I’m not very good at writing headlines that might attract readers, but that doesn’t really matter as there are far better things to read out there. A lot of people think that Kieron Gillen writes a lot of nonsense. Not true. He writes a tiny bit of nonsense. But he writes a great deal of stuff. One certainly outweighs the other. Mr Gillen wrote the comic that got stuck inside Chaos League. Considering that was the first game I ever did bits of marketing and PR work on that means I will like him forever though he’ll never know it.

(I go very quiet when he’s around as I don’t have anything as interesting to say.)

But I had to point out this short section of text from his review of The Path, published today on Eurogamer:

“The name “game” is always going to confuse people. You only really work out what something should be called after a name’s codified. Names for mediums are always kind of made up on the fly. “Novel” has a particularly tortured history as a word. Comics comes from the fact they were the funny pages in the paper – but soon became anything but. A century down the line, they realised they should call comics “sequential narrative”, which cuts to the core of what the medium is. It’ll never stick, because it’s so bloody ugly and there’s already a name everyone knows. C’est la vie. We’re stuck with novels, comics and games – and novels that aren’t novel, comics which aren’t comic and videogames which aren’t…”

He’s right. But then, perhaps Nintendo are finally starting to give us games which are games now… and we all know what sort of a fuss that’s kicked up don’t we.  The sad thing is, right at the end of Kieron’s review which so carefully explains why The Path isn’t a game, is a big fat 7/10 which stands there in tight Speedos, gleefully kicking sand in Gillen’s intellectual face.

“Say it! Say I’m a game… say it four eyes!”

A curse on website templates. The fact that a score had to be placed at the end turns the review into the self-indulgent mess it most certainly isn’t. That’s upsetting and confusing. I think that’s what Kieron must have meant when he stated:

“if you’re the sort of person who cares about the review score, it’s almost certainly not for you”

Neither the game, nor the review in this case. Somewhere behind that muscled 7/10 is the latest covergirl from Need for Speed. She’s beautiful, but she’s with 7. Most likely it’s the grains of sand clogging up your eyes but just maybe that’s a look of sorrow on her face. She wishes she understands you Kieron. She wants to be with you. But 7/10 just keeps on pulling her away. One day.

We usually all have to wince when videogames are brought up in the House of Commons due to the overriding opinion that most games are retellings of “Custer’s Revenge“. Today though, Gamepolitics has reported there’s a knight in shining armour defending the cause.

A vocal backer of the UK video game industry, Vaizey also took the opportunity to criticize the Labour Government for not providing what he views as a sufficient level of support to the British game biz:

[Moved:] That this House notes the importance of the video games sector to the UK economy; congratulates the winners and nominees at this year’s Bafta Video Games Awards; notes in particular the success of UK developed games, including Media Molecule’s LittleBigPlanet, Codemasters’  and Lionhead Studios’ Fable II, all of which won awards…

applauds this recognition of the continued success and significance of video games despite the complete lack of support from Government; regrets the fact that this lack of support from Government has seen the UK fall from being the third largest producer of video games in the world to the fifth largest; and urges the Government to devise a clear and supportive strategy for the UK video games sector as part of the Digital Britain review.

A lovely development certainly. Mr Vaizey can hold his head high. It’s a shame the kids of today will never hear about it. Yeah, he’ll still get called “Clean Shirt” when he’s on his way back from a busy day on the benches. Shame. Kids…

*The tag “Cow Punching” may get me a load of hits from an underground movement on wordpress. Let’s see! Exciting.

** Ooh, two… sweet

If there’s one thing that is always brought up over drinks between a PR and a journalist, it’s scoring. If the journalist is lucky, they won’t be having a pint with one of those PRs that moan about scores (or are pressured to by their bosses) but it’s true to say that even the most relaxed PR staff can really get down about review scores. Sometimes it’s inevitable and sometimes it’s those scores that hit you like an electric car.

It’s a PR department’s job to try and achieve the most positive coverage possible and to generate pagination in influential and widely read publications or websites. The staff in those departments are judged on their ability to meet these goals. That’s pretty clear. What isn’t clear is the way in which PR departments traditionally judge coverage. The average tracking document and coverage report will take the publication, circulation, pagination and maybe a  choice quote or two. But it seems to me that if you are to track publicity for your titles accurately then you have to look a little deeper.

