See the video here.

It’s a little bit sad, as this is the first time in 10 years we haven’t done it, but it’s all good!

We encourage all designers who are actively working on new and different design ideas to apply. Here’s a link for more information.

The deadline is January 26, 2010. (We had erroneously listed the date as February 16.)

(An embedded player from video.google.com was here. It used Flash, which browsers no longer support.)

Sorry about the incorrect aspect ratio, but I spent 45 minutes trying to figure out how to fix it, with no success. The web is kind of sad sometimes.

Here’s the link to the article at NextGen Player.

Ben Fritz at Variety recently wrote a column wondering why there’s so little industry participation in these awards, and postulating that it’s because the industry is anti-union. After all, to be eligible for the awards, game writers only need to join the Video Game Caucus and pony up some cash ($75 a year). No problem, right?

Being self-employed and having no employees, I have no reason to be pro- or anti-union. But I am definitely anti- these awards; they are insulting to game developers and serve no real purpose for anyone else except the WGA.

The problem is that it’s not really an award ceremony. It’s a membership drive masquerading as an award ceremony, and that’s a large part of the insult. You can tell it’s not really an award ceremony because of their decision to exclude most people from qualifying! So, here’s what’s going on: they are giving out pretend awards, in order to get people to join their caucus. Implicit in this action is the message that we are too dumb to notice what they are doing, or else vain enough that we don’t care what’s going on as long as we get some awards. I don’t take either of those as a compliment.

I would not mind participating in an award ceremony that is honestly trying to recognize the best in video game writing. When the WGA sat down to create their awards, they could have made this their priority: that the awards would go to the people most deserving, and over time would build a reputation of respectability, giving game writers something real to aspire to. Along with the award nominations they could have sent out a letter saying “Hey, please join our guild; guild membership does not influence the awards in any way, but we feel that we have a positive contribution to make to the game industry.”

Instead, they mandate caucus membership, with the obvious effect that the awards probably won’t go to the best games. So the structure becomes this: you give them a little something by making their guild more powerful, they give you a little something back by maybe giving you an award. It’s just slimy, and if the public were to assume that these awards were chosen based only on quality, then it would be fundamentally corrupt.

I said that all this was just part of the insult. The rest of the insult is that, apparently, by joining the caucus you are not even a real member of the WGA, because hey, just because we are giving you an award for outstanding video game writing doesn’t mean you are a real writer. This is made very clear on the first page of the application (see the sentence that I’ve hilit in yellow):

Video Game Writers Caucus membership does not provide the right to vote in WGAW elections, to run for office or to attend WGAW membership meetings for the Writer’s Guild of America, West Inc.

The bolding and italics are theirs. They want to be very sure about this point!

Suppose a video game writer felt very pro-union and wanted to join the WGA. After reading this he might feel a little miffed, and wonder, okay, if this doesn’t make me a real member, what does? So he goes to the WGA’s web page to find out. What he sees is that he has to accrue a bunch of points by doing radio, TV and movie stuff. In other words, there is no path available to him for actual guild membership.

But wait — what about authors of books, short stories, poems, and whatever else? That’s writing, isn’t it? Oh, those people join the Authors Guild, a completely separate entity.

Since the writing in Braid is patterned after book writing, not TV or movie writing, I then feel especially out-of-place in this whole arrangement — hey, I should be submitting the game to the Authors Guild Video Game Writing Awards, except that those don’t exist.

Braid also has problems with the WGA awards because the game contains no explicit writing credit, which one of the documents says very clearly disqualifies Braid immediately, though a clause elsewhere says that maybe I could petition them. But this, and other parts of the application, make clear that the WGA is targeting large-team industrially-created games, and that indie games are out of their area of concern; this reinforces to me the notion that this is about business, and money, and union power, rather than being about quality. (I guess to appease them for my next game, instead of saying “A game by…” in the credits, I can say “Designed by Jonathan Blow, Written by Jonathan Blow, Programmed by Jonathan Blow, Business Development by Jonathan Blow, Producer: Jonathan Blow, Key Grip: Jonathan Blow,” and try to put my name in there as many times as I could before I get to David Hellman, Edmund McMillen, Sean Barrett and Harry Mack. Yeah, that would be a lot more elegant.)

Anyway, that’s why I didn’t participate: I do not feel that these awards are worthy of respect. This has nothing to do with my feelings about the WGA as a whole; I don’t know anything about the WGA, so I can’t form an opinion. But this was a horrible way for them to try and make a first impression with an industry they’d like to break into.

We’re now looking for submissions for the 2009 workshop, which will be happening in March. If you make unconventional kinds of games, I encourage you to apply. Our Call for Submissions document discusses everything in more detail:

Also, here’s the main page, for those who are just generally curious about the event.

This year at the Tokyo Game Show, the Sense of Wonder Night event was held for the first time ever. This was a session where developers from around the world gave 10-minute presentations on their unconventional game designs, the idea being to inspire the designers in the audience, and give them a good summary of some of the things being done on the avant-garde.

Even if you follow the Western indie game scene, there will probably be some surprises there for you; often games that are made in Japan don’t become well-known in the West, because of the language barrier.

You can follow that link to the Sense of Wonder home page, where videos of all the presentations are posted (they are on YouTube).

(In related news, the Experimental Gameplay Workshop page is a bit out of date, so we are going to update it soon and also put out the Call for Participation for 2009; and the fact that SOWN is posting videos seems like a really good idea, so we are going to try and do videos for 2009 as well).

[Note: Thanks to Tim at the Indie Games Blog for posting the original notice of this.]

I’m glad they are doing this, although I wonder if the focus of the conference isn’t too broad. It also seems extremely lacking on the Art Game side of the fence (looking at the board and invited speakers), and heavily weighted toward the Serious Game side of things. Which is fine, I guess, but I think they are then missing the biggest chunk of “Meaningful”; perhaps they should call it the “Utilitarian Play Conference” instead.

If you’re a game developer, they have a Call for Games posted. (Their web site has been painfully slow sometimes, so if either of these links don’t work, try again later).

I don’t know if I will be there, because some friends are convincing me to go to the Tokyo Game Show which is happening at the same time.

Snippy note to MPC2008 organizers and people at other academic conferences I’ve seen lately: Please stop using dual-analog console controllers as the symbol of your conference or the big illustration at the top of the web page. We in the industry are not proud of these controllers; they are not cool. Also they are just a stereotypical surface signifier of games; they don’t say anything about interactivity or the nature thereof. Nothing says “We Have No Ideas” more effectively than a DualShock controller.

The trouble all started back when Slamdance leadership attempted to remove Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from the festival, after it had been selected as a finalist. Several other finalists (including this one) had adverse reactions to that.

As a compromise solution, Slamdance was going to hold the games festival in Los Angeles, where there aren’t as many mormons (and where, I guess, the games festival would be enough far-removed that it wouldn’t tarnish the image of the film festival. Or something.)

This is kind of a bummer, because it’s one less venue for indie games to get exposure, and I know that Sam Roberts put a lot of work into it. At the same time, there are other, more-active festivals now, and Sam is a director of one of the most prominent ones, Indiecade. Indiecade are having showings at E3 and PAX this year, as well as a stand-alone show at OpenSatellite in Seattle. Braid was in the IndieCade showing at E3 2007, and it was a good situation.