PAX East: Pros and Cons

Our indie company, Frogdice, is going to PAX East for the very first time ever, so I'm pretty excited. I'm also pretty nervous. I can't wait! I also don't want to go. I've been vacillating all week, so I finally decided to get it all out in a Pros and Cons list.

PAX and Cosplay

Pro: I absolutely love cosplay. Our players have been cosplaying for over 13 years for Threshold RPG, our 16 year old text RPG. There's going to be tons of cosplay there!

Con: Since I am representing our booth, I can't cosplay any of my favorite LoL characters. I was thinking of going as Gragas. (Yes, imagine a 4'11" old, Asian lady dressed up as Gragas. HAH!)

PAX and Marriage

Pro: I'm going to PAX East with my husband. We'll be representing a company that we've built together and showing off games we've built as a team. All this from having met each other on a game he created while we were both in law school. It's like the culmination of an epic love story.

Con: Prepping for PAX East might result in a divorce. I'll let you know if I'm still married when I get back.

PAX and Swag

Pro: I love our swag! And I can't wait to go swag shopping. I may be a game developer, but I'm also an avid gamer. I've already contacted other booths in hopes of swag swapping. Woo!

Con: It's swag. There ARE NO CONS. Okay, maybe a little con. I had a hard time choosing our swag because, as an indie company, you have to be pretty frugal and spend very, very carefully. There's not a lot of room to spend money on swag that people might just toss in the trash. I'm pretty pumped with the swag that we picked out. I think they have a high chance of making it home with gamers. If we have any left over, I know a ton of people at FroggaCon who will want it. So, maybe I was right. THERE ARE NO CONS!!!

PAX and Press

Pro: Our interview slots are filling up, and since we're both going, we can double up on the interviews. I'm extremely happy with the press and their interest. We've got a great story, but sometimes it can be a little bit tough to get their attention. Wait until I tell them that we're only married because I wanted better gear for my character on Threshold.

Con: As I said, it can be hard to get gaming media to reply at times. On the other hand, I can't wait to meet the people who have been INCREDIBLY responsive and supportive from the first time we've contacted them. Also, I may run out of bourbon trying to booze these guys up.

PAX and Parties

Pro: I'm gonna party all night like I haven't since college.

Con: I'm gonna party all night and pay for it since I'm now 37 and not 19. If you see me lying in the gutter, kindly scoot me back onto the sidewalk. Oh, and can I borrow your walker?

Photoshop: My Enemy, My Friend

Recently, I subscribed to the Adobe Creative Cloud service which gives me access to all 17 of their powerful programs for $30 a month. I can't even tell you the amount of excitement I got from having all that creative power at my fingertips. Now I wasn't stuck with using Paint for all my creative endeavors, and I would produce brilliant pieces of concept art for my hard-working team at Frogdice.

Look at the difference between my concept art!

No, I'm just kidding. I really wish that was how it turned out. (I borrowed the turtoom from our 3D Artist, Adam.) Instead, I got Photoshop and couldn't figure out how to make a circle. Well, that's not really true either. I made a circle, and I was pretty excited about it. I got up to get a drink, and when I got back, my circle was gone. I never did figure out where it went or how it disappeared.

Now, of course, I'm much more comfortable with Photoshop. I'm still not doing anything super beautiful with it, but I did make the title to this blog. I have to say that I felt incredibly proud of it. Of course, Photoshop turned around and kicked me in the teeth the day after I finished my Frog Pond title. I ended up pasting 400 codes into a template in Photoshop and saving each page as an individual file in preparation for PAX East. Photoshop had a great laugh at me then.

Photoshop, sometimes friend. Sometimes enemy.

Nerd cred, yo!

Recently, I've been reading about women game developers and women geeks in general having to defend their "nerd cred", and my first thought was, "What the hell is nerd cred?" Immediately, I start imagining gangs of people in their pocket protectors and horn-rimmed glasses doing a dance off in front of white boards and armed with colored dry erase markers.

As I did more research, I discovered that I was guilty of laughing my butt off at a meme that is now considered extremely sexist. I was first introduced to this meme when one of my friends, a fellow geek girl, had this posted to her page:

This was months and months ago, and I remember calling my husband over to laugh over it with me. First of all, it's funny because my friend absolutely won't have anything to do with DC comics. She's a total Marvel Girl. (Pun intended! And a girl after my own heart.) Secondly, I've dealt with so many people (not just women) that this meme makes fun of over the years. Heck, I may have BEEN this meme at some point in my life.

