By Tom Lin, co-founder and creative director of Demiurge Studios, Cambridge

If you've been working in the video game industry, chances are you've heard this before: "Hey! I've got a great idea for a game."

Ideas! You've got 'em. Your co-workers have 'em. Heck, even the guy at that party last weekend had 'em. The problem is, most of your ideas probably aren’t very good; at least, not yet. Actually, they may never be good. How do you know when to stop chasing a bad idea, and just kill the thing?

Here at Demiurge, we've had to learn the hard way how to put down ideas, and we’ve developed an approach to making that kill-or-keep decision.

From a full-blown game pitch to teeny opinions on how a character jumps, it’s natural to want to protect your idea. It came from your head, and it's a unique shard of your gaming intuition/experience. A precious, precious baby of an idea. Right?

No. An unproven idea is a murder suspect. Don't protect it. Put it on trial as soon as possible. The best ways to do so happen to also be some of the cheapest:

• Talk about it with other people.
• Organize your thoughts by writing ideas down, drawing out steps and requirements.
• If you can, get a rough version of an idea into playable form.

Your goal is to kill bad ideas as quickly as possible. Every day that one exists, it's wasting time and resources that should be going to more deserving notions.

A good rule of thumb: If an idea is easy to test in-game, implement and test it before you start talking about it. Often, all it takes is a moment holding a controller to realize, "This doesn't work. Keep looking," saving countless hours of debate.

It sounds so easy! Of course, it's not. At some point, an idea will appear that's controversial. The concept is awesome! The concept is lame. The rules make sense! The rules sound confusing. The change is fun! I liked it better the way it was before.

Balancing conflicting feedback takes real strength of will. Keep? Or Kill?
In such cases, we have a few proven strategies to get to a decision:

• Procrastinate. Change can cause unhappiness, but if complaints stop after a day, it's safe to move on. If the whining continues, it's time to sharpen the knife.

• Find people who have never seen your idea before, and get their opinion. The industry term for these folks is "tissue testers," because they can be used only once, like a Kleenex. Once they're used, they can no longer give raw feedback.

• Bring in trusted advisors who have no stake in the project, and are willing to give blunt feedback. These "truth tellers" will give you informed opinions; take it or leave it.

Armed with these strategies, I hope you'll find your next round of idea-killing more manageable. Remember - the goal is not to protect your concepts. The goal is to get the best ideas possible into your games!

Tom Lin is a co-founder of the video game development company Demiurge Studios, where he also works as creative director. Tom has managed content development for every project through Demiurge's history, including work on Brothers in Arms: Earned in Blood and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Tom holds a B.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI

By Barbara A. Jones, Esq., Greenberg Traurig LLP

Associated Press

In this May 17, 2012, file photo, a Congolese government army soldier displays a mortar round after his unit returned from fighting against rebel forces.

What are video games made of?

The games themselves are software; electronic pulses and magnetic charges. But the consoles they’re played on, like a lot of other electronic equipment, are composed of plastic, metal, and often, minerals like tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold, or 3TGs.

Those are known as “conflict minerals.” They are being mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and used to fuel what has become the deadliest conflict since World War II. In fact, gaming consoles and conflict minerals are so closely linked that some refer to the decades-long conflict in Congo as the “Playstation War.” In May, a GlobalPost report stated, “Forty percent of the two million people working in the DRC’s artisanal mines are children, according to World Bank. Minerals extracted by children in Katanga include coltan, cobalt, copper and others.” Coltan is the raw material used to create tantalum.

Enter the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which included a provision ordering the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to develop rules forcing companies to disclose the origin of their minerals. That includes supply chain participants, who are deeply involved in determining and certifying the original source of the 3TGs and their numerous derivatives that are sold to customers.

Central to the application of the SEC rule is whether the conflict minerals in a public company’s product originated in the DRC.

Some game console manufacturers have made a great deal of progress on the issue. Electronics giants such as Microsoft, Intel, Motorola, and HP engaged early on, by developing compliance policies and procedures. Nintendo, which has been viewed by many as slow to get on board, recently stated that it "obtained individual confirmation from each production partner that they agree not to use conflict minerals."

The SEC regulations impose a three-stage procedure that applies to public companies, which must determine whether they use any metal sources designated as "conflict minerals." If they do, they are obligated to discover the origin of those minerals. If those minerals are not found to be from the DRC, or are from a government controlled mine in the DRC, they can label their products "DRC Conflict Free."

If the minerals come from rebel-controlled mines, or a public company can't determine the origin of the minerals, it cannot use the "DRC Conflict Free" label. Either way, it must publish a Conflict Minerals Report that is reviewed by an external auditor.

Failure to comply may result in SEC enforcement proceedings and/or shareholder litigation, not to mention adverse publicity from shareholder activists or humanitarian groups.

Companies must file their initial conflict minerals disclosure and, if necessary, an independently audited Conflict Minerals Report, by the end of May, 2014. That means they should start the process now, because the required due diligence will be long, expensive and arduous.

Meanwhile, some companies want to include in their supply contracts provisions to ensure 3TGs are not sourced from the DRC at all. Some are considering replacing conflict minerals in their products with alternatives. Many companies along the supply chain, both public and private, could lose business if they are unable to provide the requisite certifications to their customers. And some companies are using this exercise to streamline operations, reducing the number of suppliers they engage and reorganizing internally to streamline operations and rethink product specifications.

Video game companies must use this as an opportunity to rethink certain aspects of their operations, and become more efficient. Ironically, in this case, it is likely that any humanitarian benefit will be merely a footnote. Even so, we’ll take it.

Barbara A. Jones is a shareholder in Greenberg Traurig’s Corporate and Securities practice group, a member of the Global practice group and the Emerging Technologies Team, and co-coordinator of the firm’s cross-disciplinary Conflict Minerals Compliance Initiative.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI

By Trevor Stricker, founder, Disco Pixel, Kendall Square

Schoolboy me had an orange plastic clamshell that opened up to reveal two screens of Donkey Kong. If you were good, you could jump from the girders on the bottom screen to reach the top screen, and jump on more girders.

A Nintendo Game & Watch had a single, lonesome game on it. So we'd trade. You might get to borrow Mario Bros. (with its calculator screen that displayed just a few positions of Mario, there was nothing super about it). Or you might get stuck babysitting an unused Snoopy Tennis. "Multi-player" basically meant watching another kid play your game to see if he could get further.

Hand-held games are terrific. Every child of the ‘90s played a Game Boy. Every child of the 2000s played a DS. How popular were they? Nintendo had a period where it was more profitable per employee than Goldman Sachs. When the masters of the universe are bested at their top metric by some guys who actually make something, you can assume that that thing is pretty awesome.

But now, poor Nintendo is on the wrong side of a trend. The stock has been floating down over the years like Mario in his raccoon suit. Something disruptive this way comes: That glass slab in your pocket. A smartphone plays games just as well as anything dreamed up by famed Nintendo designer Gunpei Yokoi.

In the video game biz, a debate raged for years about whether the console would kill PC game. Some thought user-friendly consoles would become much more mainstream than driver-update-requiring PC games. Meanwhile, Valve came along and built a billion-dollar business selling mainstream games on the PC. That made it hard to say the PC was dead, or even suffering from a little sniffle.

The thing is, a console isn't quite as necessary as a telephone. And I've yet to see anybody pull out their laptop on the Red Line. But a guy playing Owlchemy’s Snuggle Truck on his iPhone? As common on the T as a Red Sox hat.

Cell phones that can play games are soon to be in everyone's pocket. When you’ve got one, it is hard to justify another device just for video games. Smartphone games as big business is already happening. GungHo Entertainment is the poster child for a successful mobile company of 2013. Its title Puzzle & Dragons was earning more than $3 million a day in January. Recently, its market cap briefly eclipsed Nintendo.

"But wait," some might say, pipe in hand, as a phonograph plays gently in the background, "I'm not interested in trifling mobile stuff like puzzle games or endless runners. I like Video Games. Zeitgeist and depth and sparkly shaders." When there's a platform with an install base of everyone, where some are making bajillions, the publishers of video games won't ignore it. Brainasium will make a sequel to Eternal Death Slayer for it, as will every other big publisher. Maybe you'll even hook it up to your TV and play with a Bluetooth controller.

But more to the point, the games of tomorrow will be created by and bought by the kids of today. Middle schoolers play Androids on the bus. Toddlers are entranced by iPads. I took my little niece to see dinosaurs at the natural history museum. A Tyrannosaurus Rex towered over us, its huge jaw agape. She rushed past the old pile of bones to the trivia-displaying iPad mounted in the exhibit, just like the one she loves from playing Dora.

