Lots of pitching new articles and requesting interviews last week. Also, talking to people about the future of Bashers.nl, which is always a concern for me. If that sounds alarming, you got me wrong: Bashers.nl is never not in need of a new direction for long. So everything is pretty much normal. Now, move along!

On Tuesday I spoke with Atlas Contact, which might become my new publisher. We talked about games and literature. (What else?)

On Wednesday, nrc.next published my Next Level column about Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore who died in April.

That afternoon I met with SonicPicnic and Monobanda, to discuss our audio art game, which feels a lot more concrete than last time I checked in. It’s interesting how much momentum a simple and rather unsatisfactory prototype can cause, if only because it makes it easier to talk about a project.

On Wednesday night I had pizza and beer, and played The Witcher 2 with a friend, in preparation of the Gameclub about this very game.

On Friday morning, I interviewed Fabian Akker and Olivier Thijssen at Ronimo Games, the Utrecht-based studio that just launched its Awesomenauts. I want to write about the subgenre this is a streamlined entry in, which I don’t think the world at large has settled on a name for, though Wikipedia insists on action real-time strategy. I came away with quite a few new insights, so yay!

That evening, I curated a mini expo at the Setup Expo Extravaganza about futuro-retroistic indiegames, terminology I fabricated entirely, on which Wikipedia doesn’t have an opinion (yet).

The concept is a lighthearted semi-reversal of retro-futurism, with me arguing that instead of looking back at what we used to think of the future, some indie game makers are now creating games in the image of what they think the past was like. Instead, they create games that have superficial similarities with classic video games, but for various reasons couldn’t and wouldn’t have been made this way in the eighties and nineties.

On Saturday, I woke up with a sore throat, but attended my soon-to-be brother-in-law’s bachelor party anyway. I gathered all my strength and joined a cooking workshop (taking responsibility for the rack of lamb, which has such a nice heavy metal ring to it), had probably too much alcohol for someone on the verge of illness, then had a night of hallucinatory fever dreams in a fancy hotel, and played golf on Sunday. Even so, I felt almost OK by evening. And pretty bad again on Monday morning. But I shouldn’t complain, because my soon-to-be brother-in-law cut his finger instead of the anchovy and fainted.

Somehow, I also managed to finish the 3DS version of VVVVVV during the weekend, though without getting all 20 sometimes ridiculously difficult trinkets. Great game and a good example of futuro-retroism.

Last week I wrote a new Next Level column for nrc.next, about Jack Tramiel, the forceful founder of legendary computer company Commodore, who died last April. Years ago I read the book On The Edge: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore by Brian Bagnall – which was recently re-released as Commodore: A Company on the Edge – and I felt I had to share some of its excellent stories. (It’s a good book, though perhaps a bit heavy on the technical details.)

The column wasn’t published yet, unfortunately. Things are a bit slow at the paper, it seems, although the masterplan for more frequent and consistent games coverage seems to be moving forward.

They did publish my Fez review after two weeks, so I shouldn’t complain. (Do note, though, that Super ‘Pepper’ Mario is not my typo.)

Otherwise, it was a short week full of distractions and without much actual work.

On Monday, I celebrated Queen’s Day with my (extended) family.

On Tuesday I drove to Leiden to get a huge stack of terrace tiles for in our garden. It seems that this summer, after five years, our garden will actually be finished. We worked on it almost every summer, though, going from a piece of bramble-filled jungle that turned out to hide a small pond to something somewhat representative of our middle-class decency. Without a pond. What all this means is that we might, at long last, throw a housewarming party later in the year.

On Wednesday, I drove to Kampen to visit Harry Hol and discuss writing, freelancing, Bashers.nl, and more.

On Thursday, I hosted did another Bashers Gameclub, on a welcome subject: Thatgamecompany’s latest ethereal game Journey. At over a 100 minutes it may have gone on for too long, but the discussion was pretty good and almost everyone in the audience chimed in.

It’s interesting how this game seems to reflect its players, both yourself and the your anonymous online travel companion. For example, my experience of the game was something resemnbling a race, because the first player I encountered seemed (to me) to be in a hurry. I always felt he was right behind me and I had to get out ahead. So was that player actually rushing through the game, or am I just paranoid? A bit of both, probably. Download and listen to the podcast for more stories.

