Culture

In what might prove to be the most meta post ever, I'm going to talk about gaming journalism and how it's changed in recent years. Now, the mainstream media -- by which I refer to traditional magazines like Time and Life, and news outlets like the Wall Street Journal the New York Times -- have always worked diligently to maintain a high-quality standard for themselves. As a collective, they follow the rules set down in regulatory tomes such as the Chicago Manual of Style and the AP Stylebook. Of course, every publication has its own house style to which its writers must adhere, but by and large there are many generally accepted guidelines concerning tone, editorial slant, and the like.

As video games grew as a phenomenon, it quickly became evident that the mainstream press wasn't going to give it the coverage its enthusiast audience demanded. Typically adopting an outsider's approach, traditional news outlets left their coverage at "Here's a new trend. It's kind of strange and we don't understand it, but the kids seem to like it." This journalistic void left the field wide open for a new generational voice to inhabit.

Tim Allen wasn't precisely the same flavor of hardware guy that we are, but his Tool Time mantra, "More Power!" certainly resonates with a lot of computer enthusiasts. Not only do the games we play and the applications we use require more and more computational chutzpah to perform well, but the silicon bits themselves are not shy about sucking down the wattage to do it.

If you're considering an upgrade or a new build, you're going to need to feed that beast. Onward, to the supplies of power!

Last week Blizzard announced that it would hold a lottery to sell the remaining 3,000 tickets for this October's Blizzcon 2008. Today the official Blizzcon web site revealed the details on how the lottery will take place. People much have had a Blizzard account before 9 pm PT on Tuesday, August 12 (when Blizzard announced that the first batch of tickets have sold out). You must also be an adult, have not already purchased tickets for Blizzcon 2008 and live in a long list of countries.

There will be an op-in period beginning later today and ending August 24 where people can enter an eligible Blizzard account to get a chance to purchase the $100 Blizzcon tickets. More detailed info on how all this will work can be found on the Blizzcon site (and yes, it's a tad confusing).

Deciding to take a break from the grueling process that is developing a game for the last decade, Duke Nukem "himself" will be on hand during the Leipzig Games Convention in Germany to promote the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP release of the Duke Nukem Trilogy. We sure hope the Duke impersonator is a burly German man who spews out 90's era one-liners through a thick accent.

Want to take a picture with a gaming icon? Well, we don't know who else will be on hand but if you'd like to snap a picture with Duke in the meantime by all means!

Late last month NCsoft announced that players of their sci-fi MMO Tabula Rasa could win a chance to have their DNA shot into space alongside the game's creator Richard "Lord British" Garriott when he travels to the International Space Station this fall. Now NCsoft is offering another way for one person to have their DNA join "Operation Immortality."

That effort is a special eBay auction that is running now and will close on August 20. The person with the winning bid will have his or her DNA digitized and then placed on the "Immortality Drive" which Garriott will take into space and leave on the Internatiol Space Station. There's another eBay auction where the winning bidder will have a Tabula Rasa character named after him or her. Proceeds from the auctions will be sent to Planet Make-Over, a non-profit organization that is aiming to reverse the effects of global warming.

In what can only be considered a triumph for the MMO community as a whole, beleagured French title Saga of Ryzom, after enduring great hardships, has returned. Typically, when these things go away, they don't come back. Even more so when control of the assets gets passed on to others to be auctioned off. Yet against all odds, Ryzom has cheated death and is set to fully open itself up to new players soon.

Ryzom was always more of a fringe title, with its completely unique look and feel, but the larger MMO sphere needs games like this to really flesh out the potential of persistent online gaming -- tired of the standard fantasy hack and slash? Think science fiction is played out? This game might just be your cup of tea. As an added bonus, the Ryzom team has made the game free for past subscribers, and kept everyone's game accounts as they were when things went down. It's a win-win for everyone. Welcome back, Ryzom. Let's hope this puts an end to your previous troubles once and for all.

Harvey Smith, Lead Designer for the classic Deus Ex, will be the keynote speaker for the Game Career Seminar at this year's Austin Game Developers Conference on September 17th. The keynote will focus on careers in game design, and is titled "Luckiest People Alive" [sic].

Smith, currently with Arkane Studios, will be speaking on what he foresees as "an imminent explosion of change, creativity, and possibility within the world of interactive entertainment." Being a publication that loves explosions of all types, we're all for it. Other speakers will include representatives from Aspyr Media, Game Developer Magazine, and Vicarious Visions.

[Thanks, Gryphon!]

So the way Blizzcon ticket sales were handled was a bit of a bust for pretty much everyone. The Blizzcon web site got overloaded with traffic when tickets went on sale for the October 10-11 event in Anaheim, CA and as a result many fans who might have had a chance to purchase a ticket got, well, screwed. Thankfully, Blizzard has a partial solution to that issue.

In a new message on the Blizzcon web site by Blizzard president Mike Morhaime, he apolgized for how ticket sales were handled and announced that they have found a way to work with the Anaheim Convention Center to offer up 3,000 more tickets to Blizzcon. Those tickets will be offered up in a lottery with details to be announced later. You must have had a Blizzard account by 9 pm PT on Tuesday, August 12, when it was announced that Blizzcon tickets were all sold out, to be eligable to enter the Blizzcon ticket lottery.

