Demigod interview

It's hammer time... sorry

It's hammer time... sorry

Just finished off an interview with Chris Taylor of Gas Powered Games on the subject of Demigod. I don’t do a huge amount of games writing these days, but this was a favour for James over at Gamerzines. It went Gold on Monday and is looking like a lot of fun – although a bit spoiled for me that only one character is a giant man-fort with ballistas on his shoulders.

The interesting part of the interview was where Chris explained a bit about the development cycle. He said they’d had a team of just three people working on the core mechanics for a long time, so when they went into full development it took just a year to produce the whole game. An interesting alternative for those who were holding their heads in their hands at GDC about the cost of producing games these days, and a far better vision of the future than tosh like SAAS gaming OnLive.

Here’s the choice bit, the full article is out next week I think.

With a small development team over a longer period of time you have the ability to test gameplay mechanics and make sure they are delivering gameplay that is entertaining before spending a lot of money. More often than not what I’ve witnessed in this industry is the Lead Designer being forced to design the game in his imagination and it being halfway through production where that set of ideas manifests itself in the game in a meaningful way… at which point you’ve got to hope that whatever was written is actually entertaining because there’s little to no time to change it.

That ‘more often than not’ comment is very telling…

Network to nab work?

Most of the people I know who’ve had career trajectories similar to mine are very good at networking. Meeting new people and plumbing them for information is an essential skill for any writer/journalist. I don’t know – and I could be wrong – if any of them actually formalise the process though.

We’re generally a bit too cynical for that.

I spotted a write up in the local paper this week, though, for an outfit called BNI. It’s an American business networking organisation which works via local chapters to promote business referals between its members. So for example, I’m chatting to you in the pub and you mention you need a mechanic/accountant/lawyer/gardener/tree climbing expert (I jest not on the latter – the man with the coolest job in the local group here organises tree climbing expeditions for children’s parties and corporates), I mention that I happen to know one and should I ask him/her to give you a call.

This sort of thing is usually an anathema to me – the rigid structure to the meetings, the NLP-style public demonstrations of usefulness to the group push all the wrong buttons. However, as someone who’s lived in the West Country for most of my adult life and still answers the question ‘Do you know a good mechanic/accountant/lawyer/gardener/tree climbing expert?’ with a blank expression I’m drawn to the idea of actually getting to know the local community a bit better. I still have no idea how long we’ll stay where we are, but if Tabby leaves High School and I’m still not on first name terms with at least one plumber, I’ll feel like I’ve failed something or other.

Then there’s the fact that Steve from LearnAsOne went to a charity networking event last week and got tons of useful stuff from it. I’m beginning to mellow to the idea.

More to the point, it was amazing how many people I spoke to over a bleary eyed coffee that said ‘Ah – a copywriter. I must talk to you at some point’. As Tamsin has now gone freelance too, it could be a very useful tool for expanding our empire. And we’ll know someone who knows about mortgages if we ever decide to buy a house.

I also like the fact that most business networking sites look like this…

The cheesemaking business

The cheesemaking business network

While BNI look like this…

These people do not inspire fear

These people do not inspire fear

There’s a joining cost, natch, but it’s not much and would pay for itself in a couple of contracts. The question is do I want to get up at 6am every Friday morning…

Nuts in May

Thanks, in no small amount, to persistent – ahem – encouragement from my wife, I’m finally broadening my writing horizons again. Basically, I’ve been shoved off the metaphorical sofa and told to go do something which I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Something like this…

You can see zebra crossing too

You can see zebra crossing too

I’ve volunteered to go to Zambia in May with the founder of LearnAsOne, a charity which is fundraising with an eye too building schools in various villages around Africa which can’t afford to build and run them themselves.

So far so noble and honorable and so like all the other African school building charities around.

Without wanting to sound too cliche, LearnAsOne is quite different. And, for a geek, it’s also quite cool.

