I have a friend, whose name is Mark Sorrell, who yesterday posted this column. It’s probably worth going and reading that first, or none of the rest of this will make sense.

That column triggered a bunch of discussion, part of which was a reddit thread, and part of that thread was this comment from a reader called LadyKeen.

It shouldn’t have to come to this. It isn’t about just accepting the fact that you will be harassed, but being a legitimate prescence in the gaming world. Women in the gaming industry aren’t just being shat on because they are women. It is because they are used/using themselves as sex symbols or they come out with outrageous claims/ideas about something (ala Hamburger Helper). Successful women in the gaming industry do their job without being a nut about it and therefore do not get the flack.

The whole comment thread is worth reading, partly for Mark’s smart answers, and partly for the bit when someone says that Jade Raymond is letting herself be used as a sex symbol in the photo at the top of this post. The one where she’s wearing jeans and a cardigan and smiling, the filthy, gaping whore.

Here’s what makes me sad.

My position used to be exactly the opinion quoted above. I don’t get the flack that a lot of other women-on-the-internet, and especially women-on-the-games-internet get. And that, I used to think, was because I was clever and smart. I didn’t cam-whore. I didn’t flirt. I didn’t do anything to make myself a target. And therefore I was better than the stupid women who courted the hate-mail and the rape threats and the knee-jerk dismissals.

Here are some other things that I included in my ‘not making myself a target’ strategy:

- not wearing skirts
- not wearing heels
- not coming to the defence of other women on the receiving end of abuse and threats and dismissals
- not, under any circumstances, ever ever ever ever indicating that there might be any sexual activity in my thoughts or my life or my body
- not talking about ‘being a woman’ or anything dumb and feminist like that
- judging the success of my approach on the number of people who didn’t realise from my writing that I was female.

These things pervade everything about how I comport myself online, and indeed in the industry. I posted a picture of my skirt on Twitter the other day, because the pattern reminded me of a Pokemon. I was anxious about posting it, in case it seemed like something that would lay me open to accusations of being a camwhore or an attention-seeking flirt. In the end, I decided I would, but was careful to take a picture where you could only see the pattern, and not – god forbid – some of my leg or something like that.

In a word where Jade Raymond gets accused of being a sex-token for standing in front of her team and smiling, these are sensible precautions to take.

So when Mark talks about women who self-censor, he is talking about me. It took me a long time to recognise that, because since expressing what I think is such a central element of who I am that facing up to that fact is miserable.

And when LadyKeen makes her point, I sympathise and identify. But I also despair, a bit. Everyone – absolutely everyone – has to decide how to handle themselves online, how to construct themselves professionally. Everyone has to decide where to draw the barriers between their private and public life. We all self-edit, and we all *should* self-edit. It’s a pleasure and a responsibility, both, to ensure that we are who we want to be and we have a generally non-shitty impact on the people around us.

But it has taken me a horribly long time to understand what an insidious impact the fear of attracting the degree of negative attention has on the way I present myself. It’s taken me a while to recognise that a big part of why I don’t post things like this is because I’m *scared*. Actually scared. Actually worried that I’ll terminally undermine my credibility. And that’s because the degree of abuse you can attract is of a different order from the generality of internet rough-and-tumble [interesting, newly-self-aware side note. I would normally have deleted 'rough-and-tumble' after writing it, because it could just about be interpreted as something titillating. Today, I'm leaving it in there]. General internet rough-and-tumble doesn’t phase me. I’m secretly delighted that the 4th Google result for my name is ‘Margaret Robertson is full of shit’. It amuses me enough that I’ve bought www.margaretrobertsonisfullofshit.com, even if I haven’t quite figured out what to do with it yet. I think, on the whole, I can make my peace with being called a cunt for what I write, but I find it more daunting to be called a cunt for just having one.

That’s a thing I wouldn’t have written out-loud before today.

So I’m not saying that a degree of self-editing is bad. And I’m not saying that women (or men) shouldn’t be try to be good at their jobs, or act professionally if they want to be treated professionally. I think women being great at what they do is the single best advert for that fact that women are great at what they do.

But in the end, I was right to think I was clever and smart. I have avoided making myself a target of sexist assholes by playing by their rules. I’ve done a *blinding* job of that so far.

I think I’m going to stop doing that now.

Stall seats for Penn and Teller’s return to the UK after a 15 year absence. I’m not going to try to do justice to the 19 impossible, beautiful things they showed us all. Nor am I going to try to explain them – I’m taking Penn’s advice and living in the happy persistence of mystery, rather than clutching at unfounded rationales. Go, if you at all can. There do seem to be a few tickets left.

