Developer Gama Torrents Curbed?

Lawks-a-lordy, there's lots going on. Let's try to run through it all, and not get all confused and disorientated and fall down.

So, it was Game Developer's Conference last week, and as well as providing meta-coverage for Slashdot Games, I was asked to be 'interviewer-at-large' by Gamasutra, and ended up doing six interviews (free reg. req.) with people I thought were intriguing - Richard Marks of Sony R+D on creating the Eye Toy hardware, Chris Bateman of International Hobo on writing and design outsourcing for games, Daniel James of Three Rings on the marvellous Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, Jason Busby of 3DBuzz.com on his VTM (video training module) free goodness, Kevin O'Hara of Sony Online Entertainment on the Star Wars Galaxies community, and Gonzalo Frasca of Copenhagen University/Powerful Robot Games on academics/political gaming - conducting in-person interviews with a digital voice recorder was a really nice change from all that sitting in front of a computer.

When I had a spare moment at GDC, which wasn't that often, I moderated the open IGDA roundtables about game preservation, as entertainingly reported on by the guys at Insert Credit - there's a lot of momentum into this software/game preservation thing, it's just harnessing it. I also have a Soapbox column in the new Game Developer Magazine about the whole kit and caboodle.

Other than that, I'm working a lot on the O'Reilly book, which is due, yikes, really quite soon, and occasionally being torn away for a minute or two by entertaining distractions, like Jason 'Loonyboi' Bergman's v.fun IF Quake, which I surreptitiously helped Betatest - try calling up the Elder Gods in-game for a silly Easter Egg that I suggested, heh.

Oh, LegalTorrents is still going well - we added old zombie movie Night Of The Living Dead just recently, since it seems to be public domain in the States, and it's getting plenty of downloads - also, there's an audio interview with me on IT Conversations talking about LegalTorrents and the Internet Archive.

Finally, the media watching of recent has been limited to TV like Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 1 on DVD (obviously, but gloriously semi-unwatchable), books like Neil Gaiman's Stardust (evocative faerie leanings, indeed), and games like Muppet Party Cruise (we need to try the mini-games on their own, the longform game was pretty much unplayable!) Stuff like that, y'know.