The News: I have given my two weeks notice at Backbone Entertainment. I have accepted a new job, at a location that I will not disclose here. I know that may seem anticlimactic, but there you go. What I can say is that it’s a raise, and a promotion. My new title is “Senior Designer,” and it’s with a company I’m really excited to work for. They have a long history of making high-quality games, and I’m really hoping that this will be a great learning experience, and an opportunity to make something that I’m really excited about. If you’d like to know the specifics, drop me a line, and I’ll be happy to tell you more.

So, yeah. That’s the news. If that’s not cool enough, check this out:

http://www.flytheroad.com

A $23K fully electric vehicle that is basically a TRON cycle. OMFG.

1.) Got interesting news, but I can’t make it public until tomorrow.

2.) Some new screenshots of Forza 2 were just released. Is it just me, or does it really, really look like the Stig behind the wheel?

3.) Fortunately, the cold seems to be breaking. My stomach’s still a mess, and my back is killing me, but I’m much less of a zombie today than I was yesterday, which is a nice change of pace.

Anyway… more tomorrow.

Oog. I woke up this morning, and thought to myself, “Shit, I’ve got the flu.” I took a couple Advil, soaked for a couple minutes in a hot bath, and felt worlds better. I ended up going to work. About 11:45, I felt progressively worse and worse – I could barely keep my head up, my back was killing me, and I felt like my head was being crushed in a vise.

No congestion, no sneezing/coughing, just pain from head to toe, and tired as all get out. Fun!

So…

This weekend’s been an ordeal. Switching to the Macbook has, in many ways, been quite painless. Yeah, there’s some weirdness to be had, but for the most part, I’ve found it to be a great experience… with one glaring exception.

iPhoto fucking sucks.

Now, let me be absolutely clear – part of the problem is me. I screwed up the initial photo import, then tried to “fix” it in the wrong way. This will come back to haunt me later.

Basically, iPhoto takes all of your photos, and imports them into the iPhoto Library, copying all your photos into the library, unless you’ve selected an option in the preferences. So, because of the initial screwed up import, then the accidental duplication, I’d used up all the space on my hard drive. ‘That can’t be right,” I thought.

So, I went about trying to figure out how to get all the duplicates off the drive. “Wipe it all out and reinstall” would have been a great option, except at some point in the process, everything had appeared, momentarily, to be going right, so we imported a bunch of wedding photos off Ei-Nyung’s computer *and then deleted the originals*. Now, yes, this is stupid. Shut up. I already know.

So, we have three sets of photos, and one other. That last one is the last copy of those photos we have, so I *CAN’T DELETE THEM*.

So, I figure, okay, I’ll just go manually through iPhoto’s library, and delete all the duplicates by hand. Great. So, I do that. It takes about four hours.

Tonight, I go to spit out a slideshow in iDVD, and I can’t move some of the photos into the slideshow pane. Why? BECAUSE THEY DON’T FUCKING EXIST ANYMORE.

Here’s the problem. iPhoto creates thumbnails and picture info, and keeps that in some meta thing. They aren’t updated in real-time, so that you can browse through your photos without constantly refreshing everything. Great. But I did the initial delete of the original import I’d f’ed up, the thumbnails were left behind, along with the picture info.

When I went through and deleted all the dupes by hand, I’d checked a few of the groups randomly, and found that the right most photo in the list was good. So I went through the entire library, spot-checking, and deleting all but the right-most photo in the library pane.

Of course, what happened was that for almost every photo that I *didn’t* check by hand, and for NONE of the photos I did, they were the phantom remnants of photos that I’d already deleted. Thumbnails and picture info that didn’t know when to die.

So, now, I’ve gone through the iPhoto library, deleted every goddamn instance of the phantom thumbnails, and re-imported all of our existing photos, while leaving behind all the ones that looked alright.

Now, I’ve gotta go through and redelete a bunch of new duplicates. God, I can’t fucking wait.

