pubs
So for the last two months I’ve been under a boulder, localizing a sort of insane Russian RPG. It’s taking way longer than it should, for a bunch of reasons (most of them out of my hands, for once!), and it’s kind of driving me batty. As if that’s not enough, last week I had GDC to contend with! So that put back the work another week, while I saddled up the BART and began to regularly drink coffee for the first time in my life, just to keep myself moving.
Most of the fruits of my labor, for what they’re worth, are now up. Pay especial attention to the content of the last one. (That’s the animation panel.) There’s a real howler coming up; I’ll amend this post when it goes live.
- Sawyer, Smith On Serious Gaming For Life (A half-step toward a workable theory, for once.)
- Video Games To Build And Retain A TV Audience (How is this different from advergames?)
- The News Game: Using Neverwinter Nights To Teach Journalism (A hack for hacks!)
- GameLab’s Zimmerman Says Casual Games are Dead (Sort Of) (It’s true; someone really needs to rethink this market.)
- Filling the Void Between Casual And Mainstream Games (Like… Nintendo?)
- The Media Myth Of The Casual Gamer (Yeah, pretty much.)
- Baer, Alcorn Talk ‘Brown Box’ Beginnings, Industry Birth (Baer is getting a little senile, I’m afraid.)
- Emotiv Knows What You’re Thinking (Control videogames WITH YOUR MIND!)
- Nintendo Reveals Wii Pay-For-Online Play, WiiWare Compression (Now with more throat warblers. What may not be clear is just how clueless Nintendo is about the whole concept of The Internet.)
- The Future of Animation is Games (No, Really!) (Oy. Just let the quotes do their work.)
- (NEW!) Peter Molyneux’s Top 10 GDC Proclamations(This was edited to be a little less irreverent.)
There was also a session on using games as tools for meditation, that I just didn’t have the time to write up. I’ll go into more detail if anyone is really curious. I thought there was some neat stuff in there, even if three-quarters of the session was an infomercial for a new agey revival of early ’90s-style multimedia starring Deepak Chopra & Company.
EDIT: I just noticed that someone switched around a few things in the animation article, such that it’s not completely accurate. (I also notice a lot of grammatial errors; this is what happens on an instananeous deadline.) Early on, the hour-long program they were discussing was literally just all the cutscenes from one game or another, edited together. They example they used was Prince of Persia: The Two Whatevers. The third game, you know, that’s got both the good and the evil Prince in it. (Or the sixth game, if you include the originals, plus that weird 3D thing for the Dreamcast.) Hi ho!
EDIT 2: All fixed! Well. As far as information goes. It could still use a copy edit.
EDIT 3: See above!
Twas awesome seeing you at GDC, man! Good luck with the Russian RPG!
Nintendo
Do they not understand the Internet, or do they understand it all too well?
From those links, it seems as if the primary marketing consideration for the Wii was to make it appear parent-friendly, and not a kids’ entry into some scary other world alien to their parents. So they put in news and weather channels, and made the controller look like a TV remote instead of a special batwinged game-thing, so parents can on some level think of this as a normal piece of consumer electronics for the whole family.
But for many parents, the Internet is the epitome of scary-other-world; they don’t want their kids to have unfettered access to it, for reasons that are not entirely irrational. So it’s predictable that Nintendo’s parent-friendly console would have limited to nonexistent online play options. Other companies are pushing to appeal primarily to the young gamers themselves rather than to their parents.
Re: Nintendo
I’m afraid I skipped most of the speech; even though he went fifteen minutes over-time, it was pretty much just the last five minutes that were of interest. What you’re not seeing is lots of surreal dialog amongst the team, that the man relayed. All sorts of business about maybe limiting play to P2P connections, and just a completely puzzled, backward methodology to solving problems — even if there were some clever ideas in there.
I’m afraid I can’t give more concrete examples off the top of my head; it’s just that I kept finding myself wondering what planet they were from. It was like they got their concept of the Internet from 1990s TV shows.
I should mention that the man who planned the Wii’s whole network system is something like eighty years old; refused to allow anyone to take pictures during the session (at threat of confiscation of cameras), despite the “confidential information” apparently coming down to graphs of North America that show that the northwest is more prone to be afraid of snakes, while the southeast is more afraid of spiders; and immediately scampered for the exit the moment the session ended, under cover of protector-people.
As far as what’s there, though, you’re right. And safety is a sensible concern, for a company like Nintendo. It’s just… I guess you kind of had to be there to appreciate the inanity. :(
Yeah, this is nuts. I’m close to finishing with the initial copy-edit, anyway. Then I have to finish the rewrite. Then there’s the whole SECOND HALF. First things first, however.
Sorry the translation got held up on my end. In my defense, I work fulltime already and the combined strain has come close of making my face explode. Literally.
Yeah, I can understand that. Well, your part’s pretty much over now! Now the strain’s on me. And whee to that!
Ah well. There are worse ways to make a living.