So IndieCade’s Sam Roberts just reminded me of this, and I felt bad that I hadn’t mentioned it here sooner, but then I realized they hadn’t blogged it yet either. [edit - This was a lie! They did blog it, just at their new website, with my 'tough-guy' photo & all!] Either way! Back in November when I was spending a few weeks in NYC, I sat down with Charles Pratt & Noah Sasso (he of soon-to-be Miracle Adventures in 2113 renown) at the legendary and now sadly defunct Ariyoshi for an hour long talk for Another Castle (direct MP3 link).

If you haven’t yet added Another Castle to your podcast rotation, you should do so now. It’s one of the very few I follow regularly, not least because it’s more or less the smartest of all gaming-related broadcasts — Charles semi-jokingly called it the ‘Charlie Rose‘ of games podcasts, but I think that’s actually pretty apt.

Anyway, the metadata description for the episode reads like this:

The chairman of the Independent Games Festival and former editor of Offworld talks to us about his long, off and on relationship with games, as well as his plans for IGF and beyond.

and, having recorded it nearly six months ago and not listened to it since it was aired, I can’t fully recall what more I can add about it, other than (again, as Sam reminded me) a total diversion into how I first became acquainted with the Church of the SubGenius and the massive impact that had on my future.

Have a listen to it now to hear how that’s at all relevant to anything, but be warned that it probably isn’t at all! And then subscribe to the whole thing and dig back through the archives, because there’s really, really good chats with people like Frank Lantz, Richard Lemarchand, John Sharp, Adam Saltsman, Andy Nealen, Steve Gaynor, and a whole slew of other names that should definitely mean something to you if they don’t already.

Wait, so I hear there was a Game Developers Conference this year? This is all I remember:

I ate spaghetti with Eric Chahi.

I did a microtalk (watch at top, watch the rest here), my first to the wider games industry & not just an “indie/choir preaching” audience, and it made a girl cry (mission accomplished!).

I introduced the IGF Awards Ceremony and didn’t totally screw it up (despite doing kilos of illicit drugs in the green room with Tim Schafer).

Robert Ashley dropped a desiccated orange peel straight from his mouth into my wine and it was delicious.

I was very happy to receive a wicked Super Crate Box poster (now on my wall) (I think I was reeling a bit from that Ashley’s-Surprise Sangria).

Eric Chahi gave the best talk of GDC, including the best anecdote of GDC (Eric Chahi & the Infinite Fax), which you can watch in its entirety for free here.

I bought artwork by both Maré Odomo (see that here) & Derek Yu (above, click to zoom super-big), from Giant Robot.

And then I woke up at sunset and it was time to go home?! Here’s looking forward to next year, then.

I probably definitely should’ve mentioned this sooner, if only because it’s the first time I’ve ever appeared in something hard-bound, but last October, as I was on a train to Nottingham for GameCity, 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die was released in the states.

I ended up writing somewhere around a whopping 1% of the book, while the rest of the duties were heroically covered by too many awesome names to list here, and all edited together by Tony Mott. I ended up on a parcel of games you’ve probably seen me write about a thousand times before, but now you can read about them again in a volume heavy enough to double as a blunt trauma murder weapon.

Here’s the quick guide to where my stuff lives, once you buy it, which you can do over here!

Chibi-Robo: p. 606; Edge: p. 835; Bonsai Barber: p. 842; Eliss: p. 860; Noby Noby Boy: p. 867; Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure: p. 888; Scribblenauts: p. 918; Zen Bound: p. 926

In August of this year, the organizers of Australia’s Freeplay games festival very kindly invited both Adam Saltsman and I to come and be their 2010 keynote speakers (aka international men of indie game importance). We obviously accepted and, after an all-day flight of screaming babies and marathon Clash of Heroes multiplayer, we touched down under in beautiful Melbourne.

Adam’s speech — which you can see over here — was fantastically and meticulously well-researched and spoke to the true universality of not just games but play, which doesn’t just pre-date formal game design but, like, man itself, and anyway was pretty eye-opening and mind-expanding and inspiring.

