The night before last, Mrs. Sipwell and myself had a thorough discussion on Powersoccer. She is intrigued by the game – although not interested in football and let alone football games at all – and especially by its community. She also knows how much her “hubby” cares about the game and reflects with him some of the things he writes on this blog. That night however, she did not only comment on or substantiate an entry I wrote, she launched an idea herself. So here goes: the idea is all hers.
Introduce “Generations”
In real life, every person is a “member” of a so called Generation. I for one, together with Powdersnow (fortunately or unfortunately), am a member of Generation Y, also dubbed the Millennials. We are the children of the Baby Boom Generation and we tend to have two important traits: first, we are peer-oriented; second, we somewhat have the Peter Pan syndrome: we don’t want to grow up. We try as much as we can to delay the rites de passage of adulthood. Looking at both Powdersnow and myself, that makes a lot of sense. Both of us are very much community-focussed and consider that to be more important than our personal profit (I hardly play a game, yet am logged in at least 1,5 hours a day). The mere fact that we ARE playing a game… even if we are in our late twenties/early thirties… is enough proof for the Peter Pan syndrome, is it not (Powdersnow is also said to get 100 krona a day to buy candy in the store next to his office)?

Generations create a sense of belonging yet they are completely missing from the game even if the partner game Managerzone does have Generations (in the sense that they organize generation cups for people who started with the game in a specific season).
Why not create Generations in Powersoccer? When you create in account in a given month (or 2 months), you are dubbed Generation 1,2,3,4… It is a tag you get never to lose again. Everybody can see what generation you are (it is on the team page) and you can see what other people in your generation do: what level are they at now? How are their ranking points? O my, person X from our generation just won a cup or a league!
You could create Generations cups in which people can compete for the title “Best of my Generation”. There could be a Generation Forum, just like there are Clan Fora. And there could even be inter-generation competitions, just like there are fan zone competitions.

People want to feel part of something. People want a sense of belonging. People want to be able to say: “This is me! I am part of this.” A generation is a good start, is it not?

The development blog seems to be abandoned. The last blog post was one by me. You could interpret that as a very bad sign, namely that crew couldn’t care less about blogging about its endeavours and above all ‘parties’. You could (and should) however interpret that as a very positive sign and you should know the story behind the absence of blog posts. And that is what you are about to read.

In early summer when Sweden is hitting its peak 15° C/58° F and the rain goes from heavy rain to moderate rain, many crew members take their holidays to lose all the fat they gained in the months of sitting behind their computer screen making this game better and better. It is stated in their contract that if they have on July 1 an weight increase of 12 percent they have to start working out in order to become healthy again. Yes, dear readers, the owners of Powersoccer are well aware of all the scientific literature on the correlation between overweight and productivity. Thus, all crew members – with the exception of the ever slim shaolinda – need to lose a certain percentage before they can re-enter the Powersoccer premises: a guard by the door has a specially designed weight scale to calculate how many “fat” – thus not weight in itself – they lost. If it is not sufficient, the crew member is sent back home with a specially designed work out program. Rumour has it that our good friend Powdersnow, who is known for his exuberant dinners– he got kicked out of a “all you can eat” diner when touring the United States of America with his band Surreal last spring – is still busy with his weight loss program and has his exam on Monday the 17th of August. Hence the complete absence of activity on this blog on their part.

As for me, I just was too busy working in my real life job. I have A-grades in procrastinating, slacking but also in making deadlines with work that blows you of your feet. And that is just what I did. I worked hard, all day and all of the night…

… wait a minute! Wait a minute! I just recalled that some of the crew members are so slim that you could pull them through a key hole! No way they could reach the 12 percentage of weight gained level! What have these guys been up to then? Our slim heroes?

The answer is very simple, dear readers: they have been working all day and all of the night on an improved – and that is the right word for this change – version of Powersoccer. I am so glad my deadline is over (and that I met it) because Powersoccer will be where you can find me… all day and all of the night!

Attentive readers of my and shaolinda’s posts on this blog have probably noticed from time to time a mainly played animosity towards a certain character named Powdersnow. That animosity – but especially the show especially the Marx Brothers are giving – has its root in old stories and long forgotten battles. Unfortunately for the named Powdersnow, I have a horse’s memory. We can forgive but we will never forget. If you are interested why Powdersnow nowadays is known as Dodo Pow or want to know why Shaolinda is a Goddess with her own high-priests and followers (Frogodo, the latest crew member, always washes her feet when she enters the office), I suggest you browse to the Marx Brothers blog and read up. Twenty people devote time and energy to write the greatest fabrications, exaggerations and PS-related stories. This official blog will not be used to say anything bad about Surreal*, the “who the hell?” clan Powdersnow was presiding and still mentally leads. I want, briefly, to discuss clans in itself: their goal, purpose and reason of existence.

