We finally find the willpower to return to the task. For those who are latecomers to the series, earlier this year Mythic’s Creative Director Paul Barnett and I met up in a London bar and set a dictaphone rolling. Three hours later, we stop. We’re serialising it in handy topic-based chunks. This time: Paul talks about what his favourite MMOs are. They’re not, strictly speaking, MMOs.
Read the rest of this entry »

A few months ago Mythic’s Creative Director Paul Barnett and myself went into a London bar, set a tape rolling and got mildly smashed. Only now do I dare return to these hours of tape to transcribe a series of topic-by-topic interviews. We pick up where we left off last time, with Paul about to explain why he went to Futurism-festival LIFT rather than this industry’s mecca, the Game Developer’s Conference. And it’s much more fun than him hating San Francisco.
Read the rest of this entry »

A few months back, I met up with EA Mythic’s vocal Creative Director in a bar near London Liverpool Street Station. We ordered drinks. We set the tape rolling. After three hours, I stopped the dictaphone and we stumbled off. We’d covered a lot of ground – pretty much everything away from Warhammer itself, which was out of bounds for the usual PR-reasons. Since the full transcript would run to tens of thousands of words, I’m going to break it down to individual segments which I’ll lob up every week or two. And it’s just as well, as much of what Paul says is going to lead to debate and each topic should be taken apart individually.

The first one’s about Games Journalism, how it should work, how it worked for him, how journalists minds get broken, the problems of journos turning devs, where it’s gone wrong and how RPS has invented a time-machine (to our mild embarrassment).
Read the rest of this entry »