For my part, well, after a day and a half holed up in my hotel room subsisting on little more than a steady stream of tea and Tim Tams, I managed to emerge with what you can now view above.

It’s probably still a bit half-baked (I revised and expanded on it a bit for a talk at the most recent IndieCade), even built upon a message I’ve been trying to spread all year, but I think the soul-bearing sentiment’s still there. It’s as much a call for diversity (honest) as earlier, shorter talks, as it is a call for, well, sentimentality, honesty, humanity — putting more raw “you-ness” in your games — and also a short slice of Indie History as I understand it, and also there’s some junk in there about me and girls.

Anyway: it’s about an hour altogether, split into four parts, so you’ll want some cocoa and/or Tim Tams while you watch, and maybe you’ll want to skip the Q&A at the end (if it’s in there, I’m too frightened to watch), where I think I shrink further and further behind the podium at the prospect of trying to come up with clever things to say on the spot in front of a large audience. I write for a reason! (The reason is I’m a terrible extemporaneous speaker.)

Also, as a bonus, I’ll embed the two video clips I show toward the end after the cut, and also include two extra photos (including one chicken) from the audience (thanks to Polymonkey and Hiperactivo for those).

With a vastly different audience than my first talk, I knew I couldn’t — as I was invited to do — simply repeat my GDC Indie Rant, so I decided to laser-target the crowd in the room that night: Austinites, and more specifically, Austin developers who very probably weren’t working in and/or had little familiarity with the indie world.

I’ll let the now fully-annotated slides speak for themselves, but note that this is the first appearance of My Magritte Joke, which I almost hesitate to include here because I’m still using it in speeches, and it still gets the biggest laff, and I don’t want to wear it too thin. Too late now!

P.S.: if you have photos/audio or even (!) video of the talks that night, let me know! Anyway, OK, here we go:

Hey everybody, I’m Brandon, used to write for Gamasutra and Edge, and then founded Offworld, and just last week I was named chairman of Indie Games Festival.

So, originally, I wanted to do a talk about the overall cycle the games industry has gone through since its very beginning, and I wanted to start –

just a little bit south of where we are right now, with Richard Garriott — right at the dawn of computer games.

I’m sure everyone here knows the legend —

– how he built his empire (and a bitchin’ castle), starting as a teenager, one self-sealed ziploc bag at a time.

And in thinking about this, I’ve realized there are a lot of interesting parallels to be drawn between how games have grown up and how the music industry has progressed —

In the early 80s we were able to sell games on cassettes, reproduce them and distribute them in small numbers on our own, as people did in the music biz — this tape on the right spawned an entire independent music movement called C86, where tiny labels grew up publishing their own cassettes –

And there was even a real brief stint where games moved into vinyl, mostly as a novelty, like this Thompson Twins adventure game that came on a 7” record–

Anyway, you see where I’m going here, how both games and music moved to CDs and beyond — but doing this concept justice was ultimately outside the scope of a 5 minute talk.

But thinking about Garriott and Austin game development in particular got me thinking about someone else –

this guy, who will be speaking later — Harvey Smith.

Back in 2006, when I first started at Gamasutra, I interviewed Harvey, and he said something that’s still resonated with me to this day–

This part right here, “OK, we know how to model gunplay”. Every time I re-read it, I hear it with a little more exasperation. OK, OH-KAY, we KNOW how to model GUNPLAY.

Why aren’t we testing the waters in a new area? Why aren’t we approaching games as Romeo & Juliet rather than Lord of the Rings–

And thinking about this directly led me to something else I observed when I was at Gamasutra. We used to run this column called Media Consumption, where we’d ask developers what they were listening to, watching, reading, playing.

It was a great, illuminating, idea, but time and time again–

We’d get the same fucking answers back. People were watching Star Wars. They were watching Lord of the Rings. Or Battlestar Galactica. Or just name whichever sci-fi/fantasy property.

Only VERY rarely you’d get an answer back that was a complete surprise–

like this one, recommending this amazing Miranda July movie over everything else.

