Is this their strategy to motivate existing employees, or to attract top talent?  Regarding their recent round of layoffs:

“This was a small and somewhat routine event for this time of year when many of our titles are finished and being shipped,” said a statement by EA.

To be fair, many studios lay lots of people off, or plain close up shop, when they can’t pay the bills after their title ships.    Furthermore, a gigantic company like EA is simply going to lay off more people than a smaller company would.  But with statements like this, could a prospective applicant look at EA as anything but a resume builder out of school, or a stopgap between other jobs?  Maybe EA realizes that if you still want to work there, nothing they can say is going to change that.

Database app development does have its rewards– chief among them being the ability to understand this comic.

Check out these shots of the Three Rings offices.

If you were trying to shake the reputation of “critical darling, commercial letdown” (to be diplomatic), you might start by getting your game a major cover story on one of the largest circulation game magazines in the world. And then if you were really serious, you might decide to throw Jack Black the starring role.

I knew the new “Double Fine Zone” signs around my house were a portent. I’m really looking forward to playing this game.

I’m sure you already felt the great disturbance in the force. I don’t think I have anything to add that you didn’t already feel.

I just had one of those fantastic gaming experiences: compulsively playing “just one more level”, ignoring the clock, until it’s way, way too late for a weeknight.  Shamefully, I had this experience playing a puzzle game.  I don’t even like puzzle games.  Eets?  Sure, I respect it.  I seriously considered buying a copy, knowing full well I’d never fire it up.  I think Lemmings is the last puzzle game I really killed some hours on.  Since then, I don’t think I’ve spent more than 5 minutes in one (including remakes of Lemmings).

Well, not until Portal.   Portal is so perfectly paced, the learning curve so perfectly tuned to give your brain that high, that it’s almost impossible to stop playing.  On top of that, the writing– yes, in a puzzle game– elevates the Portal experience far more than should be possible.  That’s what’s struck me most about Portal, and another recent Valve release, Team Fortress 2.  Writing– so long neglected, so disdained as a necessary or even helpful element in games– lifts both games from respectable genre entries to memorable new experiences.

It’s not that good game writing is a new occurrence.  There are genres in which it’s made appearances, or in which it’s been the defining factor in a game’s quality.  However, most studios make excuses for skimping on it.  “If we gave the main character personality,” they say, “you might not be able to identify. ” “Writing?  That obviously means extended cutscenes, and we’re not going to take control away from the player.”  By filling both a puzzle game and a team-based shooter with personality and humor, Valve has exposed these cop-outs for what they are.  The bar has been raised, and gamers might not be so quick to give future games a pass.

While reading a Jade Raymond interview on Assassin’s Creed, I saw clearly how games have progressed over the past seven years. (The writers from seven years ago, by the way, have moved on to some very awesome things.) As you may recall, seven years ago the quality of a game was scientifically determined by how long it took to see a crate. At that time, even the crates in Deus Ex met a disappointingly mundane demise.

As you’ll soon discover, while Start to Crate time may not have changed, the ways in which games feature crates make the crobars of yesteryear seem absolutely stone age:

What exactly is “crowd-based gameplay?

…. For example, if you bump into people who are walking around carrying a crate, that will make the crate drop. That means the crowd all around will go “Ahh!” and if there’s a guard around, the guard is going to say, “There’s the assassin!” and recognize you…. Other examples in a crowd might be be drunk guys stumbling around. They react like a traditional level design ingredient — think of mines that placed in levels. The drunk guys will push you over if you get close to them, and that’s something that will also cause you to stumble and draw attention to yourself, especially if they push you into, for example, someone carrying a crate.

This is clearly going to be a revolutionary Christmas season for gamers.

As I mentioned recently, I’m looking for a collaborative, online design tool. I’ve decided to try out TWiki, a wiki with so many plugins it looks like you can do anything. For example, I’d talked about wanting the ability to draw, and there’s a diagramming tool. It’s a long way from a notebook and a pen, but maybe it’ll have its advantages.

So far, the results aren’t terribly encouraging. It took several hours to get TWiki up and running with the appropriate plugins and security settings, and I had to have my host install a module (which they did promptly, and for free!). Now that it’s up, the idea of fighting the Wiki language or the WYSIWYG plugin’s quirks just makes me want to retreat back to the notebook. I fight that inclination long enough to mess with the wiki for a few minutes, and then I give up design work altogether.

Maybe the payoff is down the line, when I’ve figured out the wiki and I’ve opened it up to friends. Hopefully I can get to that point.