Everkvetch

Parenting moment for the day

I was walking around the block with my daughter on my shoulders.  On the street behind our house I was overtaken by a mother carrying a small dog and her little seven or eight year old son proudly carrying a dvd or game box.  As they passed I noticed that it was a copy of Grand Theft Auto 4 that she had just purchased for him.

What can you do?  We try to police ourselves....

PS3 feeling embattled?

Ok, so maybe this is overstating it a bit.  Sony has recently released a PS3 commercial showing clips of released and soon to be released games.  The voice over was a segment of the St. Crispian day's speech from Henry V ("We happy few, we band of brothers...")

http://youtube.com/watch?v=P9fa3HFR02E

Somehow I don't equate the console wars with the importance of the Battle of Agincourt, but it does give some interesting insight into Sony's current mindset regarding to their market position.  Of course, it will be interesting to see if Sony is able to pull off a Prince Hal.  No word yet if Ballmer has sent a case of tennis balls to the Sony executive team.

GDC Day 1 recap - Ernest Adams Keynote

Last year I brought home the plague from GDC.  This year I get my revenge.  Yes, I AM THE PLAGUE MASTER!

And as such I tried my best to keep a respectful distance from folks, take my dayquil, drink lots of fluids, and oh yeah, learn as much as I could from as many people as I could meet.

After some initial hemming and hawing about what I wanted to go to (XNA development) and what I needed to go to (Education SIG meetings) I made my way over to the North Hall to hear Ernest Adams give the opening keynote for the EdSIG.  I'm glad I fought off the impulse to indulge my inner code geek.

Ernest Adams' 10 Commandments for Educational Game Programs (recap)

10. Thou shalt not give tests in game development courses, nor be dogmatic in thy doctrine for even thou knowest not all.

He had an interesting side note about how textbook publishers make authors insert 'bonus content' like multiple choice questions.  He acknowledged that the ones in his book were outsourced and poorly done and ultimately not useful.  Much better to complete his design exercises.

9.Thou shalt reward precision and punish hand-waving for the Lord loveth it not.

In short, anyone can talk about how their game will have all of these neat new features or will combine everything about their favorite genres, but until you actually get to the detailed point about how you are going to engineer it, you haven't really done the design. 

The key element here is that you need to commit to actuality.  Place limits on yourself.  Every game is a compromise.

8. DO NOT emphasize aesthetics or story at the expense of game play (except possibly in a Masters level theory course.)

Don't tolerate incoherence in your student's plots, but don't start there.  The difficult work is in the puzzles, challenges and actions, not the back story.  If your student's are saying the avatar does this, and then they do this, they have removed the agency from the player and ought to be working in another medium.

7. Thou shalt not only teach game development, but also the history of games, the analysis of games and the sociology of games.

There are games out there that were hits almost a decade before some of our students were born.  Most of the games they can produce in a limited time frame of a semester are more akin to the arcade classics than to the massive epics that they wish to produce.  Learn the history and then learn why the early hits were hits.  Finally, also learn who is their customer base and what are their motivations for play.

6.  Thou shalt build relationships with industry, and shall remember that the industry is more than just PC games made for a Western audience.

There are many entry points to game development, and given the number of schools producing graduates, the math dictates that not everyone will end up on a AAA title.  Need to be able to figure out how to work with other entry points like mobile development.

At this point my notes ominously say - reject those who can't do the work.  I don't recall the thread that brought up this quote, and it seems to apply more closely to the previous point.  But I think it was related to rewarding the students who embrace the idea of many entry points and build for a variety of platforms, and to wash out the people who aren't going to try because they aren;t going to last in the industry anyway.

5) Thou shalt teach skills of project management and discourage over ambitious projects.

At one school Ernest mentioned the project teams were 8-10 developers spread out across the disciplines with 2-3 programmers and artists per team as well as an audio specialist and a producer.  The idea is to include redundancy.  Also, the project lead must know where everyone is on the project at all times.  Ultimately, the teams must produce something.  The goal has to be to finish, not to just do something half-way.

4) Do not punish failure in first year projects, but encourage them to learn from it.

The focus needs to be on the quality of the teamwork rather than on the quality of the game at this point.  The game design industry is all about working in large teams and making it to the finish line as a group. 

3) On the final project, think outside the box.