So. As of about noon today, I got my first Mac. It’s a white MacBook 2.0Ghz Core Duo (not the Core 2 Duo, alas), with a gig of RAM, and a Superdrive (a combo CD-R/rewriteable DVD drive), with OSX Tiger. I’m sure there’s all sorts of “jargon” mistakes in that last sentence, but I don’t particularly mind.

First impressions:

1.) Holy cow, this is different. Having used a PC for the last … forever, the basic structure of the Mac is just really alien in many respects. It’s like… it’s like doing something that’s sort of vaguely familiar, but while blindfolded and upside-down.
2.) The hardware is absolutely *GORGEOUS*. The laptop is beautiful in almost every way that it could be. The keys feel nice, the screen looks great, and overall, it’s just a very, very pretty machine. Much more so even than the old Vaio I used to have, which was the best looking laptop of its time. Admittedly, that time was something like seven years ago.
3.) Things aren’t as easy-to-use as I might have expected. While they are still *quite* easy to use, because they’re different, I don’t even know the basic hoops through which one can jump to do things differently. As a result, even problems that must be simple still feel complicated. I’m sure this will pass, though, and honestly, I’ve had fewer problems moving stuff between XP and OSX than I did simply installing SP2 on XP.
4.) I have a long way to go before this feels familiar. I’m still at the point where I’m doing things in oddball ways, just because I don’t know the “right” way to actually do them.
5.) It’s really nice having a usable laptop again. The Vaio’s still actually functional (except for the housing for the power cord is completely falling apart), but the 90% keyboard, and 0 battery life do make it a little tricky to get real functionality out of.

At this point, frankly, it’s just strange. I’m still going to be finding random things that I’ll expect to be able to do, but can’t, just because this isn’t a PC. I have no idea whether Flickr has an uploader for the Mac. Maybe I’ll look right now.

…and we’re back.

Yes, indeed, there is an uploadr for flickr for OSX. Hooray.

Yeah. So, so far, I’m liking this quite a bit. I feel like MS is going to have some serious problems with Vista, because right now, there’s simply no compelling reason to use it, but they’ve effectively created this demand for something “new,” but then almost entirely failed to provide it. I wouldn’t say that I was dragged into a new-computer purchase because of MS, but basically looking at Vista, and realizing that it was more of the same, if not worse, and that the next likely update would be in 2010, I began to really seriously consider a substantial change.

So, here we are.

While walking Mobius tonight, I wondered if my decision to switch was at least in part triggered by my move, career-wise, away from something that was more engineering-focused, to something that was more design-focused.

While more engineering-focused, I used to take pride in putting my own computer together, keeping it relatively close to the cutting edge, and knowing the ins and outs, even if to a greatly limited degree, of how it all worked.

Now, I realize that I don’t really give a crap about *any* of that, and the be-all end-all is the user experience. If the user experience is good, I could have a laptop with almost no “power” *as long as that lack of power isn’t completely obvious to me*. With the PC, everything was continually getting slower. Slower, more bogged down… just “dirtier.” Booting up took forever. Starting programs took forever. It was a pain.

Sure, I could reinstall the OS, but basically you’re asking me to invest on the order of a day just to bring everything back to the status quo? And that’s not even counting when things go wrong, like SP2 making my USB drivers no longer work, killing my keyboard and mouse. Fun stuff. No – it’s not, and I’m hoping to minimize my involvement in bullshit like that. I’m sick of the incompatibilities in the open box hardware. I’m sick of needing to futz with stupid crap in the OS that has no effect on anything I actually *want to do*.

I’m hoping this will be different, at least to some degree. That it’s a change from the status quo is a good thing already. Here’s to hoping it continues to get better.

You know that pensive feeling you get, when you know you’re missing something? I’ve got that now. And though I generally know the reason why, I can’t figure out what to do about it. What I’m missing can’t be found.

I don’t know.

