Home
March 1, 2008--Commentary
So, I was a little emotional about the fact that Iron Lore shut its doors, and I opened my big mouth, probably more than I should have.
Regardless of the surrounding debates about piracy and its impact, I
hope the one thing that doesn't get lost is how incredible the accomplishments
are of the team at that studio. The real point here is that developing
a core gamer's game is terribly difficult, the odds of success are long, and
the team did a phenomenal job with Titan Quest, its expansion, and the Dawn
of War expansion as well. Though the studio is shut down, hopefully
its people and their great work will not be forgotten. Working with
them has certainly been one of the highlights of my career.
March 1, 2008--GDC Presentation
Okay, the slides are now available here
(you can do the "right-click and save as" thing if you want your own copy).
I was a little disappointed by the turnout for the talk, but then again,
I was up against both the producer's group gathering and Star Wars. I'll
be curious to see what the feedback was on the talk itself when those numbers
are available. For those of you who go to GDC, yes, we really do care
what numbers you circle.
July 20, 2007--Commentary
People sometimes complain that the games industry puts out a lot of
the same type of game (pirates, ninjas, westerns) all at the same time. While
one could chalk this up to the collective unconscious, I've always thought
that it's simply that similar people in different places have similar ideas
at about the same time. Well, apparently, this happens in the games
journalism biz as well, because within about a month of my airing my issues
with the field, suddenly articles start cropping up dealing with similar
issues. Here's the good and the bad of it, if you're interested.
July 1, 2007--New Content
I'm trying to be a little better about actually putting content on
the site, and a recent forum discussion inspired me to write up one of the
exercises I use when evaluating candidates for design jobs.
The Game Designer
Interview Exercise
The question of how to get a job as a game designer is a perennial one.
Designer is one of the "sexy" jobs in game development, particularly
as the common misconception of it is that you get to sit around and think
up game ideas all day. While I've covered the basics of getting a
job as a designer elsewhere,
I thought I'd walk through one of the exercises I use when interviewing
designers to give a more in-depth view of the specific kinds of things potential
employers may be looking for. This is something that I've developed
and refined over several years, and while not foolproof, it has been remarkably
successful in separating out the wheat from the chaff at the phone interview
stage. more...
June 24, 2007--New Content
So I've had some things bubbling about in my head about the games
press, and I finally decided to write some down. I hope this doesn't
get me into trouble, as they've got a much bigger soapbox than I do.
Random Thoughts
on Games Journalism
There are certain things you can count on from games journalists,
among them Top X lists and navel-gazing. The former is an easy tool
for filling up space and generating conversation, the latter an inevitable
side effect of taking what you do seriously. While that may seem like
a contradiction at first, I think it speaks to the diversity of practice
in games journalism today. A couple of recent reflective articles on
myths
of game journalism and reviews
have inspired me to put down a few of my own random thoughts on these practices.
more...
March 17, 2007--New Content
GDC 2007 Random Notes
GDC is my favorite game industry event. As someone with an academic
bent, having several thousand developers gathered in the same place talking
about everything from specific production issues to the state and future
of the industry to process and relationship structures is just bound to be
a good time. On top of that, it's a great opportunity to touch base
with various people I've worked with and get into ridiculous conversations.
There's plenty of coverage (and more coming, no doubt) on the talks
themselves, so here are just a few quick hits on things that likely won't
get discussed elsewhere. more...
February 11, 2007--New Content
Wow, almost a year between updates. I think that's a new
record. It is also, of course, a testament to how busy things have
been. In spite of that, an offhand moment from a TV show caught my
eye as something much more significant, and so we have a rare new edition
to the cultural criticism section:
The N Word
The use of the N word in American culture is a highly contested and
potentially explosive territory. In a country where racial divisions
have been a defining characteristic for over four hundred years, where
domestic slavery was widespread a hundred and sixty years ago, and where
as recently as forty years ago, major civil rights legislation had to be
agitated for, the use of a word that was historically disparaging and used
primarily by the dominant White culture can stir very strong emotions.
