

This is easily expressed in the linear-story game which you play once and put away, when compared to the ever evolving experience of a frequently updated and well modeled community/online based game. It's our strong belief that the social aspect... that human condition... is what makes online games in particular so much fun and keeps us coming back to them time after time after time.

It's not to say that AI isn't important (it is), or hasn't come a very long way (it has), it's just as far as I know it doesn't get any better than the real thing.

I am about 1,000 kilometers from my office, and nothing is stopping me from being able to work except running around Alberta visiting my family, friends, and doing the occasional bit of wedding planning.

You see, Verse Studios is a 'virtual office', you could even go as far as to say we are a 'virtual corporation.' Everything we need to work we can pull down from our dev servers, google docs, or over Skype. I'm sitting here on my Mother-in-law-to-be's computer chatting and catching up on the status of production and the company with my fellow Versers, doing a bit of beta testing ( ie: breaking things ), and of course catching up on my way over-due blogging.

There are a lot of people who think that companies need to have an office. That everyone needs to be in the same location for the synergy to really get flying. I don't think that is true at all, I've been riding the superconscious through remote collaboration for years. Sometimes being in an office actually hinders my work, I get destracted, or I destract those around me.

When I was at GDC I overheard a conversation where two designers were cringing over the idea of programmers developing remote from each other. In a panel discussion at IGS panelists shuddered at the idea of programmers and artists working outside of the office.

I know it may not be for everyone, but man, a virtual office kicks serious but for us. More game developers should look into it, and avoid the 10,000 sq ft office with super-fly paint jobs and soft overhead lighting. No office can ever compair to the comfort of your own living room, or how great it feels to work on your patio in the sun. Happy employees work harder, I know I do, so why not let them work from where they are happiest?

Plus, office space, tres expensive. Why, I bet I could even work from the Calgary Stampede...

So, I come in to work this morning to find an article on games.internode about CCP bringing on an economist. Not a big surprise, it's not the first time I've heard them having an economist floating around the offices. Each month that goes by the writing on the wall is getting bigger and in snazzier colours. People in the industry seem to be waking up to the fact that there is something powerful in 'game economies'.

I for one am glad to see it. I'll leave this discussion at that, least I become pedantic on game economics.

I'm headed off to Under the Radar tomorrow. Just reading through the list of attendees it looks like I'll have more than a few friends there.

I'm hoping to make some more money contacts in the southern California area, so we'll see how the Gods of Funding shine on me.

Looking forward to seeing everyone there!