Author: harold

Dickland not in declined

You guys -women-, you work so much. You do so much. And yet you don’t get any damn respect.

Watched national French news all weekend. The woman who is fighting something terrible doesn’t exist at all. It was all about how DSK was doing and how France was relieved that he wasn’t in prison anymore. Not a single word for the presumed victim. I’m not even talking about these "intellectuals" known as stupid ass rich white men sharing their retarded opinion but holy fuck, I just want to hurt them so bad.

I just read about Mr. Schwarzenegger follow-up and it’s insane too. I don’t even get how you can live with all that shit in your head, everyday. How to sleep. It means you cranked up the “I don’t give a shit about respect” fader to the max, 11. The respect toward women is inexistent. That makes me think about Michelle, from bin Laden’s night on Twitter.

I can’t say I’m proud to be a man these days. I spent two days in the countryside with women doing everything, running life basically. I just picked up some strawberries, sat at the table. 2 hours from Paris and a woman is great if she cooks and can breed, like 200 years ago. For the rest if she’s too smart or ambitious, she’s just a bitch and nobody will want her and she will die alone and stuff. It doesn’t change. It doesn’t change one bit. It’s terrible. You are so getting fucked guys I mean you need a fucking war. Starting with yourselves. This French woman who regretted to not sue DSK for sexual abuse isn’t going to testify in NYC.

Bitch grow a pair and do what you have to do: tell the fucking truth and help your sister from another mother. You opened your mouth saying what this man did. Now it is on and you can’t just say “no, thanks”. When it’s time to act, it’s time to act, goddamn. Way too much women can’t do what you refuse to do.

I think this will happen

If countries with maximum freedom cannot apply justice correctly and show the respect women deserve, we’re screwed.

I put a track on the internet and guess what, only women bought it. W.R.E.A.M (Women Rule Everything Around Me).

Audio&Games

We need a MIDI engine II

The goal would be to provide a toolset a game audio designer could use to:

-Make him able to be free and creative by using his/her standard sequencer software and export midi/soundbanks/scripts in a convenient and efficient way to the game.

-Minimize the programmer’s work who would spend NO time on things he/she shouldn’t do like fixing sound fxs volume issues (remember, I am not talking about triple A business) and spend more time on better things like polishing.

What we have

The tools are a mess. Some tools do some extent of the job, some did it perfectly but are now dead, some survive but are dying… We’re almost there. And yet so far!

First there’s the MOD file (.s3m, .xm, .it). Yes, it’s MIDI data + samples/synths. It’s not crazily supported but Irrklang does as well as well as the ubiquitous Fmod.

Where it’s so weird is that it’s only for playback purpose: no way to interact at the lib level with channels and parameters of MIDI data! Why would you absolutely just play a mod file instead of any pcm stream, I don’t know.

To add to the mess there is the tracker, the most annoying and unnatural way to create music. I don’t want to argue about the fact that it can do great music, it does. But we shouldn’t have to deal with the tracker if we want something with MIDI + samples/synths. Like it or not, we don’t have to enter music on computer keyboard in hexadecimal anymore.

So because the MOD file while supported is definitely depreciated, because the tools are awful, it’s pretty much useless for game development.

OpenAL? No MIDI, bye. OpenSL? Just started for mobile, there’s MIDI, there’s a mapping of its data –I like to read SLMIDIMuteSoloIt– but there’s no designer tools (and what the fuck these profiles mean? 3D Audio for games? On mobile? Please). SDL? No MIDI.

There’s the BASS audio lib that is supporting the playback and manipulation of MIDI files and real-time events through soundfonts, it’s cross-platform but I’ve never been able to see a game using it. People use BASS to build their own little tracker or MIDI player. Soundfonts are pretty much dead too.

The Miles Sound System seems to do everything right according to this page… But it’s 4000$ so I never tried it.

