That’s it. When my studio goes big time, I’m hiring booth dudes for #E3.

–amandadadesky, via Twitter

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Booth Dudes

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Nick tagged me in that 15 games Facebook meme, but as I started to compile my most memorable games, I realized I’m unable to just type a list.

Civilization 2 would definitely make that list. When Civ 2 came out, I wasn’t at all interested because I didn’t like military strategy games. Eric had it, though, and I don’t remember exactly how Eric overcame my objections to strategy games and fighting games, but I imagine it was the sort of saintly patience and Jedi mindtricks he used to get me to try Morrowind (Note to self: Seriously consider listening to Eric every once in a while).

I forget if I was playing the Romans and started cleverly naming my cities Claudius and Lupercalia, or if I was founding the Japanese colonies of Tempura and Midori.

Civ 2 had optional movies of the world wonders, and in every conversation I’ve had about the value versus distraction of cutscenes, I think of design sketches blossoming into the flowers of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. That’s still my favorite wonder to build, and if you build it first, I will come after you and take it back. With my armies, because as it turns out, I do kind of like military strategy games.

It may have been the first time I saw early-morning sunlight after playing a game of Civ, but it was not the last.

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Civ 2, Or Why I Should Listen To Eric Sometimes

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From the post Girls Got Game! A Look at Gender & Gaming, on the usually-awesome site Frisky Mongoose:

First and foremost, what would you say if I told you that 60% of women that play games don’t actually consider themselves gamers?

What would I say? Oh, I’d just be preparing myself for another one of these ZOMG! Girls play social games! conclusions. Of course people who play the odd Facebook game (ZOMG! Girls playing games! All game players aren’t antisocial teenage boys!) don’t call themselves gamers, kind of like the way people who enjoy fixing an occasional grilled cheese don’t call themselves gourmet chefs. Especially if “gourmet chef” was usually associated with angry, unshowered teenage boys.

(Yeah. Casual games are grilled cheese. Not my best metaphor ever.)

Via Girls Got Game! A Look at Gender & Gaming | Frisky Mongoose

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

New Study: Still Shocked By Girls Playing Games

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A recent post on Brenda Brathwaite’s blog discusses “the frequently forced, painful and cramped narrative-on-rails that is the in-game tutorial” (Full text here). These are usually an awkward blend in media res urgency with a constant jarring reminder of what keys to press. Her example is “Grab that gun! Let’s go! They’re after us. Oh, and if you need me to give you ammo, press CTRL A.”

I like a world-building intro, whether it’s cinematic or a story, but I prefer jumping in to play. (Amanda D’adesky has an awesome post in defense of cut scenes as a storytelling mechanic.) Ideally there’s an easy setting or a slow curve, so I don’t get killed too badly while figuring out what’s going on. The ideal game would let me know about shortcuts once my basic commands become unwieldy, but once I have too many items in my inventory, too many attacks in my action bar, I’ll look up shortcut keys on my own.

And the usual tutorial feels repetitive, like my credits didn’t transfer and I’m sitting through Gaming 101 again. We don’t need to be told W walks forward and space bar jumps, and I can work out on my own how to go into the Options and reverse the mouse. (Apparently no one else likes playing that way. My only conclusion is that developers put that option in just for me. Thanks!) We really only need to be shown the controls if something’s going to be unusual, like M represents not Map but Massive Self-Destruct Button, or if there’s a special mechanic for the game.

We all know my personal preference for jumping in without reading the instructions (Stop nodding, Mom and Dad!), but what do you think about detailed tutorials? Are they essential to understanding a new game? Do you like a tutorial level, or a slow introduction of skills and abilities, or just experimenting and seeing what happens?

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Skipping The Tutorial

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Tonight was the end-of-term dance for the students, and some of the responsible adults also grabbed the chance to dance around the gym/auditorium, gossip by the water fountain, hang out with the smokers on the stairs and generally act like high school kids.  I’m not hip to Euro club music (or whatever that was), but there was still at least one song I could really dance to.

Student: Miss Meg, where did you learn the ‘Poker Face’ dance?

