I have a bold idea:  have the U.S. government producing the next 10 Avengers features to get itself out of debt. With $700 million banked worldwide after a mere 13 days, Disney should net north of a billion before Blu-Ray sales.

So what transpired to make this Marvel film so successful?  Was it the MARVEL fanboy nation, the hype machine, Joss Whedon’s deep Buffy fan base, what was it? Whatever the reason, the bottom line is that when the sun shone through the Staff of Whedon in the Disney map room, it revealed the location of the Ark of the Cash Covenant.

I’m finally getting back on track with my monthly International Game Developers Association column, thanks mostly to the patience of the organization and my editor, Cat Wendt. IGDA Board of Directors elections were held a while ago. Sadly my personal favorite pick – the awesome Kate Edwards of Englobe Inc - won’t be joining the IGDA board, but I have a lot of confidence in those who did win, and lots of optimism for the future of the organization.

This month I write about the uniqueness of how games relate to their consumers, and how developers are inventing some clever new approaches to authorial control that ensures players see and experience what the developers want them to, despite gaming’s inherent affordance. Enjoy!

There are basically two schools of thought on how to approach a Souls game: use the wiki, or don’t use the wiki. I use the wiki. I don’t rely on it, but I use it. My experience is that a few spoilers are nothing compared to what you’d miss without those resources. Characters. Goodies. Immense swathes of storyline. Arguably, the whole theme of the game (Eastern-tinged postamble interpretation of Hellenic ‘Olympians vs. Titans’ creation mythology refracted through Knight of Faith concept in contra-Campbellian nihil-existentialist environment). Two entire regions I would have missed without the wiki form this, our latest (and gloomiest) entry in the Diaries.

Unless you’ve been living in a closet lately, you’ve probably noticed a lot of excitement focused on Kickstarter. Kickstarter, the crowd-funding resource, is being used to fund all kinds of cool games for development. Often, these are games of the quirky variety that might be considered too unusual for a regular publisher to take a risk on. Today we’re drawing your attentions toward a promising Kickstarter done by some friends of Tap: Map Monsters.

Fez is actually two different games. Only one of them is the game you were promised. I like the other game much better.

Welcome to Dragon’s Dogma! In this demo, you

Thank you for playing the Dragon’s Dogma demo.

I’m a week late and it’s totally my fault. – Dix

Whenever I go to the pictures (or ‘cinema’ as most people call it) I make every effort to avoid trailers. Over the weekend I went to see The Cabin In The Woods, a film I knew absolutely nothing about other than it was apparently good, and it was written and directed by Drew Goddard (Lost, Cloverfield, Angel) and co-written by Joss Whedon (partly responsible for quite a few things I’ve not liked, particularly that fourth Alien film after the trilogy). We arrived early, got into the screen early and I had to watch the trailers. Looking back, I wish I’d had some ice cream to distract me.

The formerly iPad-exclusive Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP is now available (and on sale) for PC on Steam.  So you should definitely go get it if you don’t have an iPad.  If you do have an iPad, you better have played this already!  Because it’s amazing.

Sword & Sworcery is an indie action/adventure game with a really incredible soundtrack, and is frankly not quite entirely unlike anything you’ve ever played probably.  It was also one of my games of the year.

So what are you waiting for?  GO NOW.

A few more post-PAX reports! Indie was a huge precence at PAX East this year, and it would’ve been just as difficult to see everything there as it would have been all the triple-As. Here are impressions from just a few indie games I played at the convention. I’ll take a look at Girls Like Robots, Primal Carnage, and A Valley Without Wind: three games that are all pretty different from one another and reveal the huge variety of indie games that were available there.