“Kotaku was a little-known, little-read blog in Gawker Media’s online publishing empire until Brian Crecente transformed it into the PR-terrorizing powerhouse it is today,” writes GamePro senior editor Sid Shuman. “Crecente brought investigative grit and a healthy disregard for the rules to the blog’s blitzkrieg coverage of video games and gaming culture.” There’s an interview with Crecente as well in which he discusses his career, game writing and the year 2015 among other topics. Check it out and congrats to The Provocateur.

20 Most Influential People in Gaming: #20 – Brian Crecente [GamePro] [Pic]

Take us out, Rockapella!

Harai, author of ‘Break from the Pack: How to Compete in a Copycat Economy, will be joined by a slew of other industry folks and journalists. Yes, game journalists:

Cammie Dunaway, executive vice president of sales and marketing, Nintendo of America, Inc
Jeff Bell, corporate vice president of global marketing, Interactive Entertainment Business, Microsoft
Peter Moore, president of EA Sport
Michael Pachter, managing director, research, Wedbush Morgan Securities
Jason Holtman, director of business development, Valve Software
N’Gai Croal, Newsweek
Daniel Sieberg, CBS News
Geoff Keighley, Spike TV
Brian Crecente, Kotaku.com.

Hey! I know that last guy! I sure hope everyone knows to not say anything around him, I hear he’s a blogger.

NEW YORK, March 25 /PRNewswire/ — 1UP Network, the recognised leader
in print and online videogame content, announced today that celebrated
author, Dr. Oren Harari, will be headlining a stellar lineup of speakers at
the 11th Annual Electronic Gaming Summit. The Electronic Gaming Summit,
held May 19-21, 2008 in Napa, Calif., is the only event of its kind to
provide a platform for leading videogame industry influencers and top-level
executives to learn, network, and exchange ideas about the gaming culture
and its future.

The 2008 Electronic Gaming Summit boasts presentations from an array of
elite videogame industry and non-industry leaders, who through their vast
knowledge, experiences and business visions, will share invaluable insight
on hot-button gaming-related issues and trends. In addition to Dr. Harari,
author of ‘Break from the Pack: How to Compete in a Copycat Economy,’
Summit speakers include such key business players as Cammie Dunaway,
executive vice president of sales and marketing, Nintendo of America, Inc.;
Jeff Bell, corporate vice president of global marketing, Interactive
Entertainment Business, Microsoft Corp.; Peter Moore, president of EA
Sports; Michael Pachter, managing director, research, Wedbush Morgan
Securities; Jason Holtman, director of business development, Valve
Software; Beth Simone-Noveck, professor of law, director, Institute for
Information Law and Policy, Democracy Design Workshop; Tanya Giles, senior
vice president, research and planning, MTV Networks Entertainment Group;
and a panel of prominent journalists that cover the gaming industry
including N’Gai Croal, Newsweek, Daniel Sieberg, CBS News, Geoff Keighley,
Spike TV, and Brian Crecente, Kotaku.com.

“From the inception of the Electronic Gaming Summit, this event has
been the gaming industry touchstone for uncovering key trends and
generating forward thinking,” states Jason Young, CEO, Ziff Davis Media.
“This year’s diverse lineup of speakers truly continues the prestigious
reputation of this event. Through their varied backgrounds and specialties,
their presentations will no doubt enlighten minds, open important dialogues
within the industry, and cultivate new ideas. I can’t wait to hear what
this great group of minds has to say!”

The theme of this year’s Electronic Gaming Summit is 1:1, exemplifying
what the focus is of this unique event, as it is defined in many different
ways — the meeting of individuals face to face, the opportunity to have
direct, focused communication, and the current industry genesis as the
birth of the next-generation consoles translates into continuous growth and
opportunities.

To check out what the 1UP Network is all about, please log on to
http://www.1up.com. For more information about the 1UP Network, please log
on to http://1upnetwork.ziffdavis.com.

The group covers a variety of topics, including the responsibility of a game journalist, the role of the reporter versus that of a critic, the impact that the emerging casual game market is having on game journalism, and one question from an anonymous contributor about the pay structure of gaming sites. One of the most interesting discussions, though, surrounded the influence giving a score to a game has on not only the game, but whether people will read the article:

“I hate game scores”, Crecente said. He cited a film reviewer’s quote that if you put a letter or score on a review, no one will actually read it. Keighley agreed that the score-driven culture bothers him because the industry views the score as “objective”. “You never hear someone say [that] about a music album”, he noted.