That’s it. No widely available tool to help you create sound interactivity with MIDI. Microsoft had this amazing thing called DirectMusic Producer but they killed it when they shut down the MIDI part of Windows with Vista’s brand new audio stack. They did that to simplify APIs I guess and also because nobody wanted to use MIDI (I’ll get to that in part 3) but man, that was annoying to witness.

Since then, it’s all about 3D. I never really got this obsession with 3D audio. There’s way too much tools for it compared to the number of people or games actually using this feature (FPS and hardcore gamers, and? Who is playing with a nice 5.1 setup? People spent like crazy for their big ass TV and thought “fuck it” for the audio gear, for what I saw).

Main tools and audio engines like Fmod and Wwise are providing designer tools aiming for “volume” features, things helping to manage huge amount of streams and sound fxs, localization files etc. Which is fine but it’s now a very small part of the game development market! Teams, projects are shrinking heavily (for the best) these days.

What we need

My handwriting sucks, I know

I tried to get more specific about file formats.

The sequencer of your choice export data in .mid (ubiquitous format), the soundbank for the sampler is provided either with dls (industry standard and there are tools to edit them) or sfz (Cakewalk’s take on soundbanks), the advantage of sfz being that it’s highly flexible and completely free. Plus, you just need a text editor to change things, I know programmers would be really happy with that :-) I use this format all the time and it’s really nice.

Then, .mid/.dls/.sfz are mixed together and controlled by scripts. I’d go for Python in terms of readability but all of them would probably work perfectly. The output would be a Fmod-like pair of files separating data/content. It could almost be only done ala command line style!

I added a door in the synth/filter part of the engine so that if someone wants to throw in their own filters or synths they have already coded, they can (VST format).

Also overall, the GPU could be used to take care of heavy processing synthesis systems or shit like that.

I see many advantages with this MIDI game audio engine:

-A strong personality and interactivity: the game audio designer set up a “band” and makes it play –in every way- with the game.

-High scalability: the .mid can be reused with minimum efforts on any platform, only the “band” needs re-design. It’s the fun part, it’s like changing textures in an environment. You can have samples in 24bits 192KHz if you want or minimize to 8bits 16KHz for a small game on a phone, no problem.

-Efficiency: .mid are a few Kb, .dll are a few dozens of Kb and soundbanks are the size you want. Between the compression settings and what your “band” is, I’m sure an uncompressed 100 Mb soundbank –in RAM- would provide more than enough for a majority of games. Graphic cards have 1 Gb dedicated c

-Stability: editing scripts in a text editor or a free IDE is stable. Editing soundbanks in a text editor is stable. Exporting midi is trivial. Maintenance would be kept at the minimum, only the audio engine would need it. That’s huge!

Anyway, it’s just some thoughts.

Next time I’ll talk about the social-economics of the game audio engine.

Audio&Games

We need a MIDI engine I

There was something impalpable in the way game music and sounds were played through synthesizers and samples back in the 80s and 90s. Something that was telling you that the sound, melodies and beats were coming from the heart of the machine, something REAL was happening.

Now computer game music just feels detached or forced, especially with non AAA games. It doesn’t feel “natural”.

Let’s take the ubiquitous Mario on the NES. Los doggies (amazing music blog btw) deconstructed the sound of the game, music and sound effects. Here’s the example of the famous coin sound –2 notes-:

The B acts as an ornament to the E. Together, they form an interval of a Perfect Fourth. In relation to C Major, the tonal center of Mario, they are a Major 7th and a Major 3rd respectively. What kind of world has Major Thirds erupting out of reality? Oh yeah, our world has that. Major Thirds are found in car horns, bells, telephones, door bells, convenience stores, pop music, and every other kind of music. And now coins.

Not that Koji thought about it this way but he certainly made sure that sound fxs were matching the music tune, then iterated to hear in which interval it was sounding best. Yes, you can do that with non-MIDI game audio. It’s just so much more tricky, annoying and tedious in the work flow and production process to do so. Plus we need multi-platform support business wise so it’s even more complicated. I did it for SideFlip but it was painful and I could have done so much more with a MIDI engine.

