Our technology puts us in a unique spot where we integrate directly into the game, and this is when we work directly with the game development teams.  A few key examples below:

• Tracking and storing all user profile stats.
• Tracking and storing all user match stats.
• Powering in-game MOTDs.
• Supporting the upload/download of in-game UGC (user generated content).

Our technology also puts us in a spot to then help translate those in-game features onto the web, and this is when we work directly with the web development teams.  A few key examples below:

• Providing the stored game data and APIs to showcase a full user profile.
• Providing the stored game data and APIs to showcase a user’s historical match stats.
• Providing APIs for a community team to build web tools so they can push new MOTDs in-game.
• Providing the stored game data and APIs to support a per user UGC queue so that UGC created in-game can be showcased on edited on the web.

The nice one-two punch of awesome in-game integration combining with a spiffy community website package is hard to achieve.  We’ve helped game projects achieve this game-to-web Nirvana on numerous occasions, but a good majority of the time we see the community website fall very short of its original expectations.  We’ve been on early project marketing calls where a super excited marketing representative lays out an amazing game and community website combination, with all the bells and whistles that “they must have!”  12 months later an awesome game launches, but the community website is a barren wasteland of a basic user profile and community forums.  We’ve seen this happen too many times.

I’ll preface the next section by saying that Agora Games totally understands that the game is king.  The game is 60 bucks a pop, and all in-game integration gets first dibs at all times.  We understand, and we fall in, we like your business.  With that said, it so deeply saddens us to see community websites fall into the red-headed stepchild role, playing second fiddle, and inevitably hitting the cutting room floor [I think I hit the max on cliches in that last sentence].  This doesn’t have to happen.  A community website might not get you 60 bucks every time a user signs on, but a strong community website with solid integration into the ever so popular social networks can keep your user-base playing well into the next fiscal year and buying every single piece of DLC you throw at them.  How do we make it work you ask?

We like being in the middle, we’ve been in the middle, we HAVE seen it work, and we have 3 easy tips!  Note: These tips do not require you work with us — we’re not that sneaky.

1.) Don’t leave so fast Mr. Marketing – That same super excited marketing guy that I mentioned above tends to disappear fast.  He/she usually has a really awesome dream scenario of what a game and its community website equivalent should look like, they speak the hell out of it at the beginning of a project, but then they fade out of regular communication with that plan shortly after.  Weekly calls get setup with the engineering team.  Weekly calls get setup with the web team.  Mr. Marketing tends to not show up at either.  This means that the already tight engineering resources and deadlines pummel community website features in the face, slowly knocking them off one-by-one because all in-game features must be there on launch day.  If there was a marketing presence checking in more often throughout the lifetime of the project, there would be many less angry marketing people that cry when they sign onto the community website on launch night (only to see community forums and a “community profile coming soon” message).

2.) Community Managers are smart, let them play early and often – As I mentioned above, marketing folks tend to have 15 other projects to move onto right after they give their game and community website speech at the beginning of a project.  Since they can’t make it to bi-weekly and weekly tech calls as actual development picks up, they should send someone in their place.  Community Managers can fill this role!  Send at least one voice to all weekly calls that fights and reminds the team of that original game and community website plan.  If a community manager can hear there is the possibility that things might get cut (because of deadlines and resources), they can at least go back and report these facts so the top community website features can be re-prioritized and fought for on next week’s call.  The best community features WILL actually launch if there is a voice to fight for them.

3.) Don’t be afraid to let game developers and web developers mix – Too often game developers want nothing to do with web developers, and web developers don’t particularly enjoy developing a community website if they’re dealing with half-assed game code on features that we’re deemed as “they can be cut if we don’t get to them community website features.”  It’s almost going to sound too easy, but get a web developer presence on weekly tech calls as early as possible!  Don’t force producers to waste time and run two different calls (a weekly game tech call and a weekly web tech call) when they can be easily joined into one.  Get both game and web developers on a weekly call, have a precise agenda that you follow each and every week, and hit the ground running.  Game and web developers will actually know each other, like each other, and will ultimately make Mr. Marketing very happy.  As a third party producer I will now purposely force my will upon the game projects our Agora team works on, because I am so passionate about this particular tip.  We’ll run the weekly tech and web calls for you, we’ll send out the precise agendas, and we’ll keep the communication between all teams open very early on for you.  We do it first and foremost because it helps our development get done on time, but it also makes YOUR game and community website projects successful!

