For years, people interested in online games have been saying, “We don’t have a business model yet.” By this they meant that no one is making any money, or has any clear idea how anyone can make money with online games. They debated what kind of model would work: hourly charges, monthly subscriptions, pay-for-play.
But as it’s happened, the single most successful online gaming venture to date, and one of the few that actually operates in the black, doesn’t charge. It doesn’t have to. And yet it makes money. And paradoxically, its very success poses a threat to most other online game operations — and suggests that it’s the old store-based retail sales approach, rather than the new online medium, that’s winning the war for gamers’ dollars.
The success is called Battle.net. A free service run by Blizzard Entertainment, the developers of StarCraft and Diablo, Battle.net allows StarCraft and Diablo purchasers to play online. StarCraft, not incidentally, was the number one bestselling PC game of 1998, according to the PC Data list — and has sold 1.6 million copies to date.
Battle.net claims 2.3 million active users. The MSN Gaming Zone claims more — 4 million — but the numbers are not directly comparable; according to Battle.net, “active” users are those who have actually played a game on their service within the past 90 days. The MSN Zone’s figure presumably includes every account ever created on their (free) service, including ones that have never been used since they were created.
A better measure, anyway, is the number of simultaneous users at peak periods: Battle.net boasts more than 50,000, while the Zone reaches a bit over 30,000. Battle.net is clearly, by most measures, the single most-used game service on the Internet.
Battle.net’s integration with Blizzard’s games is tight: If you want to play StarCraft online, for instance, you just fire up the game, click on “Multiplayer” and then “Battle.net,” and there you are, in a waiting room, looking at a list of open games and chatting with other waiting players. Join a game, and when the necessary number of players have joined, you’re playing. As simple as that.
But more than this is going on behind the scenes. When a game starts, Battle.net looks at the players’ computers and chooses one of them to act as the “game server” — it’ll choose the one with the lowest latency (delay) and the fastest processor. And then Battle.net goes away. The players’ machines talk to each other, over the Internet, for the duration of the game. If the game server loses its connection, somehow, one of the other players’ machines takes over smoothly, so the game is never “lost.” The players never connect back to Battle.net itself until the game is over — at which point, Battle.net takes the results of the game and integrates them into its “leaderboard,” which lists the top players and player rankings.
The clever thing here is that Battle.net’s servers don’t shoulder much of the burden. Battle.net provides chat rooms and player matching and rankings, and that’s about it. All actual game processing occurs on the players’ machines, and Battle.net doesn’t handle any of that traffic. The result is that Blizzard can run the service very cheaply; at peak times, Battle.net takes about 10 servers to operate. By contrast, a game like Ultima Online, which demands continuous traffic between Origin’s servers and players’ machines, requires dozens of servers to satisfy peak demand.
To be sure, Battle.net’s approach is nothing new: If you play Quake on TEN, say, it works the same way. In fact, this is how online play of most Net-capable CD-ROM games works. The “aggregators” — companies like TEN and MPath and Heat.net — were all founded as services to provide this kind of player-matching.
In other words, if you’re a game publisher, and you want to offer online play, you have two options: You can make a deal with one of the aggregators, or you can, like Blizzard, implement your own service.
There are advantages to both approaches. If you make a deal with MPath, say, you don’t have to pay to implement the server-side software and maintain the service. And that’s not an inconsiderable concern; this is a technically demanding kind of operation.
But there are some strong advantages to doing it yourself, too. One is control over technology; when a problem arises, you can fix it yourself, rather than calling a third party, which has its own priorities and may choose to fix a problem with some other publisher’s game first. Another is differentiation: All services on MPath, say, look pretty much alike, because when MPath implements a new feature, it spreads it across all the products it offers, not just yours, so there’s nothing you can do to make your product stand out.
Perhaps most important, when you run your own service you have a direct connection to your customers. You see what they’re doing and how they play; you hear their complaints and their praise; you learn how to serve them better; and you can reach them immediately when you’ve got a patch or a new game to offer. And of course, if the operation is profitable, you keep all the income yourself.
Blizzard isn’t the only company to have done this; Sierra offers its games through Won.net, and Bungie through Bungie.net. But Battle.net is, far and away, the most successful such operation.
It helps if you have a game that sells 1.6 million copies as a basis, of course.
If Battle.net lets people play for free, how does it make money? The answer is simple: advertising. Players waiting for a game-start, or chatting on Battle.net, are exposed to ad impressions as they do. “We’re serving millions of ad impressions every month — 30 million last month,” says Paul Sams, Blizzard’s vice president of business development (last month being March 1999). Moreover, according to Sams, Blizzard supports higher rates for its ads than most other Internet sites because their click-through is substantially higher than average — “around 4 percent in a good month, and at least 2.5 percent in a bad one.”
Although Sams says Blizzard originally accepted that Battle.net would lose money, the service has operated in the black since the third quarter of 1997 (it was launched in December 1996) — purely on the basis of advertising revenue. In other words, it has more than covered its operating expenses since then, without including a proportion of boxed game sales or any other revenue as attributable to Battle.net’s existence.
Blizzard says it thinks sales of StarCraft were 10 to 15 percent higher than they would have been if the game hadn’t offered free online play. Sams cautions that the number is a guess, not based on any hard research.
