This is the first part (of 3) about How Not To inspire struggling employees.

In my early career, I had a number of jobs which, for various reasons, paid less than they should have, resulting in financial struggles for me and my family. There were three particular incidents, at different companies, which exemplify very poor understanding of the situation and demonstrate a boss utterly failing to instill any sense of confidence or hope for any improvement.

It should be noted that I chose to leave each of these companies, and all of them went out of business fairly soon thereafter. I present them in chronological order, starting (appropriately) with the first:

The situation: I had a dual position which involved both management and development responsibilities, in different areas of the business (service/repairs and consulting, respectively). I accepted lower weekly pay in exchange for an annual bonus plan that seemed good at the time. Alas, the bonus was not paid on time (and actually took almost a year to receive, in pieces, until I took an “in kind” payment two weeks before the next, larger, annual bonus was due). More relevant, though, is that I worked may way up to being the senior employee, #3 in the company behind the two owners, finding to my chagrin that meant my paychecks were more likely to be late, and usually by a full pay period.

The incident: The boss presented me with my W-2 for the previous year and proclaimed, seemingly with some misplaced pride (or something): “Look! I only made $200 more than you did last year.“

Let’s see… The company owes me a couple of weeks of past wages, most of my annual “bonus”, and I am having great difficulty making ends meet as a single person living in an efficiency apartment with minimal expenses. To quote a line from one of my favorite sitcoms, Coupling (the hilarious British one, of course), “What part of your brain thought that was a good thing to say?”

The lessons: If a paycheck is late (more than once) or a promised bonus is not paid, it is time to find another job. If the owner of the company has to live on ramen noodles, yet the checks are late anyway, find a different job now.

[link to part 2]
[link to part 3]

It looks like my new web server was rejecting blog comments.

I think that I have fixed the problem for past entries, but this post is a test to confirm that I have resolved this permission problem going forward.

Please make nonsensical comments to let me know that it is working.

Thanks.

[Note: This is my second try.]
[OK, third attempt now…]
[Fourth attempt….]
[Fifth attempt!]

Today begins the Year of the Rat.

Happy Chinese New Year!

The new year finally begins in earnest.

With 2007 in the rear view mirror (and, of course, closer than it appears), I am ready to make great progress throughout 2008. As promised in the previous post, I emerge with the woodchucks to be seen on this day, and likewise, I started out the day in a hole. Nevertheless, I am definitely looking forward to the near future.

We have a big game development project, ultimately representing several products on (at least) a couple of platforms, that is taking much of my time now. The first testing version will be ready shortly, with a couple of releases (for Windows and Mac) scheduled as soon as everything is solid and “bug free“. There are also several more to follow in the first part of this year.

Also, as the ASP Chairman of the Board, I am excited that the Association of Shareware Professionals has all of its 2008 leadership in place now, and with the quality of our team, I am expecting that we will be making great improvements this year, including with the ASP Indie Games SIG (Special Interest Group). Similarly, our chapter of the International Game Developers Association, IGDA Detroit, is ready to make big strides forward.

Remember, we gain an extra day this month, and even my late beginning gives me a head start of five days over the Chinese. [Chinese New Year is Thursday, February 7.]

Thanks for the great memories, 2007!

On this first working day of 2008, I want to wish everybody a Happy New Year!

Additionally, I will take this opportunity to hope everybody (in the US, anyway) has a good Martin Luther King, Jr. Day [January 21]. Big things are cooking here, but it looks like activity on this blog will be slow or non-existent until Groundhog Day, when I, too, will come out of “hibernation”. Until then…

Numeric year update was successfully installed. Rebooting now.

Another season of artificial shortages comes to an end.

For the second year in a row, Nintendo has managed to create completely artificial shortages of their Wii console to increase demand. There were questions in 2006, within the first few months of the Wii release, about whether this was a legitimate production issue, but more than a year later, it is fairly obvious that Nintendo is manufacturing scarcity alongside the hardware.