This is what happens when these tips aren’t used (I purposely left this in a “ramble-on” format): Marketing folks disappear, no community voice is on weekly calls, game development teams dig in (concentrating on their in-game features first and foremost), time goes along and things get built — with no one reminding the teams of community website needs on the weekly calls (we bring community needs up the best we can, but ultimately we can only push when a web team has priorities), the web development team gets brought into the fold months later (too late usually), they look at the list of features they should be building onto the community website (handed to the them from Mr. Marketing), they ask the game development team whats ready to go, and the game development team says, “uhhhhhhhhh, not a whole lot,  but you do have a user profile!”  This leads to additional community website feature cuts after the web development team is left scrambling having to re-prioritize the small set of community features they actually can build, wasting time not getting to the actual web development itself.  We’ve seen it happen too often.

In conclusion, if you’re reading this, we want you to take our tips because in-game and community website integration is something we ALL need to see improving on a regular basis — we all need our jobs after all.

As a resident of the Capital Region, it’s good for our economy
There are almost a dozen out of town Venture Capitalists, executives, and engineers travelling here to learn more about what we have to offer. This area has become increasing important due to our local engineering talent and our vicinity to both NYC and Boston. Startup Weekend is the perfect time to show off our entrepreneurial and technical prowess. It’s my belief that while this region has all the right raw materials, it needs a grassroots spark to fan the flames.

As a business owner or manager, it’s good for your company
Startup Weekend is a great way to let your company and your team think outside the bounds & constraints they work with during the week. It’s also a great way to meet other local talent and test your wits against other people in the area. I promise you’ll be surprised at all the small startups that exist right here under your nose. Finally, it shows your team, your customers, and your colleagues that you care about their field and our region. Win win!

As a software craftsperson, it’s good for your career
No one stays in one place forever (particularly in our field). The opportunities locally aren’t as abundant as they might be in a larger metropolitan area,but that itself creates a unique opportunity. Great startups (like all great teams) require the right mix of people. It’s exceedingly rare to see a single individual take an idea and develop it into something meaningful on their own. Said another way, its more risky (resulting in a smaller potentially upside) to go it alone. At Startup Weekend you’ll meet scores of other people interested in the business of technology. Who knows, maybe that idea you’ve had kicking around will take root and grow.

Agora is encouraging (and helping to subsidize) attendance by any interested employees. Here’s a list of other businesses sponsoring the event (current, as I write this post):

• 1st Playable
• Adirondack Basement
• The Anchor Agency
• Arsenal Business & Technology Partnership
• Enable Labs
• GreaneTree Technology
• GreyCastle Security
• Marvin and Company, P.C.
• Nixon Peabody
• Outspoken Media
• Overit Media
• Pinnacle HR
• Rensselaer Emerging Ventures Ecosystem
• TechConnex
• Troy Web Consulting
• Unique Minds

Sponsorship opportunities are still available (but limited) for anyone else interested in helping out. Check out the website for more information!

At Major League Gaming we recently launched an internal profile service using NodeJS. In an effort to get more familiar with Node, I decided to use it on my latest personal project. In addition, since CoffeeScript is now included out of the box in Rails 3.1 I decided it was time to try that too. Here’s a simple app to get you up and running with Node, Zappa, Coffeescript & Mongoose.

To get it working:

• Install MongoDB
• Install NodeJS
• Install NPM
• npm install -g mongoose
• npm install -g zappa
• Run the gist ‘coffee file.coffee’

Dig it?  Follow me @genexp

Besides, administering an FTP site is so 1971.

It took an hour or two to figure out the proper permissions, so I’m documenting them here for posterity. Read on if you’re interested.

1. Login to the S3 management tool and create a bucket. Write down the name!
2. Login to the Amazon Identity & Access Management tool and create a group.
3. Create users and add them to the group you created. Write down the secret key and access key for each user.
4. Edit the group and attach a group policy. Here’s the one I used.
5. Download Cyberduck – It’s cross-platform, open source and is simple to setup and use. While you’re there donate a few bucks.
{
"Statement": [
{
"Action": [
"s3:ListAllMyBuckets"
],
"Effect": "Allow",
"Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::*"
},
{
"Action": "s3:*",
"Effect": "Allow",
"Resource": [
"arn:aws:s3:::my_bucket",
"arn:aws:s3:::my_bucket/*"
]
}
]
}

6. Open up Cyberduck, choose Amazon S3 and test using a Secret Key/Access Key pair.

Done!