If you read my weeknotes, you know that my day-to-day work in recent months consisted mainly of writing articles, developing Bashers.nl and working on a couple of game development projects off and on.

Along the way, I try to get new stuff off the ground, hopefully transforming the future in the process. Last week was marked by three of these initiatives finding some momentum. (Which doesn’t mean they’ll happen overnight, they just inched a wee bit closer.)

On Monday I visited the offices of nrc.next, together with David Nieborg. The meeting was definitely one of a kind, in ways I shouldn’t describe here, but in the end we got closer to our goal of a weekly games spread.

On Tuesday I worked on a proposal for a TV show. This one is really close to my heart: it’s a series that shows the many (sometimes surprising) sides of games in a compelling way. If this happens, and that’s a big ‘if’, remind me to be really, really happy about it before I start worrying how to make this as great as it could and should be.

And later in the week, I received notice that another major Dutch book publisher wants to discuss my new novel (De verdwijners, or ‘The Disappearers’, for those keeping track), as well as a non-fiction book about games. Like the TV programme, if this happens, it will be awesome and worrisome at the same time.

Otherwise, last week I wrote an article about game development tool Unity for Items, the magazine about design. Like an earlier story for Control, this was based on the interview I had with CEO David Helgason at the Game Developers Conference in March (and also on my experience working with Unity at the Global Game Jam in January).

Speaking of Control and the Global Game Jam, the short piece on my Berlin experience (which was in Control Magazine a while ago) can now be read online.

Meanwhile, nrc.next published an article on Kinect by Rogier Kahlmann, for which he had his five-year-old niece test some games. I mention this because I edited it, like most other gaming articles in the paper. Unfortunately, my Fez review is still missing in action.

On Wednesday night I made a Hete brij (‘Hot Stew’) podcast with Karel Millenaar, interviewing Marthe Jonkers and Ward Lindhout, which was published on Thursday. Marthe and Ward are both game concept artists on the verge of leaving for Japan and working at major game studios. We asked them about their experiences, and of course about the difference between Japanese and Dutch game design.

On Saturday afternoon, I sorted out my administration and declared my quarterly sales taxes.

Then, on Saturday evening, I finished an article about the wonderful digital-meets-folk game Johann Sebastian Joust for the Dutch Official PlayStation Magazine, which was based on an e-mail interview I did with developer Douglas Wilson.

Finally, later that night, I played and finished Journey. It took me a while to get started, mainly because I didn’t have to do a review. Or actually, I couldn’t, as my policy is to not review a game if I spoke with its developers at length, which I did for my Journey / Jenova Chen article. I have to say I am a little disappointed, but I won’t go into the ‘why’: we’ll have an entire Gameclub for that.

Last week I produced/directed/hosted another Bashers Gameclub, this time about snowboarding game SSX. The first edition of this bi-weekly live podcast with one game per episode took too much time, and the second went a lot better. I’m also much happier with my role as host. I had more to do, standing next to the table with a wireless microphone and interviewing people in the audience, and was more at ease. I predict that the next one, about Journey, will be the best yet.

I also finished Fez, with about 40 cubes, and wrote a long review for nrc.next, which they unfortunately haven’t published yet. I really like the game, its tough puzzly nature and the way its eccentricity seemingly mirrors creator Phil Fish’s personality.

And I love how the gaming community collaborated to beat its puzzles: this happens on forums like Gamefaqs.com with every major game, but it usually doesn’t take as long.

In other newspaper news, I edited a piece on Kinect by Rogier Kahlmann, which also hasn’t appeared yet.

They did, however, publish the previous week’s Next Level column about animation in games.

I finished Jacked by David Kushner, and wrote an nrc.next review together with David Nieborg, which was published today. Our conclusion: it’s an exciting, entertaining book, but it’s also on the light side. We’ve seen deeper cultural analysis of the Grand Theft Auto games and their impact elsewhere, but Kushner was obviously not going for that, opting to write a fun pageturner about a controversial franchise instead. It’s the first time David and I co-wrote a piece doing multiple passes over Google Docs, which worked pretty well.

