Digital Cowboys: Episode 128
Posted on : 30-10-2009 | By : Alex Shaw | In : Podcasts
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This week we welcome to the show; James Portnow – CCO of Divide By Zero games and accredited game designer. We’re talking about the words ‘Game’ and ‘Gamer’ after an article on Gamasutra by Tynan Syslvester prompted us to ascertain if new words and descriptions could be used for them in the face of an ever-changing medium.
James lends us his considerable experience and expertise as we chew over public perception and how we cling to the idea that games are more than just frivolous entertainment.
After that there’s some frivolous entertainment in the form of our Brutal Legend and Scribblenauts in-depth reviews. Two of the most hyped games of 2009. Find out if they meet expectation. Also discussed are the Beatles and Queen Rock Band DLC.
Check out James’ work in conjunction with Daniel Floyd in brilliant animated lectures here.
The music at the end is Rain by Mark Tschanz from his album; Blue Dog, since on this week’s show we talk about how important Heavy Rain is likely to be in the case of serious games.
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Just hopped off the phone having listened to the first half of the show. Interesting discussion. I think with a title like Six Days in Fallujah the problem actually comes from making it interactive.. by it’s very nature that gives you such an impact on the events that the danger is you skew the reality of what occurred there, and heaven forbid if there are achievements associated with ‘headshots’ or the like. For a game like that, if you want to make it documentary style, how about have you making the documentary? Could you not have been a FPS camera crew, who is following the troops about? Perhaps this never happened and would be a change of the events, but you could tell the story you wanted to tell perfectly, without the player actually changing the events you wish to retell, but having them having to frame shots of what is occurring. The game would have to rely on some quality characterisations and really good voice work, but by adding that layer of extraction whilst still giving the player stuff to actually do within the world, scoring based on capturing key events on film and so on. You could even throw in some QTE’s to get from one squad to another. Again it might not be the most ‘fun’ to play, but do you want a game like that to be? You want to experience the story, as you would with a quality TV doc or movie adaption but without just sitting there watching, actually being in the battle zone just in a non combative way.
Heh. It will be interesting to revisit that topic once everyone has had a chance to play Modern Warfare 2.
Stellar episode, guys! That was one of the most interesting discussions I’ve heard on the show so far.
In-depth game issue discussion, Beatles DLC and Brutal Legend. It’s like an episode custom-made for me.
[...] been running over Episode #128 of Digital Cowboys in my head all evening. In that show we talked with James Portnow about what we should re-brand the [...]