The Dragon's Talon

Cut loose from big-business, I suppose I am free to consider myself a freelancer or an indie, but the last thing I want to be is a bum.  I need to stay active, to keep getting my ideas down on (digital or literal) paper or I will go mad.  Unemployment does not suit me, but working on my own projects while I find gainful employment is enough for now.  Of course, better than ‘stay active’ is ‘work toward independence’ and at least two people have actually congratulated me on my redundancy because it got me out of the rat-race.

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Apologies for the silence.

As some people will know, the company I worked for laid off some staff and I was one of those selected for redundancy.  This means that I have been a little preoccupied recently, but it is not all doom and gloom.  For the foreseeable future, I will be freelancing; this means networking (it’s a pity I just missed the Develop Conference / Expo) and looking for contract work.

I also have a little something I am working on, but it’s still top-secret for now.  Sorry…

This was in a UK print-magazine a few months back, but only just published online, so it might be familiar to some UK developers.

Let’s start with a sound-bite…

“Firstly, a writer should learn to think through the structure of interactive scenes in terms of Boolean variables and secondly, they should abandon all thoughts of dialogue trees.”
- http://www.develop-online.net/features/905/The-Conversation

It would be a bit unfair to judge the whole article on that one statement, so go and read it.

First and foremost, I have to say that I got a little hot under the collar when I started reading it.  How can he possibly say these things?

After a while, I started to see where he was coming from.

Finally, I found myself nodding along.  He makes some good points and, in all fairness, I have already been doing things that way (with some small dialogue trees) for a while.  I have always favoured the non-linear, almost parallel finite-state machines, approach to storylines.

Where I differ is on his assertion that we need to kill off dialogue trees; to me, I think dialogue and storyline are two different beasts.  In my experience, they are often written by two different people.  He is saying that storylines work best with Booleans, which I agree with, but then using that as a justification for killing off a technique for dialogue.

So what do you make of it?  Do you agree, do you disagree or is he just stating the obvious?

A quick one; I have been accused of being a communist for my support of Free and Open-Source Software.  Using Linux is therefore akin to joining the Party and worshipping Marx.  Amusingly, the latest accusation came as a certain group raised over a million dollars between them by following a “free as in ‘Free speech’, not as in ‘free beer’” mindset.

Four indie games (Gish, Lugaru HD, Aquaria and Penumbra) recently went open source, making $1,273,613 for a coalition of developers (not all of whom went open-source) and charities.  In the end, each of these companies made $166,733.37 for their efforts and gave Child’s Play (a charity who give toys and games to children in hospitals) $188,583.92, as well as giving the Electronic Frontier Foundation (a charity who help oppose legislation and other legal threats to information) $183,607.34 just from this one act of going open-source.

I don’t know about you comrade, but I think that looks like a good capitalist venture from here…

In recent years, I have noticed certain disturbing trends in the industry, the worst of which has to be the death of finesse.  In an age where time is money, it almost seems that the English language itself has become a casualty of ‘efficiency’ and has been supplanted by txtspk and just plain bad spelling.

Unfortunately, this seems to have been accepted as a fact of life, with even lead designers and producers tossing out barely-legible memos via email on the basis that ‘people know what I mean’ and woe betide the grammar-nazi who corrects them.  The trouble is that this same ‘it will do’ attitude leads to a laissez-faire attitude to communications with publishers and clients, which drags down the public image of the company.  I am not even referring to one small set of companies; I recently saw a full-page advertisement in an industry publication by a major UK PR company who managed to include any number of misspellings, Americanisms and bad grammar.  What does this mean for the industry, if even PR companies don’t proof-read before going to print?

To head off the inevitable, I will admit that the world is not going to stop turning if someone mixes up the words ‘stationary’ and ‘stationery’.  When you get an email that asks you to “please see my Note’s bellow”, most of us will just roll our eyes at the three glaring mistakes, while a few might sigh at the two less obvious mistakes.  The problem is that these are not the mistakes of ill-educated, but of those who take no pride in their English skills.  It has been said (and argued with at length) that a game designer’s most important skill is communication, something I would emphasise to all design students, but I can count on one hand the number of designers and former designers whose spelling does not make me flinch.

We have lost our love of words, we make do and move on.  Perhaps this is a sign of the times, leaving me as a solitary Narrative Designer trying to hold back the tide like Cnut sitting on the beach, but I think there is still time.  Games are not art (yet) and so maybe time is money, spell-checkers are too slow and I am a relic of a bygone age.

When all is said and done though, I would like to think not.

Update: As though I needed to sound any more cynical, I just got an email from a primary school teacher that looked like it was written by one of his pupils.  At least we can see where the trouble starts, if even our teachers fail at basic grammar and spelling.

Two impending events have made me stop and consider what it is to be a ‘grown up’ – impending fatherhood and Talk Like a Pirate Day. I mean, it is no longer ‘okay’ to sit in the living room with a toy castle and re-enact the capture of Rochester Castle or to make a fortress out of the cushions from the sofa and throw balled up socks or shoot Nerf darts at passing victims.

Why? How long has that been ‘wrong’ then?

I mean, one day we are riding our bikes with our coats done up by only the top button playing Batman and then, the next, we are dressed in a suit and tie de-bugging software. Where did the fun go?

Some people LARP. That is a good start. When I used to play Everquest, it was something akin to saying you read porn. These days, people admit to playing World of Warcraft and will happily discuss their level 56 Warlock over the water-cooler. This is not bad, but it is not enough.

We are adults now, not necessarily grown-ups. We can afford the stuff we always wished we could, but we no longer want it. So… why not? In all honesty, we need to remember how to have fun or we will go mad.

I propose that we celebrate Talk Like A Pirate Day properly. A 50p eye-patch and a plastic sword is all you need to get you going. Bring on the wenches and grog, hoist the Jolly Roger on your car-aerial and forget that you are a grown-up. Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning!

Anthony is a 27 year-old computer-games designer who still owns two pirate ships, a re-issue G1 Starscream, Force FX lightsabers and an army of Lego knights all called Norman. Growing up is obviously something that happens to other people.