First of all, this meme makes fun of posers, and we all have met posers or been one at some point in our life. People try on a lot of hats for all sorts of reasons, and popularity and "being cool" are definitely two big factors in being a poser. We're all offended by posers because we often feel like they're mocking something we truly love or feel we've invested a lot of time and energy doing.

I'm not sure why this meme got turned into the "sexist" meme. I mean, most memes are downright insensitive in one way or another. I find Super Photogenic Guy to be far more sexist than Idiot Nerd Girl for the simple fact that Super Photogenic Guy is literally about that guy's maleness, even if it's in a positive light. Idiot Nerd Girl has very little to do with that girl actually being a girl and more about people pretending to be something they are not in order to make an impression on another group of people. Would we have the same reaction if it was Idiot Nerd Guy?

Now, don't get me wrong. There are jerks out there who question a girl's "nerd cred" and accuse us of using our womanhood to get in their sacred, geek pants.  I've had a run-in with it lately while playing a game on Kongregate of all places. I got accused of "getting all the men riled up because you let them know you're a girl who plays LoL". My horrible deed? One of my buddies on the game asked me what my League of Legends account was so he could friend me. Why? Because he liked playing games with me. So because I answered and because I had not hidden the fact that I was playing the game with my husband, I had obviously lured all these men to treating me better by... I don't know. I got lost in trying to follow his line of thought. He obviously had a problem with me playing an online game and being a chick. Here's the thing, though. That's HIS problem. He temporarily made it mine, but it was VERY temporary.

The meme, however, is not the result of a bunch of sexist, misogynistic men who are out to destroy all nerd women. In fact, before I knew it was "sexist", I made a bunch of them just to amuse myself. I even used the template to make up one for some of the sanctimonious role-players in a certain game where I can often be found. By attacking the meme, we're allowing the douche canoes who are making us defend our "nerd cred" to  have a rally point and to hide behind that meme. And really, those guys are like that with EVERYONE, even other guys who aren't in their accepted group and their accepted level of knowledge. It's their version of pissing on a tree to tell others to keep away, and it works remarkably well.

I was on the other side of Idiot Nerd Girl at Barnes & Nobles the other day. I had found a Lego Death Star, complete with a Tie Interceptor there, and of course, I bought it for my husband. When I got up to the register, the cashier gushed all over my Death Star. Then I said that I saw that there was a Yavin 4 and a Tatoonie as well, and I was thinking about getting one of those. She told me that she teared up every time she thought about Tatoonie. I thought that maybe she was sad that Boba Fett had died in the Sarlac Pit, and I was about to tell her that he actually makes it out when she said, "I never understood why Princess Leia wasn't more upset when they destroyed her planet. I would be devastated."

Before I could help myself, I blurted out, "Oh, you mean Alderaan."

She looked at me and said, "What?"

I said, "You mean Alderaan. Princess Leia's home planet was Alderaan, not Tatoonie."

Immediately, the lady got flustered and said that she couldn't keep any of the planets straight. There were just to many. For a moment, I doubted myself and started to feel like a guilty nerd who had spent too much time watching Star Wars. (Which I probably have, especially since my daughters are now getting into it.) I had a flash of resentment that she'd brought up Princess Leia in relation to Tatoonie at all and putting me in this position. She could had just gushed about my Death Star and left it at that. At the same time, I felt bad that she was trying to engage me, and it turned out awkward. So, I suppressed my nerd guilt and said, "Yeah, there's a lot of planets. The only reason I remembered it is because one of my favorite T-shirts shows Luke and Leia together with Alderaan in the back, and the hilarious caption said LOOKING FOR LOVE IN ALDERAAN PLACES." We had a good laugh and moved on away from the awkwardness. She helped me bag everything up, gave me about a thousand coupons, and rang up my discounts. We were both happy by the time I was done.

Still, I had that flash of resentment, but I'm a 37 year old woman with two daughters and a TON of geek/nerd friends and customers. I knew better than to let it unleash or to even hold it against that woman who was just trying to engage me. The Cred Warriors just don't know any better. They feel the need to stomp, moan, and freak out over their Nerdom. I leave it to them. They can have their little corner of the universe while I find friends who don't mind if I make a little bit of a mistake every now and then as I try to share their passion, and they don't mind if I correct them in my moments of extreme geekitude.

"Relax. It's just a game."

