It seems that amidst the ever increasing bombardment of information that is coming our way, there is far less of it that translates to revelation.  Then again, maybe I’m just not tapping into the right sources.

Last week I attended the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. This was my 2nd year in attendance due to my most benevolent employer’s nurturing ways. It’s pretty amazing to see such a large portion(16,000) of the game development community come together and share knowledge. I always leave feeling like I have my finger on the pulse.

…And this pulse is a cause, with the effect being my inherited ability to know what I should be learning or focusing on. It gives a nice high level overview upon which I can more confidently determine what path to follow in my career. It can be really easy to find yourself pulled in random directions due to being constantly bombarded with so much information. There are myriad options found everywhere and having a good high level overview really helps distill this down to a smaller, more digestable set. So in essence, I’m learning what to learn.

And here’s a random list of things I’ve gathered to focus on:

curved surfaces, stats & probability, stream processing, ray tracing, lighting (cook torrance, radiosity), linux dev, assembly, modeling via 3dsmax or maya, uml like modeling for threading

Each of these items could easily each get their own post…

So I was recently accepted into Guildhall’s master’s program with advanced standing.  What this basically means is that I get to turn my Master’s Certificate into a legit Master’s of Interactive Simulation degree by completing a thesis project over the course of 9 months.  This doesn’t change anything with my job, but will be yet another thing to eat up my free time.  Why even bother you ask?  Well, I plan to be Professor Michael in another year or two so this will help get me there.  Nuts, here I come…

I’ve recently taken it upon myself to try integrate some of these snazzy sounding things into my vocabulary.  The last such one being “je ne sais quoi” which means ” A quality or attribute that is difficult to describe or express”.  It’s french and it’s smooth and in the word of the merovingian, like wiping your ass with silk.  Another one that I probably should’ve known but didn’t is “Quid pro quo” which is latin meaning ” An equal exchange or substitution.”  Anybody have some equally good ones?

Despite the vast potential of the Nintendo Wii, since it’s arrival we haven’t had much to do with it aside from hordes of minigames. It’s a platform that seems ripe for first person shooters but any attempts at it thus far have disappointingly not enriched the experience and in some cases heavily degraded it. MP3 was our last hope out that the wii could be all that it could be. The army would be proud. Go play it!

Next up: I welcome the master chief to my HDTV.

Those are the correlations we should be making with those 2 words. Somehow, the media has became stained by that stupid spoiled whore but at least one reporter has some decency. Kudos to Mika: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul3zgUfSgqY

As with most things in society, once we find something that works we innovate less and refine more. Game are no exception to this. Lately I’ve been playing the Godfather game for the nintendo Wii. It has open world quest driven gameplay in true Grand Theft Auto 3 fashion. It’s only real appeal is that it lives in the world of the Godfather and will appeal to fans of the movie. On the innovation vs refinement scale, this one weighs heavily on refinement. Thankfully, it’s refined enough in that world’s context to keep it fun.

If you managed to ready my previous post on Crayon physics, you can probably see where this is going. I really just want to redirect you toward another interesting experiment i ran across. This one is completely on the web so don’t worry about having to download anything. Check out Human Brain Cloud. It’s a really cool interface to a user contributed word association database. Interfacing databases is a really interesting subject that has had some significant evolutions in the last few years (at least with respect to games) but more on that later.