So, any guesses as to who made this left-field shout out?

Of course, it was Tim Schafer, who’s done more over the past couple decades to push character and humanity and obviously humor in games than nearly anyone else.

But so, I’m not here to knock sci-fi or fantasy — I love my Joseph Campbell as much as the next guy — but I do think the fixation is contributing to one of the industry’s much-discussed core problems, a stagnation where games are continually about THIS GUY, over and over again.

And so what I’m calling for is more media literacy from people who make games, because honestly–

we have literally one of the finest institutions in the WORLD for this — three of them — right here in town. I implore you to use it not only to see Iron Man 2 or Kick Ass, but to stray WAY outside your comfort zone and discover something completely unexpected. I promise you: it will only make your games better.

So a year ago my good friend Margaret wrote a column for Offworld where she talked about the essence of game design as VERBS. In particular, she brought it up because we were obsessed with this DS game called Picross 3D, which actually just came out in the US a week or so ago–

See, Picross is a game whose core verb is SCULPTING, basically exactly like an old master, chipping away at a big stone block, based on the logic of the numbers you see here, until you reveal the object inside, like the puppy that’s about to pop out of this. It’s a brilliant game–

and it made me wonder how many verbs we actually have in the English language, which this helpful website says comes out to just under 36,000. But how many are being used in game design?

a desperately small number. Even if we cheat and break it down into smaller sub-categories, even if we don’t just go by the major genres like “adventuring, or driving,” we’re still only utilizing a fraction of our potential–

in very broad terms, we’re — still, in 2010 — taking the absolutely AMAZING capacity of this brand new art form that can express mystery, surreality, humanity, can express ANYTHING that we can possibly imagine, and too often we’re reducing it–

to this. The cheap thrill of a clean headshot.

And I’m not trying to be coy or naive about WHY we do this–

See, this is Noby Noby Boy, a five dollar downloadable PS3 game from Keita Takahashi, the guy that created Katamari Damacy. It was released in early 2009, and to date, as of last Sunday, WORLDWIDE, with the FULL BACKING OF THE ENORMOUS FOUNDATIONAL GAMES PUBLISHER NAMCO–

it’s sold just over 113,000 copies, a number which, like Keita admits, Call of Duty sells about every 10 minutes.

So yes, there IS a challenge, primarily in a retail context — everyone’s risk averse because everyone wants to make enough money to feed their family, and drink with friends, as we’re doing here tonight.

But that actually brings me straight back to where I started off, because there has NEVER, in the entire history of games, been a better time for another single person to make something that can make a difference, that can reach an audience that will sustain — well, at least a CERTAIN kind of lifestyle — and, more importantly, will appreciate your perspective and your honest expression.

It’s the path that — even if he’s only started out with a Facebook poker game — our original indie Richard Garriott’s turned to — away from retail and onto games that only live on the web–

and it’s a path that Harvey Smith’s gone down, taking time out from Arkane to design an experimental iPhone board game about the emotional trade-offs in our lives.

It’s a path you can take by downloading Adam’s flixel library to make Flash games over a couple weekends, or by getting an iPhone dev kit and getting comfortable with it at night.

But above all, if you go down this path, don’t just make us a game another game about THAT GUY. PUT DOWN YOUR WEAPON and tell us a story we’ve never heard before, one that only you can tell. And when you’ve done that, seal that game up in your own personal digital ziploc bag–

and tell me about it or e-mail it to me as soon as you can. Thanks very much.

Basically the very first real speech I’ve ever actually given, my five-minute rant at the 2010 Independent Game Summit was addressed not so much to the developers in the room, but the press. Granted, given that the press in the room were actually in the room for the Indie Game Summit, the ones that heard it were probably not the ones that needed to hear it. Still, I hoped the message would resonate.

Screencapped here from the GDC Vault (where can you watch the entire 60 minute session for free and see lots of other awesome microtalks), apparently it went well! There were some cheers and applause and some nice things said on Twitter afterward.

