The new episode of PATV today is all about my game Thornwatch. This one has been in the works for a long time. They have footage in there of the very first time I ran the game for anyone outside the PA offices, all the way up to our public tests at PAX East. Right now we’re preparing for another test at PAX Prime. We made some huge improvements after East thanks to the feedback from our playtesters and I’m excited to get it in front of folks again.
I’ve always thought “screen time” was a silly idea. I think it’s important to consider what’s on the screen. Maybe it made more sense back when screen time just meant television. The idea that sitting and watching Spongebob should be tossed into the same bucket as playing ABC Mouse is absolutely insane. I won’t let my four year old watch cartoons all afternoon but if he wants the iPad he is welcome to it. That’s because if he is using the iPad he is coloring and doing puzzles. Nine year old wants to lay on the couch and watch Ninjago all afternoon. Not happening. Want to play Minecraft with your friends all afternoon? Yes! I say that because I’ve gone into their Minecraft Realm. I’ve seen the hotel these kids built. I’ve played with the redstone machines they have designed. I've played games my kid built in Project Spark on the Xbox and Hopscotch on the iPad. That’s technically “screen time”, but those are experiences I will never put a limit on.
Friday's was weird as shit, but I loved it. Today's is fairly complex, even if its comic expression is incredibly straightforward.
I heard that this or that device was going to be graced with a chamfered bezel, and I felt a knot in my chest unwind. No lesser bezel would do. And then I realized that I have no idea what either of those words mean. I don't know what the first one means, and I don't know what the second one means, so I have no idea how the first one would modify the second one. I talked about it with Gorabriel, and we agreed that even though we had no idea what either of these things were it was very important to have both. And, I was quite correct: r/bezels did indeed lose their shit.
If you are a nerd, or a dork, or a square, or a polygon, or a Porygon, or whatever the word is for people who fetishize this kind of stuff, Virtual Reality is approaching normalization. We have a fairly robust conception of it, pop cultural models of the form coupled with our own experience regarding state of the art entertainment simulations.
I borrowed an Oculus last night and decided to show it off to some friends and family. First I had my folks come over. My Dad was really curious about it. he doesn’t play games but he likes to read articles about them since he knows it’s such a big part of my life. He was aware of the Oculus but had never seen one in person much less used it.
They're going hard over there, I mean, like... Ke$ha hard, coming in at $53,635.02 at the time of this posting. I have to keep changing the post to account for the growth: strong showing, all. I'm gonna keep an eye on that total - if they end up cracking 75k this year, that brings their lifetime total (seven years!) up to a cool half million. Jamie's gonna give 'em a call today at 3:30, just to see what's up.
Playing games with us can be difficult. That sentence is true in multiple ways.
Sometimes people send me boxes full of cool shit. I don’t always end up talking about the stuff I get, but if it’s especially cool it will usually end up in the comic or a news post. A while back Razer sent me one of their incredible Blade Pro laptops. I’m playing Wildstar on this thing every day and I love it. They sent a second package a little later full of peripherals. I’m not generally a PC gamer so I was using a $5 mouse which has now been replaced with the Razer Naga. I did have a decent set of headphones but the Kraken 7.1’s they sent blow them out of the water.
So, maybe we don't think it's the best terminology ever. Or, maybe it's fine terminology, but it calls the very endeavor into question; it is The Hand Which Draws itself. But for some reason we can't stop saying it.
In 2007 - when the vast majority of American children got to school on the backs of herbivorous dinosaurs - Johnny Lee flipped motherfuckers out with his YouTube summer jam "Head Tracking For Virtual Reality Displays Using The Wii Remote." A thoroughly baller proof of concept, it conveyed the power of a deep display that retained its experiential vigor even when it was ostensibly only two dees.
When the folks at the Reading Rainbow Kickstarter asked if I was interested in contributing to their calendar I could not say yes fast enough. They hadn’t even told me what I was supposed to draw yet. “It should be a piece inspired by Reading Rainbow’s idea that a book can let you go anywhere and be anything.” I was told. Yes yes yes a million times yes!
It's called the Avarice Amulet, though it's been called lots of things over the course of its life - initially it was a Watchwork Golem, a traitorous creachoid that would flip allegiance on death. They thought it might be fun if it were an artifact, which fit the Penny Arcade reference better anyhow, and ultimately that's the genetic stock that survived testing. It's best for the weirdo, novel formats we tend to like - there's a cool piece with meta-level suggestions over at TouchArcade featuring the official art, which has a tasteful reference for you to savor.
There are too many games to name which conform to the brutal PVE/Survival model, and more coming out all the time; they spread like wildfire, they mass and hatch in people's extremities. Spintires, catalyzed by Kickstarter, has been making the rounds - and even though you don't brain spiders with pipes, or make shanties, I'm comfortable saying its situated in that storied continuum. You explore, and contend, and amass, and rarely, rarely succeed.
Her Wildstar house of course. I like to visit all my friends houses, help with their gardens or mines, check out any challenges they have and just poke around in their bedrooms. Anyway I was in Jamie's house and I noticed that she took a set of Granok furniture and she shrunk it way down to make a tiny room for her stuffed animals. She then placed her dolls on the furniture.
Grabiel and Kiko (who I haven't actually called Kiko since 2003, opting for either , Kikkorzord, Kierkogaard, Korkenwold, or Krizz Kaliko) are basically going non-stop on this Console Wars thing. They are careful not to give each other "spoilers," which seems odd, but there you have it. Some people don't like how it is a narrative account, that people have been made into "characters" that have "dialogue" or whatever, as opposed to something more clinical; who knows. The Historical Account version of the book probably doesn't get picked up by Sony for a movie as quick as it did.