On the Something Awful forums, Nickoten asked me the process I took to get into the games industry. I’ve told people in person, but I realized I never wrote that whole story down. To fix this, I’m going to start writing about my journey to working in interactive media. I should preface this by saying that I don’t think anyone else can take this kind of path anymore as the landscape has changed significantly. What I do hope is the overall themes of my story can help others in their own paths.

The Beginnings

Since around kindergarden, I wanted to work for Disney Imagineering. I was very interested in creating narrative environments of which a lot of the rides at Disney specialized in. Taking an audience member and making them apart of the story, rather than viewing the story unfold. As I grew older, I had less of a dependency on working for Disney specifically, but still wanted to create these thematic landscapes of which the audience participated in directly. Throughout all my life, I haven’t deviated from this ultimate goal. The tools and forms of presentation have changed, but that driving essence hasn’t.

Grade school was very limiting for me in working in anything arts and entertainment. Band was about the only thing available to me at the time and waited every moment to participate. The alto and later tenor saxophone was my instrument from fifth grade and lasting though high school. This was my first foundation in performance art and the basics of performing to an audience. There were a few plays in grade school, but due to ‘morality restrictions,’ which was limited to Christian plays such as the one John Brownlee wrote about on Boing Boing. I also the school announcements which were one of the few outlets of work in media at the Roman Catholic grade school I attended. It was the start of my carer in voice work, which I wish I did more of today.

In High School I had plenty of other options available. The theatre department was relevant which I took to as a fish to water. I am a card-carrying member of the International Thespian Society and can produce the card upon request. More music options such as jazz and marching band. At the start of sophomore year, I started getting involved with the video production team at the high school. In the three years I spent, Jeremiah, myself, and others built the program to a media production house with live broadcasting and other projects. While my family has supported me all the way, and the arts/theatre department of faculty were highly supportive, other teachers and especially the administration were less than supportive. Mostly along the lines that my work wasn’t applicable to ‘real life careers’. As you might have guessed, I didn’t listen much to them.

Senior year is when I started to gain more of a backbone and confidence that my work can be applied to a larger picture. I became heavily involved with the Thespian Society by being on the state of Michigan board. That year was the most productive year to date having produced two festival events and toured a show called “Guns Kill Kids: And Other Stupid Comments”. It was the first time I was appreciated for my work by complete strangers. What I learned is that I should have worked on outside projects much earlier in my life, but hindsight is 20/20.

My high school years showed me how I learned; I make my own curriculum. The best environment for me is a place with good teachers of established media who are also open to mix other fields of work. To me, the best teachers are the ones willing to learn new things. With my interests in storytelling, and the lack of established academics in the field of Interactive Media at the time, I needed a place where I can have the most flexibility.

College Planning & Limited Options

When it came to college planning, I was in a difficult position. My high school’s grading scale was rigged at every student’s detriment. While the national average was a 93% for an A, my high school’s level was a 96% and trickled down form there. This resulted in me looking dumber on paper. While the staff would make statements that schools adjusted for this, the dark secret is it only applied to colleges in Michigan, Ohio and maybe Indiana. For schools outside of this geographic, admissions wouldn’t realize this subtle but very dramatic difference. So in effect, I was too dumb, but only on paper. Cost issues aside, I couldn’t expect my 2.71 GPA for high school would be seen seriously. Which would be a 3.1 had I went to a public school (higher if the extra religion coursework was removed).

I should make clear that I knew I was good enough for these schools. I didn’t meet academic requirements due to the paperwork.

With this limitation, I had to pick a college which allowed me the greatest flexibility but with good foundations. To be honest, there wasn’t a school in the midwest that really sold me on this. The only schools that started to fit these goals were MIT, Emerson College, USC, UCLA. All of which I knew I didn’t have a chance due to my grades on paper. Instead, I applied to Western Michigan University. Having done work at the college in the Summer of ‘99 with the video production department, it was the most comfortable choice for me.

Then and now, I knew I had settled into a college rather than picking a college I wanted. My plans were to build up my academic record and reevaluate either during my undergraduate work or make grad school the place where I started actually learning the way I wanted. This isn’t to say that WMU was a bad school. For the options I had a the time, it was the best school I could pick. There seemed to be enough flexibility for me to work on what I want. My plan was to walk in the door as a Cable/TV Broadcast major and work it out from there.

The admission process was embarrassingly simple. A WMU admission consoler was at my high school, where I sat and talked to her. In four minutes I was officially accepted into WMU. It was way too easy, and I didn’t even feel great after that. No challenge. Nothing I did in high school really mattered. I showed up, and I was in.

To be continued!

Background

Child’s Play Charity is a foundation created by Penny Arcade to provide video games, toys, and other financial support for children’s hospitals around the globe. The Child’s Play website can tell you more in detail about what they do.

Fünde Razor was founded by Joel Johnson (currently the editor of Boing Boing Gadgets) started Fünde Razor in NYC where Rock Band is played to raise funds and awareness for Child’s Play. Last year the event was in three cities: NYC, Denver, and San Francisco. The other cities run by other bloggers like Brian Crecente (Kotaku), Gawker Media, and Chris Kohler (Wired Game|Life). The idea is to have a nation wide event where all cites have the events on the same night. More cities and more people are involved, but I’ll wait for Joel to make that announcement.

The overall purpose of Fünde Razor is to raise awareness for Child’s Play. Come to the events if you can, but if you can’t, consider donating directly to Child’s Play. This makes the judgement of success less about the returns of the one night, but the overall fundraising goals of Child’s Play.

My Involvement

I attended the San Francisco event last December and as you can see from these photos, it was a great time with a lot of people for the 150 capacity at Shine. It was a fun time, but with a media push on the day of the event, I know that the SF event can hold a much larger audience with some additional planning. I decided to get back to the family “business”* and get back into fundraising.

You can think of Fünde Razor as a sort of franchise arrangement. Joel is the founder and above all things go through him. While we work as a team, each city’s planners are working on their own cities. We share resources, but each event has their own uniqueness due to the local and the venue they have.

The past few months I’ve been in talks with Joel and the rest of the Fünde Razor crew. My involvement is specifically is with the San Francisco event in getting the venue, planning the activities for the event, and other things around the actual event in San Francisco. I will need help in running the various aspects of the event itself, but my roll is to make sure the larger parts of the event are planned and managed with a small staff executing the plans. Not that I’m hands-off, but I can’t do everything. Chris Kohler is also a partner in the SF event and handeling more of the corporate communications aspect of the event.

My goals for this year’s SF event include increasing the number of attendees and establish the event as a large, yearly event. This means advertising at least a month or two in advance along with a larger venue and more activities. In addition, I want to activate not only gamers and Rock Band players in the area, but have more participation with all the game studios in the Bay area. At the minimum getting people working at these studios to show up; Bonus for helping to sponsor the event. Though I help here and there, the corporate communications are being done by others in the group. If you know of an organization that would be interested, pass them along to me.

Want to help?

Right now I’m attempting to lock down the venue and date. I’m in talks so I can’t reveal more details than that at the moment. Once we get the venue, date settled and talks with sponsors firmed a little more, I will need a few people willing to be in charge of specific aspects of the event. These positions will be higher-level management that will start working early on. Someone in charge of the main Rock Band stage, for example. Someone in charge of managing all volunteers. Upper-level stuff.

We’ll also need a small army of volunteers who will staff various things for the event. Hopefully we can get a sizable number so no one person is working more than two hours for the event. That call won’t happen till a month or less before the event.

Once we start having these positions open, you’ll all know.

* My family and I have worked for various charities though out the years including Festival of Trees for Detroit Children’s, my High School’s auction, etc. It’s not an established consulting business, we’ve simply done a lot of work in the field.

Scope of this Review

I think it’s important to realize that this is a culturally significant title on a platform never dreamed or intended to be on. There is much said on the game itself in the past sixteen years and I don’t think I have much to uniquely contribute from reviewing the iPhone version. What I intend to focus on is that nature of porting the title onto the iPhone and review the choices made. This review is about how this title works on the iPhone and less about the content.

As someone who claims himself as the resident Myst nerd, there isn’t much Cyan Worlds needed to do in order to buy the title. I own the Myst board game, so I can be counted as part of the base audience. My goals with this project is how this title can attract a new audience to the title. Stated different, how can the new platform revive the franchise. As I stated before, you can earn a one-to-one relationship between the desktop computer experience with a portable device. Success then is how closely the title can communicate the essence of the original experience.

Implementation

Basic Controls

The interface starts off naturally and as expected for an iPhone game. Touch the section of the screen in which to interact with or to move forward. The cinematography of the frame is the interface. Turning around in a node is done mostly with moving the finger across the screen. This is borrowing directly from the iPhone’s photo slideshow behavior.

