The Minds Behind Some of the Most Addictive Games Around

If you've wasted half your life playing Peggle, Bejeweled, Zuma or Plants vs. Zombies, blame these guys!

by James Turner | comments: 5

The gaming industry tends to focus on the high end products, first person shooters that crank out a bazillion polygons a seconds and RPGs which spend more time developing the plot in cut scenes than in actual gameplay. But for every person playing Borderlands, there are scores playing casual games like Bejeweled and Zuma. PopCap Games has been at the forefront of casual game development, with a catalog that includes bestselling titles like Peggle and Plants vs Zombies, in addition to the two previously mentioned. I recently had a chance to talk to Jason Kapalka, one of the founders and the creative director of PopCap. We discussed the evolution of PopCap, how the casual gaming industry differs from mainstream gaming, and the challenges of creating games that can be engaging, without being frustrating.

James Turner: Could you start by talking a little bit about your background and how you came to PopCap and what you did before then?

Jason Kapalka: My career in computer games started back in the early '90s, when I was writing for the magazine, Computer Gaming World, doing various reviews and articles. In '95, one of the editors from the magazine left to join an internet dotcom start-up in San Francisco called TEN, the Total Entertainment Network. He invited me to come down there and work there, which I did. And TEN evolved over the dotcom boom and bust cycle, from a very hardcore gaming service into what eventually turned into Pogo.com around 1999. I worked there initially on hardcore games. One day, I was working on Total Annihilation tournaments, and then the next day, someone said, "Hey, design bingo." And I was sort of like, "Oh. Bingo? Okay."

That was the beginning of my casual game design career, I guess. And yes, I was there at Pogo. I helped design a lot of the structure for their casual games until around 2000 when I left, and Pogo eventually went on to get bought by Electronic Arts, of course. I left in 2000 and started PopCap with two other guys, Brian Fiete and John Vechey who are these guys from Indiana that I'd met earlier, around '97. They had made an internet action game called ARC that we'd produced on TEN, and we stayed in touch. In 2000, we all thought we wanted to try something different. So we all left our respective companies to start PopCap. As you might remember, 2000 was not the best year for internet companies. So we didn't really realize that the entire industry was collapsing. We had an interesting time initially. Luckily, our ignorance protected us, I guess.

PopCap started from there, just the three of us working out of our apartments. And over time, we'd say, "Well, I guess we need to hire an artist." And I'd say, "Well, I guess we need to hire maybe another guy here to program this stuff." And then eventually, maybe someone should look at the books or whatever, so we'll hire someone to take care of the bookkeeping. And it kept going like that until eventually we thought that maybe we needed an office. And from there, suddenly, we've got nearly 300 employees now in 2009. So it's been an interesting kind of experience. We never really intended PopCap to get anywhere near as big as it has today.

James Turner: How would you describe PopCap's place in the market today?

Jason Kapalka: I guess it's a bit odd. Casual game companies exist in these strange spaces where they're often the developer and the publisher at the same time. And then they also publish stuff with other guys, where they're sort of rivals, but also they're partners. There's a lot of this co-opetition thing going on. PopCap is obviously a developer, and we develop a lot of games. We used to publish other people's games. And we still do indirectly. in that we have SpinTop Games. which is a company we bought a couple of years back. They distribute a lot of other people's games through their site. But primarily, I think we develop and then publish titles. But we primarily focus on publishing our own titles. So we're kind of a self-publisher, I suppose.

James Turner: That's actually something I wanted to ask you about because one of your distribution channels now is Steam, which is another company's portal for their games and others. How do you see that relationship?

Jason Kapalka: Steam's been really good. We work with lots of different portals. Steam is one of many that our typical game would go out on. On Steam, on Real Arcade, Big Fish Games, Yahoo Games, MSN, WildTangent, a whole bunch of smaller channels. So Steam was just one of several. It's been interesting in that it was developed differently than a lot of those other ones. Steam is definitely much more of a hardcore game distribution channel than something like Real Arcade. So initially, when we started on Steam, it was uncertain whether our games were going to really fit in. Initially, a lot of the ones we tried on Steam didn't really work too well for their audience. Hidden object games don't do especially well with Steam users, for example.

The turning point for Steam was probably when we did Peggle Extreme with Valve. I don't know if you remember that. Peggle had just come out, and the guys at Valve really liked it. We were talking and we had some weird ideas. Someone had the odd suggestion to do sort of a miniature-themed version of Peggle that featured all of the Orange Box's characters, the Half-Life, MT Team Fortress guys. It was a really strange idea, because that was a fairly mature violent kind of franchise. And certainly, it didn't seem like the obvious fit for Peggle. But, on the other hand, we thought, "Well, what the heck? We can try it and it's only going to go on Steam anyway so it's not like it'll offend the soccer moms necessarily." So we tried that out, and it went up. And we were all kinds of nervous because we didn't know -- it had launched initially as a free download with the Orange Box. And even though it didn't cost people anything, we were still kind of wondering if there was going to be this big backlash from the hardcore community about, "What the hell is this cheap little pinball thing doing in the middle of my Orange Box product."

