h. Play

Releasing this, reading that. It stresses me out. We failed at creating a real Europe, we failed at not fucking Africa more and now everyone is paying it. But fuck.

It’s hard to be black. The way Paul says it man, it comes from down there and I feel that shit so hard. So much BS to deal with, so much awkwardness, humor and music to handle all of that. That 8 billionth time an old lady freaks out thinking I’m going to snatch her damn purse because I walk fast, even faster under the rain. That eight billionth time for some reason, it’s more painful.

The hardest part is to stay calm. Stay smart.

I like those chords. Written with that Los Angeles sunset orange and violet light around. I could do a completely different track with them. I wanted to punch away with this one.

Except for some game developers and game journalists, no one cares about having a "pure" game machine. Actually, the opposite.

So basically they are building -Sony, Valve and Nintendo included- that living room PC, that living room computer that does it all, because the market is asking for it: no one likes to have four boxes, 15 cables, a remote dying from switching input everyday and different UI/UX between each machine, which is the current situation for a lot of people.

Under this light, I think the Xbox One is technically strong with a software layer/integration with mobile and tablets that competition doesn’t really have and is extremely complex to build.

For the rest, well I don’t care. I told you thousands of time that proprietary, closed platforms should be avoided as much as possible. This is where to me I’d rather have people buy Win8 licenses and stay hardware and distribution free because when a company owns the hardware, software and distribution you really are in a different position that we game developers -outside the 0.1% studios which can tackle that kind of game production- don’t want to be in again amirite? I mean if we ever learn from our mistakes, musician mistakes, directors mistakes etc. That’s a lot of facts now.

As creators we want to be on top, not below. There’s another thing.

Legacy.

This is Tera: City of Skulls, a 1986 French RPG DOS game from Loriciel running on Windows 8, flawlessly. I’m so used to that level of backward compatibility I don’t know how you do, guys. It’s fucking fantastic.

As time passes by the ability to have a real memory, a real library of our gaming past is more and more awesome and it will become more and more important as population ages especially with inter-generational links around computer game culture, especially with hundreds, thousands of dollars spent on game downloads you can’t transfer. It’s not just about legacy, it’s about having your mind at ease knowing that you will not get screwed, maybe ever. People are searching for solutions when they see that all of their 60 bucks games will not run on MS and Sony’s next boxes. The backlash’s started. 

Which is why you should -no offense to console companies- stay the fuck away of these consoles. Games are everywhere and the most diverse, thriving, stable place to play is still a Windows PC. Or Steam, if you prefer to call it this way but it’s not just Steam, though.

As for competing with Intel, if you look where Intel is going in terms of GPU investment and the selection of an APU by Sony [for the Playstation 4], all that reflects the fact that heterogeneous system architectures [google it, folks] are the future.

RPS interview with some AMD dude.

It is the future and always has been. It’s probably the most consistent trend in home computers that for some reason, no journalist is paying attention to (except RPS).

The heterogeneous system took the fuck over every single homogeneous system in the past thirty years.

How many soldiers down? C64, Atari ST, Amiga, consoles… I can play, emulate all of them on my inexpensive Windows laptop and when I upgrade it, even more things will run from 1986 DOS RPG to the last AAA with few to no friction. Just ten years ago, Windows as a dev platform was crazy complicated. At that time laptops barely did any 3D now a 500$ one can do Crysis in 1080p. Hardware is still not homogenous but it is powerful enough so that even the least powerful  can deal with games that need big teams to be made. That’s a big shift.

Of course heterogeneous wins. It brings choice and freedom. If you look at the game market on Windows, it’s thriving and the humble store will make even more viable. So many things, so many different games, just subscribe to RPS and Freeindiegam.es and witness this great, unique diversity. Even Metal Gear Solid is coming to Windows! Absolutely unthinkable ten years ago. That’s a big shift.

People are not stupid, they know they kind of get fucked with a small Ouya, it’s just that the price is not so bad so why not? That’s not a good sale argument though. And they know that to do media center stuff, consoles are definitely not easier (this video file doesn’t work on my ps3 why?).

