E3: It’s Back!

Forget everything I said the other day about E3 being nothing but  a giant PR junket. Alright… so maybe it still is! But so what? It’s back to its old self again! The image on the left should tell you everything you need to know about the con returning to a state of normalcy.

It was a rough two years of soul-searching, but it seems all involved parties have finally come to their senses and realized that you have to give the people what they want: Scantily clad women, music and sound effects blaring at 120db from every surface capable of mounting a speaker, and five square miles of demo stations, stretching off as far as the eye can see.

My only complaint now is that Kentia Hall remains closed. Everyone who has ever been knows that Kentia Hall is the true heart and soul of E3. Things won’t really be back to 100% until we can all wander back down the basement for some hot knockoff NES console and vibrating plastic racing seat action.

E3: Is Anyone Out There With Testicular Fortitude?

When I first got into the media business, I told myself that after I’d dug in and established a reputation I’d grow that pair of balls the industry was so sorely lacking, and stand up against the sort of coverage I was all too used to seeing as a player: The obsequious pandering interviews and “Aw, shucks, Mister Developer, thanks for making such an awesome game!” reviews that produced nothing of value to anyone, and served only as mouthpieces to advertise game X or product Y.

But, after two years of covering the MMO genre, I’ve come to a sad realization: No matter what you ask people, with few exceptions, everyone is living in such fear of the PR department taking them out to the woodshed if they deviate from the company line that it makes no difference how giant or brass your balls may be, or how “tough” a question you may want to ask, no one is going to give you a straight answer–they can’t.

Straight answers are dangerous, unpredictable. Someone might slip up and reveal something that hasn’t yet been announced, or make an off-the-cuff remark that damages the company name. MMOs are multi-million dollar projects, employing hundreds, spanning years of development time. We can’t have some malcontent from the design team going out there and making fools of us just to appease the ego of some random, no-name reporter!

Much safer to have Marketing define a message, rehearse it, and then regurgitate it to every member of the media they come across.

I guess what I’m getting at is this: I know it’s a shot in the dark, considering that E3 is by its very nature nothing but a massive PR junket, but is there anyone out there who’s interested in sitting down this week to have a real, honest to god discussion? Where I ask questions I don’t already know the answers to, and you aren’t reading off a script?

If so, please drop me a line at steve@mmogamer.com.

Editorial: I Hate L.A.

There’s always a certain hesitancy on my part to write an article like this, as you want to avoid biting the hand that feeds you (literally in this case, they served me lunch). But, after my experience last week at the Los Angeles Games Conference, I felt very strongly that something needed to be said.

I hadn’t even heard of the con until two days before I decided to attend. I found out about them in a very new-media sort of way: They began following us on Twitter.

Looking over the agenda, I spotted a few sessions that I thought would be of interest to the readership here, as well as a few people I hoped to be able to pull aside to have an on-the-record chat-I managed to have a fairly interesting discussion with Turbine’s director of marketing this way.

I was somewhat leery that it seemed like the majority of speakers were focused more on the business side of the industry, rather than the development side which I’m used to covering, but I’m always open to new experiences.

Who knows, I thought, maybe seeing into the inner workings of how games are funded and advertised would help me to gain a better appreciation of the industry as a whole.

This would turn out to be a major error in judgment.

I ended up sitting through eight hours of nearly every speaker proclaiming that people such as myself-life-long gamers, who tend to see games as their primary form of entertainment-are dinosaurs, relics of an age long-past. And that all the woes of the industry could be traced squarely to trying to cater to our demands, when really, all along, they should have been focusing on making dress-up games for 50 year old housewives, as that’s where the real money is.

This was what the conference boiled down to: People brought together not out of a love of games, but out of a love of the money they think that games can bring them.

I am not an idealist about many things in this life-hell, in most regards I’m a rank cynic-but games are one of the few. To hear people talk about them as if they were nothing but loaves of bread, or rolls of toilet paper, commodities which existed for the sole purpose of being consumed and discarded once the next fad comes along… this did not sit well with me, at all.

Obviously, the gaming industry consists largely of commercial enterprises, and if people aren’t making any money, they aren’t going to be able to continue making games, either.

But the business side should be a means to an end-not the other way around. You shouldn’t be producing games for the sole purpose of making money for the same reasons you shouldn’t be producing films, or music, or literature for the sole purpose of making money: Because then you end up with soulless, hollow, forgettable trash.

