The Stylus Orchestra

Article about the full event on Gameplayer!

Gameplayer <3 Spel²

And now it is official. We jumped ships. The core crew of Spel² has joined the ranks of the site Gameplayer. We are all very happy with how it has all turned out for the best and confident in that we will help in making Gameplayer become one of the best swedish gamesites around, if not the best!

The Gameplayer crew are resourceful and full of ambition, and I am eagerly looking forward to getting to know them all better. And it's also fun that we can maintain some of the soul and ambitions from Spel² still.

For the official statement go here!

Henrik has also a blogged about this here!

Kieron Gillen has never played Anarchy Online

That is the only conclusion that can be made. Quite a bit embarassing for mr Gillen I'd say. Isn't he allknowing?

To his defence however it must be said that he does play Urban Dead. That's respect!

Gaming for Culture

This saturday night, I will be performing live together with Stefan Blomberg, Michael Gill, Mattias Wikström and Ulf Sandqvist during the Kulturnatten event here in Umeå. What we will perform? Music of course, but it won't be a regular performance. No, we will be playing a multiplayer session of the Nintendo DS game Band Brothers. For those unfamiliar with the game, which is likely since it's a japanese import and not released here in Europe, it could be described as Guitar Hero, but for the NDS. Looking forward to it a lot. We did go through the playlist yesterday and will be rehearsing some more today in preparation of the event. If you're around, be sure to check us out.

As a sidenote, Linda Bergkvist will be exhibiting some of her art at the local Pilgrim-shop during the event. She will as per usual without doubt draw a lot of attention.

This means however that I will miss out on the finale of the Eurovision Song Contest, and possible the finnish monsterrock band Lordi's eventual triumph there. Such a shame, but I guess I can always watch the reruns. It is possibly one of the coolest things to happen in that lame contest ever. Such a shame I won't be able to vote.

Ashes to ashes, Dust to dust: In Retrospective

As of yesterday, the 15th of may, around 7pm, Spel² is no more. It was decided by the chief editor that the site was to be shut down with immediate effect. The reasons were many, but the final blow was the single fact that he's becoming a dad and just didn't have any time for a project that didn't bring any form of income. Add to that some of of writers had lost focus and ambitions, and many of us others was becoming overburdened with responsibilities towards the site. All in all, the level of ambition had dropped and discontent was starting to rise. While we still had some amibitions left and some, I'd dare to say, really good ideas and concepts for the future of Spel² it's not possible to pull such a thing through if all involved aren't involving themselves hundred percent or more.

It's with a heavy heart I am letting go of Spel². After all I have dedicated my life for about exactly a year to the site now. But it's not only that. I am probably the one person who had enough competence to pick up the torch after our chief editor Emil. And that knowledge has pained me quite some, because a part of me really didn't want it to end like this. But neither I can dedicate myself to that extent without getting paid. It of course sucks to admit that a lame reason as money has to ruin things, but that's reality. In theory I could have taken over. In reality, that is just a dream, nothing more. Also, even if I had, what would be the point? Since the atmosphere and morality was low among the others, it would just have been a futile attempt to prolong a painful death.

Looking back now, it is easy to see some critical points were we did wrong, or somewhat failed. Things that ultimately paved the way to this situation.

First and foremost I think it was a mistake focusing on keeping up such broad content, because ultimately we lacked the resources to keep that image up. The initial thought was to have many writers and freelancers helping us to cover up all areas. But as some who were in the project first dropped off for different reasons, it became harder and harder. And with freelancers you have the problem that they can't prioritise helping us if they can't get paid. We just couldn't rely on peoples good will. It doesn't hold up in the long run.

I know for sure we should have dropped the mobile part already in the beginning, and maybe we should have only divided the formats into three categories: PC, Console and Handheld, to limit the stress of trying to cover every damn format to prevent the site from looking inactive or unupdated. Also, the culture and retro-articles should have been merged into one category also, since after all the retro part was just a subcategory to the cultural articles anyway.

It doesn't matter now, but in the end this was one of the most fatal mistakes since it forced us to compromise and prioritise on quantity instead of quality. Quantity material ensured a steady flow of visitors, but without enough quality material to back it up we could never reach the goal and image we had originally set. For myself it meant being stuck doing reviews and previews and stuff noone else wanted to do, leaving little or no time to write the articles that I really wanted to focus on. And I think we all got caught in very similar positions thanks to that. And naturally, it lowered the level of ambition. Since we didn't get paid for it, neither could we fully focus on what really motivated us.

Another problem that indirectly affected the image, was the lacking community part of the site. Since I wasn't there when the site was originally designed I can't say for sure what the idea behind the user registration system, comment system and forum really was. I just know that when I joined it didn't seem quite thought through. So I took it upon myself to revise the concept, considering my cast experiences wih online communities and forums as an old administrator at the old Ebony Keep art forums among others. But in the end, although I gave loads of advice and had a clear vision of what needed to be done ro raise the usability of the system, only about a tenth of my ideas were realised, leaving us with a halfarsed compromise that totally lacked any clear use. As I see it, the user registration system should either have been dropped from the start, or put more effort into. The only point with having a community is to give the site visitors a home, where they can mingleand rant. But our forum was never a home to anything. It was an empty shall lacking all vital functions and with a design I never had any confidence in. We did open up the comment system, after I had nagged about it a while, but it was still too late for the community part. We should have dropped it, since we were just dragging a corpse.