Developers whine in heterogeneous environments but closed systems are far from perfect either and barely make sense financially for manufacturers now that we’re talking in billions of transistors. The risk is ridiculous.

So bring it on AMD, embrace diversity and put those good APUs you have in all tablets and computers of all sizes and all brands. That’d be sweet as hell.

It’s one of the best moment with my job.

“Wow, now my game is alive!”

Yes before sound came in your game, your interactive software was dead. Before audio came in, your game wasn’t really existing on its own. Like if it was all black and white and with sound I just made it colorful and vibrant. *snaps fingers*

It’s great to see people’s faces illuminating with the medium that really triggers the “it’s really finished!” feeling, sound. It probably comes from that baby moment when s/he cries and that we finally know that everything is all right now. Maybe.

On the other hand audio is always and still treated at the very last second, on the very last amount of money left.

It’s a damn shame considering how happy people are when they get to like the audio and how it dramatically changes your relationship to the said game. Journey without music wouldn’t work as well, I will always remember how Triple Town on Facebook came out without sound and how people were like, “dude, it feels dead an stale where my sound fxs at?”

So you need a sound director in pre-production. You need as much iteration and collaboration with sound that you need for visuals and gameplay I know, it sounds fancy but it’s not. Whatever thing you’re crafting craft is a long process,  and I would add even more with audio! Because it’s invisible, because it’s about feel and flow more than visuals, things are not instantly obvious. Furthermore the sound director is going to help with consistency, give ideas that visual peeps or game designers don’t necessarily think of because, sound.

Don’t think about your game with layers in mind. Think about it in terms of blend of ingredients. Or like architecture, you’re building a house, shaping up walls and I have to be here to tell you that you need to punch holes there and there for electrical wires, before you can’t do it at all.

So I really like this Wikipedia entry, describing my job as it’s going on in India and Asia in the movie industry:

Director of Audiography is a technical role blending leadership, management and administrative skills with creative audiography ranging over pre-production, production and post-production – constrained only by the Director’s vision and the production’s schedule and budget.

I like this audiography term, as pompous as creative director but more scientific. Sound or audio director sound good too.

By production I mean everything about game design*features/budget, the rest is pretty explanatory. Also, it looks like the respiratory system and I like that. Nice analogy.

I’m really digging the impact of sound these days. The amount of memories, thoughts, feelings that sound triggers through a simple ringtone is amazing. Goose bumps.

No visuals can do that.

I just spent four days outside with simple tools like hammer, saw and my hands.

It feels good to unplug from the digital world, still creating, and solving problems though. Confronting nature, physics’ laws, your body’s abilities. It’s great. Forgetting super high level discussions like game design crisis or what the future holds for Big Data in the world of deodorant, I needed that after weeks and weeks stuck on my machines.

Of course really happy to help my dad who’s trying everything to make it like he doesn’t need me even though he totally needs me: stamina, muscles. Also I have a good “estimation-eye”, give good advices and it’s funny to see him try to brute force shit at the end of the day and I’m rightfully like “you’re doing it wrong, son. We need to reduce the end of that plank”. Ha! But then I can’t stay to have dinner with them, I have to bounce to my world, switch back to English, internet and black music. I need that solitude buffer.

Anyhoo, back to my monitor I had this  “wow, it’s amazing how many things you can do with just ONE tool” moment, using my laptop and then I vegetated before going to sleep, pretty dead.

Forget about the horror of the abduction.

Forget about those sick fucks, make them disappear.

Forget about police not being so smart or this simple black man knowing something was up in this bitch.

I want to know how three young women can’t escape a house located a mile from where they’ve been kidnapped, for ten years when a 7 year old is capable of doing so. In a day.

I think at 14 I’d be ready to lose limbs to break away. I’d have shit to do, a life to live.

What kind of fucking uneducation these women got? I don’t get it. It’s almost like Louis CK’s skit.

“Of course, it’s insanely horrible and it should never happen ever ever ever to anyone….

But maybe, maybe if your survival skills and fighting spirit are that low, maybe you were the perfect candidate for a horrible news story.”

Just by respect for women who died rather than live hell, for those who fought back so hard that they finally escaped, for those going away from their own families raping them -talk about being REALLY hopeless-, for all these women I can’t just give these three all my empathy. Fuck no. I’m sorry.

