Author: harold

Last year in games

It was bad. Not just business wise but as Raph Koster points out in his blog post:

But this was the year when an editor at a games publication actually said to me “stop writing.” This was the year that the metaphors of violence were the most popular way to describe what we should be doing to each other’s life work and passions. Burning down. Destroying.

The game industry in 2013 felt like that to me too.

I’m a game developer and reading that an editor at a games publication can actually say “stop” to someone who contributes to the game design community as much and as hard as Raph does (and when people minimize that I just think STFU you don’t know shit), says it all. Something is super rotten in the game industry. I don’t know how to react except prototyping on my own and reading arguments.

I’m a game audio designer and all I heard about all year long was audio implementation and 3D sound and HDR and things that are absolutely not core to a great game audio experience. Tons of games don’t use that at all and have great audio. Needs for more audio interactivity and flexibility are shared by all my peers in the field and yet, nothing changes. We use the same inherently broken audio stream design. It’s been a while now. Like over a goddamn decade. It became taboo.

We like to remind ourselves of how a couple of people pretty much had solutions to seamless, atomic game audio end 80s or how Nintendo masters game audio design since Mario but the game industry is not about mentors or spreading knowledge, it’s about being violently childish (Fmod vs Wwise yay). Back to Raph being humiliated online, back to Chris Crawford –kind of the father of us all, amirite- treated like “fuck that old weird dude”. Back to that article where professional game developers can’t wrap their heads around the idea of people having fun driving a cleaning truck in a simulation. I don’t know, jumping on platforms for 30 years seems pointless to me too and also, your mom albeit being old is still a ton of fun. You get the point, to each his own. Good designers know that. They analyze, they don’t laugh at taste or worse, bully you (super condescending title, Gamasutra) because you don’t play the last AAA or the last indie darling. There is no hierarchy in games, it’s like music.

Anyway, a lot of people profit that situation of intellectual stagnation and game design idling. From that editor to Raph to guys selling sound banks and focusing on how important having $50K worth of microphones will change your game audio forever, it’s not about games. It’s about business and I’m just as naive as ever: if we move on, their business will fail. If tomorrow someone comes up with a cheap, responsive audio engine that does what games need and not what sound people want Fmod and Wwise would bleed.

Computer games complexity is such that a lot of people are living out of it, without asking the good questions or caring about where it goes, what we can do with them. The mutation is slow. I blame rent and living wages.

Me Myself&I Music

Harder

Composed in L.A. Finished in Paris. An essay on minimalism and structure. Also, quiet hop funk storm. Peace.

Me Myself&I

Are we sex yet

So I’m making an erotic game. There are enough platformers around, I think.

Which means, sex research. Everything, from physiology to history to businesses. Getting some ideas, feeling how much I’m on something or if it’s rubbish etc. Good news is, I’m on something.

Bad news is, holy fuck is sex the subject where you see the most vile and ignorant human behavior. Race, hitting me hard when I never thought of interracial sex as “something” nor did I have physical preferences except for having kind of the same height/width that I have. Black women. Oh my, I didn’t know (fourth graphic). There’s way more depressing stuff, trust me.

(this is a very good example of how racism and race issues are always, always there somewhere even if I don’t search for them; and then they hit me with a cane the size of Jupiter.)

The ignorance and the shame around sex that I see all around, web or real world makes me realize the luck I had growing up as I did and how I’m pretty much a sexpert today.

So excitement, huge depression, hope, I got it all. Moving on.

Me Myself&I

Something rotten

I might reuse this picture a lot.

These days I’m realizing that one of the most powerful weapon to change things around –learning from others- is not used at all.

You know, whatever your beliefs are I always thought that when the real world shows you that there’s a better way, you go for it. I mean, this is what we did post WWII, making progress.

Today though it’s increasingly something people not only don’t want, but are against! Healthcare in the US is still a raging debate, despite Europe, despite Germany, despite Sweden, despite France, despite Costa Rica, the US will not copy something that works somewhere else and apply it to its people. Not even something as basic and crucial as healthcare. Mind blowing.

The same can be said for all cultures, France can’t structurally change despite having Germany perform a ton better and three decades of economic analysis coming from everywhere stipulating over and over what needs to change so real growth comes back. Nope.

Not knowing is one thing. Not applying is I suppose, a right albeit a dumb one. But not acknowledging that something else is better or “refusing” that it is the case is plain denial and goes against everything we went through and built up to the past thirty years. We now have to fight hard just to allow common sense to be heard (yes, end the drug war, yes, right to die etc).

It’s just fucking weird. It’s like we benefit progress everyday but don’t care about future progress that we enable now, with changes. Well, I’m craving for them changes.

Me Myself&I

Rimming

Fell on this article about rimming some dude and straight anal sex.. The conclusion says it all for me: “I’m only in the meat body for so long, whatever is going to give this spirit the best experience on earth, I’m taking it. You know?”

Especially something good, harmless and free. So let’s cover the subject.

