Book Review: Permanent Death

Clint pointed me a while back to Permanent Death, a free e-book/machinima/something from Ben Abraham narrating his experience in trying to play Far Car 2 through on a single life. In the author's words it is:

391 pages long and features hundreds of full colour screenshots from Far Cry 2, one of the most beautiful games of recent times. It chronicles my progress from the beginning of the game all the way to the end of my single in-game life some 20 play hours later. Permanent Death represents a large portion of a year of my life, and an obsession with a game that captured my imagination in a way that I struggle to articulate.

Clint's post on the experiment and book is also worth reading.

I found parts of it to be as monotonous as many games are (I ran into some guys. I hid behind cover and sniped them. then I scavenged their stuff. repeat). However, the parts of the game that were more moving to Ben are interesting, as are his thoughts about the game's rules and mechanics, his attempts to infer the designers intent at times, and his thoughts on things like switching off the background music.

Those and Clint's foreward make it worth reading. It's free, and it won't take you long, so what's keeping you?

Permanent Death

Edge's "hot 100" list

Edge published their list of the 100 most important people in game development. While it was nice to see some friends make the list, there were also some weird entries and folks missing that should have made the list. Anyhow, congrats to Robin, Trent, John, Clint and everyone else on the list.

...and speaking of games as art

...Clint casually mentions that Ubidays (Ubi's big press rollout of the year's coming catalog) is being held at the Louvre.

Rented venue or not, I think that says something, no?

Teaching the Teachers

In response to the Canadian Teacher's Federation call for a ban on the release of Rockstar's 'Bully: Scholarship Edition', Clint Hocking has issued a pretty compelling challenge. He's offering to buy Emily Noble, the head of the Teacher's Association, an Xbox360 or Wii system, along with a copy of the game, if she commits to entering a critical discussion of the games merits rather than call for it's ban out of ignorance..

Let's give this enough linkage that Ms Noble and her collegues will have to accept the challenge!

Passed on Pax (again)

Another Pax goes by, and I didn't make it down again. Shame on me! It's in my back yard, too.

Anyhow, while I didn't make it, I sure am glad for the folks it brings to town. Drinks with folks a couple nights ago, and then today I got a note that Clint was in town to demo his game at Pax, so I hooked up with him and Chris Butcher for drinks and more interesting conversation.

Talking big-budget games certainly is a different conversation from the indie-related conversation of the other night. I can't really go into what was discussed, but it's just interesting how many different "spheres of perspective" there can be in this industry of ours.

Anyhow, on Pax, next year I'll attend! Promise!

The Internets are on FIRE!

Man, there's a lot of stuff going on, and I don't have time to blog it all with the detail I'd like.



Here's a smattering of this week's interesting tidbits, and a quick thought or two on each. More when there's time... work's got me pretty busy right now.

• EA gets caught with their hand in the cookie jar, or rather in the Wikipedia, for makin' a little revisionist history. Jeez guys, I get why some clueless government lackey does this, but a tech company? Don't know know you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube? Also, I just don't get why people think their company's wikipedia entry is what gives tehm their rep. Your company gets it's rep from it's behavior, and thus ya just screwed the pooch a little more, didn't ya?


• Clint Hocking takes PC Gamer's Vederman opening salvo on Far Cry 2 ("will it be art? Will it have the power to affect you emotionally on anything other than a surface level? Probably not.") as a personal throwing down of the gauntlet. One thing about that Clint, he does love his wicked problems (see also here). Go Clint Go! We're rooting for ya!


• Bioshock is getting crazy good reviews. While I'm glad for the developer and for what it's doing for our platforms, I more depressed about it overall, and have a lengthier post I'd like to write about "local maxima and the game industry", but that's for another day.


• Not only is Facebook going to eat the social networking universe, it's also turning out to be a pretty compelling game platform as well - especially for play-by-mail type scenarios. No wonder people say it's a black hole.