So, every so often, I wonder about what it is that I actually do. That is, if you ask someone ‘What is a doctor?’ they will have a relatively straightforward answer. If you ask someone, ‘What does a mechanical engineer do?’ they will generally have an answer. ‘What does a game designer do?’ is tricky for two reasons. First, it’s not a profession that’s been around particularly long, and even throughout its existance, it’s been somewhat amorphous. Second, to define what a game designer does, first you must define what a game actually is.

On the surface of things, a game designer’s job is to come up with cool ideas for games. Great. But as pretty well everyone knows, coming up with cool ideas for games is pretty trivial. That’s basically the process of ‘Wouldn’t that be cool?’ where you sit around and think of awesome things to do. Wouldn’t it be cool if you made a game where the world was ruled by sentient stand mixers, and humans had to overthrow them using only aluminum foil and a spatula? Stuff like that. Come up with ten of those scenarios. It’ll probably take you what, half a second?

That’s what it seems a lot of people think game design is all about. It’s certainly the image they pitch on those Westwood College commercials where they’ve gotta ‘tighten up the graphics on level 3.’ Whatever. Let me just dispel that notion. That part of game design is maybe the initial .5% of the work. Doing it well, and coming up with compelling concepts has great worth – don’t get me wrong. It’s genuinely difficult to come up with innovative, compelling ideas that are actually even marginally feasible, even in a blue-sky style brainstorming session.

So, yeah, it’s a skill. But it’s a skill a lot of people have, at least in some degree.

So… about what a game actually *is*. I had to think about this a great deal while writing my NaNoWriMo project this year, because it deals with someone who’s thinking about exactly that, and I needed to have a plausble, realistic conclusion for this guy to come to. As you might know, if you’ve ever written a book, sometimes, your characters say unexpected things. It’s like exploring some bit of your subconscious that you’ve allowed to speak for the first time.

The essential conclusion was that a game was a series of choices that allow the player to make choices *better* as the game progresses.

It’s a relatively nonstandard definition of what a game is. In ‘A Theory of Fun for Games,’ Raph Koster solicits definitions from several famous game designers, and it turns out that that definition appears to align most closely with Sid Meier’s definition of what a game is. That’s not surprising, to me, because as much as I love action games, I’m a system-based designer, and Sid Meier makes a lot of system-heavy games.

But then, what does the game designer actually *do*? This was another thing that I had to tackle for NaNoWriMo, because in the context of a novel, you can literally make anything you please. I had to figure out some concept for a plausible game for this character to design in a fantasy world I’d created. One of the challenges he faced was the notion of creating anything you wanted without restriction.

A game, without restrictions, is essentially meaningless, given the previous definition. How do you determine what the consequences of an action are, if you can actually be doing *anything*? I could say, I’d like to design a game where the game world is the whole world, augmented by my imagination. I can have any or all powers I can dream of, and I can do anything, go anywhere, be anyone. If it’s not something that occurs in the real world, I can change it so that it does. I can open doors to dimensions that are defined only by my imagination.

So, what I’ve come to is that being a game designer is fundamentally about creating an efficient, compelling representation of a limited space, and providing situations where a player has to make meaningful choices, in a way that augments their ability to continue to make those choices.

Which is about as academic, and dry a definition as you can get. But let’s take a game like Gears of War. It’s a limited space. You play as a human. The physics that govern the game world are largely Earth-like. You possess no real ‘powers’ save for a largely superhuman durability. These are all limitations on the player’s experience, and they were *created* specifically by a game designer who was working within another set of restrictions – time, budget, manpower, technology. A good designer creates an efficient, compelling representation of a limited space *because* all games are fundamentally limited by time, budget, manpower and technology.

The difference between a good game designer and a bad game designer come down to basically how well they can create a compelling experience (the X factor), and how efficiently they can translate the resources at their disposal into that compelling experience.

