Cross-posted fromhttp://delsyn.wordpress.com/The Angry Bear

My first piece for Gamasutra, "Dungeons and Dragons Online: Switching Gears",just went up. As tough as it was to write, there's nothing i like better than delving into the guts of the game industry and figuring out what makes this stuff tick. DDO is a ****c example of a game hurt not so much by what was on the screen (I reviewed it over at GameSpy and while it was good then, it's gotten much better) but by the decision about what business model to put on it. It's amazing how sometimes the littlest thing can help or hurt a game — being in the right place at the right time, having a celebrity admit that they're a fan, putting the wrong artwork on the box… The bottom line, as with the movies, is that nobody really knows anything before a title launches. It's a lot of educated guesses and soothsaying. You can be smart and reduce the risk, but ultimately it's still a roll of the dice. Are you listening, Mr. Kotick?

In the mean time, I was once again impressed at the passion that goes into the people who work in the gaming industry. I'm not just talking about designers or producers like Fernando Paiz but also PR people like Adam Mersky and Atlus Online's Jaime Ortiz (who a business operations guy) struck me while talking to them as people who love what they do. It may be because this is still a relatively young and small industry where the first generation of pioneers is still around even as the third generation of money-men and MBA try to corporatize it, so enjoy it while it lasts. It's not often you get to be present at the settling of a new frontier and this is a time in gaming that will never come again.

Hey! I just got an idea for this week's Angry Bear column!

Read the story here: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4136/dungeons__dragons_online_.phpat Gamasutra.

This entry: http://delsyn.wordpress.com/2009/09/17/words-of-praise-for-president-obama/

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Anyone whose read this blog knows that I'm not really a fan of our President's policies. I swore when he was elected however, that I would never descend to the level of vitriol that was directed at President Bush when he was in office. As with Mr. Bush, I would defend and support Obama when I thought he was right, and I would criticize him when I thought he was wrong. I do not hate Obama. I do not love him. I judge him. He's my President and that's my right and my duty as a citizen. So it is that I'd like to praise the President for his signature on the execute/capture order for Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,550100,00.html) one of 4 co-conspirators wanted in the 2002 bombing of an Israel-owned hotel in Mombasa, Kenya. Nabhan is by any stretch of the imagination a bad man and the world is better without his presence.

It would be really easy for President Obama to back off our commitment to Afghanistan. The anti-war left, quiet for these past few months, is beginning to make some noises again, joined by jackasses on the right (I'm looking at you George Will) eager to pull out of Afghanistan because it will make Obama look bad. That is a huge mistake. I'm never eager for our country to enter a war and I'm willing to concede that Iraq may have been a mistake, but as far as I'm concerned, once boots are on the ground, the war must be brought to a successful conclusion. To paraphrase Ender Wiggin, it isn't just winning the battle, it's winning so decisively that future battles never happen. I say this with the full awareness that my support means people - Americans, Afghans and Iraqis - will die because of it. I hate that. I don't want anybody to be killed. What I hate more though is the idea of emboldening America's enemies into yet more attacks by becoming a paper tiger. We still haven't recovered from President Carter's disastrous attempt to rescue the hostages in Iran in 1979. Sometimes life doesn't give us pretty choices.

I hope President Obama has the courage to do what needs to be done in both Iraq and Afghanistan. I don't want him to "fail" any more than I wanted President Bush to fail us in the myriad ways he did (did the man not know he had a veto pen?). A liberal friend asked me after Obama's election "how I was taking it," as if politics were some sort of team sport. Well it is, only we're all supposed to be on the same side, America's. I was fine with Obama being elected, that's the nature of the system. If he fulfills the greatest hopes of his admirers, I'd be happy to vote for his re-election, though that's looking like a real long-shot at this point. In the mean time, when I agree with Obama, I'll give him his props.

