Sam and Max Done Slow…

I’ve been working on a lot of new projects lately; some Product Management stuff with Dennis’ iPad development team, writing for a handful of sites and magazines that I hadn’t worked with before and even doing some game type stuff on top of all that in what little spare time I have. It’s been really interesting to learn to look at things in a new way; some of the reasoning that goes into User Interface and audio design in games is really fascinating when you get down into the nitty-gritty.

One thing in particular that seems to stand out is how UI design and documentation (including tutorials) for modern games differ from old ones. I can’t remember anything but the most token of tutorials or explanations in games like Doom or Day of the Tentacle, yet these days games like Modern Warfare and Fable are overflowing with tooltips and guided examples. It’s easy to shrug a lot of this off by saying that new games have much more complicated features – Doom didn’t have a crouch button, let alone grenades – but that’s a poor excuse and ignores the fact that MW can rely on common user assumptions more than Doom could have.

Monkey Island never had to explain ‘This is how you talk to people’, so why does Fable lecture me about being nice or nasty to people? It’s not because this is a deeper feature which requires explanation (we all know it pays to not be an asshole, right?), but because there’s a greater gap between what you do, how you do it and the level it’s been gamified to. What was important and simple in Monkey Island is important, more complex and worth points in Fable.

Spurred on by the latest issue of Kill Screen, I’ve also been reading a lot about audio design in games too lately – especially the composition and value of ambient music. I even took the theme tune from Lucasarts’ Sam and Max Hit the Road and slowed it down 6.4x just to get an idea of how the same melody can create and entirely different mood, which is what you can listen to above.

Creepy different, eh? Sadly, it’s one of the few games of that era that comes out well when slowed down, as there tends to be a lot of snare drum on the other Lucasart soundtracks – slow that down and it just sounds like white noise. The same holds true for the original Doom soundtrack. Grim Fandango, on the other hand, sounds great.

Listen to the original song here.

Joe, Out.

Monkey Island Map…

Something stupid that my Dad and I noticed over the Christmas period – Guybrush Threepwood watching over Finland. He supplied the idea, I supplied the shitty MS Paint work in between playing Bastion on Onlive, Limbo on PC and an as-yet-unreleased art game.

I thought it best that I didn’t continue the illustration below the waist, as the Gulf of Finland could be interpreted quite suggestively…

Joe, Out.

I Am Out

I haven’t posted on here in a while. That’s been because there’s something I want to write about, but which I’m not able to at the moment. It’s a big thing; a big change, but it’s also got to be a quiet thing for a bit longer. I’ll write about it in January, in whispers.

Until then, I am out. Out of London, out of sorts, going out of my mind, Out of Office.

Hi,

You’ve probably tried to reach me for something really important, but unfortunately I’m now out of the office for the Christmas period. I’ll be back at my desk on January 3rd, 2012 and will get back to you then.

If you are contacting me as a matter of urgency then I can be contacted at XXXXX@gmail.com, or through Twitter at @joethreepwood. You can also find me on LinkedIn.

I hope you have just as happy a holiday as I’m planning to have. Here’s a great recipe for a whisky Eggnog, to help you along: http://tinyurl.com/denniseggnog

Joe Martin
Games Editor
Custom PC Magazine & Bit-tech.net

What an appropriately named drink. I have the original recipe in my copy of David Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks at home, but I couldn’t find a copy online – which is why that link takes you to an old newspaper scan. It was the only listing of the Pendennis Club Eggnog which I could find online. The Pendennis is meant to be one of the best whisky eggnogs.

Out, Joe

Why I’m A Bad Journalist #2…

As I write this, I’ve literally just come back from the Games Media Awards 2011. I’m still quite drunk, but I’m cogent enough to be certain of the fact that as far as these awards go, the less you care, the more you’re worth. It’s probably worth clarifying that just because you don’t care doesn’t entitle you to be an ass, however – something Grainger Games don’t seem to have got their heads around as they booed and heckled through the entire ceremony.

The Care < Talent equation makes my own placement at the event kind of awkward, by the way – as I’m fairly certain I only got invited to the event because of the extent I was slagging it off on Twitter. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one too, as there were other faces around who seemed mystified at their own presence. We claimed corruption, that we didn’t care…but we still got lured in by the promise of free booze or tiny, secret hopes.

I wasn’t nominated for any awards, despite a brief and not-to-be-repeated bid of encouraging Dennis staff to nominate me. Even though, I had a lot of people come up to me over the course of the show and, aware that I’m on the lookout for new projects, presented new ventures or insisted I couldn’t leave since I ‘still got a soul and stuff to say’.

Just A Blogger…

I went to GamesCom in Cologne this year and was pleased to see it turn out better than my last two visits. This time I knew people, my way around and where all the good parties were. I had bookings back to back and they were all interesting. Best of all, I didn’t end up stranded in the same industrial wasteland I got stuck in two years ago – the one populated only by vodka and prostitutes.

One thing I did notice though was an abundance of unusually young people with press badges, often moving in groups of three as they nervously navigated the business centre. At first I thought I was just being getting old and judgemental; then I got chatting to one group and discovered that they were bloggers.

Bloggers was how they described themselves (in fractured English) and it was immediately clear before they explained further that they weren’t from Kotaku or Joystiq or anything of that scale. To be honest, I was a little stunned that they’d even been able to get themselves press passes, as they had the impression of not knowing what to do with what they had.

I’ll admit that a part of me bristled at the situation – I’ve been doing this job professionally for five years and yet this group had greater presence at the show than Dennis Publishing (or Future, by the looks of it) and were being taken with matching seriousness. I’ve tried to shove this bitterness aside however, as it’s unfair to judge without knowing more.