The last Big Ideas focused on the idea of identity, and what it means to see yourself truly represented in a video game. In this installment, we take a look at gender portrayals for both men and women and try to shine a light on some invisible assumptions.

To begin with, it used to be a commonly-held -- and trumpeted -- belief that "girls don't play video games". Certainly, the Boys Clubs that most video arcades became in the 1980's managed to make video games unattractive by sheer atmosphere. Dimly-lit, smoky, and raucously loud, is it any wonder that gaming might not have been a draw to females until it entered the home? Peering over the shoulder of a big brother as he played Combat on his Atari 2600 might have sparked some interest in a dormant gamer if she weren't brusquely told to go away.

Similarly, the rise of media coverage of the pastime perpetuated the stereotype of video games as a male-only pursuit, bolstered in the main by the focus of its advertising. Typically featuring sexy female models clad in ridiculously fetishized fantasy costumes, these ads titillated pubescent males into buying games based solely on the perceived value of the model. Sadly, content in the games themselves followed suit.

We didn't think it would take long and, well, it didn't. Blizzard's official Blizzcon web site has posted up word that all of the tickets for the October 10-11 event are gone. Sold out. Not available. You get the point. Exact sales numbers of Blizzcon tickets were not revealed but we bet there's a bunch of folks who were not very lucky.

If you tried and failed to get Blizzcon tickets there's still a way you can check out the events from the Anaheim Convention Center right from the confort of your beanbag chair. As previously announced, the DirecTV satellite TV service plans 16 hours of live HD coverage from Blizzcon at a pay-per-view price of $39.95. DirecTV plans to give new customers a way to get their Blizzcon coverage for free if they sign up.

We know that Electronic Arts has high hopes for their upcoming release of Spore but can the life simulation game from creator Will Wright move into other forms of entertainment? A new Reuters story indicates that EA would love to license the Spore property for a movie or TV series.

Speaking to Reuters during an Asian press junket for Spore, Wright was quoted as saying, "With Spore, we're looking way outside the game space, such as TV, movies, etc. We're basically planting the seeds to spread Spore out to a much wider group of people than would ever play a computer game." One wonders exactly what kind of movie or TV show could handle such a concept or if indeed any other entertainment medium could convey what Spore is like.

Making PC games for a living isn't all about programming a fire effect or creating 3D models of a dragon or making your AI enemies smart. It also takes business and legal experience to stay afloat in the industry. Now the Guildhall game industry development school at Southern Methodist University is planning to hold a summit conference designed to talk about these kinds of issues.

Titled Game::Business::Law, the event will be held on January 14-15, 2009 at the campus' location in Dallas, Texas. According to the press release, "The summit will bring together global game industry leaders, investors, developers, publishers, and lawyers for two days to explore the latest trends in the games industry. Game::Business::Law will provide practical approaches for achieving success in the evolving marketplace of digital games." NCsoft's Richard Garriott will co-chair the summit.

On Monday Blizzard tried to start selling tickets for their sort-of annual Blizzcon event on October 10-11 but the site got slammed with so much traffic it caused the server to basically say, "Screw this. I'm going home." While a few people were apparently able to purchase tickets most of us didn't get through.

Today Blizzard posted up a new update on their forums that finally gave the good word that ticket sales are once again back online. So now you should be able to get your $100 entry into the event, at least until the tickets all sell out. We doubt E For All Expo has these sort of issues.

Update: The Blizzcon web site has been updated yet again, announcing that the bulk of tickets for the show have now sold out. However Blizzard has a small reserve left and will put those tickets on sale tonight at 11 pm EST.

We may have to wait nearly two years to see the Prince of Persia movie on the big screen but you only have to go to a movie spoiler web site to see the first images of the lead character right now. Just Jared has the first pictures showing some behind-the-scenes pictures of actor Jake Gyllenhaal in full Prince of Persia mode.

The movie is currently filming in Morocco and is based on the Sands of Time revamp of the game franchise that Ubisoft released a few years ago. It was set for release in June 2009 but as we recently reported the movie's release date got moved back to Memorial Day weekend 2010 to get the film out of the reach of Transformers 2.

As games continue to evolve into greater spectacles, gamers become more interested in behind-the-scenes secrets and methods. It's always interesting to learn how a game came to exist, and even more so when that game reaches a high level of success. In 2007, 2K Games Boston and 2K Games Australia released BioShock, a game quickly embraced by consumers and critics. The game's moody atmosphere and emphasis on morality prompted players to cite it as an excellent example of storytelling, as well as technical achievement.

Eurogamer recently sat down with BioShock director Ken Levine and a number of his key team members to discuss how the spiritual successor to System Shock 2 was conceived and built. The interview has an easy conversational flow, and Levin and his team provide insightful answers that should satisfy that curiosity of the game's biggest fans.

When asked about BioShock's theme of objectivism, Levine surprisingly states that not a lot of the story was preconceived; as he mentioned, most of the concepts and plot twists grew organically. "We wanted a world that's cut off from the rest of the world," explained Levine. "So, have an underwater city. ... Maybe it's a utopia. What kind of utopia would it be? We had these gatherers, these Little Sisters, so maybe it was some kind of economic thing, or a philosophical thing."

The full interview is available at Eurogamer.net and is a very interesting read.