When EA says that their Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO is sustainable at half a million players and very profitable at a million, I hear the drums of doom. No one since WoW has hit those numbers and I doubt anyone hit a million before WoW, either. The license won’t do it, any more than it did for Star Trek and that launched with a hit movie at hand. I am the Duke of Doubt.
Author: John Scott Tynes
Reading this PA strip after a week in which I rode The Many Adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh four times in a row, I’m reminded of one of my favorite videogame levels.
(Reposting this from my private profile, where I put it by mistake this morning.)
Penny Arcade! – My Friend Wyrmidon
Equal parts comics and commentary, Penny Arcade features Tycho and Gabe, the alter egos of creators Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Read about the antics and thoughts of the Penny Arcade crew, updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
I spent the last couple hours reviewing game prototype proposals from various studios in response to a concept we gave them. It’s a sure bet that one proposal will always be forehead-slappingly awful and yep, one was. I guess they thought being laughably uninformed about their audience was meant as a competitive advantage?
I saw some really amazing Kinect tech demos this morning. I can’t talk about them but I’ll just say that I believe Kinect’s success is much more due to software than hardware, that Microsoft’s greatest strength is software engineering, and that no product we ship ever stays at v1 for long. Awesomeness is coming.
New study finds positive effects when girls play videogames with their parents. It’s gender-specific, too: boys displayed no such results, probably because they already play more videogames anyway.
http://jahonline.org/webfiles/images/journals/jah/feature3.pdf
The essays on Gamasutra routinely disappoint me. This one starts off with an interesting perspective on the continuum between the game designer’s narrative and the one the player creates, but then promptly falls into the trap of assuming that player agency is only good for navigating within the designer’s narrative. Argh.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/6276/closing_the_loop_fostering_.php?print=1
Behind the scenes, I’m working on a massive overhaul and relaunch of Revland. It’s still very much in the early stages, but here’s a sneak peek at the current stage of the redesign. Note that the page isn’t functional–the links aren’t real and so forth, so don’t bother bookmarking it. It’s just a snapshot of where Revland is at in the future, if that makes any sense. Check it out! And test this.
Well, Mike got bumped from the Letterman episode during the taping, to make room for an endless conversation with the guy in that Scooby-Doo movie. He has a great write-up of the experience on his site.
Dennis, Scott, and I have been working steadily on the storyline for the Delta Green computer game. It’s been a lot of fun. We haven’t really collaborated directly on a project in several years, and it’s nice to be bouncing ideas around again. We’ve got a pretty good first draft of the whole thing and it’s going well. At Flying Lab we got a look at some concept art for Deep Ones which looked fantastic.
I went to another pitch meeting yesterday, to yet another computer game publisher. It went pretty well. We’re pushing forward on all fronts at once, and we’ll see who actually whips out the big six-foot check. I’m very confident that we’re close to a deal, and then we can really get busy.
I’ve taken on a new project that I’m really excited about. I’m serving as editor for a short film called The Resurrectionist, made by friends of mine here in town. It’s a gothic horror western, shot on Super 8mm. Tonight we watched about two hours of raw footage, and there’s another half-hour or so still in the lab, but they’re done shooting. The finished film should be something like 30-45 minutes long, or so they think. We’ll have a better idea soon. They’ve had the film reels transferred to miniDV, so this weekend I start digitizing the footage and assembling the rough edit. Next month they’re doing all the sound recording. I’ll probably be working on this into September or so.
The footage really looks great. By which I mean it looks awful, gloriously awful in that old silent movie sort of way. It’s black and white, one of the cameras frequently stuttered, there are beautiful light leaks whenever the film is running out, and the whole thing just has a gorgeous sort of decay and murkiness to it. I’m really hungry to get the footage into the computer and start editing. I think we can make a real virtue of the film’s inherent visual flaws and turn this into something pretty delicious, especially if the audio can match the distressed glory of the images.
The director is my friend Jason Soles, and he’s been keeping an online shooting diary. Other friends are involved in the production, including Unknown Armies Second Edition artist Ann Koi as an actress and general creative type and Thom Ryng (who wrote the King in Yellow play that Armitage House published a while back) wrote the script. The film’s still-nascent official site, with some fun photos and such, is also online.
Sometime very soon, GamingReport.com is going to run an interview I just did with them that I’ve been looking forward to for about a year and a half. It’s going to be a relief to finally see this happen. See, I’ve been working towards leaving the gaming industry since January of 2001, and at this point it’s pretty much happened. With the exception of Unknown Armies, I don’t expect to write, edit, or create any more tabletop RPG stuff, for Call of Cthulhu or anything else. It’s time for me to move on.
Though I did enter the recent Wizards of the Coast contest. It’s a hundred grand–what the heck!
This last week has been very, very hectic. Between the Seattle Film Festival and the Delta Green computer game, it’s been tough. Friday and Saturday nights I only got three hours’ sleep. But it’s paying off. I went to a very large software publisher on Monday morning to pitch the game to them and it went very well indeed. I’m more and more confident that we’ll lock up a publishing deal for the project in the near future.
More to come, but meanwhile, it looks like my friend Mike is going to be on David Letterman this Wednesday night. The evening’s other guests include Freddie Prinze Jr.! Good lord. Here’s the line-up.
Two links from Andrew Sullivan’s irascible and indispensable daily journal:
This is quite a good article. Though I find it mildly annoying that when a comedian writes something for a highbrow publication he miraculously becomes a humorist.
And here is a rather pleasant idea for what to do with Ground Zero: build an inter-religious worship center, an ecumenical house for muslims, christians, jews, and whatever mice you have in your pocket to boot.
(Andrew Sullivan is a British journalist working in New York. He holds the unusual cultural position of being an HIV+ gay Republican Catholic, which by all rights should put him in the running for a “Man walks into a bar” joke. He’s also an excellent writer and commentator, even when I don’t agree with him. I’ve come to find that I’d much rather read opinions and journalism by people with politics at least somewhat different from my own, because I’d rather have my ideas challenged than coddled and confirmed.)