snagger.org http://blakeellison.posterous.com Most recent posts at snagger.org posterous.com Mon, 27 Feb 2012 00:57:00 -0800 Being Elmo http://blakeellison.posterous.com/being-elmo http://blakeellison.posterous.com/being-elmo

I've had a sort of big-picture life quandary over the last several months, and then I saw Being Elmo.

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Being Elmo is a documentary following Kevin Clash, the puppeteer who's always played Elmo. Even though it's a documentary in format and presentation, the story is heart-warming enough to be as good as the Oscar winners from a few hours ago.

Clash came from very humble origins - a house that could've passed for projects on the outskirts of Baltimore and no means to travel - but his passion for puppetry was spotted at a very early age. He put on puppet shows for local kids and survived constant heckling from classmates. That grew into a spot on local children's TV shows, which grew into a spot on the popular broadcast show Captain Kangaroo. 

In his senior year of high school, he got his big break and met his heroes: Jim Henson and his entire crew. He succeeded before Henson and eventually settled into a steady career on Sesame Street.

Elmo is his creation, his character made from a spare puppet that was rarely used on the set. The real pivotal point in the film - spoiler alert (if such a thing exists for documentaries) - is the revelation that each Muppet character is based on a very focused character. Fozzy Bear is a Vaudeville performer, first and foremost. Elmo's character, on the other hand, is a concentrated and raw form of love. Elmo always gives hugs and kisses. Elmo loves you. 

Everyone who was interviewed for the film, from fellow puppeteers to Henson's contemporaries to Whoopi Goldberg, pointed to that Elmo character as a hidden side of Clash that only gets to come out when he's in character. 

While I'm glossing over a lot of wonderfully heart-warming details, the sum of the parts is that Clash had this passion for puppetry from his youth, and he followed it with such whole-heartedness and dedication that it led him to meet his heroes, become part of that tribe, and win great professional success along with it.

At 27, I've started to fear that I've missed out on my Elmo moment.

When I was 4 and first saw a video game, that automatic, natural connection went off in my head the same way it did for Kevin Clash when he saw the pilot episode of Sesame Street and Bert and Ernie talked to him by looking straight into the camera. 

When I was 9, I tried to learn C++. When I was 10 or 11, I subscribed to Game Developer Magazine. All the while, I played with every level editor for every major PC game that was a part of my childhood: Doom, Descent, StarCraft, Quake, Unreal. I was trying to be creative, the equivalent of sewing my own puppets together. 

Opportunity knocked for me, the same way it did for Clash. I attended Dallas gaming conventions and met heroes like John Carmack and John Romero. I worked in the gaming press - the dream job to end all dream jobs, if you were a young kid. I even worked at an actual game studio and had so much fun I preferred work to home life. I was invited to work - not just attend - E3 2009.

Yet in each case, things fizzled. The Dallas gaming empire collapsed, and my heroes fell from the spotlight. I lost my gaming press job after a couple months. I lost the game development job after mere weeks. The publisher that tentatively hired me for E3 backed out. 

The games industry - my own calling since birth, as I saw it - chewed me up and spat me out multiple times. My desire to work a job that would last, and one where I'd be taken seriously, led me to Rakuten. 

I feel good about Rakuten - it connects a lot of dots from my past including the Internet business, business strategy, working globally, and of course the Japan thing. 

My ultimate, eventual goal is to be part of a creative place. The Pixars, Nintendos, Sesame Workshops and Apples of the world have in common one thing: love. As Al Gore put it at the global tribute to Steve Jobs, Apple has it. Pixar and Nintendo both have it, if you go read the books about those companies. Valve, too, has it, as its legions of fans will attest.

Kevin Clash has it in spades, obviously. And if you watch his documentary, you'll notice that the same Henson Workshop puppeteers from the 1970s are still around and have aged very gracefully in lives filled with happiness and passion.

My only fear about Rakuten - a company which is kindly giving me a job, a paycheck, training and a position with advancement capability in a sector where I have passion and experience in my favorite city in the world - is what happens to creativity in a business (and consequently a career) with success and failure defined by metrics.

"Suck it up," you may say to me. I should be thankful I'm employed at all. I should have to do some real work and pay my dues. Everyone else does "work work" and I'm not deserving of escaping that.

Feel free to say those things to me. Just keep the volume low enough that the four-year-old me can't hear. 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:35:19 -0800 How was the Zelda Concert? Well... http://blakeellison.posterous.com/how-was-the-zelda-concert-well http://blakeellison.posterous.com/how-was-the-zelda-concert-well
Back in early January, I got to use a birthday gift I was given back in December: two tickets to the Legend of Zelda performance at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra.

I got a couple questions pretty frequently following the show. From Dallas Arts District regulars: "How was Jaap?" That referred to the DSO's celebrated conductor and was an easy question to answer: he wasn't there. An Irish woman conducted the performance as part of the touring company that was putting on the Zelda concerts around the nation. 

The other question - "How was it?!" - is much harder to answer. It depends on what you think about games and what you know about music. 

"It was definitely an experience," I wrote to my brother, who I had unsuccessfully begged to come down from Oklahoma to join me at the concert. A professional musician and a devout Zelda player who even managed to sneak an Ocarina of Time reference into one of his successful compositions? Who should come but him? (On an aside, the excellent writer, world traveler and equally passionate gamer Hudson Lockett was an even better bromance-date for too many reasons to list here.)

The definitive trampling all over classical music tradition was in plain sight from the moment we walked in the place. Dress was all over the spectrum, from dating couples in suits and black dresses to cosplay groups in little green, elf-like Hylian outfits. The giant white board above the stage, visible in one of the pictures with this post, is a washed-out video screen that showed video clips from the games being referenced in the music.

The idea, it seemed obvious, was to educate listeners about what places or moods are being evoked within the music. The piece that we had all been assembled to hear was the "Symphony of the Goddess," a four-movement 'symphony' composed by an American spanning the Zelda franchise and a name derived from the latest game, Skyward Sword. 

The 'symphony' was, Hudson and I agreed, just an elaborate medley. Individual movements were medleys from individual games, so there was very little depth of atmosphere. Smaller details typical to the classical music tradition, such as the conductor's handshake with the first-chair violin, and not applauding between movements, were forgotten entirely.

Worse, the DSO sadly didn't do this music justice. The pianos and fortes were all in the right places on paper, but the group generally had a lack of chemistry that would move the audience. It sounded like the DSO hadn't had much rehearsal time at all with our Irish conductor. Criminally, the Fairy Fountain theme (you know it from every Zelda game's file selection screen)...

...was utterly butchered. No other way to put it. The poor harpists had to play their shortest strings to get those notes out, but by the looks I got on a video screen close-up, one player was older and had arthritic fingers that caused her to miss most of her notes. Stranger still, our composer thought it wise to do some call-and-response thing between the two harpists, but all that did was mess things up further when one player hit her notes and the poor other one didn't. It was cringing, dear-god-look-away awkward and equally painful to listen to.