Clans are in my view institutional oddities. They were created long before Powersoccer embraced them – crew members luckily have plenty of moments of vision – officially as independent, unofficial gatherings of people. If you were to command or create a clan, you needed to create a blog, have four members and write “we exist” in a specific thread in the best place on earth: the powersoccer forum.
It was only in November last year when clans were created in Powersoccer itself. Clans were bands of brothers fighting for clan ranking points and the overall honour of their clan (one could state: “as Surreal hardly played clan cups, they hardly had an honour”). As clans became official and gained a purpose (to be the best, the loudest or the most solicited, the least active), they became a tool for creating a sense of belonging as well. You prided yourself on being in a specific clan and you prided yourself on your clan mates. You upheld their honour in one on one’s clan cups and got to know each other better through the secret clan fora. Or you could do none of those things at all and call yourself an active clan, Surreal as that may sound.

Powersoccer becomes – and this is the main point of this article (yes, I have a clue) – through its institutional oddities ‘familiar’. You start to know all the household names. You start to like their characteristics (or dislike them). After a while, you get used to in real life absurd sentences like “Marx Brothers Clan is one hell of a great bunch of guys. Boy, did they kick Surreals’ ass – sorry for the word – badly” and you start to feel at home. Powersoccer becomes a family, a nation even, where there is shared belonging. We all talk Powersoccerian by now. We all talk about clans, tokens, MAs, PSE and many more things. We all know ATG, Imperium, Colony of Slippermen, Marx Brothers, TVST (and a tiny minority also vaguely recalls something called Surreal – please don’t shoot me if I misspelled the name). As this is a game played by thousands and thousands of people, that is one great achievement.

* A big thanks to Bigdaddyat for retrieving the link to their clan page. It was a bit dusty but we cleaned it and post it here.

As most of the readers of this blog probably already know, I am a 100 % Forumite. I never enter a gameroom on this account. In fact, I even am not allowed to enter a gameroom according to my religion (of which I am obviously the High Priest – interested people can contact me in the game). If the gamerooms were to be scrapped, I wouldn’t leave my sleep over it. I can challenge everybody I want to challenge and I can play cups without really entering a gameroom.
The forum is my home and my love. I just love to browse through its many daily posts and reply to some threads I find interesting. I am always happily surprised to see that people take time to actually sit down and write a proper text of 200 + words. And I am even more “walking on clouds” as I see it happens more and more often! The forum of Powersoccer is booming. The number of daily threads and daily posts equally borrowed those Seven-League Boots I mentioned yesterday. I have seen a whole bunch of young, fresh and inspired people entering the forum and started to post. Earlier this week, Powdersnow – on request of the Forum admins of the game – decided to expand the forum section of some of the existing languages (Dutch, Turkish, Polish, Spanish, Portuguese) and to create a new forum for Romanians. The forum seems to be the newest place in town everybody seems to check out. Let’s hope it can develop into one of the bars you simply had to have your beer when you are in town.

Not only is the number of posts increasing, there has been a new trend discernible too. People actually start to understand the community-feeling and living up to it. In a previous blog post, I noticed that a strong forum creates a community and a sense of belonging. You don’t cheat on your peers, you don’t offend your brothers and sisters. This seems to be happening as we speak. The post of one person, timcahill7, led to an avalanche of replies by various persons. What did timcahill7 exactly say?

“Hey guys,

Today is the day I make a public apology. Today is the day that I say sorry for all my PS mistakes, bans and lies .
So lets start off. To all of PS, i am sorry for my mistakes that I have made. I am sorry for my bans and lies. From now on you will see a big change in me, i will not do this stuff.

There is one person I would like to make a big apology to. And that person is sipwell. There is one reason why I would like to apologize to him. And that reason is I’m sorry for sending in all those FA apps, the reason I am sorry about that is i am under age, I am 14, not 19. So i am sorry about that. Can you forgive me?

I am sorry to the rest of PS if I have done anything to you. I am sorry for every single bad thing I have done. There is going to be a new timcahill7 around today.
Thank you, and goodbye.

