The-Agent.net

Five Minute Slices: The Pizza Wars

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Sat, 31 May 2008 01:45:00 +0000

I had often wondered if anyone would ever displace Papa John's.

Not that I was asking for the sturdiest contender in modern life's most unsuspected covert corporate war to wink and take a fall, but - well, maybe I've just been feeling nostalgic lately.

Let's back up.

Earlier In My Life, ca. 1996

Your Author with Father

My God, what was I wearing? Anyway.

At this point - an obvious high-water mark in my life - I had a considered favorite in competing delivery pizza chains. Of the two actors in a then-smoldering pizza vendetta that was only about as post-adolescent as I was, there was really only one that got my business: Dominos.

I wasn't drawn by corporate sponsorship, gimmicky ads, "technology" such as the now-rigeur and oft-copied "HeatWave" box, or even promises of punctuality - sure, I'd bitch if it didn't get there soon, but come on, man, you think I'm really going to waste my time watching the clock? I was playing Pilotwings!

The Dizzying Heights of Modern Technology

Like all good business classes will tell you about corporeal profiteering, the answer lies in location. How big is your world when you're fifteen? About as big as a five-block radius around:

the highschool
the library (nerds only)
Patrick's house (because he had the Super Nintendo)

I remember there was a Nickelodeon show back when that tried to explain that very concept (starring Scarlett Johansson's now-beau Ryan Reynolds, of all people), a modern equivalent is generously provided by Family Guy's version of One Tree Hill.

As I was saying. Dominos had the virtue of being there. Sure, I could have called anyone, but do you remember phone books? (Seriously, do you?) Thanks to an earlier, terrible experience trying to call "N. Atkins" for a date in junior high, I no longer tolerated those giant, raw dripping slabs of area code listings and plumber ads. It was local or bust: to this young, impressionable, sofa-bound soul, they were not merely a choice in a sea of readily-available competitors - they were The Italian Connection.

Anyway, feed enough pizza to a guy and he'll start to like it. Years of this and upon each move to a new locale, not only did I gravitate to nearby Dominos in a sort of eerie balloon-to-sweater relationship, but I do believe I was physically repelled from neighboring Pizza Huts.

But the politics of mobility were undeniable - and I wasn't the only one being influenced.

A quick chronology:

2001

Papa John's introduces online ordering. Dan S. is the first in my circle to try it. I announce my skepticism to Jennifer, and then to the world via LiveJournal. I then call Dominos on my cell phone to order a familiar pizza, and go back to listening to Steely Dan.

2002

Jennifer moves out. My feelings on pizza don't change, but I'm eating a lot more of it, suddenly.

2003

In a dark room, isolated, in secret, I try Papa John's online ordering. Nobody questions my topping choices. Nobody overhears my credit card number. The pizza arrives, perfectly prepared.

I dismiss this as beginner's luck.

2004

I try Papa John's online ordering again, this time for a party. Everyone is satisfied and happy, and no phone calls were needed to accomplish this. Numbers, prices, and toppings could be confirmed visually (drunkenly).

Papa John's is crowned new champion, and Dominos is solemnly, reverently, laid to rest and completely forgotten.

2005

Is my hair falling out back here? Anyway.

Everquest II integrates the /pizza function.

Encouraged at this news, I still refuse to try Everquest. In an attempted compromise, I enter a Pizza Hut. A sneak breadstick attack repels me out of the front doors and into traffic.

2006

Nothing happened.
I'm serious.

2007

Papa John's unveils SMS ordering for pizzas.

Pizza Hut offers a free mobile phone with pizza purchase.

Finally, Dominos allows online ordering - six years after Papa John's.

2008

Papa John's and Pizza Hut both announce one-click desktop "widgets" for ordering pizza.

And Dominos announces this: the Pizza Tracker.

The last of which I discovered only today, by complete accident.

I watched, entranced, as the bar filled up, refreshing every few seconds - as "Thomas" prepared, baked, and boxed my pizza, then handed it to "Todd", who later arrived at my door.

A prompt later asked me to rank both of my server's performances from one to four stars. I ranked four stars all the way across, not only because I got my pizza on time and hot, but because the Pizza Tracker predicted it.

I feel myself falling in love with Dominos again. I feel the ghosts of old, creeping up behind me, full of reminders of glory days and spring showers, of the halcyon days of youth and...

What the hell? Aw, Jesus, I forget they cut their thin crust into those little squares. Why do they insist on doing that?

Man, I hate Dominos.

XNA Community Games and the Skinner Box - Rewards in Games

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:50:00 +0000

By now you've heard the news - the XNA Creators Club Online web site is back with the all-new Community Games Beta on Xbox LIVE. I'm proud to have contributed and prouder still to see that games are already coming in from dedicated creators.

I wanted to offer a perspective on why I think community games are important. It's not for the reason you think.

Let's get the obvious out of the way. There's been plenty of discussion about the Democratization of Video Games, and while I like the term and its implications, let's be honest: it's been difficult for the industry to justify so many "pipe owners" on the publishing side with Steam and other digital distribution networks barging in on the space...it was only a matter of time. Distribution isn't the part of the equation that's got me excited.

And, if you put your ear to the ground, you'll hear that everyone's talking Retro. The old new thing, the platformers, the puzzle games, the "casual" space - of course, we're conflating generations; mixing the old with the new. Retro is Casual, Casual is Retro, it's all cool and there'll be a lot more Atari 2600-themed bands playing at the Triangle in short order, I'm sure. That's great, but that's still not it.

I'm scratching these off my worksheet. We've all talked 'em to death. Digital distribution is the future, and Retro is a generational hiccup. As we grow and as we change as a culture, we're hungry for the same things, and community games is the key to getting them faster.

I'm talking about rewards.

Pipe Dreams and Plumbers
If you remember the old days of gaming, you'll find your own examples of games that are timeless. Play them today and they'll appeal. They'll challenge you, they'll enchant you, and considering that they were probably made before you were two feet tall, it's not on account of the graphics.

It's not the quality of the visual or audio elements that defines a game's lasting value to a gamer. Remember - games differentiate themselves from movies and music not just by rolling them together, but by being responsive to user input choices.

In the simplest (some would say Skinnerian) analysis, that it beeps when you press the button is more important than what the beep sounds like.

The beep, the explosion, the squashing the bad guy when you stomp on his head is reward, it is interaction. These moments are what we dream about when we dream about making games that appeal. We are in the business of creating reward experiences, from the simplest user interface rollover graphics to the most elaborate explosion effects.