From where I sit, that number looks far, far too low. In the last 90 days, 2.3 million people have played on Battle.net. Seventy percent or more of them were playing StarCraft or StarCraft: Brood Wars, an expansion. That’s 1.6 million separate IDs in play — and only 1.6 million copies of StarCraft have been sold (and about a half million copies of Brood Wars, but almost every purchaser of Brood Wars will have previously bought StarCraft). Even assuming that some players have multiple IDs, and that some are playing with pirated copies of StarCraft, a very, very high proportion of StarCraft purchasers are clearly playing online. This should be no surprise; StarCraft is faster, more engaging and more challenging when played online than when played solo.
In a way, that’s good news for other online game providers: 1.6 million people are being conditioned to enjoy online play. But in another way, it’s bad news: Battle.net’s success implies that the traditional retail channel for games sales is winning. So much for the long-awaited online gaming revolution.
According to industry wisdom, more than 90 percent of all computer games published lose money. At a typical development cost of $2 million, a game needs to sell 100,000 units to break even. Fewer than 100 of the 1,500 titles published annually do so.
A typical software store has 40 slots for computer games. So many releases never see much retail exposure, and many sit on shelves for a few scant weeks before being removed to make room for new products. It’s a very difficult retail environment for computer game publishers.
The reason gaming is a big business is that the few real hits each year can make a lot of money. StarCraft retails for around $50; typically, half of that goes to retailers or distributors, meaning Blizzard makes about $25 for each copy sold. 1.6 million copies times $25 is a nice profit.
But the business operates in ways that fundamentally make no sense. What the game industry does is take a lot of bytes, copy them to a metal disk that’s encased in plastic, stick the plastic disk in a plastic jewel box, shrink-wrap it, put it in a bigger cardboard box and ship it in a pollution-spewing truck to a retail shelf — where you find it, pick it up, take it home, insert it in your CD-ROM drive and copy the bytes to your machine.
As it happens, you already have a wire, coming into your home, down which you can receive bytes — in fact, to read this article, you did so.
Why not cut out the plastic, the trucks, the retailers? Why funnel your product down this expensive, narrow, screwed up distribution channel, when you can do it over the Net?
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“Doom was a watershed event on a par with the Atari 2600 because it changed the way video games circulate and reproduce … Doom gave video games a way to proliferate in cyberspace … Down the line, you can see a point where video games will be sold in electronic form and jettison their bodies entirely. Doom points the way. Doom is a fulcrum.” — J.C. Herz, “Joystick Nation”
That was 1993. Fifteen million copies of the Doom demo were downloaded worldwide; id, Doom’s publisher, sold more than 150,000 copies directly to consumers. Retail was the icing on the cake.
But then came the CD-ROM revolution, and software bloated. Computer games went from a few megabytes to a few hundred megs of data. At typical modem speeds, it takes forever to transmit that many bytes. No one’s going to download 600 megs over the Internet.
So the success of StarCraft — and of similar Net-capable CD-ROM games, like Age of Empires and Myth II — is making online game people very nervous. They had hoped that online gaming was a way to break the tyranny and cruelty of the retail channel. After all, if you’re playing online, why not get your software online too?
But StarCraft seems to say: The future of online is the future of retail. The future of online is retail sale plus free online play. This is the business model that works. Forget about charging for play, or by the month; that’s a niche market at best, because the retail channel can move 1.6 million units. No online-only game reaches anything like those numbers.
And if that’s true, all those analysts’ reports saying that online gaming would one day be a $1 billion-plus market were wrong, not only about when it would happen, but about the very fact of it happening — because online gaming is never going to be something different from PC gaming. It’ll just be another way to play CD-ROM games — and you’ll pay the same way you always have, by handing a credit-card to an obnoxious sales clerk down at a mall store.
And the business models of Kesmai,Simutronics, MPath, the MSN Gaming Zone and Sony’s The Station — indeed, the business models of any online game operations that isn’t counting on the retail channel — are broken. They’ll never fly.
This is the analysis that the game industry’s pooh-bahs are just beginning to digest. Should they be afraid? Personally, I think there are some big holes in the argument.
First of all, the retail channel has a lot of experience promoting and marketing products; online-only operators are just starting to figure out how to reach potential customers, and are only gradually waking up to the fact that they have to start thinking like magazines rather than packaged-good companies. (Magazines are typically willing to spend an entire year’s revenues from a customer to get a new customer, on the grounds that some portion will resubscribe, and they’ll start making money in the second year.)
And second, online-only operators have a potentially compelling value proposition for consumers: Instead of spending $50 on an untried game that you may shelve within an hour, you spend nothing for a free trial and a modest amount by the month — meaning you won’t pay anything like $50 unless you decide you really, really like this game.
Those points suggest that the tide might turn once more in the future, and that online gaming isn’t entirely doomed. But right now, the “retail sale plus free online play” model is unquestionably king. And anyone in online gaming has to think about the implications.
Greg Costikyan's 27th commercially
published game, Fantasy
War, recently launched on Sony's Station; he also recently completed a report on the future of online games for Good
Reports.
