Tiny Subversions

Warren Ellis, one of my favorite authors, has been doing a bunch of articles called "Second Life Sketches" talking about life in SL. They're really interesting and well-written, and it seems he'll be doing it for Reuters now.

Full article here.

Labels: culture

Due to the recent discovery of my very first ever Internet griefer, I've enabled comment moderation. What this means to you is that when you post a comment, it goes to me first, and then I decide whether or not it goes on the blog.

Labels: admin

Over on John Romero's blog, in honor of the anniversary of the Apple/NeXT merger, he's written a great post about how DOOM, Quake, and other great iD-affiliated games like Heretic and Hexen were all developed under NeXTSTEP.

I thought this tidbit was really interesting:

In fact, with the superpower of NeXTSTEP, one of the earliest incarnations of DoomEd had Carmack in his office, me in my office, DoomEd running on both our computers and both of us editing one map together at the same time. I could see John moving entities around on my screen as I drew new walls. Shared memory spaces and distributed objects. Pure magic.

God damn! This was back in 1993--does anybody out there know of any collaborative level editors that exist nowadays?

Labels: know_your_history

Vincent Diamante is the man. He was also my roommate at the 2005 Indie Game Jam.

He's written an article on how to get into the game audio industry--check it out!

He makes an interesting observation about game audio at the end of the article:

While team sizes will go up as you go to bigger and better projects, audio team sizes don't change quite so quickly. The experience that you had being an audio director with lots of responsibilities (music, sound effects, ambience, ADR direction and recording, integration) on that small project will come in handy as you find yourself acting as an audio director on a next-gen console project.

Labels: breakingin

Looks like I'm GDC Geek of the Week for 12/11 to 12/17!

Labels: gdc

I'm totally psyched. All-around awesome guy Ken Harward was just made Studio Head at Ritual Entertainment. I met him at GDC '03, back when I was just a young student and didn't know a single person in the game industry. I remember we started chatting about stuff and he invited me out to dinner with his co-workers. A lead programmer invited me out to dinner with real live game developers OMG! I was star-struck. It was an awesome experience for me, and we had some really awesome conversations (one was about the market prospects for niche games).

Also, this is an example of someone extremely competent being promoted from within the ranks to a high-level management position, in direct opposition to my rant from earlier this week. So that makes me happy.

Labels: industry, management, memories

So I just upgraded to Blogger Beta. Hopefully nothing will break.

I'm just glad I can tag posts now!

Labels: admin

Okay, I'm going to make a slight clarification on yesterday's rant. I wrote that management skill is not as transferable as we think it is, and that I would hesitate to hire an executive from outside the game industry.

I think that execs that come in from outside industries have the capacity to be good at their jobs, but they don't have the capacity to be truly stellar at their jobs. And I happen to agree with Joel's philosophy on the whole hiring thing: if you're not certain that someone is going to be absolutely amazing at their job, don't hire 'em. Don't settle for merely good.

That said, lots of companies out there will settle for hiring people who are merely good. While I have no patience for them, they're more than welcome to bring in generic managers.

Labels: management

I've been thinking about the different kinds of employees you see at a typical game company. I kind of group folks into a few different areas.

Game Industry Mavens. These folks are the ones who are plugged in to the game industry at large. They go to conferences, have worked at a few game companies, and they want to continue making games for the forseeable future. This is the kind of person I encourage everyone to be.

Game Industry Clueless. These people are really happy that they're working in games, and they want to continue working in games. This is probably their first game industry job, and they're making the assumption that because they've worked on one game they'll be able to get hired at another game company. While this assumption is not groundless, these people also don't know what IGDA stands for, and think GDC is a waste of their time and money. They're going to have a hard time staying in the industry.

Window shoppers. These guys just wandered in randomly through one venue or another. Maybe they worked on banking software back in the day with one of the lead programmers and got hired as some kind of arcane windows driver specialist or something. They think it's neat that they're working at a game company, but would be just as happy working somewhere else.

Administrative assistants and legal folks often fall in the Window Shopper category, understandably. However, a surprising number of VP-level people get hired with no game industry experience. They are often hired on the assumption that someone who managed a department at a web hosting company could do the same thing at a game company. This is tied in to what I once heard someone call "the myth of the MBA," that management is a wholly transferrable skill. While running, say, an IT department at a game company isn't going to be much different from running IT at a non-game company, 90% of the time I really question the wisdom of bringing in anyone at the executive level who doesn't have extensive game industry experience.

Okay, rant over.

Surprisingly, I don't see much of a continuum between Mavens and Clueless. You'd expect to see some middle-of-the-road people who've been to GDC once and know a few people who work at other game companies. Those people exist, but are few and far between. I think it's a positive feedback loop: once you start down the path to being a Maven, you get sucked in and there's no turning back!

Labels: management

I overheard someone in public a few weeks ago say to somebody else, "My son is 13, and he has an Xbox and a high definition TV. It cost us $1200 total! I never had any $1200 toys when I was a kid. I remember I got a brand new bike and it was the best thing ever. Kids these days!"

I think she may have been missing the point. To me, the fact that we're spending more on toys (and entertainment in general) on a per capita basis means that we're attaching more value to play. Perhaps play is worth more to us as a society than it was years ago.