She won't need to escape the calculator graphics of mobile to the high-rez world of the PC. She'll grow up without having to fight for time on the living room TV. She'll grow up with a game machine always in her pocket. Maybe she'll become the Shigeru Miyamoto of the 2040s? If she does, maybe she'll write a blathering opinion piece about being a youngster playing on that primitive iOS version 7. It couldn't hold a candle to the Occulus virtual reality mind jack in her cell phone.

Trevor Stricker is founder and president of Disco Pixel in Kendall Square, maker of Jungle Rumble, a rhythm game in which you bang a drum for freedom, happiness, and bananas.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Michael Brown, content marketing manager, uTest

There are not many businesses that have been disrupted more often than the hit-seeking video game industry, where success always seems to be fleeting. Consider that at some point in the last 30 years, Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sony, and Xbox have each held the console crown, only to be deposed by another.

We’re now witnessing another displacement, except that it doesn’t apply to any particular console gaming system, but rather all of them. This time, the usurper is the mobile games industry, and it may bring down console for good. Or maybe not.

Minyanville writer Andre Mouton recently took a closer look at the challenges that mobile poses to video game developers. Citing a 21 percent decline in console sales last year, he speculated that mobile apps might be part of the reason why, but acknowledged that there’s no real proof that is true.

In the absence of hard numbers, we’re left to state our theory about apps vs. consoles, based on our own observation, assumption, and common sense. So here are a few reasons why we believe mobile apps will not kill the console games industry:

1. The decline is console sales is not what it appears. The current drop in sales is almost certainly related to the lack of fresh gaming products. The newly unveiled Xbox One has yet to hit the shelves. Ditto for the PlayStation 4. One would have to expect sales to climb again later this year, as both consoles are highly anticipated.

2. The indie video game development community is on the rise. If you think all of the young technical talent is focused on app design and development, you’re wrong. As this video shows, there is a global community of young, creative, indie developers just waiting to make their mark and take console games to the next level.

3. Apps may be social, but so are console games. Maybe they used to, but it’s not as if console games exist in a vacuum any more. Today, almost every console game incorporates some sort of online/social element. Some games have moved to this model exclusively (with varying degrees of success). In other words, the attractive aspects of social/mobile gaming are already built in to the console. It’s not a choice of one versus the other. Thus…

4. Prediction: The two platforms will complement and converge, rather than compete. The user experience for video game consoles and mobile apps is completely different, in almost every way possible. While mobile apps offer convenience at a cheaper price, console games clearly offer a more robust user experience. Instead of competing, it’s more likely that mobile apps and consoles will complement each other going forward.

(Side note: the two most popular paid games, according to Mouton’s article, are Tetris and PacMan).

So are mobile apps and games killing the console? Not in our view. It’s easy to look at declining console sales and the dramatic rise of mobile games and leap to that conclusion, but there doesn’t appear to be a direct correlation. When it comes to the future of gaming, there are plenty of other factors at play.

Michael Brown is the senior content marketing manager for uTest, based in Southborough. He frequently writes about software development, app testing and startup life.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Liz Cormack, Marketing Manager, The Tap Lab

Have you ever heard John Lennon’s first song? It was called “Hello Little Girl,” and it was, well, bad.

What about Steven Spielberg’s first commercial film? It was called Firelight. He made one dollar from it, and that’s about what it was worth.

Riddled with imperfection, those first attempts at greatness still contained the spark that brought us two of the world’s greatest entertainers. Those works were just part of the path Lennon and Spielberg walked to get to their greatest accomplishments – the same path that must be followed for any musician, director, or even video game designer.

Creating that first, awful game is essential. Mistakes will be made, lessons will be learned, and great game developers will be born.

More than ever before, jumping into game design and iterating quickly is possible even for those with little or no experience. Dave Evans, an independent game designer at Hybrid Mind Studios in Cambridge, worked as a programmer in the corporate world for years before opening his own studio in 2009. His career was in large part the result of a childhood filled with copying code from the back pages of borrowed magazines.

“The tools are available now – you can make games without being a high tech programmer,” he said. “It’s a skill like anything else, and the more that you make small games, the better you’ll be getting at game design.”

Any game designer remembers his or her first-ever attempt at creating a game. From copying reams of code line for line from a magazine, to turning your college campus into a mobile battleground, a game designer’s initial experience often teaches lessons he or she will remember for the rest of their career.

For Evans, making a mistake can be a catalyst for something new. “Sometimes a mistake can be a bug that gives you a different idea. It can give you a whole new idea for a game mechanic,” he said.

This past March at PAX East 2013, a massive video game expo in Boston, four local game designers gathered together to share hilarious and insightful stories of their own first games on the "I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours" panel. In a room packed full of aspiring game designers, industry insiders Alex Schwartz of Owlchemy Labs, Seth Sivak of Proletariat Inc., Dave Bisceglia of The Tap Lab, and Ichiro Lambe of Dejobaan Games told their personal tales of 60-hour work weeks, crazy mistakes, and the leap they made into game development.

Three gaming legends have also recounted their own first-game-ever stories on video: Jesse Schell, author of The Art of Game Design; Will Wright, creator of Sim City; and Raph Koster, previously lead designer of Ultima Online.

“Probably about 70 percent of the time I worked on Raid on Bungeling Bay were mistakes that I had to back out of, but those mistakes were valuable,” said Will Wright, talking about his first commercial video game title.

Ultimately, the prevailing bit of advice offered to prospective designers was to just get started. Build games, and get them out there. Prototype, play-test, and have a blast doing it.

“Life is short, and games are really, really fun to make,’ said Sivak.

Besides what you learn in the process, the feeling when you finally build and ship a completed game can be extremely empowering. “There’s something about making something that you can build a community around,” said Bisceglia. “it sends shivers down your spine when you launch a game. People get into it and you’re playing it with them.”

Sivak emphasized the importance of getting your game into the hands of players early on. While making a gesture-based game in college, he told the story of their team's first 8-year-old play tester who couldn’t swing the Wii remote hard enough to make anything happen. “We were a bunch of 20-something year old males, and we turned the Wii remote gyroscope all the way up to 5 Gs,” he said.

The videotaped stories from Wright, Koster and Schell sparked the realization that such videos could be shared with aspiring game designers everywhere. So we figured, why stop at PAX? We’re building a community of a game designers and developers to promote making games – and mistakes! – and we’d love for you to join us.

Subscribe to YouTube.com/1stGameEver and get in touch at liz[at]thetaplab.com to let us know whose story you’d like to hear next. We’ll be posting new interviews every week, featuring all kinds of designers, from our neighbors in the Indie MEGABOOTH to Henry Smith, creator of Spaceteam.

After showing a hilarious video of his first attempt at building an Unreal 2004 Mod at the First Game Ever panel, Alex Schwartz put it best: “Your first games are going to stink – if you keep doing what you’re supposed to be doing, what you’re trying to do…” you’ll eventually have a terrific story to help inspire all those eager, budding designers at PAX and beyond.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Scot Osterweil, creative director, MIT Education Arcade

In the opening to David Lodge’s wonderful comic novel Small World, he likens a group of academics on a swing through a series of conferences to Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims, revealing themselves as they swap stories. I thought of that novel as I spent the past month attending five conferences; one here at MIT, and four on the other side of the continent.

It’s not hard to find the humor in conference-going, with its share of self-promoting speakers, not to mention the ever-present networking. I flew off to the majority of these meetings filled with more dread than anticipation. But at each of them, I found myself pleasantly surprised by the things I learned, either through presentations or conversations. Each such positive moment was a reminder of the importance of human interaction in our construction of knowledge.

In our daily lives we are bombarded with too much information. At its best, the conference represents an opportunity to experience the affect and enthusiasm of the presenter, enabling new ideas to cut through the fog of the familiar.

A small example from Sandbox Summit, the conference we hold here at the MIT Education Arcade: One session involved a conversation with Harvard professor of cognition Howard Gardner, who, among other things, briefly summarized the work of philosopher John Dewey. Dewey’s notions of experiential learning -- that we primarily learn by doing -- are the basis for modern progressive education. They are also fundamental to our approach to game design.

We believe that through digital games, players learn to explore complex systems; and through interaction, they construct their own understanding of the processes at work. When we embed challenging academic ideas in a game, it is with the goal of helping players experience the pleasure of learning and mastery.

