good stuff thread.

[bob]

Stepping stone?

 

Formula E is going to eclipse Formula 1 in a few years time, don't jump onto a sinking ship.

[MoogleViper]

Man, I fucking LOVE twitter.

 

So me and Retro have started a twitter account for Formula E (an electric version of Formula 1) and after contacting some of the teams, they've agreed to let us interview them tomorrow at the test.

 

Literally ecstatic. I've dreamt of getting into F1 as a journalist and this is a perfect stepping stone to that

 

How are you gonna write a news article in 140 characters?

[Magnus]

Very efficiently?

[bob]

I had no idea @The Peeps was so enthusiastic about plugs!

 

[The Peeps]

haha someone else linked me to him before but I can't remember who it was... he's not going grey like me though

[Goron_3]

Stepping stone?

 

Formula E is going to eclipse Formula 1 in a few years time, don't jump onto a sinking ship.

 

Formula 1 will always be bigger simply because of the teams and drivers. That said, I'm sure F1 will adopt even more electric power than it currently does. We'll have F-Zero before we know it

 

How are you gonna write a news article in 140 characters?

 

Starting up a website/blog in the coming weeks

[MoogleViper]

haha someone else linked me to him before but I can't remember who it was... he's not going grey like me though

 

I tagged you on one of Dannyboy's facebook posts.

[Beast]

So I shut up shop for the first time on my own last night. I was in charge and I had to make sure everything was neat and tidy, everything was counted, everything was locked, etc. Obviously, I did it all and came out and was like "Oh shit, I didn't do this, that and the other"...anyway, I came in this morning and my manager was very happy with me and told me I did well. I counted something on the sheet wrong but other than that, I did everything correctly. Very happy bunny!

 

What's more? I did this assault course that basically had you doing 100m rowing, zigzagging through cones, cycling for 30 seconds, 25 star jumps and 10 sit-ups. My mate represented the shoe shop and I represented my new place. He got told by the bitch-boss of my old place that she would give him an extra two hours on today's wage if he did it. Anyway, he tried first and he got a time of 1 minute and 32 seconds. So I did it and I got the time of 1 minute and 22 seconds and I BEAT THE ENTIRE BASTARD SHOPPING CENTRE! Everybody cheered for me and a few shook my hand, it was just mental! The woman even commented that I did brilliant. So my mate wanted another run on the course and he beat me by 3 seconds so now he has the top spot. Funnily enough, the only people who congratulated him was the people working in the shoe shop and me. The security guards who watched actually said "Don't worry; they had two goes, you had one. Also, he didn't jump to the other mat to do the sit-ups when you did and also he had someone to hold his legs during them sit-ups and you never. You did amazing!".

 

But honestly, I'm not even dis-heartened that he beat me. I was actually expecting him to. I'd be more worried if I beat him because he's more sporty than I am. But nobody can take away the fact that, for the first time ever, I was the most athletic out of everybody. There have been a few times when I've beat two or three people in my gym class but I've beaten people who work in the gym, in Tesco, in Sports Direct, total randomers and security. It's just such an amazing feeling, I can't even describe! I've always wanted this my whole life and I got that feeling of actually being first for once. The woman actually saw how happy I was coming first and then second and she actually said "I have a good feeling about tomorrow. Do it again!"

 

I've told my mate about it and he wants to do it so I'm doing it with him tomorrow. Anyway, here is an actual picture of me coming first place. I'm printing this shit off and it's going on my wall!

 

[dwarf]

I had a good day today. I feel as if everything will turn out just fine.