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Upon first brush, there’s not too much to grasp on to with Draw Something. The title of the game is essentially its elevator pitch: You are presented with three words, then you pick one, and then have a blank canvas on your smartphone/tablet/whatever to, well, draw something. You use your finger to draw some stuff on the screen, which ten times out of nine comes out as some sub-MS Paint-worthy scribble. The person you’re playing with then guesses what you just drew. Then, they draw something. You watch this happen, all in real time. And on a certain level, that’s it. Pictionary for the digital age. But why do we play Draw Something so obsessively, like an alcoholic returning to the bar for just one more round, and then another? Perhaps there is something downright pedestrian about Draw Something. Then again, that might be the point.
What’s astonishing about the game from a pure numbers standpoint is how many people are playing the damn thing. In its first five weeks, 20 million people downloaded it. Fifteen days later, that number increased to 50 million. Miley Cyrus plays it. So does Rosie O’Donnell. There are 6.9 billion people in the world. That means statistically, about 7 percent of the world plays Draw Something. It is currently the second-ranked paid app in the iPhone and iPad’s app stores (its free version is ranked second on iPads).
Though it reads “social game” much in the same way as Words With Friends and Scramble (also With Friends) do, Draw Something is an entirely different chimera, more of an exercise in interpersonal communication than a game per se.
It’s owned by Zynga, the social gaming behemoth whose IPO launched for a billion dollars. Zynga more or less made its name from FarmVille, which was a game that you probably remember downloading for Facebook and then becoming obsessed with. It was about farming. In all likelihood, you played it for a few weeks and then deleted it because it became annoying. Such is the Zynga way — release something addictingly addictive, have its user base grow tired of it, and then release something else that is equally addictive. Their strategy is, as the notoriously business-minded rapper Jay-Z might say, an exercise in “on to the next one.”
Zynga’s games are overwhelmingly free, and the company is publicly traded (stock is resting comfortably at $9 a share, for all you Gordon Gekkos out there). Essentially, all Zynga games are what some people refer to as “freemium” games. That means they’re free, with a caveat: You get the game, but you don’t get the full experience. If you want the Full Zynga Experience, you have to shell out. In FarmVille, this meant you could convert your money into “Farm Cash,” which could also be earned — albeit at a snail’s pace.
There’s a thing about addiction, though. Eventually, you get over it. You might enter into a 12-step program, or you might just delete Words With Friends from your phone. Whatever you have to do. Zynga understands this. This is why it offers social games of every flavor, from Words/Chess/Scramble/Hanging With Friends to Farm/Fish/Forest/Castle/PetVille to both Mafia and Vampire Wars. Clearly, Zynga is just plugging in different variables to the same equation. But people like the equation.
The same business model applies to Draw Something. In the game, your color palette is extremely limited. You get black, plus the primary colors. There is no mixing. Want pink? Oh, that’ll be 249 gold coins. Don’t worry. You get four other colors with it, too. And if you give Zynga $25 dollars, they will give you 10,000 gold coins, which translates into being able to buy basically every single color in existence, even the ones scientists haven’t come up with yet. This is the same strategy that your friendly neighborhood drug dealer employs: Give something to somebody for free, get them hooked, and then stand out of their way while they trip over themselves to give you money. It’s like the brains behind Zynga got their financial savvy equally from Business School and by listening to Biggie.
Still, there’s something compelling about Draw Something that just isn’t there with other Zynga games. It lies within the fact that unlike Words With Friends or Mafia Wars or any of the approximately 1 zillion other Zynga properties, Draw Something is an intensely communicative nonverbal experience. There’s no chat function (though the recent game update allows you to offer comments on your drawing), so anything you’ve got to say has to go down on that little white canvas. Sometimes, people will just write what they’re trying to draw out. It’s an interesting strategy, and not an unfair one. It’s still hard to draw a word on a touchscreen, and if you’ve got terrible enough handwriting (as I do), it might just look like a herd of portentously shaped snakes.
But by watching someone struggle to draw a clown fish on a blank canvas, you’ve inadvertently opened a window into their personality. There is a certain voyeuristic pleasure to be derived from watching your drawing be sculpted for someone in real time, and then watching them guess at it, and then watching them go through their own creative process, struggling to re-create a pirate ship, or Skrillex, or such abstractions as “champ” or “thug.” Succeeding at Draw Something is less a test of artistic skill — imagine Matisse, color-obsessive that he was, trying to make do with his scant four colors as he tried to draw a facsimile of a snail on his iPhone — and more a testament to the relationship one has with their Draw Something partner.
I might not be able to draw my way out of a paper bag — thankfully, a concept that has not cropped up for me in the game yet — but if someone really gets me, they’ll know that little yellow squiggle with a couple jagged edges is a walrus, not a hornet’s nest or a stack of gold doubloons or an orangutan. (Note to self: Buy the “Mardi Gras Color Package,” whatever that means. It has orange in it.)
That’s another thing about the game — there’s no way to win. Once you hit your 99th turn with someone, the game resets and you’re back to round one, without even so much as a virtual fist bump. It’s Theseus, finally slaying the minotaur, only to find himself back at the start of the labyrinth and having to do it all again. It’s quixotic in the fullest sense of the term, only instead of a suit of armor and Sancho, you’ve got a digital, smartphone-shaped scimitar and your fingers. And your friend.