There are those who believe no one should use this word; there are
those who believe that only Black people can legitimately use this word;
there are those who believe that the word can only be used in specific contexts.
So, the use of this word in a popular prime-time drama-comedy series
on major network television could be expected to raise quite an outcry.
Only it hasn't, and I find this quite interesting, particularly since
this event not only evoked the word but also brought in a context that
is racially complex and raises serious questions of authorship and performance.
more...
February 12, 2006--New Content
In spite of all my best efforts, the project of finding, or making,
a formal language of game design continues to catch at people's minds,
much to my chagrin. My last exposure to this virus has brought some
new clarity to my understanding of both the problem and my reaction to it,
so we have a new rant:
Platonism
and Game Design Theory
So, I've been against a formal
language of game design for a while now. Last year at GDC,
Raph Koster gave a
talk on a formal notation system for game design, which was close enough
to get my hackles up, and presented more or less the same system in his book
A Theory of Fun for Game Design. Just recently
I ran into another, similar proposal from someone else entirely, and the
ensuing discussion helped me to clarify for myself why I object to these
types of approaches so vehemently. more...
December 14, 2005--New Content
So, the concept of a "creative crisis" in the game industry
continues to roll right along. In spite of all
the evidence to the contrary and various public debunkings, it's taken on a life of its own and,
as propaganda is wont to do, is quickly becoming a self-evident truth.
One of the common pieces of this meme is that it's the suits who
are to blame for it, and for most everything else wrong with the industry.
So, in spite of the busy schedule, I managed to channel my frustration
into a new article:
The View
from the Other Side: So, I'm a Suit
Well, actually I'm more of a button-down shirt and jeans guy, but
metaphorically, I am definitely a suit. I work for a publisher;
I make decisions about what games will and will not do on the design side;
I take pitches from developers and help decide which ones are going to get
funding; I look at the budgets and the bottom lines and make calls about
whether a project is ready to ship or not. So, when developers or
gamers blame the suits, I'm the guy they're talking about. more...
Hopefully, I'll be able to make it through the holidays without
having to vent again.
December 4, 2005--New Content
Well, things continue to be hectic around here, with two of
my projects going into the finaling phase and two others ramping up
towards full production. With the holidays just around the corner,
I expect it will be a while before I have the time or energy to write
much on the site. Given the history of sporadic updates, this probably
surprises you not at all.
But in the meantime, I have a new piece on the games business:
The View
from the Other Side: Developer's Bill of Rights
Recently, Eric Zimmerman posted his take on a Developer's Bill of Rights on Gamasutra. Based
on a similar piece for the comics industry, it attempts to address what
are seen as common shortcomings in the business landscape for game developers.
Certainly, there are some points that seem reasonable, and there
are some that are just common-sense, but there are also several that
I see problems with from the publishing side. more...
I also was, um, inspired to finally drop something into the culture
section:
Have a
Nice Day?
So, my morning routine involves watching MTV. Okay, actually
VH-1 Classic, that's how old I am, but I'll occasionally cruise through
the other music video channels when there's nothing I'm interested in
watching. Generally, this makes me grumpy, since they'll play the
same damn crappy videos on four of the five channels I tend to cycle between,
and the only thing worse than seeing a crappy video is to see the same crappy
video being pushed all over the place. Which brings me to Bon Jovi.
more...
Also, I updated the biography with
the last year's changes, and the Neighborhood
section has been updated with a few more links.
October 1, 2005--New Content
Looking back through some old forum posts I'd made, I found
a discussion of the difficulties of getting co-operative multiplayer
into a game. Since it's as difficult today as it was back then,
I've cleaned it up a bit and put it together as an article.
