Click Nothing

Nothing Changes

Like you didn't notice.

In preparation for more big stuff coming soon to Click Nothing, I am in the process of overhauling the blog. I don't have a lot of time to mess about, so I'll still be relying heavily on templates but I figured it was time for a change. Anyway - it should be fairly apparent (if only from the banner cleverly saved as a jpeg with ugly compression artifacts and all) that my webskilz perished along with dusty old Web 1.0. I'll get around to polishing out the ugly bits when I can.

For now, since I always wanted a blog that looked like my shoes - I made one.

Oh - and by the way - www.clicknothing.typepad.com can now be reached by the much simpler www.clicknothing.com as I finally got off my lazy ass and registered my domain. I'm still being hosted at typepad for now so none of your old links should be broken.

Anyway - thanks for all your continued support, and keep checking back over the coming couple months as I roll out all the cool new stuff.

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part I

So for those who missed it in the microsecond that it flew past on Twitter, I will be keynoting the GameX Industry Summit conference taking place in Philadelphia on Oct 24-25. Here are the working title and summary of the talk I plan to give:

The Territory is not the Map: Hyper Realism and the New Immersion Paradigm

The games of today unsurprisingly strive to mimic the linear, authored structures of previous generations of media largely because gamers and game developers have grown up in a world where those media are culturally dominant. That is changing. As our media become more richly interactive and as our experience of the world becomes increasingly fragmented and parallelized, a new media culture is disintegrating the old. Games of the future will reflect this cultural shift by themselves becoming more fragmentary, more parallelized, and less focused on rich simulation and traditional notions of immersion.

This talk examines the potential long-term future of gaming by looking at the accelerating convergence between rising technologies and competing media from the internet, games, music and narrative media to augmented reality and the prominence of portable wireless devices.

Sorry that the summary sounds so brainy and cerebral - I promise it will be a talk about games and that it will be as chaotically poetic and filled with increasingly obsolete jokes about the first 8 seasons of The Simpsons as the rest of my recent talks.

But more than just announcing that I'm speaking at GIS, I wanted to announce that I am expanding the trip to do the talk in several other cities. I don't want to announce any places or dates yet, because I'm still putting it together, so I'll let those interested speculate away. I will admit that a part of planning this as a 'tour' was because I am a couple of trips 'in debt' following cancellations resulting from my injury - so if you had been hoping to see me talk a few months ago and were disappointed by a cancellation, odds are good you'll be getting a second chance.

For the subject of the talk - it spawns out of a lot of the thinking I have been doing recently. Needless to say once you come off a project and get some rest, your narrow, single-minded focus on closing and delivery opens up and you get to look at the big picture again... so that psychological shifting of gears definitely has inspired the core of the talk. Also, recent conversations online - particularly the discussion that evolved out of my debate with Manveer, and even yesterday's discussion on the nature and future of the expressive potential of games between David Jaffe and Anthony Burch (and others) (extended) are all topics that have been close to my heart lately and will be elementary to the talk. I'm hoping to be able to synthesize some of these ideas with my own recent talks about Immersion and Generational Shift. If you really want to get the most of the upcoming 'CN Tour 09' talk, you might want to refresh yourself on those two previous talks...but...

As an added bonus (and you get all this for free!) - I am also looking toward launching a few other special projects to 'celebrate' the tour that will hopefully increase the utility of Click Nothing as a whole and make the idea of reviewing those old talks a little easier.

So - to use the most ironic metaphor I can muster - stay tuned - if I can keep a modicum of focus, it's going to be an exciting post-midsummer.

Powers of Ten

So this post marks two awesome simultaneous events.

First it is my 100th post on Click Nothing in just over 3 years. That puts me at not-terribly-respectable-but-not-terrible average of about one post every 10 days. When I started I had hoped to post minimum once a week, and there's no denying that I have enough data to say I have failed that objective. However, aside from a couple of specific windows where I didn't post for an entire month or so, I have been pretty close to once a week. Not bad. Maybe I can turn it up a bit and try to log my next 100 posts in a 2 year window... especially given the number of emails I send myself from work saying 'something to post' and then never get around to it.

So a good start... and room for improvement.

