We just took a weekender in Santa Cruz and these are my little sketchy remembrances of the trip. We hit the beach one day for a couple hours…tough, b/c no one wanted to sit still long enough to be drawn.
Santa Cruz beach
We stayed in a B&B on the water called The Darling House.
Monterey Room, Darling House
Nick, worn out from the 60 minute drive to Santa Cruz, takes a nap.
Nick, Darling House
I’ve been remiss in my sketch-crawling and I once again, missed the big sketch crawl gathering in the last month or so. However, I have done a few little drawings of my own in recent days. In the last few weeks I’ve been in SF on different occasions and here’s a few little nothings I did at the Embarcadero…
at Rincon Center…
and hanging with the freaks at Dolores Park…
Dolores Park
Don’t be misled – this is unfortunately, not about the brilliant Christopher Guest movie, Waiting for Guffman.
It’s about coming up with ideas for story pitches, which when it really comes down to it, kinda sucks. In fact, few things take as much out of a person as trying to come up with an idea good enough to be expressed in a short paragraph, and strong enough to convince other people to spend money on it. Today’s fiction-related difficulty is of course, the “McGuffin”. Now, one shouldn’t mistake a McGuffin for a Red Herring…
…or indeed, for a McHerring, which will no doubt end up on the McDonald’s menu some time in the future.
For those of you who don’t know, in writerly circles, a McGuffin is defined as: “A plot device in the form of some goal, desired object, or other motivator that the protagonist (and sometimes the antagonist) is willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to pursue.”
…while a Red Herring is: ” A clue which is intended to be misleading, or distracting from the actual issue.” (I figure the McHerring is self-explanatory.)
I’ve spent a couple of hours today, trying to come up with a good example of the McGuffin, in order to figure out why in hell a clever and resourceful young street urchin would be motivated to use his rare talents to pursue adventurous and heroic things. No wonder reality TV’s taking over the world. Anyway, why does a hero even need motivation? Well, aside from justifying the collective urge of self-important actors to walk around grimacing like De Niro, it’s to avoid writing what self-important writers like to call “melodrama.”
Melodrama’s what you get when you cook up an unbelievable story and toss a lot of far-fetched characters into it. And that’s not to say that you can’t depart from reality – it’s what happens when your characters lurch around doing “stuff” for no reason at all and then spend the rest of their time moaning about it. (Wait a minute – this is the exact formula that made Stephanie Meyer a literary giant. Eureka! I’ve found the key to greatness!)
Video game writing is all about the McGuffin. You have to give the player a reason to do what they do and that generally means what having them go in pursuit of what some writers affectionately call a “BDO” – Big Dumb Object.
It’s the reason behind all the shooting, punching and grenade-tossing; without it, the player’s just spinning his or her wheels. Which brings us to the crux of my dilemma.
I find myself at the start of another project, the most exciting and frustrating part, when everything’s wide open and I’m burdened with coming up with something other people might actually want to play. We’re selling fantasy here—not just a fantasy identity, but a fantasy life, and the biggest part of that is the McGuffin, the player’s reason for being. Ever wonder why so few games are made about insurance salesmen and tax collectors? They’re boring, that’s why. So how does one come up with a quest thousands of other people want to pursue?
Yeah…I’m not sure either. At least, not yet. Man, all this thinking’s making me hungry. I think I’ll go get myself a McHerring.
Well, GDC is over for another year and for me, this one was a weird one. I don’t know if it was a lack of focus on my part, or the attendees’ bizarre need to wear attention-getting hats that got me down, but somehow things felt different. I swear, what’s with the hat thing?
Aside from men in kilts, the one thing you see too much of at game conferences are silly hats. In one day I saw a dude in a red velvet bowler, a guy in a pirate hat complete with plume, a girl in a tri-corn, and a slew of people in those stupid knit hats with the animal ears built into them, whose wearers are just asking to be doused with acid.
Without a chapeau of my own, I felt under-dressed. Then again, perhaps all these flamboyant hat lovers were all just trying to compete with game design icon, Ernest Adams, known as much for his ten-gallon top hat as for his published game titles.
