You may have heard of rocket jumping in Quake before. These guys in the Tricking iT video make plain old rocket jumping seem so...mundane.

I can't decide what I'm most blown away by: the tricks, or the Matrix style editing/AfterFX/music. I'm almost hoping this is done through frame-by-frame emulation, because I'm not sure I want to live in a world where someone can be this much better at Quake3 than me. Granted, they've got god mode on, but still.

Hrm, copyright date at the end says this is from 2004, but I've never seen it before.

In about an hour I will leave to head to the airport to catch a flight to Seattle, and thence to Bellevue, home of the Penny Arcade Expo. It will be an amazing time. I know this, because last year was amazing. I expect to be even more amazed this year.

No small feature: the weather in Seattle is forecasted to be 81, 82 degrees this weekend.

Ryan and I will be working on The 1UP Show from there.

Now, here's the news part: this will be my last 1UP Show. I'm leaving Ziff to work at CMP, as Conference Manager for the GDC.

I'll be reporting to Jamil Moledina, the Executive Director of the GDC; I'll be working on a new unannounced conference, as well as helping to program tracks and sessions for the GDC proper, in March, which will be in San Francisco again this year.

It's odd to think about leaving a place like Ziff because here, I get to be creative every day; I got to basically make up a position for myself and fit myself into it. I got to create a show that became a flagship product for the video wing of Ziff. I got to write emails to the team saying "I'm not coming into the office today because I'll be at home working on the new theme song." I got to work with talented and humane people who cared deeply about what they are doing. I learned a bunch of new skills and I met a bunch of new people.

Thank you, Ziff, and it goes without saying that I'll miss you terribly. You really did become like family to me. Never have I worked anywhere that felt like home; never have I had coworkers whom I've universally liked. We had a lot of laughs, surely, and concocted some tasty memories.

And now, I'm leaving to do the same thing - to conquer a new challenge, to meet more people, to do something I've never done before, to make a product I can be proud of.

Life never stops, so why should I?

Anyway, I'll write more later - from sunny Seattle!

Don't you know who Jack Thompson is? He's not someone to deal with. He's not someone to give any more publicity to. He's not anyone that ought to be taken seriously. He needs to be discredited as the fraud and sensationalistic self-aggrandizer that he is.

I'm really disappointed that you'd invite him as a guest on Attack of the Show to talk about violence in videogames. He will cheapen and distort an issue that ought to be taken seriously. He will twist words, he will insult gamers, he will use the platform to make ugly, untrue accusations as he always does.

There's no winning against some people, so putting him on the show to hope to argue against him is futile. He, like Bill O'Reilly and other pundits who make careers of shouting loudly at other people, will avoid reasonable argument because he knows it will defeat him. He seeks merely to inflame passions. He freely makes up facts and lies when he does not have the information - or when he does, he twists it to suit his agenda. He is, in the most classical sense, a troll.

I'm disappointed, because putting someone like him on the show reveals that you really have lost respect for gamers and their intelligence. That said, the issue of videogame violence and how it may affect both children and adults - and our larger society - is a crucial issue that can be addressed by many, many other people besides the self-inflated Jack Thompson, including Dr. Walsh, head of The National Institute for Media and the Family, who believes essentially in the same philosophy as Thompson but refuses to employ the same dirty tactics. Or anyone from Common Sense Media, or the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, or indeed any of the hundreds of media watchdog and consumer advocacy groups who are concerned with the impact videogames have on children.

Moreover, why are two journalists (Adam Sessler and Mark Friedler, president of GameDaily Biz) asked to defend videogame violence? That is not our job. Our job is to report. The job of defense clearly belongs to an industry lobby group like the ESA. Why aren't they represented? Because they know better. The ESA has a policy of not responding to anything Jack Thompson says or does.

By the way, editors at Ziff Davis were asked to appear on the show as well. We declined.

Sometimes, you see shit in real life that just looks like it belongs in a video game.

This was one of those days.

Inspired by the lack of good poems about games, these writers have formed the Game Poet Society. Their ambitious goal is to post a new poem twice a week.

From the "about" page:

Fanfiction currently resides as the only popular method of extrapolating concepts from video games in a literary sense, and the differences between our poetry and fanfiction is something that we think needs to be noted here.

Where fanfiction almost exclusively consists of characters from video games portrayed in author-determined situations where the plot is most important, poetry focuses more intently on the method and tone with which the message is being delivered. A fanfiction will chronicle a character’s actions and hijinks in situations outside of the actual game, but the poem’s tendrils are capable of far more elaborate feats.

So, by now you've heard the announcement that E3's cancelled, and you're not invited back to the "new and improved" version. Everyone has their own theories and opinions on the matter, but what I'm not hearing (at least not in the sources I'm reading, anyway), is the speculation about the other game shows.

What about Leipzig? Most Americans probably don't know or care, but it's Europe's biggest game show, and it's open to the public. Officially open to the public. It's also five times larger than E3 (they're estimating 300,000 attendees this year, whereas E3 had about 60,000). Obviously, the "big four" can't go and say "this is the last Leipzig" before showing up, but I'd bet real money that we hear a cancellation announcement after it's over. After all, if they're out to save money, why would they cancel E3 and still do Leipzig?

Then there's the Tokyo Game Show, which has been rumored before to be on shaky ground. Sure, without the big American companies, the Tokyo show could go on, but if it was on shaky ground to begin with, wouldn't knocking out four pillars bring it to the ground?

I've heard some talk that "GDC is getting pretty big, though," or that some other show might "take over" the reigns, much as E3 did 12 years ago from the CES. However, I dont' see that as likely, as that would just require the same investment in a different convention hall.

No, the days of the big industry show are soon to be over.

If you haven't been to one of these big spectacle shows, now's the time to do it. You've still got two international shows left. What are you waiting for?

Derek makes a really interesting point in his (sensationalistically titled!) post, Will Wright=Jenna Jameson. He's not saying that Will's got a nice rack, but rather that Jenna's rack and Will's brain are analogous - they are very, very important in a specific industry while their marketability in another field is unknown.

When we think of "game developers", who do we think of? The Miyamotos and the David Jaffes of the world, the Will Wrights, the superstars who make a salary way above the reach of the rank and file game developer. We tend to assume (or at least, I did) that game developers must be highly paid because their skills are so specific. But the reality is, as the popularity contests like Ten Hottest Guys in Games show, people are hard-pressed to name even ten developers, let alone know what they look like or understand what they do.

How many porn movies have you seen? Five? Ten? A couple hundred? How many porn stars can you name? I bet it's a fraction of the number of films you've seen. Derek has a point - it's a pyramid, but on the other hand, doesn't that exist at a lot of companies? Derek's real point is that game design and development, like porn, is not a transferrable skill. You can't walk into IBM or Oracle with intimate knowledge of the combat systems of God of War 2 and expect to get a job at the same level you were at. And when you leave, as many game developers know, there are kids lined up right behind you who will do your job for less.

There's always a prettier, younger girl who will shove you down the stairs and out of her way.