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.

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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?

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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.

Last week in the closing keynote of the Montreal Games Summit,

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Jonathan Blow said that games are fundamentally a sucky medium in which to tell a story.

He made a lot of compelling arguments supporting this. Roughly paraphrased:

- The storyteller isn’t in perfect control, especially when we try to give the player freedom, so we can’t use a lot of the narrative devices available to other media;

- Oftentimes the game’s rules actually go against the story’s meaning and direction, as there generally isn’t really any thought put into making them gel with each other in the first place. It wouldn’t be hard to change this, but you can never really tell how gameplay will be interpreted narratively by the player until it’s tested. And if it’s found that the rules don’t support story, this isn’t usually seen as a big enough problem to justify going back and change the game.

- Story needs to flow forward, and the challenges (to the player) inherent in a game keep preventing this from happening. To remedy this, some have reduced difficulty in their games (eg God of War), but this is cheating the medium, essentially turning it into a movie that you have to mash buttons to keep going.

The fact that the medium inherently keeps us from telling good stories is a conclusion I’ve reluctantly been inching towards, and Blow may have gotten me the rest of the way there. Of course the maturity level of the general gaming audience is a factor, but could we even tell a compelling story (integrated with gameplay so we’re not actually a movie intercut with play), if we wanted to?

I was expecting, after this conclusion of his, some sort of “so here’s how games should tell stories instead: “, but that’s not what came. He basically said that we shouldn’t try to tell stories; rather, a game’s meaning should be suggested in a much more implicit way, one that is derived almost osmotically by experiencing the work, like the meaning of a painting.

At first glance, this seems to me a tall order for an industry that isn’t known for its subtlety. Rare exceptions notwithstanding, we can’t even tell a compelling linear story when we try (even if the dialog of Mass Effect had been punched up, the story would still have sucked for a so-called story-driven game). Can we really be expected to do something even more challenging such as collectively producing a contemplative work of art?

… well almost.

Month 3 of freelancing went something like this:

Things were going relatively well, I was spending about half my time on an unlucrative project dear to my heart, and the other half on work that pays the bills. I was determined not to take on more.

Then, early in the month, the work from the one client started drying up, and I spent a white night worrying that the unlucrative project would remain unlucrative, and I’d have to work until I was 85. I spent the next day doing bizdev, and things went nuts from there. The phone rang and rang and rang, and I had to hurriedly print business cards, throw together a professional website, gather up a portfolio and run from one meeting to the next. I said yes to everything. My available hours were filled before I’d seen half the people I’d committed to.

Then I set about actually doing all that work, and first-impressing all those people at once. Nights were white again, evenings and weekends non-existent. I was proud to be able to work from my terrasse, but it soon felt like a cube.

Now it’s time to exhale again, to be courageous for the second time. I have to convince myself that this trove of work will hold, drop the work I like less, and continue with the unlucrative labor of love.

To be continued.