Ka-Lee-For-Ny-Ay

It’s official.

After being given the go ahead by the boys at GameAxis I have gone and filed my registration for the Electronic Entertainment Expo, better known as E3, the big Los Angeles industry show at which all the game developers show of their wares to the shameless whores–read game journalists–who salivate over the glitzy new games and then scurry back to the sunless cubicles to eat more pizza and rhapsodize about the fact that they just saw and played games that the rest of the public won’t be able to touch for any where from 3 months to three years.

I have been wanting to go to one of these things for, like, EVER.

I guess sometimes being a geek does have its fringe benefits.

And in other news, tomorrow I have to talk to a bunch of teenagers about the games industry. More on that after the fact…

Australia Just Says “No”

To videogames about graffiti.

I’m still amazed that this even happened. Usually it’s countries like Oz, America and Canada that lead the pack with an easy-going, tolerant, fairly liberal attitude, while Singapore acts like a prudish stick in the mud.

This time around, Singapore is allowing a game, called Mark Ecko’s Getting Up to pass its censorship standards and enter stores, while Oz has given the game an adult rating, effectively–if not technically–banning it from the country, since while adult rated games are legal, stores as a matter of policy don’t sell them. I’m still trying to figure out what made a country as progressive as Oz suddenly decide that this game was too corrupting an influence. Meanwhile, Singapore, which has been trying to promote creativity anyway it can–including holding graffiti contests and exhibits–can’t shy away from legitimizing the game, but ironically, the game itself is about toppling government, which falls under the very loose censorship laws here and could potentially make it proscribed material, in the same way that Naked Lunch was illegal here for many years.

Man, things are getting all topsy turvy. Singapore more liberal than Australia, I never in a million years would have imagined it…

It’s Away

Too much time spent today writing the BioWare submission and then hurriedly checking it over before mailing it off. I’m pretty sure I missed quite a few typos and errors but oh well, at least the thing got sent off on time. Barely.

On the other hand, I also watched Dragons: Fantasy Made Real which was, more or less, Walking With Dragons, and was uniformly excellent when they were doing their Walking With natural history part, and uniformly sucky when they did their C.S.I. Dragon bit with a fictional scientist performing an autopsy on a preserved Dragon carcass.

I’ve read comments from some people that the documentary style of this program (which plays it straight. Sort of.) could fool children and adults into thinking the program is legit and dragons really are real. Having read those comments, I can only say that either they have an extremely dim view of the intellect of television audiences today, or else I’ve seriously overestimated how smart people are capable of being these days…

The Day Of Mixed Anxieties

The distress however, belongs almost entirely to the Wife, not me.

For the most part, I thought my day was going to be pretty run of the mill. I was just going to work on the Bioware submission a bit more, then go off to a little seminar about Copyright and Intellectual Property Law as it pertains to Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games, and then go home and work a bit more. It sort of went half that way, anyhow.

In the morning, I got a little bit of work done, and then the Wife enacted her new decision to move her computer from end of the room to the other. This seemed like a relatively straightforward proposition until she hooked everything up and got it running, at which point, the router that controlled our mutual access to the Internet, promptly refused to work. No matter what she did, Internet access was dead. Time was counting down and she had another appointment to get to–she wanted to bring a Mac she had recently acquired over to her Uncle’s to trade it in for a Mac Powerbook–and so I went with her to dutifully lug said Mac around.

Then I went over to the lecture, which was not, I state now, my idea, but the assignment from the editors at GameAxis.

It was kind of interesting in that most of the people there were either lawyers or people with the Economic Development Board, or the Infocomm Authority, and not a single one of them had the faintest clue of what was happening in the realm of MMOs, or just how crazy the legal wrangling is getting there. It’s the damn Wild West frontier all over again, with all kinds of cases going to court that have no precedents, and what amazed me was that while they obviously knew their law very well, they were almost dumbfounded with amazement to hear about things like the infamous “Jedi for sale” fiasco that plagued Star Wars Galaxies, or the millions of US dollars transacted on E-Bay for virtual goods, or the hands off approach game developers have taken to Seconed Life.