It is less an academic science in the fields of both the what (a sound? a graphic? a controller jiggle?) of the rewards and the when of the rewards (when the player jumps? when they get a hundred coins? when they build a skyscraper?), than it is an experiential exercise - a trial-and-error usability study of the messiest, most disorganized order.

Why? Because games are fantasy. Any one element that ultimately contributes to a game being a rewarding experience runs the risk of sounding silly on its own.

Let's listen in on an early, one-sided conversation about a popular video game.

...Jerry, Jerry, just hang on and listen. No, don't put it on speakerphone, that makes me feel like you're laughing at me.

...So I got a game idea.

...So there's this guy, alright, he's a plumber...what? No, what does it matter who he works for? The Italians, okay?

...I know you don't know how to speak Italian, Jerry. It doesn't matter. Anyway. Anyway. He hits bricks.

...What? No, they're not on the ground, they're in the air.

...Floating.

...Yes, they float.

...I don't know, about twelve, fifteen feet up, they're pretty up there.

...No, he hits them with his fist.

...No, I don't know if that would hurt. Probably, Jerry.

...Yes, he can jump fifteen feet!

...No, no rocket boots or anything.

...No, the bricks, they - kind of bounce. Like they were made of rubber.

...No, they're real bricks.

...No, they just act like rubber, Jerry.

...Who cares how much that'd cost in real life, Jerry, they're not real, it's a video game, don't you remember?

...No, no, no, see, if he's big, then they don't act like rubber, they break apart.

...Well, he - uh - has to eat a mushroom.

...A mushroom.

...A MUSHROOM, JERRY!

...No, I don't know what kind of mushroom. A magic one, alright?

...Yes, magic out the ying-yang.

...No, look, see, if he eats the mushroom, then he gets bigger!

...Bigger.

...Yep, ten feet tall.

...I don't know, about four-hundred pounds?

...Look, Jerry, I don't know how much lasagna he'd have to eat. That's so racist I don't even want to talk about that. Look. You just have your art guys draft the little Italian man and the bricks and the mushroom.

...Yes, you can call him Mario.

...And remember, he needs to jump in the air and hit the rubber bricks until he grows ten feet tall when he eats the mushroom and then he can break the bricks, okay? You got all that?

...Yeah? Good. Oh. Wait. Unless he eats the flower. Then he can throw fireballs.

...

...Hello? Jerry? Hello?

So, barring that, I have no doubt that some very capable designers can visualize these interactions abstractly, no matter how externally silly. They can weave the web before they lay in one line of code.

But I have even less doubt that we all have the capacity to create these interactions through experience. Through playing around, through quick code and easy prototyping, we can all tap into the feelings we have when playing the games we like. We can identify them, mimic them, and help them evolve into great gameplay that keeps us coming back. We don't have to dream them - we can create them.

New School, Old School
Some of the best designers of the "old days" (and I'm looking at you, Sid Meier), were programmers. They visualized and moved into prototype as quickly as possible, to pour the foundations of their games and each reward system into an experimental mold to play with - to bring it out of the mind and into the world where it could be poked, prodded, and revised.

Big teams with lofty designers have, I think, lost much of that connection, and experimentation costs valuable dev time. First or second-round gameplay tweaks are lumped into horrendously-short "fit n' finish" milestones. The result is little to no experiential reward tuning, no prototyping, no tactile assurance that the game is going to be "sticky" to that spot in the brain that all the great games continue to ping unfailingly.

Community games, by placing prototyping power into the hands of smaller teams, even single, independent individuals, brings the inventor/craftsman mentality of game development back from oversized teams, and the experimentation and reward designs that will be forged by these new, agile developers will, I believe, stand the scrutiny of not only the seasoned early gamers, but the brand-new generation of gamers. The mobile gamers, the Xbox 360 gamers, the cinematic gamers.

Sure, they'll look weird. Yes, they'll be simple at times. But the gamers of yesterday, today, and even tomorrow won't have to call them "Retro". They won't have to call them "Casual". They won't have to call them anything.

They'll pick them up. They'll play them. And because the games reward the players, because the creators could be close to their game, to tweak it, to get it just right, those same gamers won't be able to put them down.

They'll be hooked, and those games that get it right, no matter how small, will live forever.

It's a great time to be a creator.

Games in order: Cannon Fodder, Armor Alley, Airborne Ranger, Inner Space
Graphics courtesy: fabricoffolly.com, abandonia.com, sdispace.com, lemonamiga.com

Fewer Words, More Feeling

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:22:00 +0000

Lemme tell ya a story.

Late in my young development - probably later than most - I began to realize that systems of deep-seated belief remained so only by tenuous virtue of masses of people remaining heavily and personally invested in their continuation.

This did not excuse me from explaining physical systems; planes do not fly because people believe they do, but it brought into question social machinery; organized patterns of behavior, starting fairly early, with reading.

I read as a child. I read now. I don't know why I do it, other than to learn that which would be painfully slow or unbearably laborious to learn in practice. History is a fantastic example of a lesson better learned by written analysis than by structured re-enactments.

And, I read for enjoyment; every Sherlock Holmes story, the Sprawl books by Gibson, a few by Stephenson, a few by Clavell. Catch-22. A bunch of others. They melt like wax now and combine and get on my fingers and it feels weird.

But something then - and now - ate at my brain as I ate at the books.

What if this isn't the best way to learn? To enjoy myself? To gain insight?

Part I: Don't Know Much About Science Book

As a young man in school, I knew that sitting on this fear would be the best thing to do. To attain any hope of scholastic success, not to mention respect from adults (whom I already knew were my only chance of gaining any influence over the course of my young life) I knew that demonstrating a lifelong fealty to reading was paramount.

I knew that to survive, I had to tow the party line and insist in lockstep with my peers that "books equal knowledge", that the publishing mechanisms that brought us bound and set type were the wellsprings of human evolution and greater good, and that the defense of every piece of printed material sanctified by a publishing mark was my overriding and irrefutable life directive.

Certainly the only option for a young man struggling through the public school system and trying to attract the attention of an erudite crowd was to be literate. After all, if you're not literate...you had might as well be illiterate.

It was stressed as well that readers had better capacities for abstract thought. The goal, of course, was to attain powers of imagination and visualization. I think. Nobody ever said outright that the goal was to try to get to the point that you could levitate stuff with your mind and get psychic powers, but you kind of got the idea that's what everyone else was hoping would happen if they read more than the kid across from them.

