The Beckett Massive Online Gamer magazine has a new annual article series titled Top 20 Most Influential People in MMOs and I’m deeply honored for having been chosen in the first set of people.
Raph is covering this, having been listed. :) Congrats to everyone!
Incidentally I got a copy of the magazine and enjoyed the _other_ articles as well. Wonder how I can get my hands on the Mabinogi beta.
Laughed so hard there’s tears coming out of my eyes. Classic!
Finally something from Polaroid that I want to buy – a camera for kids!
My godchild loves to take photos but he’s only three years old so lending my DSLR is a bit awkward so this product is a nice solution. :)
Wondering where to get one, next.
Downloading the patch as I’m writing. The downloader is complaining I’m behind a firewall (which it hasn’t before) so it’s dog slow and hitting the More Info link shows me the following:
which I guess means the support site has crashed. It’s shown the same message for over an hour. Hope the patch is slightly better quality than the install experience.
It snowed six inches last night and getting to work took almost three times longer than usual. Silly me thinking the spring was here.
I don’t think I’ve posted this before so below’s a story I adapted years ago from a Finnish original to some of my English-speaking friends. No idea where the original came from and Google doesn’t find the original, so here it is. I feel the story captures the relationship many Finns have with snow quite nicely.
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This morning when it snowed for the first time this year I checked my diary for my feelings last year from the the same period.
From the diary:
December 1st It’s 2 PM and snowing. The first snow is so beautiful. The nature becomes glowing white and the spirits rise as it’s not so dark anymore. I drank hot rum toddy with my wife, sitting by the window and looking at the snowflakes fall slowly from the sky, covering the trees and the ground. Words fail to describe the beauty outside.
December 2nd I woke up and looked out the window. Everything was covered by crystal clear fresh snow. What a glorious sight! Every tree and bush has a white cape. I cleared both the yard and the pavement of the snow for the first time this year and enjoyed every swing of the shovel. Later during the day a snowplow cleared the streets and pushed all the snow into the front of my gate. The driver smiled and waved and I waved back as I started to clear the front of the gate again.
December 3rd Last night it snowed six inches and the temperature’s a couple degrees below zero. The trees in the front of the house lost a couple branches due to the weight of the snow. Cleared front of the house of snow. As I finished the snowplow came. This time the snow was brown and grey.
December 4th The weather got warmer, the snow melt and then froze and got slippery when the temperature dropped again. I fell on my ass on the ice and felt something snap. The clinic only charged 50 euros and fortunately nothing was broken. Weather forecast says more snow is on the way.
December 5th It’s still cold. I sold my wife’s car and bought her a jeep so that she’d be able to get to work. My car slid and hit a rail and the right front corner got trashed pretty badly. It rained close to seven inches lash night. Streets were salted to melt them down and now both the cars are covered with salt and dirt. Cleared front of the house of snow. The goddamn snowplow drew past our house twice today. I somehow fail to be grateful for all their extra work.
December 6th Ten degrees below zero. More of that bloody snow. The yard doesn’t have one tree or bush that isn’t damaged. The electricity was cut almost the whole night. I tried to keep the house warm using candles and a gas generator. I splashed some of the gas on the floor and on top of myself, got it lit and almost burned down the whole house. I did manage to douse the flames but got second degree burns on my hands and lost all my facial hair. I lost control of the car while driving to the clinic and broke it apart totally.
December 7th There’s more of that white crap coming down all the time. I have to wear every single piece of clothing I have to go to the mailbox. If I get my hands on the asshole driving the snowplow I’ll rip his heart out. I bet he’s behind a corner spying on when I’ve cleared the way! The electricity is still out. The water pipes froze and it looks like the roof won’t take the weight for long.
December 8th Six new inches of that f**king snow and sleet and ice and Lord only knows what the shit was that fell out of the sky last night. I tried to hit the snowplow driver with an ice pick but he escaped. My wife left me. The car won’t start. I thing I’m getting the snow blindness. I can’t move my toes. I haven’t seen the sun in weeks. The forecast promises more snow. The wind make the air really, really cold. Oh f**k it, I’m moving to Spain. I’m so pissed off! The f**king snow and the whole winter.
Freely translated from the email I just got: “The songs sold in the Music Store are very high quality files protected by Windows Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, which you can listen to using your computer and your mobile device.” I find it interesting that Nokia enters the music market with a new store with DRM, just as pretty much all other stores have learned the lesson and are dumping the technology.
The deal smells like new N-Gage.
The site doesn’t even let me in to check what it looks like – I’m just getting the Mac’s not wanted message.
Tim Sweeney on PC games market: “World of Warcraft has DirectX 7-class graphics and can run on any computer. But at the end of the day, consoles have definitely left PC games behind.”, followed by “The biggest problem in this space right now is that you cannot go and design a game for a high end PC and downscale it to mainstream PCs. The performance difference between high-end and low-end PC is something like 100x.”
In other words: “Those damn mass market gamers must be blind for not demanding 64-bit HDR! My business built on pushing more and more polygons to the screen every year is going bust! Must be those PC manufacturers not promoting the 3D accelerators enough!”
Dear Tim, the games industry is shifting. You have very, very cool technology but it’s aimed mostly at the core gamer. Most companies have now realized there’s more money to be made aiming at the mass market. Instead of whining about this, how about cashing on the phenomena? I’m sure you could.
I have a theory why the websites which have successfully utilized user generated content in form of photos or video generally don’t look anything at all, or are butt-ugly. Here it is:
If your website is so ugly or blank that a user customizing a page on your site can only improve the page, 100% of your users have a chance of feeling gratification for having authored content, no matter what their level of skill is.
Conversely, if your site has strong visual identity, Joe Average will feel pressure to match the level of design he sees on your page. If the only thing Joe has is a badly lit photo of himself with a massive pimple in the middle of the forehead, it’s harder to upload that to a site that looks like it could be presenting Gucci models than to a site that looks it’s done by the geek down the road.
It’s so simple it has to be true. :)
I made a behavioral observation when stepping out of the bus this morning that I though was somewhat interesting. As the bus stopped and I was standing up to the aisle, a girl was stepping to the aisle on the other side. We were both listening to music on iPods (the white earbuds are just so discernible!) and hence had to negotiate who goes first by using hand signs and by pretending to speak to each other. We both mouthed something around “you go first” and hand-signed the globally recognizable “you go first” hand-sign of passing the hand to the direction of expected movement.
I realized this happens all the time now – people are aurally in a virtual music world (listening to music on an MP3 player) and have to communicate without sound. Looking at people obviously listening to music, there’s a pretty broad range of behavior that emerges from this, from totally ignoring others leading to bumps to being extra careful and polite while not actually uttering a word in real world. Obviously all this did happen before but at least in Finland, only the MP3 player phenomena has resulted in massive adaption of having the earbuds on all the time.
Given that deaf people have had to live in this land for long, it made me think if this has any implications for understanding people who have to live without the real world sounds. Or if we should be looking at how the deaf deal with signage in situations like above.
Makes me wonder how long it’ll take for us to realistically model all this in a way that’s intuitive to use. I know there’s a lot of research being put to this but so far the results seem to mostly be in the deep recesses of the uncanny valley.
Whew. First talk at Worlds in Motion in GDC is over. Went pretty well, got the whole audience laughing a couple times. ;)
The second talk is on Friday, interesting to see how many people turn up.