The world’s leading multiformat games magazine Edge even saw fit to put me and my budding double-chin in their GDC “Talk of the Town” section, next to, like, Peter Molyneux and Sid Meier and much more important people than me. It was also talked about in places like 1UP, Edge Online and Destructoid.

To date, I have never heard from Seanbaby himself, though it did not escape his attention. I’m sure he’d understand that it was more about what-came-next rather than what-he-did. At least, I hope so. That dude’s like a would-be UFC fighter or something crazy, and I — well, you’ve seen the budding double-chin.

Shortly before the 2010 Game Developers Conference, Beth at Game Writers Quarterly — a newsletter from the International Game Developers Association’s Writing special interest group — asked to interview me (along with Gamasutra’s Leigh Alexander and Official Xbox Magazine’s Francesca Reyes) on the general “wot I think” subject of writing about games.

So, like, I did, and ended up divulging most all of the dirty secrets of How I Got To Where I Am Now, etc. etc., which were tantalizing enough to be used as the article’s embarrassingly over-honest pull quote.

Anyway, you can read the whole newsletter online over here, with Reyes & Alexander’s contributions included, or just follow along below for the annotated version of just my bit. Bear in mind: this is from so long ago the iPad wasn’t even open for pre-orders yet, and I genuinely hope you don’t steal my idea for embedded-Unity cover discs. I’m gonna make that a thing.

What kind of game journalism would you say you do?

I’ve gone through a number of phases since I got my start: traditional reviews and features for Edge, business reporting and interviews for Gamasutra, and most recently and unquantifiably — with Offworld and the bits I write for Boing Boing — some strange brew of art appreciation and cataloging and advocating for the accomplishments of the indie game dev scene. Maybe, more broadly, I’m trying to help champion a new games culture that doesn’t have anything to do with discarded pizza boxes in the basement hovel and ‘Bawls’ and ‘booth babes’ and all the pervasive ‘gamer demographic’ tropes corporate marketers have adopted to help sell razors and Axe Body Spray and Doritos.

How did you get your start?

It’s all been a long string of serendipitous events. After college I put in six or seven years as an office/cubicle drone in interactive/multimedia, Flash coding for just about the most uninteresting projects you could imagine. I’d just discovered Edge Magazine and recognized a.) how valuable this was as the first games writing I’d ever read that was treating me like an adult with a life-long interest in the medium, and b.) how if I ever did write about games, this was the only outlet I’d want work for, but assumed I’d have to put in a decade-long slog working my way up through writing about football franchises and bottom-rung racers.

I subverted my office drudgery by spending most of the working day browsing the Gaming Age Forums (prior to their ‘Neo’ rebrand), and kept stumbling across another anonymous user in most of the threads about the obscure/import games I loved. A friend told me he thought the guy might work for Edge, so I summoned the courage to send a polite private message to see if it was true. As it turned out, he’d been hired by Edge only a few days before, and asked who I wrote for, because I was his favorite American journalist he’d never heard of. I was obviously not one at all, but after a few more back and forths he asked if I’d ever want to contribute to Edge, and suddenly, thanks to him and the fantastic and welcoming and supportive team they had there at the time, I found myself suddenly transitioning into a new career.

With Gamasutra? I’d been following Simon Carless‘s work for a long while but never could figure out how to break the ice over the internet, so, quite literally, I waited until I was drunk and sent an unsolicited message saying I’d be happy to do some local Chicago freelance work he needed done. That worked wonders: I ended up as their news editor for two years following.

What’s the most memorable moment you’ve had as a game journalist?

This answer changes at every consecutive event or conference I go to, and it’s nearly always more about having the chance to “be human” with people whose work I admire than anything related to “professional” work. That time Keita Takahashi bear-hugged me on a couch. Smoking cigarettes and talking about Stupid Fun Club with Will Wright well before he’d left Maxis. That time I stayed up until 5am playing cards and getting completely wrecked with Lego Star Wars producer Jon Smith (Should I say that out loud? He makes family games!) and some old Edge crew, and left annoying prank voicemails on Kieron Gillen’s cell. Staying up all night basically every night of the week with the indies every time everyone’s all together. Sneaking into the suite party at my first GDC by telling the aged and oblivious doorman that the now-editor of a UK games mag was Peter Molyneux, and challenging Seamus Blackley to a Guitar Hero duel once inside.

