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

In the months leading up to the big switch to self-employment, I dreamily read all the so-you-wanna-be-a-freelancer posts I could find. There I received some great advice, promising myself I wouldn’t make any of the mistakes I’d heard about.

After two months of freelancing, here are the promises I’ve broken:

- I will set aside X amount of hours per week for my personal projects.
- I need to work X hours a week; I will not let financial worry or greed convince me to take on more.
- I will not watch daytime tv.
- I will have a daily to-do list every day, so that I know when I’m done and can watch daytime tv.

On the plus side, I’m working on things I thoroughly enjoy, I’ve been sticking religiously to a workout routine and proper diet, and I’m pinch-me happy. Finding a way to be paid for what you enjoy is actually simple; finding what it is you really enjoy is actually harder.

Iron Man the movie hit the theaters yesterday, and the game hit stores. The PS2, PSP, PC and Wii are the ones I got to produce. The next gen SKUs were done by Sega’s own studio.

Last night we went to the movie, then home with the newly purchased game and I watched Jonathan play. The evening was a very cool ride, a happy culmination to 18 months of hard work.

When I produced Happy Feet, access to assets was complicated by the fact that the movie was being produced in Australia. Nevertheless, the whole team got to see the movie at various stages of its production. I had therefore seen it three times by the time it was released.

With Iron Man, the film crew was extremely open with assets, and we visited the set, witnessed some scenes being shot, met director, cast and crew, saw flight animation tests and the Iron Monger suit in the “flesh”, visited Stark mansion and saw Iron Man suit concept art, but I never read the script or actually saw the movie. Consequently, having been allowed access to some information, without seeing the finished product, just made the whole thing extremely tantalizing.

And last night was the biggest payoff a superhero fan could wish for. The movie is awesome, definitely up there with the first Spider-Man for superhero movies.

Go. And make sure you stay until the end of the credits

I mentioned recently that I’m now working as a freelancer. It’s probably a good idea to get the word out about the kind of freelance work I’m doing, so here goes.

What I’m most interested in is pretty much anything having to do with training, including in-class training, instructional design (training programs and materials), e-learning application design, and training consultancy. Right now I am designing a highly immersive online course for a client, a type of work which I’m finding, unexpectedly, to be quite close to game design. The big difference is that the main goal is knowledge transfer via entertainment, rather than being entertainment itself.

My other freelanceable skills include project and personnel management, technical writing and translation, though I’m much less interested in the latter two.

It’s funny how fast one gets used to the new lifestyle, and gets confronted with the typical freelancer dilemmas. How much work should I take on, versus working on my personal projects? Will refusing this contract damage my relationship with the client? Will working outside my home increase productivity enough to be worth the lost time commuting?

This has been brewing for many months, and today I can blog it. Late last week, I resigned from my post as Game Director. I won’t go into the specifics of my reasons for this move here, but suffice it to say I haven’t taken employment elsewhere as a videogames producer (or any other position for that matter). In my estimation, Artificial Mind and Movement is an employer of the highest integrity, humanity and professionalism, the best I’ve worked for. Nevertheless, I haven’t enjoyed being a game director there in a while.

Considering how highly I esteem A2M, I doubt things would be better elsewhere, so I haven’t traded this job for another one. Wanting more control and flexibility over my conditions, the manner in which my work is done, and consequently the final result, I’ve decided to just leave, trust the future and see what interesting doors open.

In the meantime, I’ll pursue two avenues: freelancing, and working on a special project. I’ll write more about each shortly.

Today, Patrick asks, who’s the most awesomest company you can work for in your field? Which company would be the equivalent of playing for the Montreal Canadiens in the 70s? Which would be like playing for them now?

I thought about it, and one of the first that sprang to mind was BioWare. There’s a company that in a bitch of an industry conditions-wise, manages to crank out top-notch games on their own terms, whilst succeeding in being a recognized leader in the area of quality of life. Of course, being in Edmonton, they could only ever hope to be the Oilers, not the Canadiens, but hey.

However, as you may know, BioWare was bought a couple of weeks ago by EA, arguably one of the most infamous games companies for quality of life issues. To some developers, this is like Luke joining forces with Vader. Yesterday Jonathan, a BioWare stockholder, received papers to sign related to the deal. We joked about his stopping the 860M$ deal by failing to return the signed documents on time, and thus becoming a grass-roots hero of game developers everywhere. We wondered how much of a loss he would be willing to take to nix the symbolism-heavy deal.

But no, BioWare will be absorbed into EA, thus motivating the question, if you define awesome by good conditions and quality products, who’s the awesomest NOW?

I’m working towards first playable these days (basically the first major deliverable of a game, where the first level is usually delivered at near-final quality). This weekend I dreamt that my game’s hero had been replaced by the ball from Metroid in my first playable build.

I know it sounds silly, but it was really scary.

I’m terrified to go to sleep.

Eidos Interactive (Tomb Raider, Hitman) is setting up shop in Montreal in March.

Happy Feet, the game I’ve been working on for over a year, came out a couple of weeks ago. After thinking about penguins for the past 14 months, I’m very pleased to finally see the end product on the shelves. Two weeks ago, on the night that the movie came out, we threw a fantastic wrap party, on top of Place Ville-Marie overlooking Montreal, the whole crew dressed in penguiny black and white. Our giant inflatable penguin mascot was there for the occasion as well.

As we were debating what to do with him now that the game was done, we were approached by another group who offered to buy him off us. As it turned out, our prospective buyers represented the Canadian Anti-Doping Agency. Ever since Lance Armstrong ran the New York City marathon earlier this month, I’ve been thinking about writing a post about doping in sports. I ended up renting the penguin out to them for one year in exchange for 20$ and a DVD about doping.

The next night, I went to see the theatrical release of the movie for the first time with three of my best friends. Then I came home, looked around my home office and took down all the photos of penguins, Antarctica and leopard seals collected over the past year. The year of the penguin had come to a close for me.

The odd thing is, for the past year, Happy Feet’s been my personal project most people know nothing about. Now that it’s out of my life, it’s taken a life of its own out there in the world. Now that I’m done with it, I’m starting to see it going by on buses, I see penguin-shaped treats at the grocery store, I see penguin toys at Burger King and Happy Feet lingerie at La Senza.

It’s like my little penguin’s all growns up, and it’s awesome to see him doing well in the world.

(See the movie, it’s fantastic!)