The reality is that marketing has been an essential part of history and those who effectively master the far from dying art, are the most successful. Lets look at Apple for example. Their focus has been brand management since CEO Steve Jobs hopped on board. Because of this, they’ve gone from near bankruptcy to one of the top companies in the world. As of August 1, they held more cash on hand than the United States treasury. Are they selling any products that are necessary for survival of mankind? Are their products much different from those on the market?

The answer to both questions in my opinion, is no. I consciously know that there are phones that can do much more than the iPhone can. I also know that there are phones that are much more customizable and free from Apple’s unreasonable restrictions, but I want an iPhone. I know that a Windows computer has the same capabilities if not more than Mac computers, but I want the Mac even though it costs more. Why do think that is?

It’s all about the way Apple markets their products. They’ve successfully made it to the point where it’s sort of a social “norm” to have certain items. Apple products are now for the most part, fashion statements. I remember when the iPod first came out. Everyone at school wore them on their belt buckles with their shirts just above the clip so that it could be seen. Guess what, if you didn’t have one, you felt left out. Fast-forward to a few years later and it’s on a greater scale, meanwhile the main beneficiary is Apple.

So now that we’ve established the importance of marketing, how has it changed over the years? Well for one thing, you’re dealing with a new generation. Before, you had all the power and control when it came to your audience. Flash the ads on the television or radio and no matter how reluctant a viewer, the reality was that they had no choice but to watch. That was then, nowadays, people have much more control. With things like Tivo and the Internet, your audience decides what to watch and when to watch it (same goes for all other types of media). Not only that, the generation isn’t on the floor with their mom and dad, watching The Brady Bunch anymore. They’re on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube and spending countless numbers of hours a month there (I know because I am one of them). So how can you reach an audience that is no longer passive and won’t sit through your boring pitches? It’s simple, change your tactics.

First, go to where they are; don’t wait for them to come to you. Second, ask what they would like to see or what types of products they’d like to see advertised. If your product isn’t included on their lists, then you save you time and money. The fact is, people are unlikely to buy a product that they’re not in the market for. There’s been several times on YouTube where I’d be watching an ad and right before the time is up, they ask if I found the ad relevant. I normally said no in hopes of eliminating them completely but if it were for a product that I was in the market for, I would have definitely said yes.

If you look at some of the ads on those videos, they are a lot of the times relevant to what the video is showing. The fact of the matter is, if I typed in “ how to play blackbird” into YouTube, there is a huge probability that I’m interested in the guitar. Maybe I want a new one or maybe I want local lessons. At this point I don’t even watch television anymore so I, like many others, won’t sit and endure just any product pitch.

As far as Facebook and twitter, those are respectively the 2nd and 9th ranked sites on the Internet. That being said, there is a high probability that your market is there, so why aren’t you? Every company should have a Facebook and Twitter profile in my opinion, even if it is just informative. The point of those sites is self-expression. As it is “cool” to own Apple products (I think I might be on my way to becoming a fan boy), I want to “like” Apple on Facebook so that my network knows, “ hey, I’m cool”. As dorky as that sounds, that is the simplified version of the image you need to create for your company. People should want to be associated with it. Additionally, I’ll add that if you have people on your Facebook constantly pitching products at me, I will “de-friend” or “unlike” you.

That brings us on to the Twitter regime. Twitter is an amazing way to interact with your customers (the key to modern marketing – interaction). With it, you can easily find out what they like, their issues and inform them of your upcoming products. Like anything however, it can easily be abused. Consider this situation, you are following 50 people; one of those is a company. We’ll say that the remaining 49 update their statuses about 5 times a day. If you as a company are updating you status every thirty minutes, you’re spamming that person’s feed. So what’s the result? Your number of followers goes down by one whether or not they liked you. One of our practices at Agora is to update the status every 2 hours and respond to questions every hour. This way we remain visible and give our community an efficient response time without spamming everyone else.