But actually, the response was really good. I mean, the Orange Box guys all really liked Peggle a lot. And ultimately, that led them to go and seek out and buy the regular versions of Peggle which made Peggle suddenly this fairly big success on Steam. Which a month or two ago, before that, didn't seem very likely that this game with unicorns and rainbows would be selling well on Steam. So after that, that sort of seemed to kind of be -- it sort of opened the floodgates a little bit. And now a variety of our games do very well on Steam. Obviously, Plants Vs Zombies was the last one that had quite a hit there. Not everything. There's still some of our games that are clearly more casual and that don't particularly work well on Steam. But the ones that do work there seem to really work well.

James Turner: There seems to be a fairly different expectation level for casual games in terms of graphics and such. Do you think that's a natural result of how they're produced and what they're intended for? Or could you see something like Plants Vs Zombies but with the graphics levels of a Half-Life?

Jason Kapalka: It's certainly possible. I mean in some cases, we're not intentionally trying to make the games low fidelity. We try to do the best art direction we can. Although the usual contradiction, or decision to be made, there is we also want to make games as accessible as possible. So we want Plants Vs Zombies to play on every crummy netbook and seven-year-old computer your mom has and all of these types of things. And so that tends to mean that we try to work and have good art, but usually make the technical requirements very modest. We've been working at making things that can scale well so that on a good computer, you'll get a really nice experience and it'll still scale down to play on a lower-end computer. But that can be challenging in itself. So usually, we err on the side of not worrying about the graphics being too high-end because our experience is showing that a good game with not very fancy graphics can sell very well, like Plants Vs Zombies. And I think that game has good graphics, but it's definitely limited. It's only got 800X600 resolution and so forth. But on the other hand, we've seen plenty of games in the casual space that have really good graphics and they sell very poorly if they're not a fun game. So accessibility and fun definitely, for us, end up being a first priority over graphics. And especially 3-D or technically impressive graphics versus just good art direction.

James Turner: You would think Nethack and Rogue would be the ultimate proof that you can have good game play without good graphics.

Jason Kapalka: Sure, I love Roguelike games. We have lots of Nethack fans over at PopCap, which seems a bit weird in that they're obviously not very casual in many regards. But yeah, they're good exemplars of that principle that graphics are not as important as game play.

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Computerization in Nilekani's Imagining India

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 0

Imagining India: The Idea of a Renewed Nation promises to occupy a central position in discussions about India as well as the world economy this year. The book was released last year in India, came out in the United States just this past March, and has racked up some prominent reviews recently. Particularly relevant to this blog are the book's observations on computers' role in the economy and society.

Author Nandan Nilekani can speak with quite a bit of authority on computers, having founded and led Infosys, an early success story in modern Indian commerce and a major player in the historic rise of outsourcing.

Imagining India is a huge book with many big agendas; it covers education, infrastructure, environmental challenges, government intervention, and the role of historical narrative, among other things. Biggest among its agenda--and the one that I wager will generate the most debate--is Nilekani's own version of a modern combination of neoliberalism and neoprogressivism that seems to be gaining ground. The general idea is that governments should take a leading role to promote social progress by creating an infrastructure that allows individuals to form their own destinies (good education, good health care, good physical infrastructure, a light-touch form of regulation that ensures quality, and occasional direct welfare payments) rather than preserving oases of protection and easily abused subsidies for particular interest groups, notably unions, small businesses, and disadvantaged castes.

But all that lies beyond the scope of the Radar blog and of my own powers of analysis. I'll just comment on the following points from the book, because they concern the role of computers and because they resonate with trends I see in the U.S. and elsewhere.

• Technophobia shouldn't be assumed
• Internet access goes along with transparency and egalitarianism
• Software leads innovation in other areas

Technophobia shouldn't be assumed

A lot of technologists glibly anticipate that computers and Internet access will be rejected by some group of people who are implicitly labeled ignorant or clueless: racial minorities, poor people, the elderly ("how can you get my grandmother to use this?"), etc. In every case, the key to adoption turns out to be access and sometimes the availability of useful applications. When presented with the opportunity, these populations always prove eager to take advantage.