But the moment that’s had the most lasting impact, because it was one of my very first, was staying up until 1am so I could wake up Alexey Pajitnov in Moscow and talk to him for two hours about his life with Tetris, and spending the first ten minutes in silence listening to his early morning smoker’s cough and his answering the door to receive packages. I was so green and nervous I was shivering, and was so quietly in awe of what was happening that he kept politely checking to make sure I was still on the line.

What’s your opinion on New Games Journalism?

Are we even still using that term? Either way, I’m a big believer in and huge fan of doing more experiential/experimental writing about games, if that’s what the label still implies. Mathew Kumar’s debut zine ‘exp.‘ has some wonderful stuff in it, diaries written “from inside games” like Dwarf Fortress and Sims are all a thrill when done right, Julian Dibbell’s My Tiny Life, dearly departed David Sudnow’s amazingly pioneering Pilgrim In The Microworld, the peculiar angles that Clive Thompson always manages to cut through the industry at — it’s all fantastically necessary to understand Just What’s Happening Here.

What do you feel is the current state of game journalism?

Like every other form of journalism, and as you’ve no doubt heard about a bajillion times if you’ve been alive in the past decade, the “professionals” are under threat by and struggling for relevance amidst the mass proliferation of personal/hobbyist writers willing and able to do it for free, and with more developers doing their own writing about their own work (or just simply channels like YouTube and GameTrailers), even “breaking news” and “professional previews” are losing value. If you believe that “reviews” are by nature subjective — and I’d argue that done right they’re not — then every single “journalist” is up against several million Jane/Joe Citizen’s Blogspot Dot Com And Their Sack Of Opinions.

What defines credibility to you?

I suppose this follows on from what I was just saying: credibility comes from adding valuable context and left-field incisiveness to otherwise cheap opinionating, or rare access to and the ability to draw out the humanity of people normally behind the screen/scenes. On a day to day basis I don’t read reviews or read about games to find out what any particular person thinks (that’s what friends are for), I read to unearth new information. That’s exactly what the people I find most credible do.

What do you feel is the importance of game journalism to the industry itself?

I hope this doesn’t sound overly cynical, but by and large (as it stands today) it primarily serves to amplify a developer’s message to a wider body of people — honestly hardly a half step away from PR work — only done right, it adds some semblance of editorial filter from the daily deluge. Done right, it should tell a reader This Is What’s Happening And This Is Why You Should Care Even If You Have No Idea What I’m Talking About. That best serves the reader as well as it obviously serves the industry.

How do print magazines and online publications compare?

This might be the most boring and over-obvious answer I give, but again, as with all other forms of struggling journalism, print allows for carefully considered insight that is almost entirely absent from fire-and-forget online work. I desperately hope — as every other media organization on Earth hopes — that new tech like the iPad can cleanly merge the two outlets, bring consumer value back to periodicals, and some gorgeous shining interactive phoenix emerges from the rubble of displaced print journos’ foreclosed homes.

Where do you see game journalism going as a field?

Well, I sincerely hope it’s that phoenix! I hope Edge or France’s Amusement mag‘s tablet version gives me a swipe-able array of screenshots to accompany every preview blurb, and that their interviews include HD footage of the nervous laughter and shy asides of all of my game design heroes. I hope my own inevitable boutique magazine in 2012 includes full “pages” of playable demos of beautiful indie games in Unity in place of cover discs. I hope that no stone goes unturned and that everybody doing honest, artful work finds the audience they deserve.

What advice do you have for someone who wants to be a game journalist?

