Dopass.com

My sister is a kennel manager for a local humane society. She has a tough job, they all do there. It's not just that they fight against community apathy to save the lives of animals every day; they also often have to fight each other. It's one of those startling parallels between her job and my job as a creative director in the games industry.

I should probably explain what I mean by "fight each other" before I go on much further: Everyone comes onto a project, or into a new workplace, with their own goals and agendas. Most of the time, these individualized ambitions are in accord, if not harmony; that is to say, they usually don't get in the way.

Usually... Read more»

I hack away at side projects all the time. They're a way to indulge this absurd passion I have for creating interactive things, without having to think about my day job. You see, when you make games for a living, you're working under all sorts of constraints and restrictions. You can't choose to do things the way you want to, unless that's also the choice the stakeholders you answer to want to make. No choice is ever just made - every change to a game, every decision on a path forward, is a series of negotiations and compromises.

 Helmuth von Moltke's famous quote, translated roughly as "No plan survives contact with the enemy intact" pretty much sums up the problem and the reality. We're not enemies, obviously, but when it comes to getting done the things you want personally, it can feel that way. Ask any frustrated level designer that ended up on a mmo that wasn't nearly as much like WoW as he'd like. Short of a complete mutiny in which you oust the guy calling the shots (something that would get you fired at anywhere but at a ridiculously incompetent studio), what can you do? Nothing. You grit your teeth and you make the compromise because at the end of the day, that's your job when you're a professional game developer. Read more»

 

I've been incredibly critical of the Syfy channel lately on twitter. Mostly, I'm pissed that they cancelled a show I watch; I'm the first to admit that. However, it's not the only reason for my ire. Hell, it's not even the reason that has me motivated most. You see, it's not really rage that makes me critical. It's disappointment.

 When the Sci-Fi channel became the Syfy channel many of the more diehard fans of the sci-fi genre predicted a spiral of decline and decay that would eventually lead to this "new hip brand" being the death of the channel. From their perspective, and maybe from mine now that I've seen it, that's exactly what has happened.

 The channel shows more cheesy horror and wrestling than sci-fi. They seem to care more about them than their flagship shows and the viewers they represent. The truth is that's exactly right, but the reasons should be obvious to anyone who's ever worked on a creative endeavor as their paying job: It's about the money. Their flagship shows aren't bringing in the viewers, but these movies and the wrestling, they do.

 How can you fix that? I mean, if you're a diehard sci-fi fan looking for some place to see new shows like Stargate and to see reruns of your old favorite shows like Firefly, where do you go? How can you create a demand big enough to take your sci-fi channel back from the "greedy clutches of Syfy"? Read more»

Auto Assault closed its doors in 2007. It's now been over 3 years since the last set of tires ground virtual dirt beneath their tread. 3 years since the last "LFG" and for me, an entire lifetime away. For a long while, I stopped thinking about Auto Assault. Completely. I don't mean that in a bad way. I wasn't angry. I just, I don't know, didn't want to open the box again. I mean, it'd been buried right? Read more»

I was inspired recently, by something a friend was doing. It was an art project; one that really grabbed me because, well, in its way it was a piece of lore. I mean it seemed to tell a story and it seemed like a glimpse into at a larger, deeper world. I'm sure some art critic somewhere would tell me it's not really art, blah blah blah, but it inspired me to take on something I've never tried before and that's pretty rare. So what did it inspire me to do? It inspired me to learn how to build electronics projects -- to [i]tinker[/i] out here, in the physical world instead of in the game worlds I sculpt for a living. Read more»