The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

What have we learned today?

Did anything interesting happen at GDC this year? No, not really. Michelle Obama announced a new scheme to coerce developers into making games that will "encourage healthier eating and exercise habits among kids, and educate parents on their childrens’ diets," with hilariously small cash prizes ($40000? Do these fools have any idea how much it costs to make a game these days?). It’s pretty much a bust, except for this chilling quote from Aneesh Chopra, who apparently gets paid to talk about video games at cabinet meetings:

"We’re hoping this might strengthen the [game industry’s] ties with Washington … this might be the beginning of a longer collaboration."

Fuck you, Aneesh Chopra. And while I’m thinking about it, fuck you too, Deepak Chopra. It’s funny watching the government’s rudimentary thought-like processes slowly evolve, though; fifteen years ago, first lady Luciferia Clinton was trying to burn video games at the stake, since they were apparently turning all of our children into battle-hardened super-soldiers. Nowadays we’re going to try to use these powers for niceness instead of evil, and subvert some of the indoctrination box’s evil sorcery to convince our children to eat lots of celery while gunning down their classmates.

In other news, Sid Meier gave a completely wack speech about how surprised he was to discover that many people who play his games aren’t perfect reasoning machines. I guess the problem is the ESRB — they failed to give Civilization 4 the coveted "Mr. Spock Only" rating, and normal stupid people were allowed to play it too. The concept of Sid Meier having no idea that most people just react to things viscerally and don’t think so much really makes me wonder about his own thinkosity.

Also Gabe Newell got his Pioneer Award, and used his speech to talk a bit about the Portal ARG. He was going to show a little multimedia presentation about it, but then it bluescreened on him. Which, as anybody who’s been paying any attention to the ARG immediately knew, was another piece of the puzzle. Here’s the error screen, which has encoded in it the message that the ARG proper will resume at E3.

On the subject of Portal, though it has nothing to do with GDC, GameInformer has an interview up with Chet Faliszek and Erik Wolpaw, which should put the final nail in the weird theory that they’re the same person. It has pictures and everything. I guess there’s a third dude involved too, but he’s Canadian and didn’t write for OMM, so fuck him.


March 13th, 2010 Posted by | Games | no comments

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