The HG Blog

LOMBARD, IL - HeavenGames LLC today announced that award-winning single player campaign designer Gordon Farrell will write a regular column for HGS entitled Solo: Essays and Commentary on the Art of the Single Player Game. The column is slated for a March 1st launch.

Professor Farrell has been designing AAA games since 1999, when he joined the team that created the original Empire Earth. Since then, he has worked on strategy titles such as the expansion pack for Empire Earth: The Art of Conquest, Empires: Dawn of the Modern World, Caesar IV, and Children of the Nile. He is currently Lead Writer and a member of the scenario design team for Reverie World Studios’ first game, Dawn of Fantasy, due for release in Fall 2008. He is the author of some of the highest-rated and most popular campaigns and scenarios at HeavenGames Sites, including Age of Empires Heaven, Age of Kings Heaven, Caesar 3 Heaven, and Stronghold 2 Heaven. In addition to his HGS mods, he has popular, highly-rated Civilization 4 mods uploaded at CivFanatics.

Prof. Farrell studied playwriting and screenwriting at Yale University, and began turning his talents toward game design in the late 1990s. Currently, he is on the faculty of New York University, where he teaches narrative theory for video games, theory of screenwriting, and advanced studies in dramatic art. He also lectures at Marymount Manhattan College in video games, script analysis, and theatre history. He has been appointed a Visiting Lecturer at Yale University six times. In 2002, Prima Games published his essay, “The Theory of Scenario Design.”

His extensive professional and academic experience promises an exciting column filled with commentary on the art of games that will be both controversial and thought-provoking.

According to Prof. Farrell, “My first column will be entitled ‘Towards the Art of the Game’ and I’m going to start off by asking some challenging questions about the nature of art and whether games will meet the criteria for being considered art. Then I’m going to offer practical pointers on how the best single player experiences are created by designers. Sometimes I’ll review SP Campaigns from retail games or report on game seminars I’ve attended, starting with Ken Levine’s recent presentation at the NYU Skirball Center for New Media. So look forward to some provocative stuff!”

ABOUT HEAVENGAMES, LLC
HeavenGames LLC (http://www.heavengames.com), based in Lombard, Illinois, is a privately owned web-content publisher building and maintaining sites for PC strategy games. Because of its many high-quality sites, content, and vast resources, HeavenGames has become recognized by developers and press around the globe as one of the premier destinations for gamers worldwide.

LOMBARD, IL - HeavenGames LLC today announced that it is maintaining its dedication to internet communities by sponsoring ROFLCon (http://www.roflcon.org), a convention in Cambridge, Massachusetts planned for April 25th and 26th. It is being organized by a team of students from Harvard University.

ROFLCon will dedicated to internet celebrity and the culture surrounding it. The Brothers Chaps - the creators of Homestar Runner, Ryan North - the creator of Dinosaur Comics, and Jay Maynard - “Tron Guy” - are only three of the 35 popular internet celebrities which are currently confirmed speakers for the event. In addition, the convention has confirmed a number of members of academia to discuss online culture and memetics. ROFLCon’s potential success is apparent in its press coverage; it was reported by WIRED in December and will certainly continue to receive such attention.

Registration for ROFLCon is now open, and as a sponsor HeavenGames encourages its visitors to sign up and attend the convention. Additionally, it encourages its visitors to provide any information on any originators of internet memes to ROFLCon’s administrator: Tim Hwang at thwang (at) fas (dot) harvard (dot) edu.

ABOUT HEAVENGAMES, LLC
HeavenGames LLC (http://www.heavengames.com), based in Lombard, Illinois, is a privately owned web-content publisher geared towards the creation of sites for Real-Time Strategy and City-Builder games. Its sites, content, and vast amounts of resources make HeavenGames’ sites recognized by developers and press alike as one of the premier destinations for gamers worldwide.

So now that things have been settled with HG’s identity, it’s time to go on to the fun stuff: the staff system! Woo!

It’s been discussed in a previous blog post that HeavenGames doesn’t operate as efficiently as it could from a staff perspective. A lot of issues have already been dealt with in the past several months, but there are two substantial problems that must be taken care of. First, there is no effective way to ensure quality and consistency of work across all of our sites. Second, we do not have dedicated jobs in a number of support capacities, including marketing, sales, and the like.

Revamped Staff System

The owners have thus discussed the issue with the HeavenGames staff and have come up with the following system:

• Trains seraphs.
• Ensures our websites are in compliance with our vision (constantly updated, forums friendly to all users, involve visitors and entice them to participate, community forums are tended to, etc.)
• Develops programs to better serve the community (get staff to host more contests/tournaments, figure out strategy to encourage community participation, etc.)

