I did an interview at E3 with the Ventura County Star.

Low and behold they pieced it together, and its on their website.

Watch Me Speak.

Hot damn, I'm every where.

Apparently, the editorial I wrote has been picked up by Slashdot and Blues News.

This almost makes up for me coming home to a dead computer.

Slashdot.org (Under the Gamersinfo.net link)
Blues News

Even the Killerbetties picked it up.

If you want to go read what people are saying about the article, head over to Gamersinfo.net.

Now to fix my computer.

Dear Reader, I have a confession to make.

I am dieing, slowly, on the inside. And its all due to a horrible concrete building called South Hall. For those of you who don’t know about South Hall, it’s the housing place for the cream of the marketing crop at E3. Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Ubisoft, and all the major movers and shakers from Japan (Square, Capcom, Namco, et al) have massive instillations that cannot be sanely called “booths”. The word booth implies three walls and a desk. It implies a sense of structure with pamphlets and business cards and little pens that will barely work but have some one’s name on them. E3 booths are the giant radioactive mutant cousins of those sad, mundane little booths that have come to rip out your spleen and boil your brains inside your head.

All around you, lights flash and music screams. Half naked women shove pamphlets into your hands for products that you can’t define in any sort of coherent language. Millions of dollars in lights and steel frames hang from the ceiling, flashing at near epilepsy inducing rates. The throng of people shove from one booth to another in search of the much valued “swag”; free junk that the companies pass off on to the people that visit them, which invariably caries the company’s logo and turns the person who receives said swag into a cross between a pack mule and a billboard. By the end of the day, you are bent over from the amount of behemoth sized t-shirts and glossy pamphlets that you carry. You can almost be assured that you’re a good bit farther along the way to developing tinnitus. And you’re seeing splotches of color swim across your vision from the time you looked up just as the laser light was making its sweep of the crowd. Ladies and Gentlemen, I have come to a realization. E3 is the video game world’s Sodom and Gomorrah. And I blame the marketing people.

Yet, with all the millions spent to showcase these games, of which most should be considered lucky to have words like “mediocre”, “unoriginal” and “average” used to describe them, I can’t help feel that people are some how missing the point. Games are essentially about play. They are about interacting with either your fellow player or the game system in a way that is enjoyable. They can be used to tell a story, they can be used to teach, there is theoretically no limit to them. Video games are the new medium of the age. What movies were in the 20th Century, games will be in the 21st. But for now they are ruled by the mega-giants. The South Hall Mafia, if you will.

So, I put this challenge to you, the Reader, be you gamer, developer, publisher, hardcore, casual, old school, new school, or just some random passer-by. Go Metallica on the game industry. Make the game version of the Black Album. Make a game that is brilliant and destined to become a classic, and then wrap it all in black. Make the marketing guys have fits trying to figure out what to do with it. Make it cross genre, cross platform, online enabled, what ever. But wrap it in black. Define convention, leak stories about your true cover art being rejected by stuffed-shirts at the studios. Do this and the press will come to you, looking for the story. Get the press and you will never need a marketing budget. We’ll do everything for you. I should know, I’m here right now, doing exactly that.

Do this, noble Reader, and start the ebb of the tide away from the established structure of the big studios, toward new games and ideas, not just rehashing of the same dozen IPs. Do this and E3 will shift from sensory overload to hide the imperfections in forthcoming games, and become an actual showcase of new ideas and directions in the marketplace. Challenge, adapt and change the shape of this industry. Don’t just let the South Hall Mafia sit there and shove the same things into your hands over and over again. Give us brain fried reporters a respite. Please. If I keep this up much longer I’m going to go deaf and blind in South Hall.

I'm at the GDC right now. Typing rapidly from the Expo floor before they throw us out.

Things to remember.

-Raph's game atoms are really quantums. And they need to be done in hypertext (in the true term of HT) to really come across as game notations.
-Companies mean either level design or technical design. Applications should reflect either or...and both if you aren't sure.
-I need to really fix my Morrowind mod. Add some stuff to it.
-Imped needs to be finished, badly.
-We broke the live action MMO game here in a matter of minutes.

Gates are coming down, time to run.

-Z

The update is finished. Feel free to look around.

I've added tons of videos and art to look at.

With the completion of this site, I've officially graduated college. I'm no officially unemployed.

Here's hoping the GDC will go a long way to fixing that.

I'm out til after the 12th.

-Z

My GDC pass just arrived today. On the registration site, where they had a spot for "Position/Title" I put Mad God King.

Now its on my pass, just under my name. That makes me happy. Now I feel like I have an excuse to yell and scream things at people during the conference. After all, I am a Mad God King.

Something else is on fire downtown and the entire apartment smells like smoke. Third time something has burned down around here in as many months.

But, here's a pretty picture I took with my new digital camera.




Back to work.

Its a week until I head out to San Francisco for the GDC. I'm hoping to have everything finished by that point. The current list is as follows.
-Art Demo reel
-Game Design tutorial videos
-Still art portfolio
-Upload my games
-Edit and post all my design docs
-Tweak this website.
-Make a flatbook and burn DVDs of the site.
That's my list for the week. God only knows how much of that will get done.

I'm having horrible issues getting my design tutorials off of MiniDV and transfering them to a digital format. None of the decks here at the school do anything, and my friend's computer corrupted the file at the last second when I thought I almost had it transfered.

Its down to the wire. That deadline keeps getting closer. Better get back to work.

I realize that I can post in this blog from any net connection. Like now, I'm posting from class while a rigging demo is going on behind me. I'll have to try this from my cellphone some day.

I'm working on creating a script for a demo reel movie today. I think I'm going to blatantly rip off Errol Morris' format for FOG OF WAR. Basically, I'll have a talking point "rule" about design and then talk for a minute or so about it, then move on. I'll have 5 rules, and I'm shooting for a 6 minute or so movie.

My favorite options for rules right now?
-Rules are all behaviorist psychology
-Fungibility is power

Don't worry, they'll make sense in context.

....I hope.