. . . When Writers Attack

The Debt We Owe to the Gaming Community

If I had unlimited time I could easily expand upon the feelings that many of us who cover the games beat have with respect to how truly fortunate we feel to be part of it.  While there are a lot of reasons for us to complain -- some more legitimate than others -- the complaints that you hear from the writers who work this beat most often take the form of the complaints that you hear on any job, being for the most part the manifestation of frustrations and the petty issues that tend to exist in well-structured work environments -- but once you get beyond that none of the people who do what we do will honestly wish that they were doing something else.

The games beat is a great beat, full of interesting stories and dedicated people, but more important than that, it is a beat that serves an audience who wants to read what we have to say -- something that is not true about every beat in journalism -- and that relies upon us to tell them the truth; to keep them informed about subjects that are important to them. 

They trust us to refrain from allowing our personal feelings (or lack of them) for a title to shade or influence what we say about it, and to speak to them (not at them) every time.  The trust that they place in us is an earned thing, not to be taken lightly, and never sacrificed for petty reasons.  It is a trust that extends beyond the by-line, and often invests itself in the publication that we write for -- and vice-versa.

When you are writing on this beat is important not to get it wrong; it is critical that when we write about a game we write from a position of informed knowledge and personal experience because we were there, and we put into it the proper effort.  It is critical that we employ an ethical approach to the stories we write, and that we meet the standards set for us not just by our publications, but by the community we serve -- and that we never forget, not even for a moment, that the privilege that we enjoy as members of the games journalism community is drawn from the gaming community.  Our readers.

There are different levels of betrayal that we can commit -- and at the very top of the list there is one form of betrayal that the readers will not tolerate, and that is the act of faking it. 

A good example of the weight that is placed by the gaming community on certain elements of the beat is their take on the annual Electronic Entertainment Expo -- an event that is widely viewed by most gamers as a mixture of nirvana, the gamer version of  Disney Land, and the perfect vacation or honeymoon destination all rolled up into one three-day all-inclusive package spelled F-U-N!

When the day comes that you -- as a games journalist -- fail to feel that sympathetic level of excitement, the day when you no longer "get" it, well, that is the day you need to quit.  In fact you are much better off simply walking away, with your reputation intact, than you are in trying to fake that level of interest or in skimming the games and their presentations and then writing lukewarm and inadequate coverage...  If you walk away at least you take with you your self-respect and the possibility of finding work on some other beat. 

The people who are our audience are not stupid, and when you fake it they can tell.  When you try to speak with authority about a game you clearly know nothing about, they can detect that faster than a professional wine critic can taste a fart in a car!  And they will not forgive you if you make that sort of mistake; trying to bullshit them will have very real consequences, starting with their complete loss of trust in you -- and by extension in the publication you write for. 

Having that sort of thing happen is the worse nightmare for most editors, which is why they usually exercise significant caution in who it is that they dispatch to cover events like E3.

Understand something -- offering an opinion about a game is not the same thing as judging it and finding it wanting -- and when as a games journalist you do harshly judge a game, you had damn well better be right.  And able to explain the reasons and reasoning behind that opinion.  Because when you pass judgement on a title and that judgement is negative, there is an assumption that you know what you are talking about.  Especially if you are the only one saying the bad things you are saying.

Getting it Spectacularly Wrong While Wearing a Disguise

Before I finally get to the point of this post, I want to remind you all that this blog is not an official anything -- it is the place I go to say the things I am thinking about, and it represents my opinion as a person, a writer, and all of the other things I am and some I am not.  The point that I am making here is that you should take this with a grain of salt, and bear in mind that its point is to serve as an outlet where I can say the things I am thinking that largely would not be appropriate in any other venue.

When E3 2012 opened I had already ironed out my schedule of appointments, and I knew where I was going to be and when I was going to be there.  Based upon knowledge obtained from previous E3's I have developed certain practices that are intended to smooth the path of covering that event, starting with avoiding the need to enter either of the main exhibit halls on each morning of the event.  Specifically the point to that policy is to avoid having to be part of the crush of enthusiastic attendees as they turn into an unruly mob trying to squeeze through the inner gates to the West or South Halls.

My solution to avoiding that crush is to schedule my first appointment of the day for a game whose exhibit space is located in one of the private meeting areas located on the upper levels of the Concourse that connects  the two halls together, spanning the entire length of the Los Angeles Convention Center, access to which, while it is still controlled by security, does not include funneling through gates.

So it is that the first game of the day for me was a title from developer and publisher City Interactive called Enemy Front, which is a fusion action-adventure historical shooter that takes place during World War II.  In fact Enemy Front presents a very different take upon that well-covered story and genre in gaming, different enough to cause it to stand out.  You can (and probably should) read the first piece that I wrote about Enemy Front over at GamingUpdate as it presents you with my take on the game, which was generally very positive. 