The fact that most-though I stress most, but not all-of the people in the room seemed just fine and dandy with producing soulless, hollow, forgettable trash was all the more distressing.

Emblematic of this mindset were a number of the panelists, who referred to themselves as “serial entrepreneurs.”

For those of you who don’t know, a “serial entrepreneur” is a man with an idea. Just one. And somehow, this man is able to convince a venture capitalist that this one idea happens to be worth a lot of money.

Of course, unless you’re Thomas Edison with the light bulb, or George Lucas with Star Wars, having just one idea does not a tangible business make.

In fact, most of them seemed to have no real business models at all, except for making money disappear until they managed to sell themselves off to a much larger company-whereby their idea becomes somebody else’s problem.

Then, once they spend all of their buy-out cash on hookers and blow, they come up with another idea. And, because their last one got bought out, and the VCs made their money back with interest, they get another ten or twenty million dollars to start the process all over again from the beginning.

These people were held up as role-models for the conference attendees to follow: They had solved the greatest mystery of our time, and found the secret to reliably making money off the gaming industry.

For Christ’s sake there is no mystery. If you make a good game, people will buy it. Though there are exceptions to the rule, like The Last Express, there are a hundred others that prove it, like BioShock and Fallout 3.

And conversely, if you make a bad game, no amount of marketing bullshit, or pedigree, or cheesy stunts like sending your player’s names to the International Space Station can save you. End of story.

So, I can honestly say I did gain a better understanding of a side of the industry that I hadn’t seen up close and personal before-but now, I wish I hadn’t.

All in all, the Los Angeles Games Conference reminded me a great deal of that old saying: You’ll like the taste of sausage a lot more if you don’t know how it’s made.

Almost Heroes: Camp Check!

Back in the swing of things

I’d been out of circulation for awhile before I went to GDC. It took some doing for the gears in my head to shift back into reporter mode, but now that they’re there I should finally be posting the coverage I got out of the con on a regular basis. Starting today I plan to publish one interview every two days.

The first of these interviews is up now: http://www.mmogamer.com/04/06/2009/making-mmos-on-a-shoestring

Just wanted to put this little update up for any of you out there wondering where the interviews I mentioned in my last post were. (as well as for any irate PR managers reading this, thinking I drank all their Red Bull and then skipped out on their coverage).

Stay tuned.

GDC: Week in Review and Upcoming Features

Last week, I told anyone who asked when our first round of coverage was going to be up that “It’ll be Wednesday at the earliest. I plan on sleeping from Saturday until Tuesday.”

I’ll bet they thought I was only kidding!

I don’t know how the hell people can do an interview at a convention at 3 o’clock in the afternoon, and then manage to have it edited and posted on their sites by 4:30 the same day. I can only assume that they have peons behind the scenes doing the grunt work for them, and the hardest part of their job ends after they stick a microphone in somebody’s face for fifteen minutes.

Unfortunately for me, I haven’t got any peons. I’m the one-man band.

For of all my insomnia-induced Red Bull swilling, and the week-long grind of running back and forth from one hotel to another trying to make my next appointment on time, the hardest part of my job is yet to come: Now I actually have to sit down and start writing all this stuff.

I’ve spent the past few days since returning home from San Francisco in a sleep-deprived fog. I crawled out of bed this morning and regained lucidity just long enough to discover that somehow, over the course of five days, I had managed to record nearly twenty hours of audio and take fifteen hundred photos.

I got some flak last year from other sites over having the audacity to post interviews I did at GDC a month after the fact (of course, snide remarks didn’t stop them from linking to said interviews anyway), and I can anticipate a repeat performance this time around.

But, the nice thing about covering an industry that works on development cycles approaching half a decade is that unless someone gives me some real scorchingly hot exclusive material (which no one ever does), what possible difference does it make whether I post an interview on the same day it was done or a week after the fact?

Those are my thoughts on the subject, at least. I suppose I could always just be lazy.

Anyway, on with the week in review.

“Seen anything interesting at the show?” is your standard-issue boilerplate conversation starter at conventions. I’m as jaded as they come, so normally I have to lie and mumble something about “Game X looks pretty good,” but not this year. This year I was actually genuinely impressed.

From the moment it was announced, OnLive was undoubtedly the talk of the show. Everyone I met had some very choice words about it, the most frequently used of which was “bullshit.”

I’m taking a more wait and see approach. It’s certainly an intriguing concept. If they can get it to work the way they say it will, it’s going to be huge. But, until I’ve actually got it in my hands and see it working with my own two eyes, I’m not going to get too worked up about it, one way or another.

