Things have definitely been fast and furiously paced in the last little while, a tempo I’m glad to find myself still very comfortable with. In addition to working intensely and enjoyably on the game, quite a few fun personal events have taken place.

Pikoti’s five-year-old son came to stay with us for a few days last week; what a strange and new experience. Although I was a little nervous about being a sorta-step-girlfriend-or-whatever for a while, it went very well. The big surprise wasn’t that having a kid around takes up every minute of your attention and every joule of energy; I was rather well-prepared for that. Rather, I was stunned by how much more time needs to be budgeted to get anything done with a kid. And after just a day or so, I found myself becoming one of those people who talk about the kid all the time.

After this momentous meeting, we went to Paris to stay with Pikoti’s parents, both of them shrinks. With regular business visits to HQ, Paris has somewhat become for me synonymous with a conference room in Montreuil (the Longueuil of Paris). I hadn’t really had time to build up too many expectations about this Easter weekend stay.

But Paris being what it is, I didn’t have to look for anything to be blown away. It was a gorgeous sunny 25C, we enjoyed incredible food and drink (ahhh, Conté), and I spent a fortune as Pikoti took me on a veritable tour of all the best shops. One nighttime dinner and walk in Montmartre particularly moved me; the place looked very much to me like Québec City, and after almost a year in northern England it was touching to be (sort of) in the homeland.

We’re now concluding two days in sunny London before returning to Newcastle tonight.

As for work, Driver San Francisco has come under media attention again, with positive cover stories in Joy-Pad and GamesMaster this week. Watch this space for links to those and other stories.

Been meaning to publish this guest post for about a month, but many things got in the way, including some sad news that needed blogging about. Now that the weather seems to be clearing, here goes…

It was a sunny Wednesday morning in June, in Newcastle. A producer from Montreal had just landed to give us a hand to close and ship Driver San Francisco for the holiday period of 2010. However…

Nine months later, things have evolved quite a bit. lightspeedchick is cooking dinner while I am checking her blog from the Gym/Gameroom of our tiny apartment in downtown Newcastle, hoping that she might have updated it during a fit of insomnia I would still be unaware of. But still no news since the last July post where she was mentioning the difficulties of settling in somewhere that is definitely not home. I have since been pushing her to start posting again, but it seems our relationship, Driver San Francisco and her life as an expat have sucked up any energy she could have used to write. She is busy slicing onions when I start to push her once again:

Quand est-ce que tu postes sur ton blog ?
Ché pas. Trop à raconter.
C’est le moment là, tout est en place.
Pourquoi tu le ferais pas toi ?
Moi ?
Oui, des fois j’ai des guests, ça s’fait.
Tu veux que moi je raconte ta vie ?
Ben oui !
Et parler du boulot, de nous, de nos conflits, du reste…
C’est ben correct.
T’es sérieuse là ? Parce que moi là écrire ça me démange.
Mets-en.

But who am I? I am pikoti, an arrogant little fucker from Paris. I have been designing games for quite a while now. Prior to that I was a film and game reporter and a wannabe screenwriter. I have a five-year-old son, living with his mother in the 15th arrondissement of Paris in an apartment I called home for seven years, before a very unlikely chain of events transported me to Newcastle a few weeks before Christmas 2009…

So, back to that sunny Wednesday in June when the producer from Montreal landed. She called a meeting at her desk to be updated on the recent design changes operated on Driver San Francisco. We spoke in Franglish as her French and mine were not really in synch. She referred to “chars” all the time and I soon realized that I didn’t follow. For me a “char” is a military tank or chariot like the one driven by Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur. For her, it is what I would call a “voiture”, an “automobile” or a “caisse”, a car in English. And during that meeting I had the feeling that she was checking me out. It was subtler than what I could express with my written English skills, but I think she was definitely checking me out.

Later during that day, some colleagues I was not really close to proposed to take her out for a welcome meal. I had been added to the mailing list as a French speaking expat who could help her blend in with the studio more quickly. Without consciously realizing it, I felt motivated to join in. It’s not exactly my kind of thing to join in a crowd that I hardly know. I prefer the tranquillity of my apartment and the company of movies and video games rather than superficial discussions that often end up in drunken nights, especially in Newcastle. But this time the Montreal producer was to attend, and some mysterious magnetism was pulling me toward her.