Meg: Oh, I picked it up from the Dance Central booth at E3.

Eye-Rolling Student: No, be serious, how did you really learn it?

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Two Worlds Collided

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Issue 11 of Indie Game Mag is out, including my article on IndieCade:

In the midst of the booth babes, the pumping ‘Poker Face’ from the Dance Central demo at Harmonix, and the all-out gaming promo swag of E3 is a section devoted to IndieCade, an independent games showcase.

IndieCade will host the third annual International Festival of Independent Games this October 8-10 in Culver City, California. This showcase displays of some of the best indie games from around the world. The exhibit in October will feature the winners of IndieCade’s competition, as decided by voters and players, but for a bit of a sneak preview, IndieCade organizers have selected twelve submitted games for display at E3.

The selected games show some amazing creativity, truly engaging storytelling and interesting new ways to interact with a game and with other players.

Just quoted enough to get ‘Poker Face’ stuck in your head again. You’re welcome!

Via Indie Game Mag

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Indie Game Mag, Issue 11

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At the airport — on the LAX side — I met Mike of GameDrinkCode. We hadn’t met before, although I’m a big fan of GameDrinkCode (I’m more of a GameDrinkWrite girl myself), and I’d been disappointed to miss his highspeed-development talk at the Triangle Game Conference. When he’s not posting on how to afford an indie game, he does iPhone games as Ludoko. (Yes, from the Latin.) Thought it was a good sign that the first person I met was an indie dev.

I ran into a guy in the elevator who asked who I was representing. I said I was freelance. He congratulated me on my successful BSing of the E3 media board.  That’s how I secretly feel, deep down,  about being a journalist, but sometimes I secretly feel like I’m gothly pale or a bit too pear-shaped, and I don’t think I want that pointed out by strangers, either.

I finally met my Twitter friend @CaptainCursor in person! His people over at Rifts went on Unattended Journalist Alert when I asked to see him, and then Nick came out and said hi and tossed me up in the air a couple times.

(Which was extra nice, because my friend who usually greets me by picking me up and swinging me around the room had the bad manners to move to Korea a few years ago.) The Rifts tour was pretty awesome too, thanks, Nick! And for a little while, I felt like one of the cool kids who already knew people at E3. Look, three full days of endless introductions can be pretty exhausting.

I ran into a guy in the elevator who asked if I was a booth babe. Aww! I wasn’t sure if I wanted to laugh hysterically or hug him.

I ran into another guy in the hotel coffeeshop, who saw my Triangle Games Conference bag, and asked if my husband was here for E3. I wanted to give him a one-finger salute,  but instead I gave him my card. And an icy glare!

I met up with the rest of the guys from DIYgamer at the IndieCade party for drinks and mutual admiration society. Guys, if I didn’t tell you clearly enough, I love your posts.

I was in a taxi on the way to the Scott Pilgrim kegger when some basketball team won something or other, and the whole city started cheering. Oh, yeah, and when I got to the party, the line went down the block and around the corner, but the  line was fantastic, tarted-up girls and posturing guys, all texting friends and comparing how drunk they got last night to how drunk they’re going to get tonight.  I thought it would be fun to post about how I couldn’t get into the Hollywood party, so I went to the front of the line, and said who I was, and asked if I was on the list. I wasn’t, of course, but here, go in anyway. This is either because A) I am famous or B) There weren’t enough girls inside. You decide!

The thing is, that once you’ve gotten inside, then you’re just a girl at a party who doesn’t know anyone, and that’s a bit annoying. Sometimes, as a journalist, you have to look at the line of kegs and ask yourself “What would Hemmingway do?”

I added an extra day to my trip to see the Getty Villa, because one nerd-dom just isn’t enough for me. Seeing the Getty Villa has been a dream since I first read about the Villa of the Papyri and the reconstruction. It was an awesome day for me. Then I caught the bus back to downtown LA. The route runs along the Pacific Ocean, so there’s a bus full of tired commuters and dirty vagrants… and me, jumping up and down and staring at the Santa Monica Pier.

