PixelVixen707

Here at PixelVixen707 we’re pleased to announce a new links feature. It’s just like the “best reads of the week” lists you could get from GameSetWatch, Rock Paper Shotgun or Insult Swordfighting. Except it’s different! Pix Vix Picks doesn’t stick to gaming clips. We love great magazine writing, and we look for reads that are worth reading, in full. Pix Vix Picks highlights pieces that tell a story, tell us something we don’t already know, and explain why people do the things they do. It’s a reading adventure!

Don’t use a restroom again without Pix Vix Picks by your side.

• Tad Friend, The Cobra (The New Yorker) - I thought I knew all I needed to know about the cynical practice of Hollywood marketing. But Friend’s piece, which is nominally a profile of Lionsgate’s Tim Palen is rich with hilarious quotes and riveting tips from the trade: “‘If a movie is completely, one hundred per cent about death, then it’s also about life, right?’” How will the game industry look when it learns to market this well? And what’ll happen when it learns to pay this much attention to any demographic beyond men ages 18-35?

• Scott Brown on Why Hollywood Needs a New Model for Storytelling (Wired) - While this is a wifty little humor piece, it makes its point: while the idea of “transmedia storytelling” sounds jazzy in our interconnected hyper-online age, too often it leads to works where shoehorning product placements, strewing your canon across the intrawebs, and living and dying by your viralness replace the simple pleasure of telling a story with a start, a middle, and a finish. Still: as happens so often, this cynical brush-off of the potential of transmedia ignores its early successes. If you think it’s impossible to engage millions of people in a story that’s told in real-time, advanced in fragments and text messages, relies heavily on live events and constantly asks you for money, then let me tell you about the Barack Obama campaign.

• Scott Jennings blogs on the end of NCSoft and Tabula Rasa - intriguing post-mortem written by a developer who wasn’t on the Tabula Rasa team, but saw enough to describe how the much-hyped MMOG-in-space finally tanked. 

• Anne E. Kornblut, Staff Finds White House in the Technological Dark Ages (Washington Post) - How bad was tech in the White House under Bush? “‘It is kind of like going from an Xbox to an Atari,’” Obama spokesman Bill Burton said of his new digs.”

• Chris Remo, Jonathan Blow: The Next Phase (Gamasutra) - Long-form interview with Braid-auteur Blow sees him brilliant and incisive as usual. Hints about his next game abound.

And …

• The kicker: a personal ad for a Super Mario Bros. fantasy that I won’t soon forget.