Click Nothing

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.

41 Days Down

So, after a doctor's appointment this morning, I have been cleared for a part-time return to work, starting tomorrow.

For the time being, I'll only be working four hour stretches, three days a week. That will leave me all the time I need for my physiotherapy, osteopathy, and acupuncture, along with swimming, cycling and whatever else I can squeeze in there that might speed my recovery - without overdoing it and injuring myself.

For those not already in-the-know, it's a herniated disk between L5 and S1, and the base of my lower back. The herniation was compressing the nerve down my left leg in classic fashion and limiting movement considerably. It was also extremely painful except when lying down, and much to my own disappointment, the prescription calls for stationary bed-rest... and they mean it for real (and they're right). I tried to resist it for the first couple weeks, but that proved itself pointless - so instead I basically got to sleep 12+ hours a day and play videogames the rest of the time. That actually turned out to be a big plus, because I missed so many of last years games, I thought I was never going to catch up. I got to play Fallout 3, Dead Space, EndWar, Bully, Left 4 Dead (with Tom and PY mostly),  Naruto, Chinatown Wars, and a lot of Drop7, and now my intimidating list of games-to-play is a lot shorter.

The other good news is that I was smart enough to take the 'opportunity' to change my eating habits so that I wouldn't gain 20 pounds while I was rendered immobile. Even without any exercise (aside from very light stretching in the last 3 weeks) I managed to lose almost 15 pounds simply by tracking my caloric intake versus my (non-existant) burn. For for any of you out there wishing you could lose 10 pounds - if I can do it with a hernitated disk, lying on the couch like a lard-ass all day every day for over a month - you can do it to. Even better - the positive messaging of today's post is not sponsored by Oprah or Wheaties or Weightwatchers or Tracey Anderson or anyone else other than good old fashion arithmetic. Calculate how much you need. Calculate how much you burn, add the two numbers, and count what you eat until you reach the sum and stop. So you know - it means that you have to either stop eating Doritos, Sour Cherry Blasters and One-Bite Brownies or you have a lot of fucking running to do - I chose the former option.

Alas, now the sick-leave that followed my vacation-within-a-vacation that came after my honeymoon that was embedded in my vacation that followed my world tour has come to an end.

Looking forward to getting back to work on that new game I can't talk about.

Sports Injuries - Elbows and Egos

A couple little news items that made me laugh and cry this week.

First is the Wall Street Journal covering so-called 'Wii-elbow'. No other way to decribe it than a kind of culture shock arising from the collision between a bunch of fat, lazy pre-diabetics suddenly finding their sedentary life-styles in conflict with their insatiable thirst for entertainment with the arrival of the Wii.

A twelve year old girl says "it's harder than playing basketball"... which is such an absurdly false statement than I was almost blinded when I read it. Have you ever even played basketball? I've played a lot of Wii now, and one thing I can say for sure is that - while better than nothing - it's a far cry from playing a 'real' competitive sport. The only way I could reconcile that statement with reality was to assume she meant "it's harder than playing basketball". Gimme a break.

Next is the guy who complains of aching shoulders and arms and profuse sweating after playing Wii boxing for and hour and a half. An hour and a half. Of shadow boxing!! That's like 20 rounds of shadow boxing including all the breaks. Twenty, three-minute high intensity anaerobic sprints. The guy is threshold training with his Wii and fucking himself up. Does anyone in the world think it would be a good idea spend 90 minutes doing threshold training at the gym the very first time they go?

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for using Wii Sports daily to get some exercise, especially if you currently get none, but ease yourself into it. Soon enough you will find that the exercise itself is as fun as the gameplay, and the gameplay will start to get tired once you've exhausted the depth of the system-space. Then - god forbid - when your brain is bored of the systems, but your body is craving the movement - maybe you'll actually want to do some real exercise for its own sake.

I wonder if we'll make it through the holiday without someone's Uncle Jack from Winnipeg having a coronary from playing 45 minutes of Wii Tennis with little Billy after gorging himself on Christmas Ham and Turkey? I wonder if Nintendo will face class-action lawsuits from a North American population so addicted to laziness and broadcast media pablum that a few corpses will actually be more shocking than an entire population of pale-skinned, carpal-crippled, diabetics with soaring blood-pressure and cheetos-orange stained fingers?

Part two of this sports-in-games weekend-write-up is an article from UrbanGrounds that went around the office last week. Now, I don't know much about football, but this is fuckin' hilarious. Ethan Albright is what I gues you call a 'special teams lineman' playing with the Washington Redskins in the NFL. He's had a 12 year career (which I take it is exceptional for a lineman) because he's good at doing a long snap to a punter, thereby buying the kicker enough space to get the ball away before being pummeled into the earth.

Unfortunately for Ethan Albright, someone has to be the lowest rated overall player in Madden Football, and this year, it's him. He writes a foul-mouthed rant to Madden and EA that's a good read provided you're not trying to drink a can of Coke while you read it.

Anyway, to bring a point to it rather than just point to it, question: does there even need to be an overall player ranking in such a game? Does someone have to be the 'worst' player in the NFL? It certainly seems like a problem to provide overall rankings - especially in a game like football - which has so many orthogonal units in play. You can do it more easily in boxing or tennis where everyone is being compared in the same way, but in more complex team sports with a variety fo player (unit) roles - of which football may be the most complex - is such a ranking even meaningful?

Regardless, Albright probably didn't complain when he got the royalty check from EA or via the player's association, and probably he wouldn't opt out of receiving such a cheque next season either, so maybe he should just deal with it. It's still a funny letter.