 

I started out by reading the last third of Black Swan Green by David Mitchell, the only novel of his I hadn't finished (he's got a new one coming out in September, fellow fans). I then had my first driving lesson in over a year. I ran out of time to pass my test last summer so I've picked it up again, and hopefully I'll pass late August/early September. Pleasantly surprised to find I wasn't too rusty. Then Grandma and Granddad dropped by for a quick cup of tea. Grandma had become a little gaunt since I last saw her, but she remains plump and maternal all the same. Her memory's been deserting her of late but she was fine today, and I can't ever imagine her losing the ability to make a treacle tart like the one she delivered to me today. She churns them out perfectly every time. Granddad was a tad grumpy about not being served tea immediately upon his entrance, and he was as uninterested in me as ever, an attitude I don't begrudge him for. He never spurns our handshake, which is all I need. They left to visit my aunt in London. I then shared some nutty Milka chocolate with Mum while she unhooked washing in the garden. She brought it back from a school trip that she helped to supervise in France. It reminded me of the Austrian chocolate my Dad got me in Austria back when I was ten or eleven years old, in a cafe you could ski into half-way down a red run.

 

I walked around the garden in my socks, enjoying the calm and pensive mood which had swept over me. I was at one with nature, of course. Speaking of nature - when I was reading in bed last night a spider caught my attention, and I must've stopped for a good couple of minutes just to watch its pointless, unfathomable journey across my ceiling. Every now and then you are reminded of nature and the way it just goes about its business without considering yours. And then I thought about the thoughts of everyone else in the world during that moment (there's a foreign word, possibly Japanese, reserved for that sort of realization but I cannae recall it off the top of my head). On a related note, Attenborough's Frozen Planet was repeated the other day, so I stuck it on HD like a wise gentleman, and I actually started to tear up at the story the producers had woven about the life of a certain moth. The way, as a caterpillar, it freezes and ceases to breathe for months on end before stoically coming out in order to weave the next chapter of its life, cocooned. It was sort of pathetic of my eyes to glaze over but hey. The music on the series always captures the mood of the nature so adroitly, and the sped-up cycle of the seasons is breathtaking. Might have to shell out on a blu-ray collection of Attenborough's work. He's phenomenal.

 

Back to my day – I returned to my room, picked up Black Swan Green again to finish it off, but stopped thirty pages short because, like a COMPLETE PUSSYHOLE, I teared up again. It wasn't the kind of dubious cry you get where your eyes water up slightly, but in a way that makes you doubt the sincerity of the tears and wonder if they're artificial. I knew this because one drop managed to roll down my nose unprompted. I've read a few novels that take the perspective of teenage boys, and have enjoyed them and related to the central character before (e.g. Holden in Catcher in the Rye, Gordie in The Body) but David Mitchell absolutely nails it in BSG. In an interview I saw a while ago he mentioned about a third of it is autobiographical. The relationship that the character Jason has with his older sister is fairly similar to my own, and likewise his experience of bullying has parallels. It is done so fucking well. I stopped reading and looked out of my window and just ruminated over my own childhood, and my present situation - the bumbling and relaxed transitional phase I'm in, the pioneering gaming article I want to publish as Games Editor of my student newspaper (a weak gloat, if it can be called that – I’m not terribly proud about winning the position because I doubt many applied for it), the salsa dance lessons I'll be taking with a delectable Latvian lass I grew intimate with over Easter (albeit not infatuated with – strictly friendly and randy), the summer readings I'm going to do to get ahead for next year, the brilliance of novelists like DM, how sweet it must be to be paid for your thoughts, the hope that I will be paid for mine one day, and the satisfying thought of, in a week's time, helping a bunch of strangers clear up a serene little alcove in my village which has been overgrown with vegetation, I having by chance passed a humble volunteer's notice near the hushed and concealed area when taking an obscure path up to the local church to earn a few quid catering at a wedding party.

 

I finally thought of N-E, the decade I've spent on here, and how absurd it is that I should choose to share my twee anecdotes with people I've never met. I only infrequently share my personal life on here and there's no real rhyme or reason to it, but the forum is a reliable old rock, and it won’t be going anywhere soon. And then I thought, well, maybe I will meet ReZ or Daft one day, piss around on the Playstation 4, or 6, or whatever, and that made me smile. I'm sure they'd be tickled pink by that admission.