For the Dutch Official PlayStation Magazine (OPM), I wrote a new column, about Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. (My monthly column is retro-themed, I’m basically going through all the games for the original PlayStation that made a big impression on me, and through all the memories connected to these games. When I’m done, I’ll do the same for the PlayStation 2.)

I got the latest issue of OPM in the mail, which contains an extended edition of the interview I did with Journey‘s Jenova Chen at the Game Developers Conference. And another column of course, this one about music games, especially Parappa the Rapper and Guitar Freaks.

On Tuesday I visited Two Tribes to talk through recent development progress on the upcoming puzzle game Toki Tori 2, for which I’m creating the story. As the creation of the game world is edging closer, we’re reworking our setup to make it fit better with the essence of Toki Tori (which of course means figuring out what that essence is). Secondly, everything should be logical for the player and feasible production-wise.

On Friday I was moderator at the Festival of Games conference.

Last week on Tuesday I visited Control Gamelab, where my friend Karel Millenaar jumped around in a motion capture suit. Also, people like Olivier Thijssen, Matthew Groen and Paul Veer talked about animation in games, which I wrote a Next Level column about for nrc.next, that will be published this week.

On Wednesday I paid a long-overdue visit to Richard Boeser in Rotterdam. Richard is the creator of Ibb and Obb, an upcoming co-operative platforming game for PSN and PC, and he is one of those game designers who pleasantly surprise me with the articulated way in which they talk about their work.

I got goosebumps when Richard described the ‘new game design movement’ he saw around him a day after the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this March, playing a freestyle card game with other game makers, improving rules as the game went on, and playing Johann Sebastian Joust on a cliff near the Pacific Ocean.

Otherwise, I did a lot of brainstorming, pitching, researching, interviewing and playing to get some new articles of the ground, which means I’ll be writing a lot the coming week.

One of the highlights was looking into Botanicula, the fresh-looking adventure game that comes out in a few days. It got me reading about the history of Czech/Chechoslovakian animation and listening to a great band called DVA. They won the IGF Excellence in Audio Award and remind me of recent Sigur Rós stuff Múm and Cornelius.

Another highlight was playing Fez, finally, which is proving to be anything but a predictably hip looking and sounding indie platformer. Well, maybe it’s that, too, but I have a lot more to say about it, which I will later on.

I spent some time tweaking Bashers.nl, adding a Gameclub block in the sidebar and updating the Gameclub page. Speaking of which: on Thursday at 8 PM we’re doing a Gameclub on snowboarding game SSX. You should join us at the Dutch Game Garden, or tune in to the stream.

On Friday I wrote an article about Unity for Control Magazine, based on my interview with CEO David Helgason at GDC.

Finally, I got invited for a series of lectures about Dutch design history in May, where I will speak about the development of the games scene and game design style in The Netherlands, a topic I hope I’ll write a book about someday. Check it out if you’re into that kind of thing.

Last week I produced, directed and hosted the first edition of the Bashers Gameclub. A bi-weekly live show, live stream and downloadable podcast that focuses on a single game per episode. The first one was about about Zelda: Skyward Sword.

For a debut it went pretty well, though obviously there’s lots of room for improvement. The next one will be about SSX (on April 19th), the one after that about Journey (on May 3rd). I’m pretty excited about these, especially because they should be a lot more focused. I mean, you could talk about Zelda for a week and still not repeat topics. Now try to do that with a snowboarding game.

(We’re aiming for 50 minutes of excellent conversation about mechanics, difficulty and simulation. You should come! It will be great!)

I did – kind of – underestimate how much time and organizing it would take to make this happen. For a writer who often operates alone, it was a big shift to work with Dutch Game Garden (for the venue and recording equipment) and Claynote (for the intro tune and sound engineering). To make sure people would actually come. To brief the guests (game scientist Joris Dormans and game journalist Gerthein Boersma) and co-hosts (Menno Schellekens and Rogier Kahlmann).

