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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Author: harold
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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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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.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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FrankenStoriesandgamesstein
Stories are making a strong come back these days. The Walking Dead, Double FIne’s projects, Dreamfall, Kentucky Route Zero, Twine games, Valve and JJ there’s a lot going on.
I think it reinsures the industry. It’s been a good business in the past, stories are as old as humans and if we can dig more games around them, it should stick on the wall, right? In some extent, yes.
But I have a hard time believing it simply because stories demand you to be passive. That’s when they strike the strongest, your entire self is absorbing it, situations characters what’s going on and what is going to happen. Maybe it’s just me but I feel like the best delivery possible is through a passive mode. Interactivity doesn’t bring anything but breaks the flow.
On the game side, games are about decisions, interactions. Stories never really add anything. I’m always a bit sad at all the work I skipped in games because honestly, fuck your stupid story I’m playing Angry Birds there’s no story come on now.
The most complex game stories are all diminished by power fantasy phantasms that I can’t connect to: there’s nothing captivating for people who saw/read a lot of classics, except with games like Dys4ia, personal, talking about an unspoken side of human life. Coen brothers just kill me with their movies, all their stories hooked me up in seconds, all so simple and dumb on the paper. But the delivery, man. The sound design. The depth.
Kentucky Route Zero seems to be the closest to that maturity and honesty, as well as Ron Gilbert’s work so special for growing up in the 90s kids like me. But it just creates some kind of dull games with great stories. Or great stories with tedious delivery. Twine games make me feel it this way too. If your story is great, I don’t care about choosing I want to listen. Write it, direct it with multiple angles if you want to get away from the single lonely, traditional story path. Me inputting? Unnecessary.
So I kind of want to buy KRZ and at the same time, I don’t.
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Living dead
That’s what my grandma called her husband today, calmly after looking at him. She’s right. I kind of hope that he’ll pass away peacefully this year because it is just unsustainable. I’m sorry.
The dissonance with this crazy ass L.A. story with a black ex-cop killing white people because of their presumed roles in physical abuse and racism in the LAPD -who knew? Oh wait- which in return shot two Asian ladies in a van thinking it was the said ex-cop. Police brutality, race issues, L.A. me playing dozens of songs from Los Angeles based black bands and bam 40 mn an hour of train later my white family, an old man to maneuver around in his wheel chair, my dad and his broken leg, my mom freaking out over stupid little dramas. Me, helping as much as I can. I even tried to fix my mom’s unsupported, old accountant software by hijacking its Access database. It didn’t work. Too old. Terrible software design. Nonchalance: casual lack of concern. I hate when you slap me with that, France.
It’s brutal. I have two house music tracks ready to ship and I can’t even do it, I’m so not in the mood. My brain is filled in. If only there was only that. It’s too much but I can’t look away.
I think I am kind of a zombie too today. Oh shit I forgot, my cooking tops died. Things suck sometimes.
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Dreams and green entrepreneurship
Last weekend at my parents. The usual except for one thing, my dad telling me about his business plan for his passivehaus company he just founded. We talked for hours about everything about it. I might do some marketing for him, he’s so bad at that (dad, you don’t sell with specs you need a story). I’m born in it they say.
It’s great to see him excited, taking risks. It’s a great idea and I can’t help but dream of doing the same in L.A. re-building entire blocks using the most of nature and technology. Damn, I wish I could especially for black people for whom social mobility is being refused. At least have a home that doesn’t make you want to go anywhere else and frankly, that is all what is missing in beautiful Watts or South L.A.
Anyway.
I’m kind of jealous of him. Sometimes I wish I was a 6’ 2 blonde dude with blue eyes born in the 50s. It’s not even confidence at this point, it’s another world. Like for him mine. I was telling him about Zynga and Notch, how nothing makes sense today from a company born in 2007 valued at $billions and already kind of dead to a dude releasing a non-finished game that made him last year $270 million. It’s scary as fuck. Not the risk taken or the amount of efforts you put into something, but the fact that the outcome is highly unpredictable and rarely positive today. Add corporations agendas and lobbies, governments doing the same and your company dies you barely understood how or why. It’s brutal.
He doesn’t feel that. He never experienced that. He just hears about it, looks at me not knowing what the fuck to think about. I know right? So when I see that he’s investing all his money in his new venture, I’m excited and I try not to delve into the negative aspect of the economic global world today. Right on dad!
He’s already getting enough negative energy in France where an entrepreneur starting something passed 60 is asked “why would you do that? Just chill with your miserable retirement checks until you die in front of your TV”.
I’m proud of him.