John Davison

5 days to 40

2012-01-10T20:14:00.000-08:00

I've been fortunate enough to work with some fantastic people over the years, and I think the results from those collaborations have been generally well-received and at least moderately successful. Back when I started in the media business, the most important aspect of what we produced was representing the brand. Yes, there were individuals within those brands, and readers enjoyed particular bylines, but it was a very different time and readers weren't bombarded with the volume of media they are today.

A consequence of this volume is that audiences need something much more personal to relate to now, and simply developing a fondness for, say "GameSpot" or "GamePro" is no longer sufficient. Without an attachment to the individuals that provide the voice, audiences drift off and consume something else. Back when we made magazines, our reader's act of buying the magazine was implicit loyalty. They had made an active choice before consuming the information we gave them. Online, readers and viewers no longer behave that way - they consume "the Internet" as a whole, and when searching for information on a game, or a movie, or whatever, they'll gobble up whatever hits them first, or is recommended to them by others. Unless they have an affinity to an individual that they wish to seek out.

Looking back over the past couple of decades, it's not hard to identify the one thing that helped me establish any kind of "personal brand" and allowed me to thrive in this larger, scarier world: 1UP Yours.

Back when it launched in (what was it, 2005 maybe?) 1UP was doing very well, EGM still had a passionate following, and the Official PlayStation Magazine was still very successful. The 1UP Yours podcast seemed to give voice to something, though. It filled a gap. It affected people.

When we started it, we really had no idea what it could become. It was initially little more than an exercise in flexing our media muscles and seeing what would come of it. Podcasts were a new thing, and Garnett Lee had expressed a huge interest in exploring what we might be able to do. The first few episodes were little more than a random group of us talking about videogames for an hour, and wondering if people might be listening and give a shit about what we thought. It wasn't until a few episodes in when we found that special combination of personalities that anything even remotely magical happened.

I can't stress enough that it was not by design. The whole thing simply fell into place. Luke Smith had just joined us from Kotaku, and the lineup on the show that particular week happened to be Garnett, Luke, Shane Bettenhausen, and myself and it just…worked.

Over the period that we recorded those shows, every Thursday night (late into the night, and accompanied by ever-more-exotic alcohol supplied by our listeners) what people were listening to wasn't just five guys (Andrew Pfister, our producer, was the most important part of keeping it all together) talking about games. It was five guys becoming closer and closer friends. It was distinct personalities clicking into place and finding their "role" within the whole. Later, we were extremely lucky to find others like Mark MacDonald and David Ellis that came along to be one of the legs that propped up the show, but the real magic, the real special sauce was the chemistry.

All of us were strong personalities, all of us had strong views that were informed by our day jobs of crunching through information, and all of us were confident in each other that we could say whatever was on our mind without fear of their being any ill will. Sure, we fought…and occasionally passions flared to the point that it spilled over into the next day, but there was a feeling of brotherhood that kept things together.

Part of the magic came from the fact that we all sat around a table while recording the show. I know that sounds simple, but the fact that we could all see each other was hugely important. There was a body language that powered the show; we could see when Luke was getting wound up and was ready to explode, we could see when Shane was preparing to drop a bomb… we could communicate silently just with a glance, and we got really good at seeing what was going to happen before it happened.

Lots of people that listened to the show believed that it was really as raw as it sounded. In truth, we planned out the basic structure of every individual episode and had a very specific running order that Garnett and Andrew used to steer things along. The themed shows, like "4 Minute Warning" were even more structured, and we often had piles and piles of paper in front of us so we knew exactly what we were reacting to.

Honestly, it was the most fun I've ever had at work. We knew people enjoyed the show, but it wasn't until we did the first live episode at PAX several years later that we became aware of quite how we'd touched some peoples' lives. Guys would come up to us and tell us that they loved the long shows because they had crappy jobs, and listening to the show helped them get through the day. That stuff really humbled us.

Obviously, truly great things can't last forever, and 1UP Yours didn't. The subsequent shows were just as much fun, but looking back it's nice to know that there was something truly magical.

I don't see any of the guys anywhere near as much as I would like. Both Luke and Andrew are in Seattle, Garnett's in LA, and Shane just recently moved back to San Francisco from LA.

I truly love those guys though, and love that particular chapter of my life enormously. Without that show, and those guys, I'm certain I wouldn't be where I am today.

19 days to 40

2011-12-27T11:01:00.000-08:00

The single biggest mistake I've seen so many managers make over the years is feeling the need to have all the answers. I've seen a bunch of potentially great people stumble because they feel that they have to be the one to come up with the great idea, and then execute on that same great idea while demanding recognition and celebration for the fact. It's a difficult thing to get past, and I can remember having plenty of challenges with this kind of stuff myself in my 20s. Who doesn't want to be the rockstar smart guy? That said, I think the main reason I've been able to keep moving forward, particularly over the past 10 years, has been by surrounding myself with great people, and understanding that when they succeed, it reflects well on everyone.

You don't have to have all the answers. No one, no matter how smart they are, can be that good. But by empowering people so that they have the freedom to be creative, and the leeway to make mistakes, the team as a whole will end up better off. Great managers, I think, refine and enable greatness. Sure, it's good to have an awesome idea and move forward with it, but it's more important to inspire, than try to take all the credit.

20 days to 40

2011-12-26T10:23:00.000-08:00

When each of the boys were born, I bought each of them a nice Moleskine notebook and metal bookmark and decided that I would occasionally jot down pearls of fatherly wisdom that one day I could hand over. Rather than have the whole thing come across like some saccharine, fatherly riff on "Life's Little Instruction Book" (or whatever it's called,) I wanted to draw as much on real life experience so I could pass on truly authentic advice, rather than glib "just be nice to everyone" bullshit.

The past eight years have certainly been eventful, and I've been able to draw on a lot while jotting down those notes. I think (hope) the most poignant thoughts I can pass along to my boys concern the handling of mistakes. I've certainly made my fair share over the years, both personal and professional, but I've learned more from them than from my successes. Beyond the specifics of these, the overarching learning has been to take full ownership of mistakes. Deflecting blame, or denying the existence of a fault always leads to further problems and, in my experience anyway, never to a solution.

Thankfully, I've been able to rectify some of the biggest mistakes of my life by tackling them head on and taking ownership of them, rather than trying to avoid the consequences. To say that this has been difficult is beyond an understatement, and on more than one occasion I would have much rather hidden and ignored the problems rather than try and do anything about them. In fact, on numerous occasions I have denied my problems, and life certainly didn't improve as a result. I've faced the fear of loss because of colossal mistakes and have been able to ultimately stitch things back together by acknowledging what's important.

No doubt the boys won't fully comprehend this until they've lived through some mistakes of their own. The challenging thing about trying to pass along wisdom to your kids is realizing that you can't protect them from everything, and understanding that for them to really become fully-rounded people they need to face their own difficulties. If I can at least arm them with the emotional strength to proceed, then hopefully I've done a good job as a dad.

21 days to 40

2011-12-25T10:09:00.000-08:00

Just three weeks to go. It's Christmas day. Whatever day of the week Christmas Day falls on is also the day that both New Year's Day and my birthday fall. So at least I know I'll be waking up 40 on a weekend.

22 days to 40

2011-12-24T10:02:00.000-08:00

When I first moved to the U.S. the intention was to stick around for about two years. I remember lengthy conversations with the HR rep that helped me through all of my immigration paperwork where she would ask what my plans would be when my visa expired. Because I never made it to university, Ziff Davis' lawyer had worked out a way to get me into the country on the O1 "exceptional ability" visa (it's the one they also bring hockey players in on from Canada) and the process was both long and complicated. Because it all seemed so obstructive, I figured I'd probably be heading home after a couple of years. That was perfectly OK. I was only 26, and the whole thing was something I was approaching as a big adventure. "If we don't do this now, we'll never do it," I thought at the time.

It's now 14 years later, and I'm still here. The likelihood of me ever going back to the UK on a permanent basis gets less and less each day. I miss my family and the friends I left behind, but I'm no longer homesick for the place, per se.

The difficult thing about moving to a new country in your twenties is that you lack a shared culture with the people around you. I don't have school friends here, I didn't experience any of the same things that the people I spend time with every day did (with the exception of some English co-workers) and my kids are growing up and going through things that I have no direct experience of. As they've grown passionate for sports, or specific American culture, I've had to play catch-up as quickly as possible so I can help guide them without looking like a clueless father.

On the flipside, on the rare occasions that I go back to the UK or I spend any amount of time with Brits through work or when they come to visit, the country has moved on and changed dramatically in the past 14 years. I no longer have the same cultural reference points, and when my parents, my brother or friends quote pop culture or comedy or whatever else is driving the group psyche in the country, I have no point of reference.

The net result is feeling stuck between worlds. I didn't grow up in the States, so I'm not "American" but I've lost 14 years of my native culture so I no longer feel "English." So what am I?

23 days to 40

2011-12-23T15:06:00.000-08:00

Some things I've done that you probably haven't. Not to gloat, but simply to illustrate the uniqueness of life...

Played guitar on the soundtrack for the PC point-and-click adventure Normality by Gremlin Interactive.
Tested whether playing Quake was the most exciting thing imaginable, and whether the quote "it's better than sex" was an appropriate description. Article was for long-forgotten UK magazine, Escape.
Bungee jumped for the above article.
Had sex for the above article.
Had to masturbate in a room while men in lab coats observed in order to calibrate equipment for above article.
Appeared on the Star Wars Episode One DVD talking about the LucasArts game Starfighter.
Played in a band whose demo was number three on a radio station playlist. In Belgium.
Worked on the first (and only) weekly videogames magazine in the UK, called Games-X.
Had my first game review published when I was 14 in a UK Atari magazine called Page 6, which was later renamed New Atari User. The game was Winter Games on the Atari ST by Epyx.
Name-drop alert: Spent a lengthy lunch date with Mark Hamill (when he was promoting Wing Commander 3) and talked about his fascination with pornography.
Perhaps foolishly turned down a job on Edge magazine in 1994.
Had the keyboard player from Whitesnake, Ozzy Osbourne and (now) Deep Purple play at my first wedding.
Reviewed games on the UK TV show "GamesMaster."
Rode drunk on a golf cart with "father of the PlayStation" Ken Kuturagi.
Similarly rode drunk on a golf cart playing "Starksky & Hutch" with Ubisoft president Laurent Detoc. Of note: it's difficult to get any air with a golf cart.
Interviewed Lost/Star Trek/Prometheus/Cowboys & Aliens writer/producer Damon Lindelof live on-stage in front of 400 people.
Have run a whole bunch of different magazines over the past (gulp) 15 years - many of which you'll have probably never heard of: Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, Super Control, PC Player, Megatech, Sega Zone, and PC Zone in the UK before drifting stateside to run EGM and then later OPM, and finally GamePro.
Related to the above, I'm the only editor-in-chief to have run both EGM and GamePro.
Started my own company and helped define a sector of media that previously didn't really exist; games media for kids and families.
Raised over $2 million to start that business.
Had my photo on the front page of the Business section of the LA Times.
Did an eight-minute live segment on the Today Show about videogames for kids and families.
Got hugged by Meredith Viera.
Have also been on both Good Morning America and The Early Show along with a whole bunch of other news shows over the years.
Wrote the foreword to a book about iPhone games called "Buttonless."

24 days to 40

2011-12-22T14:42:00.000-08:00

I'm keen to assert before I go on, that this is in no way a declaration of favoritism. My children are the most important things in the world to me. That said, there's no escaping the fact that possibly the single most significant and life-changing "first" moment of the past 40 years was the birth of my oldest son. His presence in my life opened my eyes to a capacity for love that I wasn't previously aware of, and a sense of purpose that was clearly lacking before he arrived. His impact on every fiber of my being was so significant that when we learned we were pregnant with our second boy, I initially couldn't fathom how we could possibly supplement that volume of emotion. It was already almost overwhelming. Would it be divided? Would the power of emotion that we felt somehow be redistributed? Clearly this was foolish nonsense, as the powerful feelings for my second son amplified the importance of my family still further.

My kids are everything to me. They're the reason I push myself to excel, and the reason, along with their mother, that I'm able to keep life's events in perspective and understand what's truly important. When things feel stressful or out of control, I simply look to them. As I look back on the past 40 years, if there's one thing I'm most proud of, it's the family that I'm a part of.

25 days to 40

2011-12-21T17:58:00.000-08:00

People that have been significant in shaping my career over the years, all of whom I owe a debt of gratitude. Most of them were people that hired me, or became my boss. All of them are important people in my life in one way or another.

My Dad

Without the encouragement he gave me to channel my love of videogames through my love of writing (and to follow his path of writing about what's dear to me) I never would have got started on this path. I've no idea what I would've ended up doing. Given what I was considering doing at University; perhaps a psychiatrist or criminal psychologist? A cop of some kind? Some kind of behavioral consultant thing? I have no idea. My dalliances with retail would certainly have been over regardless, I'm sure.

Les Ellingham

Editor and founder of Page 6 Magazine (later New Atari User) and the person that first put my work into print. Little did he know what he was unleashing on the world, I guess.

Hugh Gollner

Hugh gave me my first full-time job writing about games. He actually turned me down once (for ST Action,) but then came back with the weekly gig at Games-X. Later he gave me my first taste of the start-up life at Maverick Magazines in 1992 and my first editor-in-chief title.

Tim Ponting

My boss and good friend at Dennis Publishing in London. When Maverick went under, he very quickly (much to my surprise) offered me the job of running PC Zone, and it was a fantastic experience. Working at Dennis felt like being in a different league completely, and during my time there I was both editor and publisher of the magazine. With Tim as my group publisher, I was exposed to marketing, PR, circulation, sales and editorial all at the same time; an invaluable set of skills for the years ahead. The whole period at Dennis was pretty magical. I got to work with some amazing talent at a really significant period in the evolution of PC gaming.

Joe Funk

The reason I now live in the States. Without Joe's belief in me, and his absolute refusal to take "no" for an answer back in 1997, I can state with some confidence that I wouldn't be where I am today. His phone call to me, literally the day I got back from my honeymoon to the inaugural Mrs. Davison, was a turning point in my whole life. "Dude. Remember when you said that if Ed Semrad ever left EGM that I should give you a call," he said. "This is that call." Before I knew it, I was on a plane to Chicago to meet the team. That was the first time I met so many important people in my life, including the woman who ended up being the present Mrs. Davison. Little did we know that would happen at the time.

Dale Strang

Dale was my boss after Joe, and was the man that brought me to San Francisco. First he put me in charge of the Official PlayStation Magazine, then he put me in charge of the whole content group, and then he made me a VP at Ziff Davis. That was a big one. He's still a friend and mentor to this day.

Scott McCarthy

My next boss at Ziff. Scott came to us from Disney, and gave me my first exposure to the way larger media companies think about content, programming, and talent. After Scott left Ziff in 2007, he went to set up a VC firm, and ended up being the principal investor in What They Like. So, his impact on my career (and life) was pretty substantial. I haven't seen him for years, which reminds me that I must look him up. Last thing I heard, he was running ESPN radio.

Ira Becker

My partner in crime at What They Like. He and I quit Ziff together, and braved the wilderness of the startup scene as brothers. We were pretty tight before that experience, but the bond that formed over those two years will no doubt last forever.

Marci Yamaguchi-Hughes
Marci and I worked together at Ziff Davis. She later landed at IDG as the president on GamePro Media. Her confidence in me led to the most freeing and liberating management edict I've ever worked under; "Just make it cool," was the direction. "You have total freedom to do whatever you want with it." The 10 months I worked on GamePro were a lot of fun.

Simon Whitcombe
Simon and I had known each other for years, but had never really spent much time together and certainly not worked together. Previously he was at Future US, the sworn enemy of Ziff Davis Media. Later he landed at GameSpot as the VP of the games group. He approached me at an industry event and we started talking about the kinds of things we could do together. I'd actually flirted with some GameSpot opportunities in the past (a long time ago, back in the Ziff years) but never really got past the flirtation. Simon presented a fantastic opportunity, and a great new direction for my career.

My Wife
Her constant support, and belief that somehow I actually might know what I'm doing keeps me strong and keeps me going. Sometimes the pressure of being the bread-winner (particularly when you live in the Bay Area where things are expensive) can get a bit overwhelming, but she's always a voice of reason and encouragement.

26 days to 40

2011-12-20T11:53:00.000-08:00

I should probably try and tackle the weight thing at some point in this process. It's been something that's hung over me for what seems like forever, so it warrants discussion in the countdown to 40.

There was a brief period in my late teens where it wasn't really a concern, but I was a chubby kid, and have struggled to keep things under control for the majority of my adult life.

Outside of a brief period in my mid-20s when I was pretty sedentary, and partied far too much (thanks to living in London and hitting the beers nearly every night) I've always made a lot of effort to try and exercise, and I've always been fairly careful about what I put into my body. All the stuff that you read about as "life changes" to help with weight loss are either totally fucking obvious, or things I'm already doing, or both; "give up soda and candy" for example - well, d'uh. I haven't consumed either since I was a kid because they make me (guess what?) FAT. Similarly "replace burgers and pizza with vegetables and lean proteins" is something I've been (mostly) doing for at least the last 10 years, and is similarly obvious and not terribly useful advice.

In my late 30s, the whole thing has become much harder. Despite exercising much more aggressively, and taking up long-distance cycling (I do the Marin Century every year, which is a 60+ mile bike tour around the North Bay) and an even-more-sensible (read: boring) diet, the best I ever seem to be able to do is maintain my weight. It doesn't go up, it doesn't go down. I've been stuck at 207 pounds for two miserable years now. It doesn't seem to matter what I do, it just won't budge. I've seen doctors, trainers, and nutritionists and followed all of their advice, which is summarized here;

"You're not eating enough, eat more."
"You need to cut out carbs completely."
"You need carbs in your diet to kickstart your system."
"Eliminate at least 500 calories from your daily routine either through diet or exercise every day."
"Your baseline should be over 2,000 calories every day."
"Your baseline should be 1,700 calories every day."
"Your baseline should be over 2,500 calories every day."
"You need less than 1,500 calories every day."
"You might be allergic to dairy, cut it out completely."
"You might be allergic to gluten, cut it out completely."
"Do more weight training than cardio, it helps you burn more calories."
"Do more cardio than weight training, it helps you burn more calories."

Lots of contradictions. Which is irritating. Honestly, after two years of nothing really achieving anything I'm at a complete loss. And honestly, being allergic to both dairy and gluten is no picnic. I'd set a goal at the beginning of 2011 to shed 22 pounds and be 185 by my 40th birthday. I thought a year would be plenty of time to achieve that, and I've worked hard to try and do it. As I write this with 26 days to go... I'm still (unsurprisingly, because the universe is just fucking with me) 207 pounds.

It's starting to feel like some kind of cruel joke. If I had even a scrap of religious faith in me, this would have convinced me that the big man is just malicious. I've set a new goal; be 200 pounds or preferably less by my 40th. That's got to be possible, right?

27 days to 40

2011-12-19T11:35:00.000-08:00

Some things that teenage me (specifically) would have wanted to have done by the time I was 40...

Be a famous rock guitarist, idolized by millions and adored by women everywhere
I was in a couple of bands, and we were reasonably popular in the small towns where each played, but I was hardly "famous." The only "groupie" of any kind was in Macclesfield, and she was the singer's girlfriend. She was all sorts of trouble, so the less said of that the better.

Have started my own company, and made millions of dollars
Did the first part, failed fairly spectacularly on the second part. Was an exhilarating experience, and I'd definitely be up for doing it again. Perhaps with something of the latter as part of the package next time.