On the other hand, I’d think that the game score means a lot to the game industry, since that number (or letter, thanks to 1UP) may be what makes or breaks someone’s interest in the game. Those scores are also a factor for advertisers when looking around at what games and publishers to support. Having that score could potentially be what gives other games from a publisher or franchise a future. The rest of the discussion is definitely worth taking a look at.

Best of GDC: The Game Industry Confronts The Press [Gamasutra]

For the record, I would never go to a talk about me… unless I was invited. Nora Paul, with the University of Minnesota school of journalism’s Institute of New Media Studies, emailed me over the weekend to clue me in to the talk she was doing entitled: “Being Brian Crecente: Using an Off-The-Shelf Role-Playing Game to Teach Journalism.”

Actually, the whole name thing really was a last minute add-on. It sounds like Paul had been working on the idea, introducing college-level would-be journalists to the profession through a video game, for a number of years.

After playing around with a couple of different concepts, Paul said she saw a presentation Kurt Squire did about how he and his team made an American Revolution mod for Neverwinter Nights.

Paul scraped together some grant money and 20 copies of Neverwinter Nights. Using a pool of student assistants, and consultant Matt Taylor, Paul and her team rewrote the dialog trees and reworked the graphics for Neverwinter Nights to make it match their goals.

“The course objectives was to teach information gathering, synthesis and analysis,” she said. “We wanted the game to let them practice (journalism) and find out the implications of their choices.

“The idea was to develop a game that would reinforce good reporting practices.”

In the game, the players take on the role of a reporter (no, not me) who is covering an accident in which a train carrying anhydrous ammonia hits a truck and derails, forcing the evacuation of the surrounding neighborhood.

“We had to create the city…22 different characters,” she said.

Students had to figure out what story angle they wanted to take, covering the health, public safety, transportation safety or environmental issues, before getting started. Once they figured that out that have to identify the important questions, collect the necessary background information, find the right sources and interview them, keep notes, and eventually return to the newsroom to write and file a story to the paper’s website.

When Paul contacted me over the weekend, she asked what my take was on reporting, what important things had I learned over my years as a police report. I gave her three key lessons, which she included in her presentation and, in some sense, the game mod.

Treat people like you want to be treated.

This is one of the most important things you can learn not only in journalism, but in life. Treat people like crap and you’ll get a double dose of it in return. I was happy to learn that Paul’s mod incorporates attitude a bit. The game allows the questions to take essentially four forms.

They can can come from a cocky journalist, a very competent reporter, a ditzy journalist or someone so tentative that they don’t seem to know what they were doing.

Don’t rely on the officials.
Paul said this was a tricky, but important thing to incorporate into the game. They had to make it possible for a reporter to get conflicting information from different sources and then figure out what the real, and full story is.

If your mother tells you she loves you, check it out.

A famous journalism chestnut, that couldn’t be more important. No matter who tells you something, never assume it’s right, check and double check everything. Something that seems ingrained in the journalism training mod.

While Paul and her students seemed to like the mod, she said that Bioware didn’t really cooperate much with their effort, making it nearly impossible to roll out the program to more students or larger classes. So Paul decided to transition the mod over to a different program.

Now Paul’s team is working with Pine Tech’s Johnson Simulation Center and a program they have called MULE.

I loved the concept of turning journalism into a video game. Funny enough, years ago when I was still a full-time police reporter I was contacted by a fairly sizable development studio who were playing around with the idea of creating a mainstream game about being a police reporter. They asked me about consulting for them.

That never went anywhere, but I’ve long thought that in many ways being a reporter, in particular a police reporter, is a lot like being in a role-playing game. You need to explore, talk to people, figure things out. I think that could be made into a great game.

If only the little sewn man were wearing a bird on his shirt, Crecente could have some sort of a case during litigation. As for now he’ll have to settle for something like unlimited anime patches that look like him, which while not a bad prize (hell, sounds great to me), won’t put little Tristen through four years at Harvard.

SCHOOL RUMBLE HARIMA PATCH [gee] Thanks Mooseferatu!

We finally got the whole thing figured out and tested about ten minutes before doors were set to open at 6 p.m. Five minutes after six I was still standing in an open room, starting to think that perhaps I had over estimated the interest in a local Child’s Play fund raiser… but then the booking manager came up and asked if she should start letting people in.