In this way, Draw Something isn’t really a game at all. It’s a conversation, full of pointed chit-chat, pictures, and sometimes several-hour lapses. After challenging me to a game, my dad didn’t realize that you were supposed to play at your own leisure, and sent me an antsy series of texts because I didn’t draw him back immediately. My father’s immediate instinct to treat the game as if we were sitting across from each other speaks to a very real generational gap. When my father was my age, you were lucky if you could jam a computer into a ranch-style home. Now, he’s got a computer in his hand, and he’s drawing on it. That’s pretty drawesome (as the app puts it), in and of itself.
I have very few running conversations in my life. I like it that way. It’s hard to talk with someone on, say, Gchat, for hours or days on end, and there are few people I would actually try to do such a thing with. However, I am currently playing 14 games of Draw Something. Social games allow for a certain level of mediation, creating the necessary distance to feel like you’re interacting with someone without actually talking to them. In many ways Draw Something is the perfect surrogate for real communication — drawing is an inherently more impressionistic mode of exchange than speaking, but you’re still getting your message across. It’s not like Words With Friends, where you’re taking turns filling in tiles on a faux Scrabble board with somebody you went to school, while holding a real conversation with them in the app’s chat function. There’s still a message to be gleaned. Draw Something just tells you what you’re trying to say.
Drew Millard is an Associate Editor at Kill Screen Magazine and a freelance music writer. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, VICE, and Time Out New York. His blog Rap Industry Fan Fiction was named one of Huffington Post's "Seven Sites You Should Be Wasting Time On Right Now." He lives in Brooklyn, because of course he does. He tweets from @drewmillard.
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“Sleep No More” is one of the hottest shows in New York right now, which is surprising, considering that I spent most of my two hours during the McKittrick Hotel production wandering around the six-story building, wondering what the hell was going on.
The British company Punchdrunk’s production is ostensibly the story of “Macbeth,” though mixed with Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Rebecca” and told in the form of an interactive maze that owes more to video games — New York magazine compared the experience with “puzzle-horror first-person video games like BioShock” — than Shakespeare.
Audiences form groups and are given “Eyes Wide Shut”-style masks as they enter the lounge area, which serves as the show’s waiting room. They are told they aren’t allowed to speak until they return to the lounge and also not to bother the actors — but nothing else is off-limits. Then you are let loose in the hotel, where every room is decorated like a spread from “Nightmare Homes Monthly,” and run into the “characters” (easy to spot because they aren’t wearing masks). They perform their wordless scenes as they race from room to room. Sometimes they dance. Sometimes they fight (also a form of dancing, with some super-intense choreography). In one room, you might find a weeping woman looking at a photograph while packing a suitcase. In the basement, there’s a dinner party where guests are either having a blood orgy or doing a sweeping waltz, depending when you arrive.
There’s even a strobe-light rave room where a naked man wearing a boar’s head simulates sex with a woman. In another, a lithe man lip-syncs to Peggy Lee’s “Is that All There Is?” while crying. David Lynch would be proud.
“Sleep No More” was beautiful, terrifying and novel. What it wasn’t, however, was coherent. But maybe that’s because I hadn’t known that in order to get the full experience of the play I would have had to spend hours unlocking hidden Internet websites and swapping clues on Facebook with other devotees. Basically, it requires turning your life into one big alternate reality game before the show even begins.
“The idea is once you’re let loose on one of the floors of the hotel, you pick out a single character and pursue him or her (though you can switch any time you want), as the performer runs, dances and vaults all over the place.”
That’s easier said than done. These actors will run you ragged through corridors and secret passageways, sometimes locking the door behind them. Audience members themselves act as another deterrent to sticking with Macbeth or one of the witches; mobs form around the actors and block you from seeing all the action. Half the time, the group divides as it tries to (silently) figure out if Macduff ran up the stairs or slipped into a backroom somewhere. Next thing you know, here’s a new character with a plot all his own. You end up watching a bartender fight some other guy for awhile before realizing that you’ve completely missed the point … if there ever was one.
Unlike fragmented films such as “Memento” or “Inception,” there’s no DVD version of “Sleep No More.” If you leave feeling like you didn’t get it, well, you didn’t get it. If only you had bothered to check out the discussion boards on the play’s Facebook page, where hyper-vigilant audience members post clues on whom to follow, where the action is going to take place, and what the hell is actually going on. It’s like a go-to guide for the uninitiated, and after the show it’s the best place to go and post your questions about the production. Say, for instance, that you wanted to figure out how to follow the character of Macbeth without losing him in the crowd. Well, here are some tips (which contain major show spoilers), courtesy of another “Sleep No More” forum:
“I followed Macbeth around pretty much all night. After the dance, Lady Macbeth takes Duncan away to another room. I followed them.
She seduces him, then after some kissing, she goes away.
Duncan undresses and then goes to the area right next to his bedroom that has pillows on the floor, and a basin with blood, and he lies down on the pillows.
Macbeth walks in and smothers Duncan with a pillow. Then he goes to the basin and covers himself in blood.
He runs to the bedroom with the bathtub, Lady Macbeth undresses him and bathes him, etc.
Then Macbeth runs to the Witch Disco Orgy, where he gets covered in blood all over again.
After that, he goes to a room with a pool table and kills Banquo.