Found the love of a beautiful woman
Done that. Miraculously.

Moved to America
Did that one too. Original plan was to come for just two years. It's been nearly 14. See above.

Possess a garage filled with spectacular sports cars
I've half done that. I've not had any of them at once, but there have been some good ones over the years. Maybe not Ferrari's or anything, but I've had; a Corvette, an Audi TT, a Mitsubishi Evo VIII, and a Porsche Boxster over the years. Not rock star stuff, but not bad I guess.

Created some work of staggering artistic genius that genuinely moved people in some way; either an album, a book, a movie, a song, or a game
Nope. None of the above. I guess there's still time though. Maybe a book?

Achieved some kind of fame
I'm not sure 15,000 Twitter followers really qualifies.

28 days to 40

2011-12-18T10:23:00.000-08:00

One of the most influential people in my formative years, outside of mum and dad obviously, was my Grandad (on my mother's side.) He taught me about life, pragmatism, hard work, and finding the logic behind things. There's advice that I remember him giving me when I was maybe seven or eight years old that I still make use of today, and I've lately noticed that I've been passing along to my own boys. Professionally he was a factory worker; building tyres at the Goodyear factory in Birmingham or Wolverhampton (or somewhere around there) but he clearly missed a calling as a teacher. His advice touched me deeply, and that's why I still miss him today.

Most memorable was his approach to maths; he had a knack for articulating how you approach things so you can simplify them and do them in your head. He taught me all about breaking down problems into their constituent parts, solving those parts as simple equations, and then piecing the whole problem back together again. It had a profound effect on me, and I'm sure it's a big part of why I quickly developed a talent for mathematical problems at an early age. The magic of this academic advice was that he also showed me how you can apply the same idea to pretty much anything in life. Things that seem complicated are usually much simpler than they appear, and all you need to be able to do is break it down and tackle it methodically. Without that foundation from him, I'm sure I wouldn't be the person I am today.

He also had a cheeky, glib side, of course. The other most memorable advice that he gave me concerned a general approach to dealing with others, particularly those that are either nagging, or being a pain in the ass. "Just say yes, and take no notice," he would say.

Sometimes that proves very useful too.

29 days to 40

2011-12-17T10:22:00.000-08:00

As I approach 40, that means it's perfectly OK for some things to make me irrationally grumpy, right? C'mon...surely that's one of the perks? To celebrate, I've started a list (in no particular order);

The confusion people seem to experience in differentiating between their, there, and they're.
Inappropriate use of the word "literally."
People saying "bless you" after every sneeze. Bonus points: The fact that I never sneeze just once.
The way that kids toys are twist-tied into boxes.
Trying to set up pretty much anything out of the ordinary on a Windows PC.
People reading/watching over my shoulder or just generally standing very close behind me.
PlayStation 3 updates (and, by association any other kind of PSN-related forced update.)
People reading stuff on their phone while talking to me, and clearly being distracted.
Wanton untidiness (I'm not a neat freak, I just think stuff should be put away.)
Whining, complaining and generally any kind of non-constructive repetitive negativity.
Being allergic to gluten.
And dairy.

30 days to 40

2011-12-16T16:20:00.000-08:00

My first serious girlfriend dumped me before my end-of-school exams when we were 18 because the whole thing was "too stressful." We later bought a house together. Yeah... I know. She's now a druid or a witch or something, and is married to a ninja and living in Wales.

My second serious girlfriend was a little bit crazy and in hindsight probably wasn't really a serious girlfriend.

My third serious girlfriend became my first wife. She didn't want children, and didn't like living in America. We got divorced and haven't spoken for a decade. She currently lives somewhere in America and has at least one child that I'm aware of. Yeah... I know.

My fourth serious girlfriend is responsible for, and therefore truly represents all of the most important things that have ever really happened in my life. She is the mother of my gorgeous children, and the most caring, tolerant and beautiful human being I have ever met. I'd be lost without her. The fact that she has put up with me for 10 years and has yet to threaten otherwise is testament to both her resolve and her...wonderfulness.

31 days to 40

2011-12-15T15:40:00.000-08:00

About a month after I turn 40 will see another anniversary; 21 years of being in the videogame media business as a full-time gig. Technically it's been 25 (coming up to 26 at some point in 2012) years since I started writing about games professionally (if you can call it that,) but my first full-time gig was at the age of 19, and the whole thing was pretty much an accident.

Technically speaking, I'm still on my year off before I go to university. The original plan had been to secure a place at either Nottingham or Warwick University to study psychology, and then spend a year earning some cash so that things didn't get too tight in the four years (or more) that I would spend dazzling the academic establishment with radical new insights into human behavior. I don't remember the specifics, but I think I actually got the place at Warwick pretty much sorted out at one point.

Fresh out of school, resplendent with a uniformly atrocious portfolio of exam results (thanks to the "I'm going to dump you the night before your first English paper is due" shenanigans of my then-girlfriend) I had landed a truly glorious job in the menswear department at English department store Marks & Spencer. This was after a brief two-week stint of twisting bits of wire and dipping it in solder at a local industrial park that was the single most mind-numbing experience of my life. Stretching this crap out for a whole year was looking like it was going to be a truly painful experience, and despite occasional changes of scenery working in either the grocery department (which I loathed) or the lingerie department (which was a bit surreal, particularly when women that would have been classified as cougars before the term even existed would come in and ask "what I thought" of various frilly things) I was thinking of changing my whole plan.

At some point during all this, I'd applied for a job as a staff writer at ST Action at Europress up in Macclesfield. I didn't get it. In a bizarre twist of fate, that same girlfriend that dumped me the night before my English paper landed the same job several months later. But I digress. I figured that professional games writing was something that would be permanently out of reach. Then, out of the blue, Hugh Gollner (the boss of the games rags at Europress) called to ask if I'd like to be a staff writer on a new publication, a weekly magazine called Games-X that would be modeled after pop-books like Smash Hits. Needless to say I jumped at the chance. I actually took the call while on a coffee break at Marks & Spencer, and upon receiving the official offer - a staggering 7,000 GBP a year - I quit the menswear gig on the spot and walked out. Two weeks later I was living in a horrific bedsit in Stockport, and writing about Amiga, ST, and import Super NES and MegaDrive games all day and night. It was wonderful.

Games-X lasted almost exactly a year, but the discipline of that weekly deadline is something that has been the foundation of my attitude toward writing and editing ever since. While there, I sat next to Alex Simmons, who is now the editor in chief of IGN in the UK. Our London news editor was Gary Whitta, who later went on to run PC Gamer in both the UK and the US before leaving the industry to be a movie screenwriter. I met a lot of great people, and from that point on, I was on a career path that I wanted to make last for as long as I could. Games-X led to work on both ST and Amiga Action, as well as a brief stint on GB Action. Soon after, Hugh left Europress to start a new company and a bunch of us went with him to form our first "start up" Maverick Magazines, where we produced MegaDrive Advanced Gaming (my first editor in chief gig), Control (a SNES mag) and later PC Player, my first solo-launch. PC Player led to the gig at PC Zone in London, which in turn shoved me into more international circles and helped get me on the Ziff Davis guys' radar in Chicago, and ultimately to the gig on Electronic Gaming Monthly in 1998.

Back in those early days, I always wondered how long the whole thing could really last. Would this be something I'd still be doing when I was 35, or even 40? Turns out the answer to that is a resounding yes.

32 days to 40

2011-12-14T21:39:00.000-08:00

My brother maintains that my finest hour (journalistically speaking) was a a feature I wrote for the short-lived UK “Internet culture” magazine (yeah, I know) Escape called “Better Than Sex!” I'm not entirely sure I agree with him on it being my best work, but the research and production of this particular piece makes for a good story.

The gist of the piece was that I had to scientifically test the oft-quoted proclamation (at the time) that “Quake is better than sex,” which ages the piece, obviously. To do this I wore a heart-rate monitor while performing a variety of tasks that included playing multiplayer Quake, bungee jumping, buying pornography, hitting on a stranger at a supermarket, and having sex. Readings were taken during each activity, and this was all calibrated against test results acquired in a lab where I had to provide an orgasmic baseline reading for comparison. To do this, I had to drive to a heart lab in Devon on the south coast of England and… how to put this delicately? Pleasure myself while under observation.

I don’t actually have a copy of the magazine to hand at my home in the U.S., but my parents very graciously dug out a copy back in the UK and scanned it for me. They must be so proud.

Rather than paraphrase or try to downplay the content any further, here's a link to a PDF of the whole sordid thing. I should preface this with a note that this was produced during the high point of “lad mag” culture in the UK. Loaded, Maxim, FHM and their ilk were all killing it on newsstands, so this kind of salacious, raucous, knob-joke gonzo journalism was very much the norm. Hit the link below to see the whole, sordid six-page article. Also: Bonus! Pictures of skinny me with very long hair.

Better Than Sex!

33 days to 40

2011-12-13T21:31:00.000-08:00

I think it’s fairly safe to say that I’m not a particularly patient person. My wife is no doubt chuckling if she’s reading this. I have become reasonably adept at projecting the impression of patience, but at my core I find slow decision-making, or slow processes to be absolutely unbearable. It’s not a new thing, I’ve struggled with it for as long as I can remember, but I’ve had to really adapt in the past 15 or 16 years as I’ve moved into more senior management roles. I find indecision or slow-moving work initiatives to be incredibly annoying, and as I have become increasingly proficient at not venting frustration directly at people (there was a time when I didn’t hold back, and it wasn’t particularly productive) I’ve had to keep things slow and steady emotionally. If I leave things unchecked, and let the stress take over, I’ve been known to drift in one of two directions; either a form of intellectual paralysis, where the lack of momentum causes me to lose focus completely – thankfully something I’ve not had to deal with for a very long time – or (and this is the scary one) emotional numbness.

The latter was something that I wasn’t even aware of when it was happening, but having been through it during the tail end of the What They Play chapter of my career, I can look back on it now as possibly the scariest time of my adult life. Having been through a period of what can only be described as spiritual vapidity, I’m now fully aware of where my dark side is. I’m not talking about getting all Lisbeth Salander here. I don’t suddenly develop a penchant for black nail polish and freaky weirdness. The truth is that in my most extreme times of emotional distress, my psyche doesn’t freak out, it…what would you call it? Freaks in. When my stress levels wound up to truly extreme levels, I found that rather than getting increasingly emotional, I actually got less so. In the case of What They Play, as we struggled with funding during the worst years of the financial crisis, the idea that what I’d spent two years building may fall apart and that the team that had been so loyal and dependable may be out of work became a huge burden. While at the time I had absolutely no idea this was happening, what I found was that my emotions just shut down completely. I wasn’t scared, I wasn’t angry, and I wasn’t unhappy about what was happening. Similarly, I wasn’t expressing much of any kind of real emotional response to anything else either; I wasn’t happy, I didn’t find things funny, or sad. I was incapable of feeling excitement, or nervousness, or anything emotional that you would otherwise take for granted. With this emotional compass somehow missing, it turned me into a completely different person. I believe the technical term is denial. It took me until about a year after the dust had settled to realize that without that internal barometer, and any kind of self awareness about it that my usually quite measured ability to make reasonable judgment calls was completely obliterated.

In retrospect, the scariest thing about the whole situation was that I had no idea that it was potentially a problem. When you’re stressed out, it’s easy to watch out for quintessential crazy person behavior – freak outs, rage, whatever – it’s another thing to notice that things are swinging the other way. I really don’t know what I would have done if it wasn’t for Mrs D and her amazing capacity for both tolerating my ridiculous bullshit, and helping me piece things back together in a much more self-aware fashion. Without her Yoda-like ability to turn me from the dark side, I really don’t know what I would have done, and there’s a very good chance that things would have gotten far more destructive. By learning and understanding that (if none of us are paying attention properly) I have the capacity to just shut down completely when things get really tough, she has helped me achieve a balance in the last couple of years that I really didn’t have previously. Importantly, this is also a balance that I didn’t fully appreciate that I needed. The majority stems from her love and the kids’, but it’s also a greater focus on both physical and emotional health, and a willingness to stare right into the face of what’s challenging and acknowledge problems as they’re happening.

With the pressures of new jobs and new responsibilities in the time since we eventually sold What They Play to IGN (see? There was a happy ending there eventually) I’ve been able to process challenges and stress in a completely different way, while also keeping my head above water and fixed on what’s most important.

See? This is what an imminent 40th birthday has provoked; it’s prompted some self-analysis, and consequently a blog post that was in serious danger of drifting into granola-crunching, touchy-feely, sandal-wearing, spirituality nonsense before I pulled it back from the edge there. Bottom line? Wife, good. Kids, good. Stress, bad.

34 days to 40

2011-12-12T21:21:00.000-08:00

Both of my boys amaze me. I know it’s indulgent, clichéd, and boring to rave about your own children in a public forum, but it’s my blog, and hardly anyone’s reading it anyway to I’m just going to go for it. Particularly over the past year or so, I’ve been acutely aware of both boys really developing physically, artistically and intellectually. Both of them have started consuming books with a voracious appetite, and often have four or five on the go at once without any problem. My oldest has been taking guitar lessons, and has taken to it with far more natural flair than I was ever able to muster. Their skills at different sports have moved on leaps and bounds, with both their basic strength and game-smarts taking on whole new dimensions.

Saturdays during the summer always hit this home for me, as my oldest has weekly basketball games over that period. This isn’t just a proud father boasting (I can say this with some confidence, as pretty much everyone at the Y has said it at some point) but during his last games this year, my boy was on fire. I was so proud watching him confidently take the ball, quickly move it up the court and make poised, phlegmatic shots, jumping up for the rebound and taking command of the game. A year ago he was eager but struggling, today he owned the court.

My youngest, while not quite the quintessential jock that his brother is becoming, has a sense of spatial awareness that’s enviable. I was well into my 20s before I was able to judge my surroundings as accurately as he seems to be able to. It’s incredible watching him learn from his brother and absorb the knowledge with a nonchalance that just makes him all the more charming. He’s no jock, he doesn’t particularly care that much about the sports, but he can just do it. I’d have given anything for that kind of coolness when I was a teen, let alone even younger.

They both must get this kind of skill and audacity from their mother. Clearly I live with three people that are infinitely cooler than I.

35 days to 40

2011-12-11T21:11:00.000-08:00

Something I was pretty proud to be a part of earlier this year was the "Let it end like this" exhibition at an art gallery in New York. The idea was for creative-types (that would somehow be me, I guess - just being thought of for such a thing was pretty humbling) to put together something that would serve as an imaginary obituary, in a manner that reflected how the artist hoped people would remember them. It took me a while to come up with a concept, and even longer to actually execute on the self-portrait (below) but I was ultimately really proud of the result. Now that the exhibition is over, the gallery-wrapped canvas version of the piece is hanging in our dining room. Mrs D says she really likes it, and the kids continue to be intrigued about the process required to make a fairly realistic rendering of myself using nothing but words. If you click the image below, there's a giganto-version that gives you an idea of the scale of the document I was working with.

36 days to 40

2011-12-10T18:07:00.000-08:00

Between the ages of 11 and 16, I was pretty much invisible. So much so, that upon entering the sixth form at my school at the age of 16 I remember being asked several times by "cooler" kids which school I'd attended previously, and if I was "new." This hadn't phased me, I found it more amusing than offensive because I'd spent the bulk of the previous years just keeping out of everyone's way. I wasn't unpopular or reclusive or anything; I was just shy. I was geeky, into computers and videogames, I wasn't particularly sports-focused (although I could run forever, which made me good at endurance races - but no one cared about anything except football so no one noticed) and I was a bit overweight. For the bulk of the first five years of secondary school I'd hung out with the same crowd of half a dozen or so guys playing games and watching sci-fi, and it had been perfectly acceptable. Girls didn't notice me, I was socially a bit awkward, but I'd always felt like I should try a bit harder to be sociable.

Entering the sixth form I made a conscious effort to completely reinvent myself; something I've fairly successfully pulled off twice over the course of the last 40 years. It didn't hurt that I dropped some weight over that summer, and the platonic (though I'd wished for two years that she'd be more) girlfriend that had shared my love of heavy metal, videogames, and geeky movies had finally caved and noticed that I was more than just an awesome study buddy. Suddenly I was visible. I made new friends (hardly any of my old crew had stayed at school past 16,) I started playing guitar in a band, I grew my hair long, and for some reason people started to seek out what I had to say about things.

The shyness remained though. I don't remember why I chose to deal with it the way that I did, but as a life strategy it has served me very well ever since; if in doubt, I would move towards whatever made me most uncomfortable. I'd get up on-stage to play in the band, I'd volunteer for speaking engagements, I'd try and reach out to new people, but all of it was always almost debilitating in how nerve-wracking it was. Looking back now, I wonder if someone encouraged me to behave this way, or if it was some piece of advice from my grandad (the source of much practical life-knowledge in my youth; his best being "just say yes and take no notice,) I really don't recall. Still...it's something that worked for me, and I will no doubt be imparting it to my own boys when they get older.

37 days to 40

2011-12-09T16:41:00.000-08:00

Time for a list, to break up the pace, I think. With 37 days to go, here are 37 things that have been a significant influence over the course of the past 40 years (in no particular order) with very brief descriptions as to why. I'm leaving people out of this one, as I'll no doubt tackle that list in a later post. I'm also trying to avoid the totally fucking obvious too, with a few obvious and notable exceptions. This isn't a "my favorite" list by any stretch, they're just things that helped nudge me in new directions.

Ozzy Osbourne's Bark at the Moon album

The first hard rock/metal album I ever bought. I was 11. Plus, I'd recently learned that the keyboard player (Don Airey) lived down the street from us, which humanized the whole thing a lot.

Iron Maiden's Number of the Beast

Absolutely the first time I noticed that music was "about" something. Iron Maiden's interest in history, and telling stories with music was something I'd never really paid attention to before. I didn't discover the album until a few years after it was out. I was probably 13 or 14 when I finally got a copy.

Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force

Not my proudest declaration of something that's influential - but it was one of the many albums that inspired me to keep practicing the guitar.

Gary Moore's Still Got The Blues

Another connection to our friend Don (he played keyboards on this album too) but most significantly was finally understanding the lyrical and emotional complexity of really good guitar playing. Another one that inspired me to keep practicing.

AC/DC Back in Black

For the longest time, I couldn't stand AC/DC, but I after I saw them at the Monsters of Rock festival at Castle Donnington, I had a whole new appreciation for rock music that could be timeless.

Anthrax' Among the Living

Four words: I. Am. The. Law.

Another one of those moments appreciating that music could be unbelievably cool when it was actually about something you already thought was pretty awesome. Metal + Judge Dredd. Awesome.

Extreme II: Pornograffiti

I loved this album at the time. I first heard Nuno Bettencourt play because "Play With Me" was used in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure. This was the first album by Extreme that I actually bought, and it introduced me to how clever and satisfying rhythm guitar work could be. I learned "Hole Hearted" and "It's a Monster" as quickly as possible, and still have them memorized.

Depeche Mode's Songs of Faith and Devotion

Teenage me would have laughed in your face for suggesting that Depeche Mode were a band to be taken seriously. Songs of Faith and Devotion came along when I was 21, and it opened my eyes to the wonderful and magical place where pop, rock, dance, and electronic music meet.

Bach's Toccata & Fugue in D Minor

There were two significant versions of this piece of music that ingrained it in my memory; a version played on acoustic guitar by John Williams (different one, not the composer) with his band Sky in 1980, and the soundtrack to the arcade game Gyruss which had a similar vibe. Virtuoso guitar playing and videogames; two things I'm a sucker for.

