So, in game development, there tends to be a somewhat adversarial relationship with marketing. Sometimes, it’s just wondering WTF they’re thinking asking for a particular feature, sometimes, it’s outright hostility. I tend towards the latter camp, and frankly, my experience thus far with game marketing departments hasn’t really left me holding them in high esteem.

Of course, there’s a natural tendency to be at odds, simply because the marketing department are the ones that tell you that you can’t just make whatever you want, you have to make something that will sell to someone. Nominally, they’ve got some capacity to do research, and listen to the supposed consumer.

I think the thing that bothers me is quite simple. As a designer, it’s my job to create something interesting. Maybe fun, maybe thought provoking, whatever – something compelling. And if I can’t make myself genuinely interested in it, it’s very hard for me to do a good job. But more than that, it’s *also* very hard to make something interesting for someone that’s *not me.*

Why? Well, I only occupy my own headspace – I can only judge what *I* find interesting. I can’t tell you what a 12 year old girl wants, and frankly, it’s stupid of me to try. I can make something I think is compelling, and ageless, and might not overtly say, be hostile to 12 year old girls, but I can’t get into their heads, and understand them. Never gonna happen.

And frankly, neither can marketers. They can listen to them speak, and they can relay what they say in condensed form, but in my experience, they don’t know any better what a 12 year old wants than I do. And I know what makes a compelling interactive experience a hell of a lot better than they do.

Am I biased? Oh, hell yes. But the thing is, their job is to nominally study a demographic, and determine what they want. I would say that most real acheivements that further a medium are things that the market doesn’t know they want until *after* they’ve seen something radically new.

Show me a marketing person who did a focus group that showed the Sims would be the commercial success it was. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

…

…

Right. So, there weren’t any. And the marketing genius who really got behind Katamari Damacy? Hmmm.

No?

I don’t harbor delusions that great art comes from creative freedom. Great art often comes from trying to get around crushing limitations. And I’m sure the schmoes that commissioned the Sistine Chapel ceiling were as ignorant and shortsighted as any current-day marketing drone.

And I think that that’s also my major problem with democracy, and the current political climate – political strategists, and the like. Leadership isn’t done by the masses. Ever. Leadership is done by leaders – people who are willing to break the status quo, not people who sit there and ask their pollsters what the public wants. What the public wants is stability, and the status quo, whether it genuinely benefits them or not.

Consider the wave of malaise that swept the Democrats after Kerry started to crumble as the polls closed. How many people really *fought back*? I certainly didn’t. I didn’t want to say, question that the entire electoral system was broken, and that the election was possibly stolen. Instead, I gave up. I figured the public was stupid, and that was the way it was. Because *I* was willing to settle for the status quo.

How easy it must be to placate the public. How utterly trivial and banal. Leadership comes from the purposeful resistance to the status quo, in politics, life, and game design.

…ask a complete stranger if the movie you just saw was, “like, the worst movie you’ve ever seen.”

It’s particularly good to do, if you think that person’s out with someone they’re romantically involved with, like a girlfriend or a wife. It’s even better if they might have actually *liked* the movie that you all just saw, and figure you’re an ass for having asked about what the beginning of the movie was, ’cause you showed up 10 minutes late and were talking through the last 10. If I’d have had my portable sterilization ray, I’d have zapped them and been done with it. Oh, well.

THe movie in question, incidentally, was “The Lake House,” which I can’t actually recommend without reservations. Those reservations are:

* You have to at least marginally like Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. If you don’t, you won’t:
* Buy into it.

That second one’s the really big one – you’ve got to completely suspend your desire to ask *why* certain things are happening, at the beginning. It’s like the beginning of Equilibrium, in the scale of “okaaaaaay, whatever.” But for some reason, for the most part, it works. At the start. There are times later in the movie that are definitely “WTF? How could they not (do obvious thing)??!?!?” and in large part, that’s another reason I can’t really recommend it without reservation.

Because for anyone who’s really bothered by that sort of stuff, it’ll drive you absolutely batty. But if you just sort of “let it go,” and not worry about it too much, it’s sort of a weirdly charming little story.

