It's really a bit painful, in a 'tree falling in a forest' type way, that there's a four-part Warren Spector treatise on storytelling up on The Escapist for a few weeks now, and, uhm, nobody has really made a big fuss about it. And they should, because it's pretty interesting, if on the dense side.

Randomly picking Part 4, here's some perceptive, if slightly depressing prose: "Once we can create beautiful, photorealistic spaces, players will expect us to do so, and then we'll have to teach our NPCs how to navigate through and interact with ever-more complex worlds appropriately. Rapid advancements in graphical fidelity and depth of simulation have always left AI and design playing catch-up. That problem seems likely to get worse, not better, in the next few years."

Getting away from TEH DOOM for a second, Tom Chick's Escapist column has been proceeding apace, and apparently, the Fight Club logo designer still hasn't sued yet (parody!), yay. So far, a random email exchange is probably the funnest one, for me, since it included the immortal line: "He can't do it. He just got a job as a viral marketer for Second Life. I need you to do it." Though I will note that splitting up longer articles into X weekly installments is totally a print trick, and doesn't work very well on the web.

Also, Mr. Chick has now brought his own brand of laconic spitballing to GameSpy, where his first Alt-Tab column is up, and it's also a load of entertaining, hyper-intelligent bollocks: "Let's talk about the things that are untrue about you. You are a twenty-four-year-old leggy girl from Texas who worked as an exotic dancer for four years so you could save up money to put yourself through a PhD program in electrical engineering. You only date guys you meet from your World of Warcraft raiding guild."