Europe, Day 8: Closure in Copenhagen

My mind’s reflection centers are rapidly closing down – the event is over. From its start in Dublin, Ireland, and now closing the last two days in Helsinki, Finland and Copenhagen, Denmark, the XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007 has been an unprecedented success.

There are blogs and forum postings detailing community reactions in almost every venue. We are headed to Tivoli Gardens to celebrate this evening, and tomorrow morning at 10 AM I board a plane for London, and then for home.

It's not unlike me to get reflective at times like this.

Helsinki, Yesterday

We are standing on the steps of the cathedral. Helsinki is under a gray sky, a grainy colloid of old mixed with new. Gravel sprinkled everywhere melts the recent snowfall.

I am awake. After Dreamhack, it has been almost impossible to regain any strength to pull through, but I finally have what I need – fresh air, and the proximity of a culture that’s more than just the here, the now, the digital.

It was years ago, early on in my career in Microsoft that I began to realize that I could live only short sketches of life surrounded by the sterile triumvirate of glass, black, and chrome designs that signal the apogee of the modern age. For the first time in what felt like years, I stepped out among the trees and saw them not as resources, but as symbioses, variables in an equation owned not by us, but by the larger structure.

I realize the same feeling is upon me – and satisfied – on the steps of the Helsinki Cathedral. We are games, games are us, but it is more than we’re concerned with at the moment.

We work long hours. We suffer intolerable crunches. We are prone to shortsightedness. Too often, we make ourselves – or others – victims of our inability to see integration in everything we do; how what we create today may affect so many tomorrow.

The cathedral’s insides are handsome, sparse, functional. They bring with them not the unstructured sketches of early worship, or the gilded, dyed tones of later hierarchical religions, but a sense of form and scale. An engineer’s cathedral, perhaps.

Mathematics, logic – these things intersect the planes of belief and culture – perhaps no more visibly so than in games. As we look forward to a day of free expression in interactive form, for all, not just through the filters of top-down production, it is on my mind to understand that games have a point.

It’s not that they didn’t before. It’s just that more people are listening.

Helsinki-Vantaa Airport

The snow is blowing sideways. Deicing vehicles are spraying down the waiting aircraft, including our Avro jet to Copenhagen.

I remember the social atmosphere at the University of Helsinki. The scholastic home, of course, of Linus Torvalds – the driving force behind Linux. We, as Microsoft, were an orthogonal concept – the very definition of an enemy force, well behind their lines.

The students were open-minded. They did not jeer, they did not shout us down, they did not reject us. There have been so many ideas I have seen – and some that I have worked on – that have short-sighted goals in mind: goals of domination, offense, position-jockeying, gamesmanship. These, I feel, would have been called out and rejected, and rightly so. But I feel that what I am doing now represents a belief in something that transcends these short-sighted tactics and focuses on serving a new and emerging need that people genuinely want – if only in small baby steps.

XNA Game Studio was not for everyone. It was clear enough through this tour that not everyone wants to be a game developer, and in the group of those that do, not everyone wants to use XNA Game Studio. This is good, this is normal, this is healthy. This does not scream the needle’s far-right peg of quackery, nor does it seem a deflated and uninteresting concept when played in front of the European stage.

I can say then, that XNA is building and moving a resource that will become part of the larger ecosystem of games, and of the larger world we live, work, and play in. It is growing its own legs now, and the community is allowing it the space to continue to thrive.

For that, for the reception I have received in every country, in every venue, and for what that courtesy indicates – an acceptance of a product that is on the way toward passing the global metric for what we believe to be genuinely good for our future – I thank you; it reinforces that this product is worth working on, worth tweaking, worth restructuring as we learn more about the world around us, both digital and corporeal.

As one of the many messengers to bring the news and teach the platform: Ireland, Austria, Italy, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, Denmark – thank you for everything.

Now let’s get to work and build some games!