The only end to nightmares like that is perverts knowing that if they kidnap a woman, they either get killed/their asses kicked or she will break away anyway and put them in jail where their buttholes will suffer. So they don’t even start.

Stopping them before they even try. Women need to be strong and there’s no way around it.

Programming is horrible. Not really because it’s weird and painfully slow but because time evaporates with this shit. I mean, in a way that is so not healthy, physically.

You don’t want to eat, you’re about to solve something. You don’t care about what’s going on around, you’re just getting how this sub-system works. I like to understand things and the “haha!” moment where you finally can do what you wanted is great and oh, so powerful.

But it’s 6 hours later, I’m hungry my body is achy, the day is over and it depresses me. I understand why coders often work at night, it’s calm and less depressing to see the sunrise.

But it doesn’t fit me, I’m a sleeper. I’ve been following everything this article says all my life. I remember my mom telling me about deep sleep and how I didn’t want to miss that stage so I could become a Super Saiyan easily.

We spend one third of our lives sleeping, it’s crucial for muscle recovery, fact retention and preparing the body to operate at full speed the next day, sleep is one of the most important things when it comes to day-to-day happiness.

So when I see every single coder ruining their sleep and diet for decades, I’m pretty sure it ain’t good.

Anyway, it makes me scared of coding it’s like going down the rabbit hole. If I start in the morning and think I’ll be able to make sound or music in the afternoon, it usually doesn’t happen. Nothing happens but lines of language that only machines understand. At least when I create audio it’s for an audience, it’s direct, it’s timeless no one gives a crap about “my code” and how I perfectly formatted it. In two years to do the same I’ll be ticking three dialog boxes.

We really, really, really need better tools to build software.

So I learned about Mandingo parties the other day. There’s an obviously nsfw documentary on Vice. You know, it’s the kind of thing I thought was some suburban legend but hell no, it exists.

Well, the documentary covers a Mandingo business in Florida. Florida, man. Giant snails sinkholes and swingers, Florida isn’t about the average.

But I saw that it was not just there. It’s not that a career as a black escort would interest me -though I’d probably do a great one, let’s be real- it’s the women’s psychology, sexual appetite and social construct that interests me.

How does it feel to grow up scared of black men and 30 years later craving for their cocks? Do you feel liberated, finally, or is that a twisted game of white guilt and fantasy? Also, it is well documented that a lot of women’s highest sexual drive happens in their 40s and beyond, how much does it weigh in? What about all these -white- guys with small penises who don’t want that swinger lifestyle, do they get as many plastic tools as possible? How do they deal with that and their maybe past and glorious careers as powerful men?

Is religion and its terrible view on sexuality responsible for people going nuts over sex after decades of denial in their lives?

There are so many things going on, it’s fascinating.

Small tool to write without distraction. It’s free, you can save in .rtf .odt. It’s the best I found.

I made four themes with wallpapers found on the web a while ago:

Nothing fancy, but I thought I would share. Now write these thoughts!

I don’t particularly like candies and never did so right from the start, I’m not that much into this game everybody was talking about yesterday.

Second, grind. Grind. Grind. “but wait, it gets better!” NO SHIT. Your insatiable brain and the effortless action of waiting and clicking a box make it OK, I guess. I don’t have an insatiable appetite for meaningless rewards you get with no skills. I don’t like starting all over in games but I don’t like either when there’s pretty much nothing to do.

Third the traditional, heroic fantasy quest with goblins and dragons. Please kill me. I still have the tab open but I’ll probably not play this game anymore. How come you get excited with that, I don’t know.

I don’t get how game designers and game journalists don’t see how a grinding fest with themes that are aimed at the same sugar-addicted, roleplaying culture can be just that, and nothing else. Looking at my Twitter feed it looked like this game was like the new MinecraftTA6 or some shit.

And what about this game culture where you either praise something or you quietly shut up because Game Intelligentsia Police? How can we move forward?

In other news like I said earlier this year we’ll see weird successes you don’t even understand how it happened, like Starbound getting $1 million in pre-order or Monaco breaking even before launch. Let that sink in.