We Make Holes In Teeth

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.

Hoth Couture

(Another culture coup courtesy of the house of Ecko. Linkjacked from starwars.com)

I guess if you're dad was Phillip K. Dick...

... you'd pretty much have to expect something like this would happen eventually (read through to the end). That's one of those authentically Gibsonian paleofuturistic things that could only have happened in the perpetual recent past, circa the early 2000s.

AGDC 2007: My talk notes and slides

I hate being so tired on a flight that I can't even summon the energy to fire up my laptop and do basic text-editing. But as I promised to a small group of shell-shocked GDC attendees, post-screed, here are the zipped-up slides and presentation notes for "Familiarity breeds contempt: Buidling game stories that flow (1.35MB)".

22 consecutive hours of breathing space station air later...

... and I'm back in Montreal. Austin was fan-freaking-tastic. The conference - especially as an inagural journey under the command of the folks from CMP - was really damn good. I ate my body weight in conchinita pabil, BBQ sausage, pecan pie and hush-puppies (I'm not talking about the shoes. If you think hush-puppies are shoes, you are a freak.) The talk, near as I can discern, went well. I'll have more impressions on that shortly.

The real story here, though, is that I have established once and for all that one should never, EVER, allow a travel agent to book one a connecting flight via Dallas-Fort Worth. I don't know what kind of fucking magnetic anomaly they've built their 90 zillion dollar boondoggle of an airport on, but apparently it can snatch 737s whole from the sky in completely different time zones and summarily ground them on parking lot -like stretches of tarmac, arranged in sanity-rending tesselations of stalled aviation, like giant iron filings slammed into visible ranks by invisible lines of force.

Where Credit Is Due

A very long time ago, I worked with a web marketing genius named Fraser Cain who, among other things, co-created one of the first Internet-enabled recovery systems for stolen laptops. Years later, he transformed his lifelong passion for astronomy, star-watching and space exploration into a fairly lucrative web publishing venture that still orbits to this day. Fraser incorporated every traffic-wrangling gambit he'd ever learned and/or personally invented into Universe Today, and it evolved into the most widely-read aggrogator of space-related content anywhere; enough to earn the rivalry of, well, Space.com. It was during UT's nascent days that Fraser introduced me to the term schmontent - as in, "Content, schmontent..." - a euphemism refering to the daily compilation of linkjacked and excerpted content on Other People's Sites with which he populated his home page every morning like clockwork, from the comfort of his own False Creek living room, presumably while dressed only in constellation-pattern boxer shorts.

Up til now I've resisted the urge to use We Make Holes In Teeth as my own personal show-and-tell of Obscure Shit From The Depths Of The Webs, but the fact is that there are occasionally some useful things to point out, out there in the wilds. And frankly, I'm getting sick of spamming my friends with YouTube videos of masturbating pugs or links to recently declassified counterinsurgency manuals in .pdf format.

I've reserved a little spot off to the right for Schmontent, but it won't be much use without some context, so I'll try to devote a few (quaint)column-inches(/quaint) to each new artifact I uncover before banishing it to the footnotes.

The Blueberry in the Tomato Soup

Goin' to Austin. As of... a while now, I guess, I'm officially on the program for this year's Austin Game Developers Conference (Writing in Games track), running from September 5th to the 7th. The title of my talk is, perhaps not unsurprisingly, "Familiarity breeds contempt: Building game stories that flow." To the three or four of you who've read any of my blog entries, this should provide a fairly clear hint as to what I'll be covering; although it represents a fairly powerful source of procrastinatory anxiety for me that the lion's share of what I'll be talking about (and have yet to fully codify in Power Point form) is new, that is not covered in my blog entries. I have a lot of writing to do between now and the August 17th deadline for handing over my materials -- a week from Friday. Ulp.

Why We Write, Pt. 1

I expect that the meat of this post will develop into a sort of standard introduction, by way of back-rationalization, to the benefits of Narrative Game Design as a formal practice. This isn't the first time I've tried to do this, but it may end up being the most pragmatic approach so far. After all this time, there are still people at the studio where I work who do not understand why there should be someone on the core design team - different from (or not only) the scriptwriter - who cares about the story of the game. Someone who is involved in the production from concept to gold master. Lately, my tried and true flippant response to people like that has been to hold up a very complicated flowchart printed out on tiled 11x17 sheets, explaining that "this is the story". But frankly, this seems a little glib.

Luckily, in the course of doing research for the Familiarity talk, I ended up reading the frequently-referenced paper by Penelope Sweetser and Peta Wyeth on Game Flow that lays out an excellent and rather thorough framework for examining how any particular aspect of a game's design contributes to the overall player experience. And since I've been arguing for a while now that the narrative is implicated in - you heard me - every aspect of the player experience, I now have a mouth with which to co-locate my money.