Jordan sent me this, joking that it's only when he's on strike as a writer that he got to shoot and direct some A-list movie stars. Ha!

Hollywood has the last remaining powerful unions, I think, because they are stars and can capture the sympathy of the nation. I would love to see a similar model of residual revenue for the game industry....but I don't know that a union is really the answer. If game designers went on strike, would anyone care? Besides us, I mean. :)

And I mean that in the best possible sense, that he is manly. At his talk on Tuesday he gave a brief most-mortem in which he basically apologized for Blacksite. I wasn't there, but I heard about it through friends.

I think this is incredibly brave of him. It's very unusual to have this level of frankness from a creative director about a game. But I appreciate the honesty and the attempt to provide some transparency to game development. Sometimes projects don't go as planned. ...Sometimes, they don't even get planned properly. Harvey was brought into Blacksite really late to, basically, rescue it. All summer and most of the fall this year he was personally staying up to 3 am to go in and fix code and track bugs. He cared about the game and poured his energy into it.

It's like my friend Ryan always says: the line between a bad film and a good on is a razor's edge. So much can go wrong to turn a good film bad. I wonder if the line is even thinner in games.

In any case, I think Harvey is so articulate and personable and talented that he'll weather this and go on to something even better. Because he's the man.

I didn't get to see a great many sessions yesterday because I had a string of interviews to do but the four that I got to catch revealed a couple of interesting common themes. First is the notion that we are now mature gamers and we want deeper, more meaningful play experiences. Clint brought this up in his panel, Jon Blow talked about this in his awesomely inspiring and challenging keynote, Ben Sawyer lamented the lack of playable, shareable games for small children, and Koizumi Yoshiaki spoke about the need for a game that would be simple and fun for the whole family in his talk on Super Mario Galaxy.

It's true. We're not kids anymore. The power fantasies and the simplistic good versus evil tales which pleased us back when we were kids awed by Star Wars are still good fun, but we want something more complex now, maybe more challenging, more Citizen Kane and Chinatown and Breathless than Transformers or Die Hard.

I also realized something else, listening to Jon Blow's excellent critique of why Bioshock is manipulative schlock - he could put into words what I had intuitively felt about the game but wasn't able to express because I lacked the analytical tools. It also reminded me of Clint's really smart critique of the game. Why does it take game designers to provide actual critique of games in this manner? Because we don't have a real game studies department, we don't have writers who are training in formal analysis of game systems - the people who are most qualified to think about games in this way are people who are building systems and confronting systemic challenges constantly. I don't think it's necessary to have education to be able to talk about games as smartly as people like Jon and Clint do; but it would help. And I'm afraid that true game criticism will not come from game enthusiast press, which are essentially the modern equivalent of fanzines.

Well, more to think about.

This is hilarious: the NY Mag write up of the Wired profile of Doug Morris, CEO of Universal Music Group. (Thanks Ryan!)

We'd always assumed the labels had met with a team of technology experts in the late nineties and ignored their advice, but it turns out they never even got that far — they didn't even try! Understanding the Internet certainly isn't easy — especially for an industry run by a bunch of technology-averse sexagenarians — but it's definitely not impossible. The original Napster hit its peak in 1999 — kids born since then have hacked into CIA computers. Surely it wouldn't have taken someone at Universal more than a month or two to learn enough about the Internet to know who to call to answer a few questions. They didn't even have any geeky interns? We give this industry six months to live.

Ok, you know that I'm obsessed with Etsy.com. Here's a really great interview with the founder, Robert Kalin. He's got some great things to say about consumer culture, the nature of marketplaces, and how he raised money for Etsy. His comments about bringing community back to markets and how to reconnect consumers to products are really insightful.

Haha! This is awesome. Snippets:

Are you playing on your brother’s/boyfriend’s account?
Well clearly it’s not my own. Everybody knows girls don’t play video games and thus don’t have their own accounts. I don’t even think Microsoft lets females purchase their own accounts actually. I think I read that in the fine print somewhere.