With Dewey’s ideas as the bedrock of our own practice as learning game designers, we may forget how little those ideas have penetrated beyond our circle of colleagues. But at Sandbox Summit, I had a chance encounter with the head of a trade group that represents toy makers. He had never heard of Dewey, or the notion that we learn best by doing, and was fascinated and affected by Gardner’s talk.

That trade group leader was gaining new insight into the audience his industry serves, reminding me again that game designers need to be in an ongoing dialogue with a broader public. It was the kind of teachable moment that is peculiar to conferences designed to open up conversation between industry and academia. I’d argue that only in a setting like that would we have made the human connection that made that learning possible.

Scot Osterweil is the creative director at MIT’s Education Arcade. He has designed games for computers, handheld devices, and multi-player on-line environments, including the acclaimed Zoombinis series of math and logic games, Vanished, the MIT/Smithsonian Curated Game (middle grades environmental science), Lure of the Labyrinth (middle grades math) and The Radix Endeavor (high school biology and math).

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Dr. Gita Sukthankar, assistant professor, University of Central Florida

Ever wonder how a character in a video game knows the right thing to say? Or have you been frustrated when your non-player companion messes up an easy tactical move? If so, come to the Ninth Annual AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE) on October 14-18th, 2013, at Northeastern University. That will be the place to talk about what works and doesn’t work when it comes to artificial intelligence in computer games.

After several years in California, the conference is coming to the vibrant game development community of Greater Boston. AIIDE 2013 is being sponsored by two local companies -- Charles River Analytics and Boston Dynamics -- that work on the more "serious" facets of game research: simulation, modeling, and training.

Artificial intelligence (AI) design utilizes smart agents that are capable of perception, cognition, and action in complex environments. Many aspects of game development and design can benefit from the use of artificial intelligence techniques, including behavior authoring, level generation, play-testing, player modeling, and structuring narrative flow. At AIIDE, there are presentations on algorithmic improvements to animation, planning, natural language processing, and machine learning. The conference unites attendees to network and swap ideas about entertainment applications of the future, including areas such as personal robotics and computer-generated art.

One new topic at AIIDE is the use of machine learning techniques for player modeling and game analytics. These techniques can be used to understand customer preferences, tune the in-game experience, and discover fraudulent trading activities. Many games include telemetry systems, originally designed for debugging, that can be used to collect general data about game play. The study of user log histories can reveal statistical trends of behavior; The challenge is sifting through terabytes of data to discover what the players like and dislike based on subtle shifts in the frequency of the their action selections.

This year, AIIDE will host a new workshop in game analytics, along with workshops on intelligent narrative technologies, game aesthetics, musical metacreation, and serious games.

The main conference will feature talks from prominent researchers and game developers, including Richard Evans (Linden Lab), Dr. Fox Harrell (MIT), Aleissia Laidacker (Ubisoft), and John Abercrombie (Irrational Games). New to 2013: The conference will offer a "playable experiences" track to showcase applications that use AI in novel ways to affect the user's playing experience.

The event will also host the 2013 StarCraft bot competition, which is designed to foster and evaluate the progress of AI research applied to real-time strategy (RTS) games. There will be a man vs. machine demonstration, pitting the winner of the AI competition against an accomplished human player.

Often we think of research advances as being a means of enhancing human productivity, but AIIDE shows the equally important ways that artificial intelligence can bring entertainment, enjoyment, and new experiences into people's lives.

For more information, please see http://www.aiide.org/ or follow on Twitter @AIIDEConference.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Dan Basoli, economist, Abt Associates Inc.

Ah, coffee – sweet nectar of life, without which we just can’t function. And yet, we’re practically obsessed with reducing what we spend for our daily caffeine fix. Or at least, I am. After I smashed my coffee pot carafe against the side of the kitchen sink last week – a fate I knew was inevitable – I faced a truly dreadful decision: Do I upgrade to a Keurig-style K-cup system, or stay with the more traditional, dineresque, drip-style brew system?

No doubt, the K-cup system is great, brewing a virtually instant cup ‘o Joe without the hassle of dealing with a whole pot. (Instant coffee, with its wretched taste, is out of the question). But what is this convenience going to cost me? Do I really want to spend that on a coffee maker, and what about having to buy these K-cups?

Naturally, as one in my field (economics) tends to do, I quickly determined that this question called for a spreadsheet calculator. The calculator compares the average cost-per-cup of coffee over the life of the appliance for both styles, based on your answers to a few simple questions. You can download it here: Coffee Maker Calculator.xls

It is clear that the K-cup style system generally costs more than a basic drip-style system, but as it turns out, our personal coffee drinking habits do matter when considering the trade-off between different styles of coffee makers. Are you a savvy shopper who will hunt down the best price for K-cups, or do you tend to waste a lot of coffee down the drain when using your drip-style carafe? Then a K-cup system might be an economical option. Do you rarely ever make coffee at home? Then you’ll probably find the drip-style carafe system more economical. And of course, the up-front cost for the appliance itself matters, too.

Try the calculator. See what works for you. Interestingly, I ended up going with a hybrid approach: a single-serve appliance utilizing a reusable K-cup filter. I get the convenience of quickly making a single cup at a time, while still being able to buy relatively less expensive bags of ground coffee.

Dan Basoli is an economist with Abt Associates Inc. in Cambridge, MA (dbasoli@yahoo.com).

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Jamie Saine, marketing writer, uTest

The stock market is (supposed to be) a window into the economy. Companies doing well in the stock market are likely pleasing consumers and are in high demand. Examine which stocks are performers, and you should be able to get a sense of who’s doing well and where consumer demand and confidence is high. Are major retailers doing poorly? It may be a bad time to open a big store. Is a new industry booming? Get in while the getting is good. Is an industry dominated by one company? If you’re brave enough, find a niche and try to lure away its customers.

The same goes for the mobile app economy. Would you still produce a new digital game if you knew users were losing interest in that style of play? A smart bet would be no.

Assessing the competition is all about making your app as strong as possible. By building the type of features that users already like, and solving issues they have with existing games, you poise yourself for success.

So before you move ahead with your brilliant new idea, do your research. Keep an eye on the most popular app lists to see what type of games are currently making a splash. Are word games still popular? Which age demographics are driving downloads, and what are they favoring? Fruit Ninja, for example, has a very different target audience than Final Fantasy III, and as such, is a very different game.

Games like Fruit Ninja (above) and Final Fantasy III (below) have different styles, and that often means different fans.

In addition to generic “most popular” lists, use available tools that track downloads and user sentiment for a more detailed understanding. And keep an eye on the mobile gaming ecosystem as a whole to track how bellwether games – the ones that represent the overall category - are faring. Understanding the economy you’re about to enter will help you determine whether your game has a market, and how to best position it for success.

Research will also help you identify your competitors, and even allow you to learn from both their successes and their mistakes. Read app store reviews and see what actual users of rival games like and don’t like. Focus on the major, repeatedly-complained-about pain points, and make sure your game doesn’t duplicate those issues.

For example, popular word games such as Words with Friends and Ruzzle largely leave users disappointed when it comes to app elegance (how it looks and feels), security and, sometimes, stability. If you spend extra time on those areas and can offer a better experience, you can lure users away and more importantly, keep them coming back.

Meanwhile, simple action games like Fruit Ninja, Doodle Jump, and Draw Something are already strong performers. That category of game will likely be harder to break into. While doing your research, also identify fan-favorite features, and consider incorporating something similar.

Don’t forget to do this research for each platform you’re targeting. The same app can be radically different and have radically different user responsesdepending on whether it’s on Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android. Doodle Jump on iOS, for example, is near perfect, but the Android version leaves a lot to be desired.

Users of different platforms have different wants, needs, and concerns. You’ll need to focus on key points such as usability or security, depending on the platform. In general, Android has a lower benchmark than iOS. Its open nature means it’s more complicated when it comes to development and testing. That doesn’t mean you can slack off on Android. To the contrary, releasing an excellent game that performs well on all the major devices and OS versions (and there are a lot) will win you users and force your competition to play catch-up.

Don’t get wrapped up in metrics that force you to make assumptions, like user retention rate (just looking at a number doesn’t tell you why users stick around or run away) or number of downloads (it doesn’t do you much good if someone downloads your game then deletes it because it keeps crashing). Focus on information and insights that tell you explicitly what users want.

By understanding what your competition does and doesn’t do successfully when it comes to the opinion of real gamers, you can cut the risk and better ensure your next mobile game is a smash.