The question I was having a real hard time answering, though, was “What are you looking forward to in terms of MMOs?”

Now, the kneejerk reaction to such a question is of course, “Well, [whatever the person who asked you's company is working on] looks great!” but I never gave it. Instead I tried to be as noncommittal as I could, because honestly, I haven’t seen enough of any upcoming MMO titles to have an informed opinion about them.

This also presents a problem for me in terms of producing content. I’m not much of a preview writer kind of guy–I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the WAR impressions piece–particularly not when my schedule didn’t permit me to get much, if any at all, hands-on time with the games I was covering this year. So, my reportage out of GDC is going to primarily consist of interviews… and there’s no shortage of them.

• Mythic’s Paul Barnett Talks Warhammer, Art, and a Lifetime of Gaming
• Simutronics CEO David Whatley: From Diku to H eroEngine
• A Conversation With Carbine Studios: The Biggest MMO Company You’ve Never Heard Of
• Making MMOs on a Shoestring:  The NetDevil Story with Scott Brown
• Real Money, Fake Property: Live Gamer’s Andy Scneider Talks Legitamate RMT
• Ragnar Tornquist: Storytelling and Worldbuilding in the MMO Genre
• From Shadowbane to Child’s Play: Kingisle’s Todd Coleman on Wizard101
• LOTRO Executive Producer Jeffrey Steefel Listens to me Browbeat Him About Boar Quests For 20 Minutes (working title)
• Age of Conan Director Craig Morrison: Designing the Fun Back into MMOs
• CCP on the Latest EVE Expansion, and the Council of Stellar Management
• Petroglyph’s CEO Chuck Kroegel on Their Upcoming Title, Mytheon
• Possibility Space Founder Gage Galinger on Outsourcing, Procedural Content, and Adventure in the World of Warrior Epic

Interviews arranged at GDC but not yet completed:

• Atanas Atanasov on Earthrise
• Lee Hammock on Fallen Earth
• Henrique Olifears on Jagex’s upcoming title, MechScape
• Vogster Entertainment’s “Medal of Honor meets Grand Theft Auto” MMOFPS, CrimeCraft
• NCSoft’s AION

And lastly, in a bit of a change of pace for me, I’ll be doing my first hardware review, of the Xeno networking card from Bigfoot Networks. I was somewhat dubious that you’d be able to see any performance increases in the non-twitch world of MMO gaming–the last thing I wanted to do was accept a review unit and then have to flatly say “It didn’t do jack for me.”

But, a conversation on the show floor put those concerns to rest. We shall see.

For now, I feel tired just typing out the names of the articles–and I still have to go transcribe them! Anyone want to be my peon? The pay isn’t great (zero), but you get to set your own hours and work from home!

<crickets>

……No?

GDC: The Home Stretch

Conventions are funny things. I look forward to the big ones for months, thinking of all the people I only get to meet in person at them a few times a year. I spend a week beforehand packing, repacking, and then re-repacking with all the things I forgot to pack the first two times.

The initial hours after arrival are always the smoothest. The strains of walking for miles with 30lbs of camera and computer equipment strapped to my back have not yet begun to sink in. I’m well rested, my energy levels are high. My mind is sharp, and witticisms flow easily from my lips.

By the second day cracks are starting to appear in my facade of professionalism. I begin slipping up in conversations, making remarks that no respectable journalist (which is what I try to pass myself off as, often unsuccessfully) would ever say.

“Mark my words: That game is going down faster than a two dollar whore on Broadway.”

The 30lbs of equipment suddenly starts to feel more like a hundred and thirty. My body somehow manages to age fifty years in three days.

I return to where I’m staying each subsequent night more drenched in sweat than the last; hair ragged, skin flushed, not so much walking as lurching across the threshold.

I throw my bags down on the floor with a relieved groan, shed my clothing, and promptly take a half dozen pills before crawling beneath the covers, wishing there were twelve extra hours in the day and that I could sleep through all of them.

The pills never work. I wake at 3AM and toss and turn until dawn. Insomnia begins to take its toll, and lack of sleep leads to increasing incoherence.

“So uh… um… do you feel that uh…. you know, I… I lost my train of thought!”

By the final day of the con I have trouble determining waking dreams from reality. I develop tunnel vision, and the world begins to consist of nothing more than the face of the person I am supposed to be interviewing and the booming report of their voice in my migraine-addled ears.

