In our last episode, I lamented the lack of roleplaying games in my life. And then, I undertook a refresher course in table-top roleplaying this weekend to prepare me for a new adventure!

I have only once before played Dungeons and Dragons, a couple of years ago with some friends in San Diego.  Once a week, we would gather in an empty conference room to lead a hapless pack of goobers out of the tavern and into the local abandoned mine.

My first character (an elven bard) died a few months into the campaign and we were not a resurrecting bunch. Hence, she was replaced by a new character (a half-elf druid) who survived simply due to the fact that EQII was in crunch mode and I had to give up game nights.

As my new Dungeon Master outlined the setting for the current campaign and explained to me the new rules we’d be using, I asked him the one question which had been burning in my mind ever since I was asked to join this group:

“Can I use Mr. Owl?“

 

 

Mr. Owl was my druid’s animal companion, of course, and I am very attached to him. He towered over the rest of my original campaign’s party. I had no figurines of my own and thus was using a Wade whimsy owl figurine to represent my little friend.

I recall the tragic night when Mr. Owl was knocked from the sky by some vile beast and I hovered anxiously (if figuratively) over the game scenario, wringing my hands and asking if someone could heal him. Fortunately, he survived and is now part of the menagerie that lives on my desk here at the office.

While I may not need to use the whimsy owl (I have a tiny glass owl from Kiev that I may use instead) in the new campaign, I am very happy that Mr. Owl will once again be my companion in adventuring!

Dare I say it? … “Whoo-oot!”

I didn’t grow up playing paper-and-pencil games. I grew up before those kinds of things existed. I even pre-date the Society for Creative Anachronism. Back in the ancient days of my youth, we didn’t have the Internet or cable television. We had only…the power of our minds!

We read a lot in those dark ages. My sister and I used to play a game wherein we each had a book and one of us would read aloud a random sentence. Then, the other of us would read a random sentence from the book she had open, striving to quickly locate a random sentence on the page that might provide a good laugh. We also created our own plays (a difficult task, given that there were only two of us and we had to serve as both actors and audience) and wrote newsletters. Ah, such simple days!

From that sort of literary entertainment, we eventually gravitated toward text-based games. The experience was very similar to our random sentence game. You never knew what someone might come up with in response to something you wrote!

I loved roleplaying. In particular, I liked having two characters on separate accounts that I could play with at the same time. With text games, one didn’t need two high end computers to hydra. I could alt-tab very quickly, and with typing gusts of up to 95 WPM, my characters often carried on lengthy conversations with each other, each using a distinct in-character “voice.” At one time, I went adventuring with a friend of mine; he had no idea until I told him that both the bard and the ranger in the group were me.

I often miss that aspect of playing games, as nowdays I’m just as likely as anyone else to be using macros for everything.

To play multiple characters in a graphical game, I need more than just good alt-tab skills. I have to have a custom user interface, maybe several rows of macros and a cheat sheet. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of roleplaying, either. Players are focused on whatever it is that they’re going to received from the adventure, whether it’s an item or more experience. Even on a roleplaying server, there are frequent out of character discussions on the open channels.

Games seem much more complex now and require different skills than the old text games. I miss being inspired by a coastal cliff description where I’d type out, “I love the view from here,” and someone else would see the same words but could imagine different landscape than mine.

Roleplaying allowed me to be someone else (or several someone elses) for a while. It was an escape from the mundane world and my regular life. I miss it.

I recently read an article stating that parents today need to teach their children about technology in the same way they teach them how to use a stove, or cross the street: in stages, rather than dumping the child in front of whatever and letting them have at it.

Now, it is not this revelation that got my wires in a bundle. It’s the fact that it’s government-funded research.

Do none of these government people have parents? Are none of them parents? Of course one can’t just dump a little cherub in front of an appliance and expect them to know what to do with it. Cherubs need parental supervision!

Why do folks get paid gobs of money to study stuff like this?

I remembered this (and got irritated, as you might be able to tell) while walking last night. I’m training for the Breast Cancer 3-Day later this year and am building up my endurance. I passed a business with spray painted warnings along their retaining walls:

“No skating. No skateboarding. No in-line skating. No jumping.” There was more, but one can only remember a handful of admonishments at a time.

It seemed pretty sad that this business had to go to this sort of trouble to keep people from damaging property and/or damaging themselves on the property.

In addition to all the warnings, there were bars imbedded in the concrete wall to keep folks from grinding. That reminded me of the “arm rests” one will now find in bus stop benches; they aren’t designed for resting arms, they’re there to keep people from sleeping on them.

Why do we have to go to these lengths, obscuring the obvious and then paying someone large sums of money to present “findings” about stuff we should already know? It’s not polite to skateboard along someone else’s wall. Bus stop benches are for people to sit on while waiting for buses. Children need to be supervised by their parents when embarking on new technological adventures.

