Compare this, Variety magazine’s analysis of Katie Couric’s rough year as new anchor of CBS Evening News:

Moreover, the attempt to add even modest touches to brighten up the stodgy old evening news was one of those dunderheaded schemes unlikely to attract new viewers who don’t give a damn, while potentially alienating stalwarts who had long supported Dan Rather and, after his awkward exit, the avuncular Bob Schieffer.

So now Couric finds herself tethered to what appears to be, if not a sinking ship, one taking on water faster than anybody at CBS News knows how to bail. No wonder she’s undergone a minor image-reclamation project, suggesting in a magazine interview that with perfect hindsight she might have balked at the challenge — a cry-me-a-river lament if there ever was one, coming from a multimillionaire anchor as news divisions and newspapers hack their way toward profitability.

with this, my report on Sony Online executives acknowledging that the ill-fated changes to Star Wars Galaxies nigh on two years ago were a mistake:

[John Blakely:] “But you know, part of my reason for presenting this and talking about it is I want to educate – I want people to learn what we’ve learned in that process. We took a big risk, and we learned. There was some really positive stuff, and the game now is as solid as it’s ever been, our people have done a great job – we got the bug count down to about half of what it’s been in the past six months. But what I would have done differently was be more sensitive to the target audience. The audience you launch with is the one you’ve got.”

Great expectations abound. So much so, that those in charge forget the risks they run, or brush those risks aside as if they weren’t real.

And it can happen anywhere. Quite a number of the SOE people that were at that talk last year, aren’t at SOE anymore.

I’m half tempted to start a running feature here.

I happen to spend a lot of time on the IGDA.org forums, and while a plurality of the posts there are made by people who appear to be genuinely concerned about the craft of making games and the well-being of those who practice this craft, there are exceptions.

Oh boy, are there ever.

I could do at least one post a week featuring the flotsam of this site. I’m not sure how people would take it, however. Might be entertaining, but some people might think it’s sniping. Need to think more on this.

E3 does not seem fun. Better that I just watch from here, fellas.

I noticed that Professor Bartle took some time out today to worry openly about how his home country of Britain has apparently fallen behind Canada on some list of countries and their amount and quality of game development education.

So too, was his dismay at how his home country has apparently produced a 15-year-old (apparently) girl (definitely) who can program well enough to build a browser-ready command-line interface for Second Life, called AjaxLife. Given how Britain’s academic approach to game development is a bit schizophrenic at the moment, Bartle wonders if she’ll have anything waiting for her in her home country when she graduates public school, but what she did on her own was “better than that of all but one of the games” his own graduating students produced.

I was so sure I was going to be able to write an essay worthy of the topic, but all I’ve got are crumbs here. It’s been almost a year since I wrote Out of School, my reaction to the last ACC game program open house, and my biases remain intact. Maybe that’s my problem.
Continue reading Inspiration, or lack thereof…

Hope someone out there got to blow something up. I had to work a split shift, so I got a mid-day nap and not much else.

Turns out the Captains of the Chess Team have a blog, now. And the IGDA-Austin site has their own report about the party at Richard Garriott’s house and moving pictures. If you recognize anyone in the “chanbara montage,” don’t tell them about it.

Finally got off links from just about every MMO bloginati’s Web site. Wasn’t hard, just had to stop updating with stuff people actually cared about. Only took three years. I doubt if anyone made a map now, I’d be anywhere on it.

Oh well. Occasional links are OK. Heck, I never bothered rebuilding my own links to sites I think are cool, so about half of them I used to read, I don’t anymore. Hardly anyone knows what I’m working on or what I’m doing half the time, unless they’re on my IM list, in which case are sick to death of hearing.

Have to say that suits me just fine. You watch, though, in a year I could be stuck in the middle, all over again.