So the performance itself really straddled the range from awful to (for tiny fractions of seconds) blissfully euphoric. And to cap it all off, our conductor left the stage two or three times, giving the audience the impression that they were being treated to a whole series of encores. That resulted in multiple (unnecessary) standing ovations.

That brings us back to your opinions on games and music. If you think games are art, then to celebrate them in the hallowed ground of a major city performance hall is an honor that they've earned. If you think games are the devil's work, it's sacrilege to let them into that hallowed ground. And if you're educated about classical music, then serviceable orchestration don't make up for blah arrangement, a wildly inconsistent performance, a huge video screen floating in the room shouting "HAY THIS IS THE PART WHERE ___", and all the smaller details of classical performances thrown out the window. But if you're not educated, you probably wouldn't have been bothered by any of those factors.

"You were probably not right not to come; you'd have hated it," I also wrote to my brother. A classically-trained musician, he wouldn't have enjoyed what was academically a lackluster piece of music and a bad performance to boot. Many real musicians probably committed suicide that night just so that they could roll over in their graves in response to the lack of musical convention and tradition. I honestly don't know if Kris would have been in that group.

Regardless of opinions, however, the facts speak for themselves. The Zelda symphony is the DSO's only sellout in its entire season and the fastest sellout in the organization's history. The arts, always more susceptible to patronage than we like to admit, will soon notice that gamers are a powerful, loyal and untapped demographic. In their (our) defense, is it so wrong that we call into question four hundred years' of tradition and appropriate classical music as our own when we pay for the artists? Who says we can't applaud if we hear something cool? Who says video can't augment a performance? Who says we have to be educated before hearing a symphony if we now have the technology to be educated while we listen?

As a birthday present, it combined pomp-and-circumstance and one of the greatest gaming franchises of my life. How could I hate on that?

Three or four standing O's, however many there were, were one final nail after another in the coffin of musical tradition. But from those gamers, those fans, those guys and girls across generations rocking Triforce tattoos and elf cosplay: I have no doubt that all of them were from the heart.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Mon, 16 Jan 2012 23:15:00 -0800 Nintendo + Apple http://blakeellison.posterous.com/nintendo-apple http://blakeellison.posterous.com/nintendo-apple

The connection - or rather, similarity - between Nintendo and Apple is incredible.

Here are a few choice quotes from Osamu Inoue's Nintendo Magic, one of the better Nintendo books from the last few years:

"I think they have a lot in common with us in that we both make unique, interesting products that surprise people. I really respect and think highly of Nintendo. I myself own a Gamecube and a Wii." -Phil Schiller, 2008

Apple takes pride in its software development, bringing new experiences to its customers on the twin pillars of hardware and software. On that count, it's certainly not unlike Nintendo. [Nintendo president Satoru] Iwata himself agrees: "We want people to be surprised, and we want people to call our approach unique. That's what people say about Apple, too.

It's cherry-picking the numbers, but if you stack up quarterly sales numbers from 2005 through 2008 the lines are identical. Apple's are higher by a steady margin of about $3 billion, but the lines are identical in shape:

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That's Apple on top, in black, and Nintendo below in grey, and me creepily peering around from behind the book

The quotes are endless about how either company wants to surprise people, or focuses on R&D heavily, or holds employees accountable, or how execs use each other's products, or has been to the brink of death and back, or has millions of people waiting with baited breath before product announcements.

My personal favorite common factor about the two companies is how both reach into their back catalogues of experiences and bring them back in unexpected ways. Roughly 48% of all media coverage of the iPad has referenced the Newton (a prototype PDA from 1993, pretty far ahead of its time). Other recurring themes include the Macintosh and iMac unveils, but you'd have to find a dedicated Apple fan to get you more examples than that. 

I can give you some Nintendo ones, though. The 3DS is, in a sense, a refinement of the Virtual Boy that came about once the technology improved. Nintendo has some product failures, such as Virtual Boy, just like Apple had the entire 1990s and the Motorola ROKR. Products aside, Nintendo brings back some small details in very subtle ways. Check out this little tune, which was bundled with a DSiWare animation app called Flipnote Studio:

Seems innocent enough, until you find that someone snuck a very similar tune into a secret level of Super Mario 3D Land:

And it turns out that these little tricksters have a long history of doing this stuff. If you owned a GameCube, you may not have ever known that the calming ambient system menu music is actually borrowed from a Famicom (NES) accessory that never made it to the US:

Speaking of hardware that never left Japan, learning about Satellaview blew my mind. It was a SNES addon with a satellite modem that let players download small segments of Nintendo games and even play along with live broadcast audio tracks, creating a sort of Legend of Zelda-meets-radio drama kind of feel. 

But the "download small segments of Nintendo games" is the big thing here. New bits of content for games like Link to the Past, F-Zero and Dr. Mario were created exclusively for the service. So, in effect, Nintendo was pushing the boundaries of what we now know as downloadable content and episodic gaming. In 1995. Here's a commercial, and even though it's in Japanese, you can get a basic idea of what's going on:

So in one corner you have Apple, which tried to take the computer mobile nearly 20 years ago with Newton and failed because the technology wasn't ready. And in the other you have Nintendo, which tried to reinvent gaming by way of connectivity over 15 years ago and failed because the technology wasn't ready (at least on the small scale of Japan, which didn't have terrestrial Internet in 1995). The ideas were always there, but the means weren't.

After being an Apple user for some five years, and having read Steve's bio, I'm finally coming around to understanding why someone would be an Apple fan, someone who follows the company out of something more than attachment to the products themselves, someone who sticks by in thick and thin.

I'm understanding it because I'm the same way with Nintendo, a very similar company.

Postscript
In all fairness, Nintendo didn't invent the gaming modem. The Sega Channel beat Nintendo to the punch in 1994, but the precedent for failed gaming modems goes back way further than I ever thought. 

In fact, attempts at connected gaming go all the way back to the Atari 2600. If Wikipedia is to be believed, that failed attempt became the eventual core technology of AOL.

If Nintendo had to be 'first' at something in the field, it was the use of a broadcast satellite, although even the Golden Age-era consoles used cable TV to achieve much the same effect.

(On an aside from my aside, Ed Rotberg, the creator of Battlezone, even told me that gameplay analytics were thought of at Golden Age-era Atari but the machines needed modems to phone home. Does the gaming industry have any ideas that weren't originally thought up in the 1970s?)

And while I'm doing the errors-and-corrections segment, I may as well admit that the 48% statistic about Newton is totally made up.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Sat, 17 Sep 2011 22:54:55 -0700 A bit of politics http://blakeellison.posterous.com/a-bit-of-politics http://blakeellison.posterous.com/a-bit-of-politics Recently there was a wave of forwarded emails and Facebook copy/pasting wherein students showed their support for passing some sort of law that would forgive all student debt.

