Click Nothing

Click Nothing Tour 2009 - Part II

In the beginning, there was nothing

It's been a long time in coming, but I have finally put the finishing touches on the Click Nothing Tour 2009.

It's going to be a long and complex one, but it should be fun. One talk, seven cities, ten days.

The talk, as detailed in a previous post, is about changing notions of what immersion means in the context of social and cultural shift in the face of technological change and generational change.

The dates and locations, for those who might be intertested in attending, are as follows (though not all are open to the public):

Sunday, October 25th, 9:30 am
GameX Convention, Keynote
(details)

Monday, October 26th, 3:30 pm
ETC Carnegie Mellon

Wednesday, October 28th, 4:00 pm
MIT, GAMBIT Game Lab
(details)

Thursday, October 29th, 6:00 pm
NYU, New York
(details pending)

Monday, November 2nd
SCAD Savannah
(details pending)

Monday, November 3rd
SCAD and IGDA Atlanta
(details)

For a walkthrough of the tour, you can drop this into Google Earth. If you're on Dopplr, friend me and you'll see the specific dates I expect to be around in which towns. If you're on Facebook and/or Twitter, friend or follow me and you'll be able to keep tabs on my frequent updates.

Since I already gave an early version of the talk at Ubi, here in Montreal, the Twitter stream for the tour and its collected talks is live if you want to listen in on #CNTour09.

Hopefully, if you had any interest at all in listening to my demented ramblings, I will be coming to somewhere vaguely near where you live - drop by and see the talk and harrass me with questions that I won't be able to answer and then we have a drink and talk less seriously.

If I'm still not coming anywhere near you or if you have to go to your cousin's wedding on the night I am passing through your city - don't worry. I am currently in the process of building out video for many of my previous talks - including this one - and I hope that over the coming months you'll have access to this material in video format that you can watch in your underwear while eating ice cream, or on your iPhone on the bus - or both.

Hope to see you somewhere between here and 32 degrees North latitude.

(No, I don't have t-shirts, but I promise if I survive this and do it again next year, I will have some made.)

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.

The pen 2.0 is mightier than the pen 1.0 which was mightier than the sword 4.3.8

Pat sent me this. But since it is a year + a day since he updated his blog, I'll post it here for him (slacker).

I'm not much of a 'gadget' guy (yeah, yeah, ignore the phone). I am much more into general purpose stuff - a computer, a camera, a phone, etc. But as computing gets more and more embedded and ubiquitous, things that once were 'gadgets' now are cool-ass fully-functional parts of the computational collective that is devouring us all.

I like this.

I dislike - as any sane person would - the need for custom paper... but at a $150 price point it's kinda irrelevant. By the time we solve the paper problem (which is tricky, yeah) the price will be down to 1/64 what it is now.

By 2020 (or hell, even 2019) we'll be buying 8-packs of these the same way we buy Bics now (err - wait a minute... I can't remember the last time I bought a pen... where do they frikkin' come from??), and they'll be fully wireless and dumping their data to a PC in real time whether you're drawing with them on paper, on a white board or in the air.

So. Cool.

X-tra Powerful Stuff

So with the insanity of production in the past, I finally had the time and energy to start replacing all my obsolete hardware. For those who haven't recieved an email from me with the pleasantly lame default signature 'Sent from my iPhone' that Apple so humbly provides with every new device sold, I can report that I have given up my 5 year old 6GB Nomad Jukebox Zen, my horrid little Nokia phone and my Palm Tungsten C (which I had stopped using a couple years ago already) and replaced the whole mess with a new iPhone 3G, cheaper and superior to all of those things combined in all ways except one.

Having to have one *.wma copy of all my music to play through Windows Media Player and stream to my X360 and another *.aac format copy for my fucking iPhone is lame. Lame beyond belief. If Billy and Stevie would just stop fighting the world would be a much better place. Although, it looks like perhaps Steve is willing to make some compromises.

