Bullet Points @ timlongo.com

So I’ve been trying to play more and more web games lately. I find that we pass them around at work fairly often and it turns out that while we have been spending all this time making these damn multi-year long games on these ridiculous consoles that all these amazingly talented web developers are using the one platform that outnumbers all the consoles sold combined, Flash, to make games just as compelling as anything we could make (if not more). Playing from a browser. That is it. Well, whether you can say it is part of the indy revolution or not, truth is it has sort of snuck up on all of us and proven that in the end the power of the hardware and the big budgets have little to do with the art form.

Some may have seen this already, but a recent game that crossed my path via a friend, Jason Botta, is called Questionaut. It seems that the design company Amanita Design created it as an educational game for the BBC for 11 year old kids. But trust me it is great for all ages. I had forgotten that these folks also won Best Web-Based Game from the IGF (Independent Game Festival) last year in 2007 for Samorost 2. I knew I had seen the Questionaut art style somewhere.

Questionaut is a wonderful blend of what games can do with integrating learning and interactivity but with style and originality as well. We get so caught up in all the crap of making huge games, we sometimes forget about the fundamentals. Well that is all these folks have to work with…and frankly I’m envious. We could all learn a thing or 200 from these devs.

Well enough of this crap, go play Questionaut. Everyone.

Well between GDC(thanks to all those who came to my lecture – slides incoming), homeownership (for our first time) and having major DSL issues during the move, I’m finally back up and running on the web in our new home. Sorry for the downtime. I have to share some numbers related to my experience with AT&T (which also happens to be the company my father retired from – so I’ll watch my step…hi Dad!)

• 15 days of downtime.
• 7 members of customer service.
• 2 different companies (Apple and AT&T).
• over 10 hours on the phone.
• ~2 hours of just being on hold.
• A new DSL modem ($50).
• ~4 hours of solo troubleshooting.
• 6 (of the 7) customer service reps gave up.

I wouldn’t even know where to start if I were to try to really add up the money spent on dealing with this issue from both my side of things as well as the companies’ side of things. I can only assume that the above list and numbers can’t really make any good sense when it comes to the amount of time and resources that were used to eventually solve the problem. Something somewhere HAS to be wrong. I’ll point one obvious finger at inefficiencies. Or has the pressure for these companies to keep up with the competition caused them to enter into areas they aren’t ready to fully support but have to try to support anyway to stay competitive? Are things over the phone just too complicated? If so, could all this money be spent on better standards and more streamlined User Interfaces where even someone tech savvy like myself can more easily navigate the world of PPPoE (WTF does that even mean, anyway?!). I shudder to think how these phone conversations would go with my grandmother. And Apple products are supposed to be the best around, but they still have a long way to go. And yet, after all that, even if I wanted the freedom to make my own choice and boycott the company that screwed me, I can’t. I’m stuck between a terrible choice in pricing with Comcast or terrible products and service with AT&T. What kind of free market do we really live in, anyway?

This reminds me of a similar utopian view I’ve always dreamt of where we put all of our time and money and resources we currently devote to the automobile industry and instead plug it all into a massive public transportation network. But god forbid we all give up the privacy of our own cars. However, that is another post altogether.

Apparently I didn’t find my breaking point though, because I continued calling and trying to figure it out despite the pain. Did I not learn a lesson of some kind or is this just what we are left with at the end of the day? I’ll step off my soapbox for now, but as I write this post to you over my new DSL connection I’ll curse the dogmatic and complacent monopolies of the world and go back to my hobbit hole.