So what are the lessons to be learned here? Target your market, go to the places that they spend most of their time and be courteous. They now have the power to choose what they will allow themselves to be exposed to so keep it relevant. Additionally, one last piece of advice, don’t use them to market your products alone. Give people information that they would like to know about as well. For example, we do not work with nor endorse Game Informer in any way shape or form. However, they post information on their site that is relevant to our audience, information that we do not specialize in producing. Since the majority of our community are gamers and would like to be kept informed, we link to some of their updates. So now that you know what it takes to formulate a success like Apple’s, what will you do with it? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter.

“I honestly can’t find the difference between an intern and a regular employee. Employees get one trip to a related conference every year; I was also sent to one. Employees may go to MLG events and I’ve been to two. I deploy apps to production on a daily basis, make design decisions when required and am involved in the process from top to bottom. That is why I feel MLG has been a great experience, because I’ve been completely immersed in the software development process. “– Matt Perry (Intern)

You’ve learned a bit in school, but don’t know if you’re ready for the elite work force. Well, most of us have been there so we understand. I guess one of the royalties of an internship is that you’re not expected to know everything. School has set the foundation for you and now its time to start conditioning your catalogue with experience. That’s the exact same feeling that troubled me in the beginning of this summer, so I figured that my perspective might be useful to anyone considering an internship at Major League Gaming.

To begin, you’re treated and welcomed like any other employee. Also aside from compensation, the main difference between an intern and a full time person is that the interns are expected to make basic mistakes. They know that most of us lack experience and probably won’t know exactly what we’re doing so we’re granted mentors. Additionally, the work that you are given is not very different from the projects that you’d be working on as a full time employee. So, with that in mind, exude the thought that you’ll be assigned tasks like operating the fax machine, making coffee, or fetching the mail when it arrives. The work that you are assigned is very valuable and is usually necessary for projects to progress.

“When you first start, you are taught the basic processes that allow to you integrate with the MLG workflow. After you’ve become familiar with these processes, depending on your role, you may start tending to issue tracking tickets, working on independent projects or working with your team on high-level projects. One thing is for sure: you will be challenged, so bring your A-game.” – Cameron Cope (Intern)

At some point they we’re all students so they understand the pressures and troublesome schedules that you’ll show up with. As long as you’re willing to apply yourself and learn, they are willing to work with you. Also, a lot of the current employees started out as interns so there’s always the possibility of being hired full time. It all really depends on your aspirations.

In a flash, he enters and our leader speaks. The speech rebounds off of the walls with power and echos through everyone’s mind. Simultaneously, he is demanding yet asking, telling yet not, requiring but not really. More or less something like this:

Having internalized the words that would hype them up to a sense of self-belief and desire to work, the diverse people of the Agora rejoice. They then disperse to attack the monstrous tasks that they have chosen to resolve.

Agust 4th 7:00PM: Although four hours have passed, the Agorians are still hard at work. Their determination prevents any pesky amount of noise or discomfort from discouraging them and preventing the success of the vision at hand. They have a task to fulfill and intend to do so. Bright eyed and in high spirit, they continue to bang away at their instruments.

Some have even been inspired to a level where chairs are irrelevant; working while standing up, an unnecessary yet amazing triumph.

August 5th 1:00 AM: Signs of tire begins to appear as the day progresses…

August 5th 5:00AM: The Agorians have taken the ultimate form of humankind. The zombie. Driven by their goals, the Agorian continues. He continues working without the slightest thought of rest.

Having diligently continued regardless of the obstacles, 3:00 PM arrives and the event is concluded. All of the Agorians meet at the same place that their tasks were appointed to speak of their successes and failures. Another grand Hack-a-thon has been successfully completed. Many accomplishments came out of this event and will be implemented into the natural flow of life soon. Visit our Facebook for more photos and because we’re cool.

Chef leverages CouchDB for it’s datastore. CouchDB is “NoSQL” database product, similar in concept to MongoDB. CouchDB provides a lot of features and usability, but as a tradeoff for versioning, speed, and convenience it sacrifices disk space. In OpsCode’s documentation, they do helpfully point out in the “CouchDB Administration for Chef Server” page that you should periodically run a Compaction. Basically what this does is remove some of the older versions of documents.