Good on you, Mr. President! Keep it up.

http://delsyn.wordpress.com/2009/09/15/can-a-critic-be-biased/
Check out the rest of The Angry Bear at http://delsyn.wordpress.com
I really like A.O. Scott, the film critic for The New York Times. He's smart, usually on target and manages to do it without picking up the obnoxious "I'm so much more sophisticated than you" tone that seems to creep into most of the Times writing. Probably comes from being a veteran of Newsday, the big Long Island newspaper. Speaking from experience, Long Islanders never quite get over their awe at being in "The City." Here's the thing, though. I'm about to accuse Mr. Scott of being biased - yes, a biased critic - because of his review of "The Baader-Meinhof Complex" on the latest episode of At The Movies. According to Mr. Scott, this is a film that takes a middle road in its portrayal of the 1970s German terrorist organization.
According to Mr Scott (and I'm paraphrasing from memory here as the show's not up on the offical site yet) the film doesn't ask you to sympathize with them and doesn't shy away from showing the consequences of their actions but also gives insight into their motivations as a bunch of idealistic kids trying to make a better world. While this already sounds like the words of an apologist for Baader-Meinhof excusing mayhem and murder because their motivations were pure, what really puts his comments beyond the line for me is when he later wonders why Hollywood can't create political movies that portray controversial topics with the kind of passionate intesity on display in this film. He surmises that Hollywood is "so afraid of offending its audience that they won't take a stand on issue." (again paraphrasing)
Excuse me? Has he seen the output of Hollywood in recent years? Never mind the list of anti-Iraq war movies as long as your arm. There are liberal jibes, commentary and messages in virtually everything put out by Hollywood. And they're often in the places where you'd least expect them and where they're the least appropriate. Take Definitely, Maybe, a treacly little romantic comedy starring Ryan Reynolds and Abigail Breslin. This is a film where the main character is made a political consultant (a Democratic political consultant, natch) stricly for the purpose of becoming a mouthpiece for the director and writer's liberal political views. In one scene for example, Reynolds expresses shock and outrage that a woman he's interested in isn't a Bill Clinton supporter (a man well known for how well he treats women) or at least a Democrat! There's also one scene that has nothing whatsoever to do with the movie and exists solely to take a potshot at George W. Bush. The idea that Hollywood is somehow afraid to offend half it's audience flies in the face of the reality that that's exactly what Hollywood does - continually. To the point where they continued to make anti-Iraq war movies depite their box office failures and continued to come up with desperate rationalizations about why they kept failing.

Now I don't expect critics to adhere to some sort of nonsense about being "objective." They're critics, after all. Their whole existence is based on them having opinions which are, of course influenced by their biases –including their political ones. This is not my objection. One of my favorite film critics, MaryAnn Johanson over at The Flick Filosopher is an outspoken liberal, something that comes across quite often in her film reviews. Roger Ebert, who I also enjoy, is the same way. I read them and I trust them because their biases are right out where everyone can see them and my judgment on their judgment can be filtered through my understanding of what colors their opinion.
What I object to is when a political bias becomes so strong that it distorts everything about a particular review including the reviewers judgment. Mr. Scott did this in his "Baader-Meinhof Complex" review. Is his political judgment so far to the left that he honestly thinks that Hollywood films are middle-of-the-road politically because they're afraid of alienating the audience? What does that say about his judgment of "The Baader-Meinhof Complex?" Is he somehow so sympathetic to the aims if not the methods of the Red Army Faction that iT skews his judgment of the film's quality? I don't know. After that comment I can't tell and as a result I can no longer trust Mr. Scott's judgment.
Too bad. He's a big improvement over Ben Lyons.

