March 2006 – LOSTGARDEN

Month: March 2006

Unofficial GDC Blogger Bar Meetup

March 21, 2006

I’m missing the official blogger meetup Wednesday, so here is a night time location for Thursday. The real benefit to the unofficial meeting spot is that it is a bar. Unlike convention halls, bars tend to serve frosty beverages in a wide variety of pleasing flavors. Date: Thursday, March 23rd, Time: 7pm. If the conversation is good, we’ll likely go for quite some hours afterwards. Location: O’flahertys Pub (https://www.oflahertyspub.com/) in San Pedro Square. The address […]

Paintbox games: Games that serve as augmented creativity tools

March 20, 2006

by Daniel Cook

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In my job, I constantly run across people who claim they can’t draw, can’t write or can’t tell stories. They readily pronounce that they lack a single creative bone in their entire body. Yet when you give such folks the correct tools and the right social support, they produce amazing works of craft and art. Over the years, I’ve been thinking a lot about the use of tools to augment the creativity of individuals. The […]

Never innovate halfway

March 18, 2006

by Daniel Cook

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Double Fine’s Psychonauts was an original game that by all indications did poorly in the marketplace. This has led to the odd comments from fence sitters (and misinformed publishers) that innovation is a failed strategy. Bad monkeys! Bad! We often talk about “innovation” in product development as if it were a miraculous substance that always benefits a game. I also imagine a scene in an idyllic game development kitchen with a game designer wearing a […]

GDC means beverages

March 16, 2006

by Daniel Cook

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I’ll be in San Jose Thursday and Friday (23rd and 24th) to partake in the tail end of GDC. Unfortunately, that means I’ll be missing out on the general blog meet up on Wednesday. If anyone who reads this site is around, I’d be delighted to buy you a beer. Drop me a note beforehand and we can set a time to meet up. My email (which I’ve been meaning to post on the site […]

The root of shock game advertising

March 14, 2006

by Daniel Cook

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I was flipping through my copy of EGM with my fiancé just the other day. It was a rather embarrassing tour through the current gaming culture. In the first few pages, we perused the standard mixture of guns and ultra violence. “Look,” I pointed, “there’s Lara’s bum festooned with some charming grenade accessories. And check out those flying WW2 chaps on page 10. They certainly do bounce about when consumed in a massive fireball.” Finally, […]

Tyrian Comic

March 7, 2006

by Daniel Cook

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Here is a completely obscure Tyrian comic that I never expected to see. Gaming subculture is turning into a real culture. We are seeing music, art and stories that take the language and mythos of games and weave them into a broader experience. Not so long ago, the culture of games was limited to just games. As much as I like the medium, it deals with the shallow end of the human experience pool. Well, […]

Notes from FlashForward 2006

March 1, 2006

by Daniel Cook

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Matt and Mike Chapman, the artistes that draw Home Star Runner (and Strong Bad!) are Nintendo DS fans. They had put on a talk at FlashForward in Seattle and the first thing they did was announce that they had started a Pictochat session. While one guy talked, the other guy would doodle away and read messages from folks responding in real-time to their talk. They also showed an early version of their cartoon that they […]