Unwinnable

A TL;DR History in Hypertext (more…)

When Renaud Bédard spoke, I did not understand his language. (more…)

It’s weird conducting an interview with someone while contending with a language barrier. Addressing you, your interview subject tends to look you in the eye. You stumble over the vocal sounds at their end of the conversation, paying attention to cues in their inflection, nodding or showing some sort of change in expression when you gauge it’s appropriate and they do the same. You’re both more or less adhering to an unspoken set of rules of social etiquette, even though neither one of you necessarily understands anything the other is saying.

You never really get used to it. (more…)

The annual Game Developers Conference is a hydra of many heads. You try to pin down just what GDC ‘is’ and one of the other heads lashes out at you from behind, reminding you that you haven’t really pinned it down at all. (more…)

“Mass Effect 3 is a great game until the last few minutes, they destroy
everything fans have been playing for in the past 5 years.”

As of writing this, there are over 3,000 signatures on the petition to change the end of Mass Effect 3. That is not a lot of people, but it is enough people to be interesting, especially given the recent attack on BioWare employee Jennifer Hepler. I think there’s something going on here about the types of people who play games (beyond the presence of misogynerds) and how they relate to them. (more…)

Like I said last week, GDC is about so much more than the next hot videogame. It is about ideas and philosophies. We writers go to mingle with great designers and thinkers (not to mention each other) to better understand our favorite medium and to discover the ideas that we, in turn, will be pondering for the next year. We go to dinners and lectures to drink deep and taste the future.

Then, after the show closes, we go out and just drink. (more…)

After some eight years of attending GDC I still make rookie mistakes. Late Monday night I found myself slumped over a bar in the Tenderloin, much too drunk for a man of my age and experience. I credit my lapse in judgment to childish enthusiasm. Ten years of writing about games for a living can wring the soul dry. But the Game Developers Conference may be one of the few industry events that can make me feel like a kid on Christmas morning. It takes massive, continual effort on my part to keep from making a damn fool of myself. And on nights like Monday I still slip. (more…)