Next, the Support Departments. Support Departments will take care of a number of jobs that need to be handled for HG to be successful. These will be headed by a Department Head, which will need to ensure that their department - through their plan and staff - takes care of the following responsibilities:

(more…)

After considerable deliberation, the owners have decided that one major inhibiting factor for HeavenGames’ prosperity is the simple fact that it doesn’t have a clearly defined identity. It has always been a site about games, but that is far too vague for the development of any clear goals and the effective marketing of the site.

We have thus discussed the issue with our staff and decided that we should make HeavenGames a site entirely geared towards community. At its core, HeavenGames always has been about building the best communities possible, so it only makes sense that we devote all of our resources to that service.

Fully Developing HeavenGames’ Community
We plan to make HeavenGames the premiere gaming community network online by making all of HeavenGames - and not just its forums - a tool for developing community. This will be accomplished primarily by giving many of the tools that our staff members have had for years to every single visitor of the network. Under this new system, every visitor will be able to make news posts, add strategy articles, or host their own site events.

The community will be built from critiques and discourse through this system’s ratings and pageviews feature. Every contribution will be able to be rated by all visitors, which will be displayed with the total pageviews. Visitors will also be able to respond to any contribution with their specific thoughts on it. As a result, all contributors will be able to become a better community member by looking at the ratings and feedback and HeavenGames’ most valuable contributors will be rewarded through the prominent display of their ratings and pageviews.

The user profile will be what will link all of a user’s contributions across the network and will give a face to the HG devotee. It will display the user’s photo and basic information, but most importantly it will display an average ratings score and total pageviews figure for all of their contributions. Additionally, it will list all of the user’s recent contributions.

A Couple Questions
What will happen to the current HG staff under this new system? Absolutely nothing, our staff has been the backbone of the network since its birth and we have no plans of getting rid of our current staff members. They will be doing essentially the same jobs as what they’ve always been doing, only with a little more help from our visitors.

When will this transition be complete? Given that it is a considerable undertaking, I will not make any promises for an ETA that I can’t keep. The project will be our priority until it is done, so the only thing I can say is it will be done as soon as we can get it done.

That’s the basic idea of the direction we’d like to put HeavenGames in. At HeavenGames, it will be our goal that every visitor has the best possible experience as they exchange information on the site portals, engage in discourse on the forums, and enjoy the company of friends at site events. If you have any questions, critiques, or suggestions, don’t hesitate to contact me at socvazius@heavengames.com.

What’s coming next? A more thorough staff revamp, should be out in the next week or so.

Hey all,

So it’s been a little while since my last update. It’s mostly because we’re still hard at work figuring out the big picture for HeavenGames’ future; it’s a daunting job but I like what’s being hammered out. Anyway, in this article I’m going to discuss the two biggest problems that I’d like to get fixed before any grand scheming…and their solutions. Solutions are good.

Problem 1: HeavenGames current staff system is not what HeavenGames needs
While everyone works as hard as possible, the current staff system is simply not enough for what HeavenGames needs. Becoming staff is a big ordeal at HeavenGames, largely because of the daunting committment on both sides. A prospective staffer may be discouraged because of the considerable time commitment that is often necessary to be staff, while the Seraphs are discouraged by the lack of guarantee that the new staff member won’t act in a manner that could bring many problems to HeavenGames, including legal trouble.

Solution: Reorganize the staff system
Reorganizing the staff system will help our current staff operate more efficiently. First, we will make sure that all of the owners are active at HeavenGames and aware of everything that’s going on. To supplement this, we will create an anonymous complaint/suggestion email for staff. Next, we will create a list of jobs for ever site; Seraphs will be required to heavily advertise job openings to ensure consistent service and organization across the network. Finally, we will work to make a job at HeavenGames more attractive by giving benefits such as possible college credit and aid in getting a job in the gaming industry (Read more).

Solution: Automate HeavenGames’ content contribution
Fully automating HeavenGames’ content contribution will allow everyone to contribute to the community and make sure HeavenGames is the best strategy network online. It will take the load off of the current staff and allow our sites to grow only at the limit of our massive user base’s want to contribute. Under an undefined system, any user would be able to contribute to any aspect of the site: news, articles, screenshots, anything.

Problem 2: No one knows about HeavenGames
Okay, maybe not no one…you’re reading this, right? In HeavenGames’ specific niche we are well known but the rest of the gaming community tends to have no idea what we are. We are simply not able to provide our great services to nearly as many people as we could.

Solution: An aggressive marketing campaign

We need to adopt an aggressive marketing campaign to get HG’s name out into the gaming community. This will include working to get HeavenGames mentioned in press more often (not difficult as that’s already happened). It will also involve guerilla marketing such as popularizing our Facebook group and making our articles Digg-able. Eventually, we even would like to purchase Google adsense space and target our advertisements on gaming websites.

What do you think? If you have any further questions, comments, suggestions or concerns, please email me and let me know. I genuinely mean that, any thoughts would be appreciated and considered.

What’s coming next? Hopefully, a writeup of a cohesive plan for the future of HG. Keep your eyes peeled!