What makes the iPhone different from other platforms is the lack of cursor. On the PC, your cursor changed based on the context of the area. If the cursor hand was pointing to the left, is showed you could turn left when clicking. With a direct finger input, a cursor would be too much UI and therefor not included. The problem that comes with this decision is communication to the user on what possible actions may be taken. Myst doesn’t allow you to look in every possible place as it’s not a 360 view point. When using a mouse, the cursor did a good job hiding the lack of viewing options. With the touch interface, not being able to go to the left may be either an action not allow, or the user did the behavior wrong. Or in some cases, the user doesn’t know they can look above or below them.

Myst was a unique example of the day by having a very limited inventory system with only pages of books and temporary limited inventory items. For example, the match in the shed.

While I won’t spoil much of what you need to do here and why, it took me 3 minutes to figure out how to obtain a match and then light it. All of which came around the hit areas of this match box. I had to hit the right side of the box to get a match, then strike it. Two minutes was spent on trying to obtain the #@*% match. In this case due to the size of the active area, dumbing down the actions may help with the interface. Let the whole match box be the area of action.

Device Orientation

While it’s very clear that Myst shouldn’t be played in portrait mode (Home button on the bottom), you are fixed to play the game with the Home button to your right and headphones on the left. It would be nice to pick which way the game would play and swap between the home button on left or the right. I can understand issues with accidentally flipping over the orientation on accident. Still, would a preference setting be that hard to implement?

Saving

The Auto save system is spot-on with the iPhone. While doing anything on the iPhone, the application must be ready to close at a moment’s notice for an incoming call. For a title that has a save progress, it’s extreamly important that the application pick up right where it left off. I’m happy to report that iPhone Myst does this very successfully without missing a beat. What I haven’t figured out is what happens when you’re in the middle of a Live-Action video sequence. In all, I don’t worry about loosing my progress all of the sudden.

You are also allowed up to four additional saves or ‘Bookmarks’ as the application calls them. I’ll go more into the specific UI aspects later in this post, but the limits of 4 save slots (in addition to the auto save) is a little frustrating for me, if only so I can make a save for each age. For the average user though, you get what you need from saving. Can’t go wrong with that!

Video

Myst made use of a lot of pre-rendered video due to technical limitations of 3D rendered graphics, rather than a purely artistic goal. While the use of actors for video is obvious, video was used more for animation of objects from switches to stairs appearing to lighting changes. While you will only see human actors in the Red/Blue/D’ni books and when meeting Atrus in person, the rest of the game used video for any animated sequence. Elevator movement, doors, paths/steps rising from water. Computers back then could only play video mixed with still images. Now it’s harder to make a game of all video than to pre-render. Yet with iPhone Myst, there doesn’t seem to be a concern to make these difficulties transparent for the player.

In the 1993 offering, the video appeared seamlessly with no loss of picture.

In the iPhone app, this is the common steps of display:

1. Activate event for movie clip.
2. The ‘loading’ circle appears in the middle of the screen.
3. Black screen for 1.5 to 2 seconds.
4. Play video at full screen, regardless of the effected area.
5. [Optional] Black screen for 1.5 to 2 seconds.
6. [Optional] ‘loading’ circle.
7. Resume rest state and resume interactivity.

This is hugely distracting! The viewer is pulled out of the narrative and reminded of the technology, not the narrative. I’d be concerned about the loading circle, but the black screens are completely uncalled for. I can’t imagine there isn’t a way to send a still image buffer to prevent a solid black screen. This isn’t limited to video that requires the full screen display. All the video in iPhone Myst is fullscreen video. The 1993 title compartmentalized video to only the parts that move. Apparently the iPhone can only do fullscreen video. This may be why the game is larger than the 1993 title; All the video is fullscreen.

I don’t know the background on making these technical decisions, but is there really no other way? This aspect alone makes the iPhone port go beyond being different due to the platform. This aspect ruins the essence of the title.

Settings Panel

The settings panel for the game which is always accessible in the lower-right of the screen during gameplay. While you’ll see the ‘i’ icon in the lower-right, you can turn it off with the ‘Options Icon’ setting, which I recommend you do. It’s not distracting, but once you know it’s there it’s good to turn off.

This is ugly. A mix of custom UI elements with the de-facto iPhone UI elements. I’m not saying the one or the other is a wrong choice, but the mix is a mess. The settings screen is apart of the title as it’s within the title. While you don’t get any part of the story from the settings, it must fit the mood of the piece so that transitioning to and from the actual content is a smooth delivery. Instead, this settings panel says: OH HAI! YOUR ON AN IPHONE PORT! I’d rather it say “You’re in Myst.”

Heaven help you if you hold down the info button too long. Otherwise that ‘Hints…’ button will trigger… into Safari. While the auto save system is top notch, you have to reload the game from the top once you get out of Safari. Same for ‘Help/Info…’ What gets me is with a game already a huge size, why not use an embedded hint/help/info messaging system? Or the in-app web browser API? This information doesn’t need to be dynamically changed, so there’s no fear of imbedded information. Instead the least path of resistance for developers was place; Call Safari.

And what content do you read? “Help/Info…” | “Hints”
I should note that the Hints page only works in Safari (both iPhone and desktop versions).

What really gets to me about this panel is my overall impressions with the iPhone port of Myst. Enough effort was put in to make the game function, but not for a quality experience. I don’t want to say they didn’t care, but I get the feeling that development resigned on so many aspects that efforts to improve the experience fell by the wayside.

Conclusion

I focused on the UI design and technical implementations of this title, but I want to make it clear that I love Myst for what it is. This title was significant for the period and did a lot of amazing things both technically for the time and for the art form. It’s why you have a optical disc drive in your computers. It showed that removing dependence on explicit UI elements can make for a more engrossing experience. I would even go far to say that the iPhone itself has to give acknowledgment to the 1993 Myst. The idea that interacting with the object in a natural manor is the key to UI design.

What I find with the iPhone experience is a lack of that acknolagement. I’m left with the feeling that the experience is attached with too many applogies for the work. I don’t regret the purchase on my iPhone, but I would hisitate giving the iPhone version to someone who hasn’t experienced Myst before in fear they will leave with the wrong impression.

What sparked my desire to do this lecture came from a conversation I had while standing outside a GDC party for Steam/Valve. While talking to a man whom had at least 15 years in the industry, he really brought to light the disconnect between academia and the industry. We got on the education subject and snapped back by saying he preferred students from DigiPen and Fullsail because they do what they are told. I have a much different take on the situation as I consider students from these and other schools with much more respect than he did. I want to make sure there are enough students out there to prove me right and him completely wrong.

Here’s the text I used in applying for the PAX lecture. Obviously not set in stone, but I’d love your feedback as I start shaping this lecture in the next few months.

Title:
Making a Career in Video Games

One-Paragraph Description:
Are you looking for a job with a game studio, or a career in interactive media? Learn how to identify the styles in game development curricula and the tools to help you find the best education for more than a job, but a lifetime’s work in the gaming industry.

Is there anything else you think we [PAX staff] should know?
This lecture will provide tools and perspective for finding the right curriculum for the student. This entails a two part approach. First, a student needs to start figuring out what direction he or she wants to take. The second part is knowing what information to extract from potential institutions. From this foundation, attendants can make solid decisions on which schools are applicable to their educational goals. Potential undergraduate, graduate, and transfer students will all find this lecture helpful.

I include my credentials to represent my own personal expertise, but it does not illustrate endorsement by any current or former employers.

Credentials of Highlight:
* First recipient of a Bachelor of Fine Arts in New Media at Emerson College.
Created the first BFA New Media curriculum at Emerson College, Boston.
* Emerson College, Enrollment & Student Affairs
Created tools and content related to admissions and enrollment for duties related to being an admission counselor.

For more information about me, visit http://segonmedia.com/

Official Website @ Cyan Worlds | This link opens iTunes right to the application.

Myst is one of the trifecta of games that got me into this art form of interactive storytelling. It’s a body of work that helped shape me as an artist in new media and made me what I am today. Which is why I’m buying the crap out of this title. I have the Myst board game for goodness sake!

I hope that Cyan Worlds does a postmortem on bringing the game to the iPhone. A few immediate questions I have are what kinds of decisions were made to update the port. Was there a point where they pulled punches to make the game have the spirit of the 1993 release? I also want to know what they did with the LAV scenes. Can’t wait to play to look how they turned out on the iPhone.

On a forward-thinking note, I hope this will help Cyan Worlds fund a new project from their studio. Honestly, I hope it’s something not Myst related. Heresy, I know. I love the Myst franchise. I love the work Cyan Worlds has done. But I think it’s time to move away from the past and start with something new.

Note: I did copy the above image from the Boing Boing Gadgets article. I can also screencap it myself, but I’m lazy.

Do you want a job or a career?

