"But we don't use griffins, and I think that is what separates us from them."

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture? I've put this video here because it invariably requires repeated viewing.

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Talking genre in games

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to give a guest lecture in Roxana Hadad's online course on game design. The topic was genre in video games, and the (arguably) ambitious title of my presentation was Exploding Genre in Games. I've attached the presentation (as a .ppt) below. Click to download in .ppt. The exploding head came out of a Google image search, apologies for not having a better cite. I should mention two things about it:

1. The fonts and chalkboard are borrowed from TF2. I'm not sure if that's entirely legal, but if Valve takes notice of it for some reason at least I'll have made an impression before asking them for a job ;)
2. I used Dan Kline's taxonomy in this talk and took a pass at modifying it based on some issues I had around classifying some games. In the process, I kind of butchered the placement of the games Roxana's students are currently playing and a core feature of the chart (Platformers are misplaced), apologies Dan.

I'd love to talk through the core ideas from the lecture here and I've also had a bunch of other thoughts on the matter that deserve mention, but I'm going to post on them at a later date. If I start trying to write them down now I'll never get this post up, and it's almost two weeks late as is. In other news, the dissertation proceeds apace.

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After GDC: Thoughts on writing in games

One of the things I did at GDC this year was poke around in the game writers sessions. My motivations for doing so were two fold. On the one hand, after watching my roommate play countless hours of Mass Effect (replaying the original and then the sequel) in the last several weeks I was thinking that writing for games might be an interesting job which I'm more or less qualified for. On the other, I wanted to see what the state of the industry was with regard to thinking about narrative in games, since as might be evident from my previous post I think about this stuff a lot. The results were mixed, and you can find my thoughts after the jump. I've tried to keep it brief, but I'm afraid there were a lot of interesting sessions. There might be good reasons to question the conventions we use for getting things done.

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That old question again

This post is just getting less and less timely. On the other hand, this question is timeless. "Birth of an Icon" - found at FreakingNews.com That said, the event which sparked this post happened almost a year ago now. So after reading this new post by Mark Danger Chen, which deeply abuts the themes of postmodernity which this here post is really about, I figured I'd better just hurry up and get this thing out the door today.

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Robotic Vibraphone?

Yes, in fact my dear friend and fellow vibes player Tim O'Keefe and his team of crack designers recently completed Marv the MIDI Actuated Robotic Vibraphone. You can find out more about Marv at robovibes.com. For now I leave you with this awesome video of Tim jamming along with Marv on Song for My Father by Horace Silver. Also, extra props for getting news of Marv picked up over at Laughing Squid!

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