Sadly, the exclamation mark at the end of the heading there might have oversold the post. Nothing really Earth-shattering here. But, it was a crazy-ass weekend, so I fiugre I might as well write about it.

I guess I’ll start a little before the weekend. Work’s been pretty good. We’ve been chugging toward a deadline, and the work, as of early last week, looked pretty daunting. I’d have to almost double the content I was generating, and as a result, it looked like it’d be a week of long nights. I thought, the only way I’m going to get all this done is if I’m on fire, nonstop, from now ’till I leave Thursday night.

Well, I *was*. It was crazy. I had been averaging about 1.2 “conversations” a day for the preceding week, and to finish, I’d have to average about 2. On a really, really inspired day, I might get three done, but on an average day, ekeing out 1.5 of these things was challenging, since I’m writing them all from scratch – there’s really no slack for say, writer’s block. So, if you’re stuck, you’re stuck.

Fortunately, my ficticious character was talking to me last week, and I churned through the rest of her dialog at a rate of about 2.1 convos per day, which was pretty damn good.I wrapped her up on Thursday, and save for some minor edits, she’s done. It’s actually quite strange – it’s like I’ve spent a lot of time with this aspect of myself (she is like a female version of me in many ways), trying to find her “voice,” and figure out interesting things for her to talk about with the player. So, being done with her, I sort of put her into a little box, and shuffled her off into the recesses of my mind. Maybe I’ll see her again someday, but I doubt it.

I think she turned out ok – she’s quite different than the other characters in the game – her whole conversation *structure* is different, and it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out in practice. It’s a little less intensive on the “gameplay” front, but I think a lot more compelling as a character, with a more interesting story to tell. Hopefully, that’ll come across. We’ll see. We’ve got another few days of churning through content, then the review and revision process starts, where we all read as much of the game as possible (up ’till now, it’s been pretty segmented between the various designers) and try to identify the weak aspects and what’s necessary to make them better.

So, that’ll be fun, I hope. We’re done with the contractors, which is great – honestly, I hope I never have to ever work with most of them again. One wasn’t horrible, but that’s about the best I can manage.

Right – so, the point being, I actually didn’t have long nights last week, got everything done in a timely manner, and wasn’t all that stressed out. Who’d have thunk? Ei-Nyung & I took off Friday, and headed out to NYC on a redeye Thursday night. Perlick was nice enough to loan us his place on Friday to crash, which was just about the best thing ever. The weekend was absurd. We were (with the exception of the wedding, sleeping, and dinner Friday night) NEVER in a place for more than two hours. We drove from NYC to Philly, were up ’till 3 one night, and saw a *ridiculous* number of people.

Sorry to those we missed – the timing just didn’t work, and we barely made it to everywhere we needed to be.

I was really glad to see Pete, even if it was only for about 25 minutes at Penn Station.

We ate at WD-50 with Perlick, which was a really entertaining meal full of interesting (and even sometimes delicious) food and lively conversation. A great time.

The wedding was fun, mostly because I actually got to meet Ei-Nyung’s friends in a more … um… not unusual setting. I’m used to seeing them at weddings and such, but the actual wedding this time was relatively short, and was followed by like, 4 hours of karaoke, where we all just hung out. I sort of “got” the vibe, and was able to get everyone’s names and stories straightened out for the first time. I’ve met them all before at various places, but it was just one of those things where you meet a LOT of people at once, and things just got jumbled up. This time, I talked with, and spent enough time with them all that I think I’ve got it all figured out. It’s a good bunch, and I see what she sees in them, at least to the degree that an outsider can.

So, that was really good, and a lot of fun. I sang a song (Exit Music (for a film), by Radiohead) in front of ’em, so I guess I must have been at least sort of comfortable making an ass of myself…

Strangely, that was really fun, and I even think I “got” the appeal of karaoke this time, too, which is something that’s largely evaded me before – mostly because prior to this time, I’ve never actually really tried to *SING*. You know? I’ve been a few times, and mumbled tunelessly into the mike, never really “buying into it.” This time, I pretty well gave it my all. I totally blew the high note in the middle (if you know the song, you probably know the note. (the “Now” in “Now we are one, in everlasting peace…”) Totally flat. But I *went for it*, which is something I’ve never done before, and I was surprised by how …erm… exhilerating it was.