Of course, me being me, I inadvertently insulted the man by not knowing who he was. Waiting for a session to begin, I looked up and saw the be-hatted Adams sit down a little in front of me. Having seen him and his top hat for years, I said, “Hey, nice hat,” whereupon he told me it was his “trademark.” I then asked his name and I think I got a weensy bit of annoyance back along with his answer, “Ernest Adams.”
Adams, pre-top hat days?
I had to look him up but then realized I’d seen his name on game design books and suchlike. Oops. Anyway, where was I going with that?
Oh yeah. GDC was weird this year. I just wasn’t as fired up about going to meetings as I usually am and I can’t say why. I didn’t even sit all the way through the yearly awards show, which I almost always do. Part of that can be attributed though, to the doof sitting behind me. Just like the fools who can’t stop themselves from talking back to movie screens, this guy seemed to think he was alone in the auditorium with the people on stage and had an obligation to respond to them.
They’d get up and deliver their spiels, say their thank yous, make their jokes, and he’d sit back there going, “Ooh!”, “Oh!”, “Hi!” or “Haha!” in a voice that could’ve been heard clearly over a jet engine. Then there was “Encore!”, “Bravo!”, “I’m impressed!”, “Yay for the drowned people!” and my personal favorite, “They let WOMEN on STAGE???”
It was just too much for me and I had to leave, but not before witnessing the triumph of the many deserving recipients (chosen from over 800 entries!) of the Indie awards (Yay, Dear Esther!)
INDEPENDENT GAMES FESTIVAL WINNERS
Best Student Game: Way, The Way Team
Technical Excellence: Antichamber, Demruth Games
Excellence in Audio: Botanicula, Amanita Design
Excellence in Design: Spelunky, Mossmouth
Excellence in Visual Arts: Dear Esther, thechineseroom
Best Mobile Game: Beat Sneak Bandit, Simogo
Audience Award: Frozen Synapse, Mode 7 Games
XBLA Award: Super Time Force, Capy Games
Nuovo Award: Storyteller, Daniel Benmergui
Seumas McNally Grand Prize: Fez, Polytron Corporation
Yeah, I hate that cut-rate Genesis song too, but unfortunately, it accurately represents the way my second day at the conference went. This is the first year I tried to drop the habit of using an Excel printout of my schedule in favor of doing what everyone else does–using their phone calendars. Not good.
I literally bungled the entire day and missed three separate meetings. I should be high on the PR shit list by now. Other than (or because of) hosing my schedule, it was a fairly uneventful day. The high point was grabbing lunch with an ex-coworker, friend and game design coach, who can be seen here, giving phone instructions to his live-in cat nanny. Game designers are weird.
Things were going fairly well until the powers that be denied me a free GDC t-shirt. Every year they give them away and I’ve been collecting them for a while. I was standing in line waiting to claim this year’s, when an eagle-eyed volunteer saw me and outed me–all the way out of the line in fact–in front of everyone. A weensy bit embarrassing maybe, but no biggie. Things didn’t go downhill until I realized that everywhere I went, I was faced with this:
–impenetrable walls of slow-moving humanity. Guess I’m becoming crowd-phobic in my old age. Still, with the help of determination and plenty of free press room coffee, I soldiered on. I attended an interesting talk by the folks at DoubleFine where they discussed their new development strategy (smaller teams, smaller games) and some of the cool titles that have already come out of it like Stacking and Costume Quest.
Tim Schafer made wry jokes but was also completely forthright about the fact that these little games saved the company from annihilation when Brutal Legend 2 was given the axe. The DoubleFine brand has hence been redefined as anything, any kind of game that exhibits: originality, personality, great characters and the element of surprise.
The afternoon was mostly talks but evening was all about the Independent Games Festival (for a list of winners, look here) and the Game Developer Awards which were just as entertaining and awkward as ever. It’s not easy to follow Tim Schafer (who hosted the latter last year) and this year, Cliff “Cliffy B” Blezinski did his best and fell terribly flat. The jokes he made elicited a sort of squirmy silence from the audience and in fact, his funniest bit was a series of photos he got from Tim Schafer, pretending to bathe, smoke, blow his nose on, cuddle and wipe his butt with, the nearly 2.5 million dollars he just got from Kickstarter donations. Hilarious!