A lot of the talk and guidance about video game education is rooted in getting a job with a studio. Yes, being employed is apart of a career and one seeks an education to become employable. I’m not questioning this aspect. What concerns me is the debate is geared towards getting that one job. There isn’t talk about the sustainability for one to adapt though their life time in interactive media. Simply training for getting hired out of college, not as a practitioner of the field.

by Sklathill

Part of this comes from the current venues of advice one can seek. Naturally one would look towards the veterans in the industry as cues for being successful. While this advice is very valuable, the material from them seems more about getting the job rather than forming a career. The veterans of this industry created careers in a way that can’t be duplicated; The industry is created now. The experiences of our veterans can’t be duplicated. I wish there were more long-term advice applicable to today, but right now one has to extrapolate how the experience of the vets can be made in current times, and how it can’t. This kind of nuance isn’t realized by a potential applicant from high school, nor is anyone pointing this out. The debate is stuck at ‘get a job,’ not ‘make a living.’

On the academic side, there’s two extremes going on which don’t help anyone. On the traditional academics side: There are individual professors doing great work across many different schools. I’ll name drop my alama mater, Emerson College, but other schools like USC’s Interactive Media program and Michigan State’s Media Arts & Tech program. The problems are trying to advertise these programs. I see a lot of failures from admission offices to assist applicants in informing the program properly. Professors should be working on teaching and leave the admission office to sell the school. This requires the admission office to be knowledgeable about the climate of the academic landscape and how the program they represent etches their unique space. There isn’t much of that going on from my experience. The reasons are varied for each school. Some schools simply have uninformed admission consolers. Some schools don’t want to pitch full-blown game development degrees in fear their program isn’t adequate enough. Great work is being done, but they aren’t informing potential applicants properly.

The other end of the spectrum are establishments that go all-in with video games as their only avenue of training. DigiPen, Full Sail, and schools advertising game production on late-night cable. For the most part, the marketing with these schools fills the void the traditional schools create. A lot of the marketing messages are along the lines of “we only focus on games/media” as to imply liberal art schools set back the student. My largest fear with these institutions is too much focus on current production tools and methods; Less on forming a background on larger principles that aid in a career. Producing a project soon and often is a sexy selling point, but at what point does it become a cheep thrill at the expense of a lasting education?

At this point I feel I’ve sealed my fate in trying to bring a more substantive debate on what an education in interactive media means. I’m starting with formulating and applying to conduct a lecture at PAX in Seattle. It’s safe to say there will be enough interested people looking to go into higher education in interactive media. My goal is to get these people to ask the right questions to themselves and potential educational institutions. I think it’s an attractive lecture to have, I hope the organizers agree. If it turns out well, I can reprise at PAX East in Boston.

¹ Still waiting for the recording to be released. Will post when this happens.

When ever Boing Boing Video posts the clip, I’ll post it on here. I’m curious to see how I cam across on the video, King of Cosmos head and all.

Boing Boing Video + Offworld @ GDC
Direct UStream Link

I should also note that I will be at GDC as well, sans the time when I appear on Boing Boing.

In all seriousness, I am very glad that an effort is being made. I only have their website to go on, so I have to go on a bit of speculation from the presented materials. They’re also starting off small but hoping to expand their collection and open a full presentation and space in 2012.

There are a few things I will be watching for. I don’t want to give the impression that I am looking down on this effort from the start, but I have deep concerns which I hope are addressed. I hope this center can make the history of our art form accessible.

Games as Toys vs. Games as Storytelling Objects

The largest concern I have is on intent and focus. The center is under the Strong National Museum of Play. What concerns me is that the center will portray all articles as an article of a toy and by extension only for children.

It is very true that in the early days of video games were marketed as toys rather than media texts. What I fear is that the context of games as toys would perpetuate in modern context. Would we consider the story line of Myst as a toy? Would we consider all movies only for children because there are Disney movies? I fear that this center would only perpetuate a misconception that video games are only for children.

Reading though the center’s Concentric Circles document [PDF], I don’t have the fullest of confidence. Most of the dialogue is about video games for children only, and mostly being male centric. I feel that the initial goals of the center are only about focus on children with video games, rather than a society which has incorporated electronic games though the years. While it does raise some broader questions, I feel that the center is tied down by being apart of a museum which goals are for children’s toys, rather than a broader discussion of a form of media and how different audiences have participated.

The toys vs. media text argument is certainly a mater of academic discussion. What I fear with the center is a lack of discussion in this area. The art form has evolved where video games are presented differently now than they were. Quickly looking over the documentation, I am left with little confidence.

Access to Collections

It’s obviously way too early to make a conviction of how these materials and research will be presented, but it’s the right time to discuss how the material will be accessible. The center is located in Rochester, NY. No matter where you decide to put a physical place, there will always be limits to people to come visit. This is the current statement from the center on their access to the collections:

All the collections are accessible to scholars for research. A small but representative sample of artifacts is on view in museum displays, and a few games are available to guests to play as components of exhibits on other topics. Plans are underway for a major, permanent exhibit projected to open in 2012. See below for additional information.

Which raises many questions for me. This statement is along the lines of access to the physical objects which have obvious access limitations. You wouldn’t want to put out physical artifacts in the effort to preserve the quality of the artifacts. What worries me is the accessibility of the information of these artifacts and other findings. It’s not fair to go into speculation, so let me present how I hope the center will proceed with the collection.

First and for most, I hope all text and images are released under some form of Creative Commons license, ideally Attribution 3.0. What’s the use of history research when no one can use the information?

Which leads into my next thought: How will the collections and presentation be transmitted? Nothing can replace the experience of viewing and interacting with the actual artifact, but I hope that each artifact is presented online with it’s relevance. Allow anyone to look though the catalogue and know the relevance of each piece. Allow anyone to start their own research with out the need to be pre-approved as ’scholars for research’. While I fully understand and appreciate limiting pubic accessibility for the physical objects in person, there is no reason to provide digital copy and images of these context.

Here’s an idea out of the blue: Join up with MobyGames. Course, MobyGames doesn’t technically share their content freely being copyrighted content, making their mission not entirely philanthropic. This is a larger topic for another day, but my point is to have a catalogue of titles that is shared to the public for any use, matching with tangible objects.

How are they interfacing with the producers of electronic games?

What is the outreach effort for collecting the history? How are they going to deal with the significant presence of Japanese and other non-US roles in electronic games? How are they going to accept participation from current developers for preserving the current history? In other words, how people involved in the history help in preserving?

What’s the long-term plan?

The center is ramping up for a dedicated presentation space for 2012, but what are the future goals of the project? I see a center like this making a decision between two paths. Will this be a center which collects artifacts only to encourage visits to the center? Or will this be a center which presents their collection to the world, with the physical building only a starting point to a larger mission?

After looking though the Strong National Museum of Play’s website and other artifacts, I really don’t see how they are in a position to treat our history with the respect and context. Nor are they willing to put the resources in sharing history to the general public. I only get a very limited view of what might be presented at the main museum; I can’t even find what is in the collection with much detail. I can’t find much confidence for the electronic games division to be different. I do hope to be proven wrong.

Watchmen has finally made it to the sliver screen with much fanfare and service. The preamble has been enjoyable with posts from The New Frontiersman. An ingenious way of putting more use out of B-roll and props the film created.

This photo for example was the first put on the Flickr account, and the most important one. But there were a slue of other significant artifacts including this video “6 Minutes to Midnight”. Don’t want to dwell on this for the post, but I really wanted to illustrate that this was pre-release marking at it’s best. These things weren’t blatant and weak attempts, but strong pieces to help establish the narrative.

The format of the Media

The main point I want to make is how the format of the media can hinder or strengthen an adaptation. Watchmen is a 12 part story which also included ‘book excerpts’ for all but the 12th chapter. Even when you read the novel in the complete book form, there are 11 intermissions between each chapter; You can pause and take in the stories. Movies don’t allow for the audience to ‘digest’ the story before continuing. You have to go along for the ride until it is done. While you can pause a DVD, the fact that the movie doesn’t allow for these pauses by design.

This was the inherent problem for me with adapting Watchmen for the silver screen specifically. Even if there was a ‘part 1/2′ of the film, it still wouldn’t be enough to digest the narrative parts. I don’t claim that this film shouldn’t have been done because of this; I have to embrace the fact that we can never be satisfied with a film that can’t be broken into it’s parts.

But what form of media do we have that can be separated into parts but still yield the high production value required for the film? TV has the ability to separate into parts, but not the kind of production value to supply the demand. The movie industry can provide the funding, but the format limits. The Internet in general can do this, but not enough capital can be made to fund the production.

