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Dead Head Fred wins Writer Guild's very first game writing award
Now that the writers are back on work (hooray, TV!), it's time to take a moment and reflect on the Writers Guild of America's first ever choice for best video game writing.The winner? Dead Head Fred for PSP. It's a game that (shamefully) almost no one bought. The more cynical of our readers may be asking, "But why them?" in a year that has so many great options. Mass Effect, Bioshock, Uncharted all come into mind. Well, these awards are limited to members of the WGA's New Media Caucus. Even with the limited candidate pool, this is a great first step for the industry -- we need more video game writers to be recognized for their efforts.[Via Joystiq]
Dead Head Fred wins WGA's first Video Game Writing Award
Now that that silly writer's strike is under control, it's time to get back to the busy work of ... video game writing awards! The Writer's Guild of America has chosen the winner – from amongst five nominees – of its first-ever Video Game Writing Award. Congratulations to the team at Vicious Cycle Software for their work on Dead Head Fred. As much as we enjoyed Dead Head Fred (it even made one of our Best of the Rest '07 lists), there's still that part of us that says it wasn't a fair fight. In a year that included some of the best video game writing we can think of, the fact that the WGA's nominees didn't include titles like Mass Effect, BioShock, or Portal leaves us feeling ... well, uneasy.We understand that the game's writers must have been or applied to become members of the WGA's New Media Caucus in order to be eligible for the award so, fair enough, perhaps the other games weren't. Regardless, highlighting quality game writing – regardless of the game – is a noble task in an industry where all your base are belong to the master of unlocking, y'know?
The WGA strike is over, when are our favorite TV shows returning?
That's right, the dark period is over. The Writer's Guild has ended its strike, and now we can look forward to some of our favorite shows to watch on our HDTVs coming back sooner, later, or not at all. Thanks to our friends over at TV Squad, we've found a pretty comprehensive list at TV Guide, but here's a few of the ones we're looking forward to: Sooner (March/April/May): House, Grey's Anatomy, My Name is Earl, The Office, ER, all the CSI's, One Tree Hill, Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Smallville Later (Fall '08 - 2009): 24, Chuck, Heroes, Life, Pushing Daisies Not at all: Big Shots, Bionic Woman, Journeyman, Life is Wild [Via TV Squad]
Dead Head Fred gets nomination from Writer's Guild
Finally, a headline about the Writer's Guild that's not about the strike. The Writer's Guild of America announced nominees for its first-ever awards for video game writing. The winner will be announced on February 9th (but don't expect a fancy awards show). There were five nominees, including one high profile PSP exclusive. Crash of the Titans, The Simpsons Game, The Witcher, and World in Conflict all got nominations. Dead Head Fred, a PSP exclusive, also earned a nomination. It was written by Dave Ellis and Adam Cogan.Dead Head Fred had a fairly muted release, but was notable for its inclusion of a popular television actor from the show Scrubs.
Writer's Guild of America announces nominees for game writing award
The only thing that's consistently more ham-handed and embarrassing than the writing in games is the writing about games. Unlike the latter, however, small glimmers of hope emerge every year with the few games that thought it wise to deliver engaging dialogue and thoughtful plotting. This year alone saw titles like Mass Effect, BioShock and Portal being praised for exceptional writing and the emotional heft it lent to gameplay. Of course, none of those were nominated for the Writer's Guild of America's first ever Video Game Writing Award, but never mind. The winner to grace the stage during the Writer's Guild Awards held in Los Angeles on February 9, 2008, will be chosen from this list of witty nominees: Crash of the Titans -- Written by Christopher Mitchell for Sierra Entertainment Dead Head Fred -- Written by Dave Ellis and Adam Cogan for D3 Publisher The Simpsons Game -- With lead writer Matt Selman, written by Tim Long and Matt Warburton, dialogue by Jeff Poliquin for Electronic Arts The Witcher -- With lead story designer Artur Ganszyniec, dialogue by Sebastian Stepien, additional dialogue by Marcin Blacha and writers Sande Chen and Anne Toole for Atari World in Conflict -- Story design by Christofer Emgard, story consultant Larry Bond and script consultant Ed Zuckerman for Sierra Entertainment. A game's eligibility hinged on being released between Dec. 1, 2006, and Nov. 30, 2007, and credited writers must have been or applied to become members of the WGA's New Media Caucus. Though we're undecided about which game deserves to win, we're certain that highlighting and rewording the good righting in games are vary importent.
