Morning DLC: Video Game News & Rumors 2/19/2016

"Many times, people working on games have the attitude “everyone knows that everyone can write and it’s cheap and easy and we can just do something later,” she said. But a writer can bring more to the table.“Yes, part of what we do is the word bits… it’s not just that, it’s not just the writing. I think that word scuppers us a bit in this industry,” she said.“What a writer can do is very similar to what a designer can do — they can world build, they can use the environment, gameplay, and mechanics to help build the world, and seed the narrative in the game, and help the world feel cohesive,” Pratchett argued.“Story flows through everything… and everything should support the story. Writers are very good at looking at all the parts of the game and seeing how everything could support the story.”"

Integrated Narrative Writing For Games

Rhianna Pratchett has been making the rounds as she expresses her own words of wisdom she has gained from working in the video game world as a freelance writer. From the quotes above and in other articles, Rhianna Pratchett effuses about the way the writing process in games can work to create better narratives all around the games industry.

You hear it often from many developers and publishers that the importance of story in games is overrated. Just look at games like Titanfall, Battlefront, Evolve, and others which forego the story points to jump you right into the multiplayer. Yet, with each of those releases the main complaints about them are their lack of anything tangible to hold onto or propel you forward outside of a natural want to compete with others.

Titanfall changed its tune when it realized how few gamers they held onto after launch and how many more they may have kept engaged with some kind of real story line. Maybe more games will have this realization and hopefully they will heed some of the words of Ms. Pratchett as they look into it.

"“On this subject, I’m so encouraged about the growth trajectory and the positive trajectory of this industry when it comes to diversity,” Gallagher said. “If you look at what our industry currently represents, we have 22 percent of the jobs in our industry held by women. Now in other parts of tech sector, it’s dramatically lower. It’s in the mid-teens. Now that’s not good enough and we know it’s not good enough.”Gallagher noted that within the 180 institutions of the Higher Education Video Game Alliance, 31 percent of the students enrolled in their video game programs are women."

Michael Gallagher speaks on future diversity in games

For those who look at the diversity of the major studios of today and notice the lack of female talent that is often trotted out, here are some encouraging stats for you all. The number of women enrolled in video game programs is effectively double what it is for engineering as a whole at the university level.

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Now, if only Michael Gallagher could also address the elephant in the room: sexism. It sure is great that future generations will have more women in development, but just having more women study the industry and how to get inside will not solve the issues surrounding women in tech, in general, or women in games, specifically. Let’s not view diversity as simply a numbers game. Diversity issues arise from a lack of empathy and understanding of others. It is not simply the result of not enough people being interested.

"All five Tales from the Borderlands episodes will be bundled up for a physical release on April.The retail version launches on April 21 in Australia and New Zealand, and April 26 in North America. Expect European release somewhere around the same time."

I think that about sums it up for what you can expect from Tales of the Borderlands in the future. The physical release follows in the same footsteps as the Walking Dead game before it. Telltale must do pretty well in selling these physical copies of their downloadable titles. They do the physical release a lot more often these days.

"The nanostructured glass the data is written to has a 360TB capacity, and thermal stability up to 1000 degrees Celsius. At temperatures below 190 degrees, the data will last for 13.8 billion years. The glass changes the way light passes through it, and the different polarizations can be read by an optical microscope and a polarizer. University of Southampton writes:“Coined as the ‘Superman memory crystal’, as the glass memory has been compared to the ‘memory crystals’ used in the Superman films, the data is recorded via self-assembled nanostructures created in fused quartz. The information encoding is realised in five dimensions: the size and orientation in addition to the three dimensional position of these nanostructures.”"

New Experimental 5D Memory Chip Means Video Games 4 Evah!

I first heard about these new 5D memory chips a week or so ago and I wondered how it could possibly apply to other items beyond the lasting legacy of books and journal entries. It seems the chips would also be able to store video games on them.

The real question is: How would whatever form of life exists those years into the future be able to actually extract or play the data that exists on these chips? Personally, I can’t wait until we can put these things to work in phones or consoles. Definitely would not have to worry about deleting items to make space anymore!

That’s your morning DLC as we head into the weekend. Happy Friday, Readers!