Author: harold

GDC 13

Post author By harold
Post date April 3, 2013
No Comments on GDC 13

Once again, I wasn’t there. I don’t know when it will happen but I hope it will one day.

Of course, it’s becoming very predictable now. I haven’t even covered it last year. I feel like we’re avoiding the same issues, making the same mistakes and pushing the same “realistic” goal over and over. It was the last game design challenge and I hope it will reborn somewhere else, it was very inspiring. /sad face

It looks like the industry is now paying attention to more personal and small projects -thanks Minecraft- which is good but obvious as this is where the most exciting things are coming from since 1845. Indie doesn’t mean anything now, that’s good too. Names, people, faces, regardless of your contract or platform where you release on, that’s much better.

A lot of discussion about free to play but nothing changed: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. I think developers shouldn’t focus so much on it. If they can afford to make a free to play game fine but to me it looks like you need to eat too. I want to educate people on how the small-transaction-between-you-and-me thing is the fairest business, make them learn that it’s worth it to help me out making this awesome shit. Really on the Chris Hecker wagon on this one.

I’m concerned about the total lack of noise around the app store problem and censorship. It’s amazing how “brand loyalty” can block people from opening their mouths. Imagine Microsoft leading the store paradigm, censoring games. OMFG the GDC would have been all about leaving the platform. It is once again the kind of stuff where I see how immature we are.

The problem at the end is that we’re barely starting to benefit from digital distribution and we’re already giving all its power to middle men. It’s not that distribution is everything but yes, it kind of is business-wise. We have this window to keep things in control and this window is closing up.

Layoffs en masse were not in the conversation either like it’s not connected to what’s going on, like if there was a barrier between big publishers and developers (which doesn’t exist, it’s the same people going in and out and now more out than in). People are still amazed at how the AAA business doesn’t work anymore, when it’s not news. Gotta connect the dots, yo.

Oh game development frustration, you are a bitch.

Audio&Games

Different play strokes

I had demos.

As a result, I learned to play games a bit differently. Being limited so severely meant that I began thinking of games as smaller, bite-sized experiences—miniature worlds to poke and prod until I’d seen everything they had to offer. As I played, over and over and over yet again, I got better. Satisfaction came from mastery over a situation—from becoming so good with the tools at my disposal that any situation became a cakewalk—rather than constant newness or endless repetition. Discovery and exploration were all-important, but instead of discovering new abilities while exploring new maps, I discovered new ways to tackle old challenges. I’d try to do things in ways the designers had never intended.

This is me, pretty much. I played hundreds of demos in the 90s and it definitely helped me get a sense of taste that I think, you don’t really get as well by playing much less games for a much longer time. Testing new things, new gameplay, all the time.

I don’t much like difficulty. I don’t really see the point. If I fail repeatedly, I get bored. Sure, I might beat a section one time after a dozen attempts, but it’s not as if I want to go back, and it’s rare that the difficulty actually helped me become a better player.

I could almost write a full post called “Dark Souls, you guys” with people LOVING its difficulty. To me spending dozens of hours of painful enjoyment is like doing crack all night and being like “that shit ain’t so bad after all”. Of course everything you spend time on is going to feel valuable, but like the author I get bored if I fail repeatedly because the designer made it this way. I have always questioned their decisions.

So the fact that we design games this way -remember, that was to make money through arcades- always has been a problem to me. The sweet spot for the perfectly balanced challenge is so rare and so personal. The technology that allows following of your play style, raising the challenges you want is going to become huge, critical tech.

This is where games are so close to music and that between what you want from it, the difficulty of entering it and what it actually does to you is different for everyone. Fascinating. Hard.

Me Myself&I

Your work is real, developers

Post author By harold
Post date April 2, 2013
No Comments on Your work is real, developers

Google announced today that it’s shutting down Google Reader on July 1, 2013. It’s not a big surprise to us as we knew that it was going to happen someday but may be not so soon. Anyways, R.I.P. Google Reader – we loved you and we’ll miss you as developers although you never gave us an official API. ;-)

Spotted on a developer’s website, which is the average developer reaction after Google announced the big change.