The Changed Ending

My LA collogues already warned me that the ending was different than the novels, but made sense and worked. When I saw the movie, I agreed that this change made a nice take. Though I would have loved to see a large squid…

What I find interesting is what kind of ‘other’ that left the society with each ending. For the novel, the ‘other’ is an alien race. This leaves the society to think to the stars and to not feel alone in the universe. Though hostile, there were other sentient beings in the universe. With the movie, the ‘other’ is Dr. Manhattan. Since he’s simply indestructible, the best path is to avoid him at all costs. Thus society is closed off from the rest of the world.

Personally, I’d rather have a world of a giant squid than Dr. Manhattan as the enemy. At least we’d be looking towards the stars more.

The Soundtrack

Being a period piece, using licensed songs can do a good job taken in the mood of an era. 99 Luftballons was welcomed both for the choice of the german version and that it’s a cold war protest song. Then it got weird.

While I can’t recall the specific songs and scenes, what stuck out was how simply inappropriate these songs were. I felt like I was back at Emerson where a professor would play a scene of Triumph of the Will (1935) and play the Yakety Sax song as the soundtrack. It ruined the mood and was simply awkward in a couple of scenes. ESPECIALLY with the sex scenes.

This is the only aspect of the film that was a completely wrong choice.

Random other thoughts

Jupiter / Silk Speckter II: Didn’t smoke. Was only apparently missing with the Mars scene.

Night Owl I: Completely skipped his death which was an extremely key aspect to Night Owl. Obviosuly we’ll be getting it with the 20-hour DVD version, but the situation around Rorschach’s death (the 2nd friend he looses in a day) really explains the crushing weight of the situation.

Rorschach: Jackie Earle Haley needs to be nominated (again) for best actor due to his performance in this movie. I can’t put it plainer than that.

I can’t begin without mentioning the various references to Michigan though out the movie. The family is from Pontiac, MI and moved to Oregon. The real father wears a Michigan State sweater. A key prop is a snow globe of the Horace Rackham Memorial Fountain. Both of which is funny because Rackham donated heavily to U of M. Not that it needed help, but I found myself warming up to the movie for these references.

As for the film’s content, I found myself needing to supplement some of the short comings of the film in order to make some of the choices Coraline makes more meaningful. Particularly, I found the real mother portrayed in the film as extremely vicious with no redeeming quality. While the real mother needs to give push back in order to stimulate Coraline’s desire fulfillment in the Other world, the real mother doesn’t show any real love for Coraline. There’s no subtext communicated for the Real mother, which leaves Coraline making the choice to not to live in the other mother’s world, rather than to live with her real parents. While I haven’t read the book, I feel that this may be more of a problem with Selick cutting that depth for the film. While I am fully aware that you can never communicate in a film like a book, there doesn’t seem to be an effort to make the real mother have any love for Coraline. The connection is too assumed with no context.

The voice casting was great as I didn’t find myself having any issue. What did stand out for me is the ’stunt voice’ casting with the Father. John Hodgman was the voice of the father which certainly brought a smile to my face. A former literary agent voicing a writer is not lost on me. What stood out for me in casting is the “Other Father Song” about Coraline, sung by non other than one of the Johns of They Might Be Giants. What struck me is how well the singing voice matched Hodgman’s voice. Hopefully there’s another film which Hodgman’s character needs to sing and TMBG are brought in.

At once point in the film, there is a musical number with the characters Miss Forcible and Miss Spink. While sitting in an audience with a fair mix of 20-somethings and families with kids, the point where a psydo-bursleque act created a bit of an unease in the audience of “Oh wow, they went there.” Not really that risque, but enough to give an eyebrow raising moment. Which brings me to the next point…

I’m just going to come out and say this. All old ladies in this film have very enormous breasts. There. It has to be said. And come to think of it, that pattern of stop-motion animation characters where old ladies have enormous breasts leads me to wonder why such a pattern. Even Corpse Bride had this. In Coraline, even the saleswoman in the uniform shop had very large breasts. What’s going on here? Is this the Wilhelm scream for art direction in stop-motion animation?

After my friends Jim and Liz saw the film, they told me the film is Psychonauts: The Movie. When the movie reached the point where Coraline discovers the ghost children and given the task to find the three eyes/souls, I couldn’t disagree. The story turned into a potential interactive storytelling (re: game) with clearly given and multiable tasks to the protagonist. While there is a game adaptation of the game, it’s a merchandise product of the film. Not an independent piece of art.

I’m not advocating that Coraline should have been a (well produced) game either. If anything, this observation is my feeble attempt to get Neil Gaiman to write a new story for interactive media. Course, not just with anyone as there aren’t very many studios that would be a good match. Such a studio would need the consultation and collaboration skills with Gaiman in order to deliver an interactive story which exploits the talents they would all posses. Also, I believe that something new would work out better artistically, rather than adapting a set linear storyline; Thus removing expectations.

As for Coraline, its a very strong initial feature film offering from Laika and I expect good things for them in the future. Well worth seeing and will tide you over till The Watchman opens.

Edit (2-22-2009): I made a mistake and said Plymouth instead of Pontiac. As a bonus, I added a YouTube link to the Other Father Song by TMBG.

The point of this post:

Windows 7 must include a fully patched DirectX installation.

Users of Windows 7 will still need to run programs in DX10 and DX9. There’s no reason why the OS should be updated to the latest of DirectX; Especially when the updates are over four years old.

Windows Update needs to include DirectX as apart of updatable software.

Of all the ‘optional’ and ‘critical’ software that Windows Update includes, updating a core API as DirectX is to Windows should be one of them. Updating DirectX is crucial for any graphics intensive program, especially Games for Windows. Why not include it, even as an ‘optional’ update?

DirectX needs real version identification

Did you know there are at least 17 versions of DirectX 9.0c and 8 versions of DirectX 10? All of which report with only on version number?

Did you also know that Vista still needs updates to DirectX9, but wasn’t included when Vista was released?

This makes it very hard to do technical support when no one can decree a realistic version number.

The Context:

For anyone who’s played games on Windows, you may be familiar with Microsoft® DirectX. DirectX is an API and acts as a bridge between software with advanced sound and visual needs and the array of devices and drivers on your computer. There are others¹ for other and operating systems and platforms, but these problems are for DirectX specifically.

Without these APIs, each software would need to program for every possible graphics and audio card in existence individually. With an API, software needs only to work with the API and drivers of devices needs only to work on the API. From there, new software or new hardware can be released and still work without massive overhaul.

For Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, the engineering team developed what I nicknamed a “Flash” shader in order to achieve the similar look of the Flash animation into 3D graphics. The graphics would work on Windows so long as the user’s Windows computer had at least DirectX 9.0c – Aug 2007 installed.

I have to include the date with this version number as Microsoft stopped incrementing version numbers, even though releases were made after 9.0c on a bi-monthly and now quarterly bases. Yet any callable version number are all listed under “9.0c” or “4.09.00.0904″, which is the primary version for Windows XP SP2, released in August 2004. Even when you update DirectX, the same version number is reported.

The problem: We needed users to have August 2007’s release or later. Upon research, I found a form of version numbering with DirectX. If you look in “C:\Windows\System32\”, you’ll see a series of files named “d2dx9_**.dll”, the ** being a range of numbers starting at 24. The ‘27′ being the August 2007 DX9.

Windows XP (RTM / SP0) included DirectX 8.1. Windows XP SP2 included DirectX 9.0c. Only after SP2 did the “_**” updates start. To add more insult to injury, Windows Update doesn’t check or update DirectX. Ever. While they’ll include optional software and Office updates, DirectX gets the shaft.

My saving grace is the DirectX updaters will update all versions on all platforms of Windows in one installer. There are two flavors, one large installer for off-line updating, and one small and web-based. The web installer downloading the components needed at the time of install. I included this with the Strong Bad episodes. It’s worked out, but it adds a step in the install process by asking to do an install one doesn’t expect.

By now you may be thinking: “But Vista is on DirectX 10 and Windows 7 on DirectX 11. Certainly there isn’t an issue because it’s later version!” Oh how I wish this was true. Normally when one thinks of software version numbers, the higher number replaces the lower numbers. In the land of DirectX, the version numbers are modes that run independently of each other. While you have Vista, you still run DirectX 9 unless the software specifically requests DirectX 10. Since DirectX 10 doesn’t run in Windows XP, very few games run in 10. If they do, there’s a DX9 version along side it. Even with DX10, there’s quarterly updates. Still, this isn’t updated via Windows Update. Meanwhile, users still need to update DX9 and DX10.

Try explaining all of the above to users with Vista. “But I have DirectX10 which is more up to date than 9!” Yes you have DX10, but you don’t have the latest DX9 which you still use. The DirectX installers I mentioned above work on all platforms, which is something. However, it’s still left trying to instruct users to run the installer, which goes upstream from conventional thinking.