If you are a gamer, you have heard this at least once in your life. Maybe you yelled at your husband when he interrupted your Bejeweled Blitz minute after you'd spent tons of coins on power ups and a Phoenix Prism, and he gave you the standard, "Relax. It's just a game." Perhaps your wife told you that after she got you facerolled while you were solo mid, and you, understandably, had a few words to say it. Maybe your WoW tank said it to you after you watched him switch to his DPS gear for "fun" and wiped the raid.

I had that moment a few days ago. I had a player write me because I was really slow in processing a character for him. He explained to me that he had just had four days off work and had look forward to his new character, but now those four days had passed. He felt that those days were days he'd never be able to get back on playing his character. My initial thoughts were, "Man, chill out. It's just a game." Afterall, I'd just been through a week of hell, my company was going through some major (and great) changes, and my child's fieldtrip to Washington, DC had been cancelled two days early. I had a lot on my plate, and here was this guy whining about how he didn't get to play a GAME. Sheesh. The nerve.

But then I stopped and thought about it. This player had just had a new baby. I knew very well how precious gaming time becomes with a new baby. I'd had two myself. He was right. He deserved those days of gaming, and I was just trying to displace my own failure of dealing with my responsibilities by minimizing his complaint by saying, "It's just a game." And how poor a rationalization that was! It was MY game. My business. My customer. He keeps me in the business of making games, and he really would never get those four days back.

I thought about how frustrated I felt when I couldn't play SimCity due to all the server issues. I remembered the people mocking others who had taken time off work in anticipation of the first new SimCity in a decade. "It's just a game. Why would you take time off work for that?" People take time off work for all sorts of stuff they enjoy. Why not a game?

Gaming is valuable time for most people. It's time we carve out from our families, friends, work, school, etc. It's time we're choosing to entertain ourselves. So, the next time some gets mad at you for something and you want to reply, "Relax. It's just a game.", really take a look at your actions. You might be trying to shift blame for wasting someone else's time. And for gaming companies that blow off their players for not being able to access their game (I'm not naming any names. You know who you are.), take their complaints seriously because they take your game seriously.

(Okay, if you're living with a gaming addict, you can definitely say, "It's just a game!" and be justifiably mad. You are exempt from this blog post.)

Top 5 Signs That You Are a Game Designer

5) Whenever engaged in a mundane activity, you think that you could make this into a game.

It doesn't matter what activity you're involved in doing. You think there must be an awesome game there. That's exactly how cooking games came to be. When I was working on a cooking system for one of our games, every time I was cutting, stirring, chopping, smashing, chilling, or doing anything- no matter how mundane- I was sure there was a way to turn it into a game. Epic game designers probably think about how to turn pooping into a game.

4) You start bedtime stories for your children with, "Hey, honey, pretend you're playing a game involving mushrooms, badgers, and llamas that create a trade nation, what would you do?"

Seriously, you view your children as real sources for game design solutions, and you pick their innocent little brains as much as possible. It doesn't even have to be your children. It could be random children off the street. Just remember that parents don't appreciate it when you, a stranger, offer their children candy- no matter how good your intentions may be.

3) When faced with a growth of mushrooms and admiring the beauty of nature for exactly 3.8 seconds,  you immediately start wondering how many points/xp/resources/gold you could get for stomping/gathering/smashing/kissing every single mushroom.

Yeah, you've been there. You start eyeing everything in terms of what you SHOULD be able to get out of it if you did a particular action. The good thing is that many pots remain unbroken, mushrooms un-stomped, and trees un-chopped because you can't figure out what you'd actually gain from it in real life. So, you glance at it, admire it and move on- blissfully thinking about how you can incorporate such action in a game and how you can reward a player for it.

2) When irritated by someone, you wonder how you can build them into your game and really teach them a lesson.

Every now and then someone really irritates me. It's usually on the road or at my children's school. Someone already made a game for drivers who piss you off. It's called Crazy Taxi! And I don't think you can make a game that advocates violence in schools at this day and age.. even if it's against parents. Thus, you have to get creative and name the person who irritated you as some wimpy, puke colored dragon in your RPG. (Don't be surprised if you end up a puke colored dragon in my next game!)


1) You write a blog post about the Top 5 Signs That You Are a Game Designer and strategize how to get the most Likes, +s, Shares, Re-Blogs, Re-posts, Links, and Tweets you can get...

because there MUST be an extrinsic reward of some kind. You can't just blog for sheer enjoyment of writing or any other kind of intrinsic reward.