And so we found ourselves side-by-side at Wagamama on Eldon Square, chatting politely about our respective careers and the games we worked on previously. Then the meal was over and the group split. I was surprisingly disappointed by the lack of final drinks during which I could have talked to her a little more…

At the end of the week, the two workaholics that we are found ourselves together at the office on Sunday, while the rest of Newcastle watched England be booted out of the World Cup. Late in the afternoon, I offered her to go on the quayside for a pint… There, we chatted for hours about movies, religion, video games, books, politics and evoked the complicated relationships we were both in. I think she had me when she said that she loved The Untouchables and had done a thesis on James Cameron focused on Aliens.

The rest would be some very good material for a Franco-Canadian romcom, where a Montreal girl and a Parisian boy, both tangled in some serious shit back home, find themselves working together in Newcastle - the British capital of Stag Nights - and fall for each other…

So I’ve moved to Newcastle in the UK for a few months, to work on this with them. It all happened quite quickly… so here I am and after 3 days pretty much offline I’m like a very relieved addict getting a fix. Even doing a blog post.

Newcastle looks like an old town that’s had a lot of investment to modernize it, full of Edinburgh-like brownstone, spires and ancient cathedrals, mixed in with a lot of modern “culture centre” buildings. The result is schizophrenic, but not without charm. In some areas the understated modern signs work well with the stone walls, in others (a huge sculpture of DNA made of shopping carts next to a wall built by the Romans), it’s a stretch. A search for a Tesco (UK version of Loblaws) took me for a walk down Quayside near the water last night, and it was quite beautiful.

The apartment is great. Centrally located, clean, bright and modern, with huge windows and a view over the city. Enough groceries were waiting for me to make dinner and breakfast stuff, as well as a bottle of red. Strange priorities, though: there are puzzles in case I get bored, but no alarm clock. Gardening stuff including earth and seeds, but no hair dryer. Along with the absence of an Internet connection or TV service, it seems this trip is intent on connecting me with my inner Zen.

Have already hit a few of the UK required milestones: Friday night at the pub, Tesco, curry and Antiques Roadshow. Football tomorrow!

Hi again,

After trying my hand at freelancing, I found that while it was a successful endeavor, it wasn’t really an enjoyable one. Although I saw people every day, they were never the same ones and I missed being part of a team and creating the bonds one does through repeated exposure. So after getting the freelancing curiosity out of my system, I became an employee of Ubisoft this year, and after helping complete and ship James Cameron’s Avatar: The Game, I’m now producing my own project again.

I’d like to become more blog-active (ie. writing, but also reading and commenting) in the next year. My reasons for neglecting by blog all this time had mainly to do with the fact that readers increasingly call you on every half-baked opinion, requiring in-depth support for seemingly everything you say, and there’s always the possibility that some client or upper manager will find your half-baked opinions online. All this can be quite castrating. But what the hell. This space is mine, and after all, it’s opt-in for everyone else.

Here’s hoping you find it worth opting in.

Well boss, it’s starting to look like a real production. I’m leaving around 7:30 PM, the creative director called me a castrator in public today, and I can’t tell you how happy I am.

Since leaving A2M last year, I’ve been searching for the same level of joy I found in my first years as a game producer (especially on Happy Feet). Unfortunately, by the end of the Iron Man project, that joy had been replaced by throwing up into office garbage cans and on one memorable occasion, losing vision from the stress. Although in hindsight it seems that leaving was the sensible thing to do, it was an excrutiating decision to make at the time without feeling like a failure. I know that the more driven parts of me will always feel like it was.

Anyway, at the time I tried my hand at freelancing and was successful at it, but I missed seeing the same people every day and being part of a team. Slowly I dropped each client in favor of my favorite one, Ubisoft, where I worked in the training department. At Christmas Ubi presented me with a full-time job, saying I’d get paid holiday vacation if I signed right away. I did it for the vacation, unsure of what the job would be.

A couple of weeks ago I landed ass-backwards into Ubisoft’s campus, where 100 soon-to-be graduates are working together to make a game over one semester, and I’m acting producer on this project. The campus gig ends in May, and I finally - happily - have an idea of what I want to do next. And I’m excited about it. I’ll be able to talk about it by the end of this month.

Yahtzee excels at eloquently expressing my thoughts.