So in light of all of this, I tried the Windows 7 beta (using VirtualBox on my MBP). You would expect the latest released updates of DX9 and DX10 right? Wrong. What ships is the DX9.0c before the updates, and DX10 from the original Vista RTM release. Since DX11 is still in beta so there are no quarterly updates to speak of. I honestly can’t fathom why they wouldn’t roll the updates in at this point. It’s inexcusable.

¹ Other APIs like OpenGL, OpenAL, etc exist and do a great job, but require a full client-side install on Windows.

The experts watched as Kaminsky opened his laptop and connected the overhead projector. He had created a “weaponized” version of his attack on this vulnerability to demonstrate its power. A mass of data flashed onscreen and told the story. In less than 10 seconds, Kaminsky had compromised a server running BIND 9, Vixie’s DNS routing software, which controls 80 percent of Internet traffic. It was undeniable proof that Kaminsky had the power to take down large swaths of the Internet. 

To be honest, the Internet dodged a bullet with this one. Had this been discovered with someone with less moral character, there would have been a very very bad day for the world. Then again, we currently only patched the hole; Bought some time.

Secret Geek A-Team Hacks Back, Defends Worldwide Web

Can You Name the Video Game Systems (Released in the U.S.)?

As someone who studies video game history, the test really kicked my ass. Under the cut (or huge spoiler line) are my analysis of my results, but a few tips. The auto-correction is very good and will take most acronyms as well as the official titles. So if it’s not firing off as correct, you are either wrong or need to be more specific. “Sega” alone doesn’t cut it. For reference, I got 25/68 and kicking my self for forgetting three of them.

OMGLOLBBQ SPOILERS BELOW!

I thought about putting this above the spoiler, but it would give away answers. The Game & Watch is a bit contradictory with the ’single game system’ rule. G&W were a series of single game systems; No cartridges replacing games. There’s also things missing like Leapfrog systems which fit the definition. Just because the target audience is different doesn’t make it not a console system.

The three I bonked myself in the head for forgetting: Dreamcast, PSP, and 3DO.

The rest of what I missed were either me forgetting the exact number for the Atari systems, forgetting the word ‘Odyssey’ for the Magnovox systems, me not realizing that the Sega Master Systems were indeed released in the US, N-Gage was marketed as a game system, and forgetting to list out things that are currently on the Virtual Console for the Wii. Some of the rest of the entries are systems I never read about or were obscure enough that I never even heard of!

Needless to say, it’s time for me to do some reading on a few of these systems. Like the Nomad for example or the Mega Duck, if only for the name!

“We are not here to compete with the games industry,” he says. “We are not here for people to come and make a game in a less-expensive manner utilizing equipment and software that has student licenses.”

“Just as importantly, we are not equipped to properly firewall our projects in the sense that we really don’t know legally speaking how many or which students created which games. We don’t know whether they received input from other students who have not been credited.”

This statement really rubbed me the wrong way on a few levels. The academic institution is skipping an extremely teachable moment by not incorporating IP rights and attribution of work. Will mistakes be made? Very much so. This is an educational institution and mistakes are part of the learning process. Avoiding the issue doesn’t make the issue go away, only defred for the student post-graduation. I can’t see how a student can be prepared to work in a field of intelectual property without understanding the basic law and practice of IP.

The counterpoint is the position is schools should teach the use and practice of tools and the IP should be left for law students. While I’m not claiming that each student should be prepared for entering a pre-law program, IP practice is the core integral part of being a professional artist. You don’t have to fully agree with the practices, but knowing the basics of how business is conducted seperates the professionals from the hobbyists. By denying students how to run the business, DigiPen seems limit student’s ability to become involved with being their own independent participants of this art form. The DigiPen curriculum seems to make worker bees for the game industry, rather than practicianers of interactive entertainment.

Wanting to work for a company is certainly a good choice to make in a career. Hell, that’s the choice I made for myself in my career. I was afforded that choice from my curriculum at Emerson College, rather than forced to that choice as DigiPen’s IP policy states. My education allowed me the choice to either start my own studio or incorporate myself into an existing studio. In either case, I was prepared to be an active and educated individual, rather than one who simply followed orders.

This was afforded to me though the shared distribution policy. While I own the IP rights to Antidote and can do pretty much what I want with the thesis (with some exceptions of commercial software I used), Emerson College has shared publication rights to showcase Antidote. I can do whatever I want with the game, so long as Emerson can show the piece. This way, any IP claims are rested on me, the student. Not the college. Emerson’s not the only insitution with this policy, but it’s also one of the reasons why I chouse to go to Emerson.

All said, the best policy that meets everyone’s needs is one that passes this test:

Can the student choose to distribute the IP under a Creative Commons license?

I think it’s very important for an academic institution to be able to showcase all work its students submit in their educational career. This is how an academic institution can illustrate the work done at the school for many purposes including enrollment and more importantly academic performance. What’s also important is respect for the students’ work. A policy that divorces the rights away from a student is simply insulting to the student.

Notice that I use the word ‘choose’ and not require. For DigiPen, not only are students not allowed to do a traditional copyright IP license, but they can not choose a copyleft IP license either. In fact, the DigiPen policy prevents one from using any copyleft as DigiPen owns everything. Any sharing is forbidden. There’s simply no choice in the matter. Having the choice of copyleft means that right or left versions can be imployed. Even if the school requires sharing of distribtuion rights, any IP license can be picked.

I do hope this topic gets more attention as it is a very serious aspect of an education in a creative field. Students should know these topics as it is apart of their careers. DigiPen and other schools seem to avoid these topics for the sake of avoiding teaching. This can not be tolerated by anyone.

While there are a small assortment of titles I can point to, the largest influence in my career as a game developer and artist is Myst. Now that I am employed as a developer at Telltale Games, I wish Cyan Worlds a happy 15th anniversary of their landmark title. Thank you for all of your quality work though the years and inspiring me as an artist.

Mini History Lesson

While 7th Guest was released prior to Myst, 7th Guest was highly restricted due to adult content. I remember purchasing a Packard Bell which included 7th Guest, but wrapped in paper marked “ADULTS ONLY” before revealing what was inside. Myst on the other hand was all ages in the sense that any age can enjoy the title, not dumbed down for children nor exclusive to adults.

Myst really was the killer app for optical disks for data. While there were certainly CD-ROMs prior, they were mostly storing large amounts of data and the occasional postage stamp of video and audio.¹ Or (as the case of 7th Guest) restrictive in target audience. Myst was the first widely distributed entertainment product that fully utilized the space to make an enriched experience not emulated on other media.

It was also a time where a new generation of computers as multimedia centers were available. However, being able to watch non-interactive video was not as attractive on the computer when you have a TV and VCR. Myst was a new experience entirely, so consumers wanting a new computer would want their standard word processing and spreadsheet work, but also a computer that ‘played that Myst game’. Thus CD-ROM drives were quickly became a standard issue on a computer. The rest trickled down from there.

While a case could be made that something else may have come along, Myst was the app that got optical disk drives standard in all computers, which lead to DVD as well.

¹ Yes, Myst’s video was also postage stamp size, but it was embedded into full screen of photo, not a small window in the Windows UI. Thus the framing of content was full-screen.

Before I continue, I want to make extremely clear that I do not wish anything bad to Shigeru San. As you’ll read, this is a platform for me to talk about a larger context with a theoretical concept using him as a test case.

In the dream, I was an upper management of a video game history museum (a concept I covered before) which was prepared in the sense of being able to act quickly when a high-profile designer passes away. First there was a press conference, having timing it for after Nintendo of America made their statement. I was presenting the main statement by quickly reviewing the many accomplishments Miyamoto had done in his life time. While he is one of Japan’s greatest sons, he really is one of humanities’ greatest assets. This was followed by the museum having a memorial service and special visitations. A monument at the museum, already erected in his honor with a prior event, would become the focus point for visitors to pay their respects. The museum itself would be open, but in order to provide the context of Miyamoto’s work the admission would be waived for two days. In addition, three days there will be someone standing watch over the monument and public visitation at any time.

The takeaway I have from this dream is what would happen now if one of the great pioneers of our industry were to pass away. For the amount of contribution certain individuals have made to the art form, I worry that their work doesn’t match the recognition they have made. Miyamoto has the benefit of representation from Nintendo, but what about Nolan Bushnell, Tim Schafer, and anyone with a Lifetime Achievement award?

What I’m trying to get at is the differences of when a high-profile artist of the entertainment field passes away and the differences between media. Movies, television, music and to a slightly lesser extent with books work within each other so that daily entertainment programs and news programs provide context to each other. Interactive entertainment is mostly avoided in a positive context as the impression video games are stealing audience away. Course, ignoring the situation doesn’t help matters. My aims are to make the art form I chose not loose it’s relevance to society. Specifically, equate the public perception of the work to the size of the audience. It’s not the death of the individual that we can make this case, but it’s the honoring of a person’s work that we can see where the art form has made an impact.