But why??

Because pragmatism: the area is packed with a mountain of nerves and vessels and muscles, like a lot. It makes sense to use all of that to enhance pleasure, don’t you think? Did you know that the area between genitals and the anus is twice as long in males as in females? That’s some playground stuff right here and so by extension, in the heat of the moment you can lick that little star too, all of that being connected underneath. The act also means that you probably completely trust your partner to do or receive the gesture, which is a sign of a healthy relationship (and why you can’t really rim a butthole on first date). Also a lot of people rim: between gay and lesbians, straight female and straight males who play with theirs, you will not be in the minority if you try:

That’s worldwide. That’s double the interest in half a decade. We are broke, bored and have the internet apparently.

But what about poop??

Well science, Bitch. You have a muscle that acts like an automatic door which is closed by default so unless you or your partner are willing to push and shit in each other’s mouth, it is safe to lick and kiss some ass. If we’re talking about poop in butt hair or around, just demand that stuff to be gone, forever. A clean and moisturized bottom is probably way safer than your coworker’s keyboard so don’t get too paranoid on that. The clean your butt and empty your stomach before playing part is obvious but I guess it needs to be said again.

Let’s say I just got out of the shower, how can I ask my partner to do it, that I’m ready?

No you’re not. You can’t just clean your butt and ask someone to lick it. You need to learn on your own first by touching, squeezing, massaging, pushing, pulling, petting the entire “danger zone” while you imagining her moaning, sucking on your cock. There, I did it all for you.

The point is to get comfortable with your own entire body, first. I’m sure I would be traumatized by anal penetration if it was to happen for the first time with someone else, in an confusing and painfully dry way.

Don’t make your partner responsible for your own body discovery, that’s your job.

Once you know yourself, the asking part is easy. You know what you want and you’ll feel if the partner is up to it and because your butt will be squeaky clean and sexy, she’ll probably go at it on her own. I mean, it happened to me.

Anyway, this stuff takes a while. It takes quite a long time for a straight male to think about something deeper than the penis tip discharge, that moment we’ve been waiting for over and over and over. Boring. It took me about a year between the idea of playing with my butt and understand my body better and find pleasure. Sometimes I would give up. “This is weird and dumb”. Pass that.

Once I found the p-spot, I increased my pleasure gradually for another year, at least. Learning how to breath. I didn’t know what you can get from controlling and playing with the Joy Machine, full throttle, including nipple stimulation. Oh yeah, touching nipples simultaneously with your genitals increases pleasure, for all humans. Nerve connection (in my twenties I HATED any nipple stimulation so I guess it’s a matter of learning). We’re talking about complete blackout of the mind, body shaking-induced orgasms. And at least 5 liters of cum everywhere. La petite mort, the real deal. I feel like it made me hornier, but more in control of it. That is some upgrade. Maybe it’s just me. I don’t think so at all.

It goes full circle: as a boy entering puberty you start shaking the tip of your tiny penis with shame to let some white stuff come out because it apparently wants to, and as an adult you start playing with your butt with shame, to achieve something way stronger than just emptying your balls. There is more to your body than just bodily functions.

*drops the mic*

*waves crowd*

Audio&Games

Doom and me

20 years of Doom. It itches. First time I heard and saw it, Joystick Magazine #37, April 1993. Page 118.

Thanks a ton to Abandonware-Magazines and my memory.

Then my PC game dealer –Ze Warez- obviously had it later on. I’m from that older Wolfenstein3D school so Doom was the iteration. What an iteration though. It’s almost like if Nintendo had done Mario and then, Mario World. In the article it says that it would perfectly run on my machine and I was amazed and skeptical that it would and it fucking did.

Bear with me, I was a kid who after years of playing on mom’s IBM PC some awful CGA games just wanted some cool games on his 386 DX 33, like all those fuckers in the UK on their Amigas and STs or my friends on consoles. Two years later Commodore is dead and I get to play Wolf and Doom, two games that were unique and quite impossible to make on any other platform at that time.

Talk about Revenge of The Nerd.

Also, tons of fun. Tons of customization and first taste of game dev tools. Just passing the language barrier in itself was some work (‘member, no internet, only books). I remember making an audio track of myself dying through the infamous Doom’s chainsaw sounds. The total freedom! It was a degamified game, it was fun being a god or a piece of shit in a room with no ammo.

Doom is important to the game culture because of the focus on technology and 3D. What people very fast forgot is that Doom was also optimized and run well on a large variety of machines. Most developers will not care about performance scaling for the next twenty years (also computer’s architecture evolution made it nearly impossible). Today as Moore’s law is now BS, they have to (or they do 2D).

ID Software made its name doing the costly optimization on its own. Sudden and huge trust and respect from millions of players? Priceless. People forget that aspect. ID cared. You never forget that.

