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Let's Play... Screw the Banks!

Maybe you've been vacationing on Pitcairn Island since the beginning of April and you haven't gotten news yet, but a month or so ago millions of documents were leaked to the press from the Mossack Fonseca law firm in Panama. These papers reveal how hundreds, or potentially thousands of wealthy individuals have been using offshore companies, banks and law firms to avoid paying taxes in their home countries.

Leaving aside questions of whether or not this kind of shit should be legal at all, the probability is that some of it is not. I personally think tax avoidance (the legal optimization of your finances to minimize your tax payable) kind of sucks to begin with - for the simple fact that it disproportionately benefits people who already have lots of money and can hire lawyers and accountants to help them pay less tax. Tax evasion (the illegal concealment of income to avoid paying tax) is an actual crime - the crime that got Al Capone sent to prison. Money laundering is the transformation of money made through criminal enterprise (such as dealing in arms, slavery, drugs, conflict minerals, etc) into 'not-illegal' money. Law firms like Mossack Fonseca, and the offshore banks they work with, and the shell companies they create, explicitly, openly and legally help wealthy people avoid taxation. Unfortunately the same systems and structures they use to do so can (and are) used for tax evasion and money laundering. I think that sucks.

Anyway, the Prime Minister of Iceland was already forced to resign because of his involvement in this mess, but his is only the highest profile head to roll so far. Acting and former Heads of State and their immediate family members from over 40 countries appear to be named in the leaked documents along with many other wealthy individuals and public figures. Apparently on Monday, May 9th, a giant list will be published of all the people connected to the couple of hundred thousand offshore companies that have been created through Mossack Fonseca for the purposes of doing international business, avoiding taxes, evading taxes, cleaning the bloodstains off their cash, or hiding the fact that they simply stole it outright from the budgets of very countries they are supposed to be running.

While all of this has been going down, I got to reminiscing with Mathieu Berube, who I work with here at Ubi in Toronto. Mathieu was a level designer who worked with me back on the first Splinter Cell, and was the LD who built the Panama Bank level of Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, which I personally think is the best Splinter Cell level ever made. In the story of the game, MCAS Banco de Panama was the financial middle-man able to conceal the people involved in the arms-for-information transaction between Displace International, Zherkezhi, and Peruvian revolutionary-wannabe Hugo Lacerda. Mathieu and I joked about how, when you work on these kinds of near-future political thriller kinds of games, you often end up predicting the future: the Bank level in Chaos Theory was ultimately about the power of offshore banks to make these kinds of illegal transactions anonymous.

After talking about it, we realized that it would be cool to see if we could get the game up and running and play through the level again while talking about how we designed and built it. It would also give us a chance to rant incoherently about our frustrations with all the shitheels who are screwing the rest of us by not paying their fair share. So that's what we did - we dug up a 360 (SCCT was on the original XBox, but was made backwards compatible) and did a run through and talked about some of the decisions we made.

So we made a Let's Play...



PS Making this video is not in any way intended to imply we are working on any particular game. What we're working on is unannounced. The fact that we're talking about Chaos Theory is a coincidence related to current events and nothing more.

I'm Sad...

I totally don’t have the time or the emotional energy to be writing this post, but in fact, I kind of feel like I don’t have the time to not write this post. You see, someone who I don’t know seems to have un-Friended me on Facebook.

I first accepted a Friend Request from this person – whom I will henceforth call 'Gina' – sometime before GDC. I remember noticing her updates around that time because we had a friend staying at our place during GDC and I remember lamenting that this new Facebook Friend was causing me some consternation.

I am Canadian. As such, I tend to have fairly left-leaning political opinions and moral convictions. To boot, I am probably more left-leaning in the ideological sense than the ‘average’ Canadian. That said, when I agreed to come to America as a guest of this nation, I decided that I would put a lid on my politics, and do my best to observe and understand how Americans think and feel about their nation and about the issues they struggle with, while trying not to pass judgement. I suspect that I fail to keep my opinions in check more often than I succeed, but I do try.

Judging from her updates over the course of six months or more, my former Facebook Friend Gina has fairly right-leaning political opinions and moral convictions. Her stances on a variety of hot-button political issues in America today are virtually the opposite of mine. She questions the legitimacy of Obama’s birth certificate. She opposes gay marriage. She opposes more stringent gun control laws. She is against health care reform. She supports the Tea Party. When I told my friend during GDC about Gina, his response was simply that I should un-Friend her.