This is probably the only time for a long time in their careers that students will be able to pitch and make the game they want to make.  They should be free to be weird, but should also be encouraged to avoid juvenile satire.

This project will likely be the most important part of their portfolio.

He also mentioned that as an IGF juror he quickly tired of yet another FPS.  The genre is so established you really need to raise the bar in order to stand out.

2) Thou shalt require your students to study the other Arts and Sciences that they may combat the instinct to produce derivative games.

Some faculty I talked with indicated that they worked with other departments to allow for game development students to approach theor course work from the perspective of games.  (i.e. work through anthropology by using the course to help a developer define a culture that would be anthropologically plausible, but set in an unknown or alien environment.)

1) Thou shalt integrate all the disciplines of game development unto the utmost of thy institution's capacity.

in short, make the students learn each other's tools.  Programmers should learn a bit about Maya and 3DSMax, Artists should play with scripting, everyone should know how to use a waveform editor.

This is not to let them think that any one person can do it all, but instead to show them they they need each other's strengths on the team.  It is important that you not fail the3m if they suck.  Only fail them if they refuse to try.

And since this is from a programmer...

0) Thou shalt not take an existing CS, Art, animation, media studies, English or other program, add a game course or two and call it a game program, for it is an abomination to the lord.

I noticed there were a few furtive glances at that comment, though I will not say from which institutions.  I believe Ernest said something like, if I offended anyone with that statement you probably needed to be offended,  (I am mangling the quote, but that was the gist of it.)

And with that - we wrapped, and so will I.

More plague tinged goodness tomorrow.

Helvetica, the Spiekermann blog and feeling i'm not alone

I'm a geek.  I admit it.  I embrace it.  Who else would be home with a fever, relishing election returns on the TV while watching a documentary about Helvetica on the MacBook and browsing type designer Erik Spiekermann's blog on the side?

Oh, you do it too?  You're my kind of people.

I can't recommend Helvetica enough to type junkies.  Or wanna-be type junkies.  Or folks that haven't considered that typography is an art form.  It's a rich look at the history of the typeface everyone recognizes. 

Erik Spiekermann, noted typographer, was interviewed about the impact of Helvetica.  As he was talking about it I decided to google him and found my way to his blog.  Really fascinating stuff.  But the thing that I found most heartening - I am not the only one who is was intimidated about facing a potentially global reading audience.

http://www.spiekermann.com/mten/

Just get thoughts out there.  No pretense.  It's hard to be that open, but what is the cost of the alternative?  Just write...

Left the ranks of Mac owners...

...for now.  I decided that the chance of something great being released at MWSF was just too great for me to commit to the MacBook.  So I'm holding out until after the keynote on Tuesday.

Come on Steve, hit me with a jewel-toned, aluminum cased MacBook with 2GB ram and 250 GB hard drive standard!  (Hey, I can dream, can't I?)

Ouch

I have found few things as painful as the second day back on a bicycle saddle after a lay off of several months. 

On the road again

The weather has taken a turn for the warm here in the northeast.  That coupled with a really nice present from my wife for Christmas meant it was time to get Nora bundled up in warm clothing and get myself back out on my bike. 

This past summer my wife purchased a Burley trailer as a way for me to spend time with my daughter while getting exercise.  As a former racing cyclist I have a love/hate relationship with my many bicycles.  I love feeling the wind in my face and spinning a good high cadence, but I hate my current fitness level, where the slightest rise in the road slows me significantly, when I used to race hill climbs and use upward turns of the road to put a hurting on my opponents (and on occasion, my teammates.)   [Ok, to be fair, J.B. often put a hurting on me, but he weighed 132 pounds dripping wet and I was (and am) a good size bigger than him.]

It's funny how one's perspective shifts over time.  I have to confess that I feel awkward in a  bike shop now-a-days, like the regulars are asking "what is this fat guy doing in here?"

In my smaller form I used to wonder who in the world would order the XXXL clothing from bike nashbar instead of purchasing the higher quality Castelli, Giordana or Pearl Izumi.  I now have my answer.  People who love the sport of cycling but who don't have the time to devote their lives to fitting everything around time spent on the bike.  People who don't see 37-40 as a reasonable interpretation of XXL.

The weather is still kind of nice today.  Think I'll go throw on my knickers and take a ride.

Joined the ranks of Mac owners...

I just joined the ranks of Mac owners... or at least I'm straddling the fence.  I guess this requires some explanation.