BT's Movement in Still Life

This one is definitely something that plays double duty as both "influential" and "favorite." The track "Never Gonna Come Back Down" opened my eyes (ears?) to how electronic music was able to blend genres so elegantly.

The Crystal Method's Vegas

Having grown up with rock and metal, I've always liked music with some bite. The Crystal Method showed me that dance music could have a similar, if not greater, bite.

Nine Inch Nails' Pretty Hate Machine

Not an especially original item on this list...but it was a biggie for me. It inspired me to experiment with playing a different kind of music, and blending my love of computers and technology with my love of loud guitars.

Star Raiders

I think in the grand scheme of all things that have ever blown my mind, the degree to which Star Raiders made me feel that I was in a space ship has yet to be matched. Looking back, it looks unbelievably simple, but the emotion it inspired at the time with stay with me, always.

Pole Position

Where my love of cars and my love of videogames first really intersected. My parents looked for the cartridge for the Atari 400 for ages so they could get it for me one Christmas. The arcade machine looked incredible at the time, and the computer version matched it pretty closely.

Super Mario World

Growing up in the UK, I didn't have a huge amount of exposure to Mario. The NES just wasn't a big deal in the UK, because we were all playing on computers like the ZX Spectrum, the Commodore 64 or the Atari 400. The first time I really played any Mario game (save for Donkey Kong) was Super Mario World on an imported SNES when I first started on Games-X. I was blown away. It opened my eyes.

Mario Kart

A benchmark for fun, multiplayer gaming.

X-Wing

Star Wars + Videogames. It was truly magical, and built on that magic that Star Raiders evoked, and sprinkled it with a Jedi-style magical fairy dust of awesome.

Gran Turismo

Still special, even after all these years. The fact that they did this on the original PlayStation still boggles my mind. The cars felt right...something that few games had achieved this consistently before.

Grand Theft Auto III

The boundaries moved with this one. Plus, it was a bit of a career-defining moment too; at the Official PlayStation Magazine, we were the only magazine in the U.S. to believe it was going to be special enough to put it on the cover.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

I sank over 100 hours into this game. It was the first experience to pull me in to that degree. I've always loved games, and always loved fantasy worlds, but this changed my expectations of role playing games.

Philips G7000

Our first game console in the Davison household. Known as the Odyssey 2 in the U.S. In hindsight the "Videopacs" were mostly horrific knock-offs of better-known classics, but there were some very special games; Munchkin, Take the Money and Run, Battlefield (no, not that one) and my absolute favorite, space shooter Cosmic Conflict.

Atari 400

Our first home computer; the beginning of my life in technology, games, and media.

Atari 520ST

After the 400, we were Atari loyalists. I wrote my first game review on an Atari ST; about Epyx' Winter Games.

Star Wars Trilogy

And so we enter the movie portion of the list. An obvious one; but now seeing it through my kids' eyes, I'm even more in awe of the magic it weaves.

Silent Running

Little-known enviro-sci-fi flick that had a profound effect on me when I first saw it. My first exposure (outside of 2001, which I didn't get into until I was much older) to sci-fi with a real message.

Highlander

Sword fighting mixed with sci-fi is always cool. (See: Star Wars) There's something elegant and intimate about it.

Superman

Not necessarily the Christopher Reeve movie, although that was special, but just the whole Superman thing. I'm not religious or especially spiritual in any traditional sense of the word, but I have a huge soft spot for the whole savior/hero thing.

The Hitchhikers's Guide to the Galaxy

My dad bought the albums of the radio series and we used to listen to them together. I later read all the books, watched the TV show, the movie, and re-bought the entire radio run on CD. It had never occurred to me that sci-fi could be funny before this.

Reeves & Mortimer

I still occasionally slip into Reeves and Mortimer mode when around more than one other Brit. It's utterly nonsensical to my wife, but I still find it hilarious.

The Fast Show

For the same reasons as Reeves and Mortimer, I guess. My sense of humor is still informed by this nonsense.

NPR's Fresh Air

Terry Gross' series on NPR taught me how to interview, and what makes a compelling interview. This show continues to illustrate that the key to this kind of content is really getting to know the subject, and presenting them as a human being, not just a vessel through which messaging about a book/movie/game/album/cause is conveyed.

The Dark Knight Returns

Kinda obvious, but what the hell. It's my list. Batman at his best, and at his oldest. Particularly relevant given the overarching theme of this whole 40 days blogging thing.

Watchmen

Another obvious one, but this was more about conveying a strong message through unexpected and original means. Something that anyone in media needs to be constantly thinking about.

Perfume

I'm not sure what prompted me to read this. I don't remember who recommended it, or who first talked about it, but it was powerful stuff, and the story had a significant impact on me. It was beautifully constructed, cleverly executed, and the setting was remarkably evocative.

The Canterbury Tales

I read it at school, and basically hated it at the time - but something about it just stuck with me. It's still a tough read (although not as hard as it was) but it's one of those books I'm always glad I have some knowledge of. It's oddly useful from time to time.

Sons and Lovers

Another one from school; where I discovered a love for (and a knack for) both metaphor and simile. Before I read this at the age of 15, I didn't really know what that even meant. It's been a useful skill ever since, and all because of DH Lawrence, and my English teacher Mr. Stevens.

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

How I discovered Mark Twain, who's wit and intelligence I've grown to admire more and more with each passing year.

OK, so now that's done I realize there are a lot more than 37 things I'd want to single out. Maybe I'll do an addendum post later.

38 days to 40

2011-12-08T18:17:00.001-08:00

Yesterday's post was a bit serious, and was very much work-focused - so today let's swing all the other way and talk about dogs. Yes, dogs.

Growing up, I hated them. Big, loud, dirty, uncivilized slobber-monsters that were pushy and obnoxious. I was more of a cat person. Cute, cuddly, a little aloof but generally loving. I had a cat growing up, and had them as soon as I was able when I left home. I even brought two with me from England to the States back in the late 90s. Though it's incredibly unlikely, I guess it's remotely possible that the pair of them are actually still alive somewhere in the deepest, darkest Midwest. I wouldn't know though; they stayed with my ex-wife, who has been exercising her right to completely ignore me for the past 11 years.

Since meeting the current Mrs. Davison I've switched allegiances. I am now "of dog." As of last night, I'm temporarily "of three dogs," to be accurate. We adopted a wonderful puppy in 2002; a mutt of indiscernible origin that we were told was part Labrador and part, oh I don't remember, Spaniel or something? Maybe German Shepherd? I really don't remember. Regardless, I'm pretty sure they were wrong, because he's clearly part awesome and part excellent. There are rumors that there's some Rhodesian Ridgeback in the mix too, and that's completely fine. He is now nine, and is the most caring and loving animal I have ever encountered. We got him at the time because we wanted to go to a rescue, and couldn't afford the $2,000 it would have cost to rescue a pure breed like a Golden Retriever or something. Less than a week after we brought him home he cost us more than that in vet's bills because he had Parvo. I don't hold that against him though.

Last night the household (which, incidentally, also holds two cats, though one of them fucking hates me) was joined by a pair of puppies. The idea was to get a puppy. A puppy. One. But the rescue across the street had two that were very cute, so we made the executive decision to foster both of them while trying to decide which of them to keep. After just 24 hours, the entire concept seems entirely unfair and difficult and I'm already leaning to the idea of keeping them both, despite the fact that it would be really, really stupid to do so. They are incredibly cute and friendly, and I'd be sad to see either of them go. Already.

So, there you go. I've officially become a "dog person."

39 days to 40

2011-12-07T09:27:00.000-08:00

Honestly, I still haven't decided on the format for this. At one point I'd entertained the idea of trying to a year for each year going backwards until I either ran out of years, or ran out of things of significance from that time period. Probably would have been a bit much, really.

That said, I do want to use number 39 to make some broad strokes observations of events that have happened while I've been 39. I think it's fairly safe to say that the word "tumultuous" is an apt description for the past 11 months or so. It's not often you have the luxury of using such an evocative word to describe your own life, but here were are. "Excited, confused, or disorderly" says the dictionary - yep, that pretty much does it. At least on the professional side of the house. On the homefront, the greatest cause of any disorder has been trying to manage my weight (a disastrous project I'll no doubt go into in a separate post filled with woe and self-pity) but work, notably the businesses in which I exist (media and videogames) has been batshit crazy.

Over this past year, I've seen spectacular examples of both highs and lows. I've witnessed examples of every kind of behavior imaginable; Petulance, defiance, selfishness, negativity, and incredulity on one hand, but I've also seen boundless creativity, selflessness, intelligence, and wit on the other. I've seen people walk away from opportunity because of ego while others have sought out opportunity and defined themselves in defiance of the odds. I've seen success born out of a whim, and disaster brought about by pessimism. I've watched people find themselves and lose themselves. I've watched businesses blossom and crumble, the establishment topple, and new ideas flourish.

Significantly, after feeling like the "old man" for a while, and spending the bulk of the past few years imparting knowledge and guidance, this past year has been a tremendous learning experience. "Drinking from the firehose," as my buddy Ira liked to say back in our time together at What They Play. Yes, the last year has been one of the hardest in recent memory for me, but I've learned so much, and been able to adapt and evolve more than I could have possibly anticipated.

40 days to 40

2011-12-06T18:02:00.001-08:00

I mentioned a while back that my imminent 40th birthday had been on my mind a lot lately... well, today it has even more so. I turn 40 in exactly 40 days, so I thought that was as good a reason as any to find an excuse to try and gather my thoughts on the subject and jot them down. Catharsis is the main motivation, but given that there are a few people of similar age that occasionally read this blog, I figure it may provoke some conversation (or some disagreement) over what's important to us all at this point in life. For those of you that are much younger, you'll no doubt be able to chuckle at the sad nonsense that some greybeard old fart is spewing each day.

I'll wait until tomorrow to really get into the meat of things I think, but over the next 40 days I want to take the opportunity to talk about people that have been an important part of my life so far, things that have had a profound effect on me, and events both professional and personal that have shaped who I am.

My kids have certainly picked up on how this is playing on my mind. This morning they woke me with breakfast that they (partially) cooked themselves, along with hand-written notes celebrating "40 days to 40." Apparently I have been far from subtle in what's bothering me lately.

RIP GamePro, 1989-2011

2011-11-30T13:25:00.001-08:00

GamePro has meant many things to me over the years, and has become very much a part of my professional and personal life over the past couple, so today's news that both the print and online properties are being closed, and the staff laid off is particularly sad.

Back in 1998, when I first moved to the States to run Electronic Gaming Monthly, GamePro was "the enemy." This was pre-Internet dominance, pre-Game Informer surge, pre-blog, pre-YouTube, pre-anything else that people consume videogames content through these days. It was us-versus-them, and we thought they were a bit crap, honestly. I loved the people, but the mag wasn't for me. I don't mean to disrespect the memory, but coming from a different culture in the UK, I didn't have the emotional bond to the brand - so looking at it purely subjectively, and as its main competition, I just didn't like it very much. What I did have though, was a huge appreciation for how many gamers grew up with it (just like they did with EGM) and a massive respect for its place in the history of what I do for a living.

Little did I know that 12 years later I'd be running the thing. The whole situation came about almost entirely by accident. I'd just sold my own site, What They Play, to IGN and was "between jobs" and wondering what to do next. Some old co-workers from my time at Ziff Davis had recently made the move to IDG to run the GamePro business and reached out to me with a very compelling offer to do pretty much whatever I wanted with the GamePro brand both online and in print. What followed was a liberating 10 months of editorial and design experimentation that allowed the whole team to change the way people thought about the brand, and try some new ideas for games coverage. It was a lot of fun, and I'm incredibly thankful to everyone that made it possible.

Sadly, the business always had a sword of Damocles hanging over it; print. Its legacy was so entwined with physical production and distribution that transitioning the whole thing to a digital business was more complicated than you would expect. The print business in general is a mess. Distribution is expensive, production is expensive, and efficiencies are terrible. For every copy of a magazine that is sold these days, four, five or six are pulped. The wastage is incredible, and with the unit price of a printed magazine being roughly $1, it's an unbelievably difficult business to sustain. The audience just isn't as engaged as it was, and consequently advertisers aren't either. So there's a huge cost and a diminishing income. I believe the technical term is that it's "fucked." But I went into the whole thing with eyes wide open; I knew it wasn't a long term gig, and my assumption at the time was that we'd shift the emphasis from print to online, and allow the magazine itself to ultimately enjoy a dignified death while things flourished on the web.

After I left GamePro to run GameSpot last year, my connection to the brand remained. I met some wonderful people in my time there, and they were a group I had grown extremely fond of. Also, with me out of the picture, my brother was free to step in and contribute to the content mix; which he did with considerable vigor. Under Julian Rignall (someone I've looked up to and respected since he ran Mean Machines back in the olden, olden, olden days of British games magazines when I was running MegaDrive Advanced Gaming) Pete made an enormous difference to the volume of content on GamePro's site, and to the breadth of their coverage.

Watching the comments about the news on Twitter, it's clear there are several themes emerging; the obvious respect and fondness for the team and what they were doing, a great sense of respectful nostalgia for something that had been around for so long, frustration that yet more games journalists are out of work, and questions as to why this is happening.

The glib answer is that media is a tough business, and audiences are fickle. Building a large-scale media business is expensive, audience needs are adapting constantly and people need information in new ways that aren't always easy to keep up with at a scale that can sustain the costs involved. It doesn't help that the competitive landscape has changed so much either. Magazines used to compete with each other and nothing else; EGM versus GamePro is a great case in point. Later, big websites went toe-to-toe (and still do) like GameSpot and IGN. These days though, because the way we consume media and information has changed so much (particularly for games) and the way we seek it out has evolved (Google, YouTube, etc.) the competitive landscape is far more complex. Gaming media brands compete with each other still, but they also compete with their own subjects; publisher's own social media presences, official websites, official communities, studio Facebook pages and YouTube channels; and they compete with their own audience too, particularly on YouTube. Media across the board is having to adapt to citizen journalism in all forms, and in the games space the breadth of that covers everything from commentary to cool gameplay videos and walkthroughs. With so much information online, people aren't loyal to any media brands the way they used to be. People know what they want, so they just search for it...and if you don't rise to the top of Google's (or, increasingly, YouTube's) search results page - you're not going to get the audience, and audience equals revenue which pays the bills.

Talent remains though, and I'm sure that many of the folks affected by today's sad news will find other work. They're a great crew. I'll certainly be taking a long hard look at what we have opening up on GameSpot in the near future and considering who's now available. There's still a need for good, imaginative writing about games.

Raising Gamers With an Appetite for Learning

2011-11-29T14:57:00.001-08:00

Somehow, while I wasn't looking, my kids grew up really, really fast. Five minutes ago (it seems) they were babies, and now they're strapping six and eight year old boys, and consuming media and entertainment more voraciously than anyone of my generation was able to.

A few years ago, I wrote something for What They Play (sadly unlinkable, as IGN have since closed the site) about the way my oldest son was digesting information through games. Both a little jock and a little geek, he is obsessed with both football and videogames, and through Madden on the Wii was able to bring all the loves of his life into one package at the age of five. He learned the more intricate rules of the sport using the game, but more importantly he was absorbing mathematical skills that helped him understand multiplication and division well before his teachers were prepared to broach the subject in first grade.

My youngest is similarly motivated thanks to games, and while not quite the jock that his older brother is has also learned how to count in base six and seven thanks to Madden, and mastered his basic mathematical skills thanks to a healthy love of baseball, the San Francisco Giants, and MLB 2K11.

For both my kids, I credit an unlikely source for their enormous appetite for reading. While both boys developed their fundamental controller skills thanks to the Lego Star Wars games (I can tell you where every hidden object is in Complete Saga thanks to having to play through the whole thing over and over...TWICE) it was the Lego Harry Potter games that inspired them to pick up their first "grown up" books and read them. A game with no dialog, and virtually no written communication besides instructions for loading a saved game, was instrumental in prompting my oldest to power his way through the first three books, and is now embarking on book four. Similarly, my youngest has already worked his way through The Sorcerer's Stone.

It's usually at this time of year that videogames take their turn being more vilified than usual; not just for their violent/antisocial/depraved/amoral (take your pick...they all come up) content, but also for their "unhealthy" contribution to sedentary lifestyles and to their lack of intellectual stimulation. This is garbage. Sure, if you let your eight year-old play Call of Duty online for hours on end unsupervised, then what the hell do you really expect? By being more involved in the selection of what your kids are playing, and not using them as an easy babysitting device (they sure do keep 'em quiet, I'll give them that) you can nurture appetites for more than just killing monsters.

Apparently, being 40 soon is playing on my mind

2011-11-27T19:01:00.001-08:00

I'm not usually one to really dwell on things. Stuff happens, you deal with it. It was the attitude I was brought up with, and has (mostly) been the way of things for as long as I can remember. Just lately though, I've become acutely aware of the passage of time. My kids seem to be growing up faster than ever. I feel that I never have the time to squeeze everything in; whether its in a single day (go to the gym, spend the necessary amount of time at a demanding job, get home in time to see the kids, spend quality time with the wife, have an appropriate amount of personal time - the balance of which I still have yet to master) or over a weekend, a holiday weekend, or a vacation. Things seem to be moving faster than ever.

It took me a while, but I know the cause...

I'm nearly 40.

"Landmark" birthdays have typically not been an issue for me. 30, for example, came and went without a blip. 40 is really bearing down on me though. It has become a psychological line in the sand and a temporal reference point against which I'm judging all the crap that I seem unable to get a handle on; weight loss, fitness regimen, achievements at work, and a whole host of other bullshit that otherwise wouldn't have a clock on them that casts a shadow of inadequacy over an otherwise perfectly adequate existence.

It's time to get a handle on this stuff, and sift through the crap before the big day arrives.

Allergies, Shmallergies

2011-09-05T13:59:00.000-07:00

So, yeah. This whole food allergy has turned out to be a colossal pain in the arse. After a whole month of elimination diet, and being careful with exercise and a generally healthy lifestyle, very little has changed apart from meals being more annoying to think of, and I now have enormous selections of food that I can't eat. After trying to reintroduce both dairy and gluten into my day-to-day diet, both caused me to exhibit horrible hangover-like symptoms. Headaches, cold-sweats, cramps, and all kinds of nastiness. The reason I wasn't getting this before, I'm told, is that my system had so much of the allergens in it that it had built up a working immunity to the worst of it. Once it was cleared out of my system it was free to wreak havoc with my gastro intestinal system and, well, pretty much everything else.Not being able to eat dairy or gluten truly sucks. You know what has one or the other in it? Everything. Going to a restaurant is irritating, and even trying to think of a meal in the evening is much more work than sometimes I can be bothered to think of. It's taken the pleasure out of mealtimes quite considerably.And the worst thing? I still haven't lost any weight. And it turns out my cholesterol is no better either. So I'm no further along with the health issues I actually wanted to fix, only I can eat far less now. Super.

Day 10: Room Service Negotiations

2011-07-20T21:35:00.000-07:00

I'm down a couple of pounds, but nothing particularly radical is happening. The initial misery has worn off, but finding things to eat is still a lot more work than I'm typically used to. I am no longer able to think "jeez, I'm really hungry" and just grab something from a nearby store or restaurant. No, now I have to scour labels and interrogate servers.