It is frustrating because visual designers have such a wide array of rendering solutions and graphic output with great control over them. We don’t have shit. The analogy with graphics is that MIDI is vector-based, sampling is vector and bitmap-based and streams are full bitmaps. We only have access to the last one, which is not the best in every case, far from that actually.

When you think about sound, music and fxs as tones that you can control through an engine and manipulate with gameplay, MIDI is just the way to go. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time we need this functionality, it’s stable it has everything we need. We need an audio suite with an editor to create extremely interactive audio and awesome stuff.

Basically

Game audio designers feed the engine with MIDI, feed the sampler with uh, sample banks and/or adjust synths and filters through a few scripts and the final audio stream happens in RAM, in the game. The important thing is this:

This is where the fucking magic happens

We can control everything here. We can cut the bass line if the player is low in energy or add a clap on the snare when the player is doing great. We can accelerate music and sound fxs as the player moves faster, we can filter and sweep out a jump fx made with a synth to match the exact length of an analog action, we can send a note off if the combo is not perfect, we can make musical transitions, cuts and breaks to match the action… Things we can’t do or are so tedious with audio streams and one shot samples. Loop. Fade out/fade in. Cut the ambiance or music. Repeat. Streams are so limited.

This is how professional audio software like Reason are working, MIDI to computation to RAM. People associate synths and samples with bad quality because for some reason (ha ha) they think about it as the NES sound, the 8bit sound, the lame 90s Internet music (powered by 2 or 4Mb built-in soundbanks) and nothing else. They don’t know that a nice 64 Mb soundbank and a few synths can be used to make great music and soundscapes like Nintendo is doing since ages (people often can’t even tell the difference with streams since the Gamecube/Wii). They don’t know that computers are so powerful today that they can emulate with extreme accuracy a dozen if not dozens of complex synthesizers on the fly with real time input under 2ms without sweating. I mean, in ten years it is really ridiculous how much power we gain in audio rendering and computation (cheap ass netbooks ship with 1Gb of RAM and 24bits audio output).

This interactivity opportunity needs to be deployed into game development. Not in a back to the old school way, but more as a rebirth. After ten years making audio and music for computer games, I haven’t been convinced by the stream road we took, at all. In a lot of cases, especially for small and medium-sized games, a MIDI engine would stimulate the gameplay and make it more alive than a 2 channel soundtrack looping in the background with stock sound fxs. But yes it means you really need a musician/designer/scripter on that part of your game!

Next time I will talk about the tools we have now, the tools we need and the weird situation with programmers.

Me Myself&I

Fransformers

Reforming gloomy France.

Though only 17% of young people told one recent poll that their country’s future was promising, a massive 83% said that they were satisfied with their own lives.

This is France! Four months I’m back and I can tell and feel the same: life’s pretty good here, when everything works nicely –public transportation, internet, sunny days etc- it’s damn nice. It’s just that if you want to think a bit about the future, if you’re working in the private sector, in a small company, doing jobs that are today important or will be the only jobs in a few years, I feel that the future here is horribly gloomy and I’m not the only one (1,5M French live outside France as of January 2011). I remember a few years ago having arguments with stupid ass high school teenagers telling me that we don’t need to reform the work market and all they could say was “yeah anyway, I’ll not work in France later”. But you’re heavily protesting reforms? Goddamn Crazy French.

Most strikingly, the French birth rate has risen to just over two babies per woman. By some estimates, France’s population will overtake Germany’s by 2037. The French, it seems, are persuaded by the ambient gloom that their country is doomed—yet even their own behaviour suggests that they think it may have a future.

