Free Candy For Everyone

I’m a tiny bit addicted to World of Warcraft. Just a tiny bit, really, I swear. I was playing tonight (just because I haven’t been talking about non-stop here on my blog doesn’t mean I’ve stopped playing, I was just sparing folks further paeans to the unstoppable time sucker) as one of the expansion races, the Blood Elves. I’d noticed an herb in their starting zone called Bloodthistle.

I’d gathered up a bunch and it was just sitting in my bag. I took a look at it and thought it sounded pretty good.

A bit more damage, a bit more healing? Sounded lovely for my Paladin. I munched a bit down and continued on my way. Ten minutes later, the buff ticked down and I got this awful debuff on me.

I ate up another leaf of Bloodthistle and the debuff went away. Yay! But wait… That’s terrible! You just have to keep eating more and more to maintain your “high”, and if you stop you suffer adverse affects for longer than the original buff lasted.

The backstory of the Blood Elves is that they’re addicted to magic, so this makes a lot of sense and goes well with that high concept. But it was not quite expected. Usually items in game tell you what they’re going to do to you without you having to consume them to figure out what’s going on. Not that I’m complaining, it just seems like they tackled the expansion with a different tone than the original game. My friends and I have all noticed that BC content seems to be much more pun-filled - the original WoW has a lot of puns, but the expansion is even more so. It contains quests that make you do silly things like sift through shit (I’m not kidding, it’s an actual quest).

There’s a vendor somewhere who sells you items for vast sums of money that don’t actually do anything. I can’t remember his name though, so I can’t find the link! But he’s basically a con man, selling you junk that does stuff like “enable you to regain health when you eat” which you do anyways.

Back to this addictive Bloodthistle stuff. I suggest you stay away! A small amount of +dmg/healing isn’t worth -5 spirit for 20 minutes. Nope. Drugs are bad, m-kay?

Ok, so why do people persist in making movies out of video games? I just read that New Line just grabbed up the rights to make a Gears of War movie and I can only wonder why? What video game movie success story leads Hollywood to continue to snatch up our IP? Could it have been Wing Commander? No, no - that couldn’t be it since it has an IMDB user rating of 3.5/10. Maybe it was BloodRayne! No, 2.5/10, that can’t be it!

Well, it must be something from the oeuvre of Uwe Boll since he keeps getting tapped to make video game movies… Well, maybe that’s not it.

Whoa! Wikipedia to the rescue! Here is a big ole’ list of video game adaptations. I know! It must be the Pokemon movies! Those are probably a big success with the kiddies, so let’s make this M-rated game into a movie too! Kiddies love the M!

Ok, all sarcasm aside (I’ll do my best), why do they keep making video game movies? Take a look at the wikipedia page and see all the game movies currently in production! It’s out of control. Games and movies are two very different media. Just because something is a success in one area doesn’t mean it’ll be a success in the other.

I know that smart people who make the greenlight decisions for very expensive movies must be aware of this already. I guess they’re banking on the fact that people like IP with which they are already familiar. You save on marketing costs - you already have brand awareness, so there you go, something for free!

But the trouble is that you have two options for a movie, the way I see it. First, you can make a film that follows the game. It is as exact a translation of the story and the experience as you can make when removing interactivity. This only works for games that have a strong story. But I’m not a fan of this. If I played the game and won my way through the story then I was the hero and I saved the world. But now some burly Hollywood actor man is going to be playing the part I once controlled and take that victory away from me. I’m not too excited to see my game experience played out with me in a strictly observatory role.

The other option is to just keep the world of the game, but tell a new story. For games with a deep and rich backstory, this is feasible (Warcraft movie, anyone?), but for games that are pretty thin, kill-stuff-til-it’s-dead gameplay (Doom had a story?) then making a movie in the world of the game isn’t all that interesting.

Ok, I confess, I haven’t actually played Gears of War yet. I know, how can I make any comments on it if I haven’t played it? Well, I’m just ranting about game movies in general. A friend is supposed to be loaning me a copy to play any day now (if he’ll just remember to bring it to work already!) and maybe I can follow up my uninformed comments with something more … informed. Regardless of which category this movie would fall into, there are few (if any?) examples of video game movies that were actually good. I shall wait and wait and perhaps be surprised? We shall see.

This is an annual event where there is a wacky game design request (a Love Story, Emily Dickinson, Nobel Peace Prize) and famed designers need to come up with a game based on that idea. The audience votes on the best game, and a winner is crowned. I’d heard how awesome it was in the past, and had regretted that I hadn’t made it to it in the past. So this year I was determined to go, even though both the theme and the designers entered into the competition weren’t quite as known to me as others from previous years. Unfortunately, it didn’t really live up to my expectations.

I think that perhaps the moderator of the Game Design Challenge, Eric Zimmerman is getting a little caught up in being clever. I poked around his website and it looks like he’s received a lot of accolades on the work he’s doing, but I’ve never heard of any of it. The idea for this year’s challenge was clearly trying to be a riff on the Wii controller - alternate and crazy control mechanisms lead to the Needle and Thread interface. I think this theme really was what killed the session. The idea was that you had a piece of 2 foot by 2 foot fabric (up to 8, actually), and various needles and thread to connect up to your console for control. What the hell?

The three designers really tried their best, but what can you do with such a ludicrous premise? The past ideas were at least possible as games. This is just not at all.

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I always go to see Peter Molyneux talk. It’s getting to the point where I’m not quite sure why I persist, but I do. This year I made it to half of his talk, since I was at the Nintendo keynote which ran over since it took some time to stuff the thousands of us into the auditorium. But this is not a post about the keynote, so on to what I saw of Molyneux’s talk.

He’s worked on some of my favorite games - Populous was truly revolutionary, I loved Dungeon Keeper, and many of his other titles were quite exciting. But in recent years, he’s been known more for talking about his games than for the games themselves. He’s a very impassioned speaker, and he clearly is excited about his projects, so I do like to go and see him speak, just because you never do know what he will say.

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I attended several more sessions today and took copious notes, so hopefully I’ll be able to find the time to write them up in the days to come, so check back. Sessions attended include:

• Shigeru Miyamoto’s Nintendo Keynote
• Peter Molyneux talking about Innovations in Fable 2 - and it included a cute dog!
• The Game Design Challenge - making a game with a needle and thread interface (just think about that)
• Clint Hocking talking design about exploration in games
• Robert Gutschera, who works at Wizards of the Coast, talking about balancing a game
• The Programmers Challenge, a funny gameshow type event

If anyone is eager to hear more about any of those in particular, leave a comment and I’ll try to write up the ones people care the most about first!

I’ve got 3 more sessions to attend tomorrow, then I’ve got to get back to the office. I have a bunch of plans for the weekend, so maybe a few more events typed up Sunday, but probably not before then.