https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ozo1EYAjkNM

Sony has an IP problem. Short of Little Big Planet 3 and Uncharted 4, none of the other titles seemed to grab. While the exclusive experiences are interesting, their application to existing and expected titles feels lackluster. The chunk of time dedicated to the Playstation ecosystem felt like a slow, redundant message from announcements past. Sony needed to display PS4’s ease of development with ready-to-go titles rather than a collection of non-surprises releasing in 2015.

In 2013, Sony promised potential. In 2014, they are having a hard time executing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqvraGNfKVY

Austin Wintory, Grammy-nominated composer, on the AFM Videogame Agreement:

This contract created an untenable situation. Composers and musicians have continued to need to earn a living in this industry. Those musicians and composers therefore we’ve been forced to work without union sanction because the union has failed to signed any video game companies to work with them in almost two years.

After having successfully recorded the iOS game HORN with AFM musicians, I attempted to do the same with THE BANNER SAGA. The unusable contract forced me elsewhere, and I soon found the remarkable Dallas Wind Symphony. This collaboration happened as a direct result of the AFM’s unusable contract, and I am now being punished for simply doing my job under those circumstances.

I continue to be deeply moved by Wintory’s Journey OST. It’s a shame to see anyone punished for creating music, especially that as brilliant as Wintory’s.

Garnett Lee of Garnett on Games on exclusively multiplayer vs. exclusively single-player games:

We still have vestiges of the prior generations where it’s just sort of natural for those us who have been playing games for a long time to think of single-player as “the game” and multiplayer as “the extra you get with the game.” I think that that influences us at times. However, I think that there are a number of multiplayer only games that you can point to that are very, very successful as stand-alone multiplayer games beginning all the way back with Team Fortress 2.

I was really hoping Garnett would have mentioned early dice, board, or card games.

Games require two or more players. The term “player” is embrued with human characteristics. We often forget that games can not only involve challenges with other humans but also ourselves, computers or luck. Single-player video game experiences are multiplayer experiences against computers.

From solitaire to geopolitics, humans enjoy games. We enjoy games because there is a level of risk and challenge involved that (typically) does not seal our fate. There is variety in experience, chance and strategy. If a single game provided the same experience over and over again, it would become boring. Single-player video games provide humans with a computerized variety of ways to enjoy games in solitary fashion; new mechanics, settings and competition are introduced over the course of a single game and my vary with each play-through. Online multiplayer experiences allow for the same type of human variety that is experienced when playing a dice, board or card game; the receptive mechanics, settings, and characters are a shell for a battle of experience, chance and strategy.

Exclusively online multiplayer is a remote evolution of human-to-human competitive play; however, all games are between multiple players. It is not a debate of “single-player” versus “multiplayer” game design as all games are multiplayer. It is simply a debate of preference between solitary and communal. Not all video games need to played against a computer; not all video games need to played against a human.

Garnett Lee of Garnett on Games discussing a call from listener James on the idea of the sacred and profane nature of games:

On the one hand, we have the mechanistic part of the game: the things that you do in the game, the systems that support those actions, the environments they take place in. On the other hand you have the designed aspirations: the story a game wants to tell, the emotions it wants to draw out of you, the atmosphere and imagination that it wants to inspire as you play the game.

My earliest childhood memory is of playing Mega Man 2. When I first saw the game, I was blown away by the dual-layers of tech and toys. There was something uniquely special and alive about Mega Man that would act as the catalyst for my interest in the games space. After hearing Garnett’s bit, I now realize that the power of Mega Man was in his simple and subtle “blink” animation. This interest became further perpetuated when an idle Sonic broke the fourth-wall, tapping his foot as he glared directly at me.

Author Blake J. Harris on his new book, Console Wars, as quoted by Polygon:

My biggest influences on business writing are Ben Mezrich and and Michael Lewis. But the actual greatest influence on the narrative style has to be Game of Thrones. Because, really, that’s what this story is. It’s all these different families or corporations and entities competing for this one seat at the top of the table that they all think they deserve for a variety of different reasons. Or that they believe that they should inherit — because it’s their God-given right or because they have the right strategy, and they deserve it.

I’ve been extremely excited for this read. I might have to shelve Catmull and Swift in lieu of Console Wars, or Game of Games.