Following their advice, we set it up as a weekly cron (in our Cron cookbook, naturally), and so it looks like this:

cron 'Compact Chef DB' do
  user 'nobody'
  weekday '1'
  hour '4'
  minute '0'
  command 'curl -X POST http://localhost:5984/chef/_compact'
end

which results in a crontab entry that looks like this:

# Chef Name: Compact Chef DB
0 4 * * 1 curl -X POST http://localhost:5984/chef/_compact

One fine summer morning I came in one morning to several thousand emails saying “Chef Run Failed.” This, as you may understand, severely degraded my opinion of the morning.

Cue the Swedish Chef crying “Bork Bork Bork!”

After I determined that a full disk was the problem and deleting an old unneeded backup file to get some headroom, I found that the biggest contributor was the /var/lib/couchdb/0.10.0/.chef_design directory.

root@chefserver:/var/lib/couchdb/0.10.0/.chef_design# ls -lh
total 96G
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb  30M 2011-07-21 18:26 07ccb0c12664d1f1ca746003182b521a.view
-rw-r--r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 1.7G 2011-05-11 12:03 178087e2a7c06ff437482555acf60bab.view
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 8.5G 2011-07-22 08:24 18757f7428c465dd0504ac3d5d7ce577.view
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 8.9G 2011-07-22 08:24 367772ed026257ff1f88a1011576c9c3.view
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 6.6M 2011-07-21 15:52 3970d32b6acb424bb4d19684bdf9aff1.view
-rw-r--r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 8.6M 2011-07-22 08:11 91188e3c7d61bdf079eee6ca719be05c.view
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 6.0G 2011-03-16 16:44 9f39fce5f578a23cc8cad7b3fe9b8ce9.view
-rw-r--r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 1.4G 2011-07-22 08:24 af280ad217f6edca6276d1d1bcbc069d.view
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb  19G 2011-05-11 12:00 b96879fe1377e2b91f228109f3aac384.view
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 565K 2011-07-20 09:31 be708387555557a5b4886292346da6bb.view
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 3.0M 2011-07-20 11:27 d381d1f4b207dc3d9624720a7e88f881.view
-rw-r--r-- 1 couchdb couchdb  51G 2011-07-22 08:20 fe06cf9119d23dd7fec2492b79e7ebef.view

I was surprised that there was so much disk use, since we had been running the Chef Compactions, and expected this kind of thing to be taken care of. Wondering if it was throwing some kind of error that we weren’t seeing (since it’s running as a cron), I ran it manually:

root@chefserver:~# curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://localhost:5984/chef/_view_cleanup
{"ok":true}

Which yielded:

root@chefserver:/var/lib/couchdb/0.10.0/.chef_design# ls -lh
total 70G
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb  30M 2011-07-22 08:43 07ccb0c12664d1f1ca746003182b521a.view
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 8.5G 2011-07-22 08:43 18757f7428c465dd0504ac3d5d7ce577.view
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 8.9G 2011-07-22 08:43 367772ed026257ff1f88a1011576c9c3.view
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 6.6M 2011-07-22 08:43 3970d32b6acb424bb4d19684bdf9aff1.view
-rw-r--r-- 1 couchdb couchdb   51 2011-07-22 08:42 7bbcbf585caef33abc0733282f40a22a.view
-rw-r--r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 8.6M 2011-07-22 08:43 91188e3c7d61bdf079eee6ca719be05c.view
-rw-r--r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 1.4G 2011-07-22 08:42 af280ad217f6edca6276d1d1bcbc069d.view
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 573K 2011-07-22 08:43 be708387555557a5b4886292346da6bb.view
-rw-rw-r-- 1 couchdb couchdb 3.0M 2011-07-22 08:43 d381d1f4b207dc3d9624720a7e88f881.view
-rw-r--r-- 1 couchdb couchdb  51G 2011-07-22 08:26 fe06cf9119d23dd7fec2492b79e7ebef.view

Well, that was a significant but only partial win. Why do I still have 70GB in .view files?

What Opscode hasn’t told us about is that CouchDB has a thing called “Views”, and these can – over time – come to take up space. A lot of space. (CouchDB views are the “primary tool used for querying and reporting on CouchDB documents” according to the CouchDB Wiki.) Opscode also hadn’t mentioned that CouchDB says that these, too, need to be compacted.

The good folks on the internet, notably the CouchDB docs and a question on StackOverflow “CouchDB .view file growing out of control”.

Among our findings we came upon this link to the Compaction page in the CouchDB Documentation.