That piece, entitled "An In-Depth Look at Enemy Front @ E3 2012" includes is a mixture of what it is like to be at E3 on day one, as well as a humorous assessment of the WWII shooter genre, and a tongue-in-cheek look at the inconsistencies that tend to crop up in that sort of game, while celebrating the serious approach that City Interactive has taken, and the fact that much of the credit can be given to well-known game developer Stuart Black, who heads up the dev team for Enemy Front.

Choosing to eschew the stereotypes and take gamers along a path much less traveled, Enemy front takes gamers on a journey to solve a mystery in the role of secret agent and special operative, covering big pieces of real estate in Europe that certainly played key roles in World War II but that, because those roles were not as sexy or as important as, say, the beaches at Normandy or the Dutch countryside during the disaster that was Operation Market Garden, tends to get far less attention from the dev teams that make games in that genre and on that subject.

As you read this you should bear a few points in mind -- the exhibit space contracted by City Interactive to demo Enemy Front and its titles Dogfight 1942 and Sniper: Ghost Warrior II was not part of the main display floor.  It was a private meeting room, and so not accessible to the 95% of the attendees at E3 wearing Yellow-coded cred holders.  You had to either be working press of a member of the games industry with a reason to be there, and you had to have arranged an appointment in advance.  For that reason all of the people who I saw both in the lounge area and in the presentation theater for Enemy Front sported green-stripes on their cred holders -- and were members of the press.

I mention this to illustrate that I was not the only person who would be writing about this game -- or the other two games that we saw after the Enemy Front demo and briefing concluded.  I was also not the only person who was favorably impressed by the game, and its take on the subject, or the fact that it displayed elements in play and style that were very easily considered trademarks of developer Stuart Black, who has an impressive track record for making immersive games.

Go Ahead and Google "Enemy Front E3"

Despite what may seem like an adversarial community, the world of the games journalist is almost always anything but; a lot of us know each other because we are constantly running into each other at industry events, enjoy gossiping and exchanging notes and tips, and uniformly did not like the free lunches that were laid on in the Press Lounge at E3.  We still showed up and ate them mind you -- a free lunch is a free lunch!  But while we did our best to enjoy them, partaking in the ritual of tea, we talked about the games that we saw and which ones impressed us most.

When asked if I saw anything good that they should cover by the group of fellow writers who I consider to be friends (we see each other at gaming events all the time and chat via email regularly) I mentioned the favorable opinion I had formed of the three games at the City Interactive exhibit (they are all very good games) -- and I was not surprised to hear that opinion mirrored by the roughly half of the group who had, like myself, already taken in the briefing.  The other half decided that they would.

If you Google "Enemy Front E3" you will find a wealth of favorable pieces on the game, with some of them like Just Push Start's Josh Garibay providing an enthusiastic but  measured preview of the demo, and GameZone's Mike Meredith offering a decidedly pleased take on the game.  The glowing piece by Game Rant's Andrew Dyce nicely represents the more enthusiastic end of the spectrum, but the important thing that you need to grasp is that everyone who saw the game, its briefing, and its demo, came away favorably impressed.  Well...  Almost everyone.

Over at the website GamerLive.TV the direction that they decided to take for part of their E3 coverage was decidedly negative -- the piece that I am talking about is their Top Five Disappointments of E3 by self-styled games journalist Alex Martinet -- who the site actually ID's as one of its editors...  In his short bio on the site it reveals that he has only a year's experience writing in the beat...  I am not going to point out his obvious lack of experience or the piss-poor job that he did in that feature piece, though I could. 

It would be very easy to dismiss him as an amateur and point out that if all that he took away from the Enemy Front briefing and demo (assuming he actually attended it) was that "the graphics and gameplay aren’t up to par" that piece serves as a perfect illustration for why he does not belong on the games beat...  I am shaking my head right now in disgust -- I know that you cannot see it, that is why I told you.

The problem with pieces like that written by Martinet is that they are textbook examples of how not to do games journalism.  At the very least if you are going to crap all over a game you had better be able and willing to explain why -- something he does not do -- and at the same time, the voice that he wrote with alone concerns us.  Martinet declares his conclusions with the confidence that we should care what he thinks, but fails to explain why his opinion means anything, or what facts he is relying upon as the basis for it.

Who is Alex Martinet?

That was the subject of the email I received from a colleague who pointed out that this guy Martinet just gloriously shot himself in the head and did I want to see the mess he made?  The general consensus was another chapter in a very old story: the story of a writer getting a subject very wrong and, lacking the experience to recognize this, compounds that error by making it public.

That email directed me to the feature piece on GamerLive.TV that crapped all over Enemy Front, Silent Hill: Book of Memories, Dead Space 3, the Harry Potter Wonderbook, and Nintendo's Wii U -- a piece written by Martinet that could just as easily have been titled "How Not to Do Games Journalism" or "Watch Me Demonstrate How Ignorant I am!"

