I think it’s interesting that in the Ukraine, exit polls are showing Yuschenko winning, and all the major sites are saying, “Yuschenko wins” – and yet, in the US, when exit polls showed Kerry winning, somehow, Bush still won. Now, what’s that mean? That exit polls are flawed? If that’s the case, they shouldn’t be writing the headlines they are right now, yeah? And if they’re *not*, you think maybe the Ukraine did things right, and we fucked it up here in the US somehow? Or more appropriately, *got* fucked?

Hm. I think it’s terribly sad that Ukrainians hold democracy in higher stature than we do here in the US.

Merry Christmas.

Our drain got backed up again. Hooray! My money’s on it being a repeat of a prior incident, and if it is, let’s just say that I’ll be super fucking pissed. And if it’s not, I’ll be pretty weirded out, as it would mean that our drains have backed up two times in as many weeks. But I’m guessing it’s the former, which means that the latter makes sense. But still. Color me pissed.

Now *that* is one hell of a knife.

Best feeling knife I’ve ever held. And tomorrow, it’ll be the best feeling knife I’ve ever used.

And in case the image doesn’t show up, it’s a Shun 7″ Granton-edge santoku knife. Holy hot damn, it’s awesome.

Responding to a comment in the post before this one:

I think the reason that the game designers on the Sims in particular happen to largely come from a writing background is that basically, we’re making a port of a pre-existing game, with some tweaks to make it more console-friendly. One of the things that the designers on these games do is write a lot of text. Tutorial stuff, descriptions, etc. Because the fundamental “game design” had already been taken care of by the design staff of the original Sims, whose composition short of Will Wright, I don’t have a clue about, “game designers” weren’t really what was needed, for the most part.

Now, the problem with the Urbz is that it’s quite different from the Sims, and some things that were removed (the job concept from the Urbz is radically, fundamentally different than the one in the Sims) had unexpected and unintended consequences. Consequences that fundamentally altered the way the Sims worked. Strangely, the Sims isn’t just about going to the bathroom. That’s a large part of it, but what it’s *really* about is juggling the motives, the skills, and the relationships – those things got *measured* by the original job system, providing motivation to keep all the balls in the air. In the Urbz, the job system was revamped, but it didn’t have that measurement of progress in the same way the Sims did, and as a result, it radically unbalanced a lot of things.

So, the problem is that what happened was that we went from taking a pre-existing design, and mucking around with the details to make it viable on consoles, to fucking up the system, and needing a redesign from a *gameplay* perspective, rather than a detail cleanup perspective. The fundamental game core had been altered, and what we needed was a design staff that could understand what the underlying mechanics were. We didn’t have that last year. I’m somewhat concerned that we don’t even necessarily have that this year. Better, definitely, but I’m not sure anyone on the team is quite savvy enough to rebalance the game after having changed it so dramatically.

Anyway – the point was that basically, that’s why we have a design staff that’s mostly comprised of writers, instead of “game designers.” But it’s sort of weird, right? Because when I say “game designer” what I’m thinking of is the guy who works out the mechanics. The guy who makes Monopoly, not the guy who writes Star Wars. But then, there’s probably people out there (Final Fantasy fans, no doubt), who say, you need plot, atmosphere, character as well. And to that, I say, “yup.” So, the “game designer” then ends up being Gary Gygax crossed with George Lucas, working out both the systems that underlie the world you’re creating on top of it.

And for that, there just aren’t a lot of people who can make their brains encompass all those goals. Dealing with mechanics, as well as the creative aspects is a strange melding of left and right brain functionality. To some respect, you need to be both a mathematician and a painter.

Or something like that.

My year in review:

Pretty strange year, this one. Started out with a mix of bad and awesome, with the first thing to happen in the new year be my engagement to Ei-Nyung. Was sadly unemployed at the time, though, which was no good. I don’t really remember a whole lot about January, to be perfectly honest. Ran a lot of errands and such, and was dealing with getting the power to the downstairs working, and finished. We moved into the downstairs sometime in January, I think.

