Scene from the convergence war
Interview with Ken Kutaragi, the father of Sony’s PS. From KokoRo. The actual interview is in Japanese.
Yawn, part 2
What else am I going to write at 4:30 in the morning, except that Game Players are an Increasingly Diverse Group, Says Poll? Seniors are up, so are adult women. Draw your own conclusions.
Yawn August 29, 2003
While I’m in the office crunching on this amazing title I can’t tell you about yet, may I point you to a number of news items I scammed off Slashdot Games?
- Will the ballooning costs of developing next-next gen games crush small developers? Hardly a new topic for developers, but it remains interesting.
- The rise of video game fashion. Since, what, 2002? video games have been making a major impact on Western culture. Here’s more proof.
Troubles at Disney Animation August 28, 2003
I found this article about the end of 2D animation at Disney through BoingBoing.
I have a couple of reasons for posting this here instead of my more general interest blog, Jurieland:
- I think animation is closer to games than live action - everything is artificial, just like in games.
- It’s interesting to watch industries being revolutionized by information technology - even if, in this case, the revolution seems to be very bad.
- Disney is in the entertainment industry, and so are we. Their struggle to balance creativity and profitability is something professional, commercial game developers have to deal with every day.
Robot battlers! August 23, 2003
“Japanese engineer has a great passion and also love to a robot. ROBO-ONE, the combat sports of Robt, attracted very powerful robot. I’m rellay impressed by movements of various robots. They are never industrial but purely sophisticated for fight. This fact touches my heart.”
There are no clichés. Check it out here - it has videos of actual robot combat (shades of Manhunt?).
CNN/Money interviews John Carmack at QuakeCon
CNN/Money interviewed id Software wizard John Carmack at the recently completed QuakeCon. He talks about simplicity in games, projects after Doom 3, and space flight.
Memorable quote:
“To simplify a game, you have to not listen to your customers,” he said. “They know your product and really know what they want to add to it. … It’s always easy to convince someone that adding something is a good idea. Saying ‘less is more’ just doesn’t go over well.”
Shades of “Portrait of the Gamer as Enemy”.
[Slashdot]
Depressing Thought For The Day August 19, 2003
For as long as I have been interested in game design, I have also been interested in writing about game design, as a way to clarify my thoughts on to impress the ladies. This blog is just another way for me to try and express what I’ve learned. But writing a coherent mini-essay on a regular basis is hard - usually I crack and post about some funny picture or a game about breasts. So it was rather depressing for me to discover that that sneaky Mark Barrett has written an essay about universal design basics on his site. And as usual, it’s smart and well written.
Jamie Fristrom over at gamedevleague also finds this depressing, but for different reasons.
Update: Gamedevleague archives this far back don’t appear to work right now.
Games Convention 2003 in Leipzig
The Games Convention in Leipzig starts tomorrow. It looks like a pretty big deal, with cultural events, booth babes (with their own website sponsored by Eidos), parties, world premieres, awards ceremonies, professional gaming competitions, TV shows, raffles, etc. Everything a show needs to become another E3.
There’s even a developers conference, and many friends and (former) coworkers will be speaking there. Be sure to go and see Erik Simon, Monika Sange, Hannes Seifert, Helmut Hutterer, Harald Riegler, Thomas Friedmann and Teut Weidemann. Tell them Jurie sent you.
Manhunt August 18, 2003
Well, the news is out about Manhunt, the new game by Rockstar North. Even though I work for Rockstar, I hadn’t heard anything about what the game was about until the first previews came out a few weeks ago.
“The hero — or, at any rate, the playable character — is James Earl Cash, a prison inmate who discovers an unpleasant life after death. His lethal injection is faked, and he finds himself in a ruined city that is the property of the Director, a wealthy dilettante who amuses himself by staging violent games of survival. “Carcer City,” as it’s called, is populated with wrecked buildings, roving armed gangs, and closed-circuit cameras, all of them feeding into the Director’s control room. It’s Mr. Cash’s goal to escape the city without dying for the Director’s vicarious entertainment.”
Manhunt, if you look at it from a certain perspective (the perspective often used on other games), is just another MGS clone. But there is a lot of excitement about it: from the press, from gamers, from developers, even from me. Partially, that seems to be caused by Rockstar’s very tight marketing strategy: all they showed at E3 was a big banner for Max Payne 2, and that was it. All the rest was shown behind closed doors or not at all.
But I think it’s also caused by the the narrative context, the setting and storyline. It’s the old Most Dangerous Game trope, but in a modern, and quite grim world. Apart from the fact that it shows Rockstar’s publishing strategy of only choosing realistic (compared to, say, Warcraft) and mature settings, think of how unusual this is: in an industry where writers and stories are not yet universally recognized as being a valuable addition to a game development team - although I would argue that many of the more successful companies do recognize this - here’s a game that gets its unique edge mainly from its narrative context. The gameplay and the setting are very closely intertwined (as they should be), and if you look at the artwork and read the descriptions, you will notice that the art direction and, apparently, the sound all combine to create one coherent and consistent experience. A grim, violent experience, but nevertheless.
(On a different note: if you thought a rich director making violent entertainment for his own purposes was unrealistic, how about Mel Gibson’s new movie?)