But I didn’t (and don’t) see the point in that. I don’t see the point in that for two reasons.

The first reason is Facebook itself. The beating heart of Facebook is the idea that you can connect with people who you otherwise would never know – never mind share ideas with – by way of something else you have in common. Whether Gina knows a friend of mine, or has played one of the games I have worked on, or went to a school I went to, the point is that whatever tiny thing connects us has the potential to be the thing that bridges the gap between us and allows us to reconcile our differences. Now, I am a pretty cynical guy, and while I see that Facebook has the potential to be that, I also see the reality that it is mostly just a platform for marketing and self-promotion and for reinforcing already-held ideas. In the end, though, that’s the point. If we give up on what Facebook can be by un-Friending all the people whose opinions we disagree with, then we submit to a more cynical Facebook that nobody wants or needs.

The second reason is America. If there is any country in the history of the world where thinking differently is not just accepted, but is embraced, celebrated, and rewarded, it is the United States of America. I didn’t come to this country because I wanted to be around a bunch of people who looked the same, acted the same, sounded the same, dressed the same as me and/or thought the same as me. I came here to be challenged. Now, being challenged does not mean rolling over and accepting things you oppose – and I remain opposed to most of Gina’s positions – but it does mean coming to understand how and why you hold the ideas you hold, and why and how others hold differing ideas. This understanding strengthens your ideas and prepares you to challenge their ideas when the opportunity arises. But that opportunity will only arise if you continue to listen and refuse to walk away from the table. You should never turn your back on someone with a bad idea. If you don’t convince them it’s a bad idea when you have the chance, they’ll convince others that it’s a good idea and when you next confront it, it will be a bad idea with momentum....

So why am I sad?

Well, the end of this story unfortunately starts with the recent shooting at the theatre in Colorado. I didn’t read too much about it, frankly. I already read that story when I was in high-school, and again in college, and again in university, and again, and again. I have my opinions about how to better deal with the problem of murderous rampages, but those are not ideas I want to discuss on Facebook. I am fortunate to have a career where I can share ideas about the shape of the world, both as I see it, and as how I feel it ought to be. When it comes to complex issues of human nature I would prefer to spend the three or four years of effort it takes to develop a well-reasoned position on one idea than to scream hundreds of ideas at the walls of Facebook – which after all is just that – screaming at walls.

After the Colorado shooting, Gina put a lot of updates on Facebook of the fairly predictable sort; pro 2^nd Amendment, anti-gun control rhetoric of the ‘from my cold dead hands’ sort. All of that is fine. I disagree with the idea, but it’s irrelevant because firstly I support her right to express those ideas (under the Amendment that comes before the one that enables them) and secondly because I am a Canadian, and I have no say in the matter anyway.

What did trouble me a bit was her blanket assertion that the guns used in the shooting must not have been legally owned by the shooter. When I later read the guns were all legally acquired, I was tempted to post on her wall to ask what she thought about that fact. But I didn’t. Maybe I should have. Maybe that was the moment when Facebook could have been good for something and allowed two people with differing ideas to connect. Opportunity missed.

But then, this afternoon, I read (sadly) about another mass shooting by a person with a legally owned firearm. I remembered Gina’s update (it wasn’t long ago), and wondered if in the ensuing weeks people had pointed out her mistake, and if a discussion had arisen there and if I might have been given a second chance to see if I could reconcile my ideas with hers.

I typed (her real name) into Facebook’s friend search, and turned up nothing.

In the preceding 24-36 hours, she had inexplicably un-Friended me. I know because I remember seeing an update from my timeline at mid-day on Saturday. I wondered if she was just cleaning out her Friends list, and so I scrolled back through the last day or so of updates to see if I could find a clue.

Then I realized I had posted this tweet relating the cost of the Curiosity Rover to the cost of the Iraq War.

And then it dawned on me that very probably she had un-Friended me because I had said something she didn’t agree with. I had shown her that I was not the same as her, and (probably) she wanted a wall that reinforced what she already believed, not a wall that challenged her ideas.

