Newton’s Initative
The hardest part of anything is getting started. Then once that thing is started, it takes more energy to stop than to keep it rolling.
All right, I’m working, I’m working…
Busy busy busy
So for the last two months I’ve been under a boulder, localizing a sort of insane Russian RPG. It’s taking way longer than it should, for a bunch of reasons (most of them out of my hands, for once!), and it’s kind of driving me batty. As if that’s not enough, last week I had GDC to contend with! So that put back the work another week, while I saddled up the BART and began to regularly drink coffee for the first time in my life, just to keep myself moving.
Most of the fruits of my labor, for what they’re worth, are now up. Pay especial attention to the content of the last one. (That’s the animation panel.) There’s a real howler coming up; I’ll amend this post when it goes live.
- Sawyer, Smith On Serious Gaming For Life (A half-step toward a workable theory, for once.)
- Video Games To Build And Retain A TV Audience (How is this different from advergames?)
- The News Game: Using Neverwinter Nights To Teach Journalism (A hack for hacks!)
- GameLab’s Zimmerman Says Casual Games are Dead (Sort Of) (It’s true; someone really needs to rethink this market.)
- Filling the Void Between Casual And Mainstream Games (Like… Nintendo?)
- The Media Myth Of The Casual Gamer (Yeah, pretty much.)
- Baer, Alcorn Talk ‘Brown Box’ Beginnings, Industry Birth (Baer is getting a little senile, I’m afraid.)
- Emotiv Knows What You’re Thinking (Control videogames WITH YOUR MIND!)
- Nintendo Reveals Wii Pay-For-Online Play, WiiWare Compression (Now with more throat warblers. What may not be clear is just how clueless Nintendo is about the whole concept of The Internet.)
- The Future of Animation is Games (No, Really!) (Oy. Just let the quotes do their work.)
- (NEW!) Peter Molyneux’s Top 10 GDC Proclamations(This was edited to be a little less irreverent.)
There was also a session on using games as tools for meditation, that I just didn’t have the time to write up. I’ll go into more detail if anyone is really curious. I thought there was some neat stuff in there, even if three-quarters of the session was an infomercial for a new agey revival of early ’90s-style multimedia starring Deepak Chopra & Company.
EDIT: I just noticed that someone switched around a few things in the animation article, such that it’s not completely accurate. (I also notice a lot of grammatial errors; this is what happens on an instananeous deadline.) Early on, the hour-long program they were discussing was literally just all the cutscenes from one game or another, edited together. They example they used was Prince of Persia: The Two Whatevers. The third game, you know, that’s got both the good and the evil Prince in it. (Or the sixth game, if you include the originals, plus that weird 3D thing for the Dreamcast.) Hi ho!
EDIT 2: All fixed! Well. As far as information goes. It could still use a copy edit.
EDIT 3: See above!
Holy Moley.
From what I can tell, that ridiculous NextGen column of mine yesterday got the most hits of anything on the site. The piece with the second-most hits seems to be the J.Allard interview, where he drones on the thought process that led to the two variations of the Xbox 360 hardware. Not a bad topic; the kind of thing you’d expect on the top of the heap.
In comparison, my column got… let’s check again…Â something like every news piece on the site combined, times three.
So. Maybe that explains something?
Journalism: The Videogame / Chapter 2 – Role Playing
by [name redacted]
Videogames are a form of human expression. You can call it art, if you like. You can deny that and call it entertainment. “Art” is merely what happens when the listener starts to apply that entertainment to his own life.
What amazes me is that, as things are now, so few do seem to be listening. We demand and we superficially memorize and cover, yet we’re not willing to put the effort in and meet the games or the people behind them halfway. When we review, we review games as product. As a channel for discussion, we’ve become a weird mix of free PR and advertising, and the latest issue of consumer reports.
Our message is that videogames are objects. The people behind them are their manufacturers, both in a literal and a figurative sense. Our major challenge, then, is to make the leap from understanding videogames as things to viewing them as ideas.
Diction of Dissonance
I haven’t been around much (in the sense that I have, but just haven’t been communicative), but to make up for that I’ve actually sort of been doing things! Kind of! Maybe! I guess!
Beyond the things which are actually interesting: this will all look pretty familiar to nearly anyone reading me today, but that article of mine is up on Insert Credit. It was supposed to be a review, except that it took so long to scrunge together that it has transformed into a “feature”.
Me? I don’t like it. Cluttered, disjointed. The review, that is. Next time I’ll be working with fresh ideas, so it should go a bit more smoothly. And Brandon says the response has been good, whatever that means, so there’s room for even more out of whence this particular article didn’t come!
Also not sure why he linked the site, twice.
So. Um. E3? Tim made sure that it’s clear that he’s going. Am I going? I have the option, right in front of me. I won’t have to pay for a hotel, in theory. I just have to figure out how to get there.
Why haven’t I gotten my macaroni and cheese, yet? Tell me. I must know.
P.S.:
Is it just me or does Dmitri Dmitrievich Shostakovich rock the socks off the… uh, guards of Fort Knox? It’s all in the timing.