Category Archives: Events

PRACTICE Makes Perfect

I had a whole Silent Hill tribute post planned for Halloween, but I’ve been too busy. I went to GDC Online with Gamasutra — and I also spoke at the Game Narrative Summit with friends Chris Dahlen, Kirk Hamilton, N’Gai Croal, John Davison and Ben Fritz (Kirk wrote about our panel and shared his slides).
Right back from GDC Online, I had my gigantic 1990s-themed birthday party (feat. Ava Luna, Radical Dads, EULA, Ovlov and Casiorossi, check ‘em!) Then it was CMJ week, and then the Halloween parties began.
I went as Laura Palmer — what about you? Also over this past weekend was the fascinating inaugural PRACTICE game design conference at New York University’s Game Center. Eric Zimmerman and Frank Lantz explain what it’s all about here, and I attended some great talks as well!
PopCap’s Scott Jon Siegel spoke about the need for more prototyping specifically in the arena of social games. In a recent column of mine that EDGE published (in the print edition; it won’t be online until later), I compared the design methods used by popular Zynga games — and the player behavior they incite — to the methodology of drug pushers and the behavior of the addicted. I also wrote not too long ago about how disappointed I was to see some of these methodologies adopted by The Sims Social.
Scott told me on Twitter he was disappointed that folks like me seem to be throwing out his entire industry with the bathwater, but while I’ve gone after specific examples, design forms and business models with my fists up, I actually do believe there’s potential to do special things with this new frontier and don’t wish to dismiss that.
Last week I talked to online game veteran Raph Koster, who said that while he feels a sense of loss as games evolve into the social mainstream, he’s also excited by the unprecedented opportunity to reach so many people with our love for games. I share Raph’s feeling of loss, but I also share his enthusiasm for the possibilities the social space can doubtless attain when the right people are working in it for the right reasons.
Long story short, Scott Jon Siegel is one of those good guys, and he believes that more prototyping — the experimental rapid sort that is core to process in traditional design — can help address a lot of the risk aversion and idea-cloning that slows genre emergence and innovation in the social space, and that’s a great idea!
Speaking of game design, Harmonix’s Matt Boch took us inside Dance Central‘s prototyping process. The part I wish I’d written down verbatim was when he mentioned the way the game doesn’t legislate gender in dance performance (“gender is performance,” he said), and showed a video of how a man and a woman could interpret the same feminine, sexy song in their own ways and still succeed in the game.
In other good talks, we had Steve Gaynor on how the design of progression gates can lead to both better storytelling and more interesting use of space, and there was a fascinating, rapid-fire debate among Manveer Heir, Chris Hecker and Nick Fortugno about the extent to which the ability to program is — or isn’t — essential to the game designer’s role.
PRACTICE was such a good time, and is heartening evidence of the fact that we’re starting to collect a cohesive, diverse and wonderful game design hub in New York City! I mean, look at this awesome segment on games as art that was shot by PBS — everyone in it is a New Yorker (I’m in it, too)!
Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo was also at PRACTICE, and he wrote about the surprising and interesting discussion that emerged when Seth Killian and Arturo Sanchez were asked about sexism in the Street Fighter community.
I also wrote about sexism at Kotaku today, but I’m going to save the discussion for its own post. Stay tuned!

All Work, A Little Play

At Gamasutra we’ve been so busy with coverage of GDC Europe and GamesCom that I’ve hardly had time to eat, let alone blog! But if you’re at all interested in what game designers did in Europe all last week, we’ve got lots of coverage for you, so check out: my interview with Mattias Myllyrinne and Avni Yerli on the Euro scene, plus our Day 1, and Day 2-3 roundups for everything you need.

I’ve been doing a lot of interviews and things myself, lately. I just talked to Crystal Dynamics’ GM Darrell Gallagher about Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, the new co-op game for downloadable platforms (there’s a full, AI-less single-player mode, too). This game is extremely rad. Studio obviously knows what it’s doing in that space — and that’s not really a facile observation to make in emerging markets, even for a studio with that pedigree. For their first outing of a major IP on downloadable, I think they knocked it out of the park.

Another thing we’ve published lately worth noticing is that a number of the prominent indies whose games you love would like you — well, “us”, really, the critics — to stop weighing a game on how long it is or isn’t, and instead to look at it as a holistic experience. It is understandable that consumers are concerned about “value per dollar”, but why is value being measured in minutes? I’ve gotta say, I’m very much behind their sentiments, so you should read this editorial from Klei’s Jamie Cheng and the numerous essays published simultaneously from other devs linked in the piece.

Terminal Reality seems to have come out of nowhere as a powerhouse on the game engine scene. It’s the Ghostbusters engine, and it’s only been publicly available for licensing since then — but they already have some 25 games in development on the Infernal Engine. VP Joe Kreiner explains to me how they quietly ramped up, and tells me they have a Kinect project in house. I think I have a good idea what it is.

Despite the Madden series being one of my #videogameblindspots, I am weirdly fascinated with the annual development of the product. Maybe this interview I did with the EP will shed some light on how deceptively complex it is.

My goodness, how could I forget — I was here at the New York City event when Irrational showed off the new BioShock game, BioShock Infinite. I heard a lot of “why call it BioShock if there’s no Rapture” muttering from the internet, but hopefully my event coverage and interview with the art director will help answer that question. And maybe it’ll even make you as psyched for the game as I am!

This is just a little bit of what’s been keeping my colleagues and I running lately. With so much work going on, I’ve gotta play a little, right? Oftentimes, a lot of the ways I have fun look a lot like work, but hey.

Here’s an LA Times article I just wrote about Babycastles, the fantastic indie arcade some friends of mine are setting up in the basement of a community space where I love to hang out. It’s so cool seeing an indie game scene here merging with the music scene. I wish you could all check it out for yourselves, but until then, read the piece, willya?

Finally, I am weirding out the lovely literate community at Thought Catalog with a proud chronology of my gaming history; these are some personal memories of every game console I’ve ever owned — part one of four (it’s a long chronology!) Pass it ’round if you are into it. I’m really fond of Thought Catalog and read it for fun, and you should check it out too.

Oh, yeah. And still lots and lots of Persona 3 Portable. In general I think P3 is a much weaker game than P4; halfway through, it tends to take major shortcuts on narrative trajectories that it previously explored in-depth; whereas getting to know your housemates and discovering Fuuka early on were fairly fleshed plotlines, later on it just seems to start throwing party members at you. I loved the way that in P4, every character had their own individual story; P3‘s more like “okay, I said what you wanted, S. Link level up!” I guess preference for either installment depends more on whether it’s atmosphere or individuals that motivate you as a player.


[Today’s Good Song: ‘Murder Dull Mind‘, Amen Dunes’]