He goes and meets Lady Macbeth again (but not in the bedroom) and they go to the banquet scene.
Then Macbeth leaves (unless you’re catching the very last go-around), and goes to the Hotel Lobby.
He beats up and tries to rape Lady Macduff, and then Macduff beats the crap out of Macbeth.
Then Macbeth runs to a balcony (we’re not allowed to follow him, we have to watch from the sides), and he jumps down to the forest.”
Don’t live in New York or have $80 to spend on a ticket? Well, there’s a reason to care about these secret clues and weird haunted-house rooms. Remember that 1997 David Fincher film, “The Game,” the one where Sean Penn buys his uptight corporate brother (Michael Douglas) the ultimate birthday present — a voucher for a live “game” from a company called Consumer Recreation Services. From there on in, every person Douglas’ character comes in contact with is part of the game, from business associates to that pretty waitress who just messed up his food order. Before you can say “Big Brother,” Douglas is running for his life, convinced he is about to be killed by this shadowy CRS conglomerate, which is everywhere and owns everybody.
Now jump ahead a couple of years and meet a man named Elan Lee, one of the founding fathers of alternate reality games (ARGs), who cites “The Game” as one of his major influences.
ARGs usually start out on the Internet (check out ARGN.com, which links to the big games being played right now). A cryptic website leads participants to a couple of clues, which quickly move into real-life scenarios. Players are expected to meet a certain person at a certain place in order to get another piece of the puzzle. The difference between “The Game” and ARGs is that you are working with a team: everyone else who is playing the game at that time. It’s a group activity, where one person’s find is quickly put up on a forum, to be compared with what someone else discovered in a different location. It’s like Fincher’s movie plus Dungeons and Dragons, with enough viral buzz to attract a cultlike following.
Even if you’ve never heard of ARGs, you’ve probably followed one anyway. “The Dark Knight” used one to give away the first peek of Heath Ledger as the Joker. To a lesser extent, it’s how J.K. Rowling revealed Pottermore as her new website, because the clues were only handed out online.
ARGs have been mainstreamed by marketing strategists for everything from the movie “A.I.” (where the game was called “Beast” and revolved around a fictitious murder) to Lee’s first corporate creation, “I Love Bees,” which was actually a viral promotion for “Halo 2.” Here’s a walk-through of how the latter worked:
The great part about using alternate reality games instead of regular advertisements is that a small group of super-fans can be counted on to play the game as quickly as possible, then post the results online. Then it’s picked up by the rest of the Internet and mainstream media, which don’t have the time or inclination to do hours of real-life legwork just to see a sneak peek of an upcoming movie. But for ARG fanatics, the results aren’t the point; it’s the game that matters. Well, the game, and the community built around it.
Which brings us back to “Sleep No More.” Yes, this play is an ARG, although it doesn’t have to be; it can start and end with your experience during a performance. But the show does have bonus material that will lead you to real-life encounters with the characters outside of McKittrick Hotel, provided you can figure out how to unlock Punchdrunk’s coded website. There have been location-based clues at Grand Central and IRL meet-ups for those who are as obsessed with solving the seemingly endless mysteries of “Sleep No More.”
Suddenly, those insanely detailed rooms filled with ephemera in “Sleep No More” don’t seem to simply mean some whimsical set designer had an unlimited budget. As it turns out, everything is a possible clue, relating to a story much larger than the ones told inside the confines of the “Macbeth” story line.
So “Sleep No More” is an interactive play that’s also a community-sourced Internet game that requires a working knowledge of Greek gods and JavaScript in order to solve it. God help all the Luddites of the world if this is the future of theater.
A photo of the author as a teen, with one of his D&D dungeon maps superimposed behind him.
Some say that all narratives ultimately tell only two stories. One: Someone goes on a journey. Two: A stranger comes to town. The summer before my eighth-grade year, when I was 12, I experienced the intersection of both. In other words, I learned how to escape.
This was 1979. My mother had been home from the hospital for a few months, and my sister, brother and I were just coming to understand her. Our “new” Mom.
The new version of my mother was a changeling. At 38 years old, she had suffered, and barely survived, a ruptured brain aneurysm. The head injury caused her to be mostly paralyzed on her left side. Her brain became scrambled. She limped around the house, couldn’t tell time and didn’t know the day of the week. Often, she’d make inappropriate remarks, swearing at the slightest provocation or making some lewd joke in front of friends. At times, she scared me.
“Ethan!” she’d yell from her lair. “Help me get up!” She might be half-dressed in her bed, or on the toilet, or on the floor, or in the bathtub.
Years before my mother’s “accident,” as we called it, my dad had moved several hours away. We saw him regularly, but he and my stepmom were largely out of the picture. A family friend had moved in to help take care of my Mom, my siblings and me. The theory was, Sara Gilsdorf might make a miraculous recovery, and the friend would move out. We eventually discovered this would never come to pass.
It didn’t take long to figure out I couldn’t tame my mother, not this beast. I knew I couldn’t save her, either. I fought with her for a while, usually battling over her inability — what I mistakenly read as her refusal — to regain her old life, be it making a cup of coffee or making a family decision. After a while, I gave up. And kept my distance. I was stuck with a mother I was afraid to love.
We began calling her the Momster.