Unlike the blog posts currently making the rounds at the time of this interview, my advice isn’t “don’t”, and it’s not even “don’t do it for the money”. It’s “develop an expertise”, it’s “find your niche and guard it like a junkyard dog”, it’s “don’t simply add to the deafening TV static of opinions”. Be smart, pay lots of attention not just to the industry and its output, but to other journalists and what you can do for them, and above all: get drunk at your computer as often as you can and cold-email everyone you’ve ever admired, because we’re all just humans, and people — more often than not — love knowing that someone’s noticed. That last bit’s certainly done the trick for me, anyway.

I am here, or rather, was when I started the post yesterday morning. I know I’ve been neglecting the site for too long, having moved most all my Awesome Links to my infinitely-easier-to-update and more community-oriented makeshift tumblr for now, but as you’ve no doubt sussed out (or heard me talk about ad nauseum for the past few weeks), there are major changes afoot, and so it’s probably best to get The Last Word down here.

So, first, the big news: as you will have heard, with Boing Boing’s relaunch, I will no longer be working on Offworld, and will instead be doing weekly columns on the Mother Boing (the first of which should be going up soon): round-ups of the indie/iPhone/retail games you need to be paying attention to, galleries of amazing things to lay your eyes on, and wider-ranging features that reveal something of the shape games are taking, still shining a sharp light on the stuff at the periphery and the people who make it, as was Offworld’s wont, but for a bit more generalized readership. In a sense, it’ll be quite a good thing, putting Boing Boing’s obviously sizable audience in more direct touch with indies and the rest.

But, a site like Offworld needs to exist, and I’d always approached it since its launch last November as the site I’ve been waiting ages for someone to do, so there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that I’m cooking up Something New basically like as I write this, and that there are a lot of exciting things that will go hand-in-hand with it.

Whether it’ll still be called Offworld or something new is irrelevant, I think: the site itself has been subsumed by the network and community of wildly intelligent, passionate game makers and game lovers that have grown around it and congregated through it (even if the commenting was too wonky to talk easily on it), and I’m not worried that we’ll find each other again quickly wherever we land.

As for the more personal rest: as of last Wednesday, I have left Austin for a bit, first to head to LA for Indiecade (which turned out to be proof positive of the collective wonder of the makers/lovers above: you should see my flickr [or Tiff's or Greg's or Felix's or Eric Nakamura's Giant Robot post] for some of the wicked times), and following that, to here — here being San Francisco — where I’ll be spending upward of a month. Or so. I haven’t exactly bought a return ticket yet, we’ll just see how that works out. The plan? Good time spent with good friends, particularly Ginger Anyhow, Steph, and Tiff, to say nothing of the billion other people I want to see while I’m here.

Don’t hesitate to contact me about anything at all on the past/present/future of my games coverage and involvement (brandon@tiger-town.com works fine!), and it’s probably easiest to see what’s happening when via twitter (@brandonnn, which probably everyone who reads this will be well acquainted with anyway). Let’s all talk more soon!

As you may have seen from the proper announcement, the various links and writeups, the now official Laugh-Out-Loud Cats comic, or the ‘tweets’ of others, it’s official: I have joined the league of Happy Mutants at Boing Boing, and have just — against all odds — launched their new games site, Offworld.

I won’t rehash what I’ve already said in my introductory mission-statement type post on the site, but instead will simply thank everyone involved, as Joel did officially: the Mother Boing crew, BB Gadgets’ Joel, Rob and John, Leigh and Jim, and everyone else that’s given me advice, assurance, and in general put up with my half-dazed/half-crazed state for the past few weeks.

I can still remember the first time I’d heard of the then-mythical Boing Boing print ‘zine in my Gibson-reading/Daydream Nation-listening/SubGenius-following early teens (though I’ve lost track of whether it came to my attention via the debut issue of Wired, a random issue of Mondo 2000, or the glossy-pastel-color-covered edition of the Whole Earth Catalog I can’t seem to find online): suffice it to say it’s a fantastic honor that they’ve put the rudder in my hands, and here’s to steering it somewhere amazing.

It’s true — I’ve been a bit slack in updating post-Austin GDC, as I’m still not quite up to speed, life-wise. Everything important is still inside boxes underneath other boxes behind other boxes, but I’m slowly getting there.