• Related to the above, I think it's only a matter of time before Scrabulous (I've been playing the facebook app version) gets sued and shut down. Oh well, enjoy while you can!


• Parks Associates reports that gaming is the most popular activity on the web - more than blogging/reading/socialnetworking/youtubin', etc, etc. (And no, this doesn't contradit my previous post - the games will just move onto facebook - it's the platform, silly).


• EA says user created content is the next big thing in games. I agree. This is another subject I need to do a longer post on, but I have come around 100% on the UGC thing. I will say a couple quick things: (1) I don't think it's going to happen in the way EA anticipates - or likes, (2) there's going to be a TON of interesting discussion on user and creator IP rights, ownership, copyright protection, etc, in the coming years (like I said at the conclusion of my MIGS talk last year - Customer Ownership is going to come by granting customers ownership. Also relevant is this 2004(!) Clay Shirky quote: "So forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast."

That's all for now. More once I catch my breath.

Convergence Shmonvergence!

Clint has a his feathers ruffled over Hollywood directory Michael Bay's forray into games.

At first glance it's the standard "those hollywood guys wouldn't know a good game if it hit them!" rant, but it's worth reading, as he hits on some of the key issues in the hollywood and games convergence debate:

Do they think that 10 years from now I won't be sure whether I just watched a movie or played a game? Again, I have to make some assumptions about what they mean to have this kind of crap make any sense at all... I can only assume they mean 'the production methodologies and business models are increasingly similar and it is becoming more and more practical to look at doing feature film development and game development simultaneously as part of a multi-media production that increases efficiency'. In other words, they mean convergence in the purest business sense.

Anyhow, worth a read. I agree with him a hundred percent.

On 300 and convergence...

Clint has a great post about the movie 300, and what it exemplifies (and doesn't) in terms of the 'convergence' between film and game media. Great read.

GDC 2007: Sessions I attended

As I stated earlier, I only attended a small number of sessions. In ranked order, they were:

1. Clint Hocking's presentation on (self) Exploration in Games.

Clint's own post-mortem on the session, along with the slides and accompanying paper, can be found here. (Note that the talk was written as a paper first, like I did here, and like he, I and some others discussed here).

Clint is the awesome. At some point I decided that if I'm going to a conference where he's speaking, I block that time to attend and schedule around that. The guy takes some hard topic ideas, dives after them, and does some serious work on both the research and the resulting presentation. Clint is my presentation hero :-). Go read the paper, or get the short version in the gamasutra coverage here. (or buy the Mp3 version here, if reading is more painful to you than parting with $8 :-)

2. How Casual Games Will Kill the Console (and Why That's a Good Thing)

John Welch, President of Playfirst, gave a really good session that I'm surprised wasn't blogged more widely. John subscribes to the same Geoffrey Moore school of thought that I do, and he led the audience through a well thought-out argument about how open markets win, and how games will be no exception. Plenty of good analogies from other mediums & markets, and a good presentation style to boot. I beleive his pitch was right on the money, and is the long-term light at the end of the tunnel that Greg Costikyan presented during the rant session. Speaking of which:

3. Burning Mad: Game Publishers Rant

The rant session is always entertaining, enlightening, and provocative. This year's was a little more mixed, which is why this falls midpoint on my list. Some rants fell flat, while others were well prepared and thought through. Details on the sessions here. My short comments on each:

• Great: Chris Hecker's Anti-Wii rant. Already blogged in detail around the web. I agree, and he's my hero for having stones to get up and say it, even if he regrets the way in which it was taken.
• Great: Nicole Bradford's "excite the young'uns using games" rant. It was a strong message, well written, and well rehearsed. A lot of similarities (and no, I am not refering to race nor gender similarities) to Majora Carter's TED speech I blogged about a while back. Perhaps that's the style/effect she was aiming for? The only thing making me rate this one second is that it was perhaps a bit TOO rehearsed for the GDC rant session. It's supposed to come off as a rant; a little rough around the edges. That commentary aside, she was very good.
• Good: Greg Costikyan's "wolf in digital distribution clothing" aka "the consoles will be our new overlords" rant. Greg is always a little understated in presentation style, but I beleive his to be the most insightful of all the rants. I beleive his argument is absolutely on the money and one that developers/publishers should keep in mind. And yeah, I say that despite his bagging on Arcade, and despite his misnaming Arcade 'Xbox Live Arena'.
• Good: Richard Hilleman's Leadership rant. Spot on topic, well delivered, if a little understated for the flavor of gdc rant.
• Good: Lee Jacobson's "some devs pull some funky sh*t" rant. A good look at walking in the other man's shoe that hopefully let devs understand why the evil publisher sometimes needs to be as evil as he is :-)
• Poor: Jason Della Rocca's "I read some books this year" rant. Uh, sorry J, you're a friend, but that was a pretty shoddy rant. (a) it was more or less a repeat of Seamus' rant from last year, and (b) it was far less specific. It also made a pretty big assumption: That the rest of the industry doesn't already dabble in other media by reading books, viewing movies, etc. I don't know what your IGDA polls are telling you, but many of the devs I hang with are the biggest renaissance men & women I know, reading far more, and far more varied fare, than most folk I know outside the industry. Gotta ding you for this one buddy, sorry.
• Poor: Alex St John's yet-another-vista-rant. I've addressed this in the IGDA Casual Games Sig Q&A, but I think he's overstating the issue, and came off looking that way. No real call to action anyway, though I'm sure he's pitching his company's product as a solution in other sessions/meetings. Whatever.

4. Innovation in Indie Games

An interesting and entertaining panel during the Indie games track. I commented to Jon Blow after the session that he came off as the time-tempered old veteran of the panel, whereas just a few years ago it seems he would very much have filled the raging, stand by your principles and damn-the-torpedos role that this year was filled by Jonathan Mak (creator of the brilliant Everyday Shooter). A summary of the session can be found here.

5. Jeff Minter 'keynote' from Indie Games Summit

Hrm. Jeff's a pretty poor speaker, didn't have a well thought out message to give people (other than perhaps "do your own thing") and labored through a bunch of demos of old games saying "I didn't want this to be a clone of X", and then would show us a clone of X where some element had been replaced by a bunch of wildlife. Sorry dude, but replacing a space ship with a camel doesn't exactly make it innovative. To boot, he was rude during Q&A by ignoring audience member questions while playing his own games on screen.

There were a couple highlights: (1) Space Giraffe does look to be an LSD-like trippy game. (2) I like than an equally, ahem, alternate substance afficionado got up to ask a question along the lines of "so, this is a game where I can take alternate substances and trip out while I play?" and he answered "alternate substances are optional, but yeah". Kindred spirits. (3) Clever wordplay when he said his small indie games that are visual-rich but not aimed at the commercial big time were "about electronic art, not Electronic Arts".

6. Sony PS3 keynote

This has been covered to death elsewhere, and I'm not listing it last because I'm a microsoft guy. I just wasn't wowed. I have two things to say:

I was asked *a lot* what I thought about PS3 'Home' while at GDC. Here's my opinion: It looked like the software embodiment of a knee-jerk reaction. It was a feature list, implemented, and wrapped into a demo. It's basically like someone said "Go do Xbox Live, Mii's, Habbo Hotel, and some of the better bits of Second Life". They concatenated those feature lists and then built it. Only then did it seem they said "what might we then do with it?". Rather than starting with "what do we want people to be able to do?". Many of the demos were about technically impressive things as a result. Few were 'omygosh gotta have!'. Mostly, I saw things that would be HARDER to do/use as a result of having been done prettier or in 3D.

On the other hand, LittleBigWorld looks *really* good. I really would like to have a go at playing it.