The piece was structured to maximize page views with a tiny set of paragraphs for each of the subjects, spread over five pages -- the point to that being to increase the traffic clicks x5 for a piece that should have been contained in a single page.  That is actually a common tactic used on the site though, so we cannot lay the blame for it at the feet of Martinet...

He concludes the piece with his assessment of the situation with the best tabloid journalism approach, offering Nintendo's Wii U up as the sacrifice in the Number One slot -- but in so doing only illustrates his broad ignorance of the industry and the strategy that Nintendo was using -- and then he asks what he considers to be "the serious and impossible question that no one ever imagined to ask." 

 What was the question?  "Is Nintendo out of touch with what the market wants?"

Well Alex, the answer to your question is that what that elongated run-up that began at last year's E3 (and will culminate in the release of the Wii U this Fall) is all about is a complicated issue involving Nintendo's need to persuade mainstream game publishers and studios to support their 8th gen console.

That support is critical to the commercial success of the Wii U, and their strategy is based at least in part upon it being the first next gen console to market, and in part on the very interesting second-screen controller tech that is going to heavily influence the next generation of games consoles and games. 

What it was about was Nintendo needing to get those publishers and studios on board to release titles from the mainstream gaming segment on their console -- something that they have refrained from doing in the past because the numbers were not there and they did not believe that it made financial sense to offer that level of support for a console whose core audience is over 50 and under 14 and largely interested in sports games, and as many Mario Brothers games as Nintendo is willing to make, which they eat up like popcorn!

The fact that Nintendo largely succeeded in that effort, securing commitments for versions of Batman: Arkham City Armored Edition, Darksiders II, Mass Effect 3, Tank! Tank! Tank!, TEKKEN Tag Tournament 2, Trine 2: Directors Cut, Ninja Gaiden 3: Razor’s Edge and Aliens Colonial Marines as well as others means that they will actually have a solid shot at obtaining a piece of the core gaming segment that has eluded them for over a decade...  Well, perhaps not as large a piece as they might have had thanks in part to the surprise announcement of SmartGlass at the Microsoft Pre-E3 Press Briefing -- but still some share is better than no share at all.

To give you the benefit of the doubt Alex, I took a look at the last dozen of your other pieces on the site and they do not speak very well of you...  In fact they illustrate the half-assed insincere job you do as a writer.  I am not going to pick each piece apart (I could) but I am going to offer a general assessment of your writing and its underlying lack of quality.   In your defense I note that you do not do this for a living -- according to you, you are a journalism student at university -- and even though you claim to be a paid member of the games journalism community I can only assume that you made a mistake in phrasing when you wrote that you have "been working in the industry for a year" as it is painfully obvious why that is not so...

Speaking from a Position of Strength and Knowledge

A good journalist makes the effort to acquire the facts before they start writing about them -- the reason that they do so is so that they do not get it wrong.  Getting it wrong is easy to do when you have no clue what you are talking about, and aside from making yourself look bad, it also calls in to question the point to your efforts.  The reason that the readers bother to read your pieces is that they expect you to tell them things that they did not know, entertain them, and inform them.  They tend not to like it when you tell them things that they did not know and those things turn out to be untrue.

Take for instance the piece you wrote on Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell: Blacklist...  The title is E3 2012: Sam Fisher Returns in 2013 for Splinter Cell: Black List and you start the piece off by declaring it "One of the biggest first day E3 surprises" which is rather odd, considering that the primary announcement, trailer, and demo was made at Microsoft's Pre-E3 Xbox 360 Press Briefing in the Galen Center at USC on Monday, the day before E3.

You said:  "This was a short demo, but we did hear Sam Fisher speak and he dose (SIC) sound a little bit different. Now I have nothing to prove this, but Sam Fisher looks noticeable (SIC) younger than when he last appeared in Splinter Cell Conviction and Sam Fisher seems to be more darker. Could this be a lead up to when we first see Sam Fisher?"

No Alex, this is not a prequel, and this does not present a scenario in which we get to meet Sam Fisher before the events of Third Echelon. . .  The reason that the Sam Fisher in Splinter Cell: Blacklist sounds different than the Sam from the previous games is that the actor who used to play him (Michael Ironside) has been replaced by a new and younger actor (Eric Johnson).

The decision to replace Ironside with Johnson was based upon Ubisoft Toronto's decision to focus upon advancements in performance capture technology that are being used to make the game -- tech that requires the actors to physically act out their scenes as they're delivering their lines.   The reason that they are using this new tech is because it offers a more realistic animation process, making the actions more believable by conveying the physical elements of the events such as real-world exhaustion or pain.