The conference itself was somewhat understated, but had its moments: for those that hadn’t seen, I eked out some session coverage for UK business site gamesindustry.biz, notably breaking news that Arkane’s local Austin branch was at work on an iPhone strategy game, and covering Bruce Sterli– err, NOT Bruce Sterling’s curious but basically delightful futurist keynote (a full transcription is here), a panel on why URU: Myst Online failed commercially not once, but twice, the typically-cantankerous Chris Crawford yelling at his reflection about the state of story, Club Penguin’s Disney-inspired roots, and, finally Google’s somewhat bombshell news that it was indeed opening up its virtual world Lively to game developers.

That last point has been continually perplexing me in the week since, not least because the attendance at Google’s session was so slim (save the notable presence of Areae’s Raph Koster, quietly and hurriedly typing away at the back of the room). For a locale and a conference so heavily invested in the virtual worlds business, shouldn’t the entrance of the most ubiquitous technology company in the world have competitors quaking and desperate to spy a glance at their future plans?

And those plans couldn’t have been more clear — as noted in my coverage, Google’s short term goals are to open Lively to let developers create interactive Google Gears for the space, a somewhat jargon-masked way of saying that web apps will be playable on the surfaces of in-world 3D objects. Art director Kevin Hanna offered virtual arcades — similar to those Sony has prepared for Home (pictured above with a version of its PSN/PSP puzzler Echochrome) — as the very least of the possibilities coming soon to the platform.

But beyond that, Hanna let slip that Google’s long term prospects for Lively include opening up the platform itself to game developers — a fully featured web-embeddable 3D engine that, if guided properly, could reach Flash-like ubiquity in less time than we all might think.

I talked to Hanna for a good hour on the final day of the conference, for an interview that has yet to show up on GI.biz, and while he smilingly could “neither confirm nor deny” that Google itself was developing Lively 3D games projects internally, it shouldn’t escape anyone’s attention that the company has helped form the “game development studio” X-Ray Kid, helmed by former Warner Brothers, Disney, EA, Sony, Marvel Entertainment, and Microsoft talent, including Hanna himself (who’s worked on Xbox titles like Crimson Skies and Shadowrun, and oversaw some 50 Disney Interactive games) and studio president Jeff Matsuda, who previously was a character designer for cartoons like The Batman and Teen Titans. It might lack the dream-team punch of more recognizable games industry celeb-designers, but it’s a formidable bunch, to say the least.

Maybe it’s not all that surprising. Two years ago (concurrent with the formation of the Lively team, actually), Margaret did a bang-up job at looking at how Google was first dipping its toes in the industry water through Sketchup and ARGs (just prior to Goog’s $23mil buy-out of upstart in-game ad firm Adscape) which went similarly unnoticed, save for the one now-forever-archived snotty comment.

It could be nothing more than the Google-beta-fatigue that’s been remarked about on a number of tech blogs in the past week. As Hanna told me during the interview, there are very few ideas to be had that someone at Google isn’t currently plugging away at in their 20-percent time, and the industry’s pulling a wait-and-see on Lively’s buoyancy before sounding the alarms. But with a stockpile of new content still being sat on, Google’s not giving up any time soon.

On a different note, after I shut the tape off on Hanna, we moved on to a number of less-Lively topics, and I soon learned that in his spare time he’s also been hard at work in the comics arena, having just had his own original work, The Clockwork Girl, not only published, but optioned for a film by Telefilm Canada, on which animators have apparently already started production.

Even more excitingly (but only because he had a copy to give me at the conference), he has published another graphic novel though his own vanity label Frogchildren: Sixteen Miles To Merricks (found here on Amazon), by Barnaby Ward, who by Hanna’s own description is a Brit toiling away in a tropical paradise in absolute obscurity (and who also supplied the Clockwork pinup above).

Thank heaven for Frogchildren, though, because the book is honestly quite stunning. Apart from his keen eye for doing idealistic girls that cut straight to my core, the dreamscapes peppered around the various stories within are gorgeously abstract. I’ll leave you with the trailer so you can (mostly) see what I mean.