One of the weirdest things about the new generation of consoles is that Nintendo has insisted that better graphics aren’t the wave of the future. As a result, while the X360 and PS3 are pretty substantial steps forward in terms of graphical fidelity, about the most the Wii will provide is what the xbox *currently* provides. Nintendo’s mantra has been “accessibility uber alles.”

Here’s why it won’t work:

When you take a 2-D game, your brain abstracts it into some representation of reality. Your brain has been trained since near infancy to interpret two-dimensional images, whether photorealistic, or completely iconic, as representations of some form of reality. You understand, fundamentally, how to interpret 2-D of various quality, resolution, etc.

However, CG “3D” is nowhere near photorealistic yet – even the most talented of artists cannot make faces that are indistinguishable from reality with the current hardware, because people are so trained to look at the detail of a human face, and understand all of its nuances. 3-D is *too much like reality*. Your brain does not easily abstract a dodecahedron into a sphere – it’s only by immersing yourself in that context that you understand how to translate those visual abstractions into reality. This is *not* a process that has been as deeply ingrained as a person’s ability to interpret drawings, or effectively, sprites.

The critical piece is this: 3-D technology is currently progressing *towards* shedding the technical limitations, and being artist-dependent, in terms of replicating visual fidelity. That’s important because essentially what it means is that learning how to interpret “bad 3-D” (low-poly models, low-boned animation skeletons, etc.) is a skill that people are going to lose in the near future, because it simply won’t be necessary anymore. And as a result, something like the Wii, which has settled for obviously “bad 3-D,” will literally look terrible to anyone who’s lost that skill, because they’ve grown accustomed to looking at less abstracted representations of reality.

Look at Virtua Fighter. Not the new ones, the original. How *terrible* does that look? That one would consider that a valid representation of a human in *today’s* context is a *joke*. Look at old Playstation games. They’re almost unplayably terrible looking. But look at SNES games. They still look remarkably good. Sure, they’re low-res, by and large, but Super Mario World is *still beautiful*. It’s because the skill of interpreting low-poly 3-D is transient. Once someone’s adapted to the better technology, and lost that skill, things simply look bad. You don’t tolerate texture warping, pop-in, pointy circles, etc.

So, what Nintendo’s banking on is that the visual difference between the xbox and the x360 isn’t substantial enough that a gamer would care about the difference. What they’re *also* banking on is that that’s not the factor in making games accessbile to everyone.

And in my opinion, that’s where they’ve completely, totally blown it.

Finished the first season of House, and finished my time spent unemployed. Back to the grind, as of tomorrow. It’s a little strange, to be perfectly honest. I’m not really *excited*, or nervous – in some sense, I’m a little scared, sure – change is scary. But I think one thing is that it’s maybe less intimidating? Maxis was a sort of legendary place – the kind of place I imagined was full of candy canes and magical spirits, or something, before I worked there. Now, I know it’s all just a job, and even the best places are f’ed up in all sorts of crazy ways.

It’ll be a chance to work in a smaller environment again – something I think I like much better than the larger, corporate craziness. I wonder what their work-life balance is like, whether it’ll drive me crazy or not. I wonder what sorts of things are possible, and what I’ll find impossible, there. How long before I feel like it’s limiting, instead of educating, how long it’ll be before I want more, or want less. I dunno. I think it’ll be fun.

Starts tomorrow. And I go back to wishing, every day, that I just had more *time*.

One day left, of freedom. Job starts Monday. It’s been a good month. Relaxing when it needed to be, full of productivity when it should have been. I could have done more. Probably could also have done less, and been happy, as well.

The thing the month has taught me are twofold:

The first is pretty simple. I’m good at filling up time. I have a lot of hobbies, and basically never enough time to pursue them all. Without a job, I *still* didn’t get a chance to paint this month, nor did I play much music. I did play the sax a bit during the weekdays, and I played some on the keyboard. Now that we’ve got the piano, I’m actually excited to re-learn how to play that, as well. I sketched up a painting of a flower, from a photo I’d taken in London, but haven’t yet applied paint to canvas. Cooked a lot, which was really fun, and did a bunch of random stuff around the house, which was remarkably satisfying. Lots to go, but baby steps count.

The second is a little weirder. It basically has to do with prioritization and allocation of time. I didn’t realize how much I prioritize, and think of everything in terms of opportunity cost. Should I watch a movie? That’s pretty much a whole evening after work. Meals are always a balance of prep and shopping time vs. money. Playing a game, surfing the internet sort of “kill” time while something else might come along. What I’ve done, in the past, was actually “kill” time instead of pursuing good opportunities, lest something *better* come along. When my time was “free,” I prioritized things differently. I’d go places and talk to people, friends, Ei-Nyung, whatever – hang out ’till late in the night. Take the dog to the beach almost any chance I got, because it was all “free.” But those experiences are *better* than the experiences I have when I’m doing the cost calculations, and hoping for something optimal.