Even in my perusal of children's TV, the particular self-righteous tone of Baby Piggy from Muppet Babies is still vivid now as I recall her speaking proudly of her i-mag-i-na-ci-on before diving through the closet into another matted clip of French Dadaist pie fights.

And if I thought I was going to be safe discarding the standard talisman of scholastic achievement and stubbornly go my own way - learning minus the University system (shocking!) - I was wrong. Apparently, there is no autodidact in anyone's memory that has ever survived more than two seconds in open air without a book. They shrivel up or get a rash or something, I don't know.

I couldn't escape. One way or the other, I had to merit any successes I had to books. Reading them, writing them, lauding their authors, collecting them, comparing them, analyzing them, spending my life worshipping them. Words. On pages. Printed out, stuck together with glue, jammed between cardboard. Like it or not, this was to be my religion. I liked books. But this was a cult. And I wasn't a believer.

I went for years agonizing over which track would cause me less pain. College, or surviving on my own. I was in grave danger of spooling out the rest of my teenage probationary years without clinging to either liferaft: books, or severely overpriced books. Textbooks, I think they call those.

An Aside

I mention this because it's now over a decade later and I remain very skeptical that there is any God-planted flag in the ground that declares every victory in the war of human progress as belonging to the Nation of Books. I scrapped and climbed up to the current ladder rung I inhabit now watching system after system declare itself self-evident, much in the same way books do.

Every system had the same thing in common. A group of people, several million truckloads of resources, and a mountain of money, all sworn to protect a continuously paying investment.

But what kid ever figures that out? Back then, there was no fighting. There were no great epiphanies that tore open the shroud hiding the grand machine. There was only acquiescence if you wanted your freedom, A's if you wanted your allowance (or your Nintendo).

There was no reward, no personal profit in declaring a tautology a tautology, nothing behind the door of great discovery of the whirling cogs and escapements of the world's massive, silver-age clanking mechanica than another dismissal for being "young and passionate".

So.

Having not declared my allegiance to either the staunch collegiate or independently didactic track, there was despair in everyone's hearts as I took to my first few years of highschool unsure of myself or my future as a someone-who-has-to-start-thinking-about-paying-for-his-own-Nachos-Bell-Grande (hey, the concept was a lot more frightening back then).

But something was changing. Something about the way I was going to receive, send, and process what books were all about: information. A change in information was playing out that would lead to a new path for me and for people like me, stuck in the middle.

It began the first day I heard the crackle and shriek of a healthy modem reaching out to touch an open circuit, thousands of miles away.

Jesus. If only my mother knew the long distance phone bills she was about to receive.

To Be Continued...

The XNA Game Studio AI Challenge (or, The Art of Doing a Thing)

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 04:51:00 +0000

Think arrangement. Coordination. A Thing. You're with me, right?

Qu'est-ce que c'est? You're right – I'll explain.

Seats. Computers. Network cable. TVs. Signs. Hundreds of spectators. It wasn't that long ago that I looked at these elements in a disparate way – took the glue of the thing out, factored it right out – and saw instead a discrete point where I fit. Where the specific set of skills met a specific criterion for applying, it glowed, it said plug in. Beyond that, it was silent. No pushing beyond, no coordination to bigger, better things.

That worked for about two years, maybe three.

It started simple. I planned parties at my place. Made notes on the whiteboard about who was bringing the "lite" beer, the bratwursts, made question marks by the people that were tentative – I ended up with best-case worst-case counts and food arrangements for my own birthday party, because I wanted that kind of organization. No cracks, no places where people would run into a problem they couldn't solve and look around with that lost expression that just screams out that they're just not feelin' it.

I knew it then, I was talking about putting together a Thing. Let's step back and define this.

thing (ˈthiŋ): noun. a matter of concern what takes a certain size (t) of what-have-you, a length of time beyond x whenever, a given critical whatszit (y), and z wrangling of human beings to Make It Go.

Examples of a Thing: Shuttle launch, ladder badminton tournament, three-family Christmas, rock concert.

Examples of Not a Thing: Calling your masseuse, planting a flower (single), sending a Thanksgiving card, drawing a dragon (poorly).

So, sailing: that's a Thing. The instant I stepped into the O'Day 27 with the kitchenette you just didn't want to touch, backwards and missing instruments, smoky outboard engine, I knew something was going to happen with me. I imagined bigger boats, week-long treks, meals, and unforgettable evenings under the spell of sunsets. I spent money, I spent time, I passed tests, and before a year was out, I was hip-deep in self-made Visio charts, planning Bahamian cruises, San Juan adventures, and every single one of my one-hundred cruises since that day was officially a Thing.

And there was last year's GDC, and Europe, and all the workshops in between with their kickoffs and their checkpoints and their post-mortems, these, they were Things.

Today, it's a brand-new challenge, two months in the making, for this year's Game Developers Conference here in San Francisco. And I'm pleased to report that, once again, we're talking on the order of a Thing. The XNA Game Studio AI Challenge.

In Closure in Copenhagen, I alluded that it was the power of consensus that drove it home for me; XNA had earned its stripes by the gauntlet of the Community – through fire and flame, XNA had been stretched, torn apart, beat into every shape, rolled flat, and ultimately came out a winner – a genuine What People Want.

The XNA Game Studio AI Challenge was a push forward on that concept – what can we bring that leverages XNA that's got appeal – developer appeal, crowd appeal, something for everyone?

Without taking too much of your time, I'll tell you that they called me up on this one. Told me to go be a PM (Program Manager) on this for a while. Today was our first competition day at GDC, and it's been an amazing ride so far. Our first day we had hundreds of visitors, thirty-two competitors, and eight finalists with amazing AI bots that drove the crowd wild. And, we now have a full slate of competitors signed up for tomorrow – all remaining thirty-two spots are completely booked.

I figure I'm posting this as not only a plug for the continued success of XNA as a platform, but also as a personal touchstone as I realize that a PM's mantra – for me, anyway – really comes down to being the person that coordinates, administers, and seeks constant improvement, and their unit of currency – that atomic count of what they live and die by – is a Thing.

Can I put together a Thing? Can I Make it Go? While the jury's not in on the endgame – there's still all day tomorrow and the Finals tomorrow night – this Thing does indeed Go. And that makes me happy, it makes me confident, it makes me want to continue to reach higher, broader, bigger.

To all that made this first day spectacular – including our competitors and spectators – thank you! See you tomorrow!

2008 Game Developers Conference

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 18:49:00 +0000

All those in San Francisco this coming week for the Game Developers Conference, listen up:

Stop by Booth #738 in the career expo area on Wednesday, Feb 20th, or Thursday, Feb 21st during the day to participate in the XNA Game Studio AI Challenge!