All of these things, I might add, had to be brought up by ME, the most unlikely person in the entire room, since everyone was wearing business shirts, shoes and jackets, and I was sitting there with my birkenstocks, “Lone Wolf” T-shirt, and a Nintendo DS with Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories to pass the time. I think I short circuited a few brains when I talked about the Jedi thing, since even the speaker hadn’t known about that.

Towards the end, there were case studies that were given which resulted in the entire room being broken up into four discussion groups to debate the merits and ramifications of each case. They were supposed to be hypothetical, but I recognized one of them as a thinly disguised scenario of what happened between NCSoft, creators of the Superhero MMO City of Heroes and Marvel when Marvel sued NCSoft because the game players were infringing on Marvel copyright by creating their own version of Spiderman and Wolverine within the game. I told my group, “This is the NCSoft/Marvel case,” and when I explained it to them, the speaker ended up asking me to explain the entire case and its unsatisfying real world result (An out of court settlement, thus avoiding the burden of having to establish the first legal precedent).

After I spilled the beans on it, I think I got a whole lotta’ credibility from the people in the room for A) Not speaking with a Singaporean accent, and B) making it abundantly clear that I knew exactly what I was talking about. A couple of people even asked me what company I was with, and when I said “GameAxis” they wanted to know which games they made, which confused me until they explained that from the way I discussed the industry, they thought I was a developer. And I got a bunch of people asking me for my card, to which I replied, “I’m just a cog in the machine, man, don’t look at me, I’m only the writer, you wanna’ talk about this stuff, talk to my editors, they’re the brains, I just do what they tell me.” The scariest one was when the lawyer in my group asked me if it would be all right to occasionally contact me for consultation with her clients on the dynamics of the game industry which flipped me out, and I again referred her to the office. This is Not My Scene…

After that, I found out that the Wife was over at the Geek Mall, Funan Center, having spent the last few hours getting a tech-head at the shop to look over the router and finally say, “Yup, it’s broken. That’ll be $80, please.”

In the end, we didn’t get out of Funan until sometime close to 9:00 pm, because she went to another place, asked them to help get the router/internet situation fixed, and they reccomended a new router/modem combination. The Wife at this point was in the “Fine, I’ll pay whatever you want, just please, please, PLEASE make this problem go away…” and so he obliged her by offering the configure the new doohickey to work using my laptop (She’d brought it with her to get a new battery for it) and promptly spent a couple of hours being unable to do so. At which point he advised, “Maybe you’d better not buy this, since I can’t actually get it to work…”

So, the end result was an incredibly frustrated Wife (who has sanctioned the purchase of a pack of cigarettes for HER stress) and only one computer at a time allowed access to the internet.

Right. Off to bash more demons in Digital Devil Saga 2, then go to bed. Hopefully tomorrow will be a little calmer and I’ll actually be able to get more work done on the Bioware submission and start writing up my article on the Intellectual Property seminar, carefully leaving out all the stuff about being asked for my business card and offers to be a consultant.

Man. TOO freaky…

A Nibble

I strolled into the office today to play more games, and upon checking my e-mail, I noticed I got one from someone who was not spamming me. I didn’t recognize the name of the sender, but the subject heading caught my attention, reading “Hello from BioWare.”

For anyone that doesn’t follow either the games industry or my own incredibly boring life, BioWare is a game company that specializes in role playing games for the PC and game consoles. They make some pretty good games, and I’ve played and enjoyed a few of them over the years. They also happen to be based in my hometown, Edmonton. A few weeks ago, the Wife pointed out that they had an ad on their website saying that they were looking for a writer. I figured it was one of those “Aw hell, I’ve got nothing better to do,” type scenarios and looked it over for their submission requirements, found that I did not have the Neverwinter Nights toolset they asked the submissions to be formatted with, and so promptly sent them an alternative in film script format.

