Game talk

This is the catch-all category for stuff about games and game design. It easily makes up the vast majority of the site’s content. If you are looking for something specific, I highly recommend looking into the tags used on the site instead. They can narrow down the hunt immensely.

  • IGN/GameSpy Live

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 1 Comment

    I forgot–I was at this event today. I was on a panel with Brad McQuaid of Sigil and a fellow whom I hadn’t met before, from the new NCSoft Orange County office. John Keefer moderated.

    We spoke about the usual stuff: will MMOs come to consoles, will the grind go away, what about user-created content. We were all in vehement agreement on everything (Brad even said that if a game is designed for RMT, that’s OK), so I fear the panel may have been a little dull.

    Fortunately, perennial rabble-rousers Tommy Tallarico and Mark Rein were both there. They kept the crowd entertained. Becky-the-Star-Wars-Galaxies-belly-dancer was there too, and she hated it when I introduced her that way to people.

    (Once, at E3, when she was working for Mythic, she started doing the Exotic dances from SWG in the middle of the Mythic booth; she was a Master Dancer, you see).

    (No, I can’t let her ever live that down).

    Alas, Becky and Tommy tell me that more people need to buy tickets to the Video Games Live shows… the one in San Diego may go away. Again. Which would suck, because I skipped the Hollywood Bowl one expecting to go to the SD show!

    The show itself was like a small E3, but for gamers rather than press. My favorite booth: the Intellivision Lives! one. I was tempted to buy the 6-pack of pin-on buttons with old-skool graphics on them.

  • Game Informer review

    Hours Categories Game talk, Writing
    Comments 1 Comment

    CSSW1 is done, and next I will be off to Web 2.0. While I was at CSSW (which was a lot of fun, by the way), I got word that Game Informer did a review of the book. Short but sweet, you can see it to the left.

    While at Indiana University, I learned that Thom Gillespie there has been using the book in his classes. One of these days, it’d be nice to get a list of all the schools that are using it as a textbook…

    I’m pretty exhausted from travel already, and it’s barely started. Otherwise, I’d spend more time coming up
    with a blog entry. 😛

  • Travel and speaking schedule

    Hours Categories Game talk, Misc
    Comments 1 Comment

    Whew… I think I am going to be on the road a lot. Upcoming speaking engagements in chronological order:

    • CSSW Ludium 1, held at the new Center for the Study of Synthetic Worlds, at Indiana University. I’ll be one of the “Artisans” so this isn’t really a speaking engagement.
    • Web 2.0, in San Francisco. I believe I am on a panel.
    • Training Fall, in Long Beach. This one is directly related to the book, and is entitled “Why Games Matter.”
    • Austin Game Conference, in, duh, Austin. A couple of panels here.
    • Korea Games Conference in Seoul. I’ll be keynoting.
    • Online Games Summit, Paris. No website is up for this one yet, but it’s put together by the Informa folks with help from the IGDA. I’ll be a keynote at this one too.

    And I didn’t mention it, but I’ll be going to the Game Designers Workshop for the first time in years, since it’ll be in my backyard. But you can’t come unless you’re invited. 🙂

    The Internet is a small place. My wife, who plays Discworld MUD, has found someone to translate those Dutch reviews. So hopefully I’ll find out what they say sometime soon!

    Jessica Mulligan did a brief review in English, which makes my life much easier. It’s posted up on the press page now.

  • Computer Games mag reviews AToF

    Hours Categories Game talk, Writing
    Comments 1 Comment

    I’ve spent three weeks mostly on the road–speaking at Microsoft Meltdown, off on vacation, then off at a company meeting. And the week since I got back has been pretty crazy-busy!

    Paraglyph Press, my publishers, and I have been talking about a follow-up to AToF. If we do what I am thinking about, it is going to be a large project. But it’d also be a lot of fun, I think.

    The book is about to go back to print with the few pesky factual errors in it fixed. I have copies of the Chinese edition in my hands, and hopefully I’ll hear more about the Japanese, Korean, and other international editions soon. In the meantime, it still seems to be popping up internationally. Anyone read Dutch? ‘Cause I found this mini-review:

    A Theory of Fun

    Dit boek is een leuk “weggevertje”. Het gaat over het begrip ‘Gameplay’ en waarom spellen eigenlijk leuk zijn om te spelen. Het laat duidelijk zien dat het een onderwerp is waar je met gemak een boek over kunt schrijven dat nog lekker weg leest ook.

    Machine translation seems to indicate that this is something somewhat nice.

    This review definitely is:

    Computer Games Online review