My background in the entertainment business is in performing art; Theatre. Creating art directly in front of a live audience give the instant feedback of an audience. With interactive entertainment, there are no opening nights. No red carpet screenings. A file is uploaded to a server, a variable switched, and eventually some people roll in with comments on forums. While I certainly welcome and value the feedback on any form and appreciate our world-wide release in an instant, I still long for the face to face interaction with the audience. These conventions are the few places where I can get that interaction.

Most of the setbacks about the conference are do to my lack of planning. This trip was very last moment for me and I will never do again. While I very much appreciated the hospitality I was given, I will only do PAX again while staying at a hotel within walking distance. I missed out on a lot of things as I carried my day’s worth of stuff and tied to the Seattle bus system. PAX runs till 2am, but the last bus is at 1am. Not to mention being able to drop stuff off at the hotel and change would have helped a lot. And while I had a few friends on site, they were not as available to enjoy the conference with. Rob from Orange Lounge Radio was working as a media contact, and Kate had her own things going most of the time. I did get to spend some time with them at the conference, and found others as the weekend progressed, but more would be more.

The big conference-only complaint I have was crowd management. I felt there were lines for something that shouldn’t be a line, and other high-profile events that should have been managed better. The biggest culprit was the line to get into the expo. Attendees are encouraged to wait in line for the 10am opening of the expo floor. Not an event such as a keynote or performance, just the expo floor. The reason? Armbands for the 8pm concert. Frankly, I can’t understand the logic of having people show up early to an all-day event. I’d rather they encourage people going for the expo floor to show up starting shortly before 10am. And the evening’s concert you want the armband? You can get in without them without problem, negating the need to line up for the expo. This is getting worked on, but it was a confusing decision in the first place.

I’ll be writing some specific things about the conference in the next few days. Right now I needed to get out the overview and acknowledge I attend and arrived home safely. You can also take a look at the photos I took while there. Here’s a sample:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/the_seg/

1) I moved!

I went from living in the North Bay where I was close to work but very far away from civilization, to living in the East Bay. Here the commute to work is longer by 10 minites, but it’s a trafic-less ride. My place is also much bigger and accomidating to guests, not to mention actually on public transportation.

2) Vacation!

Finally took a vacation after 15 months working. Traveled back to Boston and NYC to hang out with friends in both areas. While my lappy broke on vacation, I was still able to hit the reset button for myself and come back fresh.

3) My Lappy Broke

My PowerBook G4 Laptop bit the dust and is out of warrentee. While I still have my two desktops, I’m not able to remotely write on the thing. For the interested, I’m getting the ‘bad RAM’ post error where the laptop beeps three short beeps when attempting to turn on.

I have been in the market for a new laptop as I need to get on the x86 Mac bandwagon, but was waiting for the next revisions of laptops to come out. Luckially the rumor mills seem to point to a laptop update in 3-5 weeks from now. When they do come out, I’ll be deciding between the newest hottness or a referbished which will be much cheeper.

4) Releases!

On Monday, we will be releasing the first epsidoe of Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People for both Windows and WiiWare. It’s totally awesome and will be a great relief to finally start the season.

Still getting a bit settled in the new place. Once I do I’ll be posting much more. Got a few topics I’ve been simmering about for a while and want to share sometime soon.

I’m amazed at how good this is done. Nice to see some creative writing and simple-yet-effective Flash use. Not to mention how this sells the marketing firm’s services.

Before I continue, here’s a little review of recent weeks of highly publicized public gaming projects and research grants.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation announced the first round of recipients in their Health Games Research Project. Over $2 million to various institutions focusing on using video games for public health research. Some of these projects are research-only projects while others are focused on games for public consumption. For you NPR listeners, you may have heard their sponsorship announced for the past few months.

At Games for Change conference in NYC, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor announced her collaboration with Arizona State University with a game called Our Courts. It’s a piece that addresses the lack of knowledge of the American judicial system.

It is clear that there are existing venues of funding for public works of games. I can’t see how any foundation would say no to a well proposed video game project that fits their goals. I wish developers would take more interest in pursuing these grants. However, there’s a common thread among all of these projects that I think a CPM would will the need: Publishing Services.

Publishing and distribution of a title is not as easy. Even with titles that are free to play for a consumer via the Internet, the marketing of your game and distribution is wildly crazy. And don’t get me started on console development! This isn’t to say that it’s impossible for a grant institution to make a successful marketing campaign for a project, but right now that kind of effort needs to be invested per project. There is no central body that focus attention on distribution of public interactive media. With an organization that specializes in publishing services, the publishing line items can be assigned to a different grant institution, rather than demanding more costs to pay a third party for publishing.

Enter the CPM. While I would hope for a grand-giving wing of the organization, the primary role would be publishing services. This would be the minimum involvement for a title included in the CPM portfolio and include:

• Infrastructure investments (bandwidth, hosting solutions, etc)
• Quality Assurance
• Marketing of titles
• Customer Support / Troubleshooting
• Console publisher relations & console port development.

The CPM would have a goal of building a reputation as a solid venue of interactive content, just as NPR and PBS do with their content. Instead of building a marketing campaign from the ground up per title, the network reduces the marketing development for any new title. Using Our Courts as an example, the development from Arizona State and et all are paid for. The CPM’s roll can range up the web server architecture, pays the bandwidth bills, etc. In addition, the marketing wing includes Our Courts as apart of the CPM network. First-tier support handled by CPM, which is a huge reduction of burden on the developer!

Then there’s taking the project further to other venues. It would be great to see Our Courts on consoles using the exiting digital distribution channels for each console. Sadly, there’s no way a publicly funded institution can effectively launch such a plan and effectively negotiate with any one or more console manufacture for a freely distributable title. CPM would help to create a relationship with the big three and help to bridge the development and distribution gaps between. But that’s another post for another time

I’m actually lucky to play though all of the WiiWare games today (except My Life as a King) today. Checking the competition, I realize that we don’t have competition. Not in the perspective of quality judgments, but for the fact that each of the titles released on WiiWare are very different from each other. There is something different for a lot of different people, which is about what one would hope from a service launch.

The Wired Game|Life Blog does a good job outlining all the launch titles, now with impressions of each title. But if you insist, here’s my quick review of the titles:

FFCC: My Life As a King
I abstain since this was the one title I did not play today.

Pop
I feel kinda torn with this title as I don’t hate it, but don’t think it’s worth $7. You pop bubbles, and it gets fun for a time being. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy it, but with Defend Your Castle at $5, Pop just seems too much for little return.

Defend Your Castle
While I hate to admit cost as a factor, the value of this title is tied to it’s price. The group play and pure loony of the title makes this a rewarding game. When set to normal, it starts out VERY slow just to make sure you have the mechanics and you rank up on points to spend. But once it gets insane… it’s fun. Well worth the $5 and great for one-player and multiplayer. It’s also very easy to add on players while you’re playing; The difficulty will adjust as more players join/leave.

LostWinds
This is simply a must-buy in my book. It looks and sounds beautiful, plays great with the wind mechanic, and leaves you feeling fully rewarded when playing. Don’t be put off by people saying it’s too short; This is a quality game and worth the $10. Frontier Developments, great job!

V.I.P. Casino: Blackjack

It’s Blackjack and that’s about it. Of all the launch titles, this is the simplest title (yes, more so than Pop). You play blackjack and that’s about it. If you really love blackjack and like to play it on your Wii, then by all means. It’s not worth $7 to me, but others may see it differently. I hope this was just the first step in seeing more WiiWare titles from High Voltage Studios. Considering that their website doesn’t even mention it on their games list, I’m thinking this was just a first-run WiiWare title with more in the future. At least I hope.

TV Show King

I agree with Chris Kohler of Wired that the Wii is surprisingly devoid of trivia titles, so it’s great to see Gameloft make the first attempt. If you have friends that come over and play with you on your Wii, this is a good game to get. While the game mechanics of the Wheel could have been better, the rest of the game is great with groups. It is $10, but if you plan on having friends over, it’s worth the purchase.

As an aside to TV Show King: There are people asking the questions about expansion packs to questions beyond the initial 3,000. I have no idea or any inside information at all, but I will say that Nintendo requires titles selling DLC content to notify up-front, which this title doesn’t. Assume you get only what you paid for now.

PS: I hope Jellyvision realizes they need to partner with a studio to make You Don’t Know Jack on WiiWare. Unless they have already and it’s too early to talk about it.

Wired Blogs: Games | Gaming, Real Violence Trends Tracked, Charted

It’s easy to claim that gaming violence has no correlation with real world violence, but those arguments are a bit hollow if you can’t provide data to corroborate; or even better, a fancy line graph.

The graph makes no direct claims towards a relationship between real world and gaming violence, though it’s interesting to see an inversely proportional trend of violent gaming releases and incidents of real crime.

