Month: July 2011

Categories
Audio&Games

Some questions (and answers)

Which makes me think:

– Why everybody’s doing an iOS game or trying to, despite so many warnings about walled garden and platform power?

– Same question with Facebook and how G+ would be different?

– Why HTML5 still fucking sucks so much? It’s never going to be enough is it?

– Why when big indie names are going exclusive on a platform, nobody says that it’s wrong? How come a risky project would do better on ONE platform, let alone when that one is not the most used out there? I think both TGC’s Journey and Sound Shapes would kill it on “the Internet” so much more.

– Why nobody talks about the fact that “the Internet” is happening on computers which more often than not, run Windows? Is it that bad to aim at the biggest “Internet” platform when making a game is such a hard task or should we always say that we’re making a game for Steam?

– Why simple distribution schemes like Tricky Truck or Minecraft are not embraced?

– Why people forget about how ID and Epic made their fortune, selling disks through mail orders and how it’s even easier to distribute games today? Yes, indies could live without “the Internet”. They did, by making different games because carbon copies of SMB3 weren’t good enough.

– Why indie games are more often than not personal remakes of classics?

– Why so many indie games feel like developers just want to cash out with ads over a simple physics-based gimmick?

 

I think I will conclude like Tarn from Dwarf Fortress fame:

“The problem isn’t with indies or platforms so much as it’s with society.”

Categories
Me Myself&I

HomeCloud

89% of Hulu users and 42% of Netflix users watch shows & movies directly on computer. http://on.mash.to/ov6L51

That’s huge. Mid 2011, pretty much nobody is watching something on a smartphone or a tablet. And if we do the same charts with games, you can be sure that “classic computers” come far in first (just Facebook and Steam, bam) with consoles and tablets at the bottom. Considering the amount of bullshit we have to eat saying that PCs are so dead blabla, it needs to stop.

The computer, the PC, is going to be a central piece of the house as the fridge is today. A simple commodity (that’s why the all Apple hardware business will be in trouble: do you know your fridge brand? Soon nobody will care either with computers, it’s already happening because they’re all “good enough”). People like to have a machine that does it all and the PC is the one doing everything as good as you can. And it is now dead simple.

Different, smaller devices will connect to it but we will definitely have a computer at home that does a lot of things, like we do today but even more and in a perfect way, not with laptops, noisy towers and DVI-to-HDMI converters. We already have so much power, unused today except for some bad games at very high resolutions. Next step is not to make this technological power fit smaller devices but to distribute it over devices and monitors. Benefits will be greater for everybody (no overheating devices with poor battery life for users, easier for engineers, scalable for suppliers). This, is the beginning.

Imagine that each home has a computer box somewhere in a closet with xx cores and xx GPUs, running the TV, games from anywhere, internet and the AC system. Don’t be afraid, we will certainly have ways to make everything independent so that you can fix a part without breaking another. Don’t be afraid to have a computer taking control over your life, it’s already the case in planes. Imagine that each home at night is using its calculation power for distributed computing, warming the house and channeling the heat for the family’s next morning? How fucking cool would that be? That would be super efficient. Imagine that we cure cancer because your house and millions of others helped the process of understanding protein folding? Now that’s true glocal citizenship my friend.

Tablets and at a least extent smarphones are just accessories to our digital life. Like plates forks and knifes, we use them to consume but the food comes from one place, the fridge, the kitchen. The PC. The issues with the Cloud and privacy show that people are going to LOVE having their personal stuff at home, streaming to their devices around the world.

HomeCloud. It’s happening and the PC is the core.

Categories
Me Myself&I

Summer11

Hi.

I played a Nintendo DS game which asked me to use the pad and the stylus at the same time. Except that there’s no way to change anything about it, the game controls or my left-handedness. Whatever, the game was awful. 

I got hooked on Gordon Ramsay’s shows. I now know the formula and can’t cook or prepare food without imaginarily hearing “fock me” or “WhatAShame” in my back.

Netflix is cool, unless you have a good TV and that you’re watching an old 1988 movie that just looks like a .rm full screen on your ten year old 21” CRT, buffering excluded (though sometimes, it happens). Not cool then.

I don’t care if Intelligentsia is an expensive hipster place with phonies hanging around, their coffee is good as fuck.

Sometimes I can’t believe how many different things I do with just a laptop and three USB ports.

