Big Brother IS watching you

Here at Moviestorm Towers, we're always striving for greater realism. And as we stroll innocently through the streets of Cambridge, minding our own business, we can't help noticing the way our benevolent rulers and retail environment owners have placed cameras everywhere to keep us safe from the foul miscreants who would destroy our civilisation. It makes us happy to know that our every action is being watched and recorded so that we can prove our innocence should we need to, and it makes us feel good to know that we are doing our bit to help our heroic law enforcement officials in their fight against terrorrorororrism. And we know you feel the same way too.

So here you go. Security cameras. Moving, blinking, and remembering everything you do, just like the real thing. So no more excuses of "I didn't touch anything, it just crashed." We can see your keyboard, so we know you hit the magic CTRL-ALT-7 combination that causes everything to go slow.* And we can see what you're doing while you wait for your movies to render.

They'll be part of the Criminals pack. Which will be out... altogether now... when it's ready!

*Oh come on, don't tell me you actually tried it, did you? You did? Mwahaha!

Of all the Views in all the Moviestorms, he had to make changes to mine.

It was a Tuesday, just like any other Tuesday in rain-soaked Cambridge. I'd just returned from the 2008 Machinima Film Festival in New York. Crazy city. I was jetlagged, but anxious to get back to work. Before I left for New York, I'd completely rewritten and expanded the internal help pages for Moviestorm's Set Workshop View. It was a big job, but I'd got it finished and submitted to QA for testing just before I left. I was feeling proud of my work. I was ready to make a start on the Director's View section.

Dave Lloyd, co-founder of the company and Chief Bit Shoveller, looked up as I walked into the room. He seemed nervous; sheepish. Perhaps even guilty. I stared him down. I knew he'd crack eventually.

"Ingram," he gulped, "good to see ya! I, er ... I didn't know you were back in town. I'd love to stay and chat, but I got things to do, you know? Gotta run!"

I wasn't buying. This schmuck knew something, and I was going to find out what. I grabbed him by the lapels of his smart checkered suit.

"Spill it, Lloyd," I growled, "whadya know?"

A single bead of perspiration rolled down his craggy cheek, glinting in the moonlight, and then dropped to impact on the top of his trusty MacBook like a gunshot.

"I made some changes." he whispered, "I'm sorry! I didn't know it would go this far!"

I might have guessed. Lloyd was always pulling crazy stunts like this. They didn't call him "The Workaholic" for nothing. I pulled out my copy of The Ruby Way from inside my trenchcoat and pressed it to his throat. Violence is the only thing these engineers understand.

"Show me," I muttered between clenched teeth, "or I'll cut you a new programming language."

I felt sick. All my hard work had been for nothing. My documentation was now as useless as a J2EE engineer on an OpenGL project. This job gets to you sometimes. It eats away at your soul like a World Of Warcraft addiction. Still, as I walked down the smoke-filled alleyway towards my office, I had to admit: Lloyd's changes were good. Crazy, but good. Maybe I could document them after all ...