The other power-of-ten landmark to note today is that I hit the 10,000 Achievement Point mark on my X360. I landed it while doing co-op missions on GRAW2, so I'll thank my comrades in arms for covering my back while I racked up the points...

Alpha Team
Final1Option - Gunner
XL Burrito - Marksman

Bravo Team
Chuck Gagarin - Grenadier
MagnumPY - Rifleman
gregvw - Rifleman

I haven't had my 360 for quite as long as my blog - only 2 years and 5 months, minus about 2 months of downtime with the two RROD's, which is about 27 months. That's a measley 370 points a month - or just over 10/day. There is another ratio I need to improve. New target - 500 per month. That would be a significant 35% improvement, but I think I should be able to do it. It might be tricky as we move into the last half of this year with all the huge open world games I am expecting to play - Mercenaries 2, Fallout 3 and GTA IV... those games take a lot of time to harvest - I'll have to try and get a head start before I get sidetracked to all of those huge games. 

My New Avatar

Wicked.

For those who know me, you will probably think I either got some friends at Valve to put me in Half-Life or that I found a way to swap out one of their character heads with on I made myself, but in fact, that is just a stock character from Half-Life 2: Episode 2, who happens to bear a chillingly uncanny resemblance to me. It looks more like me by coincidence than the golfer I created spending a couple hours with Tiger Woods Game Face, to say nothing of how generic my Mii is given my total lack of distinct features....

So the story goes, one of the designers on my project was playing HL2E2 during lunch the other day and came across this medic as one of the incidental members of the resistance fighting against the Combine and said "Holy shit it's Clint", and I got him to snap this screenshot - which I will henceforth use as my picture anytime anyone wants one.

Immortalized in Half-Life 2... accidentally... sweet.

Collating Chaos

I way dig this guy's blog. Aside from very high calibre layout and design, and his uncanny ability to find brown hues that actually work, he has this wicked 'tag cloud' functionality.

He has a java script that parses all his posts, finds the most commonly used words by month, and the most recently used words, then sizes and colors them and gives you a slider that allows you to scroll back and forth in time to find what he has been talking about most often and for the longest time. Of course, you can click on any of the words in the cloud and it will open a page with all the posts that use that word.

The word 'cool' simply does not have enough 'o's in it to capture how cooooool that is. Once I have enough actual content on this blog to make that even remotely useful as a search tool for wanderers, I'll have to get the same thing.

I also think there are some interesting practical applications for this tool. It could be used to parse the mass-media, internet wide, to predict trends in pop-culture and get a jump start on developing entertainment that will arrive just as certain concepts boil over in the mass-consciousness. It kind of reminds me of Watchmen, and how Ozymandias parsed the media by watching a bunch of TV channels all at once to understand all of us lesser beings. Anyway, this dude has a billion dollar invention in his hands. He should sell it to Google right now.

I also think his web-comic 'Calm Down!' is hilarious.

More Games

For those who haven't noticed, I added a new link list on the right hand side of different web-based game-type-things I've come across and enjoyed. Recently added is a link to pjio.com, which I picked up at Ben's, who got it from Pat, who got it from... well, you know... you've probably already seen it.

Also added is Reflections. This is a game that drove me bat-shit for days and days a few years ago, but then disappeared. Well, it's back. Go waste your life.

Some minor tweaks

Made some minor tweaks to the site and some of the content.

1. Added README's to the zips containing the various presentations
2. Added my XBox Live Gamercard so you all can cower before my 1,065 points of Ownage
3. Added a Recent Films list, and will likely do the occasional review of films that I particularly like or dislike
4. Minor rearrangements of format for usability

Feedback on the layout is now more than welcome as it will likely stay in this form for some time. The only planned structural changes now are to add a music links list - this will come with my pending review of GTA:SA as it has pushed me into an old school hip-hop/rap phase that's dominating my charts right now. The other significant change will be to get an actual banner image at the top to replace the template one... but that's just eye candy. After all - graphics come second, right?

First post

Here's my first post... and it got me to thinking... twenty more posts from now it will be my twenty first post... then each of my posts will represent 1/21 of the total number of posts.

And its a good thing it's a text format too, because I actually don't know how to say '1/21'.

Is it one twenty-first-th, or is it one twenty-one-th?

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