I love the over-the-top craziness of the show floor, with sets, swag, crazy stunts, and costumed booth babes, but the bouncy castle jumpers were a bit too close to girls-on-trampolines for me.
Using boobs to sell games is insulting everyone, it plays into the worst gamer stereotypes about unshowered, antisocial guys who’ve never seen a woman up close, and it continues to marginalize women who work in this industry.
Figment: We’ll get a drink and you can tell me about how your content release went.
Meg: I’d love to, but there’s not enough booze in California for this one.
Figment: This is wine country, Meg, we’ve got vineyards.
Our game’s last content release had a small problem that left players stuck in the Ancient Greece realm, unable to come back to tropical. And the major activity in Greece was running around in underwear (Figment: How’s that a bug, exactly?).
So we got our new content release out and it fixed that issue, but another one popped up. Players who died in Greece, under certain circumstances, found themselves stuck in the underworld caves, unable to revive.
When I wasn’t crying over this (and there were some serious tears), I was snarkily suggesting that my players bribe Charon, or get Orpheus to bail them out, or for heaven’s sakes, players, don’t eat the pomegranate seeds while you’re waiting!
That is precisely why I got a degree in classics.
But back to the underworld bug. Because of the Entropian real-cash economy, we’re not able to give a lot of items as quest rewards. In-game achievements, especially sharable, unlockable achievements can reward exploratory gameplay and inworld successes as well. We tried to create a variety of epic and silly achievements, to be gained in both obvious and surprising ways.
So when my players got stuck in the underworld, all they could do is fool around enough to unlock the goofy meta-achievement found there: The Cave Is A Lie
You know this is completely true because I could not make this up.
Meg: Hey, Eric! I sorted out my transportation to your place next Friday, I’m picking up a gar from a place near Alewife.
Eric: You’re renting a guar? Cool, I thought you could only find then on Vardenfel.
Meg: I got it on eBay. And since when do YOU get to point out MY typos?
“Remember when you were at SxSW, and I got comics without you, and you were disappointed* that I didn’t wait for you?” Harold asked on the phone the other night. “What would you think if I didn’t wait until you’re back to go see X-Men First Class?”
“I wouldn’t be too disappointed. But between when you see it and when I see it, I’m going to unfollow you on Twitter and Tumblr, and defriend you on Facebook, and probably not pick up the phone either, so your inevitable comic-book-movie complaints** don’t hamper my enjoyment of the movie.”
* He actually used a word a bit stronger than “disappointed.”
** I actually used a word a bit stronger than “complaints.”
I can’t figure out what I like best about this photo…. Is it the red wig? The intent expression? Waving my arm in the air for some futuristic cyberpunk videogame?
So Figment has an idea for a social game with optional premium content. The basic concept is a multiplayer knifefight on the Facebook platform. Anyone can play free, but getting a knife costs extra. For a gold membership, he explains with an evil grin, you can actually bring a gun to a knifefight.