Like many African countries, Zambia is much poorer now than it was 20 years ago

Like many African countries, Zambia is much poorer now than it was 20 years ago

The founder, Steve, is trying to do something unusual with LearnAsOne, outside of the traditional aid model. There are tons of stories doing the rounds at the moment about how good money is being throw after bad in Africa, because traditional models of aid giving – intergovernmental and charitable – either have no effect or make things worse. Money either gets lost to administration costs, spent in inappropriate ways that have no lasting benefits to the people they’re supposed to help or – all too often – simply stolen by corrupt bureaucrats.

Things like this story from the New Scientist – about the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on building boreholes to provide fresh water which are then left to fall into disrepair – aren’t unusual. Anyone interested in the subject should really read Dead Aid by Dambisa Moyo.

Will blog more thoughts about this book another time

Will blog more thoughts about this book another time

There are two things everyone agrees on. First of all, charity work must be more transparent. Secondly, communities being sent money must decide for themselves – and take responsibility for – how the money is spent.

Steve’s idea is rather brilliant in its simplicity. He wants to use Twitter to save the world.

Now it may sound a bit bobbins, put like that, but the theory is very sound. Exploit every simple, cheap web technology in existence to help donors and recipients to stay in touch and develop some sort of relationship. Visitors to the LearnAsOne site get to follow missions out there live, and hear the story of the community they’re helping ‘live’. Supplemented with blogging from the teams on the ground, video feeds, IRC/Twitter chats and – eventually – live video conferencing, donors get a more detailed insight into the lives they’re helping than any other operation out there, and most importantly see where every penny is spent.

And according to Steve’s principles, it will be spent wisely. Sourcing local materials and human resources to help with economic generation is a start. Funding things you might not expect, like meals to encourage kids to stay in school all day. All the details are on the site, including a great anecdote about why two way transparency helps ensure cash is well spent when it arrives.

The theory has been tried out by other charities working in Africa already, but not – to the best of my knowledge – in quite such detail, with quite the same understanding of how the web works.

The first trip to Zambia for LearnAsOne will be a fact finding mission. The plan while out there is to locate a suitable community for the first project, talk to NGOs already established in Livingstone who can help manage both the practical side of money transfers, assisting with posting updates from the villages and so on. That’s happening in May, and – barring some disaster – I’ll be joining Steve and a group of volunteers on it. My job is to journal what we find out there for the LearnAsOne blog, crafting the stories of the people we meet into copy and uploading it as quickly as possible. It’s an incredible opportunity for me to get back into the kind of writing I really want to do and also to see the way a charity really works. It’s exciting, it’s quite scary and – hopefully – it’s going to make a bit of a difference.

Oh yeah, and I’m also trying to find someone who’ll lend us a satellite modem.

Saturday…

I remember weekends. Those were the things before freelance and children, right? Still, couple of sort of interesting projects to pick at today.
Number one is the first of a regular monthly column for the South African equivalent of PC World’s in store mag. It’s being published by a good friend of ours over there, Brett, who’s asked that it’s a comical look at everyday PC problems. He could, of course, have just cribbed from a netful (imperative: this word should be added to the dictionary next year) of such stories, and the fact that he’s asked me to do it means I’ll have to try to be original.

So this entry is really about a warm up for that. Pretty much what I suspect this blog will turn into, as well as a method for getting the first-person urges out of my system in a magazine world that remains solidly communal in its terms of address. Although I think I have more leeway than I suspect with Systems, must remember to ask Ross about that.

Other exciting things to play around with today: new iMac and 17inch MacBook Pro for Stuff.tv. Which reminds me – the Inq believe Orange is about to start doing discounted Apple products along with phone tariffs. Annoying as I really want a 13inch MacBook, but also want to leave Orange the second my current contract runs out.

It’s not that they haven’t been good over the years, but no coverage in my house, terrible tariffs for data and no decent handsets on the horizon are forcing me to quit after nearly 10 years with them.