A couple years back, I wrote a “browser-based multiplayer role-playing game” called Nexus War. Don’t go looking for it on Wikipedia; the article was deleted (again) a couple weeks ago for being “non notable”.

(Fuck you for that, by the way. I play lots of “free to play” games from time to time to see what they do, and so many of them integrate gameplay elements that I fucking invented so fuck off with your entire “not notable” shit. The game was mentioned in fucking Playboy but whatever I guess people who don’t know dick about the subject at hand know more than me.)

Anyways.

Nexus War was fun for me to build. It started as a small hobbyist thing that my friends could play and that was cool. That was my only reason for doing it for a long, long time. Later, it got popular and it started requiring Real Cash Money to manage.

I never designed the game with the intent to make money and it showed. Any monetization principles were clearly bolted on after-the-fact.

After a time, the output for the game overran the input for the game and I had to kill it.

Those of you who have been in the situation where you had to murder your own children may understand the emotions I dealt with in this.

Given that I am a communist bastard at heart, playing the game was free. Everyone could play. You got to have three characters for free and that ended up to anywhere between 15 and 30 minutes a day that you could play. For free.

I really only ever wanted to break even.

If you wanted to play more than a half hour, you could buy “character slots” at a one-time cost of about five bucks per slot. That gave you an additional dude that you could have running around. But buying slots didn’t create any advantage for you: you still couldn’t work your characters in tandem, nor could you “slip time” to other guys. So a one-time drop of five bones gave you another 10 minutes a day for the life of the game.

Later, I added the ability to buy small tokens. These things were not game-affecting; they were the equivalent of “cool clothes”. 25 cents and you could have a rare type of clothing. That sort of thing. It was a credits system, where one US cent equalled 1 credit.

I also ran ads in sidebars and such not. Mostly text ads, but some were images.

At it’s peak, Nexus War had 40,000 unique players at a time (80,000 over its life). Games like this have a rotational user-base. The lifecycle of a player is about 3 to 4 months, after which they move on. I guess it was costing me about 700 dollars a month to run on multiple servers, before the entire “cloud computing” thing happened. I was coding this in my spare time.

There was exactly one month that I made a profit and two months that I broke even. The ad revenue was key, actually. The introduction of ads pushed me into the green for the initial 30 days I had them turned on.

You cannot imagine my emotions at this. I could do this! I could continue running the game and not compromise any of my principles. Holy smokes, I was in the green.

Then someone made a post on the game forums about how to best disable the ads using various adblocker techniques.

I briefly thought about killing the post. I could do it. No one would really complain. But I would be censoring someone and I couldn’t abide that. They weren’t being racist or homophobic or any other kind of hateful. I had to let it go. So I did.

And the advertising revenue halved itself in the next month. And yet again in the month after, with no appreciable loss in players.

At that point I was deep in the red. It continued to get worse, until my ad revenue checks were along the lines of “ten dollars”. The playerbase hadn’t really decreased, either.

I ran the game at a heavy loss for another eight months before I had to close it. I just couldn’t do it anymore.

So.

Every time I visit a site and it throws an advertisement at me? I know what that means. And I don’t block it. I reckon there’s somebody on the other side of that http request who is hoping that my visit will earn him 1/100th of a penny.

Remember that when you decide that you love something and want to kill its ability to make money.

Once upon a time, back in 1997, I worked for a small company known as Sun Microsystems. They were hot shit then. For me, getting a job there was an enormous thing. Sun had been the be-all and end-all of unix-style computing: the holy grail, as it were.

I was hired on a contract to be the NerdBitch for the marketing department. Back then, this was called “webmaster” but that term has since seen pollution and has fallen out of favor. I had many and varied duties, but my main ones were overseeing the care and feeding of two major, huge servers used by the marketing department: rock-n-roll and infobahn. (dot sun dot com). rock-n-roll was a huge machine. It was the primary server for all of Sun’s marketing.

I was “root” on these boxes.

(For the non-nerds, that means that I was the equivalent of “God” on these two major computers that ran everything).

From time to time, we’d have contractors come in to do small gigs. Usually, a contractor would get a full @sun.com account. However, sometimes the IT department was slow on the uptake and the contractor needed to be productive immediately. So, in these rare instances, I would simply create a user account for them on rock-n-roll, independent of the global account structure. They would then log in directly to rock-n-roll through via XDM from a workstation.