Actually, going from the decision that we should rethink the Bashers Podcast to actually rebooting the thing took almost one and a half years. I pitched the idea for a live podcast at the Dutch Game Garden a year ago. Practical preparations started in late February. And last week I spent two full days on the Gameclub.

It’s an understatement that this is too much time for what’s essentially a hobby project. (Though that undersells it somewhat: the Gameclub also happens to be a fun intellectual exercise that lets me practice stuff I want to be better at, and which might grow into serious business someday. Or perhaps that’s an apt description of the word ‘hobby’.) Either way, besides improving the content, my focus is on becoming more efficient, doing it better in less time, with less stress.

So what else did I find time for last week? I wrote a review of Kid Icarus: Uprising for Nintendo 3DS, focusing on Masahiro Sakurai’s algorithmic design style, which was published in nrc.next on Tuesday, along with a Next Level column by David Nieborg.

I made an effort to come up with a bunch of article proposals for nrc.next and other clients, which you should see the result of in the coming month or so. In general, I spent some time worrying about finances and continuity. My wife says this is a quarterly thing.

With Bram Ruiter I made a podcast on The Hunger Games. Because that didn’t scratch my itch entirely, I wrote a quick essay about the film.

I also met with Bram to discuss our plan for a video documentary about Vlambeer. We sketched out our ideas for a promo that will explain why this documentary is such an excellent idea and why it’s important that someone payrolls it.

And on Sunday I celebrated Easter with my family.

I was entertained by The Hunger Games, but moreso, I was surprised. Surprised by some of the creators’ choices. Surprised by the total lack of moral dilemma. I should again note that I don’t know how the books handle this, though a film stands on its own and should be analyzed as such. Also, I haven’t seen Battle Royale, which I understand does tackle the issues I thought this movie would be about.

To cut to the chase: Gary Ross and his creative team have managed to make a shocking, disturbing (and interesting) subject — children being forced to fight and kill each other — almost entirely ‘Hollywood clean’. It deftly avoids moral ambiguity and repulsive images. I guess this is quite an achievement by itself, but personally, I don’t understand why you’d want to make a film about a shocking, disturbing topic that raises interesting moral questions, if you’re not going to actually make a shocking, disturbing film that investigates these questions.

The natural question raised by this story is: what do harsh conditions do to a person? Can they make you do things you wouldn’t normally do? Evil things? Can you hold on to human dignity when you’re about to die? Will you still be human, or perhaps something different, more animal-like? In other words: what would you do if you were thrown into the Hunger Games?

But while one of its characters explains that most contestants in the Games die from starvation, the film doesn’t even show any of these harsh conditions, let alone the moral issues that might arise. The biggest dangers main character Katniss has to face are external factors, summoned by the game masters who run the Games. In the meantime, there’s plenty of safe spots, too: as long as you’re in a cave, or covered in leaves, you won’t be bothered for days.

The ‘bad’ kids are so underdeveloped, character-wise, it’s scary. They didn’t decide to do whatever necessary to stay alive and win, they were just trained – programmed to be evil – by adults. Or they follow those who were trained by adults, simply to avoid getting killed themselves. This is telling the viewer: don’t worry, we don’t think children can be this bad, really. They’re all good at their cores! They’re just misguided!

Worst offender is Katniss herself, who despite being in a deadly arena, being hunted right from the start, never strays an inch from her moral high ground. She never kills anyone except by self-defense, making her a pretty lame hero, winning only by good fortune. (Or divine intervention?) There’s one segment in which she takes the initiative, blowing up the bad kids’ food supplies, and it’s easily the film’s most effective sequence. But, lo and behold, the plan gets Katniss’s friend Rue murdered. After which she quickly returns to Passive Mode.

You’d think that the hardships of the Games would challenge Katniss’s convictions. At least make her think twice about her world view, then come out stronger afterwards. Instead, she doesn’t change at all in the course of the film. She starts out 100% good and never strays.

Well, actually, she does develop somewhat, but only in the way you might see a teenage girl transform over the course of a dance movie: Katniss wasn’t sure that people would like her, but in the end she’s gained some self-respect.