Shouldn’t you be playing Barbie Horse Adventures?
I’ve already beaten it over 10 times. I rock at that game! Just every once in a while I need a break from it.

How old are you? Where do you live? Do you have a MySpace page?
I will share all of that information with you as long as you promise to stalk me. Frequently.

Just got Rock Band. Yay!

But I have a question for those folks who have been playing it longer. Are the instruments locked to each character? So in other words if I have been drumming as "Jane" do I really have to create a new character to sing or play guitar? I can't just switch instruments?

No love for multi-instrumentalists? :(

Okay, back to Rock Band practice. More later.

Awesome jewelry made from recycled vinyl records! My favorite are the necklace and earrings.

So cute!

(Found over at MissMalaprop.com.)

Stories like this make me so sad. Soldiers serve in the war when they're still so young, they experience horrible things, and then they fall apart, and fall through the cracks. This man may not even get help if he's court-martialed for desertion.

Recently there surfaced an appalling comic about Jade Raymond that I will not link to. And there have been equally appalling forum threads saying, essentially, that she deserved it. I won't link to those either.

Jade Raymond is for real. She is fucking smart. She earned her job. And frankly, Ubisoft should be grateful to have her, and they don't deserve her. Because they unfairly pushed her image as part of the marketing of Assassin's Creed. I'm sure that they are as horrified as anyone at the backlash. But they also are guilty of exploiting a genetic accident that made Jade a beautiful woman in the games industry.

It is dangerous to be a beautiful woman in the games industry. Oh, it's difficult to be a woman, period. But if you also happen to be attractive, you are doubly cursed. On the one hand, yes, when you're at a conference where you are among a handful of women, you are remembered, and that is advantageous. But for every break you may get for being female and attractive you get a chorus of voices telling you that you don't deserve it because, well, you are attractive, and obviously you can't possibly have gotten where you are without seducing men along the way. And I am devastated to say that sometimes joining in those voices are other women.

And then on the other hand you have groups that want to use you because you are beautiful - whether its the marketing machine, PR, the press - it's all a form of exploitation, honestly. And while men like Cliffy B and Will Wright are also pimped out to move product, they don't suffer from quite the same sexually tinged commentary that comes with being the female spokesperson for a product.

It's disgusting. And distressing. And depressing.

The punishment for being a beautiful woman in this industry is to be called vile names, "incompetent slut" being the mildest of insults. I suspect that most women in the business have experienced some form of this irrational hatred.

So what to do about it? I go back and forth between being so white-hot with fury that my hands shake and my breath comes in gasps, to thinking, fine, don't give those reprehensible troglodytes the satisfaction of having made me - made us - angry.

But it's wrong. Of course it's wrong. And it's all nastily tied up with sexism, with the nature of celebrity, the cowardly losers on the internet, and exploitative marketing practices that have always sold products by slapping a pretty face - real or digital - on the game boxes. And part of me wants also to speak out against that.

I don't have an answer. I can be suspicious of Ubisoft's motives, but after all, they are just trying to sell product, just like everyone else. And I can also be disappointed that the press chooses to focus on Jade Raymond and feature her face prominently on pictorials not because they are interested in promoting women in games, but because they want to sell magazines or adspace on websites. What I don't understand is why the supposed fans of games react so vilely to the notion that a woman - a very pretty woman - has helped to create what may be one of the biggest games of the year.

Are they so small that they are threatened by this? Do they really think that a woman could have gotten to the kind of position that Jade achieved simply on her clear skin tone and nice figure? Do they really think that the executives behind the games they supposedly love are so moronic to allow that to happen?

And yes, I do call out Ubisoft on this, on some level. They are behind the Frag Dolls, an enterprise that I still don't find completely benign. And I think they over-promoted Jade's involvement in the game, pushing her to be the spokesperson and the frontwoman. All those pictorial spreads. The magazine cover. Who even knows what Patrice Desilets looks like? And he is the creative director on the game. Household names in gaming are very, very rare, and usually reserved for someone with the stature of Miyamoto or Will Wright - legendary icons with decades of experience. Can you name the producer of Halo 3? And yet that is another important game this season. This in no way discounts what Jade has done, but rather puts it into perspective -- isn't Ubisoft just a little disingenuous in trying to make her the face of their top game of the year?