Which is strange, ’cause I’ve performed in front of people before – clarinet stuff, piano stuff, saxophone, whatever – and I got that same nervous twitchiness, but singing is definitely a completely different feel than channelling that same emotion through an instrument. I’d like to give it another go, but the thing was that this karaoke place had a phenomenal selection of English songs. I don’t know of a comparable place in the Bay Area. Ah, well. And, of course, having said all this, I’m sure if I go again with friends from around here, I’ll just mumble tunelessly into the mic again. Alas.

Met another person we’d only previously met over the ‘net, and it was really good to associate a person with the “presence,” I guess might be how one would call it. One thing that I’ve found with everyone I’ve met through TGF is that there’s almost no adjustment time – the online friendship transfers instantly, and effortlessly into real life. I’ve met what, now, at least six people from TGF in real life, and they’ve all been really good people.

We saw my parents’ new place in Long Island, which was good – it’s a nice place that suits them, I think. Or will, at least, when they “tune it up” a bit. It’s a good size for them, I think – big enough that they can get distance when they need it, but small enough that it feels like a home. There are a lot of McMansions around them, but their place is surrounded by trees, and actually feels “homey.” It’s pretty cool. I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with it over the years, and hell, even just having an excuse to go visit every once in a while, and hang out with the East Coast folks more often.

It’ll be sad that they’ll undoubtedly finish their renovations well before us, but ah, well – they’ve got the space, money, and time. Good for them – they deserve it.

We went to the Met, which was really impressive. They had an exhibit that had a lot of Van Gogh, Picasso, Cezanne, and… um… dammit, Tahiti guy… forget his name. Rats. It was a lot of fun. There were a couple really interesting paintings, and it definitely reinforced, for me, that I enjoy Van Gogh’s paintings a lot. And that audio tours of museums are almost always a good bet.

Anyway – crazy-assed weekend. To everyone we saw, thanks for making the time, or helping us out. To the people we missed, or saw on really crunched schedules, sorry – we really wanted to spend (more) time with you, but couldn’t. Three days just wasn’t enough time for all the things we’d hoped to squeeze in. We’ll be back, and hopefully, we’ll catch up then.

Fun, exhausting, and damn, it’s good to be home.

On an unrelated note – if you love video games, you owe it to yourself to pick up Okami.

The following link is pretty explicit. It’s ABC’s transcripts of Mark Foley’s IM conversations.

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/BrianRoss/story?id=2509586&page=1

It’s worth reading, because to me, it makes a few things quite clear:

• Mark Foley is clearly the “aggressor” here, and not the teenager. If, for some reason, you’re the kind of degenerate monster that thinks that that sort of thing matters.
• These are not “overly friendly” IM’s. They’re explicitly sexual, without question.
• Reading these definitely makes the GOP leadership, and the right-wing talking head morons like Hannity look like 1.) Complete morons, and 2.) Staunch defenders of pedophiles.

Having read this first hand, and knowing that the information is out there for people like Hannity or Hastert to read makes it clear, and quite obvious that these people have no concerns for decency, moral values, reasonableness, protection of children, or anything of the sort other than the lust for power. That’s it – cut and dried.

These transcripts should be spread as far and as wide as possible. Rural Republicans who vote based on some notion that these people are “moral” should read this transcript, and ask themselves if in the context of this information, and the actions of the GOP as a whole, if they can vote Republican in the coming election, and not go straight to hell.

Sony must really hate their engineers.

http://www.kotaku.com/gaming/immersion/hirai-rumble-possible-motion-sensing-a-strategic-choice-205056.php

Basically, the execs at Sony, when asked why they can’t implement rumble in their controllers is that the motion sensitivity would be disrupted by the vibration in the controller.

