We Make Holes In Teeth

The Audacity Of A New Hope

This just flat-out makes me smile.

For the uninitiated, the late graphic designer Saul Bass was responsible for some of the most iconic film titles sequences of the 1950s and 60s, notably Hitchcock's Vertigo and North By Northwest as well as The Man With The Golden Arm and the screen adaptation of Leon Uris' Exodus. He also gave us the AT&T globe logo.

Design student and YouTuber 'bhilmers' describes his homage to Bass' distinctive graphic style as what the titles might have looked like "if Star Wars was filmed two decades earlier". He adheres to the common trend of the time of including sly visual references to the discipline being credited. My personal fave is the paper-cutout Max Rebo peering sideways from the edge of the screen in time for composer John William's 3 seconds of fame (although Williams' most famous score is swapped out for a 1967 Buddy Rich track "Machine").

GDC 2008:: Slides for "Do, don't show"

Somewhere around 11pm last night I discovered that Boing Boing's Mark Frauenfelder has been systematically posting the highlights of the TED Conference. I swore to not look at any of this cool stuff until I'd finished annotating my slides. Not because I'm particularly diligent, but because I knew that watching even one of these visual communciation masterpieces would be utterly demoralizing...

As promised - and naturally, somewhat belatedly - I've uploaded the monster slide deck for my talk at this year's GDC, entitled "Do, don't show: Narrative design in FarCry 2".

In case you're wondering where the actual spoken part is; I've embedded directly into the notes pane of the Powerpoint doc. If that ends up being a pain in the ass, someone let me know and I'll paste the chewy center into a separate Word file. It's a whopping 6+ MB, and that's after I went through all the image compression/cropping wackiness. I'm sorry. Actually, no I'm not. If you can wait patiently through 350 MB of BitTorrent action to pirate the latest episode of Dexter, you can spare me a measily 6MB of your time... Damn you, Dexter.

Dereliction of Duty 4: Modern Slideware

Yeah okay I'm back.

Right now my patented TypePad List Of Posts is littered with the half-formed abortia of various points I had wanted to get across between now and whenever it was I finished Portal and Call of Duty 4, and started playing Assassin's Creed. It was kind of a watershed moment for me, frankly. But apparently I was too euphoric to complete whole sentences and hit the Publish button.

But inevitably, my brief honeymoon with the beanstalk-like Stack Of Games Next To The 360 came crashing to a close at the same time as the Christmas holidays. I had started my time-off giddy, or maybe actually just dizzy, from the announcement that FarCry 2's release date would be pushed from the March end of fiscal Q4 to... sometime I'm not allowed to talk about publicly yet (but soon).

The end of holidays also brought with it the sickening - maybe even self-loathing - realization that I had made sweet singing fuhbleep-all by way of progress on my talk for GDC. Presenting at GDC is one of those rituals that, by virtue of the stress-junkie personalities that populate the game industry, has been inflated into a mammoth and solemn responsibility not to be taken lightly, or even reasonbly, but as some kind of professional scourging ordeal. Like Rat Month at VMI, except with fewer uncomfortable Confederate military connotations.

Trevor Cawood's Terminus

As anyone who's seen Neil Blomkamp's pre-HALO work can attest, independent film-makers are proving to be the pointy end of the maturation process for CGI effects. The latest manifestation is this wonderfully creepy short by Spy Films director Trevor Cawood:

Cawood - whose commercial reel has a decidedly automotive focus - makes full use of Montreal's uniquely time-lost metro system; both for its Logan's-Run-meets-Solaris paleo-utopian architecture, and by referencing the perpetual clash of commuter and street cultures that plays out on its platforms. Rainmaker's effects work is beautifully blended and wonderfully restrained.

GDC 2008: The "Do, Don't Show" uh, show

So I was pointlessly holding off on posting about this since the actual date hadn't been attached. It still remains dateless - possibly contemplating returning its rented tux and staying home to watch the Mr. Bean marathon - but for what it's worth, here is the announcement for my talk at GDC next year.

I was briefly gratified to have the talk included among the two or three design track highlights, but I'm not willing to engage to too much self-deception: A number of us from the FC2 team originally proposed a panel-style talk, and since that number included Clint and Susan, the proposal had ridiculously high profile up until the moment that the event organizers decided not to do panel talks in general. We were asked to turn it into a solo lecture. Because of the topic, I got to ride the trapeze into the spotlight this time.

On the title: Within about a week of the session announcements going up on the GDC site, I got an email from Noah Falstein. Noah was writing to taunt me with the fact that he had already coined the phrase "do, don't tell" in his regular column for Game Developer magazine (January 2007 issue, I believe). If his work on the 400 Project is any indication, it wouldn't surprise me in the least to learn that he's been sitting around for literally years, systematically ludofying core principles from other media into pithy maxims, his printer churning out trademark applications a few feet away. I'm on to you, Falstein.

At some point, I promise to talk about the actual content of the talk.

Flow and Engagement: Too Human

One of my FarCry2 colleagues, Simon Charbonneau, directed me to this video produced by Silicon Knights to promote some of the game design philosophy behind Too Human. I'm not very familiar with the game -- sadly, more aware of the recent Unpleasantness between Denis Dyack and Epic -- other than its central hook of the Norse Gods as cybernetically enhanced humans. But it is interesting to see how much of this video is given over to tweedy academics talking about psychological models for gamer satisfaction. They get into Flow in very broad terms, and discuss something Dyack calls engagement theory as a rough formalization of elements that need to be present in order for Too Human to achieve its experiential goals.

On a completely superficial note: For a dev diary -type piece, I find it a little odd and over-stylized; heavily derivative of Errol Morris' documentaries down to the Philip Glass -inspired minimalist score. But you know what? Steal from the best, man.