This real-time coding competition is your chance to show off your coding skill and win some great prizes. I'll be there running the contest on both days, so stop in, sign up, and say hi!

You can also say hi at the ISM Poker Invitational on Tuesday. See you there!

My Life with Games: Introduction

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Thu, 03 Jan 2008 00:31:00 +0000

Note: In light of the New Year, I was giving consideration toward a kind of retrospective, maybe a word or two about where I've been yielding to more recent exploits - something like the traditional Christmas letter.

I realized that there's more here.

Something about where I have been has recently been nagging at me; I am at a crossroads, and taking my life's work further means an exegesis of my past pivoted around a central point, in this case, games.

There are many stories to tell, all for different reasons, all contributing to the person I am now and what I can be in time.

I hope you enjoy these memories - this is the first in a set I hope to expand as the year plays out.

January 1990

I am nine years old.

It is cold, but very little of me – save the tops of my ears – seems to care. I am on a mission at the back of the playing field. I am in fourth grade, and in my hastily-assembled kit bag are the gadgets of high-tech spydom. A stocky, blocky semi-automatic pistol. A grenade. A basically-round thing that’s supposed to be a tracking device. Even a little listening device that goes in my ear.

The devices are all made out of construction paper. The gun is purple. The grenade is yellow. The bag is constructed from two sheets of paper stapled hastily together on the edges. This departure from reality matters little to me.

I have discovered Covert Action, a game developed by Sid Meier and released earlier in the year on those big floppy five-and-a-quarter discs. I am acting out the game. It is spying, surveillance, and sabotage, all for the good of the free world.

I am at that critical age that homogenization gives way to the diversity that will define subgroups in later years. We are giving way from being "just kids" to being kids in one group or another. This type of child, or that type of child. Readers, athletes, debaters, scholars, troublemakers.

I don't know what I'm becoming. I am aloof, almost deaf in a way. A year ago, I was running around the playground with my arms outstretched, channeling my innate desire to fly. The slipstream wind over my hands was almost enough for a breath of barely-discernible lift, and with that buoyancy, I fancied being sustained, weightless, forever.

At nine years old, I have a vague sense that, as a child of my age, that sort of behavior is unpopular, even touching the tangent of the symptomatic. My mother and father fight about money, about work, about time. I feel a desire to stay disconnected from their worldly problems, but I am losing the earliest comforts I had - I can no longer fly.

I turn toward video games, by no means a new pursuit, but one recently having gained some social prominence through the development of new VGA graphics, and so, for being there when the need arose, I settled into the simulations of the surreptitious, the underhanded, the camouflaged.

I would become a spy.

One student - Matthew - stays with my evolution. He watches me cut my functionless gadgets from multicolored paper. He listens as I outline plots against world targets, fed by descriptions of nefarious shadow organizations.

And, at his most devoted, Matthew faithfully tags along. Along to the playground, along to the playing fields. We imagine stalking targets in the sewers as we walk in the shadow of the bleachers. We climb fences and pretend to jump building rooftops in pursuit of shadowy masterminds.

Not one tracking device beeps. No grenades explode. I do not shoot any bullets from my gun, because it isn't real. We don’t know how to make guns that shoot. We are children.

But something sticks, something at the core of what we imagined we were. Maybe someone saw us. Maybe Matthew talked - certainly a punishable offense in the clandestine service - but word got around.

I know this, because it is January, 1990, and there sits atop my desk a rolled-up tube of red construction paper. I did not put it there. Matthew did not put it there, yet there it sits. It is adorned with the letters TNT - a child-sized stick of trinitrotoluene. Dynamite. Somebody had made pretend dynamite, for our pretend game.

Someone else wanted to play, too.

XNA European Tour 2007: Videos from Belgium and Finland Available

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 01:20:00 +0000

To those that didn't get a chance to attend the XNA Game Studio European Tour, never fear. Our partners around Europe are finalizing and uploading the recorded sessions so you can view them and learn all about XNA as if you were right there.

I'm proud to announce two such sessions are now available for you to view; the first comes from our partners in Belgium, the second from our partners in Finland.

Belgium

The Belgium sessions are available in Silverlight format only, and require a few clicks to subscribe to MSDN Chopsticks.

Democratization of Game Development - Dave Mitchell
Build a Game in 60 Minutes - Charles Cox
XNA 2.0 Deep Dive - Charles Cox
Future View and Call to Action - Luc Van de Velde
Benelux Game Initiative - Tommy Goffin

Finland

The Finland sessions are all available in non-Silverlight format, however: the coding sessions are available in a Silverlight-enhanced format that seperates out the code and the speaker (that's me). I highly recommend the Silverlight version.

Democratization of Game Development - Dave Mitchell
Making Games for a Living - Jyri 'Jay' Ranki
Build a Game in 60 Minutes - Charles Cox - Watch in Silverlight!
XNA 2.0 Deep Dive - Charles Cox - Watch in Silverlight!

Enjoy, and I'll be bringing you more as they arrive!

XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007 - Photos Now Online

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 04:32:00 +0000

The collection of photos I and others took for the XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007 is now available on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/agentcox/collections/72157603421195725/

Enjoy!

Europe, Day 8: Closure in Copenhagen

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 16:31:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 14:32:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:12:00 +0000

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 2: Midnight in Milan

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 09:47:00 +0000

The roads are still full at midnight – our driver is speeding up, hugging the center lane to scare off motorists thinking of merging in. He has good reason – we’re traveling at over 160 km/h. Working it out on my phone, I realize that’s about a hundred miles an hour. We’ve been driving for a half-hour already, after the hour-and-a-half flight from Vienna. I need a distraction.

I sit back and think of almost seeing the Alps. It was dark – we fly at night – and they could have been mistaken for clouds on the long, cautious approach to the Milan airport. They played Strauss, and the attendants – red skirts, red jackets, red tights with a blue chiffon – served a midnight meal.

If there’s advice I could give to business travelers, it’s this: eat whenever you can. As the (admittedly early) days go on, opportunities to eat remain far away and few between. So far it ends up as a simple binary choice during a break between talks:

Eat
Answer Questions

In a scenario of pure numerical outcomes, the choice of mortal refueling versus knowledge dispersal is easy enough – you need to take in order to give, and the maneuver of presenting should be giving enough to warrant calories paid back to the presenter.