Two other things:

1.) My parents are moving away tomorrow, as you might have read in an earlier post. it’s weird, but I guess I’ve built up to it, and it’s not overly strange. We’re not the kind of family that really made a big deal out of “family time,” on a regular basis, so I figure we’ll see each other less, but probably spend more real “time” together. Which is probably going to be just fine. I hope they find a place they grow to love soon.

2.) I spent some time this afternoon unplugging our desktops, and the various accessories therein. Basically, the two computers are connected to a single monitor and keyboard in the “office,” and when I’d originally hooked ’em up, I did so without rhyme or reason. The cables were a total mess, and it was obvious. So, I unplugged everything, rearranged some stuff, and slowly, methodically hooked it all back together, zip-tying the various cables, separated basically into power cables and everything else. It looks much neater, until you look behind the computers, where there’s a big pile of bundles of cables. Didn’t really know what else to do with them, but they’re safely out of sight.

3.) (yeah, whatever – I’d only thought of two when I started) spent some time cleaning up the downstairs, though my progress was pretty feeble. Now that my parents have dropped off a lot of stuff, it’s actually quite crowded, with four people, a lot of my childhood stuff (and useless crap), and some of my parents’ stuff. It’s just weird. We’re even getting two more chairs tomorrow, because my dad doesn’t like ’em (they’re my grandparents’ chairs) and I love ’em. So, that’s even *more* stuff. Geesh. We’ll find a place for it, I suppose. One thing that’s really weird is that this house is pretty well perfect for four people. It’s big for three. It’s monstrous, for two. It’ll be weird, one day, when it’s just Ei-Nyung and me, and maybe a child. I figure that’ll happen eventually. Weird.

I want to make a game. I’ve had ideas in the past about stuff I’d really like to make, but they’ve all been beyond the scope of what I could do, reasonably. Games that were “too big,” no matter how we’d tried to make sure we’d thought of something small. We’d start small, and it’d grow, and grow, and grow. This concept, though, for the first time, feels *right*. Not that the previous stuff hasn’t been good – it’s been *damn* good, and one day, I’ll see that stuff gets made as well.

But this one – it’s the right idea, at the right time, for the right hardware, and can be done with relatively small overhead by a relatively small number of people. Other times, I’ve had excuses – I didn’t know any programmers. I didn’t know any artists. Whine whine whine. This is a concept that can be done in theory with almost no financial overhead. It can be done with relatively few people. It’s not ridiculous in terms of content generation, asset creation, whatever. If it’s done right, and people are receptive, it would be the game that *absolutely* is *the* defining game for the platform, no question in my mind.

The only question, really, is whether I’ll reach out and grab the opportunity – find people who are also willing to pursue this idea, take the risk, however small, and devote the time to make it happen, or whether I’ll watch as it passes by…

So, reading one of the recent story arcs on pvponline got me thinking. The basic overview of the story is that there’s a character, Shecky, who’s basically a boozing, gambling con-artist, who fleeces his close friends for protection, to avoid a huge debt he’s racked up. One of the people who’s hiding him gets beat up by the person coming to collect what’s due.

At some point, the “good guys” beat up the enforcer, who’s trying to collect from Shecky. Later, Skull pays off Shecky’s debt to get him off the hook. Shecky then decides to leave, now that he’s no longer a fugitive, and says that he’s glad that he’s now got somewhere to call home. Of Skull, he says, “Kid, you’re the only person who’s never judged me. Not even once. I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”

It’s presented in such a way that my perception of it is that that’s upposed to be a good thing. Skull’s pretty consistently the “innocent” one, and generally, his simplicity is supposed to be a good thing – something to aspire to.

But this really rubs me the wrong way. Shecky used them, he got one of Skull’s friends seriously injured, he lied to them repeatedly, and has never done anything positive for anyone else. Why is “not judging,” in this case, a good thing? It’s not like Shecky was being pursued by some evil villain for no reason – he’d racked up that debt, and was running from it.

It bothers me that basically, you’ve got a character who excplicitly does bad things, and the “hero” is the one who basically ignores all the shit they pull. It’d be like having a heartwarming story about how Hitler was really a good guy underneath all the genocide, and the hero of the piece is the one who can see past the evil actions, to the inconsequential non-evil that hides behind it.

