T’was the night before SWTOR

and all through the house

hardware was updated.

Look! A new naga mouse!

Refrigerator well stocked with energy drinks

Everything just so, ready to own some Imps

Pre-order codes had been input with care

With the hopes that 7am email will promptly be there

Perhaps a last minute patch to watch for?

Just one more time, login to the launcher

On forums, On vent, On teamspeak and twitter

Discussions raged about which server was better

“Helm of Graush? WTF does that mean?”

“Relax  my friend, at least it’s not RP-PVE”

Podcasts, blogs, videos consumed

The fasted path to 50 illume’d

CE delayed? How will I activate my subscription?

Should’ve ordered the Digital Deluxe Edition

All Apologies

I had the great pleasure of attending the IGDA Leadership Forum in San Francisco a few weeks back. It was great. There was a lot of interesting and informative presentations about leadership in the game industry. Especially interesting to me were the presentations of Scott Crabtree, Marc Merrill and Laura Fryer.

Managing Your Team with Brain Science

Scott Crabtree is the only presenter ever that got me to put away my laptop AND iPhone for his entire presentation. He even scented his handouts with a nice orange smell so we’d remember that smell is important to learning. Unfortunately for me, I was asked before the presentation to smell the handout and as he apologized for the odd request, he explained that he was weird. So now I will associate that orange smell with “Scott Crabtree is weird” forever.

But that pre-presentation apology was just the beginning of what would be an hour of apologizing that his brain science ideas were basically not “manly” enough. While he never stated that exact phrase, anything that was “warm and fuzzy” in his presentation was prefaced as such. And yet, he had the scientific proof to back up the idea of wafting the smell of fresh baked cookies through the office when investors toured it to get more favorable results.

Creating a Culture of Awesome

Marc Merrill, President of Riot Games, spoke about his culture of awesome at Riot. It did indeed sound awesome, but he apologized several times for the idealism in his culture during his presentation. Awesome needs no apologies, my friend.

Fiat Lux

Bold, Smart Management

Laura Fryer, on the other hand, had no apologies for her straightforward, yet idealistic approach to management. She spoke of really personal struggles. Still, she made the case for leadership as a truly noble cause and she didn’t apologize for any of her values.

It’s People!!

Leadership means nothing without the people. A few days ago I was having a conversation about the Netflix Culture Deck with a mentor of mine. He also apologized for appreciating the idealism embodied in some of the values. He, whom I admire precisely because he cares so much about the people who work for him.

My frustrated response to his apology was, “It isn’t idealistic at all. It’s Human.”

Valuing things like social interaction, good judgement, honesty, commitment and even the smell of delicious baked goods are what makes us people. What is truly crazy is that by making the aforementioned values  ”ideals” imply a strange conception that people are interchangeable automatons and are stripped of all humanity in the work place. An organization is made of people, like soylent green.

So leaders, stop apologizing, embrace your humanity and lead as a human! It isn’t idealism.

The first test of an entrepreneur is – can you spell “entrepreneur”?

So I think I passed that one. *whew*

I’ve decided to combine my passion for empowering women with my passion for video games. Its like the peanut butter cup of video games and its going to be awesome. As much as I’d love to spill the details, I know I can’t just yet — and its driving me nuts!

I have to say that I am amazed and in awe of the support I’ve been receiving for both my idea and what I’m going to accomplish. People really do want to help others.

So to that end, I encourage anyone with a great idea to start talking about what you want to do with that idea and see what happens. Perhaps you’ll be amazed too!

Assuming that your Shepard did not kill Wrex on Virmire, Wrex will appear on Tuchanka in Mass Effect 2. His cameo is the best in the game of all your ME1 squadmates.

Unfortunately, if you can’t import a save game, the default option is that Wrex was killed on Virmire. This is a serious bummer for those who can’t import for whatever reason or don’t want to replay ME1 to do so.

If you are one of those unlucky souls who don’t have a save game and you play on PC, there is always Mass Effect saves. Its a web site where people upload saves of various Shepards who have made different choices in Mass Effect.

Wow, I really don’t know where to begin, what an amazing event!

First I want to give thanks to all the people who supported Team USA. That was amazing to see all the well wishes and support on Twitter, Facebook and the Bioware forums. I’m sorry we didn’t win it for you guys, but we tried.

Second, I have to thank my team: Cat, Tiffany, and Elaine. I have to say that it was incredible being on a team with these women – smart, gorgeous, feminine and video game lovers. It was really validating for me to be with other women that enjoy playing as much as I do. And while our approach might have been similar, our styles were definitely different. And I have to say, I think our new friends at Bioware also learned something about what female gamers love and how that translates to the way they play the game. In that sense, I really feel like we had a real victory. Thanks ladies! You’re the best and I love you! I also want to thank Derek, our team handler from Bioware. He was kind, patient, professional and never condescending.

Third, I have to thank all the other teams. What a great bunch of gamers. It was a blast and I am seriously missing all of you already. It was incredible playing against you and watching you play as well. Team Hungary was solid and I’m happy to see them win. A special shout out to Team Canada and Team Bioware, with whom we spent the most time with before the event. You guys and gals are some of the nicest and funniest people I have ever met. I feel blessed that I was able to meet you all in person.

