First off, if you haven’t played Rock Band, play it, and if you don’t have it, get it. It may be the best party game ever made (rivaling Death Tank Zwei for the honor, anyway). And I’m not just saying that because we have two people here at Conduit who worked on it. If you like music (and that’s pretty much everyone, right?), then you will have fun. It’s so much fun we held off on setting it up in the office until we had finished launching a little Facebook toy we built called Make Me, knowing it would be impossible not to play once it was here.

My younger brother once told me that Sorry! is one of his favorite games, because inevitably, after a game, the players would hate each other for hours. Sometimes days. I mean, how powerful is that? A bunch of silly rules and plastic pieces moving into our lives, evoking real, outside-of-the-game emotions and putting strains on real-world relationships.

Rock Band is that kind of powerful. This story at the Escapist captures what a good game can do perfectly:

“This is not the revolution; it’s just something like it. It’s not about games. It’s about music. It’s a new way of listening, of trying to get in, like following the lyrics in the album sleeve or clumsily learning the chords on a beat-up guitar in the hopes of one day being that guy at a party who impresses the girls who might like the song as much as you do.”

If you can take the time, read through the whole story and count how many times actual gameplay is mentioned—hardly any! It’s about relationships that form through gameplay. Like just a couple weeks ago I was playing Rock Band with some friends; my friend Misty is our bass player. We get to a song with a particularly tricky bass line, and
she fails and we lose it. Stacie takes over for her, and manages to get through it.

“I don’t want to play anymore,” Misty says. “You guys seem to be doing FINE with Stacie on bass.” I sit down on the couch next to her. “Misty, listen to me. Boys Boning Boys is not Boys Boning Boys without you on bass. We need you.”

Misty looks up with these puppy dog eyes, “Really?”.

Needless to say, Misty came back and played, and we rocked. This was one of the most awesomely surreal and hilarious experiences of my life. I love it… and it’s what Rock Band is all about.

Finally, Moving Day! On August 31, 2007 we packed up our computers, took pictures of our notes on the white boards, and stacked our kitschy toys onto our desks. One by one we rolled our stuff into the service elevator and ascended. No longer would we be sharing a small windowless closet that barely fit four desks and four chairs that we have been in since April. It was the first tangible change since we got funding, finally I could back up my chair and not bump into anyone.

Upon opening the door of our new space, golden rays of sun poured through the door and into the room as if the gods themselves were welcoming us to Mt Olympus. I’m sure if we were quieter we could have heard the herald call of an angel choir, but in our giddiness, we drowned out any other sounds. The back wall is an entire window that looks westward toward Central and Harvard Sq. The other walls are modern with aluminum and glass while the loft like ceiling provides much head room for the taller members of the team. Could this space BE more perfect?

Well, it turns out that, yes — it actually could. What became apparent nearly immediately was that that we had already out grown this space and we hadn’t even been in the office for an hour. The next 3 hours could only be described as company-wide battle Tetris with 10 desks, 10 chairs and a ridiculous number of filing cabinets. For some reason the CIC folks continued to bring us a couple filing cabinets every few minutes.

To add insult to injury, the CEO of the company next to us stopped by to tell us that “You guys will be able to hear us as much as we can hear YOU!” Was this a “welcome to the 14th floor or were those fightin’ words?” Chill out guy, we’re moving in. What’s more is that Linden Labs, creators of Second Life, are two doors down and they have TONS of room, however we rarely see more than a third of their chairs filled at any one time. In fact, there have been times when we have walked by their offices in the middle of the day and don’t see ANYONE in there. Where are they and why are they hoggin’ the office space?

Well anyways, we have been in our new space for 2 weeks now and our tenth hire starts tomorrow. We are all pretty psyched. Over the next couple months we will ramp up the new hires, dive into production and look for a larger office space. Until then, the office chairs will continue to crash into each other, elbows will be rubbed, and some folks will have to suck it in to let others pass by.

Intruders.TV came by the offices here in Cambridge and sat down outside our kitchen to chat about Conduit Labs. Strangely, they don’t have embeddable video (they’ve heard of YouTube right?) but the link is below.

Hey guys, David Newton here, one of the recent hires at Conduit Labs. I’ve been a art guy for the last six years, working in print, web design and illustration for social networking sites and such. You can check out more of my work over at paper raincoat. My intro into gaming kicked off four weeks ago when I joined Conduit as the Senior UI Designer.

Nabeel thought it would be a good introduction to the game industry to drop me into the Austin Game Developers Conference and wander about confused for three days in 100% humidity. So here’s my fish out of water impressions of AGDC.