Now, anyone who’s been following this knows that the *real* reason that Sony doesn’t have rumble in their controllers is that they don’t want to pay Immersion, who they’re fighting in court because they violated one (or more) of their patents.

So, that’s fine – they’re contesting the infringement. But I guess that the execs at Sony are *so* loathe to mention this that they’re willing to throw their engineers in front of the bus, and make them look like *complete morons*.

I mean, it doesn’t take a whole brain to figure out that the frequency of rumble-related motion and gameplay-related motion are totally, totally different. There’s never, ever going to be any time when a player’s movement at ridiculously high frequency is ever going to matter in a game. It’s just not. You can block off reading motion on any frequency higher than X, and you’ll probably improve the experience overall, because you’ll eliminate meaningless noise, and wacky unintentional user input.

That, and Pelican made a motion sensing controller, with vibration, way back when, and their controllers are incredibly poorly made.

So, Sony’s basically saying that their “world class” engineers are incapable of doing something a mostly inept third party was doing several years ago? And that it’s a task that the solution is obvious to anyone who devotes even twenty seconds to think about that?

I know Sony’s execs don’t really care about their peons, but telling the world their engineering staff are complete morons doesn’t really seem like the best sort of morale boosting move at a time like this.

Whoa. So, that’s the new Mondeo concept from Ford. For a Ford sedan, I’ve gotta say, that’s damned attractive. That thing, in a dark red, or black, or even white? Nice.

Wacky day at work today. A misunderstanding with my boss made me believe that he thought that I was running slow on the work I was doing. This made me really upset, because I’ve been basically doing the work of two people, faster than two people would have done it. I’m writing, from scratch, an entire character, picking up the slack for errors in the schedule by doing process work on other characters, and doing new, system-level scripting that few people, I think, are even capable of doing.

So, I spent the afternoon pretty pissed off.

I’d also heard that a friend had gotten a substantial raise, and was now making almost twice my salary. Congratulations to her! But, sad to say, this made me jealous, and on top of the misunderstanding, I felt like I was being paid pretty well shit for the work I was doing. Also, given that I’m making now EXACTLY what I was making in Sept. 2000, that means over the last six years, my salary has gone down proportional to inflation. That’s pretty depressing. So, again, I spent the afternoon in a pretty venomous funk.

The salary thing shouldn’t bother me. Logically, it doesn’t. I have a really good life. I live in a nice house, however much more work it needs – I mean, the remaining work consists of fixing one part of the roof, doing some interior cosmetic work, and remodelling an upstairs bathroom and the kitchen. Then, there’s exterior cosmetic work that’ll eventually need doing, some cement repair on the front yard’s retaining wall, steps, walkway around the house, and back patio. But once that’s done, this place will be a freakin’ PALACE. I mean, it’s huge. For two people, it’s more than twice the space that we could reasonably need. We comfortably house four people, and there’s a good room worth of space in the downstairs that we simply don’t use – not because it’s awkward or weird, but because we just don’t have any idea what to do with it, or the time to inhabit it, even if we did find a good use.

So, what am I wanting a bigger salary for? Between Ei-Nyung and I, we save a reasonable amount every month. We support her family. We live comfortably. I mean, I sure wouldn’t mind being able to afford some camera goodies and a Tesla, but if I made twice what I make now, I’m sure I’d be jonesing for some other ridiculous thing I can’t afford. Whatever. So, the salary thing – I can’t say I’m not jealous, and I can’t say I don’t feel underpaid for what I bring to the company, but things are what they are, and being bitter about that isn’t helping anyone.

I think the key, though, is that if I ever really want to get rich as a game designer, there’s no alternative to starting my own thing. That much is pretty clear. So, really, it’s just a matter of doing it. I don’t lack for confidence in ideas – I have absolutely no doubt that among the group of people I know, we have absolutely stellar ideas, and enough competance to execute them well. It’s just a matter of doing it.