 

Life.

[drahkon]

I only infrequently share my personal life on here and there's no real rhyme or reason to it [...]And then I thought, well, maybe I will meet ReZ [...] one day

 

If you ever do, this is the place to tell us.

[ReZourceman]

Life.

 

So you're....like....the best person ever?

[Beast]

I BEAT MY BASTARD TIME ON THE OBSTACLE COURSE! WOOO! OH MY DECADES!

 

I went in this morning and I had my trainers on and the right pair of trousers. I conquered that motherfucker, shagged it's mom and ate steak and chips afterwards! I beat my old workplace's time by 3 seconds and beat my own time by 7 seconds! Nobody else could beat me in the ENTIRE FUCKING SHOPPING CENTRE and they tried for five hours! I did it at 10am and it finished at 3pm. People tried and failed. In the end, I won A MOTHERFUCKING TROPHY FOR BEING A PIMP-ASS MOTHERFUCKING ATHLETE!

 

It's the first-ever trophy I have ever won in my life! I actually came first at something to do with fitness! Suck it, bullies! Suck it, P.E. Teachers who couldn't be arsed! I FUCKING DID IT! I beat slim dudes, gym people, shops and shoppers as well! Oh my God, I'm just so HAPPY! AAAAAHIKSLPHFUILWSGHFI;SF!

 

Here's a picture of me getting presented my trophy for being a bad-ass motherfucker! This is for all the geeks, freaks and fatties! We can do it and we can all do it so much better! FATTIES DO IT BETTER! XD

 

[Eenuh]

Jim and I have been in Spain for two weeks now and it has been lovely. We have done absolutely nothing, and it has been great haha.

 

Two weeks of sitting in the sun, lazing about and having nice food, yes please! We are returning to the UK tomorrow (nooooo!), but I can't wait to come back to Calpe, hopefully next year. =)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[The Bard]

@dwarf gourami Can I see that pioneering gaming article?

[Sheikah]

I finally thought of N-E, the decade I've spent on here, and how absurd it is that I should choose to share my twee anecdotes with people I've never met. I only infrequently share my personal life on here and there's no real rhyme or reason to it, but the forum is a reliable old rock, and it won’t be going anywhere soon. And then I thought, well, maybe I will meet ReZ or Daft one day, piss around on the Playstation 4, or 6, or whatever, and that made me smile. I'm sure they'd be tickled pink by that admission.

 

Life.

 

You should come to the meet. This August. :awesome:

[dwarf]

@The Bard

 

No, because I haven't written it yet.

 

It’s a vague and jumbled idea about the agency of the reader/viewer in literature/film and how successful examples in those media, which intimately and more obviously involve the audience within the narrative, could be used as inspiration to make games a 'purer' and more intelligent art form. That’s not to say any conclusion I or someone else makes should funnel all future game development into a certain direction – there will always be room for the entire spectrum of games we have now – but I think the form does need to advance or at least focus on its strengths, its transcendent aspects. Indie developers are peeling the perimeters back all the time.

 

Strap yourself in for some trademark Jayseven quasi-coherent babble.

 

So, the article. I’d possibly mention the way early novelists like Richardson/Fielding made direct appeals to their readers, entreating them (ironically in the latter case) to use the text for their own edification, and the way authors of that ilk try to jump out of the book and clasp the reader’s hand in a bid to win their trust – this isn’t so much about agency but myeh. Then there are the subtler ways of engaging with the audience in books, and I think this was one of the catalysts for my idea, whereby the reader takes on the role of a faceless character in the story. I recently read The Reluctant Fundamentalist which consists entirely of a dramatic monologue. Back story is piped in through a Pakistani’s account of his life, and the reader is restored to a sense of place and time when the speaker (Pakistani man) interrupts himself to 'talk' to the figure opposite him at a restaurant table, offering them food and querying their mannerisms and attitudes. The reader there (in the way I engaged with the text anyway) takes on the persona of the faceless character at the dining table so that the author can probe his/her sensibilities through the eyes and words of an accusatory character (the Pakistani bloke).