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Coincidentally enough, the film “Super 8″ also takes place in the summer of 1979. Like the boys in that film, I armed myself with a movie camera and was determined to be the next Spielbergian blockbuster kid. I studied Disney animation books. I built sets in my sister’s bedroom where stop-motion Plasticine creatures ran amok through an HO-scale train town. I ripped apart Revell model airplane kits to make my own “Star Wars”-like space ships that I’d film, frame by frame, as they dangled from fishing line in front of a hand-painted star-scape.
As I built and destroyed these worlds, my journey through the realm of adolescence to the kingdom of adulthood began to reveal itself as a tricky maze filled with traps, monsters and dead ends, not to mention broken mothers. I longed for some safe way through that labyrinth of conflicting, constricting emotions. The Super 8 movies I shot provided one avenue of escape.
Then, later that same summer of 1979 when my mom came home from the hospital, a stranger came to town — a new kid moved into the neighborhood. And a new path appeared to me.
JP and his family bought the house across the street from me. Not a ramshackle, creaky, 19th century New England colonial like mine, but a more modern one, with linoleum in the kitchen, wall-to-wall carpeting everywhere else, and a fully present, fully functioning father and mother.
I hung out a lot at JP’s house that summer. After a few weeks of watching “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century,” listening to Electric Light Orchestra’s “Discovery,” and programming primitive video games in BASIC on his TRS-80 Radio Shack computer, JP told me about Dungeons & Dragons.
“Elves?” I said one particularly hot afternoon as he cracked open the Basic D&D boxed set’s lid. “Like the Keebler kind?”
“No. Not little ones, doofus.” JP seemed a little miffed. “Have you read ‘Lord of the Rings’?”
“I saw the movie,” I countered. Ralph Bakshi’s half-baked, but still haunting, adaptation of Tolkien’s fantasy novel had come out the year before. I saw the cartoon on a trip to Boston to visit my mother in the hospital and it blew my mind.
“Well, D&D is kinda like ‘Lord of the Rings.’ Only you’re in the book. You’re in the movie. You choose what happens. You can be an elf, or a dwarf, or a human. You can be a wizard, or a fighter, or a thief. Even a cleric.”
I wanted to ask what a cleric was, but I kept my mouth shut. “A fighter. You mean like Conan? Or Strider?”
“Strider is more of a ranger. But yeah, you kill stuff. You’re the tank.”
I didn’t know what a ranger was either. All I could picture was the Lone Ranger, and the Texas Rangers. Mentally, I thumbed through my baseball card collection that my pet cat had recently peed on, ruining it. Neither of the Wild West or Major League Baseball universes seemed to be of use here.
“OK, I’ll be a fighter.”
JP handed me a pile of polyhedral dice — not just 6-sided dice, but 4-, 8-, 12- and 20-sided. I rolled as he instructed and before I knew it I had written six numbers on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, next to six categories that JP called attributes.
“Is 14 Strength good?” I asked. “Wait. He’s only got 5 for Intelligence.”
Strong and dumb. This sounded like exactly the opposite of me, Ethan: about 5-foot-6, 130 pounds, a predictably good, B-plus/A-minus student, and never once tested in a real fight. Fun. “So now what happens?”
“Go to the store and get your equipment.” JP said my character had a few gold pieces to outfit himself.
This whole role-playing thing was new to me, but not to JP. Using words only — and in my mind, but also in the combined words and minds of JP and me — my fighter went shopping. Once in the “store,” in the “town,” my fighter (me) asked JP (who was the gamer referee, or the Dungeon Master) if he could buy himself a sword, a suit of chain mail, some torches, 50 feet of rope, a grappling hook, food (what JP called “rations”), a throwing dagger, a shield and a helmet. JP said he could. By the time he got out of there, my fighter had about six copper pieces left. JP told me to write down all these items on my character sheet. I dutifully complied.
“So now, you need to find the other adventurers,” JP said. “I’d suggest you go to the tavern.”
Go to the tavern. This was strange. D&D felt too much like little kid’s play, too much like make-believe. But I liked where this story was headed. “OK. I go to the tavern.”
“Good idea.” He smiled. “You push open the door. Inside, it’s gloomy. A fire crackles in the corner. You hear that a ship just docked in town, and a big battle against some nasty goblins just ended, so the place is full of tough-looking guys. There’s a dude in the corner with a funny hat. You might, you know, go over and talk to him.”
“I go over to the corner and talk to him.”
“Hello there, traveler,” JP intoned, with a kind of mysterious, Mr. Roarke from “Fantasy Island” voice. “I have heard of your exploits. You are a brave warrior.”
“I am? I mean, I am.” Maybe I could be a brave warrior. Even if I felt far from brave in the real world. “Yes, good sir, very brave.”
“Well, I have been assembling a group of worthy adventurers for a task.” JP looked up from his books and dice spread out around him on his bedroom’s pale green carpet. “Oh, how rude of me. I forgot to introduce myself,” Mr. Roarke continued. “My name is Malicus. Malicus the Wise, they call me. And your name?” JP raised one eyebrow, wizard-like.
I was sitting on the floor across from him, propped up against his bed. My fingers sunk into the soft fibers of the carpet. “My name is … My name is E … Ethor.” Ethan + Thor = Ethor. It was the best I could do.