I have recently set up shop with Amazon and I highly encourage any aspiring game developers to peruse its contents. I can’t seem to properfly embed it within this page so please follow this LINK

I’m not talking about Will Wright’s upcoming game “Spore” but rather Kloonigames latest experimental game. I’ve played many of this guy’s games before but with never with so much enjoyment as Crayon Physics. The game is played on what looks like the construction paper you used in art class in elemntary school. There is a ball drawn in red and somewhere on the same paper/background lies a star. The object: move the ball to get the star. The awesomeness is in how you do this. You draw shapes with crayons to create 2d rigid bodies that affect the motion of the ball. He creates amazing atmosphere at the same time with a great soundtrack that further immerses you in the physics of crayon land. Check it out: http://www.kloonigames.com/blog/

So on a more personal note, I’ve been doing some thinking on my path in life lately. I’ve found myself in numerous and diverse groups where I’ve managed to at least hold my own or even show a degree of proficiency. Some examples(in the order discovered) of these would be gaming, playing guitar, surfing, programming, and dancing(ballroom). It was easy to excel in some of these when each activity wasn’t competing for my time but by the time I’d gotten to surfing, my guitar skills hit a plateau and then regressed. The same thing happened to my surfing once I went to UCSB and focused on computers. The trend ends here. In no way am I hardcore about ballroom dancing but it’s on the list of things that I’ve always wanted to do. So my progress is slow but steady and not placing a heavy impact on my other activities. The problem is that I can’t give due time to the guitar or to surfing without falling behind on a skill that has a heavier impact on my life: programming. The fact that I’m dividing my time up as it is forces me into the “jack of all trades” position and prevents me from mastery in any one area. Maybe I’m just being hard on myself, I dunno.

I just found another golden internet nugget.  Check it: Peekvid

http://addictinggames.com/spamalot.html

So as an aging gamer I no longer have ample amounts of free time with which to spend gaming. As it is, I probably spend too much time playing… in a fight to the death against adulthood. Ok, so i haven’t had much time for who knows how long already but the point is how someone with limited time can still play. Up front, one answer is casual gaming, typically of the java applet or flash variety.

Video games began as such simple skill based toys and somehow evolved into complex epic systems that reward time more than skill. While I don’t take issue with the scale of modern games, I am bothered by the balance of time vs skill. Take World of Warcraft and most MMO’s out there. People must put in riduclous amounts of time in order to be “good” at the game. Though it still takes some degree of skill, it’s probably not much of an issue since after you’ve played the game for a total of 1000+ hours, the ability to know what to do is given. On top of this, you pay a montly fee for it. And now we have game addiction as a legitimate condition. Arrgghhh.

Anyway, all of this was just a huge tangent and the real point of all this was that i wanted to share a really cool “casual game” that I recently came across: http://www.joystiq.com/2007/02/23/relax-play-some-speedcluster/

With the advent of On Demand cable comes the unexpected pleasure of watching movies you wouldn’t normally watch.  Somehow, I stumbled upon this intriguing film:  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064030/  I know very little of King Henry VIII and wondered how truthfully that movie portrayed the events leading up to his first wife’s beheading…  Either way, it kept me immersed for the entirety of its length.  I’m started to find myself gravitating toward older movies now.  They seem to capture some alternate reality the piques my interest.

Though I’ve been using www.pandora.com for quite a while now, it still amazes me just how great of a thing this is.  For instance, i type in the song “lost keys” by tool and am immediately shown several great artists that I never would have discovered on my own.  I even felt the impulse… get this, to “buy” music.  I know, it’s crazy but music lovers have needed a tool like this since the inception of the art itself.  So with that, I’ll attempt to contain the excitement that is bubbling within.

Lo I sit late on a saturday morning.

By morning I mean noon with coffee securely in hand.

Behold! Online are my previous coworkers doing that which I remember them doing.

I leave the computer to go enjoy life in the waters of carmel by the sea.

I leave the sea to play poker with military men who gladly give me their money.

I return to computer at 1:30am where i find my olde coworkers still doing that which i left them.

I leave the computer to sleep, content with my life choices.

There once was a man from Nantucket

Whose dick was so long he could suck it.

While wiping his chin,

He said with a grin,

“If my ear were a cunt, I could fuck it.”

Oh, those people from nantucket…  Anyone been there or possibly *gulp* from there?

After an 8 month hiatus, teh Gobriela actually wrote something in her blog.  Hot damn!