I even got it from my mom, and she stopped forwarding MoveOn.org emails to me after the 2004 election. (Then again, she moved a little more to the right in the intervening years, but I digress). My grad school classmates, my band of brothers in job searching, blew up Facebook with it.

Sounds nice, right? Drop a year's salary in debt on a Masters degree, find that it doesn't get you a job, then let the debt slide since you did the good American thing but it didn't work out for you anyway.

Too bad it can't happen. 

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Total student loan debt hit $830 billion this year, a 4x increase from just 10 years ago. American university education is officially a racket.

Remember AIG? The "too big to fail" guys? Their market cap was just $200 billion at peak and held just barely $1 trillion in assets. For $830 billion in debts to suddenly vanish overnight would be a serious, serious problem for the guys who own that debt.

And at 8 percent interest - that's what you're paying, grads! - the $830 billion easily balloons its valuation into the trillions of dollars. As much as I hate to say it, I suspect that forgiving student debt would actually be a systemic risk.

You could make the argument - and perhaps those on the left do - that if the government were to pay off those debts at face value, and the government has spent nearly as much money on deficit stimulus in recent years, you'd avoid financial collapse and still do the right thing.

To them, I wish them luck in persuading the government to spend nearly a trillion dollars on the country's small sliver of most educated people.

That said, as a student debtor, I'm obliged to say that I would support such an action in the alternate universe in which it could happen. But since I don't believe in online petitions or political action via Facebook posts, I'd like to propose some more concrete political action:

I will donate $10,000 to the campaign of the President who passes student loan forgiveness.
(*by way of a shell corporation, since it's above the limit for individuals.)

Sound crazy? It's more money than I have, yes. But it's a small fraction of my student debt and since I have good credit, I could pay back that loan at way less than 8 percent.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Mon, 25 Apr 2011 14:29:00 -0700 Unexplored territory [warning: OMG sooooo nerdy] http://blakeellison.posterous.com/unexplored-territory-warning-omg-sooooo-nerdy http://blakeellison.posterous.com/unexplored-territory-warning-omg-sooooo-nerdy
In ancient times, I probably wouldn't have been an explorer. The world was too big.

But now, the world is small. So what few places aren't well-charted, or known, or inhabited, always leave me curious.

In the real world, this is true of small Pacific islands used by Americans in the mid-20th century. There are places that were of serious importance for things ranging from guano mining to logistics in fighting against the Japanese to nuclear bomb testing. And since those uses they've been largely abandoned. 

For many of them, the US Fish & Wildlife Service stops in "every year or two" to check up. Aside from that, it's wild birds and wild cats that were brought along on ships. Maybe the occasional airstrip for emergency landings.

I mean, we could go to these places. It's possible. We just don't, because they're not important anymore. Who knows what they'll be needed for again in the distant future.

Meanwhile, think of the people who still do go. They're either military personnel there to clean up an airfield, or Fish & Wildlife staff to record a statistic or two. Are these jobs totally cushy positions because they're quiet and situated on the world's most private beaches? Or are they hideous for being so disconnected from modern society? 

I get the same vibe from the Internet.

No, really.

The absolute center core of the net is a more fascinating way to explore history than any museum could be. Just take the endings of web addresses you know and love: .com, .net, .org, .edu and so on. Then add in the countries: .uk, .jp, .kr, etc. And the miscellaneous stuff like .biz, .info, and even .museum. (All of these endings are called domains, so keep that in mind if I drop that word later on). But there's more than that. 

For a while there, you could just enter in http://to/ and that was a valid address. (That's really .to, the two-letter code for Tonga, but since there's no words before it you don't even need the dot). But there's also .arpa used in the root networks - the guys who tie the backbones of the backbones together. That's because ARPA, the US military's research agency, funded the inventing of the Internet. And their basic stuff, which was supposed to be replaced, is now keeping the entire world connected. 

Then there's a whole shadow Internet outside that system. Anonymizer software, frequently used in countries with repressive regimes, uses domains like .onion and .freenet. These things are "on the Internet" in the sense that you access them over a network with your computer, but they're also "not on the Internet" because it's not within this one big unified network. 

But it's not limited to just democracy advocates trying to fly under the radar. Allegedly, NSA internal email uses .nsa and Hotmail's internal workings are inside .gbl, so that they can't be reached easily by random Joes on the Internet. As far as your computer is concerned, it's never heard of .nsa or .gbl.

The Internet wasn't always so centralized for ordinary users, and technically still isn't. Leaving the domain stuff behind for a second, dial-up services in the 90s like AOL and CompuServe often listed what features their service came with. A lot of it involved special content or unique chat rooms, but it was also access to certain parts of what was coming together as The Internet. So they listed 'WWW Access' as just one feature alongside other stuff like Usenet and Gopher. Nowadays, things are much simpler: your ISP sells you Web access and off you go, because the Web ended up replicating the functions of Usenet (forums), Gopher (uh, just browsing), Finger (blogs) and so on. [Yes, techies, I'm glossing over the differences between domains and protocols. Apples and oranges. If you know, that's great, but I'm not burdening readers who've made it this far with that.]

But those things didn't die forever. You can still use Usenet and Gopher. Usenet fell into the hands of warez jockeys, so ISPs dropped it and you have to go pay someone a subscription for access. Gopher is around, and free, and usable right now with a Firefox plugin or alternative browsers like Camino. Wikipedia suggests that there are 150 Gopher servers hanging around. That's a tiny amount. On that alone I gather it's a little old club for old guys who enjoyed "the good old days" on Gopher sites and occasionally want to stroll down memory lane. 

But in a sense, playing with these things is like diving backwards in time. Gopher, or Darknet (which is a spinoff of the .onion thing mentioned above), lets you see what the Web looked like in the 90s. For me it's a whirlwind back to childhood. It's the only history museum that's ever been interesting, and it's because you can actually relive some experiences, however trivial, instead of looking at an object in a glass case and making your imagination do all the work. So it is as the root of the Internet, too. We take for granted that the entire thing is held together by some links that ARPA strung together in the 70s and 80s. 

What we have now will eventually be Memory Lane too. The ARPA stuff is staying in place, even with a big conversion we'll all have to make to IPv6, but the whole domain thing is about to get real freaky. They added support for foreign languages. So right now, if you're Japanese and you want to read about Nintendo, you to go www.nintendo.co.jp - those are English letters, which many Japanese aren't so good with. (That's probably why they picked up QR codes so fast, but that's a different story.) In the future, it'll look more like: http://例え.テスト. By the way, you actually can click that. Look at what it does to your URL bar!

This stuff blows my mind. IT'S SO COOL! 

Ahem. Sorry. Nerd freakout.

