The Webcomics Examiner has an interview with Scott McCloud, where he presents the following breakdown of types of comics artists:
Scott McCloud’s creator types
(Visited 10498 times) Game talk
Jun 212006
Massive Magazine
(Visited 6250 times) Game talk
Jun 202006
Also something that was in the works for a while, but now it’s officially announced: Massive Magazine from the editors of Computer Games.
A few years back, there was MOG, but it’s gone now. Recently Beckett launched an MMO mag as well, but I haven’t seen it yet.
EA buys Mythic
(Visited 10580 times) Game talk
Jun 202006
Well, it’s been rumored for months, and now it came true. Mythic has sold to EA. Congrats to Mark Jacobs & the rest of the crew!
What this means?
Well, it means that EA is once again trying to get into the MMORPG market, and they decided that they needed a reasonably sized license plus outside expertise. They did this before when they acquired Kesmai, but most of the talent subsequently fled the EA.com debacle.
One thing EA can do is apply serious funds towards Warhammer, making it into a viable competitor for WoW.
One hopes it also means that EA’s historically bad track record keeping independent studios alive with their own culture is due for a change. But we’ll have to wait and see on that one.
It also, alas, means the disappearance of yet another of the true veteran companies in the space. Virtually none of the major players from the closed services generation remain intact today; Simutronics is probably the only one left.
User created content
(Visited 66879 times) Game talk
Jun 202006
David Edery has a nice list of reasons why user generated content works.
The big rap against user-generated content, of course, is that it’s directionless. It leads to a hodgepodge, and users who enter an environment built from it quickly feel that there’s nothing to do, because a rather small fraction of user content is actually finished. (Which just goes to show that the most needed attribute for a creator in any field is persistence!)
The Sunday Poem: The Man With Wooden Hands
(Visited 8497 times) The Sunday Poem
Jun 182006
This was a man with wooden hands. He danced to heavy beats
but in the silence of his closet Mussorgsky bellowed.
He greeted with an hidalgo turn of wrist, and breathed the country,
inhaling its people and brushing the industries off his upper lip
like the foam from stiff beer. The kind of man
Who searched for the foundation stone of mountains.