As far as the actual process of building the consoles is concerned, it is not as if they should be experiencing any delays due to, say, protecting the environment. Recently, Nintendo got the very first zero rating given to any company by Greenpeace in their Guide to Greener Electronics. That is quite an accomplishment; as the actual report on Nintendo [PDF] states, “The company scores zero on all criteria, allowing infinite room for future improvement.“

Nevertheless, whether by stumbling into the problem last year and then merely replicating it in 2007 or by marketing design from the outset, this “Cabbage Patch Console” approach appears to be working. Dozens of adults lined up at our local Best Buy at 8:00am last Sunday morning, in winter advisory conditions including wind gusts up to 50 MPH, to get tickets to allow them to purchase one of the 120 units available. These ticketholders then waited in line again, some for hours, waiting for the opportunity to actually make the purchase. All of this just yards from where the technically superior XBox 360 and Playstation 3 consoles sat in piles as if stuck on the Island of Misfit Toys.

Fortunately, Santa Claus managed to bring a Nintendo Wii for our family this Christmas season without standing in any such ridiculous lines, but his method remains a closely kept secret. For my part, I find that the Wii controllers are well designed for certain types of games (Wii Sports Bowling in particular), but for other games they seem an awkward fit (think shoehorn). The fact that most games require players to stand, rather than sit down, to play has both positive and negative aspects.

On my first attempt, my Wii Fitness Age matched my actual chronological age exactly; I will have to work on that.

I was interviewed for a podcast that has now been posted.

About a week ago, Rich Elswick (of Moya Entertainment) interviewed me for Detroit Creative Talent, which (as the name suggests) promotes creative talent in and around the Detroit area. Michigan boasts a strong pool of such talent in areas such as game development, multimedia production, film and broadcast media, and this site works to highlight some of the individuals creating product here.

The podcast of my interview is now available from the Detroit Creative Talent web site. [MP3 size: 55.4M, Running time: 1:00:30.]

Here is our solution to online statistics manipulation.

As mentioned in my previous post, Problem: Statistics Manipulation, we have some players who manipulate their online statistics for solitaire games using a variety of methods. Equally, we have players complaining in the Goodsol Solitaire Forum about this practice and asking for something to be done. Worse, some players have stopped participating and reporting statistics due to the unreliability.

In an attempt to address this issue, and generally make our games more fun for our customers, we designed a new mode of gameplay called (for now) Climb Mode.

In Climb Mode, a user plays the deals for a particular game in strictly numerical order, starting with deal #1. This eliminates the ability to cherry-pick or replay deals to inflate victory percentages. At the same time, it assures that all players are compared on results from exactly the same deals. (This mode actually removes several features, such as Select Game, Previous Game, and New [random] Game.) Further, the game options are always fixed, so easier (or harder) variants are not available.

To address the question of which types of gameplay is preferred, we created a cumulative scoring system, where the score on a certain game is the total of all scores for deals played. This allows players (like me) to play for the maximum number of victories, hence scoring the most points per deal, to compete fairly with other players who play as many games as possible, rather than replaying each trying for a victory. Once one moves on from a game (by either winning or using Next Game), one cannot go back.

All games are timed in Climb Mode, and average time per deal is reported along with the total score. Ties in score are decided in favor of the player with the lower average time. Unlike in standard mode, the timer does not reset when restarting a deal, so one can replay as often as desired, but the extra attempts are reflected in the overall game time. (I have several deals in Free Klondike where I eventually won, but only after the timer maxed out at 99:59.9.)

Of course, the implementation of Climb Mode does not completely remove the possibility of cheating, as somebody who is truly determined could still potentially manipulate the results. However, we operate from the philosophy that anybody who goes through that much trouble to cheat in a friendly competition has bigger issues. In practice, since only paying customers are allowed to submit online scores, this has never been a problem, and the situation is certainly better than before.

