Game on and the 'open web'
yaxu
http://pluto.kuri.mu/2011/02/03/mozilla-game-on-and-the-open-web-mystery/
Here's my comment there:
Problems always occur when people use the word `open’ as a moral
position, but without any clear context giving meaning to that word
means. For example Steve Jobs arguing with google about who is the
more `open’, easy to argue your ground when you don’t ever say what
the marker is.
Here according to the rules, the`open web’ doesn’t mean free/open
source, doesn’t mean free/open data, free/open API or free/open tech.
It just means using some API that uses HTTP and has some kind of spec
you can read under whatever conditions are imposed. There’s not a lot
to love there.
It also doesn’t mean free/open competition, or free/open discussion
around it. You can get knocked out without being told or made aware by
the website itself, with no response before the end of the
competition. Great!
It seems that naked on pluto was silently dropped because the judges
weren’t equipped to understand a game that makes a political point
about the subject matter of the competition. That might have been a
mistake — maybe they got a lot of spammy entries so didn’t have the
time to engage their intelligence, or read the blog, interviews etc…
But that they passed an opportunity to engage in dialogue and perhaps
correct their mistake speaks volumes. It looks like there is an
unwritten rule that satire about the `open web’ (whatever that might
be) is not tolerated.
In summary, this sucks.
Xavier Antoviaque
> It also doesn’t mean free/open competition, or free/open discussion
> around it. You can get knocked out without being told or made aware by
> the website itself, with no response before the end of the
> competition. Great!
transparency around this contest. I think most projects entered the
contest, if not to win, to have at least some feedback about their
game. The fact that there are no comment section on the blog or on the
game entries, that we can't see the community or judges ratings in the
gallery, and that some games are dropped without explanations is
really surprising.
Don't take me wrong though - the contest is a very nice initiative,
and it's great that it happened - thanks to those who spent a lot of
time organizing it. But out of respect for the time and energy all
contestants put into it, it would be nice if the next iteration was
more community friendly.
Xavier.
pascal
These are good points you raise. We got back to the developer of
Naked on Pluto yesterday with our feedback. We pulled the game because
of concerns around the way social data was displayed and used.
Appropriate use of private user data and user control over their
social data is of the utmost importance to us.
We're really sorry that this took us a while - we should have been in
touch with the team from "Naked on Pluto" beforehand and we have
simply dropped the ball on this one.
We'll also incorporate the feedback around comments/feedback for the
contestants into a potential Game On 2011 - again, thank you for
bringing this up.
Pascal (Mozilla Labs)
yaxu
cheers
alex
Steve Baker
like a poor loser - but I think you need some feedback on why things
went so horribly wrong.
There should have been a decent forum system for people to discuss their
entries, chat about problems, etc. The "community" did get together
and we created a forum system ourselves - but since it wasn't
"official", and wasn't promoted on the GameOn site - we didn't get a lot
of participation. What there was was good - we helped each other out,
chatted about this and that. But there should have been a hundred plus
people chatting there - not the ten or so who actually signed up.
Official responses to competition-related questions on the blog and to
email were slow - often non-existant.
Publicity was awful. Just terrible. This was by *FAR* the biggest
single problem.
I have the server stats. I got 277 new/unique visitors to my site over
the month of judging...that's *IT*. I assume that 35 of those were
judges (boy, I sure hope they all played my game at least once!) - and
probably most of the other competitors came by to check out the
competing games (there were 160 entries - several people participating
in some of those entries - that's got to be a couple of hundred people).
So the odds are good that not one single member of the general public
played my game!! It's a multiplayer thing with lots of 'social' stuff -
but the MOST people who ever played the game at one time was 5 and two
of those were me and my son and another was a co-worker of mine. The
logs on the in-game chat system show that your judges didn't even try it
out. The game was (essentially) never played with a 'realistic' number
of players...not once. Standing by yourself in an empty barroom hardly
makes for a great gaming experience - so there was absolutely no way for
us to win without publicity. I could have turned on a bunch of AI
characters to fix that - but the rules said that we couldn't "improve"
the game once the judging has started - so we had no way to react to the
unexpected lack of interest.
I've talked with many of the other entrants - and they report similarly
terrible numbers.
The judges and the organizers NEVER made the effort to get a bunch of
people into the multiplayer games at the same time to try them out
fairly...not once. It's statistically likely that almost all of the
"community" judging was likely done by people who submitted rival
competition entries! (I can't believe you let people who submitted
games participate in the judging!)
When we did finally get a mention on Slashdot (which you'd normally
expect to bring 100,000 tech-savvy game-hungry visitors to the site in
one day), the GameOn site crashed almost immediately and stayed down
until the news had scrolled off the bottom of the Slashdot site - so the
actual traffic to the games underwent almost no increase...certainly my
site saw not so much as a 'blip' in traffic that day.
I did multiple web searches looking for discussion of the contest on
gaming sites, indy-game sites, sites like reddit that frequently have
game-related discussion - and nothing...not a single hit. You guys put
in ZERO effort to get the news out there. Aside from the initial
announcement (which I saw on slashdot), I saw no mention of the contest
whatever outside of the Mozilla site.
Your web site design was terrible from the get-go. The art style and
visual design quality was great - but the implementation was just
awful. The screenshots were initially *cropped* to make tiny thumbnails
so only the top-left corner was visible - most of the thumbnails were
either just black or (in my case) showed a cryptic doorway.