Ironside was replaced because he is now over sixty-years-old, and the demands that are made upon the actors in the game are simply beyond his physical capabilities -- so no, this is not a prequel, no, we are not seeing a Sam Fisher who existed before Third Echelon.

The thing is, here was a perfect opportunity for you to tell your readers about something they probably did not know about -- all that you would have needed to do was actually attend the briefing for this game at E3 and you would have known all of this...  This is what I am talking about when I refer to the duty that we owe the readers.  This was a test, and you failed it.

The writing style that you use (the quoted bit above is a good example) is raw and unedited, full of errors in punctuation, tense, and often the words you are using do not mean what you think they do.  Your finished copy has the appearance of being rough draft copy, lacks polish and professionalism, and makes both the site you are writing for and you look bad.  Considering that you hold yourself out as both Writer and Editor, that is not good.

If you are feeling picked on, well, sorry about that mate...  The reason I am writing about this is that it -- and you -- irritated me.  

. . . How Dragon's Lair arrived on XBLA

On a Tuesday morning in a time-place-coordinate in which there was no such thing as a Tuesday or a morning, the sun slowly climbed above the horizon and cast its light upon a wide and very deep glacial structure through a thick almost impenetrable haze in the thin atmosphere that was composed of a mixture of water vapor and very fine ash powder ejected from the earth into the sky by the massive volcanic eruptions that plagued the area.

This blanket of thick and amazingly hard glacial ice that covered the world for as far as the nonexistent eye could see had yet to exchange the energy that was stored within it for the inevitable alterations to the landscape that would create that naturally deep-water bay and the rivers that were destined to connect it to the interior of a land mass that would one day be called Australia, thus transforming this particular spot on the third rock from the sun into a highly desirable location for the establishment of a settlement called Byron Bay, situated along the shoreline of a Bay called Byron Bay, that would eventually consist of a political creation called Byron Shire.

Before all of this takes place this location and its massive glacial cap would very soon -- soon being a relative term -- present an almost ideal set of circumstances to attract the attention of a group of naturalists and scientists intent upon the study and classification of the flora and fauna of the area -- but we really are getting ahead of ourselves here.

The well-known writer and sometimes philosopher Susan Sontag may or may not have observed that “Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once…and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you,” while drinking a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice in the breakfast nook in her home; miles and years away in a different time and place a very smart bloke named Albert Einstein may or may not have observed that "The only reason for time is so that everything doesn't happen at once," while drinking a hot cup of tea in his garden in New Jersey.

What we do know is that regardless of the many other reasons that are certain to exist for its creation, we owe an awesome debt to time because if it did not exist everything would happen at once and it would be impossible to discuss it in logical terms because we already didn't do that...

 It's About Time

At some point in that time-space-coordinate a significant amount of radiant energy was transferred through the hazy soup of atmosphere to the glacial structure from the sun, which if you are not aware happens to be an almost perfectly spherical ball of hot plasma that is interwoven with magnetic fields and sports a diameter of approximately 1,392,000 km -- or about 109 times the diameter of the Earth -- though in the interest of complete transparency I should probably inform you that I am pretty much guessing about those measurements, since I did not get out of the van and personally measure them with the measuring tape I bought at Home Depot last month... But if I had I assure you that the figures above are pretty much spot-on, give or take a thousand kilometers either way.

The point to all this is that over the course of a few million years sufficient energy was transferred and stored within the glacial body to cause it to begin to shift and recede, and when that happened its motions --which are estimated to be something like a few centimeters a year at first but quickly grew to a wicked fast three to four inches a year -- presents an almost perfect example of how to express the incredible forces of mass and pressure and... 

Well, nobody was actually there to witness it, but all of the computer simulations agree that it was impressive so you will just have to take my word for it -- and besides the point to this is that as the glacial mass moved away from the land toward the poles (in this case the south pole because the north pole would have been one hell of a long trip and the equator would have insisted upon offering its opinion about the wisdom of taking that route, as I am sure you are aware) -- the point being stuff happened.

Among the stuff that happened was the formation of a large and naturally deep bay as well as a number of rivers and smaller threads of moving water of varying levels of salinity formed thanks to the glacial construct leaving its mark upon the area, and figuratively becoming the first tagger to hit the vicinity in a major way.

The Establishment of Byron Bay

Fast forward (really fast) around twenty-million-years or so, give or take a few thousand, and the aforementioned Bunjalong people arrived on the scene and named the naturally deep-water bay Cavvanba, while shortly before that or maybe after -- nobody is actually sure on that account -- the Minjangbal people settled in the Tweed Valley -- which was a green paradise resting in the shadow of the majestic Wollumbin though at the time it wasn't actually called the Tweed Valley -- and around that same time the Arakwal Bumberlin people settled in the area that would one day be known as Byron Shire after a bunch of white men turned up in wooden boats and decided that they did not like the names that were being used by the indigenous people for the area (but that is a completely different story)...