But for me – and maybe this is something endemic to the setting, or to the product, but when people, many of them young people, have not only the courtesy to indulge your teaching style and presentation material –they respect you that far – but that they then have the fortitude to question something they have seen or heard – they worked it into their conscious minds – it becomes the priority to be responsive. Answering their questions is the right choice.

Thus, I remain forever grateful to the small tokens presented by the busy, for the busy; it feels as though in the small silverware and serving dishes of the airlines, in the leftover sandwiches from the conference caterings, and from the snuck-in meals from cafeterias after hours, there is a shared respect for the sanctity of basic nourishment, and it engenders within that culture an ideal – one of courtesy.

It is in the faces of the servers and the served. The same feeling I felt working those early months at the neighborhood hotel, a few miles from where I grew up. Food, beds, showers, souls in need of recharging.

“A hot meal?” she asked. The smile on her face was genuine, warm. A small glass of Riesling. A Swiss chocolate. When these things are readily available, we might refuse them. But I refuse nothing in these hectic days, and learned something in that moment, eyeing the food placed in front of me: I travel, not to increase my isolation, but to learn to be grateful for it, and for the moments that I return home and appreciate it for being there, and unchanging.

Don’t refuse a chance to rest and refuel when traveling. Eat whenever you can. It helps you remember home. It helps you stay human.

Europe, Day 1 Midnight: Vienna

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 01:12:00 +0000

The phone is ringing. It’s ringing, and I’m taking a shower.

I know why it’s ringing, of course. I also know, because the bathroom I’m in is a futuristic, clinical one-wash all in white tile with integrated shower, toilet and sink, that the phone on the wall of the bathroom will be waterproof.

I really don’t want to answer it, because I know why it’s ringing. They think there’s trouble. They think there’s trouble because I saw a long length of cord wired to a switch on the wall, and I pulled it. Curiosity got the best of me then, as it does now, as I pick up the phone.

“Room 212,” I answer. Maybe the guy on the other end will be fooled by my professionalism and, instead of telling me what he’s going to tell me, he’ll go “oh, you’re the guy in room 212? Let me tell you, you’re alright.”

Instead: “Hello – this is Stephen at reception. Is everything okay? Your alarm has just been triggered.”

Earlier

Vienna strikes me as a chemical city – in the midnight nearness there’s really only the forests of great industrial gas pipes and hulks of liquid storage tanks along this stretch of highway. There is a materials-processing smell that hangs about.

We are driving under blue neon-lit underpasses, while I scribble notes in my notebook in the dark. One day, I realize, I’d like to get really superb at writing in the dark. Right now, it ends up listed off to one side like a badly-drawn ship in child’s crayon seas.

Long stretches of grassland along the highway sprout wind turbine stalks occasionally – the European kind with the three blades that never spin faster than you could do by hand. Well, if it were smaller. These are a few stories tall.

With the city looming ahead and the background sparse green and farm, I realize where I’ve seen this before. Fort Worth, Texas.

I’m in Fort Worth.

Panic Room

I shake the memory and realize I’m still on the red phone to the front desk, talking life and death. Not thirty minutes ago I met Stephen for the first time. Tired from a long day, but jovial, he offered us free airline miles when we checked in. Now, he’s wondering one of two things as he waits for my response:

God, I hope he’s alright. Did he fall? Is there a burglar? Can he speak? Maybe he’s being held hostage...

Those goddamn Americans always pull the alarm cord.

But he can’t say those things. He just tells me my alarm has been triggered, and waits for me to make the next move in the conversation.

Note the tone and the inferences here – your alarm has been triggered. Nothing accusatory here even though I did the boneheaded American thing to do and pulled on a rope for no discernible reason other than that it had the bad fortune to exist within arm’s reach.

As I explain down the situation to Stephen and try to keep dripping water and shampoo out of my eyes, I look down and notice that the cord just about reaches the floor, where someone – if they had fallen down during a shower, would be able to crawl, and with their last vestiges of strength, pull down the cord and trip the tiny switch. A lifesaving device – and I fiddled with it.

Don’t blame me – I’m an American, and life-and-death stuff is always painted red. This was white cord with a black knot. And who the hell expects an alarm cord?
I pull on things, press things, try things.

Hell, there was no way to have known how to turn on the lights in the room by any amount of reading, and I would have been reduced to exploring the minibar in absolute darkness if I hadn’t looked at the little black box by the door, my keycard, and felt like it might be interesting to put one inside the other. The screwer-abouters influence never dies; Et in Arcadia Ego.

“You can press the green button by your door to deactivate the alarm.”

Very staid. Adopting the stance myself, I assure with Stephen the non-emergency nature of the emergency, hang up, shake off the excess water and resolve to turn off the alarm immediately and save good-natured hospitality rescue teams from destroying their own double-peepholed door.

As I step naked out of the bathroom and cross to the door, I freeze. My feet, still wet, are making a cold pool underneath me, but I’m motionless, as if tracked by a Tyrannosaur; my eyes catch two red lights that weren’t lit before on the head of my bed, and below them, the unfeeling diode eye of a camera.

I have just activated an alarm-based closed-circuit recording. I am naked. In front of the camera. And in the interests of litigation that may ever rise from even trivial or false alarms, I know instinctively that this footage of me, frozen in horror and naked, will be stored forever.

At least I got a shower.

Europe, Day 0A: Aerial Farming

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 22:35:00 +0000

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.

Europe Day 0: Lounge Lizards, Duty Calls

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 17:54:00 +0000

I decide to head to the lounge restrooms (because I prefer doing my business at sea level – I have nightmares about being the one still in the toilet when they need everyone seated and that means you, guy taking a dump). They have the sinks that detach the basin from the faucet, the style that always to me feels vaguely Roman, though I have no idea if that’s accurate or not.

As I leave, I realize the logos on the restrooms are backwards. The guy in the wheelchair is supposed to be pointing to the right.

Speaking of duty calls, I’m thinking about some of the elements of games I’ve played recently on Xbox 360, including Call of Duty 4. Others include Rock Band, and Ace Combat 6. Each has its own flavor.

Thinking back to Thanksgiving: CJ is maybe six, seven. He’s telling me about From Russia with Love on the Playstation. Exploding barrels, falling chandeliers – he even mentioned that the chandelier thing would be possible in real life – the pantheon of shooter cheap-tricks that I’ve seen in just about every game since Duke Nukem 3D. I try to explain Rock Band to him. He’s not excited about it. Playing instruments doesn’t do it. Explosions make more sense to him.

There has to be a connection between Russia and Rock Band that’s more core than its eventual expression – mellifluent sounds or mauling shrapnel converge on the same limbic response – they have to.

