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By Simon Carless

Round-Up: Gamasutra Network Jobs, Week Of January 8

In our latest employment-specific round-up, we highlight some of the notable jobs posted in big sister site Gamasutra's industry-leading game jobs section this week, including positions from Bungie, Sledgehammer Games and more.

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

2K Marin: Multiplayer Systems Designer
"2K Marin is looking for a dedicated, passionate and personable Multiplayer Systems Designer to join us on an exciting unannounced project. As a Multiplayer Systems Designer, you'll be in charge of taking high level goals and translating them into game systems and moment-to-moment experiences."

Relic Entertainment: Senior Director of Development
"The Senior Director of Development executes the developmental strategy of the studio in accordance with the GM and THQ’s strategic and tactical objectives. Responsible for ensuring project development achieves operating objectives and financial goals; ensuring development efficiency and product timeliness, and otherwise ensuring consistency and process improvements across projects."

BungiePlayer Investment Design Lead
"Do you dream about creating worlds imbued with real value and consequence? Can you find the fine line between a reward that encourages players to have fun and an incentive that enslaves them? Can you devise a way for a player to grow while preserving a delicate game balance? If you answered yes to these questions (and you are a creative genius, a charismatic visionary and a work-a-holic game-o-phile) you might want to polish up your resume and apply to be Bungie’s next Player Investment Design Lead."

LucasArts: Sr. Core/PS3 Engineer
"LucasArts is looking for a Sr. Core/PS3 Engineer. Ideally we are looking for a senior level generalist with strong knowledge of low-level optimizations and heavy expertise on some of the core subsystems. You should be very knowledgeable on the PS3 console, & SPU's, GPU's etc. We are working on new, as yet unannounced projects & are looking for Senior staff, with recent experience shipping games on PS3."

Sledgehammer Games: Tools Engineer
"Check out our brand new studio, headed up by industry veterans Glen Schofield as Vice President and GM and Michael Condrey as Vice President and COO, the leaders of the Dead Space franchise. They are joined at Sledgehammer Games by many award winning developers from across the industry. Sledgehammer Games is actively recruiting top industry talent to join their development team."

To browse hundreds of similar jobs, and for more information on searching, responding to, or posting game industry-relevant jobs to the top source for jobs in the business, please visit Gamasutra's job board now.

By IndieGames.com - The Weblog

Round-Up: Gamasutra Network Jobs, Week Of January 8

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

By Simon Carless

Round-Up: Gamasutra Network Jobs, Week Of December 11

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

Guerrilla Games: Lighting Artist
"Ready to set Guerrilla alight with your awesome lighting skills? As a member of the lighting team, you will collaborate with level designers and environment artists to literally light the way for gamers, so they can enjoy our games to their fullest. You will work with our cutting-edge deferred rendering engine, adding lighting to levels and cut scenes using both real-time and pre-rendered solutions. You will take concepts created by our visual design team and turn them into reality within our levels, working closely with the art director to ensure that our vision is achieved."

Blizzard Entertainment: Dungeon Artist, World of Warcraft
"Blizzard Entertainment is seeking exceptionally talented dungeon artists for our World of Warcraft team. You should have extensive experience modeling and texturing diverse game environments across a broad visual range, applying a solid grasp of form, color, and light. Senior applicants must possess a variety of skills, including illustration, modeling, texturing, animation, and concept drawing. The ideal applicant will work well in an environment of peers, providing motivation and inspiration to others, while displaying a strong passion for making great games."

Edge of Reality: Systems Engineer
"Edge of Reality is a veteran cross platform console studio based in Austin, Texas. Most recently, we worked closely with BioWare to release Dragon Age PS3 & 360. We also work with The Sims Studio, a part of the EA Play label on various projects. We have been fortunate enough to be part of several hit titles. As a result of this success, the studio has a stable future. Edge of Reality is completely independent. As such, we are free to work with any publisher, on any platform."

Koei Canada: CG Animator
"As a CG Animator, you will be working primarily on character animation for our current project "Warriors: Legends of Troy" with our CG and Development staff. You are able to meet deadlines, be responsible for the work given to you, and as a result be involved to see the project through to completion. As it is an action game, you are interested in the action genre of games. The ability to communicate in both English and Japanese is required."

By IndieGames.com - The Weblog

Round-Up: Gamasutra Network Jobs, Week Of December 11

Each position posted by employers will appear on the main Gamasutra job board, and appear in the site's daily and weekly newsletters, reaching our readers directly.

It will also be cross-posted for free across its network of submarket sites, which includes content sites focused on online worlds, cellphone games, 'serious games', independent games and more.

Some of the notable jobs posted this week include:

By costik

Tales of the Arabian Nights

Tales of the Arabian Nights, originally published by West End Games in 1985, has recently been published in a new edition by Z-Man Games. It is, in its own way, an important game.

It's a "paragraph-system boardgame," a genre that had a brief spate of popularity in the early 80s, and while it is not the first such game (Barbarian Prince, among others, predates it) it is perhaps the most polished and interesting game of its type.

