Spicy Thai
Given a corner table next to the kitchen with a view of the entire restaurant, I had to at least try to take it all in.
Interviewing Leni Riefenstahl
Twenty years ago, my friend George Hickenlooper asked me to come to Munich with him to interview Leni Riefenstahl, the brilliant/infamous director of Triumph of the Will.
Here’s the transcript of my notes from that interview in case anyone’s interested. I stumbled across it while cleaning out an old hard drive.
It was May 1991. She was 89 years old. She often spoke of herself in the third person. She had a strapping male secretary named Horst.
As we said goodbye, I realized I was shaking the hand of someone who’d once shaken hands with Adolf Hitler.
“And maybe did more than just shake hands,” George added.
Classic Game Postpartums
In a couple of weeks, I’ll be speaking at Game Developers Conference 2011 in San Francisco, about the making of Prince of Persia (the original, 1989 side-scroller) as part of their “Classic Game Postmortems” series.
I’m especially excited to hear from the other speakers — an awesome lineup including, among others, Eric Chahi, Will Wright, Ron Gilbert, Peter Molyneux, John Romero, and Toru “Pac-Man” Iwatani — about how their games, which sucked up so many hours of my youth, came to be.
(A non-game-industry friend asked me, in some confusion: “Why call it a post-mortem?” These are retrospectives of games that shipped, not ones that got killed. But even though we game designers and programmers are supposed to be a logical bunch, I don’t think the term “post-partum” is going to catch on any time soon.)
See you at GDC!
PoP original game screenplay
A few months ago, I posted my first-draft screenplay of last summer’s Prince of Persia movie. Now, here’s the script of the videogame that inspired it: 2003′s Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.
Or rather, partial script. For writers interested in the differences between writing for movies and games, it’s worth noting that there is no game design document equivalent to a film screenplay (i.e. an established format for the writer to communicate the story to producers, director, cast and crew).
Typically, the larger part of my writing work on Sands of Time was conveyed through non-screenplay documents (dialog recording and tracking spreadsheets and the like) to the team of designers, artists and engineers. I’ve described that process in more detail in this article for MIT Press.
The “readable screenplay” posted here reads like a film screenplay, but that’s because it contains only the cinematic cutscenes – not the in-game scripted events, dialog, and voice-over narration that are just as essential to the player’s experience of the story. Those exist in no easily readable form.
The best way to experience a videogame story is to play the game. But for a quick read, this script offers at least a glimpse into Sands of Time’s beginnings.
Silverlake style
Filled these pages at an art opening in Silverlake last summer. The place was packed so full of people I couldn’t see the pictures on the walls, which was just fine for my purposes.
Ammo for Luddites
Having just read three Ian Fleming novels, one Henry James and one Jonathan Franzen on my new Kindle over the holidays, I found myself vaguely troubled by the feeling that I hadn’t really read them… that their plots and characters might slip out of my memory as easily as they slipped into the Kindle’s.
I told myself this was old-style thinking, that just because I don’t have the actual physical, dog-eared, tea-stained books to shove onto a bookshelf as souvenirs doesn’t mean their contents have engraved themselves any less deeply into my brain.
Now along comes this post by my scarily intelligent friend Jonah Lehrer (and his previous post foreshadowing it), citing a new Princeton study hinting that, maybe, the inchoate unease we bibliophiles have been feeling is more than just sentimental:
This study demonstrated that student retention of material across a wide range of subjects and difficulty levels can be significantly improved in naturalistic settings by presenting reading material in a format that is slightly harder to read.
It reminds me of another study I read a while back, suggesting that elementary school kids who squirm and fidget in their seats actually retain and process information better than if they sat still like they’re supposed to.
I just wish I could remember where I read it.