It all makes me wish I could see that root. Maybe it's like getting out of the Matrix and meeting the Architect. Granted, it's probably just a data center somewhere, but it's only in Hollywood that the inside of the clockworks looks interesting. The core of the Internet is put together by an offshoot of IEEE, which is a big academic body for engineering. 

So basically, whether you're on the world's most remote island, or at the center of mankind's greatest invention, you're really looking at a handful of academic types hanging around, being all academic-y.

There's an awesome book in that parallel somewhere.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:45:09 -0700 Televised racing is awesome http://blakeellison.posterous.com/televised-racing-is-awesome http://blakeellison.posterous.com/televised-racing-is-awesome In the last month or so, I've fallen in love with telecasts of Formula 1 and American Le Mans Series races. You should too, and here's a few awesome reasons why:

An amazing team sport. Winners often credit their teams (that is, their crews and engineers), while the crews and engineers treat the driver like another part of the car. That's not a lack of respect, that's chemistry to an extreme. A football team specializes only along the range from huge and fast to huge and faster. A racing team ranges from PhD mechanical engineers to dudes who can lift serious weight using their necks.

Travel the world. Formula 1 hits a new destination in the world about every two weeks. Gaming career, what? What's a startup? I totally want to do something menial for Red Bull's F1 efforts just so I can follow the team around.

Way less advertising. Advertising in American sports has gotten way out of control. The first down line is sponsored. The line of scrimmage is sponsored. The scoreboard is sponsored. The commentators' predictions for who wins are sponsored. Individual clever comments or identifications of key plays are sponsored. The halftime show is sponsored. The two-minute warning is sponsored. Instant replays are sponsored. Oh, and the postgame show is sponsored too.

ALMS? In two and a half hours of continuous racing I've seen maybe 2 minutes of commercials and a 2-minute shameless plug interview with someone from Mobil 1. F1? Can't recall any shameless plugging, at least on the BBC broadcasts. Sure, there's plenty of logos all over the cars and drivers, but that doesn't detract from actually watching the action. Nor do commercials, because there really aren't any.

Decent announcers. You might enjoy Charles Barkley's trrbl talk but I could use something a little more intelligent. Racing announcers aren't always MENSA members, yes, but they're capable of taking complicated engineering talk and reducing it down to pedestrian levels. Pretty cool.

Plays nice with new technology. F1 fan? BBC's iPlayer has you covered. Le Mans fan? ESPN3 lets you watch entire races, commercial-free. No blackouts, no regional nonsense (unless you're British - I torrent F1 since there are no US sources to my knowledge), and no other such silliness deriving from American cable TV monopolies. 

So join me and start watching so we can talk about the races!

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Wed, 09 Feb 2011 23:54:49 -0800 RIP Music Games, 2005-2010 http://blakeellison.posterous.com/rip-music-games-2005-2010 http://blakeellison.posterous.com/rip-music-games-2005-2010 Today, I finished DJ Hero 2.

(Yeah, I'm way behind on my gaming backlog, school is utterly demolishing me lately). 

It was the best music game I've ever played. When Guitar Hero came out, it was widely loved for how it enables 'power fantasy' - the ability to suddenly be awesome at guitar, without all the work and calluses. I always, always wanted that for turntables, a symbol of the music that more appealed to me, whether hip-hop or electronic. Getting to imaginarily play the part of DJ was as appealing to me as electric guitar is to white people.

DJ Hero came out in 2009 and lived up to the promise, just. It was a flawed game, a 3-out-of-5 in most reviews, but I was just happy that the thing existed. But DJ Hero 2 seriously tightened up the graphics on level 3 - better visuals, yes, but more gameplay depth, more difficulty depth, and much better music. Out of all the tracks I played, I'd only give about 2 tracks less than a 3 out of 5. Most were very good, and a large number were seriously awesome. This game is, objectively, a 4 out of 5. 

For me? Subjectively? A 5 out of 5. I'm ready to buy this game for good and keep it on the shelf forever. I love it.

But sadly, today was also the day that Activision put the final nail in the coffin. Its entire music game business is done, as are 500 employees, meaning no more Guitar Hero or DJ Hero. The train stops here. It's only shocking when viewed in light of statements from annual reports and conference as recent as two years ago: that the music genre was one of (only mildly paraphrasing here) "three pillars" of Activision's business.

Not that Activision is some sort of unique bad guy for getting out of the music games business. Harmonix (the geniuses who made this whole thing happen) was put on the block over the holidays and they've already begun shrinking. The only 'bad guy' move here was irrational overinvestment.

Anyway. It was truly a good run. Harmonix wowed and amazed us with the original Guitar Hero during the 2005 holiday season. Let's not forget that sensation of the first time we all played it. And let's face it: Rock Band was the superior product all throughout its fight with Guitar Hero, because it was Harmonix's baby. Activision was just along for the ride. 

Want proof? Look at the tie-ins when things started getting skinny. Activision looked at some spreadsheets and came back with some big, mass-market names: Metallica, Aerosmith, Van Halen. Harmonix dug into its heart, looked at the stars and came back with the trump card, the ultimate tie-in: The Beatles.

Activision was just along for the ride... until DJ Hero. Acti dug through its large organization, its celebrity Rolodex, and put together a new and original entry for a whole new set of gamers. And all the muscle that that development exercise built up was fully and satisfyingly flexed for DJH2. 

That was for the holiday of 2010. The whole genre has risen and fallen in five neat years. During that time there were some great moments for me, and for everyone I know who's played the genre. The first "oh holy wow, this is cool" moment. The axe battles with friends. The drunken band nights. The stage events. 

From here, plastic toy instruments will fade out of use but not out of existence. They'll start going for clearance at game shops, and then stores will refuse to buy used ones, and like the crazy gaming peripherals of our past they'll fade into closets and garage sales. But there are tens of millions of them out there, so they won't become eBay token rarities like some oldies from the 80s and 90s. 

So in ten years' time we'll all have old, incompatible plastic toy instruments in our closets and when nostalgia strikes we'll say, "Remember Guitar Hero?"

It was a really good run.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:30:22 -0700 Go read this website http://blakeellison.posterous.com/go-read-this-website http://blakeellison.posterous.com/go-read-this-website Game Journalists Are Incompetent Fuckwits

It's true. I worked as one. It's a crappy job.

Also, it's very convenient to simply read their aggregation of actual journalism done, the not shit journalism tag. Interesting articles are highlighted and idiots are called out. This is what games blogging is supposed to be.

No wonder everyone's making Facebook games. You can rely on viral effects to spread games instead of insidious marketing types and the hordes of barely-educated, blog-publishing automatons they command.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Sun, 25 Jul 2010 15:24:00 -0700 Shut up Internet, the iPhone 4 is good http://blakeellison.posterous.com/shut-up-internet-the-iphone-4-is-good http://blakeellison.posterous.com/shut-up-internet-the-iphone-4-is-good

In my experience, the iPhone 4 is pretty great. Relative to my 3G, which was on the verge of collapse after two years of software updates, undone jailbreaks and loads of intensive apps, it's way more stable. Not being on AT&T's California network is a refreshing reminder of what cell phone service can actually be like. Everything is way faster, which makes me appreciate how fast the network can actually be when things like Facebook updates load instantly. (Who knew that was a hardware limitation?) TomTom loads and operates quickly and navigates more accurately.