Ha! To me it’s not thinking about the future, it’s thinking about yourself, being a woman in your 30s and being stuck. When you’re having kids you socially jump from being a young woman struggling with your life like everybody else to a MOTHER. All of sudden everything changes and you are now socially supported and busy for eighteen years. To me this birth rate is not an optimistic way of seeing the future, pretty much the opposite actually. It feels like this: screw you future society, I’m having kids and having the life my parents had but worse and I don’t care what my children will have to deal with. The worldwide problem with sustainability, pollution etc comes from the fact that population grows. If you think about the future, today, you don’t have children (adoption would be ok though). I know it hurts.

France’s start-up scene may be relatively new, but a fresh generation of faces has begun to graduate into the big league. They include such figures as Pierre Kosciusko-Morizet of Priceminister, Marc Simoncini of Meetic, and Xavier Niel of Iliad, who launched Free, a telecoms firm, from nothing to take on the established giants.

The interesting part is that France struggles so hard to export. All of these start-ups are focusing on France and it’s not enough to create a lot of jobs. Just think about California and how the giants there –Facebook Apple MS Google- are getting most of their cash out of the state, obviously. I don’t care how, we –as any country does too today- need that to get a real economic growth (the population grows too, remember?) . Germany is so hot because they export like crazy. Outside of the big old French companies which are definitely not creating jobs but more reducing them it’s not happening here. Facebook barely existed in 2004 in its own country of birth and six years later there are 20M of French people using it. Even in the world of internet we stay French and don’t go global immediately, which is kind of the great thing of the internet right? Why not benefit from that right away? With the insane amount of culture the French have about other cultures, it shouldn’t be difficult.

The French seem simultaneously to hold two conflicting views. When asked if they backed the strikes, a majority said yes. When asked in the same poll whether raising the retirement age was “responsible towards future generations”, 70% also said yes. In other words, the French temperamentally liked the idea of protest, not least as a way of snubbing Mr Sarkozy. But, at the same time, they knew that raising the retirement age to 62, when the Greeks were being told to stay at their desks till 65, was the reasonable thing to do.

It’s smart. If your message is confusing and noisy when things get real you can choose which side you back up and argue forever without being wrong “Oh yeah I was not against that…”. Right. That’s how we deal with problems in France. Yes, it totally sucks. But when we have to do something because we really have to it usually happens in no time: the debate has been done to death.

The young, who have become serial collectors of short-term contracts, pay the price by lacking the security that the insiders enjoy.

And then it gets complicated: people have sex and form couples with often one “insider” and the other being on this short-term contract diet. Trying to find a balance. So people don’t fight the system, they accommodate around it and at the end, they’re pretty happy even if they know that the all thing is definitely unfair and not getting better. And so a generation later problems are the same +1. The plan is to find a place in the French machine that will make you go without too much harm if possible, to retirement. The social positive value is not to fulfill something –it triggers indifference or jealousy- but to exploit it dare I say, abuse it. Then you’re doing the right thing.

Next year we redistribute political cards and it will be interesting to see what will happen. Still looks so gloomy though.

Me Myself&I

Quiet Hip Hop Storm

WhatUpWithThat by Harold

I enjoy so much this achievement of opening my favorite music software with an empty page and then later there are 30+ tracks, dozens of parameters everywhere and hundreds of possibilities around a “simple beat”.

Then I release it and it feels like “yeah well, it’s cool but it’s just a beat”. And then I remember how little things make the song or don’t. It’s so incredible. It’s like life!

Me Myself&I

Vanity 1%

Post author By harold
Post date April 8, 2011
3 Comments on Vanity 13

I read this Vanity Fair article and it reminded me of this Russian dude who recently bought a $100 million house in Cali, the biggest sale for a property in the US, ever. He’s not even going to live there. I know right?

Give me just 1% of that and I would pay cash for a high tech fully upgradeable almost off the grid passive house I would design and shape like I want. I would invest the rest of the money in diverse projects and try things out. If I failed with everything I still would have a comfy and healthy life while saving the Earth with my don’t-cost-anything-to-run small property.