In terms of the misunderstanding, a little bit before I left, I put my frustration into a calmly worded, very rational, and most importantly, short, e-mail, and sent it to my boss, who I also consider a friend. He turned around, and responded (we sit in adjacent cubes), telling me it was a misunderstanding, and that he has complete confidence in my work, and knows that I’m taking on a lot of stuff. So, that got resolved cleanly, and happily for all involved (I think).

The coming days are going to be tough – there’s a lot to do at work, and some of it is really going to depend on whether I can get the creative process revved up at the right time. There are some days when I’m on fire, and can crank out two or three units of progress in a day. Other days, maybe one. To hit the deadline, I’m basically going to have to be at maximum output four of the six working days remaining before the deadline – a feat that I find exceedingly unlikely. So, probably means longer hours, but it’s a little worrisome, because longer hours doesn’t ensure good work, for something like writing character dialog. We’ll see, though – it has to get done, so it’ll get done.

Then, this weekend, starting Friday, is a trip to NYC, to hang out with some friends, visit the parents on Long Island, and go to a wedding in Philly. Gonna be a hectic week…

How White and Nerdy Are You?

Maybe I’ve been watching too much Keith Olbermann, but about halfway through reading David Freeman’s book on bringing emotion to games (I’m not going to use the title of the book, or his trademark phrase, which I think is one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read), what went through my mind was that this is one of the worst books ever written.

I mean, it’s a book on writing. The whole *point* of the book is, in theory, how to make compelling characters, and how to write about those characters in a way that’s compelling to the reader. He focuses on his “techniques” for creating interesting or “deep” characters, though I loathe to say so, because I don’t think the guy has a goddamn clue in his head about what makes a character deep OR interesting.

He basically says that a character has anywhere from 3 to 5 major traits – he calls these character diamonds, because normally, most of his characters have four major traits. Something like “dry humor” might be a trait. “Depressed” might be another. So, he’s basically taken his characters, and reduced them to four major bullet points. That’s “interesting.” Not. He talks about his techniques for “deepening” characters, like showing sisters who have common traits, or common knowledge, or can (god help me) finish each other’s sentences! It’s so clever, it makes me want to shoot myself in the EYEBALLS.

He talks about making groups have similar traits, so that you might make them “deeper,” like have a group of cavemen have a worldview that might be spiritual, instead of scientific, in a way that might be more spiritually “true” than the modern, scientific worldview. Ohymygod! Genius! He said one way of making a group “deeper” would be to give them characteristics like “nobility,” which he elaborates on by saying, “Maybe they could carry themselves in some sort of noble way.” I shit you not. This, in a $50 book about writing.

I’ve written one really crappy “novel.” 50,000 words in 16 days. I’m a better writer than this guy will ever be. His notion that one can break down the act of creating compelling characters and dialog into a fistful of trite, simple rules that are accessible to anyone is stupid beyond belief, and what’s STUPIDER beyond belief is that he has a whole consulting group that people PAY. THIS IS INSANE. Has no one who’s ever hired him ACTUALLY READ HIS BOOK?!?!?!

The writing examples contained within it INSTANTLY disqualify him from ever writing about writing in ANY medium, games or otherwise. The guy writes like a goddamn fifth grader. A practically illiterate goddamned fifth grader. Pathetic. Absolutely pathetic.

Why do I ever go to an EB Games, or a Gamestop? Every time I walk in to one, I leave either wanting to burn the store down, or strangle the people working there. There’s really two things wrong with every specialty game shop I’ve been to, save for Network Video, in Burlingame, CA, and to a lesser extent, the EB in the Emeryville Bay Street mall.

1.) The people: The people who staff these stores tend to be relatively young, and the main qualification for working in one of these stores is that they’re gamers, to some extent or another. They’re often unkempt, sloppy, have no sense of professionalism. A greeting is more likely to be, “What up?” than “Welcome!” The cashier might have a really sloppy haircut, be talking to someone on their personal phone while checking you out, or be “DOING THE DEW!!!!” while talking to you. If you want to talk about reinforcing the image that gamers are basically illiterate morons, you really need to look no further than game store employees to get a sense of why the public at large has the image they do.