Now, probably, since most of my own friends, and most of the people who come to my blog, are self-selecting and will be inclined to agree with me, I suspect most of you will say ‘good riddance’. You probably think it’s a good thing that she has cut herself off and further isolated herself. If that’s what you think, I direct you to the title of this post. It’s not titled ‘fuck you, Gina’, it’s titled ‘I’m sad’.

I’m sad because the fact is that my and Gina’s differences – relative to the scope and scale of human disagreements in general – are effectively non-existent. Gina and I live in the most enlightening society in human history, and we have access to the most powerful connective technology in the history of the world, and we still managed to outmaneuver each other. I’m sad because, in some sense at least, I invested a lot of time and energy into this pseudo-relationship with this person I never met. I persisted in not un-Friending Gina based on principles that I actually care about, even though at times it diminished my own happiness to do it. I tried – for months – to make this technology work for these people in this culture, and at the end of the day it seems to have not mattered at all.

I’m sad because sometimes it seems like it doesn’t improve my life, or the lives of those around me to even think about these things, never mind talk about them. And that sucks.

I <3 Japan

I can't imagine that it is even possible that anyone who would end up on my blog would not have already been aware of this.

Gamers Heart Japan is an initiative launched by Victor Lucas and Electric Playground to help raise money to support the Red Cross relief effort in Japan. I'm honored that Victor would reach out to me to help with this, and super happy have been able to have the time and the resources and the assistance to get my segment shot and delivered on such short notice.

To see the hour long video special, with interviews from dozens of the smartest and most talented game developers in the world, go here. From there you are also just one click away from making a donation if your are able.

The Next Generation of Player

So I am finally posting the slides and other presentation matertials for my Generations talk.

The talk is about the current shift in player demographics taking place in population of gamers and game developers.

I originally gave the talk in Vancouver as a Keynote to Vancouver Film School's Game Design Expo back in the beginning of Febraury.

I also gave the talk to the IGDA Chapter here in Montreal at the beginning of March. The IGDA Montreal Chapter has a write-up of the talk here (thanks Caroline), and they're also linking a full video of the entire talk, here - it's actually hosted on Motionbox, here.

For those who don't know, I have been laid up with a herniated disk in my lower back for the past month. I was supposed to be going down to GDx in Savannah a couple weeks ago to give the talk there as well, but my injury regretably prevented the travel. Thankfully with the slides, text and now a full video, anybody can see the presentation at their own leisure.

One final note for you number crunchers out there: the talk presents - in rapid-fire format - a lot of graphs based on data pulled down from the US Census Bureau which I harvested here and then aggregated. I have included in the ZIP file all of my datafiles and the graphs that were generated from them. The data is included as notepad files, whcih were then imported into excel to make the XLS file.

GDC09 - Part 3 - Wines and Rants

The last set of slides I have to put up are those for my five minute talk about game rating systems that I gave as part of Richard Lemarchand's Microtalks session on Thursday morning.

Overall I really enjoyed the session - though the prep was a nightmare. I guess it's pretty easy to enjoy a session where you only have to do 10% of the work and then you get to listen to smart people explain to you what exactly it is that you do for a living.

Anyway, the five minute format is colossally difficult. Especially if you are trying to make a point and support it with arguments instead of being all hand-wavy and theoretical. I wish I could have brought to bear all the arguments I have as for why we should switch from 10, 20, 100 or even 1000 point rating systems to a simple five point rating system, but I just didn't have time.

I guess that's what blogs are for.

Here are the arguments I made in the talk:

100 point rating systems are so analog that the human brain cannot make sense of the granularity (what is the difference between an 86 and an 87 in real perceptible, measurable terms?). These systems nobly attempt to make a threshold-less system - but when the brain is overloaded we add thresholds back in... we say '61-70 is above average' and '71-80 is good' or whatever. This is effectively adding back in the thresholds that a 100 point system endeavors to remove... but it is adding them back in in a less rigorous way leading to a mysticism created around certain improbable thresholds at the far reaches of the curve. I called this mysticism the Cult of 90+ and talked about it specifically in the context of wine rating.

I talked also about the relationship between the review scores, the reviewer, the publishers of the review and the developers and publishers making the games. There are pressures in these relationships that push reviewers to give higher scores. This is very easy to do in a 100 point system (because of the bracketed question in the previous paragraph), meaning a reviewer under pressure can relieve that pressure incrementally by inflating a score ever so slightly to make everyone involved a little bit happier. This systemic, distributed pressure release into the system of review scores is inflationary and increases game review scores over time.