Something like that, but smaller. Hot damn.

A million dollar. It seems so crazy and unreachable to me while it’s barely a tip for these people . And I’m part of the 10 or 20% of the population for whom it’s not that bad at all…

That’s why I feel so compelled to at least use that luck to do something that makes sense and not being ready to sell my sister for a fucking art book or a guitar collection or so many shit I could go crazy for. Owning things is not an end and it’s just so much what our society is telling us to do. So I’m like fuck no. I just want to own a place for the exact same reason that everybody wants that too. Live a good life. But for the rest… We waste so much. And I am lazy! I would not want to have a $10K unique bass, what about maintenance and what if it breaks? Standard, good stuff is great. It’s true peace of mind.

I hope people are going to invade this Russian house this summer, throw some parties and heavily pee in the fountain.

Me Myself&I

Fuck carrots

The thing is I’m not searching for racism proof, racism finds me. I’m on a funny Tumblr and there’s this Google search result about Asian people and I feel obligated to try it out too. Then I try with white black Indians… And I kind of freak out:

Let’s see if it’s better in 10 years?

“Why do black people exist”. It’s just weird because it doesn’t really sound offensive yet it’s the most hostile thing from all searches. Suddenly I feel the urge to make this little picture editing to show the world that well, people using computers are mostly white and not that bright if I look at these screenshots.

Later I click on a BBC documentaries link via Twitter. I go through the list, I see Abraham Lincoln: Saint or Sinner? I click on it and read:

150 years after the war his reputation is being re-assessed, as historians begin to uncover the dark side of his life and politics. They have revealed that the president who ended slavery secretly planned to deport the freed black people out of America.

Wikipedia. Google. Lerone Bennett Jr. A book, Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream 20 years of research, 688 pages. Bipolar reviews and comments, people praising the amount of work and that nothing is black or white and people complaining that this book is biased –you mean like mainstream “common” History?- and so on. It reminds me of stuff, like the Good Hair documentary I saw a few months ago:

The main focus in the film is the extreme lengths that black women are willing to go through in order to look a certain way. A common ideology in the African American culture is that the straighter the hair, the prettier the woman. On the contrary, a woman wearing her hair naturally (with no chemical processing) is viewed as unkempt or unprofessional. Black women are willing to spend thousands of dollars on their hair, even if they cannot afford to do so.

I think about Bill Russell, a basketball player –one of the best ever- I discovered through Flea’s Twitter account, who lived crazy times and hard segregation. I think about this documentary I haven’t seen yet because the start hurts so bad, Crips and Bloods: Made in America, something I wanted to see because it’s about L.A. (and directed by a famous skateboarder). It starts by explaining how black people were not allowed to be in the Boy Scouts so that they started their own clubs, who would have to deal with police all the time. Gang’s hood culture was born.

I think about Katrina and the second part of Spike Lee’s documentary is probably one of the most painful thing I have ever watched.

And everything makes sense. This crazy feeling of insecurity or that I have to prove something all the goddamn time. Why despite virtually being free, I feel something heavier and heavier that is making me think more than twice, too much. Damn if even I feel it, with my sweet 200% white back-story and family I can’t imagine what’s like for other black people and black men I see around. Unconsciously I make music because also, it’s where it’s fine to be a black dude in this society. Constantly asking myself “can I? May I? Should I?” because I know what people see, I know stereotypes are also true and that I try not to be that and yet I am sometimes. It makes sense. It comes from a long way. Social inertia is ridiculous.

The older I get, the more I understand why smart black people who seem to be loved by any race end up building a bubble, living inside: Meshell, Dave Chappelle, Chris Tucker, Dieudonné, Prince whatever. It’s way too fucked up to be in the middle analyzing that shit, man.

Obama will always represent that first. Holy shit it felt good even if it sounds stupid.

Anyway, peace. And fuck carrots.