Games are great with the new processor and screen. Between Nike+ and another new Nike app, I'm back to working out with my music. The new glass is more precise and less smudgy. And I haven't taken advantage of the improved camera much yet, but I'm excited for the first time I'll snap a quick picture and think "I'm glad that got updated!"

It's smaller than my old model. And fighting with my car to get it playing music has made me discover that Bluetooth audio works flawlessly, even when I put navigation on top of the audio. It's amazingly cool getting voice navigation and music over my car stereo with the phone in my pocket.

The antenna thing is, in many ways, its Achilles heel. But in the Age of Internet Criticism, people tend to forget that except for that spot, Achilles was an all-around badass.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Fri, 05 Feb 2010 14:41:16 -0800 New rule, amigos. http://blakeellison.posterous.com/new-rule-amigos http://blakeellison.posterous.com/new-rule-amigos New rule, effective immediately:

No directly addressing days of the week. All statements like the ones below are officially verboten:

"Dear Monday: We didn't get along last week. Let's try harder this time, eh? Love, Me"
"Friday, how I love you more than your nearest brethren."
"Tuesday: Stop being so rainy. I'm le bored."

Those who continue to post such statements will be penalized 5 Twitter followers for each subsequent statement.

Look sharp, friends. The Cool Police are watching - and they beat my ass like Rodney King just last week.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:26:56 -0800 Happy is a relative thing http://blakeellison.posterous.com/happy-is-a-relative-thing http://blakeellison.posterous.com/happy-is-a-relative-thing
Life is pretty grand right now. I'm making a niche in San Diego, I've got a dream job for a research gig, I can handle the academic pressures of school, and I'm beginning to be exposed to the joys of southern California, such as lots and lots of promising concerts from artists I love.

Still:

I'd rather be in Japan. I can't spend a day without walking home from school thinking I'd rather be walking home from work somewhere in Japan, following my nose to good food and beer. And sumo on TV. And trying to understand the evening news immediately thereafter.

It's easy to be nostalgic when my life in Japan was so relatively easy, but I think what draws me most is the same thing that sent me there in the first place: the sheer unpredictability of each day. I didn't know where I'd eat, or who I'd meet doing so. I didn't know what I'd learn. For all my training, I still couldn't read a lot of the signs I'd see along the way, and they became miniature intellectual curiosities as I walked along.

And I could really go for some legit sushi right about now.

I still miss that general sensation of "I'm in a foreign land! I'm in Japan! Wowwwwww!" It's still a motivator, even after having lived there. For the last three years, I've been in Japan at least once every 8 months. I'm about to break that trend, and it's disappointing.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Sat, 21 Nov 2009 14:13:22 -0800 Blake Recommends: Winter Edition http://blakeellison.posterous.com/blake-recommends-winter-edition http://blakeellison.posterous.com/blake-recommends-winter-edition
It's been a while since I've done a round of recommendations for stuff I'm consuming. Let's fix that!

Stuff I love:

-Last.fm: If you use Pandora, switch to Last.fm now. They've really developed their ad-supported streaming radio service, and it's pretty solid. It's great for being exposed to new artists without falling into the Pandora trap of super-specialized stations that play the same 5 awesome songs over and over. My favorite feature is the presence of international music, so I have stations for J-pop artists like m-flo and Crazy Ken Band that play new tracks from them and their musical cousins. It's also a new feature on the Xbox 360, and I'm pretty sure I have it on non-stop while I'm studying at home. I've especially fallen in love with...

-Crystal Kay: Japanese-born, halfie, bilingual R&B. All the catchiness of Japanese pop music with some seriously solid vocals on top. Lots of fun to listen to, even if you don't speak Japanese.

-DJ Hero: I understand the complaints about DJ Hero. But I don't care. Even if what I'm doing in this game isn't actually what DJs do, it's a fun enough facsimile. There are enough tracks that completely kick ass to make up for the weak ones. And I really don't care about the reportedly blah multiplayer modes. I just want to do cool DJ things, and I get to do that. The art direction is cool and the game is good. DJ Hero is, honestly, what I've wanted ever since Guitar Hero came about. I wanted a game built around an instrument I care about more than guitar, and I got that. I paid the stupidly high price for this game and don't regret it. It's pretty rare that I enjoy a game that isn't critically acclaimed, at least outside the presence of diamond-in-the-rough-seeker John Martone, but this is one such rare moment. I'm going to revel in it, even if no one else does.

-Left 4 Dead 2: I have a little clique of Left 4 Dead playing buddies, and we've really enjoyed the last 6 or so months playing together. We had mixed feelings on whether L4D2 would mess that up, but after a week with the game we're all on the same page. And it's the page I wrote a few months back: It's more Left 4 Dead. How can this be a bad thing?

Stuff I just can't bring it upon myself recommend:

-Modern Warfare 2: It unfortunately fit with the trend in Infinity Ward games: an amazing, innovative, emotionally investing game gets followed up with a solid, but relatively not boundary-pushing, sequel. See: Call of Duty 1&2, Modern Warfare 1&2. 

Warning: spoilers. Skip down to Mos Def to avoid.
Clearly IW was trying to break the pattern with the infamous airport scene, but this was a hugely blown opportunity. The setup was this: you're an undercover agent sent in to root out an evil, evil former Soviet dude. So you're supposed to fall in with him, build his trust, and eventually bring down his whole empire. All of that should have been playable, in-game narrative instead of dropping you in this story's climax at the start of level fucking two. What the player gets instead is a paper-thin context from a load-screen briefing and a command: open fire on these innocent people, and go on a terroristic rampage. And when it's done, you get shot in the head and die. You play as a specific character for one level and then you're capped in the face. How much more disposable can your own in-game avatar be?

Compare that to the heaviest moment in the first Modern Warfare: halfway through the game, after you've followed this American soldier through to a climax in the Middle East, you die. You die. It was the biggest moment in gaming in 2007, and the biggest moment in 2009 is the bungled result of a very difficult development schedule dropped on IW. There wasn't time to make the player gain the trust of the evil Soviet guy, but IW couldn't spare the game this seriously heavy moment. Thanks for the mix-up, Activision. Now when anyone wants to explore the 24-esque theme of "doing horrible things to save more people," gamers will have this disappointing precedent to look back to. When will the core game publishers realize that short-term schedules impact the long-run quality of their product and their industry?

