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heh
As much as I love Civ games, I miss two of them sorely: Master of Orion and Master of Magic. Both of these old Microprose games were the dog’s bollocks. After years of games, nothing’s come close to being a good game and I believe it’s for the same reason. In the old days, you had restrictions on programming that caused the developer to cut out ALL extraneous bullshit.
In Master of Orion, you control a civilization race and attempt to take over the galaxy. The limitation was that the more powerful you got, the more likely an evil race of alien creatures would come and annihilate your colonies, eventually leading to a big confrontation.
Every game since then that has tried to inherit the title has been mired in the depth of reality, not realizing this is a game. Galactic Civilizations over at Stardock is the closest inheritor to Master of Orion, but even so it’s got a 1 ticket to win strategy that many civ games have.
[Hint: throw all the race configuration points into Morale and tax the fuck out of your peeps until money’s coming out your ears. While growing your culture, tech-invest in Planetary Defense and troops. If you break the tech curve, it’s over for the AI races.]
Master of Magic is Civ with mages. Very powerful mages. Sorta like the CCG game only less expensive to win at. Might and Magic is the worse, palest imitator.
Now, with the RTS imitator, there’s no game that will follow behind it. So many players are about the agressive win vs. the long term sandbox, lost in meandering thought games. The market has died.
Sad, sad, sad….
For a while now, I’ve been following the talks over at Ted.com. I honestly don’t care why Teddites are doing what they are doing, but they are doing COOL things. Their talks are a little more and a little less than cutting edge - and they are wise, innovative, and probably some of the best efforts to mass communicate excellent achievements that occur in today’s society.
Ted has shocked me, like with the computer interface or raw data analysis demos, and it’s humbled me, especially when listening to the successes in Africa, their long climb from destruction. The most salient has been Jeff Hawkins Discussion about a Real Brain Theory. Hawkins is the genius behind handheld computing, in my opinion, and while he’s always going to known for that, unless his Redwood Center for Theoretical Neuroscience is able to achieve what he expects to achieve.
If it does, we’ll be in a wonderfully new wide world that will make life much better.
Alan Turing, once he applied some thought to it, basically made an implied behavior - effectively, if we can’t detect a difference between real intelligence and artificial or mechanical intelligence, then there’s no difference. This is a cheap shot, but a valuable cheap shot - if you can’t tell the difference between synthetic and real diamonds, then they are the same thing.
So that’s the goal, but what are the objectives? What’s the steps to achieve the goal? Hawkins has a plan - it’s of course, not the only plan, but he’s been the only one I’ve heard on in the last 4 years to bring something new in my opinion. Maybe I haven’t been reading the right literature, but it was great to stumble across this Ted Talk by Jeff Hawkins.
If you think about it, without computers, we never had a physical representation for Intelligence. Animals are obviously not as intelligent as us. Tractors, factories, mountains, weather, river… none of these things are something that compare to intelligence as we know it. We’ve had no models - until some guy got a railroad spike driven through his head and suddenly behavior & brains was inextricably linked. Since then, we’ve learned a hell of a lot more. The closest thing that comes to my mind is a book - but books “remember”, but the don’t think.
However, in fiction - and the odd religious text, books predict a future, or a “possible future” - except for escapist fiction (fantasy).
Computers, from games to spreadsheets, are prediction engines. Right now they are crude core functionality of input-output. This brings me back to Jeff Hawkins. Our brains are not computers with memory, or books, but prediction engines. We create the reality by embracing, learning, modeling and predicting - over time, our predictions become more accurate. We change our economy, fashion and lifestyle through predictions - from educated guesses to inventions.
More importantly, it doesn’t appear to be all that hard to understand after seeing some examples.
Amazingly, I’m finding the time to write a blog - I’ve missed this for several months now. Basically, work has taken over my life, but I’m making the effort to get back into my game design and writing work. What a monster: effectively, I’m designing - on top of SAP - a multiple contract control module for driving pricing and sourcing for a multi-billion dollar company. Love the work, but DAMN, it sucks at times because of the no-life aspect.