 

‘My team did not wait for me; by the time I entered the customs hall they had already collected their suitcases and left. As a consequence, I rode to Manhattan that evening very much alone.

But why do you flinch? Ah yes, the bats; they are circling rather low. They will not touch us; allow me to reassure you on that score. You know, you say? Your tone is curt.’

 

Sometimes the artifice reveals itself too readily but it also builds tension and can be used very cleverly. I guess this feeds into the silent protagonist we see in games, the way you assume a template.

 

On the film side of things, you’ve got first-person films like Cloverfield and documentary film in general, which creates a highly subjective and engaging viewpoint. Cloverfield might well have been influenced by games but I still think there are lessons to be learnt from the film industry as a whole. I haven’t ploughed much thought into this part to be frank (probably shows).

 

The games that showcase or hint at the sort of purity in form that I’m after are those that offer a strong sense of agency. Early text adventures with multiple paths and outcomes have this, Gone Home (while the writing was sub-par) presented a scenario for you to go about at leisure and it allowed you to piece together the story. Journey represents to me something very pure in the medium. It is very self-contained and free-flowing, it isn’t a rush and ushers you through many moods. I’d love to see something as beautiful as that game but with more substance, something that is more substantial and delivers you a slightly more concrete story in a way that doesn’t seem artificial. None of these games ever take control away from you (in Journey instances of that are very minor and the camera never cuts to a place you aren’t in touching distance of). Also, these games are short but rich, and don’t insist on failure as a mechanic. There are no gameovers, they just go on in tandem with you.

 

Games that transition between gameplay and cut-scenes feel imperfect to me. No matter how smoothly the transitions get, something about them screams imperfection. They take control away from you, and the characters are suddenly put in action mode as soon as you’re in charge - you can only perform actions at a fraction of the level of complexity that you’ve just been forced to witness in the cut-scene, and a HUD has popped up to spoil the screen. There are also issues of agency in games like The Last of Us, which can be seen as strengths, but do not necessarily fit in with my fuzzy ‘vision’ of an alternative form (please don’t mistake me for a snob – I’m not one to turn my nose up at fantastic action/adventure games with elite cinematography and tense zombie stealth shizzle). I’ll quote myself from TLoU thread to illuminate a little about what I’m getting at:

 

HUDs are artificial because they don’t belong in the world. Samus’ visor is more acceptable as a HUD, a watch/phone display can be used as a menu if you really want, but standard HUDs… If you can feasibly get rid of them, super. HUDs remind me of directors who think they’re being clever by having something hit their camera during a film shot, like raindrops or cats. Unless it’s a comedy or something wacky, nothing should be hitting the camera. The camera isn’t supposed to be a physical object in the world, so don’t draw my attention to it. Derp.

 

 

‘I'm not sure why gamers feel entitled to multiple endings. In The Last of Us you're playing the character of Joel, and this is his story, it's conclusive and finite. I thought it was the perfect ending because it was surprising and thought-provoking. If we were given more than one ending we wouldn't be left with a character at all, because we'd assume responsibility - you can't project your own values onto Joel as he is clearly defined.

 

I wasn't comfortable when NaughtyDog shelved my volition in the last gameplay scene, but that's the point. It does raise a good question about agency in games and what it means to the story.

 

I won’t spoiler the moment in the game, but basically near the end you (as Joel) are forced to do something which you might not necessarily have thought of doing. But you aren’t Joel, so it’s this weird role-play grey-area, which is fine, and it was the best option available to NaughtyDog in that game, but it would be nice to side-step that grey-area as well. It’s certainly a worthwhile experience in itself.