“People? You mean there are people?”

Turns out there was a line, a line that didn’t really dissipate until closer to when the event ended at 10 p.m. In fact at one point they had to stop letting people in because we had exceeded the 142 fire code capacity for the back room… by a lot I suspect.

Attendees included members of the local Game Developers Association, people from the local studios (I talked to people from SOE Denver and NetDevil and suspect Idol Minds was in the house as well) and a lot more readers then I had thought would make it. One couple drove the 100 miles or so from Pueblo to attend, even getting a room for the night in Denver. Wow.

The entire night was spent watching people up on stage playing Rock Band, something that never seems to get old, especially when a light system and concert sound is involved. There were some amazing singers, guitarists and drummers there last night, including not a few expert level players.

I ended up giving out the schwag over the course of the event, and even got a few on-site donations of stuff from Game Daily and Dave Thomas (who snuck a free copy of the Videogame Style Guide into his donation). About 9 p.m. I gave away that amazingly cuddly Companion Cube, but not before giving it a big hug. (For the record Luke, I did not have sex with that Companion Cube.)

The winner, Mike Kappus, of Broomfield, took to the stage and admitted he had no idea what a Companion Cube was, and then shouted out to the audience that he would sell it to the first taker for $US 50, which he wanted to go to the fund raiser. The first-taker, Erik Rieger, of Denver, ended up giving $US 80 to Child’s Play and then hoisted it above his head with a bit of a maniacal look in his eyes… I told him that the cake was in the other room and we all had a good laugh.

It was a good time for a good cause and I can’t thank the people who came enough for helping to make this happen. Thanks again to Robert Workman for the donations, taking pictures for me and helping out on the stage and to the NetDevil folks for donating a ton of LEGOs, which were shipped direct to Brooklyn for Joel’s Funde Razor.

I’ll be posting an update later today with the final amount raised from the Denver event and more photos, but we definitely topped $US 1000. Joel tells me his Brooklyn event blew away past Funde Razors.

PS. Send any pics you may have taken at the event and we’ll add them to our gallery.

Big, big thanks to Phillip, Robert and others for the snaps!

Funde Razor

Hope to see some of you there. For those of you planning on attending in Denver, it runs from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. and you’ll need to be 21 or older to get in. The cover is a $US 10 minimum donation.

The ticket gets you, besides a warm fuzzy feeling inside, a door prize ticket. I’m bringing a mountain of swag with me to the fund raiser to give away including the Manhunt 2 straitjacket, one of those Wii bags from E3 06, a Metal Gear Solid multi-tool knife, a Lair lighter, a Valut Boy Fallout 3 bobble head, Zelda hourglass and more shirts than I want to even think about. We will also have a Limited Edition copy of Rock Band for the 360 on hand to giveaway and, of course, that life-sized companion cube.

If you’re planning to attend the Brooklyn Funde Razor hit up the official site for the details.

Why? Well because that’s when we’re doing the first ever local Funde Razor here in Denver. For those of you planning on attending in Denver, it runs from 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. and you’ll need to be 21 or older to get in. The cover is a $US 10 minimum donation.

The ticket gets you, besides a warm fuzzy feeling inside, a door prize ticket. I’m bringing a mountain of swag with me to the fund raiser to give away including the Manhunt 2 straitjacket, one of those Wii bags from E3 06, a Metal Gear Solid multi-tool knife, a Lair lighter, a Vault Boy Fallout 3 bobble head, Zelda hourglass and more shirts than I want to even think about. We will also have a Limited Edition copy of Rock Band for the 360 on hand to giveaway and, of course, that life-sized companion cube.

If you’re planning to attend the Brooklyn Funde Razor hit up the official site for the details.

Now, attendees of the upcoming GDC Serious Games Summit will have the chance to learn just how he does it. In the presentation “Being Brian Crecente: Using an Off-The-Shelf Role Playing Game to Teach Journalism”, by University of Minnesota’s Nora Paul, you too can learn the secrets of Brian’s bird shirt, his blinding smile and most importantly, his hidden obsession with writing talent Mark Wilson.

So what’s weird about this presentation? Brian didn’t even know it was happening. As in, Brian was checking out the GDC presentation website and spotted it. And then he ran to tell us all but was stopped short, his head too big to fit through the door of his office.

Serious Games Summit [gdc]