Sundays are for working your way from Agatha-Christie-esque countryside across the country towards an eventual destination of evening Agatha-Christie Sunday Evening Cheesy Adaptations. But on the way I take a break to chew on pop-corn, sip tea and compile a list of some of the fine reading that came to my attention this week, present it for your delectation and try not to include a link to a couple of pieces of pop music. I must try. I must.
- Edge’s Making Of articles are always pretty decent, especially when it’s on a genuinely good game. You don’t get much more genuinely good than Deus Ex. The nameless Edge-hero chats to Warren Spector on the Doom where you could talk to the monsters.
- Point/Counterpoint: The New York Times’ Seth Schiesel thinks Rock Band: Beatles may be the most important game of all time. Conversely, Crispygamer’s John Teti thinks that the New York Times’ Seth Schiesel’s review of Rock Band: Beatles may be the worst game review of all time.
- While we’re on the Fake Plastic Guitars part of the world, you followed the whole Courtney Love Gets Angry With Guitar Hero 5 thing, yeah?
- Vertical Slice believe they can predict review scores. EG talk to them, and about how you can predict fairly well even from the first 30 seconds how a game will score.
- Blue Casket really is a lovely little site. Their Saturday Short stories are good teasers of what they do. Go see.
- Gaming Daily dropped me a line saying we haven’t included anything for a while. And we haven’t! Here’s Craig Lager scowling at motion-control and hoping it stays as far away from the PC as possible. Here’s Steve Peacock on why he likes playing the HYPER HARD MACHO AMERICAN MAN in games. Yes.
- This week’s sexy graphs: CCP on their current actions against real-world-trading of Eve’s ISK.
- I’ve been a bit mean in the past about the Technical Comparison articles which Richard has been doing over at Eurogamer, which is probably unfair. The articles themselves are always well done, but it just seems to feed into the console-wars in a not particularly useful fashion. Conversely, I think the PC ones – especially when they just focus on the PC – are a little more interesting, if only because it has a much wider remit. This one looking at the forthcoming Red Faction: Guerrilla is a good example. I’m also looking forward to RF:G enormously.
- Do you want another gaming round-up article? YOU CHEATER. STAY TRUE TO THE SUNDAY PAPERS. Or, if you want to philander, Critical Distance is a smart cross-section of the weekly conversation.
- This was distributed widely, but on the chance you’re not in those circles… A History Of Violence’s screenwriter Josh Olson on Why He Will Not Read Your Fucking Script. The comments thread is also a very funny breeding ground for bitter writers.
- I suspect Jim slipped this into the Sunday Papers document, the little futurist that he is. A chronological list of when inventions first appeared in fiction.
- Waking up to find a message from Gordon Brown apologising for the treatment of Alan Turing was a pleasure this week. Go read what he had to say.
- Los Campesinos release new track The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future online, for shits and giggles, apparently. Strong micro-epic thing I like a lot. Go get. Also, S*M*A*S*H’s Kill Somebody. I loved S*M*A*S*H and I don’t care. IT’S NOT THAT I WANT THEM DEAD – IT’S JUST THE WORLD WOULD BE A BETTER PLACE IF THEY NEVER EXISTED. Ah, teenagerdom.
- Actually “Virginia Bottomley, Especially” still makes me smile.
Failed.
Related Stories:
Wow, The Beatles: Rock Band “reoffers an entire world view encapsulated in music”, “the most important video game yet made.”, unlike most games is not devoid of other meaning.
Jesus if all it took was a button matching game and a digital represtantion of a pop-band to make games as art, why do developers even bother?
Throughly agree with John Teti, worst review ever.
@Therlun: Let me elaborate, then. The problem with EVE and gold farming ISN’T that people are willing to pay money for in-game currency rather than grinding it out themselves. Not that EVE doesn’t have problems, but this isn’t really one of them; arguably, one of the features of EVE is that ships and equipment have real value and can be lost, and that this makes things more interesting.
(Hell, there’s a growing complaint that it’s becoming to easy to make tons of money in EVE, and that rare, expensive ships aren’t nearly as rare and expensive as they used to be.)
. . .
The problem with the farmers is that they clog up game resources, both in terms of server capacity and in-game space, as illustrated by those there graphs in the article. It makes it significantly harder for players to make money legitimately if bot-run miners are chewing through their asteroid fields in droves. Hell, large numbers of bots become a travel hazard, as they lag up and slow down travel through the systems they populate.
The OTHER problem is that these RMT organizations are a big source of malware and keyloggers and account hijacking, which causes all manner of disruption for players who patronize them. Players aren’t choosing to buy ISK through them because it’s a legitimately better deal offered by a better service; they’re doing it because they don’t know any better and get their account stolen for their trouble.
