Next week, The Gameological Society will bring you coverage of E3, the year’s biggest video game trade show. That coverage will include interviews from the show floor, and we want your help determining the questions we’ll ask.
E3 is rarely a good venue for a traditional in-depth interview. The convention center is extremely loud, developers are tired and pressed for time, and PR flacks limit creators’ discussion of upcoming games to a predetermined set of talking points. So we figure, why not have some fun with it? And thus The Gameological Questionnaire is born.
Here’s how it’s going to work. In the comment threads below, suggest a question that you would like us to ask the developers we meet at E3. We’ll pick five or six of our favorites, and that will become the Gameological Questionnaire for E3—we’ll pose those same questions to every developer we can wrangle on the show floor. (Be sure to “like” the questions you want to see on the list, too. We will take reader preferences into account.)
We’re looking for a mix of earnest and silly here. The questions can range from “What are the aesthetic goals of your game?” to “If your game’s hero were a hat, what kind of hat would it be?” Other than that, the guidelines are pretty simple. To be considered for inclusion, your question should be respectful. (You can be pointed, just don’t be mean.) It should pertain to the developers’ work. And it should be the kind of thing we could ask any developer regardless of what kind of project they’re working on.
There are rewards. Every commenter who submits a question that we choose for inclusion on this year’s Questionnaire will receive a Gameological pin, suitable for lapels, backpacks, and other places that you typically find pins. A pin cushion, maybe, I don’t know. This thing is polished metal with red paint—none of that chintzy cardboard-and-plastic crap here. Take a look:
One randomly chosen winner from among the selected questioners will receive, in addition to a pin, this replica of the Murder Of Crows “vigor” from BioShock Infinite. This isn’t quite what it looks like in the game, as this replica was produced early in Infinite’s development life. But it is still a very cool item. Here is a picture of me having a staring contest with it. The crow won.
Rules-type stuff: You can submit more than one question, but don’t spam the threads, because then we will purposely not pick any of your questions on account of you were being annoying. And while anyone is eligible to receive the pin, we can’t ship the crow outside of the U.S. or Canada—the bottle has liquid inside it, which not only makes it heavy (and expensive to ship) but would probably raise an eyebrow at customs. I’ll work out some alternate prize if you win the random drawing and you’re overseas.
We can’t wait to see what you come up with! We’ll announce the winners and the final questionnaire on Friday.
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