- logging coolness from 127.0.0.1, daily.
Only a few months away from the blog - so might well be worth a quick update with what I've been up to. Actually, I updated the bio page, so that would be a good start:
"I'm currently a Group Publisher at Think Services, encompassing game products such as the Maggie award-winning Game Developer magazine and the double Webby award-winning Gamasutra website, the top information sources for professional video game developers - plus the GameSetWatch editor weblog. I also act as publisher for the Dr Dobb's series of products for programmers, including the Dr Dobb's Journal magazine and website. Finally, I function as Chairman of the yearly 'Sundance Festival for games', the Independent Games Festival, which holds its awards at Think Services' Game Developers Conference yearly."
So, I guess the new stuff you might notice in there is the Dr Dobb's Journal ownership - I'm helping oversee the venerable programming magazine/website franchise, founded in 1975 or so. So far under my watch, we've launched Dobbs Code Talk, a Joomla-based community blogging/forum site that we've recruiting some excellent expert bloggers for, as well as The Dobbs Challenge, which is a 'mod your game' competition with full source code for Windows and Windows Mobile games, and $10,000 in prizes for making new game variants from the code.
Also coming soon - a redesign of key Dobbs website DDJ.com, and we're also looking at possibilities for the venerable and rather wonderful Byte franchise, which Think Services (the new name for our part of CMP under United Business Media). So that's that stuff, at least. But I'm still doing the game stuff too.
Otherwise, still keepin' on - and really enjoying puzzling out new media, services, and high quality editorial in the 21st century web weirdness. Oh yeah, and Gamasutra got nominated for a Webby again, third year running. Yay. See you all soon.
Just stopping in long enough to wish you all a wonderful Xmas and a very Happy New Year from myself, Holly, Rollo the dachshund (pictured), and all of the Carless family. Off for celebrations here in beautiful (no, really!) San Jose pretty soon, but wanted to thank readers for hanging around.
A reminder, if you're looking for places where I don't update, uhh, about 3 times a year nowadays:
- Gamasutra is the chief site I run as part of work, of course - 'the art and science of games' - but since I'm Group Publisher nowadays, there's less writing on it from me, and more, uhh, planning, or something. No, really, I do something important and business-y, you just can't tell. Nuh.
- GameSetWatch is my chief area of semi-recreational output, while still promoting work stuff, and it's pretty much updated three times a day, 365 days a year, with alt.game news from around the web, various lovable columnists, CMP Game Group-related shenanigans, and other fun stuff. I like doing it.
- Other CMP sites I have at least a finger in include the Independent Games Festival, Worlds in Motion, the newly launched Indie Games: The Weblog, Game Career Guide, Games On Deck, Game Developer magazine, Game Developer Research, and more.
- ffwd links is the linklog part of this blog, and still gets updated a few times a month with interesting and random non-game-related material from around the World Wide Web.
- My Flickr page gets updated fairly regularly just to show that I've actually left the house - which many people disbelieve. Most recently it was for the Walking With Dinosaurs stage show here in San Jose, and down to San Luis Obispo to hang out with surfboarding plastic BBQ pigs.
There are various other ways I interact with the Web, of course, including my Xbox 360 game profile, the latest Monotonik releases, and various brands of IM, MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn profiles I won't bother linking here - but if you know me, you know how to get hold of me. Fun! Happy 2008, all.
Aha, just returned from a nice day in San Francisco, checking out the DeYoung Museum, finally, and having a most pleasant dinner at Lime SF, so it's probably a good time to kick back and finally update ffwd with what the heck I'm up to.
Firstly, as you can see, the image accompanying this post is for Game Developer magazine's 'Top 20 Publishers' issue, and we've revealed online that this fifth annual countdown saw "...a resurgent Nintendo taking the top spot from former four-time victor Electronic Arts." A super-detailed version of the report is available at Game Developer Research, which is going great guns, and is officially expanding to one report per month in 2008.
Elsewhere, let's see.... Gamasutra continues to go wonderfully, and is posting record numbers and (on the other side of the church-state split) some of the best editorial about games out there. Also, it continues to be wonderfully cathartic to have GameSetWatch as an outlet to talk about indie games, little-noted developer blogs, and anything else smart and overlooked in the game industry.
Finally, a couple of milestones related to the aforementioned indie game scene - we had a record 173 entries in the Main Competition for the 10th ever Independent Games Festival, which is just spectacular, and just published on Sony's official PlayStation blog is 'From IGF to PS3: Everyday Shooter’s Backstory', some incredibly concrete proof that independent games are a vital and growing force. Very neat.