Surely the value of a piece of coverage should be judged on more than the number of pages and circulation. All too often, coverage is given a financial value equated by multiplying the pagination by the cost of an advert in that publication. For example, a 6 page preview in a magazine with an ad rate of 2 grand a page will have a value of 12K. But that figure is actually meaningless. Firstly, editorial coverage is designed to educate, inform, entertain… an expression of opinion. Would a 6 page article that rubbished a game or a 4 page review giving it 2/10 be worth thousands of pounds? It would actually be the opposite, costing sales and public opinion. The true value of a piece of coverage can only be judged using deeper criteria:  Circulation, pagination, key messaging covered, audience, tone… and this is where it gets impossible. A busy PR staffer would have little time to analyse each piece of coverage and judging tone suddenly becomes as subjective as the always controversial review scores themselves. You wouldn’t be able to get away with a simple digital Good / Bad system… at least a five star rating of tone would be required with 3 stars as neutral commentary (a simple news piece or non-commital preview).

PR should be judged in terms of its use, not its value. PR is for selling games, so, does a piece of coverage make someone more likely to buy a game or not? Maybe some kind of equation is required? i might have to leave that one to the philosophers. All I can say is that great PR hits the right people with the right message at the right time and is nothing to do with the price of the paper it’s printed on. Online statistics will help give a greater analysis of the true value of coverage. If I secure a three page preview on a website how many people click on it? How many of those people click through to the second and third page? How many people click from the preview to a shop? These are the sort of statistics you can track. Real people, real behaviour.

Still, it’s clear that the simplest way to judge a successful PR campaign is the number of covers a game achieves… and that’s not even beginning to get into the horros of metacritic slavery.

“I got 10 coverz can i haz bonusz plz?”

If there’s one thing that rabid videogame forumites love it’s Papercraft. There’s something about that iddy biddy, slightly angular bundle of joy that you’ll know you could never recreate, that makes their ice cold hearts of pure sarcasm just melt away. Now if only I could find someone willing to make a template for Windows Live… a really adorable one.

This may not work.

Happy happy! I’ll be in the next issue of Games TM, out March 19th. Waiting for a .pdf as we speak. Very, very exciting. Followed a chat with Matt where Ponting and I babbled on and on. Tim pretty much stuck to AWOMO which was sensible. I started babbling on about all sorts which I won’t go into now in case it got cut. Apparently all the pictures they took captured me looking grumpy. I can’t wait to see it. Have to be honest… it’s really exciting to get interviewed. I’m chuffed to bits!

UPDATE: Couldn’t wait to be sent a copy and luckily Smiths was selling it early. Four pages and they kept all the interesting stuff in so I’m not too boring. I had a massive smile on my face when I opened that up. Thanks Matt and Rick!

Just spotted the news that Martin Walfisz is leaving Massive. I’m sure he’s going on to something exciting but can’t help feeling sad. I saw World in Conflict when it was in pre-greenlight stage and plugged away at it until it’s release. I loved every second I got to spend with Martin, David and the rest of guys at Massive who came out to E3 a few years back. Great game and great bunch of guys. They’ll carry on making classic games of course. Where are you going Martin? Good luck…

The BBC have been so kind as to cover our now not so little AWOMO project. They also saw fit to include my rough sketch visualising AWOMO’s data delivery as a road being built in front of you. It is, let’s admit, not a great sketch. Something to show the grandkids though (if I go on to achieve nothing of any significance in the next 50 years).

I wandered about for two hours. After I had walked a few miles I stopped, turned around a few times and jumped twice in frustration… then over a fence. “You can never go back” people say, and now I saw it was true. Friends move on and people change. Those you once knew are… well… different. You can’t quite put your finger on it…

… actually no, that’s a lie. They’ve all turned into giant shoulder pad wearing, flying mount riding, level 70-fied idiots.

After a hiatus of about 7 months I have once again been drawn back into World of Warcraft. I have never been the most active of players, never raising a character over about level 25 but wandering around is nice. My problem was that I was never organized enough, or even bothered enough to get into a guild, a friendly group, or meet up with my friends regularly. This despite the fact that at the time I worked for Vivendi and so had WoW coming out of my ears. As the song goes… “When I was young, I never needed anyone. And making love was just for fun”. Well, those days truly are gone now. I have realised that even if you never interact with anyone else in WoW, you still need those people there, bustling around, questing alongside you, yet never speaking. Now there is nobody… they’ve all moved on. “Oh everyone’s in the high level realms now”, a friend of mine said. What good is that to me? My character feels like he’s walking through Hull after the UK’s shipping industry deteriorated. Now everything just seems… disjointed. The vendors are still vending, soldiers still soldiering but there is no life any more. I think I missed the party.