Case in point; for the next three days I'm in San Diego at ComicCon. I'm very lucky to be here, it's a blast, and CBS is doing a ton of stuff that we're able to hitch the GameSpot wagon to in one way or another. It's going to be a lot of fun. What isn't, however, is finding stuff to eat. Today I wasn't able to eat lunch because both the timing and the location didn't allow for it. I ended up munching a gluten-free vaguely apple-flavored breakfast bar thing at 3pm to fend off the hunger pangs. For dinner, I gave up reading menus outside restaurants and went back to the hotel to order room service. Why? Because every restaurant in San Diego has a greeter wearing a short skirt who shoves postcards or menus into your face while asking you if you want to come in for dinner. Walking up 5th Street to the hotel was half a mile of constant harassment.

Room service was an unexpected challenge though.

For a start, the nice lady taking room service orders was...let's be nice and call it "struggling" with the English language. When I told her "I'm allergic to dairy, can you make sure the fish isn't cooked in butter" she sounded so confused I thought she was just going to hang up on me. Eventually, after much explaining I was able to order some salmon, but the process of getting it was painful; "no I can't eat anything with dairy in it. No, no butter. Or anything milk related, no. The sauce has butter in it? OK, so I can't eat that. Yes, that means I don't want the sauce. I do want the fish though. Can you do the fish without the butter and without the sauce? Yes? OK. No, the spinach can't be sauteed in butter either. Why? Because I'm allergic to dairy."

Eventually I got some food. I have no idea if there was actually any dairy in it, but I guess we'll find out in a few hours if I get stomach cramps or something.

Big discovery of the day: Pop Chips Original flavor chips are a) awesome (which I already knew, although I was more partial to the BBQ flavor) b) only have 100 calorie a bag, and more importantly c) are both dairy AND gluten free.

Day 04: Quinoa

2011-07-14T18:40:00.001-07:00

Four days in, and I'm following the diet very strictly, as instructed. I've eaten a lot of egg whites, and a lot of salad. I've eaten so much asparagus that my pee permanently has that obnoxious smell to it. Most of all though I've eaten a lot of quinoa. Endless bowls of fucking quinoa. Grainy, weirdly sprouting, mostly tasteless, oddly textured quinoa. Red quinoa. White quinoa. Quinoa cooked in water. Quinoa cooked in chicken broth. Quinoa with salmon. Quinoa with tuna. Quinoa with chicken.

Tonight, Mrs D asked if I wanted to take the kids out to dinner. And you know what? I do. But I don't want to have to study the menu really closely only to realize that the only thing I can probably order is yet another fucking salad. It's that, or suffer the lengthy negotiations required to ensure that meat or fish isn't cooked in butter, and that cheese isn't sprinkled on anything, or that something, somewhere in the meal might have gluten lurking in it.

I'm at a point today where I honestly have no idea what I want to eat, because I really don't want to put any real work into it right now. I've just spent all day at work working, and now I'd really rather just chill out and try to satiate the aching hunger that I feel every night.

And so far, no weight loss. Of course.

Day 01: And we're off...

2011-07-11T08:41:00.001-07:00

Here we go... Hopefully the next four weeks will lead to some positive physical changes, which will in turn have some kind of psychological halo effect. I'm not depressed or anything, but spending a whole year (give or take a few weeks) with this kind of frustration nagging away in the back of my head has to have been taking its toll whether I was aware of it or not.

The bathroom scale read a depressingly and infuriatingly familiar 206.4 this morning. That's a good 25 pounds porkier than where I want to be. If the nutritionist is right, it'll take a few days for my body to adjust to the absence of allergens in my system and then the inflammation will start to go down. At that point science will start to happen within my innards. My body should decide to let go of a bunch of water its been hanging onto, and my metabolism should change for the better. Quite how all this will manifest itself is a mystery. There's an outside chance I'll spend the next week as a big fat sweaty man with a bladder control issue and narcolepsy. That sounds like fun.

We'll see.

Mrs. D has been wonderfully supportive already; helping me with research and talking to friends that have had similar issues in the past (the gluten thing seems to be quite pervasive, thanks to processed foods stuffing more of it into what we ingest than is healthy). She's also elected to try and join me, for the most part. That said, her attempt at a coconut milk latte this morning was apparently disastrous. I couldn't bring myself to try it, honestly, as it looked a little strange and smelled like that overly flavored nonsense that Starbucks is currently peddling.

Breakfast was painless; egg whites, some veggies, and avocado washed down with black coffee, and then lunch was similarly pleasant, as I brought some leftover quinoa with tuna to work, and followed it with a coconut yogurt thing. If there's one thing that I need to be super-vigilant about, it's making food at home and then storing it so I can bring it to work. Given the food options near the office, I'm pretty much screwed unless I want to eat nothing but salad every day. Honestly, my biggest problem might be snacks. The nutritionist is still adamant that I need to be eating six times a day, and I totally forgot to pack anything to nibble on between meals today. Honestly, I was at a bit of a loss when I stared into the cupboard this morning. Fruit, perhaps? Maybe some of those nut crisp things? Tomorrow I'll be better about it.

Countdown to a new lifestyle

2011-07-10T16:52:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow, the new diet begins. With regard to my usual routine, I've been pretty lax this weekend. I've not worked out anywhere near as much as I should, and yesterday (Saturday) I played it a little faster and looser than usual with the diet. Knowing that something very strict and difficult to maintain is imminent, I figured I'd just let rip and go with the flow. We had guests for dinner last night, and while I cooked something pretty healthy - I didn't pay quite as much attention to every tiny nutritional detail.

Knowing that tomorrow (Monday) may be the last time I ever drink a latte or eat a "normal" piece of bread is certainly an odd feeling. If I had to pick one of the two potential allergens, I think I'd rather it be gluten than dairy. While working around the gluten content is going to be a colossal pain in the ass, life's little comforts (for me) tend to come from dairy. I don't overdo it by any stretch of the imagination, I'm not gorging on cheese or snarfing down cream buns or anything - but a non-fat latte in the morning is something I really look forward to each day, so I'd rather not go without long-term.

In preparation for the month ahead, I went to Whole Foods yesterday and tried to stock up on appropriately dairy and gluten free foodstuffs. It was more of an undertaking than I was expecting, and I ended up spending over and hour and a half scanning food labels and picking through nutritional info to find things that I'll actually be allowed to eat. Whole foods like fruits and veggies are the easy part, but there are lots of things that you'd expect created for those of a sandal-wearing, hemp-loving persuasion that simply aren't appropriate. Stuff that's dairy free often has gluten in it, and vice versa. I'd been told by a number of friendly vegans that I could peruse concoctions designed for them, and I'd be fine. Not so. Fake meats are packed to the hilt with gluten, it seems. The human equivalents of snausages, while healthy and friendly for vegetable-folk, are totally off the menu for me.

Fortunately, I did make a pleasant discovery; coconut milk, and coconut milk-derived shenanigans. I was unaware (until this weekend) that it's the latest dietary hotness thanks to a marketing campaign spearheaded by the omnipresent supertrainer Jillian Michaels. It (we're told) is the latest "superfood" discovery, thanks to all kinds of "good fats" and there are all kinds of goodies made with it. Lucky for me; I'm a big fan of the stuff. Macaroons and Mounds bars are some of my favorite forbidden goodies, so it's fortunate that the vast majority of coconut milk products have a faint whiff of both about them. There's a brand humbly called "So Delicious" that makes yogurts, milks, and ice cream - and it ain't half bad. Having experimented with a variety of milk alternatives in the past, I'd come to the conclusion that they all tasted like shit. Almond milk is borderline acceptable (sorta...it's all relative) but frankly I'd rather suck the sweat out of the gusset of my cycling shorts than drink soy milk or (shudder) rice milk. There's potential for a whole tirade about calling anything "milk" that comes from a nut or a grain, but we can save that for now. The bottom line is that coconut milk, comparatively speaking, isn't bad. I'm not going to be steaming it and pouring it over an espresso shot any time soon, but I could imagine using it on cereal without it making me want to retch.

So...one evening meal left, and then we're all in...

The ongoing struggle

2011-07-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

I never intended this blog to be a weightloss journal, but given the ongoing struggle I guess the fact that it has become just that is an insight into an important aspect of my personal life. Since I last updated on this particular blog, I've dabbled with a different blog concept, where I tried to keep up with my brother's daily "One A Day" blog movement (I couldn't, just too damn busy) and I've settled into a new job. The whole time though, I've been dieting carefully, and exercising vigorously.

The result? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

As I write this, I'm pretty much the exact same weight I was a year ago. I've talked to doctors, I've talked to personal trainers, and I've been to two different nutritionists, but so far nothing has worked. I ride at least 10 miles almost every day on my bike, and often ride 30, 40, or 50 miles at the weekend. I go to the gym regularly. Basically, I work out in some fashion five or six times a week. I also monitor and track absolutely everything that I put into my body, to the point of it being almost pathological, so I can keep to the guidelines set by my advisors.

To say that the lack of progress has been frustrating is an understatement of galactic proportions.

Today, I returned from another consultation with a nutritionist with a new plan in hand; food elimination to determine whether or not I have an allergy. The theory is that it's highly likely that the weighloss issues aren't caused by anything caloric, and are instead dictated by an adverse reaction to something in my daily intake. Allergies create inflammation, which leads to water retention, and they affect metabolism. Eliminate the allergen, and you can reboot your system.

So... starting Monday, I start the process of working out what might be going wrong with my innards. For the first month, I need to eliminate all dairy products, and all gluten from my diet. I keep this up for the month, see what happens, and then we introduce one of them back into my daily intake, and see if any fucked up stuff starts to happen.

Hopefully there'll be some actual weightloss along the way too.

Today, as I go into the last weekend of what has become "normal" eating (though to many of you, my usual intake will seem very conservative already) I'm thinking that I kinda want to journal the process, as it's likely to have some physical and psychological effects.

I think it's working

2010-08-30T11:53:00.001-07:00

I have to say, I was doubtful about the whole calorie slamfest thing, but now that I'm over a week into the new diet and exercise regime it's starting to look like it might be a success. I've been tracking every ounce of food and drink going into my system and logging every minute of exercise using the Livestrong app, while getting on the scales every day to watch it bounce up and down all over the place but trend in specific directions.

As warned by the nice nutritionist lady, the adjustment to what she called a "proper" diet resulted in an immediate weight gain of a little over six pounds. This, I'm assured, is the carb reserves coming back along with the associated water that they are suspended in. After five days, I topped out at what I can only describe as a weight I'm uncomfortable with, but miraculously it didn't stay up there for long. The trend now, thankfully, seems to be in a steady downward direction. It's a little early for jubilation at any kind of freefall fat melting dive, but I'm reasonably confident that things are working the way they should, and more comfortable with what's going on than I have been in a long while. There's more of a tangible feedback loop between going to the gym and the bathroom scale, and I'm back into the healthy habit of obsessing over food levels and nutritional values.

System Reboot?

2010-08-24T17:26:00.001-07:00

So, today marks day 5 of the "new" diet as advised by the nice nutritionist lady. Rather than going for the full bore 3,000 calorie insanity that she had initially proposed, I've been aiming for something in the less porcine 2,200 to 2,500 range with the hope that that is sufficient to reboot my metabolism and get things cooking again.

Remarkably, it has proven to be immensely difficult. You'd think that simply eating more calories would be as easy as snarfing down burgers, pizza, and ice cream at every available opportunity but it's far more challenging than that. The trick has been to move my overall daily calorie intake up by more than 500 calories while ensuring that no more than 20 per cent of them come from fat. The only way to tackle it successfully has been to turn it into a bit of an ongoing mental game. I punch everything I eat or drink into the MyPlate application on the LiveStrong website and iPhone app and track calories, fat, protein, and sugars to make sure that everything sits within the range that it's supposed to be.

Not. Easy.

On my first day I struggled to eat more than 1,900 calories and with over 800 calories burned on the bike and at the gym, my net intake for the day was actually less than usual. The following day wasn't much better, but because I didn't work out at all I could at least feel comfortable that I nearly squeezed 2,000 calories into my system while only overshooting my fat goal by 5 grams. By Sunday I was getting into the swing of things more, but I was starting to realize that the optimal mix of calories and carbs necessitates a lot of lean protein, and a lot of vegetables and high fiber breads and cereals which make you feel bloated in the short term and, um... let's call it "loose" in the longer term.

I've been loathe to step on the scales for fear of the horrors that it will reveal (I could put on between three and six pounds before things start moving in the right direction, apparently,) but I have to say that by yesterday I was noticing a distinct difference in how I felt.
I wasn't feeling hungry in the middle of the night (a big no-no according to the nutritionist, and a sign that something is seriously amiss) but I was starting to feel much hungrier during the day. The recommendation/warning that I would need to eat six or more times a day was pretty much on-target, and I find that I have to keep topping up the tank every three hours or so to avoid feeling absolutely ravenous.

Given that today is the fifth day of this madness, my whole system should have rebooted by tonight. If the changes in hunger pangs are any indication, something is definitely happening, and so far it all seems to be along the lines of what was described.

Given that I'm a gentleman of leisure for the time being while I spend a fortnight between jobs, I'm able to put a lot more time and effort into this than I would otherwise. I'm also able to spend a lot more time exercising. Sadly though the weather is conspiring against this. Today I had to cut a long ride short at just 20 miles due to the fact that the thermometer was pushing well north of 100' on my chosen training route. As I pushed up White's Hill in Fairfax I thought my tires were going to melt. It was so hot that my insulated water bottle, which was also packed with ice to chill the Gatorade even further, heated up so much that in less than an hour the contents were undrinkable.

It was all a necessary evil though. If, indeed, my new diet is working today's ride should have elevated my resting metabolic rate by more than 1 calorie a minute for the next 24 hours. That may not sound like much, but it means that with the right fuels I should now be burning 1,440 more calories while resting. It also means that if I have this carbs/fat thing balanced correctly that I should have retrained my body to burn through things in the right order.

The proof will come later this week when I start weighing myself again, I guess.

Eat more to lose weight. What?

2010-08-22T17:05:00.001-07:00

For as long as I can remember I've struggled with my weight. I was far from a skinny kid, and after slimming down as a teen, its been harder and harder to stay in shape as I get older. A job that involves sitting down for most of the day, and involves lengthy research that's also best performed sitting down doesn't exactly help. "Sedentary" barely describes it. There aren't many things you really have to get up off your arse for when writing about video games, or working with teams that write about video games. If you want to get active, it's got to be a conscious effort, and you've got to really make the time for it. Not drinking beer helps, too.

Things got particularly bad after the kids were born - the incentive to just bounce between work and home with nothing in between (and even the commute is sedentary, just 40 minutes sat in a car instead of at my desk or on the couch) became even more pronounced, and as I crept ever closer to 40, my metabolism slowed to what seemed like a complete halt.

For the past three years I've been making a concerted effort to be far more active with the goal of melting some of that wobbly flab away. It can't be sexy, right? Mrs. D says nice things, but this stuff can't be attractive. After topping out at a number far further north of 200 pounds than I can ever feel comfortable admitting, I finally shamed myself into putting some concerted effort into it. I've dabbled with gym memberships for years, but somehow there has always been something more important to do than bang out 20 reps of something painful. Not any more.

The first big push was getting on the bike. After a friend questioned how I could possibly live in Marin and not spend as much time as possible riding up and down mountains, Mrs. D indulged me for Christmas and it didn't take me long to get hooked. There's an excellent feedback loop that comes with cycling, because pretty much every time you go out you get a little bit better.

After a year of creeping up to 20, 30, 40 miles at a time, I eventually signed up for the Marin Century - a 100k (62 mile) ride that snakes its way from San Rafael to Petaluma, up murderous hills and through some beautiful scenery, as a key fitness goal; partly to prove to myself that I could do it, but also to affirm to Mrs. D and the kids that when I say I'm going to do something, I really mean it. Along with this, I started tracking my exercise and calorie intake so I knew exactly what I was doing to my body, with the hope of being able to fine tune things and drop some more weight.

Then came the weird part. After successfully dropping a little flab, I started to plateau. This is completely normal, I'm told - but as my fitness increased, and I was hitting the gym four times a week and riding 40 miles or more at the weekend nothing would budge. The belly was still there, and the scales weren't moving. At all. I do have thighs that appear to be made out of rock though. Cycling has a way of making your legs solidify.

I went to the doctor, and he just sort of shrugged at me before reminding me that effective weight loss comes from eliminating about 500 calories a day from your daily routine. "If you're usually eating 2,000 calories, drop it to 1,500," so that's what I did. I went to a fitness instructor who just said that working out really, really fucking hard would make a difference. Fearing that he was confused or overenthusiastic or something, I went to another fitness instructor who basically said the same thing. So I followed their advice; "work as hard as you can until you think you're going to puke," said fitness guy #2, so that's what I did. I never actually barfed from exertion, but there were times when I came close.

Result? Nothing. I trained for my second Century, and again nothing.

In fact, on occasion my weight was going up rather than down. Back to the doctor, who did the shrug thing again before suggesting that maybe I should talk to a nutritionist, because perhaps there was something weird about my metabolism or something. Or something? Like what?

I put it off and put it off, because...y'know, isn't that a bit much? But after the plateau entered month seven, I decided that enough was enough. Working out like mad and eating carefully for that long with zero results is demoralizing, to say the least.

One hour with a nutritionist later, and I have a whole new understand of how my innards work, and came away with what felt like extremely counter-intuitive advice. My "tenacious plateau" (as it's called) is, in fact, a problem with my metabolism. Turns out I've not been eating enough, and that coupled with all the exercise has resulted in my body dramatically slowing my metabolism down as a kind of survival mechanism thing. "Your brain thinks you're in a semi-starvation state, so it's clinging on to all the fuel it can," she said. "You need to eat considerably more, and make sure you get plenty of good carbs to reset your system."

She went on to explain how the results seen in low-carb diets like South Beach and Atkins are a result of something not entirely natural happening inside your body (the 10-12 pounds that you lose so fast aren't fat, they're the result of burning through your natural carbohydrate reserves, which along with the water they're suspended in weigh about 12 pounds) before explaining how the body processes food, and how it will react once I get my shit together.

So here we are. I've gotten so used to eating 1,500 to 1,700 calories a day that eating more than that is actually proving to be much more difficult than I expected, particularly when factoring in the fact that no more than 20 per cent of my calorie intake can be from fat. She suggested I shoot for 3,000 calories - which just struck me as batshit insane, and would surely result in me piling on pounds, but she assured me it wouldn't. "Start with about 2,200 to 2,500 and then tune it from there," she suggested - so that's what I'm doing, and it's tough. I'm three days into the craziness now, and within the next two or three days I'm assured that my whole system will reboot and we'll start to see some results.

Fingers crossed.

Moving on from GamePro

2010-08-20T13:07:00.001-07:00

Earlier this week, I announced that I was going to be leaving GamePro to do something new. My last day in the office was this past Wednesday, and it was sad to say goodbye to everyone. I had a great, if very brief, time working with the team, and I feel like we achieved an awful lot in a very brief space of time. We changed people's perceptions of the brand, completely rethought the editorial direction and design of the magazine and website, and hopefully got people thinking about how games media can evolve in the years ahead. I was given a tremendous amount of freedom and latitude by the management at IDG, and for that I'm extremely grateful.

My time at GamePro certainly had an impact on me, and judging from the little in-jokes on my leaving gift (below) it seems my many little quirks and foibles were clearly noticed by everyone...

1. An easy one... I've been pretty into iPhone games for a while now, and I still get requests on Twitter for an "iPhone game of the week" based on something I used to do on the 1UP podcasts a few years ago.