Crossposted at The Angry Bear Blog Read the Blog here! And it's finally happened. Kotaku is reporting that Bethesda is suing Interplay for their failure to develop the Fallout MMO. Is there anybody out there who didn't see this coming? I'm excepting as always, the troglodytes and mouth-breathers over at No Mutants Allowed and the rest of the so-called "Fallout community" (warning, following that link and reading anything on that site WILL make you stupid). By that, I don't mean those hundreds of thousands of people who have rightly enjoyed Fallout 3 (many of whom have as it as their sole Fallout experience) or those like me who genuinely love the first two games in the series. I mean those who, their loud protestations to the contrary, have never forgiven the universe for not stopping the clock in 1998 and Interplay for daring to go out of business. Yes, I said go out of business. I bear no malice at all towared the tiny shell that currently bears the name Interplay and if the seven employees over there manage to magically produce a Fallout MMO, I'll be thrilled. Good luck, God bless. Let's be honest, though. It's not going to happen. Whatever Interplay used to be, it's been a mere ghost of that for many years - exactly what it was when it sold the rights to Fallout to Bethesda in a wild gamble at creating a Fallout MMO. You don't need a crystal ball to figure that out, either. The company itself admits as much in their public 10K report. Check out this list of "Risk Factors:" WE CURRENTLY HAVE SOME OBLIGATIONS THAT WE ARE UNABLE TO MEET WITHOUT GENERATING ADDITIONAL INCOME OR RAISING ADDITIONAL CAPITAL. As of December 31, 2008, our cash balance was approximately $0 and our working capital deficit totaled approximately $2.4 million. We are currently operating without a credit agreement or credit facility. There can be no assurance that we will be able to enter into a new credit agreement or that if we do enter into a new credit agreement, it will be on terms favorable to us. We are presently without a CFO, and Mr. Caen has assumed the position of interim-CFO and continues as CFO to date until a replacement can be found. These are not the business conditions that make me want to go out and purchase Interplay stock. I'd get a better ROI selling my old comic books on Ebay. I'm not entirely certain why Bethesda agreed to this deal in the first place. I can however, envisage a scenario where they get a substantial discount off the price of the original IP purchase in return for essentially waiting for Interplay to fail in which case they would then be able to sweep in and be able to do the Fallout MMO themselves. And if Interplay had succeeded - great! It's a win/win for Bethesda either way. As for Interplay, well, they were selling the last valuable asset they had in a gamble to keep themselves alive and capitilize on the potential success of a Fallout MMO. If they've failed to realize that, well there's certainly no shame there. Businesses fail all the time. I'm sure the principles and employees currently at Interplay will be fine. What gets me are the idiot Fallout fanboys and their venom toward Bethesda for doing exactly what anyone in their position would - protecting their intellectual property rights and insisting that Interplay live up to the terms of its agreements. I don't have any knowledge whether Bethesda is correct in its allegations, of course, but there's certainly nothing immoral in a perfectly sensible business decision. There's this perverse romantic streak in the hard-core Fallout community that somehow believes that they not only have a right to "their" Fallout 3 - done of course in a "proper Fallout style" - but that going business concerns should somehow modify intelligent business practices to tailor to them because the original Fallout games were so good and they love them so much. And please don't pull out the old "We're the audience, they should listen to us." Here's a news flash - when it comes to Fallout, you are not the audience. The "audience" for Fallout are those millions of people happily shelling out the shekels for Mothership: Zeta and racking up Xbox 360 Acheivements. Full disclosure: I was the product manager for Fallout: Tactics, a decent though not stellar stratgy game based in the Fallout universe. I loved working at Interplay and am proud to have been connected, however tangentially, to the Fallout games and the great people who worked on them. Having said that, the Fallout games as represented by Fallout 1 and 2 are history. Everyone involved with them has moved on - in many cases quite successfully - and the Fallout universe is in the hands of people who obviously love the franchise and are not beholden to you in any way. Here's a little secret: The original Fallout games were not terribly successful. Not that they were failures, of course, but even by the standards of the late '90s they garnered much more in critical acclaim, fan love and industry respect than they ever did in cold, hard cash. While I won't reveal proprietary numbers, Bethesda does more with the franchise in five minutes than Interplay did with it in its whole history. Knowing that, it makes Bethesda rescuing the franchise from oblivion (no pun intended) even more worthy of respect. They had access to the same numbers when they were considering purchasing the rights to the game. They did it out of love for the universe and the belief that they could bring both the same critical acclaim and the success that had eluded it under Interplay's care. They were right.