Note that we decided to first implement the above changes in Pretty Good MahJongg rather than Pretty Good Solitaire. Now that the system has proven itself over the last few years in Pretty Good MahJongg, will Climb Mode be implemented in the next version of PGS? As the Magic 8 Ball says, “Signs point to yes.“

One solitaire game problem can be online statistics manipulation.

[Editor’s note: This blog post was written more than a year ago, but only posted now.]

One of the common complaints on the Goodsol support forum is that the online statistics are skewed in some way. To be sure, there are some exploits that can be used in the flagship product, Pretty Good Solitaire, to manipulate the statistics in ones favor. In particular, one can select any deal (of 2147483647 available deals per game), so selecting known wins helps. Also, the starting position can be examined and, if no moves are made, abandoned without adversely affecting ones victory percentage. For the truly vain, unswayed by monotony, one can even play the same game repeatedly to boost their score.

Game secret: Due to the shuffling algorithm used, by design, the very last deal (i.e., game #2147483647) produces an unshuffled deck, which sometimes makes a victory easier. Veteran players who are really desperate to win a particular Solitaire game sometimes use this deal number in an attempt to get above 0%.

In addition to manipulating statistics via cherry-picking deals, there are a few other complaints. Some of the games have rules that make winning easier (or harder), so the statistics do not always compare like with like. Similarly, some players attempt to get high victory percentages, restarting a game repeatedly until it can be won (if possible), while others value the number of victories and play many more games to do that. Which is better: 100 straight victories in 100 games (100%), or 200 victories in 1000 games (20%)? That is a philosophical question.

We decided to seek a better approach for the online statistics to address some of the expressed concerns. My next blog post will discuss our solution to this issue.

A major computer retailer ceases operations.

Last Friday, it was announced that computer retailer CompUSA will close all of its 103 stores, which includes a store just down the road (about a mile) from here. This decision comes on the heels of our Director of Operations declaring that she will no longer purchase anything for our company from there due to systematic failure of customer service at these stores.

In analyzing the situation, I think that the only surprise in this announcement is that CompUSA managed to stay in business (here, anyway) as long as they did. There are three fundamental errors that this business made to lose our business:

1. First, the service to customers in the retail stores was reliably “last rate”. On our final visit there, we had four red shirts standing around debating nothing of substance, and not dealing with customers, while the one cashier on a lane went to the back of the store to find something, leaving a line of customers, credit cards in hand, waiting indefinitely. This was not merely a regular occurrence, but the usual situation.
2. Second, most of the advertised “deals” involved mail-in rebates, unnecessarily. Frankly, rebates are a scam, especially when instant savings offered elsewhere ostensibly give the same end result. We had a policy in place not to consider rebates when calculating costs, which resulted in far fewer purchases there.
3. Third, CompUSA is a spammer, using (fraudulent) third-party mailing lists. I know this because they regularly mail one of our honeypot email addresses that has never been added to any mailing list (and, in fact, never even existed until spammers started pummeling it with UCE). It was certainly not double opt-in.

After doing my basic analysis, the first web news article I found about this, CompUSA To Close Up Shop, has comments which show that others had similar experiences, tending to indicate that the failures were truly corporate, not merely bad management at our local store. Although it is generally better to have more choice, I say “Good riddance to CompUSA!“

For local purchase of hardware, we strongly recommend Digilink Computers. They are always helpful when we have to buy computer components, usually in an emergency situation. (Yes, this includes the new server on which this blog is hosted.) My only complaint is that they are no longer open on Sundays, which sometimes requires us to go elsewhere.

The second choice in this area is Best Buy, which is much larger, but is oriented toward general consumers, so individual components (e.g., processors, fans, or empty cases) are either not available at all or only in severely limited selection. (Digilink has a sales case with various motherboards on display; do not look for that at Best Buy.)

Let me end this post with an open invitation to Fry’s Electronics to open a store in this area. The closest Fry’s to our location is almost 250 miles down I-69 to Indianapolis, not exactly convenient. However, I know of a perfect computer retail location nearby that will be available and vacant within a month or so…