So, by trying to optimize, using bad calculation of the odds, I’ve effectively been making very bad decisions. I like movies. I like hanging out. I don’t mind being tired, or losing some sleep, and instead of waiting to see if something better comes along, I should just *do* what comes up when it does, and figure out what the ramifications of that decision are as it happens, rather than waiting for some other circumstance that may or may not come. I enjoy doing things, and so the primary concern should be *doing* them.

And for the last question, I put this to a vote, of people who have been to our house. Prioritize the repair or remodel of the following:

* Proper repair of the roof is a given, and is not part of this list.

* Drywall in upstairs common areas and the stairs
* Complete strip & remodel of kitchen
* Complete strip & remodel of upstairs bathroom
* Resurface and paint front of house
* Finish detail work in downstairs (baseboard trim & window trim)
* Terrace walls & strip grass from backyard
* Front stairs & front yard retaining wall repair
* Repair walkway up side of house

Personally, after the roof repair, drywall, kitchen, and bathroom are the ones I’m thinking, in that order.

Just curious what others think.

Strange day. Went to the gym in the morning, after having woken up at about 5am, from asthmatic wheezing. Swam for a bit – sort of a crap workout, but still at least made it to the pool. Came home, adn then went to the despot to pick up trim for the remaining two doors downstairs. Ended up doing the inverted L for the trim, becuase the doors are too close to adjoining walls. On one it looks fine, on the other it looks a little weird when the door’s closed. When it’s open, it looks fine. *shrugs*. I’d need a way to cut trim down the grain to put the piece in properly, and I don’t know if the circular saw’s up to the job.

So… yeah, did that. Then played some games (Uno on Live Arcade is remarkably fun). Then, decided that since tomorrow’s our bulk waste pickup day, that I should get all our crap together. Which I did. Sink, pieces of counter, old damaged drafting desk & chair, old monitor, various pieces of useless ductwork, an old papasan that was being used as a planter, but is now totally destroyed, the papasan’s cushion, and two destroyed rolly-bags. Whee! I think it takes up almost the whole space. Fun fun.

Then, I trimmed the tree, and the ivy on the side of the house that was clogging up the passageway to the backyard. It was insane, but now it’s at least mostly manageable. Sorta. I’m gonna have to take out the backyard with a flamethrower or something. I can barely keep up with the front yard, and the backyard’s about 6 times the size. Yeesh. Maybe time to hire a gardener.

thinking about the fifth of june
it feels as though it’s much to soon

Work starts next week. It’s exciting, sure, but there’s so much to do. I’m going to put up trim around the two remaining doors downstairs. It’s strange, though, because they won’t be completely surrounded by trim. Instead of an upside-down U, they’ll effectively be upside down L’s, because the doors are too close to the walls. It’s weird, but there’s not really a good way to do it otherwise. Alas! I’d like to refinish the front door, as well, but I don’t think I’m going to have time. It needs to be sanded, restained, and repoly’ed. To do that properly, I don’t even really know what I need to do to strip the old poly off first.

Then Thursday, we have bulky pickup day, so tomorrow night we have to move all our large trash out to the front curb, which includes sawing the old piece of counter in half. It’ll mean moving some trash out of the downstairs, getting rid of our old range (sitting on the back patio), getting rid of the old sink (sitting in the kitchen), getting rid of the old piece of counter, a broken drafting table (and chair), an old monitor, and I’m sure a fistful of other crap. Maybe trim can wait ’till Thursday, and tomorrow will be spent moving stuff and getting ready for trash.

Ah, and I’ve also got to break down my old desk, and create space for the piano, which is coming on Friday from my parents’ house. That’ll be fun. An upright piano, for the cost of moving it. Talk about weird.

… I know you mean well. You want to support your candidate, and you want to support participation in the political process. I agree with those goals, and would like to express my support of those goals. I’d love to get more people engaged in the process, and I understand and respect the importance of elections, both on a local, and national level.

That said, go fuck yourselves. Having four people call me from various campaigns between 6pm and 6:40pm on a weekday night is NOT the way to get people involved in the process. Disturbing their dinner, or their relaxing evening with pre-recorded bullshit, or people who instantly start talking at high-speed about their various candidates and why you should support them is just about the most irritating, invasive, and obnoxious way I can imagine to help people understand who they should vote for and/or why.

STOP CALLING ME, dammit. Stop calling me in the middle of the work day, stop calling me at night, at my home. Stop calling me on the weekends, on the weekdays, in the mornings, evenings, afternoons, or nights. Stop calling me, period. I’m going to vote, but I can see why people would stop, after being pestered by an army of fucking telemarketers. Stop it already.