I turn to an unlikely source of inspiration. The snack bar in the lounge has chilled mini-slabs of Cabot Creamery Monterey Jack cheese. On the rear of the package, I read the ingredients. A simple list: pasteurized milk, cheese cultures, salt, enzymes. That’s it. And yet, there’s satisfaction in the “tear here” packaging, the shape of the cheese both in and out of the package.

When you’re selling curdled milk, it’s not the ingredients, but in the structure of the thing where you make your imprint.

And the relationship goes from cloudy to clear. Reward. Regardless of the method of implementation – AC6’s lead-off missile trails and trailing glittery explosions, Rock Band’s last-second overdrive band member rescues, Duty's sweep-leg full-auto takedowns; the games unify around the concept of rewarding the player at nearly every opportunity, certainly with acceptable hurdles along the way, but never leaving the player unsatisfied for unforgivable stretches.

I think this particular ethos of design is a favorite of mine, perhaps a culprit in my latent but resurging interest to find work in the almost-field of Hedonics. And I think it’s a big part of making these presentations at GDC and in Europe. If there’s any advice I can give to up and coming game developers, it’s this – focus on reward. The player is taking valuable time to play your game. Even though it comes down to a series of button presses and clicks, do something engaging – reward your players. They’re hoping, praying that you will.

H4x0r Economist: You Only Think It's Over

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:00:00 +0000

It was just another day of guilty pleasure on the Internet - I mean, what are Mondays for, AMIRITE? - spending a few minutes with Strong Bad, the cast and crew of YTMND.COM, and, in a rare half-nelson of nostalgia, I looked up Dan Weaver's perpetually-poignant politinomical perodical: H4x0r Economist.
Or, at least, I tried.

Try it yourself.

Yeah. It's closed. Empty.

It's gone, the man says, a fair ship of comic economics, now digital detritus, left floating only a black placard stamped with a dismissive, plasma-screen green, street tribute to Ben Bernanke.

There was once a site. Then, he killed it.

Weaver, I may be the only one to go on record to say this outright, but I will not stand here a man convinced he has done his diligence, without delivering my assertion to you that what you have done, sir, is no less than horrific.

And it will also stand on the record that, if you had read my blog post on digital continuity, you would have realized the simple fact that you can't get away with that shit on the Internet.

What man is it that could purport to plow anything under that's made of simple text and pictures, when storage is so painfully plentiful, bandwidth so wantonly wide, and when entire fields of servers exist solely to catalog every piece of the Internet standing from point-to-point, guaranteeing a pristine copy of your comic for all eternity?

The dramatic reveal:
Wayback Machine's Copy of H4x0r Economist from August 2007

It's clear that the world takes some goods as public from their inception. Web Comics are one of them. Let it be known that We have your comics, and We will always have your comics. And to those that would have me cast off H4x0r Economist as the residue of a dead administration, I say Bernanke be damned - we are still in The Age of Gr33|\|$P4|\|!

Phear!

Updated: Charles Cox at Microsoft XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 17:30:00 +0000

UPDATED: Final tour links posted (Ireland is sold out!)

Well, I suppose if you see it on the web, it must be true - I'm headed to Europe for a couple of weeks as part of the Microsoft XNA Game Studio European Tour 2007.

While there, I'll be presenting information on the newest version of XNA Game Studio, and doing that trick where I put together a game in an hour.

Here are the dates, locations, and sign-up links (if you're the international type):

November 26th - Dublin, Ireland (SOLD OUT) link

November 27th - Vienna, Austria link

November 28th - Milan, Italy link

November 29th - Mechelen, Belgium link

November 30th - Stockholm, Sweden (At the Swedish Game Awards) link

December 03rd - Helsinki, Finland link

December 04th - Copenhagen, Denmark link

We're looking at nearly twenty seperate presentation sessions, a couple thousand people, constant travel and questionable (read: negligible) amounts of sleep. I'm sensing a lot of macaroni and cheese. If you're in the area and get a shot of me looking like a half-dead raccoon, just remember that it's for a good cause.

I'll be posting what I can, from where I can, when I can. That may be never. Wish me fair tailwinds and benevolent Wi-Fi.

See you on the road!

Flags by markfennell.com.

Kaua'i Reflections, Day 4: Dead Lizard

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Tue, 16 Oct 2007 08:22:00 +0000

"Aloha."

It's only the millionth time I've heard that. Sonia, dressed in a long, floral dress, motions for us to bow our heads, and we receive leis around our necks. These leis are not the general welcoming color of orchid purple that we received on our first day to the resort. These leis are green.

We are here for the timeshare lecture.

A representative works us down to the bottom floor of the resort - shallow stairs and dim hallways with low ceilings. There is the smell of baking cookies. Ahead, like a near-death experience, a brilliant light shines through the glass doors, and we pass through to a dozen hotel portraits, stalwart and proud, looking over a luminous, angelic view of the cresting waves of Hanalei Bay.

This is where they will try to sell us property.

12:00 PM

"I'll compress my usual 90-minute sales presentation to seven minutes."

Covertly, I set my stopwatch.

12:20 PM

He's still talking.

Over a flurry of satellite photographs, artist's conceptions, blueprints, price sheets, whiteboard drawings, value propositions, room layouts, trading option sheets, and hotel point exchange brochures, his ninety-minutes-now-seven-minutes-now-twenty-minutes presentation drags on.

I'm scratching out my own figures on a piece of paper. Every once in a while the agent looks over to see what I'm writing. Selfishly, I shield my work.

12:30 PM

I stop the timer. He's done.

Thirty minutes.

We don't buy anything.

1:00 PM

"How's it going, man?"

I look back. It's the bellman, heading by with a cart full of luggage.

"Not bad," I answer. "You?"

"Pretty good," he says, his voice fading away. "Better if my wife wasn't cheating on me..."

1:30 PM

The sand reminds me of Johnny's Seasoning Salt. We are leaving soon. The clouds obscure the easternmost point of the island; the weather is changing. A rising wind is tugging at my shirt; I watch the surfers slip the lashing waves that rip back against my feet, digging holes around them, leaving a slime of salty wet sand on my toes.

There's no plan today. I feel like having an ice cream cone - it's a far cry from sailing four-foot waves in Na Pali, or dangling at thirty-six hundred feet. But desires are just that ephemeral; nowhere in the social contract does it say we need to make our inclinations match our surroundings day after day.

It still feels strange. I constantly question myself in times like these, standing, watching others move themselves in time and space. I ask what right I have to hang onto silence, stillness, storing up my entropy. Some never quit running.

