So I wrote the Student Perspective feature in the IGDA’s December newsletter, which was pretty neat. You can find a link to it here, or a copy/paste below. The theme for the month was ‘preservation’.
Also, apologies for being so sparse over the holidays, but expect me to be back to posting more regularly!
You may or may not remember a previous post where I declared my reborn love for Disney after witnessing the incredible production value of everything that goes into Disneyland. While that love most definitely remains, I revisited the park this past weekend… and felt compelled to analyze what I felt was the one, single piece of Disneyland that left me feeling disappointed: The Indiana Jones Ride.
Yes, I’ve seen the movies and I do like them. I’m aware that this ride is the favorite of many of my friends, and that most riders happily wait in line for over an hour for this 3-4 minute experience. But for whatever reason, this ride just didn’t do it for me. I felt the same way this summer, but after my second trip, I was able to pay a lot more attention… and I think I’ve been able to hone in on some of the specific reasons. Feel free to check it out under the cut.
I know it’s been almost two weeks since I last posted, and for that I apologize. Between finals, preparing to fly to the east coast for the holidays, and the spring internship search, I’ve been insanely busy lately. But I haven’t forgotten about you!
What are some of the nifty new things in my life, you ask? I’ve had a lot of thoughts that deserve their own posts recently (expect them soon! I’ll have more time to write while I’m on winter break), but there are two that are relevant to games and worth mentioning here.
The first is the Blizzard Holiday party. I was invited by one of my friends from this summer, and it was pretty incredible. The first half of the night was dinner at the Disneyland Hotel, and the second part of the night? They opened up half of California Adventure Park just for Blizzard. We didn’t have access to everything, but they did have the Tower of Terror operating, both of their karaoke venues open, and two showings of the ElecTRONica laser show (oh, and an open bar!).
The best part, however, was the private viewing of their World of Color show. This is because afterwards, they had a 5-minute Blizzard IP-themed show. No joke. It was one of the most epic things I’ve experienced in my entire life. The video doesn’t do it justice, but it’s still definitely worth checking out:
Amazing, right? I don’t think I dorked out this much since I found out I would get to be working there.
The other item (which doesn’t really hold a candle to that one but is still worth mentioning) is that the IGDA is starting a Student Perspective column in their monthly newsletter, and my submission was chosen to be the inaugural piece. It’s a little higher level compared to how I usually prefer to write – meaning it’s more theoretical and potentially ‘Ivory Tower-esque’, not more advanced – but it’s got a decent point behind it that I think I communicated well.
And it’s kind of exciting. The IGDA site gets a collective 6k+ unique monthly viewers, and while I don’t know how many of them go for the newsletters, it’s still a neat feeling. I’ll post it here when it’s actually published if anyone cares to check it out.
In high school, I wrote a paper arguing that video games don’t cause violence in children. While this isn’t really a big issue anymore since games have come a long way in terms of gaining respect from non-gamers, there was a study done recently about games causing violent tendencies that seemed to find its way all over the web yesterday.
The highlight? The study sounded extremely poorly done and inconclusive, and even the LA Times, a non-gamer outlet, says in the last paragraph, “While controversy over the neurological impacts of video games has been widespread, there has been little scientific evidence demonstrating that the games have a prolonged negative effect on players’ brains, according to a statement provided by the Radiological Society.”
That’s pretty neat.
My own opinion is that, a) people gravitate towards things that their natural tendencies already predispose them towards, and b) people can get dramatically different things out of the same piece of media.
That was a fancy way of saying that games aren’t worse than any other kind of violent media, that violent people will seek out those things because they’re already violent, and that the majority of players are in it for the social/competitive aspect, or for the satisfaction they get from the dexterous skill it requires, or even the story. They’re not going to come away thinking about actually killing people in real life.
Maybe your girlfriend will, if you spend too much time playing them. But that's why I personally believe that gamers needs to stick to dating other gamers.
As for the “long-term” (one week?) brain effects? What they’re doing is putting the subjects in a certain mood and then measuring the effects of that. When you’re in an abnormal mindset, you emit certain hormones and your brain activity changes. It’s as simple as that. If you’ve ever taken a psychological test like Myers-Briggs, they tell you not to take it when you’re particularly happy, depressed, anxious, et cetera… in order to avoid exactly what this study is exploiting.
This article makes me giggle more than anything else, but I thought I would share. It’s encouraging to see the changes in the attitudes of the general public in the space of just five years.
I realized that I haven’t written anything on my opinion of free-to-play (F2P) business models. I’ve done countless presentations on some derivative of that for grad school, but never written anything up here yet… probably because all the presentations burn me out periodically, and by the time I recover, I want to do something with it for a class again rather than here.
Anyway, here’s my take in a nutshell, although I do plan to write more in-depth on it at some later point: I think that the F2P model is essentially the future of gaming. Some high-end games will still follow the blockbuster pay-$60-when-it-launches model, but that more and more games will turn the way of Riot and Turbine and focus on monetizing players after they’ve already been playing.
I think this is a good thing, although it’s extremely, extremely important that companies figure out how to do it right. Not many are right now, and it’s giving the whole model a bad rap. The idea of releasing essentially half a game and requiring players to pay for the other half is a terrible trend, and I hope it dies a fiery death. It’s a surefire way to piss people off.