After the awards, as I was headed down the 101 and I had yet another replay of what I’d been encountering all damn day.
When I took this picture, a policeman behind me, who I hadn’t even seen, turned his lights on and I nearly had a heart attack. He wasn’t after me though, which was a relief. I’d always imagined if I spent a night in jail at GDC, it’d be for something a lot more scandalous.
Well, the Game Developer’s Conference has crept up on me again and this year I’ve been smarter and not over-scheduled myself. For instance, I did nothing yesterday but attend a press event for Lollipop Chainsaw at Minna Gallery. The peeps at Warner Bros. Interactive were ready to do it up right, with a big zombie bus parked outside…
…and waitstaff dressed (very convincingly, I might add) as zombies. I don’t know, but there’s something unsettling about accepting a chicken skewer from a girl with shreds of bloody flesh hanging off her neck.
Fanboys were beside themselves at the presence of creative director, Suda51, composer Akira Yamaoka and screenwriter James Gunn, who also seemed to get a kick out of hanging with the undead:
When I first heard about Lollipop Chainsaw, it sounded like the dumbest idea for a game I’d ever heard. After playing it at last night’s event though, my mind is officially changed. The script, written by screenwriter James Gunn (known for cult classic, Slither) is both suggestive and hilarious and serves the game’s freak show atmosphere to a “T”. For instance, I cracked up when the game’s heroine, busty cheerleader Juliet Starling said, in the middle of executing some acrobatic combat moves, “When I’m at home, I practice this move naked to decrease wind resistance.” =D
Aside from the great writing, the other surprising thing was the inclusion of puzzle-ish minigames made in tribute to the classic arcade games all of us (well, some of us–the oldsters) grew up with. These inject a nice dose of nostalgia and prevent the game from being nothing but “all zombies, all the time.”
Lollipop Chainsaw doesn’t come out until June 12 of this year but I for one am planning to buy it. I mean, how often do you get to kill zombies while wearing pigtails and legwarmers?
Finally, I finish a project begun before Christmas. I set myself the task of making two little marshmallow superheroes for my niece and her husband to commemorate the Superheroes: Icons of Good, Evil and Everything In Between art show we collaborated on at 516 Arts in Albuquerque.
A simple concept, yes, but I’m satisfied with it because it packs a lot of silly into a very small item.
Well despite the chilly, damp weather, my friend Ann and I braved the San Francisco Zoo yesterday for what was for me, the first sketch crawl in at least a year. It wasn’t easy keeping the lines under control while shivering but we did our level best. One up side to going on a day like that – the place was empty!
My favorite animals of the day? “Cynthia and Zakary” – a mother/baby koala combo who were adorably cute spooning away during their joint nap.
Up for “saddest exhibit” – the Meerkats who were all huddled together on a rock, trying to stay warm. It was so pathetic watching them shiver. Somebody get these guys a space heater! Or at least a bunch of tiny wool sweaters.
The rest of the time was spent watching a majestic horned owl, some gorgeous flamingos, a gaggle of entertaining penguins and some surprisingly combative prairie dogs.
Here’s hoping this is a trend we can continue so I don’t stop drawing for months on end.
As of last weekend, the art show I co-curated in Albuquerque is closed but the fine folks at 516 Arts sent me some gorgeous exhibition photos and I just had to share a few of them. The show was great in person, but these photos really do an amazing job of making the setup look good. I can’t figure out why WordPress doesn’t want to include all the captions/credits on these photos…
“Mr. Bends” – Esteban Bojorquez
Knitted Superhero costumes - Mark Newport
Superhero prints - Boneface
“Bik’eh Hozho” – Jolene Yazzie
David Gremard Romero
Aaron Noble
Well, it was a nerve-wracking week, pulling together my first game concept. I’ve done it informally before of course, but never actually put it together in a cohesive format. I submitted it late last night and waited until this morning with baited breath and to my complete and utter surprise, it was accepted without qualification. I’m stoked!!
Now if only the rest of the milestones could go as smoothly…
