Games, Design, Culture, Politics...

I’ve posted the entire thing now, in PDF form, and at some point soon I hope to have a Kindle version available, but you might have to pay a couple of bucks for that one.

http://www.mattcolville.com/download-priest/

I’ve had two long Squaremans posts percolating for a while, one on Mass Effect 2 and one on Harlan Ellison, which I should now be able to finish. The Harlan Ellison one is going to be good, stay tuned!

If you’re keen to know what the novel is about, here’s the excerpt from the web page.

What’s it About?

A reasonable question!

It’s about a man who lead the typical Fantasy Hero life for a long time, and the damage that life did to him. A man who, when we meet him, is incapable of living up to the standards he sets for himself. It’s about the awful choices life forces us to make. It’s about how for some people, before things can get better, they must first get worse. There’s a lot of action, some of it epic, a large cast of characters, and hopefully some little humor.

Our hero is lured out of the inn he bought but never opened, and sent into a dark forest to solve a murder no one wants him to solve.

It’s short, compared to most fantasy novels these days, more akin to the typical fantasy novel from the 1980s when books were about 350 pages. There’s a lot of dialog, and I hope  it reads fast.

It’s the first book of what I intend to be a series about camaraderie. All my favorite movies are about camaraderie, and I felt there was no point writing anything personal, anything that spoke to me, if I didn’t build it on a foundation of camaraderie.

But this first book only hints at that. It’s not about a group, it’s about one man. I rewound the series back to before the heroes get together to show the reader that you can have the bad-ass Fantasy Hero, but there is a price. The things that happen in this book give the rest of the series a much-needed sense of gravitas.

Part of my inspiration was Heroes, which takes all the tropes from comic books, and reskins them to make them universal and appeal to a wide audience. So a fan of fantasy fiction will recognize many of the tropes of the genre in Priest, but someone new to should, I hope, also find it accessible.

Popularity: 12% [?]

I have a Mass Effect 2 post percolating, but I had to take it off the boil, so I could work on something else.

For you see, I have written a fantasy novel, the first in a series, and in an effort to build some interest in it, I’ve built a site for it and started posting chapters online. I put the first seven chapters up, and will post more every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as a means to promote the book.

http://www.mattcolville.com/category/the-book/

I take the craft of writing pretty seriously, as you might be able to tell from this site, and I think I have produced a work of some substance, although that may not be evident from just the excerpt. Stick with it. Shit happens.

I subjected the book, the whole thing in various drafts, to friends and strangers as part of what I called the Beta Reader program and I got a lot of really good feedback. In spite of much work and revision, I feel the book is still basically unedited and will remain so until an actual editor gets their hands on it. Getting an agent or an editor is a laborious process and the more I learn about it the more just unlikely to work the process seems.

These people, agents and editors, especially in the electronic age, are just swamped with a ridiculous amount of crap and to first wind their way through it all and find my book, and then for everything to go well and end up on a bookshelf seems so unlikely, quality aside, that it seemed better to just go play the lotto in the hopes of someday buying a publisher.

Better, I thought, to put the book up chapter by chapter and let it speak for itself. It’s a risk, I realize this, but I thought if it held up, if people responded to it and I was able to build an audience, I might be able to attract the attention of someone in the industry and demonstrate that my work is not as much of a risk as some others.

In a certain sense, this is ridiculous. I realize this. There’s a whole process, an elaborate one, with many thousands upon thousands of people going through it at any given moment. Meanwhile I am trying to subvert the entire thing. But it’s my hope that thinking outside the box a little, relying on the Web, which I understand pretty well, might yield some results. Sure, it’s a longshot. But so is the normal method of going about getting published.

What’s it About?

The book is called Priest, and it’s what I think of as a Hard-boiled kind of novel, with breezy, tough-guy dialog and generally a quick read. Things move. Stuff happens. I think the page count comes out to 350 pages, so it’s pretty far afield from the Fat Fantasy that’s dominated the shelves for the past 20 years, and more like the stuff I grew up with in the ’80s. Though I take heart that other authors are having success with shorter work in the genre.