“Well, Ethor,” Malicus said, “I know an Elvish archer named Quikpuck, a Halfling thief by the name of Slyfoot, and a cleric named Fabian the Just. The four of us have been hired by Lord Rathbane to investigate some mysterious happenings in the Krog Mountains above this port town. We have been told of treasure in a dungeon there. But also many men have died trying to get it. And these parts are overrun with goblins. We need a fighting man.”
“Uh huh. Well, Sir Mal … what is his name?” I whispered.
“Malicus.”
“Sir Malicus, I am not afraid of goblins. I have slayed many a … uh … Fell beast.” I had no idea where the phrase “fell beast” came from, but I was pretty proud of myself. I raised my arm in the air. “I will join you!” I was getting the hang of it.
“Very good. A stout warrior like yourself will come in handy. We leave at daybreak. You’d best get some rest, Ethor.”
It was way past dark. I could see, across the street, a square of light from my kitchen. The TV flickered like a blue flame. Mom would be wondering where I was. “I should probably go. Can we play again tomorrow?”
JP nodded.
“Can I take this?” I held up Ethor’s character sheet.
“Sure,” JP said, his nose in a rule book, already onto the next thing. “I gotta plan the adventure anyway. Come over after dinner.”
I gathered my stuff and booked it across the street, hoping to get though the front door and sneak past my mom without her seeing me. Maybe like Slyfoot.
——-
That summer, I kept making Super 8 movies, but D&D soon took over. It quickly became more than a game: It became a vital experience that let a geeky, introverted, non-athletic kid — a kid who felt about as powerful as a 3-foot hobbit on the basketball team — take action, be the hero, go on quests, and kill monsters. Not that all guys (and they were mostly guys in those days) who played D&D were geeky, introverted, non-athletic kids, but enough were, and at least this one felt invisible. With everything going on at home, perhaps I was the perfect candidate for escape. But I was also drawn to the idea of this game. I had always sensed that something was missing from the real world. My no-budget movies were one Band-Aid. But shooting my “Star Wars” remakes and clay monster battles took weeks and resulted in three-minute movies. Entering the D&D fantasy was effortless, instantaneous and endless. Epic.
I now see it was no accident that the year I found D&D, or it found me, coincided with my mother’s return from the hospital. It took courage for a teenage boy to deal with the Momster — more courage than I could muster at the time. I couldn’t face down the creature that plagued my own house. But playing D&D let me act out imaginary, possibly symbolic battles instead, and distracted me from the prospect of facing the real ones waged within my family’s four walls. In the D&D playscape, I learned to be confident and decisive, and feel powerful. Even cocky. Some of the guts and nerve and derring-do I role-played began to leak into my real world. By the time I graduated high school, I had transformed. I had used fantasy to escape but also to gather strength for later, when I could face and embrace my mother again. Which, as an adult years later, I finally did.
But in the summer of ’79, I was but a newbie. I needed to gain experience. I had only tasted the power Dungeons & Dragons. I didn’t know that game was about to save my life.
Back to those two archetypal narrative plots: someone goes on a journey; a stranger comes to town. That summer, two strangers came to town: JP, and my mother. Three, if you count me. I would become a stranger, myself, again and again. I would play many new roles. I would go on incredible journeys to imaginary lands. And I would defeat many monsters.
When I got home that night after my virgin D&D session, after slipping past my mother, I headed straight for Webster’s. “Cleric |ˈklerik|, noun. A member of the clergy; a priest or religious leader in any religion.” The next day, back at JP’s for another adventure, I would learn that in the D&D game world, clerics weren’t just priests. They were characters who had dedicated themselves to a god or perhaps several gods. They could cast spells such as “cure light wounds” and “protection from evil.” They could dispel the undead.
Surely those powers would come in handy, at home, or in my head, or in whatever life I would choose to live that summer, or in some realm far away in the future.
San Diego’s annual Comic-Con can be a very scary place for the uninitiated. With thousands of panels, screenings and artist booths, the four-day entertainment convention is perhaps the only place in the world where you can have a panic attack while staring at six versions of “Sexy Leia.”
In two weeks, nerds will descend en mass to California, and in preparation, the producers of Comic-Con have posted the schedule of events for the kickoff day on July 21. (Technically there is a preview night, but who is counting?)
If you’re still feeling overwhelmed, we’ve prepared a brief guide of the day’s must-sees, as well as what programs to avoid.
Author George R.R. Martin moderates a panel featuring series executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss as well as cast members Emilia Clarke, Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Peter Dinklage, Kit Harington and Jason Momoa.
I know this is going to be the hot ticket event of the first day, but I’m not sure if it’s because the show is so popular, or if fans are just going with a bag of rocks to pelt at George R.R. Martin’s head. Either way, it’s not to be missed. Bring your Flip cam.
Definitely avoid: “Battlestar”: So Say We All
Richard Hatch hosts a panel and fan discussion of the “Battlestar Galactica” universe, politics and philosophy with Hatch (Tom Zarek, Capt. Apollo), Michael Taylor (“Battlestar Galactica,” “Caprica,” “Blood and Chrome”), Dr. Kevin Grazier (BG science consultant), and surprise guests for this exciting roundtable and Q&A session.
