Week 696

What’s this? I’m blogging about my work on a weekly basis – a simple way to track and archive whatever it is I spend my time on.

Continuing the previous week’s theme, last week I pitched, prepared and drafted articles and even books, but didn’t actually finish anything. Among the things I worked on were interviews with Ronimo Games and Honeyslug, and a piece on the popularity of word games.

I also started playing Diablo 3, which I enjoyed, even though it doesn’t run that well on my 2008 MacBook.

I edited Rogier Kahlmann’s The Witcher 2 review (for the second time) and Harry Hol’s Prototype 2 review for nrc.next, which would both appear this week.

I got mail from nrc.next: they have decided to start a weekly technology (two-page) spread on Fridays, focusing on societal impact. The games coverage David Nieborg and I spearheaded will move to this new spread, so we’ll no longer compete for space with theatre, fashion, design, art, music and other topics on the ‘Uit’ pages. Better yet, our columns, reviews, interviews and other games reporting will get a regular spot, so it’ll be easier to keep track of what we do. (And of what the paper does in terms of games journalism.)

I still feel games should get their own spread: throwing them in with the web, gadgets and apps could skew them away from the cultural perspective I’d like to see. The techno-deterministic view is always lurking in the shadows. And while the focus on societal impact is great, you don’t always need that long zoom. Sometimes you just want to tell your readers about interesting new games. We’ll see how this turns out!

On Wednesday, I visited Two Tribes, where I briefed everyone on the current state of Toki Tori 2’s story and world. Afterwards, I made a big update to the big story doc. The next step will be creating storyboards for some of the story sequences.

Later last week I got a text message from co-founder/designer Collin van Ginkel, with one word, followed by an exclamation mark: “Slices!” I had to call him to make sense of this, but after I got the gist of his idea, I envisioned Van Ginkel as Archimedes in his bathtub, having his proto-Eureka-moment.

Finally, I read up on The Witcher 2, preparing a new edition of the Bashers Gameclub, which I hosted on Thursday. The next one will be about Fez, on May 31. It will be the best Gameclub yet.