Why Co-op
Is Harder Than It Looks
Co-operative multiplayer is one of those features that can be
really tricky to get into a game. There's a relatively small, but
dedicated, fanbase that likes to play games co-operatively. Because
they often play on local networks, it's difficult to get an accurate
measure of how many people use this game mode, as opposed to adversarial,
which gamers are more likely to play against strangers, i.e. over the
internet. Playing co-op over a network, gamers will often use the
same copy on multiple machines, which means that you can't necessarily
translate numbers of players into numbers of copies sold. On top
of that, co-op play has a number of technical and design implications that
can be particularly tricky to handle. From the player's perspective,
though, it seems like a given that if you can support single-player and
adversarial multiplayer, co-operative should be possible. This article
lays out a few of the reasons why you don't see co-op in as many games,
or with as much robustness, as you might expect. more...
Also, a small update on the last piece. Apparently,
Greg Costikyan has decided to put his manifesto into action, starting
a new distribution partner for developers called, appropriately enough,
Manifesto Games.
While I wish him luck in this new endeavor, I fully expect it
to fail, for all of the reasons detailed in my piece.
September 23, 2005--New Content
Wow. It's been a little over a year since the last
actual content update. It has been a crazy, crazy, busy time. Around
this time last year, I was interviewing with my new company, and the
transitions (from one coast to the other, from college town to metropolis,
from single to married, from development to publishing, from production
to management) have been challenging, in the good sense that I've been
stretched and have grown and learned a tremendous amount. Part of
that learning has involved looking at things from the publishing end, and
so I offer up the first of what I think will be a series of articles based
on that new perspective.
The View
from the Other Side: Death to the Industry?
There's a piece that's been making the rounds, Greg Costikyan's
"Death to the Games Industry". My understanding is that this
started as a GDC rant, and since then he's turned it into a full presentation and is now publishing an extended
version in a new online gaming magazine, The Escapist.
The gist of Costikyan's argument is that the economics of game
development are out of whack and this is hampering creativity in the
industry. more...
March 19, 2005--GDC Presentation
Okay, so we're pretty much in the last stages of moving
in (a few boxes in the guest room, a pile of trash in the garage, and
a lot of pictures we have to figure out where we're going to hang), but
things continue at the nuttiest of paces between GDC, business trips,
preparations for E3, and the wedding that will
soon be upon us.
In the meantime, though, for those of you who went to my talk
and are looking for the slides, the PowerPoint is here. (You may need to right-click and
save as; I'm still working on figuring out all the appropriate tags.)
If you don't have PowerPoint installed, you can get the viewer
from here.
February 15, 2005--Status Update
Okay, well it looks like the re-hosting has gone off
without a hitch, although if you find any broken links, feel free
to report them using the address in the Mailbox section.
We're still in the middle of relocating to LA (we're out
here, but not into our apartment yet), so it will be a while before
I can do any real updates to the site, but there are lots of things
I've got in mind to write. LA is an odd, odd place, and it was
the classic long, strange trip to get out here.
December 13, 2004--On Hiatus
Well, the site has unofficially been on hiatus for a
while now, but I guess it's time to make it official. One of
the reasons why there hasn't been any new content in a while is that
I've been busy looking for a new job, and now that I've found one, I'm
busy with getting everything arranged to move across the country. Since
this web-space is tied to my home ISP account (which will, in all likelihood,
be cancelled in a month or so), I don't know how long this site will
even stay up. I guess it's time to look into a little more permanent
web-hosting solution. In the meantime, a few links.
If you haven't seen it, I got into a great bitch-slap fest with the folks at Grand Text Auto.
This is the last game I was working on at Red Storm.
Here is
where I will be going next.
If you liked the text version, I'll be doing a live version of "Pitfalls of the Working Lead Designer" at the next GDC.
Thanks to everyone who dropped by and took the time to read,
especially those of you who sent me nice e-mails. Once I get
re-settled, I'll probably put some version of this site back up in greener
fields and pastures new. After all, what's a pastoral without a
decent troll?
August 1, 2004--New Content
I like to drop in on the IGDA forums from time to time, mostly because it's a
place that a lot of people who want to be involved in the industry
go. You get a little conversation between people who are actually
working in the industry, but mostly it's a lot of folks on the outside
who would like to be on the inside. Giving them the benefit of
my experience feels a little like giving back to the community.
