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Me Myself&I

Ridiculous green

After watching a couple of action movies (The Hobbit, Spiderman Dark Knight RIses etc) and animation movies (Madagascar and Ice Age), I wonder when blockbusters will be entirely 3D (comedy, drama and human stuff are better without computers).


Just render the all thing… Facial expressions are not that interesting in action movies anyway.

I thought it would be the case today. There’s no real need of humans anymore. At best it reduces possibilities, at worst it absolutely kills immersion. First Person View is something easy to do in 3D and we’re just starting with that (The Hobbit cave scene and Madagascar’s circus one). The two 3D blockbusters are for kids but the camera work is amazing and smells like freedom compared to the green screen + meat sausages + 3D rendering combo.

How much would it cost to New Zealand if to make a Lord of the Ring movie, you only needed 3D artists and render farms? There’s an entire industry built on top of this franchise there. And Hollywood, oh boy.

But for now VFX companies are taking punches in the face, for the exact same reasons than the game industry: very fast technology evolution, over populated work pool, bad management, high competition and yet huge amount of work. So weird.

Nevertheless, I can’t wait for much more fully computer-generated movies because of the fascinating possibility of blurring lines from extreme realism to 2D cartoons all in the same medium (and same tools!). Same as computer games: absolute creative freedom.

For now this power consumes digital creators, quite literally.

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Audio&Games

These times when I reached maximum violence income

The first time I was probably thirteen or fourteen. After a day at school watching The Name of the Rose which features torture, I was at my friend’s and we watched Robocop 2, and then I was home playing Doom. Killing monsters. More blood. More guns. At some point I’m in berserk mode with blood all over my monitor, sound FXs something just kicks in in my head: I don’t want this anymore. Just stop. What the fuck is wrong with you. Hours and hours of violence, just for fun? I stopped. Put some cool music and grabbed my comics. I had found out that there’s a threshold.

The second time was pretty obvious: 9/11. We’re at work and it’s been months that my office is “terrorists only” on Counter-Strike everyday at lunch. We joke all the time about it. How many suicides to make our team win? I don’t know but that day it didn’t work. I think we stopped playing CS for at least two weeks.

The third time was last year with SpyParty. I was starting to dig the spy action and be amazed at the amount of information the sniper has to deal with. Extremely stressful and fascinating. But then, the Colorado shooting happened. Snipping in SpyParty triggers avatars screaming and searching for cover in a room. I haven’t been able to launch the game since then. I failed at making myself a mental “sandbox where it’s all right to shoot people because it’s just a game”. Since then more shootings. Last one I read about.

It’s frustrating because first person view is great. Immersion-wise, it’s hard to beat. Instantly send a player  to game over with a headshot is very satisfying too. Beat the shit out of a punk in a third person view game works all right too.

I’m kind of glad I don’t have kids. The threshold for them is probably way up now.

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Me Myself&I

Engineered junk

Article on junk food in the US.

Nothing new really but a comment grabbed my attention:

If you are disciplined and motivated, you are, you can go "cold turkey" off junk food in one day. This is not heroin or crystal meth, for goodness sakes.

Well I’m not so sure of that at this point. It’s easy if you have been told, or if you had the luck to grow up at a time when junk food wasn’t so crazy. Try to stop someone used to drink Coke not to do so, it really is like a smoker.  The shit is addictive, if you never had anything else, your taste buds are fat ass junkies and junk food is everywhere. There’s no way you can escape just by being “disciplined and motivated” (and that would be easy for me to say so, cozy in my athletic meat suit).

But the problem starts before intake, it starts with the snack culture as the article shows. So yeah don’t fucking snack, it’s the worst health-wise. Only in the US I hear people saying “I had ice cream and coffee for diner!” and be happy about that. You’re gently fucking your body up I guess it’s cool it’s yours but again, I see the differences with France’s bodies and we don’t ever do that kind of stuff. I mean we used to not to. The snack culture didn’t invade us so much in the 90s but  the 00s? Of course, obesity exploded. So if I look at the chain of events:

Obesity <= Junk food <= Snack culture <= Family workload <= Illuminati (kidding hey what’s this moving red point on the wall)

One thing that I find amazing is the amount of engineering, the incredible amount of data used to hack our diets, our brains, our sensory systems. If only we were using that kind of resources for the benefits of us all…

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Audio&Games

Get another DJ

Steven Soderbergh.

