[video]
(via oldfilmsflicker)
I met Sean Smith and his family a couple of times in Montreal - his wife organized an anglophone parents group and helped us settle in to our new city. I wouldn’t say Sean and I were good friends, but our kids played together on a number of occasions, and I have trouble thinking about his kids no longer having a father. My thoughts are with them and their mother.
We talked games one time - he knew I worked at Ubisoft, and I knew he spent a good amount of time online. But it wasn’t until his recent senseless death at the Libyan consulate that I realized the full extent of his devotion to the world of Eve Online. The Eve memorials to Sean are really touching to watch.
In her eulogy, Hilary Clinton mentioned his gaming - saying how much he meant not only to the wife and children I knew, but also to the extended family he had built online. She mentioned it as “the virtual world Sean helped create.” Of course, he wasn’t on the CCP development team that makes Eve, but it’s still a true statement. Games, online games in particular, are unique as a medium, because, though we developers may build the infrastructure, the final part of “creating” a game is in the hands of the players. (Who knew our Secretary of State knew so much about this stuff?)
At the Game Developer’s Conference a few years ago I did a talk about how video games can make you cry. Of course, when people ask “when will a computer game make you cry?” and the ridiculous idea that this somehow measures our worth as a medium, what they really mean is “when will games make us cry like movies makes us cry?” But games can’t do that, because they’re not movies. But the audience doesn’t help create movies, a movie never built a community like Eve Online has. Because they require so much engagement from their players, the best games bring people together, they strengthen our relationships as humans, they build connections and bonds that might never have existed without those games. And they make us cry not because they are carefully orchestrated melodrama, but instead we may weep in a more naturally human way, at sad moments like this, when we lose friends and remember that none of us is going to live forever.
[video]
[video]
“I looked upon a desolate shell, with no whisper of the past about its staring walls. We can never go back to Manderley again, that much is certain. But sometimes, in my dreams, I do go back…” - The Second Mrs. DeWinter (Joan Fontaine) in Rebecca
[video]
Happy Birthday, Alfred Hitchcock - (August 13th, 1899 - April 29th, 1980)
“Give them pleasure - the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.”
(via oldfilmsflicker)
[video]