2. This one's not about the line itself (although there were some download-heavy mornings)...it's the four exclamation points that are important. Fairly early on in my time at GamePro I instigated a blanket exclamation point ban on all content, and particularly on all headlines because they were starting to get out of hand. I soon escalated this to a blanket ban with a $1 fine for any individual usage. Not exactly my most visionary moment, I'll concede. It was both necessary and effective though.

3. While training for the Marin Century bike ride this summer, I was run off the road while about 20 miles from home and went over the handlebars at 25 mph. I landed on my head and cracked my helmet. Fortunately I was just bruised, and nothing else was broken.

4. Sometimes, conference calls can be very long, and very frustrating. On one particular occasion I was feeling a little under the weather, and that coupled with the frustration directed at some... let's call them "less progressive" individuals... led me to start feeling a little nauseous, much to the amusement of everyone on my end of the phone.

5. It's true...sometimes the Brit accent can help in unexpected ways.

6. I hate, hate, hate introductions/decks to interviews that start with "we sit down with..." because it's lazy and cliched and you see it so often in magazines and on websites. Not just video games stuff, but everywhere. Also, more often than not, it's not true either. I know "we sent emails back and forth that were subsequently sanitized by an over-zealous PR person" doesn't have quite the same ring, but if we didn't "sit down with" the subject, let's not say we did. Apparently my vehemence on the subject didn't go unnoticed.

7. Not sure if you can see it here, but the on-sale date for the fake issue is my last day in the office - 8/18/2010.

Too Big and Too Hard

2010-08-15T13:50:00.001-07:00

I wrote the following early this year, and it generated a lot more attention than I anticipated. Developers, particularly, responded very positively and noted that the topics covered are a big part of the cultural shift that is taking place at the moment. On the flipside, a lot of hardcore gamers thought I was talking absolute nonsense and treated me like a harbinger of doom. In retrospect, this ably highlights the challenges that lie ahead for video games. The audience is expanding and shifting away from stuff that satiates the core's tastes, developers are able to be more experimental, and the shifts in distribution methods are facilitating this stuff way faster than any other change in the industry's history.

Since we rebooted GamePro at the beginning of the year we’ve spent an awful lot of time talking to game designers and creative directors in an effort to try and get into their heads and find out what makes them tick. While we’ve lots of different stories about what motivates them to get out of bed in the morning, there have been a surprising number of common threads that we’ve pulled from each of these conversations. Most pervasive is the notion that the games business is currently going through a once-in-a-lifetime period that should be relished as much as humanly possible. Unlike any other part of the entertainment business, gaming’s auteurs and its most influential (or at least most affluent) consumers are maturing at roughly the same pace. So as the vanguard of creatives in charge of our experiences adjust to their own life changes, they are able to channel their learnings back into their products (reasonably) safe in the knowledge that they’ll be well-received and broadly supported. As an overall community we’ve grown up together. We’ve gotten older, settled down, and had kids together. So as designers are deciding that they want to make different experiences to indulge their own lives, they can be fairly confident that their audience is in the same boat. This period is unique in that the industry will only be as naturally in tune with its audience as it is right now for a brief period, and its still adjusting its technology at roughly the same pace as its artistic vision.

This whole scenario isn’t just based on anecdotal evidence and wishful thinking from people that want to go home and spend time with their kids. Like everything else about game design, the tools available to designers that prove these theories are more useful than ever, and they’re providing the sort of data about the way we all consume games that’s proving very surprising.

The revelation that I’ve heard from more designers than anything else is this:

Games are too hard, they’re too long, and they provide way too much stuff.

While this may sound like an excuse from an aging group of individuals faced with technology that takes an increasingly large degree of effort to utilize, there’s an enormous amount of data being collected that backs this up.

Conventional gaming wisdom thus far has been “bigger, better, MORE!” It’s something affirmed by the vocal minority on forums, and by the vast majority of critics that praise games for ambition and scale. The problem is, in reality its almost completely wrong. The vast majority of gamers don’t need more. They don’t have the time or the inclination to invest enormous amounts of time and effort with a game. This isn’t the kind of conclusion that can be reached through surveys or questionnaires, because when it comes to our behavior we all have far too much pride, we’re all greedy, and we all lie. If someone asks us, collectively “do you want more or less game?” it’s fairly safe to say we’d all go with the former rather than the latter. Also, when someone asks us if we want to coast through something that’s just challenging enough, we’d say “oh no, I’m a gamer - I need the challenge.”

The problem is, the vast majority of gamers don’t really behave the way they say they do. How do we know this? Because an increasing number of games incorporate telemetry systems that track our every action. They measure the time we play, they watch where we get stuck, and they broadcast our behavior back to the people that make the games so they can tune the experience accordingly.

Every studio I’ve spoken to that does this, to a fault, says that many of the games they’ve released are far too big and far too hard for most players’ behavior. As a general rule, less than five percent of a game’s audience plays a title through to completion. I’ve had several studios tell me that their general observation is that “more than 90 percent” of a games audience will play it for “just four or five hours.”

So what does this mean for the future of games? Well, before we all get our panties in a bunch over the inevitable endumbening of games, it seems that games will become increasingly modular in order to accommodate different tastes. Currently, Microsoft’s development guidelines tell developers and publishers that the optimum time to release DLC is “within the first 30 days” of a game’s release. The problem with that though is that it’s not enough time to gather enough data about the audience’s behavior and then generate content that reflects it. Content delivered in the first month has to be pretty much finished and sitting in the first party approval queue before the actual game comes out. So right now, that first bunch of DLC we see for something is usually based on a hunch, rather than the way we actually play. For some games that appeal to specific tastes, that’s easier (I guess) to anticipate. But as games are increasingly under pressure to achieve monstrously huge sales, the whole system will have to change.

The nature of the majority, as one developer told me recently, is that their preference is to “just dick around” rather than follow the structure. It’s not just an occasional thing – in terms of behavior its fairly pervasive. There’s always a minority that plays things the way the studio intended, but as another developer told me, “sometimes, you just want to tell people that they’re playing it wrong.”

The thing is, we’re not playing it wrong. What’s happening is that studios are starting to look at the way they make games and concede that they’re making them wrong. The vast majority of releases, even the most spectacular and successful, adhere to structural conventions that date back 20 years. As an audience we’re getting bored of that, if we’re honest. Right? Younger gamers demand something more sophisticated, while older gamers don’t have the time or energy to play through something for a bazillion hours.

So expect this; more games that reward that “dicking around” and celebrate emergent game modes, and more games that accommodate the hardcore based on behavior, rather than assumption. Big time multiplayer shooters like Call of Duty and Halo can always rely on an unusually large hardcore contingent, but the teams making many other games can stop beleaguering under misguided assumptions. Consequently our experiences will be “tuned” over time to a far larger degree than they are currently, and they will do so based on how we’re actually playing them, rather than how its hoped we’re playing them.

Hopefully the notion of “value” won’t be lost during all of this.

This originally appeared on GamePro, April 30 2010.

Social Games are the new Coin-Ops

2010-08-14T15:02:00.001-07:00

When I was a kid, the gaming landscape was probably pretty different to anything that many of you remember. For one thing, I’m old. Hopefully I’m older than you actually think I am, but honestly based on many of you that I’ve met at PAX, I’m old enough to be your dad. No really, I totally am. Secondly, I’m foreign. I write this from the perspective of being in America while not being American, so my assumption is that to you I’m “that old guy with the funny accent.” I do understand that there are plenty of Brit readers to GamePro these days, but for many of you, my personal history with video games probably differs quite substantially from yours.

I never owned a Nintendo as a kid. There you go, there’s my thermonuclear starting point. The first Nintendo device I ever had any prolonged exposure to was an imported Super Famicom at my first full time writing job in 1990. This explains my occasional on-again, off-again reputation on gaming forums as a bit of a “hater” when it comes to old-school Nintendoness. It’s not that I hate, it’s just that I don’t have that ingrained sense of Mario-centric personal history that many of you do. I didn’t grow up with Zelda, Square never had the opportunity to earn my blind faith, and my earliest “favorite Nintendo game” was, I dunno, probably F-Zero.

My personal gaming history comes in two distinct fruity flavors; home computers, specifically Atari home computers, and arcade machines. I’ll no doubt meander back to the former at some point in a future Friday editorial, but for the purposes of this week’s thoughts, I want to focus on the latter. Yes...there is a point that I’m getting at, and the clue is in the headline.

Some of my favorite gaming memories are of playing arcade games for brief moments with my dad. I say that the time we had was brief because a) I had limited exposure to them, so b) the money dropped into the machine rarely lasted very long. The place where I grew up in England is a small hamlet in the middle of nowhere in which there are probably more chickens than there are human beings. Most of the houses were built before America was even discovered, and there was only one general store within 15 miles. The nearest arcade was probably 50 miles away. Consequently, I only ever saw the fabulous coin op game technology of the late 20th century when on road trips or on vacation (that’s “holiday” in English.) When we visited my grandparents, we’d always stop at a “service station” (rest stop, I guess, to Americans) at which there’d be a handful of arcade machines blinking in a corner. It was here that I first saw Space Invaders, Pole Position, Gyruss, Battlezone, and the original Star Wars machine. My dad and I would put our money in, play for a few moments, and then gawp at the amazing graphics while wondering what it would be like to play something like that for longer than a couple of frantic minutes.

This was before the arcade business was completely obliterated by Nintendo, Sega, and later the original PlayStation, of course. This was 1980-something, when arcade machines were designed to relieve you of as much money as possible. They practically reached out and stole the coins right out of your jeans. Gameplay was tuned to be a little too hard, but no so hard as to discourage you from emptying your pockets completely. As an exercise in entertainment ROI they were fabulously effective. If you were vaguely competent, you’d survive long enough to feel a rush of excitement, and there was the constant social motivation of getting your three-letter name on the high score table for all (that cared) to see. Some people got really good at these games, but they still had to pour a ton of cash into the machines in order to become that competent.

By the mid-90s of course, all of this changed, and our gaming habits were altered forever by increasingly impressive home consoles. Or so we thought.

Skip ahead to 2010, and the coin op model is back with a vengeance. It’s not location based like that old Star Wars machine, and it’s not targeting those of us that are most interested in playing games, but it’s gobbling up attention at the edge of our collective comfort zone and drawing in millions of new “gamers.” (I’m using air quotes there, for reasons that will become clear in a moment.) As it does so, it’s causing the entire industry to take a long, hard look at how it asks us all to pay for our games, and it’s changing the way that many new experiences are designed.

What is it?

Social games.

There are plenty of examples that wander vaguely in the direction of my point here, but given that I’ve already tried to hold your attention for 807 words, I don’t want to push my luck.

First: At the Game Developers Conference this year, there was plenty of talk about this stuff. Social games were identified as being cheap and quick to make, and the importance of their “virality” was cited frequently. Part of this process was also identified as optimizing games for revenue opportunities - which means designing the game around the parts that will motivate you to pay for something that makes things happen sooner. Make your crops grow faster, make the thing you’re building appear sooner, buying mana/gold/fuel/mojo/awe to cause specific actions to happen quicker.

Second: That social motivation of getting your name on the high score table and having something to boast about has morphed into something quite different. One of the primary motivations in social games like Farmville or We Rule is shame. Because you’re inherently connected to people that you know, your performance is very visibly reflected in the upkeep of your game. You don’t want your crops going bad in Farmville, and you don’t want your minions looking all ragged in Godfinger. If you’re playing regularly and drawing benefits from the social aspects of these games, you need to keep up appearances. Doing so requires work, and in the absence of the necessary time to do all that work, you can spend real cash to speed things up. Genius, huh? As long as you’re super engaged in a game like We Rule, the likelihood that you’ll spend money on it increases because it’s preying on your available time, and your patience.

If you’re a hardcore gamer you’re probably looking at this and thinking “so what? How does that affect me?” Well, given the enormous success enjoyed by companies like Zynga, Playfish, and Crowdstar, the whole industry is starting to look at the psychology of this stuff, and wonder if it would be possible to make more money out of a return to what is, essentially, the coin-op model. Zynga, as has been widely publicized lately, is making several hojillion dollars a day out of its social games and is quickly becoming one of the most profitable games companies in the world. They don’t “sell” any of their titles - all of their revenue comes from encouraging players to pay a small amount of cash regularly. For a company like Activision, which never met a revenue opportunity it wasn’t afraid of exploring, this has to have them frothing when they brainstorm the future of franchises like Call of Duty.

The future of how we pay for games is nearly upon us. In part, it’s a return to the ways of the past, but it’s creeping up on us disguised as simple and innocuous social games that many of us don’t even think of as being video games to start with. Brace yourself.

This originally appeared on GamePro, April 23 2010

Being pitched a cover

2010-03-05T16:57:00.001-08:00

So, so true...

Space Invaders Infinity Gene and its evolution through music

2009-07-31T13:54:00.001-07:00

I've been pretty thrilled with Taito's Space Invaders Infinity Gene on the iPhone even since before it came out. Just the idea of an "Extreme" style Space Invaders title on my favorite device was enough to make me smile and wibble on endlessly about it to anyone that dared raise the subject. Having spent a week with the game now, I'm still just as happy – and although I've not worked my way through every stage it can throw at me, I've become hugely distracted by the way that it will custom-generate new levels based on music pulled in from my iPhone's music playlist. Initially I'd dismissed the idea as just a neat little gimmick that would add a little extra to the game's lifespan, but now I'm completely hooked on throwing all sorts of different music at it to see how it would interpret them.

My first try was with something that seemed appropriate vibe-wise, the Sam Fog vs Carlos D. Main Mix of Nine Inch Nails' "Every Day is Exactly the Same." Little glimpse into my music taste there, I guess. It kicks off with an almost robotic and repetitive bass line that slowly swells to introduce new audio themes and subtle changes, while maintaining a constant rhythm. The resulting Space Invaders level was beautiful, complex and unbelievably difficult.

The level opened with a simple blue to gray fade in the background, which then revealed itself to be a form of tunnel with undulating walls that pushed into and out of the main play area in time with the changing pitch of the bass line. After and initial wave of very basic invaders, the action soon exploded into a swarm of violence with the first crash of a cymbal and the introduction of more complex drum patterns. The screen was filled with hexagonal "mines" that I had to cut a path through, while avoiding fire from both large and small invaders.

From here, the game started to bring larger and larger dreadnaught style ships into the action, the likes of which I had not yet seen in the "normal" gameplay. Rather than drop in from the top of the screen, many of them would slide in from the sides, or even up from the bottom of the screen, firing endless barrages of destructive, solid-looking laser beams. As the music continued to swell, the game started to introduce solid objects into the "tunnel" it had formed, and began to drop in larger and larger enemies that would arrive as though dropping in from above, and behind my little gunship.

After this, things got even crazier; it would start throwing in lines of "gates" that blocked the whole "tunnel" that had formed, requiring me to shoot at specific lock points to open them and let me through the environment that was forming ahead. The whole thing was just fascinating. I've played the same level over and over again just to try and spot all of the cool things that it's introducing. It's not just a lot of fun, but the way that the game evolves, even over the course of a single piece of music, is a delight to watch.

I've since tried with a number of other pieces of music. A lengthy DJ Tiesto mix of "Adagio for Strings" resulted in an almost blinding, fast-paced barrage of invaders, while a Wilco track brought a swirl of tiny ships interspersed with gigantic battleships pounding me with star-shaped missiles during the chorus.

Not only does the gameplay if Space Invaders Infinity Gene evolve over time, but so has my relationship with it. Now I'm hunting for music with different rhythms and textures to see how it will respond. How about my wife's Afro Cuban All-Stars album? How Rodrigo y Garbriela's "Diablo Rojo" be interpreted? Some Metallica, perhaps? This game's life just extended way beyond my expectations.

The first ever Thinking out Loud: 11.28.01

2009-06-20T12:37:00.001-07:00

Back in the olden-olden-olden days (OK, it started in 2001) when there weren't Twitter feeds or even blogs for that matter, people still read newsletters. How quaint! I'd almost completely forgotten about this - but I used to write one that went out every week called (imaginatively) "Thinking Out Loud." This was before 1UP even existed, and the "official" website of EGM, CGW and the Official PlayStation Magazine was Gamers.com. Remember that? Good times. Well, no. Not really.

Anyway, every week I let nonsense spew out of my keyboard, and it gathered quite a bit of a following. In a weird kind of way, I guess it was a very, very early precursor to the kind of conversation (albeit one way in this case) on 1UP Yours. The brand "Thinking Out Loud" lives on as a gathering of thoughts from bloggers on 1UP, but the original was just me talking shit for a couple of thousand words every week.

If the archive on an old hard drive I just found is to be believed, the piece pasted below is actually the first ever Thinking Out Loud from November 28, 2001. So it's like a digital collector's item or something. Note the seer-like quality with which I observe industry happenings, and the clairvoyance I display in predicting that some obscure game called "Halo" has the chance to be pretty successful.

Here it is. Enjoy. I've not tested any of the links that are still in there. Chances are most of them are broken, given that it was nearly eight years ago.

THINKING OUT LOUD 11.28.01

Apparently, according to conservative estimates, between us we managed to spend somewhere in the region of $400 million during gaming’s “big week”. Considering that the newspapers told us on Wednesday that we’re “officially” experiencing a recession, and we’re all supposed to be broke, that’s pretty darned impressive. There aren’t many actual numbers on system sales, but from what I can gather from contacts at both Nintendo and Microsoft, as well as various retailers is that the official number is “all of them.” According to the majority of news sources, Nintendo alone made more cash in that first weekend than Harry Potter managed to…and that took us all for somewhere in the region of $93.5 million. That would explain why I still can’t find a Gamecube anywhere I guess. I have a copy of Rogue Leader ready and waiting, but I can’t find a system anywhere…let alone a black one. If you stumble across one let me know, eh?

The nice people at Konami announced on Wednesday that they had shipped 1.8 million copies of Metal Gear Solid 2 already and that they’re really rather pleased about this, thank you. If you haven’t bought it yet, go out and do so. There are apparently plenty. If you foolishly pre-ordered it from an online retailer that still hasn’t got round to shipping it, at least check out the official website and let the music make the hairs on the back of your neck tingle while you’re fuming. Do yourself a favor and keep away from the chat forums online about this one until after you’ve started playing it though. People have a tendency to talk about all the bits that you’re not going to want spoiling.

In other PS2 related news, those of you dying to know what’s going on with WipeOut Fusion will be pleased to know that…no, it hasn’t been given a release date, but it does have its own website now. The last thing I heard, the UK release had been pushed back to next year to “make a product worthy of the WipeOut name.” Does that mean that the thing they’ve been working on for the last couple of years isn’t worthy of the WipeOut name? There’s still no word from SCEA as to whether they’ll be releasing it in the U.S.

Did you hear the one about the Xbox making Sony execs rethink the PS3 release strategy? Nope…it isn’t a joke, according to a recent interview with The Financial Times, Kunitake Ando, president and CEO of Sony, said that the Xbox could force the company to transition to the PS3 earlier than intended. "The biggest threat to the PlayStation 2 is that the Xbox changes the industry's life cycle," said Ando, who feels that it is unclear whether the current PS2 business model is sustainable and that its console life cycle could be reduced to three years as a result. This doesn’t sound like the typically bullish Sony to me. Where’s all the talk of “ours is better than yours” and people holding press conferences to say that no-one else has a chance? Check out Gamespot’s full story.

