Tiny Subversions

Pitchfork recently interviewed Eddie Argos, the lead singer of Art Brut (a band I like, although I have yet to hear their latest album). When asked what his favorite video game is, he responded with a funny anecdote about Halo:

[Halo]'s not my favorite, but I can't play a game; I'd rather sing about it: [singing to the tune of the Doors' "Hello, I Love You"] "Halo, I love you, you're my favorite game," or [to the tune of the Beatles' "Hello Goodbye"] "I say go out, you say Halo, Halo, Halo!" I'd actually sing that quite often, like he wouldn't go out; he'd stay and play Halo. So for Jasper I'll say Halo's my favorite game, because of all the songs we wrote about it. [sings] "Halo, Halo/ You say go out, I say Halo" [laughs]. That's why I like it: I like Halo because we used to write funny songs about it.

Labels: games, music

Just learned from Sara Jensen Schubert that CCP has brought on a real economist to monitor the EVE Online economy.

Now, this economist is keeping a developer's blog, but it seems that his blog doesn’t have a dedicated RSS feed: they only offer a feed of *every* dev blog for EVE Online.

However, I just ran that feed through the oh-so-awesome Yahoo Pipes, and produced a brand new feed with just posts authored by the economist:

http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=chOB1Lcl3BGSArXyy6ky6g

So if you're like me and try to keep your feed reader clean, this can help.

Labels: economy

I was reading a good article in the mainstream computer press on women in the game industry, when I noticed something in the comments section. Someone made a comment using the phrase "the gaming industry." An anonymous poster rightly chastised him for using that phrase, as "game industry" is more correct. (I want to note briefly that the actual published article was very well-written and did not make this mistake.)

Hear me now, n00bs of the game development world: if you are writing a cover letter for your first industry job, or just interacting with potential employers, do not call it the "gaming industry." That's like applying to a job at Ford Motors and saying you'd love to work in the "driving industry." You'll look like an idiot. Don't do it.

(UPDATE: reader Zach makes a good point that the "gaming industry" already refers to the gambling industry.)

Acceptable terms to use, in ascending order of awkwardness: game industry, games industry, video game industry, video games industry, game development industry, video game development industry.

Labels: breakingin, industry, vocab

A lot of indie devs have been very happy to hear about the WiiWare announcement.

However, my friend Casey O'Donnell makes a very good point about how WiiWare is maybe not all sunshine and roses. Bottom line, in Casey's words:

What [Nintendo] should have said is, "Established developers can create small teams with small budgets and big ideas to bring original games to the marketplace."

I mean, I hope it turns out better than this. But it's not looking that way right now.

Labels: indie, tools, wii

This is a funny story about Randy Farmer and Richard Bartle freaking out some kid in a game store, as told by Bartle (via Intelligent Artifice).

(Also, this is my 300th post, which means I've averaged a little over 10 posts per month, a little over two per week. Woohoo!)

Labels: humor, industry, stories

I wrote an article about catching gold farmers for the latest issue of The Escapist. I'm pretty pleased with the way it turned out, but that's largely to the credit of their great editors! Here's a brief excerpt:

An MMOG is an amazingly complex entity. You might believe a gold farmer could easily hide among the millions of other characters on a server, like a needle in a haystack. But farmers behave fundamentally differently than a normal player. The farmer isn't trying to have fun. In fact, if you look at the act of farming, it's probably the most boring thing you can imagine. But it's efficient, and efficiency is what the farmers are optimizing for. That efficient boredom sticks out like a sore thumb. We can see this stuff happen. So it's like finding a needle in a haystack where the needle is colored bright orange and we happen to know the density of each cubic centimeter of the haystack.

You can read the article here.

Labels: escapist, metrics, mmo, publication

German game magazine GEE just published their interview of me! Here's a scan of the article:


I posted about this in more detail on the Orbus Gameworks blog, including a translation of the article and my thoughts on the magazine.