Simply amazing. Opening up a jar of peanut butter is the same as millions of years of time passing in the world’s environment.
Over a billion experiments over a hundred years. And the food industry depends that life doesn’t occur.
Amazing. A little bit of knowledge is heinously dangerous.
Jump to DevilDucky to see it
I don’t give a shit about the third of the trinity. Just today, Pope Republican the Rightwinger has announced Limbo is no longer in the doctrine, and that all those little children that have been punished waiting outside the doors of heaven and hell, now magically have been ushered inside the door.
For what it’s worth, I think Christianity has lost one of it’s most potent memes to enslave the minds of people - you must SUFFER for your [made-up, hokus-pocus] Religion, or it holds no power over you. No one used to be safe without baptism and obeying the clergy. Now… the innocent children have an out.
So, I urge you to take the Blasphemy Challenge and lift the mental shackles.
Like this woman has, or this guy, or this dog. Or this thoughtfully edited declaration.
What’s really sad is that I’ve found out about this 5 months after it occured.
And when you’re done, take a further step and declare yourself Bright!
So here I go on a rant
1) Development is time consuming. Ever since I bailed on OpenLaszlo, I’ve been mucking around with Flex. Learning an IDE with a new language (along with the crap that’s been happening at my day job) has been a nightmare.
2) Now that I FINALLY have the legal issues out of the way, I’ve been too busy (see under: “crap that’s been happening at my day job”) to get back to the artists and get them going.
3) Last but not least, I’m needing to buy software to get my website up and running. This, my friends, is the biggest nightmare ever. $1000’s of bucks for Adobe products, or 1000s of hours learning the GIMP. I love opensource development. I love the people who do it. I hate their products. For f*ck’s sake, FINISH a product before you start adding cool features.
Or, as my friends point out, I could steal the software. This, of course, is the worse idea of all. And I don’t recommend it to anyone.
’nuff of my whining.
-Bob
Last year, I searched for “mashup” on google and got zip. Now you search and you get tons. Gotta love that. Recently stumbled onto DJ Earworm and I’ve got to admit, we’re at a brand new stage of artistic development.
I’ve long believed that we will develop a new level of language once we can communicate using emotions. First we used crude hand signals, body language and grunts - the rudiments which has gone from cuneiform and kanji and evolved into txtmsgs and L33tsP34K. Thirty+ years ago, we starting samples and scratching. Earlier, I pointed out about WiiJaying.
Sound, especially popular music, convey an emotional role, almost engram of emotion that when you hear the music, the emotions come with it. Mashups allow those emotions to overdub on each other, weaving a complex structure.
First we had a songwriter who took an original folk tune and made a new song of it. For instance how Hank Williams music pulls from early tavern & bluegrass music.
Then we had remakes of those songs. All through the 40s, 50s, and 60s, it was incredibly popular to make entire albums with no original songs.
Then we had an incredible rise of original music - very rarely now we have remakes, but soon people began to sample other works, evoking the original emotions.
Now we’re to the point where full musical structure are woven full cloth of other emotional impacts - so emotionally, there’s an entire landscape of musical combinations.
Now, if we could only learn to communicate in these complex glyphs to convey complex emotional information without having spend time to remix them all. For example, I come home from work late one night and the wife glyphs at me that “she’s angry, why I didn’t call, and she had her heart set on our anniversary tonite being special” and I glyph back that “two employees are in the hospital, the car has a flat and I’m sorry” all at once.
One of the necessary steps of communication is the ability to get the “other” to empathize with you, and more importantly make it seem you’re empathizing with them - removing the “other” in the communication. If we were able to just give our emotions to others and receive - without the definitions of “otherness” (male-female, black-white, my body space-your body space, etc), we could immediately know where the other stands and recognize a common path.