Mostly, it made me think about making and running games. More than the magic, what astonished me tonight was the quality of the workmanship on show. The staging, the timing, the writing, the costumes, the performances, the precision, the invention, the experimentation. Understanding the man-hours that had gone into the evening was impossible – understanding the man-hours that had gone into each individual trick equally so. And, while Penn’s mischevious promises that the nail-guns and tank-drownings weren’t actually dangerous were persuasive, it was perfectly clear that the level of precision required to bring the show off were astonishing.

And so I left with one over-riding feeling: that everything I’ve ever made is a sack of shit. And I’m proud of the things I’ve made. Proud of the people I’ve worked with – of their talent and their diligence and flair. But nothing I’ve ever made came anywhere close to the standards of excellence I saw on stage tonight. Even Royal Opera House performances, my previous benchmark of enacted perfection, don’t quite cut it. My standards simply aren’t Penn and Teller’s standards. They wouldn’t work with me. They shouldn’t work with me. I accept a margin of error, and a rate of failure, which they wouldn’t. They’re six sigma – beyond six sigma – and I’m two-and-a-bit-of-sellotape-and-fingers-crossed sigma.

Most of us are, to be honest. Most of us accept – particularly when we’re making digital, coded, things, that there will be bugs and flaws and things we bravely trumpet as ‘working as intended’.  But seeing tonight’s show reminded me of reading the account of the way NASA code – of how you make things actually work, rather than just mostly work. It’s easy, it turns out – it’s just agonisingly slow, expensive and thorough.

Penn and Teller’s example hasn’t left me daunted, however. It’s impossible not to be inspired by their warmth and hard-earned pride. I don’t want to make things like their things, but I do want to make things as well as they do, and it makes me happy that it’ll take me the rest of my life to learn how.

I’ve had the pretty extraordinary experience of getting to have the best job in the world twice (OK, three times, if you count that day as a dental chaperone). Editing Edge was an absolute, pinch-yourself dream come true, and the years since which I’ve spent consulting on interesting, challenging games with clever, passionate people have been hugely rewarding.

Moving from journalism to consulting was an exercise in putting my money where my mouth was. It’s easy to comment from the sidelines, more daunting to put your theories to the test on real projects. Doing so has taught me a huge amount, but left me aware that there’s still another money-mouth replacement manouevre left undone: running my own projects rather than advising on other people’s. But where, might you ask, would you find a bunch of people brave, optimistic and open-minded enough to let me do my own thing?

Enter Hide&Seek. You may know them from the Weekender*, the annual weekend of playful mayhem on the Southbank. You may know them from Tate Trumps, the laudably Ronseal-titled iPhone game for Tate Modern. You might know them from 221b.sh, the two-player collaborative Sherlock Holmes adventure game I designed with them last year. You might even know them from today’s rather lovely Guardian piece. It’s a company whose ethos I love – players first, gameplay second, platform last – and who I’m joining today as development director.

We’ve got extraordinary things planned, from projects with the Royal Opera House to pioneering work with a major console manufacturer, all of which you’ll be able to read about when the NDA deadlines mature. I’ll be working four days a week to start, to finish up my ongoing consultancy commitments, but will be helping to lead the studio in generating original, valuable, unpredictable game projects.

And so here I go again: new best job in the world.

*And the Weekender is NOW! Come down to the National Theatre this weekend to say hello. The bunting has to be seen to be believed.

After a frankly frenzied week of preperation, the splendid Richard Lemarchand’s GDC microtalk session is finally over. I know I’m not supposed to say this cos I was part of it, but it was by far my favourite session of the conference so far. So many brilliant ideas coming at you so fast! It was like the Dopler Effect in reverse.

I just wanted to tip my hat again to Leigh Caldwell, whose blog shows how he applies his expertise in behavioural economics to games and other interesting systems, and whose help was invaluable in putting my talk together. Other references for the talk are on Delicious, tagged GDC10Margaret.

GDC is weird this year, because everything’s on the wrong days, and in the wrong halls, and accompanied by the wrong lunch, but by jove it doesn’t matter cos the people are so nice.

This evening, the people who were being nice were mostly indie-types, brought together by the now-fledged UK Indie Developers club. It made me think, while introducing people to other people it was inconceivable they didn’t already know, that there’s still an awful lot of us who haven’t met, despite all living in a country the size of a teapot. So, if you’re an established, or just-getting-established UK indie, and fancy being on a mailing list with a bunch of other nice indies keen to help each other out, drop me a line (contact form on right) with info about yourselves and the game(s) you’ve made and I’ll get you on the mailing list.

