One of our avid players, Basil, is running a charity drive, where he’s trying to raise money for a variety of causes.

To help him out, we’re donating two decks from the upcoming second run of Word Ace cards - so check out the charity drive here, and give to a good cause.

What platform now runs the WORLD’S BEST social multiplayer Blackjack app?

(An)Droid does.

Play with your friends on iPhone/iPod Touch, webOS, and Facebook. Marvel at the new high-res art. Get alerted to invites even when the app’s running in the background. Online multiplayer. Chat. Picture emotes. Free chips. Everything you could ever want (and the kitchen sink) - now available on Android!

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For players who have recently transitioned to Android from another device & have existing accounts - to transfer your old account to your new device:

1.) Download Card Ace: Blackjack on your Android device. Go to Friends -> Find New Friend, and grab the code you find there.

2.) If you have your previous device, do the same there & send us both codes, clearly label which is which. If you no longer have your previous device, send us your username, along with any other info about your account - like level, XP, a description of your pictures, etc. If you have a friend who still has your account as a friend, you should be able to grab the info easily from their Friend List.

3.) E-mail that to support (/at/) selfawaregames (/dot/) com, and we’ll get your account transferred.

See you online!

For all you iPhone users, PLEASE update your games now! The new updates are 100% iOS4 compatible. If you’re reading this, please tell your friends to update as well! Thanks for your support, and we’re sincerely sorry for the inconvenience.

Ok. So, lots of stuff happening over the last few weeks. Some of it is good - great, even. Some of it, not so much.

Here’s how it goes:

Updates are now live for Word Ace, Card Ace: Hold ‘Em & Card Ace: Blackjack on the iTunes store. Go get ‘em now, and you’ll be able to run flawlessly on iOS4!

The big news is that if you’ve upgraded your iPhone to iOS4, our games will crash on start. We found this bug a few weeks ago (with help from one of our intrepid users), and we fixed it ASAP. Problem is, with the release of the new OS, Apple’s approval queue is backlogged. We submitted the new version a couple weeks ago, but it’s stuck in purgatory. The moment the update is released, it’ll fix the problem. Our sincerest apologies - in the meantime, if you’re an Apple user who’s stuck, send us an e-mail (support at selfawaregames (-dot-) com) and we’ll see what we can do to help you out.

* In better news, Card Ace: Blackjack for Android is almost done! We’ve been getting a TON of e-mails from Android users who are looking for our games, and I’m really happy to announce that we’ll be making our first leap onto the platform soon. As with all our games, it’ll be fully cross-platform multiplayer. So Android users will be able to play with their webOS/iPhone-owning friends! We’ll announce it here as soon as it goes live. Soon!

* We’ve ALSO got another announcement in the pipe. Our newest project is about to go into a public beta. We’ve chosen a pretty unusual way of doing this, but the good news is, if you want in early, it’s *easy*. We’ll have details on how to participate online soon.

So, yeah. That’s what we’ve been up to. I know, I know - it’s a post about upcoming announcements, which is sort of silly - I just wanted to say something, since we’re really excited about the impending launches.

Or rather, win a promo code for Taxiball. If you want to actually WIN Taxiball, you’ll have to beat all the levels & unlock the secret Credits level. But winning a promo code? Easy.

Here’s the deal:

Download Word Ace, Card Ace: Hold ‘Em, or Card Ace: Blackjack. They’re all free, so take your pick. Play a hand in the game, so we know you’ve got it, and grab your Friend Code (go to Friends -> Find New Friend, and write down the code you find there).

Then, post a tweet about the games @selfawaregames with your Friend Code included. (I’d love to say that we’re immune to flattery, but we’re not. Saying nice things about the game will certainly up your chances to win! :D) From there, we’ll select a handful of winners. If you’ve won, we’ll direct-message you in-game with a promo code for Taxiball!

We’ll select winners by Saturday, June 5th! Good luck!

p.s.: Taxiball is available only for the iPhone. Pre players are more than welcome to participate, but you’ll potentially win a code that can only be used on the iPhone. Still, a Taxiball promo code would make a great gift for your iPhone-owning friends!

In the last week, just about everyone on the team’s gotten horrendously ill. Not fun.

On the plus side, the people that are healthy are still hard at work. We’re getting close to be able to let you know what we’ve been working on (on top of all the updates for the Ace games). Not there yet, but keep an eye out either here, or on Twitter (@selfawaregames). More news will be coming … soon.

Go check out the review here, and let ‘em know you do, too! I think this is Gamespot’s first ever official webOS review!

Woo! 9/10, Editor’s Choice!