This, I think, is a *very* system-focused view of what game design is, but I think it still works. For me, a lot of my work is utilizing existing tools to produce unexpected results. Flexing systems to do things they weren’t necessarily designed to do, but are capable of. Taking two systems that work independently, and finding the capabilities of the intersections of the two systems to produce something new. I know that sounds sort of obvious, but this is where a lot of the most interesting stuff I’ve created has resided.

Because all resources are limited, finding places where you can create things essentially out of nothing, and then understanding what makes something compelling are pretty core skills, IMO, to being a successful designer.

But what *is* compelling? What makes something interesting? What makes something fun? Something I read about the Wii, and its control scheme, talked about the concept of ‘input magnification’ and how the Wii magnified a user’s input *less* than other consoles. That is, if I hit a button in Gears of War, I can kill someone in a giant fountain of blood. To bowl, in Wii Sports, I have to make a much grander, and more importantly, *less abstract* motion. The input has a higher corelation to the output.

While the less magnified input is clearly compelling, I like the notion of ‘input magnification,’ and not just in terms of press button -> things go boom. In the food creation system for the Sims, for instance, the point was that you could take a system that’s quite simple – you have a palette of thirty-some odd ingredients. In previous games, you had maybe five different ‘ingredients’ that you could use to create five different meals. With the combinatorial system in Sims 2, those thirty ingredients could be combined in dozens of different ways, resulting in millions of unique results.

But, millions of unique results doesn’t mean anything, unless there’s some consequence to what result you generate. So, the stats for the food *matter* – they affect your character. Some combinations create powerups that can be used for a limited time. Because the stats are then tied to the ingredients, you give the player the tools to understand how the system works, and make better decisions in the future. You not only give them a large space to explore, but you give them the tools to begin to understand it.

Not only that, but in-game, their avatar can use that information to become more efficient, giving them more time to explore the space before they go hungry, or need to attend another need. The consquence of the system applied both to the player’s knowledge, and their avatar’s ability to use that knowledge.

That magnifies the input of not only the player, who can make very simple choices and achieve powerful results, but it also magnifies the input of the designer, who can create a huge amount of gameplay with relatively little input. That’s where the efficiency comes in. That system was created by probably only 1.5 person-months worth of effort, whereas other features in the game took several person-years, with less compelling results.

I’m not really sure if this is the best way to describe my job, but it’s something that’s been rattling around in my head for a while, and it’s certainly less arbitrary than many other definitions I’ve heard.

Really, if you’ve never seen Top Gear, you should. Torrents are available from finalgear.com – I’d start with Season 3, as they had a slightly different, and less good cast in Seasons 2 and 1. There’s all sorts of good stuff. Or, you could do a search on YouTube. I’d recommend this one:

Why this isn’t broadcast in the US is totally beyond me. If Speed carried this, I’d watch it every week, probably two or three times.

That was a pretty good weekend. Finished Lost Planet, which was alright. It’s sort of funny – where I couldn’t tell Dead Rising was made in Japan, Lost Planet was an obviously, obviously Japanese game. It had a lot of design “quirks” and narrative quirks that no western developer would do. Overall? Not a bad game – definitely had its moments, but by and large, it’s a B, B- sort of game. My my old rating system, I’d give it about a B:70 – ambitious and innovative enough, but not executed well enough to realize a lot of what they’d intended, I believe.

Saturday night, we went out to Karaoke, which was a ball. Started out the evening with Korean BBQ at Samwon, where we haven’t been in a while. For BBQ, it’s pretty damn good, IMO. Lots of sides, and everything’s uniformly good. Karaoke was pretty crazy, with something like eight of us in a room singing for almost four hours. Good stuff.

Today, I ended up getting up at 9, for no good reason, though I felt like I really wanted to sleep some more. Spent the morning reading cooking books. I was in the mood to cook something sort of involved, which was either going to be coke-braised or maple-glazed ribs, or a lasagna. Yeah, I know – usually lasagna’s a pretty low-intensity meal. Cheese, maybe some frozen spinach, a jar of tomato sauce, and a big pile of mozzarella, right? Nah.