Jamie Saine is a marketing writer for uTest, based in Southborough. She covers all things software testing, web and mobile – particularly apps.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors.

MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Seth Sivak, CEO, Proletariat Inc.

How do you build a game?

I say, you do it one version at a time.

At Proletariat Inc., a Cambridge-based development studio, every game begins with a prototype. With Letter Rush, the team was brainstorming ideas and started talking about doing something with words that would have a fast-paced, arcade feel. We wanted to develop a new, short-session game that could give players a quick and satisfying burst of fun.

It’s hard to create. Every author, poet, artist, and even video game developer knows that. You don’t know what you’ll get when you’re done. You don’t know whether you can truly realize your vision – or whether your audience will have the experience you intend.

That’s the risk: That we won’t do what we want to do. It’s also why the act of creation is so much fun. You haven’t done it right unless it surprises and, hopefully, delights you and your audience.

Iteration is the key to any creative endeavor, but especially when trying to build a totally new experience like a game. In programming, iteration means repeating a series of steps a number of times, or until a desired effect is achieved. In video games, it means producing segments or versions as you build to keep your work moving forward and keep your eyes on the final goal.

Games are complicated. They have many moving parts and it is almost impossible to imagine the exact feeling of playing a game before it is built. When you are attempting to design a game on paper, it’s tough to know how to tune the difficulty of a playing level, or how long a single session will be, or whether the game will have enough strategic choices and positive feedback to be fun. That is why we move as quickly as possible from theoretical design on a whiteboard to a prototype.

The initial prototype of Letter Rush was built in a day. One of the things I wanted to try out was a means for using swiping gestures to create words on a board. It was a little like a word finding game, but it was timed like an arcade game. I sent this out to the team as you see it on the left; the board was hard-coded, and there were only about ten words. Interestingly, the original iteration was fun enough for us to use it as the initial seed for the game.

At that point, we did some exploration. We played every word game we could find and we thought hard about what we liked and did not like. The goal was to build a game that was approachable and fun, but also quick to develop. Dan Ogles, our CTO, starting building additional prototypes off this initial idea, attempting to pull in inspiration from other games and genres.

We spent about two weeks just trying different features. The team explored a range of possible outcomes, including allowing players to place words they found onto a two-dimensional battlefield to defend their turf, and a puzzle-ish version of the game that was turn-based instead of real-time. Each new prototype would be circulated and everyone on the team was encouraged to give feedback on what they liked or disliked. We were able to put prototypes side-by-side to compare and contrast gameplay rather than simply speculating. To the right is a screenshot of the final game.

The iteration involved in this process is a powerful way for creative people to collaborate and solve problems. We were able to fix issues we saw in the game, like the length being a bit too long. Each time we produced a new prototype, we would create lists of what we liked and what we felt could make the game better. This process was rigorous and it allowed us to create a better product.

No matter how much iteration you put into the design there is much to be learned from releasing the game into the wild. We released the game less than a month ago and have already made numerous changes to the balance and core game. It can be hard to show your game to the world, but the sooner you do it the more you will learn - and remember: you can always make another update.

Screenshots provided by Proletariat Inc.

MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

PAX East 2013 has been determined to be the largest PAX ever - not surprising to anyone who attended the massive gaming culture expo at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center last weekend. Tens of thousands of fans, developers, exhibitors and speakers from all over the world took part in the annual celebration of games that range from tabletops to screens.

More than 40 Massachusetts-based companies, organizations, and institutions were on the show floor this year. There was an amazing concentration of local talent within the Indie Megabooth, an array of area colleges and universities with game development academic programs, and folks displaying everything from hardware to comic books; not to mention the presence of local game makers like Harmonix and Irrational Games.

Helena Fruscio, creative economy industry director for the state, took some time to make this short video featuring many of the local exhibitors. Check it out:

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

Among leading-edge releases from top video game companies and independent developers exhibiting this weekend at PAX East 2013 – the largest games show on the East Coast – one will be unique: a cutting-edge game developed by students from the top-ranked interactive media program at Becker College: “Pressure Switch,” an unusual game with an unusual hero. He is a super soldier who shoots to heal. His mission is to reverse a viral infiltration in a military complex, and the purpose of shooting enemies is to “recode,” or cure them, not to kill them.

Senior Anthony Botelho of Dighton, Mass., was the lead developer of “Pressure Switch,” along with three 2012 Becker game program graduates who are currently adjunct faculty members at Becker.

The Massachusetts Digital Games Institute, or MassDiGI, which is housed at Becker, is featuring its “Made in MA: The State of Play” booth (#595) on the show floor! Thanks to its many friends in the Massachusetts game development community, MassDiGI has some really great booth programming. See the schedule right here.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Marc E. Check, director of information and interactive technology, Museum of Science, Boston

It’s not often that a technology comes along with so much potential that I spend hours every day thinking about all of its implications and potential uses. But in the last couple of months, I’ve had my hands on just such a technology – one that has potential to radically alter the way we connect, gather information, and even play videogames while indoors.

I’ve been in the museum technology field for close to fifteen years now, a a period in which innovations have reshaped both the way we operate as a business and the way we offer programs and exhibit experiences to the public. The elusive technology of the last several years has been location awareness - which if made affordable, reliable, and accurate, can completely change the way museum visitors interact with our content and exhibits, navigate the building, and ultimately provide unprecedented insight into traffic patterns and visitor behaviors, thanks to mobile device analytics.

In video games, they call this location-based gaming. The idea is to apply the same type of accurate, GPS-based location awareness technologies now being used in the great outdoors, to craft experiences indoors. The closest-watched technology has been indoor Wi-Fi triangulation, which has not matured in the way we had once hoped. Wi-Fi continues to remain elusive as a location awareness technology because it has limited accuracy (the best implementations still offer mere ten-meter accuracy when everything is working well), a significant infrastructural cost, and is high-maintenance; it requires significant attention to ensure all wireless points are calibrated and positioned correctly.

Given the rather bleak landscape for indoor location awareness, imagine my excitement a year ago when we were approached by ByteLight, whose technology offered a potential model for affordable, flexible, sustainable, and accurate indoor location awareness technology.

The general idea of the technology is easy to grasp: LED light bulbs allow for the transmission of light to be pulsed on and off faster than the human eye can see. By controlling the pulsing of light through an LED, we can send digital signals through the light beam itself, right to mobile devices, which receive the signals through front and back-facing cameras.

This technology offers reduced implementation costs, since most institutions now have (or are moving towards) LED-bulb infrastructures; reduced development costs, as the ByteLight content management system allows us to develop content and other applications using non-proprietary Web-based development languages and standards; accuracy far greater than pre-existing technologies; and sustainability (as well as flexibility), as the cost I slow and bulbs can simply be moved to reconfigure environments.

The Museum of Science embarked on a partnership a few months ago to test these technologies in our Cahners ComputerPlace exhibit. That gave us a content-rich area to deliver varied virtual content on mobile devices in a fairly dense area of the museum. Because light-based digital transmission is such a great science story in and of itself, we have been taking this opportunity to talk to the public about the technology while assessing the potential uses for providing content based on location, visitor way-finding applications, and back-end analytics to understand visitor paths and dwell times within the exhibit.

Our staff loves the technology so far. I think visitors feel the same. And that’s just so far – wait and see what more we can do!

Museum visitors wishing to experience ByteLight-illuminated tours must request one of a limited number of iPads from Cahners ComputerPlace staff. Tours and Museum staff is available Saturday through Thursday from 10:00 a.m. – 4:45 p.m. ET or on Fridays from 10 a.m. – 7:30p.m. ET. Entry is included with regular Exhibit Halls admission: $22 for adults, $20 for seniors (60+), and $19 for children (3-11). For more information, the public can call 617/723-2500, (TTY) 617/589-0417, or visit mos.org.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Chinh H. Pham, patent attorney and shareholder, Greenberg Traurig LLP - Boston

Everything you know about patent law is about to change.

Well, maybe not everything. But enough will change that it may be urgent to submit patent applications before March 16, 2013 -- a momentous deadline when many provisions of a new patent law goes into effect.

The law is the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act ("AIA"). Signed into law in 2011, the AIA is the first comprehensive overhaul of the US patent system since 1952. The first thing to go: the first-to-invent rule, a foundational principle of patent law, in favor of a new rule: First to file.

For video game developers, who depend so much on patents to protect their work, filing before the March 16 deadline is the only way to take advantage of current patent law.