Now fast-forward really-really-fast another ten-thousand-years  or so (give or take a few hundred years either way) and pop over to the other side of the world, on the other end of the world (seriously if you look at a globe you will find that England is on the other side, and in the upper half not the lower half which is where Oz is, but I digress) and you will notice a great deal of furious action as a young and ambitious Royal Navy Lieutenant named James Cook got ready for a big journey.

You knew that he was a Lieutenant and not a Captain because of the number and size of the buttons on his blue frock coat (it wasn't until around 1795 that the Royal Navy adopted the standardized symbols of rank that included epaulettes, so the layman might easily be forgiven for not being able to tell the difference between, say, a Lieutenant and a Commander let alone a Captain, though even without the standardized rank symbols you couldn't mistake an Admiral for anything other than an Admiral).

Lieutenant Cook was frantically working with the officers under him -- who addressed him as Captain even though he was not actually a Captain by rank, because it was the invariable custom of the service to address the officer in command of a vessel as Captain no matter what their actual rank was...  So though he was a Lieutenant he also happened to be the ranking officer and in command of the ship, thus the courtesy title of Captain was pretty much a given -- to get his new ship ready for an epic journey, adventure, and expedition.

The vessel in this instance was the former civilian merchant collier Earl of Pembroke, and was originally launched in June of 1764 from the coal and whaling port of Whitby, in North Yorkshire. Having recently been bought into the service expressly to serve as the vessel for this joint expedition being undertaken by the Royal Navy and the Royal Society (whose proper and actual name was "The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge," but was more commonly known as "The Royal Society" because let's face it, that other name was a mouthful) to seek evidence of the postulated Terra Australis Incognita or "unknown southern land" as well as to observe the 1769 transit of Venus across the Sun, which was set to take place between the 3rd and the 4th of June of that year.

Renamed HMS Endeavour, she was ship-rigged and sturdily built with a broad, flat bow, a square stern and a long box-like body with a deep hold well-suited for sailing in shallow waters and able to be safely and conveniently beached for loading and unloading of cargo and for basic repairs without requiring a dry dock, which later turned out to be a good thing, but again that is another story...

With a length of just 106 feet (32 m), and a beam (width) of only 29 feet 3 inches (8.92 m), you have to admit that this was not a lot of room for the 94-people who made up her compliment -- a count that breaks down to 71 official ship's company, 12 Royal Marines, and 11 civilians (the latter being the scientists who were absolutely necessary to the expedition) both the crew, the Marines, and the civilian scientists seemed to get along OK...  That was not always the case mind you, but it seems that they were very fortunate in that there were no significant personality conflicts to be found on board.

A Little Naval Wisdom

At that time in the history of the Royal Navy ships were still powered by sail, and armed with cannons, and carried compliments of Royal Marines to serve as security officers whenever the vessel was in port, doubling as fighting troops when it was under attack or going about the process of attacking another ship or shore installation.  

While combat with another vessel is generally thought to represent the greatest danger to the crew by most readers today, the reality was that illnesses -- and in particular a combination of "The Pox" and the scourge of the well-feared illness called scurvy (it was not known then that scurvy was caused by a lack of Vitamin C in the diet of sailors, but most progressive officers and ship's surgeons of the era recognized that there was some relationship between the diet of the crew and the appearance of that illness... 

By all accounts Lieutenant James Cook was a very progressive and intelligent officer with his own notions of how to best combat both The Pox and scurvy -- what was called The Pox at the time was really a collection of venereal diseases, most of which were not treatable, and Cook's solution to limiting the risks associated with them on that voyage -- since there was no entirely reliable prophylactic available -- was to limit as much as possible the crew's access to the shore, and thus to houses of ill-repute and the more common variety of prostitute  by restricting the men to the ship and allowing visitation by what were called "bum boats" ordering the ship's surgeon and his mates to

His Majesty's Bark the Endeavour departed Plymouth Roads in August of 1768, rounded Cape Horn and made Tahiti in time to observe the 1769 transit of Venus across the Sun and take on fresh water and supplies prior to continuing on to Australia, arriving in April of 1770, where Cook first went ashore at what is now known as Botany Bay and the fellows of The Royal Society began their incredibly successful efforts at documenting the natural sciences there as well as carefully charting out the shore and waters in that general vicinity -- though not so well that they could prevent the barky from running onto one of the previously uncharted fingers of the Great Barrier Reef (though one may safely assume that AFTER they ran into the reef it got charted).