 

So anyway, does the form I’m looking for, which grants maximum agency, or at least an immense feeling of it, require that the character/perspective be you/yours, or at least a faceless or undefined entity? Possibly. Sort of like a blueprint character in an RPG, like in Fallout 3 but without the bullshit modelling of your every facial contour and the ability to name yourself while you’re still only a newborn baby. Your choices here are your own and you aren’t making them to satisfy any predetermined set of criteria or characteristics.

 

Grant agency, avoid blatant artifice (as much as possible). A blank canvas, of sorts.

You are about to read a paragraph that is even flakier than those which preceded it.

 

At a base level with games there is always the ‘problem’ of people playing something and just running into a wall endlessly, or not being able to progress, which almost makes a mockery of the medium in an odd sort of way. People can, I suppose, fail to read books, which amounts to the same thing (let's not head into the Barthes death of the author schtick and the question of where authorship/control of meaning really resides within the text) and I suppose you could call inept player control a type of gaming illiteracy. I’m not advocating some sort of dumbing down of mechanics or a reduction in barriers to entry in the new form I’m hypothesizing, but rather a form of game that can just flow on indefinitely and be foolproof, free from the possibility of being tainted. This objective is probably less important in the grand scheme of things but you see what I’m getting at, with any luck.

 

The following concept might not be that useful but it might shed some light on this elusive gaming ‘form’, a form that represents purity and agency in the medium. You are a disembodied spirit. You can drift around, invisible, wherever you please. You are positioned at the outskirts of what I’d call a small but incredibly detailed sandbox. Imagine a few meadows, a couple of barns, a house, and a few human characters. There is a defined story to the world, but only in so far as you discover it or perceive it. You need to be present in order to hear the characters, but if you’re in one place, you won’t be able to hear what is going on elsewhere, or see what is happening. I guess the closest thing to this would be, weirdly, something like Hitman: Absolution, where you’re presented with scenarios that unfold in real time whether you participate or not (at least, that’s the impression the gameplay trailers give off – there are probably trigger points when you reach certain rooms/areas etc which initiate situations). The difference here being that in my game you don’t suddenly scatter the characters or interrupt the scene by shooting someone or getting spotted. In the meadows, your impact is only ever intangible. There aren’t any button prompts which tell you how you will interact with objects, instead you just have a single controller command that lets you imbue nearby objects with energy, depending how long you hold it for (this is sounding like a cross between Flower and Journey but with human characters, I realise). Imagine a theatre production where you have an audience situated either side of the stage and that, because of the objects and visual obstacles on the stage, each crowd sees something different – e.g. one side can see that a character is carrying a gun behind their back, but the other side can’t – which changes the dynamic or the truth of the story. That is happening in the game constantly, in the meadows, depending where you are. You have to be present in different parts of this small realm at different times to build a picture of what is happening to the family, and you will care about the family because the writing is good, and it is ordinary and truthful and thus beautiful but also extremely sad because the characters die at the end of every cycle before you’re put back to square one. If only you could explore more thoroughly and find out why it has to be that way, and find out if you have any part in the family’s end. And then - when you do identify the cause, instead of the family dying and the screen fading into black, with you respawning to uncover more about the world – time whizzes by centuries at a time before you, and the realm opens up, there is nothing left of the civilization and you are suddenly free to leave the former mini sandbox and soar into a procedurally generated universe a la No Man’s Sky.

 

Yeah, the last bit is definitely not relevant. Oh well. There is a picture. I wouldn’t want it to be a Dear Esther, or just a story in which you take the role of a spiritual director. It would celebrate itself as a game, but also be closeted. Can games capture the ordinary and be interesting, or is it that not desirable or possible? Is agency as important as I’m making out? Maybe we just need better writing.

 

///

 

A slew of mutating ideas, I confess. Not a pioneering article by any means. But a possible jumping off point for discussion, research etc. I feel like there is a breakthrough yet to be made in the medium. There will come a time when games aren’t ignored and dismissed.