I preferred Duke Nukem 3D to Quake because I didn’t care about more technology at that time. I was good having fun with what we had. Plus it was asking some hardware upgrade, the start of the out of control spiral where things get twice as fast every six months. That gave birth to the “PC Master Race” as Reddit call those guys who play on 7 GHz space shuttles with a keyboard and a mouse, but it also sent people to the super awesomely accessible Playstation so hard that Microsoft had to answer with their own box.

With game development being more platform agnostic than ever, It feels like we’ve seen it all and that now as it should have been from the start, hardware is hardware and the two lessons I’ll keep from Doom are:

– Make the best tech for the best game you want.

– Be nice.

Me Myself&I

Lil overview

Second week. I have now seen, dealt with so many dysfunctional shit that it’s a miracle that I’m not sick. The transition is always weird because I always think that it’s going to be easier than it is. That I’ll jump on my stand-up home studio and go back to my music but it’s grey, the vibe is definitely not the same in December in Paris and finishing tracks made in sunny LA… It’s not easy.

Finally, I’m soon going to port my game prototype to Unity 4 with full, official, FMOD integration. Thank god the devs made it happened in September, I was waiting for it for the past three years, hacking Unity 3.5 and crying. This is why people don’t code, too many moronic things to deal with.

I hope it will work technically. Then I’ll be able to have a bit more fun building up mechanics and less anxiety (is my tool chain dead?).

I also successfully pitched a game to the great Baratunde Thurston, so much work to do though and we’re both super busy. But that game ~~could~~ will have a huge impact. So excited to use all the knowledge I have to make great stuff. Every time I watch some game design guru or TED talk about how to design best, I’m totally green-lit in my approaches and that makes me even more determined.

I’m now searching for a can-pay-the-rent job in L.A. so if you have something for a good looking immigrant, please, please, please email the fuck out of my email address.

Never forget:

"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence.
Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent.
Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Education alone will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.
Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent."
Calvin Coolidge

It’s just started.

Me Myself&I

It feels like way longer

A week in. Pretty brutal, let me tell you. #backtofrance #ugh

Me Myself&I

Frank Lloyd Wright

Designed in 1935, built in 1936. Before rockets exist, 30 years before NASA and 60s futurism, 40 years before Star Wars.

So I went on Mid-Century Modern architecture binge in the past few days. Lloyd Wright (crazy life!), the prairie school, the Case Study Houses, Wright’s disciples like John Lautner, Rudolph Schindler or Richard Neutra.

I adore that modern style. I always loved futurism but what makes me crazy is that some of these houses have been designed almost 100 years ago (1920s), built a little bit later and still, in 2013, look super modern! It blows my mind.

We have Wifi and devices we could not imagine even ten years ago and we live in houses and buildings that look like we’re in 1800s. Even compact or mid-size cars have beautiful design today so why don’t we do that with housing? House design really demonstrates how we suck at big scale change.

Melvyn Maxwell and Sara Stein Smith House. Usonian as fuck. I can’t stop contemplate.

Despite designing houses to a ridiculous level of detail (up to furniture and knobs), which would often double the budget decided, there were not that perfect. Wright’s iconic flat roofs were often leaking after a couple of years and although he used locations to get as much sun as possible in the house –passive heating- or very innovative radiant floors, a lot of these houses were/are hard and expensive to maintain, too cold and too hot.

The thing is today we have the technology to have those problems solved. Wright’s didn’t have triple pane glass for example, which solves the glass problem (lets the sun go through as much as the cold) entirely. Leaking flat roofs? We have rubber technology for that now or even better, green roofs. I’m surprised Wright wasn’t into this, he seemed to love nature and the technique is as old as Vikings are but maybe he didn’t want to think about any old building technique, he wanted to disconnect entirely from Europe and the Old World.

Super fascinating stuff to me. Wright’s focus on harmony and structure talks to me, bassist-composer-passivehaus-lover.

Me Myself&I

Transition

November, an hour ago.

I was wondering why people moving to another country would come back and forth in their lives pretty regularly. Obligations. Now I know.

Meanwhile, constant comparison between my life in California and my life in Ile de France. Just putting them together in the same sentence sounds weird. Who wins? Nobody wins. Through different lenses, different angles and different distances, there are preferences. It’s an endless mind game.

These days I tend to feel an unlimited amount of creativity in L.A. while I feel most at peace in the City of Light. That actually sums it up very well.

Sometimes in France people tell me “tu remontes là-haut?” which means “are you going back up there?”, like the USA are obviously an upgrade or inaccessible, higher. It’s always sounded exciting as hell, especially from France’s countryside. So when I look around me and see a typical US street like on TV when I was a kid and that I’d dream of riding my bike there, it’s always a bit surreal. And still exciting.

Obviously, there’s much more to living somewhere than just spacing out at a LA stop. The American Dream these days looks like a spinning bottle going faster and faster pointing at two things:

It’s total bullshit and always has been.
It’s possible to make it.

It might not matter at all. For now it’s the classic, weird blues a couple of weeks ahead of switching back to Paris for a while.