Whee!

I hadn’t been all that psyched to see Cars. One of my friends from college had recommended it, and he knows what sort of things I like. Even still, something about the visuals, and the concept as a whole didn’t scream, “must see,” to me.

I was wrong – it’s awesome.

Not, say, Incredibles awesome, but probably my second or third favorite Pixar movie – in the running with Toy Story. Great stuff.

But man, those guys at Pixar must *love* a challenge. Making the cars relatable, sympathetic, interesting, complex characters… that’s not easy, and it takes some time before you really “buy into” the notion, and aren’t weirded out by it all the time. Sure, the characters are largely stereotypes, and you could say maybe that’s one of the things that Pixar uses to make them more accessible – but it’s so well done, I didn’t mind at all.

The “small town = better than the city life” story, I dunno – it’s easy to wax nostalgic about the simpler life, and ignore the things that came with the simpler life in the real world – but as utopia goes, this wasn’t a bad thing to aspire to.

Yeah, the visual style may not sit well with you at the start, and the whole thing’s just so utterly bizarre it takes some getting used to, but give it a shot – it’s definitely worth seeing.

…but you can drive by it.

When I was in sixth grade, we moved from our house on Harvard Rd. to our house on Magnolia Ave. It was a weird move, just across town. I have no idea why we moved specifically. Still, it quickly became home, after we got rid of the dank-ness, and had wallpapered the rooms and such.

Got our dog, Sonja, not long afterwards, if my memory serves.

Lots of memories of things that happened in that house. Visits from the grandparents, cousin, and other family members. Studying for finals with Steve & Joe, and throwing Joe’s books out my bedroom window into the driveway. Getting little seeds thrown at the front window in the middle of the night when a friend needed to talk to someone. Lots of fights with my parents. Lots of nights studying. Lots of mornings waiting for rides to the pool, sitting on the couch, looking out the large living room window.

Sonja, barking as the mailman dropped the mail into the slot. Fixing up a static spark generator with my dad in the garage. Having my foot run over by a guy dropping me off from band practice. The ride up Magnolia Ave. to the pool. The short walk to school. Piano lessons. Lots of piano lessons. Secretly hoping that my piano teacher would be stuck in traffic, or unable to make it. Looking back, and wishing he’d made it more often, and that I’d appreciated it more when he did. I do now.

The light, above my bed, which let me read in the darkness. Sonja, running in the morning down the hall from my parents’ room, to mine, the click, click, click of her nails on the hardwood, and the whoosh of her flying through the air and landing on the bed next to me. The shiny new saxophone in the closet, which my dad showed me after I’d gotten into a really nasty fight with my mom. Listening to my dad playing his one note on the violin, over and over again. Lots of meals. Eating, at 10pm, after a swim workout, with my mom sitting there, watching me eat. I always thought it was weird, but I get it, now.

The smell of opening up the credenza, and getting out the silverware, or the nicer plates, when company came over for dinner. Playing computer games – Terminator 2, I think, with Sean & Kyle one New Year’s Eve. The Commodore 64 on my desk. The one night I had an NES, before my dad made me bring it back to the store for a refund. One solid night of Rygar. My grandfather, talking to me, telling me I have a responsibility to the world to use whatever gifts I have to make it better in whatever way I chose to pursue, as the two of us sat side-by-side on the edge of my bed. Pulling my bike out of the garage, almost every day, and riding it somewhere or another. Mobius, running out the front door, having spent the day in the care of my mom.

The last moments of whatever day, walking down the walkway, and unlocking the door to come home.

On the 22nd, my parents hand over the keys to the house I’d consider my childhood home. Sad, sad they’re moving, but happy for the memories I have now, and will keep forever.

It’s been a while since I’ve actually picked up an album or two that I really, really like. Recently got Demon Days, by the Gorillaz, and Massive Attack’s Mezzanine, which I’d heard plenty of way back, totally, totally forgotten about, and was reminded of again while watching House (they use one of the songs off Mezzanine for the theme).

It’s also been a while since a song has really put me in a mood, but Teardrop never fails to elicit a sort of melancholy calm, which makes it perfect working music. Strangely, it’s also perfect running music, because the spare drumbeat happens to be exactly my 6.5mph pace. So, yes – running with a melancholy calm. Very odd, but it works.