-Mos Def, The Ecstatic: I admit, I haven't given it an honest listen yet, but it's every bit as odd as other Mos Def albums. Maybe a little too out there.

-John Mayer, Battle Studies: Mayer's at his best when he's singing about things other people don't think about or can't put into words easily. His first and third albums were great for this reason, not because they were good music. So now he's adopted the most common theme of all, love, and done an entire album around it. It just seems like a waste of talent. At least two songs borrow their structures from tracks from Continuum. And what is Taylor Swift doing in my John Mayer?

PS: The cover of Crossroads is seriously lame. If Mayer is a young Eric Clapton in terms of guitar virtuosity, why isn't he showing it off here?

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Sat, 21 Nov 2009 13:11:15 -0800 The defriending thing http://blakeellison.posterous.com/the-defriending-thing http://blakeellison.posterous.com/the-defriending-thing
Supposedly the "new word going into the dictionary this year" is unfriend, the teen-drama word referring to the removal of friends from Facebook and other social networks.

Unfortunately, they got it wrong. It's defriend. Nobody says unfriend, not even 16-year-olds with questionable grips on grammar.

As of yesterday, I had 770 Facebook friends.

That's a smidge too many. Once you start asking "who is that person?" or "have I had any contact, let alone meaningful contact, with that person in 5 years?", you know it's time to cull the list.

Don't worry: if you're the kind of person who reads this stuff, you're not defriended. I'm mainly talking about people I met once at meetings or parties during college and never contacted again.

After a quick look through my list last night, I managed to bring my list down to 699, but I feel like that's not enough.

There are certain things that you've gotta do about once a year: a thorough house cleaning, IM your oldest online contacts, clean up your computer, and now, clean out your Facebook Rolodex. 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Mon, 12 Oct 2009 16:13:00 -0700 Really, are there no gamers at Google? http://blakeellison.posterous.com/really-are-there-no-gamers-at-google http://blakeellison.posterous.com/really-are-there-no-gamers-at-google

Why has there not been a single "20-percent time" project at Google resulting in anything even vaguely beneficial to gamers? 

 

Google is now The Big Dog in IT, if the price on Nasdaq is any indication. IT is inexorably tied with gaming. Ordinary office workers kill time with fantasy football or style blogs; IT guys always killed it with Quake.

It was called "Google's experiment with gaming" when it launched an abortive Second Life clone and shut it down a few weeks later. Not only was that a horrendous misnomer - that nonsense wasn't a game in the slightest - but the press sounded as if they permanently shut a door on Google's entry into an ever-growing market. Google stuck its toes in the water, the water was filled with piranhas, Google will never go near the water again. In truth, the Goog ignored the possibilities entirely, and its lack of gaming projects has left them excluded from a marketing sector.

If I had been a Google employee in the last 10 years, I would've done some stuff that gamers have wanted ever since I was just sinking my teeth into Quake III a decade ago. Stuff like:

Stats and Web integration across games
Quake III was barely on store shelves, and a stats company had emerged to track in-game performance and relay that back out to a bracket website. Basically, it automated pro gaming tournaments, gave fans the scores and numbers they wanted, and was viewable to both tournament attendees and fans spread around the world. Modern pro tournament organizers are still doing a lot of this stuff by hand, and that's shameful given the technology that was needed to give birth to pro gaming. It's just a tee-tiny baby step to bring this stuff back. 

And thankfully, someone is bringing it back. Bungie integrated basic online stats lookups in Halo 2, and really unleashed its potential with Halo 3. Players are getting a kick out of following their numbers (like accuracy, favorite weapons, best-performing maps, most likely areas to die) as much as simple stuff like Achievements. A few strategy-game makers are following suit, and Blizzard is sure to make a big feature out of it in StarCraft II. Valve also keeps detailed stats on its games for balancing and anti-cheating purposes, but its keeps all its data to itself.

Now imagine that this fun stuff wasn't limited to one AAA game every three years. Had Google thought to offer its quantitative expertise to gaming, gamers might have taken advantage by forming clans around the best-performing players, or speeding up the balance-tweaking cycle. It might have even given rise to some cool products, like Fantasy StarCraft for Korean fans. At the very least, Google would have had its name slapped on every game that had decided to open up to a sort of Google Games API.

Shareable video recordings of games
10 years ago, there were "demos," which were the term for saved replays of games. Entire matches were recorded and then could be replayed from any number of perspectives. This never really went away in PC strategy games, but they were once a standard-issue in FPS games, disappeared, and then reappeared as "replays" a couple years ago in Halo 3. These are distinct from the highlight videos you see on YouTube because "demos" or replays use game-specific data to be replayed inside the game itself. Instead of a 30-minute match weighing 500MB of compressed video, it's a 2MB game-readable data file. That's great if you own the game, but not so great if you usually play at your friend's house or just want to show off a quick move to a friend. 

As soon as the cloud took shape, the computing horsepower at Google should have tied game replays and YouTube together. Upload a 2MB demo, and in 5 minutes you have a YouTube link to your amazing come-from-behind victory for all to see. Now, Bungie is experimenting with selling this service with Halo 3 replays - but why sell a service specific to one game when Google could sell YouTube video overlay ads that are actually decently targeted to viewers for once?

------------

Hopefully those two examples show just how much impact Google could have on gaming, depending on what resources the company put to use. Whatever happened to using 20 percent time to innovate (Maps, Docs, Voice) instead of trying to replicate social networking services (the Second Life knockoff, Latitude, Wave, the list will probably go on)?

C'mon, Google. Ask around. There has to be a gamer or two in that GooglePlex of yours somewhere. Let 'em make a contribution - it could be really valuable.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Sun, 27 Sep 2009 20:44:00 -0700 This (fragile, amazing, scary) American Life http://blakeellison.posterous.com/this-fragile-amazing-scary-american-life http://blakeellison.posterous.com/this-fragile-amazing-scary-american-life

It's been a very, very big-picture kind of 24 hours.

Not only have I attempted to help a friend improve his quality of life (by way of advice on schools and skills and careers) but the TV version of Ira Glass' This American Life has left me wondering about my own.

The finale of Season 2, John Smith, borrows the concept from an old Washington Post piece looking at one complete life by piecing together the lives of seven different men, who don't know one another, but share the name John Smith, the most common name in America.

The baby John Smith was a few weeks old, and lived vicariously through his parents. Their dreams for him were big - maybe President or CEO - but they hoped for the usual things - a happy family, a life as a working man, an education.

The 8-year-old John Smith was a bit like any other kid - he went to school, he played in the yard. Like me, he looked for something to control. At school, he played the policeman whenever he could. At home, he often played by himself.

The 24-year-old John Smith was unlike me - unsure of himself, looking for direction, trying to balance a steady job with drug offenses. I'm lucky to not be in such a situation.

The 40-or-50-something John Smith welcomed his son home from Iraq, and set about repairing a strained relationship. 