Guys: “Battlestar” is over. Time to move on. Now, someone show me the way to that Damon Lindelof/”Lost” theory panel.
Definitely catch: “Oh, You Sexy Geek!”
Does displaying the sexiness of fangirls benefit or demean them? When geek girls show off, are they liberating themselves or pandering to men? Do some “fake fangirls” blend sex appeal with nerdiness just to appeal to the growing geek/nerd market, or is that question itself unfair? And what’s up with all the slave Leias? Action flick chick Katrina Hill (ActionFlickChick.com) asks Bonnie Burton (Grrl.com), Adrianne Curry (“America’s Next Top Model”), Clare Grant (Team Unicorn, “G33k & G4m3r Girls”), Kiala Kazebee (Nerdist.com), Clare Kramer (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), Nerdy Bird Jill Pantozzi (“Has Boobs, Reads Comics”), Jennifer K. Stuller (Ink-Stained Amazons, GeekGirlCon) and Chris Gore (G4TV’s Attack of the Show!) to discuss whether fans can be sexy and geeky at the same time — and if they should!
I’d say that you could just watch the mashup of hot chicks on late-night shows and save yourself the effort, but since these are actual nerd girls discussing gender issues and not just Mila Kunis talking about World of Warcraft, it’s worth making time for.
Avoid: TV Guide Magazine: Fan Favorites
TV Guide is back with an all-star panel for the fans! Moderated by editor in chief Debra Birnbaum, Fan Favorites features your favorite talent from your favorite shows — in front of the camera and behind the scenes. Panelists include Nestor Carbonell (“Ringer”), Johnny Galecki (“The Big Bang Theory”), Jorge Garcia (“Alcatraz”), Leslie Hope (“The River”), Zachary Levi (“Chuck”), Joe Manganiello (“True Blood”), Julie Plec (“Vampire Diaries”), Matt Smith (“Doctor Who”), Kevin Williamson (“Vampire Diaries”), Deborah Ann Woll (“True Blood”), and others.
What a clusterfuck … do the same people who want to see Jorge Garcia or Matt Smith really care about what “Chuck” or the guy from “The Big Bang Theory” have to say? I imagine this panel will be the real-life approximation of channel-surfing when you’re bored.
Definitely catch: Entertainment Weekly: The Visionaries: A discussion with Jon Favreau and Guillermo del Toro on the Future of Pop Culture
EW moderates an in-depth conversation with Jon Favreau (“Cowboys & Aliens”) and Guillermo del Toro (“Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”), two filmmakers at the forefront of bringing geek culture to the masses and making blockbuster art out of pulp fiction. They will discuss their inspirations, their current work, and how they strive to put a personal stamp on blockbuster entertainment. Plus: How is new technology changing the way stories are produced and viewed? And what do they think the pop culture universe will look like a decade from now? Moderated by Jeff “Doc” Jensen.
Comic-Con is one of the first places that “cool” directors will leak spoilers and info about their upcoming features, so get a front seat and turn on your tape recorder in case Guillermo del Toro lets something slip about “Pacific Rim.”
Bonus “Don’t Miss” screenings: Mike Judge hosting the new “Beavis & Butt-Head” episodes, “Archer” viewing and cast discussion, and the exclusive premiere of “Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe.” Just kidding.
This list is far from definitive. What events are you most looking forward to for Comic-Con?
"Here the gumdrop hammer-stroke will fall hardest."
Last week, the sweet world of nostalgic board games got a little bit more bloody. Glenn Berger, one of the writers for the upcoming “Candy Land” film, told Entertainment Weekly to “envision it as Lord of the Rings, but set in a world of candy.”
While my first reaction was to send that idea to Yikers Island for a life sentence, Berger’s bold vision grew on me. Think of how many jokes there are to be made here! Lord Licorice bellowing from the Cupcake Commons, “NONE SHALL PASS … UNTIL THEY PICK A PURPLE CARD FROM THE TOP OF THE PILE!” And that’s just from the top of my head! I could think of so many more jokes by the time the film actually came out.
So anyone who thought Berger was going to try to backpedal from that grandiose claim was badly mistaken. If anything, the writer wants audiences to know how committed he is to doing a J.R.R. Tolkien thing for the Hasbro game. Also, how committed he is to candy:
That’s precisely, I think, why we got the job on CANDY LAND. But that’s also why we were excited about getting the job on CANDY LAND. It’s something that, on the face of it, seems like a huge challenge: it’s a board game for kids, and there’s no strategy involved. But what it does have is the opportunity to set an action movie in a world made of candy. So when we meet with the director, Kevin Lima, and he says, “I want this to be LORD OF THE RINGS but with candy,” you could either laugh at that, or say, “If you could pull that off, that would be really cool. We’d love to be a part of that because we love LORD OF THE RINGS and we love candy.”
That should just be the film’s tag line: “Love ‘Lord of the Rings’? Love candy? You’ll love this movie!”
Hey, if you can think of a better tag line … or even a better “‘Candy Land’ meets ‘Lord of the Rings’” joke, let me hear them in the comments.
"I've gotten to the secret level in Macbeth!" 
A photo of the author as a teen, with one of his D&D dungeon maps superimposed behind him. 
Get ready to rock out. 
"Here the gumdrop hammer-stroke will fall hardest." 
