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Here's the newest game from the Channel 4 Education slate, this one steered to completion by the other Comm Ed, the brilliant @matlock, and from the award-winnning team who made our 1066 game.
Presenting the very gorgeous Trafalgar: Origins:
You start by getting to grips with boat-steering and curve-taking: steering ships is like strategy games rather than twitch - it's all about the planning. (Tip: once you get going with the wind in your sails, you don't need to keep holding down the forward key.)
Multiplayer, too. Come take my ship if you can, ARRRRRR.
An arcade section [enables] players to learn the ropes by engaging in real nautical exercises, defeating foes, sinking ships and collecting loot while building points and scores. Historic missions recreate actual skirmishes experienced by Nelson and the allied navy where you pit your skills against enemy ships.
We were careful to ensure that the game was fun and engaging to play as well as being historically accurate. We worked closely with the Curator Emeritus at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich to make sure that we captured the detail, mood and feeling of the day in a way that was completely faithful to the facts of the battles.
My bolds. I love this.
World of Love is a one-day indie fest, hosted in Channel 4's basement, courtesy of C4 Education's party budget :-)
I don't know who that cute kid is, but I suspect it's either Toby Barnes or David Hayward of Pixel-Lab, who are organising the event. The day costs £65, and features some of your favourite Brit (and beyond) indie superstars, including:
Curiously, Will Wright's next project seems to be about crowdsourcing TV. It borrows from all sorts of ideas that are (and have been) simmering in the general pot of transmedia soup, but no Big Name has tackled it yet, to my (EU-centric) knowledge?
Set up at Current, The Creation Project teams Wright with producer Albie Hecht, former president of Spike TV and Nickelodeon. In essence, The Creation Project is a TV series about the creation of a TV series.
What we've seen suggests users will submit story ideas online and via mobile devices. This will lead to the users than discussing the submissions and voting for their favorite. Finally, the winning storyline is actually produced and will air as two half hour episodes.
What, no play? No game?
There appears to be a major online/mobile device component to this series, including a "StoryMaker Engine" Wright has designed that will allow users to quickly make their own storyboards to accompany their ideas using pre-existing images or those uploaded by the users themselves.
(A story engine? And is Chris Crawford involved, I wonder?)
IGN points out that it's super early stages for this project, so it could, and probably will, change.
Gamasutra have just posted their "The Game Developer 50": a list of the most exciting games people to Gama right now: "the most important contributors to the current state of the
game industry -- from indies to AAA, from business to art, design, and
beyond. Naturally as it's an American publication, there seems to be a bit of a skew to American people. But all of them seem to be men.
Not one woman. Not even one?
So obviously I have to post something about this. Lists are a wonderful and terrible thing:
magazines do them for precisely this kind of response: ATTENTION.
Discussion. Shouting, complaining, agreeing, etc. It's magazine crack. But I have
to stick my oar in, because having 0% women on that list is straight up appalling (and I adore Gamasutra).
Off the top of my head, without doing any research, here's a handful of women working in games who I think Gama could happily have included in that 50. And I could actually add a whole bunch more ladies doing amazing things with games (Jen, Diane, Cat, Sophie, Robin, Heather, Sarah, Claire, Rita, Susan, Merci, Regina and Tracy, for instance and for starters).
Meggan Scavio. Runs GDC. Runs GDC. Gama are probably being modest or something because Meggan's an employee of its parent company.
Kim Swift. Designed Portal. Portal, no less. Gone to do a startup: if that's not fuck-yeah exciting, I don't know what is.
Paulina Bozek. Wonderful, incredibly talented, invented Singstar. Doing some secret, very interesting things right now, but I'll let her tell you what they are.
Margaret Robertson. Living legend. Annual packed event at GDC, an incredible games designer and oracle, and, well, I've said it all before.
Babsi Lippe (Chief Designer) & Claudia Kogler (CTO). The creative & technical team who produced Papermint, with a titchy team and a titchy budget.
Rhianna Pratchett. Wrote Mirror's Edge, and Heavenly Sword, and Overlord.
Like I said, I could go on, and on.
If it were up to me, in creating any list, I would take a number - say 50, and a field - say games, and then pick out the top 25 men and the top 25 women, highlighting whatever it is they're doing. Because that's called fairness.
The reason women aren't currently making up 50% of every field is not an intellectual issue, but a cultural issue, and the longer we continue to publish lists containing all-men or nearly-all-men, the longer we propagate the broken image and insulting idea that women aren't as good, or as important, as men.
Many women just haven't had the chance yet: they haven't had the encouragement, the education, the freedom, the support, the role models, the contacts, the friends in high places, the opportunities and the finances that their male counterparts often get by default, by tradition and by homophily.
It's not right and it needs to change. Monocultures are evolutionarily a dead end: game people, take note.
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