Me Myself&I

Visual art, sexology, social economics

Post author By harold
Post date April 2, 2011
1 Comment on Visual art, sexology, social economics

The Art of Steal

It’s a documentary about the Barnes foundation one of the most amazing painting collection in the world.

I’ll take this comment from The Awl: “What you have is a powerful group of city elites with real estate and tourism dreams (they’re also avaricious philistines, by mere coincidence) determined to seize the control of this spectacular asset, and there simply isn’t anybody with the power or position to stop them. Their success has been a complete tragedy.”

I wish I could go before the collection moves downtown Philly in June…

The Perfect Vagina

Kind of eye-opening to see how women can be able to ruin their genitals based on what people (that is, stupid jerks and bitches) think of it. I always thought that big lips were like a big cock. More surface, more pleasure. I didn’t know the porn industry had such power by displaying small vulvas, a big turn on for men apparently (not a fan of the kid-looking pussy, thanks). I was amazed that these women didn’t even know that vaginas are unique, like their male counterpart. What the fuck??? We all are different, genitals included. It shows how depreciated this organ and source of pleasure is, even today in a pretty liberal society like the UK. Girls do what you have to do: be proud of it.

Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?

Outstanding article from 1982 –thank you the Atlantic, thank you- about the diamond bullshit, the exploitation of Africa, the insane wedding marketing in the US/Japan that would create demand “forever”, the 100 years monopoly, the absence of value of this so-called precious rock… Seven very well documented pages. There’s only one conclusion: don’t ever, ever buy any fucking diamond in your life. I’m glad I haven’t because I always thought that it wasn’t looking good. Some people use credits to buy this useless shit that is not even an investment. It’s pure loss.

Nothing that will make you smile, everything good to know though.

Audio&Games

Platform exclusivity

Imagine if Sword & Sworcery EP had been out on Windows Linux Mac. Yes, no fancy number 3 in the charts –charts and grades… I think we could live without them- but the same amount of buzz on Twitter and at least, EVERYBODY would have been able to buy it and play it.

I realize that there’s this idea that the gameplay needs a specific device. But as we’re seeing more and more because we have a lot of ways to control a game available on multiple platforms –joystick, gamepad, mouse, touchpad, touchscreen, stylus, keyboard, remote, nothing- the idea doesn’t really hold up.

Magical experience that I could get on my laptop, on my couch.

I don’t really believe in the “unique experience” of a device. I played Braid on the 360 and on my laptop, it wasn’t different. The mechanics, the ambiance are still here and working. Same with Everyday Shooter. I think that you should be able to play a game using whatever you want to control it, at some extent. I don’t like the “put your finger on the screen” in a game that really doesn’t need this to be enjoyable, like Sword & Sworcery EP. It’s just a matter of creating an artificial scarcity when software can be virtually available anywhere. The scarcity is that you need an iPad to play this game. It profits Apple and nobody else.

But back to the input in games. It’s a matter of personal preferences. Some people can’t play a fighting game without an arcade stick. Some play with the “insane” Reverse Mouse setting in first person shooters (the variety of configurations from people jumping with the thumb or with the pinky is remarkable). Some people are comfortable playing a driving game on the keyboard etc. I didn’t really like Crayon Physics with the mouse but with a Wacom it’s perfect, even more than with your finger on the iPhone. Same with World of Goo. I love playing shoot’em up on a keyboard and I’m really bad with a gamepad. It’s endless.

So why would developers absolutely try to make people believe that you need the “real” deal? There’s none. It isn’t a meaningful goal for most players to quote Daniel Cook again. It’s like music or movies, even if there’s a “perfect way” to enjoy them –the bigger the better?-, people listen to mp3s in noisy environments or some watch movies on their computers. But you know what? They’re happy. It’s not that I don’t want to push them to have a better experience but if it fits for them, if it fits their lives then I’m happy that they listen to my music in any circumstance, even at a funeral with shitty headphones.