Remember when I mentioned that it was a good thing that the ship could be beached for repairs? Yeah, well, it was a good thing indeed, because after "charting" that particular reef it was necessary to beach the Endeavour on the mainland for seven weeks to permit rudimentary repairs to her hull. But that was OK because lots of science stuff got done by TRS fellows Joseph Banks, Herman Spöring and Daniel Solander, who made their first major collections of Australian flora in the interim, and then Lieutenant Cook sighted and named Cape Byron (named for Vice Admiral The Hon. John Byron, RN and not the poet like a lot of tourists assume) as the easternmost point of land on the continent of Australia (which it is).

Cook named Cape Byron on the 15th of May, the same day that he named the Solitary Isles -- which could have been named Booby Island but he saved that honor for one of the last islands that they discovered later in the voyage, I am just saying...

Video Game Dragon's Lair?

You are probably confused by the heading above, but seriously, Cook's discovery and naming of Cape Byron indirectly lead to the discovery of the video game Dragon's Lair! Well, to MY discovery of it -- bear with me a little while longer and this will all make sense... Sort of.

After Cook nearly ran into Cape Byron and gave it its name, the Royal Society blokes charted what was thereafter named Byron Bay, along with some rivers, and noted that this would be a very nice place to put a settlement if the natives could be persuaded that doing so was a good idea... As it turned out if you point guns at natives they can be persuaded of practically anything, and Cook saw that it was good!

And so Byron Shire and the town of Byron Bay were declared, named as mentioned above, after Admiral John Byron, who was in fact the grandfather of Lord Byron -- yes, THAT Lord Byron -- and because Byron Bay was both a safe harbor (safe in the sense that the vessels of the era could safely enter and anchor inside of its protection without the risk of striking the bottom) although later when they discovered that every now and then the wind cutting across the bay could (and often did) flow in a very unsafe direction, making it a mostly-but-not-quite-always-safe-harbor, they ended up finding some other harbors up and down the coast that were a bit safer... But that did not prevent them from continuing to use Byron Bay, or in its Shire and town becoming important places for the area, as it being situated 780 miles north of Sydney, and instantly determined by The Royal Society to be a most excellent place to establish a beach resort, tourist attractions, light industry, farming, and a great place for actor and all-around dinkum Aussie Paul Hogan to settle down at, history, as they say, was made.

To make it easier to locate the nude beaches from the ocean, the town fathers of Byron Bay built a lighthouse in 1901, and shortly thereafter the first commercial brewery was established (but that is another story), I merely point that out because everyone knows about the close association between lighthouses and breweries since you cannot really have a thriving surfing or skydiving venue without them, and besides some of the best hang gliding to be found anywhere includes lighthouses and breweries, which is a proven fact considering that there is a lighthouse and brewery there and you always find half a dozen hang gliders in the vicinity.

The Discovery of Dragon's Lair

Thanks to Lieutenant Cook, fellow Joesph Banks, and HMS Endeavour Cape Byron was discovered and named, Byron Shire was established, then the village of Byron Bay became the town of Byron Bay and the very wise residents and town leaders quickly established the meat, dairy, farming, and light manufacturing industries there, as well as a number of different tourist industries and attractions...

The abundance of the bountiful crops and wondrous cheeses forced the government to establish over sixty different wine regions in Australia so that Aussies would have wine to drink while eating their Byron Bay cheese and crackers made from the most excellent wheat grown in Byron Shire, and soon the overabundance of cheese, crackers, hang gliders, parachutes, and bicycles forced the government to develop a ready market where Byron Shire and Byron Bay could sell its goods, so an area roughly 165 kilometres (103 mi) to the north of Byron Bay (because Sydney was too far away) that they ended up calling "Brisbane" as the result of a contest that was held in one of the Byron Shire pubs that involved a cow, three Irish milking maids, and a bet on how much beer you could pour into a wellie (there was more to it but I cannot remember all the details just now) but the point is that is how Brisbane got founded.

Fortunately for everyone concerned, in the 1960's a young lad was born in Byron Bay who would later go on to discover, in 1983, the video game Dragon's Lair, which was created by the famous artist Don Bluth and game designer Rick Dyer, with that now-classic arcade game Dragon's Lair being born and, if not for all of that history, you would not be reading this now! God you are so lucky I was born!

Anyway, the title of that most cheesy of epic games -- Dragon's Lair -- follows the exploits of bumbling would-be hero Dirk the Daring, who is on a quest to rescue Daphne the Princess, who is being held prisoner by the evil Dragon Singe... By the standards of the time it really wasn't so much a videogame as it was a an interactive cartoon, but there you have it!

Dragon's Lair 25th Anniversary

Now fast-forward to June 6, 2008 and we find that Dirk the Daring, hero to an entire generation of gamers, has turned 25 and should seriously consider moving out of his parents basement... Sadly the celebration of the 25th birthday of Dragon's Lair went largely unnoticed outside of gamer circles, until last month, when someone found the memo that had fallen between the desk and the wall in the game studio back in 2008 and remembered that they had actually made a new celebratory version of Dragon's Lair for the Xbox 360 via XBLA, and not only that but it somehow had Kinect support built into it before the Kinect was invented, and how cool is that?!