Nilekani cites one instance after another of rural village dwellers, farmers, taxpayers, and others who quickly grasp what computers and Internet access can do for them. Whether it's the chance to learn English, check crop prices, or pay a utility bill, Indians at all levels come to depend on the computer once it's introduced. (The hard thing, as you might guess, is persuading agencies and local officials to install systems that undercut their power as gatekeepers.) And we've all heard of the Hole in the Wall Project, where Indian kids in slums come to enjoy and figure out how to use computers with little or no adult help.

Nilekani may be citing anecdotes selectively, but his observations echo other reports I've heard about disadvantaged or lagging communities. The problem is not the people, but other factors such as availability, cost, and usefulness.

Internet access goes along with transparency and egalitarianism

One reason the Indian population loves computers, according to Nilekani, is that it attacks favoritism and outright corruption. This advantage matches up with the promise of open government in the United States and other developed countries.

In some cases, Indians are burdened by extremely crude forms of corruption that crumble the instant computers are installed. One example in the book is the registration of changes in land records, which farmers are required to report to the government every year. Agency staff could easily steal land by deliberately filing wrong reports, or extract bribes by delaying the filing until the desperate farmer caves in. But a computerized system takes the staff person out of the process.

Bringing sunlight into government activities in most developed countries has somewhat subtler effects and becomes a more long-term project, but the essence is the same and depends on computerization to work. In the US, we have a lot more control over the stimulus package, thanks to Recovery.gov, than we have over expenditures in Iraq or the bail-out to the finance industry. Indians are similarly learning how to watch over their governments and raise their voices digitally, according to Nilekani.

The sunny role that people around the world are granting to the technologies of going online is not intrinsic to these technologies, because they also lie at the center of modern surveillance, warfare, and regimentation. The benign role is hard won, and represents a collective choice by the public that has adopted the technologies. As Nilekani puts it:

The idea of technology as something ominous and scary that is used by "Big Brother" to control our lives and eliminate jobs has given way to the idea that it empowers, liberates and gives us access to all the services that are due to us, as citizens and consumers.

Software leads innovation in other areas

The reason that the computer industry was the first to take off in 1990s India is that it required practically no infrastructure. Of course, it required a computer, which might require six to twelve months for an import license in those days. It also required electricity, which could be obtained in major cities and supplemented by private generators. (In areas of unauthorized urban growth, the slumlords strung the wires.) So in a regulatory environment that scrutinized and imposed conditions on every allocation of equipment, it was much easier for entrepreneurs to set up a computer firm than any business that had more physical manifestations.

As is well known, the relative independence of computing from physical infrastructure also made Indian companies lucrative in a world increasingly linked by the Internet. Nilekani says that this physical flexibility was also valuable internally, helping IT-savvy businesses cut across the logistical and political barriers that have always geographically segmented the Indian market.

Nilekani seems to believe that there's nothing about the computer industry that's uniquely suited to Indian talents and business acumen. Now that the computer industry set an example, the same advantages have been applied to many other industries. In the 1980s, economists doubted that India could succeed in any industry, and a few years ago they wondered whether India could succeed in any industry except computer services. The evidence is now strong that the country will become a leader in many areas.

Indian industry is just one example where computerization has shown light on a path that social change can take. A worldwide example is provided by the open source movement, which Nilekani mentions only in the most fleeting manner in his conclusion--unfortunately enough, because free software can be a compelling wild card in story of international development, especially as part of a trend I dubbed tech-splicing in another article.

The first open license was a software license (the GNU General Public License). When it was released, the phenomena of allowing unlimited changes and sharing these changes looked like a peculiar aspect of software. But many years later, these ideas seeped out into fields of innovation with a more physical basis, and research by Eric von Hippel showed they always had legs.

Software was also the inspiration for gene splicing and other aspects of synthetic biology, even to the extent that biologists share their innovations in repositories that look like software libraries (check out the BioBricks Foundation).

Finally, the popularity of scripting and other software hacking initiated--or revived, or perhaps just legitimized--a tradition of solving a problem through invention instead of settling for a standardized, commercial solution. The DIY movement found in many areas of the world--including the Indian practice of assembling local motor vehicles called jugaad--makes it more and more likely that products of many types will come out of small, even amateur workshops.

Products of creativity and pure thought embody a freedom that allows them to metamorphose and spread quickly. The added formality and clarity that software brings to these activities doubles the power of that freedom. So my guess is that software will often lead the way in social innovations by a decade or more.

Jonathan Heiliger on Web Performance, Operations, and Culture

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 0

We were honored to have Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook’s VP of Technology Operations, as our opening keynote speaker at Velocity. Jonathan is one of the most accomplished leaders in our field, and is a master of the craft.

Here is his keynote in its entirety:

Note: Other videos from Velocity are being posted to VelocityConference.blip.tv