Marek

I know the "you shouldn't be afraid of dying" thing is a bit of a cop-out, because it isn't true for early 90ies Sierra adventures. But I can't think of any adventure games after 1997 or-so that kept that convention, so as a non-backwards compatible definition of the genre it works.

Okay, Netmonkey's post made me post this. A couple of years ago I wrote an article for AG that roughly defined the genre as focusing on three things: Narrative exploration - by which I meant not spatial exploration, but exploration that leads to discovery that leads to story progression etc. Non-competitive, non-threatening - today I would probably have tried to come up with a better term for this, but what I meant was that you're not playing for points, or that you should be worried about dying and starting over (true for any modern adventure game) Designer-created, player-controlled protagonist- to seperate adventure games from RPGs, where the protagonist is also player-created. These three loose rules are inclusive enough to make Myst and Monkey Island part of the same genre, but it nicely excludes action/adventures and RPGs. Anyway, I agree that often way too much importance is put on the control method. Other than weird subgenres like rhythm games it seems very counterintuitive to define games by how they're controlled. It would put Wolfenstein in a different genre than Quake because it didn't use a mouse.

Hahaha yes pretty much. Also (and I know Jake hates this), but ... the guy from the movie Sideways is like Jake's insane wine-loving brother:

I was thinking 3 basic rounds, then the winners of those compete in the ultiround. Up to 10 actually, though voting for all 10 would be super lame.

I like that this is the first Revo game to be revealed: it's pretty, it's in a conventional Western genre, and it's not made by Nintendo. This tells the hardcore gamer skeptics (and Mark Rein and Scott Miller ) that the Revolution won't be all about "gimmicky games", but that all types of games can benefit from its innovations. I'm just as excited about Bob Ross: The Joy of Painting though.

I can't tell anymore if you guys are dumb or just trying too hard to be funny. You seriously didn't see that was a glossy professional made trailer with some amateur videos inserted? I have trouble believing that so I guess the sarcasm / pretend ignorance is being taken way too far here. It's not funny, it's just annoying. Or, just in case you're actually serious: hoooooooly shit. Nintendo would really show a guy fake peeing at a plain old, fluorescently lighted office desk with a Playstation sign above it? You think Sherlock??? Please what the fuck are we talking about. I thought we were talking about a newly announced game. This thread:

Ubisoft Paris took their idea directly to Iwata and Miyamoto, and were given the go ahead. After that meeting they were given prototype controllers. The article states that Ubisoft worked "closely" with Nintendo's engineers in Japan on the title You signal "yes/no" answers by nodding the controller up or down or shaking it from side to side You show extra respect by bowing to the masters "You can act disrespectively as well: there are no cut scenes in the game - all conversations take place in game, as in Half Life 2. However unlike that game, characters wont keep prattling on if you walk away from them. They will react angrily to your imputent behavior" You turn gang leaders to your side by besting them in battle and stopping a deadly blow miliseconds before it strikes

But, but, you can also not shoot people! That's innovative!

Haha the Revolution is so underpowered its graphics will just suck ass. Why won't they just rerelease the GameCube with a remote control lol??? all are owned. Looks great. And it's not a sequel. Hooray Ubisoft. More info here. And here.

Actually, this game is real. It's not a prank. The FOK! community came up with fake boxart independently of a real Bob Ross game being made.

Yep Sumo is doing the actual production now. Charles Cecil (and I'm pretty sure at least one other Revolution guy) are acting as writers/consultants.