So, today, I slept in, I took a nap in the afternoon, and generally took it easy. I didn’t do anything productive today, and just sat around, recharged the batteries, and didn’t worry about much. Tomorrow I’ve got a dentist’s appointment, but today it was just relaxation.

Pretty strange. Didn’t realize how tired I was. What’s even weirder is that I really have no good *reason* to be tired, other than catch-up from the stress that’s been so pervasive over the last four months of working. It feels, genuinely, like detox – like the body’s giving up the habit of being stressed, tense, all those things that you adjust to when you’re constantly requested to do ridiculous things.

I wish I had more time. Still, grateful for the few weeks that I’ve had (including the honeymoon, and time post-resignation where I didn’t really give a flying … care about work, it’s been longer, obviously). Realize how much I’d really *like* to win the lottery, and how well I’d be able to keep myself entertained/engaged without the structure of a daily job. I haven’t once wanted for something to do, or a *goal* to work towards. I put up trim in the downstairs. I wrote parts of the design I’d had in my head. I sketched out a painting I’d like to do. I spent some time in the garden, played a lot with the dog, and cooked the vast majority of the days I could.

I wonder how much of that I can maintain and have a job? In the past, it’s been difficult, but I think the notion of being home 10 minutes after leaving work will hopefully change that. I’m pretty sure the next month will be busy, but we’ll see how well I can manage this work-life balance thing. The grocery store is on the way home. No reason not to keep cooking.

Been watching House, M.D. – it’s a show on Fox, I believe it just ended its second season. Hugh Laurie plays the main character, who’s basically a sarcastic, snide, and incredibly gifted doctor. It’s sort of a “medical mystery” show, though unlike most mystery stories, you’re unlikely to say, figure anything out unless you have extensive medical knowledge – and the stuff they’re dealing with is incredibly obscure. What it’s really about is the interplay between the characters, and this setting provides a very compelling series of things that drive interactions. It’s to medical dramas as the movie Pi is to mathematics. The subject is sort of a MacGuffin – there to push the plot forward, but not critical to what makes the thing tick.

I think my dad would enjoy it, and maybe relate to the main character. It’s a fascinating show.

Which makes me think of a bunch of things I don’t really know how to say. I mean, I think people relate to House because he says what people think, when they put themselves in his shoes – that is, he talks like you might want to talk to a stupid co-worker. You’d want to tell them they’re an idiot. But at the same time, he acknowledges when people have done well, his staff is (for the most part) loyal to him, and even when he’s wrong, he’s usually able to figure out how to make things better.

So, in some sense, he’s the interior arrogant jerk that resides in me, that I wish the world would accomodate, but won’t. I wish I had the freedom to say the things in the way that he does, because he does it essentially without repercussion. His character operates in an insular enough world that he doesn’t really have to worry about people not liking him – regardless of what he says, he knows they respect him, and more importantly, some of them *understand* him. So, the arrogance, the directness, and the lack of social grace don’t matter. Ah, what a world that’d be. But it’s impossible, I think, both because that’s not the way the world works, by and large, and it’s also not necessarily the way I’m willing or capable of interacting with others.

I’d *love* to tell people I thought were idiots that they were idiots. But it’s not always that simple. Sometimes an idiot has other redeeming qualities. Sometimes you have immense respect for someone’s intelligence, but think they’re a jackass. (what I might think if I worked for someone like House.) But everything’s grey. Sometimes the right thing to do is be blunt, and honest, and not give a shit about how the other person will react in the short term, because it’s the long term change that matters. Other times, you lie, because the short term is all that matters, and you don’t care about making the investment to change their long term behaviour. Sometimes, you know they won’t be able to handle honesty. Whatever. It all depends. And to some degree, Malcolm Reynolds, from Firefly, was that sort of character, where it was interesting to watch his different approaches to different situations, because you knew the core of who this character was, and how he interacted with people he knew illuminated *them*, as it illuminated him.

House has some of that, but it’s much less pronounced.

Hrm.

Anyway. Yeah.

So, for the last few weeks, I’ve been unemployed. This has been really interesting, because it’s largely been an exercise in minimizing $ spent, maximizing productivity, and still having some fun. Working within those constraits was pretty easy. I played games I already had, I took photos, I played with the dog, I cooked. Cooking is a *great* way to minimize $ spent, while still being entertaining, if you’re into that sort of thing. I put up some trim in the downstairs (which is looking damn fine – one more door to do, then on to staining), which cost some $$ (~$40/door) but has been really fun, and a good use of the miter saw that Ei-Nyung got for me a couple years ago.