(It only appears to be a “better service” because they offer ISK at much lower prices. Which CCP would be stupid to match, because they don’t want to fuck up their economy. Especially considering that an actually functional economy is one of the reasons the game runs as well as it does. Considering the minimal amount of impact banning thousands of RMT accounts had on the market, the actual amount of ISK coming from these transactions is relatively small; “terrible scourge” is from all of the other side effects of large scale RMT operation.)
Not to mention filling chat channels and the forums with spam.
. . .
So CCP doesn’t like ISK-sellers for several well-defined reasons that have nothing to do with the idea of people converting real money to ISK being an inherently bad thing. It’s not symptomatic of a problem in the game.
CCP doesn’t like ISK sellers because they’re extremely disruptive to everybody else. Which is why they’re working on cracking down on RMT operations and providing a legitimate, safe alternative.
that article about reading scripts breaks my heart, and feeds right into my fear, as a writer, that I cannot acctually write, despite being at it seriously for years. Stuff like that just makes me want to go back to the drawing board and start all over again.
Fuck.
@Metal_Circus: If it’s any consolation, I’m pretty sure that terrifying little neurosis lurks somewhere in the back of every writer’s head. It just comes with the territory.
Of course, it gets worse sometimes. Every so often, you stumble across someone whose writing is so damned awful you can’t stand to read more than a paragraph of it, yet the writer is sure he’s quite good. If he can be that delusional, how do you know you haven’t been lying to yourself all these years?
There are only two options at that point. Either you quit, or you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, toss out the now-empty bottles that saw you through the ordeal and head back to the keyboard. If you choose whichever one makes you happy, you’ll have made the right choice.
@Metal_Circus: If you haven’t already read it, I strongly recommend Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird, her book on writing. She has some excellent and entertaining stuff on the neuroses that prey on every writer, and overcoming them.
Metal_Circus: That article about reading scripts, I think it really refers to people who hand this guy a script and expect him to give useful feedback. He really can’t. You can’t teach someone how to be a better writer by reading one script, especially if they’ve put no time into it.
I don’t believe anyone is a naturally good writer. Some people have real ‘talent’ in the sense that they pick up on things quickly, they learn from their experiences faster than others. Some enjoy it so much they don’t see it as work. There’s still a time component, and nobody’s first story is good or even readable.
I’d love it if the first story I wrote was the story I really gave a damn about, and I could actually do it justice, but that’s simply impossible. If I personally wanted to be a better writer, I’d just take a class at the community college where I’m expected to turn in a bunch of short stories for a grade. I definitely wouldn’t do the stories I really gave a damn about there, but it’d do me a lot of good when I set my mind to something I care about.
“From a commercial point of view this makes perfect sense though. Where huge profits may equal a higher risk investment, sticking with proven formulas will have a fairly predictable profit. Think EA’s Fifa series or even their Need For Speed series. People like soccer, people like fast cars. You’ll hardly need to change more than 20% to keep those customers satisfied despite having to pay for a new game.”
Not directed towards the original poster of this paragraph, but why is it that every second gaming blog comment these days reads like a lesson in corporate efficiency? Wasn’t there a time when people were skeptical about faceless turbo-capitalism? Do we really have to feel respect or sympathy towards a company, just because they hired an army of under-payed and over-worked programmers, artists and PR people to produce uninspired, focus group approved mega-productions at a 100 mil budget?
You know, it’s all frighteningly insightful to see how game companies shape their gaming experience after 30 second impressions… but why aren’t they ashamed to even advertise that practice on a gamer-focused site? Why is that considered appropriate?
“We’re not game designers, but we can influence the game design.” Isn’t that sentence plain cynical to gamers?
Why are so many surrendering to this embarrassing state of the gaming industry? I see many that do not like it, but more who do not even find it necessary to protest it.
Well, some people just roll with faceless turbo capitalism, others consider everyone who commits the crime of (GASP!) trying to get money to be pure evil incarnate (to the point of hating Valve for… well, everything. Chet was right about the 20 bucks for a ten business).
People make mistakes in all directions. You just have to learn to live with it.
@Psychopomp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credibility
Anyway my post was more an appeal to those who might consider an appeal to Mr Olson.
He does write a good rant though, and should consider foregoing further screenwriting for a promising career in critical review. Strongly consider.