For those doubting the graph’s figures, have a look at the data on which it was based: a relatively recent survey of national violent crime rates published by the U.S. Department of Justice.

We have to be very careful with how we state this information.

While it’s easy to jump to the conclusion, these facts can not prove that violent video games cause a REDUCTION of violent crimes. There are simply way to many factors at play to make this claim. This would be a separate set of studies to determine what the real factors are and even then may never be truly ’solved’.

What this information does say is that claims of increases of violent crime over time are inherently false, regardless of what is being pointed to. We can safely state that violent video games have not increased violent crime at a national level for the reason that there isn’t an increase of violent crime to begin with.

Obviously there are more complexities in the situation to say that any one factor is the deciding factor. But isn’t that the problem? There are certain lawmakers point to violent video games as a reason seem to be interested in investing time and money on appearances that they are solving existing social problems. Obviously these resources would be better spent investing in long-term solutions, but these solutions are not easily communicated to a voter.

Here’s a title idea for anyone to take on. Interactive entertainment is a very strong and powerful media that can make the depth of a subject matter more accessible to an audience. As SimCity provides accessible depth of urban planning and zoning, perhaps a title exploring social and economics to better illustrate the complexities of violent crime and related social woes would help create a better informed society. If you do this, or even address a microcosm of this situation, people will want you to work for them and you can pretty much ask for any grants to do similar work. No need to wait for me to approve the idea, just go out, do it, and do it well!

Editor’s Note: Hosting the image locally as to not leach bandwidth.

Sam & Max on the Wii
On April 3rd, Telltale Games announced that Sam & Max Season One will be a disc based Wii game, set for release sometime in the Fall. I was even featured on the blog post holding a Wii Remote:

We spent quite of bit of time cleaning up that room, especially all of our retail consoles. We didn’t want people to think that just because we had a PS2 in our media room, that we would release for the PS2 (which we are not doing). As you can see from the photo though, we forgot the PS2 controller right next to the TV. :/

I mention this because it’s a interesting history between Sam & Max on the Wii and me. Back in Aug 2006, a few of the various staff at Telltale were mentioning how point & click games, including Sam & Max, would be great for the Wii. No plans to do so, just that the idea of going to the platform would be nifty. Obviously this lead people to think Telltale was actively developing for the Wii. This rumor propagated. Emily decided to make a post about it to curb the rumor and set facts straight and state while it’s a desire, they need Nintendo’s support to make it happen. A link to Nintendo’s contact page was made. When I saw this post, I wrote up a form letter for people to use. About 3 hours later, Emily updated the post saying Nintendo contacted Telltale and to stop sending e-mails.

Between that time and now, Telltale created a Wii game… for CSI: Hard Evidence. The development of the Wii port was the entry way to working with WiiWare (read on) and the Sam & Max port. Now we’re public about the development of the Wii port and I’m apart of the team making it happen. Funny how these things come full-circle. While I certainly aimed to be working in the industry (or attending grad school at USC) by now, I wouldn’t dream that I’d be working on that port. Well, I did dream of it, but actually I wouldn’t think I’d be actually working on it for reals. Let along being pictured in the press release announcing the Wii port.

Life is nifty.

Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People (SBCG4AP)

Yup, working on the Strong Bad game! It will be for WiiWare and later Windows with five episodes. We had a big work push for two week running up to the announcement so we would have a strong showing and demo running for Nintendo’s media showing. Not a crunch time, but a lot of effort was put into making something showable for the press. Not much else I can add but for what’s already been said between the press releases and the website for the game. As thing progress on I’ll be sure to add my thoughts in.

Your Lappy Explode

The final, and most significant reason for not LJ posting is a very fundamental reason. My PowerBook G4 broke hard. Thu April 10th, just as the press was going apeshit about SBCG4AP, my lappy gave what I call a CLI Kernel Panic. “Normal” Kernel panics in OS X have a multi-language and clean message asking the user to restart the computer. The problems I were having were so bad, that it was showing up command line information, forgoing the ‘pretty’ message:

This photo was with my attempt to run Disk Utility on the lappy, which was my sign to give up a normal repair. Booked an appointment at my local Apple Store and spent the night attempting to back up my data since my last backup in late Jan. Lucky for me, my AppleCare is set to expire 2.5 months from now, so I see this as a final support pass for the computer.

Got the laptop back on Tuesday with a review of the damages and repairs (all for free). First, the hard drive was gone and replaced with a working one. Considering my laptop has been running almost non-stop for 2.8 years, I’m surprised the drive lasted this long. Second, they replaced the motherboard but didn’t state the problems why. Lastly, the tech said that my third-party RAM chip was broken and provided a new 512mb RAM stick. I did try the old stick again, and the resulting crash lead me to believe the tech told the truth. After ordering a new 1GB RAM from NewEgg, I was still getting a few problems. After doing a reinstall of the OS, things are back to normal. The whole situation caused me to loose a few iTunes songs, and all my saved RSS feeds. Otherwise I’m doing good with my laptop. Besides the shaky reinstall of Mac OS X, I’m very happy with the service from the AppleCare.

I actually plan on getting a new Apple laptop so I can ride the Intel Apple bandwagon. My plans are to give my current Powerbook to my father when I’m done with it, so it’s kinda a good thing that this computer went through an Apple support pass. It’s a good computer, but I want to work on iPhone apps and be able to do work stuff using Windows-only tools. Defiantly a MacBook Pro 15″ as I need a real graphics card (NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT @ 512mb). Anyone willing to offer a good deal on a new one?

Closing Thoughts

I decided to try something a bit more personal with this post than sticking only to deep subjects. Not to diminish the topics, but an effort to put a bit more personality to this blog. Thoughts?

That particular day I visited the History Museum, a demonstration of the PDP-1 was being held twice that day. I admit that while I knew this was an important device, I was murky at the time as to it’s exact history. Going to the demonstration made me hurt myself for forgetting. The PDP-1 was the first ‘personal’ computer in the sense that one person could operate the machine rather than a team of computer engineers. This paved the way for the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club to make key software in computer history, including Spacewar!

What made this even more special was not just the presence of a working PDP-1, but that one could actually play Spacewar!, on the original hardware. While the control box was a modern fabrication (the original used telephone key switches), the controls were connected to the PDP-1 directly and used the PDP-1’s screen to play. That’s powerful for telling a historic narrative.

All of this leads me to an idea and/or wish I’ve had for some time:

I want to preserve this historical artifacts of this industry.
I want more than just a book to tell me these things (great book, want more).
I want to make sure every game on every platform can be played.
I want to make sure the story of developing these titles are told and not lost.

I want a computer and console game history museum.

Obviously this is the start of my thoughts on the subject, but expect more when I finally get around to making more posts…

Myst Online: Uru Live Season 2 Status

Hi Everybody,

I have some news that some of you have probably not been looking forward to. GameTap has decided to discontinue the operation of Myst Online: Uru Live.

< SNIP >

Ricardo Sanchez
VP of Content and Creative Director for GameTap

I’m upset that the eight year journey has come to a close, but I also think that it’s time for the experiment to come to a rest. Uru was a needed and welcomed experiment in a MMO based narrative, not on combat. The goal was not to level up or defeat the baddie with spells and swords, but to progress and the story line. From this, a very strong and tight-nit group believed intensely in the project and the community they built.

History of Uru

My journey with Uru started when the project was called MUDPIE. This was back in 1999 when the Myst fan site RivenGuild was still very much alive. The follow up to Myst and Riven, Cyan Worlds set out to anticipate the saturation of broadband internet services and release a MMO. The idea comes from people wanting to share the adventuring of worlds with others. Cyan wanted to capitalize this by providing a platform to explore with others together. In addition, the online distribution model would provide Cyan the means of distributing new content without the need of making a full boxed game.

In the fall of 2003, I was invited to participate in the beta test of Uru: Ages Beyond Myst. The title was being published by UbiSoft who obtained publishing rights of the Myst catalogue at the time. This would also be Ubi’s first venture into an MMO. As a huge Myst fan and working towards a career in this industry, it was an honer to be included. I tried to give as much feedback as I could, especially mixed with my college work. For years I have read about the places in the novels, and now I was experiencing them and contributing to one of the development companies I would give most anything to work for.

With out going into much of the details, the release wasn’t the best of releases. Ubisoft wasn’t sure about selling an online only game and forced Cyan to make the box an off-line version with the online component an add on. This would have been fine, but the process of getting to the online component, albeit free, was a complicated mess of invites, sign up procedures (yes, plural), and maybe then you’ll be able to play online. While the start was meant to give a free start of online capabilities and then later start charging, there weren’t enough people who bought the game that knew about the online capabilities, let alone pay for them. In February of 2004, the whole project was canceled and two expansion packs were released using already developed content.