A comment I see more and more on the internet.

May I introduce you to Chocobeam, game audio company with a distinct sound. And soul. A lot of soul.

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Audio&Games

Playstation4 more like pr4ystation

First thing I thought was “bye Cell” and immediately had 2 minutes of silence for all the guys who fucking died on this stupidly complex architecture. For nothing because now the PS4 sports a X86 architecture like hundreds of millions of PCs. That’s right no PS3 games (including PSN games, apparently) can run on the PS4, it will happen through streaming. Sounds like a lot of problems ahead.

I can’t help but draw a comparison with the arcade era and its massive custom chips, expensive machines designed around games in its heydays. But then the business side took over, 16 bits consoles brought an “unfair” advantage and these crazy machines needed to be profitable: arcade cabinets became Pentium powered PCs. Same running code everywhere, easy to upgrade. Today touch devices and $1 games brought “unfair” competition to the ridiculously complex and “innovative” PS3. Sony had to solve that.

The moral of the story is that developers’ support is much more important than engineering beauty. People, first. Business, first.

That’s what I keep being amazed at, how business doesn’t seem to matter to developers when they hear about a new platform. It should! Dev kits to rent? Check. Certification to pass? Check. Price, availability, prototype non disclosed? Check. And the thing is a PC.

I am supposed to get excited? Which developer is excited, the ones on Sony payroll? Sure it makes sense, good for them but for the rest of us I think it looks pretty damn bad.

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Audio&Games Me Myself&I

Twisted turn

There’s this pattern that I see often: a person from a minority who comes across as cross-cultural and smart, will somehow end up fighting for said minority.

I’m thinking of that looking at a lot of smart black dudes. They all in some ways, fight for black people, even when they are the result of a multi-cultural blend or are where they are because of a broad audience.

Ethnocentrism is like a black hole in the game industry. It absorbs every attempts to change it. In a comment on an article about how to attract non-white male audiences, Ian Schreiber describes it perfectly:

I once had a situation where, in a classroom setting, I asked students (on a written survey) if anything would offend them, since we talk about video games (and therefore, things like sex, violence, and profanity tend to come up). Once I had a Black student who wrote "racism."
My first thought: oh, good, I wouldn’t want racism in my class either.
My second thought: wait, there’s racism in games?
My third thought: wait, maybe there’s racism in games all over the place, and I just don’t notice because I’m a white guy. How would I know? Now that I think about it, I don’t even know if it’s better to say Black or African-American or something else, what’s correct and what’s offensive, so I could very well be bringing all kinds of racism into my class without even realizing it. Crap.
My fourth thought: I know, I’ll just ask someone I know in the industry who’s Black about this. Wait, I don’t know anyone. I am so screwed.

13 years in the game industry I read this and I want to kill myself, so to speak. I know he’s not the only one. Guys, just do more interracial stuff in your lives and fucking hire more diversity, if you want to address a lack of diversity it’s that simple.

Am I going to have to make games about the really disturbing lack of (my) diversity in the game industry? I don’t want to do this, I just want to make games. Career wise though, that could be good: talks to make at the GDC about what it feels like to be part of a microscopic minority, connecting with people, throwing burning facts at developers, making scenes etc

But I refuse this. It’s like I’m in denial. Addressing these issues is recognizing a massive failure and how much of an exception -in a lonely way- I am. It’s going for the easy whiny way from my point of view, I know how bad black history looks like and I feel like it shouldn’t bring me down but motivate me to push the envelope. But it’s so insanely hard to abstract that from my life, yet I don’t want to make it the main thing in my mind. Just fighting internally, ad vitam eternam.

I don’t know. I just see that it seems like what smart people from a minority do: battle for their minority. Minority that I’m part of, though at a very atomic level with no community to go for. That makes me fragile to those things I guess.

What a clusterfuck, man.

Categories
Me Myself&I

FB problem

The core problem with facebook graph and social recommendation in general is that people’s friends are rarely the best source of recommendations for anything. This isn’t high school (or high school’s extension, college). I don’t hang out solely with people who all share the same interests and tastes I do. I have a lot of friends whose taste in food is awful so I don’t really need their restaurant recommendations. I have a lot of friends who have very different taste in music than I do so I don’t really care what they’re listening to.