I've been saving up for a while to purchase a MacBook.  I've missed my PowerBook Pro since I had to give it back to Rutgers upon leaving for RVCC last January.  I really missed the ease with which iPhoto allowed me to catalog and chronicle all of the photos of Nora, the integration of tools like GarageBand with iMovie, and the  fact that I could open a terminal window and have a nice unix command line to work with.

So right before the end of last year I took my pooled resources down to the local Apple store and purchased a white MacBook with 2GB of RAM.  But that's when I realized that I committed a Mac newbie blunder.  I just purchased Mac hardware less than a month before MacWorld San Francisco!

Oh No!  What to do.  I know that Steve (you know, of black turtleneck fame) is likely to unveil the latest and coolest for the Mac faithful just 3 weeks after my long awaited but apparently impulsive purchase.

The Horror!!!

So I've been waffling now for almost a week.  I have the box sitting here.  Unopened.  Contemplating bringing it back to the Apple store (I can return it until the 12th.) and holding off until after the 15th to actually purchase.

Arguments against bringing it back.  The MB was just quietly upgraded this past fall with better processor and graphics chip.

Arguments for bringing it back... what if white macbooks are discontinued?  I will be branded as a pariah in the Mac community.  Or at least the holder of old technology! 

Ok, so i think this boils down to the hope that MacBooks will get cool colors like the nano.   The machine I bought has all of the power I need to do what I want to with it.

But the feeling that if I had just been patient...

But this is technology, so it will be obsolete as soon as I get it home...

I think that this is largely a reaction because I haven't purchased my own computer for such a long time.  Usually I am just working on the machine I have for work, and there was always a lot of cross over between work and personal projects.  But that was pre-Nora and pre multiple GB of photos and movies.

I want and need a system that is strictly for managing home media.

So I throw it out there to you, my friends.  Should I just open the darn thing and get it over with, or should I hold out and see what Maccy goodness Uncle Steve bestows upon the faithful?

HEEEEEeeeeeeeellllllppppppp! 

<big grin>

Best games of 2007

Ok, so Darius and Jeff both did this, and I want to weigh in too.  Why?  Because I hate feeling left out. 

1. Portal - simply put the best 5 hours of game play I have experienced in a long time.  When you walk through your life looking for places to put portals, you know a game has gotten in to your head.  That hasn't happened to me since the original Katamari Damacy.  Added bonus points because the song, Still Alive helps to get Nora to sleep.
2. Catan (XBox live arcade) - This game has been in constant use on my 360, probably accounting for why it hasn't red-ringed yet.  It's a great way to get a Catan fix late at night, or with friends online when you can't all be in the same place.  It captures the spirit of the game well.  And the music has a good beat and my daughter likes to dance to it.
3. Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords (DS port) - I had so much fun with this little game and it caused me to lose more sleep than was probably healthy to do so over the summer.   Matching skulls up in my dreams for weeks at a time.  Great game to play in relatively small increments, late at night, after the last bottle has been given.
   

This is in no way a comprehensive analysis of all games produced this year. Like Jeff, things were pretty hectic.  I didn't play as much as I wanted to with a toddler to chase after and a new position that is kicking my butt, but a lot of games that I played, while enjoyable, weren't game of the year quality.

Noticeably absent -

• Mass Effect.  I want to play it, I just can't have that much of my life sucked away right now. 
• Rock Band.  You won't believe how much day care will run you...and you want me to get this too?
• Assassin's Creed. After reading Matt's analysis I'm curious to try it, but can't comment on it yet.
• Bioshock.  Really want to get this game.  Loved the demo.  But am afraid I will be disappointed (based on other's commentary) and not sure I can commit so many late nights to playing it.
• Halo 3.  I played through it, I just didn't like it that much.

I guess it also doesn't help that I've been retro gaming like a mad fiend on both the 360 and Wii, which kind of cuts down on total titles to talk about for this year.

New Year's resolution(s)

There are only two this year.

First, I absolutely refuse to feel bad if life is too hectic for me to blog regularly.  This blog is intermittent, so be it. 

Second, I'm going to drink more water.  The requisite mythologically accepted eight cups a day if I can manage it.  And if possible I will do it from my tap with a filter rather than paying someone else to bottle and transport filtered tap water to the local store.

What, if any, do you resolve to do in the coming year?