One of the things that you get, though, is people with
game design ideas who don't really understand game design; this isn't
that uncommon in other places, but it happens there a lot because
there's a forum devoted to design. A recent thread inspired me to put together a few notes on general
things that non-designers don't consider when they're throwing out
ideas.
Five Things Non-Designers
Tend to Forget
One of the things about working in commercial game design
is that everybody you run into thinks they can do your job. Players
think that because they've played the game and know it from that angle,
they can improve on the design. The people you work with think
that since they've developed the game and know it from that angle,
they can improve on the design. Hobbyists who have done design
in their spare time think of themselves as designers, so they think
they can improve on the design. Random strangers think that game design
is just sitting around playing games and thinking up ideas, and since
they've done that, they think they can improve on the design. Designers
love to bitch about this, but I think it's more important to educate
people, to get them closer to the design frame of mind so to speak, and
thus I offer up some of the most common things people tend to forget about
when they're playing at design. more...
July 13, 2004--New Content
Sometimes, the stuff I read in the game studies "blogosphere"
really ticks me off. Occasionally, it's enough that I sit down
and write a response.
The Parable of Irony
This one takes a little bit of a setup. Simon
Penny wrote an article called "Representation, Enaction, and the Ethics of Simulation"
for a collection of essays called First Person. Sections of this book are
being published over at the Electronic
Book Review, and one of the benefits of this re-publishing
is that it allows for comments by other thinkers on the same subjects.
Jan van Looy wrote a response to Penny's article, in which he accused Penny
of re-hashing the "violent games produce violent behaviors" debate
and argued against that position. Penny wrote his own response,
in which he disavowed the position that van Looy had attributed
to him and claimed that he was making a much smaller and more focused
point, which he accused van Looy of having missed and unfairly dismissed.
more...
June 27, 2004--Commentary
So, this site has been up now for a little over
a year. For most of its life, it's been safely hidden away,
with no links to it anywhere. No one came here, because no one
knew it existed or how to get here. Slowly, I've started to leak
its existence and location to a few people I've argued with, a few people
I work with, and a few people whose opinions I just generally respect.
I have to admit, I'm profoundly ambivalent about the site becoming
more public.
On the one hand, there's little point in writing all
this stuff down if no one else is going to read it. I mean,
writing about something does always help me to structure my thoughts
more formally, and there's a certain pleasure in writing, at least
when it works, but ultimately if I didn't want anyone else to read it,
I wouldn't have written it, much less published it. Sure, it's handy
to have a repository for some of the frequently asked questions (like
the jobs piece), or a record of transient conversations (like the copied
forum posts), but a lot of what I'm saying here doesn't have any value
without actually being read by someone who doesn't already know what
I'm saying.
On the other hand, it's much easier to hold forth as
an expert when you know that expertise is never going to be challenged.
The flaws of logic and presentation, the self-indulgent rhetoric
and diction, the primitive state of the site itself, none of that
mattered when it was simply a private repository, a place to hold some
of my thoughts in case I ever needed to point someone to them. If
people start coming here, then this persona I've created actually begins
to have life in it; I become responsible to it, tied forever to its words
and postures. People will take the impression of the person that
is expressed in this writing, and for them it will be who I am. I'm
not sure I'm ready for that. It was with some small terror that I
realized the other day that this site is actually listed now with the
major search engines. I guess I was already pushing it into the
public eye, so to speak, and there are already more people who have visited
than have actually mentioned it. Having opened the door and invited
folks in, I suppose it's time to take the consequences for what they
are.
So, to you who have walked through this door, I
bid you welcome. If it makes an impression, for good or for
ill, by all means, let me know.
June 27, 2004--New Content
The latest in the ongoing "pitfalls" series.
Pitfalls of
the Working Game Designer: Bright, Shiny Objects
Most of the game developers I know play a lot of games.
On one level, this is simply because the people who are most
likely to get into making games are the ones who love playing games.