Under the former patent system, an inventor who conceived of a technology first, but filed a patent application after a competitor, can still be entitled to a patent on that technology. However, in the new first-to-file system, the first applicant to file a patent application is entitled to a patent regardless of who conceived of the technology first.

This “first-inventor-to-file” regime will have profound ramifications for the patent filing strategies of videogame developers. The new system encourages inventors and companies to file patent applications quickly—almost at the proof-of-concept, or invention-formation, stage. To keep up with this race to the patent office, inventors and companies will need to streamline and accelerate their invention disclosure collection and review processes.

There will also be a larger applicable pool of prior art after the deadline. Prior art, or any art that exists before a filing, is of critical importance because a patent will not be granted for an invention described in prior art.

Under the current patent system, public uses and sales by a videogame company do not act as prior art against a claimed invention unless they occur in the US. Under the new AIA laws, public uses or sales anywhere in the world could serve as prior art. By waiting to file until after the change in the law, there is a possibility that a published reference or public disclosure which would not have been considered prior art before March 16 will now be considered prior art, and could block your patent claim.

So under the current law, any publications, public uses, or sales by anyone that occur within one year of the first US filing date may be removed from the applicable pool of prior art if the claimed subject matter was invented prior to those publications, public uses, or sales. Under the new AIA laws, prior activities of others cannot be removed from the applicable pool of prior art and can affect the claimed subject matter.

One last thing. The new post-grant review process of the AIA will not apply to a non-provisional patent application – a patent in which there is at least one claim, and which will be examined -- filed before March 16, 2013. The term non-provisional patent claim was coined to distinguish regular applications from provisional applications, which are which are not reviewed by the US Patent and Trademark Office, but serve as a placeholder. Provisional applications must be followed by a non-provisional application or there won’t be a patent issued (you can’t get a provisional patent).

The post-grant review provision was effective as of September 16, 2012, one year from enactment of the AIA, but applies only to patents issued from “first-inventor-to-file” applications filed after March 16, 2013. The new post-grant review process allows companies to challenge patents on any grounds of invalidity during a nine-month window from the issue date of a patent, with an aim of shifting the patent challenging arena from the courts to the US patent and Trademark Office.

Video game companies that won’t be ready to file before the March 16 deadline should consider patent strategies early in the design phase, rather than wait for a development of a prototype or game. That will be the only way to set some early priority dates, and maintain a competitive advantage in a rapidly changing arena.

Chinh H. Pham is a registered patent attorney with particular experience in the strategic creation, implementation, and protection of intellectual property rights for high technology clients. Pham can be reached at phamc@gtlaw.com.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Ichiro Lambe, president, Dejobaan Games LLC

It's not unusual to hear stories of big successes on the part of small development teams. Two-person teams will sell millions of units of a quirky title, as was the case for Super Meat Boy and World of Goo. But those are the success stories; other independent developers struggle with the challenges of being small. Those who set up shop in the Boston area, though, can become part of a supportive community that will help get them over the hurdles and into success stories of their own.

Rags-to-riches stories about game development weren't common during the 1990s. For the most part, game developers had to partner with large publishers to sell their creations through brick and mortar stores. But the high up-front costs, low margins, and limited shelf space meant that publishers preferred to go with blockbuster material rather than unknown games.

Fast-forward a decade, and always-online PCs, smartphones, and tablets have significantly replaced retail when it comes to bringing games to the masses. Large distributors like Apple, Microsoft, and Sony began opening up digital platforms to small studios and small games in the last decade. Online stores such as Steam and the Apple App Store cropped up. We went from hundreds of thousands of eyeballs looking at our games on odd websites to tens of millions via worldwide portals.

Some gamers, too, started to look past the glitzy graphics of big-budget, "AAA" games created by 200-person companies, and began to discover the pleasures of unconventional titles created by teams of a half dozen or less. Audiences in 1993 might have rejected a title such as Proteus for being crude, but in 2013, it wins awards for its artistry.

The industry has also developed better development tools, making it easier for small studios to create compelling games and to publish on desktop PCs and mobile devices. (The Boston Unity Group exists to promote and discuss one such tool called Unity, for instance.)

That makes this a Golden Age of indie game development. And inspired by stories of success, hobbyists have started making games in record numbers. Experienced members of large studios are leaving to start out on their own. In Boston, alone, former employees of Harmonix, 38 Studios, and Irrational have broken out to form companies like Moonshot, Eerie Canal, and Subatomic, to name a few. In fact, there are a dozen indie studios that reside right in Kendall Square, including 82 Apps, Disco Pixel, The Tap Lab, and even ourselves.

We’ve got a strong local community, but we’re only one such community in a worldwide market that’s getting crowded. Greater numbers and a rising quality bar are making it difficult for us to be seen. There are now nearly two thousand titles on the desktop-centric Steam platform, of which a thousand are considered indie games. On the mobile side, there are more than a million games for the iPhone and iPad, up from the low tens of thousands in 2008 and 2009.

Developers need to step it up to remain in business. I think that one key is for us to collaborate with each other like crazy. By joining forces, two studios create bigger, better games for the obvious reasons: more brainpower; more person-hours. But just as authors co-writing a novel can weave a story that neither one could have created on his or her own (think Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman with Good Omens), indie teams with different talents will create games that arise from the chemistry of teams working together.

We've done it ourselves. In collaboration with fellow Boston-area studio Owlchemy Labs, we brought our award-winning BASE jumping title to iOS (and won the number 10 spot on Metacritic's best iOS titles of 2012 as a result).

Small studios also often share detailed knowledge on sales figures or behind-the-scenes strategy that larger companies wouldn't; it's one of our community's strengths. At the Indie Game Collective in Kendall, we invite members of the local game development scene – from hobbyists to entrepreneurs – to visit us for help refining their games and pitches.

Such collaboration casts a bright light on the future, although the limits of success are hard to predict. Will console alternatives such as the Gamestick, Project Shield, and Ouya create new markets, where vastly-better-funded (albeit different) OnLive didn't? Will the advent of new technologies like Google Glass or low-cost 3D printers provide new ways to create games like we've never seen?

I'm hopeful that the dozens of the area's tiny studios will flourish over the next few years. While game development's becoming brutally competitive, we feel lucky to be in Boston.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Ryan Casey, student, Worcester Polytechnic Institute

Ed. Note: The MassDiGI Game Challenge is a pitch competition designed to help indie and student game development entrepreneurs hone their ideas and showcase the rapidly expanding game industry cluster in the region. Forty-four teams of indie game developers and student teams from around New England competed in a sold-out event from March 1-2 at NERD, the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center. A panel of game industry veterans served as judges for the competition.

Let's be clear: we knew from the beginning that the MassDiGI Game Challenge presented an unprecedented opportunity to my team as we worked on our game. We knew we could show off to other game developers. We also knew we had a shot at some pretty great prizes.

Who doesn't want some help finishing their game along with a healthy bit of cash to boot? What I didn't realize was how much more we would get out of the event.

I was there as the team leader for four students from Worcester Polytechnic Institute who have worked on our game, Pandora, since last August. I was happy to see friends and fellow game developers from around the area, and I took this as yet another chance to socialize for a little while. I was pleased there were so many talks about the nuanced art of the game pitch, how to deal with game publishers, and ways to better market your game – all subjects that are not included in the game design curriculum of the schools I know.

Then there were the mentors, real video game professionals that were available to us budding developers. I can't express how helpful they were. My group had the opportunity to speak with four game developers already established in the Boston area, each with a different take on the perfect way to pitch our game. Having access to them, with their direct, personal experience in the games industry, was invaluable.

The inevitable moment eventually came: time for us to make our pitch to the judges in the preliminary round. As daunting as it was, we presented with as much confidence and charisma as we could muster. Then it was out of our hands. While waiting to hear the list of finalists, I spoke with some of the other groups in both the college and indie developer categories. The creative energy and sheer excitement were tangible.

I also talked with some of the companies who had come to see the talent on display. I was thrilled to hear that many of the games had made such a positive impression. They seemed keen to recruit some of that talent, and I know I wasn't the only student who was more than happy to entertain the idea.

Then I heard Pandora listed among the college level finalists! We all gave final pitches that we had been refining for two days, thanks to the conversations we were able to have at the Game Challenge. In the end, the winners were all truly great games.

That's what really impressed me. Everything at the Game Challenge was so new, unique, and creative. Whether student or indie developer, the passion on display was incredible, and I know that we all will be back next year with even better games in tow.

