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au Louvre

As of this writing I am in Paris, getting ready for Ubidays.

We'll be in the Louvre, where we I will be presenting a short, live stage demo during the opening conference on Wednesday night (Paris time - that will be Wednesday afternoon EST and Wednesday morning PST).

We'll also be doing full length demos and hands-on demos with the the press as well as doing all kinds of interviews and stuff throughout the day Thursday.

Ubidays in San Francisco was just over a week ago so coverage from that event, plus the live streaming coverage from UPlay dotcom and the live coverage Gamespot is hosting should all land over the course of the day Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Of note, our first full trailer will land sometime in there so keep your eyes open for that.

Choice and Consequence

Randy is so frikkin' smart.

His latest column on Next-Gen dot biz is right on. In particular, I really appreciate this concise statement of one of the big challenges we face today as game designers:

Modern games, by contrast, teach us things like it doesn’t really matter which way you choose to go. That someone will always watch over you and check you’re OK. That there is an omniscient judge of your behavior who is generous with this information. That you should do what you’re told and get really good at it.

Anyway, the article is short, so you should read it. I won't try to rehash it here either... no point in cluttering up what Randy gives us so eloquently and concisely. I think Randy raises most of the important questions, and I sure as hell don't have answers. I do think, though, that if the people who are interested in tackling (and maybe one day even solving) these problems were to just try and take on one of them in their next game, we would have all of them solved in the next 3 years. So get to it.

I sent the article around to my design team and after reading it one of the guys on my team turned to me as said 'sounds like he wants to play Far Cry 2'. Well, I'd like to think we're trying to tackle some of these problems... but as I said, it's going to take a bunch of us attacking from different directions to gain any ground.