Children don’t grow up automatically knowing everything (despite our own youthful belief that we could). They learn from their friends as well as from their parents (shocking, I know). If parents don’t pay attention, then their children lose out on the stuff the parents have experienced and learned along the way.

Parents should pay attention to all the new stuff in the world that they themselves have never experienced, too. They should become familiar with things like ESRB ratings on games; they know what those movie ratings are, right? Parents need to know lots of unexpected things, like where all the clean restrooms along I-5 are and how to get to the closest one. They should teach their children, learn with them when they haven’t a clue and let children mature into responsible adults.

Growing up is a tough business. So’s parenting.

And no one paid me to research this! =)

Before I started working as a full-time game designer, the only game conference I’d ever heard of was the GDC: Game Developer’s Conference. Back then, it was held in San Jose. That was a cozy little place compared to the sprawl of San Francisco’s Moscone Center, where GDC is now held.

People often ask how to get a job in games, and I often tell them that conferences like GDC are a good introduction. You get to attend roundtables and tutorials and panel discussions with industry people who may later remember that you know Program X or have a great art portfolio or whatever. You also can learn various practical applications for things you were supposed to learn in school from people who are doing the kinds of stuff you want to do.

The downside is that conferences can be expensive. If you’re a starving student (or just plain starving), the fees are sometimes prohibitive and when you add in transportation, food and lodging…well, it can be more than a budget can bear.

Some of these conferences offer scholarships, or at least let volunteers sit in on sessions that occur when you’re not needed to actively do something. If I were broke, that’s how I’d look to attend these conferences. You still have to pay to get there, but once you’re there, a whole new world opens up before you!

Coming up soon are the Vancouver International Game Summit and the ION Game Conference. Fortunately for me, both conferences are in the Pacific Northwest. I may get to be on a design panel at the former, while I can run into various SOE folks including John Smedley as a keynote speaker at the latter.

I love looking at the speaker pages for these conferences. It helps me put faces to names that I’ve seen for years. It also is fun to see my friends as speakers. Friends, mind you, that I would not have made if not for attending my first conference nearly 10 years ago.

In any case, this is my advice to anyone who reads this blog hoping for that inside track towards a gaming job: find a game conference near you! And if you go to one that I’m at, please feel free to say hello! Like most of the folks I know in games, I am often funny in person and don’t bite.

Much.

For those of you just joining the adventure, yesterday’s post was the April Fool’s Day edition and is intended to be mildly humorous.

On the bright side, my sister fell for it. Hahaha! Clearly, I am much mildly more humorous than I expected!

In other news, the Gamers in Real Life (G.I.R.L.) scholarship is open for bizniz! Please pass this information along to those you know who’ve been waiting for the details.

I’m personally looking forward to seeing what the candidates design as this is the first year the scholarship is being offered.

Like a lot of businesses, SOE’s no stranger to marketing strategy seminars and meetings. Those are opportunities for our business-side folks and our developers to work together toward presenting the game in its best light.

Last week, Matt Wilson (Seattle’s studio head and my boss’s boss’s boss) attended one of these strategy meetings in San Diego and came back to present the new focus of The Agency.

Apparently, market research has shown that in our target demographic, people are very interested in office politics and water cooler antics. Witness the success of movies like Office Space and shows like The Office! The cartoon Dilbert has been running for nearly 20 years. Therefore, The Agency would be in a stronger marketing position if we skewed our product ever so slightly.

Instead of being primarily an action shooter slash spy MMO, The Agency will present itself more as a virtual employment agency.

Courtney Simmons, SOE’s Director of Corporate Communications and PR, attended our meeting yesterday to give us more details. She said, “The Agency has received a lot of positive attention in its current incarnation, but we want it to reach a wider audience. The move towards a more globally recognized office structure will allow us to present the game to a much larger potential player-base.”

She added, “Players can still become spies or paramilitary operatives, but only if there are openings in those career fields.”

Matt Wilson suggested that this is a great opportunity for our coding engineers/developers to work on a project that had been side-lined: the physics of sitting on chairs.

I’m really looking forward to that. We’re going to be able to have desks and chairs that players can actually sit at! I don’t know why that’s so exciting to me, but I think it’ll be an innovation that will make a big difference in our game!

An interesting bit of drama over an opinion piece at Gamasutra  has game writers up in arms, hoping to prove the pen is mightier than…the pen!

I’m have mixed feelings about this. The article’s writer states that “…I have to admit that when it comes time to add to the team of a project I’m on, I would rather have another designer than a writer.” And still later, he continues, “…you can hire a designer who is also an unsung writing hero…and when the story is done, that same designer can be there to throw his lot into the fire with the rest of the designers and actually make the game fun.”

With EverQuest II, I was a game designer who wrote. In my current team, I’m still a game designer by title, but am considered one of the writers. My title didn’t change, but the perception of what I do is different now.