Ryan Casey is a graduating senior studying Interactive Media & Game Development at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Screenshot above is from Pandora.

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Caleb Garner, game producer, Part12 Studios

Ed. Note: The MassDiGI Game Challenge is a pitch competition designed to help indie and student game development entrepreneurs hone their ideas and showcase the rapidly expanding game industry cluster in the region. Forty-four teams of indie game developers and student teams from around New England competed in a sold-out event from March 1-2 at NERD, the Microsoft New England Research and Development Center. A panel of game industry veterans served as judges for the competition.

As an indie game developer, participating in the MassDiGI Game Challenge offered a valuable opportunity to get feedback on our project directly from fellow from more accomplished developers. To hear from others in the industry, who have their own strengths and experiences to draw from, gives us a perspective that we would never get while we’re pounding away in our game developer ivory towers.

This was my second MassDiGI Game Challenge. Last year, I was there while I had had several games in various degrees of completion. It was an incredible opportunity to talk with mentors who served as sounding boards for our game concepts.

This year, we could only pitch one game. The one I chose was “Finger King”, a parody Japanese game show. I had a pretty good working prototype to show, which I felt would better convey the concept than a pitch for one of my many backburner game ideas. Those may or may not get made this year, so why waste the chance to get some valuable insights?

The game’s elevator pitch was, “Be a contestant on a Japanese game show, where you move your finger through courses of razors, fire, and other obstacles, losing as few fingers as possible and winning fabulous prizes!” The idea really got traction in October, when I met Anthony Cefaretti, a student artist who wanted to collaborate on a project. Over time, others joined up, including Bonie Rosario, our marketer and launch strategist; Flemmings Beaubrun, an audio and music specialist; and finally, Mariah Almeida, who came on as our Japanese translator/cultural consultant as well as providing additional art support for the game.

I was thrilled that the whole team was able to be a part of the Game Challenge, helping the judges to see our team spirit. It was also a chance for everyone to finally meet at the same time and brainstorm not only for the pitch, but for our future plans as well.

The pitch came together pretty well. Tim Loew, executive director of Game Challenge sponsor MassDiGI, was very good about offering all participants clear guidance on what the judges would be looking for. The four big factors: originality, a business model, art style, and a technical overview. Keeping those criteria in mind really helped us to make sure we covered all of the bases, to the best of our ability.

Looking back on the weekend competition, I realize that events like this do not just happen. They depend on the dedication and passion that can be found throughout the Boston-area game development community. That community is strong; Boston companies believe in helping students and indies develop their ideas into reality. Sponsors like Microsoft, Adobe, Turbine, Becker College, GSN, and many other local businesses embody this passion through their generous backing of events like the Game Challenge. And the individuals who make up MassDiGI also deserve much praise and gratitude for helping us navigate the challenging and changing landscape of game development.

Caleb Garner is a game producer at www.part12studios.com in Randolph, MA. @part12studios

The State of Play blog, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors. MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Christa Avampato, National STEM Video Game Challenge, Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop

How do you motivate kids so they want to build up their skills in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics – better known as STEM?

Make a game of it, of course.

The best way to engage children with technology in a healthy, meaningful way is through games that are fun to play and teach them important skills like reading, writing, language development, design, systems-based learning, creativity, and collaboration. The National STEM Video Game Challenge hopes to motivate such learning by leveraging the natural excitement students experience when they play and make video games.

Why is it important to encourage STEM learning? With these skills in their pockets, students will have a better understanding of the world around them, and will even be able to shape the world around them. They will be empowered to build strong, healthy communities, and they will be able to connect with, learn from, and share their experiences with people across the globe.

Right now, the National STEM Video Game Challenge, presented by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop and E-Line Media is accepting submissions of original video games and game designs. The challenge, now in its third year, is open to middle school and high school students in grades 5 – 12 through April 24, 2013. It is free to enter; one middle school and one high school winner will be selected for each game creation platform. Each winner will receive an AMD-powered laptop computer, including game design and educational software. And each winner’s sponsoring organization will receive a cash prize of $2,000.

The National STEM Video Game Challenge was inspired by President Obama’s “Educate to Innovate Campaign,” an initiative promoting science, technology, engineering, and math education. More than 3,700 middle and high school youth participated in the 2012 Challenge, a 650 percent increase over its inaugural year. There were 28 winners last year and two winners from the inaugural year of the competition who were invited to showcase their games at the White House Science Fair in February 2012.

STEM skills are critical to ensure we create graduates who can compete in an increasingly global marketplace. The world is becoming increasingly complex, with science, technology, engineering, and math playing larger and larger roles in our daily lives. Soon, having a deep understanding of these subjects could be as much of a requirement for employment as knowing how to use basic computer programs. In short, STEM knowledge will become a part of every professional field. People who build products and services using STEM knowledge, or who at the very least understand at a deep level how technology works, will have the greatest influence over the global economy.

In three years, the challenge has been able to reach thousands of kids, showing them the opportunities that await in professional STEM fields. "I consider winning the STEM challenge to be one of the best achievements of my life,” said Julia Weingaertner, Middle School category winner, 2012 National STEM Challenge. “Creating the game opened my eyes to the world of computers, which I had never even considered to be interesting before.”

Students can get help learning how to design their own games from industry pros at E-Line Media, a workshop for middle and high school students. The event is free of charge, and sponsored by the Institute of Museum & Library Services. It will be held at the Lynn Public Library, 5 North Common Street on Thursday, March 14, from 5:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.

Details on how to enter the challenge, game design resources, and a calendar of upcoming workshops on creating games are available at www.stemchallenge.org. Among the game design resources are video tutorials, links to open-source game-making software that can be downloaded free of charge to any computer, and toolkits for parents, teachers, librarians, afterschool program facilitators, and mentors to help kids create their games.

The STEM Challenge is supported by title sponsors the AMD Foundation, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, the Entertainment Software Association and national community sponsors the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and Hive Digital Media Learning Fund in The New York Community Trust.

Educators and public officials say time and time again that this nation needs to improve student STEM skills to build a competitive society prepared to take on the future. Here’s a way to help that will help create a better future, and is fun besides.

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The State of Play, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors.

MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Michael Suen, community producer, and Adam Mandeville, producer, Learning Games Network

Albert Einstein once said that play is the highest form of research, yet many students seem to experience less play as they grow older. That’s true even as videogames are earning more respect as learning tools; and as some educators buck the trend and encourage students to learn through play.

That said, there can be real obstacles to training teachers how to use games in the classroom, or proving the marketability of learning games to commercial companies. Teachers work with restricted class times, limited access to computers, and antiquated academic standards. And in the games industry, the rise and fall of learning games has made some companies wary of the enormous investment that new games require.

That’s what we do at the Learning Games Network: show teachers how to use already available games in the classroom, and collaborate on new learning games that can be used both in and out of classrooms.

As an industry, we have long been cursed by the fact that we never seem to belong. We hear that learning games are too educational; or learning games are not educational enough. Or perhaps most heartbreaking of them all: Learning games are not real games!

In truth, a well-designed learning game retains many of the same elements as a good commercial game. Good games tell good stories. Their art engages players, and their mechanics offer hours of play. Most of all, good learning games ask us to experiment, to take on new identities, and to learn from our failures. A big red “F” discourages students, but a “Game Over” screen reinvigorates them. If a game can properly marry play with a subject matter, the potential for learning becomes all the more powerful.

The rate of adoption of games on the part of teachers is a major hurdle to the widespread use of learning games. And for good reason; games can be giant beasts to manage, whether it’s Civilization, spanning millennia of ancient history, or Portal, exploring an immersive world of physics puzzles. Still, the right game can certainly teach “hard skills” such as algebra, reading or writing. The right game can also teach strategic thinking, problem-solving, and interpretive analysis, soft skills sometimes overlooked in curricula. Perhaps most encouragingly, such games can be used both in and out of the classroom.

As a non-profit that spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Education Arcade and University of Wisconsin’s Games+Learning+Society group, LGN’s mission is to support the development of the learning games industry. In our experience, failed learning games often start with a game that may have once been fun, only to cram in learning elements. Imagine your elation at nearing the end of a space-shooter level, only to be met by an extraneous algebra problem.

Other games make the mistake of starting with a learning goal and adding gaming elements. Who wants to catch all the “fraction monsters”? The most successful development of a learning game starts with both learning and play. Play-testing with students and communicating with teachers at early stages, and throughout the iterative design process, is the only way to be sure that a game will have a chance of being successful, although both can be overlooked by the commercial gaming industry.

