The dangerous life of a game designer

The Heart of Texas

11:25 AM

T minus 1h until take off

T minus 3h until the drugs start to wear off

Destination: Austin, TX with a layover in Phoenix, AZ

Flhying, in any elevated capacity, is a recipe for paranoia, risk of heart attack, early onset baldness, oily skin, diabetes types 1-7Z. Other symptoms may include vomiting, dizziness, mild euphoria, a skewed sense of time, nausea, spotting around the webbing of the fingers, and psychic battles with personal demons. It is not recommended that those with a sensitivity to the behavior of small children fly with us today. Halitosis is expected. 

You will likely see at least one girl you’d like to talk to during your stay here at SFO. Approach no one. You are in a major international airport. The year is 2012. The paranoia is so thick in the air, they sell soup bowls of it for $8 with a side salad. 

11:55 AM

My God, it’s begun.

The sneezing! The sneezing!

12:05 PM

It has become apparent that the arteries of commercial airlines are becoming clogged. Too many fattys with too much shit. Now please, for the love of God and America, turn off your phone sir. ‘Full off’, please.

The part where you take off your shoes, after the x-ray machine. It moved too fast. The shoes, the belts, thew alleys, all must be repersoned.

BANG! My belongings, or their remainder anyway, fly over themselves and onto the floor. I had taken too long, and instead of waiting, the grey plastic tubs of crap just kept coming through. They’ll think I’m a T for sure now. Or at least a P DUB. Person Displaying Unusual Behavior.

One strike. Mark it. 

Passenger ‘tlones’:

Failed to reperson belongings in allotted time. One demerit.

Assessment: No sign of any issues yet. Most likely a non-carrying drug user. NCDU. 

No, scratch that. Too inefficient.

NCSU. Say it with me! En-See-Soo.

Think of the seconds we’ll save! Seconds into minutes. Minutes into hours.

Don’t strain your voice attendant! I know your speaking over jumbo jet engines, but I may sue if I can claim that the attendant had a ‘combative tone’. 

“I don’t know why he was so angry with us all, Your Honor, but the way he told - No! Demanded! - we sit back and enjoy the ride - whatever he meant by that I’m not sure and don’t care to know, I’m a Bible believing Christian, you see - well I broke down right then and there”.

The airlines would be deemed incompetent for the private sector to handle any longer. After all, our citizens certainly deserve more than this.  The government is more powerful, more capable, more able to serve you. We love you, the American People. You are the Heart of America.

A large woman’s belly fails to phase through my forearm. She doesn’t stop or apologize. This is obviously routine. 

Full governmental control of travel would spell hopelessness. No way in, no way out. If we are unfortunate enough to witness another Kinetic Action Against Freedom, we are really in for it.

12:37 PM

The inside of my nose is going dry and numb. My heart is healing, but the booze has left my immunities in questionable order. 

The water cart slowly makes its way towards the end of town, and I feel a sleep coming on

An unstructured rambling about Play

This afternoon, it struck me how important play is. Play has a special role unlike any other in our lives, and offers a portal through which we may find some Truth.

Play is the perturbation of an otherwise static equilibrium. Where there is no play and things are taken very seriously we recognize ‘lifelessness’. The strictest constructs we have: office work, bureaucracy, government, taxes all lack a sense of play, take themselves far too seriously and really are no ‘fun’ at all. This is invariably because who ever designed these things took themselves far too seriously and likely had, perhaps even at one time in a gesture of play, stuck their head up their own ass. However, being a “tight ass” as they are, they could not remove it and thus became an “ass head” or “ass hat” and otherwise came to be described by the very distinct characteristic of having “their head up their own ass”. 

I believe that Play is a metaphor through which we can recognize Life. Life is neither  equalized and controlled, nor a formless swirling swirling. Life comes forth when we take what is given as an assumption and challenge the idea of that assumption critically. Give us a stick and a length of string and music will be born. Give us a measured square of fabric and stones and two armies will be raised. Likewise, give us a forest and we will create a town of wooden buildings and fill them with people. Give us a herd of buffallo and we will create warm clothing for winter.

To think critically is to breed creativity. Creativity leads to change. And change is a very underpinning of Life. Play is the interactive metaphor for Life itself.

Every video game, every stage production, every athletic competition tells us the story of a struggle. This struggle can be individual or shared, it can be an internal struggle or an external struggle, it can be many things. However, it always leads to change! Two rivals, through play, are transformed into Victor and Loser. The princess shifts was once “In another castle” but is now on vacation with “Mario…Yoshi and their friends…” (Super Mario World). 

Play pokes and prods and questions every assumption of every individual. To not play is to be like stone. It is worth noting in fact that stone is a terrible substance to facilitate play. It is too hard, too course. To even play in the proximity of stone, as two children might play hide and seek dancing around a stone pillar, will invariably lead to cuts and scrapes. No, stone is much too strict and unforgiving to let play really come to life. For it is never the intent of play to break, restrict, scrape, dictate or cut but merely to bug, poke, prod, question, and bend. So just to remind yourself of what it is to live, introduce some play into your life, don’t take things too seriously, and if you think your eyes are open but you still can’t see, you may have to take your head out of your ass.

Hello all. What follows is an edited transcript of a short fury of Skype messages sent to my design & production coop earlier tonight. I’d like to consolidate feedback on this idea so I thought I’d dig up my old blog and post here. 

If you would, please leave some feedback for me; ideas to build from, potential scenarios you think would be effective, anything you think could help propel the design.

Cheers!

If you would, please leave some feedback for me; ideas to build from, potential scenarios you think would be effective, anything you think could help propel the design.

the pre-iterative vision is that you play from the top down perspective in a 2 dimensional world, realistically, given our art resources or probable lack thereof, with a simple 8/16-bit aesthetic. You control an avatar in these worlds, able to move up down left and right as in pokemon on the original GB. That is probably actually a good art-style baseline to work from, technically and aesthetically.

The basic premise is that you control an avatar, playing as a different character in a varied number of levels. Each level has its own character you play as with their own backstory and set and setting. These characters represent realistic individuals who live realistic lives. They are all minorites. You spend a few minutes playing through a simple dramatic scenario with each character. 

It becomes common place for the player to be referred to in these scenarios with various, very harsh, racist terms, the goal of the which is to make the player understand the commonality of experiences shared by minorities and turn the mirror on their own behaviors and prejudices.

*****As an afterthought about 20 minutes later*****

Is it possible to create a social game that builds off of this idea?

Thanks for any feedback you wish to leave!

Ascension of the Geek

A lot of people have been talking about the absorption of geekdom by the mainstream, most notably Patton Oswalt in Wired magazine. If you find yourself saying tldr;, the argument being made is that because of the vast amount of information available to your average citizen of the Internet, the glory days of the geek, of being able to pride yourself on your encyclopedic wealth of pop-culture knowledge, are over. 

Everyone is a geek.

So if everyone can have the knowledge of an otaku, does that mean that those who identify as geeks have no place to call their own? Not at all. We haven’t died, we have simply moved. In a way, we have transcended.

We are Meta-Geeks. Yes, in theory, you has access to every last scrap of data available on the internet. But how do you access it, and how do you access it well?

How can you grab data fast and efficiently? What software should you use? Is RSS just a hip marketing name for Reese’s candies? Why can I only watch that new JailBreak show on the iPhone? This and more is the new domain of the Geek. 

We live in the age of the cloud. Data is effectively infinite. What is important now is not the retention of data, but the ability to sift through it. 

If you really want to keep Geek alive, you’ll also bump some more MC Chris.