Brace yourself – a lot of the people at BKWLD play and love video games. I know, shocker right? From PC to consoles, to MMOs to handhelds, like most interactive shops and people of our age group, we all play and love games. So it’s no surprise that we enjoy making online/web games, whether as full fledged mini-sites, or in banner ads.

Recently we were interviewed by .net Magazine and one of the questions was what sort of things we felt made an online/web game successful. I enjoyed the question, and thought I would expand on it a bit in a blog about what Robert and I shared with them.

We basically boiled it down to four points we felt made for fun and success.

1. Competition & Recognition
If there’s one thing Twitter, Facebook and frankly, this blog proves, it’s that people love attention. Even while I am typing this, I am hoping you are enjoying reading this! So it’s not a surprise that people love to see their name at the top of a scoreboard, or to blast on their ‘wall’ that they just gained a level in Farmville. A game that doesn’t allow someone to ‘tell a friend’ about their score and challenge that friend to beat them is missing out.

2. Variables
I remember about 4 years ago we made a game for the California Tourism Committee that had you skiing against Governor Schwarzenegger down a mountain. Almost immediately, every high score on the board was “14 seconds”, because once you figured out the best path, that was the absolute best score you could get. Not very fun.

So by adding in some crazy score multipliers or jackpots, and things that might only show up in 1 out of every 100 games, you’re easily injecting not only variability, but also giving players a reason to keep trying.

Additionally, throwing in ‘bad’ items like point subtractions also helps make the game not about just trying to gobble up every item on the screen, but gets a little strategy into play.

3. Incentives
This is probably the most obvious of them all, but when someone is playing for an iPod/Corvette/cheeseburger, they are going to play. And play. And play. And tell their grandma to play too.

I think giving stuff away should be two pronged though – give something to the best, but also just give something randomly. In other words, you can give the Corvette to the person with the highest score, but also have 2nd and 3rd place prizes, and even a ‘boobie prize’ where any person who plays, has a chance to win that cheeseburger.

4. Keep it simple stupid
There’s a time and a place for an 80 hour epic gaming adventure. And that place is certainly not in a 300 x 250 banner on yahoo.com. If ever there was a time for a game to be ‘pick up and play’ it’s when it’s a banner or a minisite game. I think a good rule of thumb is if you need more than one page of instructions, it’s going to be too complicated for a ‘casual gamer’ and not complicated enough for a ‘hardcore gamer’.

Overall, there’s plenty of examples however where a game shines in just ONE of these categories, and that’s enough to keep people playing. But if you try to intertwine all of these into your next game (and let’s not forget about the actual ‘design’ of the game) you should have a winner on your hands.

We love making games, and for a while we always had at least one in development.  The demand has waned in the past year as companies focused on more direct kinds of marketing.  Here’s hoping we get more excuses opportunities to make games in the new year!

PS – here’s some of my faves we’ve done over the years.

• http://funnevergrowsold.com/game/
• http://www.whodouwant2b.com/game/
• http://yourcowtown.com/game/index.htm
• http://bkwld.com/work/indiana-jones-the-staff-of-kings
• http://www.firstbank.bkwlddev.com/728×315.php

I’m not sure if it was Demetre’s last blog post or the deafening crush of hearing “Twitter” come from every web, marketing, entertainment etc. person for the last few months, but it’s abundantly clear that Twitter is not going anywhere, and that’s a good thing.

Not to recant on my previous post regarding Twitter’s penetration – and after re-reading it, I realized that I sounded as if “your mom having a twitter” was a bad thing. Quite the contrary, it’s a fabulous thing for the web and for my industry. For at it’s most basic level, anything that keeps people using and talking about the internet is good for interactive shops.

That’s why I was especially stoked to see this New York Times article talking about how small businesses are using Twitter to get their name out there and connect with other customers and businesses.

One quote I found particularly poignant was the following from Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter:

“We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit.”

I think this is the real value in Twitter – immediacy & intimacy. Whether it’s breaking news spreading like wildfire through the “Twitterverse” (please slap me for using that term) like Michael Jackson’s death, or an impromptu Dave Chappelle appearance turning into a gathering of thousands of people, to much smaller scale things like that New York city street vendor broadcasting his location and menu items for that day, there’s nothing fresher on the web than a tweet. Read the rest of this entry »

Seems every Tom, Dick and Harry these days is talking about and hawking their Twitter. I’m trying to figure out when I started Tweeting – searched my email and found a message from Eddie, dated March 11th, 2007 simply saying “http://twitter.com”.

I’m thinking then I’ve been tweeting for over two years, and to say the technology, support and people using it has changed drastically is an understatement, but I’ve been using it the exact same way from day one. Here’s an example of both of these concepts. I used the site http://myfirsttweet.com to find my very first tweet (there’s a friggin’ cottage industry of these kinds of site):

danthebeast: Breaking this twitter cherry like so many sunflower seeds. 2007-04-12 22:38:00

Read the rest of this entry »

Via Kottke I just skimmed an interesting article about the sort of test subjects that 3D artists use when creating their work (see the article here if you’re interested: http://www.artfagcity.com/2008/07/28/img-mgmt-20-archetypes/).

It made me think about the sort of FPO (which stands for “for placement only“) images and text that Buk uses in our projects. Of course there’s Lorem Ipsum, which I’ve been grabbing from Lipsum.com now for years. I take for granted that the majority of people (marketing people even) have no clue what Lorem Ipsum is, and can’t help but chuckle a little bit when they ask me “site looks great, but what’s the deal with all of that weird greek text?”

