Another Sunday, another compilation of diverse thoughtful matters to digest as you’re digesting sunday lunch. Not that I’m having sunday lunch. I’m having the chili I made last night. Which… yeah, the problem is we can get off topic, so best to rush through these thinky-things before I start trying to work out whether a band can actually sound as good as they look or something else irrelevant.
- Firstly, Internet Superstar (apparently) Shawn Elliot of 1UP chats in a postmortemly fashion with Valve about Orange Box. Mentioned mainly because Walker’s lunacy gets namechecked.
- Over at Gamasutra, Russell Carroll of Reflexive talks about the piracy rate in the casual space. 92% of copies of Ricochet Infinity were pirated. Blimey. However, where it gets even more interesting is their analysis of the effects of DRM. Effectively, they have to annihilate 1000 pirate copies to net a single Sale. Blimey again.
- Over at Gamers With Jobs, Colleen Hannon talks about her return to PC Gaming. ONE OF US. ONE OF US. Meanwhile, Eurogamer’s Rob Fahey on Why PCs Aren’t Dead… they’re just CHANGING. Which makes me think of Caterpillars transmuting into mini-gun wielding butterflies, so I like that.
- Columns by game designers! Cliff Harris of Positech (Democracy, Kudos, RPS Comments Threads) writes about the curse of genre. Meanwhile, I notice Next Gen are reprinting Edge’s Randy Smith (Return to the Haunted Cathedral, The Cradle, other stuff) columns. This one’s about the A-word.. You know the one – rhymes with smart.
- Imperial Creed mailed me a while back, asking if I could get hold of a PDF copy of my The Girl Who Wanted To be God piece on AI-hottie Shodan for a piece for his English masters. I – er – never got around to it, but he did the piece anyway. It’s called How “Thinking With Portals Changes Everything: Half-Life 2, Portal, and Feminist Literary Theory in Video Games”.
- Seriously – Ipso Facto look like this. Their austere Garage-psych is neat enough, but doesn’t stand a chance.
Failed.
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I wish the casual game piracy article was clearer on how its statistics were derived. I’m not unwilling to believe 92% as a number particularly, but the article is rather short and confusing on the detail of precisely how they came to that number.
The other part of the reasoning based on sales figures also strikes me as slightly specious as well. How can they be sure that the associated fluctuations in sales were due to the current quality of their DRM?
Didn’t Randy Smith also design Fort Frolic in BioShock? Or did I read that on Wikipedia without fact checking it as I should do with just about anything I read on Wikipedia?
Shawn Elliot writes for Games For Windows and thus for 1Up. He’s also on the GFW podcast (1Up again) and practically dominates it, in the bullying kind of way.
Alex: No, that was Jordan Thomas. Smith and Thomas co-designed the Cradle.
KG
So I went to read that English piece and then realised how long it was. I’d love to read it, buy my TODO:s aren’t going to code themselves. Instead, it shall be bookmarked for future reference.
Also, Kieron, you at least deserve a pat on the back for lasting until the end of the post before wandering OT.
Ah, that’s the connection.
No matter – they both deserve to be kissed on the mouth for the Cradle (openmouthed, if so desired – please inquire with the desired designer of your choice).
Thanks again for the plug there Kieron! I hope anyone persevering through 5,000 of my words at least finds it semi-informative.
I found this quite interesting – Gabe Newell on Portal:
I’m under the impression that it’s an online game.
A 70% spike immediately after making fixes seems a pretty solid cause and effect pair to me.
Well, purely statistically, that wouldn’t hold much ground. You’d have to know all the possible factors that could influence those kind of fluctuations before even beginning to fiddling with one to see if it has an effect. As long as there’s a possibility there are other, unknown elements influencing test results, you can’t speak of any cause and effect reliably.
I’m not saying that’s how you should look at their results, I’m just saying.. :)
“Shawn Elliot writes for Games For Windows and thus for 1Up. He’s also on the GFW podcast (1Up again) and practically dominates it, in the bullying kind of way.”
I wouldn’t say he bullies the others, just he’s a tad more articulate than the rest, save Jeff Green. Plus Shawn is a genuinely funny guy, and is clearly passionte about his games. I like the surrealness that is the GFW podcast, it’s interesting that he’s been moved up to the 1upyours show now, to battle it out with the console boys.
Cool article, as always.
@Imperial Creed
Nice work, definitely worth the read.
Shawn hasn’t been moved, he’s been copied. (He’s still appearing on GFW Radio.)
“Shawn hasn’t been moved, he’s been copied. (He’s still appearing on GFW Radio.)”
Wait till next week, it will just be Jeff, Silent Ryan and Shawn Molloy Phoenix. they said he can only do 1 podcast apparently….
@Imperial Creed
I’m seconding mbanana, well worth the time on this slow, slow Sunday.
Hey, in that 1up article about the development of Portal (where Walker’s lunacy gets name checked), they mention that “One player literally spent 30 minutes trying to push a shelf onto the button, meanwhile, the box was sitting right there.”
I wonder if they’re referring to CargoCult, when he was visiting valve and forgot about the “use” key, and spent quite a long time just pushing things around before discovering the use key?
Kinda funny if it is. :P
I think that was a joke. They said they were going to do daily podcasts from GDC and Elliott said he would have to do 8 podcasts or so, with Jeff saying it was his own fault.
I do think he’s a bully – they make a lot of jokes about him being a bully, to the point that you start to think those jokes are based on reality. The before last edition of the GFW podcast was a breath of fresh air, no Shawn Elliott, just a lot of talking about.. games! (Umm.. to be fair, they then talked about Lost, which sucked..)
I don’t know, Elliott gets too much airtime with his sophomoric shit about Second Life and/or other griefing, it isn’t half as funny as he thinks it is, it’s just more bullying, basically.
“I don’t know, Elliott gets too much airtime with his sophomoric shit about Second Life and/or other griefing, it isn’t half as funny as he thinks it is, it’s just more bullying, basically.”
Most listeners of GFW find it very funny, his griefing in most games is not bullying. The Ralphie character he has is designed precisely to irritate the “bully” online gamers who yell and swear and tell people to shut up and make fun of others.
Shawn talks about games plenty, and generally offers the best insight, stirs up talk about deeper things in game design, during the GFW podcasts.
Its shame he’s gone over to the cesspool that is the 1up yours podcast, with their fanboy approach to sales numbers and “teh console warz”.
Shawn Elliott’s humor and general intelligence is what makes GFW worth listening to, in my opinion. It is a breath of fresh air to listen to a gaming podcast with a host who seems to have picked up a book once or twice in his life.