On another level, though, it can be a critical part of doing
your job. As a designer, specifically, it's important to know
how other people are tackling problems you might face in your project,
what the audiences are responding to positively and negatively, where
innovation succeeds and fails, and generally what the standards are
for games in the industry. However, there are dangers lurking in
this process, and one in particular that I'm going to focus on is the bright,
shiny object. more...
June 12, 2004--New Content
The concept of "sandbox" games has been bugging
me for a while. After seeing a description of a talk on the
subject, I decided to write down some of my own thoughts on the topic.
Pissing in the Sandbox: What's in an Analogy?
The term "sandbox" in relation to games is one of the
most used and misunderstood in talk about games today. Largely
due to the commercial success and cultural high profile of Grand
Theft Auto 3, "sandbox" has become on of those grail-like features:
if only we can discover its whereabouts, gaming will achieve a glorious
new future. While it would be easy enough to rail against this
phenomenon's status as the newest "bright, shiny object", I believe
there is a more fundamental problem with the concept itself and the
way it is being used. more...
June 5, 2004--New Content
Two new pieces in the ongoing "pitfalls" series.
Pitfalls
of the Working Game Designer: More and More Features
Feature creep is a well-documented bane of game development:
growing the feature set for a project over time, while not making
corresponding cuts or adjusting the schedule. Adding more and
more work, but expecting the schedule to stay the same, is a recipe
for disaster. more...
Pitfalls
of the Working Game Designer: The Devil's in the Documents
Every job description I’ve ever read for a design
position includes a line like “excellent verbal and written communication
skills a necessity”, and for good reason. Aside from meetings,
what designers do more than anything else is write documents.
It should come as no surprise, then, that there are many dangers in
documentation. more...
June 2, 2004--New Content
Continuing the series of short pieces about the
realities and minefields of working as a commercial game designer,
here's a new trap.
Pitfalls of
the Working Game Designer: Believing the Hype
Design has a lot more to do with marketing than
many designers would like to admit. more...
May 30, 2004--New Content
Inspired by some of the conversations I've seen
in the game studies blogs, I've written my own little manifesto.
It's very rough, and a bit polemical, but I think there's
a few good bits in there.
Game Studies:
A Model
This is a collection of some of my thoughts on game
studies--where it's going, what it should be, who should be doing
it, and how. Along the way, there's also some ranting about
what's wrong with how it's being done today. more...
May 30, 2004--Update
I added a few links related to the below-mentioned
journeys through game studies blog space to the Neighborhood.
These are by no means exhaustive, but among the list of
places I find interesting to lurk, and occasionally comment on.
May 30, 2004--New Content
So, I recently discovered the game studies blog
world. It seems that there are all these very bright folks
out there in the world taking note of and discussing all sorts
of issues having to do with games and the studies thereof. Now,
the incredible part of this is that some of these people actually
update their sites every day. Boy, does that make me
feel like a slacker.
But, it finally inspired me to put some short pieces
I've written up on the site.
Pitfalls of
the Working Game Designer: An Introduction
I hear it time and time again: “Game design must
be the best job in the world. You sit around, think up game
ideas, and then you get to play the game you’ve always wanted.”
As compelling a fantasy as this is, though, it has very little relation
to the realities of working as a game designer in a commercial
studio. This series of short pieces identifies specific issues
that come up in the day to day business of game design. more...
Pitfalls
of the Working Game Designer: Not Defining Design
It may seem like a no-brainer that the role of the
designer on a team needs to be defined. However, as fundamental
as this is, there is no standard definition you can rely on. more...
Pitfalls
of the Working Game Designer: Too Many Cooks
When it comes to design, everyone has ideas.
This is not a good thing. more...
October 12, 2003--New Content
Well, spurred on by yet another pointless article
on the topic, I finally put together my rant against the formal
language project:
Against
a Formal Language for Game Design
There have, unfortunately been a number of
calls for such a thing. This article discusses why it's
a bad idea. more...