Handbags and Swagbags…

While the streets of London have been filled with tracksuited twats stealing more tracksuits, I’ve been inside thinking about a different kind of looting – the consensual kind where companies allow fleets of barely-qualified journalists to turn up and make off with bags of swag.

Swag is one of those weird topics in games journalism; one that everyone is involved in but few want to talk about. Some sites, like Kotaku and Destructoid will openly boast about the exorbitant or rare items that are thrust upon them at press events, albeit under claims of transparency for the the latter. Other publications frown on even mentioning it within the office. Nearly everyone takes the loot though  – I know only one person that claims not to and even then it’s a claim I doubt.

Some people even view the swag as a reason to get into the business – the kind of people who value material goods over all else, evidenced by the way they label games journalism as ‘getting free games’ rather than ‘playing games all day’.

In the interest of transparency, I’ll say that my own attitude is one of up-front British awkwardness and delayed utilitarianism. If a bag of goodies is thrust upon me at a press event, I’ll accept it if because it’s rude not to. Later I’ll go through the contents and redistribute items that aren’t of guaranteed use to me. A few weeks ago I won an Android phone at an Nvidia event and immediately tried to give it to either of the bartenders. It was only at the fierce insistence of others I kept it long enough to try it out.

Why I’m A Bad Journalist #1

One thing I learned very early on about games journalism is that it’s an incredibly incestuous business; oddly closed and reliant on the swapping of favours. It’s cliquey, with writers who ‘come up together’ often remaining so and PRs, who constantly shuffle from one allegiance to another, carrying their bonds with them when they go. Worse, some journalists then jump to PR and complicate things a whole lot more.

I’m not having a cry about this; I realise it’s an essential part of an industry where people move around a lot and I’ve never heard of these cliques being juvenilely enforced in the ‘You’re a Future writer, you can’t talk to us!’ kind of way. Still, the Future writers do tend to band together, as do Imagine’s and so on. Sometimes they’re easy to spot, like the Official Console writers, who seem to radiate their own kind of party-hard vibe, or those I think of as The Next Generation, who form a welcoming, laughing huddle at all the launch events. Loosely and with acknowledgement to the foggy boundaries, these cliques exist and that’s not an unexpected or bad thing.

Looking to Score…

I had a disagreement about a score recently. I wrote two reviews for a game, one for Bit-Gamer and one for Custom PC Magazine, and in the process of formalising my thoughts I scored 95 per cent for one review, 99 per cent for the other. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I just had a better day when I wrote the second review, or had just done particularly well in the lunchtime game of Call of Duty 2. Either way, a 4 per cent discrepancy showed up and I wanted to stand by both scores equally.

In the end, I was rightly told to reconcile the reviews to a single, consistent figure across the brand. The game scored 95 per cent, remained excellent and I moved on to the next project – but not before I’d had several interesting discussions with other journalists about their views on scoring systems.

The idea which seemed to stick in most people’s craw was that you cannot ever score something 100 per cent and that there is no such thing as perfection. 10/10 was alright, some people said, because it’s less granular – a 96 per cent game would be 10/10 without having to be perfect, for example. 100 per cent, however? Get out of town.

The Killing Screens…

I’ve been reading Kill Screen lately, which is a new American games magazine that’s currently working towards its fourth issue. I’ve already subscribed to the mag (which costs a pretty penny when you factor in shipping), but it’s important to note that ‘magazine’ isn’t really the correct word. It’s more like a periodical or multi-author novella.

Structurally, the first thing that sets Kill Screen apart is that there are no adverts in it. In fact, there’s very little in the way of pictures at all and what few are there are usually illustrations or brief photo-articles in their own right. This alone sets it apart from the increasingly flashy magazines that spatter across newsagent shelves – most magazines like pictures because they grab the attention of customers and are far cheaper than paying writers. Once a magazine has more pictures than words, it’s usually a bad sign.

Kill Screen does a few other things I like too, but it’s important to note that much of this is only possible because it doesn’t really care about the recent trends or news. Each issue has a central theme, which is decided far in advance and which all the writers discuss in their own way. There are no reviews and no news pieces – just a topic and the guiding tone, which can admittedly get pretty pretentious. New Games Journalism and its approximates are out in full force.

Kill Screen has a website too, by the way, but like me they don’t like to repeat content from the magazine on the site. I’ve been forced to do that occasionally (usually because of interfering deadlines or because we’ve had an article that I think needs repeating). Other than that, nearly all games content for Custom PC is either unique or rewritten.

Mainly though, what I like about Kill Screen is that it’s different. In the publishing industry there are still plenty of folk going over the same arguments that we’ve been having for years – what do we do when print dies and internet advertising finally bottoms out? At the moment the focus is on tablet devices and Social Media, because that’s all anyone ever talks about. Those things will doubtless be important, but as the primary form of publishing? I’m not convinced.

Alive and On Fire…

I’m back and a lot has changed in the three or four months since my last post. I’ve moved into London where I have a nice shared flat in a shitty area, I’ve moved on past a lot of the old pain and I’m in a new relationship. Those are the highlights, but the crux is that I’m happy now and secure enough in that that I’m not going to talk about that on here right now.

Instead, I had planned on talking about scoring metrics for games journalism – a topic that’s been bothering me a bit lately. I say planned because I’ve been fiddling with this blog and getting it running again for the best part of an hour now and my painfully short attention span demands I move on to something else. I’ll be back to talk about stuff later, but in the mean time: thanks to the few people who sent me email and messages over the last few months. You weren’t numerous, but it was nice to know that not everyone was laughing at my previous melodrama.

Joe