A 50-something John Smith visited his father - the 79-year-old John Smith - at the nursing home every day after work. Even when the elder was in a bad mood, the loyal son was there, saying what he could to a man who was confined to a wheelchair, jaw stuck open, and said little in response. But, in the paraphrased words of the infant John Smith's father, he may have sat at the head of the table at Thanksgiving and simply silently admire d this family that he had created.

In order of age, I skipped one, because his story hit home. The 30-something John Smith worked in the Xbox division at Microsoft. He spent his time in meetings or answering emails, was tethered to a Blackberry, and traveled frequently. He had a wife and a beautiful baby girl, but his mother was on the way out the door. And the piece focused on what this did to John. To him, it felt as though everything had been thrown into the air, leaving him unable to focus on everything that he knew he had - the job, the wife, the baby, the house, the car. (The same things that the eldest John Smith had black-and-white photographs of, to illustrate this eponymous American life - one of aspiration, of acquisition, of work and of family.)

It could have been me, 10 or 20 years from now. That was the point - the whole show was essentially telling the stories that we all have to go through, from growing pains to the search for one's own identity to parenthood and grandparenthood. But the 30-something John's story hit home because I know that it's what I'll go through. Many years from now, I'll have the wife and baby. There's not an ounce of doubt in my mind. And I'll lose my mom - that I couldn't possibly doubt. And it's mortifying; it's the only thing that's made my brain grind to a halt more than the thought of my own death.

Remarkably, John's mom was very brave. "I know she's not scared, but I am," John said of his mother's downhill battle with cancer. I think my mom will have the same bravery, the same peace of mind. She's smart and self-aware that way. But like John, it will throw everything I know into relief with that one giant elephant in the room - she's going, or she's gone.

John picks up the phone to call his mom on the way home from work, but then, realizing he can't call her, he just gets stuck in an infinite loop. He can't put the phone back down as easily as he picked it up.

In 10 or 20 years, I'll have the wife, the child, the house, the car, and the job. Of these things, I have no doubt. 

Whether I'll be able to appreciate them, with the distractions of American aspiration and the fear of lost loved ones, is a different story.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:41:00 -0800 The best idea ever http://blakeellison.posterous.com/the-best-idea-ever http://blakeellison.posterous.com/the-best-idea-ever OK, so, we're in month.. I dunno, 4? .. of the world's financial meltdown. Obama's been in office for a week, and the last of the TARP money (for now) is being disbursed.

Anyone else see the Daily Show tonight? Jon Stewart's idea is really goddamn simple:

-Give TARP funds to the people
-People pay back their debts on their belly-up cars and mortgages (because that's what people do with economic stimulus money)
-Banks get money
-People crawl out of their credit holes
-Everyone gets back to zero, equilibrium, a nice place to be.

I can't find a problem with this idea.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Sun, 04 Jan 2009 19:24:00 -0800 Are video games art? http://blakeellison.posterous.com/are-video-games-art http://blakeellison.posterous.com/are-video-games-art The gaming writing itch has settled back in after a month away. Time to scratch it. This entry's pretty long, so grab some coffee and get comfy.

Every so often The Internet gets together and decides to have a fight about whether video games are, or can be, a form of artistic expression. Unfortunately, that debate always devolves into a debate over the definition of art itself. While that is, in fact, a necessary discussion to have, the net's master debaters tend to overlook that that exact discussion has proven inconclusive for all of mankind since the Renaissance.

Roger Ebert raised the ire of gamers when he categorically said that games aren't art. There's not total authorial control, therefore they aren't art. He truly made a solid argument, even if kids experiencing Internet Rage didn't agree at the time. Ebert said that we, as players, could co-opt what a game auteur wanted you to do. It's true: you could watch Sonic the Hedgehog, controller comfortably sitting out of hand, for hours and hours and Sonic would stand there and not do a damn thing until you did something with him. At the most essential level, nothing unambiguously forces you to watch Sonic's progress. I'll share what I really think of Ebert's opinion later on, but for now I'll say that I think he does the most inspired, grandiose virtual worlds - Liberty City in GTA4, or Azeroth in World of Warcraft - a great disservice.

Since the definition of art itself quickly grinds game-related discussion to a halt, I agree with those who sidestep the issue and say that games can be a medium of artistic expression, in the same vein as TV, film, and radio before it. Sure, much of what we get is mindless drivel, whether on TV or on Xbox, but the potential for art is there, just like The West Wing is much better than a reality TV show and like The Legend of Zelda is better than the latest Shrek game.

As a gaming evangelist, presenting games to the outside world, I take the common shortcut of putting games' value in economic terms. Given the time and money spent on creating and playing games in this day and age, how are we not to take them seriously? How can there not be a de facto cultural impact of something that takes up so much of our attention?

So suppose the evolution in creative mass media goes like this: radio, then TV and film, followed by video games here at the current peak. Those who explain the "medium" of video games in terms of TV and film, as often happens, are doomed to describe the medium in too constricting of terms. What about a competitive, strategic multiplayer game like Halo? What about the "demoscene," the subculture of hackers who create digital, non-interactive scenes that make you go 'ooh' and 'ahh'?

Games can give a compelling experience without narrative, to the point where games become more like jacking into the Matrix than watching a story with a pigeonholed genre. Game publishers like Microsoft get this idea, but their marketing departments are at a loss for words to describe what you actually do with games, so they resort to calling everything an "experience."

Which brings me back to Ebert: I think The Internet is quick to brand him as this jealous "old guard" of That Which Can And Cannot Be Art, but I think he's just innocently basing his conclusions on ideas that are on the brink of going out of style.

Using the existing conventions of film - or music, or literature - games have the unique luxury of crossing boundaries. A single game can use a close-up camera shot, a tense musical cue, and textual metaphor near simultaneously, which is something that a movie, symphony, or novel can't do. But games get even better, because interactivity is inherent to the form. And interactivity - like any other artistic tool like the close-up and so on - vivifies the experience.

Take Metal Gear Solid 3. At the game's end, you're finally confronted with the baddie you've been hunting since the game started: The Boss, a deadly female agent with innovative combat tactics - and your one-time mentor who speaks with a motherly tone. At the game's start, she defected to the Soviets, and your character, Snake, is the only one with the potential to track her down behind enemy lines and dispose of her. The fight's dialogue is a jarring mix of her familiar motherly tone with an almost forced "bad guy" line here and there - "Finish your mission! Kill me!"

Once you win the fight, she's not dead. She lays silent, barely moving. Snake is locked in place, posed at The Boss's feet, gun in one raised hand, barrel pointing at her head. Suddenly, none of the controller buttons work. You can't open menus, pause, change weapons, or move. The only button that works is the one that pulls the trigger.

There's no escaping it: you kill The Boss.

We've seen dramatically significant killings in movies tens of thousands of times, but no matter how spectacular the method, no matter the relationship between killer and victim, film is simply incapable of conveying this act in the second person.