You truncated the game descriptions completely arbitarily - so that many
people wrote a sentence of introduction before describing the game - and
that's all that showed up. If you had intended to do that, you should
have asked us for a "less than 80 character description". So people
saw 120 games with (in many cases) no meaningful description and no
useful screen-shots! Then you shut off our ability to edit our
descriptions - so we couldn't even fix the problem.
I was so frustrated by this that I actually dug through your site to
find the image cropping bug myself and emailed your web guy to tell him
how to fix it!
Even after that - your web page used the "width/height" CSS to resize
the full images on the client side - so visitors to the site had to
download 120 640x480 PNG's in order to see 120 microscopic thumbnails.
The main page never did work properly in Chrome.
That's just inept.
Because you didn't dump enough of the "obvious losers" in the initial
cull from 160 to 120 games, visitors were presented with so many games,
they had no reasonable chance to possibly play them all. My
Mozilla-originated web traffic (terrible though it was) jumped by a
factor of four when the site switched from order-of-submission to
alphabetical-order! Since I entered in the last hours before the
contest closed - and had a name that started with 'B' - that jump can be
best attributed to going from the bottom of that crazily long S-L-O-W
page to the top.
IMHO, you should have culled to 35 games MUCH sooner - and split the
entries into categories ("Puzzle", "Action", etc) to let people navigate
the site more rapidly.
When the winners were announced, the web page was a total mess for an
hour before it finally sorted itself out...you're a BROWSER COMPANY and
you can't make a simple web page? It doesn't reflect well on your
organization. Don't you even test the page once...even on
firefox...before pushing it out onto the public web? You had months to
prepare these pages, test them - were you really bashing in HTML in the
last minutes before the announcements?
You invited me to write a "guest blog" for the site - then held it up
until after the competition was over. That took my son and I a good
while to get right - and now the odds are good that nobody will ever
read it. Even if you publish it now - there won't be any visitors there
to read it.
In the end, the only thing I wanted from entering the competition was
some publicity to push players to my site - and a way to publicize
WebGL, which I firmly believe is the future of the web and must not be
allowed to die out through lack of use like VRML and other efforts to
make a "3D web".
It was clear from the first day of public access to the games that I
wasn't going to get that - so I kinda zoned out and moved on (we're
preparing an entry for IndyPubGames - which seems like a much more
organized event). It actually doesn't matter a damn to me whether we
won or lost (my boss is threatening to send me to GDC anyway - unless I
can wiggle out of it, I'm getting a bit old for skydiving!).
But I did hold out the hope of getting some traffic from slashdot or
something.
I have to wonder what Mozilla got from this.
What you clearly wanted from the competition was something that shows
off your fancy new browser technologies - (which are AWESOME, BTW).
HTML5, CSS3, <canvas>, <audio>, <video>, WebGL. The competition rules
said exactly that.
What you ended up with was a bunch of tired old 'retro' games that could
easily have been built 15 years ago using flash.
Marble Run is a competent enough implementation of a very, very old idea
- but it could have been written without canvas, without webgl, without
CSS3 without <audio>/<video> - without flash even. All you need is
JavaScript and DOM. It's an OK game - but it doesn't remotely push the
envelope. Far-7 is also pretty good, (although it demands too much
time-commitment for most casual gamers). I don't think it really pushes
the envelope in the way your competition goals were asking...but as for
the rest...meh.
If you're planning on launching Firefox-4 with those games as your
flagship gaming apps...people will yawn and go back to flash and places
like http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/
The kinds of things you NEED are things like your competitor will be
pushing for their browser. Things like Google's Body Browser that
really do things that are quite impossible using any other technology.
-- Steve
jchoi
really helps to read your feedback on how future contests can be
improved. In terms of promotion, I'm hearing you loud and clear - next
time, we'll do more to promote and drive traffic to the games from the
community.
Game On is far from over - I think that gaming has always been a
special thing to developers both here at Mozilla and outside. We want
to bring light to great games like yours. We'd like to start off by
kicking off a series of "Spotlight on Games" blog posts - starting
with Bar Fight on Monday. Thanks for your patience on the publication
date - we just wanted to steer clear of the noise of contest mechanics
and give you guys a clear chance at focused air time after the dust
settled.
Thanks for your partnership in this crazy journey of trying to do good
for the Web. We want you to succeed and are here to help you however
we can.
- Julie
> http://pluto.kuri.mu/2011/02/03/mozilla-game-on-and-the-open-web-myst...
SteveBaker
I presume you have traffic counters, so you can find out...but I bet
it's pretty small and can only decline with the competition over.
Judge from the Google page ranking: The blog/GameOn pages don't show
up on any obvious general searches. Search for "Web games" or "Online
games" or "Browser games" - and no Mozilla sites show up in the first
10 pages of results for any of those queries. "WebGL games" produces
your site at the bottom of the second page. "HTML5 games" finds you
halfway down the third page. "Canvas game" produces a link on about
the fifth page. "Firefox games" eventually gets us to the "addons"
page for games - but that doesn't link to the GameOn/blog page (why
not?).
If your series of interesting blogs is going to do any good, pushing
the page-rank up has to be the first step...and that means linking to
it from everywhere in sight - also stick the usual set of Facebook/
Reddit/Twitter/Digg/StumbleUpon widgets on the page so people can spam
their friend-lists easily...you should probably have a Facebook
presence too - get people to 'friend' it like crazy.
I'll link to it from my various web sites - I have a high page-rank so
that'll help some. Would it be OK to use the 'joystick-in-a-shield'
logo to link to the site? (I'd hate to violate copyright or
something!)
What is the 'official' URL we should point to?
-- Steve