Last but not least, I have to give it up for the Bioware staff. They were the most generous, genuine, friendly, and kind bunch of people. I really can’t express how awesome they are with words. These people are definitely the reason why Bioware has such success as an organization; amazing talent. Thank you for everything Bioware!

I can’t believe it! I got picked!
I am such an uber game nerd.

I’m going to be representing Team USA during the Warden’s Quest next week in London. How epic is this? I can’t even begin to speak about it’s epicness.

So what’s this nerdly activity I will be doing to represent my fine country, you ask?

Welcome to the Dragon Age: Origins Wardens’ Quest, a 24-hour gaming event where 10 teams of gamers from around the world are competing for a grand prize of $50,000 to be shared between team members. Each team must enroll as a Grey Warden and fight against the evil forces of the darkspawn. The road will be tough, teams will be eliminated throughout the 24-hour period and competition will be fierce as each team tries to out play and out role-play their competition.

You can watch all the action as it happens on our live video stream as well as support your favourite teams on their dedicated Facebook and Twitter pages. There will also be teams from BioWare and European Dragon Age Communities to broadcast live from the event on the Dragon Age forums, Twitter account, Facebook page and more. Throughout the event we will be giving away Dragon Age: Origins merchandise to fans who tune in and cheer on the competitors.

Join us on Wednesday 28^th October from 10am GMT to support the teams, watch the eliminations, learn more about the game and see who will eventually take the ultimate prize of the Warden’s Quest.

What is even more awesome is that Team USA is all women. Thats right! All women.

So stay tuned. I will post links to all the relevant live broadcasts and hopefully I’ll be able to do some tweeting/blogging/video from the event as well.

Cheer us on and maybe win some swag!

I keep stammering over all my praise for Bioware. What an amazing opportunity and what an amazing company. I cannot wait!

Last July I created the video below. It is my Shepard character from Mass Effect riding in an elevator with Wrex and various other NPCs that are in your party. It is arguably my most popular video on YouTube, at least as far as comments and views go. That said, its no “Chocolate Rain”.

Recently, Mass Effect 2 was announced by Bioware. On 2/20/09 they released a teaser trailer. While ‘Wrex in an Elevator” recieved a decent amount of daily visitors, the average amount of unique visitors increased about 60-70%. 

Yes, there was simply more general interest in Mass Effect videos due to the announcement. There were smaller increases in my other Mass Effect videos as well after 2/20. What is of particular interest to me is that several other sites picked up my “Wrex in an Elevator” movie and embeded it to get more visits to their spammy gamer sites.

People want to know if their saved games will be used to determine the fates of their old crew, namely Wrex, Kaiden and Ashley. (Per Bioware: Don’t delete your ME 1 saved games if you still have them!) Because of the comments I get on the video contain some speculation about Mass Effect’s sequel, it ranks pretty well for queries such as “‘mass effect 2′ wrex kaiden ashley”. The embeded video ranks pretty well for the same terms:

So from an Online Marketing standpoint, this just goes to show how easy it is to use existing content on YouTube to give visibility to pages as well as why it is important to look at your analytics to see where your traffic is coming from and if anyone is using your content.

Giving in to peer pressure, I downloaded the Audiosurf demo off of Steam about a month ago now. A perfectly simple premise – drive to YOUR music, collect blocks of colored blocks and “win”!

Here is an example of me playing Deceptacon by Le Tigre:

It is always nice to be reminded that your friends still have good taste in fun.

Audiosurf is a fun game, made all the more fun as you use your own music to create the maps that you ride. Slower more mellow music tends to be more blue and cool toned. Faster tempo, intense music tends to be more warm toned like orange and red. Faster music moves downhill, slower, uphill. I’ve also discovered that there is a theme across the music I seem to really like – its very “bouncy” in Audiosurf.

I think the best feature of it is the scoreboard. I don’t know if it is the indie music grrl in me or what, but I love when I surf something obscure, like Servotron or local, like The Soviettes, and find that others have have surfed the same song.

On February 27, 2008, I received a flurry of emails from the AudioSurf ScoreKeeper along the lines of:

Audiosurf scoreboard alert – Dethroned!

You used to have the worldwide best score for: raging in the plague age by les savy fav

Now the Audiosurf player ‘Kraid’ has beaten you. Get back in the game and reclaim the top spot!

View High Scores for raging in the plague age by les savy fav

What is this? A fellow Les Savy Fav Fan? For a couple weeks, me, “ann anomaly” was the only name on that scoreboard. And yeah my score is sucky….

So if AudioSurf decides to be smart about this data they are collecting, it could be HUGE for musicians. The social media aspect of the game makes it fun and competitive and I hope they expand it in the coming months.

Freakin’ Finally.

Peggle is like pure glucose for your brain. A digital energy drink. And its really great fun (and extremely addictive). After recieving this game as a gift on Christmas day, I spent the next 3-4 hours becoming a Peggle Master. I’m currently only about 10 challenges away from being a Peggle Grand Master.

Seriously, I thought griding for ep1x and gold on WoW was bad but Peggle might be worse. Yes, I used to have World of Warcraft dreams, but for the last 3 nights I’ve had Peggle dreams where I see the map. Its just sitting there with a green and pink peg strategically placed and I wake up for want to take that epic shot.

I DONT HAVE A PROBLEM AND CAN QUIT ANYTIME.