I gotta say I'm not happy with the picture. I should get a few glamor shots done, just in case a few more magazines come knocking on my door :P

Labels: metrics, orbus, press

GameCareerGuide.com has an article up detailing the early careers of several game developers, including Boston's own Greg LoPiccolo, of Harmonix. Greg was actually the first Boston-area developer I ever met, introduced to me by Robin Hunicke at GDC 2003. Anyway, Greg's path into the game industry is an interesting one, as he was the bassist for the much-loved Boston band Tribe before he started doing audio work for Looking Glass. He eventually moved into project management and went to Harmonix around the time Looking Glass dissolved. Read the full story here.

As a side note, a few other members of Tribe entered the game industry along with Greg: Eric Brosius and Terri Brosius, the latter of whom you might know as the voice of SHODAN.

Labels: boston, breakingin, know_your_history

Oooh. THQ just announced Warhammer 40k: Squad Command. It's a turn-based strategy game set in the 40k universe, on the DS and PSP. Should I get my hopes up? Urge to buy, rising... rising...

Labels: games

I'm currently reading a great book on Microsoft SQL Server called Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005 T-SQL Querying, by Itzik Ben-Gan. I just came across a particularly funny anecdote in one of the chapters that I thought I'd share.

[This] reminds me of a programmer and an IT manager at a company I worked for years ago. The programmer had to finish writing a component and deploy it, but there was a bug in his code that he couldn't find. He produced a printout of the code (which was pretty thick) and went to the IT manager, who was in a meeting. The IT manager was extremely good at detecting bugs, which is why the programmer sought him. The IT manager took the thick printout, opened it, and immediately pointed to a certain line of code. "Here's your bug," he said. "Now go." After the meeting was over, the programmer asked the IT manager how he found the bug so fast? The IT manager replied, "I knew that anywhere I pointed there would be a bug.

Labels: programming

Awesome Boston industry news: Tilted Mill, in Wellesley, MA, is making the next SimCity game, SimCity Societies! This is... huge for Boston. It will be another game made here that I can mention to people, and they'll say, "Ah, yes. I've heard of that."

Labels: boston, news

So I was reading a review at Gamespot that happened to mention a character in the Street Fighter series that I didn't know about: Dan Hibiki. Apparently, this guy is modeled after the main character in the Art of Fighting series (which was a direct competitor to Street Fighter). But he's comically weak: his fireballs only go a short distance, his signature moves are easy to block. He also executes his moves in a way that the characters in AoF do (one-handed fireballs instead of two-handed fireballs in SF). He's an overconfident weakling.

So, he's comic relief, which is nothing really notable in and of itself. But the interesting thing to me is that he plays like a character from Art of Fighting within a game of Street Fighter. He's weak, precisely because his moves would be fine in a different game, but not in SF.

Usually when you see crossover characters, they get updated so they're balanced. Like it's pretty obvious to me that Samus could beat up game-and-watch guy, but in Smash Bros. he's given a boost to level the playing field a little bit. The cool thing about this character is that they create comedy by showing you what it's like when a crossover character is not balanced.

Labels: design, games, innovation, parody

Joe Ludwig just wrapped up a three-part series of articles about the time he spent working on Middle Earth Online for Sierra back in '98/'99. This is the game that was to eventually become Lord of the Rings Online, which I worked on at Turbine. However, the Sierra game and the Turbine game have no common code base or anything like that--development was effectively rebooted when Turbine got a hold of the license.

Anyway, the tale of MEO as developed by Sierra is sort of an industry legend as far as dysfunction is concerned. Joe tells some stories about it from his point of view, and I highly recommend that you read it if you care at all about the game industry:

Part 1 - Wherein half the team is fired and the rest relocated.
Part 2 - Wherein there is much mismanagement, and cancellation.
Part 3 - Wherein deep dark secrets are revealed, well after the fact.

As a side note, Joe's working on an MMO called Pirates of the Burning Sea, which is shaping up to be really awesome. You should check it out.

Labels: know_your_history