That, I figured, would be the end of that, and if anyone ever asked me how come I never tried to work in the games industry when I love video games so much, I’d be able to tell them I tried and promptly got shot down.

Except that I haven’t been. Not right away, anyhow.

Much to my surprise, the e-mail I got was asking me if I’d be interested in undergoing a “test.” After reading my submission, BioWare is kind of interested, and they want to know if I’m game for an evaluation of my non-linear dialogue and plotting skills. They say the test takes about 2-3 days for most candidates to finish.

I’m kind of caught off guard by this since I was expecting it to go nowhere, and honestly, I’m still not sure I’m all that hot on going back to Edmonton if this thing were to get that far. But it would be an opportunity to actually write for games, something I’ve been bitching about for years about how I’d do this or that compared to what other writers have done with their games, I’m really not sure how to take all this.

Oh well, I guess I’d better stop thinking about what ifs and just concentrate on whatever it is they give me and see how I do for this little test.

At the very least, I’m glad they actually read it. For a while there I was thinking that they wouldn’t even give it a glance because it wasn’t in their preferred format, but I guess they actually do read all submissions after all…

And yeah, I know it’s Valentine’s Day, but the Wife and I are incredibly uncool, so we didn’t have dinner at a restaurant capped off with a night at some hotel the way the other 3.4 million people on the island are…

It’s Away

Or very nearly

The writing of an alternate submission piece (Since I didn’t have a Neverwinter Nights editor lying around) went by remarkably quickly, and was actually kind of an interesting and fun exercise, since it gave me the chance to hint at a much bigger story, though I have no clue exactly what that story is. So I’ve updated my resume, the Wife has gone over the sample for typos that I usually miss, and I’ve printed and filled out their product submission form, which more or less makes it impossible to sue them if you mention an Elf in your sample and a game comes along a year later with an Elf in it.

Once the submission has been e-mailed, I’ll have to fax off that product submission form as well, since they want that dated and signed. But it got me to thinking, and it reminded me of an article put out not too recently by GameAxis itself, in which a professional game writer was interviewed. I’m including a link here because the website has a tendency to push down the more “professional/academic” side of things way at the bottom where it’s easy to miss.

One of the things I’m interested in is the relationship between writers and the development industry. I think there’s a horrible amount of interference on both sides, though I also think that this is slowly changing. For the longest time, because games were regarded as “toys” even by the developers themselves, the use of a professional writer was a novelty at best, a complete redundancy at worst. Thankfully, this has been undergoing a major revision in perception as the the sophistication of both the games and the gamers increases, and now characterization, plotting, pacing and plausibility are all just as important considerations in interactive entertainment as in the non-interactive versions. Perhaps moreso since developers want to keep players “sucked in” and cookie cutter characters and story can demolish an immersive virtual experience in a heartbeat, no matter how good the textures look.

On the other side of things, I think writers though, have to understand that writing for games–while new–is not “slumming it.” In the same way that many writers, particularly the “literary” types and more “serious” writers didn’t take comic books seriously until the aftermath of Miller, Moore and Gaiman, thinking that any moron could write a comic book, so too do games still suffer from this same stigma. A lot of writers tend to not take the craft seriously when it comes to games, somehow feeling that the audience is less sophisticated and not ready–or willing–to be exposed to “the good stuff.” Nothing could be further from the truth. However, the problem lies in the approach to writing for games, and in the application of technology.

When you write for a game, you cannot think of it as a script, or novel. This isn’t a set, fixed entity that is finished once the last word is typed in. It is like going into a debate, or conversation, or an argument. You have a vague idea of what it is the opponent (Or player) is going to say or do, and you must be prepared to respond appropriately, though not in a fixed order. There is a flexibility to conversations and argument, where the content is identical, it is simply the order and method of presentation that can vary from person and the same is true for writing and narrative in games.