@Bret
Pick any popular game company and there are going to be two small but vocal minorities with respect to them: one that would complain about paying $10 for a game box that contained a $20 bill, and another that would pay $20 for a box full of literal feces. The tricks are 1) not to be in either of those groups and 2) not to categorize people with a more nuanced position as being in one of those groups. There’s been a lot of the latter going around in Valve threads around here, from both sides.
that should be “would pay $50 for a box full of literal feces.” Though I suppose the $20 box of crap would probably sell better. :)
The NY Times article about Rock Band made me apoplectic with rage. Maybe because I spent a lot of time with slavering, pandering neo-hippies while getting my BA (in political science, naturally). Maybe because the TRUE WARRIOR way to bait a baby-boomer is to say, “The revolutionary free-spirited-ness of your generation was just a facade that crumbled at the first sign of the Man waving cash at you.” Or maybe it’s because Rock Band is the furthest thing from innovative or interesting.
Maybe.
The writing thing, while it’s amusing and I can see the bind the guy is in and it’s definitely true that everyone thinks they can write just because it requires little technical skill, this does remind me just how egotistical the whole enterprise is.
I swear once people get a job in “the biz” they forget almost instantly what it’s like to not be in it and it’s replaced by bloodyminded stuff like that or terribly bland magnanimity (some of which he expresses in there) about passion and art. “If you’re a writer, you’ll be a writer no matter what. No one will be able to stop you” or whatever he says. Self Help book balderdash. He needs to remember that the whole thing is a crap shoot and he knows perfectly well people who write utter garbage are gainfully employed and can say the exact same things he can (and, as pointed out, some people think he’s one of them). How long has ‘Heroes’ been running? (snark snark).
I don’t want to advocate a world where every would be writer is treated with kid gloves so that they aren’t put off. He does have some good advice in there: an idea is not writing; a story isn’t even writing; there are places that will tell you how to format this stuff for nothing; if you’re not sure you can do it (and it takes you a year of fiddly redrafting) you should perhaps take your idea to a writer instead of doing it yourself.
But this relatively mild discomfort of his seems a pretty small price to pay for having a creative job (and all the credits and connections that go with it) that so many people want.
@Robin – you disagree with an opinion piece and therefore brandish us idiots? Really? Ah well, life goes on.
- That Kurt bloke singing BonJovi songs was a bit wrong and probably, immoral.
- The article about Gordon Brown apologising is gaming related how? (because the guy was a coder…ooooh I gedit)
- The Science Fiction list was cool.
- I will not read your fucking blog. It was amusing and you can apply that situation to everything.
- Your choice in music is always bad bad bad.
No-one’s brandishing anything at you, Waste_Manager.
@Mike. No, you’re right. English fail. :(
I think people are both reading too much into that review score prediction stuff and giving it too little credit. There’s very interesting research suggesting we can make far more accurate judgements and predictions on very little information than we think we can, and the guy their research is based on seems to credibly be able to predict the long-term future of marriages based on short conversations to a very high level of accuracy.
The other thing is that it doesn’t lead to set ‘recipes’ for successful games because it’s about predicting a review score based on what people talk about in a game after playing it very briefly (so the game has to be a decent way through development already), not on what features are included in the game. It’s not something that can guide you before you start putting a game together – it could only tell you how much of a potential hit you have on your hands when you’ve already gone quite far down the road.
@Dolphan
But they are saying that based on this research they can help the companies make better games to get the 80% score and thats why we have the problem with it.
@Phemox
You know this is why I hate commericalisation sometimes, I know all this stuff about you have every right to sell your art and you have every right to sell crap to get lots of money. But i feel in myself that there is something wrong with that and i want it to change. it never will its a pipedream and it seems I may be the only one that things that people should make stuff because they like making stuff and not ebcause the can get lots of money from it.
In response to the Olson article, I’m totally on his side.
Amateur writers who wish they were professional: there are pathways towards that type of living available to you. Very few of them involve sending your script to an established writer. If you simply must send it to someone, send it to a publisher in the case of a novel or a producer in the case of a screenplay. Those people get paid to tell you you’re crap (or in extraordinarily rare cases to offer you a job).
And if you do get told you’re crap but you still think your idea is strong enough to be worth working on, there are classes to take to improve your understanding of how to develop your idea. In all likelihood the writer you want to send your words to took some such classes himself. When you get knocked back, take it as an indicator that there is room for improvement.
But keep your first drafts. It gives you something to laugh about later.
Full disclosure: I’m an aspiring writer with a long, long way to go before I would feel comfortable calling myself a fully-fledged Writer. But I’m the sort that’s embarrassed to let anyone read anything I write, let alone someone established.
Your collection of links points to another collection of links which points to another collection of links about computergames. This is madness! You are stealing all my free time!
@Hastur:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolbodo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Rican_p%C3%A1ramo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YMCA_of_Hong_Kong_Christian_College