Speaking of the Xbox, it’s shocking how the overall perceptions of the Xbox have changed isn’t it? Let’s be honest and admit that we’ve all spent the last year poo-pooing the idea of Microsoft building a games machine. We’ve all bitched about the crappy software line-up that they showed during the summer. We’ve mocked the system itself for weighing as much as a small car. We’ve mocked the joypad for feeling like a potato with a Pog wedged inside it. Now that it’s here though…it’s a bit different isn’t it? We’re a bit disappointed that the green thing in the middle of the system isn’t the glowing jewel-like orb that we originally thought it might be, but we’ve been wowed by what the box can do. We’ve also laughed at the Dead or Alive 3 commercial (even if, and I may be alone in this, the game itself isn’t really that fantastic). We’ve grudgingly acknowledged that Munch’s Oddysee is really fun and, most of all, we’ve come to the realization that Halo may turn out to be one of the finest games ever made. It’s a wonderful experience that will eat into your free time the way that Microsoft itself is eating into its $500 million ad campaign. Even if the sound track does occasionally sound a bit like Riverdance. C’mon! What do you mean you don’t hear that? There are places when the action gets a bit tough and the music erupts in such a way that you wouldn’t be surprised to see one of the Covenant prancing around like Michael Flatley. I spent the majority of the holiday weekend alienating my loved ones and blasting my way through Bungie’s epic and loving every second of it. Sure, there were some odd moments involving bits of spaceship that appeared to have been built by skatepark designers (why are there little jump ramps sprinkled along a major escape route?) but I haven’t had that much fun with a shooter since the first Quake.

Play Halo all the way through. Play it again and try and finish it on “legendary” level (if you’re man enough) and then try and convince 15 of your friends to gather together four TVs, four Xboxes and 16 joypads so you can experience the superb multiplayer modes. Few people will get the opportunity to play it this way, thanks to supply, cost, friend-availability and space issues…but if you ever get the chance, find a large room away from distractions and dig in. Alternatively, check out GameSpy’s hack that allows you to link your Xbox to a PC with a broadband connection and pretend you have lots of friends by meeting them online and kicking their asses. It may get a bit sluggish at times, but if you have the opportunity, try it out.

The team at Electronic Gaming Monthly have been hopelessly addicted to the game and it’s no secret that Halo was in part responsible for “winning” the magazine’s Xbox vs. Gamecube feature…as well as causing everyone on the team to be late handing their work in on time. There are 11 editors on EGM…six of them voted for Xbox, five for Gamecube. If you speak to them now (hunt them down in the forums) you may even find that some of the Gamecube fans are switching allegiances. Who would have thought huh?

Halo’s probably been responsible for a lot of the positive press that the Xbox has been getting too. That, and the recent surge of patriotism that everyone’s been feeling lately. The most unusual comment I saw was Joe Salkowski of the Chicago Tribune who posed the thought that the “purchase of Xbox [is] a patriotic quandary.” He even closes his piece with the comment “If I don't buy at least one game console this Christmas, I'm afraid the terrorists will win. At least, that's what I'm telling my wife.” Hope she believes you pal.

So…when is Sony going to get round to doing the right thing and dropping the price of the PS2 then? It’s down to 199 pounds in the UK (that’s about $249), in Japan they just dropped the price to the equivalent of, ooh…lookee here…$249, so now it’s starting to look like the U.S. has the most expensive system anywhere. Except Canada where I hear you have to pay with your firstborn child. Right now, everyone at Sony is steadfast in their denial that there are any plans to drop prices. A telling sign could be the prices you can find a GT3 pack for these days. A lot of stores are selling this for $329…which does work out a bit cheaper than a PS2 and a copy of the game separately. If you’re gift shopping – this would be the choice to go for.

Speaking of gift shopping, here’s something perfect if you’re on a tight budget. The recent surge in demand for the Dreamcast thanks to the price drop has prompted the production of 2,000 more black Dreamcast units in Japan, according to Consolewire. It seems that it will never die. The official U.S. price is now $50, although not all retailers are sticking to this at the moment. A giant heap of systems at a local Best Buy here in the Bay Area still has them tagged at $69, but even that is a complete bargain. If you don’t have one – go and get one while you can…if only to play Soul Calibur. And NBA 2k1. And NFL 2k1. And Shemue. And Crazy Taxi as it was meant to be played. And…and…and….and pretty much every other Dreamcast game there is. They’re all bargains. This is like the gaming gods cutting us all a break and handing out gaming manna. This kind of thing doesn’t happen very often, so take advantage of it.

Finally, the big news this week is that Square has taken the bold an unprecedented step of announcing that it will be shipping a game earlier than expected, and on top of that, it’s a game that we really want to ship early. December 26th will be a big day for us all…as it means that we have to rush out, still hungover from Christmas day and try and track down one of the early copies of Final Fantasy X that’s shipping that day. Fantastic eh? If you can’t wait even that long, and can get yourself to San Francisco on December 15th, Square will be previewing the game at the PlayStation store at the Metreon all day.

My first magazine

2009-05-11T11:37:00.001-07:00

I've talked occasionally about my first "professional" video games writing gig, which was for an Atari themed magazines called Page 6 (no, that's no me in the bios, that's my dad - also called John) starting back in 1987. This past weekend however, I got an email from my parents with the following "magazine" scanned in from old printouts they'd found filed away in the attic. This "Atari Micro Mag" dates back to (based on the "news" items within) just prior to the release of the ill-fated Atari 260 ST, which puts it probably around 1985. So I was (counts on fingers, toes) um...maybe 13 at the time of "publication." Judging from the bylines, it was a school project or something, as they were all guys I hung out with when I was 11, 12, 13 years old.

Anyway...here are the scans. From printouts on a "Star SG10 printer" apparently. All designed in Broderbund's Print Shop. Remember that? Fantastic program.

Reviews Symposium, part one

2008-12-18T14:30:00.000-08:00

Are reviews primarily a consumer guide, or should they serve another purpose? Do review scores deter intelligent discussion of video games? Is the presence or absence of a review score the only difference between a reviewer and a critic? What is the role of the reviewer when the Internet is democratizing published opinion? How should reviews and reviewers evolve in light of the emergence and growth of Flash games, small games, indie games and user-generated games?

These questions and more were on the mind of N'Gai Croal, John Davison and Shawn Elliott last summer when they decided to expand their conversation to a number of noted reviewers, writers, bloggers and journalists for a published email symposium on game reviews. (See below for the full list of participants.) The planned list of topics include Review Scores; Review Policy, Practice and Ethics; Reader Backlash; Reviews in the Age of Social media; Reviews in the Mainstream Media; Casual, Indie, and User-Generated Games; Reviews vs. Criticism; and Evolving the Review. Round 1's topic: Review Scores.

Participants

* Leigh Alexander, Gamasutra/Sexy Videogameland/Variety
* Harry Allen, Media Assassin
* Robert Ashley, freelancer
* Tom Chick, freelancer
* N'Gai Croal, Level Up/Newsweek
* John Davison, What They Play
* Shawn Elliott, 2K Boston
* Jeff Gerstmann, Giant Bomb
* Kieron Gillen, Rock, Paper, Shotgun
* Dan Hsu, Sore Thumbs Blog
* Francesca Reyes, Official Xbox Magazine
* Stephen Totilo, MTV News

The entire transcript of the first part of this discussion, which focuses on review scores, can be found on Shawn Elliott's blog here. It's an epic read...16,000 words worth of insight from the above list of folks. I think it's worth noting that while we discuss the topic at great length, it is not our intention to set the world to rights and instruct everyone how things should be done. We are by no means perfect, and certainly don't suppose to tell people how they should do their jobs. As a "symposium" the goal is simply to air the issues as each of us see them, discuss them, and above all else raise questions and thoughts that will get all of us thinking about the topic, and possibly even change each others' minds.

From a purely personal perspective, I have to say that it's a remarkable thing to be a part of. I have a tremendous amount of respect for absolutely everyone on the panel, and reading their thoughts has been a fascinating experience. One of the comments that really gave me pause to think about how we approach writing about games was from Harry Allen, who says, "Though I use different language, I know that when I started writing about hip-hop professionally, in the late '80s, I made it my objective to never talk about an album in terms of whether I liked it or not. Instead, I always saw it as my job to explain the artist's intent to the readers. I've never called myself a "music critic." I've always said that I am a Hip-Hop Activist."

On the subject of scores he says, "I think a reason similar to this is also why I always resisted, during that brief period of my life, when male friends would ask me to assign a number to a girl I've seen. In hip-hop / Black slang, a "dime" is a girl who's a 10...but what does that mean? According to what objective scale? And indeed, isn't that the core idea that disproves the fantasy: That without an actual 10 to which one can point—the theoretical perfect game—the numbers become meaningless? That is, on a foot-long ruler, "4" only means something because there's a "7," and a "9," but, most of all, because there's a "12." However, "12" only means something because there's a "13" and "25"; an agreed-upon metric, in other words."

Photoblogging our UK trip

2008-11-06T15:30:00.001-08:00

With the kids on the Virgin flight out. They were remarkably well behaved.

The location of my brother's wedding, out somewhere deep in the southern English countryside. There were wild horses wandering around. Seriously.

Pete and Jane, several seconds before doing the ring thing. Apologies to both of them for the unflattering camera angle here.

Mrs. D looking crazy hot in her bridesmaid/maid of honor (or whatever she was...I forget) get up.

I appear to have caught the exact moment at which everyone in my family (and a bunch of people I don't know) weren't smiling for some reason. It was a happy day...honest!

Me and the big guy at the wedding reception. Both kids were remarkably well behaved.

Car museums are pretty awesome.

A 1949 bus that we got to go out in one day. The boys seemed to get a kick out of it.

It should be noted that this is not actually our bus. This is simply the Davison clan in front of a bus belonging to someone else, who very kindly took us out in it.

With the kids in Cambridge. This picture doesn't do justice to just how miserably grey the sky was all day. "Why is England so cloudy, Daddy?"

Yes, they do Halloween in England. The little guy was a ninja this year. This is his ninja face.

Ugh...no posts in forever

2008-11-06T12:31:00.001-08:00

I've been a little busy. Sorry about that.

Do game reviews help you?

2008-09-17T17:10:00.001-07:00

I sort of got my panties in a bunch this week while reading through all the reviews of the latest games. Now that I'm outside the processes of the "machine" and looking on from the outside, it's a very different experience to be looking at coverage of games. It's inevitable that I'll feel this way every Q4 moving forward, but at the moment I'm super aware of the inconsistencies that seem markedly apparent in a lot of the "criticism" of games. I do the obnoxious air quotes thing there, because honestly, that's part of the problem. Without veering too far into games criticism wankery – that's just annoying to read – the core problem (for me) while reading the reviews of things like Rock Band 2, and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is not that I necessarily disagree with the opinions voiced (I do, but that's irrelevant) it's that the coverage is neither criticism, nor buying advice. Because it aspires to be both, ultimately it is neither, and what we get instead are subjective little microcosms of opinion. Less and less, we see content edited within the context of the outlet in which it lives, and the result is that we see the same arguments used to reinforce contradictory points. Reviews editors are increasingly just editing individual reviews, and are not editing their reviews sections. Otherwise, we wouldn't constantly see these contradictions.

To paraphrase:

"This game is just like this other game, and that makes it awesome."

"This game is just like this other game, and that makes it terrible."

Today on What They Play, we posted a story about this in the context of how it impacts people that aren't hardcore gamers. Given that parents, by and large, are not avid followers of video games, and only look for content (if at all) when a purchase is about to be made, we pondered whether the editorial reviews available are actually of any use. Personally, my feeling is that no, they aren't. Why? Because more often than not, decisions about entertainment are made outside of the critical process. People go to see bad movies. They watch crappy TV shows. They play games that aren't necessarily well received. We are polling our audience on the subject right now, so if you have an opinion on the subject please provide a comment on the story, or at least click on the poll that we have.

As these things tend to do, the musings suddenly took on a life of their own. After Twittering something of my usual drivel-level standard, and this in turn being sucked into my Facebook status, I found that discussion on this subject started turning up in Wall responses. First, good friend and current LucasArts employee Brooks Brown chipped in noting that "reviewers seem to not enjoy games like they should," and was soon joined by Robert Ashley (whose work I respect immensely, and have since the OPM and early 1UP days when I first met him) who noted, "The fact that critics who play 40 or 50 games a year don’t feel the same way about games as the average consumer shouldn’t be a shock. It’s not that they’ve lost touch with the spirit of gaming. It’s that experience drives them toward novel and away from familiar."

Shawn "Shawnimal" Smith (whose Ninjatown game comes out on Nintendo DS next month) then hit the nail on the head with, "this is obviously a complicated issue made worse by reviewers who place themselves on a pedestal without ever really doing the work needed to be taken seriously. The moniker 'Critic' in any form shouldn't be taken lightly, and those of you out there who truly are 'Video Game Critics', and take that title seriously (AND do all of the years of research and constant diligence that comes with it) should be a resource for gamers who want to dig deeper. But then where does that leave the average consumer who simply wants to know if they should buy a game or not? Should reviewers 'dumb down' or should consumers 'smart up'?"

Posting Junk on Tumblr, too

2008-08-28T11:40:00.000-07:00

Blogging and posting time is now spread between this, Twitter, the official What They Play blog (which occupies most of my time, honestly) and I've been posting some random photos, quotes and junk on by Tumblr thing. Tumblog? Is that what they call them? Been feeding it all into FriendFeed, if that helps at all.

Photos from some recent rides

2008-08-07T16:27:00.001-07:00

Lake Lagunitas is at the top of one of the mountain bike trails I occasionally ride at the weekends. The trail works its way around the edge of the lake. It's a beautiful place at the best of times, but if you catch it at the right time of day, it's breathtaking.

This is taken on Lucas Valley road, a few miles from Skywalker Ranch. The valley ahead works it's way down towards the north end of San Rafael and Terra Linda. As I took this picture, I actually had my back to this thing...

This is Big Rock. So called because it's a big rock. George Lucas owns it. The road here is pretty much the highest point on a 27 mile road circuit that I ride. According to the funky GPS device in my watch, the climb up to this point puts me at about 630 feet above the level where my house is.

This is the data that my watch spits out. The top is GPS location data overlaid on a map, and the graph at the bottom is speed (blue) mapped against elevation (grey)

This is becoming an addiction

2008-08-07T16:18:00.001-07:00

About a year ago, by friend Pete visited from the UK, and cycled to the top of our local mountain (Mt. Tamalpais, it's pretty big) on this crazy, exotic, Italian carbon fiber road bike that weighs about an ounce that he brought with him. Since I'd seen him last a few years ago, he had become super fit, and told me that he was "addicted" to cycling, and that he routinely rode 20 or 30 miles. He then implied that I was nuts for living in the best cycling area in the world but not taking advantage of it.

After he left, I took his comments to heart, and dug the mountain bike out of the garage and started working my way around a nearby trail. Eventually I was riding a fairly tough 10 mile circuit that wormed it's way up part of a mountain, and back down the other side. It was certainly helping me feel a bit fitter.

Then, for Christmas last year, Mrs D bought me a road bike. Something a bit more exotic and carbon fiberous than the tank of a mountain bike I'd been riding. After some embarrassing crashes (thanks to the toe clips), bruises, and near-death experiences as I toppled over sideways in the middle of traffic because I was physically attached to the bike, I started to see what Pete had been talking about.

Now, I'm riding between 70 and 100 miles a week (when I can) and riding fairly rigorous 20 or 30 mile routes that take me through some of the most beautiful parts of the Bay Area. I'm faster, and fitter than I've probably been in 15 years...and now I'm really beginning to appreciate what Pete was talking about when he said it was an "addiction."

Spending all day in front of a computer, working on 10 things at once is certainly stressful. But hurtling down a hill at 40 miles an hour on a road bike requires such singular focus and clarity that it eliminates all the stresses and complications of my usual day-to-day routine. Now, if I don't ride for a couple of days, I really feel it. There's a physical yearning to get out there and ride. Not just for the fitness aspect of it, but for the clarity and feeling of freedom that it provides, too.

Porn, Booze, Weed, or GTA? What's Worse?

2008-07-30T17:48:00.001-07:00

Our latest "Question of the Day" is live on What They Play, and we want to know what parents think is the worst thing their kids could be getting up to when out of sight; watching porn, smoking weed, drinking booze, or playing GTA.

Which do you think would be the worst?

So far, weed is winning but as I write this, the poll has only been up for an hour. Head on over to the site, and cast your own vote.

Girl Talk Video Mashup

2008-07-23T11:02:00.001-07:00

As if Girl Talk's "Feed the Animals" wasn't incredible enough already (and certainly a shoe-in for "album of the year" for me so far, and I wouldn't characterize myself as a hip-hop fan by any stretch of the imagination) now some incredible mangod has done what would seem like the impossible, and built video mashups to match the insanity of the album.

Who Watches the Watchmen?

2008-07-17T17:14:00.001-07:00

I will

Watchmen Motion Comic

2008-07-17T16:13:00.001-07:00

Timed to hit with the new Watchmen trailer that's hitting with the Dark Knight trailer tonight at midnight, Warner Bros. has released the first of 12 chapters of the Watchmen Motion Comic on iTunes today. And the best news is...it's free.

Hit this link to go direct to the iTunes page and start downloading...it's definitely worth it if you're a fan of the Watchmen, or of comic books, or indeed of things that are awesome.

This week's high: Today Show appearance

2008-07-13T15:13:00.001-07:00

If you missed What They Play on the The Today Show with Meredith Viera this week, you can watch it at your leisure right here.

TODAY Show - NBC - July 9, 2008

What They Play | MySpace Video

Tumbler Autobot

2008-07-13T15:10:00.001-07:00

The Tumbler as an Autobot, thanks to Jester Pictures. Wow.

Countdown to the Today Show

2008-07-03T13:08:00.001-07:00

I've been loathe to mention this yet, for fear of jinxing it...but now we're less than a week away, and half the segment is already "in the can" (as it were) I figure it's safe to mention that next Wednesday (July 9) morning, What They Play will be on the Today Show. Tell your friends, and set your TiVo. They've already been to the Bay Area to interview some families about the video games they play, they've been to our offices to talk to Zoe about the process of piecing our content together, and then next week I'll be heading to NY to do a live segment in the Today Show studio. Hopefully I won't make a complete arse of myself on live television, or pass out from sucking my gut in for three minutes.

Here are some photos from the shoot at the palatial What They Play offices in San Francisco with the delightful Ms Flower. Hopefully, I'll be able to sneak some snaps from 30 Rock when I'm there on Wednesday next week, and I'll post those too. We'll be blogging about it on What They Play: Today, too.

Bond

2008-06-30T21:14:00.001-07:00

Oh wow.

Blogging energy being exerted elsewhere

2008-06-30T11:53:00.001-07:00

I just checked the date stamps on the blog, and noticed I'd not updated for two weeks. Which is appalling of me, I know. To be fair, the bulk of my blogging energy has been going into the newly launched What They Play Blog, which we've been filling up with content, and slowly enhancing in terms of functionality. Please check it out, we need the traffic.

To be fair, I've also been traveling, like, every week as well, landing in such exotic locations as Arkansas, and Atlanta as well as seemingly weekly excursions to New York (I'm heading out again tomorrow.) I've worn a suit more times in the last 2 months than I have in the last 10 years.