Now, though, I’ve only got a week and a half of “freedom” left – so I want to maximize my enjoyment of it. I’ve also removed the “minimize $” – obviously, it’s not like, “Time to go buy a Lotus Elise,” or anything, but if I want to spend a couple bucks on materials for making the house better, I can. And because now I’ve got this freedom, I have *no idea what to do*. I want to paint, I need to do some weeding, I’m going to finish the trim tomorrow, I’ve gotta get our “bulky trash” set up for Thursday morning of next week, blah blah blah. There’s a lot I *have* to do, such as a dentist appointment for a filling next week, and there’s a lot of stuff I want to do, and now that I see the door closing, I have no idea how to do it all.

This is stupid. I should just go do something.

Off to weed, and poison the mint. Damned mint.

w00t w00t w00t!

I’ve got a new job!

Which is both AWESOME, and sort of sad. I really liked being unemployed. 😀 I cooked a lot, did some work in the garden, took a bunch of photos, started writing up a game design I’ve been thinking about for a while, and put up some trim in the downstairs.

It’ll be nice to have the salary, not feel like the pursestrings are so tight, etc. But man, oh, man – the free time. I’ve gotta say, this honestly couldn’t have worked out better. I (will) have had almost a month off, got to do a bunch of stuff, and will be working again doing stuff I love doing.

Admittedly, I’m coming in on the tail end of a project I don’t know too much about, and took a pay cut (though not a terrible one), and basically, things are … pretty darned good. It’s all very strange. I almost don’t know what to make of it.

😀

So, after I quit, one of the things I’d intended to do was write a design for a Flash game where you shoot a person, and watch them die. The point would be that on its face, it would look like a traditional FPS, and every indication, from the context, would indicate that what you should do is shoot the person coming at you. But no, they’re just a regular schmoe, and it’s you who’s got it all wrong, wandering around downtown with a machine gun. You’d only get to shoot thie one person, though, and you would see the consequences of your actions. You’d see the agonizing death you’ve put this person through, you’d see his (let’s assume it’s a man) family grieve, you’d see his children grow up without a father, you’d see the financial burden their family goes through, and watch how you’ve destroyed not just this one “real” person’s life, but how their death impacts those around them.

The point would simply be that death in videogames is not at all like death in real life, and how screwed up can be, simply because FPS’s have trained you to respond in a particular way to certain stimulus.

(As an aside, I’m *not* talking about losing the distinction between fantasy and reality – I’m talking about seeing a few simple indicators, and believing that because you’ve got a certain number of visual cues, that you assume that what you’re supposed to do is shoot an innocent person.)

Of course, I haven’t followed through on that at all, mostly because the bulk of the work is in the art, and I’m not a good artist.

However, the thought occurred to me last night, in a pretty convoluted chain. Went something like this:

* One day, I’ll have kids.
* They’ll probably eventually start asking me questions about stuff.
* I probably won’t know some of that stuff.
* My dad always seemed to know the answer to anything I asked him.
* I wonder if all the stuff he’d read at night, in his leisure time, was like the teacher’s answer key to life, the universe, and everything?
* Still, reading during leisure time, you get smarter.
* What do you get from playing games?

So, there’s a huge subset of books that are written to transfer information, or educate a person on something. Maybe that’s a person’s view of the world, or it’s a book on some new research, or it’s a philosophical tome, or whatever. There’s a lot of books that even I read in my leisure time that I’d consider “educational” instead of simply “fun.” But they’re STILL fun to read, and I seek them out because I’m interested in spending my leisure time reading something interesting.

But games are so focused on “fun,” to the exclusion of all else. Will people buy it? Is it FUN enough? But books and movies don’t only trade on fun, they trade on entertainment, which isn’t *purely* fun. So, a couple games come to mind, when thinking about this – Oregon Trail, Sim City, and Shadow of the Colossus (which I still haven’t finished, so please don’t spoil it in the comments).

Oregon Trail was fun – it was fun to make decisions, and see the unexpected consequences of those decisions. Sim City taught me a lot about city planning that I still see reflected in the various places I visit. Shadow of the Colossus wasn’t “fun” so much as “epic,” and by simply focusing on evoking a different reaction in the player, it breaks from the mainstream.

The thing is, I remember more from Sim City and Oregon Trail than I do from almost *anything else* I learned in the same period. Both games were fantastically addictive and interesting, but not because they were *fun,* but because they challenged some part of my brain that most people have stopped challenging with games. I want to go to a game store, and pick up a game that gives me an experience I cannot have otherwise. Maybe I’m a palentologist, or an astronaut, or I’m living in Iraq, during the current war. Use the interactivity to show me something I can’t otherwise see. Teach me something. Challenge my assumptions. Break the conventional wisdom.

This is something I’d like to do, in games. I don’t have the slightest idea how, but it’s a conscious focus of every design I write, and one day, I hope to figure it out, at least in some small part.