According to Microsoft's Play XBLA blog, the new Dragon's Lair will also be the first game on the XBLA platform to support both Kinect and controller-based inputs, a concept we here have thought should have been a given all along...

And so we come full-circle, and thanks to Lieutenant James Cook of the Royal Navy, an expedition by the Royal Society, and significant efforts on the part of Lieutenant Cook to ensure that his crew ate a diet that included a wide variety of greens and other food stuff, nobody got scurvy, everyone gets Dragon's Lair, so hey, win-win!

. . . Personal Heroes

One of the more common questions you will hear asked among writers when they get together informally is a simple and yet very revealing one: who are your personal heroes?

At most of the major events in the business and tech arena there is an unofficial gathering -- usually a dinner -- for newspaper journalists and columnists that takes place following the first official day of the event, at which writers who work for newspapers gather together to break bread, meet new faces, and basically socialize as they relax following what is invariably a very tense and busy day. Just such a gathering took place after the show at the 2011 CES in Las Vegas.

In terms of painting a mental image of the environment, it was a typical Thursday evening in Las Vegas, which translates to a briskly chilly and wet wind-filled night of the sort that adds exponentially to the attractiveness of a warm and well-lighted restaurant dining room, so the simple act of taking a seat at the large table and wrapping both hands around the hot cup of tea that was placed before us was a very physical as well as emotional act and, as the heat was transferred from the outside of the thick porcelain cup to mildly numb fingers the pleasure of greeting and being greeted by the collection of old friends and strangers who were soon to be new friends was intensified.

As is often the case when I cover events far away from home, I was accompanied by a companion -- and for CES 2011 that companion was one of my oldest and best mates, Geofry Glenn, who I love more than like a brother but as a brother. In simply defined terms our relationship is the sort in which we can say anything to each other and it will be accepted, because we know each other very well and because we care about each other...

So as I took my seat and my first sip of tea on my right was an old friend and on my left an old acquaintance who I first met as a fellow freelance writer in Boston in the early 90's, Gabrial "Gabe" Paxton, who now makes his living writing for a company that provides directed content for company newsletters and the sort of faux-newspapers that are published weekly by major corporations for their employees, and that largely serve as a mixture of internal news relating to the happenings of their companies, as well as related industry or tech news intended to inform about either their own products or the products of other companies with which they have a relationship.

As we settled in Gabe related how his current employer - a well-known consumer electronics manufacturer that, in addition to making television sets and other media tech, was branching out into the world of view-on-demand handheld consumer devices (in this case specifically smart phones) so he was very excited about the different products that were on display at the show from his own and related industry.

Of the two-dozen other faces at this unofficial dinner party there were a handful that I had met before, and sort of knew, but for the most part the rest of the bodies at the table were strangers to me, and naturally as conversations began and moved along we got to know each other. Directly across from me and obviously together as more than simply colleagues from the same newspaper was a man and a woman from Detroit, Michigan whose animated conversation and constant hand-holding at the table made me miss my wife intensely, but that is a different story...

It was the female half of the couple -- who everyone was calling "Gin" but whose name was actually Virginia -- who voiced the familiar question used to facilitate the rituals of getting to know each other: "So, who are your heroes?" Gabe groaned and Geof laughed.

You see I have a long list of personal heroes -- most of whom are writers -- and anyone who regularly reads my newspaper column in the Cape Cod Times is well aware of some of them: Samuel Clemens (more commonly known as Mark Twain) is one, and then Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, L. Frank Baum, and Walt Whitman round out the list of the older ones, who I usually think of as representing the formative deans of American wordsmithing.

Going farther back there is Benjamin Franklin, the poems of the celebrated Samuel "Dictionary" Johnson, and Sir Joseph Banks. Under the heading of relatively more contemporary is historical novelist Patrick O'Brian, who I find to be an incredibly fascinating writer and person both for his body of work but also as a result of his flawed but exceptional character. The name that popped into my mind and so out of my mouth in answer to her question that evening was the French novelist and playwright Françoise Sagan, which I could instantly tell was a surprise to Gin, and also to my friends based upon their reactions...

Geof raised an eyebrow, and it occurred to me that we had never discussed her or her books with each other, but as it turned out he was very well aware of Sagan and, like me, had read her more profoundly revealing works but not her more commercial ones.

"Really?" Gin replied, and it was also evident that she was searching her own mind to try to place that name. The fact that she did not recognize it is not really all that surprising -- as popular as Sagan was on the continent, her popularity here in America was based on a number of more personal events rather than literary ones, so I was prepared to excuse that lack of familiarity, but then her partner instantly leaps in to save the day for her, observing: "Isn't that the French novelist who wrote Bonjour Tristesse when she was little more than a child herself?" he asked...