Recently I picked up Lord of the Rings Online. I can’t see myself carrying on with it but it’s nothing to do with the actual game. I just know that I will be equally non-committal about the whole thing and in 3 years time everyone else will assaulting Mordor and I will still be delivering steaming hot pies in the Shire. But I want to do it… I really do. I want to feel that buzz of taking on an instance. I haven’t really done that.

But even though I feel sad that I’ve missed out on the fun here I must explain exactly why it doesn’t bother me that much. I used to listen to my old flatmate play with his guild a year or so back. He was a lovely guy but some of his guild mates seemed a little strange, perhaps even unpleasant. One evening, his party had spent 30 minutes setting up to do something, a raid is it? Suddenly over the teamspeak I heard two little children:

“Mummy… mummy it’s dinner. We’re hungry.”

“SHUT UP… mummy’s busy”

So yeah I feel left out, but left out of what? That’s like a German sitting watching his defeated army walk past at the end of the second world war and saying “Boy, that Nazi party sure seemed like fun”.

Why would I want to be a part of that?

This post originally appeared on Gameplayer.se and well before I made it moot by hitting level 80

What makes you fall for a game so quickly? I bought Super Mario Galaxy a couple of weeks ago and have I been able to put it down since? Yes, to be honest. I find him very annoying with his stupid voice and irritating friends. So this isn’t going to be a big ol’ Nintendo love in where I go all gushing about how great it is to be a bee. Fooled you though, eh? The game I’m actually referring to is one that totally snuck up on me and I think pretty much did the same to everyone. I didn’t care about it, thought it sounded silly and assumed, just by reading a short description of it long ago, that it was destined to be rubbish. Instead, its demo has made its way to my hard drive and will sit there until I get my hands on the full game. In thirty minutes it has charmed me, made me laugh out loud and, like some kind of magical snowman or bad elf turned good, saved Christmas for Sony single handed.

Well done there Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, good for you. Have yourself a ticker tape parade.

I envy the person that has had the job of managing PR for Uncharted. I suspect it may end up being the best game they ever worked on. Since moving away from games PR the one thing I’ve missed is that sometimes you can happily sit down at your desk and smile, knowing that the game you’re making plans for is truly great. And you know what else? I was never really in the position to have to worry about shares (thanks for nothing company X) or making bonus targets (thanks for nothing company Z – though I’ll let you back off the hook company X, sorry about that) so every now and again you can imagine that game as being your little secret and if nobody else knew about it well that’s their loss! To be honest though I think I’m drowning in hindsight as being in that situation is actually incredibly frustrating at the time. People sometimes ask me what the best game I’ve ever worked on is, usually if they are bored with talking to me. The last time someone did, they didn’t even let me answer before offering their guess that it was Bioshock. I said no straight away. Bioshock is a lovely game though anyone who has played it will agree that towards the ends it seems to burst out of its emperor’s new clothes a little. The game that I will remember working on forever is Trackmania, one of the first games I had anything to do with. I think it’s probably that game that has shaped my opinion about everything else and lets me understand what makes me fall for a game. It’s just chemistry, an instant attraction, the same as love. It’s like a girlfriend saying “you’re gorgeous… and I look rough today. Why would you want to be with me?”. What they don’t understand is that sometimes you will totally see through any perceptions of what should make something amazing and you’ll simply be bowled over by the fact that it just is. Mario Galaxy is the Angelina Jolie of games… it’s just ‘obvious’ but it’s not for me. Uncharted and Trackmania represent the amazing girl you meet when you just don’t expect it, who you just ‘get’ right away. Lucky you.

If I wasn’t aiming for a certain number of characters I could have simply said “buy Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, it’s great” but it’s been fun for me to ramble, though perhaps not for you. Also you’d presume I was getting paid by an increasingly desperate Sony to say it. Sadly I’m not. Even more sadly I’ve just compared my girlfriend to an arcade puzzle racer with no collision detection which is bound to get me in trouble. Games and romantic sentiment just don’t mix it seems.

This article originally appeared on Gameplayer.se