Europe, Day 6: The City of Lost Children

Sweden’s capitol city reappears quickly. It’s one of those kinds of places. Routes on the E40 surface a variety of cleverly-lit almostcities so that a sleep-deprived brain might mistake a cluster of off-highway business conference centers for their hotel, or at the very least, call the occasional disorienting lights of a petrol station a temporary home. Before you can decide on which error to make, you are rapidly boxed in on all sides by the brick rises of old canal-hugger buildings repainted and fresh with adaptive neon and you realize you’ve made it – you’re in Stockholm. You’re just not quite sure when it happened.

Nearly midnight, and we’re in Stockholm again. This is two days of Sweden, seven hours of driving, forty-eight hours without sleep.

Alright, back up.


Stockholm, Earlier

“I’ve got good news.”
Oh, great.

Jonkoping, Later that Night

There are 12,000 people here. Elmia, the conference center, looks like the remains of an old cold war air base that cracked on one side and let commerce flood in. Hotels, gas stations, electronics stores and other unidentifiable businesses bloom outward from the central conference hangars and hold an uneasy perimeter against the assault from the main city of Jonkoping, in southern Sweden.

It is one-thirty in the morning. We have driven three and a half hours from Stockholm, through dead-dark forests, to reach this, a European technological Mecca – a retreat for the reclusive, a worship for electronic wanderers. Inside Elmia’s vast structure is Dreamhack, a twice-yearly gaming party with over ten thousand attendees.

In eight hours, I’m supposed to get up in front of them – all of them – and talk.

About what?

Earlier, at the KTH College in Stockholm, we had an audience of one-hundred, and they were awake and interested. Now, I can’t guarantee anything. We’re in territory we do not understand, with people that did not sign up to see us. We could be chewed up and spit out by this thing.

9:00 AM

I’m on stage. A widemouth camera is pointed at me. My laptop is wired into a million different sockets and my head is clamped tight by a viselike boom microphone headset.

I don’t think about the watts. I don’t think about the screens and the PA systems wired into the single microphone that’s listening to me breathe, listening to my stomach growling, listening to my nose whistle in the dry air.

The lights are blinding; there’s no data left to gather. Thousands are in front of me, spread out in the main hangar, their computers stacked and shoved together in three-by-three foot spaces on giant wooden tables. Tens of thousands of cans of Jolt cola, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water, millions of watts of power, billions of BTUs of heat, trillions of bits of information being sent every second, all for these kids.

Who are they?

Stay, Don't Leave Me Mama

They’re doing push-ups on stage. It seems like nobody cares, but the Swedish military is having a push-up contest. It’s broadcast on every screen.

They’re having a Guitar Hero competition. There are shouts. Hollers, snatches of songs, bawdy shanties and cat calls, yelled by someone on the far end of the hangar. A reply, bellowed out from the other side. Someone builds a tower of Jolt cola and attaches a blinking beacon.

There are no lights in the hangar spaces, just the glow of thousands of computer screens. World of Warcraft, Counter-Strike, file sharing, movies, porn. The arrangements of pixels on the screen average out over distance, and provide a constant ambient color to the world bounded by corrugated steel and concrete. The color is blue. It’s just between the gray slate of an Atlantic swell, and the indigo of a late afternoon clearing sky, and it reflects off of everything, off of everyone. Everyone’s skin is blue. Everyone’s eyes are blue.

I’m walking by an impromptu rave. The speaker is shouting in Swedish.

“They want to get on YouTube,” Michel says to me.

The hangar crowds pull out their cell phones and wave them in air. Glowsticks join in. An air horn goes off and the crowds dance in the view of the camera, bouncing up and down. The music is heavy, unyielding, at heart-resetting frequencies and jarring volumes. It surrounds everything and claws at my ears, my eyes, my skin. I look to my left, and a gamer is asleep, headphones cradling his ears, his face cradled in his arms, resting atop his keyboard.

As I walk through the hangars, I remind myself of what I was – and what I thought I was – when I was younger. These children are seventeen, fifteen, even younger. I don’t feel old enough to talk to them with any authority, not young enough to join in. But I know why they do it. And I realize I would never want to take this away from them.

