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But they’re PEOPLE!

February 15, 2010 Uncategorized Comments Off on But they’re PEOPLE!

I keep running into the problem with the characters in this game I’m working on.  I’m working on the bad-guys.  The thugs.  The digital wastes-of-space that are included more or less to give you obstacles to overcome, targets to shoot at, sometimes used to push the player through the level fast enough to make them miss a clue, or occasionally used to pile up enough bodies for the player to use to climb over the barbed-wire fence.

Yeah, the disposeables.

This is an iPhone/iPad game here, there’s not a lot of leeway for these guys, three or four physiotypes to work with, different animation sets depending on weapons or size.  Thing is, I keep getting stuck.  I keep having to remind myself these are just the low-class thugs.  As I work through the different scenes, working on object placement, tagging things that can be used for cover, it’s hard to keep these characters stuffed into that tightly confined model.  They’re preprogrammed AI’s, they’re going to do what they do, but I keep making grand plans, trying to get their reactions more realistic, more cinematic than what their actual role in the game is going to be. 

I keep thinking of them as “people” as characters in a book or film, rather than the average-intelligence avatars of evil that is their ultimate role, at least in this version of the game.  The brutal honest truth of the matter is, if they were “people” the game wouldn’t be able to happen.  If low-level thugs and ninjas did what reasonable people would do (like run away from the guy with the glowing sword who just inflated his muscles and grew another six inches to boot) there would be no game to speak of.  So even though they may all have individual names and histories in my mind, that’s going to be something that I just have to file away and ignore for now, relegating them to the unimagininatie roles of “Thug01 and Thug02” for the nonce.

Why the heck do YOU care?

February 2, 2010 People, Uncategorized, Videogames, Writing Comments Off on Why the heck do YOU care?

I got asked this the other day, why I care about what is/was going on between Macmillan and Amazon.  After all, I am not (yet) a published author, I am not an editor, proofreader, assistant to an agent, I am not personally involved with the traditional publishing industry as of yet.  I make videogames.  So why does this affect me? 

Laying aside the fact that I do have friends in publishing, good friends and new friends, people I would genuinely feel the world would be a somewhat dimmer place without (dimmer intellectually, that is).  As a creative type, and someone currently involved with the publishing process for videogames, the goings on in our sister industries are of great interest.  The Macmillan/Amazon mashup was a big deal, because we don’t often get to see two corporate giants mix it up so publicly and cattily, we usually don’t hear anything other than vague “insider”  reports until after the ash has settled and as buyers or observers we have to deal with the winner.

Here’s the thing, despite the fact that we are all arrogant f**ktards in our own unique ways, we are sister industries. Videogames, film, literature, we all have common histories, places where we touch and depart, close and dance away again. There are lessons to learn here, lessons about comportment, about what the online community or fanbase will do, lessons in just who has the cojones and who really has the power. In the absence of emperical evidence in one industry we often look to another to see how they handled a situation, or how they structured a deal. We all like to think of ourselves as standing alone, but the types of forces that affect one affect all. Piracy, publication, marketing, how to make our fans feel loved and our publishers grateful are not limited to books or movies or music. We all have to deal with them and we all have different ways to approach them. We all deal with the vagaries of intellectual property, we all have to work with the development and sale of something that is not a physical product, not something that you can warehouse and keep in an inventory, but rather an idea.
 
The deal struck between Macmillan and Apple sounds nearly identical to what is offered to App developers, and I suspect (please feel free to correct me if you know) it is almost the same for music and video as well.  So in the case of the iPad at least, we all need to be watching closely, because the less we are treated as different industries, and lumped under the umbrella of “media” by those that distribute our products, the more the firestorm in one area is going to splash over to affect the rest. 

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