I also ditched my starting-to-fail Sony Cybershot DSC -V1 digital camera, which had served me very well for a lot of years in a lot of exotic places. I hardly ever bother to take 5 megapixel shots on it, as 3 megapixel shots always seemed just fine to me for viewing on a monitor or streamed to my X360. Consequently I was happy to get a new Fuji Finepix F100 for Christmas. It only shoots 6 megapixels instead of the now absurd standard of 10+ (something like 4x the resolution supported on a 1080p HDTV... wtf?). It also gives up some of the 'pro-sumer' features of the DSC-V1, but in exchange it is much smaller and lighter, and has a 6x optical zoom. The comparative bulk and the 4x optical zoom of the DSC-V1 (and the standard of most good hybrid cameras) were the drawbacks, and I am much, much happier to have a 6x zoom instead of 4 million more pixels I will never use.

To cap it all off, though, the real wonder purchase is what I am working on as I write this. After 4+ years of use, I am sad to report that my Dell Inspiron 700m is on its last legs. I have been watching for a good quality small (<13 inch) laptop to replace my Inspiron for over a year, but with that family of small laptops all but retired, I was getting a bit concerned. Finally, Dell has released the XPS M1330, which is not only about 10x more powerful than my 700m, it is also lighter, and well... just plain better. Sure it is about an inch wider and a half in deeper, but the form factor is nicer, the screen is bigger and its significantly lighter. Plus - though I haven't installed it yet - I am pretty sure I can run Far Cry 2 on this thing in mid-to-high configuration. The XPS machines we had in development were real beasts, but I've seen them get smaller and faster and better for a good couple years and am more than happy to be working on one now.

Here's lookin' at you - algorithm...

Two interesting links floated around work in the last couple days. Both related to visualizations of information or information processes.

One was this beautiful work being done by Alex Dragulescu at MIT Media Lab where he is feeding patterns from software viruses into 3D software to create visual representations of what they 'look like'... and I have to say they are very... viroid... be sure to look at the full size images.

The other was this cool web-based chess program that shows you what the computer is thinking. Go play a game. At first you might think 'so what - this doesn't enlighten me much, it's just pretty...' but play a WHOLE game. These screenshots show how the patterns of chess evolve over the course of a single game. It's fascinating actually seeing how the huge complex patterns break up somewhat quickly into overlapping patterns of lines of attack, and then devolve into tight defensive rids and huge sweeping lines for the losing and winning sides respectively.

What I wonder is if this information would be useful in teaching certain kinds of people - people with certain ways of thinking - how to play better chess. It certainly offers an alternate abstraction of the information that we get from observing a chess board. One feature I would like is for the creator to allow you to set up any board position you like - or even to feed entire games to the brain and see the patterns for each board position. This might allow a rich and interesting analysis of classic chess games and might offer interesting insights into how and why certain strategies work. Maybe I should fire a mail off to the ChessMaster team and get them to hire this guy and integrate this. That would be cool.

Anyway - beautiful stuff - these two things made my day.

The Olsen Saga - Part VIII - Olsen vs Mr Freeze

So I was getting a bit worried having not received my shipping container to send Olsen back to the repair center, but it arrived today. Three days. Totally acceptable considering that Montreal was nuked by like 30cm of snow Tuesday night and is still recovering. We're expecting another 30cm Saturday, and I assume the storm is engulfing most of the Central/Eastern region. It will probably delay the shipment to the repair center, and back... so I'll consider 3 days additional transit in the whole equation due to Act of RROD... I mean God.

Anyway - the set-up was EXACTLY the same as last time. In fact - the foam padding seems a little less firm and seems to be rubbed off on the edges. I wonder if they are recycling the packaging? Regardless - as of this writing Olsen is en-coffin-ated and ready for hearsing off to Purolator tommorrow AM.

The Olsen Saga - Part VII - RROD

I feel like Frank Herbert or something... after the first triology becomes two trilogies, and we think it's all finished, I have to suddenly write another trilogy.