Anyway...apologies for that. Here's what I'm up to lately though;

Playing: Space Invaders Extreme, Metal Gear Solid 4, Spore Creature Creator, Skeemo (on the iPhone)

Listening: Girl Talk "Feed the Animals," Coldplay "Viva la Vida"

Watching: The Wire Season 1 (finally caved in and downloaded from iTunes)

Wishing: I was home with Mrs D and the kids more

What They Play Blog now Live

2008-06-14T15:44:00.001-07:00

The What They Play daily blog, imaginatively titled What They Play: Today is finally up and running, complete with photographs of chiseled workout instructor chicks. Mrs. D says Jillian Michaels is "hardcore," so it's perfectly OK for us to run a photo of her wearing very little. It's all about the abs. Or something.

Find it here.

Metal Gear and The Changing Audience for Games

2008-06-12T18:51:00.001-07:00

Much like Snake, I'm getting old. There's not getting away from it. There's a weird gray streak of hair sprouting out of the middle of my head, my beard is way past "salt and pepper" and my taste in games is changing. My tolerance for nonsensical bullshit and over complicated, fun-sapping ridiculousness is virtually zero, but my curiosity for anything game-related is still high. This past week has been particularly educational, as we've seen the audience of What They Play respond to a wide variety of stories in different ways, and we've seen the dynamics of our traffic change quite considerably. Although Metal Gear Solid 4 is undoubtedly the most hyped game of the week, it hasn't really been something that much of our audience (parents) has cared for. Sure, we've run big promos on the homepage, and supplemented it with a parents' guide...but the indifference is right there for us to see in the Google Analytics data. It's doing OK, but it doesn't compare to what I'd expect to see if I were looking at 1UP's traffic, or IGN's, or Gamespot's.

So what has done well? Well, coverage of the Cartoon Network's franchise Ben 10 has been huge. It's always huge for us. It blows me away. There are apparently a lot of kids out there that love Ben 10, and there are a lot of parents that haven't the foggiest idea what it's all about. Me included. So we put together some more coverage, and it's been going crazy. Similarly, we've found that both Webkinz and Club Penguin still generate an enormous amount of interest from parents. Proof positive, I guess, that the motivation behind launching the site in the first place was well-founded. We just posted our Dragon Ball Z: Burst Limit coverage too, and it's already picking up nicely.

The lesson? I'm not sure yet, but there's certainly plenty of evidence that supports the notion that gaming is getting broader and broader in terms of its appeal, and that the place of the "core" gamer in the grand scheme of things is almost certainly diminishing.

I'm looking forward to seeing the NPD numbers for June, as it'll be the clearest indication yet of just how significant "enthusiast" spending power still is. Is Metal Gear Solid 4 appearing at the wrong time in the PS3's life to become a pop culture phenomenon? Or will it sell to core PlayStation fanboys, and no one else? When we polled people a year ago and asked "what game will make you buy a PS3?" the answer was almost unanimously "Metal Gears Solid 4" - but now that it's a year later, is that still true? My instincts tell me now that MGS4 will comfortably sell a million units this month...but that it probably (sadly) won't move the needle on PlayStation hardware. I'm old enough and gray enough to have been a fan of the franchise for a long time (and by fan, I mean "someone that likes it," not raving rabid crazy defend-it-at-all-costs fanboy lunatic) but as I sit here all alone in the LAX departure lounge collecting my thoughts on the day the "final" (shyeah, right) game comes out, I'm really not feeling the itch to stop off at Best Buy on the way home. Younger fans may be more excited, but let's face it, a lot of Snake's longest-standing fans are getting on a bit. I'm not the only gamer I know that just not "feeling it" for MGS4. It's not a system bias, or elitism or snobbery, I think it's just being tired of what is, let's face it, a beautifully refined development of the same old thing. I'm just not sure I have the patience any more to give a crap why there's a boss that pukes bees, or a solider that craps himself, or a robotic tentacled she-beast that pisses fire while burping the pledge of allegiance.

Is this just me? Am I the only one? Am I just being a cynical old fart who's just grumpy and tired? Maybe I should trying, y'know, actually playing the game, and then returning to this. How late does Best Buy stay open?

Radiohead "Nude" played using old computer hardware

2008-06-06T17:57:00.001-07:00

Enjoy

2008-06-06T09:57:00.001-07:00

1UP Yours: Indy, Haze, and a bunch of other stuff

2008-05-23T13:11:00.001-07:00

Stopped by the 1UP offices yesterday to record this week's 1UP Yours with the guys, and the latest episode is up online now. We chit-chat about how the new Indiana Jones movie takes so much of its inspiration from video games, we talk about how crappy Haze is (well, I do) and go through all of the stuff that's been shown at the pre-E3 events these past couple of weeks. Lots of info on LittleBigPlanet, Resistance 2, Gears of War 2, Siren, Viva Pinata, Banjo, and a bunch of other stuff I don't remember. There's also the video "pre-show" that you can see here.

Beck and Danger Mouse: Chemtrails

2008-05-22T10:21:00.001-07:00

Chemtrails - Beck

Epic globe trot, done

2008-05-20T19:12:00.001-07:00

OK, so it wasn't a globe trot, but I've spent more of the last couple of weeks away from home than home. Started with a mega meeting fest in NY last Wednesday (all day Tuesday was spent flying east) then up before the birds on Thursday to catch a flight to DC at the crack of what-the-fuck-time-do-you-call-this. After another batch of meets, lunch at the Ritz it was back on a plane through NY (jetBlue, puh-leaz hurry up and finish your JFK terminal, or at least put somewhere that sells coffee in the current one) to get back to San Francisco approximately 24 hours after I got up that morning. After one day back at the office to desperately try and catch up on a bunch of stuff, it was back to SFO (where I ran into 1UP Yours fan Brian and his bride-to-be in the longest security line in living memory. Congrats Brian on your wedding this week) to get on a plane to Phoenix to bask in the blistering desert heat. 120' during the day, and still 108' at 10pm!
Back home again now...and glad to be back.

Yahtzee responds to fanboys

2008-05-08T11:29:00.001-07:00

Wonderful. Especially the comment about the word "objective." I've lost count of the number of times some little oik has misused that word while trying to post a response to a harsh review.

Full Throttle on iPhone

2008-05-08T11:14:00.001-07:00

This is probably old, old news that I missed ages ago, but I just saw this video of Scumm running on the iPhone, and seeing Full Throttle up and running like has me all happy and nostalgic. Wonder if they'll do "official" versions, too?
Doubt it.

Sex, Language, Drugs and Booze, and then Violence

2008-05-07T13:29:00.001-07:00

Since we saw the results of our poll on sex and violence in games last month, I've become increasingly fascinated with how our audience responds to contentious content. Whether it's parents asking us specifically about the strong language in Assassin's Creed, or telling us that they're more offended by sex than violence, the results are always intriguing.

The latest observation in this little social experiment (I guess you'd call it) concerns the videos we posted yesterday to illustrate the ESRB descriptors on Grand Theft Auto IV. We produced four thematically focused videos based on the six descriptors that the game carries.

All of them are brief, and designed to give our audience a snapshot of what the content can be like. It's hard to show context with videos like this, so for each story we tried to set it up and explain that you don't have to have sex with hookers, and you don't have to kill everyone you meet. The point, of course, is that you can if you choose to.

Anyway, I digress. The point of this post was to tell you the order of popularity of the four videos we posted. A little snapshot of the order in which the vicarious thrills of viewing naughty content come. And here it is:

The runaway winner was, of course;

1. Partial Nudity and Strong Sexual Content

Seriously, could we really expect anything different? I don't think so. This was followed by my personal favorite (and the one I expected to "win" overall, because it's kinda funny)

2. Strong Language

then,

3. Use of Drugs and Alcohol

and a distant last place, by a significant margin...

4. Blood and Intense Violence

GTA sweary-mary video

2008-05-06T23:25:00.001-07:00

Our good pal Brooks has been helping us put together some original video content for the site this past week, and hopefully it represents what we'll be able to do a lot more of in the coming months. There are four in total for GTA IV, and in keeping with the way we've been tackling games with the written word, each of our videos tackles the contentious content described by the ESRB content descriptors so parents can get a taste of what they might see (or hear) if their kids are playing. Along with each video, we are posting a reminder that the context of the content is important to consider...though admittedly, some of them are much funnier if taken completely out of context, like my favorite, the Strong Language example.

We also have a video that combines the Partial Nudity and Strong Sexual Content, one for the Blood and Intense Violence, and one for the Use of Drugs and Alcohol.

Enjoy.

Venture Bros. Season 3 teaser

2008-05-04T09:25:00.001-07:00

Mega64 does Street Fighter

2008-05-02T16:46:00.001-07:00

The lengths Rockstar goes to for wit

2008-05-02T16:12:00.001-07:00

Check out Karen's blog over on 1UP about Brucie's tattoos in GTA IV. Excellent stuff.

"Brucie's exactly the type of person who would get drunk and get inked while thinking to himself, 'Man, kanji tattoos are the bomb. They're so exotic and mystical and people are going to think I'm bad-ass. I'm so going to get laid.'"

CBS Early Show and GTA IV, er "Carcer City"?

2008-04-30T15:40:00.001-07:00

We were lucky enough to be invited to comment on GTA IV for the CBS Early Show this week, and we just noticed something kinda strange in the footage. In the intro to the piece, rather than use the real box art, they bizarrely used a piece of early fan-made art for the mythical "Grand Theft Auto IV: Carcer City." Real GTA nerds (or able-fingered Googlers) will know that Carcer City is the location used in the Manhunt games, and is essentially a fictional mashup of Newark, Detroit, and Philadelphia. Fans speculate that the Manhunt and GTA games exist in the same "universe" thanks to subtle references spotted in the GTA games. For example, there's reference to Carcer police chief Gary Schaeffer during a radio report in GTA III, and characters in both San Andreas, and the PSP games make reference to the city on the radio, and when you run into people on the street. "I'm moving to Carcer City!" etc. If you want to go even nerdier, "Carcer" is derived from the Latin word "carcere" which means "prison."

Anyway, nerding-out aside, I thought it was weird that a major media outlet would make sure a weird rookie mistake, particularly as they seemed to be so "progressive" in the rest of their coverage, showing that they kinda "get it." Fat, hairy wildman-of-Borneo looking Davison blatherings aside (and hey, the camera adds 10 pounds, OK?) it was a very well-informed piece overall, and was one of the first pieces I saw on the game that marked the distinct lack of sensationalism from the mainstream press on GTA this time around.

Guitar Hero embeddable widget

2008-04-30T10:44:00.000-07:00

Picked up from the good people at Wired's Game Life blog, who scooped it first (hi Chris, Susan). Is it me, or is it stupidly difficult?

Oh yeah. Right. It's me.

The genius of GTA IV: The Monster Is You

2008-04-29T13:40:00.001-07:00

I was chatting with Mary Jane at Forbes last night about GTA IV, and over the course of discussing the way the game unfolds we actually stumbled upon what I think has long been the true genius of the GTA franchise. For all the talk in the press of the nasty stuff that the game enables you to do, very little of the discussion ever goes beyond that. As I mentioned yesterday, the vast majority of GTA coverage tends to be of the mechanics, and it's clear that what GTA really excels at is giving you the freedom to do whatever you want. Just because you can do something though, doesn't mean that you have to.

The true genius of the franchise is that it makes YOU the monster, rather than presenting you with a monster to control.

There's nothing making you run down pedestrians. You don't have to shoot the cops when you're trying to escape from that warehouse. There's nothing that says you have to get your jollies from hookers. Sure, you do have to take out the bad guys, and there are some terrible things served up as part of the narrative, but the truly monstrous things are, for the most part, purely voluntary. The franchise has been doing this since the early days, but the depth that Rockstar has brought to Niko's character makes it far more apparent. He is a reluctant monster. A recovering monster who only really becomes evil when you direct him to be so.

Batman and The Dark Knight trailers, eerily similar?

2008-04-29T11:31:00.001-07:00

Grand Theft Auto IV: Compassion and Consequence

2008-04-28T19:06:00.001-07:00

While the enthusiast press has spent the last 24 hours trying to outdo each other with more and more outlandish ways of saying "Grand Theft Auto IV is very, very good," I have to say that my favorite piece of criticism so far came from the New York Times. Seth Schiesel's excellent piece does a wonderful job of conveying what it's like to step into Niko Bellic's boots, and work through the tragic story at the heart of Rockstar's latest masterpiece.

To say that GTA IV is a game I've been "looking forward to" would be a spectacular understatement. I've been chastised in the past for using expressions like "my favorite" and "best ever" in association with this franchise, but time after time it delivers so perfectly. San Andreas is still one of my favorite games ever, and now GTA IV continues to make my jaw drop each and every time I pick up the controller. For all the talk of its violence, and its grit, IV is a truly elegant game. The way the story unravels, and the characters blossom is a thing of real beauty.

As I've mentioned before, in the run up to the release of the game we were asked for a "parent perspective" comment from a lot of different new outlets. As you'd expect, a common theme in the questioning was the ugliness of GTA: the sex, the drugs, and the violence. Reporters would ask why such a cold, heartless game was so popular. What no one understands, it seems, is that when you wipe off the blood, and the "smell of titty" (as Niko's brother Roman so eloquently puts it early in the game) what sets GTA apart is that it has heart.

After reading all the enthusiast press reviews, I was surprised that very few of the reviewers looked past the mechanical "perfection" of the game, and really stared into its soul. If there's ever an audience willing to go deeper on a game of this magnitude, I'd like to hope that it's gamers. Grand Theft Auto is such an established franchise, that for the enthusiast audience there is much that needn't be discussed. The mechanics of the game can be taken as read. Yes, the combat is better, and the lip-syncing is wonderful, but these are things we expect from the newest generation of one of the world's most successful games franchises.

Given that the infamy of GTA precedes any rational discussion of it, there is much to be said about what lies beneath. If you look past the graphics, or the controls, or even the wonderful performances from the numerous characters, this is a game that genuinely has something more to offer. The reporters asking about the ugliness would be surprised to learn, for example, that the notion of "consequence" has been alive and well within the franchise since 1997. Doing bad things makes life difficult for the player. This is something that fans have had plenty of time to get used to, but to many it's quite a revelation. Beyond this, the real soul of IV is Niko himself. Much as CJ was far more complex than just a stereotypical gangbanger in San Andreas, GTA IV bares its soul through it's antihero. Complex, tortured, self-loathing, and deeply flawed, he is far more than the crude caricatures we so often see in games. He frequently questions the ugly things he is forced to do, he bares his soul to strangers little piece by little piece, and he shows compassion for targets he is sent to kill. As the game world opens up, so too does its central character. The satirical view of modern day America is viewed through his eyes, and while the game is many things; witty, violent, challenging, intriguing, and exciting, what it really represents is a modern day tragedy.

As Schiesel says, it "sets a new standard for what is possible in interactive arts."

The problem with the Wii Wheel and Mario Kart Wii

2008-04-28T17:22:00.001-07:00

I've heard it all today,
"Mario Kart is lame."
"The wheel sucks."
"Mario Kart is awesome."
"The wheel is excellent."

As someone very clearly in the target zone (dad, kids, lots of family playtime) for Nintendo with this thing, I learned something unexpected this weekend. Forget whether you think the game is good or bad. Forget worrying about whether it's a step backward in terms of game design. What really needs to be asked is "does it deliver on what Nintendo is promising?"

The answer, realistically, is "not quite."

Now admittedly my kids are certainly on the young end of the intended audience for Mario Kart, but they're already big time Mario fans. I've discussed in the past how much we enjoyed playing Super Mario Galaxy together, and I think I've mentioned my three-year-old's Jedi skills at Mario Kart DS. If there was ever an "easy" audience for this game, I think we're it.

So here's how it went down yesterday.

At 10am we grabbed the keys to Mrs D's car, and the three Davison boys hightailed to the local Toys R Us to pick up the copy of Mario Kart we'd pre-ordered the previous day (let's not go into why Nintendo has yet to put What They Play on it's mailing list for product after six months of asking about it, it's too depressing.)

There was much excitement in the air. We grabbed the game, a second wheel, and indulged in a third Wii Remote thanks to the handy table with all three of the above neatly laid out to entice us. This $50 game cost me over $100 so all three of us could play together. We practically ran back to the car, and dashed back home as soon as we could.

After tearing open the game, rigging up a pair of Wii Wheels, and installing the Wii system update, we were ready to rock. The boys know a bunch of the tracks like the backs of their hands thanks to the DS game, so we jumped into a familiar environment in a three player game; the boys with the wheels, and me with the Nunchuk.

It didn't take long.

My oldest struggled through, but had some major problems with the calibration of the wheel. He'd either turn too much, or too little. Both being equally frustrating, as they result in the same thing: banging into the walls, or falling off something.

My youngest struggled at first to get to grips with holding down the "2" button for the throttle, and very quickly tired of trying to steer the kart like a real car.

We abandoned three player races and tried single player "coaching" games. Son on lap, controlling the kart together. My older son started to get the hang of it, but was still a little frustrated, while my little guy gave up completely. "Can I play Mario Kart on the DS?" he asked me, less than 15 minutes after we'd started playing the Wii game.

My oldest boy thinks he'll get the hang of it "eventually." We don't play console games during the week, so he's looking forward to trying it again next weekend, and thinks he'll start to get good at it with some practice. The little guy's not interested. "I don't like it," he told me last night.

More kids on GTA IV

2008-04-25T16:55:00.001-07:00

Our story with quotes from kids about how they were going to pull the wool over their parents' (and everyone else's) eyes to get their hands on GTA IV proved pretty popular, so we followed up with something that goes into a little more detail today. As I mentioned in the last post, something that all of the moms we've spoken to ask is "why would you want play this?" (or words to that effect) so we asked the kids exactly that. The comments from the teenage boys in our Kids talk about Grand Theft Auto IV piece are all variations on the same theme; namely that they like games for escapism, they like the violence and the naughty stuff because they'd never get away with it in real life, and lastly they all know exactly how they'll be getting the game on Tuesday.

As with the previous story, some of the quotes from these young teens that are wise beyond their years are quite sad, in a way.“I just think that the only reason parents don’t let their kids play these kinds of games is because they think of video games as a babysitter – and that’s because they use it as one," says one. Another sums up the sentiments of every "underage" teen wanting to play the game, “I really don't want GTA IV to be wrecked by having to play it in secret”."

Putting GTA into some perspective with moms

2008-04-23T12:48:00.001-07:00

The call for pre-release comments from both parents and kids about GTA IV has been great. We've been able to pull together some great quotes from kids about how they'll be getting their hands on the game, and we have been able to sit down with some moms to get their take on the reputation of the franchise too. This stuff has been particularly helpful for targeting how we'll approach the game next week, and getting a handle on what it is that pushes folks' buttons about the thing.

When we talked to the moms, we were expecting to hear a lot of concern about any of the suggestive content in the game. After all the fuss with San Andreas about Hot Coffee, and the word already out on the strippers, and hookers and "services" they provide in GTA IV I was fully prepared to be fielding questions about sexual content in games, and why this was a primary concern. Oddly though, none of the moms we talked to even mentioned it. Their perception of GTA as a franchise is that it's "violent" and each expressed concerns about beatings and drive-bys and indiscriminate killing. One mother asked us, "When will there be a game where you are actually punished for shooting at cops?" and was quite surprised to learn that GTA has been penalizing players for challenging authority since the very first game back in 1997.

After watching the trailers with the moms, and talking in more general terms about the franchise, something that came up from pretty much all concerned was "why would anyone want to play this?" All but one of the mothers found the whole notion somewhat distasteful based on their preconceived notions, but attitudes did start to shift a little when the more satirical or humorous footage was shown. For many, it seems, it's hard to comprehend that a video game can embody the same approach to entertainment as the media they're used to seeing on television. The attitude that "games are for kids" is deeply engrained in many, and coupled with parents' wishes to protect their kids from anything that might be "damaging," it's easy to see why there's a very conservative attitude when it comes to games.