In the case of games, devices are damn expensive. Comments about game exclusivity are telling these days. People are like “dude, I can play Street Fighter IV on my netbook, why couldn’t I play your 2D game on it too? I need to buy a useless 600$ tablet to do that? Seriously? Well no then”. Some people do everything on their laptop, it’s a really convenient device, it’s quite expensive. The next digital expense will probably be a newer laptop for them, not a device that is going to cost the same price just to play a few apps and show off to their friends how cool it is. And developers I know it’s hard but learn to say no to the hype, snobbery and the platform diktat. Sword & Sworcery EP is exactly in this case, Mashable interview:

Why iOS and not PC?

I go way back with Apple. After messing around with things on the Commodore 64, I really got into art and animation on the Mac Classic with Hypercard. When Jobs got things back into gear and they launched the iPod, I really dug it. I remember thinking, “this is the form factor and these are the designers to create the mobile video game console of the future.” When they launched the iPhone, I was in the video game industry doing PS3 type stuff, but I was conscious that the iPhone was “it” — a design that would last — and their high level approach to the App Store was a revelation compared to the licensing, publishing and distribution headaches on other platforms.

I don’t see where it’s a nightmare on PC. Geez, people are not even afraid to sign up for Minecraft or worse, pay obscure strangers for items on eBay. There is no business justification. It’s just a matter of personal nostalgia mixed with grabbing attention by releasing a game exclusively on the iPad. Further in the answer:

Personally, I don’t spend any entertainment time on desktop machines or laptops, and of course, the expectations are quite different on those platforms.

Personally, I know a lot of people spending their entire entertainment time on computers. Personally, I don’t know a lot of people owning an iPad. People are like “the iPad sold 15 million units in a year” but it’s nothing compared to the amount of other devices. Laptops are selling at about 250 million units a year. Developers need to not be dependent on one platform and yet everybody falls into this trap. If now Superbrothers can’t satisfy people asking for S&S EP to be released elsewhere because of their contracts with Apple, I think it’s hurting them. Developers need to be strong.

IF YOU ARE A GAME DEVELOPER YOU NEED TO READ THIS SHIT BELOW UNTIL YOUR NOSE BLEED. THEN PRINT p 53 ON YOUR FACE.

Gdc 2011 game of platform power

View more documents from Daniel Cook

I get the bet of selling less at a higher price within a walled garden for an overhyped device. It doesn’t last long, usually.

Fuck elitism. I want games to spread out, not to be intellectual products for rich people. If a game absolutely needs a device to be playable then fine: golf games can be kind of Wii exclusive, I understand. But if it doesn’t and that you’re snubbing me with a point & click retro-nostalgia game at 5 bucks that would still work perfectly on my laptop experience-wise, I’m like no.

ps: nothing against this game at all –I hope it makes them rich, great AudioVisual design, indie game love etc-, it’s just that it’s in the news and a perfect example of how game developers don’t think long term and are driven too much by their nostalgia (platform, art-style, theme, game mechanics, retail-like business) rather than innovation. S&S EP is a great example of execution done well but I fear that it’s going to make other young game developers believe that there’s a future in exclusivity.

There isn’t son.

Me Myself&I

Twitter, 5 years and me

It seems like a decade. This service totally changed my life.

Debut

I don’t know how many French were signing up in early March 2007 but I was, after the famous SXSW that really showed up what Twitter was. I immediately tried it thinking that it was a great idea. Microblogging. Sweet.

It wasn’t to follow friends because even today Twitter isn’t popular in France –at all- so it wasn’t for that. It was for discovery. Hooking up with strangers that’s right. Maybe dating too of course. Whatever was going on.

Everything you do. Even that.