I used Jamie Oliver’s “Top 10” “Easy Baked Lasagna” recipe. Sure, it’s easy, but it takes for-fucking-ever. Last time, it took about four or five hours to make, the first time I made it. The problem is that the sauce is supposed to simmer for a couple hours. Not this time. We used the pressure cooker to blast the sauce to doneness in about half an hour, while we roasted the butternut and acorn squash (replaced half of the butternut with acorn, ’cause we had another recipe that uses the other half of the butternut in the queue for Tuesday). Basically, it ends up being a pork and beef and tomato sauce, noodles, squash, creme fraiche (with a little anchovy paste), parmesan, and fresh mozzarella in layers.

It’s an incredibly mellow lasagna – the sweetness of the squash, the richness of the creme fraiche and the meat all just … harmonize. It’s awesome. I’ll post a picture later, but visually, it’s the best-looking lasagna I’ve ever seen. Ei-Nyung made a great praline bread pudding, and some braised radicchio, which at first seemed incredibly bitter, but only the tougher outer leaves – the inner leaves were silken, and almost sweet.

We’d reduced some $8 supermarket balsamic vinegar a while ago, and it’s *fantastic*. We’d reduced balsamic any number of times before, but this latest stuff… when we run out, I’m definitely getting the same brand again. I can’t remember what it is, though, so I can’t tell you what brand it is anyway. 😛 But yeah, the radicchio with that balsamic… mmm.

Lasagna, radicchio, salad, and bread pudding, accompanied by a blood orange Italian soda Joe had picked up. Dang – I can’t think of a more satisfying home-cooked meal we’ve had in a good long while. Awesome stuff.

Tomorrow, the roofers are (in theory) coming to (finally) fix the leak in the roof. I’m not holding my breath, and I’m not even sure that they’ll have fixed it once they leave. It only leaks in really heavy, persistent rain. But if they do manage to fix this, it’ll be one of the biggest weights off my back in years.

Work? Well, work’s work. The game’s almost done – I think our end date is something like the 5th, which would mean only another week or so, but my understanding is that that date’s pushed back a bit, to something like the 9th. Beyond that? Well, we’ll see.

February, though, is (barring un-or-marginally-forseen circumstances) PerGaDeMo, in which I work on writing a doc for an idea a couple friends of mine and I had over lunch one day. Oh, that’s Personal Game Development Month. I’d realized that I’d really let myself slack, in terms of working on stuff outside of work, just because at times work can be so grueling that coming home, and working more, even on something you really love, can be a pain.

But NaNoWriMo was great impetus to actually buckle down and DO something, so I’m hoping that I can motivate myself with a goal – to finish a basic, but complete design document for this concept in the span of a month – enough that it honestly, and clearly communicates the core of the idea, and how it could be implemented.

I don’t know what Klay’s current status is, but as an update on my New Year’s resolution, I can say that 1.) I haven’t missed a single day on my workout schedule, and have actually gotten in a couple extra bits of exercise, and 2.) I’m now at 220.5, and definitely look better than I did at 233.5, which is where I started (though the official weigh-in weight, with clothes, was 238, since the next morning I weighed in at 233.5, that’s the starting weight I’m using. 7 pounds to go to meet that particular target, but I expect that the habits I’m developing will keep me going well past that.

I think ideally, my weight’s somewhere between 177 and 200 – I know that’s a pretty wide range. I’d say 177 is what I was in high school, and I don’t know if I can achieve that, but it’s definitely an indication that even at 213.5, which is the goal for this resolution, I’ve got a substantial amount of extra weight.

Still, things are going well – a change in exercise and eating habits – nothing too radical, even – just making sure that my intake is less than my output, and increasing my output.

So far, so good.