Tim”

At least 5 other “bad seeds” in this game apologized for past behaviour. Some offered their public apologies to users they offended, to people they lied to or for their overall bad behaviour. Isn’t that superb? Isn’t that proof that the Powersoccer community works? Ah, posts like that simply make my day. They make my functioning in Powersoccer - voluntarily apart from the Swedish meatballs sent over by Powdersnow every week - worthwile. Make the community work, the game blossom in order to secure the income of some friends over in Sweden and increase the quality of the game even more. It is a circle I gladly step in.

And to end with a message to all the people still unsure about what to do: “Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.” (Ralph Emerson). Powersoccer is a society too. Don’t deceive it.

May-June are probably my least favourite months of the year. I seem to be strapped to my office desk from too early in the morning till too late in the evening, doing too much work in too little time. In the meantime, the sun is shining, people are enjoying a beer outside or go for an early dip in the still cold but refreshing North Sea. I have been feeling like Tantalus lately, whereas the writing a blog post is so imminently close but forever distant. The joy of blogging became a nightmare!

And yet there is so many to blog on. To stay within the sphere of myths and fairy tales, Powersoccer seems to have stolen some Seven-League Boots… the game has evolved rapidly into an extremely addictive, multi-levelled experience. I find myself – in the moments of “in between” chores – thinking about strategy, training on quick passing, counter attacking and curling the ball. It seems the crew over at Linköping has been watching the evolution in football from very close and has seen that the days of big men pushing everybody aside – “American football style soccer” – are over: it are the days of quick players who can dribble, pass, sprint and have a tactical mastermind. Messi, Iniesta, Fabregas, Hazard (to name a Belgian :p), Rooney even, those are the players of the future. Powersoccer is the game of the future as well. Quick passing, tactical mastermind: all are necessary to make career in this game.

This game has become fun in an almost autistic (no offence intended) way: you can withdraw in your own (mental) world, develop the ideal strategy and train to put it perfectly into practice. You basically need nobody else to have fun. Powersoccer has it all for the loners amongst us (even the ability to turn of your chat and refuse to interact with your real life opponent).

Yet, what pleases me more is to play the occasional game against other high level players and see how they cope with tactics and strategy. The philosophy of the Marx Brothers, the most important clan in PS (there Powdersnow, I said it on your home ground), is that we play to have fun and not to win. ‘You lose some, you draw some’, our clan motto, doesn’t mean that we like to lose or to draw, it means that whatever you do (win, draw, lose), you should above all have fun. With this new version, we have come a giant leap closer to the absolute ideal of the Marx Brothers. I have lost often in this new version and I have lost badly too. I am however stupefied about the tactical and strategic approach of most of my opponents. I have witnessed plain brilliant goals scored against me, through pass that cut my defence open and for which, if they happen in real life football, you would jump out of your chair and cheer about the magnificence of the attack. I have seen tackling that was so perfect you almost had tears in your eyes. In my opinion, there is nothing more beautiful than an opponent out of the blue tackling your attacker on his way to an almost certain goal. The frustration lasts for one nanosecond, the joy takes over from then onwards.

Powersoccer seems to have it all. And that’s why I hope this game will grow until it reaches the sky. Why? Because it deserves it.

PS. Am I back to blog? Who will tell?

So, I spoke to Sipwell earlier and he asked me about Dodo (Powdersnow) and we ranted for a while as always and anyway, here’s the short but accurate Skype conversation:

[11:31:05] Linda Wallin: we’re pow and shao
[11:31:12] Linda Wallin: hilarious, isn’t it`?
[11:31:27] sipwell: that you both are Japanese kittens?

I guess this means that this —>  is really me, just trapped inside this human-looking flesh onesie…

Most of the Power Challenge crew are back at the office today. Some are home sick (coughing, throwing up, crying…) and some are still on holiday.But most of us are here. And even though things feel surprisingly the same, there are actually some changes taking place.

We started this new year off with a moving-around exercise. We altered the teams, the focus, the desks. So now I’m actually sitting where Powdersnow used to sit! Kind of classic. (but he took his gold medal with him… greedy)

Anyway. As I sort of told you at the end of last year, we’re gonna put some more time, people and effort into Power Racing from now on. We’re NOT letting go of Power Soccer. We’re still keeping a team for soccer and there will still be features developed - we’re just moving some of the previous soccer people over to racing. So instead of one fabulous online sports game brought to you by Power Challenge - there will be two! Isn’t that just excellent news?

Well, just wanted to say hi and let you all know we’re back at work. Back in business, so to speak.