But on the other hand, I'm eviscerated by the notion that we can't celebrate women's achievements in the game industry without encountering this sort of resistance, fueled also in part by a rabid fanbase that was as quick to idolize Jade's image as it was to tear her apart. And naturally as someone working on something she believed in she would want to stand up and be proud of her accomplishments. The price of fame is a pound of flesh.

This is a rant without much of an arc or, I'm sorry to say, any sort of conclusion. I think we're still working on that - I hope I am still helping to work on that. And that's all I wanted to say. Jade Raymond is for real. She is totally real. And her ascendant career is not going to be touched by gibbering idiots on message boards, because she is way bigger, and better, than they are.

Jennine has it spot on. :)

Should game titles be italicized?

I'd been trained by some press outlets not to italicize them; but lately I have been thinking we ought to treat them the same was as films, TV shows, and books. Makes sense, right?

So, if you listened to 1UP Yours last week you know I bitched about what Activision/Neversoft did to the female characters of Guitar Hero, especially Judy Nails, whom a lot of people loved to play for her brash, tomboyish punk look. Look at them side by side now: Judy Nails 2, totally fierce! Judy Nails 3, totally trashy! Totally slutty! Totally gross!

Ugh. Anyways, I have to admit that while I love playing the Guitar Hero series, I have never really listened to heavy metal or classic rock, so none of those dudes were really my personal guitar heroes. Slash? Carlos fucking Santana? WTF? Who cares? When I was learning guitar back, oh, a decade or so ago, I was inspired by my own heroes - and heroines, because frankly, the whole Guitar Hero series is missing some serious diversity there. Most of the musicians I swooned over as role models are women. And some day when we can import our own music to play along to, these are the musicians whose tracks I will import and play my heart out for. Keep on rocking in the free world!

Ok, so they're not the greatest musicians ever...but, I don't know that I have ever been proud of my alma mater's football-related shenanigans before. OMG. Band geeks are the best. I never thought I would actually say this but... GO BEARS!

I'm a little obsessed with the DIY marketplace Etsy.com right now, and especially with their elegant little application that lets you browse by color. It's pretty useless for actually finding anything but it's really beautiful as a way to organize photos and data. Click on colors, pull up the photos, move them around, zoom in - it's very nicely conceived! Now if I could only find that perfect citrine necklace....

How scandalous! It's good to see this kind of writing about the games industry again - I think i helps keep us all on our toes.

Everything she's saying here confirms what other insiders have mentioned to me over the past couple of years, by the way. So... that's just a little more context for you.

This is why I buy all my games through Amazon.com. I can't remember the last time I set foot in a GameStop.

Well, this is neat. Thanks to collaboration with the game producer and Freezepop band member Kasson Crooker, my band Dealership has a demo track in Harmonix's new beat-matching game for iPod, Phase.

The song they used is the unreleased track Dots and Dashes, from our upcoming (I swear!) album, The Future is Far Away. Since the game is about following dots and dashes it seems kind of appropriate, no? Anyway the neat part of the game is that you can play along to any of your playlist - our song, along with some other indie bands' tracks, are in the demo portion. We'll be releasing just this track on iTunes soon, too.

Thanks, Kasson, and thanks, Alex!

Röxör is the name of the EVE-Online dev band. The night before they performed at the Fanfest, the lead singer was so ill he could barely speak. I somehow got caught up in the band practice, which happened in guitarist Runar Thorarinsson's garage. We made do without a lead singer and it was really, really fun.

I was invited to go to Reykjavik for the annual EVE-Online Fanfest. Okay, I'll admit right now that I am not an EVE-Online fan: I find it too cold in space. But the community really intrigues me, as does the company that creates the game, CCP. And how often do I get a chance to go to Iceland? Not often enough! MORE...