The development of a learning game may be different from a commercial game, but one goal is the same: to create a fun experience. The key lies in getting a well-balanced team of designers, learning and context experts, and producers around the table from the beginning to push and pull on the design in a way that builds powerful and fun game mechanics, all based around key understandings of how learners develop in a given content area.

If you build a fun game, and show the student how the underlying content of the game has application in the real world, they will want to learn more about the subject. We need to encourage play. The work will inevitably follow.

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The State of Play, organized by MassDiGI, features posts by digital and video game industry insiders writing about creativity, innovation, research, and development in the Massachusetts digital entertainment and apps sectors.

MassDiGI, based at Becker College, is a statewide center for academic cooperation, entrepreneurship, and economic development across the local games ecosystem. Follow along @Mass_DiGI.

By Chinh H. Pham, patent attorney, Greenberg Traurig LLP - Boston

It’s one thing to have a great product idea. It can be a real challenge, though, to figure out whether a budding technology is commercially viable within a specific industry – especially when it comes to videogames.

Companies and investors have relied on a number of criteria to measure viability, including timeliness, market demand, and competitive advantage. That’s fine when it comes to projecting performance in more established industries. It can be much harder to make those predictions in a new or still-emerging industry like videogaming.

When it comes to finding the greatest opportunities, game developers may want to look at the US patent system. The information available in such resources as the US Patent and Trademark Patent Database can provide insight into, among other things, early trends in technological advances. With patent wars raging and tech companies of all stripes stockpiling patents to protect their intellectual property, the information contained in the patent database can be an effective means for finding the next great technology.

A game developer may look toward the number of patents issued or applications filed in the videogame sector to gain insight into a particular trend or focus, the potential for commercial exploitation, and emerging markets for such technology. For example, a search of the USPTO database using the terms “video game” and “controller” returned approximately 400 videogame controller technology patents issued in 2012 alone. For a late entrant to a videogame category, the number of patents issued or applications filed can help determine the risks associated with entering such a market. In other words, it can provide real competitive intelligence.

A game developer might also look to the ownership information to determine who the competitors may be and whether there’s ample room in the marketplace for a particular game category or application of a game technology. Now, even though there may be but a few competitors, the barrier to entry could still be high. If it turns out that the number of patents issued to or owned by these competitors is relatively high, then the opportunity for that particular category or application may be minimal.

You might also look to the citation information of patents to determine risks and opportunities. When a patent has been repeatedly cited by others, such information can indicate licensing potential. If you are looking to establish a dominant position in a gaming area, you may want to enhance your portfolio by acquiring repeatedly cited patents. Alternatively, repeated citations can be indicative of potential roadblocks to overcome when expanding the technology outward, unless there is a possibility of entering into a cross-licensing relationship with the owner of the oft-cited patent.

The scope of a patent claim may also be used as an indicator. The broader the scope of protection covered by the patent, the more likely it may be that the patent owner has the ability to block competition in a particular area.

The trick is to become familiar with the information available, and use it to enhance your strategic thinking. There’s tremendous value in adding patent information to the treasure trove of intelligence you can assemble when developing new products or technology. The hours you spend examining the patent landscape before committing to a certain path may be the best play you can make when it comes to creating a killer product.

By Susannah Gordon-Messer, education content manager, The Education Arcade at MIT

For the past year, I have been a game content manager at The Education Arcade at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When I tell people what I do, I am routinely asked – how did you end up doing that? It’s been a circuitous journey, but each step along the way helped me to gain the right combination of experiences to be good at what I do. In our lab, you’ll find people from a mix of all kinds of backgrounds, each with an interesting story to share about how they ended up here. Here’s how I got here.

I’ve always wanted to be in science. I love experimenting, discovering, and thinking through problems. As an undergraduate, I studied biological engineering at Cornell University. It turned out that I liked evolution, disliked chemistry, and liked feeling as if I were on the cutting edge of research. But what I really liked was math. And teaching.

After graduating, I joined Teach For America, and spent two years teaching high school math in Warrenton, a small town in the eastern part of North Carolina, just south of the Virginia border. I loved it. I liked developing lessons, I liked creating materials, and I really enjoyed working with students.

When I finished my two years as a teacher, I knew I wanted to go to graduate school. I liked the teaching, but I missed the research. I thought that perhaps a career as a professor would suit me. I ended up at Brandeis University in the biophysics and structural biology program. I threw myself into my coursework, and took on a modeling chromosome dynamics project for the biology and physics departments.

Through my research, I stumbled on one of my greatest passions. As much as I liked the research, I loved explaining my research to people even more--particularly to non-scientists and young students. I would sketch my research on napkins during dinner with friends and family. While some of my classmates saw their teaching requirements as a hassle, I felt completely at home in front of a group of students. I had scientific curiosity, but was now certain that I wanted to work to inspire that in others. The question was how to do that.

During the final three years of my graduate program, two supportive graduate advisers gave me the freedom to explore all kinds of alternative science careers. I mentored for the Posse Foundation, volunteered designing programs for The Discovery Museums in Acton, and went to meetings that had nothing to do with biophysics (thank you to the AAAS Annual meeting in 2008, a truly eye-opening introduction to all the different paths I could follow). After graduate school, I landed at the Strategic Education Research Partnership (SERP), writing middle school curricula emphasizing science literacy.

Looking back, I’ve had a series of amazing mentors who gave me insight into science careers that I didn’t even know existed. I had never even though of doing content work for educational games. Before coming here, I’m not sure I even knew this kind of work existed. Now I spend my days designing educational materials that address teaching math and science in new and innovative ways. I am in a research environment and interact directly with teachers and students.

On days when I am hard on myself, I wonder whether I picked the right path. On more reflective days, I realize that each of the steps I have taken on this journey has provided me with the many, diverse skills required to be successful my role. I am in turn a biologist, a teacher, a researcher, a designer, and of course, a gamer. It’s been a pretty crazy ride to get here and certainly not a straight or easy one. But then again, what career path is straight and easy?

The Beauty and Benefits of Science - The 2013 AAAS Annual Meeting in Boston from February 14-18 highlights the “unreasonable effectiveness” of the scientific enterprise in creating economic growth, solving societal problems, and satisfying the essential human drive to understand the world in which we live.

By Kellian Adams, founder and chief executive, Green Door Labs

At Green Door Labs, I build videogames for nonprofits and education. Some are funded by clients that need games for specific purposes: fundraisers, exhibits, education technology products that need a boost, companies that want to connect with a nonprofit. And then some games… aren’t.

Sometimes we want to build a game just because it’s cool. In fact, a lot of the time we want to build a game just because it’s cool. I’m an education and culture geek, and I have no delusions that an unsupported game on arts education will suddenly make a bazillion dollars or get magical super-funding. Most likely it will be totally unprofitable. So do we build it? Hell, yes.

Take, for example,our current dream game: Project Arachne, which we’d like to build with – and run at – a particular public library. It will most likely never make a dime, yet it is worth every minute we put into it.

The key to a dream project that’s not a money-maker is to first find an amazing team that’s willing to do it for cost, or close to cost, just because it’s awesome. That isn’t as hard as you would think. Either great visuals or a great story helps.

Arachne’s life cycle started with a chat between myself and an excellent game designer about one of our favorite artists, Hilary Scott, and how much we wanted to build a real-world game with his work. We contacted Hilary; he was game for a game. We sent images of his work to our Green Door designer, who loved the story and Hilary’s art so much that he built out a logo, images, and color scheme in a day. We suddenly had a pitch deck. Our COO loved it, and started to mine her tech contacts from MIT and think about how it could potentially be built by abusing students and friends. Now we had a producer and some possible programmers. Our building team was ready.

Deck in tow, we thought about the perfect place to hold this game. Arachne, the statue we wanted to build the game around, looked like a mechanical librarian. A few Googles about games at libraries sent us to Justin the Librarian, a smart, energetic youth librarian from Portland, Maine, who’s transforming his library into a community space that experiments with games and multimedia as outreach.

Justin introduced us to his library’s executive director, who was totally on board. A short trip north, and we met a fantastic team of librarians that were excited to do something unusual. Team #2, our cultural partner, was ready to go.

Why is it important to have a partner? Game builders will have different takes on this, but I personally think that for culture games, you want to have a ready-to-go group of core game players to get the word out.

