To Meet the Devs Z - 1
<a name="fizzbang"></a>Fred "Fizzbang" Zeleny
Do you, or maybe your parents, come from former Czechoslovakia? Todays Czech (or Slovak) Republic?
My grandfather (or perhaps great grandfather, I forget) came from what is now the Czech Republic. I've never had the pleasure of visiting the old country, myself, but I hope to do so in the future. I've always heard good things, and Prague is in my personal list of cities that I need to visit at some point in my life.
Pie or cake?
Pumpkin pie, absolutely. The only cakes that can compete with its delicious perfection are cheesecake (real or metaphorical) and Cake.
Devs, will you play Fallout 3 after it is shipped?
Absolutely. It's always important to go back and appreciate (and critique) one's own work after the fact.
Nny or Squee?
The Bad Art Collection.
None of the devs seem to have answered whether they're polyglots...
Chyotto nihongo o hanasemasu kara sannen benkyou shimashita demo zenzen jyouzu jyanai. Spain-go mo.
(I'll let you try to unravel that one until later today.)
Meaning of Life or Life of Brian ?
I'll go with Life of Brian, because as much as I love MoL, I went to a catholic highschool, so LoB amuses me on many, many levels.
(And before anyone gets going on a religious tangent, I went there not for the faith, but because it was just the best school where I grew up)
Would you rather have a leg made out of sponge or ten tiny midgets following you everywhere making annoying jokes all the time (like repeating the last sound of all your sentences, ces )
I'll go with a leg made out of sponge, especially if it's not replacing one of the legs I already have.
I could put it on display with my heart of gold and my necklace made of teeth.
Any of you follow Lost? Have you seen the Season3 finale? What did you think of that HUGE cliffhanger?
I'm a big fan of it, and I think this season's finale (and the last six or so episodes in general) have really done a good job of revitalizing it after the first half of this season, when it was in pretty poor shape. In fact, now that Lost, Scrubs, Office, and Battlestar are all on break, I don't see any reason to use my TV for anything other than videogames until they're back.
Without any OMGSP0ILERZ, I'll just say that I liked the little format change in the presentation, and I think it's an interesting stylistic book-end and herald for the closing half of the show - I hope they keep it going for the remaining 48 episodes. Knowing that they've set an end-date for the show reassures me that they know where they're going with it all, and that makes me ever-more excited about putting the pieces together.
Man, I want to skip out of work to watch the finale again right now. But I'll just have to wait.
Don't get me wrong, video games can be amazing, visually beautiful, wonderfully written and involving, but books, at least in my oppinion, will always trump.
I hate to disagree with Megan's pseudo-twin, but... well, I respectfully disagree.
Where books let you explore a new world, interactive media can allow you to be a part of a new world and shape it as you see fit.
Videogames as a medium are still in their infancy, as books were when they were mere incunabula. The written word's been around as a medium for 500 years, while the interactive word's only been around for a handful of decades*.
(* This assumes you're referring to video games exclusively, rather than all forms of interactive storytelling, which traces its routes through oral storytelling traditions to before recorded history. Slowly but surely, videogames are drawing further on these traditions, and becoming richer for it, I feel. )
Books are amazing in their ability to engross and and inspire the mind, to depict vivid and personal characters and stories, and to let the reader create their own interpretations. But this need not be exclusive to books, and where a book can allow a reader to examine and interpret them, interactive media has the potential to allow a player to do this *and* to create their own characters and stories, complete with their own thematic interpretations. And this is before you open up the worlds of social possibilities of multiplayer and online games.
The progress towards this potential is slow, of course, but there are luminary examples that show the potential of the medium. Psychonauts allows you to delve into a character's psyche in a deeper (and more literal!) way than most books on the best-seller list. Fallout provides as many different interpretations and explorations as any complex philosophical treatise. The Sims allows a character to be a god in the lives of their characters, and Spore looks to widen that creative freedom for players. Rivalries and alliances formed through play of Starcraft or World of Warcraft have influenced some great and terrible real-world actions. And games like McGonigal's World Without Oil further expand the medium and promise real-world benefits and revelations that may one day rival the rewards of any written book.
So, while I love and respect books and would never give them up, I feel that interactive media has a tremendous bounty that can yet be attained. And I'm proud to be a part of reaching for that potential, even if I'm only a small player in this great exploration.