Gorillaz has one song on the album, DARE, which Ei-Nyung pointed out, is pretty generic disco-y music, except for a guy shouting the lyrics in the background (doubling up a disco-y female vocal). It’s that small vocal flourish, and a slightly more modern beat that completely change the whole feel of the song. Great stuff. Feel Good, Inc. is my other favorite on the album, but there’s a pretty wide variety of entertaining listening to be had.

…

I write a lot. It’s not like it’s a new revelation to me, and I’m surprised by it, or anything. The weird thing is how satisfying it is. Take the blog – it’s not like I’m really saying anything that’s world-changing. I’m not offering commentary on anything of any particular importance. But it *feels* like communication. I know there’s a number of people out there who read this, and when I see them after not having seen them for a while, there’s no period of “so… what’ve you been up to?” – generally, they either know my story in some detail, or I know theirs. It’s quite odd, though, because in some sense, it’s replaced “real” conversation and communication with fake, pseudo-one-way communication.

So, it’s sort of like getting to talk all you want, and not having to read the room, and realize people are bored. If they’re bored, they just stop reading.

But it raises a really weird question for me – what about the future? When I grew up, we talked to people. I didn’t use the phone much, and any social contact I got was generally face-to-face. I felt some “urge” to communicate – to interact with another person, and so I did. I learned how to do so, and what various signs meant. You learn the whole vocabulary of interaction, and develop at least some meager skill for it.

But now, there’s blogging. There’s IMing, e-mail, whatever. Are children learning to socialize through IM? Text messaging? LiveJournal? What percentage of a developing child’s time is spent socializing face-to-face? What sort of longer-term ramifications does some pervasive change in the way people communicate have over the long term?

I suppose this is probably the same question people thought when everyone got a home telephone. Then the cell phone. I’m sure every generation asks themselves, “what of the generation that follows?” and for the most part, we’ve always been fine. But like Al Gore’s slide on relative CO2 concentrations, it’s almost like information has become so dense, and so … ubiquitous, that the whole paradigms of communication have changed.

It’s no longer about whether you can find stuff or not – you want information, it’ll get dumped on your in reams – it’s about sorting the validity and the *worth* of that information. For me, a lot of that comes from learning how to judge whether someone’s a worthy source of information or not. Grammar, communication skills, persoanl presentation, etc. With the pervasiveness of unfiltered data, and a degredation of the metrics that *I* use to judge the validity of a source, what kinds of adaptation will I need to understand the future generations’ communication?

*shrugs*

The comments have been un-forked. If you did post anything in the last few days, though, it’s gone forever. Sorry!

Don’t have anything to write about, really. Which is sort of an odd way to start, but I wanted to write, so I suppose there’s something in the head rattling about.

Work’s interesting – it’s not what I’d necessarily expected going in, and as a result, the first week, I was somewhat disappointed. I’m not sure I’m not still disappointed, but I’ve taken some active steps in turning it into what I want it to be. Which is sort of odd, because the project’s not lasting much longer, and there’ll be something completely different in a month’s time, come hell or high water, because the deadline for this project was fixed long before I ever showed up.

So, that’ll be interesting. The game’s shaping up as well as could be expected, I think.

The commute’s nicer, too – about 15 minutes, door-to-door – the biggest factor in time is the stoplights, and not the traffic. So that’s a good change of pace. Still don’t think I’ve found the optimal route, but that’ll come with time. Gotta try to ride the bicycle to work one of these days. So far, haven’t really mustered up the time to actually do the ride – I suspect it’ll be ~30 minutes or so the first time, ’cause I haven’t ridden my bike, sadly, in years.

I think that’s one thing that would actually change my life for the better, to be perfectly honest. For about eight or nine years, my bike was my primary mode of transportation (starting basically with freshman year in high school). And not just like, from here to the corner store. I’d bike to workouts in Berkeley on a regular basis, I’d bike later from Boston to Harvard to visit my then-girlfriend (which is more like going to the corner store). Everywhere I went, I went by bike. It’s sort of nice. You feel a bit more in touch with your surroundings than you do in a car. Probably because you’re a.) going a lot slower, and b.) have to watch your ass, lest you be killed. So, it’s sort of a time of heightened acuity, where you’re both concentrating on propulsion, and yet have to put aside that zen-like meditative quality you get from the repetition of motion to actively be aware of your surroundings.

