One of the challenges I face at work is ensure good communications with my team. The game is currently in pre-production, which means its design changes practically daily. Every day, I have to answer questions like what game mechanics we’ll be including, what story we’re going to tell, how we’re going to tell it, what engine we’ll use to simulate physics, how the physics will differ from real-world physics, how many levels, how many visual effects artists we need, when we have to have the script ready for localization, how we can make it look realistic given the constraints of the consoles, what consoles we’re developing for, what we’re expected to deliver in the next milestone, what team member reports to whom, etc. And oftentimes, the answers change with the design.

It quickly gets confusing trying to remember what you told whom, and making sure all the ever-changing information is shared with all the relevant people, without spamming all 22 team members with constant e-mails they may not read.

Well. I’m very excited to have found a solution: a producer’s blog on the company intranet, an idea blatantly ripped off from a colleague. I figure, I’m already in the habit of blogging anything that happens, and people can access my project blog at their leisure for updates.

This is the kind of thing that really excites me. Sad, eh?

I don’t watch TV on TV. I watch TV on DVD. Watching TV on TV leads to channel surfing. And whenever I do that, I’m reminded why I don’t watch TV.

This morning, I didn’t have time to watch a whole episode of Battlestar Galactica (my current TV-on-DVD addiction), so I turned on TV-on-TV for a bit, and got a movie excerpt where two guys were talking. Roughly paraphrased:

- You don’t wanna be friends with a girl.
- Really?
- Yeah, once you’re friends, you’re in the friend zone. And there’s no getting out.
- So?
- Well, no potential for dating. It’s like you’re not a guy. You’re more like… a lamp.
- Ugh. I don’t wanna be a lamp.

Then it cut to Katie Couric talking to sociologists about whether men and women can be friends. That’s when I snapped it off, thinking “God, are they really still debating this???”

To me, the answer is yes, as long as the ambiguity is resolved. Until that question of “Will we or won’t we?’ is resolved, I’m not sure there really is a way for a single guy to be friends with a single woman.

What I mean by “resolving the ambiguity”:
- One of the two is or becomes involved with another.
- One of the two comes out of the closet.
- The Talk is had where it’s clearly stated there is to be no contact between any of the parts of one’s body with any of the parts of the other’s.
- The two have had sex and stopped.

And that’s pretty much it, a few anecdotal exceptions aside. I think they could have had that as a nice set of bullet points displayed on the screen of the Today show, but I guess that would mean moving on to something else, like actual content.

Not that the ambiguity is necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes, when the stakes aren’t too high, the ambiguity is actually enjoyable and I’ve sometimes been a little bummed to see it resolved, one way or another.

As for getting out of the friend zone, seeing as that’s only happened to me once, I think it’s fair to say once you’re there, you really are pretty much a lamp. Right?

This weekend, I caught the first ever Arcadia fest, a videogame show open to the public here in Montreal.

Overall, it wasn’t bad for a first effort, but here’s what I think should be improved for next year:

- 99.9% of the games I saw are already out. I’ve seen most of them, own some of them, have tried lots of them. Why would I pay to see them again? Also, they should have used demo versions of the game, which are usually pre-configured, do not contain lengthy cut scenes, are edited to give a good cross-section idea of the gameplay, and limit use by any one player to about 15-20 minutes.

- Next-gen content was almost non-existent, which I think is a capital sin, two weeks before the first next-gen console is launched. Saw one XBOX 360 behind a pane of glass. Big whoop. When I saw Kameo at E3, it had 1000 enemies on the screen, each with its own individual AI. However, because it wasn’t the demo version this time around, the epicness of the game was really not shown off. It looked worse than just current-gen. What I saw of it actually looked like a Gamecube game.

- The whole thing was kinda small. I don’t know how much people had to pay for just one day, but I know the price for the whole weekend was 25$, and I had about 90 minutes of stuff to look at. The XBOX booth at E3 was about the size of the entire Arcadia fest.

On the positive side:

- They had a beautifully designed “Flashback zone”, complete with vintage consoles like Telstar, Intellivision, Atari, Colecovision, LeisureVision, all in these mocked up seventies living rooms. My father and I had lots of fun in there, laughing at the blocky graphics and clunky controls.

- Lots of local content. I think over 50% of the games shown were made in Canada (and no, that doesn’t mean they were lame).

- The design was a success, with the whole thing, from the brochures to the booths, looking quite cool and consistent. The booths weren’t cheaply done, and the show managed to have a bit of an E3 feel to it.