Other nice indies around tonight included the team behind new, ultra-irresistible games mag Kill Screen. I left my promo copy in the hot hands of some over-excited paper fetishist, so I’ll be heading off to their site to buy another. It’s smart and pretty – you should too.

Last week at Doc/Fest I had the pleasure of sitting on a panel about story games in the very fine company of Alice ‘Wonderland‘ Taylor, Paula ‘Bus.Tops‘ Le Dieu, Adrian ‘Smokescreen‘ Hon and Mike ‘Routes‘ Bennett. Paula asked us some unforgivably tough questions, like ‘what are games?’ and ‘what is story?’ and the audience threw us the odd paedophilia related curve-ball, but I’d say we held our end up.

Where I didn’t hold my end up was in preparing any kind of presentation. Mostly out of laziness, of course, but partly because I didn’t trust myself in any way, shape or form, to keep within the five minutes allotted. So instead I made a stupid toy, reducing an otherwise intelligent, informed debate into a round of bingo.

Making it – other than my incredible oversight in missing out Ico and Braid, which Mike and Adrian (respectively) were quick to correct me on – it did strike me how limited our range of references is when we talk about the whole subject of the stories games tell. I’m sure you could suggest all kinds of improvements in the 24 games I’ve picked (wot no The Longest Journey? etc), but I’m equally sure you could get a decent score at almost any games-and-stories talk or panel with it as it stands. Good thing that we have a shared set of cultural references to measure complex ideas against, or bad thing that there is so little that is interesting – or well known enough – to get a mention? Both, probably.

The other thing that it made me think was, why are there so few PowerPoint games? If Excel is equal to Sonic and flight simulators, shouldn’t PowerPoint have a wider following among game makers? Other than a legion of middle-school teachers making vocab tests and evolution quizzes, and some frankly rather demoralising Choose Your Own Adventure templates, I couldn’t find much. If only someone, somewhere would rise to the challenge and make the ultimate PowerPoint story game then I could add it to my ultimate story PowerPoint and then probably embarrass myself on stage by mucking up all the hyperlinking.

In the very unlikely event you’d like to join in the fun, here’s the file.

This sometimes happens: I woke up mad at something I read a week ago. Today, it was Chris Bateman’s measured, interesting, informed article positing that a game has never – could never – make you cry. It’s not at all his fault. The distinction he makes between games as play, and games as systems is an interesting one, and his observation that games make people cry not through systems and rulesets and interactions themselves, but through the stories which are embedded within them, is sound.

What makes me angry – even in my sleep, it would seem -  is that we seem as incapable from moving on from the ‘can-we-make-people-cry’ debate as we are from the ‘are-games-art’ debate. I ranted about both before, in magazines and conference halls and pubs and railway sidings and on the internet, so I’ll try and keep it brief, but come on. Really? Can’t we leave it behind? The last group of people I encountered so dead set on making people cry were the boys in my class in primary two who had a dead frog in a matchbox they showed to all the girls. Can’t we aim a bit higher? Making people cry is not synonymous with high art, and it’s not synonymous with a deep and valuable emotional response.

I’ve been waiting all year to go to the Rothko exhibition at the Tate, and I’m not expecting it to make me cry. I am expecting to be ambushed by memories of things I thought or hoped forgotten. I am expecting to find solace and some strange kind of sustenance in the colours and contrasts that he painted. I am expecting the rhythms and patterns that I see to change how I think about the rhythms and patterns of my own life, and of my own thoughts. I am expecting to leave with a sense of wonder, melancholy and gratitude towards this man I never met, who died before I was born, who yet took the time to leave these treasures behind for me. In short, I’m expecting it to be moving, enriching, challenging. I’m expecting to be not quite the same person when I come out that I was when I went in. All with out story, all without tears.

Tears shouldn’t be our goal. Stories don’t need to be our tools. The majority of art forms don’t rely on narrative for their emotional impact. Stop and think about that for a second. The games industry tends to draw on such an amazingly limited roster of inspirations that it’s easy to forget it. But our obsession with linear, story-based – word-based, even – non-participatory art at the expense of all the other forms makes life so much harder for games, and it makes me crazy. I swear, next GDC I’m going to set myself up behind a table in the lobby with a huge pile of rubber bands and a huge pile of Jelly Tots, and each delegate, as they come in, is going to get a band on their left wrist and a handful of sweets in their right pocket. And then, all week, every time they hear the word ‘film’, ‘book’ or ‘TV show’, they have to give themselves a snap. And everytime they hear the world ‘painting’, ‘theatre’, ‘sculpture’, ‘opera’, ‘architecture’, ‘comics’*, ‘dance’, ‘music’ or ‘poetry’, they get a sweetie. Two, if they say it rather than hear it. But goddamit, we’re not the only people trying to create emotionally resonant experiences in environments that aren’t kind to linear narratives. Landscape gardeners talk with great sensitivity and great ambition about how they want visitors to their gardens to feel. Typographers can – and do, and have, and will again – talk for hours about the emotional resonance of difference fonts, of how different approaches to typesetting can totally change the mood and tone of a piece before you’ve even read a word. The world knows a lot about how to do this stuff, and all that knowledge is just there, lying about in galleries and on radios and along boulevards, for us to plunder.

