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...

Captain Kirk and I have a date tonight. We’re meeting at a cemetery in Hollywood a little after sunset. Picard, Janeway, Sisko and Archer will be joining us, along with Kirk-2.0 (Chris Pine) under the Milky Way and on top of dimmed stars, to raise our Romunlan Ale and celebrate The Captains, an Original Documentary produced and directed by William Shatner. Sure, Kirk will be about 30 feet tall, and our conversation will mostly be him monologuing, but for me, it will be a dream come true. Thanks to infinite reruns, Kirk was my first nerd crush. Long before Dr. Who or Prince, Captain Kirk strutted across my 20” TV screen and into my pre-teen heart. During my dateless teens, the cocky space traveler was my Midnight date on quiet Saturdays. Since my parent’s bedroom was only 20 feet from the TV, the volume would be almost inaudible. Kirk’s swagger shouted over the whispering crew, loudly powerful and not so subtly sexual. Before I even knew what ‘sexy’ meant, I knew that Kirk embodied it. I would pretend to be the green painted alien or Yeoman Rand, bewildered at the power the Captain held over me. Resistance was futile, long before the Borg came into the picture. Each Captain who came after Kirk had their own, whole different kind of sexy. But none quite equaled Bill Shatner. I’ll admit to having a nerdy-fit before I saw J.J. Abrams’ reboot of the Star Trek legend. He was re-writing how Kirk and Spock met, he was using this pretty Hollywood actor who said he was happy to be in “Star Wars” during an interview. Clearly J.J. didn’t understand the love of the geeks! Of course I took all that back when I actually saw the movie. I...