At GDC last year, I met someone from BioWare, a game company that actually has staff positions for writers. After we chatted for a bit, we exchanged business cards. These conferences leave one awash in business cards! Before we parted ways, I caught him scribbling on my card. This is a useful technique (although not always proper etiquette) to help you remember the person who handed you one of the three hundred cards you’ll receive over the course of the event.

“Making a note that I’m an idiot?” I joked.

“No, that you’re a writer,” he replied.

That was the first time someone had ever called me a writer in public, so this anecdote is very near and dear to my heart.

What the Gamasutra article does for me is make me think about myself more as a writer and not as a designer, because writing is my primary function. However, I’m not “just” a writer. I’d like to think that things I design are making a game “fun,” too, even if my contributions are more about the words than the programs.

As a game designer, I sit before my Access database, creating fields of attributes that will later affect certain aspects within our game. It’s still writing, yet it has a lot more to do with plain data than with prose or poetry.

I turn around and see the designer with whom I share an office creating levels in a program I don’t understand. Lines radiate all over the place in several different boxes and windows. I have absolutely no idea how he can tell what he’s doing.

When I think of game designers, that’s what I imagine them doing: building spaces, creating things from the art library and putting them into position so that the coding lies seamless beneath everything. But my bit of design is also as important. I, too, am creating a layer of game world that will (hopefully) tie in effortlessly with the rest of the work done by other designers.

And yet, I think of myself as a writer. My job is to explain what happens within our game; to describe locations yet to be created by our artists; to create the illusion of a world in which a player can lose herself; to bring depth and emotion to game play mechanics.

I decorate our world with roses. And bullet points.

As a writer, I need inspiration. I spend what feels like an inordinate amount of time staring off into the distance or sitting with a heap of knitting in my lap that isn’t knitting itself.

This is a different situation than plain old, irritating writer’s block. It’s the way my mind does its mental filing and housekeeping. The outward stillness doesn’t give any hint at all to all the paths my mind is investigating.

I may look like I’m doing nothing, but I’m in the midst of a crowded train station, picking pockets to see how it’s done. Or I’m examining the reaction time needed to dodge an object thrown my way. The characters I’m writing about are me in my mind and I need to figure out what we’re going to do next.

Internalizing things isn’t always enough, though. Movement stimulates other areas of creativity. Movements like walking over to the office kitchen for tea, or my fingers inching their way across my desktop like Itsy Bitsy Spider, straight toward my little pile of chocolately snacks.

There’s only so much inspiration even I can get by finishing off a whole sleeve of Thin Mints. Sometimes, I need to reach out for something else.

I keep a small library beside my desk. There are books on mythology, grammar, medical folklore and skip tracing. When all else fails and my mind goes blank, I flip through the pages of my books.

Maybe a certain word will jump off a page and I’ll see it repeated in different books. Or a story will spark an interest that I can take that in a new direction with my operatives.

Those little triggers are a bit of writerly alchemy. And alchemy, no matter how you experience it, is magic.

I am almost always a late adopter of new technology. Unless someone gifts me something, I wait and wait, debating the merits of whatever it is that I want.

And so, here it is, almost three years down the road and I finally bought a PSP. A lovely bundled package in Ice Silver. OooOOOOOoooh. It’s very pretty and just glitzy enough for me. Yay!

I already have a Nintendo DS Lite (in pink!) and have worried my way through a number of games on it. But I do like the PSP’s clarity and want to try out some of SOE’s PSP titles for myself, instead of just watching my son play them on his PSP.

Although, of course, like any little cherub, he took the first opportunity that presented itself and exchanged the black one I had bought him for a white one.

For now, I’m looking at all the games available for the PSP and choosing which ones I want to buy right away, versus which ones I can wait to get. Obviously, having waited this long to finally make the plunge, there’s quite a few games I can choose from, in all sorts of genres. That’s pretty cool!

And potentially expensive!

Seattle’s Cinerama theater is one of the few theaters left that can show movies in their original 70mm format. That means that it’s a great place to catch re-released classics of that format, such as How the West Was Won or 2001: A Space Oddessy. Or, as we did last night, see Tron in all its big screen glory.

I love old films like this and as I didn’t buy Tron on DVD, I didn’t remember much of it from its original release other than that it was glitzy and had (for then) cool computer graphics.

The movie held up surprisingly well, although it was funny to see very large room-size computers in use, standing console video games and dated programming terms. The theater was nearly sold out, filled with geeky, nerdy folks like me who love this kind of movie.

Although the scene that really dated the film was, in my mind, where Tron is at the I/O tower, communicating with his User. Hazy whitelight bathes the scene. Angelic choirs sing. Tron stands on the platform, waiting for his User to give him instructions. And all I could think was, “Wow, this is taking a long time…they must be on dial-up.”

But really, who could resist Bruce Boxleitner so early in his career, long before The Scarecrow and Mrs. King or Babylon 5? Not me!

End of line.