…basically I’m just so fucking bored of shit like this. The improbably Warhammer 40k-esque power armour. The automatic healing. The overcompensating macho beefcakes with voices like they’ve had their lips clamped around exhaust pipes their whole lives. The schizophrenic design-by-committee flitting between whiny drama and goofy wisecracks. The obligatory female support character with the no-nonsense attitude and permanently cocked hips. The monstrous, dehumanised, unequivocally evil baddies. The inevitable betrayal from the jaded authority figure. I’ve gone through the same banal motions so many times it’s increasingly hard to talk about them in any meaningful or interesting way.

To be honest, I’m not even really that tired of playing these games when they’re done well, I’m just really sick of seeing only these kinds of projects get real funding and attention. Of course, the cost of game development is such that publishers can’t afford to take many chances and have to guarantee hits for themselves, so it’s not a simple problem to solve.

But still, when you think of the talent, intelligence and passion that this industry has, it’s a huge shame.

Someone took exception to the fact that my BAFTA picks reflected only the small variety of games I played last year. True, but the nuance is I don’t play games I don’t like; I don’t feel bound to play unenjoyable games out of professional duty. I only feel duty-bound to try to play them. As entertainment, they shouldn’t be work to consume.

This reminds me of something a friend once quipped to me: men will watch any sci-fi, good or bad, whilst women will only watch good sci-fi. Translation: depending on how you feel about a form of entertainment, you’ll have different thresholds of tolerance for them.

In film school, I prided myself on seeing every film that came out. This eventually broke down when I found myself obliged to consume upsetting or violent movies I really didn’t want to see. By then my career had veered away from film, professional duty no longer applied so I gave myself permission to avoid them. As a result, some notable greats are still in the limbo of the unseen, for various reasons: The Pianist, There Will Be Blood, American Gangster, 28 Days Later, Boys Don’t Cry.

I’m way more willing to see movies of questionable quality because I like them better than games, but also because they are much less of an investment. I haven’t lost as much time and money if I see an entire bad movie as I have if I play a bad game halfway through.

Still, even with respect to movies, my limbo of “ought to see movies” is uncomfortably crowded, and since I’m now trying to reorient my career towards film, those lost souls are coming back to haunt me. I’ll probably bite the bullet and consume all those depressing and unsettling greats in a fell swoop, perhaps interspersed with all the insubstantial Princess Diaries I’ve also (but rightly) skipped.

I’m curious: what do you do when you need to consume something you dislike because it’s required for your professional culture?

ACTION & ADVENTURE
Call of Duty 4, which I finished in two sittings last week; it was overall one of the best put-together games I’ve ever experienced, complete with a couple of moments of genius and unfortunately a few of intense frustration. As a game I’d probably give it a 95%, which means it ranks about the same as a movie I’d give a 60% rating to.

Other nominees include Fable II and Grand Theft Auto IV, both of which I found too abysmal to play more than an hour.

ARTISTIC ACHIEVEMENT
Assassin’s Creed

BEST GAME
Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

I’m tempted to say Rock Band, though I’ve never played it. I just love the idea of Rock Band.

CASUAL
Wii Fit narrowly steals this one from the excellent Boom Blox, due to its superior replayability (not to mention a theme dear to my heart).

GAMEPLAY
Mario Kart Wii was my game addiction of 2008, with Call of Duty 4 in close second.

MULTIPLAYER
Of the nominees, I’ve only played Left 4 Dead and Mario Kart Wii in multiplayer mode so I won’t choose, but I’m surprised EA Montreal’s Army of Two didn’t make the cut. It was one of the best co-op experiences I’ve had in the past year. Most frustrating co-op game: Fable II. Just lots of broken gameplay overall IMO.

ORIGINAL SCORE
This isn’t really “original score”, but I have to give Fallout 3 a big shout-out for its awesome 1940s soundtrack.

STORY AND CHARACTER
I’ve played several of the nominees, including the story-driven Mass Effect, but I wouldn’t really vote for any of them as having an “awardably” compelling story or profound character development.

TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT
Assassin’s Creed. Although it wasn’t a great success in terms of gameplay, Assassins brought the medium some breakthroughs in terms of animation and artificial intelligence.

USE OF AUDIO
Call of Duty 4: the one game where I actually noticed the quality and immersiveness of the audio.

GAME Award of 2008
Call of Duty 4

My honourable mentions: Mario Kart Wii, Boom Blox, Army of Two

This page on how to make a good powerpoint presentation is presented in a way that makes me think I shouldn’t trust it.

I honestly thought for a second it was a clever way to make its point.