Wootfly

Apologies for the radio silence again this year. Things have been busy and difficult here and I’m trying to resolve them as fast as I can to allow me the time to keep doing the wootfly.tv chats.

I’ll keep you posted.

Happy Christmas to everyone who’s found any interest in Wootfly.tv since it started a couple of long months ago. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Apologies for being quiet of late - real life gets in the way from time to time. I will make it a resolution to do better next year.

All the season’s best to you and yours from me and mine.

Over & out

I’m certain that most of you regulars will be thankful that I haven’t done any of my early weekly roundup monologues recently. The reason is that I’ve just been too busy doing my day job (helping Developers promote their games) and annotating the videos I did while I was last in the US. I love doing wootfly chats and believe passionately about promoting the talent within the industry and connecting the creators with the consumers without any filtering in between. But paying the bills has to come first!

I’d far rather buy products off of either someone I know, or someone who has been reccomended to me by someone I know. People connect with people, not things. Brands spend millions personifying themselves to make us consumers connect emotionally and engage with them. But in videogames, the people who make the games are eclipsed by the people that fund and market them. Yet in the socially connected age, we want our information from the horse’s mouth, not the other end. I don’t want to be told about the sequel to Limbo by some faceless PR horse’s ass, I want to hear it from the Playdead guys themselves.

The more we know, understand the motivation of and support the videogame talent, the better games we’ll see emerging. I believe that. If you do too - PLEASE Like wootfly.tv on facebook and twitter. Its a noble cause.

I have been in North America for the past few weeks. The keen eyed amongst you may have noticed. I flew into Los Angeles and have been to San Diego, Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, and Las Vegas as well. This weekend I’m off to Palm Springs with my lovely (and patient) girlfriend to recover with a wet towel over my face. Its been exhausting but I have chatted to a whole load of interesting people from a variety of Developers. They all share a passion and enthusiasm for videogames in all their forms - from point and click adventures to versus fighters and platformers.

I had the huge pleasure of chatting to both Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert at length one evening in Pasadena courtesy of my friend Zack Karlsson who introduced me. They were nice enough to take a break from eating pizza and playing on 70’s videogames cabinets and I enjoyed it immensely. I’ll be posting those videos when I get back to the UK at the end of next week.

Once again, wootfly.tv only really works if people watch it. So please visit the wootfly.tv facebook page, send me comments (trying for Jeff Minter, thanks for the suggestion) and any feedback you have. If I don’t personally know them I’m one step of seperation at maximum from any videogame creative. And send me any questions you have. I want to make this as interesting and as interactive as I can. Its not The Actor’s Studio!

Sorry no end of week roundup from me recently - or today even. I look like crap and an under no illusion that no one cares about the voice behind all this. I don’t actually make games (though I do play a role in getting them made) and I know the ‘talent’ in the industry doesn’t include me!

Enjoy your weekend wherever you are.

Over and out.