The only video game I’ve played in ten years is Madden [Seahawks!] so the new Xbox reveal means very little to me. However, I know I’m in the minority on this one so the LA Times is thankfully picking up the slack: 10:02 a.m.: Microsoft launched its event with a video full of grand pronouncements from A-listers such as Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams, as the company promised that “for the first time you and your TV are going to have a relationship.” The new Xbox will set “your imagination free,” Spielberg said. After the video, Microsoft exec Don Mattrick took the stage and said a few words that will likely disappoint all gamers tuning in today, noting that at E3 the company will reveal what’s next for Xbox 360 when it comes to games. People already have more intimate relationships with their televisions than most of their friends but I digress. You can follow the action here. Feature Image Credit: LA...

First of all, what is a First Person Shooter? It is a game in first person (as in, you are the camera, like in a movie where you see a shot of someone running through the forest from their POV), and it involves them shooting. So you have a camera POV and usually a gun is in that view somewhere. Oh and one more thing: Because the core audience of FPS games are young boys who grow up to make more games for their childhood selves, the top sellers are almost always about aliens and/or space marines. Some day we will look back nostalgically at the alien/space marine era of subject matter in the way film people look back at the day when you went to the theatre to see a train coming at the screen. But we’re not at that day yet. You may see a flying car first. That being said, at our current level of technology, FPS’s are a very fun, proven game type that we’ve gotten really good at making. That is tempting to a lot of game designers to want to join the fray. But I’m about to rant a little bit about why you may not want to do that, if you want to succeed. So here we go…Take my mostly unresearched stats with a grain of salt. Your 1.0 can’t compete with their 3.1 A lot of us game developers have worked at studios that had goals of competing with Halo and beating it. Here’s why this is a bad idea: 1.  Game schedules are notoriously unrealistic, even if you had a crap load of money. The only way you can compete with the polish, the fun, and the scope of a Call of Duty or Halo,...

A lot of F and N readers are from film and literary nerdship, so here comes a little helping of cross-cultural columnizing. Games and Movies have shared a sort of awfully awkward sisterhood since the early eighties. We could talk about their first public spat when the ET movie became a classic and…the ET game famously infamously found its way into a landfill somewhere in the desert, because so many units of it were un-bought, returned, and generally avoided. Games and movies made a lukewarm truce when James Bond’s Goldeneye became a hit, and hence the poster child for why to make a movie-based game, “we really should make a game for Comic Book Movie 19, remember Goldeneye? It was good.” Or we could talk about all those Uwe Boll Movies… But we aren’t doing that today. Today we’re gonna over-simplify a really complicated thing. The question that most film people ask me:  What’s the difference between making a movie and making a game? You know I hate when people ask that. How do games get greenlit? The super duper simplified version. Just like the pictures, there are lots of types of games that all have different money paths. There’s a term in the industry called a AAA (“Triple A”, like the roadside towing thing) game. I’ve seen game designers debate this over hot pockets in the studio kitchen for hours on end, so let’s keep it simple; it’s the game version of a blockbuster. It’s a big budget game. Things go boom. Pretty vistas. Lots of other things that costs millions of dollars. These type of games are usually rained down from biz/marketing of a publisher. I said usually. (Please game friends, don’t email me about Valve.)  Publishers are the gods of this...

Designing Gamer Interview Series: Life of a Game Designer Today I sat down with designer Danny Bulla. Danny Bulla cut his teeth at Full Sail University’s Game Design and Development program. Upon graduation, he teleported to the deep heart of Texas to work at Midway Austin on titles like Blacksite: Area 51. He then warp-zoned over to Rockstar San Diego to make a little game called Red Dead Redemption. After a couple years, he respawned at the legendary Bungie Studios in Seattle, WA. He and I worked together way back in the day and we became close friends. That happens a lot with game developers. In the midst of typically crazy hours at work, you see those people more than your spouse, your momma, the inside of your eyelids, etc.  Naturally,  I tried to pull those strings to get him to tell me some secrets of his current employer, the world-famous Bungie, creators of Halo. I know you’ve heard of that game, my non-gamer readers.  Keep reading to find out if we got the dirt. You were at Midway, you worked on Red Dead Redemption at Rockstar, and now you’re at Bungie. Are you at the point in your career where you feel like you’re pursuing a genre? No I really don’t think that’s true. I think to further yourself as a designer, you have to pursue genres you’ve never worked on. I think I still have time to learn a lot before I make that kind of decision. The cool thing is that new genres keep coming out now. It gives people like you and me more options. So in that vein, a lot of people in the audience may want to know what we do. A lot of people think we go in to...