I join social networks to socialize with my friends, not ask them what products and/or services to use. This all seems to me like the tail wagging the dog. Facebook is trying to create an opportunity for more monetization of friends’ activity without actually enhancing the social aspect of their social network.

No matter how cool graph is or how good the algorithms may become, it still won’t actually be useful.

Dear Mark,

This reader is right. Stop trying. The network you built is too big now you can’t engineer that social stuff, people make no sense remember? Just let people use FB for a fee and leave them alone with ads harassment and what not. 1 billion people, $15 a year bam, 15 billion a year that’s better than your current 7.

I know you try hard, tweaking algorithms, pushing me to “subscribe” and unveil my preferences but there’s nothing you can really do to enhance the social aspect of your social network because after being connected to someone, receiving updates videos and pictures, more socialization means moving my ass and actually see the person.

FB is valuable to me, I’d like to pay a few bucks and be left the fuck alone by corporations and greed. Come on, Mark.

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Me Myself&I

Some questions

So I guess you read this too (note in the usual way we can’t have nice things, a small bank needed assistance and got it refused) .

If we can just print money and give it to banks, why don’t we give it directly to people to use it?

If less jobs are needed than ever because of massive wealth and machines then why are we fighting for them, to pay taxes to “save” banks while we struggle for no reason?? It’s a damn shame.

You’d better vote for me in 2017, shit is going to change.

Categories
Audio&Games

Talk about a Journey, man

I keep thinking about this dream I had of me and @lejade running to catch a bus and me asking “no seriously, what the fuck happened at That Game Company?”

The co-founder left right after Journey came out. Lead producer left too. That was so weird, no one asked anything in the industry like why are you leaving a studio that just released a masterpiece, a critically acclaimed game? That doesn’t make sense.

We learned this week that a lot of people in the team didn’t get paid for six months at the end of the long, six years of development. Sony paid two budget extensions and it wasn’t enough, the team had to use their savings too. That’s madness.

It shouldn’t happened. I feel like when it happens in the movie industry, it makes sense. Shooting on the other side of the country/world, paying actors, building props etc. It can be hard to follow a budget (and yet they mostly do).

To build a very linear game with very few interactions cannot take six years to make, as great as it is. I mean, we need to get much better and faster at that.

Because we’re the slowest creative production process ever and it’s really frustrating.

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Me Myself&I

Robot money

So it’s Christmas I’ve been freshly adopted or so. My toys had always been reused ones from other kids I grew up with in my foster family or fixed broken toys. I never felt it was a problem but I felt that it meant some things, that you’re supposed to get more money to be more happy or something along those lines.

In my new family I’m getting new toys here and there. It’s Christmas, I’m on the toy floor of a Paris left bank prestigious store and there’s a lot of kids screaming and stuff going on, I’m not used to the city yet. I’m supposed to choose a present and it’s kind of weird to have all that power all of sudden. I don’t even know what to choose. I think at that time I was really into playing marbles so a bag of those would have been great. Everything’s great! I’m in a toy store how awesome is that. Just the trip is satisfying and exciting. And then, on top of a shelve I see him, the red robot:

I guess my face really lit up but to me it wasn’t even going to be possible. Way too expensive. It was out of reach in my life before but now with grandparents enjoying their grandson and new retirement life, it happened.

“would you like to have this one?” I probably just nodded with my eyes open wide.

The thing is a beauty, huge in my small hands:

It transforms into this:

I wasn’t a Transformer fan, to me it was the perfect copy of Robotech’s Valkyrie mechs. I guess I was right:

Of course I broke one of its arms and felt really bad for like a year. Anyway. It was weird because I was happy but it had been a little too easy. Really? I can just get whatever? That seems wrong. And as awesome the toy was, you know how kids are. After a while it was just another toy, a nice trophy. Lego had a bigger replay value and all that made me think hard about what being happy means, early on. What money does or doesn’t. The sweet spot between enjoying life and becoming money’s slave. Really conflictual in our lives but I know exactly what line I want to follow (even though life is fucking plans up). I guess I got a head start on this.