There is a replica of a Saab Gripen jet at one corner. Kids line up a hundred deep to eat at an Army mobile kitchen trailer. Booths line the lit hallways between the hangars. Nvidia, Intel, Microsoft – they’re all here. But these are incidentals. In the hangars, all of the games they play on the network – many I haven’t seen in years – the bits they stream every second, are the stars. They are the fabric of these three days, the reason and the meaning for everything.

I think of the network traffic.

playerOne:move:left.playerTwo:move:right.playerTwo:kills:playerOne.

This language says more than any of us could about the event. And as I see it in front of me, it becomes obvious: this is not for us. They came here to get away from us.

But I’m here to talk to them. It’s going to happen whether they – or I – like it or not.

As I think about it, I ignore a caution sign and duck into another dark room, expecting a hangar full of computers, but something strikes me strangely about it. Before I realize what it is – I’m not hearing music, not seeing blue – I am surrounded. Quietly immobilized. I stand and look around me.

The hanger has no computers. No desks. No booths. No lights. The hangar is full of sleeping bags, air mattresses, blankets. There is no sound but the rain on the metal roof. On every side, stretching out for a quarter mile, lay thousands of sleeping children. Two teenagers embrace atop their blanket. Another, asleep holding a fading glowstick. A woman pushes a baby stroller around a circular path marked around a set of mattresses. We pass each other soundlessly as I step over the bodies of the sleeping.

A Gestalt

I am on stage. There is nothing left to gather now. There is nothing left to say. I won’t even explain my source code as I type it. I have a game to make in thirty minutes on stage. It will be broadcast to ten-thousand teenagers.

I plug in my iPod, wired to the sound system, cue up my own music, and begin.

There is applause. It’s all done, all on camera. I turn off my iPod and back away.

There is a contest afterward. Faces, handshakes, smiles. I give away an Xbox 360. When it is over, there is nobody around. They are busy. I am left to my own. I am tired. I have not slept for two days.

I go to the dark hangar and find an empty spot between the mattresses in the field of sleeping children. I take off my shoes, place them under my head, and fall asleep.

Europe, Day 4: The Stockholm Retrospective

Midnight again. I am in Sweden. This fact is not lost on me; it drifts about, echoing with bass tide, thumping from the techno lounge downstairs. I am in a tiny room of all black and red and silver things – I am swimming in a steel martini.

Cold blues and abrasive chromes flirt with cigarette smoke and procedurally-painted pressboards and the result is City, version one-point-one. For some reason, I have no desire to know this hotel any better than I already do.

The literature about light and colors, filled with professional “edgy” photos and quotes from designers I’ll never meet is not comforting. I’ve seen this motif before. It is hiding something.

“Part of it is,” Dave says on the taxi ride in, “I go to these places and it feels like home. I don’t want it to feel like home.”

He’s right. The road corridor up ahead has familiar lighting – the lit sky paths curve in familiar ways as the road takes gentle turns past semi-commercial zones, residential areas pulled just beyond the crest of the greenbelt and away, leaving off-exit fast food and Suzuki dealerships as the only evidence of life.

It is the geometry of home. Why can’t I feel at home here?

Just hours ago I was in Belgium, in a hotel very similar to this one. Modern. Small. Hotel Ve, in Mechelen. And yet, it was very different. A converted fish-smoking factory, the smell is still there if you take the stairs. The hallways are cramped. I even scraped a chunk of my hand off on the unfinished door jamb –the wood splinters left over still irritate whenever I find them.

And yet I felt genuinely at home there. I felt a compulsion to spend the rest of my life in Mechelen, Belgium. It was a city that kept history – kept itself – and still made room and time and respect for the modern and contemporary, and for that concession to both the past and the future I felt grateful enough to want to pack up my belongings and stay forever.

Still, paradise has a price. Today’s session felt difficult: the Belgian audiences are sharp, reserved, and difficult for a person like me – me who feeds off of the energy of the crowd – to integrate with. Each session was an attempt to win new hearts and minds, and while I did not get the outward response I was hoping, ala Milan or Dublin, the evaluation forms coming in are indicating very good news.

So, it’s cultural.