DJ Earworm’s mashups take this to a truly new masterful level, overlaying all of the emotions to make some increble stuff - I highly recommend his “What’s my Name?” and “Stairway to Bootleg Heaven”.
Other sites, please recommend yours -
Smashup Derby’s Smells Like Billy Jean (watch out, more than slightly adult content here) Please note that the crowd loves to sing along on these, indicating that the emotion is common to all of the people in the audience. What is it about Smells like a Teen Spirit and White Stripes?
Strangely, I’m reminded of Simon and Garfunkel’s cover of Scarborough Fair with Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme with the 6 o’clock news.
Took the rest of us long enough to catch up, hell, that’s 40 years old now.
Is it’s name. I pronounce it Tiggers, not Tigers, not Tigris. Tigger.
The Independent Game Rating System is an inevitable thing. With all the republicrats running around screaming “What about the children? What about the baaaabies?”, and with all the concepts of classifying the damage to kids’ poor tormented psyches that video games do, someone had to step up and try to appease both sides.
You know, sometimes confrontation is a good thing and sometimes capitulation… excuse me, compromise is bad. TIGRS is an effort to appease the jerks, and it’s a good faith effort. I don’t know Daniel Kinney, but this seems to be a genuine good attempt. At least the designs LOOK cool.
With a rating system, as a business owner, I reduce the level of risk to my business by posting. So without further adieu, here’s the TIGRS for That Cult Game.
Not Bad, huh? Personally, I think it’s sad that parents can’t get it through their heads: If you BREED, YOU’RE the one responsible. Not society, not the neighbors, and not the police. Do your best, but don’t blame others for your or your kids’ failures. Do your very best, because the kid deserves no less, and if the kid turns out to be a brainless monster, deal with the monster. Sometimes, through no fault of our own, people are broken.
But don’t blame a GAME DEVELOPER for it. That’s just weak thinking.
Gah. Lawyers. Accountants. All I want to do is play a game that will allow me to subvert weak minds to my will and conquer the rest of them. Is that such a difficult request?
So, here’s what I’ve learned recently:
1) Do not sign away Intellectual Property. Nope. No can do. No 3rd party will investigate a partnership (like a publisher) if your IP is in contention. If you are paying for IP and if you have the right contract, keep ahold of the IP, otherwise you’ll never be able to create derivative works from it.
2) Don’t listen to lawyers too much, otherwise you’re a dick. A lot of the contractors I’m working for NEED the recognition. Lawyers don’t want to offer up any liability - they are doing their job, but the bottom line is, if a contractor is doing an excellent job, you need to be able to recognize them for their efforts.
So, there’s no way for me to actually enforce the recognition of my contractors unless I (I the business, not I the individual) make it part of any agreement that I sign. Thus enters into the language “reasonable good faith effort”, a term which is technically unenforcible.
Contractors Stand Up!
If you’re a contractor, what’s your rights? Officially, all you have to do is send an email informing the game developer like so:
Hello {company}
For my {writing, artwork, development} work done on your game, SuperFigureActionFightersFoo, please credit me as {Bob Kelly, or appropriate name}.
Sincerely,
{Your name}
CC the email to yourself and save, save, save it away.
Does this enforce that they give you credit? No. Does this give you the ability to put it on your resume and CLAIM credit? Does this protect you if they say “No, you didn’t do that credit” - yes, it does because if they don’t respond to you, the email is a document that can be used in legal battle if absolutely necessary. Yes. Does this give you more rights to renegotiate extra payments? No.
Why does this matter to me right now?
I’ve been done good by two of my contractors - over delivered both of them. I have no desire to screw them over, but the IP issue something that means a lot. So, how do you be extra nice to your partners? I can’t sell them part of the game, but I can give them TOP BILLING. That’s right, I’ll be loudly announcing my Artwork and Sound design people and give them some excellent real estate to make sure
Also, if you’re in need of an artist, I’ve got dibs, but I’ll share. She’s looking for work.
Hopefully next week I’ll be able to post and announce the That Cult Game’s Official Title!