My compatriot Jeff Hagadorn and I were both looking into identifing the design view names, and he beat me to the solution:

bash -c \'for x in checksums clients cookbooks data_bags environments id_map nodes roles sandboxes users; do curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://localhost:5984/chef/_compact/$x ; done\'

(I had found a posting on the couchdbkit Google Group describing a script a user had written to solve this very problem here, if you prefer a Python-based solution which doesn’t require you to know your view names.)

After doing that, our disk was in a much healthier state, and our chef-db-compact recipe now looks like this:

cron 'Compact Chef DB' do
  user 'nobody'
  weekday '1'
  hour '4'
  minute '0'
  command 'curl -X POST http://localhost:5984/chef/_compact'
end

cron 'Compact Chef Views' do
  user 'nobody'
  weekday '1'
  hour '5'
  minutes '0'
  command 'bash -c \'for x in checksums clients cookbooks data_bags environments id_map nodes roles sandboxes users; do curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://localhost:5984/chef/_compact/$x ; done\''
end

which produces a crontab that looks like this:

# Chef Name: Compact Chef DB
0 4 * * 1 curl -X POST http://localhost:5984/chef/_compact
# Chef Name: Compact Chef Views
0 5 * * 1 bash -c 'for x in checksums clients cookbooks data_bags environments id_map nodes roles sandboxes users; do curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" -X POST http://localhost:5984/chef/_compact/$x ; done'

Now, you may suggest that we mount this location on a separate disk. The answer is that we had. /var/lib/couchdb is a separate 100GB physical disk. The problem was that /var/log is on the / partition, and that is only a 7GB disk. Once the views had filled their disk, the couchdb and chef logfiles had swelled with errors, and even mighty logrotate could only held them off for so long.

Bear in mind that there was no impact to Production during this event; the only outcome was that new changes would not have been able to be pushed out via Chef, and a couple of filled inboxes. Nevertheless, this highlighted some of our flaws. The most important of which is that our monitoring of the server was imperfect, and we missed the alerts that the CouchDB disk was filling. Had we not missed those alerts we could have diagnosed this before it was a problem.

As an aside, in addition to just alerting when disk reaches a certain capacity, you should also watch for sudden increases in utilization. If a particular disk normally runs at 20% capacity, but overnight a logfile swells the disk to 73%, it won’t trigger your “75% Full” alert, but there is very likely a problem. One way to solve this is to record a “previous percentage” and compare that to the “current percentage” and alert in the event that there is a sudden increase.

(NOTE: Server Names have been changed to protect the guilty.)

UPDATE: I’m notified by the Senior Systems Admin at Opscode that they have added these compactions to the chef-server recipe. Their implementation is quite a bit different than ours, but no matter.

Harold “Waldo” Grunenwald
Systems Engineer
@gwaldo

Of course, gaming is still dominated by its entertainment persona, but today we’ve seen it evolve and disperse into several different categories. One of these is education. Nowadays, a simple Google search will easily lead you to sites that specialize in this area. We’ve also witnessed it make its way into the mobile phone section and become one of the benchmarks of its category list. Educational gaming has been an aid in the Jason project, which focuses on learning through interactivity. The concept has also been used to support learning of subjects like energy flow or even adult popular subjects like politics or finance. Residing in its early stages of practical, productive use, can you see gaming evolving to become sufficient in other aspects of society?

After that, I proceeded to remove the inferior plastic barrier that stood between me and the future of gory deaths that I’d be responsible for. Having taken care of the plastic with my razor sharp teeth, I pried open the casing open to reveal a fairly well decorated DVD and a booklet on the side. Naturally the booklet never experienced the faintest drop of my attention, but the DVD was pampered with the greatest of care. I removed it from its casing, popped it into my PS3 and enjoyed the awkwardly menacing side of me that enjoyed achieving the bloodiest of fatalities.

Today, with most things, you normally learn as you go along. Somehow, I find myself remembering how I use to value those little booklets that I now show no love to. In the past, before delicately removing the DVD, I would have carefully removed the manual and used it to avoid the learning curve. Now, I realize that it had been a long time since I had read a game manual and will probably be an even longer time before I read another one. So I wonder, are game manuals worth it or have they become a waste of our limited resources? I personally think they should be available on the website or on the game disk. Of course, I haven’t ruled out that I may be the only one who doesn’t care for the manuals, so let me know your thoughts on our Facebook or below!