See you out there, on that giant freeway called the interweb.

// linda

So there was a Christmas party yesterday. We drank, we played, we Spotified, we cheered, we ate, we drank some more, we danced… And here we are, looking awfully bright and perky if I might say so myself. (thank God there is Helena Rubinstein Magic Concealer to cover up the tiredness. makeup is my best friend)

One of the events was a PS cup that Powdersnow - of course - won.

(Sipwell might claim he would have won had he only been invited, but that’s a different story.)

Proud winner of the office Power Racing tournament was… Erik H! Power to the racingteam! My guys truly are the best… And they’re happy too!

(notice the mega cool five of a kind t-shirt that Per S m-a-d-e for the event)

Then there was some Guitar Hero action and for the first time ever I beat Erik in a game, something I guess will never happen again.

(I actually beat Josef too, come to think of it…)

Here follows some random evidence of friendship, joy and beer:

Then we left the office and went to Platå, a restaurant/night club in Linköping where we had some food,  glögg, beer and cocktails.

Quality dude meets code dude.

Code dude happened to grab Emperor of Fun’s nose

Chancellor of Surreal vs. Per “Tropic Thunder” L.

From all of us, to all of you - a very, merry Christmas!

When you look out through my window, by my desk, this is what you see

(no photoshopping done here, I swear, this is as damp grey dystopian sad it really looks!)

What can I say? Look up “dull” in the dictionary and there you have it! The back of our office building in early December.

But inside the office things are really cooking. Oh yeah. Per is being his usual creative self and suddenly I’m not the only one doing manual work, using scissors and scotch tape! Excellent! But what is he doing?

Any takers? Oh come on, just one guess? No? He’s rearranging the backlog of course! Like hello!? Just gotta love that out-of-the-computer-thinking. Why keep it in Excel if it doesn’t feel right for you? Free your backlog! Let’s do it old school.

And on my way back from the kitchen (with like the 8th cup of tea today, spiked with honey) I found Pow who’s wearing green today! That just had to be documented. Green is such a perky color.

And to the left of Pow, there are some clever people trying to get some work done (he just bugs them):

Stroll on, move on, keep going. Behind that 90’s shade of blue wall you find Per, now busy with more manual work. Very refreshing! But there’s a terrible story behind this picture. You wanna hear it? Well, Tomas U, the man ripping out the sensitive parts of Per’s computer, is up to his neck in some Very Important Stuff, like making inspirational material for Power Racing. The problem is, he needed more memory. Well, not him, his computer. So he simply hijacked Per’s. “The RAM or your Jolt” he said. Of course Per let him take the memory.

So there you have it, even the nice ones go a bit crazy when the computer runs slow.

Our very great executive producer and Scrum Officer, Richard, is holding 3 times 2 hour scrum sessions with everyone. Very good initiative! We all need to be on the same level with things, especially something as fundamental as our production/development method. Thank you Richard! (and look, aren’t the racing team just the cutest?)

// office blogger No 1

Well, it seems to be a rather perky, but at the same time dull day today. The hanging-by-the-coffemachine-conversation addressed such issues as the potential risks (?) for kids surfing the web, death, horror movies, gruesome pictures and car accidents. Cheerful indeed.

We just seem to be hovering around the office right now. The rain is pouring down. Friday “fika” (you know, the coffe break get together) is only 20 minutes away. We’re not entirely focused but the atmosphere is great.

There is some goal keeper testing going on (Michael yells at Pow), some Maya discussions taking place, graphical pros and cons, car physics alteration talk…and… Anders and Jonas are running back and forth in the kitchen. I hope they have a good reason, or I’m seriously worried. (Anders just explained: they were sidestepping… well that’s all right then)

Photos, you ask? Well of course. It wouldn’t be Friday unless pictures were posted on the blog.

The coffe-machine-chat-dudes Anders and Jonas:

<—– The happiest Tomas in the world

Simon. His dog’s name is Yoda. Respect.

We have a candy shop. Nom nom nom.

And Per, looking terribly sharp and handsome today:

Me and Tomas. Participating in this kitchen charade.

And now - some actual development taking place:

Mikko’s location drafts —->  

Our next location in progress - are you excited? I’m excited!

Jukka modelling the next car:

Ok, it’s two minutes to “fika” - gotta go back to the kitchen now. Have a great weekend, play a lot, talk to your friends, phone your grandmother, take the trash out, don’t drink and drive, be nice to little animals and don’t forget to recycle.

See you all on Monday!

/ L