Gabe Newell on Productivity

Gabe Newell talks about how Valve works, monetisation of productivity and stuff.

Alex Moore Visits Occupy London

Alan Moore is a writer of many fine graphic novels and this video is of him visiting Occupy London. It is an interesting video because he identifies with the protesters after having control of some of his work taken away from him by large corporations. Plus many of the protesters are wearing the mask from V for Vendetta a story about revaluation, which he wrote for.

Alan Moore visits Occupy LSX from inka stafrace on Vimeo.

Random Inspiration

I loved This.

Failure Is Always An Option

Adam Savage who you might have seen on Mythbusters gave a talk at Makers Fair about times in his life where he has failed.



[Direct Link]

Ending Corruption For Proffit

Corruption is a big issue in a lot of countries, where this is the case there is usually a cultural acceptance for bribes and exploitation. Shaffi Mather has had enough of corruption in India and has a plan to stop it with a for profit organisation. It sounds insane and impossible, but I think it can work.

DNA Copying

This is the most amazing process in natural science. It begs the question as to wither our knowledge of proteins and DNA could eventually render our current methods of material production, crafting and fitting to create tools, obsolete. A world where everything from transportation and communication devices construct themselves from instructions given from a DNA Engineer.

For Entertainment Purposes Only

There are a lot of unnecessary legal disclaimers in the world, but I think the one on DVD commentaries is a shinning example. I am referring to the message at the start of DVDs that reads 'The commentary tracks on this DVD are for entertainment purposes only and does not necessarily reflect the views or options of the studio, parent company or partners.'

I am no legal professional, but if an Actor, Actress or Director says something slanderous on a commentary track like 'Our wardrobe department stole all the cloths from a local gym to save money!' Then no 'for entertainment purposes only' message is going to protect them from an order to pay damages to the wardrobe company's image and loss of business.

I understand that managers follow what advice the legal department gives them and that the legal department is trying to cover themselves in a very sheepish manor, but you wouldn't find a legal disclaimer like that at the start of an encyclopaedia.

The contents of this encyclopedia is for entertainment purposes only and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher.

Or even

The publisher has taken reasonable care to make sure the contents of this encyclopaedia is accurate, but takes no responsibility for any mistakes.

In July I Posted about how Amazon cleaned customer Kindles of a few novels. Well I am sure they thought they where legally covered, but they also deleted one Justin Gawronski's Summer Homework. He is as American tradition dictates, suing Amazon for damages. And rightly so because that kind of thing might conform to the letter of the law by Amazon giving itself the right to do that kind of stuff in it's terms of service, but it is very unreasonable.

*Note this Blog Post was for entertainment purposes and is not to be retaken orally or in a tart.

Cinemassacre's Star Wars Review

James Rolfe, better known as The Angry Video Game Nerd is a big movie buff and has done a retrospective review of the Star Wars films. I like James have seen them a lot throughout my life, but he mentions a few things in the first part of his review that I never realised before. I always knew that Star Wars followed a very classic Hero/Villain story, but I never knew how much of a melting pot of classic archetypes it was. So worth a watch.





In relation to James' comment on the optimum order to watch the films in, I think it has been well established now that watching them in the order they where filmed, results in a better first viewing.

Stand By Me, By Verious Artists

You has best visit the Gizmodo Post on this video, but it demonstrated the universal nature of music.

What America Does With It's Tax Dollars

An artist named Mibi On Deviantart has created A Graphical Representation Of What America Spends It's Tax Dollars On.

The surprising thing is that 68% of what Americans pay in tax goes to Security, either military or none-military. I don't know how much of the tax I pay goes to security, but looking at the size of the US army and the equipment that they have compared to to the UK forces, I suspect that it isn't even close to as much as 68%. It is interesting to think wither that money is well spent or not.

I suspect that most people presently will say no because America uses it's military to solve some of it's problems. Problems that could been avoided if less money was spent on the military.

[Source Digg]

This Will Blow Your Mind

The rate of technical and scientific achievement of the our people is accelerating all the time. This is both a cause and effect of our global population number, and this video contains some surprising facts around this.



What does it all mean?
It means that we are closer than ever to answering that question.

XBox Live and Gaywood

There is this guy named Richard Gaywood and he had an XBoxLive gamertage Gaywood. Microsoft forced Richard to change his gamertag because:

Gamertags are visible to everyone and it would be hard for me [Stephen Toulouse] to defend to a parent of a young child who saw it that the name did not contain content of a sexual nature.

