Macguffin Games

Paul Graham’s Wisdom for Indies

Paul Graham, for those that don’t know him, is one of the founders of Y Combinator, a venture capital firm that specializes in giving small amounts of money and lots of advice.  He is also something of an essayist, with a number of really thought-provoking ones on his site.

His latest essay is an attempt to boil down the most important pieces of advice he has for startups.  Coincidentally, every one of these things is applicable to someone starting an indie games venture.

A number of his tips are ones that I’m happy I figured out on my own (“Letting Your Idea Evolve” is one), and one or two others are obvious to indies (“Become Ramen Profitable” is one of these – for many of us, Ramen Profitable is all we are shooting for, I think).

One of them, though, really made me think.  “You Are What You Measure” – the idea that the things you concentrate on measuring are what you will improve at, so be careful what you measure.  His example is posting the number of users your have on the wall and watching it go up or down on a daily basis; soon, he says, you’ll be correlating your actions with that number, and do better as a result.  For an indie selling installer games, you could look at the velocity of your sales for a similar number.

But, what do we really measure in games?  As an indie, it’s terribly easy to not measure anything at all.  Even with a project management background I find it very easy to get lost inside whatever piece of the game I’m working on, to ignore my own scoping and scheduling – or worse, not to do any.

Then the flip side – if schedules and scope are all you care about and measure as an indie, you’re probably headed for an uninspiring game.  So how do you track your game’s fun?

It’s a question I’ll be thinking about.  I think the answer right now is, I can’t measure that until I’ve got a product to show people.  Even once we hit early prototype, it’s going to be hard to get any sort of meaningful metric out of people’s feedback.

What do you think?

Tags: Macguffin Games