Citizen Kane of Video Games

Everyone knows I love the Prime series, and recently some ABC News report named it the Citizen Kane of Video Games.

More interesting, however is Mark Pacini's (Director behind the series and one of the founders of Armature studios down in Austin, post Samus) response today.

Definitely worth a quick read.

How fanboys see other operating systems

Haha OMG hilarious. And true.

The story

I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine a few weeks ago that struck a fascinating chord. Somehow we got on the topic of dating and first dates and the awkwardness of the last moments. At one point after a sip of margarita he said, "I don't know - I'm just not the kind of person to kiss someone on the first date." Curious, I asked why. Very frankly, the shrugged slightly and looked me square in the eyes and said, "That's just not how the story goes." A few weeks earlier I had a drink with an old female friend from college who mentioned that she doesn't enjoy romantic comedies at all. Why? "Because they're so unrealistic."

Over the last few weeks it led to more introspection over a topic I've thought much about over the years - how much we fall in love and chase after ideals we've found in movies and fairy tales. To be totally curt on relationships: do you fall in love with the girl or with the story? The story varies by person but usually goes something like this: work hard in school, find love, graduate, find the job of your dreams, get married, buy a house with a white picket fence, a dog and a few kids, and they lived happily ever after. The steps may be slightly different and include other steps or in a different order, but I bet you've heard the story at least once before.

It's interesting to see how many people (including myself) have fallen into that - falling in love with the story they hope they can achieve in their current situation and letting that infatuation totally overpower the realities that are present. I think in a lot of cases it's what causes you to do things for seemingly unexplained reasons. Why do so many people work towards being an engineer or a pharmacist when they really wanted to be an artist or a photographer? Or date people that don't match them at all because one quality is exactly how they imagined? Usually because they cling onto the fairy tales they want out of their lives so much that they're not willing to do the hard work to mold the hands they've been dealt into something they may love even more.

I realize I'm not being as astute as I would want, but sitting here in my perfect little house with a perfect little Christmas tree and a perfect fire roaring in the fireplace, it all makes sense in my head how much this is just half of my fairy tale. So I'll go ahead and stop trying to articulate and end on the final words that came out of my tv from an episode of How I Met Your Mother:

Robin: How do you do this Ted? How do you sit out here all night, in the cold, and still have faith that your pumpkin's going to show up?
Ted: Well, I'm pretty drunk. Look I know the odds are, the love of my life isn't going to magically walk through that door in a pumpkin costume at 2:43 in the morning. But it just seems as nice a spot as any to just ... you know, sit and wait.

Flower

Flower is another game that has jumped up to one of the best "experience" games I've ever played. Some other ones: Portal, Braid, Ico and Shadow of the Colossus. Just amazing to play, and games that I almost literally said... "WOW" at the end of. Absolutely would recommend, and in the meantime, check out this link with an interview with some of the developers and their attitudes. Very awesome. Bravo thatgamecompany, bravo :)

Subtractive design

I recently went back to an old issue of Game Developer to read an article I on the concept of subtractive game design. I'll let you read it and form an opinion, but at the least I agree that the games that have ascribed to a simple and strong focus have delivered some of the best and most memorable experiences I've had in the recent past. Check it out here.

Independent

I've posted about Passage by Jason Rohrer once before and recently discovered that it has since been released on the iPhone. For anyone with an iPhone and interested in art, I would strongly encourage you to download it (only $0.99). Consider it a donation to view a piece of artwork. If you don't think it was worth it after playing it, I will happily send you a dollar for your trouble.

Additionally, to tack onto this post, an interesting article about building a game by yourself, an article listing some of the best indie games of the year, and a link with some of the best quotes about the indie games space. Totally inspirational. :)

Sexiest Woman Alive

I always figured it would be a cold day in hell when I posted something from Esquire, but I just had to here. Esquire named Kate Beckinsale the sexiest woman alive. And I agree so much with that statement that it just had to be stated here.

Oh that's right - not only is she crazy sexy in her own right, she's acted as a vampire, she's in one of my favorite cheesy romantic comedies (Serendipity), she has that crazy cute English accent, she's actually a mother that spends time with her kids, and she's a nerd! She's an Oxford grad, and is fluent in French, German and Russian. Bravo Esquire, bravo.

