Christian Allen's Corner

Video Games are "Satan's Sudoku"

Ah, another week, another journalist calling out the gathering fall of our civilization because of video games.  This time it's The Time's Janice Turner, in her column titled "Xbox is crack for kids."

I guess I should be offended...after all I am one of those "evil" people who create games, and "Even the crappiest cartoon or lamest soap teaches a child about character, plot, drama, humour, life. Playing videogames, children are mentally imprisoned, wired into their evil creators' brains"

Maybe I SHOULD be offended (I haven't been called evil since I worked as a Child Support Enforcement Officer) but I'm not.  I think I actually take a perverse pleasure in seeing idiots like this spout off complete bull**** because they don't have anything worthwhile to write.  I guess feel a camaraderie with the likes of Elvis and Judas Priest, who's music was worried about by older, less blog-savvy idiots without anything worthwhile to write.   

I guess the next time I'm sitting on my couch, playing Surf's Up with my daughter, I should stop myself, turn off the 360, and fire up an episode of Teletubbies, leaving her mesmerized by the non-language babble and epilepsy-inducing trash on the screen, so that my daughter doesn't get wired into those evil brains in Montreal.

Happy New Year!

Here's wishing you and your family a happy new year!

Summit Strike in 07? Game Informer thinks so...

I was happy to see that Game Informer listed GRAW2 in it's "Top 50 games of 2007," and then cracked up when I saw a GR2: Summit Strike screenshot instead of GRAW2.  And to top it off, it's one of the snowy shots from SS.  C'mon, guys, the one thing that WASN'T in GRAW2 was snow! :)

Blasphemy!

Lets see how many people this will piss off...

Harvey Smith...

Well, I meant to post this yesterday, and now I wish I had. 

I was gonna write a post on how I respected Harvey Smith for his comments on his latest game, it took a lot of balls to say what he did.  But now I read that he has parted ways with Midway, which sucks for those of us who would wish for a more open industry.  Harvey, I wish you luck, hope to see you again at GDC this year.  It's a lot easier to publicly talk about the things that go well, but it takes big brass ones to talk about the things that don't.

The BBC Actually responds to my letter...

Wow, I'm impressed.  I read a BBC article that had a factual misstatement in it, and so I sent them a letter.  Not only did they respond, but they updated the story!

My Letter:

The photo tagline in this article states "Handguns are used in most US assaults and robberies."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7104800.stm

According to the USDOJ website, "simple assaults," those without a weapon, make up around two-thirds of all assaults, as seen here:

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/aslt.htm

Also, According to the website, in 2005, 42.1% of all robberies, and 21% of all aggravated assaults were committed with firearms.  I don't see how this data backs up your statement that "Handguns are used in most US assaults and robberies."  Even if all the firearms used were handguns (which I am sure they are not), these numbers do not support the statement "most", especially when factoring the number of simple assaults compared to aggravated assaults (since by definition simple assaults do not involve a firearm).

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/guncrimetab.htm

Please correct your statements and print a retraction.

Thanks,

Christian Allen
USA

Their response:

Dear Mr Allen,

Thank you for your email. Your comments regarding the FBI statistics
are absolutely correct.  I have amended the FBI figures in the story. The
writer of the story is not on shift so I cannot check where he got the
figures from. I believe it may have been an erroneous conflation of a
line that read "handguns - the weapon of choice in two-thirds of
robberies and assaults." - which is, of course, entirely, an entirely
different statistic.

I have passed your comments on to the writer and sub responsible for
the story.

Kind regards
Americas desk
BBC News website

The amended tagline to the article reads:

"The debate over handguns is politically charged in the US"

Not that will will make much of a difference in the big scheme of things, but nice to see a news organization take the details seriously, you don't see that too much in gun control coverage.

The Jade Incident...

I hate that my first post after the "big change" has to be on this subject, but since the Ubi folks who probably share my opinion on this subject probably can't speak about it due to some legal issues, I think I should.

The situation, while deplorable, is not so surprising.  And what really annoys me is that no one has spoken out against the "mainstream" games media in their coverage of AC and Jade in particular.  A top game site has called her "Everyone's favorite pin-up producer..."  Now, I have worked for and with plenty of very capable women in the industry, including my wife.  If I read a website that said that about her, they would probably get a taste of Corps training up close.

I have not worked directly with Ms. Raymond, although I had a few meetings with her in Montreal when I worked for Ubi.  She seems like a talented producer that was passionate about her project, but the way in which she has been covered in the games media is just terrible.  How can we ever be taken seriously as an industry when articles announcing a game launch focus first on the physical looks of it's producer?  I've done some press, so I've had some photoshop fun done with my image, but never offensively.  It's too be expected, but I think that the attitudes of the games media to pander to the juvenile segment of our user base (making me think of the PCXL "Game Gods" debacle) continue to encourage this kind of behavior, and make the industry as a whole look pretty stupid when we try and stand up and explain to senators why they shouldn't ban our work.  Nice day for our maturity when you look at the Page 3 issue that also came up today.

I hope that all of the various parties involved in games promotion and coverage take a hard long look at what kind of attitudes they foster by the way this turned out.

It's True...

OK, it's been confirmed today, so you can stop emailing me and asking me about it.

On the date of my fifth year of becoming a professional game dev (I started at RSE on Oct. 1, 2002), I now work for an indepenent developer, Bungie Studios.  My time as an Microsoft employee was short, but sweet (and I scored a pic with the G Man)!

Halo 3 Launch

I'm recovering from the Halo 3 launch party at Bungie last night.  It felt a bit poserish to be at a launch party for a game I didn't work on, but that didn't stop me from drinking the liquor or saddling up for a pic with Bill Gates. :)

RIP Barry...

Rest in Peace, buddy.  Sorry we never got to get together and shoot that Romak.