So it goes.

One day, a contractor of this type got fired. For cause, actually, which is where it gets goofy. At the time, if someone got fired for cause we would isolate the machine they were working from for later forensics. So, she got the boot, and I had to shut the machine down that she was working on.

Only, I forgot that she was remotely logging into rock-n-roll. My password was the same on all machines. I seriously forgot that she was remote, so I comandeered her console, grabbed a window, logged in as myself, and typed the following:

sudo -s
(my password)
shutdown -h now

That turns the computer off. And normally I’d expect to see the workstation go blank and shut down.

That’s not what happened.

2 seconds later I realized that I’d shut down rock-n-roll, a machine that hundreds of people depended on, instead of her workstation.

Oops.

This would normally have been recoverable except that rock-n-roll didn’t come back up. She stayed down, even after the IT department tried to bring her back up. Her disk controller had fried out a couple weeks back and no one knew.

So the marketing server was down for about five business days because they needed to get a new part and didn’t have one on hand.

I was not fired, though I have no clue why I wasn’t.

End of Line.

The problem I was trying to solve was this: I had about 2,000 albums worth of music, and I wanted something that would stream music to my internal stereo. I wanted it to be able to perform the following functions:

1) Allow me (or others) to add single songs or whole albums to the music queue;
2) Track which songs, albums, or artists were the most popular;
3) Have a “smart” Artificial Intelligence disk jockey that could spin music on its own.

The program I wrote succeeded in this regard in all aspects. Sure, sure, the code itself was ugly as shit (and written in Perl). Were I to re-write it today, I would do a ton of things differently. But I had about 8 years less experience writing stuff, so I forgive myself.

At any rate, Seraphim itself became an example of emergent behavior on several levels. Not just in the AI of the DJ, but also in the way that people used the system.

This was in the early days of internet music. Before the dark times. Before the MPAA. I made this radio station and a way to interact with it, and then we plugged it into AOL’s network (I won’t discuss how that happened because there may be legal ramifications for the people involved). Suffice to say, suddenly a computer in my house was streaming music to hundreds (possibly thousands) of people.

If you had an account on the system, you could do any of the following:

1) Upload your own library of mp3s so that they were available for play
2) Modify the metadata for any song, artist, or album (genres, etc.)
3) Add songs to the system’s “queue” – the music it was playing.

(If you were a super-user, you could kill songs from the queue or mark them as “never play”).

People would listen to the station rather than their own personal libraries because there was a significant degree of fun involved in being a disk jockey. Perhaps my most favorite emergent user behavior was when someone would start a musical “theme” and the various DJs would try to one-up each other following said theme.

For example, someone might say “the theme is fire“. Then, we’d see a bunch of “fire” related songs show up (“Burning Down the House”, etc.). There was a game made of the music. It was a glorious amount of fun.

Each song, artist, and album had a “karma” score. The more often it was requested, the higher the karma. Picking a single song gave a +1 to each song, artist, and album. That way the system understood popularity (though the scales were different for each [song, artist, album]).

However, the most interesting part of the system (to me) was that if no one put anything into the queue, Seraphim would “auto dj”. And, having lived with it for a year or so, it became . . . exceptionally creepy in how smart of a disk jockey it became.

I wrote the artificial intelligence routines as a lark, to be honest. But this is an example of awesome emergent behavior.

The first thing I did in the system was to “fix” a weakness in the MP3 file format. MP3s have a “genre” tag but that’s very limited. It doesn’t say a lot; it’s a single dimension. So I wrote a large matrix called “Genre Brethren”.

For example, “Rap” is a genre brother to “Gangster Rap” and to “Hip-Hop.” “Speed Metal” is brother to “Death Metal” and “Heavy Metal”. (The system was far more complex, usually seeing 3-6 brethren). Albums, artists, and songs could be tagged with multiple genres.

When in “Auto DJ” mode, Seraphim would start with the most current song and then make choices. Did it stay in the current genre? This was maybe 50/50. If it decided to change genres, it would only move to one of the brethren genres (thus, we don’t move from Slayer to Michael Bolton). We keep a continuity of musical style.

Once it picked a genre, it had to choose a song. But that’s a trick, right? Obviously, we don’t want to pick songs that suck. And that’s where I wrote this thing that worked and worked well. To this day, though, I’m not sure how I arrived at the system.