Writers Guild strike might help video game industry
Has the Writers Guild of America strike got you down? Are you despondent when watching reruns of How I Met Your Mother? Depressed about the short season of Heroes? Well turn around, bright eyes -- at least the WGA strike hasn't slowed the production of video games; in fact, the strike might be helping the industry, according to the Hollywood Reporter.The few video game writers who are members of the WGA aren't affected by the current strike (aside from possibly getting some competition from their fellow striking writers). However, the Hollywood Reporter says that the gaming industry is improving due to the lack of original television programming, which has inspired more people to play video games in their spare time. Personally, we've used our time away from our TiVos to work on our cross-stitching. Have you been playing more games due to the the deluge of reruns?
The writers strike is in full effect
In case you haven't noticed, most of the best HD shows are in reruns. December is usually a month of reruns, but we've already seen an alternative season finale to Heroes, and in January when we'd normally expect to see our favorite shows come back, you can expect to see more reruns and more reality TV. There are some of our favorites that have some episodes left, like eight episodes of Lost, nine episodes of Medium, ten episodes of Battlestar Galatica, and seven episodes of Jerico. But others like the Office, Heroes, and Big Bang Theory are already out. Hopefully, the writers will get compensation for downloads before the remaining shows run out, and if not at least we'll have more time to watch all those HD DVD and Blu-ray discs.[Via ZatzNotFunny]
Vista SP1 kills the WGA kill switch
Microsoft's anti-piracy system known (and loathed) as Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) is set to lose its bite. When Vista SP1 launches in early 2008, WGA will still identify -- ad-nauseam -- what it thinks to be non-legal copies of Vista. However, it will lose its ability to disable said systems. The change was announced in a presentation by WGA senior product manger, Alex Kochis, who said, "Based on customer feedback, we will not reduce user functionality on systems determined to be non-genuine." That should bring a swift end to WGA customer complaints related to false-positives, spyware concerns, or server glitches. Score one point for law-abiding citizens everywhere.[Via ZDNET, thanks Daniel S.]
Striking writers could migrate to videogames
Thankfully for all of us missing The Daily Show, there are signs that the writer's guild strike could be coming to a close. But what if we're not so lucky? What if the strike continues for months? Sure, it'll be bad for you, but think of the writers! You'll be suffering through reruns, but they'll be digging through the trash outside your house looking for scraps. ... Well, maybe it won't be that bad. But they'll at least be bored.Variety says that some of those scribes could make a little side money on video games, if the situation is right. With around $50,000 for six month's work, games may not be for every union member forced to sit out of Hollywood work. But if a few talented writers make the leap to games, TV and film's loss could very well be our gain.
The writers' strike effect on HD programming
The ability for a group to go on strike is a fundamental right in American, and while we don't really understand what the problem is -- we'd assume the writers want more money -- we do know we're going to miss out on some HD programming. The first shows to feel the pinch are the live shows like Leno and SNL, next up is the scripted shows which mostly seem to have about 9 episodes under their belt. Luckily some HD programming is resilient like sports and reality TV -- not that there's much HD. At this point it's hard to know how long the strike will last, but if it lasts more than a few months, at least we'll finally be able to catch up on all those HD movies we've been meaning to watch. Here's a short list of our favorite shows that will go into reruns if this thing doesn't end before too long.Heroes - Seasons will end early on Dec 3rd Lost - Expected to have eight out of 16 episodes ready. Medium - Will have 9 of 22 episodes completed. Battlestar Galactica - Has 10 hours of episodes, plus a two hour movie to air this Fall.