Video Games Inspire Violence in Little Girls

The Newtown shooting, a national tragedy, is the stuff of nightmares for anyone but especially for parents with young children. We send our children off to school every day because that's what expected of us, and we hope that, in return, they learn to be productive members of society. It didn't take the media long, of course, to blame video games for the violence. Of course it was video games!! 

Let me share with you our own experiences with video game induced violence. We had a beautiful day of snow over Winter Break. On the first day, we just played. On the second day, we went sledding. It was amazing! We loved zipping down the perfect hill and crashing into various things. We vowed to do it again the next day as the sun went down. On the third day of snow, the temperature went above freezing, and the sledding on slush does not produce the same epic results as sledding on soft powder.

Both my little girls and I play video games, so of course, we resorted to violence. EPIC VIOLENCE. We invaded my parents' backyard with an army. Our anger had to go somewhere, right?

That's right. We built an army, and we made sure that they were armed with dangerous weapons a la Plants vs. Zombies. I'm telling you that our hours of playing PvZ drove us our great rage to new extremes. How dare the snow melt before we were ready?! We had to strike back at the world.

Our army moved relentlessly towards the stairs. They brought fear with them. This particular guy was totally inspired by hours of killing gems in a most brutal manner in Bejeweled and aggressively creating cakes in My Little Pony: Pinkie Pie's Party Parade. My girls have been inundated at a young age with this kind of stuff.   It's no wonder they're acting out with this army. 

The coup de grace is our headless snowman. It's all the Pokemon games we've been playing. I don't think it could possibly have anything to do with their curiosity about the guillotines used in the French Revolution as I was telling them the story of the Scarlet Pimpernel and discussing Les Miserable with them. That's classic literature, so seriously, it's either Pokemon or Spore that must be to blame. I haven't decided which yet, so we'll just say it was both.

Despite the fact that my ten-year-old spent the whole time talking about how this was just like Calvin and Hobbes the entire time we were building our snow army, I'm convinced that it was video games that inspired such violence in them. I should say that my mother is a culprit, too, since she provided the flowers that were used as "guns". I'm pretty sure that their reference to plasma rays must have come from overhearing something from Mass Effect and probably has nothing to do with Stitch shooting up Lilo's house from Disney's Lilo and Stitch.

And ultimately, I would like to remind everyone that this violence must be the fault of video games, and of course, I can't be held responsible, being their mother and all. After all, it's really not my responsibility to take them outside, to play with them, to engage them in new ideas and introduce them to art in all its forms. It's really just those darn video games.

Parenting and Video Games

One of the areas where I get the most questions from my fellow parents is how much I let our girls play video games. My answer is always, "Quite a bit."

I mean, that's natural right? My girls help us test our games, and we always try to put an educational bent of some sort in all of our games whether it be pattern recognition games, basic economic games, or language games and puzzles. That's the point, though. The games that I allow my girls to play always have some component designed to teach them one lesson or another or to give them a creative outlet that I feel that they need. Ultimately, I can't answer this question for them and have them apply it to their children. If I've learned nothing else in my life, it's that children start being individuals very, very soon after they're born. Things that work for one child may be completely detrimental to another child.

Here's my very simple determination of how much video game time my child gets, and I also added my standards for my own kids.

1) How are his or her grades?

My kids have to have phenomenal grades for me to allow a lot of gaming. Thankfully, they do, and they understand that their grades tie directly into their privileges. 

2) How much total time would she LIKE to spend on the computer?

The more my kids put aside other things (crafts, practice, going outside) to play computers, the less total time I give them without regulating it heavily. Basically, I am enforcing the balance. I also enforce breaks on a regular basis.

3) What does she want to play?

If she wants to play a game that I feel has education value over a game I feel is a brain-dead button masher, I'll give her far more time to explore the game. Also, if I feel the game has some value to teach my child, then she has more freedom to explore it.

4) How good is she at the game?

Once my child masters a game, I tend to start encouraging her to move on to another one. While there is much to be learned in repetition and dealing with patterns, the amount a person learns from a game he/she has mastered is much less than delving into something new. SOME games defy this. You can play them endlessly, and your brain would still be learning from it. (Check out the Tetris Effect.)

It's entirely possible that my answer will not help at all depending on the person your child is. This is a general guideline that works on MY children, but as I'm often asked for advice in this department, I figured I'd make a blog post about it. Hope it helps!