My name is Evan Griffin, but you probably already guessed that.
Like most of you, I too aspire to work in games, be it writing about them and/or writing them and designing. I know the odds are against me. Hopefully some foolhardy personal projects and luck will meet me halfway.
I graduated this past spring from NYU with a degree in Film and Television Production. While I was a student, the NYU Game Center was just beginning to get some legs, offering handfuls of video game classes and constantly promising and consistently delaying official degrees in games, instead of simply continuing as Open Arts electives.
I took nearly every game class that opened up during my time at NYU. Jean-Marc Gauthier, Mattia Romeo, Greg Trefry, and Jesper Juul were my teachers for classes on video game production and theory. In an intensive game production workshop I participated in, the class was split into small groups and tasked with creating a complete video game in 3 weeks.
The result for my team was a simple side-scrolling art game called Whittler’s Way (still a rough title), for which I was an artist, project manager, lead designer, writer, and sound designer. Essentially, the game is a daydream simulator. You play as a small boy confined to a canoe with a rotten, spiteful, filthy, rifle-toting old man who relentlessly castigates you, spits tobacco on you, and forces you to row toward a beaver colony that he wants to exterminate. There are no tutorials, no HUD, only riddles that appear on signposts that drift by in the foreground.
The old man pontificates and sermonizes in tangential asides, and the player moves monotonously downstream through a strange, devastated landscape. However, there is another game woven inside that doesn’t announce itself. To relieve the tedium of this miserable, servile duty, an industrious and inquisitive player may position their mouse over background and foreground elements (e.g. flying birds, insects, a rusted car, etc.) and transform them into surreal surrogates, mini-games, and side interactions. Other players may just continuously tap the spacebar to row.
Sorry for the long pitch. I’m pretty proud of that game. Moving on . . .
I enjoyed 2 months of solid employment this past summer before falling into terrific unemployment. This wild, harebrained work assignment had me traveling 11,000 miles across the country in a Suburban with my boss and my other boss’s nanny.
Under the pretense of filming a television show, we saw the country, visited 30+ technology startup companies, and met some incredible people: a Chinese-American, detail-obsessed (they have labels for light switches), polymer solar cell company named Solarmer that will dominate energy in the future, a former Hell’s Kitchen paramedic turned startup founder who worked alongside the writer of Bringing Out the Dead (he says the movie is tame if anything), the team that built the Philip K. Dick android, a bipolar man who thought his mental condition gave him superpowers as a kid (the founder of the comic book reader Graphic.ly), and a crazy, crusty old hermit and retired banking guy who started a financial and spiritual advice website because the universe told him to.
Some strange sights from the road.
And, we were endlessly regaled by the TV host, our worthy captain, the hilarious and brilliant, Bob Cringely, whose life stories truly give the Dos Equis man a run for his money.
You would have to try to not learn something from a man who was the 12th employee of Apple, fired and re-hired by Steve Jobs several times, a participant in the founding of Cisco and Adobe, the inventor of the trash can icon, a veteran war journalist, a respected longtime technology writer, and isn’t afraid to respond to a stranger complimenting him on how well he looks for his age by saying, “ Well, you haven’t seen me naked.” Truly a man of unmatched class, sheer good looks, and rock hard abs.
His wife provided the muscle for this operation, and is the only woman I have known of to be intimidating enough to get a refund from hotels.com. Needless to say that she can be an excellent compatriot, or a true wolf if you choose to cross her (As far as I know the body of the hotels.com employee was never recovered).
In the past I interned at Gameloft. My strangest and most memorable assignment for them took me to Bethpage Golf Course during the winter, where I took many pictures of each hole on the course for design research, escorted and chauffeured around in a golf cart by a man who worked there. We hit a large downslope ditch and nearly got concussions. Yep, blunt force trauma was my first exposure to the gaming industry.
Now, I’m unemployed and make music videos (some of which will appear in the February iPad issue of Wired) and have started making Fallout mods.
That’s about it. Those are the only salient details of my life recently that I can muster. I’ve written more about other people than myself, I guess, but that’s because they’re much more interesting.
I don’t write very concisely and I tend to ramble, as I’ve just demonstrated. I’m trying to get better, honest.
I have many more Bitmob articles in the works. My posts take a while, though I hope some of you think they’re worth it. I don’t really do lists or reviews or product reviews or news because I feel these areas are already so saturated that my meager offerings would just be white noise. I write fairly narrow interest posts that are primarily concerned with game theory, mechanics, and aesthetics. Up next is continuing the saga of my horses’ accounts of how I treated them in Red Dead Redemption. Spoiler: Horse meat is a staple of my diet.
If any of you are working on or plan to work on some indie games or any other collaborative gaming projects, let me know, I would love to help in any way possible. Email me at evgrif@nyu.edu.
Some favorite games, movies, music, and books in no particular order:
Fallout 2/3/New Vegas, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, Silent Hill series, Oblivion, BioShock, Portal, Half-Life 2, Flower, flOw, Rez, Limbo (the first half), Halo multiplayer, Eternal Darkness, Metal Gear Solid, The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Golden Axe, The Majesty of Colors, Don't Shit Your Pants, Knytt, Don't Eat the Mushroom, Samorost, Machinarium, Geometry Wars, The Endless Forest, Mary-Kate and Ashley's Magical Mystery Mall,
Stalker, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Koyaanisqatsi, 2001, Groundhog Day, Aliens, No Country for Old Men, Ivan’s Childhood, Dead Man, Apocalypse Now, There Will Be Blood, Barry Lyndon, Unforgiven, Blade Runner, Wild Strawberries, El Topo, The War Tapes, War Photographer, Being John Malkovich, Buffalo ’66, Freddy Got Fingered, Gacy, Brazil, The City of Lost Children, Fear Dot Com, Fear Dot Gov, Fear Dot Edu,
Aphex Twin, Boards of Canada, Brian Eno, Black Moth Super Rainbow, The Flaming Lips, Talking Heads, Tom Waits, Animal Collective, Grizzly Bear, Orbital, Deerhunter, The Field, Autechre, Air, NIN, Mastodon
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Post Office, Castaways, Notes From Underground, Blood Meridian, The Crossing, Cat’s Cradle, Slaughterhouse-Five, The Golden Bough
A painting of me (sort of) that my girlfriend made.