'Gay' was originally another word for happy. During the 1800's and early 1900's homosexuals where seen as unhappy, lonely people with an unhealthy sexual affliction. So when the UK sodomy law was abolished in 1967, homosexuals called themselves 'gay'.

The word 'gay' in our modern interpretation is interchangeable with 'homosexual' and is probably why Microsoft wanted Richard to change his GamerTag. But I agree whole heartedly when LesbianGamers Writes:

It does not take a genius to work out what all of this negative affiliation does, not only for the language itself, but for the rebound effects that language has on gay people in society as a whole. The more we accept people using gay in a derogatory manner such as “that’s so gay” to denote something is bad, sub-par, stupid or unworthy, the longer the hatred will flourish. The more we sit back in blinkered silence as the word gay is linked time and again to something sexual, deviant or negative, the longer the hatred will fester.

And another quote to leave you with:

Fear of a name only increases fear of the thing itself.
- Hermione granger

Do Narratives Have A Place In Gaming?

I have heard this question over and over again. So let me try and put this one to bed right now with some recent examples.

Crackdown, Assassins Creed and GTAIV are all very similar games.

Crackdown was awesome, but the mission structure sucked because all you had to do was keep killing mission selected people over and over.

Assassins Creed was an awesome set of gaming building blocks with the roof jumping and wrist blade assassination time action, but sucked because all you did was the same killing of mission selected people.

GTAIV is awesome and doesn't suck even though all you do is the same killing of mission selected people, because there is a strong narrative. I have completed over seventy missions in the game and it doesn't yet feel repetitive at all.

To me anything that doesn't have a narrative should logically be considered an abstract game. Although even abstract puzzle games like Puzzle Quest are made better with a stronger narrative. Making a game with a weak narrative is like making chicken nuggets and then eating them with the cheapest/nastiest barbecue sauce you can find. It shouldn't be done and wrecks the whole experience.

Architected Game Combat

Having internalised Jonathan Blow's viewpoint on architected gameplay rather than explored gameplay I realise I am so over exactly what Warhammer Online is doing with their combat system (see video). I know there are people that will watch this video and be excited about learning a new RPG combat system, but having learned and played several before, I am so over it all. I want something new and different, maybe even something that doesn't feel like work to play.

The Food and Drugs of Gamplay

Last Year at The Montreal International Games Summit, Jonathan Blow did a talk called Design Reboot where he talked about how we might enter a golden age of game design. He talks about how developers are conditioning players to expect predictable rewards thus turning them into reward junkies and that real rewards like a player achieving a personal goal in a game and deriving satisfaction from that, is being ignored because that is harder to architect.

His talk starts well-outside of current thinking, but he states all his points very well and then you will realise that all the best developers in the world have already been applying what he talks about.

I don't like being so cryptic with my writing, but if I cover what is in the talk. I will have written a very long post where I cover everything that is covered by his talk.

[Direct Link: montreal2007.zip ]

Sin

Question:
Of all the things that is considered sin, why isn't the docile consumption of media one them?

Answer:
Because those people who call out sins are the same people who don't want their message questioned.

Abstraction:
If everybody was to appreciate the media they consumed then the world would be a place with a lot less sin.

Inclusive Vs Exclusive Groups

As Humans we are programmed to seek our place in the world, to question ourselves and to never be happy with what we have. So that's why groups be them religions, political, school fraternities or people of similar ideals like Neo Nazis come together because it makes them feel apart of something and more whole than if they weren't in that group. This is partly because Human instinct is towards running in a pack rather than alone, but ideologically it makes us feel less alone.

In my life I have experienced many such groups and is occurred to me while watching Accepted that exclusive groups where membership is filtered to only allow the "right sort of people" in normally feel hollow because when you join such a group you are buying into the group founder's vision and not something you can influence yourself.

Inclusive groups are groups of people who all try to get along. And since everybody in them puts effort into getting along, being part of the group feels more whole as everybody has a viewpoint that is heard. A lot of inclusive groups like sports clubs, music and other groups are so inclusive that they transcend any physical place and become an idealogical movement like Wikipedia (the open source encyclopedia), The Skeptics Movement (critical thought in search of exposing truth), Parkour (be strong to be useful) or any number of civil rights movements.

However the biggest inclusive and exclusive groups in the world is society itself. In some parts of the world people actively segregate themselves in order to find their place in the world and in other places people pay for services like national health so that everybody is more equal.