In February, we got a dog, which we named Mobius – you’ve probably heard of him by now. Half Husky, half American Eskimo Dog. That was the weekend before I started my job at Maxis, which at the time was in Walnut Creek, and later moved to Redwood City. The commute sucks, but the job that Ei-Nyung got later in the year helps, because we can commute together. Very nice. She’s happy with her new job, too. After that, a lot of the rest of the year blurred together. We had a fence put up outside the house, so that Mobi could run around during the day, and I put a dog door in, which was a tremendous pain in the ass. The front windows leaked, but since most of the year was sunny, it wasn’t much of a problem until just recently.

We also got a new bed – a California King, which is both ridiculous, and awesome. It’s way too large for two people, but with two people and a sort of obnoxious dog, it’s perfect.

Work was hectic at times, but entertaining as well, and in November, I shipped my second game – The Urbz, for the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox. In early December, Paper Cup Games also finished its first game – Aura, which was submitted to a gbadev.org competition, and at least at this point, hasn’t been eliminated from potential publication yet.

Met a bunch of new people this year, either through work, or extracurricular type stuff. First year in a while I think I’ve made a couple new friends. Working in a new place has helped that a lot, and it’s been a good experience.

What do I want for the coming year? Some time to do some artistic stuff – outside the sprites and music for Aura, I didn’t do much in the way of purely creative stuff this year – no paintings, no comics, etc. Harder to do with work being as crazy as it is. I’d also like to get married next year, though finances will dictate that somewhat, and I’d like to finally get to Hawaii, Paris, or London, which I’ve been putting off for like, five years now, due to a lack of time and money. Yeesh.

Well, there you have it. A purely vain post. But it’s been a pretty crazy year – lots of big changes, far as I can tell, all of them good. Hope the next year’s as interesting.

I know it’s kind of ridiculous, and we’ll never see it in action, but I wish sometimes, when a reporter posts a headline like, “Bush looks to slash deficit,” they also add, “but his previous policies have shown that he’s really just bullshitting, and has no intention or desire to slash the deficit unless he can still give huge tax breaks to the exorbitantly wealthy. Oh, and poor people are bitches! Yeah! Bitches! Suck on it!”

*shrugs*

Huh. A whole week of nothing to do at work. I asked my supervisor if we had anything to do, and the response was basically, “Not really.” I wrote a few e-mails this morning, played some Otogi: Myth of Demons, picked up some games for peeps at the store, went and worked out, picked up some more games for other peeps at the store, including Tiger Woods DS for myself, and will be going home relatively soon. This is, far as I can tell, what the entire week’s gonna be like. Pretty odd. Might just leave my xbox here, and not play any games at home this week.

Strangeness.

I think regarding this whole intern->designer thing, I’m more or less over it – and if I get all crazy and irritated by it again, I’m just going to have to suck it up and deal. Talked to my supervisor about it again today (he brought it up, from a previous conversation we had), and he put a lot of issues to rest in a good way. So in as much as is possible, I’ve gotten good feedback, and am actually getting reasonably deeply involved for someone in my position, regardless of title. So, things, I think, are looking up somewhat.

Man, though – it’s dark in here. Tried to get a floor lamp from facilities, since for some reason, a lot of the other people like the lights off – but it’s taking a while in coming. On the plus side, apparently, we’re getting our cubes moved sometime in January, and I might end up actuall adjacent to the window, with no cube wall between me & outside, which would be really grand.

I realize it’s sort of strange a conclusion to come to so relatively late, but over the last few days, I think I’m on the verge of learning this:

Don’t give up.

There’s been a few moments, at work especially, where I’ve watched other people do this: They formulate some really good concept, get really excited about it, then when someone questions it, or says that initially, it doesn’t sound totally awesome, they completely abandon it, and start again from scratch. Three times in the last three days, I’ve heard this happen to one idea or another, and I was on the verge of doing it myself out of a sense of profound frustration.