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

E3 Run-ins

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Stick brought in the mail yesterday, and brought me a book I’d ordered and a couple adverts, and then asked if maybe I was waiting for something else to arrive. I guess in the excitement of getting my press credentials confirmed and booking my Los Angeles solo trip, I’d completely forgotten that a physical E3 media pass was on it’s way!

Yeah, I’m going to E3 next month! I first blogged about wanting to see E3 in 2006, so when my press pass came yesterday, I was more than little excited. I’ll be covering some events for Indie Game Mag, and then I’m going to go into the press room and file my stories, the way a real games journalist does. I’ll be the kind of games journalist who’s completely starstuck by who else is in the press room… but still.

Think I have time to find an old-fashioned press hat before the expo?

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

E3

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Right before I went to Denver, I went to the Triangle Games Conference.  It was a great two days, I met a ton of creative people and heard about a lot of interesting projects. This meeting-strangers thing is getting a lot easier, by the way, but I’m still not particularly good at it. I thought that once I got over my nervousness about walking up to strangers and introducing myself, that would mean I was good at smalltalk. Um, no. See, if it goes well, you’ve just struck up a conversation… and now how do you disengage? What if I say goodbye, and then run into the person again a minute later at the next panel? And there’s another level of awkward from vaguely recognizing someone from another local game dev event… What if I say hello and they don’t remember me? What if we do the acquaintance nod and then I don’t remember their name?

Yeah, I can turn hello into awkward in milliseconds. (And that’s without the bizarre attraction-avoidance of being a girl at a game event.)  I’m surprised no one came after me to revoke my press pass for such a stunning failure to network.

I went to a couple sessions on media and games, and got into a few impromptu discussions on marketing indie games. At one point, an indie developer and I were nodding and chatting about the difficulties of getting information from game studio to game journalist, when I realized we were on completely different wavelength. He was bemoaning the impossibility of marketing a game without skilled writers to compose a press release and a list of journalists to receive the press release, money to advertise the game, and so forth. And I thought we were talking about how I often try to find out more about a game or an indie game company, only to discover their web presence is a MySpace page from 2006 or a domain name with the game’s logo and the words coming soon.

Oops.

There was a truly fascinating discussion on augmented reality, which will have to be its own post, because I have so much to say there. It makes me so excited that the cyberpunk future is now, which is good, because I’ve been sorely disappointed on the moon colony front.

Oh! And I went to a lecture by Phaedra Boinodiris of WomenGamers.com, which was interesting in it’s own right but personally pretty exciting because WomenGamers hosted my very first gaming article, ok, not the first piece I’d ever written, but the first that was read by someone other than my parents and my boyfriend.

There was also some kind of discussion over giving game companies special tax breaks in North Carolina, and Bev Perdue stopped by, which meant some news crews stopped by, but I wasn’t really following that part. In fact, I started to feel sensory overload from all the conversations and information flying at me. I had to hide out in the press room for a little while to blog and make some mental room, and that led to a quiet chat with a couple other games journalists (the kind who aren’t also waitresses), and that was one of the nicest parts of the conference for me.

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

TGConf After-Action Review

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My Eufloria review is up on Bytten. Despite really enjoying Eufloria, this was a hard review to write. I loved the organic-art graphics so much, but as I read and reread my attempts at a review, I started to feel awkward about being a female reviewer squeeing over the pretty. I also loved the streamlined, elegantly basic RTS mechanics, but, again, I didn’t want to sound like the girl player who likes the simplified strategy game.

Not since I first discovered Civ2 has a game made me late for so many things. Eufloria offers two of the same addictive qualities as the Civilization series, both the empire-spreading and the need to play just a few more minutes until the next mini-milestone. Eufloria simplifies the unit selection and improvement add-ons of the real-time strategy genre, presenting mystical space lifeforms in a surprisingly vibrant universe. You play not as a general or political leader, but as a collection of seedlings, and your goal is to grow, and spread, take over neighboring asteroids, and make the growers proud.

Read the rest on Bytten.com

So, yes. I like a game with flowers. Deathray flowers.

From the blog Simpson's Paradox, please comment here:

Eufloria Reviewed

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