Imagine you run a business, some dude connects an audience and builds a business around this, all on his own. You close shop without notice or helping out this business to run without you and the business is thanking you for these good old days full of uncertainty and stress.

Don’t you want to abuse developers when you seen that kind of shit? Developers are crazy. This “as long as I build things I’m happy, even if they’re destroyed or rendered useless” mentality has to stop. Sustain your work, goddamn.

Me Myself&I

Bike palm

I’m standing in front of the shop, it’s 11 30am (opens at 10am). No one inside, a sign says that I have to knock if there’s no one at the desk. I do.

I wait a couple of minutes wondering if I should knock harder. A dude shows up behind me and looks like he wants to enter the shop. I recognize the shop owner and say hi. I start to explain my bike brake problem and he’s all like “oh yeah, that’s not the good cable” and I’m all like “yeah, this bike stuff is confusing, so many standards” and he’s going all “meh, not really” on me. Bitch.

“how much does it cost?”

“We’re at 50 euros an hour and it’s probably 15 minutes of work.”

“OK so I leave my bike to you and come back later today?”

“No, keep your bike and come back this afternoon.”

“??? OK, what time?”

“After 3pm.”

“??? OK, thanks.”

I don’t fucking understand how this shop is surviving. I don’t get France. Fifteen minutes of work he could have done with me, chatting and my day would have been different, the future would have been bright.

Of course I’d rather do it my fucking self with services like that, no wonder I dived into independence so hard.

It’s things like this.

Me Myself&I

Halp? Nah.

I’m bragging and writing how I’m the best thing on earth but I kind of need it, it’s never been that hard in my head. I feel like shit.

I desperately need a job in L.A. I always have been able to do without it for now but I can’t anymore. Last job opportunity looked awesome but before I could make a difference it didn’t happened. Meanwhile the game industry is in full restructuration there, is kind of in a hibernation mode in France. I could rent my apartment at crazy Parisian prices but the place needs quite some work done, for which I don’t really have any budget.

It is such a bad time to leave as my parents def need help and my sister is near useless. I was reading Derek’s blog post (you should subscribe) an American living in Singapore these days and he was talking about how there they’re all about family while they’re all about individuals in the US. Well in Europe we’re both and we are indeed, getting fucked.

Add the immigration layer: I am a permanent resident of the US but I spend too much time outside and they don’t like it. Trust me USCIS, if I had been able to import my tiny world and simply settle, work and pay taxes I would have. But it’s a little more complicated like, a lot. Somehow traveling every couple of months makes me neither American or French. I am this weird English French speaking hybrid who knows that there is not perfect place but hey, turns out you have to choose a fucking destination.

I always found solutions but I can’t find a good one for this big, poisoning headache.

I realize that I don’t’ dream anymore -that is, making plans- and I need to but all I can do is get stuck with odd boring jobs, game development problems or difficulties to focus on sound. Shit.

Well. The decade old black security guard at the Monoprix doesn’t have that kind of problems and I should probably shut the fuck up. Damn it feels good to have a blog.

Me Myself&I

Feministo, siempre

Steubenville rape case. Another one.

Two weeks ago I saw my feminist crew, all awesome. We don’t talk as much about terrible things in the news like rape cases, how media treats them etc as before because we’re sadly, so used to it. Angry, not surprised.

We walked the streets. We had heated debates, we wrote thousands of pages, we met this way. I still remember the feeling of entering a bar 90% full of women and sit down there like “yes, I’d like to know more it’s interesting and I’m totally not overwhelmed and looking weird”. I was in my early twenties and it would change my life.

Learning that women weren’t coming so much with the help of a dick was amazing. Hurting like “oh shit, the power balance I’ve been told doesn’t exist! Tell me more, damn *recalculate*”, learning things that looked rock solid but in fact weren’t. Two big paradigm shifts in my head were the realization of all the work women do in this world and gets unnoticed for. Unbelievable. Massive failure of a system forgetting half of its population. The second one was realizing how much physical harassment women get and how much rape is something spread out and happening most of the time inside close circles. These twos things made me think hard.