So, in this TED talk, Simon Sinek makes a case that great leaders inspire action, or great companies attract loyal customers by not starting with “what”, but starting with “why.” He does a good job of describing his case, so you should watch the video, but to sum up, he basically says that Apple, for instance, attracts a loyal following because they start with the concept of upending the status quo, not that they make great computers. And because of that, they attract people who believe what they believe, and will buy their products whether they’re computers or music players or DVR’s, or whatever.

Do I believe that he’s uncovered why Apple attracts the people they do? No.

I think he makes a fascinating argument, but that ultimately, Apple’s success comes from the fact that they don’t approach development of their OS from the computer to the user, they develop it from the user to the computer. Well, in as much as anyone *has*, at least. But it still got me thinking - what is our “why”?

And there are a lot of nice, flowery things that you can say - we love to make games we like to play, we make stuff that’s really beautiful & elegantly designed, we make games that people can play together. All that is true, but it is in some sense, the result, and not the driving force.

So, here’s the driving force, as I see it:

We make games that you couldn’t have made before.

There’s probably a better way of phrasing that - but the core concept is that most things are best when they use the advantages that are unique to them. Something like the Sixth Sense, for instance, would have been much, much harder to pull off as a book, because so much of it depended on the assumptions you make about what you see when you go into a movie - it depended on the conventions that the audience implicitly understood.

And with something as rapidly evolving as the newest generation of mobile devices & social media on the web, to make something that really leverages those conventions means making something where the ability to do this didn’t exist before.

You might think that’s a weird thing to say about say, Taxiball & Word Ace, but it really was the driving force behind building those games.

Taxiball was tilt-controlled because it was a control scheme that was really unique to the iPhone. It had friend lists & leaderboards because the persistently connected nature of the platform demanded it.

With Word Ace, we expanded the multiplayer aspect to synchronous real-time multiplayer that you could play anywhere, across a really wide range of devices. We were the first & only Pre/iPhone/Facebook cross-platform game for a very long time, and we still may be the only one (though I could be wrong, now). On top of that, things like the visual emote system, in-game gifts & chat - only the visual emote system was completely unique, but the features were there because the goal was to give you the sense that you were playing with your friends, not just random people you didn’t care about at all. The goal was to create something you’d love to play with your friends - and making the social aspect of it feel real & meaningful (which on a mobile device was something you couldn’t do before) drove the decisions about what to include.

So, in the end, I think that’s a good description of our “why” - to make games that you couldn’t have made before. And whether it’s something relatively simple, like our social multiplayer blackjack, or something like our super-secret new project, that underlying philosophy is what drives us forward.

We got some swag! Finally decided to go out and get some Self Aware-branded stuffs, we got some bags & hoodies. Embroidered with the full “halo” logo on the back, and the “Self Aware Games” text on the front left, these things are pretty freakin’ sweet.

Of course, now when we all go out for lunch together, we end up looking like a bunch of matching buffoons.

Fantastic.

On a discussion about the previous post, a friend of mine responded:

“…here’s a question for you: what, then, is the difference between a “method” and a “medium”? Isn’t a medium simply just a method of telling any particular story? You could tell the same story in a book as you could in a movie. Of course, the details would change and the style would need to be adapted to the storytelling method, but how, in your mind, does that differ from the method of gaming?”

That’s a good question. And when I first read it, I thought, “Huh. I dunno.” But at the same time, I think the key is that essentially, turning something into a game means adding a relatively high density of informed, consequential choices. And that’s not really medium-specific, right? Zork is basically a book that’s been turned into a game. Final Fantasy is basically the TV/movie version of the same. Something like Real Sound is perhaps the music equivalent - or maybe Rock Band/Guitar Hero is the musical equivalent.

So “gaming” isn’t a medium unto itself - it’s a process that you apply to other media, in order to make them more involved.

And I’d say that if you think that interactivity brings a lack of authorial control, you don’t know how games are made. After all, every decision is either hand-built, or the system that governs those systems are hand-built and tuned, and the designers are seeking to create an experience within the space of those decisions - exactly as you say - the artist’s message is buried in the interactivity.

Look at the Sims - it’s a statement about consumerism. Buy more, get ahead. And yet, it’s a neverending, never-satisfied cycle. In effect, the Sims is a joke about suburban consumerism. Sim City, similarly, was a game that was a bold statement about the need for effective mass transit. The “optimal” city in that game was one without any streets, and only rail. The statements are “buried in the interactivity” and left for the user to discover, which is a much, much more effective way to communicate a message & get the recipient to really deeply understand it.

There are endless games that can be interpreted as such, where the message is buried in the interactivity - but I think it does come back to the fact that a “game” is effectively a new *way* to write, not a new medium to write in. Thus method, not medium.