My goal with the series is to take the tropes of Fantasy and do with them what Heroes did with superheroes. Make them more universal, more accessible. This first book, though, is something of a downer. Things pick up after I put the main character through the wringer here.

I didn’t want to begin the process of writing a book in this genre, one I’ve read all my life, unless I thought I had something to contribute. Something to say, and if you read this book I think you’ll see my answer.

So please come by, check it out, and if you like it, or even if you don’t, if you have any thoughts, post a comment and let me know what you think! I have pretty thick skin…so far!

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“I was just thinking what an interesting concept it is to eliminate the writer from the artistic process. If we could just get rid of these actors and directors, maybe we’ve got something here.”

-Michael Tolkin’s screenplay for Robert Altman’s The Player

Scott Jenning’s take on the Infinity Ward drama seems pretty spot-on to me, and linking it here means I don’t have to write all that.

I can’t just post a link, though, that’s not who I am, so allow me to provide some commentary.

In the tradition of “why smart people do stupid things,” here’s my take on the recent behavior of EA and Activision, both garnering a lot of deserved attention for gutting and axing creative teams and studios with a proven track record.

It’s the IP.

Games make so much money, the industry is so big and growing so fast that we sometimes forget there’s anything else. A common reaction to Activision’s behavior is “Those guys made BILLIONS for Activision!” When you’re making literally billions of dollars, why chase after more?

Because making games is risky. It’s nowhere near as risky as making a movie, in general the rule holds that if you assemble a great team and give them the resources they need, they will make a great game. And if you market the shit out of something, it will sell. Do both and you have a legitimate hit and a successful franchise.

But a lot of games never see the light of day, and even a hit game can cost many tens of millions of dollars. EA and Activision might make a billion dollars, but at the cost of a few hundred million. They’d much rather be making even more billions at almost no cost.

That’s what a strong IP is for. If you have Mario in your stable, you can make billions just by selling Mario-branded T-shirts and pillowcases. Nike probably has to keep making shoes…probably…but their product is the swoosh.

EA and Activision are very happy to pay some developers a few tens of millions, maybe even more, if it means a franchise that generates hundreds of millions every year. But once a franchise is established, what do they need the developers for?

The guys in charge at EA and Activision don’t make games. They’re just business guys. All they do is make decisions. The act and process of making a game is very far removed from their everyday, even though their everyday is ostensibly about games. But really its about sales. Selling the games other people make. Marketing and positioning and making deals.

When a game is a hit, a lot of lip service is paid to the devs. But the guys getting the lion’s share of the money naturally believe they are the ones primarily responsible for the success of the game. Were it not for their funding, their marketing, their decisions, you’d have no game, no hit.

But dealing with developers is messy. They want to be treated like creative people, they want control over the product they invented, and they would like to get paid. So they become the enemy.

It’s not simply that the Publishers, who typically own the properties the developers invent, feel like the developers are replaceable, they fundamentally believe the game itself is irrelevant. They view the game like a movie or a song. It’s a product. Its job is to create demand for the brand. Because they believe they can extract money directly from the brand. Nintendo puts Mario on something, it makes them money. Nike puts the swoosh on something, it makes them money.

Once the game has created that demand, the game ceases to be critical to their strategy. They need to make more games, they realize this, but the purpose of more games is to keep demand for the brand high.

Medal of Honor is not a very strong brand, I don’t think there’s a lot of money to be made off Medal of Honor lunchboxes, but there’s some. There’s some. And the guys at Activision probably have plans for lots more. That’s why you create a new business unit, it’s code for “we want a team of people thinking full-time about how to spin this brand into every product imaginable.”

So the IW guys have a new studio to start, and we have Medal of Honor toothbrushes to look forward to. The system works!

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When I was at Decipher in the aforementioned meeting with the people at Games Workshop about cross promoting our Lord of the Rings RPG with their Lord of the Rings miniature wargame my boss, the closest thing I’ve come to meeting a genuine Tolkien scholar, said “What you really want, but can’t have, is stuff from the First Age. Which would you rather be, a random dude from Minas Tirith fighting Orcs in the ruins of Osgiliath, or an Elf Demigod fighting an army of Balrogs?”