8:00 PM

Nobody sits inside at the Cafe. Rain, shine, day or night, everyone sits outside. Dad and I sit down at a balcony edge table and order. Seven ounces of tenderloin in a thin wasabi sauce so minimal it looks like it was drawn on the plate in colored pencil. Miso-marinated prawns perpetually ready to burst.

Hanalei Bay is invisible, just a stretch of negative space in deadblack until the next shore's lights. Past the balcony, it looks like there is literally nothing. By morning, we will see the verdant crag again, looming massive and fog-enshrouded. We will see the same schooner, beaten by bay waves, shoved first to port, then to starboard, tugging against a firm anchor.

I regret not being able to sail these islands. For reasons concerning outcomes of history, legality, and profitability, it's not a circle I can hope to close for some years yet - Hawaii simply isn't friendly to private sailing charter, not least for the situation of the weather, which can turn temperamental without warning, damning sailors to double-digit waves and gale force winds suddenly and without safe harbors.

Later, I walk poolside, navigating by gas-fed tiki torches and cyanotic underwater lighting. The beach disappears into the same nothing I saw from the balcony; proximity is no aid. I take a step and my foot drops into muck. I chance a look at the resort. It is a terraced fortress. It is a mammoth of beige lego pieces. A light burns in the penthouse on top - the bay's only lighthouse.

I'm not sure whether it's okay to want to go home now, but home is what I want.

Kaua'i Reflections, Day 3: Whale's Teeth

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 07:15:00 +0000

5:30 PM

"It's like portals, man, coming down from Princeville; it's like every bridge you cross is a portal to another world..."

"What about these bone carvings?" I asked.

"Those? Those are just made of cow bones, man."

Oh.

Rewind to 7:30 AM

They pack us on the boat. No shoes, they said. Some are dressed to impress, some are dressed less. Half an hour ago, we were all standing around the lobby of Captain Andy's Sailing Adventures. Nobody said hello to one another, even though we'd be inhabiting the same boat for about six hours.

Dad and I stared at the sextants and talked chronographs until loadup.

The sign said dolphin spottings were possible. Reading the weather numbers, sailing looked possible, too.

9:00 AM

It's still early. Breakfast was two pieces of blueberry bread. The rest of the gang is snorkeling. Sea turtles pop up occasionally, and the swimmers bounce between sightings, eagerly flapping flippers in front of the boat, then behind the back as someone makes a new sighting. Dad and I hang back with Captain Bernard, a native with a chiseled face, dark skin, and a floral print shirt. He's proud of this boat - the Akialoa - but speaks even more emphatically about the future.

"They're gonna get this new 65-footer. Real slick. Being built right now in the U.S. Virgin Islands - we're going to take people on all-day tours, and guess who gets to drive it." He gestures excitedly toward himself.

I ask him if he's going to get to charter it on its maiden voyage from the USVI to Hawaii. His face falls visibly.

"I don't think I can get anyone to cover my shift," he admits.

10:00 AM

The dust cloud from a white Bronco streams over the top of the dunes at Barking Sands. Naval security. Barking Sands is a missile test range. The Bronco simply drives back and forth all day. We keep time with our sister ship, the Spirit of Kauai. The boats race at twenty-two knots, making around the southwest edge of the island for the Na Pali coast.

Flying fish erupt ahead of our bow wake, blasting forward ahead of the spray on dragonfly-like wings, skimming only inches above the surface. The crowd, jubilant, watches a superior specimen fly for several hundred feet before giving up. Cheers erupt.

No sign of the frigate from Day One.

10:30 AM

We are surrounded. Off the Na Pali coast, spinner dolphins begin to chase and dodge our boat. A group of twelve or more orbit us. I watch and film a dolphin with a clipped fin, keeping an eye on him. He switches from one pontoon, to the other. As we pour on the speed, the dolphins keep up, jumping and twisting.

Everyone is crowded around the bow. I look back for Captain Bernard. He is at the wheel. He is smiling.

We pass rock formations, waterfalls, secluded beaches. Na Pali, the southwest coast of Kaua'i, is being eroded faster than any other coastline in the world. The shear rock cliffs face swells of fifty feet in severe winter storms, that scrape and slough the igneous rock to powder.

The water is an unimaginable shade of blue. Reefs are everywhere. The waves are picking up, as is the wind.

11:30 AM

We finally sail. The boat, a fifty-five foot Gold Coast custom catamaran, isn't made for sailing.

"We realized the rudder was too long," Captain Bernard explains, hand-over-handing the wheel as we steered up to a reach, "It was so long that the prop wash - just the force of the water coming off the props - was bending the rudder."

"What'd you do?" I ask.

"We chopped it in half," the Captain explains proudly. "'Course, it doesn't sail as good as it used to, but -"

By the numbers, all of the gear is there. Mainsail, jib, yards of line, tackle and stoppers. But the jib is cut at an oblique angle, more for sightseeing than sailing, and we're only making seven knots downwind. We won't get home on this and the Captain knows it.

For now, though, I enjoy. Someone gets sick - the soda crackers come out. I thank my lucky stars and open another Heineken.

Kaua'i Reflections, Day 2: Caves and Canards

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Sat, 13 Oct 2007 07:44:00 +0000

3:00 PM

"So this is a constant-speed propeller, right?"

My father - ever the pilot. Not far from the dead fields and gray slate frigate of yesterday, we're standing on dry, red clay. Dad is inspecting a propeller. I'm watching the windsock. Fifteen knots - good to sail on, but I have no idea whether it's good to fly in. In fact, secretly, I'm hoping it's not.

Because I'm scared.

Let me back up. We're standing on a beach, father and I.

12:00 PM

"You know what I think that is?"

I'm watching the riptides crumble sand into brackish khaki water, curling it back with monstrous force. Warning signs, again. Caricatures of drowned swimmers, human geometry swallowed by water geometry. I'm watching the riptides and I have no idea what he thinks that is.

"I think that's a tsunami warning system."

I look back and see four green saucers on a pole. At the top lay a crown of solar cells. The system looks new, freshly painted, speaking of recently-released government funding and academic zeal, merged together in a single, unholy product with a shape only true utility could produce. Even cell-phone towers were prettier than this.

"There are sensors out in the water."

Indeed there are. Well - there are now. Tales of a mountain of black, boiling water surging through southeast Asia seem to be the stuff government proposals are made of; private or public, we find our inspirations in storytelling. There were numbers before. Probabilities, calculations, and risk mitigation routines. Now, there's tragedy.