Yeah, I miss that feeling. I miss mountain biking, as well – the rush of adrenaline and speed as you’re racing down some hill – your mind working at triple speed to process all the incoming hazards, and work out an optimal way to get from point a to point b, ten feet in front of you. It’s like playing chess while being attacked by ninjas. Fun stuff. The problem with that is that it does require a certain fearlessness that I most certainly no longer possess. I fear crippling injury. I fear death. I like my life. I love my wife, I love my family and friends, my dog – I like spending time with these people, and the risk-taking equation has changed since I was young, and stupider.

Still, I miss it. Riding on the street is sort of the idiot’s equivalent to mountain biking. Ha. Riding through downtown LA traffic in the summer of ’98 was sort of like trying to commit suicide every day and somehow failing, either not being able to get hit by a car, or not breathing in enough toxic fumes to have one’s lungs clog up outright. I mean, it takes a serious misunderstanding of physics and probability to ride around at 20 miles an hour in a crowd of things that weigh 15-30 times what you do, and believe that on the very likely chance one of the two of you screws up, your chances of avoiding serious injury are any good.

Sneh. I suppose I had my moments.

Which reminds me of my knee. It’s been stronger – in many cases feeling better, now that we’ve been working out on at least a somewhat regular basis. On the other hand, it’s feeling worse, as well. If I’m sitting, and I try to extend my leg out in front of me, it’s smooth for the first 40 degrees of motion, or so. Then the last 10 degres, it’s “pop pop pop pop pop pop pop pop,” until my knee’s straight. It’s sore when I sleep, hurts when I squat, hurts to straighten out. It’s been more or less like this since the surgery, but I figured it’d eventually go away.

I’ve got a phyiscal scheduled with the doctor – one of those things one does when they’re 30, I suppose. I’ll ask her about it then. Finally settling into the “get a doctor you see more than once every 10 years,” mode. Hell, I’ve even got a dentist I’ve got an appointment with in six months. It’s bizarre.

Eh, so this didn’t really amount to anything interesting, other than one of those posts I’ll read a year from now and go, “Huh. That’s what was happening then.”

At what point do you say, maybe it’s not that everyone else is moving slowly, maybe it’s that I’m actually moving quite fast?

Maybe it’s time to stop waiting for the master to appear, and simply accept that it’s time to take matters into my own hands?

So, the parents took us to Chez Panisse tonight. The menu consisted of four courses:

* A shrimp and cucumber salad, flavored with some Vietnamese notes. Tasty, and full of interesting, subtle flavors, but not mindblowing like the Halibut we had last time.
* A carrot soup, and a fava bean soup, served in the same bowl. Their viscosity was high enough to keep them separate, and a swirl of tarragon cream crossed the two. The carrot soup was an excellent carrot soup, but nothing more, imo. The fava bean soup was suprisingly delicious, withe flavors I neither expected, nor recognize.
* Chicken – the leg deboned, stuffed with mushrooms, and sliced, along with slices of the breast meat. I’ve never, ever had chicken done this perfectly. The breast meat was just astonishing. Flavorful, perfectly seasoned, juicy, with crispy skin… man. Genius. The leg meat & mushrooms were also delicious, but I’m used to moist & delicious dark meat, so it was somewhat unsurprising. Came with spinach, and some asparagus, both done to perfection. This is hands-down the best chicken dish I’d ever had, and after finishing it, I literally felt guilty for not being that excited about it after reading the description.
* A strawberry tart, with some sort of cream & shaved almonds. Delicious, but almost exactly what you’d have expected.
* A small chocolate ganache thingamabob, which was good, and a piece of candied tangerine rind, which was awesome.
* An iced citron green tea.

Delicious! Not say, cheap, but *delicious*. I was a little worried, as the meal didn’t start out with the punch I’d have hoped, but the chicken dish made any doubts completely disappear.