 

P.S I remember finding this interesting (Ken Levine also talks entertainingly on the subject)

Edit - shit, Cloverfield comes up in this video... Maybe I've just been plagiarising, rehashing and bodging everything they talk about without realising it:

 

Edited July 14, 2014 by dwarf

[The Bard]

@dwarf gourami

 

Lots of great ideas, I can't even keep them all in my head at once so I'm just going to respond to some at random. Also it's weird how I think in almost the exact same terminology.

I like that you use the distinction between texts that present their morality in a didactic way where you'll have an expository passage and then an authorial passage doing the interpretive work for you, with texts in which there's an interpretive flexibility, so any conclusions you come to are the result of the way in which narrative events have been arranged, as a jumping off point to talk about videogames. That's not to say that there aren't examples of the first kind that aren't good pieces of literature, but I feel as if anything that's explicitly didactic also tends to be inert because its conclusions are immediately given instead of interpretively acquired. Which is also completely the sense I get from games that don't try to find a native narrative voice for the medium and instead rely on this already given melange of elements taken from film, or book or other linear media. By that I mean specifically cut scenes, or games where you have to pause to read a codex entry to explain something about the world to you. In contrast to those kinds of games I feel like you have, closer to what you (I think) are looking towards, which is stuff like Half Life 2, where agency is never taken away from you, but narrative events are pieces of environmental storytelling that are triggered by you walking in the room, and which you don't have the ability to affect. The silent protagonist aspects have a part in it too; Gordon doesn't have anything to say, any feelings to share about the events that occur, but he's constantly interrogated by his surrounded cast, emotions are conferred upon him, antagonists question his motives ("Tell me, Dr. Freeman, if you can. You have destroyed so much. What is it, exactly, that you have created? Can you name even one thing? I thought not"), and all of it is pretty much done with the tacit admission on the part of the authorial voice, that yes, Gordon is a cipher being invested with the agency of the player for whom this experience is unfolding. Of course, HL2 isn't exactly what you'd call a “pure” narrative experience – in order for it to work, you're disallowed from exercising the very agency the rest of the game inculcates; you can't shoot a narrative participant in the head, for example.

 

There are two types of storytelling that I feel games have the potential to do well. One is observational, almost theatrical storytelling like you were talking about; something is happening in the environment, and like a sculpture, you have the ability to apprehend it from a variety of angles, without being able to participate in it. The other is systemic, emergent storytelling, the sort that comes out of you doing something that is accommodated by the system of rules the game's set up, and was just you responding to a situation that occurred, within the spectrum of agency conferred on you. Like, I don't know, riding a bike down a hill in BF4, using the crest on the other side as a launching pad, and rocket launching a helicopter. Unscripted things that happen. I sort of think systemic storytelling has the opportunity to be the equivalent of poetry to videogames, where the storytellers take one simple theme or idea, and try to express it as a system of mechanical rules.

 

Your final idea, wondering if games can pull off addressing mundane aspects of life, well you get one type of answer just in the profusion of military shooters, and other types of extreme, over the top experiences that “gamers,” seem to want. And I'm pretty sure that's a result of the lack of artistic sophistication of the medium, and its inability to properly embed you in the world that you supposedly have agency in. The strange thing is that when you talk about the artistic constraints of a medium, you don't normally have to consider technological constraints in the way you have to with games (or not as much – you could make the argument that Cloverfield, for example, is a narrative experience that couldn't have been pulled off in the sixties). I just think that there are aspects of the way our brains are organised, that were always going to feel a sense of emotional detachment from videogame worlds, specifically because it does try to make us think we're actually embedded in them. But in order for that to be convincing, there's a whole spectrum of cognitive elements aside from the visual that are detached from the experience. Maybe virtual reality will the qualitative difference that'll allow us to experience mundane situations, where our depth perception, sense of balance and environmental sound are all synchronised, making us feel engaged without the need to have extreme shit happening on screen all the time.