I have my eyes on the riptide, and my mind on the sky - we're going to be up there in a few hours. We signed on to try something new, something dangerous, something interesting to both of us. They're called ultralights. A hang-glider, strapped to a little cockpit with wheels, strapped to an engine. Space for two. A way to see the island. A way to experience flight.

Experience flight.

3:21 PM

I'm five hundred feet up in the air and my stomach is like a puppet on a string - various pieces of it are being yanked up and then dropped earthward as turbulence rattles the little cage I'm buckled into. We are climbing rapidly - five hundred feet a minute. More and more land drops away as the propeller behind us chews up the sky and bellows wind under the huge cloth wing. We are flying, and an old familiar sensation creeps up on me, rising from the historical muck of my very youngest days of flying. The feeling of fear.

Jim, my pilot, follows Cole, the pilot in my father's ultralight, and we race for Waileau crater. As we do, Jim guns the throttle and follows a current up; I look over his shoulder to see the digital readout peg at 3,600 feet. Below me, everything is ants. Ant people. Ant cars. My nervousness kicks in, and I suddenly can't control the shaking that takes over my legs. As Jim eases the throttle, my control returns. Take a breath.

I have no idea what I'm doing up here. I had the same confused feeling exiting the Grand Caravan at 10,000 feet two years ago on a tandem skydive.

They say my old man has air in his bones - that he's made for the business. Maybe I'm trying to figure out if I've got it, too. If I did, maybe that'd just be another way to get closer to him.

Or maybe I just have no idea what I'm doing up here.

3:40 PM

Thirty-six hundred feet, and we're closing on the crater. Helicopters below us fly a counter-clockwise pattern past waterfalls, dropoffs of over a thousand feet. Jim brings us up to the crater, exposed up to craggy green scraping the bottoms of clouds. The turbulence worsens, drops of rain appear on my face mask.

"Wettest place in the world," Jim says, pointing to the green slice at the top. "Right up there."

Maybe that's the point of this. Places. People. Best-of. Jim and Cole have been in the business over thirty years, with an attitude and local knowledge to match. You don't find extraordinary people doing ordinary things. You don't become an extraordinary person doing ordinary things.

It's my turn to fly now. We bank the contraption over the water and he hands me the controls - you steer with a big metal bar. Up is down, left is right. Simple. And then he turns on the iPod, leaves the controls to me, and begins to dance in the cockpit.

I really have no idea what the hell I'm doing up here.

Kaua'i Reflections, Day 1: Intraisland and Interisland

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:27:00 +0000

3:00 PM

There are whole fields - owned by the Agribusiness Corporation - where nothing grows. Perhaps it's only the season, but they look dead. Parched, desolate, they dot the western sweep of Kaua'i - the dry side.

I'm driving back from the Wailaeua lookout - thirty-five hundred feet of canyon dropoff cinder cones slashed through the green hills, when I spot the dead fields.

We've passed U.S. Navy missile ranges, NASA radar centers, and narrowly avoided crashing through the gate of an Army ammunition dump. Every type of warning sign, every cautionary insignia, all manner of symbolic attendance has been thrown our way as we circumnavigate the island. It seems everyone has a stake in this little dot of land in the Pacific, and as the fiefdoms battle for control of the land, the sea, and the skies, the signs sprout up like weeds, directing tourists and the island's residents back and forth, bouncing among the remaining free zones, ricocheting off the bounds of corporate farms, missile sites, and naval no-sail zones.

And in the middle, scorching in the heat leeward of the Kaua'i hills, are the dead fields. They pass on our left, our right, flocked by those same signs - Do Not Enter. Restricted Area.

I'm picking out something on those fields now - something that stands out against the dry, the brown, the lifeless. Tall and curved, striped - it's a sun umbrella stuck in the dusty ground. Below it: a man, a chair, a cooler. His toes touch dirt, his hand reaches in the cooler. In the middle of the field, he sits, waits, watches the waves on the west shore.

The man sits at his station, guarding the field. Behind him, in a nearby field, another umbrella, another man. They sit, they wait. Umbrella, chair, cooler. Sitting, waiting, leisurely guarding the dry, lifeless ground from a little tropical outpost. There are dozens of them, one in every field for miles.

In the background, silently surgical, lurking off the west shore, a Navy frigate turns south, showing her broadsides. The string vibrates, tension holds against the island.

Drive on.

7:30 PM

We're on the seawall, dangly legs catching spray on the south shore of the island. Over beers, my father and I alternately discuss love, life, and the island.

There are constant whispers of a Superferry - an inter-island transport for cars and people - in the papers, on the lips of the hotel workers, and in signage around the island. Behind us, an arrow proudly points the way to the loading dock - the site that the new supervessel will dock to take on cars and passengers. But not yet. The Superferry didn't make it. Protesters jammed the harbor, and turned it back.

Three lights in the dimming sky suggest an aircraft on final approach, coming our way. Sailboats dance just off the harbor, using navigational buoys as impromptu race markers. Dozens of kayakers and surfers bob and slip the waves a few hundred feet away.

I feel Kaua'i as a beautiful place resistant to overdevelopment. They say it's what the "normal" islands used to look like twenty years ago, and perhaps it's only through the outcry of the citizenry that things haven't become more corporate. Signs of it are everywhere. Hardly a building over three stories. No investment banks. Real estate offices that still sit next to t-shirt stores.

The sun is going down, and the spray is becoming more pronounced as the land breeze scrapes pressure off the land and distributes it back to the sea. Behind us, a gate opens, and cars drive off in a quiet procession, emerging from the proud future site of the Superferry.

It's the next morning's paper that brings the news of furloughs at the Superferry site, carried through the day previous. Our day at the seawall, at the site of the Superferry, was their last. The cars we saw leaving were the exiled workers.

Drive on.

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

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 18:34:00 +0000

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.

Job Opportunity

noreply@blogger.com (Charles N. Cox) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 22:54:00 +0000

Now that we've all gotten our Mondays out of the way, I'll step in for a quick note. It's been busy around here - actually, that's what I want to talk to you about.

http://members.microsoft.com/careers/search/details.aspx?JobID=7D92A555-1821-4381-8F08-C1F54E60C903

We're looking for someone. Someone who knows their game development technology and isn't afraid to write about it.

If you work with DirectX, Xbox 360, or Games for Windows, now's your chance to share what you know and build a world-class knowledge product for game developers. Step up and show us what you've got! If you are interested and qualified, send a resume with a writing sample to gdocjobs@microsoft.com.