In terms of inflation, I present the evidence of it by looking at the aggregated game ratings taken from gamerankings.com and I discuss why it is bad: principally because it prevents cross-generational comparison of games (in fact, this need for cross generational comparison means we should impose and maintain a bell curve in ratings even if games are getting empirically better over time).

As an aside: Adam Sessler ranted against a different set of problems inherent with the way aggregators work at this years Rant session. Adam is also right, in my opinion, and a global switch to a five star system would also work alleviate his complaint to some extent.

In any case, if you want the discussion on the above points, you can download the slides and the text of the talk here.

Also of note is that I used Kent Hudson's 'How To Pick a Lock' talk from GDC 2008 as a point in the discussion and I have had a couple people ask me about it. For those interested in that discussion, Kent's slides and video support can be found here. Thanks Kent.

Now - over and above the points raised in the talk there are a couple other arguments for why we ought to undertake a global switch to a five star rating system for games that I did not have time to cover in the talk itself.

Firstly, 100 point rating systems leverage the 'fallacy of precision' to lend authority to the accuracy of the rating (difference between accuracy and precision is here). Essentially the argument here is that if I claim a game is an 82, then most readers are likely to think 'well, it must be somewhere between an 80 and an 85'. In fact, this is a fundamentally invalid assumption. If I were to use a 10 point system and give the game an 8, readers would assume it to be 'probably between a 7 and a 9'. If I were to use a five star system and give a 4, they would assume it 'probably between a 3 and a 5'.

The problem is that the precision afforded by an 82 does not make the accuracy of the rating higher. It is as likely to be a 60 or a 100, just as a 4 star rating is probably somewhere between a 3 and a 5. Accuracy and Precision are orthogonal concepts, but the fallacy of precision leverages the fact that our brains tend to correlate them. In a the highly subjective field of rating games, it is much more important that we be accurate than that we be precise and someone who plays a lot of games can be accurate in a five star system.

To go one step further with this argument, I would point out that in a world full of aggregators, we still have 100 and 1000 point systems and having these systems aggregating five star ratings into percentages is useful and good (provided everyone uses a five star system and their aggregation policies are standardized, fair and well understood - cf Sessler). Having them aggregating ratings that are already claiming 100 points of precision makes the aggregators susceptible to the effects of the aforementioned inflation (in fact it is in the aggregators that we are able to measure the inflation).

For the record - this point was misquoted in IGN's article on the talk wherein they wrote:

According to Hocking ... 35 of the 100 current top-rated games (as tracked by an aggregate site) were released after 2001. That presents a skewed view of the industry's history and points toward a recent inflation of sorts in game reviews.

Note that an astute commenter then went on to reply this:

To say 35 of the top 100 rated games of all time came out since 2001 means that scores have been inflated since them is not consistent. Since 2001, there have been 8 years of games released. We can assume that almost all games with ratings have come out since around 1985, or 24 years ago. The past 8 years represents 1/3 of this time, and 35/100 is about 1/3 of the total game volume. It is consistent that ratings have NOT been inflated as 1/3 of the top rated games have come out in 1/3 of the time period of game releases.

The commenter is exactly right if 35 of the Top 100 rated games of all time were released since 2001. But the real quote was that 35 of the Top 41 highest rated games of all time were released since 2001. That`s not the 35% we would predict, that is 85%. Get it right IGN, you kind of invalidated the entire talk by erroneously reporting the most critical and central piece of data. Maybe it was the precision that threw you off?

I won't go into the other horribly broken arguments in the comments thread... I should know better... but here's my personal favorite:

Clint is a joke. Far Cry was overrated trash. The 100 point system is fine. It allows a more accurate score. Period.

That's like a straw-man multiplied by the denial of the fallacy of precision. Awesome stuff.

As a follow-on from the fallacy of precision point is the argument that the kinds of precision implied in 100 point systems feel elitist to 'ordinary' people. At a time when the industry is experiencing explosive growth - when new players of all demographics are starting to take up gaming - it serves our interest to give them reviews and rating scores they can understand. An 89.3 implies a level of refinement in perception among gamers and reviewers that not only does not exist, but is also intimidating for the mass market. It is the equivalent of terms like 'mature oak finish' and 'fruity nose' in wine discussion. These concepts are alienating for the market and make people feel excluded when - in the end - the entire purpose of game reviews and particularly of giving numerical scores at all is to help inform people about the product and invite them to play.