So what I am trying to say is that there are a lot of people in the world that try to find their place in the world by excluding other people or ideas. Even to the point where they suppress freespeech and commit hate crimes against people who they consider to be apart of another group, this is probably a natural instinct for Humans, but I think if we all tried to be a little bit more inclusive by helping others, listening to others and giving others our time then the group that we are already in, society, becomes a much better place.

Revolutionary Wiimote

I am currently on a day thing that anybody under the age of 25 that has been unemployed for so long gets automatically sent on so that is why I haven't updated much. It is a wast of time, but having the British tax-payer picking up the bill for me doing rock climbing isn't all bad. And that is also why I am just now watching the Nintendo E3 Press Conference. They keep using the word revolutionary in reference to the Wii which is bothering me and so I make this post.

To me the Wii is a gateway product that is ultra accessible and for the right game interface has a near to zero learning curve, which is what makes it a gateway product. You can read into that statement that the Wii has a natural interface, but that is only true if games allows for it. There is stuff that could be better with the Wii like online, but Wii is to Lego as Mindstorms is to XBox360/PS3.

To me revolutionary technologies have been things like, colour television, canned drinks and quarts watches. These are technologies that are developed into an existing market that completely change their respective industries. To a gaming example I think 3D graphics was revolutionary, but interface improvements are mostly only innovative. You could argue to me that the computer mouse was revolutionary as it made computers very accessible (accessible like the Wiimote), but I would simply say that the mouse is just an extension of the real revolution which was the GUI (graphical user interface) that allowed for the mouse to exist, without the GUI the mouse would make a very poor text input device and would not have revolutionised the computing industry. So I think the mouse itself was simply an innovative exstension of the GUI. As too I believe the Wiimote to be innovative, but not revolutionary.

P.S. I am probably only being so academically critical of the press event because I don't like Reggie's formal presentation style. And where as Nintendo says that they are doing great in online and there is no reason to criticise, when the Wii's successor comes out it will have had a radical online overhaul.

That Game Where Blocks Fall

There is an awesome article called Tetris the Grand Master which talks about the deviations that have been made in Tetris's design to make it a better game in it's numerous arcade versions.

Understanding And Changeing The Perception Of Video Games

I watched A Scanner Darkly earlier, a film based on a story about control and paranoia. In the special features section of the DVD, there is an extract from an interview with the writer and one of the things he said was rather enlightening to me:

The position which writers such as myself hold in Americaare... Those positions are very lowly... Science fiction is considered to be something for adolescents for, just high school kids and for disturbed people in general to read in America. - Philip K. Dick

Several things struck me about this statement. Firstly that it is true, more so then than it is now, but still true today. And that it also applies to video games. And that lead me down a though path about this.

Science Fiction is widely misunderstood. If you where to ask the average person if they liked Science Fiction they would say "certainly not" with the picture in their mind being one of a Star Trek convention. Not to speak ill of Star Trek conventions, but an in character Klingon Warrior can be seen as very silly to a layperson.
Ye if you asked the same person about the films that they like, you would find that several of the films they consider highly would indeed be Science Fiction films, probably Aliens and Termanator would be mentioned by them. And I think this same kind of denial is found more so for Video Games as our nature for curiosity automatically makes us all game players, video or otherwise.

Storytelling is important from an evolutionary perspective because it is the medium whereby experience is passed from one generation to another. Indeed if a tribe once existed that didn't tell stories, they would find their survival harder than a tribe where storytelling was a tradition. And it is for this reason that I believe we all have a genetic predisposition towards enjoying works of fiction and storytelling in general. I also believe that it is a genetic disposition that makes us enjoy playing games.

Ye the types of stories and games that are considered useful for survival is where Science Fiction and Video Games luck out. As even a trashy romance novel will seemingly communicate more important life skills than even the best Multi-Dimentional Time Travelling Serial Killing Ninja Science Fiction story would. And the game of Monopoly could be considered to teach far more useful life skills than any game of Quake would.

So here is where I get to my point. Games that seemingly teach useful life skills, day to day useful knowledge or have further reaching influences beyond the game world will always be considered a good game by your Mom and be the type of game she will play. So if we want Moms of the world to start playing Gran Theft Auto, then Gran Theft Auto needs to start incorporating learning into it's structure, maybe make negotiation, teamwork and paying taxes as part of the core mechanics. Until then Video Games are going to be considered a superfluous and silly wast of time by most people. Just like Science Fiction is as stated by Philip K. Dick.