Cheaply, you can just choose the song in the genre with the most karma. That works once. Ideally, though, you’ll spread out. So I wrote this complicated system whereby it would pick songs. If I recall correctly (and I could pull up the source to see, but fuck that), it went like this:

1) Choose between Song, Artist, or Album in genre.
2) Within that subset, take the top 50 karma values as a grouping.
3) Within that grouping, weigh each one. Those within the top 5 get +5 within 6-10 get +4, within 11-20 get +3, within 21-30 get +2, everyone else +1.
4) Select within that set based on weight.
5) If “songs”, play that song. Done.
6) If “albums”, repeat step 3 based on songs in album. Pick song; play; done.
7) If “artists”, repeat step 3 based on albums, then go to step 6.

I injected a degree of “fuzziness” into the AI routine, too. Without the fuzziness, it might play the same shit over and over again (like, all of Nevermind on repeat). While the ideal was the highest karma value in a given set, there was logic to ignore that aspect and just pull from lower in the stack (there was a routine to drop out of “standard top 50 of type” mode and pull from wherever, or to overweigh to the bottom of the stack).

As it played songs, it marked when things were last played. Thus, no repeats within 6 hours or so. It also did crazy-ass shit like “look for songs that have a positive karma value that haven’t been played in 5 days” and then give those songs extra weight.

What happened was this: I ended up with a disturbing, creepily good disk jockey. My ex-wife and I had multiple conversations about this. We’d be listening to it all day and there would be strange stretches of excellent music choices. So we’d go look and see who had been programming it, and it nearly always turned out to be the machine itself.

I write this only because I’m thinking about writing artificial intelligence routines and Seraphim was one of my first attempts at doing “smart” AI.

This is a totally unacceptable way to work. The idea of a “living document” is an easy one to understand but I’ve never, ever seen anyone get them right. When the process fails, it seems to die not with a bang but with a whimper as individuals slowly stop making edits to some insanely complicated Microsoft Word file and it withers on the vine. Oh well, at least it wasn’t loud.

Only thing: there will be a bang. The bang will be the sound of engineering departments getting thrown under a bus because features get missed and clients get pissed.

So, why do we have living documents? Because a bunch of people like using words like “agile development” or “aggressive schedule” or “plug-n-play featureset”. So what you’re working on, as a team (or even as a single engineer) often changes not only from week to week but day to day. That, combined with the fact that there are usually 3 or more people who will be authors of a document, shows a clear need.

But why do they fail? What causes the wax to melt on the wings?

Well. Lots of things, but they can be broken down into three broad categories: cultural, workflow, and technical. We’ll bullet point, because that’s organization!

Choice of Document Format.

This is a big one, because it can cause all sorts of problems. The most popular choice for living documents is going to be Microsoft Word, hands down – though I’ve been places that use Excel for everything. Plain text is also popular, as is HTML (I personally will use HTML because I can do formatting in it and I loathe Word).

The first problem we have here is a cultural one.

Program managers, project managers, and suits like Word. They know it, they’re familiar with it. The machines they work with are likely to be laptops running a kind of Windows (they spend a lot of time in meetings and have to be mobile). Since they use Word constantly for other purposes, it’s a natural choice for them.

Engineers, however, don’t think that way. I know a lot of engineers, and only a scant handful know how to use Word and are frankly baffled by it’s startlingly bad usability and overwhelming featureset. When I first started playing with Word for a game I wrote, I made a total mess of the file trying to use formatting rules and display modes and so on and so forth. I’m not a stupid guy, but the word processing program got in the way of me processing words. Word documents are binary files. They can’t be grepped or diffed. They can’t be parsed in perl, they can’t be smartly integrated into version control.

Further, many engineers will be working from machines that are not Windows. They’ll have Linux boxes or (rarely now) Solaris. And they don’t have Microsoft Word – only a shitty “Open Office” version (and if you’ve ever shared a Word doc between a Windows box and Open Office, you’ll know how badly it goofs up formatting).

Clearly the choice of Word is a poor choice for engineers.

Excel spreadsheets have nearly the exact same problems as Word, so we’ll skip that (aside from sorting abilities, they don’t bring a lot to the table).

Plain text and HTML versions of documents bring a similar set of problems to the mix, only from the opposite side. Engineers love plain text, but it suffers in that it is unable to support nifty things like auto-generated tables of context, text formatting, or, well, anything except words. HTML solves a lot of these problems, but you fall into the trap where by non-engineers won’t touch it: it’s difficult to edit if you don’t know what you’re doing, too easy to screw up even if you do, and the document becomes unweildy after a certain size.