The final point I wanted to make was that - as members of a press with increasingly important social responsibilities - the reviewers, writers and editors giving the review scores should be the ones championing the push to a five star system. For all the reasons mentioned above, finer granularity systems are broken and compromise the integrity fo their work (and the utility of their work to developers). Chris Hecker also gave a mini rant this year and he called for the gaming press to do their job well. I believe the first step in doing that lies in radically reducing the importance and weight given to numerical scores and emphasizing the importance placed on quality reviews, well written.

I am pretty sure no matter what I say, this call is going to go unheeded... but I am also pretty sure that those who don't make the transition are going to find themselves very rapdily serving a smaller and smaller niche of an explosively growing market. I look very much forward to continuing to work with those who survive the transition.

The Fast and the Curious

/corporate hat on

Fast Company just named Ubisoft as one of the Top 50 Most Innovative Companies (with a shout out to the Anvil engine and to the PoP team on the click-thru). I'm fucking proud of it, so despite that fact that some of you will call me a corporate shill, I'm going to blog about it anyway.

Yves Guillemot has always said that innovation and creativity were important pillars for us, and I must admit I have had the good fortune to be able to benefit from this stance in my creative life. Trying to innovate is something I've always pushed hard for in everything I've done. I know a lot of other people have too. We've invested a lot in innovation over the years and consequently have had to learn to embrace the risks that come with that (and we've also taken our share of the bumps that accompany them) so it feels good to finally get a shout-out for it.

It's especially encouraging given the current economic situation to have a nod like this even as Yves reasserts the importance of creativity and innovation instead of backpedalling to a 'safer' stance as (in my opinion) other more 'reactionary' CEO's might do. It means the light flickering through the smoke over the trenches is actually the sunlight of victory and not more incoming tracer-fire.

Even though such a list is a little arbitrary, it's also cool to see who they've ranked us ahead of and who they've ranked us behind.

So bye-bye Lego and watch out Microsoft and Wal-Mart.

/corporate hat off

A Teacher's Primer

Middle of last week, The Globe and Mail published an interesting and well-written article about the Canadian Teacher's Federation (ironically abbreviated 'CTF') calling for a ban on the X360 and Wii release of Rockstar's Bully: Scholarship Edition.

Before getting into it I want to praise the unbiased and seemingly well-informed writing of the article itself by Jill Mahoney and Unnati Gandhi. It is a rare treat indeed to read an article about topics like violence in games, or the banning of games and not be left with the dreadful feeling that the reporter, editor and publisher of the article are in fact terribly biased in favor of the complainant and against games and the game industry. While I don't typically read The Globe and Mail, this article reminds me that I should get off my CNN junkfood diet and start giving a shit about what news media I consume. So there you go; G&M, you've gained a reader.

Now - to the point.

I have not yet played Bully. I never had an opportunity to play the PS2 version and was eagerly anticipating the X360 version. Unfortunately, circumstances have conspired to delay my attempt to play the game, but this will not last forever. Therefore, this is not going to be a defense of Bully by saying 'the game is great, you should play it' - simply because I don't know if that's the case.

This is also not going to be a defense of Bully on principle. I am not going to attempt to champion the freedom of expression of game creators. I'm not going to stand up and say 'you can't ban me - I have rights'. I'm not going to get sucked into the debate on your terms. The simple fact is, I don't need to. Reactionary cries to ban a critically acclaimed game like Bully are doomed to failure and involving myself in the debate on these terms contributes to nothing but a minor validation of the fears of the fearful. I think that with a little bit of effort, I can come up with a better contribution than that.

So, what is it that I or the CTF could contribute? Since I haven't even played Bully - and probably neither has Ms. Noble, President of the CTF, (nor probably have her counterparts in the coalition of teacher's unions in Canada, the United States, Britain, South Korea, Australia and the Caribbean who are mentioned in the article) I wonder if we even can contribute anything? Ought we enter into debate about public access to media that we have not even engaged ourselves? That seems unethical to me - especially given our roles. It is doubly unethical if Bully might in fact actively contribute to broader and deeper societal understanding of the very serious and real issues of bullying. While our teachers are certainly on the frontlines of the battle against bullying - they are not the owners of the issue and they are not the only ones entitled to examine or discuss it. Those who create art or other media such as films, novels or games that engage the issue are also part of society's attempt to deal with the problem.

