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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Zero Punctuation + Borderlands = Joy

I've loved Zero Punctuation since I first saw Yahtzee's review of The Orange Box (or maybe before that, I'm not sure). His Borderlands review brings together a game I adore and a reviewer who smashes games. The product is mind blowing awesomeness. Notable lines include, ""It's like PowerPoint threw up on a Cluedo board and died."

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backlog continued

What better way to begin my 2010 blogging than with a steady continuation of the theme I so thoroughly established in 2009. As I've made abundantly clear through a series of topical posts arriving so late as to almost be hip again, my writing process on this blog is for the most part painfully slow. I have a handful of topics I've been meaning to write on including a previously hinted at post about ideas I've had for MMOs, something about a space opera game concept, and a series of posts about design ideas which I need to finishing sketching out and develop some crude concept art for before I can blog about them. There's also the painfully delinquent post about racist toys. In the mean time, here's some really basic content that I should've handled previously (just after the jump). This blog post pertains to content so olde that I'm including this picture of some frost on my window I took back in Feb. 2009

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