IdeaFestival 2008

I've been meaning to visit past IdeaFestival sessions, but this weekend I found two in particular that I wanted to see: Teller (of Penn &) and Jane McGonigal. Teller's session was as I expected, amazing. It was like one of his essays but with sound and life. In my wanderings through a large swath of gaming blogs and discussions I've followed Jane McGonigal in that way that celebrities in such a small niche wash in and through the blogs. She didn't deliver anything that was surprising or unknown to me, but it was fun to watch people that don't spend as much time thinking on it as I do taking it in and talking about. In some ways it was just wild because it was so close to home in what I read and discuss with so many people through the internet and here it was live and in person (and not initiated by me and with a better presentation than my own ramblings)-- in Louisville, at least for an hour.

IdeaFestival is interesting as a project to bring together a diverse survey of big thinkers across the spectrum of human endeavour. It's neat. These two lectures were the first I experienced and I came away feeling like it wasn't as good as it could have been. It particularly seemed that with such a wide spectrum of things on the schedule the event needed more scheduled "burn down" time. Ideas are great, but often the conversations about the ideas can as important, if not moreso.

A good portion of the audience, like me, seemed transient, picking and choosing between lectures with nary a reason to communicate or socialize. There were a few groups that I saw conversing, but most of these were tightly packed ...

My Unfinished Norse Project

Nascent and perhaps never to be finished, but relevant with respect to Too Human was a project I played with a couple of years back reimagining Norse mythology through a sci-fi lense. It was begun as a project for NaNoWriMo. I figured that aping Norse mythology might make it easier to write and more likely to finish, but I got caught up in research and world building and never quite came up with a story path that I was comfortable with, partly because I was certain I didn't want to tell a Ragnarok account and partly because with all the world building I was more interested in finding some sort of exploratory reason to wander throughout the concept, but I'll come back to that.

The only piece that I actually "finished" is the brief "future Wikipedia page" Creation Myth, which I never could decide if it was more fitting as introduction or appendix to a novel. It sets things up pretty simply as a norse-influenced colonization effort, admittedly similar to the backstory of Pern amongst other works. The general idea was that with a whole solar system to play with each of the worlds of Norse mythology gets its own planet. Ymir, the great giant, is the colony ship and Audhumla (Ymir's cow) it's mind vault and gene bank. I believe the idea was that the old frost giants were the cryo-stasis "old crew" of the ship and the new gods the rebellious first restorations/creations of Ymir's mind vault.

One of my favorite conceptions of the project was the use of Yggdrasil, the great world tree, as a solar system spanning space elevator complex, "rooted" in the outer planets and asteroid fields (drawing materials from them) and "grown" towards the solar system's sun ...

Too Human: The Wonders of its Flaws and the Paucity of its Story

Too Human is almost fascinating because it is mediocre. Most of its flaws, beyond the obvious graphical glitches or industry par bad voice acting, seem deliberate and it could just be from sort of "design by committee" or it could be from actual attempts to branch out and attempt originality just outside the standard lines of (A)RPG design, that just don't quite grab players the way the designers were hoping/expecting. In theory there are a bunch of individual pieces that could work well on their own: the crafting system is complicated and well balanced on top of an interesting random drop mechanics; the skill system seems interestingly diverse and assumedly well balanced; the random naming system is fun and amusing; the right stick combat system, at its best, is a unique take on the Diablo mouse click system and kinder on the fingers than traditional button mashing; the use of Futhark in the UI is cool (but underutilized in my opinion). Together the whole seems somewhat haphazard and underwhelming.

I've got a level 27 Cyber Bioengineer and believe I've only the need to grind out the final boss (got two phases in before I got bored last night) to see the end of the campaign story. I've been playing Too Human in contrast with Castle Crashers and I find the "stick mashing" a little bit more fun than the button mashing, and Too Human's odd pacing (long walks, the wells and Aesir, weirdly long death animation) does a better job of keeping me from "battle fatigue", but Castle Crashers does a better job at intangible rewards (more interesting music, more variety in the animation and level design).

It should come as no shock that rather than the gameplay my biggest complaints are in ...

The Power Outage Adventure

Hurricane-powerful winds tore through the Louisville area yesterday and my parents' neighborhood lost power along with over a million other homes and businesses (just under E.ON/LG&E). Still no power today, so I'm sitting in the (awesome) Heitzman Bakery and Deli on Shelbyville Road. Nothing reminds you how much you rely on power like over 24 hours without it. Current estimates for the outage range anywhere from 48 hours to 1 week... I was hoping to get homework done yesterday and today, and now I'm wondering if I'll get much done at all this week. More than a little frustrating for a guy so dependent on the internet and computers for work.

On the more positive side, we're on the edge of tornado alley so in terms of preparedness this region is actually pretty well off. There seems to be less physical damage than a major tornado cluster and while power outages are a bit worse than usual, it's certainly cope-able.