Which brings me to my next point. Apparently, millions of people watch the Hunger Games, somehow voting for or ‘liking’ the contestants, in an interesting parallel to today’s kudo economy on social networks. But all this goes largely unseen as soon as the competition starts. We don’t see the audience at home enjoying kids murdering one another. We never see the viewers who are supposedly fine with the group of bad kids literally camping to kill Katniss.

It’s implied that Katniss has to behave in certain ways to become more popular, but we never see the pay-off. So how does the audience react to her romance with bland and inscrutable Peeta? We’re left in the dark. Her sponsorships (which cause bonus items to be dropped in the arena), a supposedly tangible result of her popularity, seem to come mostly from Katniss’s mentor Haymitch’s haggling.

There’s the dance movie again. This is all teen logic, transplanted to a science fiction setting. Katniss has to be popular because all girls her age have to be popular, like those who rushed to theaters by the millions, to buy The Hunger Games tickets. Nothing more, nothing less.

In fact, the film signals from the very start that no sensible people actually enjoy watching the Games or accept their existence, even though they live in a future where these Games have been held for more than seventy years. Descriptions of the movie say that people are ‘forced’ to watch, but this is at odds with Katniss’s boyfriend Gale, asking at the outset: “What if everyone just stopped watching?” Two which Katniss replies: “They won’t.” At worst, this conversation is a lie. At best, it’s based on a lie.

So the moral simplicity of the film extends to its depiction of the people at large. It never challenges the viewer’s world view, instead going out of its way to reinforce that, yes, human beings are essentially noble creatures. I understand that the second book is about a rebel uprising. Unfortunately, it seems that Katniss doesn’t have to do anything at all to enable one. Because this is not a dystopian future, this is not a world in decline. This is simply corrupt leadership.

In the end, this is a teen movie about teen problems. It’s not social commentary. It’s no survival experiment. It could have been about a descent into moral grey, but ultimately says nothing about the human condition. Well, let me rephrase that. The Hunger Games may say something about the teenage girl condition. But that’s pushing it, really.

Also listen to the Salon Indien podcast in which I talk about The Hunger Games with Bram Ruiter (in Dutch).

Last week, nrc.next published a great game spread, including my column about The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3, game reviews by Rogier Kahlmann, Harry Hol and Samuel Hubner Casado (which I edited) and my article about Journey, based on my interview with Jenova Chen at the Game Developers Conference. I might publish that online at some point, but not before the full transcript has appeared in the Dutch Official PlayStation Magazine (OPM).

Speaking of which, last week I edited the full transcript of my interview with Jenova Chen, for OPM.

I also published an extended version of my nrc.next piece on Dear Esther over at Bashers.nl. After that, I met with SonicPicnic and Monobanda to discuss the audio art game we are thinking up, which could become similar to Dear Esther in certain ways. (Or not at all.)

Otherwise, I met with David Nieborg to talk about our collaboration on the games coverage of nrc.next, among other things, then spent a day working on the consultancy project we’re doing for the Ministerie van Veiligheid en Justitie.

I spent a day working on a proposal and first chapters of De verdwijners, a novel. Together with my literary agent, I am actively looking for a publisher now.

Last week I also discovered that one of my clients had not – ever – paid me. When I looked into this, the pretty stable sounding Schiphol Magazine did not, in fact, exist anymore. I placed some phone calls and sent off some e-mails, and quickly found myself forwarding messages between two higher-ups who both said that if anyone could pay me, it was surely the other guy. Hilarious, if you find probably never getting your € 1313 any kind of funny. So yeah, I have to keep better track of my invoices. I’ve been pretty lucky with my clients in recent years, so I guess I had my guard down.

I started reading Jacked: The Outlaw Story of Grand Theft Auto, a book about the popular games franchise, by David Kushner. Kushner’s previous book about videogames, Masters of Doom, was highly entertaining and insightful. So far, this seems to be at least as good.

On Friday, I attended two sessions at the Holland Animation Film Festival, including Matthijs Dierckx and Arjan Terpstra talking about Japanese animation and games, leading up to Ni No Kuni, the first game with art and animation by Studio Ghibli. Arjan was responsible for the excellent weekly games page in De Pers, the free quality newspaper that stopped that Friday. Must have been an odd day for him.