That stuff clearly pushed me away from the classic machismo culture. Which is the only one in the game industry. I was sad to be sick of deep sexism -and thus avoiding bromancing/networking- but I was also happy to get that consistency that I love so much in my head. When news like Lara’s controversy, the lack of women in tech or terrible female characters show up I just stare at it and feel that I made the good decision. Happy to see that the message is spreading, slowly through the now classic explanation-men outrage-backlash-little progress loop.

And then there’s Rihanna and Chris. I never fucking want to hear anything about them, ever.

It’s just that sexism/racism are this big thing reducing my enjoyment in this world by a LOT™Louis CK. Like for all of us actually.

Me Myself&I

Minimax and fanaticism

From Wikipedia:

Minimax (sometimes minmax) is a decision rule used in decision theory, game theory, statistics and philosophy for minimizing the possible loss for a worst case (maximum loss) scenario. Alternatively, it can be thought of as maximizing the minimum gain (maximin).

I first heard about the term through Olivier’s blog title and it struck me like lightning: this is what I’m doing and keep doing all the time and if not achieving it, going toward it. Minmax, maxmin all the way, all the time.

Minmax example: staying in shape even slightly underweight for that moment where I’ll indulged myself for a while. It will have less impact on my pants. Keeping my relationships friendly with everyone so that hate or resent doesn’t add up when shit goes down (which will happen, right? Always does). Less furniture, faster cleaning. Reusing things as much as I can. You got it.

Maxmin example: getting the best deal on a precise laptop when I could just get the new laptop du jour. Rarely eat dessert so that when it happens, it’s joyful. Do few light abs exercises everyday instead of a few heavy workouts a month so that back pain from playing bass disappears while my belly could be used in commercials or music videos. Instead of going hard on my body, I smooth it out through small routines for maximum efficiency and minimum hassle. Maximum pleasure, minimum hassle as much as I can.

Even for big events in my life I feel like I did minmax. For instance one of my bullet point to make game audio was that I was minimizing competition (everybody wanted to record music or score movies, almost none did though) and maximizing possibilities (less creative dictatorship and conventions, so much more to explore/get paid for). Sounded good to me, at least to sell it to my skeptical parents.

It’s all good except that this engineered, long term efficiency is not that popular. Actually society is almost entirely going the other way, wasting and being inefficient everywhere it can. On the other side minmaxing leads to OCPD and some kind of fanaticism about things being a certain way. It’s hard for me to witness inconsistency and wasteful behavior, even though I know that nothing’s perfect, that the world is born from chaos etc.

That really creates a tension, socially that I feel everyday a bit more.

Me Myself&I

Webvolution

2000-2010: the Far-Web

Freedom. Everything was about exploring, searching, finding stuff outside our local possibilities. Connecting with people liking the same stuff as you do. Real sharing and communicating, not for the likes. I’m starting to feel nostalgia for this amazing playground where I learned so much. Damn.

2010-2013: it’s over

Friction. Incompatibilities. People stay in their little web corner checking the five websites everybody is on. People don’t even search anymore. “How am I going to get my news now, advice?” is something I saw a lot with Google retiring Reader. Fake geek and nerd, move your little arm over your touchpad, spend ten minutes to search and find the tool you need to read your own damn news. You know how to search, right? You do it for one-time things but you can’t do it for something you do every single day? What is wrong with you people.

The recording industry -profits up this year- Hollywood know they’re on the verge of winning back their control (never forget how we got milked to death in the 90s with CDs, never forget) pushing their agendas, relentlessly (The Pirate Bay story last news, unbelievable, CISPA back). People cave in, for the sake of convenience (iTunes, Spotify). It’s not that people can’t learn it’s that they won’t (and then complain about the new order). In the digital world they’re used to have someone/something do it for them.

Companies are smiling. “Suggestions” is simply “give up your freedom of choice, now you have nothing without me.”

And now you are a geese, force fed until your bank account dies.