So please, stop trying to make me cry, before you drive me to tears. But do keep trying to make me feel.

* I know comics are narrative-led, but I like them too much to not give people sweeties when they talk about them. And they’re still more useful to games than films, books, or TV.

So, part of having The Best Job In The World, is getting to help run The Best Games Festival In The World, which is part of my cunning overall plan to get paid for doing things I would pay to do anyway. Here’s a brief guide to what you (you!) could be doing in less than a fortnight. I really can’t think of any sane reason why anyone who likes games wouldn’t want to come along.

Thursday 30th October
Sessions from SCEE’s EyeToy team and Midway Newcastle, a live Q&A with God Of War’s David Jaffe, art workshops with Bizarre Creations, design workshops with Midway Newcastle, and a chance to pick the brains of some of the best independent game developers from around Europe. Plus game design insights from Elite-creator David Braben, the inside track from mod-makers turned Quake Wars designers Splash Damage and the world premier of the new game from Amanita Design, makers of the universally acclaimed Samarost.

Friday 31st October
A unique masterclass in game design as original designers Martin Hollis and David Doak dissect Goldeneye, and an insight into the workings of Guitar Hero and Rock Band creators Harmonix, plus the chance to put your questions direct to Geometry War’s Stephen Cakebread and Oddword’s Lorne Lanning. TT Games will be on hand to advise on how to achieve real-world domination, and Monumental Games will do the same for virtual-world domination .

Saturday 1st November
Saturday takes us back to the birth of a phenomenon as we hear firsthand about the creation of the first Grand Theft Auto, before Media Molecule, creators of the extraordinary Little Big Planet take to the stage to deliver this year’s BAFTA keynote. Then we head back the the US (via Skype) to hear direct from another big star in the gaming firmament and discover how things will change when gamers rule the world.

But that’s not all!

It really isn’t. Keep your eyes peeled for some last-minute, big-name additions to the programme, which will present fantastic opportunities to hear first-hand from some of the biggest companies making games in the UK today. And, alongside all these fantastic sessions, we also have huge extravaganzas like our Halloween attempt on the world zombie gathering record, which will give you a chance to shamble your way into the record books, live gigs from Harmonix, Jonathan Coulton, Press Play On Tape and PowerPlay, pub quizzes, craft sessions, birthday parties, all-night gaming marathons and more. And that’s not to mention the chance to quaff our very own festival beer (Fine Ale Fantasy), and take advantage of fantastic offers across a wide range of Nottingham’s bars and restaurants.

…are what you need.

Just a quick pointer for anyone who’s ever fancied being a world record holder: Guinness are accepting nominations for new gaming records from people who think they can achieve them live on the big screen at this year’s GameCity. So, if you know you have some obscure, unbeaten claim to gaming fame (I’ll give anyone a run for their money of fastest lap of Altima with the TV turned off) this is your chance to claim international glory. Head over to sign up here.

Edinburgh ’08 report:

Number of things I said that made the internet angry that I regret: 2

Number of things I said that made the internet angry that I don’t regret: 19

Number of things I said that would have made the internet really angry if it had been in the room at the time but it wasn’t so phew: 487,943

Number of people I promised I really would get a ‘Margaret Robertson is full of shit’ T-shirt made: 3

Gosh,  Edinburgh’s lovely. I really ought to know that by now, for all sorts of reasons, but it still takes me by surprise every time. But it was great to get a chance to load up on plain bread, and see a bunch of old friends, and catch up with all the Dare students as they all get one step closer to taking over the world.

The rather ramshackle slides for my rather ramshackle talk are here (sorry, 13 meg pdf or so, somehow). Fair disclosure: the notes represent what I had been planning to say if I’d had rather more sleep rather than what I actually managed to blurt out on the day, so apologies if they don’t mesh very well with what you heard. A lot of people have been asking me for the Patrick Redding talk, which you can get here, and really, if you’re only going to read one of them, read his and not mine, because his is properly brilliant.  Thanks again to EIF and Dare for inviting me up: good games, good people, good beer, bad weather. God, I miss Scotland.