I know Jane Pinckard is both loved and hated around here, but I just read a blog post by her that I think touches upon a huge issue in the industry and which deserves attention. I feel pretty strongly about it because I have the exact same feelings after GDC. I'm going to be rude and copy most of her post here. She talks about hanging out with many developers at GDC. People who are working on interesting problems and challenges, people who might have some great insights to share on the projects they're working on, or just on games in general. Why do we never hear anything from those people? This is a HUGE issue that personally frustrates me to no end. Access to the real people behind the games is very very limited. The PR people build shields around people they don't want you to talk about, which is usually everyone on the team. This only changes when a specific game needs to be promoted... some press will be allowed through the barier to speak to the producer or project lead, who of course have been trained in PR-speak and knows the official company line on everything. (This leads to super boring interviews, unless the guy is well-known enough to get away with a proper interview.) This is why GDC is so surreal. GDC feels extremely human, as opposed to E3 which is ice cold. As I said in another thread, GDC is like living in a bubble for a week. Inside that bubble the people behind the games can speak and be seen, but step outside of the bubble and they're gone, shrouded by meaningless company logos. It's ridiculous that the best interviews you get to do are with people who are not actively employed at a game company (see: Eric Chahi, Ron Gilbert, etc.). Good luck doing an interview like that with someone who has an active project. You might succeed with someone like Will Wright or Tim Schafer, but almost anyone else will have to put on their PR robot voice when you talk to them. The saddest part is that many developers think they actually have to use the PR robot voice, because that's what industry professionals do. Some even think that stepping into the limelight is a big no-no, because no one else on their level is doing it and they feel too humble about it. David Jaffe became a public figure after doing two games (due to Sony pushing that), but because that's so unusual he gets shit for being too attention-seeking. There's still a broader issue here which is that 95% of game industry PR people are terrible at their jobs. I know a couple of really good ones (hi guys!), but the majority are robots who spend most their time sending out press releases and screenshots (in between making schedules for sending out press releases and screenshots). If you have a request, no matter how small, for an article with a unique angle on the product they're promoting, they will almost never be able to help you. Sometimes I wish I had more energy so I could "fight the system". I hope more developers get out of the woodworks and get in touch with sites that will do proper casual interviews with them. Who cares what PR says. The current situation only leads to: - frustrated developers, because talking to the press is horrible - frustrated readers, because every interview sounds the same - frustrated journalists, because it makes their jobs suck Sorry for the rant.

Ooh! Ooh! I did a 10-page essay on this stuff in high school! As far as I recall, the Russians technically got on the moon first. But only by crashing into it with an unmanned spaceship. The yankees actually thought it was a manned craft so the whole thing was thought to be a really close race, but then it turned out the ruskies weren't nearly as close as they'd thought.

About fact-checking: in other areas of journalism it's apparently fairly common to send a draft of an article/interview to the person who was interviewed, just to make sure the journalist got things right (not to let them back out of things they actually said, of course!). This isn't really commonplace in game journalism. I've only ever had one person ask it of me, but I don't think I would mind doing it every time. One time my editor (for my freelance stuff) got confused and changed the interviewee's nationality from American to Brittish right in the first sentence. I was pretty pissed off about that... actually wished I had sent the final draft to the interviewee as he would have easily corrected it.

Despite the title I gave to this thread, I actually find little to disagree with your posts Jason. PR and journos. There's a chicken-and-the-egg thing here. I just don't see a lot of opportunities for things to improve right now, such as more developer commentaries like Starbreeze, or more interesting personality-driven interviews. Everything is super closed-off. It was really really great that Soren Johnson was given that much exposure. I enjoyed that. It actually increased my respect for Sid Meier as well. However, here's what I wonder... if Meier had not explicitly wished for Johnson to be the main guy, and a member of the press had requested an interview with Johnson (maybe because they met each other at a conference and the journo decided he'd have much interesting things to tell), would PR have approved it? I guess the answer would be "no" for most PR managers, because it wouldn't have been pre-planned and scheduled and assigned to a "PR phase". Also, while most developers might not give good interviews, how could anyone have known that someone like Johnson gives good interviews until he could do some interviews? Also also, how could developers who give bad interviews ever get better at it if they don't get some in-the-field experience? A lot of industry pioneers were once programming nerds with little charisma, but they got really good at it doing interviews because they had to. I understand the need for the PR rep to create some restraints and balance, but isn't there a little too much of that already? Interviews (especially online) often even need to be checked and approved by a PR guy before they can be published, so it's not like there's not already a lot of quality control in place on the publisher side.

Haha. Failure.

No no no! Darkplace is one word, not two. It's essential.

They also used the words yahren and daggit, sooooo

Umm, I guess I'll make a poll for this soon!

I didn't mind it at all at first. But I have gotten annoyed with it more in season 2. They should really limit its use.

Hey got the one with the coffee machine? I lost it. Maybe we should trade!