On top of lax (now there’s a kind word) presentation, there’s also this sense that a huge percentage of game store employees are power-hungry cretins. They’re just as happy to say, “We don’t have that,” and look at you like you’re an idiot for asking of a GAME STORE has a particular GAME. HOLY COW. For some idiot reason, I go to the EB in Oakland when maybe, just maybe they’re (in theory) more likely to have something than the Emeryville Best Buy. But I’ve NEVER found anything there that the Best Buy didn’t either have earlier, more of, or cheaper. But there’s some weird tic that I have that says, “Hey, this is a specialty game shop! Maybe they have games that the big-box retailer won’t!” Ha. Sigh. Weep. But the inventory thing’s not the real problem. It’s that the employees are fundamentally bureaucrats, who revel in whatever red tape they can throw in your way. Walk into a Starbucks, and ask the person behind the counter something. You’ll get a cheerful smile, and some useful information. Maybe they don’t have what you want, but they’ll try to suggest something. You want something a little different than normal? Great!

I’m not a fan of Starbucks, in theory, but in practice, they’re really quite good about creating an environment where you feel positively toward the whole experience. EB seems to be determined to do the exact opposite of that, and make your experience as painful, frustrating, and irritating as possible by letting their employees be smug, barely competant jackasses.

And that’s all pretty obvious. Walk into almost any game store, and you’ll see some only marginally literate moron telling someone’s mom she’s an idiot for not knowing the difference between Devil May Cry and Devil Kings. Whatever. But the second thing really started to get to me today.

2.) Organization: The organization of game stores sucks. The organization of every game section of every major retailer (and minor retailer) sucks. Why? Because they’re almost always alphabetized, and unless you know exactly what you want, you’ll never find anything that way.

What you want, I think, is for all the *STOCK* to be alphabetized – the stuff that’s kept away from the consumer, so that the employees can find it quickly. Anyone comes in and asks, “Do you have Game X?” they can look it up immediately, and make sure they have phyiscal stock on hand by finding it instantly.

But in terms of browsing? I have almost no desire to look through a store alphabetically. I also, frankly, have almost no desire to look at game box covers. They’re essentially meaningless, and when faced with a thousand game box covers, browsing through covers is absolutely horrific.

What would I suggest? I don’t really have any great ideas – I think part of what you’d need to do is take into consideration who walks into a store, without knowing what they want to buy already. That’d be parents, who are probably looking for a specific age range, or a game that is similar to another game. So, organization by genre or rating would probably be useful. I’d also keep the number of titles on display WAY down. Maybe have on the display shelves games that were released in the last two months only. This way, you don’t get the fatigue of walking in and being faced with a thousand really visually noisy game boxes to look through, only to not be able to tell WTF is going on.

I’d have hardware running a lot of the major new releases, so that people could see them. I’d have a library of commonly-requested games that can be easily swapped (by an employee) into a system, so that the consumer can try them out before buying. I’d have places to sit, and watch trailers/videos of existing games, or if you wanted to peruse a library of magazines/reviews, or what have you to make an informed decision, do that. I’d have at least one internet-connected computer, so that consumers could check out GameRankings or something, for reviews, or so that employees could make informed recommendations to people who come in with questions.

Of course, all this would cost a lot of money, and hiring competant, experienced retail employees who see something like this not as a part-time shit job, but as a career, at salaries that attract good people, in a location that’s attractive, accessible, and *feels* more upscale than your generic strip mall nonsense… I doubt you could really compete with the Wal-Marts of the world. But I’d like to think that if you got parents who don’t have time to understand every game that Little Timmy plays to *trust* your recommendations, and for them to feel like they’ve made a reliably well-informed decision, that maybe they’d support a store like that.

Maybe not, but the bigger thing is that honestly, I just wish I didn’t hate specialty game stores as much as I do.

This is just mesmerising. It’s old, sure, but if commercials were this interesting, I’d fastforward through the shows to get to more ads.

One weird note: What is is that you’re re-winding these days, when you make media go backwards?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/north_yorkshire/5365676.stm

Good luck, Hamster.