So, no, I'm not going to defend Bully at all. Instead, I am going to invite Ms Noble and her counterparts to examine it with me, and to enter into a critical discussion of its merits and the difficulties it may or may not pose to students and to teachers who clearly and irrefutably have to deal with the daily reality of bullying in our society. If the concerns of these individuals - our de facto authorities on bullying - are not explored in a game like Bully, then perhaps Bully is nothing but sensationalist junk. On the contrary - if Bully does illuminate the social realities of Bullying within the reasonably defined scope and capability of the medium, then not only is it more than sensationalist junk - it is arguably an important work. Perhaps even a work that students should be playing in school as a part of their education in order to safely explore notions of bullying while having to neither engage in, nor be subjected to it.

So, to Ms Noble - and to her counterparts in the coalition of teacher's unions - I extend an open invitation to play Bully with me, and once we have all finished we can collectively engage in an informed dialogue about the merits or failings of the game. Think of it like a book-club, but instead of reading Jane Austen we'll play a game - and then we'll talk about it. We'll talk about what it says and how it says it. We'll talk about what it means. We'll talk about its contribution - or lack thereof - to our body of knowledge and to our emotional experiences as human beings - as relates to bullying.

As a primer - since you are probably not terribly literate in games - you might want to start doing some homework. You taught me how to read - so now is my chance to return the favor.

Start with Eric Zimmerman's and Katie Salen's book Rules of Play. This is probably the most complete work to date on the subject of games and what they mean. It's being used to teach Game Design in universities, you know. Probably you will even be adding it to your own ciriculum in the coming decade.

For more insight into the growing field of game design as theory, I suggest a couple of small articles that are becoming increasingly central to the development of the profession, art and craft of designing games. These are Doug Church's Formal Abstract Design Tools, and Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek's presentation of the MDA framework. While certainly not applicable to 'reading' and appreciating games, they may help you bootstrap your understanding of this emerging medium and get us to the stage where we can all play Bully together a little bit sooner. If you only have time to read two short articles about the foundations of design theory - these are the two.

For formal discussion of numerous principles underlying game design and to brush up on the critical vocabulary you will need when we enter into discussion, I humbly recommend several of my own past GDC presentations, in particular, one on Intentional play, one on Exploration, one on Immersion, and one on Simulation Boundaries. More important probably than the presentations themselves, is the fact that each of them has numerous suggestions for further and deeper reading should you care to continue. Terminology and concepts introduced throughout these presentations will lead you all over the internet and into the heart of a whirlwind of knowledge about games from some of the smartest people in the world - people made smart by the previous efforts of you and your peers and colleagues to educate a generation of children who invented an entire medium.

I would also recommend you read my own discussion of the state of game criticism - in response to Ian Bogost's critique of (you guessed it) Bully, and - while I have not yet read Mr. Bogost's recent book, well, you might want to tackle that as well. I will certainly read it before we get around to our discussions.

Finally there is probably one remaining hurdle to this endeavour. I am guessing that you are not comfortable playing a game as complex as Bully. One of the unfortunate weaknesses of our medium is the barrier to entry created by the need to actively input meaningful expression into the dynamic system of a game (ie: it's hard to start playing games because you have to actually play them). Fortunately, the game industry has been working hard to lower this barrier to entry and open the doors to new audiences of people who have been up to now intimidated by this barrier.

If you, Ms Noble, are interested in playing Bully with me, say so. If you do not already own one, I will buy you an XBox 360 or a Wii and a copy of the Bully: Scholarship Edition. Once you have your new console, you can can use it to download a host of games either from XBox Live Arcade, or the Wii Virtual Console, and you can brush up on your gaming skills. Both platforms offer a fantastic wealth of titles dating back to the days of Donkey Kong and Pac Man. You can certainly choose a dozen or more different award winning titles of varying complexity and challenge level to gain comfort with the controller and prepare yourself to play Bully.