Last but definitely not least, because either way we turn we always have our back behind us, there is the money issue. Although we made some sweet deals for site hosting and was slowly starting to build funds, there was really never any possibility that we would have made any sort of money within a year, that could support the work. So we did it all for free and we took everything from our own pockets, especially Emil himself, which definitely made the situation unbearable in the end.

But I don't wanna make it sound that all we did was a failure, because it certainly weren't. Sure we couldn't live up to our own initial expectations, but many times we did manage to raise the barrier and put out some really good stuff. We had an aim to challenge the swedish game journalism, and we did. Not always directly, but more often indirectly. I think we set up a new standard for review scores for games, and made quite a big deal of giving pure and honest reviews. We got a lot of appreciation from our readers for not exaggerating the scores we gave, and not to give halfarsed games better scores then they deserved. And all in all, Spel² was a sandbox where we could speak up about our ideas and everyones opinion counted equally. We could in theory write about everything we wanted to, as long as we wrote a good text. And I could although I strongly disagreed with someone on their article still be happy about it and love it, because I knew the article was written with passion and a drive to make a difference.

Sure, we never made the impact some of us might have hoped from the beginning, but I do think we made a dent. We launched almost at the same time as the ASOS-blog, and pushed for a more open and introspective view on the swedish gamespress. We might not have been leading it, but that isn't important. What's important is that we were a part of it and we did make a dent. We did make a difference. And to me, considering the short time we were live, that definitely counts for something. The body of Spel² might be dead, but the spirit of it will still live on inside all of us who were a part of it. I will surely miss what we hade, because I know nothing can ever be what Spel² was. It might sound like a lot of nostalgia and bullshitting, but I honestly believe so. We did have something special going on. There was never anything wrong with our ambitions, it's just that reality reared it's ugly head our way.

So this is the end of an era, but as such it is also the beginning of another. Myself I will take this time to sit back and relax a short while, and try to take this all in. But my aim at the moment is to push on and look for other opportunities. There is no way I am stopping now. We'll see what the future brings and if there is some site or publication out there that might appreciate my work.

Veils of mist

Yesterday morning I woke up quite early, at 5 am since I started early working at my small extrajob. Anyway, yesterday morning it was extremely foggy outside at that time. And when I say extremely I literally mean a fog so thick you could hardly see more than five meters in front of you, and at best sort of like ten meters in front of you. It was pretty cool actually.

My job is on the other side the city though, and I have to cross the river that splits the city in half to get there. Fastest way over there, by bike, is to take a route over the largest bridge, that is located close to our home, cross that and take a detour when it comes across to the island that's in the middle of the river, take small forest road there through a small and nice villa community and then later over a tiny bridge and be back on track after a main road until i get to the working place.

So, I jump onto the bike, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and aim for the bridge. But as I start to ride out of the bike I have become enough awake to realise that it's dead silent. Just me on my bike. No cars or traffic, and I had seen no other soul at all up until then. And as I roll on out on the bridge I realise that I'm like a prisoner isolated in a small tiny seclusion inside the fog. It's as if the bridge itself appears out of nowhere as I push on forward, just as if it didn't exist prior to that. I'm starting to creep out as suddenly a undistinct shadow or shape starts to form in the mists in front of me. It makes no sound, no nothing. As it gets close enough it's obvious however that's it's a jogger out early exercising for some godforsaken unknown reason. But it's too late. During these few seconds my vivid imagination started to paint up Silent Hill references in my subconsicious and against my will I start to feel quite a bit unsettled. Bravely however I force my bike onwards over the bridge.

As I reach the island, I take the detour and aim for my shortcut, and soon enough I'm out on the small muddy road leading through the community here on the island. It's a few houses here and there, and at this time of day it could have been a ghost town for all I know. Devoid of all that's life. But there is not silence this time. No the silence has been replaced with this silently growing eerie highpitched irregular sound. A sound born from the darkest pits of hell. Truly. And as it grows in both volume and pitch I see another dark shape coming towards me, but this shape seems highly irregular in form, sways back and forth and closes in in a very high speed. I start to almost believe in the unknown at this point. But only almost. The sound is piercing through my ears as a man in somewhat 40+ scuttles past me on his rusty untrustworthy old bike, probably aiming for hiw own work most likely. At least the word scuttle is as close as I can describe it. The sound itself came from the crappy old bike.

And I must say I love fog. Despite how rational one usually are, it's a wonderful source of inspiration at times like this. Painting up the most vivid and vibrant concepts inside your head. I arrived at work very very tired, but in quite a good mood.

Are Wii a hoax?

According to this blog, the name Wii is just an elaborate hoax to drive up expectations for this years E3, where the real name of the console will be revealed. Let me quote the most interesting parts from it:

Because we don’t believe that Wii is the real name. We think Nintendo is setting you all up to be Punk’d at E3, generating a massive amount of positive buzz when the scam and the real new name are announced.
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Allowing your audience time to vent is not SOP in a name announcement, and also telegraphs that Nintendo knows what a stinker this name would be. Second, it’s not possible to engineer a worse name for this product.
[---]
There are no trademarks registered by Nintendo nor by any dummy corp in the U.S or over there for Wii. This is unprecedented for Nintendo and it is not possible that this is an oversight. If Wii were the name, they would have registered it. In fact, no new trademarks have been registered by Nintendo at all.

Elaborate hoax or bad judgement call? Guess E3 will have the answer.