Yay! The excellent interview I helped Christian Nutt with is now up on Gamasutra. Exciting if you like the idea of reading a very literal transcription of me spending more time talking to Ken Levine about how Cloverfield sucks than anything else (although, admittedly, there’s a point to it.)
Don’t worry! I’ve never played Dofus either.
(I probably shouldn’t admit to that.)
A kinda interesting interview on the idea that game developers should pay attention to cultural differences during development. Largely, I agree, other than I do wish that Blizzard would put Pandaren in World of Warcraft, as then I might actually try it out!
This was actually published on Games On Deck too, and was a good session because it featured Tom Frencel, president of the excellent (IGF Mobile Best Game Award winning!) Capybara Games.
In this panel at the ICE conference in Toronto, a panel including Ian Bogost (Persuasive Games) and Jim McNiven (Kerb) discussed the influence of marketing money, including social and ethical issues, on advergames.”
I forgot to mention in the last post that this is specifically coverage of the Interactive Content Exchange conference, held last week in Toronto. It was an interesting sort of conference – with lots of people from all different disciplines (not just the games industry) it kind of wavered in relevance – but it’s always nice to see more people show an interest in the games industry in Ontario.
This Q&A on Gamasutra by yours truly might seem kind of random, as usually my coverage on Gamasutra has been limited to show coverage and cross-postings from Games On Deck, but this interview marks the first piece of original content produced for the site as part of my new position as contributing editor.
My duties include posting news and editing other articles on a daily basis (if we’re going to nit-pick, my first piece as a contributing editor was this short news post on the upcoming Dexter game) so expect to see my work on the site often from now on. As with Games On Deck I’m not going to post about everything I do on the site here, but I’ll be sure to post anything of interest.
My last piece of GDC session coverage that’s going up on Gamasutra, although there may be more going up from my “Best of GDC Mobile” feature series that’s currently running on Games On Deck. I’ll update the site here about that once they’re all up, probably.
This was a very tradition postmortem from Epic on Unreal Tournament III, unfortunately not quite as exciting for many people as the Portal session which followed it (and which I’ve already posted about.)
I must admit I’ve never played Unreal Tournament III, despite the fact I used to be a major PC gamer. I distinctly remember playing the original Unreal Tournament quite a lot during my time at the University of Paisley (now the University of the West of Scotland) and how true the concept of “zero time for spectacle” is to the franchise – we’d play Assault mode endlessly, with certain maps being won or lost within seconds. The only equivalent I can imagine now is playing Team Fortress 2 with only Scouts (if Scouts were all as powerful as Heavy Weapons Guy.)
He pitched in to give an entertaining (if heavily digressionary) session on his trip throughout the industry: including revealing stories about working with Chris Roberts and John Carmack.”
I do not think Paul Steed is going to thank me for this write-up.
Wait, what am I talking about? He said everything in a room that was packed with people! He knew what he was saying, and fair dos to him for that. I’ll admit that I found his digression on being best mates with the local police department pretty unbearable (notice I didn’t write that bit up) but the rest was pretty entertaining.
Anyway, I can never forgive American McGee for the travesty that was Bad Day LA, so yeah. Screw that guy.
Due to the huge amount of GDC related content we produced on Gamasutra during the conference, a lot of the session coverage got bumped to later, including all of my coverage from the final day of the conference (though I’m not complaining.)
This was actually the final talk I went to at GDC, and really was packed with Portal fans.
I recently had a chat with someone who thought I had no soul because I only thought Portal was “okay.”
Before you too put me on your enemies list, let me explain. I liked it! I really did! I just didn’t love it. I enjoyed the dialogue, but it wasn’t the greatest thing I ever heard. It was cute, but I felt that the plot just lay on top of the game design rather than was tightly integrated (though they claimed rather different in the session.) I mean, the weighted companion cube? I burned that mother without a second thought.
I challenged Erik Wolpaw at the end of the session with the question: considering that when he was at Old Man Murray he’d have hated something as contrived as a convenient furnace in the final boss’ room, what excuse did he have?
His excuse was alright, I suppose (that the idea was that the creators of GLaDOS thought she might go insane, so put a handy furnace there to destroy her if required) but it was still only an excuse.
(Yes, I have no soul.)
“I was kind of interested in BioShock, especially because you explore the illusion of choice within games as the metastory. It’s over and above that. One of the things that interests me is that there’s a point where you realize that’s what’s happened, but after that, you’re not actually given any choice! Could you talk about that part?”