But as the franchise states: The ending has not yet been written. In August of 2004, Cyan released the server code for free to anyone willing to host a server. While users had to pay a fee to obtain a user account, this kept the community going. I didn’t participate in this but I kept an eye on things. Suddenly in Feb 2006, Cyan revived the project by allowing others to join in on the public services thought an invite system. A new funder was there, sure, but who? The speculation was on GameTap. In May of that year GameTap announced they were going to restart Uru along with the news that Sam & Max would start as episodic. Basically, the single best press release ever.

The magnitude of this is great. A project, dead as a doornail, is revived due to fans keeping up the fight. I really can’t recall any other situation like this besides MUDs. Again, I was asked to beta test Uru and gladly did.

The GameTap release had a slow trickle of content drops that were kinda random. Eventually Cyan borrowed a page from us at Telltale and took an episodic route where a plot line would happen one week in a month and a content drop occurring at the end of that week to last the month. However, this reduced the gameplay to reading on various websites what was going on in the cavern than actually experiencing events in the cavern.

The Project Itself

The project was not without it’s faults. Narrative based MMOs create a huge design problem: Provide enough narrative fuel to feed the beast. With a traditional MMORPG, once you have the combat structure, the villains to defeat are more-or-less drop-in. Not to mention extremely reusable. For a narrative, a lot of work goes into building assets with an limited reusable value and at times a very small audience. When content came down the pipe for users, it was great stuff! Sadly it didn’t happen very often if at all during the GameTap run.

The other fault were on the implantation of the game itself. While the control of your character was pretty OK, the other outside functions were required a manual at best. All communication, picture taking, and other functions were placed on an ‘device’ called a KI. Some in the community have argued that figuring out the KI was a puzzle. That may be fine for a single-player game you buy at a store. For a business model that needs new users to approach and stay interested, that’s a failure. Incorporating other users to share in the exploration? The very reason for the project? A confusing mess. To their credit, the community was extremely helpful to new users. These were the nicest people on the whole Internet! It simply wasn’t enough.

Wrapping Up

At the end of the day, there were unfortunate design choices made back in the early days of development. These issues couldn’t be fixed for the GameTap release. With the fact that the Cyan studio development cycle as the slowest in the industry, there simply wasn’t a good way for these design changes to occur. This is why I’m not angry at GameTap’s decision. It’s simply time.

What I do hope for the coming months are few things. I hope Cyan will release the server code again, but let the community handle usership on their own. I hope we have a really comprehensive postmortem. One that covers every single thing. In all, there are a lot of lessons to learn in all the years. Lots of things went right, lots of things went wrong, all of which are valuable material to learn from.

On a personal note, Uru has always been with my own work in getting into this industry. Cyan was one of two companies I wanted to work for, and now I’m working at the other one. In a way it closes a chapter for me. My development period for this industry is past it’s first chapter.

So long Uru; Thanks for all the fish.

When television and radio started, different countries took different choices in how the airwaves would be regulated. In England, taxes are levied on all radios and television sets to fund programming. Some countries have all media run directly by the state. In the US, a free market economy was formulated to let market take charge of content generation; A commercial system. But with the commercial system, there was a call for providing content that wasn’t commercially sustainable but culturally important. Content of instructional, educational, and cultural significance that it’s commercially viable but very important. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967 among others did this for television and radio in the United States. I want to have an additional organization for electronic entertainment media.

I’m going to use the title Corporation for Public Gaming’ (CPG) to put a title on the idea. Barack Obama calls this initiative “Public Gaming 2.0″ in his technology initiatives. I’m not sold on either of these names, but I’m going to go with CPG for the time being.

My vision for a CPG is a roll mostly as a publisher for interactive media projects. The CPG won’t create much as the organization itself, but fund though the use of grants and other funding venues to developers of whatever size. Then the CPG would enact venues of publishing content for free (or at cost) to the public.

Development Funding Model

As I mentioned, the development of titles will be based off of grands to developers. If the developers applying propose a project that fits the mission statement of the CPG, and the developer[s] demonstrate that they are competent enough to produce a finish title, they get funding for that project with situations attached as outlines in this document. Well, a bit more vetting would be involved, but that’s the idea.

The funding would be on the stipulation that the CPG can distribute the game in the public. No up-sells; No Demo only modes; The full title for the public. This means that while the funds can provide the complete cost of developing a title including salary of the work, there wouldn’t be royalties of any sort since it’s all non-profit. That’s the trade-off. However, this would be a super awesome way for smaller independent developers to get some titles under their belt. Yea jobs!

Distribution Model

The goal of the CPG is to provide titles for the public. Because most of new media titles can be transmitted over the Internet, this comes as a no-brainer for distribution for personal computers. Obviously the CPG would have a platform for distributing games on their own website. As long as this site can promote itself and it’s content well, the costs of maintaining this site would be mostly around bandwidth. My only concern is making sure that the children’s section is on it’s on from the more not-children content, but otherwise it’s all in the implementation.

Ultimately, I don’t see much distribution in a traditional retail sense for any platform. Selling physical objects is extremely expensive! With the Internet as a viable distribution model, there’s no real need for physical objects. That isn’t to say it is forbidden, just not likely and that’s OK. I could see a combo pack of a DVD of a collection of titles for anyone really wanting physical media. This is similar to how shows on PBS tag an offer for DVDs at the end of a program. Cost involved, but certainly not the only means of distribution.

What about the consoles?

The difficulty would be console development. I think it would be a sin to exclude console systems in this initiative. However, the console platforms aren’t exactly the most open and public-friendly things to deal with. About the only one that comes close would be Microsoft’s XNA where one can at least develop on their own, use any Windows PC, and develop a console game (albeit with restrictive licenses). The other players (Nintendo and Sony) don’t come close to this development availability but are trying to catch up.

The problems are when developers are applying for projects. A proposal that places a title for more than one platform would certainly give more points for being able to repurpose a title in more than one venue. For personal computing, this isn’t much a problem and I would even go so far as make PC/Mac/Linux requirement for personal computer platforms. But consoles aren’t very cross-platform in a number of ways. Not to mention that there are a host of NDAs, restrictions, and enormous costs involved in any development on a console. It may mean that console development will be more along the lines of porting the personal computer titles into console titles. This would mean the CPG would need to fund developers purely on porting efforts as only a select few would have the viability to develop. Though the most efficient would be targeting for the platform at the start.

As far as distribution, this would be much easier and actually attractive to the consoles. Each console in this generation has some form of Internet distribution of game titles. If the CPG can convince each console to distribute CPG games for free, then it’s win-win for everyone. The public who have these consoles can obtain CPG titles for free and each console can claim more titles on their service.

Industry Response

The only major reason I can see for a position against a CPG would be the idea CPG projects will take away from commercial development. The purpose of the CPG is not to make the same kinds of games the commercial market is already handling. While there’s a bit of a case with children’s games or companies like Leapfrog that may have some case, I don’t believe that the CPG would completely dominate that sector completely. Simply put: PBS didn’t kill commercial television programing. PBS provides content not provided by other commercial means. This is the roll that CPG plays: Providing content not commercially viable but worth funding.

Closing Thoughts

I realize that this idea focused on video games, but I wouldn’t want such an organization to limit only to making flash based games that migrate to consoles. This is but one of many sectors which a different approach of funding projects warrants a public venue of funding that isn’t fit by current mandates. Nor is this approach meant to ‘replace’ the existing Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

Ultimately, this is just a starting point. I’d love to know what you think about this topic. There’s more nitty gritty details I can put up, but I still don’t have a solid mission statement. So please, share your thoughts!

* Yes, I’m quickly passing over the history of public broadcasting to a paragraph. There’s a lot more that went into public broadcasting!

I don’t care about Comcast’s video content. I don’t care about AT&T’s Blue Room or any other crap. I am paying you as a bridge to obtain other people’s content. That’s all I require from you. Why only the fat pipe? Because you suck at content generation. You’re spreading your resources to do something extra and it’s just not working very well.

Thing is, I never asked for you to make your own content. It’s really a non-issue with me. There are millions of other people that can do it so much better and that’s who I want to have access to. I’m paying you to give me unfettered access to other content providers. Is making your own content really helping you out? I would figure focusing on the speed and availability of the content of the Internet would be a bigger drive than your special little video program. I know that on the feature list, saying you have this unique content gives the impression of better value on a flyer.

You know what gets me to stick with your service without distain? Giving me access to all available content without bullshit. For example, if Comcast spent more dedication and time to improving their horrific customer support, the product would have more value than ‘Channel 1′. Or perhaps finding a better long-term plan to keep the bandwidth infrastructure on par or surpassing the rest of the modern world. Why spend time finding ways to inhibit use of BitTorrent when you can spend that time more productively by improving the network infrastructure.

Please, I don’t care about your content as it is unmatched to what the rest of the world at large can provide. Give me unfettered and uninhibited access to the world, then you have won me over!