There is a sort of half-way solution here, though, and that is to use Google Docs. But I’ll get to that in more detail in a bit.

Version Control

Issues with document version control are the second biggest. This is also a workflow problem. Here is a common scenario:

The PM writes a Word document, Tech Spec v. 1.0.doc. Sends it out for review. The archictect makes some changes and mails out Tech Spec v. 1.1.doc. At the same time, the interaction designer makes some changes and sends out a document also titled Tech Spec v. 1.1.doc, which, of course, does not have the architect’s changes in it. Bam! Version drift.

So the solution then is that the PM will painstakingly try to figure out what the changes are (he can’t run ‘diff’ on the files, mind you). Then he sends out Tech Spec v. 1.1-real.doc. Over the next week, we’ll get 12 versions of the document, an none of them will say what has been changed.

Since reading a 20 page technical specification 4 times a day is a waste of my time, I’ll go on the most recent one I have open, while the latest one may have changed requirements on work I have already completed and thus don’t re-read.

Part of this is workflow. It can be offset by having a single point of contact for the document author (which slows things down), and a summary page of “version changes”. But that’s not a great solution.

Further, we’re passing information around via EMAIL. Ugh. This is the fastest way to get me to ignore a document: I get hundreds and hundreds of mails a day and everything gets lost in a morass of garbage.

Solution! Post the documents to Sharepoint or something similar. Okay, great! But, you know, again, if I’m going to get notifications that it has changed, I’m still getting spammed with mail that I will ignore. It’s nice that there’s a single central place for the most recent document, but we’re also dealing with Sharepoint or some similar product, and they all suck, by and large.

Okay, so let’s check it into a revision control system (CVS, Perforce, whatever). Now everyone has to know how to use an RCS (hah!). Plus, documents should then be in text formats for best results (so that versions can be merged and we can have multiple concurrent editors). We’re back to cultural problems here.

My Solution

Wikis. Plain and simple. Wiki software (like MediaWiki, which Wikipedia runs on) brings the following to the table out of the box:

* Free
* 2 Hour set up time (less if you know what you’re doing)
* Easy to use/learn text formatting system that supports all manner of object embedding (diagrams, pictures, etc.)
* Multiple, concurrent authors can work on the same document – or even shards of a document – at the same time.
* Provides instant access to what exactly changed in the document (this is my favorite thing, ever).
* Revision control
* Access control (read/edit)
* Document Search and Indexing
* Auto-generated goodies (Tables of Contents, Categories, etc.)
* End-User machine agnostic (runs in a browser)

Now, Google docs brings a lot of that to the table but it has what I consider to be two glaring flaws:

* It is externally hosted. Good luck convincing the security officers of a large company to host your top-secret project design with a third party. You can’t lock it down behind the firewall, safe as houses in your intranet.
* It requires that you make a Google account. Again, this is a security thing but it’s also a pain in the ass thing. I like to keep my work and personal stuff separate. I have a Google account but I don’t use it (and don’t really want to). A company I used to work for did all their stuff on Google docs. It was a pain in the ass for me to have to constantly remember this weird password that I put in there just to update my estimated hours on a stinkin’ spreadsheet.

“Projects should be more like Star Wars and less like Apocalypse Now.”

Several of us agree that its the smartest thing ever said about management.

Star Wars projects are awesome. Everyone is excited, there is a directed goal, you get to do cool shit like cut people up with light sabers and blow up death stars, and at the end everyone is a hero.

Apocalypse Now projects are plodding hellholes of anguish. It starts out poorly managed with poorly defined goals and poorly applied resources. Then someone steals a surfboard, and then next thing you know you’re on a boat in Indochina. Everyone on the team ends up getting killed (fired, quit, shuffled off) in some way or another. MAYBE, just MAYBE, you end up hanging out with a Playboy bunny for an hour (e.g., a hot chick gets hired in QA and then later fired). Meetings will be uncomfortable political bloodbaths, and in the end you’re going to pair up with a crazy photographer and be subjected to horrors you can’t imagine by insane men with no hair.

I have, unfortunately, been a star in both movies (and more often than not, I’m trapped in the cage listening to Col. Kurtz spout nonsense).

Food for thought.