But where we get to have a little bit of fun is regarding FPO videos and graphics. It’s rare when a job is designed with the final assets; there’s always photo/video shoots to be produced, final logos to be delivered etc. And where we really get to flex our “FPO chops” is when populating a client’s new site’s CMS with test content.

So to that end, I am proud to show you some of our developers and designers “Island of Misfit Content” of sorts that we use to populate our sites and CMSs, most of which never see the light of day. (Note: some of the more scurrilous and NSFW images will remain locked deep within the http://locahost vaults of our more devious devs; we can’t put everything on front street!).

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey internet folks who read our little blog (thanks btw).

I’m sort of old school I guess when it comes to checking blog updates on my favorite sites, I don’t use RSS.

Rather, I use “Open in Tabs” on a folder called “Fun Stuff” in Safari’s Favorites toolbar. How 2003, right?

I intended this post to be more about how the lack of updates here has been because we are all so busy on some amazing projects for Dragon, Microsoft, Red Ledge, 2K and more, and not about my silly Favorites situation. We’re doing some amazing work and will be posting it soon. Hold on to your internet hats, we have some bangers coming out!

Ok, so now that’s out of the way, back to my digression!

So when I click “Open in Tabs”, I normally then go back to working, and let the 30 or so websites open up and make for one huge-assed tabbed window. It’s sort of like popping cookies in the oven…and then DING, my websites are ready!

I then go through each site (http://www.achewood.com has been my first tab for years), read what’s new and more often then not, just quickly hit Command+W and move on to the next one. I check out the usual stuff from Google News, Wired, Kotaku, Kottke, Penny Arcade, FWA, etc. including Buk’s own blog, on which I saw Mark’s old-ish post about Kill Start. And that’s what made me write this weird post, thinking that we needed some fresh content (the definition of content, used pretty loosely if you’ve made it this far in my post).

Lastly, I don’t use RSS because of, believe it or not, banner ads! I like to look at them, see what’s new, what’s cool. I owe it to my clients and my industry to see what’s out there, and RSS doesn’t deliver that.

What are your browsing habits? –DAN

Once again we descended (or maybe ascended) upon Tahoe for our annual retreat. We had a monster four-story house with a pool table, ping pong table, “sauna”, etc. It was bittersweet, for if we continue to grow as we are, this might be the last time the entire Seattle and Sac crews can become as one, like a web designing Voltron.

We rocked out, worked hard, snowboarded, gambled, drank, ate and were quite merry. In lieu of a slideshow, I thought I would show some photos with my own commentary. The first are from the Sac office before we embarked.

Mark, Robert and Garrett talking about Ground Control.

Ryan, Josh and Matt probably talking about nothing important.

Vics, Koa and Max in the ‘waiting room’.

Greg doing some shit.

ML on the case. Project, managed.

Greghog Day, popping up in that ass.

The super group BKWLD

It’s not often that we get to direct and shoot photos and videos, so we really sunk our teeth into a fun project with did in conjunction with Runyon, Saltzman and Einhorn out of Sacramento. The project was a website for the California Department of Education, State of California & California Community Colleges (quite a mouthful).

The site is about showing the amazing pathways and opportunities available to students, who might not realize they can ‘profit from their passion’ by going to a California Community College.
In order to harness this idea, Jeff came up with a great design that didn’t feel ‘corporate’ or ’state-y’, to help resonate with the target. We wanted to give the feeling that it was made for students, by students.

We also included testimonials from some real graduates and students of the CA Community College system, to help reinforce the story even more. Greg, Jeff, Josh and I shot the videos in our own office, to give it a less polished and more grassroots feel.

Here’s a few photos from the shoot and of Jeff busting some Photoshop madness.

Been too long since my last post! Which is pretty indicative of the amount of work and traveling myself and fellow Buk-caneers have been doing.

Last month, Josh and I had the opportunity to go to the Outdoor Retailer Show in lovely Salt Lake City, Utah. We got to hang out with one of our favorite clients, Kelty, as well as meet and greet just about every other outdoor company in the world. From Marmot, to Northface, to Solomon, to Oakley, to Helly Hansen, etc. Other than the usual “we make websites that melt faces” talks, we were showing off our Visual Merchandising Tool (which is the cat’s ass, trust me. Don’t trust me? Email us about it.)

Here’s a couple photos of Kelty’s booth:

There was tons of beer drinking at the booths; Josh rose to the challenge:

As did I, along with a boatload of swag from Kelty:

Been meaning to post this for days, just a little shot of our Buk Turkey Day party up in Sac.

So I thought I would do a bit of nerdery here and put my Xbox Live gamertag:

Don’t let my score fool ya, I’ve been playing games for ages, all the way back to pre-windows CGA Dos crap. I urge my other fellow Buk heads to post theirs, and if anyone wants to add us, please do!

The gamertag was a stroke of genius on Xbox’s part. Being able to easily show friends and the world what I have played, how thoroughly I played the game, who my friends are, etc. adds a level of ‘bragging’ and fun that I didn’t expect I would be so amped on.

And the coolest thing is when you’re playing the game, when you do something that’s ‘achievement’ worthy, you get a little pop-up that tells you that you’ve gained some points, and your gamerscore goes up. I love that shit! When I see it happen, especially when I am not expecting it, it’s such a pleasant surprise. All gamers talk shit, and love to rub their accomplishments in each others’ faces. Now there is tangible proof of said ass-kickery, and it rocks.

Another ‘trophy’ of sorts one can spread with their friends is the amazing system that Halo has built into their site & game. It’s a genius move of a game developer spending tons of time and resources tying their game into their site, with actual things people want to use. I’m going to post about that soon, and show some great shots of Robert, Ben and I blowing each other up in game, at super hi-res. –DAN