“Holy shit!” the guys from GW didn’t say, but should have, “That sounds awesome, what do we have to do to get that?”

“Wait for Christopher Tolkien to die.”

Christoper Tolkien is one of the sons of J.R.R. Tolkien and the executor of his literary estate. His father in the 70s sold the film rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit to the Saul Zaentz Corporation, who created a subsidiary business; Tolkien Enterprises. Tolkien Enterprises has nothing to do with the estate of J.R.R. Tolkien, except insofar that they are licensees in perpetuity as I understand it. Which means the license will never go back to the Tolkien Estate.

When someone, anyone, makes a movie based on the Lord of the Rings, or a game, or…pretty much anything except calendars which I believe are done through the publisher of the books, that movie or game is in some way produced through this license with Tolkien Enterprises.

New Line Cinema, for instance, bought the rights from The Saul Zaentz Corporation to make the movies with Peter Jackson. They had nothing to do with the Tolkien Estate, they went through Saul Zaentz & Co.

If you want to make a game based on the movies, and we did, then you have to go to New Line and get a license from them for their movies. You don’t have to deal with the Saul Zaentz corporation.

If you want your game to include references to anything in the novel(s) that isn’t in the movies, then you need to go to the Saul Zaentz Corp. and make a deal with them. You need two licenses, in other words, to cover the movies and the books. In neither instance are you dealing with the Tolkien Estate.

That’s what we did. Decipher licensed the movies from New Line (who bought the rights from the Saul Zaentz Corp) and licensed the books from the Saul Zaentz corp. Now we could include anything from either the original trilogy of books, or the new movies, in our game.

Getting our game done was kinda a pain in the ass, especially for someone like my boss who was, as I mentioned, a Tolkien nut. There was all sorts of stuff he’d like to include from, say, the Silmarillion or the Book of Lost Tales, but could not. Because the original license between Tolkien and Saul Zaentz covered only the original three books and the Hobbit. There was even some controversy over whether things mentioned in the appendix to the third book were covered by the license.

When you are working on a licensed property (and that’s all I ever worked on in the tabletop game business) you usually have to go through approvals which means submitting your work to the licensor, the guys who own the original property. Whenever we published a new Trek book, we had to first send it to Paramount and someone there, usually a very groovy dude, would read through it and let us know whether we’d presented the property in the right light. This isn’t merely fact checking, you understand. One thing we got dinged on early with Paramount was a picture of an overweight Starfleet NPC for a Trek book. The note came back; “Starfleet personnel are all fit and healthy.” On some things they would budge, especially if we could provide an example from the show, but on other things, like fat Starfleet officers, they would not.

Often this process first requires you to educate your licensor on what you’re working on. Our first guy at Paramount didn’t know what an RPG was and asked questions like “Do the players have to make their own characters?” And “do they have to be allowed to make up their own stories?” Don’t be too harsh on these guys, a lot of people don’t know what an RPG is and almost without exception Paramount was great to work with.

New Line and Tolkien Enterprises were great to work with too. I often see people blaming the failures, both real and perceived, of the Lord of the Rings RPG, or the Star Trek RPG, on the licensor, but in my experience we may have used them as an excuse, but the problems always lay with us. I mean, yes, it’s a pain in the ass to have to submit your work for review before publishing in the first place, but usually everyone wants the same thing; your product to be as good as it can be. You’re all on the same team.

The only problems that ever came about were a result, not of New Line or Tolkien Ent., but because of the Tolkien Estate, which is to say Christopher Tolkien.

He had nothing to do with our products, or indeed New Line’s movie, directly. But he was..strongly opposed to the movies New Line was making and therefore going over everything with a fine-tooth comb to find anything that he could use to revoke the license. If New Line, or Saul Zaentz or any of their licensees put anything in their books that was in direct violation of the licensing agreement, then Tolkien could sue and get the license revoked. Which he seems very much to want to do. So we had to be very careful, not because the people we bought the license from were particularly intractable, but because the ultimate SOURCE of the license in the first place was waiting for the opportunity to take the license away.

Most people, on hearing this, shout “boo!” Were it not for Christopher Tolkien’s attitude toward this stuff, you’d have all sorts of great stuff from the Silmarillion in your games and they’d be bad-ass.