Banshee Magnatune Addin Status Update

I've had a few people talking about my Magnatune for Banshee addin recently, which is awesome so I figured I should make a definitive post of its current status. First off, the good news: according to Banshee's bugzilla the next release should add support for the authenticated streams that the addin tries when given a Magnatune membership username and password, so no more ads for members looking for one click genre radio play. (I say should because I'm just using the Ubuntu PPA and haven't tried a recent SVN build.)

The sad addin news (but fun, stressful personal news): Last semester of Graduate school! The Magnatune addin I wrote was a quick weekend hack that was an attempt to explore MonoDevelop and Mono.Addins and Banshee (and a little bit of Gtk#). I don't have any time to work on the much requested (especially by myself) full catalog browser, even though I wish I did. I would certainly accept patches and would be happy to maintain the add-in, but unless I see a free weekend and a magic burst of productivity where I think my graduate work and a few other projects are in good shape, I don't expect any progress on my addin in the near future... It's on the back burner, but not forgotten. Right now I'm trying to make sure that I get that degree in my hands come December...

Blogs of the Round Table: Indiana Jones and the Quest for a Great Film Adaptation

In my followup to my own post in the June round table I wandered around some of the topics of Hollywood and Video Gaming and there's a pretty good core mantra that I think bears repeating:

The thing to learn from the "interactive movie" mess is not that "interactive movies are bad", it's that you can almost shoehorn a bad game into a good movie (Dragon's Lair) and you can certainly cross a good game with a good movie (Wing Commander 3 and UAKM), but do not ever think that it is a good idea to make a bad movie more palatable by shoehorning in a bad game to the experience. We learn that Hollywood fails to understand gaming as far back as the early 90s and that smart game companies can build good games that make use of Hollywood know-how to intertwine good movies into the gameplay.

It's about interactive movies, but I think the general principles are sound and pretty applicable to the entire intersection of Hollywood and Video Gaming. Both are subtly different art forms with almost widely divergent (but co-evolved from similar roots) tools. Mistakes happen when one or the other side underestimates the other, or tries to bludgeon their way through the other art with nothing more than a tight deadline and lots of cash.

Let me tell an allegory of two games: Long, long ago in a Californian city far, far away (to me right now, at least) was a company founded by a well to do Hollywood gentleman. This company had a vast and easy profit center in the gentleman's ...

Penny Arcade Game Pitches

Saturday during the Hothead panel someone mentioned that in one of the QA panels Jerry and Mike had talked about wanting to do a Paint the Line video game, which got me to thinking about how I would approach that game, and then to what other sort of weirdness could be drug from the depths of Penny Arcade weirdness into the world of video games. I am probably one of the few Penny Arcade readers that often prefers the tangents and diversions over the bulk of the daily strips, and I always find it funny that they apologize profusely for them.

Paint the Line, Penny Arcade's recent pastiche of 80s sports films about Ping Pong versus Communism, is the easiest to pitch as an insanely fun video game: focus on Wii development and put that ole wiggle and waggle to use in "Nearly Realistic Ping-Pong Action". It just about sells itself right there. License Final Countdown and maybe get Freezepop to do one or two other songs for the game and you've got retro-themed gold. I would even do it episodic with an epic story and call it Paint the Line: The Series, making it further a satire of television adaptations of a cult series of movies. You get a free explanation for why Gabe and Tycho only have cameos: the television production budgets couldn't afford them. Instead the player gets the opportunity to field a duo of two young upstarts upon whom the mantle shall be passed. I think it would be awesome to build it as something of a two-player co-op Ping Pong adventure. For each episode you would have two Tournament Paths, A and B, and a player could play each inter-twined or a duo of players could tackle A and B simultaneously with ...

PAX Wrap-Up

Sunday was somewhat quiet and contemplative, but also perhaps closest to my previous PAX visits, I went to demo and ended up playing a round in the tournament and didn't demo but did talk about the project some and picked up a bit more positive feedback and some tournament-derived rule changes that I was unaware of, several of which affect my game.

I took a long lunch and watched the first half of the UofL/UK game. Then I decided to finally spend some time wandering the exhibition hall. I had a few good conversations in the expo hall. Particular stand outs were Paul Tidwell with Microsoft talking a bit about where XNA Community Games is heading, going into the launch. I also met Frank Wilson of Twisted Pixel, one of the PAX 10 competitors with The Maw. (I still feel bad for not having my game further enough to compete this year, but I also wonder how I could have competed with some of the games that did make it to the floor.)

Twisted Pixel seems interesting... it seems from the website that the company is a bunch of escapees from High Voltage attempting to leave what has become a strict "franchise factory" for a more balanced existence of original development and consulting engineering for franchise titles to pay for the original stuff. Probably more interesting to me is that they are headquartered in "the Louisville area", with Louisville being the nearest big city to their home in Madison, Indiana. (It's right on the border of the Louisville CSA.) In some areas, such as San Francisco or New York, it would be potentially within commute distance from Louisville. In this area, it isn't that close, particularly with zero regional public transportation available to ease that commute ...