April 1st, 2008
- Ethic
Archive for March, 2008
I will be posting about things from IMGDC for a while, but first I must take a page from Nerfbat. If you want your game to succeed, you must have a more awesome concept than Attack of the Mutant Camels, in which you battle giant, fireball-spewing camels. This is a concept so awesome that it not only spawned a sequel involving bipedal goats with guns, but someone else used the same name for a later game. It looks like someone made an updated version, but you can still play the original.
I proposed a panel on “fire-breathing camels and your indie game.” They turned me down.
: Zubon
I have been blogging all week on a MacBook. When I get home, I am going to right-click for hours and hours.
: Zubon
IMGDC is in Minnesota. After having had conferences across the Atlantic coast, this is a nice change of pace. People hold doors and say words like “please” and “thank you.” They smile and greet you even though they have never met you and will never see you again; these are not paid employees, these are just people at the same store being friendly Midwesterners. If you turn on a blinker, people will make space for you, instead of tailgating to make sure you don’t get ahead of them.
It is like going from Something Awful to Terra Nova.
: Zubon
We’ve all heard grumbling here and there about the latest WoW patch’s new high-end loot. The new loot can be obtained much more easily than before the patch, when you had to complete high-end raids to get gear of this caliber. The grumbling generally revolves around the idea that it’s unfair and demoralizing to raiders who obtained similar gear when it was more difficult to do so.
My feeling on this is, so what? The change is not massive, and there are good reasons for it — it will help more people see high-end content before the expansion comes out. But more importantly, there’s more to WoW than gear. What about the experience of learning to work as a team? What about the satisfaction of overcoming a really tough boss fight? What about the aesthetic beauty of seeing a new dungeon? What about meeting new people and making new friends as you play together?
Being overly-focused on gear is simply materialism brought to the virtual world. It’s not a very fulfilling path. I’m not saying gear is bad, or material goods are bad, just that treating them with the proper priority is an important part of having a fulfilling life in a virtual world as well as the physical one.
~80% of library workers are female. The convention center made the wise decision to switch a few signs and create more women’s restrooms. This led to the fun of watching women enter the bathroom, see urinals, and come back out looking confused and worried as they check the sign.
I expect the online game development conference to have a different gender ratio.
: Zubon
We drove through New Hampshire on a convention trip last year. The welcome center advertised liquor.
Our path to IMGDC went through Wisconsin. The welcome center advertised, “Cheese, gifts, fireworks.”
: Zubon
Recent changes in my Real Life have forced my Online Life to pretty much be non-existent. A full time job and full time college will do that to you, plus lots of other personal obligations, such as helping my wife study for her classes - which she passed, with flying red, white, and blue colors and became an American Citizen just yesterday - but I do miss being able to pass my days away in Warcraft. Especially now that we have ‘the new shiney’ of patch 2.4.