I occasionally try to smile and nod in the right places to make it seem to them like I’m following along, but all I’m thinking of at that point is the sweet journey home, to my own bed, where I plan to spend the next several days in a state of total unconsciousness which is rivaled only by the grave.

The last day of GDC is tomorrow. We’re heading into the home stretch now.

GDC: Hump Day

I was hoping I’d have time to sit down and write little vignettes about GDC a few times a day throughout the week. Things haven’t worked out that way. I’ve been running around like a chicken with my head cut off from one appointment to the next, spending most of the day starting my sentences off with “Sorry I’m late, but…”

When I finally do manage to escape the con’s orbit, all I have time for is to swallow a fist-full of sleeping pills and hope my insomnia doesn’t kick in at 3 in the morning, like it usually does.

Today was interesting. I got to meet Paul Barnett.

Paul is the kind of guy who I’ve always wanted to interview. Watching some of his first Warhammer videos from years ago where it looked like he had downed twelve shots of Jagermeister before being pushed in front of the camera… now that was journalism!

He was a very interesting man to talk to, and our topics of conversation got into areas very far removed from his twelve shots of Jager appearances.

Pro Tip to anyone interviewing him in the future: Ask him “Is there anything that you personally are interested in talking about?”

On a side note, I’m sure anyone even remotely interested in gaming has by now heard that the REVOLUTION I was talking about in last night’s post is the OnLive system.

Sitting in the foyer before the event nursing a Red Bull, a reporter with an Australian accent sat down next to me.

“How did you get roped into this thing?” I asked.
“Oh, my editor wanted me to be here,” she said.
“I got a call about two weeks ago saying that they couldn’t tell me what the thing was, or even if our site should be covering it, but that it was REVOLUTIONARY and that I would want to be here.”
“That’s what they’re saying,” she agreed.
“Well, they say that every year, I’ll believe it when I see what it is.”
She looked at me funny. “You know what it is!”
“No… I don’t.”
“Variety broke the embargo hours ago, everyone knows what it is!”
“I don’t… I’ve been in appointments all day long.”
“Right!” she laughed.

Suffice it to say OnLive was a frequent topic of discussion among many of the people I met with today. The most commonly overheard remark: “Bullshit.”:

GDC: Ah, San Francisco

I’ve come to the conclusion that this microblogging business works best when you have something micro to blog with–like your phone, or a netbook.

Not like my laptop, which weighs over 9lbs, leading me to take it out of my bag sparingly at best.

My posts will likely be not quite so micro from now on. So much for my grand experiment. I wouldn’t last five minutes on Twitter.

Anyway, here I am at day two of GDC. Already I can feel the sleep deprevation begining to kick in, the sore shoulders, the sweat that may or may not be a fever from one of the thousand different Pandemic II-style parasites being passed among the convention attendees trickling down my forehead.

And then of course there is having to contend with San Francisco itself. The rampant, aggressive homeless, the drug addicts, the people who drive even worse than the ones in LA, which I wouldn’t have thought possible.

I’m sitting here now at Sony’s free bar in the W Hotel. I was talking to the barman earlier, because he seemed like the only relatively normal guy in the place. He asked how my day was going, and I told him pretty much what I just told you above.

He smiled and said, “Here, this’ll cheer you up!” and poured me a tall shot of Jack Daniels.

Always a good sign when a con drives you to the bottle.

I’ve been waiting for 7PM to come around so that I can attend my last appointment of the day, which was billed to me as a “REVOLUTION IN THE GAMING INDUSTRY!”

I recieved a call from a random PR firm a few weeks ago inviting me to this event, saying they could supply no details, offer no hints of what was to be announced, only telling me that the guy who was in charge of WebTV had something to do with it, and it was going to be REVOLUTIONARY!

I asked if they could send me an email with additional information. They said sure, no problem, they’d send me an email confirming my attendance.

Whatever it is, they rented out a substantial portion of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for its debut. Walking past it on my way to the bar, the front entrance was roped off with PRIVATE PRESS EVENT signs stationed around the perimeter.

I’m sure it’s going to be disappointing, a major flop, or both.

I’ll let you know.

Off to GDC

I’ve never tried this microblogging business before, but who knows, I may get to like it.

Heading out the door to travel to GDC momentarily. If you’ll be there as well, keep an eye out for the tall guy with a beard haulings 30lbs of camera and computer equipment around on his back.

If I should not make it to San Francisco alive, I am counting on my loyal readership to avenge my death.

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