So there you have it. Since I am interested in the debate, but I'm not interested in the trite and dull perspective that the uniformed are bringing to the table, it's time to turn the tables. I welcome - even actively encourage - any informed debate on the value of games, or even of a particular game. If you want to talk about these issues as informed professionals with potentially conflicting perspectives in need of thoughtful resolution - I'm game. If you want to enter into ideological debate about whether or not Bully should be banned, I've got better things to do - and frankly, I would like to think you do as well.

In closing, I wanted to say I hope you don't think I'm being a smart-ass by throwing out an offer I know you won't accept. I sincerely do not mean it to come across that way. I'm simply trying to challenge what appears to me to be systemic bias and injustice arising from ignorance of what thousands of people working in my industry are trying to accomplish for the betterment of our society. It's easy to shake a fist in outrage, and I have done my share of that. It's harder to invite rational discourse and to work with those with whom you have conflicting opinions in order to do what you know is right - especially when it is unpopular.

I think I learned that from Atticus Finch when I read "To Kill a Mockingbird" in my eighth grade English class with Mrs Uchiyama at Kitsilano Secondary School in Vancouver. Despite numerous attempts made to ban the book over the decades - I am more than proud to say that the debate surrounding it, and the content within it has been formative of my world view. Despite the cited 48 instances of the use of the word 'nigger' in its text - the book taught me not to be racist, but instead to tackle difficult and sometimes unpopular challenges head-on and with courage. So regardless of where the CTF stands on the controversial and challenging issues surrounding Miss Lee's book today, it seems clear that the debate itself makes a difference and contributes to the shaping of who we are.

I hope you do not see this new medium that your children have created as being beneath debate and ban-worthy simply because you don't understand it. Especially not in face of an offer to examine it openly. Perhaps together we'll find out if The Child is father of the Man after all. (Mr Henderson's Lit12 class).

Canadian Game Industry Tax Credits - Gamespot

Emma Boyes, out of Gamespot UK, brings us a well researched and interesting piece on Canada's game development tax incentives.

It looks at the way the Canadian Government has incentivised the game industry, and the way many other countries have failed to, and why. In particular, she looks at the (increasingly tragic) case of UK game development.

She outlines the different kinds of tax incentives available to Canadian developers - from basic R&D credits that have been in place for decades, to incentives for employing digital animators to incentives for sound recording.

Anyway - kinda business focused compared to what I usually put up here, but I think it is a really interesting article and definitely worth a read.

177%

According to this article, recent figures from Invest Quebec show Montreal's game development workforce has grown by 177% in the last 2 years. We're 47 heads short of the 5,000 mark. Awesome.

I don't know what the numbers were when I moved here six and a half years ago, but I was (just over) employee 1000 at Ubi Montreal and there were less than 500 of us in the studio when I arrived. Probably the Montreal dev community was less than 2000 back then.

We're still not at the size of the dev community in Vancouver or the Bay Area, but with 5000 of us, and with so many major publishers launching new internal development studios, if we can maintain levels of growth anywhere near this for another couple years, we'll be the largest game development area in the world easily I imagine.

Portal - The Cliff's Notes Version

Finally got Guitar Hero 2 a couple months ago, and now Guitar Hero 3 is out. Then came Bioshock. I grabbed Battlestations: Midway and DiRT (someone has to play games that aren't getting 10/10), and also grabbed Halo 3. Assassins is next week. Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect and Crysis are less than a month out. Waiting anxiously for Blacksite. GTA IV, Mercs 2, and my game are coming in spring. R6:Vegas and Viva Pinata are still in the plastic on my shelf... how the fuck am I going to find time to play HL2: Episode 2. Or Episode 1 for that matter?? Nevermind Team Fortress 2.

And shit... Portal. Now here is a game that is coming totally out of the blue (from the yellow?). I expected it would be a clever little puzzle game not worth spending my time on (with apologies to the crew at Valve - I should have known better). Turns out there is this odd industry wide shockwave of people saying "holy fuck I can't believe it, but this is the game of the year...". You're kidding me?! Leave me alone. I don't have time for this. Will just ONE of the twenty games due to ship between September 2007 and March 2008 please, please, please just suck so I can have a rest?

For those looking to get the feel for what Portal is about, but who just don't have time to play it, here's the Cliff's Notes version in Flash... I'm having a blast with this. And sadly, unless someone, somewhere, drops the ball and one of these games turns out to be crap, this is all the Portal I might have time for.