Dreams end when the dreamer wakes up. Usually. This one ends with all the dreamers getting fired.
Excellent stuff. Great writing.
I’m always fascinated by how early tech culture disregarded experience as useful. Even if your games are so revolutionary they can only be understood by those without prior knowledge (oops, they weren’t) getting a bunch of folk coordinated to complete a complex project is something that takes some learning. Management is professionalized for a reason.
A core weirdness of human psychology is the tendency to assume that anything we don’t know how to do must be easy. The Guardians of the Galaxy article focuses on the benefits of integrating writers into your design teams, which is a lesson game-makers have to keep re-learning because they can’t write, so they think it’s easy.
God Duncan does such good fucking work. Always happy to see his name on the byline. Check out his stuff on the Campo Santo Quarterly (RIP).
Feel like everyone should know that Anachronox is $0.97 (86% off) on Steam for the next 24 hours (Until 12:00pm PST Dec 1st)
I’d buy that for a dollar.
I was annoyed to discover that there’s no “license key” in the original Anachronox box [which I have], preventing me from registering it into Steam.
On the other hand, there’s not much practical difference between paying 1 USD and 5 USD for a game, really [at the rate I buy games at any rate], so the current sale doesn’t really give me a strong impetus…
Cool, an article about empathy in videogame development, those are so rare those days… 3/4 in: 16h a day, 7 days a week work schedule for a year and a half with people burning out for couple years after!
…maybe, just maybe the title may be a little misleading.