Now for the details. When we build a project, we like to think about what we have for resources and work backwards, rather than think of the perfect situation and seek out the perfect resources for it. With Arachne, our resources were some great pieces of art, a fantastic story, and an intriguing space full of people who really wanted to make this happen. We sent the library’s executive director a number of proposals and asked: Do we want to do this cheap or do we want to do it wow? He said he preferred wow; we would find the money. (By “wow”, I do not mean World of Warcraft, I mean a project that would make players say “wow”- with augmented reality, codes hidden in books in the library stacks, secret pieces of art and multimedia responses.)

Okay, now’s the hard part. How do we fund it? We’re working with a library, so we can’t charge people to play. We also can’t get budget dollars from the library’s annual fund, because this is an experimental game, not something that’s sanctioned in the budget of a public place. We can find a corporate sponsor that might be willing to work with us. We can build the game in a way that it will travel to other libraries that could license it and offset some of our initial costs. We could also crowdsource it, but that hasn’t been really been done with this type of library project before. We could also write about a million grant proposals. I’d been chatting with some incredible educational media producers, like TERC EdGE and the Kickin’ Kitchen video project, who have been funded by grants.

What will we try? Everything. What will be the solution? Whichever one comes through first. The key is that we’re not sitting on our hands waiting for our dream game to be funded. In the meantime, we’re building out a new Green Door Labs gaming platform. We’re building a new game in partnership with the Joslyn Museum of Art and consulting for education technology companies like Alleyoop and startups like Mobee. We even started a gamification meetup group where fellow game nerds can meet and talk about what they’re working on. There’s a lot to do!

For us the key is to build games that will make no money while you build games that actually will make money. Google has its 80/20 rule (80 percent of its staff’s time is spent on funded projects, and they’re free to spend 20 percent of the time to work on unfunded projects), which has been instrumental in the development of some key products. Patrick from Owlchemy Labs was recently telling us about Jack Lumber (A man out to avenge his grandmother. He hates trees, loves animals.) which they originally built for kicks, but which was picked up by Sega.

Sometimes these pet projects actually are money-makers. Does this mean it’s worth it to risk your business on products that might possibly be a surprise blockbuster? I know the start-up community is a come-what-may kind of place sometimes, but I would personally say no. Never stop producing profitable projects in the name of dream projects.

But by all means build it. Definitely build it. Just don’t expect that a “game that will never make money” will suddenly and magically make money. It will most likely lose time and money – and you and your team will be so proud of the time and money that you lost. You’ll love it and be glad that you did it.

By Emma Clarkson, community manager, Stomp Games

Without careful planning, a video game marketing campaign can risk being remembered as disastrous rather than groundbreaking; there’s no shortage of blog lists of the worst campaigns in gaming history. Yet it is more challenging than ever to put together a smart strategy for marketing games.

Search rankings of the best video games of 2012, and you’ll see the reason: more and more that are played not on consoles, but on smartphones, tablets, and Internet browsers. With evolving platforms like those, there are both new opportunities and unforeseen challenges for developers: tighter budgets, wider audiences, and more fluid development cycles.

Whether you make games for a living or just play them for entertainment, successful titles on emerging platforms have made one thing clear: traditional business models and methods of promoting games just won’t cut it anymore.

Many mobile, tablet and web-based games today achieve success on budgets that seem impossibly low. The key to understanding the success of games like Braid, Minecraft, and Tiny Wings is in the way most gamers hear about them. These games get publicity via critical acclaim and peer recommendations, rather than traditional, ad-based campaigns. Games resonate differently with the audiences of popular content sites, taste-making bloggers, and well-established news sources, and each of these audiences plays a role in the promotion of lower-budget games. Press coverage via these three types of online outlets is like a three-legged stool – depending on two of the three isn’t going to work. Also, do your homework! Seeking publicity through these websites means understanding what resonates with their readers.

While budget plays a huge part in the success of a game’s promotional strategy, another major shift to consider is today’s timeline and life cycle of the most popular games. Many online games launch to a wide audience while still in early beta, relying on player experiences and reactions to drive the direction of ongoing development. However, the most dramatic shift from more traditional game development to today’s browser-based and mobile game offerings is the relationship between the game you’re developing and the audience of gamers you assume will play the game.

In traditional game development, market segmentation, and target player definition are crucial factors in a game’s promotional strategy; that is logical in a console environment, where a player must choose to spend hard-earned money on a game in order to play it. A marketing campaign at any stage of a game’s life cycle must reflect the target audience, as that audience is assumed to be the driver of profit for the game.

A customary game launch is committed to a target demographic long before embarking on a marketing campaign, and it may not be feasible or even possible to shift gears and change direction in response to consumer reaction. Developers on today’s emerging platforms still must define an ideal marketing target for a new game, but must also have a flexible strategy after it kicks off. Many games on new platforms start a marketing campaign by casting a wide audience net, then assessing the response of each demographic contained within, identifying the different market segments that are most interested in engaging with the game. What doesn’t work for one segment of players might resonate successfully with a different group, stretching a small budget by using it much more efficiently. Even big-budget marketing campaigns work best when tuned for maximum efficiency in targeting the right audience with the right message.

Traditional high-cost, maximum-awareness game campaigns have generally been focused on the weeks leading up to a game’s release date, spending most of the budget on flashy events and top-tier media placements. Many of today’s games have lives well beyond the launch date, so marketers must have a plan to sustain marketing in alignment with an ongoing game-as-a-service. In addition, in response to the ever-changing environment of game promotion, video game marketers have learned to be more flexible in all areas of strategy, which as it turns out is a tactic that has spilled over into best practices in advertising all kinds of products. A successful promotional strategy needs to continue to be flexible and responsive to changes in the market, and adaptive regarding target demographics. As Dave Bisceglia, co-founder and chief executive of The Tap Lab, said in a recent interview, “Your business plan will be a living/breathing document that is in a constant state for flux. If it isn’t, you’re doing something wrong.”

There are many paths a game developer can take toward a successfully promoted game. Understanding the nuances and connections between the different paths is the key to choosing the right strategy for the game at hand.

By Eric Klopfer, director and professor of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

I’ve been creating educational games for the last dozen years or so. As the popularity of this genre has increased amongst academics, start-ups, and big publishers, I am often asked about the composition of our teams working on games. Do we have game designers? Content experts? Lead programmers? Educational researchers? The answer to all those questions is, “yes,” but not necessarily in the way you’d think.

Games, particularly educational games, are a massively multidisciplinary endeavor. They can’t be effectively approached without the abovementioned skills (among others). But it turns out that they also can’t be effectively approached by simply checking off a name for each of these responsibilities. That is a surefire way to create an educational game that is, in the words of my former colleague Henry Jenkins, “about as educational as a bad game and as much fun as a bad lecture”.

You can’t simply check off those boxes, because creating educational games is not merely multidisciplinary, it is interdisciplinary. It requires integrating all of the skills together effectively. The educational content needs to connect deeply with the game play, which in turn needs to be reflected in the look and feel of the world. Without that integration, the resulting product is neither educational nor entertaining.

There are many ways to create an interdisciplinary team. What is required is at least some overlap in the expertise of the team members. In the case of educational games, that means, for example, the game designer needs to know at least something about the educational content area, and that the lead programmer in turn needs to know something about game design and the content. At a very minimum, they need to know enough at these intersections to communicate effectively, but in my experience, the best teams have a much greater overlap.

The best teams have members with deep experience in multiple areas; deep is an operative word here, as limited experience in all of the above areas doesn’t work. Such teams have, for example, a lead programmer with content expertise and game design experience and/or a game designer with a programming background and teaching experience. That allows each person to communicate with, think with, help out, and when things go awry, fill in for other members of the team. Those teams have the best discussions around the table and online, the best resulting designs and products, and the most resiliency when it comes to changes and setbacks.

Those team dynamics are enhanced by input from and participation in a larger community. Through informal collegial lunches, Friday afternoons filled with games, and lots of shared spaces, ideas can and do flow across teams and projects. Even team members are shared across teams (although no more than two), which also facilitates flow of ideas.

So, yes, even on a small project I have a game designer, content expert, lead programmer, and educational researcher. And one individual must take final responsibility for any given task or set of tasks. But despite all of those roles, the team may only need a table for two when it goes out to celebrate at the end of the project.

Eric Klopfer, Ph.D. is professor and director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Klopfer is also the co-founder and president of the non-profit Learning Games Network and co-author of the recently published “The More We Know: NBC News, Educational Innovation, and Learning from Failure,” which chronicles the rise and fall of iCue, an NBC-MIT joint venture into interactive learning, including lessons about new media, old media, and education.