Thank You Nintendo Wii, for bringing in the ideas. No one expects someone to take a Wiimote and make it control your roomba. They don’t expect you to play WOW with it. And they definitely don’t expect you to become a Wii-J DJ.

But we do it anyways because the barrier of entry is a lot lower than it’s ever been before, and because swinging your arms around is cool in a crowd of techno music. Now, soon, I expect people to have excellent fun with it.

What I foresee:
- Being able to execute gesture commands that interface with games will open up standard user interfaces with operating systems
- Faster processing of scripting with higher language functionality will allow end users to efficiently program any interface
- Standardized wireless interfaces with every things will allow us to interface at a consumer level
- Artists, like our DJ WiiJ, will lead the way, by creating functionality and terminology (flickstart and beatmatching)

Man he’s got some intense stares in that video! There’s entire hair product markets afraid of that doo!

Add into the mix, all it takes is one sexy woman dancing and DJ’ing and interfacing with household appliance with some sexy dance moves (did I mention a sexy woman?) in a YouTube and/or commercial.

Just as our parents saw the advent of color TV, the rise of personal computing, our children will never know that wireless interfaces with nearly everything never didn’t exist.

I think this adds to my theory that as the singularity becomes actionable, witnesses to the singularity will not be able to know it’s occurring due to the rapid rate of change around them.

Announced on Gamasutra today, the EA is jumping in with White Council.

I want to NOT be a nay sayer! I yearn to not be negative on the EA going into MMO, and the fact that the game is new technology…

I want this to be better than WoW, more popular than WoW, and not suck. I want the developers and designers to feel very good about themselves when this project launches to great success, redefining what it means to play a game in the LOTR genre.

It’s just hard to come up with the real enthusiasm for this. It’s EA - which doesn’t have the best track record and this seems to be competing with Mythic’s W.A.R. It’s LOTR, which unlike Blizzard and Warhammer, the story is told. It’s like coming to the last supper and asking what’s on the menu - we ALREADY know what’s on the menu.

I wish all the people the absolute best of luck!

OK, I get that games need to “build ambience” and games should let you get the feel of the character. But I don’t like playing dumb characters or walking through stupid scenes written by bad writers. I suspect others don’t either

In Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth you play a stupid protagonist. I ask you: if you were in an spooky town, with unfriendly, evil looking people, with only one hotel, who’s owner is a serial killer, and has told someone else that he intends to kill you… would you a) sleep in an alleyway, b) run from this town anyway possible, or c) go to sleep in the hotel’s bed and NOT prepare a quick getaway?

In fact, before this scene, your character is so stupid actually walk INTO a building, unarmed, during a firefight. While bullets are being shot. And everyone is dead and you don’t scream “Cease Fire!”

Given no choice from the developer and designer, my character went to sleep and woke up in the middle of an attack that he knew was coming. He staggered into the next room and died. And he did it two more times before he stopped playing, allowed the cthulhuoids to conquer the Earth to go rant on a blog.

Now, I don’t know about other gamers, but I don’t identify with stupid protagonists. Not in movies, when the women don’t lock the doors of house. Not on TV before the second to last commercial I’d actually pull out the macguffin (first seen in act 1). And not in games, where my stupid actions are dictated by a lack of choices. So… what would I do different were I the designer?

I would pull a James Bond, I’d fluff the bed, pull out some cards and play solitaire until I needed to kill or run. I’d also pull the boards from the window BEFORE I went to bed or something else.

Now, I know these actions are Ian Fleming and not H.P. Lovecraft, but even if the plan failed, it would’ve been nice to know I’m not playing a moron in the game. More importantly, H.P.’s stories are full of witnesses, not daring-doers, who passively react to their friends getting killed or investigate a little too far into the tenebrious and rugose. Thus, not even the game is true to it’s original genre.

Working on: The Dinosaur to Oil game. Need to playtest and iterate now.

So, fifteen minutes after I send out an email to the Cadre reviewing HL2: Minerva, someone else responds in seconds with “if you want HL2 for free, come talk to me, I’ll hook you up.”

This behavior is foul. It offends my sensibilities. It’s messed up. So, of course, I went to ask my Cadre friend, let’s call him Am, why he believes he’s entitled to this game (and movies, and music, etc.) for free. He comes up with the same claptrap we’ve heard a million times: 0) I don’t want to pay money for a crappy game , 1) there’s plenty of others who buy them so I’m not cheating anyone out of anything, and 2) I do pay for SOME games, so if it’s good enough - I’ll buy it. In this case, he defended his actions by saying he paid for WoW, which you can’t play unless you subscribe to the monthly fee.

I pretty much got this gist: he doesn’t give a shit about the developers who develop these games. In his logic, if the games were good enough, he’d pay. I suggested he use demos first and his response: Demos don’t give you the full game.

At that point, I realized that Am should to be castrated, strung in the spokes of a wheel and left for carrion.

So instead, I started the following thought experiment:

Stage 1: In a population of Players. Each player has two resources: Time and Money. In our population, we have

Bobs, and
Game Developers aka Devs

And the following rules

Player spend money over time to survive. No money == death.
Bobs generate money over time just because they have “real jobs”
Devs generate games over time
Players want to be Happy
Games make players Happy
Devs only get money the sales of their games (let’s not go into Advergaming here).

Now, were we to use a strict population control model from Dawkin’s Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype books, I would expect equilibrium to be met quickly. And we all know that some people, we’ll call them Ams, steal games and let’s adjust the model.

Stage 2: Introduce the parasites.

Bobs (good hearted, true I-pay-for-games souls)
Ams (evil no-paying slackers), and
Devs

And the following rules

Ams can steal games with an expenditure of time, rather than money.

Now, were we to use a strict population control model from Dawkin’s Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype books, I would expect Ams to thrive, Bobs and Devs to wane until a strange equilibrium is met.

Stage 3: Now were we to add a rule on top of this:

Devs and Bobs can grudge a player that steals a game.

Thus once you stole once, if you get grudged, you can never steal again.

You’d end up with a standard grudge model, which has a good equlibrium. Thus, I encourage everyone else: don’t play with theives. While this is totally impractical and draconian, it a fun fantasy to roll over the brain.

Now, before you condemn me for being a republican, it just disturbs me that there’s a notion that someone believes they’re ENTITLED to free games. After all, Tic Tac Toe is free, why shouldn’t [Insert triple-A title here]?” More importantly, opening up the discussion with these people is like discussing evolution with fundies. People like Am are never going to change their mind until someone steals from THEM.

And that’s a sad truth. If a game gives you a smile or exposes you to a thought you didn’t have before, you should be willing to pay for it. If you don’t want to pay, then wait until it becomes free.