Additionally, it's a tech post! Her "OMFG she's so sexy" montage Esquire shot was done with the crazy awesome Red Epic 5K, which is a digital video camera that shoots at such a high resolution that photographers can now get the same quality of shot in video as they could with a still. Which literally means that (to quote the Gizmodo article):

This makes it a lot easier on the photographer since he doesn't need to know, intuitively, when the best few seconds are to snap a stream of shots—he can just point the thing and tell Kate to be sexy.

Awesome.

The guy in me is turned on by the crazy sexy Kate Beckinsale, and the nerd in me is turned on by the crazy sexy camera.

This is clearly the best news post mankind has ever created.

Awe inspiring

You absolutely must check out this story about a Malawian boy who taught himself and helped out his small family community. Absolutely amazing, and really makes you think about how different the world is in different places. Not everywhere is iPhones and the internet. Very, very cool. We need more people like this in the world.

A soul made of Austin

I made a trip out to Austin this weekend for my sister's 30th birthday (Happy Birthday Neesha!) and happily spent the rest of the weekend catching up with friends and all around soaking in Austin yet again. I'm not really sure why - maybe it's the familiar sights, the people, memories of the first twangs of independence, or just straight up nostalgia for everything I felt while living here, but I feel like a totally different person here. Different priorities, different focus, different actions. Better? I'm not sure. But certainly different.

I got the chance to catch up with my cousin, who came from LA to surprise my sister at her party (which was awesome, because she never saw it coming). Always an interesting experience, my extended family are as close to me as my immediate family, so it's always good to have a long catch up session to see the state of life we're each in. We're members of a large family, of which we (myself, my sister, my cousin in LA and his younger brother) are the final four of our generation to jump on the married-with-kids bandwagon. Needless to say, a few drinks and a nice night outside often leads to introspective life-goal conversations.

Which brings me to my (if you're poked around this blog ever, you'll recognize immediately) self-introspective point of the post. So if you check up on this for the sillier posts, just click on one of the non-personal labels on the left and look at something like 1-Ups made out of radishes.

Edit: post finished 10 days later, on 09/22/09, 12:58am.

Well, insert a ten day gap here, after becoming distracted by various things. The point I was attempting to get to is an existential one (of course). That is - as we grow up, it seems to be increasingly more difficult to focus and make decisions (or at least for me), because of all the factors that weigh in. Should I go out tonight or stay home and work? Should I get another cat? Should I sell my house? Should I drop everything and travel the world? Certainly lots of valid thoughts, of wide variety.

But really (and maybe this is the programmer in me), it seems that we should be able to fixate on one heading - some direction in which to frame what we're doing, right? Otherwise, we're just doing things for the sake of what you feel like doing at the moment - does that get us anywhere? In the world of only immediate gratification (to take a line from a friend here in Dallas), the most effective method would be to shoot up heroin all day until you died. You'd be damn happy in the process, right?

But of course (or maybe not, depending on who you are), there's more to be desired. But what is that? I sat out underneath a light sprinkle and muggy weather in the Austin night and posed the question to my cousin - where are you going? In a perfect world, where do you want to see yourself in 5 years? 10?

"Happy."

Huhn. Absolutely valid, certainly. But is that the only focus that it takes? Can you plan out what you want in the future, or rather what you think your future self will want to be happy? Surely there are some things that can be stated for sure - "I want to grow up and have a family", "I want to create the great American video game", "I want to help people and leave a positive impression on the world", "I want to have the ability to laugh at life until the day I die." The programmer in me wants an end goal that I can work towards - some level of focus that frames the actions that I do on a day to day basis. Something that when I'm sitting trying to figure out what to do becomes a beacon for where you want your life to go, "Is this helping me to _______?" Answers and focus must be a good thing, right?

I wonder, though (not that I necessarily believe it, but an interesting concept nonetheless) if it is the case that you simply can't predict accurately enough what your future self will want? When I was a kid, I wanted nothing more than to be an Astronaut, then a fighter pilot, and a Karate instructor, an artist, a husband, a father, a creator of video games, a musician, a college orientation advisor, a volunteer. So many different things that have shifted focus around. Can we really predict ourselves well enough to pick one thing to focus our actions around? Or is the moving target just too fast? Does the volatility of our mortality make it worth the effort, or should you focus on the smaller victories?

I don't know, but being on a blank canvas surrounded by inspiration is both extraordinary and gut wrenching. There are still days when I want to be something specific:

A creator
A husband
An inspiration
A father
An aide

For now, I think I'll work towards happy and see where it takes me.

The ultimate costume

Check out this post for the step-by-step creation of the best Big Daddy costume I've ever seen. With matching little sister O_O