Yesterday I had a sort of throw-away thought bubble article over at Gamers With Jobs, and pulled together two things I generally enjoy thinking about: Massively Multiplayer Games and the design/production elements of the Disney corporation. To be fair: I know it’s weird that I spend time thinking about things like resort design, ride queues, and theming … but I do. /shrug

I love Disney. Not the company, which is increasingly reaching to foul and loathesome depths in its push to get marketoys into the hands of little girls. Not even the man, though obviously he was a person to respect. I love Disney the gestalt, the overall combination of customer service, ambition, creativity and innovation that lets places like the happiest place on earth exist. Their Walt Disney World resort in particular is fascinating, a microcosm of a country all within the space of a few former swampy marshes.

Particularly engaging is the idea that – in almost every way – Disney is the ultimate MMO developer. Though their forays into the genre have been tentative so far, the house of mouse is poised to be the designer of the happiest places on meta-earth as well.

I was noodling around the internets for something today and I remembered to look up Carrie Gouskos’ blog. She’s the (fantastic) Tome of Knowledge designer with the EA Mythic folks, hard at work on Warhammer Online. She used to be a Gamespotter before she jumped into the design field, and so she knows the interview gig from both sides of the chair. She paid me a tremendous compliment in a blog post at the end of last month, which I will share with you now:

I have to say this week I gave probably my favorite interview ever to Mike from Massively. Instead of asking me to rehash the features in the Tome (he had done his homework), he wanted me to talk about passion and emotion in game development. He wanted me to talk about Xbox 360 achievement points. I think his concept for that article serves the fans in a lot more ways than simply a bullet point of feature items we’re working on and whether or not *I* think they’re going to be cool. To me, it feels like that’s the kind of conversation you should be having at preview time, what are the developers working on and what are their objectives? Who are they trying to attract and how have they accomplished it? Even using in-game examples to show off how they’re achieving those goals. Leave the excessive use of adjectives and the KILLING MY SOUL for the reviews.

Every once in a while somebody says something that makes all of this worth it. Thanks, Carrie.

Been a bit of an unproductive week, for some reasons I’m not going to go into here but did go into on my personal site. Still, I did get two pieces out that you might appreciate.

The Z-Axis: ‘Extending Pure Moments With G&T’ -

So the World of Warcraft thing was interesting but ultimately didn’t offer the kind of traction that Simon was looking for – completely understandable. Instead, I’m going to jump into a weekly/bi-weekly offering about the passtime of gaming in general. This first offering talks about the extension of ‘pure moments’ that games tend towards nowadays. I use the recent Penny Arcade game as an example, because … well, because it’s so good.

This is How I Roll (my d20) -

It’s always fun to talk about pen and paper gaming in a public place. The GWJ guys were nice enough to offer me a place to nestle some words, and so I did. Rabbit seemed to particularly enjoy this: “Running a game isn’t a task I take lightly. Coordinating these strange blends of murder simulator, poker night, and drama club can get hectic.”

Via Sanya, I laid eyes upon Beckett’s list of the “Top 20 Influential People in Massively Multiplayer Video Games” for last year. If you’ve read the site before you’re probably already aware of what I think about Massive Online Gamer. Though it has definitely improved since it launched, it’s still not all that great (IMHO). The last issue I thumbed through had some weak-sauce interviews with folks I know are more interesting than they were made out to be. The core of the mag is still semi-obsolete World of Warcraft strats, with a idiotic advertisement for Skittles at the end.

I’m also, to echo Sanya’s point, not a big fan of ‘Top X’ lists. This one in particular, though, rubs me for a few general points. It also rubs me wrong for a few specific points, which I will gladly illuminate while simultaneously making a handful of people mad at me.

As a note, I almost didn’t put this up. This is a really cynical, jaded post. I’ll totally cop to that. But I do feel that this list is kind of a load. So … sharing time begins now.

Read below for the fireworks.

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Via the fine folks at RPS, a wiki with more Lich King info than you can shake a stick at. I do love the British sense of conflicted humor:

There’s a hell of a lot of minute detail on supposed new skills and talents in there, which will doubtless prove the most thrilling element of this enormo-leak for dedicated WoWians, but those of us who care about more than the numbers can enjoy all the screenshots of new monsters and armours and the like. How Arthas, fallen prince of Azeroth and current Lich King (and WOTLK’s Biggest Bad) appears is in there, as are cutey-wutey clockwork gnomes, a possible demon form for Warlocks and Tauren canoes. We even get to see what Gnome Death Knight looks like. My main character was a Gnome. I could be a Gnome Death Knight NO STOP IT NO NO NO.

Friday I put up my third GWJ article, this one exploring the dark mirror that is Grand Theft Auto IV.

I like Niko Bellic, and I’m not sure what that says about me. Grand Theft Auto IV’s protagonist is kind of a dick, no two ways about it. While he stumbles into a situation far removed from what he was expecting, the demands placed on him soon balloon far beyond a rationale person’s tolerance. Not five hours into the game’s main storyline you’re killing people in cold blood for not much more than a verbal insult.

Still, despite it all, I like Niko. I enjoy his tale in a way that I haven’t enjoyed the story in any other GTA title, and that makes me profoundly uncomfortable. GTA is fundamentally about 3 things, and they’re all uncomfortable: violence, race, and sex. That these things speak to me is troubling and intriguing, tapping into the basest elements of humanity. It feels like there are three monkeys on my back. Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil … it’s so archetypal it’s almost silly.

Ready for a peek into my subconscious? Me neither.