“You must not be happy with how your dollar is doing,” Hans says as we try to check in. The Nordic Sea Hotel’s Ice Bar is well-known. Cyan light refracts through the open window into the icy room and cracks across the floor. I study it, and wait for Hans to finish. He’s not done yet.

“I travel to the US quite a bit,” he says proudly. “It’s so cheap there.”

In Belgium, as now, I realize, sometimes in a harsh way, that I am just a visitor here. I do not live in these countries. I am not afforded the rights of those that do; I am at the whims of the host countries and their inhabitants first and foremost, and it is their attention – positive or negative – that makes for my success, or my failure.

In a nod to Hans, it’s like this: my cultural currency doesn’t buy much here. I am an American, and that’s an outsider, and as a Microsoft employee, a potential technical enemy. It’s frightening to consider it from that perspective, and in microcosm, it’s humbling to see both ways, cultural differences aside: either the group fosters your growth in them and accepts you – or they don’t.

And I consider all of that, here in my temporary bed in Stockholm, and realize: these past four days I have been fortunate beyond fortune to speak to some of the warmest, most welcoming, most excited and inspired people I have ever met. They didn’t have to give me their attention. They didn’t have to give me their time.

But they gave it anyway. In Ireland, in Austria, in Italy, and now in Belgium, they listened. They opened up, they gave up their time and their pursuits to give me a chance. I was thrown to the mercy of that crowd, and they set me – an American and a first-timer in Europe – down gently.
For those that are reading this, and I know there are a few – I’ve even gotten comments from some of you – I’ll say this, as I said it to my Milan audience:

Grazie.

Danke.

Merci.

A million times over. Thank you.

Halfway there.

Europe, Day 0A: Aerial Farming

The Club World section of a British Airways 747 looks a little bit like a corporate cubicle outlay – gut-high partitions separate alternating bow-and-stern facing seat arrangements in a sort of transverse Air Force kind of way – pilot never notices navigator, and so on – dividers ensure you don’t have to see your one-hundred and eighty degree neighbor if you don’t want to.

I am amazed at the brilliance of the design of the cabin – the seats themselves contain a startling variety of things-that-hinge-out-from-inside-other-things, and lit panel arrangements yield to curious fingers to discover the entire seat arrangement is on electronically-actuated motors that flatten, raise, or otherwise contort the seat in ways that can really only be described by eigenvectors, perhaps more easily visualized as your grandpa’s recliner on Superbowl Sunday.

Footrests and snap-out remote controls for the television screen – on-demand video systems showing the latest movies and absolutely nothing starring Ben Stiller. Power plugs and a miniature travel kit with revitalizing eye cream (I have no idea where or when to apply revitalizing eye cream).

Even the overhead compartments mesmerize in some geometric way that fixes my attention until I can figure it out: the oval forms of the storage spaces are rotated, they lie horizontally amidships, flat in the vertical direction unlike the tall, big-brother storage spaces of the short-hop aircraft; it evokes in me the zero-angle zaftig-visions of 50’s UFOs, when things were curvy without apology.

I think my grade-school teachers would call this flat-across arrangement “the hamburger way”: orthogonal to the “hot dog” way, you see, where the long axis is up and down. I’ve been trying for years to explain this concept and it’s clearly still not working. That’s public education for you.

The silverware is weighty, though the lack of serrated edges on the knives reveals a flaw in the so-far sparkling stone; it is the reality of a recently-conflicted world. Another conflict to resolve is my own issue with airline gourmet; they serve antipasto for starters, and halfway through my consuming something beyond my food pay grade – a mushroom pate, I‘m assuming – my palate screams back to my more Virginia-agrarian roots, and I sink my teeth into a warm dinner roll. Ah, there we go.

My purposely-dulled knife is unable to score the skin of the tomato I’m served, and I’m left with a smashed seedy pool on my plate that looks, if you arrange the artichokes the right way, vaguely like the remains of a car crash. Screw you, 9/11.

Finally, the main course is out, and again, nods are made to air security. The steak – or more appropriately, short rib – is sirloin-ish, easy to cut. Sort of meatloafy. You get the idea. The gravy, however, forgives all transgressions, and the whole of the thing is sensible while somewhat sensuous. How did they do that?