The picture to the left is from the June/July issue of Game Developer magazine, and it deals with 'quality of life' in the game biz - tying in nicely with the fact that me and Holly just got back from Europe, where we went to my sister's wedding and visited Helsinki and the rather beautiful Tallinn, Estonia - most relaxing.
Anyhow, work running Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra.com and the Independent Games Festival is as busy as always - though I'm still totally digging it, despite the fact that I'm becoming a little more of a biz guy and less of a journalist. But I wanted to mention a couple of new things we're doing which are, I reckon, rather cool.
Firstly, Game Developer Research has been going really well - we've launched two reports so far, and they've both been extremely well received by government, tools companies, and publishers. Actually, we're just hiring up to do lots more research through the rest of this year and into next year. As the site explains:
"Game Developer Research was formed in 2007 by the editors of Game Developer magazine to bring a new level of empirical measurement and high quality prediction to the video game research market. The group has published two full reports so far: Game Developer Salary Report: 2004-2007 (April 2007) and The Game Developer Census 2007 (June 2007)."
Related to this, we just launched a new weblog called WorldsInMotion.biz, "...a Game Developer Research-related venture that looks at where games, interaction, and multiplayer worlds meet online. Game Developer Research will be covering the rapidly expanding area where games and online worlds interact, and has set up an Online World Atlas where it will be profiling many online world applications that game industry professionals may not be so familiar with." So, like... fun!
Well, another big gap between posts - but everything went really nicely in between, on the plus side. GDC 2007 went off without a hitch, and the IGF was easily one of the best ever, and the inaugural Indie Games Summit was really well-received, too - hoping to get video of that online soon!
Nowadays, I'm actually moving up at CMP, since I'm now publisher of both Gamasutra.com and Game Developer (pictured - the April Salary Survey issue, which we span off into the first Game Developer Research survey), so am moving into much more of a business and planning role - but I'll still run GameSetWatch as my own personal project, of course.
And let's end this brief update with some big recent news for the projects I oversee, reprinted from Gama itself: "Gamasutra is pleased to announce that, after winning a Webby last year, it has once again been victorious at the 11th Annual Webby Awards in the 'Games-Related' category, a significant achievement for the CMP Game Group-run site in the competition that the New York Times calls 'the Oscars of the Internet'.
Other nominees in the 'Games-Related' category this year were CNET Networks' GameSpot (which picked up the 'People's Voice' public-voted section of the awards) and AOL's GameDaily, as well as the official websites for LucasArts' LEGO Star Wars II and Thrillville.
The Webby Awards are presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, a global organization with over 500 members including internet 'founding father' Vinton Cerf, R/GA's Chief Bob Greenberg, Simpsons creator Matt Groening, The Huffington Post's Arianna Huffington, and film producer Harvey Weinstein.
Winners will be honored at The 11th Annual Webby Awards on June 5 at Cipriani Wall Street in New York City. The gala event will once again hosted by former Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry, and will showcase award winners delivering their famous five-word acceptance speeches, with David Bowie and the founders of YouTube winning special achievement awards.
In a separate awards ceremony, the April 2006 issue of Game Developer won a 56th Annual Maggie Award for Best Magazine (Computers/Trade) at a Los Angeles ceremony last Friday. The April issue featured a postmortem of Ubisoft's King Kong game, the magazine's regular/canonical salary survey, and an interview with Will Wright, among other major features.
The magazine's competitors at the Maggie Awards, presented by the Western Publications Association, were fellow CMP publication Network Computing, the independent Microsoft-themed mag Redmond Channel Partner, the embedded-specific RTC Magazine, and former CMP book Technology & Learning.
The entire staff of both Gamasutra and Game Developer would like to thank the readers of our publications and the juries behind these awards for honoring us, and hope to continue bringing you the highest quality editorial on the art, science, and business of making games."
Wow, 2 months plus late, this time - apologies. Most of the time, as you may have spotted, I've been updating the ffwd linklog and GameSetWatch - as well as working on Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine (which I'm now also publisher of), and prepping the Independent Games Festival and the first ever Independent Games Summit, plus some other neat new offshoots/projects. So... busy.
Some cool things that happened - Gamasutra was picked as one of the UK Guardian's 'Top 100 Most Useful Websites', which I very much appreciate - and our reader numbers continue to go from strength to strength, even compared to our competitors. My co-workers have continued to kick ass in making wonderful editorial over all our products - so thank you, Frank, Brandon, Jill, other Brandon, Jason, and a multitude of other contributors.
Elsewhere, the magazine continues to run some sparkling editorial - the latest February 2007 issue (pictured) has an exclusive postmortem of standout PS3 title Resistance: Fall Of Man: "Insomniac is known more for its stylized character-based games than its first-person shooters, but Resistance: Fall of Man is in fact a return to the company’s roots—the first game the studio ever made was an FPS. Herein, project manager Marcus Smith shares with us the boons and difficulties of creating an original IP on a brand new console at launch, as well as why they want to set the next game in Tahiti." There's plenty of other recent goodness too - and a new sample issue, also.