The basic concept behind the paragraph-system boardgame is that at times while playing an overarching boardgame, a player is asked to read a paragraph from an accompanying book, then make a decision and possibly apply some game systems to branch to another paragraph, and so on. Once this little mini-adventure is complete, play returns to the boardgame itself. Thus, while a paragraph-system boardgame is related from a systems perspective to choose-your-own-ending books and solo RPG adventures, it provides greater variety of encounter, and greater potential for replay, because story elements are not always encountered in the same linear fashion, and because the boardgame elements may themselves provide strategic challenges exterior to the stories.

You can think of this style of game, in fact, as a precursor to quest-driven MMOs, which similarly have small embedded narratives within a larger game structure.

The innovative aspects of Tales of the Arabian Nights are twofold; first, the mini-adventures are purposefully written so that the same set of events and possibilities can be reused with a wide variety of different characters, situations, and protagonists (e.g., different variables can be plugged into the story arc), providing far greater variety of encounter than most similar games; and secondly, this is a competitive, multiplayer game rather than a single-player one (which most games of this and related styles are).

In other words, Tales is an attempt to solve the difficult problem of reconciling the incompatible demands of narrative and the game in an original and unique way, and as such, deserves study by anyone interested in the problem of interactive narrative.

Full disclosure: I have collaborated with Eric Goldberg on many projects, and Z-Man Games will be publishing MegaCorps, an upcoming game of my design.

By Simon Carless

Da Chip: Daft Punk Chiptune Cover Album

French micromusician Je Deviens Dj En 3 Jours organized and put out Da Chip, a compilation album featuring "the music of Daft Punk revisited on vintage game systems".

The release features chiptune covers for eleven songs from the electronic duo's catalog, including "One More Time" (Microchip), "Short Circuit" (Random), and "Around the World" (The Listrix). There are also nearly a dozen separate bonus tracks, such as "Harder Better Faster Stronger" (Recodd) and "Da Funk" (Average Composer).

You can grab Da Chip for free from the album's official site, which is an eyesore but worth enduring for the download.

[Via Offworld]

By Simon Carless

COLUMN: ‘Game Mag Weaseling’: Famitsu for Grown-Ups

['Game Mag Weaseling' is a weekly column by Kevin Gifford which documents the history of video game magazines, from their birth in the early '80s to the current day.]

I finally got around to obtaining a copy of Japanese entertainment (including video games) magazine Otona-Fami when I was in Chicago, so I thought I'd look into it in depth a bit -- especially because it's the sort of mag that we were aiming for with PiQ, although I wasn't aware of it at the time.

The name "Otona-Fami" is a blending of otona (Japanese for "adult") and "Famitsu," and that about sums it up, really. In contrast to Weekly Famitsu -- whose pages are still mainly devoted to previews and strategy features, although the amount of hard-nosed industry news has slowly expanded over the years -- Otona-Fami is almost entirely features, and even what straight-on previews/reviews they deal with are mixed up with the regular columns in the back sections.

Here is a very basic rundown of Otona-Fami's content for the issue I have:

- A large roundup of entertainment-industry rumors and the truth behind them, in fields ranging from movies to American TV dramas to anime and games
- A multi-page nostalgic look back at the history of Shogakukan's grade-divided educational kids' magazines -- the equivalent of a US mag doing a history of Boys' Life
- A long preview of Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth with a long sidebar that traces the history of the rest of the series
- A history of Kappa Ebisen and the Home Run Bar, two long-running Japanese snack foods that are celebrating their Nth birthday this year
- A generic sort of summer movie preview feature, covering stuff like Angels & Demons and Star Trek. Otona-Fami got interview access to all kinds of big-name folks for this feature, from Jackie Chan and Ewan MacGregor to Danny Boyle and Clint Eastwood
- A multi-page history of portable game systems

I haven't seen the latest August issue yet, but looking at the website, they have a feature which strikes me as a really neat idea: a list of top manga that's complete and under 10 volumes, suitable for buying up and plowing through over a spare weekend.

Running columns include:

- "Magic Factory Tour," basically a "How It's Made" for some food product
- A look at some uniquely Japanese shop that you can visit. This month they cover a store that sells nothing but book lights, metal bookmarks and other book accessories (and not books themselves)
- A good 20-page-long list of upcoming movies, games, DVDs and manga

Throughout the magazine are small one-page interviews with idols, movie directors, whatever, covering a product they're either shilling or otherwise really interested in.

What's all this content targeted toward? Well, looking at the list above, it doesn't take a sociologist to see: It's aimed mainly at men and women in their late 20s or 30s, people who grew up surrounded by '80s/'90s culture and still enjoy games and action flicks but have run out of time to follow any of their old hobbies in depth.

Otona-Fami does a great job at what it sets out to do, and it really is just like PiQ, assuming that PiQ had a dozen editors and that many contributors on top. But does this product really have an audience? That's the question. Enterbrain, the publisher, has run the magazine since 2004 and claims a printed circulation of 100,000, but like all Japanese circ figures, the relationship this numeral shares with reality is anyone's guess. (Weekly Famitsu has a claimed circ of half a million.)

While I'm not sure anybody is going to use Otona-Fami as a primary source of information, it does succeed in being interesting to read in many spots -- which is over half the battle these days, if you're going to ask people to pay for your content.

[Kevin Gifford breeds ferrets and runs Magweasel, a really cool weblog about games and Japan and "the industry" and things. In his spare time he does writing and translation for lots and lots of publishers and game companies.]