Christopher Tolkien’s rationale for this, his opposition for virtually any work derived from his father’s novels, is not financial. He’s set for life. He’s also a respected professor and scholar in his own right. He appears, based on what I’ve read and seen, to be genuinely interested in protecting his father’s vision. And yours.

Thomas Aquinas once observed that when you look at a painting you are not appreciating the painting, you are appreciating that version of the painting which you have built in your imagination. You may not notice certain things the artist put in his painting, and you may imagine things in the painting the painter didn’t put there. You instantly create a version of the painting in your head which is unique to you. And it is this mental version of the painting which you are really appreciating.

Furthermore, he argued, that act of creation, you building a mental image of the painting, is just as valid an act of creation as the one the artist engaged in when creating the painting in the first place. The artist is a better painter, but he is not necessarily better at imagining the painting.

I often think of this while playing D&D. I have players who love to engage with the setting I’ve created and make up bits and play in character, and I have players who are really just audience members and perfectly happy to be so. I have learned that the latter players are not less creative than the former. Even the audience member is creating a version of my campaign in his head and that act of creation is just as valid as the GM’s. I long ago gave up trying to turn audience members into co-creators because I learned that they’re both appreciating the game, and to the same degree, just in different ways.

Christopher Tolkien loves his father’s work, and loves that version of it you build in your head when you read it. When you and I read The Lord of the Rings we both imagined Frodo and Gollum and Gandalf, and we each imagined them differently. My Gandalf does not look exactly like your Gandalf and it is this that Christopher Tolkien wants to protect.

It’s a battle he’s mostly lost with the Lord of the Rings, but he’s determined not to lose it with his father’s other work. For now, and for at least a couple of generations to come, Gandalf will be Ian McKellan. There are, of course, people who can see the movie and then read the book and their book-Gandalf won’t look like movie-Gandalf (when I read Star Trek books as a teenager, my Kirk didn’t look exactly like Shatner, I can’t explain why) but these people are in the minority.

For the price of getting to see the books on the big screen, New Line has killed our own creative vision. This is Chris Tolkien’s attitude and, having heard his arguments, mine as well. I loved the movies, but I loved the books more and now the latter will be at least informed by the former in my imagination. Gandalf will look like Ian McKellan. Duke Leto will look like Jürgen Prochnow. Good casting in both cases, but I was not consulted.

Sometimes people say to me “hey the movies are good for the books! Exposing them to millions more people.” Well, the books have been consistently popular for decades. They don’t need help. Movie or no, your grandkids will be able to buy them in a bookstore in decades to come.

If we still have bookstores.

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Popularity: 41% [?]

I’m Matthew Colville, and SquareMans is my blog and a kind of alter ego for me. I’m a professional video game designer, writer and occasional producer. I’m not sure if I’m a writer who designs, or a designer who writes. It usually depends on which I feel embarrassed by less. Not entirely unlike trying to figure out which of two embarrassing sexual kinks to admit to.

This isn’t a personal blog; it’s not about my life, how my pets are doing, or who’s the current subject of my autoerotic fantasies. No one would want to read that crap. Instead, this is where I write about games, movies, game design, writing, politics. Anything from a relatively small list of topics that strike me as interesting to write about. Which…is to say, also crap, but the crap I like to write about.

Let me begin by saying that the thing I crave most, the thing I hope most to gain from this, is readers. I believe that’s the thing all writers want most. Money is nice, fame and fortune and everything that goes with it. But first, writers need readers. Readers who like what they read are nice, readers who think it’s crap, but who keep reading, are also nice. The best way, of course, to get readers is to write something people want to read, and that’s what I aim to do, but I thought it worth putting my motivation up front. We might write because we want to be famous, or relevant, we may do it because we are compelled, but first, please…someone read this shit. Tell your friends.

These posts are long, and often involve a lot of introspection that might not be directly relevant to the subject matter. That’s by design. I’m paid to be concise but here in my own territory, working for free, I can indulge myself. Plenty of blogs are short, lists and bullet points, so if that’s what you crave, there’s the whole internet for you to consume.