I came home from work today at around 8:00pm and turned on my new improved Olsen so I could pipe some MP3s over my wireless to play through my 360 connected to my sweet home theatre. Alas... RRRRRRRRROD!. Sure enough, Red Ring of Death, and my heart is filled with sorrow.

So I open the relevant support page on XBox dotcom and confirm the issue.

• 3 flashing red lights - CHECK
• powersupply light is steady green - CHECK
• turn it off, wait for 10 seconds, try again - same result? CHECK

He's dead.

Well, this saga begins very much the same way the last saga did (ironically both of them started in the same time frame - right around GDC - I wonder if there's a correlation there?). I phoned 1-800-4MY-XBOX at 21:20, March 3, 2008.

I spoke with the automaton 'Max' who had me in a Support call queue by 21:22.

I was on hold for about seven minutes until Jarred answered at 21:27

I explained the problem, confirmed my contact info, gave him my serial number, and had him politely remind me that although my original coverage had expired, due to Microsoft's generous extension of the warranty, I was still covered under the new 3 year plan.

I explained the steps I had followed to troubleshoot already, and Jarred put me on hold for another 3 minutes until 21:30. Then he came back on and told me (surprise) that I had a hardware failure and would need to send the box in for repair.

A shipping container like this one should arrive from Purolator (probably tomorrow or Wednesday if what happened last time is any indication) and then I can pack up poor Olsen and ship him off.

I have my handy reference number and they say it will two to three weeks. Let's hope they fare better than last time.

Portal - The Cliff's Notes Version

Finally got Guitar Hero 2 a couple months ago, and now Guitar Hero 3 is out. Then came Bioshock. I grabbed Battlestations: Midway and DiRT (someone has to play games that aren't getting 10/10), and also grabbed Halo 3. Assassins is next week. Call of Duty 4, Mass Effect and Crysis are less than a month out. Waiting anxiously for Blacksite. GTA IV, Mercs 2, and my game are coming in spring. R6:Vegas and Viva Pinata are still in the plastic on my shelf... how the fuck am I going to find time to play HL2: Episode 2. Or Episode 1 for that matter?? Nevermind Team Fortress 2.

And shit... Portal. Now here is a game that is coming totally out of the blue (from the yellow?). I expected it would be a clever little puzzle game not worth spending my time on (with apologies to the crew at Valve - I should have known better). Turns out there is this odd industry wide shockwave of people saying "holy fuck I can't believe it, but this is the game of the year...". You're kidding me?! Leave me alone. I don't have time for this. Will just ONE of the twenty games due to ship between September 2007 and March 2008 please, please, please just suck so I can have a rest?

For those looking to get the feel for what Portal is about, but who just don't have time to play it, here's the Cliff's Notes version in Flash... I'm having a blast with this. And sadly, unless someone, somewhere, drops the ball and one of these games turns out to be crap, this is all the Portal I might have time for.

NY Times Disses Halo 3?

Okay, not really.

Jurie, over at Intelligent Artifice linked off this op-ed piece from the NY Times last week that I only got around to reading yesterday. I was honestly surprised at how insightful the article is. Normally games coverage in the mass media is dull and lifeless at best, or part of a blind witchhunt at worst, but this article really cuts to the core of important standing challenges in game development that people in the game industry are working hard to solve (even the guys at Bungie, whether Daniel Radosh knows it or not).

Radosh lines 'em up and knockes 'em down: Halo 3 is the Pong of of 2007. Cinematics undermine feelings of agency. Games are 'backward looking', and we game designers have still failed to fully formalize the language of our medium. "Transformers" is not art, Bioshock's reach exceeds it's grasp....

While any one of these statements is worthy of thousands of hours of debate, what's important here is that these ideas are starting to creep out of the pages of game design blogs, out of the post-lecture corridors of GDC, and into the popular press. There's not much in Radosh's article that I haven't said myself (and I'm not typically being original when I say this stuff) - but my 100 hits a day is insignificant compared to the Times. More people probably read that article on the day it ran than will ever read this one in the entire time it sits here.

You should read it to.