In other words, a good game is like a good conversation. It carries the illusion of flow, of moving to a destination that is under the control of the speakers, although discovery is still possible within the confines of the exchange.

Or at least, that’s what I think, anyway…

Oh well, it’s all a moot point. Seriously, the odds of getting a response on this application are astonishingly low, and I’m still not entirely sure I’m that crazy about a job that will take me back to Edmonton, though it’s not really going to be a concern. But at the very least, if anyone now asks me why I never tried for a job like this, I can now honestly say, “I tried, they just turned me down.”

So I can now scratch this off my list.

Oh The Irony…

So it turns out that at the moment, Bioware is hiring again.

For those of you that don’t know, Bioware is a video game developer. They specialize mostly in role playing games that either run directly off of, or are heavily inspired by, the table-top, pen/paper/dice role playing game known as Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, or AD & D, for short. In recent years, they’ve been recognized for cranking out such RPGs as Planescape Torment (Which was excellent for it’s time, by the way) and, much more recently, the Knights of the Old Republic series. They’re looking for a writer, particulary one that is good with dialogue.

I’m kind of torn about this whole thing, because despite the fact that most people would say this is Destiny and I am supposed to have this job, the part that really kills me is where Bioware is located.

It’s in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. My hometown.

So it strikes me as perverse that on the off chance I were to apply for this job and actually get it, it would actually mean going back to my old city, rather than breaking off for parts unknown like Vancouver as is currently the plan. Still, the job itself would be a ton of fun, and while I have no desire to produce games, I sure wouldn’t mind working on one.

Oh well, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Time to finish my writing sample…

Xbox 360 & Nausea

It’s hard to decide whether to blame it on the food or the hype.

This morning I went down with the rest of the GameAxis crew to see the big presentation to the press by Microsoft for the Xbox 360, which has already launched in North America and will launch in South East Asia by March, a fact that is conspicuously in total opposition to early Microsoft announcements of a simultaneous global release. But then it’s easy to see why they scrapped that idea when there are so few 360′s to go around that people that have pre-ordered it may still not get their consoles in America until January. So much for supply and demand…

The presentation was pretty much what you’d expect; slick, full of hype, with a lot of free food.

I have to admit, I was slightly underwhelmed by the whole experience. I know it’s because the games are first generation, but the games present at the press conference for play (Perfect Dark Zero, Project Gotham Racing and Kameo: Elements of Power) had the very slick, polished look of games that pushed an Xbox to the max. The true power of the multiple 3.2 GHz processors was nowhere to be seen in the demos.

I also got into a mild disagreement with the marketing guy, but that’s to be expected if you disagree at all. It was pointed out by my fellow GameAxis cohorts that I was indeed the Resident Skeptic of the group and have grave doubts about the system. When I was asked why, one of my concerns (There are many, but this is the first that came to mind) was the fact that Xbox 360 is still using DVD as its storage medium as opposed to going for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, both of which have much larger storage capacities and both of which are in contest to see who inherits the standard from DVD (Last I checked, Blu-Ray was winning). When I expressed my concern that sticking with DVD was a rather backwards decision, I was told, “Hey, who buys an Xbox to watch movies?”

Which kind of side-stepped the issue entirely and I had to explain my ACTUAL concern was one of simple math. Data storage space. The new consoles have greater processing power, meaning that they can render larger environments, more detailed characters and more complex cut-scenes. Up the polygon count, up the number of environmental effects and up the amount of voice-over work you’re going to require and it figures–quite simply, I thought–that you would need MORE storage for all that increased data.

I ended up having to explain then, that my worry was that if the PS3 were, for example, to come out with the lastest installement of Grand Theft Auto, with locales much larger by several orders of magnitude, more cutscenes, far more detailed characters, vehicles and buildings, etc… and it were to just barely fit on a Blu-Ray disc (Which is what the PS3 is using) then how the hell were they going to squeeze that data onto a DVD? Developers have already expressed concerns about this themselves, speculating that it means games will have to be broken up into multiple DVDs, or, more depressingly, they’ll simply have to cut down on “game assets” in order to get it all to fit.