Steve, aren't those mostly just limiting beliefs (like, "Ehh it wouldn't work anyway"), not actual problems? Are some people not mediagenic? Sure, but some are. Do some of them not want to be interviewed? Yep, and that's fine, but some would really like to if they had the opportunity, and if it wasn't perceived as much as something purely self-promotional. Will some people have absolutely no interesting things to say? Well... there's no way of knowing until we get them to talk! My rant has two layers I guess. First we need to get the project leads to give good interviews (and journalists to take them), which isn't always the case now. Then we need to open up access to some of the people below them. I strongly disagree with the notion that lower level team members are not interesting enough. I saw a lecture at GDC by the community manager of Spore and Sims 2 and I know she's got several pages worth of great magazine content simply based on the specific job that she does at Maxis. Actually, the Spore team is an interesting example. They've got an unusual number of veterans on the team so we know a couple of their names. Don't tell me Chris Hecker, their lead progammer, isn't interesting or mediagenic. I mean, you heard his great rant at the Game Developers Choice Awards. And did you know Spore has a Lead Designer, besides Will Wright? He was in half the workshops and lectures I was at though I only discovered afterwards. That's got to be an interesting guy! I'm assuming every team out there has a couple of strong personalities. The 'running their mouth' thing isn't half as much of an issue if more interest is taken in their specific area of expertise, or their past projects, or their general opinions on games. The 1UP show that Jane Pinckard works on occasionally has casual interviews at industry events with random industry people I've never heard of and they're actually great. At an Xbox 360 launch party they got CliffyB and some random member of the Halo team talking about each other's (past) games and it was really entertaining! Stuff like that is great, but the chances of those things happening are often really slim. Note that they only featured that Halo guy for like five minutes for an overall interview, it wasn't exactly The Great Interview With That Programming Guy From Halo In Which They Only Talk About Code And AI For Half an Hour, which agree would be dumb and pointless. Finally, I know there IS an audience for good interviews. The 12 year old kids are very well catered to, but they aren't the average gamer anymore. Gaming (and gamers) get a year older every year. In a decade, the average gamer might be the ones playing games like Brain Training and Cooking Mama. Heck, even 12 year old kids get tired of hearing the same crap over again. You can even talk about graphics in an interesting way, without using the same canned phrases. A 12 year old kid will go fucking nuts about an interview in which Mark Rein says outragious things about graphics, and where the journo continues to push him. They WON'T go fucking nuts about an interview that says "our team is dedicated and working very hard on taking the graphics to the next level". Sweet, the next level!!!

Some game journalists are really trying. They get sick of the standard questions too. Some of the writers at GameSpot, 1UP and a few other sites are clearly aiming to do a better job, so gotta give credit for that. (See: Dan Hsu's Peter Moore interview). I think the problem is not in the initial questions, but in not asking good follow-ups. Only very rarely do you see journalists ask to clarify something, or prod a little at a politically safe answer. Answers like "We believe both veterans of the series and newcomers will enjoy the latest installment" or "We don't think removing feature X and Y is 'dumbing down' the game, we are adapting the game to a console audience." or "We plan to support the game well after release" (what support specifically? what will you commit to?) etc. etc. These are just three random things that came to mind, out of a billion stock phrases. It would be funny if for every time a producer says "we are thrilled/excited/pleased to be working with X on this project" the journalist says "on a scale from 1 to 10, how thrilled are you really?", or just make a joke saying "oh come on, you totally hate them, admit it". You have to get off-script. No one wants to hear the obvious. I just went to BluesNews looking for some interviews. Here's some great examples of SUPER BORING pre-scripted ones: http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/698/698693p2.html http://www.firingsquad.com/features/x-men_official_game_interview/ http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm?gameId=9&setView=features&loadFeature=521&fp=1152,864,3308054625,20060329100208 http://rpgvault.ign.com/articles/698/698487p1.html http://www.gamespot.com/xbox360/action/deadoralive4/news.html?sid=6146247&mode=previews etc. etc. That last one has a perfect example of what I mean, right at the top: Obvious follow-up: Really! How many people played it on Xbox Live? Or: why was it surprising to you? What we get instead: I'm in a really ranty mood today.

"I don't give a shit" became... "Het kan me geen drol schelen." :fart:

His opinion is flattering to the game industry but not surprising. Going to GDC is like living in a bubble for a week. A bubble in which games are awesome. And in which you feel empowered and inspired. Let's make sure Ron never goes to E3. He'll be devastated.