The key is to design something with a focus on quality, and with monetization in the back of the mind. It should offer non-payers a full and genuinely compelling experience that motivates them to want to pay, not a teaser of an experience that makes them feel tricked into paying in order to experience what the game was originally intended to be. I think that Riot Games does this perfectly; non-payers can enjoy a complete game, but serious players are pretty motivated to pay (a reasonable price) for access to their favorite characters. Which are sometimes available for free. It’s essentially convenience.
With all this in mind, here’s a sort-of relevant paper that I wrote for one of my classes. It’s short because it was only supposed to be one concise page, and it focuses on piracy rather than business models. But I make the argument that, with the way that F2P models are taking games anyway, it allows many more options for games to overcome piracy creatively until a true technological solution can be determined.
I promise it’s more interesting than that probably sounds. Click ‘Read More’ to check it out!
I did. I wrote a press release. I’ve actually written a few of them, but I’m only going to post one here. This is one I wrote for ATARI (I am so cool), and is approximately 95-98% my writing; it was edited slightly by someone else here at TP, but it totally still counts. It was posted, among other places, on Gamasutra.
For the record, press releases are a lot harder to write than you’d think… especially when you’re not given nearly as much information as you should have been (not the case with Atari at all, for the record, they were terrific about that). They’re an unintuitive mix of promotional and succinct, but I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. Without further ado, go ahead and check it out under ‘Read More’. 
I know that I said I wouldn’t write about news very much, but I find the whole ado behind the upcoming Assassin’s Creed movie really interesting. Seriously, Hollywood is flipping out.
For those of you too indifferent to click the link, here’s the gist; Ubisoft signed a deal with Sony Pictures to adapt Assassin’s Creed into a movie, and is getting unprecedented creative control (“even Steven Spielberg cannot get this kind of deal”) because they’re putting up the vast majority of the money.
Considering AC is one of the most valuable video game franchises ever – and Ubisoft is putting up so much money – I don’t think this sounds particularly insane. Sony Pictures is literally paying a fraction of what it normally would for a film, and for an absolutely epic IP with a large, loyal pre-existing fanbase. It’s virtually zero risk, and almost guaranteed success.
Hey Steven, you want that deal? Go find an IP with as many millions of fans as Assassin’s Creed and then finance 80% of the film yourself, okay?
In all seriousness, I’m really excited to see how this turns out. There are some video games about which I would cringe to hear this news, but Assassin’s Creed is a great, story-and-character-centric game, and the creative obviously have a good grasp on story. If anyone can do it, it’s either these guys or Naughty Dog.
[Note: seriously, watch the video linked above if nothing else, it’s hilarious.]
Either way, I think that the success of this movie is going to have huge repercussions on the whole game-turned-movie phenomenon as a whole. The genre has traditionally been pretty lackluster anyway, but with a deal like the Assassin’s Creed movie has, I foresee the potential to either solidify this as The Way Video Game Movie Deals Are Done, if it rocks… or entirely kill them altogether, if it bombs.
Either way, I’ll definitely be watching (pun not intended).
I have a lot of really cool blog ideas in the works, but what I don’t have right now is time. So rather than leave you hanging for a few more days until I find a spare hour, I’ll share a semi-entertaining little story from my life this semester to tide you over.
I wrote a paper earlier in the semester, part of which involved summarizing a script. In one scene a bunch of reporters were waiting eagerly outside of a police department, waiting for a certain person to emerge. In my summary I wrote that, “the reporters camped the building.”
…apparently forgetting that ‘camped’ doesn’t mean the same thing to non-gamers. When I got the paper back, my poor confused professor had written in the margins, “You mean to say they ‘camped out in front of the building’?”
Camping Versus Camping
I literally laughed out loud, and went up to my professor to explain the confusion (he hadn’t graded me down, so that wasn’t the issue). He half seemed to understand what I was explaining to him, but got the concept that ‘it was gamer-speak and made sense in context’, and laughed along good-naturedly, though still a little confused.
This is also the same man who, when I told him I wanted to go into video games for the first time, got really excited (think ‘little kid at a candy store on Christmas’) and asked what my favorite games were. I listed off a few and then, with equal enthusiasm, he exclaims, “I have no idea why I asked, I don’t know anything about games. But that’s so great!”
I’ll write another time on how amazingly supportive and flexible Carnegie Mellon has been about my goals. I think it deserves a post.
Now go play Skyrim and distract yourself from my lack of lengthy content this week.
This past weekend I went to Comikaze, a brand new all-purpose nerdy convention that took place for the first time this year in Los Angeles. It was all-around fun times, but the highlight? I had the opportunity to cosplay for the first time in about 5-6 years.
More about the story (and more pictures!) below.
This past week I attended the IGDA Leadership Forum as an IGDA scholar – much thanks to the IGDA and Jack Bogdan in particular for working so hard to expand the program this year! In previous years the IGDA only gave scholarships for GDC, but this year it spanned a variety of industry events for the first time, like E3 and this one.
I have to say, I had a blast and I am so thankful for this opportunity! Since the first three days were scrum certification for the professionals, the scholars instead went on studio tours of a bunch of Los Angeles and Irvine development teams. This was perhaps my favorite part, and something I’ll dedicate an entire second post to in the next couple of days.
The conference itself was really interesting too, of course. It ranged a wide variety of topics from the changing role of game designers to the dangers of some producers who try and achieve that fabled “100% efficiency.” While it clearly catered to producers (which I didn’t mind at all, obviously), there was definitely something there for every kind of leader in the industry.
Two talks in particular brought up points that compelled me to respond to them here; the first was Brenda Garno Brathwaite’s opening keynote, and the second was Jesse Schell’s Friday morning keynote. More on my thoughts below!