Using television as a simile becomes quite useful in these scenarios. Get the moms talking about a more "adult" TV shows that they enjoy, such as The Sopranos, or Dexter, or Weeds is a great way to put the whole thing into some perspective. None of the moms we spoke to found any of these shows as objectionable as they found GTA, and they all admitted that they wouldn't allow their kids to watch them either. With this framework, it's possible to explain the fairly simple notion that "some games are for adults" a little more clearly. Much as Dexter does not represent "all TV," GTA does not represent "all video games." To stretch the concept to breaking point, you could argue that the perception (or perhaps it's more like the "wish") is that all games are like Mario Kart. If this is the case, anything that contradicts this thought is considered subversive. To feel that way though is no more absurd than considering that all TV is (or should be) like Everybody Loves Raymond. If you are prepared to see that there is a distinct difference between a sitcom and an adult cable show, then surely you should see that there's a difference between Mario and GTA?

Are you a teen? Are you getting GTA IV next week?

2008-04-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

If the answer to both of these questions is "yes," I need your help. I need to know:

How old are you?

Will you be playing GTA IV?

If so, how will you be getting your hands on it?

Do you have friends that will be getting the game? How will they be getting their hands on it?

What is it that attracts you to the GTA franchise? Why do you want to play it?
(conversely, if it doesn’t interest you – please explain why)

What do your parents think of GTA? And why do they think that?

What do you think about all of the sensationalist coverage that the game gets? Is it really so bad?

Do you think games like GTA really effect kids’ behavior?

Email me your answers here, and mark the subject line "Teen GTA IV."

Looking for a production intern

2008-04-18T17:27:00.001-07:00

We have too much to do! We need help! Here's the full job posting for the production intern spot we're opening up on What They Play...

PRODUCTION INTERN

RESPONSIBILTIES
- Process screenshots for products.
- Process videos for products.
- Basic data-entry assignments.
- Assist in article production.
- Testing site for bugs and enhancements.

REQUIREMENTS
- 1-3+ Experience using Photoshop.
- 1-3+ Experience with HTML and CSS.
- Experience dealing with various video formats ie. Quicktime, Windows
Media, Mpeg etc.
- Strong bug writing and documentation skills.
- Experience testing on Windows platforms and MacOS.
- Knowledge and interest in video games a major plus.

GENERAL
- Excellent communication skills.
- Strong Reporting/writing/analytical skills.
- Self-starter with good leadership/project management experience.
- Ability to work independently but also work as a teamplayer.
- Highly motivated with excellent problem solving skills.
- Excellent organizational skills and desire to work under pressure in a highly dynamic environment.

This job is for work in San Francisco, California. In you're interested in this position, please email your resume and cover letter to jobs@whattheylike.com. Use the subject: Production Intern.

(note: We have Rock Band at the office)

Okami as spiritual enlightenment

2008-04-16T16:20:00.001-07:00

This one's just a link whoring post, sorry; Dave Finkel's Okami piece is up on the site today, Video Games 101: What Okami Can Teach Your Kids.

“I can easily envision a child playing this game, learning more about the legends therein, and extrapolating into stories of gods, of Feudalism, of the warring within the Shogunate... the stories are so textured and the characters are so vivid.”

GTA IV chatter

2008-04-16T15:51:00.001-07:00

Fresh from the sugary ego-high of seeing N'Gai's Newsweek story on What They Play in print yesterday (maybe I'm old-fashioned, but there's still something special about seeing something in print) today's return to the office after the quick trip to Minneapolis this week included recording a radio interview about Grand Theft Auto IV for Metro Networks this morning, and then taping an episode of Cranky Geeks over at the Ziff building.

The Metro thing, particularly, was a refreshing change from the norm, as the reporter very much wasn't out to get the most salacious GTA story he could muster, and instead was extremely well-informed, and asked some very smart questions. There definitely seems to be a culture shift starting in the media right now, and while we'll no doubt see plenty of sensational nonsense about GTA IV, there are more and more mainstream reporters prepared to stick their neck out and show that Rockstar's game does not represent all video games.

I will never have this much patience

2008-04-16T13:32:00.001-07:00

Mario Theme Played with RC Car and Bottles - Watch more free videos

Iron Man

2008-04-15T10:28:00.001-07:00

23 AO rated games

2008-04-11T14:58:00.001-07:00

In light of all the attention that the sex vs. violence poll we posted on What They Play recently, I'm hoping our latest story will arouse some interest too. Over the past month, we've been digging around trying to find everything we can on all 23 games that are rated "AO" (Adults Only) by the ESRB, and the results are here in our For Adults Only story.

You'd be surprised how tough it is tracking down all this stuff...many of the games are no longer available, some of them aren't really "games" and one of them was never released. Of the 23 that carry the rating, 20 of them do so because of something "sexual," and the naughty content runs the gamut from masturbation to oral sex, sex with vegetables (!), rape, and scatology. Interestingly, with the exception of the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas hiccup a while ago, little of the AO-rated stuff is recent, and that which is comes from "special editions" on the PC which are only available as digital downloads, and are based on naughtier European releases.

We tried to play as many of the games as we could, but for some of them it just wasn't possible. Some of the older, less "gamey" stuff was almost impossible to track down, and in the case of "Cyber Photographer and Printshop" we couldn't even find any information online, save for the basic facts that are also listed on the ESRB site. Try it! Try Googling it, Asking for it, Yahoo-ing it, and any other kind of search or community based tool that might track it down. There's nothing. IGN may say that it's the "ultimate Cyber Photographer and Printshop resource for trailers, screenshots, cheats walkthroughs, release dates, previews, reviews..." and on and on and on. While that's usually the case, believe me, in this case, it really isn't. There's nothing. Its like it never existed. If you've played it, or have it...let me know. I'd love to update the feature.

Interesting international view on sex and violence in games

2008-04-11T12:41:00.001-07:00

Norwegian site Dagbladet very kindly linked to our GTA IV story today, and also provided some commentary on the sex and violence poll that we ran. What's most interesting are the results to a replicated poll that they're running that shows the very different attitudes to violent and sexual content in Europe.

Here's how their responses to the question "As a parent, which would you find most offensive in a video game?" break down as of lunchtime today. In case you don't read Norwegian; "Et grafisk, avkappet menneskehode" is the "graphically severed human head" response at 65.8%, "To menn som kysser" is what it sounds like, "two men kissing" at 24.9%, "En mann og en kvinne som har sex" is "a man and a women having sex" at 5.2% and "Gjenaatt banning" is the cursing response, at 4.1%.

Attitudes to sex and violence

2008-04-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

From the latest poll on What They Play this week...

Not to keep banging on about this, but W.T.F?

What They Play = Webby Honoree

2008-04-08T15:30:00.001-07:00

We got some great news this morning; What They Play is an "Official Honoree" for the Family Parenting category! “Of the more than 8,000 entries submitted to the 12th Annual Webby Awards, fewer than 15% were distinguished as an Official Honoree," says the official site. "This honor signifies an outstanding caliber of work.”

I'm so proud of what the team has been able to do in just a few months!

Farewell Game for Windows: The Official Magazine

2008-04-08T15:03:00.000-07:00

It made me incredibly sad to learn today that Games for Windows: The Official Magazine is being closed down (that's the last issue with Sims 3 on it.) Times are tough in the print games media space, so there's a degree of inevitability here...but it's always a bit of a shock when things like this happen. I'm really glad that the team will still be employed as part of the 1UP Network, as they are clearly some of the most talented writers in the business. I'm sure that Jeff and the crew will be producing some wonderful stories (particularly features, where they always excelled) for 1UP, and I can't wait to see them.

Putting the deal together for GFW with Jeff, and Simon, along with my old boss Scott McCarthy and current partner Ira Becker was something I was very proud of from my latter-days at Ziff. We put together the concept, pitched it to Microsoft, and pulled together the deal in a fairly short space of time (these kinds of things are often very drawn out things) as a huge effort to reinvigorate the PC games media space for us. CGW had enjoyed many, many years as an important part of our media strategy, but shifts in the market meant that things really needed shaking up. We needed something to go out and really shout about, something to re-engage readers, and marketers, and work with Microsoft on re-establishing PC games as something significant, and dynamic. I thought the magazine looked great, and boasted some really wonderful editorial. Jeff, along with Shawn, Sean, Ryan, the art team of Rose and MJ, along with Darren before he left a month or so ago put together a magazine with some of the most imaginative, and challenging editorial of anything in the games space. Far from just banging out previews and reviews, and producing a magazine that reads like something where the team is just working to a deadline to "get it done," GFW always read like something that had had a lot of thought put into it. It asked challenging questions, and explored genuinely interesting themes and ideas. It may have been shortlived, but the team should feel very proud of what they achieved. As the quote sort of goes; that which burns twice as brightly, burns half as long.

You can read more on Jeff's blog, and Simon's blog on 1UP.

Guitar Hero On Tour

2008-04-05T17:39:00.001-07:00

I dunno...As Brooks mentioned on IM the other day, it kinda looks like a lousy SNL sketch.

Quietly, a spectacular week

2008-04-05T17:33:00.001-07:00

Sometimes, you have to stop and take stock of what's going on. For the past five months we've been charging forward like some kind of proverbial charging thing, and we rarely have the chance to really take a moment to celebrate what we've achieved. While we're loathe to sit back and just think "my god we're awesome," we do occasionally have brief moments where we look back and think, "wow, this week was actually a pretty big deal."

For a start, we finally closed out the second round of our series A funding; our series A1. The money is in the bank, the lawyers are done with their expensive lawyering, the papers are all signed. Ira and I can breathe a bit of a sigh of relief, and think about our day-to-day business dealings exclusively for a while. It by no means takes the pressure off...but it takes one of the pressures off. For a while, anyway.

Secondly, we closed out version 1.2 of What They Play. This was a project that's been ongoing for some time, and its felt like we've had a never-ending bug list to attend to. Every time bugs were fixed, new ones (or, frustratingly, old ones) would rear their ugly heads and we'd start to notice more and more things that we wanted to fix. With v1.2 done, we're moving on to a new phase of development, and while we refer to the next batch of enhancements as "1.3" we're not going to be approaching landmarks like that any more. We have a big list of things that need to be done, and we'll be rolling them out as and when they're completed. As part of this, John has brought a freelance engineer on board (who started on Monday) and this week we prioritized all of the stuff that we want to roll out between now and the summer.

Sales has been kicking ass. Rachelle and Tracy were in New York for the bulk of the week, and had closed out two new deals by the time they were back on Friday. On the home front, Ira worked his magic on two big accounts, and I'm pretty sure there are more that I'm forgetting about. The Rockstar campaign for Bully that's been on the site for the past few weeks has been performing really well, and we just started running the ads for Okami on Wii from Capcom mid-week. We're getting more and more meetings booked with the right people, and we've finally nailed down arrangements with a number of big names that we'd been pestering since the tail end of last year.

On the edit side, we hit a big landmark this week; we posted our 1000th product write-up/review/piece/thing on Thursday. This has been something we've had our eye on doing for a while, and psychologically, at least, it marks a major milestone for us. The database is starting to feel appropriately "full." There's still lots to do...but a thousand of anything is a lot of stuff. We also have nearly 50 feature articles on the site, too. A less spectacular number I know, but it wasn't so very long ago that you could count that number on your fingers.

Traffic was good this week too. We had our biggest traffic day ever at the beginning of the week, and the overall trend has been heading in the right direction for the past month or two. As with everything else, there's a long way to go...but it's nice to have a string of "best day for xyz ever" in quick succession. We also had our best week for referrals too. The Grand Theft Auto IV story we posted got the most Diggs we've ever had, and it threw off some OK traffic, too. It's kinda funny getting excited about the small numbers we get jazzed about lately. In the old days on 1UP we'd get excited about numbers in the thousands...these days, anything that gets into double-digits starts to be a big deal.

And all that was in just one week. I'm pretty sure there was more that happened, too. We had a quick end-of-week celebration with champagne that was left over in the fridge from when we launched, and we lost track of everything while we were toasting...that's always a good sign, right?

Colbert's Peabody

2008-04-04T11:11:00.001-07:00

Grand Theft Auto and the American Mom

2008-04-04T10:09:00.000-07:00

Every now and then, I notice something about American pop culture and attitudes towards it that makes me feel more alien than usual. Despite being in the States for 10 years now, I'm still astounded by attitudes to certain types of content; none more so than sex and violence.

With Grand Theft Auto IV just three weeks away now, the game is an important part of what we're doing on What They Play. We're polling parents and kids about attitudes towards the game, and doing what we can to educate our audience about the game. As part of this we've been doing a lot of outreach into other communities; the obvious "gamer" and "geek" stuff like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, etc., but (probably more importantly) the "mommy" communities and blogs too. As part of this, our valiant "street team" (ludicrous marketing term) posted a poll on CafeMom that replicates the one we have running on the site right now: "Would you let your under-17 year old play Grand Theft Auto IV?" with answer options: "Yes," "No Way," or "Maybe, after I have learned more about the game."

So far, the responses are 62% "yes" and 37% "no way" and a (very surprising) big fat zero on the "Maybe, after I have learned more." American moms, I'm sad to learn, are either prematurely judgmental, or unwilling to do some research. Ouch. That screws our whole business plan, huh?

More shocking (to me, anyway, to get back to my original point) was the first comment that was posted on the page. "We are really laid back when it comes to video games because my husband is a huge gamer," says the commenter. "We let our 5 year old son play games like Gears of War and Halo, but I absolutely draw the line when it comes to Grand Theft Auto. Did you know you can pick of prostitutes and drive them to back allies and have sex with them in your car? You cant see the actual act itself, but you can see the car rocking with them in the backseat and the windows fogging up. Enough said."

I absolutely draw the line at Grand Theft Auto.

Because a five year old chainsawing someone in half and seeing blood splatter all over the screen in Gears of War is far more acceptable than an implied sex scene where you see the car bounce around a bit.

1000 reviews on What They Play

2008-04-03T19:10:00.000-07:00

We call them "reviews" but of course they're not really. "Write ups" or "synopses" or "Parent Guidance." Whatever you want to call them, we just hit a major landmark in the development of the site - the 1000th entered into What They Play.

Honestly, we weren't expecting to get here quite this quickly. Not so long ago, Zoe and I figure "hmmm, maybe by Christmas," and this slowly morphed into "mmmmm, maybe by the summer." Then, this week it became, "wow, maybe this week."

The 1000th article was Sega Rally Revo. I sorta wish it had been something more important, or more significant...but there you go. A landmark reached. Now we have to keep pushing to get as much great content as we can up for parents to understand more and more about games, and to be able to connect with their kids over this stuff.

Oh, if you're wondering what the image is, it's a snapshot of our CMS' editorial counter.

11 Things Parents Should Know about GTA IV

2008-04-03T14:10:00.000-07:00

With GTA IV hitting stores later this month, it's safe to say we're entering insanity season when it comes to press coverage of the game. While the enthusiast press prints or posts every tiny scrap of information it can possibly find on the thing, the mainstream press is no doubt psyching itself up for a fresh batch of ignorant, badly-researched sensationalism with which to scare the misinformed. To try and counter that, we put together the first piece of coverage we'll be doing on the game this week, and posted it this morning; Grand Theft Auto IV: 11 Things Parents Should Know.

We'll be expanding on this over the weeks ahead, and trying to bring some sensible level-headedness to the whole conversation. There'll be no escaping from the "prostitutes game" shenanigans, or the (inevitable) "blow job" commentary, or the "glorified violence" editorials, but hopefully we can all work together to put this stuff into perspective. GTA IV is aimed at adults, not kids. It has an M-rating, and its content is no more objectionable than anything you'll see on cable channels like Showtime or HBO, or at an R-rated movie. The whole "games are for kids" argument is just old, tired, and bullshit. Anyone with half a brain knows that if kids want to get their hands on something, there's a pretty good chance they'll work out a way. That shouldn't preclude games from targeting an adult audience, and its shouldn't necessitate foolish crusaders demanding that titles be banned. If kids want to see the bloody and sexy version of Dexter, they need only download it from iTunes. If they want to see the nasty shit that's in Saw, or Hostel, they can stroll into Target and pick it up pretty much unchallenged. GTA IV will be harder for kids to buy than equivalent other media...and the sensationalism just feeds their desire to play it further. What's important is that parents know what the game has in it, and can head anything objectionable off at the pass.

Personally, I can't wait. Because, despite evidence to the contrary, I'm an adult. The Grand Theft Auto franchise has been one of my absolute favorites since the days of the original 2D game. At the Official PlayStation Magazine, we were the only U.S. publication to put Grand Theft Auto III on the cover when it was released in 2001. San Andreas is still one of my favorite games of all time (even though I had to squeeze the entire game into a single weekend due to a print deadline.) I love the sarcasm, the wit, and the unflinching and uncompromising approach to game design for a mature audience. I'll be playing GTA IV (on 360) as soon as it comes out, and I won't let my kids anywhere near it. I'll be playing at night, when everyone's gone to bed, and playing for as long as I can stay awake until I've beaten it.

What's hotter? GTA IV PS3, or Xbox 360?

2008-04-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

Neck and neck, pretty much. Certainly not showing the huge delta that a lot of fanboys no doubt expect. This is just Amazon of course, so it's not an accurate display of the entire market - but it's certainly an interesting snapshot.

Rediscovering Myst

2008-04-02T11:32:00.000-07:00

Nick from 1UP pinged me yesterday asking if I'd play through Myst on the DS for them. Apparently there weren't many "volunteers" to review the thing, as everyone remembers it being such a handful. I don't think I've actually played it myself since the original was released on the Mac back in 1993, and I'm pretty surprised that Empire has chosen to produce such a literal port for the handheld. As far as I can tell it's using all of the original 8-bit era graphics, and they're using the same approach to the gameplay as Cyan did, too...there are no instructions, or tutorials, and there's no dialogue to break you in gently. There are no enemies, no time limit, nor any need for speed or dexterity.

The interface has been tweaked a little; you use the stylus (obviously) to interact with the environment, and the upper screen is used to convey information and allows you to view magnified images from the environment (reading signs, and books, etc.) There are some new mini-tools too; the magnifying glass helps with inspecting clues, there's a camera for snapping certain things for future reference, there's a simple notebook that uses a typewriter metaphor, and a map that shows the whole island. The DS version also includes the "new" Rime Age that was previously seen in the PSP version of the game, as well as "bonus" content at the end of realMyst (the 3D, remake that Ubisoft released.)

I only started playing this morning...but as far as I can tell, it's a full-on version of Myst, quirks and all. No doubt any of the 12 million people that played it 15 years will get a kick out of playing through it again, but you do have to acclimate yourself to the old-school UI , and the almost obstructive approach to letting you in on whatever it's trying to get you to do.

Sunday, similarly awesome

2008-04-02T11:21:00.001-07:00

I'm not cut out for drinking the way I used to be. A small gathering turned into an epic all-day drinkathon this past Sunday. It was the kind of drink-anything-to-hand epic that we used to enjoy pre-kids. Between five of us we managed to polish off five bottles of fizz, the vast majority of a bottle of Macallan and there were some beer duds kicking around at the end of the night too, which I don't remember anything about. Gary shared his encyclopedic knowledge of cigars with us (and broke open the collection) much to the amusement of the ladies.

Mrs. D tells me she loves this picture...I'm not sure why.