Time flies. It's been a little while since I posted -- apologies for that. Been super busy at work lately. I recently finished a really intense story-breaking phase, the end result being a complete throughline treatment of our game story. It's about the sixth or seventh iteration on the current game story, but the first version that I feel flows like a complete story. It's not perfect, but even getting here feels like a huge triumph.

Cool! I just did an interview with Stephen at the Narrative Designer's Network. The NDN is a new site dedicated to the art and craft of narrative design, and is meant to be a content and community hub for people dedicated to the work.

I'm always late to the party, but yeah, I finally managed to get to seeing District 9. It came very highly recommended by multiple friends and work colleagues and so understandably I went into it with very high expectations, which for the most part were not really met.

I had the good fortune to meet Jesse a few months ago in a really casual setting and spend some time soaking up his thoughts on story. It was an awesome experience -- he has this really cool energy that is simultaneously manic and calm, and it's really infectious. I left our conversation feeling really invigorated about what I do every day, which is to try to find new and better ways to get video game players engaged in a storytelling experience.

Much to the surprise of my friends and family, I've made the switch to Mac! I'm typing this entry from my shiny, new-smelling Macbook Pro. It's an absolutely beautiful piece of industrial design and really forces you to ask the question -- why shouldn't a computer look and feel like a piece of functional art?

Warning....MASSIVE SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Not sure if any of you caught the last episode of Ronald Moore's re-imagined Battlestar Galactica TV series. I got hooked on this show a couple of years ago and have been playing catch-up ever since. I found the show to be very fresh, the writing to be quite good, and the plot lines to be compelling.

Looking back on five years of episodes, I must say I still enjoy Season One the best. That's where I think the show really shone because it remained pure to the core of the conflict -- being on the run from the Cylons, being the underdog, the last bastion of the human race, having to always scramble to stay one step ahead, having to improvise, fight, fear, love, hate, etc., and sqeeze every last bit of human ingenuity left in their sad tired bodies to stay alive against an overwhelming force bent on their very extinction.

I won't complain about how the show tended to exhibit a lot of soap opera-ish qualities at times -- after all, despite my best attempts to convince my wife that we were sitting on the couch together to watch the next episode of a great science-fiction show, she and I both knew that we were watching it primarily to see how the various relationships -- always complex, always fiery -- would evolve in this next episode.

I suppose it's not fair or reasonable to expect that a show that has entertained for so many years -- primarily due to being able to juggle several tangentially related plot-lines and convince us that they were going to somehow connect them all at some point in the future -- would manage to meet or satisfy our massive expectations. Aside from having kind of lost the threads of the 'core story' for the past season or so, I'll have to admit I was kind of blindly following the show believing that at some point, my loyalty would be rewarded.

Imagine my disappointment, then, with the final episode!

I've tried to make sense of the contents, unsuccessfully. Aside from the first half -- the battle against the Cylon colony ship -- which was visceral and incredible and reminiscent of Season One battles (and frankly, highlighted how little the show has focused on this kind of action over the past couple of years, preferring to focus on a lot of internal struggles which, frankly, are a lot less compelling to me for being so damn drawn out and melodramatic at times) -- the episode was a convoluted mess of flashbacks mixed with aftermath recaps and the occasional shot of (gasp!) present day!!! I mean...WTF?

I feel it's a sad statement on humanity's struggle, and a relatively cynical conclusion, that after all these years of fighting to get to the safety of their paradise, the first thing everyone wanted to do was get the frack away from one another and head off to live like hermits.

Of the mess of flashbacks, the best I could figure out is:

• Roslyn's story was to cement the reality that she really had nothing to lose and no family to mourn when Caprica was annihilated by the Cylons; I'm not sure how this reveals anything meaningful about her character except perhaps explaining how meaningful it would feel for her to have found, in Adama, someone she could feel a deep and familial connection with
• Same story for Adama really; his flashbacks in the strip club with Tigh made me feel borderline uncomfortable, but clearly he had nothing going on back on Caprica and getting assigned to the museum-worthy Galactica was probably the best thing he had going for him
• Lee and Kara -- really, we see a pattern of behaviour that is repeated over and over (for both of them) throughout the show, to the point of being irritating. I must admit that while I really liked these characters through the first two seasons, they started to really grate on my nerves in the later years of the show, to the point where I feel they were both essentially sidelined and made fairly irrelevant.
• Cylon reconciliation WTF? Chief Tyrol's revenge for Kali's death throwing the possibility of human/cylon reconciliation out the window WTF? Hera as human/cylon hybrid/messiah WTF? Baltar and Caprica 6 existing to guide Hera to the Galactica CIC at the defining moment WTF? I'm sure the writers had that exact moment in mind when they started that whole Concert Hall stuff back in...was is Season 2 or 3?
• Starbuck as angel and ghost? WTF?
  
• Fast forward 150,000 years and we see...what was that, Time Sqaure? Japanese robots as Cylon prototypes? WTF?
  

I'm not as bitter as I seem about this. The show provided me with a lot of entertainment over the past couple of years, but honestly...this finale feels sloppy and doesn't really do justice to the quality of the show as a whole, and the follow-up interviews I've read with RDM where he's asked to explain some of the decisions made as they were wrapping up the mythology in the last 10 episodes are downright silly ("whoops...we never even thought that people might think the "shutdown Cylon Artist Daniel" and the "Daniel as mystical piano-man and Starbucks' father" were meant to be the same character -- our bad for not being more fucking clueful about how we've trained our fans to pay attention to details that we actually don't think about for more than 2 seconds!!!"), and personally make me quite angry. I mean...jesus man...have you no pride! You knew a year or more ago that the show was going to be ending in a season...surely you could have taken the time to plot out a more elegant exit.

Can anyone recommend a good TV show as a pallette cleanser?

The TV industry has the notion of a 'showrunner', essentially the person who literally runs the show, is creatively empowered, and is responsible for budgets, timely delivery, casting, hiring/firing directors/actors/writers, etc.

As I understand it, this role largely emerged from the fact that in TV -- unlike in the movie industry -- writers have the 'real power', as networks are dependent on a reliable source of high-quality content under very short timelines. Most of the producers and exec. producers you see in the TV industry -- people like J.J. Abrams, Aaron Sorkin, etc. -- started out as writers and then became show creators, and are still responsible for writing but also all the production aspects of their shows. When, just like in film, titles like 'executive producer' became abused (they were often conferred to people who had provided funding for the show, or as an honorific for senior industry people who didn't really have that much to do with the day-to-day operation of a show), the TV industry created the role and title of 'showrunner'.

From wikipedia:

So, these are people who are very strong creatives, but also very strong managers, who understand all aspects of the business and are ultimately responsible for making all creative and production decisions for a show.

I find it interesting that the TV industry would have evolved this way, while film and games still really tend to keep these roles apart. In fact, in games, the common wisdom seems to be that it's a "bad idea" for the same person to be responsible for budget/quality/team *and* creative, as though for some reason it's impossible to be good at both. We also seem to have this notion that the people in the high-level creative roles should intentionally stay away from any production-related responsibilities or concerns, and that producers should really keep their noses out of the creative aspects of a project.

Why is that? Why does it work for TV but not for games? Is it really something systemic to the way games are made? Is it a historical artifact of old thinking that just hasn't evolved?