Microsoft says WGA outage affected less than 12,000 systems
With Microsoft's WGA servers patched up after last week's outage, the company now appears to be willing to get a bit more specific about the situation and the damages done. In a post on the official Windows Genuine Advantage blog, Microsoft's Alex Kochis revealed that " fewer than 12,000 systems were affected worldwide" and that "many of those have already revalidated and are fixed." As for how the situation arose, it seems that Microsoft was in the dark initially, first learning of it "through a combination of posts to our forum and customer support." Curious about the matter, Ars Technica asked Microsoft for more information about the outage and why no backup had been put in place, but was apparently told by a spokesperson that "Microsoft is still determining the answer to these questions."[Via Ars Technica]
Vista activation "more an irritation to legit users than an antipiracy measure"
Those are the words of Brian Livingstone, a renowned expert on the inner working of Microsoft Windows: in a post on WindowsSecrets.com, he exposes a backdoor route around activation which effectively destroys activation as an antipiracy measure. That, in and of itself, isn't a particularly surprising development (we've already seen two exploits that skip or bypass activation); no, the real story is the fact that the exploit was created by Microsoft itself. The "SkipRearm" process involves some simple editing of Registry files that can "extend the activation deadline of Vista indefinitely." This backdoor around WGA was created to help corporations keep machines working whilst they work under the heavy burden of prepping systems for Vista activation. If they can't do it within Vista's 30 day grace period, they can postpone activation by 30 days up to three times using the "sysprep /generalize" command: SkipRearm can be executed indefinitely. Specifically, Microsoft documentation says "Microsoft recommends that you use the SkipRearm setting if you plan on running Sysprep multiple times on a computer." Now that Windows Activation could potentially help pirates as well as annoy legitimate Windows owners, it's hard to see how Microsoft will be able to continue to justify using this ineffective, draconian system.[Via ComputerWorld, thanks to everyone who sent this in]
Vista activation crack #2 auto-renews the 30 day grace period
Strike three two for Vista's product activation system: the latest Vista activation workaround is called "Timerstop t2a" which works by automatically renewing the 30 day grace period before the user has to "activate" their presumably legit copy of Windows. Besides the obviously malicious undertone to these kind of utilities, we're certain that there are a whole lot of legitimate Vista owners out there that would prefer to go through this admittedly complex process rather than attempt the normal activation procedure. Just like with DRM, anti-piracy PSAs before movies, and heck, even excessive surveillance, innocent people tend not to like it when they're treated as suspects. The lesson for Microsoft is that when people want to pirate software, they will: even in the face of increasingly complex activation systems. A pity then that Redmond's fired up photocopiers technically can't copy a function that -- purposely -- doesn't exist in Mac OS X.
Another Vista activation bypass: for reals this time?
Considering that as recently as a couple of days ago lots of people (including us) were potentially duped into believing that someone had created a keygen utility that churned out working serial numbers for Windows Vista, you'll forgive us for being a little hesitant to recommend the latest Vista crack on the block. Apparently the result of a combined effort by an application cracking group called "Paradox," the utility is actually a "BIOS Emulation Toolkit" that skips the activation process entirely. As always, these kind of programs are an extremely gray area, so we're not going to maintain any illusions here: this utility will be used by individuals to pirate copies of Vista. That said, these kinds of hacks -- if this one actually works -- does a service by pointing out the ineffectiveness of "activation," a process which has caused an enormous amount of annoyance to a lot of consumers that have purchased software legally. Just like every other form of piracy prevention, the only people that really suffer in the end are the innocent users stuck in the middle. [Via digg]
Mac OS X 10.4.7 Phones Home
Daniel Jalkut has discovered that the Mac OS X 10.4.7 update released last week is causing his computer to phone home to Apple. Every eight hours, a process called "dashboardadvisoryd" is contacting two different servers hosted by Apple, ostensibly to verify that the Dashboard plug-ins you have installed are the same versions as the ones provided by Apple.While this certainly isn't as insidious as Microsoft's much-maligned Windows Genuine Advantage program phoning home to verify the authenticity of your operating system's license code, I find myself agreeing with Daniel that Apple should provide us a way to turn this feature off. For my few computers at home, I doubt that I'll care much whether each is talking to Apple's servers, but in my work environment where I manage many hundreds of computers, I now need to evaluate whether this change is going to have a negative effect on my network. I've already got network administrators mistaking Bonjour traffic as PC viruses, the last thing I need is to have another discussion with our firewall administrator to explain why our lab computers are all hitting an Apple server at scheduled periods.I've been debating all summer whether or not our computers in the Fall would have Dashboard enabled. I have no choice now but to disable Dashboard on our lab and classroom computers until there's an easier way (other than using Little Snitch) to turn off this phoning home feature.
Lawsuit claims Microsoft's WGA tool is spyware
You've probably noticed that the Internet's been buzzing lately about Microsoft's Windows Genuine Advantage anti-piracy software that up until recently was "phoning home" user info every day, and now one Brian Johnson of Los Angeles has turned the issue into a legal matter by filing suit against Redmond in U.S. District Court in Seattle. Johnson's attorney Scott Kamber -- who also represented consumers in that class-action suit regarding the Sony rootkit debacle -- is arguing that a recent version of the WGA package, which was rather inconspicuously pushed to users' computers as part of a security update, fits the legal definition of "spyware" because its existence and purpose weren't plainly disclosed to consumers. Microsoft spokesperson Jim Desler counters this argument by pointing out that the WGA tool is not malicious in nature -- which presumably distinguishes it from the "bad spyware" -- and that the "real issue" here is the "industry-wide problem" of software piracy. Still, Microsoft changed the latest version of the tool by beefing up the licensing agreement and eliminating those daily status reports, so even though Desler calls the suit "baseless," we wouldn't be surprised if Johnson ends up with some hush money to prevent the negative publicity that a trial would surely bring.[Via Slashdot]