I’ll definitely attend again next year, and maybe even get involved in the organization.

Photo: Paolo

get into…

the sour cream.

And quite frankly, I resent the accusation.

It’s nice to see the problems of the current gaming industry get mainstream press coverage:

One of the world’s leading video game developers fired a warning shot over the multi-billion-dollar gaming industry yesterday, saying the sector must deliver products beyond shoot-’em-up adventures and sports hits if it wants to avoid being marginalized.

“We’ve got to stop limiting ourselves to adolescent male power fantasies,” said [Warren] Spector [credited on Ultima, Wing Commander and Deus Ex].

This was in the opening keynote of this week’s Montreal Games Summit, and I remember thinking Spector had painted a very grim picture indeed of our medium and its future if we don’t change our ways. It set a strange tone for the conference, after which I felt a little odd talking about how to create snow that sparkles realistically, with this elephant in the room.

Via Becca.

Dear Readers,

This is going to be a long post, but perhaps my most important one of the year.

I’ve been thinking for a while about changing the direction of my blog, but I have a little dilemma on how to approach it.

Here’s the issue.

Video games are at the margins of society right now, but I think this is just because it’s a medium in its infancy, something currently eyed with suspicion by the respectable, like rock and roll and movies were at their beginnings. Film has evolved to include so many genres, from Bruckheimer to Almodovar, via Bollywood, period romances and Winged Migration, so that most people, no matter what their demographic, find something to their liking, and everyone watches movies.

Well, games have everything movies have: a story, a score, a script, art direction, theme, actor performances, special effects, etc. But where movies stop, games go one big step further: they put you in the story. They make you the protagonist. They could potentially make you have to make Sophie’s choice, and deal with the consequences. We feel such empathy for movie characters from whom we are completely detached, imagine if we were involved. Imagine being the one who has to actually let Ilse go. Or run Hotel Rwanda.

The potential themes and settings are as diverse as they are in movies. The potential experience, however, far richer. Of course, games do not currently use any of their power to engage emotion. If they did, I truly believe they would reach everyone.

Put quite simply, I want to help them get there. I’ve been thinking a lot about what visionary game developers can do to push our medium forward, to reach this vision of the future. The goal is to mature the medium. And that happens by diversifying games, and getting more diverse people interested in them.

I have a lot to say about these issues, and I want to use my blog to talk about them to non-gamers, and get more diverse people thinking about them.

Now, the dilemma. I wonder whether I really want to refer game makers to my blog when discussing these issues with them, which may lead to people I work with consulting my archives and reading about personal things like my ovaries. The alternative is to take all this talk of games elsewhere, but the problem with that is that I intend to write about games for a non-gamer audience, which is most of my audience here. How many of those non-gamers would actually follow me onto my game blog?

Hm, now that I think of it, I’ll probably talk about it right here. After all, it’s no secret that I have ovaries.

But I’m not sure about the format yet. Is there a successful model of two blogs working on the same page? I’d ideally like a personal and a game blog to coexist in the same space. That way I avoid pissing off readers who aren’t interested in one or the other (by having it all in one blog), but I have a chance of getting non-gamers to read the game posts. Ideas?

(If you’ve made it this far, thank you and congratulations. You’ve beaten this post).

…that I’m seriously considering starting another blog.

I’ve been going to the Montreal International Games Summit this week, and it’s made me think about lots of stuff. I’ll digest and regurgitate later.

Also on the personal front, got some excellent news today, also making me think about lots of stuff.

But the summit closing party awaits me, gotta scoot!

From my homegirl: “You’re an endless source of inspiration. Let’s hope you won’t become boring like me when you become romantically happy”.

And she wants to come to a Dance Dance Revolution competition with me this weekend.

Girls rawk.

From Gord:

The new China: 80 story super-highrises, monorails, 8 lane super-highways, and of course who uses these super-highways? Well, ox-drawn carts carrying hay, of course. Yes, be careful when you race out of Shanghai, or Wuhan, or Xi’an, or any other 10 million-person metropolis. As you drive your Audi A8 or your Beamer 7 series (yes, that’s what some drive there, ain’t communism grand?), you’ll be swerving to and fro to avoid the mule & ox-drawn vehicles of past millenia. And don’t think they are afraid of your 2 tons of steel rocketing by at Mach 0.2, no they know who owns the road and it ain’t those encased in chrome & black leather, blasting the AC. No the farmers and laborers slowly meander along the ribbons of concrete as if they were one of the ancient emperors of lost dynasties. They know who rules the road…

Welcome back buddy.