By Kieron Gillen on March 16th, 2008 at 9:07 am.
We missed it last week due to a epidemic of laziness (aka being dragged abroad on short notice), so it’s a bumper helping of the word of minds here. The idea is, as always, is a series of rapid-fire links to diverse items we thought worth reading on a lazy Sunday afternoon, which we try to post before we start linking to videos of old nineties comedy shows.
- We talked about the GDC Luminary lunch previously, but Next Gen have put a full transcript. Now, if you bring your own finger-foods, you have everything you need to recreate the event in the privacy of your own home. While we’re talking NextGen, they also lobbed up Game Developers’ Top 50 Developers list. Which is interesting.
- A hefty postmortem on Stalker’s AI with Dmitriy Iassenev. Number one on his lessons learned? “Do not reinvent the wheel. Use the Internet to find solutions to your problems.” That’s the spirit.
- Ernest Adams a swing at another big topic over at Gamasutra – specifically, Gameplay patents and why they should be cast into the void.
- A couple of interesting interview subjects. Firstly, Indian Developers Kreeda on their attempts to introduce gaming to adults via their dance games. Secondly, an interview with Kirsten Perry, a concept artist who’ve worked for Arenanet and Valve.
- Developer blog news. Raven’s Manveer Heir joins the blogosphere. Start with him wondering where Gaming’s equivalent to The Wire is. Also, Cryptic Comet’s Vic Davis’ writes a little about the concept of Appeasement, and how it applies to strategy games.
- EA’s Steve Schnur – yet more evidence for Jim’s theory that developers are getting better names – talks about how games are useful for breaking bands. And the point becomes ever strong; look at Dragonforce, y’know?
- MMO-clever-peeps Terra Nova have Merci Victoria Grace (See another one!) talking about developing PMOG – the Passively Multiplayer Online Game. Which, at least, is awesome wordplay.
- Point/Counterpoint. 1Up on why Gary Gygax was awesome. Slate on why Gary Gygax was actually a bit rubbish. To be honest, it’s more point/missing the point. Erik Sofge’s argument can be basically boiled down to “The Wright Brother were shit. The Spitfire was a much better plane”.
Failed.
There seems to be a problem with the top 50 developers link in the first item.
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Ta – fixed.
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Did you lovely people link to this New York Times Gygax retrospective (by a Wired editor who is otherwise unfamiliar to me) already? It is funny, kind of sweet and the chart could come in quite handy. [via Boingboing, I assume.]
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That piece on The Wire is good stuff, but I doubt we’d see a parallel without pushing the idea of online games further.
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I think I can understand Mr. Sofge’s feelings, though I wouldn’t disregard Gary Gygax’s rightful place as the grandfather of the roleplaying game because of my sentiments. I’m just thankful Gary made D&D so that it could pave the way for nerd-games more suited to my tastes.
But, like Mr. Sofge, I too despair that there is no such thing as a real “Roleplaying industry.” There is only D&D, and books that exist in the cracks where the mighty monolith has been painstakingly worn down.
Though… GURPS doesn’t scale well to higher power scales. Or at least doesn’t do it as well as games designed from the top to be high-powered. At least it’s well-researched, and I wish D&D would do its homework, too. Entire generations of gamers have been using the wrong terminology to describe various weapons and armor for decades!
And it’s seeped into global nerd culture at large because of it. *Sigh* No rest for the anal-retentive, I suppose.
Edit: Ironically, the newest edition of D&D is taking more than its fair share of … inspiration… from WoW. Nerd gaming culture has come full circle.
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RPS! From now now, EVERY Sunday Papers news post should be accompanied by 90s comedy shows!
Also, mucho thanks for posting a link to the luminaries transcript. I’ll get on that right away.
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Indeedy, in fact every day needs more of The Day Today.
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Err, which game “broke” Dragonforce then?
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Guitar Hero 3.
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Well I guess you could argue it introduced them to people who wouldn’t otherwise have heard of them, but they were HUGE well before. I was DJing metal nights three, four years ago and everyone had heard of them then and since Inhuman Rampage they’ve done amazingly well for that type of music in North America, as well as the usual territories like Japan and Europe, all without GHIII’s help.
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USA Today:
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Fair enough, didn’t realise they’d done that well out of it but they were already very popular by the usual standards of the genre.
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Yeah; but it’s a niche genre. The usual standards isn’t really very much.
(Talking as someone who dug Dragonforce before GH3, I stress.)
Sander: Great Gygax piece.
KG
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If you have a look at the forum connected to the anti-D&D piece on Slate, there is a rebuttal from someone who supposedly is Steve Jackson of GURPS fame – he pretty much makes the same brothers Wright analogy as Kieron, incidentally:
http://fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/thread/987227.aspx?ArticleID=2186203
We can never be sure it really is Steve Jackson I suppose, but it sounds reasonable enough.
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Yeah. Gygax’s behaviour regarding his partner in forming D&D, Dave Arneson, left something to be desired, but nonetheless, that work and his later involvement with, e.g. AD&D did a great deal for the gaming industry.
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D&D was hugely influential on the development of computer games, which rely on mathematics – and D&D provided a steady, existing set of mathematical turn-based rules of behaviour, which was the equivalent of manna from heaven. So obviously D&D is very important, and Gygax deserves huge credit for it.
What saddens me is that we didn’t see too much move away from D&D as an RPG model until relatively recently – Deus Ex/Morrowind being the earlier examples of RPGs which were striving for arguably more immersiveness than D&D can provide. As Warren Spector’s Master Classes have shown, many of the game designers who have been hugely influential on RPGs came from paper D&D backgrounds – with the result that the games tended to mirror their favourite pasttime.
This frustrates me because, in RPGs in particular, I’m far more interested in immersion than I am in rummaging around for a plus-5 mace. So I would rather that steps had been taken earlier to move gaming away from D&D, but I accept its influence and necessary importance nonetheless.
But as Spector says in his talk, turn-based models for this sort of game should be put out to pasture. And D&D was built around turn-based combat, and has had its deserved day in the sun.
Also – The Day Today, today. Still fantastic. Bomb-dogs next week?
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God, I love British Comedy.
In regards to Gygax, I myself never really was into D&D, and paper-and-pen roleplaying in general, and really roleplaying in general.
I feel that his design of “You ARE the character” has had an ABSURD amount of influence on gaming design, and that is honestly something I don’t care for. I feel it really limits what you can do in terms of ‘fourth-wall’ type stuff. Of course, I feel that there IS no 4th wall in gaming, but hey that’s just me.
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