<a name="fizzbang"></a>Fred "Fizzbang" Zeleny
Do you, or maybe your parents, come from former Czechoslovakia? Todays Czech (or Slovak) Republic?
My grandfather (or perhaps great grandfather, I forget) came from what is now the Czech Republic. I've never had the pleasure of visiting the old country, myself, but I hope to do so in the future. I've always heard good things, and Prague is in my personal list of cities that I need to visit at some point in my life.
Pie or cake?
Pumpkin pie, absolutely. The only cakes that can compete with its delicious perfection are cheesecake (real or metaphorical) and Cake.
Devs, will you play Fallout 3 after it is shipped?
Absolutely. It's always important to go back and appreciate (and critique) one's own work after the fact.
Nny or Squee?
The Bad Art Collection.
None of the devs seem to have answered whether they're polyglots...
Chyotto nihongo o hanasemasu kara sannen benkyou shimashita demo zenzen jyouzu jyanai. Spain-go mo.
(I'll let you try to unravel that one until later today.)
Meaning of Life or Life of Brian ?
I'll go with Life of Brian, because as much as I love MoL, I went to a catholic highschool, so LoB amuses me on many, many levels.
(And before anyone gets going on a religious tangent, I went there not for the faith, but because it was just the best school where I grew up)
Would you rather have a leg made out of sponge or ten tiny midgets following you everywhere making annoying jokes all the time (like repeating the last sound of all your sentences, ces )
I'll go with a leg made out of sponge, especially if it's not replacing one of the legs I already have.
I could put it on display with my heart of gold and my necklace made of teeth.
Any of you follow Lost? Have you seen the Season3 finale? What did you think of that HUGE cliffhanger?
I'm a big fan of it, and I think this season's finale (and the last six or so episodes in general) have really done a good job of revitalizing it after the first half of this season, when it was in pretty poor shape. In fact, now that Lost, Scrubs, Office, and Battlestar are all on break, I don't see any reason to use my TV for anything other than videogames until they're back.
Without any OMGSP0ILERZ, I'll just say that I liked the little format change in the presentation, and I think it's an interesting stylistic book-end and herald for the closing half of the show - I hope they keep it going for the remaining 48 episodes. Knowing that they've set an end-date for the show reassures me that they know where they're going with it all, and that makes me ever-more excited about putting the pieces together.
Man, I want to skip out of work to watch the finale again right now. But I'll just have to wait.
Don't get me wrong, video games can be amazing, visually beautiful, wonderfully written and involving, but books, at least in my oppinion, will always trump.
I hate to disagree with Megan's pseudo-twin, but... well, I respectfully disagree.
Where books let you explore a new world, interactive media can allow you to be a part of a new world and shape it as you see fit.
Videogames as a medium are still in their infancy, as books were when they were mere incunabula. The written word's been around as a medium for 500 years, while the interactive word's only been around for a handful of decades*.
(* This assumes you're referring to video games exclusively, rather than all forms of interactive storytelling, which traces its routes through oral storytelling traditions to before recorded history. Slowly but surely, videogames are drawing further on these traditions, and becoming richer for it, I feel. )
Books are amazing in their ability to engross and and inspire the mind, to depict vivid and personal characters and stories, and to let the reader create their own interpretations. But this need not be exclusive to books, and where a book can allow a reader to examine and interpret them, interactive media has the potential to allow a player to do this *and* to create their own characters and stories, complete with their own thematic interpretations. And this is before you open up the worlds of social possibilities of multiplayer and online games.
The progress towards this potential is slow, of course, but there are luminary examples that show the potential of the medium. Psychonauts allows you to delve into a character's psyche in a deeper (and more literal!) way than most books on the best-seller list. Fallout provides as many different interpretations and explorations as any complex philosophical treatise. The Sims allows a character to be a god in the lives of their characters, and Spore looks to widen that creative freedom for players. Rivalries and alliances formed through play of Starcraft or World of Warcraft have influenced some great and terrible real-world actions. And games like McGonigal's World Without Oil further expand the medium and promise real-world benefits and revelations that may one day rival the rewards of any written book.
So, while I love and respect books and would never give them up, I feel that interactive media has a tremendous bounty that can yet be attained. And I'm proud to be a part of reaching for that potential, even if I'm only a small player in this great exploration.