Ego: Unstoppable

Time to take a moment out of my flu to become temporarily invincible by absorbing this massive power-up from Australian game magazine PC PowerPlay:

A full two-page review in the actual games section of an honest-to-god print magazine. Not only that, but they gave us a bloody 9 out of 10. And somehow I got my own damn fact box. I’m almost famous among a small subset of hard core Australian gamers! I could basically take a walk on the water across the bay to Amager right now, I’m so psyched. The mag’s online editor promised to send me a copy of the issue free of charge so I can use it for some sort of trophy display.

And that’s not all. GameSetWatch just posted the interview they did with Larry and me a bit over a month ago, Making Mods and Taking Names. It turned out pretty well, except the beginning is a bit confusing. He managed to squeeze some interesting points out of us. I especially like this part:

TNM is probably one of the most meta games I’ve played. Would you like to explain a bit about what you were trying to accomplish with the mod?

Jonas: Initially, we just wanted to do something we hadn’t seen anybody else do before – a game set in a giant metaphor for an Internet forum seemed like a pretty original idea. As we experimented more with the concept and grew more familiar with our own setting, it became obvious that TNM was ripe with opportunities for intra- and intertextuality and self-reference. There was a period when I was looking for ways to imbue TNM with some sort of cultural relevance, because it felt like we were spiralling down towards self-indulgent irrelevance, and going meta seemed like the best way to realize the potential of our setting. I just hope we managed to pull it off without seeming too smugly pseudo-intellectual.

But really, I’m just proud to have been interviewed on the sister site of GamaSutra.