 

[dwarf]

@The Bard

 

I should really be using words like 'didactic' (and 'readerly'/'writerly' would've been useful there too, good ol' Roland (I hate him)) considering I'm a soon-to-be final year student. I blame having only taken English for one year (missed a year by transferring from Economics) and only really trying in the second semester. Gah.

 

The codex thing is exactly it. A great deal of the time the information is simply a given and is sourced from nowhere, or it is delivered in a contrived fashion. And it's something most games don't even care about - as you say games often just subsume filmic apparatuses as if they function exactly the same in both mediums. The games deny anything is amiss with their approach.

 

Half-Life was superb, but so few developers can match Valve's pool of talent. There is obviously a gap between the desire for a purer form of game, and the ability to code it. For example, as is demonstrated in that video, characters address you and speak to you in a normal conversation in Half-Life even when you're dicking around on the other side of the room. Now, to do that is foolish of the player to an extent, but at the same time, the player shouldn't be restricted from doing that if that is the form the game is using. When I played Half-Life, I made sure I was a polite Gordon who would stand to at every cue and pay attention to all conversations and story moments, but even so, there was always the niggling feeling that, were I to piss off, the characters would still go through the same motions without me. That game doesn't treat you as if you are real, in other words. Now, Valve coders, if they were suicidal, could have spent ages programming NPC responses to players who fucked around. NPCs could bark at you to be more polite, grow animated if you threw something at them, ad infinitum, but it would be painstaking, laborious, and it wouldn't be worthwhile. No matter how many responses the world had for your transgression, it would still be imperfect. Besides, the developer commentary run-throughs you could play in The Orange Box showed how much thought went into the design of the game. Fascinating and mind-bending. The general player comes across as some enormously fallible tit in need of permanent care.

 

The Half-Life form can't help but be imperfect. Yet, it is preferable to cut-scenes.

 

The most effective moment in Half-Life 2 Ep.2 (mostly due to the nuts-and-bolts narrative rather than because of the form, I'll admit) is the ending when you are pinned against the wall and you're forced to observe the unfolding horror. Not sure if that reveals anything about this case.

Edited July 14, 2014 by dwarf

[The Bard]

True.

 

I can't believe they're still teaching Barthes. But take a look at the Valve developer commentaries, and you can see that they're very consciously trying to develop a "syntagm," of play in the same way that Barthes talked about trying to find the rules of narrative grammar. Games are so complicated that I feel as if you kind of need to have some sort of reductionist framework set out, that describes how to make narrative work in games because without it we're going to keep getting Call of Duty single player campaigns out the fucking wazoo.

[Goafer]

I applied to contribute photos to iStock and I got accepted.

 

It's probably not all that difficult to get accepted, but they certainly make it seem like a big deal. I had to read about 10-20 pages of terms, conditions and image suitability rules and then take a 20 question test. I then had to submit 3 photos so they could check the quality of my work.

 

Really glad I got accepted, as I really couldn't be arsed to apply again.

[dwarf]

Was really pissed off at missing out on an opportunity to take a sick module on beat writing this year. Spaces filled up too quickly so I asked the course administrator to put me on a waiting list, half-knowing they never amount to anything.

 

As it transpired, some douchebag decided to drop the module AND I NABBED THAT BITCH, DIDN' III?

 

 

 

You should come to the meet. This August. :awesome:

 

Details?

[Sheikah]

 

Details?

 

The annual N-E meet this year is in London again (Hyde Park) on Sat 23rd August, here's a link to the topic. Turnout looks pretty good and I bet it'll be just as fun as last year. You should come!

[The Bard]

Last year was the first year since the meets started that I didn't come. Going to make it count double this time.

[Ashley]

Which means everyone will be as drunk as Bard in order to see double.

[dwarf]

I'd definitely be a bit sheepish.

 

Will see how the money situation is looking closer to the time.