Basically, the whole online gaming industry seems to live in Blizzard’s shadow, and they wasted no time reminding everyone. Michael Morhaime’s keynote launched the conference discussing problems few companies will ever deal with - organizing worldwide simultaneous expansion pack launches, leveraging a brand so customers buy your game sight-unseen and of course - scaling problems best described in scientific notation. Or more succinctly, a quote from Anchorman:

“I don’t know how to put this, but I’m kind of a big deal. People know me.”

Consequently, you couldn’t throw a cat without hitting world-building kits, sci-fi MMOs or WOW clones. Morhaime’s keynote was packed to the gills with aspiring orc-bashing simulation designers while web-based games (like Sulka Haro on Habbo Hotel) had crickets playing while he spoke about how to monetize virtual furniture or providing assets for roleplaying minimum-wage jobs in the virtual food service industry. That’s a shame really… Sulka’s presentation was excellent. I’m strongly web biased of course… but come on. Habbo’s users are creating their own gameplay while a small army of designers at Blizzard struggles to get enough content out to keep their players from killing each other. Literally.

So, an upcoming generation of MMOs are taking their cues from World of Warcraft. What I fear is that ALL games – console games, first person shooters and upcoming social networks will be making WoW 2.0 a.k.a. “Facebook with elves”.

Read more…

Well done!

I woke up Thursday to find that you guys blew up our little email submission form on the website. Way to hit that submit button, that’ll teach us to use free web tools.

Looks like the coverage from the game press (Gamasutra), web press (Mashable), virtual worlds folks (Virtual World News) and financing press (Red Herring) generated a bit of a stir. Metaversed did a good overview job of the coverage, so I won’t do that.

Instead, in a vain attempt at making this otherwise bland posting offer at least a little value, I’m listing out the top five press mentions in order of who actually generated the most inbound traffic here at conduitlabs.com

1. Techmeme (22%)
2. Techcrunch (9%)
3. Read/Write Web (6%)
4. VentureBeat (5%)
5. Gamasutra/Worlds in Motion (5%)

The ranking is of course a factor not only of the popularity of the site, but also how extensive and featured the coverage was. For instance Mashable was nowhere to be seen, because despite having more traffic than Techcrunch, their coverage was cursory.

Another fun surprise for us was the amount of you that actually subscribed to the blog. It looks like there is even an entrepreneurship class that is going to be tuning in. I guess that means we actually have to work on some interesting things to put up here, eh? Don’t worry, we’re working on it.

I’m very excited to announce the closing of our A round of funding here at Conduit. Having just raised $5.5m from Charles River Ventures and Prism VentureWorks, I figured this was a good time to open up the company blog with the story about how Conduit came together and what we are up to.

what do war reporting, sports, and live action role playing games have in common?

My father was a foreign correspondent, a broadcast journalist who had to go into Cambodia and Vietnam a number of times while I lived in Bangkok as a kid. Those were often dangerous assignments, and, not surprisingly, a special type of bond was formed with the friends that he made during that time. The danger, excitement, and sense of adventure helped to form lifelong friendships.

In 1994, the World Cup came to the US and both my father and I caught the soccer bug. In much of the world, the soccer experience is so tied to a person’s sense of self that it’s easy to see why it bonds people together. That passion helped me and my father get closer than we had ever been, and also led to my second start-up, an Internet sports media company.

And in college I got involved in Live Action Role Playing Games (LARPs), a mixture of improv theatre and gaming. I witnessed and experienced the strong friendships that LARPs helped to form on a personal level, as well as the global community of players that was a harbinger of Massive Multiplayer Online (MMO) Gaming. The extraordinary growth of that network we built highlighted the power of simulated conflict.

Each of these examples is profoundly about people. Not so much about how they met, but how they formed relationships, how they built communities, how they bonded. And, in their own way, each of these examples illustrates the concept behind Conduit.

anyway, back to the present day…

Today, you don’t have to spend much time online to realize that there really isn’t any place to “hang out” with friends, an online community where you can get involved in a whole range of activities, a place where you help create a steady stream of new adventures. MySpace is about visiting profiles and passing of messages back and forth, a kind of pen pal for the Intertubes. In Virtual Worlds, the ideas of complex interaction with friends seems to stop with chat. Even blogs, which we thought would be a great democratizer, have fragmented into echo chambers, with most people subscribing only to the ones that cater to their pre-determined beliefs.

Read more…