All this, note, while we passengers retain only the vaguest of senses around being transported somewhere else, somewhere that’s expensive enough to justify eye cream and miniature glasses of Chardonnay (serial-numbered to avoid theft). In this reality, with a service crew and little to no word from the flight deck, the mechanics of the journey are the afterthought, not the primary. The service crew is careful to shut any open windows to maintain a running illusion that we’re actually in someone’s house and they – with apologies – simply have the vacuum cleaner running.

I mention this not to emphasize or elevate my own station, but to indicate that there remains something worthwhile about air travel. I have previously pointed to my love of airplanes and the travel culture surrounding them, and maintained, in the midst of the screaming babies and foil-wrapped meals in coach that there was something still redeeming about civilian consumer flight. Dignity aloft.

Kaua'i Reflections, Prologue: In Defense of Simply Tasty

Now tastier, it says.

Tastier than what?

This particular turn of advertising phrase has baffled me since its inception. The epithet itself was pioneered, I think, sometime during the New Coke phase of the post-Vietnam era, but had its roots in earlier efforts to push food upgrading, when the model of edible obsolescence needed to be sold to the American public as a legitimate way of thinking.

By the way: hi. I'm Charles Cox. I'm at the airport Wendy's, just off the security line, and they're telling me some biscuit sandwich is now tastier, and I'm going through mental anguish trying to figure out what that means. That's my current situation. My now. My gestalt. How's your Wednesday?

You know, they're putting advertisements at the bottom of those TSA search bins now...

I think being displeased with the ordinary food item was initially a postwar concept; rationing and scrap drives and air raid drills left on the last train out with Hitler, to be replaced with what must have been the first sigh of post-atomic disappointment at opening a tin and finally realizing that for all of the war-effort smokescreen literature, you were eating goo. Formless, vaguely pink and alimentary.

Food romanticism was born in those days, really, and I don't blame anyone for that; it's a natural response to Hormel. Epicurean equity theory poured into the void that used to hold warm, yeasty, brewing anti-German sentiment. What was tasty if it wasn't at least tastier than zero-state? The American palate calibrated itself on civilized C-rations, which drifted an appropriate distance toward being just like Our Boys Over There without ever actually touching hardtack. I think that's how we got creamed chipped beef, incidentally.

It's about 8:00 AM on an airport Wednesday. I'm waiting for a flight to Hawaii, and the October sun is just starting to peek out over the trees and gray slate flats of the tarmac, poked up in places by squat, pyramidal bunkers with flashing red lights.

Outside, visible through the three-paned armored Lexan bowing inward on steel cable trusses, a stout little truck is passing by a row of planes. Made by Volcanoes, the truck proclaims. It's bottled water, and while it's my understanding that we probably had water before we had volcanoes, I have to admit a little bit of awe at the concept.

Water. From Volcanoes. Goddamn.

You know, they cool submarine nuclear reactors with mercury, not water...

"What do you want for your side?"

I pull back from my daydream, and she's behind the register, looking at me looking at the menus; enthralling in green and yellow wake-up advertising plumage. I try to clear my head.

What do I want for my side? You know, they even tried to power an airplane with a nuclear reactor once...

I ordered french toast sticks, and now I get to choose a side. You know - to go with french toast sticks. I get to choose a cinnamon roll, a blueberry muffin, or hash browns. I sputter, perplexed. None of those make any sense. It's not that they are unworthy food items. I'm sure they're tasty. Hell, I'm sure they're tastier. But how can any of those go with french toast sticks? It's starch-on-starch. It's not sexy at all. I don't own a single starch-on-starch DVD in my entire mental food porn collection.

I'm having a Monty Hall moment.
I don't know what to do.
These are terrible choices, terrible days of indecision in which we live...
Stop speechwriting, just pick something...

"I'll have the hash browns," I hear myself say.

Hash browns.
Seriously. You picked hash browns to go with french toast sticks.
Way to go, Cox. Great start.