"That would be her," I agreed, and Geof -- bless him -- chuckled and said "Mauriac called her a charming little monster."

Françoise Quoirez

We rarely have the luxury of influencing the formative events in our lives -- we do not get to pick our parents, or where we are born, and under what circumstances, and even after we begin to live we do not really alter the course of our own lives until we reach the point in our personal destiny at which we begin to question the authority that limits us... Sagan -- whose real name was Françoise Quoirez -- was born in Cajarc and her formative years as the youngest child of what she considered to be bourgeois parents -- her father was a company director (what we call an executive today), and her mother the daughter of landowners -- and in 1954 when she was just 19 years old her first novel, Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness), was published.

The insight and the craft that she demonstrated in Bonjour Tristesse hinted at the very deep well of emotion and talent that existed within her, and it was no surprise to those that knew her well that she was destined to have a long and richly rewarding career as a writer. It was also no surprise to those that knew her that she was destined to live that life as something of an impulsive and indulgent soul -- often referred to as a "loose cannon" or, as François Mauriac did indeed call her on the front page of the French national newspaper Le Figaro, "a charming little monster," and by all accounts she was precisely that.

Sagan's nickname was 'Kiki' and her literary works, crafted with strong but romantic themes that involved wealthy and disillusioned bourgeois characters, tended to focus upon issues like the sexuality of the young during an era in which no matter how progressive it really was, certainly was not ready for dealing openly with that subject.

Bonjour Tristesse was a story about the life of a pleasure-driven 17-year-old named Cécile, and in particular her relationships with her boyfriend and her adulterous, playboy father, and the fact that I read it when I was 17 and during a period of several years in which I was trying very hard to define the purpose of my life (I was such a precocious teenager) and define for myself the boundaries of not just my own life and relations, but for the manner in which it would intersect with the world itself -- I was also in the process of determining what coursework would occupy my first year of university at the time, a fact that should help you in understanding where my head was at through all of this...

At the time that it was published Sagan's character became something of an icon for disillusioned teenagers, a fact that I was aware of thanks to the footnotes in the translation that I was reading and the commentary that one of the previous owners of the book had so helpfully written in the margins, and I was captivated by the emotional turmoil that she laid out on those pages, and her honesty in dealing with subjects that had grown no easier to accept in the thirty years that had passed since she originally wrote about them and when I was reading them, that it instantly stands out in my mind when I read it even today. Of course the association of the book and the period in time when I was reading it for the first time drags out those old memories, but that's OK...

Some of the questions that the book asked were also asked in different ways by other writers -- and in particular the questions it asked silently -- were the sort that were also asked in different ways by Jack Kerouac, J.D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs...

Kerouac's On the Road portrays the story of a fierce personal quest for meaning and belonging, and the rapid-fire observations of life that are the very foundation of the story makes it easy to forget that it was an autobiographical tale -- and that behind the code names for the characters in the book were the real people who in addition to being the sometimes traveling companions of Kerouac helped shape the literary history of the era. The point I suppose is that it was real, and so too were the situations that Sagan wrote about, though perhaps less real in the abstract...

On my home page I have a quote from Sagan -- really a sort of observation that she made about life and writing -- that reads "Writing is a question of finding a certain rhythm. I compare it to the rhythms of jazz. Much of the time life is a sort of rhythmic progression of three characters. If one tells oneself that life is like that, one feels it less arbitrary."

A lot of thought went into that observation, and if you spend any time at all reading the autobiographical writings of Sagan you will realize that she wrestled with the issues of not simply the meaning of life, but the process of it; how the more productive humans (you can substitute "writers" for the word "humans" pretty much throughout) tend to set small and attainable goals for themselves, and how as humans we naturally stop ourselves from examining too deeply the purpose of our own life.

When you examine this too closely you invite the demons in, and leave yourself exposed to the hurtful truth that much of what passes for meaning in life is little more than make-work and fabrications that are designed to conceal the fact that, save for a set of keys that open the door to your home or can be used to start your car, the rest of the everything that we are is little more than a basis for distinguishing between ourselves and the animals in the woods.

The reason that Françoise Sagan numbers among my list of personal heroes has to do with the fact that she viewed life on more honest terms than most people are capable of, and left judgment to others. There is much to be said for that sort of honesty.

E3 is just around the corner and I am in the midst of setting my schedule for it while I work on updating a handful of game guides as I rotate between that and working on my more recent assignment, which is one of The Sims games. As I write this visions of the counter at Mr. Churro at Olvera Street is dancing in my head, and I must confess I am very much looking forward to visiting there and indulging in that oh-so-gooey-goodness.

So how is your day shaping up?