Definitely not something I wanted. It ain’t over.

Me Myself&I Music

Double Lamar

Kendrick Lamar.

I heard about him through Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog, analyzing Kendrick’s work.

Good Kid is not simply one the best hip-hop albums I’ve ever heard, but one of the most moving pieces of art I’ve seen/heard in a long, long, long time. I sort of initially bristled at the notion of comparison to Illmatic–my personal favorite ever–but it is exactly the right comparison. Nas was able to do was conjure the chaos of inner city black America in the late ’80s and ’90s. Now Kendrick Lamar summons it nearly 20 years later (with more focus, by the way) and virtually nothing has changed.

"Good Kid" is narrative told from behind the mask. Fantasies of rage and lust are present, but fear pervades Lamar’s world. He pitches himself not as "Compton’s Most Wanted" but as "Compton’s Human Sacrifice." He loves the city, even as he acknowledges that the city is trying to kill him. "If Pirus and Crips all got along," he says, "They’d probably gun me down by the end of this song…."

So when my white friend sees the mighty folder with the songs on my portable hard drive, he’s like “oh Kendrick Lamar I have it too, it’s good right?’”

Good. How can it be good or bad for you? Sorry if it’s offensive.

For him, it’s the last hip-hop album people are talking about. There’s Dre on it, white people’s favorite hip-hop artist (they always will be over enthusiastic; “dude, The Chronic!”). It’s probably been announced on PitchfuckingFork as one of the hottest hip-hop album of the year or some shit. For him, it’s a piece of music you have to listen to because it’s hot. It’s a product.

To me, it’s a look in the soul of a young black man in Los Angeles. As I understand lyrics probably much better than my French friends now, it strikes me hard how great Kendrick’s raps are. To me, this album is a blog. To me who rode through South LA, Compton, who read the construction of this city, segregation, civil rights, fights to live a normal life, the BPP and its assassination, the crack epidemic… It’s powerful to have someone tell you a story from the inside, how his world functions and how fucking alarming it is, narrated with cold humor and cold facts from warm LA.

And then there’s the connection with the universal struggle black people and black men have to deal with. Remember, a Newton every four months in black Chicago. This fucking hopelessness. The system is running over our hopes, hard work, everything. There’s no fixing anymore. Do what you can to escape.

There’s a great connection happening to me and I don’t see where my friend is getting any. So somehow, I don’t see where this album is good or bad to him. Like I wouldn’t be able to say if some indie rock band is good or not as I can’t really connect to this music therefore I wouldn’t be able to have an opinion about it nor act like I know what I’m talking about. Double standard in yo face, Harold. Which I don’t care so much about, compared to consistency and making sense.

This is where I have a big disconnection with my white world, even if we listen to the same stuff.

Me Myself&I

Achtung baby

Me, holding my sister for the first time.

It’s baby time in France. So many of them in a couple of months. I’m afraid for them, their future. But for now when they are babies and discovering the world, being the cutest tyrants literally pooping the weirdest shit with their brand new buttholes, they’re great. You don’t see time go by. I remember that with my lil’ sister. I took that time very seriously, observing how fascinating it is to have a small human grow up. The first laughs and first steps, fucking amazing. The puppy effect.

But that’s the start, the easy part. Then they are twenty and don’t know what to do in life and in the world of today, it’s more dramatic than at any time previously in history.

That early 2010 generation is going to end up hating us so hard when they’ll understand what world we’re leaving them with. "hey it’s the boomers’ fault, those greedy fuckers” would be my answer but that doesn’t solve anything.

I think I would do a pretty good dad. I know too much attention is the worst and I know what damages no attention at all brings in, so I’d be able to balance it out. Thanks to a life filled with great women, I took notes and I’d be good at nurturing her/him. I already have this role business wise. Counseling stuff, I’m good at that.

But maybe I would be the worst a “I’ve been through this you’ll go through this too you little bitch” asshole-ish type. Or maybe I would destroy his hopes and trust because I would tell him how the world is everything but far from being fair.

Whatever. I don’t have kids!