• 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.

  • David Jaffe read AToF!

    Hours Categories Writing
    Comments 1 Comment

    Thanks for the kind words, David Jaffe! Your blog post is now on the Press page… 🙂

    And he said:

    “…it’s the best game design book I have ever read. There was this pretty deceptive sample download going around the net 6 months back that made the whole book look like a bunch of cartoons that you could read in like 5 minutes….but the book is SO MUCH MORE than that…and SO MUCH BETTER. I think any and everyone who designs games (and aspires to) should read this book…it explains alot of stuff I have never thought about and articulates alot of the stuff I’ve always thought about but have never taken the time (or had the skillz) to put into words… such a good fucking book… please read it.”

  • Training Fall

    Hours Categories Writing
    Comments 2 Comments

    First slide of I did the Training Fall 2005 keynote yesterday. Getting to Long Beach was a nightmare–the rain was torrential at times, and traffic moved incredibly slowly, even when I took the toll road. I had allotted 3 hours to get there, but I barely made it. As I drive around trying to find parking for the convention center, it’s already 10am, and the talk was starting at 10:30. I was supposed to already be in the hall doing a sound check! I ended up having to pay $20 for a $5 parking spot because I didn’t have any smaller bills on me, and I snuck into the conference through the loading dock, thanks to a helpful maintenance guy and an understanding security guard.

    But in the end, it went swimmingly, and my hosts were incredibly gracious. The presentation is now hosted on the AToF site. Enjoy!

    Next stop, the Austin Game Conference next week…

    Dr. Richard Bartle, First Penguin of online worlds, has written a very flattering review–it’s up on the Press page.

    Almost forgot–the second printing of the book is out. It has a bunch of reader reactions in the back, plus the two factual errors that have been found (Mussorgsky/Ravel and Deathrace 2000) have both been fixed.

  • 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. 😛