There were a few relatively minor tweaks to
some of the other articles as I realized some of my navigation
tools were redundant. Ah, well, live and learn. I still
need to get that whole frames thing working. Yes, I realize
it's not rocket science, but it might as well be for the time I have
available to spend on it.
October 4, 2003--Update
Well, it seems like the older I get, the faster
the time goes by. I offer as witness the increasing gaps
between updates. Well, I did go back through the job article and
separated the glossary out into a separate window. While it will now
update appropriately when you click on the links, it will not, unfortunately,
come to the front. I'm afraid I may need to delve into the world
of frames sooner rather than later if I want some of this navigation
stuff to work. Sigh.
Who has the time?
July 13, 2003--Update
Wow, I can't believe it's been over a month
since the last update. Been very busy at work, I guess.
I now have a much greater appreciation for sites that go un-modified
for long periods of time.
Anyway, just a mini-update to the Neighborhood
section, adding a couple of additional places that I realized
are landmarks in my mental map of the net.
May 26, 2003--Update
Okay, I went through and put all the links
in the job article,
populated the glossary, and filled out the resource section a bit.
I need to figure out how to do a good linking system for
the glossary terms, though, since I don't want to have to create
named anchors for both ends of each link. That one will require
a little research.
In the meantime, I figured out how to make
the links spawn new browser windows, so I've gone through
and updated all the stuff external to this site. If
you find an external link that doesn't spawn a new window (or
is otherwise broken), let me know through the address in the Mailbox
section.
May 25, 2003--New Content
One of the things I've wanted to put on
the web for a while, and one of my reasons for creating this
site, was an article on getting a job in gaming. I've got
the rough draft of it put together, but the project has grown
under my fingers, so to speak, so there's still a long way to go.
Getting
a Job in the Gaming Industry
As someone who works in the industry, this
is something I get asked about a lot, so I decided to go ahead
and document what I know about the process in one place for easy
reference. more...
The next step will be to flesh out the
resource section, hyperlink all the appropriate stuff, and populate
the glossary, but that's probably another full day's work, so
I'm going to leave it here for now.
May 21, 2003--Update
Well, I was out of town last week at E3,
so not much happening here on the site. I hope to get
some more time to work on it this weekend. In the meantime,
I have posted the first game industry content:
E3 2003
Impressions
Well, believe it or not, this was my first
trip to E3 (for the acronymically challenged, that's the Electronic
Entertainment Expo, the biggest shill-session the games industry
puts on each year). The show floor was everything I expected
it to be (too loud, too crowded, overloaded with screens and flashing
lights), and LA was significantly nicer than I expected. more...
I'm also trying to make sure that each section
has something in it (although that may take a while with the
Mailbox section, since I doubt anyone even knows this site exists),
so here's the first installment from the library:
The
Fallacy of the Future
While fans of Neal Stephenson may appreciate
the fantasy of a world where nanobots can create just about
any product out of some raw form of matter, the elision between
“Designers at Adidas print prototypes of their shoe soles” and “Other
companies prototype toys, dinnerware, bottles, golf clubs, jet
skis, and so on” in consecutive sentences should give anyone pause.
more...
May 11, 2003--First Content
After a few issues with the server going
up and down, and having to find a free FTP client (SmartFTP)
to fix my directory structure, I managed to get all the root pages
up and links between them working. Everything is very rudimentary,
still, but the architecture is at least in place. I've
also put in the first real content for the site:
Who am
I?
I have had many names in many places, which
is only fitting because I am not always the same person.
I have been Zolton. I have been Eyejinx. If you've seen
me in a beta-test or public forum, one of those names is
probably how you know me. more...
The Neighborhood
section is also live now with links to some of my favorite
haunts on the web.
May 11, 2003--First Layout
I finally found a free WYSIWYG editor
(Netscape Composer) that I could work with, so it's time
to start putting the site together. So far, all I have
is a general architecture and style in mind. Someday soon,
I hope to do some research into frames and turn that table up
there into a navigation frame. For now, I think I'm just going
to try and get the actual root pages up with some hyper-links.
Back to top