Thanks to scenes like that one, I strongly believe that games already are art, and that games might even expand what we consider to be art, if certain Matrix-esque, psychological experiences are poignant enough to warrant it. Either way, we would be wise to be spending our time establishing the conventions of the video game form. I've already written 60 pages on the topic, but that's just a rough idea from one guy. Imagine what an industry full of game designers and writers could do with such a concept.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Mon, 29 Dec 2008 16:14:00 -0800 Stuff I love and do not love http://blakeellison.posterous.com/stuff-i-love-and-do-not-love http://blakeellison.posterous.com/stuff-i-love-and-do-not-love Stuff I love:

My Mac. Sorry, it's a snooty Apple User thing to say, but I started window shopping for a new machine earlier today and realized I just plain didn't need one. Back when I was a hyper gamer, everything in my machine would've been painfully old after a year and a half. Yet I've had my little Mac for well over a year and a half and I haven't had to reformat the thing once. I used to do that at least once every 6 months in my previous life. I might be lucky enough to go computer shopping once I head back to school, but honestly, I think I just need a big monitor more than I do new hardware.

Stuff I don't love:

LittleBigPlanet. Yeah, the first level is outrageously charming, but now that I'm 4 worlds in, it's just another platformer. Thanks to my newfound hatred for The Internet, I'm also not interested in user-created levels, either. Imagine my surprise when every comment left on every level is "Play my 6 new Super Mario levelz!!!" Nor do I have the desire, or the time, to make my own platformer levels.

It doesn't matter how many palettes or options or tools they give you, it would never be enough to satisfy a truly creative desire, no matter how many raving reviews come in saying that it's a "create your own.. thing" tool instead of a "create your own platformer level" tool. The reason editors for games like Warcraft III are so good is that they're built on top of phenomenally deep games - something LBP isn't. Warcraft III managed to spawn levels and modifications so good that they became their own genres, "games" like Tower Defense (now its own genre of game within iPhone games) and DOTA (whose developers are moving into full-blown game making).

LittleBigPlanet, however, is at heart a platformer, and the bulk of its creations are Super Mario Bros. homage levels as a result. I don't doubt the possibility of a few gems coming out of its online level-sharing system, but there's doubtlessly going to be too much nonsense to sift through.

This is why we pay people called game designers money in order to use research, intellect, and talent to make games that are objectively good. LittleBigPlanet is objectively good, but at this rate I may not even bother to finish the game that's actually on the disc. There's nothing to look forward to at the end of the road.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Sun, 07 Dec 2008 10:42:00 -0800 On growing up http://blakeellison.posterous.com/on-growing-up-1 http://blakeellison.posterous.com/on-growing-up-1 I've waited a while to mention it, since some Internet Detective-type users might've followed me as I exited the game site Shacknews. And in case any of them are reading now, I won't say anything about it here, but I've explained what's up to most of the people I talk to regularly.

My time there taught me a lot - namely, that being a professional blogger, specifically a "video game journalist," is just digital blue-collar work. It's not journalism, it's an extension of the cottage industry for video game PR. There's nothing professional, much less glorious, about "informing" the masses of Internet users who strive to be uninformed.

In short, it's not a dream job for the ambitious and it's really turned me off of the 'net in general, and I spend less time online than I did before. I'm more productive, just because my shiny new iGoogle homepage gets me my info much faster so I'm not surfing aimlessly.

So what to do with this newfound time and distaste for YouTube commenters?

Enter grad school.

I was finally convinced to give it a shot after years of hesitation on my part due to a fear that I'd get boxed into some mundane, super-specific kind of study and wind up living out my days being the world's leading expert on Japanese Economic Inflation From 1951 to 1953.

Thankfully, International Relations saves me from that pain, and lets me flex my cerebral muscles based on the skills I picked up in school - foreign languages, writing, people skills, and generally being a flexible kind of guy.

While part of me still mildly fears joining the rat race - as opposed to doing something dramatic and risky, like funding my own video game or TV show or suddenly becoming a musician - I've been convinced that taking the IR route through grad school will let me do real, ambition-satisfying work that I don't dread when I wake up in the morning.

And that dread is a serious issue - I've seen it take a serious toll on my mom over the years, and it instilled in me a deep distrust of work and of bosses.

It's indicative of a larger trend, the whole twenty-something issue with getting over graduating from college and resorting to The Rat Race.

But I think the biggest transition I might face is going from more self-centered to less so. I don't mean in a sense of charity or niceness to others, though I do hope to work on all that. No, I mean that our primary motivations shift from self to others. I suspect that many are forced to confront it at some point - "Oh, you got her knocked up? Time to quit the band and get a job. And a marriage license." Others, on the other hand, might consciously choose the time to make the shift, and perhaps they're better off for it.

My friend Lisa put it this way:


I have lately been thinking that the most important thing for me, rather than trying to be a famous concert pianist (which isn't really my dream anymore anyways), is to have my own loving family and to raise a child. then i would think about my own life. Is that bad?

I definitely don't want to be a famous video game writer anymore. And I'm still ambitious as hell - I'm applying to tough grad schools, and I like Type A women - but I had a taste of a simpler life in Japan, where I was a more generous and easy-to-please person, and it wasn't all bad. There's a lot of that life that may come back to me in several years, and I'm not afraid of that.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:37:00 -0700 4 weeks and I'm jaded http://blakeellison.posterous.com/4-weeks-and-im-jaded http://blakeellison.posterous.com/4-weeks-and-im-jaded If I've done my calculating right, I'm 4 weeks into my new writing gig. I still love it, for all the reasons I listed the last time we talked, but I've learned about The Media very quickly from working here.

The big, big thing I've learned is that absolutely everything said on TV isn't said for the sake of being spun - it's already been spun. Not to get political here, but the spin on Sarah Palin, for example, isn't "She's an oil-drilling charmer" vs. "She's an insane, corrupt babymaker." The story came pre-spun - make a VP selection so bad that the world's incredulity monopolizes what's on TV.

The result? Barack Obama's face hasn't been seen at all in the last 10 days.

I'm not getting political here, I'm making a point that Karl Rove is alive and kicking, and his mastery of The Media is more clever than ever.

The last thing I want you to think is that this is just about politics. I'm seeing first-hand how - even in video games - bleeding leads, controversy leads, even on occasion speculation leads because it gains traffic from your own users bitching at each other and at you. It's the tabloid effect in full force. I've already passed up countless interesting articles on great game design, or genuinely interesting news about games that aren't big enough to draw any sort of traffic.

All in all, I get the impression that maybe 10% of what we see as 'the news' is the interesting stuff, and the rest is what sells ad banners- I mean, commercials.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/204085/n7901690_47301950_935.jpg http://posterous.com/users/4bhwSFzfEBkB Blake Ellison blakerson Blake Ellison