I’m spending next week in NYC at the Games For Change conference, which is devoted to making games with social impact. I’ll be showing our Kinect Sesame Street TV game for Xbox and giving a talk with one of my colleagues on playful learning. Really looking forward to this.

Well played, Rockstar.

Max Payne 3 cheaters forced to play against each other

Rockstar is trialing a new method for dealing with cheaters in the multiplayer modes of Max Payne 3 — rather than banning those players outright, they are made to play against each other.

At my first job out of college at Wizards of the Coast, game designer Jonathan Tweet taught me that for any game project, you should try to write the back cover sales text early and revise it often. You may not ever use that exact text for real. But by thinking of your project in such concise, player-facing terms, it really helps you focus your thinking and cut what should be cut. I’m still using that advice today and it’s more important to me now than ever.

Catching up on E3 news a bit after a week of vacation. The footage from Star Wars 1313 was a letdown. Gameplay character animations are all way too fast and unnatural; it looks like a producer slapped on a 1.5 multiplier to the game’s animations. The bit with your character vaulting across the wreckage of a falling ship, handhold to handhold, can’t be seen as anything other than a direct grab from Uncharted 2’s wrecked train sequence. I guess if you want other games reconstituted with a Star Wars bouillon cube added then you’re in luck.

I haven’t even finished reading this article yet, but this paragraph stopped me in my tracks with its pure awesome:

“While ZombiU is played primarily in a first-person view, there is no central protagonist; each time you play a random character is generated for you. When you die, that character becomes a zombie, and you are placed in control of another survivor who can then hunt down your past self and reclaim your gear.”

Brilliant. Holy crap brilliant.

The PA Report – The screen is your weapon: hands on with ZombiU for the Wii U

The power of the Wii U lies in the hardware’s ability to share information and interactions with the player through its tablet-style controller. The large screen of the Wii U controller can show data, but the player’s attention is now split between the television and the screen in their hands. That’…

I’m near the end of Max Payne 3 and it’s making the same mistake a lot of games make: changing up their well-oiled gameplay near the end to make it harder. In this case, they’ve suddenly added bosses and minibosses, which take their fun combat system and impose constraints that remove the fun. Don’t you realize that when we’re near the end, we want to dance with the one that brought us? Changing up gameplay in the last 20% of the experience is rarely a good idea.

38 Studios and Big Huge Games collectively owe $270 million to their creditors. I can’t fathom how they could owe so much money given their projects. The prospect of a combined state police and FBI investigation is also grim news.

38 Studios declares bankruptcy, under investigation by feds

Kingdoms of Amalur publisher 38 Studios has declared bankruptcy after failing to secure financing from the state of Rhode Island or outside investors to continue its operations.