But the point is that questioning doesn’t mean your idea is bad. Not being able to explain it properly the first time doesn’t mean you won’t get the point across the next time. If you know an idea is good, that it’ll work, that it can and SHOULD be done, that you don’t just fucking quit the first time someone says, “Maybe that won’t work.”

I guess it’s sort of strange. Maybe it’s that I’m so used to having ideas vetted by “Authorities” that when someone who has some authority says, “no,” I say, “ok,” just out of habit, even if I shouldn’t. So, yeah. I don’t know what the moral is, I suppose, other than that if you know something’s the right thing to do, don’t fucking roll over and die the first time someone puts up even a minor obstacle. While I’m talking about this issue in regards to my personal life, I’d *really* appreciate it if the Democratic Party would learn this lesson right fucking now.

Ah. The problem is this: The designers for our game are, essentially, writers. With one notable exception, they’re not programmers, they’re not artists, they’re not musicians. Some of them aren’t even really hard-core gamers, or really take the time to understand or analyze what the specific things are that are fun, or not fun.

The problem is that nominally, a game designer has to know something about everything. I have a hard time imagining what someone would be, if you labelled them as an excellent game designer, and nothing else. Will Wright succeeds because his intellectual curiosity got him interested in architecture and social dynamics, thus, the Sims. Sid Meier much the same way, and like Wright, also a programmer. Pikmin came from Shigeru Miyamoto’s gardening hobby. Miyamoto is probably the one I would come closest to labelling a sort of “purely focused” game designer out there, and he’s a graphic artist, by education – which, given most of his games, shows.

If you’re a “designer” and you don’t understand a lot of the underlying tenets about visual art, or narrative, or music, or simply the sort of academic side of interactivity – if you’re not at least *interested* in those things, what is it that you do? How do you design something that critically involves all of those fields? I think my problem is that by and large, the designers on our team do *not* consist of people with a wide variety of talents – they’re quite focused on one discipline (again, with one notable exception). Sure, written communication is essential to game design, and experience goes a long way… and fundamentally, I’m not so stupid that I don’t know my bitching and complaining is driven almost entirely out of a sense of enraging jealousy.

Yeah.

Seems to me there needs to be more of a distinction in games between writers, and designers. At my job, the designers write all the text. Mind you, they’re often very good writers, and write really good text. But I’m beginning to think that because they’re selected for a hybrid of skills (or in some cases, purely for their writing) the design suffers somewhat.

I think part of the problem is that game design, at this point, is still a very new medium, and there aren’t that many people who are even really trying to understand how to use it, and are just focused on incremental steps toward “newness” while creating essentially commercial commodities, nearly devoid of art, in a traditional sense, but also art, in the implementation sense. It’s really a, “what’s the easiest, least risky way of doing something,” and not, “what’s the BEST way of doing something?” Because it is a business, it’s hard to argue with that philosophy, and because the project’s on a relatively tight deadline, again, simplicity, and lack of change makes for a more easily scheduled project.

But the problem, to me, is that a lot of the design that is going on is essentially, how do we take last year’s game, and change some of the subsystems to make it more appealing? Instead, we have a new frachise – one that sort of failed to properly define itself last year. Shouldn’t we be making more strides towards saying, “THIS is what the fundamental game is really about – we missed the focus last year, but we’ve got a couple really central focused mechanics that we’re going to polish to a mirror shine.” What we have instead is, we can Band-aid this, then put some scotch tape on that, and maybe people will like it better.

I don’t know – obviously, there are people with more experience, and maybe in the end, their deicisions will be correct. But watching them work, it’s like watching truck drivers trying to fish. Maybe some of them will catch some fish sometimes, but they really don’t seem to know how to fish, but once the fish are caught, they do a good job of transporting them to the store. Fucked up analogy, sure, but the point being, we don’t seem to have any game *designers* on the project. Writers? Yeah. Producers? Yeah. Something, though, feels quite dangerously missing, though.