On Saturday, I saw The Hunger Games, which was nice to form an opinion about. (It’s a teenage dancing movie disguised as dystopian drama. Might write a review later on.)

On Sunday, I helped a friend move.

Last week was kind of slow, with lots of small things that are too boring, vague or uncertain to detail here. (I suppose… I really don’t remember most of it. Otherwise I wouldn’t know where my time went.)

I did write a new piece for the Dutch Official PlayStation Magazine, my fifth monthly column there already. I uploaded the third column to this site, as I felt came out pretty well.

Another column was published, on Gamer.nl, about the Experimental Gameplay Sessions I experienced during the Game Developers Conference (GDC) a while back. This is a pretty straightforward piece, describing some of the strange games that were presented, but judging by the comments below the article, this was enough to send some people into utter shock.

For nrc.next, I wrote an article about Journey, based on my interview with game designer Jenova Chen at GDC (see also the video interview), and a Next Level column about games journalist Geoff Keighley and his iPad production The Final Hours of Mass Effect 3. These, plus a backlog of three games reviews, could be published in tomorrow’s paper tomorrow. Not a 100% sure yet.

I also booked a trip to London, to attend a friend’s wedding at the end of June. And, sticking to the theme, I built a website for my sister’s wedding at the end of May.

Finally, I celebrated my oldest daughter’s third birthday, with at least three types of fruit juice.

Last week I got back from San Francisco. As I wrote the previous week, I didn’t eat for 16 hours before my flight, which supposedly diminishes jetlag. So did it work? Kind of, I guess. I felt pretty good all week and my sleep cycle did not selfdestruct.

I do consider myself a bit of an unreliable narrator here. I’m suspicious of placebo effects and am not even sure how sensitive I am to jetlag in the first place. It’s hard to Know Thyself in bodily matters when you’re mostly stuck in your head.

When flying from the US to Europe, anything resembling jetlag usually kicks in quite late for me. The first few days I may sleep a bit more than usual, but that’s it. Then later on, I suddenly can’t sleep and start waking up later and later. Off goes that sleep cycle. I always felt the way back from America (fast-forwarding time) was way worse than the way towards (rewinding time). But then, I’ve been bad at keeping a healthy rhythm as long as I can remember. That is to say, before I had kids.

This time, on Thursday night while editing a video, it was suddenly 4 AM, and I wasn’t tired at all. Jetlag flashback! The next morning I did get up early though – with kids you don’t really have a choice – and I had no more trouble the rest of the week.

So to be honest, I have no clue whether this worked. The experience of fasting was worth it by itself, however. Normally I always give in to feelings of hungriness. I thought that if I’d skip a meal, I’d feel terrible. But it turns out that bodies just quit whining after a while. I skipped breakfast and lunch on Sunday, and felt hungry for maybe thirty minutes in total. So I’m definitely repeating this experiment next time I fly, and might even apply learned lessons elsewhere in life.

So, what else happened last week? I cleaned up the mess of being away for a week, and not much else.

For one, I wrote a short article for Items about the Dutch nominees of the Independent Games Festival Awards.

On Friday I wrote a column for Gamer.nl, which I think will be published tomorrow.

On Thursday I announced the Bashers Gameclub over at Bashers.nl, our revamped bi-weekly podcast in which we’ll discuss a single game, together with a small audience. I spoiled the surprise here a couple of weeks ago, though the debut date was moved back by one week due to conflicting schedules.

As said, I also edited a video: the interview I did with Jenova Chen of Thatgamecompany at GDC. I recorded it with my iPhone 4 and tripod plus Glif, and recorded audio seperately with the Zoom H1. Sound is still the weak spot, so I’ll add subtitles later on. I have to transcribe the interview anyway, for publication in nrc.next, if they want it.

I’m happy with the video quality: you can get pretty impressive results when the iPhone 4 is stable and lighting conditions are good, though I’m really miffed that I didn’t get the phone focused on Chen. So now the background is sharp and my subject is blurry. Amateur problems…

Finally, on Saturday I went for a ride in a friend’s Toyota Prius. It was like being inside a science fiction movie.