When he finally got it, he said, “You think the 360 can’t do that?”

I replied, “It’s just physics.”

Then he said something about how Microsoft hasn’t revealed all the tricks up its sleeve.

I was sorely tempted to say, “So you’re saying you’ve lied to the public about the capabilities of your machine,” but after a moment of thought, went with the more diplomatic, “But the DVD player is built in, it’s part of your system specs, the only way you can provide more storage like that is as an add on peripheral.”

“If there’s a demand for it, Microsoft will meet that demand.”

At this point, it was a foregone conclusion that the guy didn’t really understand how the game industry works. Past consumer history has shown that the market generally HATES add ons to their consoles. Sega bombed with the Sega-CD and Sega 32-X. Microsoft itself learned this lesson from their competitor SONY, when Sony tried to sell an add on hard drive and the majority of consumers just didn’t go for it. Microsoft capitalized on that by pointing out their own hard drive was built into the console. Of course, with the new console, in order to keep costs down, they’ve removed the hard drive ANYWAY, and are selling it as… you guessed it, an additional add on.

To think that you can simply provide a new storage format, then go to your developers and say, “Okay, we’ve got an additional Blu-Ray drive for our Xbox 360, so, uh… even though we don’t know how many people will actually buy it, please try to support that format in addition to our current DVD delivery system” is naive in the extreme.

I finally gave up at that point and said, “But to be fair, it’s all about the games,” which we both agreed on, and I left it at that. Man, I wish people who tried to market games actually knew something about the games industry. Street credibility is still pretty important in the gamer community.

After that, I hung out with my friend James, who had been called up by a friend of his that was also attending the Xbpx 360 launch. We ate, and I promptly got food poisoning.

At least I think it was food poisoning. All I know is that I developed a steadily increasing case of nausea and about 15 minutes after I got home, promptly threw up and was laid out feeling wasted on the bed with a very sore throat from all the vomiting.

Too much information, but oh well… Back to Dragon Quest VIII…

That Thing On Battlestar Galactica

If you’re a journalist, you’ll really wish we had this thing.

For anyone that remembers the original Battlestar Galactica series in the 70′s, there were occasions when Commander Adama would make log entries. He would speak into a microphone and his words would be instantly transcribed on the screen in front of him.

Man, I really wish I had something like that now.

It’s kind of a catch 22, really. You want a good interview, so you let the guy you’re interviewing ramble to his heart’s content. However you pay for it later when it comes time to transcribe the interview.

I had two interviews yesterday with two fairly articulate nerds. Robert Krakoff and Jay Wilson, both in the gaming industry. As a result, their questions are long, detailed and take up a lot of tape space on the ol’ microcassette recorder. Until Adama’s gizmo gets invented, the only safe way to get this stuff out is to go through the laborious process of play back, listen, type out, rewind, repeat.

It is incredibly annoying.

Still the answers are good, so it’s worth it.

Up Waaaaaaaay Too Late

The Wife is asleep, as she should be, but then it’s after four in the morning.

Things I managed to do today:

Everything I set out to do.

I got my passport stamped, I’m good for two more weeks. Now I just have to get that medical check up.

I went down to the WCG and had a surprisingly good time. Who have thought listening to a couple of nerds talking about another couple of nerds playing against each other in Starcraft Broodwar could actually get exciting?

I also interviewed Robert Krakow the president of Razer (Took a while, his schedule was haywire) as well as Jay Wilson of Relic (Which also took a while for similar reasons) and then I helped the Wife out with more last minute writing related stuff for her exhibition and that lasted until two am, and THEN I went home and finally got around to writing a GameAxis article based on the day’s events, as well as a script that I needed to tweak for Nanoboy.

A full day. I am beat.

And now if you will excuse me, it’s to bed with me…