My first follower was Baratunde Thurston. Yes, it was incredibly powerful to see a BLACK MAN on the internet and nerdier than I was. Funny, witty, in the transmedia-internet-geek world, I thought that was awesome. He had a few hundreds of followers and when he worked his ass off, live-tweeting Obama’s election and campaign it was magic. He’s now Director of Digital @TheOnion and has 74,887 followers… I can’t wait to meet him because it has to happen. So many times I wanted to write to him but was too afraid to lay down some stuff.

French people in Paris on a Saturday night.

I immediately wrote in English. For me it was not even a question –why would I tweet in French when no one understands it?- and I wanted to improve so much at it that I had the idea to bring some rhymes and for like a year and half I tweeted this way and geez, it made my brain stronger and my dictionary skills better despite weird, silly, corny tweets. Mind game.

Twittervision

Anyway I just loved the fact that I had some insight in very different lives across the world, here a geeky mom in St Louis, there a web developer in Czech Republic, UK, US, Sweden, Japan, Germany, Australia… In real time, not on an irc channel with nicknames but on the web, via sms with pictures and “real” names.

More and more it became a really neat source of information too. At first I didn’t want that too much being an avid user of rss but I couldn’t resist and see that I would see a tweet and then the same in the rss feed, later. Sean Bonner showed me how much Twitter is useful and relevant in the news realm.

I giggle every time.

I also tried to follow funny people because the 140 characters limit is great for that. What value can you add on a personal level if you’re not relaying news? Comedy. I stumbled upon Alison Agosti who had about 400 followers. I thought it was a bug when I saw more than 100K like a year later but she’s funny as hell and she has a vagina too so it’s totally normal :-)

But the big thing for me has been the #itstartedontwitter with my Verdell Wilson.

Only the beginning…

It’s also been an amazing tool to connect with indie game developers as the RT process just do that, making you discover someone else via someone you already follow: this is why the new RT ain’t worth shit, making the discovery process less transparent and more intrusive.

Because of the constant stream, the more I was following people –and usually Americans- the less I was caring about France and what’s going on here. I was realizing that like rss I could just jump to the information’s source. More fascinating global, less local circlejerk.

I also saw that Twitter was used a lot by black people in the US and that I was writing English better than 98% of them. That would sometimes make me angry but I would get over it, what else is there to do?

Now I think I’m hitting a wall with Twitter. Yes having friends partying in Austin while having a tsunami in Japan, wars and conflicts in the middle East is like watching a horror movie with a comedy and a documentary at the same time. It isn’t healthy even if as the TV, I’m hooked, reading and reading, trying not to miss a tweet which could ruin the story unfolding in front of my eyes… I mean I knew about upcoming riots in the Middle East weeks before they happened, thanks to Twitter. Twitter gives a sense that there’s no time zone at all but there is and I just can’t keep reading tweets in Paris after California is up because it’s like dozens of updates after each refresh. It’s exhausting.

Backend

On the dev part, I thought Twitter very clever to let people build clients and competing over innovation. Now they’re being like total dicks, blatantly stealing ideas (the Android client was quite unique but not really efficient, the last refresh is a copy/paste of Seesmic) and saying “don’t do anything else guys, we’re in charge thanks”. Not cool.

On the business part, I just don’t get why the Flickr/Pinboard business model (pay once forever or once a year) is so disregarded. What the fuck is wrong with getting real money and stop the ad bullshit? If power users are ready to pay a fee, you should let them: they will drive followers to do so. People made Twitter.

I never had a big thing for trending topics but these days there are like effing useless, full of scammers and fake accounts. I’m still amazed at this 4000+ RT of a fake Dave Chappelle account using the #prayforjapan, what the hell people. Or the all Charlie Sheen thing. Like a lot of things when there’s a crowd, we often all get so dumb.

So I wonder what the future of this service is going to be. Like the internet showed, clones are probably going to emerge, open sourced. Dave Winer is trying to do that with rss so that you can update everything including Twitter in real time with a feed.

Whatever happens now, it will never be the same. Thanks guys.