I haven’t joined Google+ yet and I still can’t keep up with my news stream. So I’m good.

No time to work on my game but HELL, the more the game industry moves, the more I feel on a right track, right project, right angle. I’m just stuck with stupid tech problems but eventually, it will happen.

Also two weeks ago:

‘was awesome.

Categories
Me Myself&I

omfg

This isn’t healthy for me to not write. Though I’m quite busy composing for a Facebook game, I have too much shit in my mind. I feel that I learned just so much about myself and the world around in three years. I’d love to share my thoughts and findings and stuff but that would be pretty long. It reinforced everything I believed in though. I guess.

So here’s a picture of one of those sunset that L.A. has and a sound I did a while ago.


I can’t get enough of it.

Interlude by Harold

Categories
Audio&Games

Spectrum

I’m always wondering why am I constantly going back to play some music instead of playing games. I have dozens of them on Steam, waiting for me, I have MinefuckingCraft, emulators with plenty, thousands of web games out there… But all I can do is grab my bass, my guitar or sit in front of my keyboard and play, toy, learn. This slide helped me to understand that.


Wideness

Music covers a bigger spectrum of the experience of gameplay. What is so great is that I can play music by following a song, doing exactly the same as the bassist does, following the rules. Or I can play music and improvise my own patterns, developing my own melodies and have the freedom fun. Both are great and needed. Going from end to end of the spectrum is awesome, I can’t stop doing that. Back and forth.

There is not enough games going toward, designed for the play feel. The game I spent most of my time these past years is Tony Hawk on DS because I  launch a quick “free skate” session and I can do whatever the hell I want. Same with Test Drive III from the last century. Same with Deus Ex. Freedom, improvisation in games are so great too. People play GTA for the sandbox environment more than the stupid ass story that we watched in much better movies ten times already. It strikes me that people playing games LOVE freedom too. So much. And yet so many game developers hire a writer to come up with a story when it’s just not important (the theme however, is. More on that later). Anyway it’s changing, slowly (Flower, Journey from ThatGameCompany).

I think the “play feeling” auto-generates the ability to build our own challenges, our own goals. It’s pretty fun on its own and it teaches us independent thinking and not depending on external rewards. I’m starting to see that people born during the 90s, deep fried into the reward society we built (especially you old farts), are unable to make decisions and set goals on their own, they need help. Once they are set they’re good but the independent system in their brain is underexploited, poorly efficient and trained.

Games are learning systems and when I see the awful harassment –to me- that Facebook games are with their cortege of sweet meaningless rewards, I think we should push more, expand games to a bigger part of our human experience if we don’t want people to turn like pushing-buttons chimps. For now these social games are doing exactly that.

Categories
Me Myself&I

On friend lists and circles

Dave is right on this one. There is something inherently wrong with the categorization of people: We are complex atoms, moving. Categorization is something simple and static.

When I tried to create lists with circlehack.com I immediately stopped over the obvious one, family. It’s already complicated for this one. I’m connected to so many different people I just can’t categorize them all, at all. Also I feel awkward to arbitrarily say "you, you’re into tech and that’s how we met" because it might not be the essence of our relationship right now. And what will it be in three years? Should I keep a constant look at my lists to match the present? Waste of time (not for Google or Facebook, obviously).

Categorizing people means that you assume you are the one knowing what they like. But maybe they like to read stuff from you because they like you and trust you so they read it. Otherwise they would not read something about this subject because they don’t care "that" much. But because it’s from you, they do. And you don’t know what interests who, it’s probably changing all the time. It’s organic. It can’t be processed with lists or circles. It can’t be processed efficiently with the help of algorithms (not yet at least and I think for a very long time).

I now understand more why Facebook never really got into this filtering, it’s not very human and overly complicated. As a user I’m glad I can just drop an article for everyone, to read. I think it’s richer this way. It’s good that my little cousin can read something about the war on drugs even if he doesn’t give a shit right now. Following him is interesting for me too. More knowledge, more change. As long as I can block some content if I want to –Foursquare’s check-ins-, I’m good. Less headaches (shit, is this dude still in this list I want to share this drunk picture to?).

Whatever happens to social networks, there will never be one and only one. What is more useful to me is how we can automate how we push our content and to what networks we share things.

I think services like ifttt have a great future.