The name and visual theme of the site is a little window into what the site’s about. Some of you may remember the old Atari 2600 game, Adventure. We call you people beardies and I am proudly one of you.

Adventure was a very early fantasy game for the Atari 2600. Released in 1979, you played an…adventurer, who ran through a series of rooms and mazes trying to find the keys to various castles, and eventually the Chalice. It was the first graphic adventure game released for any console, was the origin of the term easter egg, and for a small boy in the late 70s, it was a hell of a lot of fun.

This was, as you can guess, not a visually sophisticated game. Nethack has better graphics…and Nethack doesn’t have any graphics. Your character, your sword-wielding adventurer, was a square. Not a cube, ah a cube would have been luxury. Literally a square. The art on the box was by far the most evocative element of the presentation. This description is more…you get the point.

Now, I’m not going to write “what’s interesting looking back, is that in spite of being a hero who looks like a square, wielding a sword that looks like an arrow, fighting dragons who look like ducks, I imagined a vivid world full of…vivid…things!” I did no such thing. I imagined I was going to beat the game, come hell or high water, and I damned well did.

What interests me now, looking back, is that this was a game I played well before I was a geek. Certainly before I was a gamer geek. I’m fascinated by the idea that all this stuff I associate with being a gamer; the quest, the adventurer, dragons, swords, mazes, castles, keys, and drawbridges, were all part and parcel of my mental landscape already, years before I’d run into D&D. Where did that come from? Not from Adventure, surely. Adventure was exploiting my existing understanding of these things. Somewhere in there, day school, kindergarten, Sesame Street, Sid & Marty Kroft, somewhere in that milieu, the blueprint was laid. Did I become a geek because I was exposed to those things, or did I seek them out because I was born a geek? The world may never know.

When it came time to name and theme my blog, I was struck by the idea of using the little square mans from Adventure. Which brings me to the other reference in the name. “Mans” has become, on certain gaming forums, a humorous catch-all term for whatever represents you in a game. Whatever you control. Whether it’s Altair from Assassin’s Creed, or your tanks and infantry in Axis and Allies, in all cases, those are your “mans.” That is your mans. In Adventure, the square was my mans. It’s important we don’t take ourselves too seriously and injecting the term “mans” into the most pretentious discussions about game design helps keep us grounded and reminds us this is supposed to be fun. Also, we sometimes sound like wankers and saying “mans” gives us a reason to laugh at ourselves.

I thought the idea of the square mans from Adventure appearing in lots of other games would be possibly humorous and certainly extremely geeky. Like me! The header graphic, therefore, depicts a game, usually a board game because that’s easy, into which the little square mans, sometimes wielding a sword, sometimes a key, fights off the Luftwaffe, or the Harkonnens, or the Outlaws and the Renegade.

And there you have it. Games, Design, Writing, Media, Politics. I should add a disclaimer that the kind of political thought I find interesting is not the kind that leads one to watch the debates on TV. I find that kind of politics to be largely wankery akin to listening to King Crimson. Something that actually contains all the negative stereotypes we associate with the genre.

Instead I’m talking about the kind of stuff you get on Charlie Rose. Diplomacy, strategy, foreign policy, statescraft. That kind of thing. The same kind of thing, no surprise, that makes good drama, and makes good games. About which, more later.

I encourage you to respond, even if it’s negative. Negativity, I can handle. Vitriol, however, is something I can do without. If there was anything in here that sparked a memory or an idea, respond. From such things do great communities rise.

I said the blog would not be personal, but I feel there are some things you should know that will frame the discussion. I live in Orange County, California, I worked for several years at Pandemic studios and now run my own video game company. I have two gaming groups, one in L.A. one in OC, that will receive frequent reference. I’m an avid gamer across all categories, including PC games, console games, board games, card games, RPGs, CCGs, miniature wargames. Everything. I’ve been in the video game biz for many years and before that I was a writer/designer in the Traditional Adventure Gaming industry, at places like Wizards of the Coast and Decipher. I’ve worked mostly on licensed games; Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, Dune, Star Wars. I’m not sure how much of this, if any, is relevant or interesting, but one never knows, does one?

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Popularity: 19% [?]