Away from work, me and Holly went to the Pinnacles National Monument here in California, which is very beautiful in January. We're also planning a trip to England this July for my sister's wedding (7/7/07, yay!), and will be wandering off to Helsinki after that, since Holly is part Finnish and has never been - and I went once back in 1999 and really enjoyed Finland, so am delighted to return. I'm trying to balance work and home life sensibly, and I think it's working.
[I'm so far behind on blog updates, that I'm just gonna repost this mag-related post from GameSetWatch, so you guys at least get SOME updates! More soon!]
So, as you guys may recall, I'm also EIC of Game Developer magazine in my 'copious spare time', and as it happens, we just made the December 2006 issue of the mag available online for paid digital download. For those who don't know, GDMag goes out to around 35,000 qualified game professionals in North America and worldwide every month, and it's a B2B trade mag which deals with the art and business of making games, with postmortems, technical articles, and in-depth columns galore. And Reggie gets it!
Anyhow, with the help of trusty cohorts Brandon and Jill, who kinda actually run the mag (since I'm evilly busy), our cover postmortem this month is for Introversion's Defcon, written by Chris Delay, Vicky Arundel, Thomas Arundel, Gary Chambers, and John Knottenbelt - yep, the whole caboodle. Wired's Chris Baker already IM-ed me to say something nice about it, so it does indeed seem to be a neat look at making an indie death sim extraordinaire - which is now available in a Santa edition, incidentally!
Other goodness in the issue includes an in-depth article on piracy, interviewing folks like Todd Hollenshead from id and representatives from the ESA, alongside a technical article on how, "...using a data-driven AI architecture, Pandemic Studios created a flexible [AI] system for Destroy All Humans II." Plus our regular columnists, of course.
And shh, don't tell anyone, but here's a sneak peek at our January 2007 cover, which both reveals the Front Line Award winners for the best game tools, and also has an exclusive Wii postmortem, for Toys For Bob's Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam, alongside plenty of other goodness.
Oh yeah, and it has a GDC 2007 preview guide in it, so the entire Jan 2007 issue is going out to >100,000 people on our GDC mailing lists - so you may see a copy even if you don't normally subscribe to the magazine. That's why we're eradicating typos _as I speak_, and consulting our Funk & Wagnalls tremulously.
Anyhow, if you don't get Game Developer right now and would like to (esp. if you're not a qualified game professional!), there's actually a special deal on the digital version to be $21.95 for the year, if you're so inclined. [The digital edition is like reading the mag in a web browser, and works really well - esp. cos you have access to back issues and it's searchable. I still like the print edition, which is a bit more expensive, but that's just my paper leanings!]
(Also worth noting with regard to my current work - the IGF Main Competition finalists are announced: "Nominations are led by Bit Blot's dreamlike, innovatively controlled 2D underwater adventure title Aquaria, which garnered 4 nominations, including one for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize. Other Grand Prize nominees included Queasy Games' cleverly designed abstract shoot-em-up, Everyday Shooter, which grabbed 3 nominations in total - nominees for the top prize were rounded out by Peter Stock's intelligently complex physics puzzle game Armadillo Run, Three Rings' Wild West indie strategy MMO Bang! Howdy, and Naked Sky's Xbox Live Arcade action-puzzler RoboBlitz.")
Well, blimey, I'm finally back at home again, and glad not to be traveling any more. But first things first - the picture to the right is for the October issue of Game Developer magazine, in which the Top 20 Publishers were revealed - for those who are interested, EA was top once again this year.
Also going to press soon is the November issue of the mag, which features a cover postmortem of the Deathwalk feature in Human Head and 3D Realms' Prey, and a rare design article from Magic: The Gathering creator Richard Garfield - v. neat, watch out for it soon!
As for the two trips I mentioned in my previous post - the jaunt to Japan for both Tokyo Game Show and a little holiday with Holly was very successful - there are lots of pictures on my Flickr account, and there's a full round-up of my coverage over at Gamasutra. Actually, London Games Festival (and seeing my folks!) was great too - didn't quite get round to taking any pics, but there's plenty of coverage over at Gama.
Fortunately, there's no need for more strenuous travel for a little while (besides an entirely leisure-based trip to Las Vegas in December!), so we can sit back and relax a little. I'm going to keep cataloging my comics stash, which I've been adding some random stuff to recently. And I'm still having lots of fun with GameSetWatch and our various columnists, as well as Monotonik, actually chilling out, and so on. Happy October, all!
