I fly out for Taiwan and then Korea later today. I’ll try to keep updating as I can–you should still expect a Sunday Poem, for example. I also went and got a nifty new digital camera yesterday, so I may drop some pics of Taipei and Seoul on here.
I’ll be at the Korea Game Conference from Wednesday through Saturday, and giving a keynote speech called “The Destiny of Online Games” on Friday.
Go read the post and the thread. I commented somewhere in there.
FWIW, I think the best background for a designer is a broad education with an emphasis on liberal arts and humanities; and the best personal qualification is intellectual curiosity and a dedication to self-education.
This is why user-created content works.
During the Q&A, a french canadian developer got up there. Not a wimpy looking guy, your typical tatoo’d programmeur-du-jour, and said the following (written in phonetic-quebecois-english for full effect)
“You talk about de need for critical acclaim. And you talk about de need for de big boodget. Der is a painting in France called de monah-leesah. It is famous. It might be very expensif too, if you can buy it, but you can’t buy it.”
Then he pulls out a peice of loose leaf paper from his pocket and unfolds it, holding it up in front of 600+ people, to show a cartoon drawing. Noticably choked up, he says, “Dis is a picture dat my son drawed for me. This drawing makes me cry, and de monah leesah doesn’t effect me one damn bit”.
To quote something I said a very long time ago now,
The thing is that people want to express themselves, and they don’t really care that 99% of everything is crap, because they are positive that the 1% they made isn’t. Okay? And fundamentally, they get ecstatic as soon as five people see it, right?
In these days of mass media, of broadly targeted disposable entertainment, we tend to forget that the core of entertainment was a person telling a story around a campfire, it was dancers in a circle, it was singing for spirituality, it was ballads that carried the news from province to province, it was writing as a holy act–the notion that one’s words might live beyond one’s life simply astonishing, potent and fraught with eternity.
Today’s mass media is a historical aberration, and it’s a recent one. As little as 100 years ago, music was something experienced in the parlor, with your friends. Every household had a musician, and music-making was democratic.
One of the things that Chris Anderson likes to talk about regarding the Long Tail is that the hit-driven market makes products that are moderately to marginally satisfying to large groups of people. But niches target people who really want the product in that niche. Their satisfaction with the product is much, much higher. That’s why I listen to Grassy Hill Radio on the web — because it satisfies me more than the local radio stations do.
As recently as a month ago, a bunch of teenagers writing deeply personal thoughts for a tiny audience of their friends was sold to a major media conglomerate for a few hundred million dollars. Small is the new mass media.
The Australian Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society has just reviewed A Theory of Fun
By skilfully traversing topics from cognitive science, to mathematics, to psychology, Koster integrates a number of disciplines into his theory of fun…. Koster successfully bridges the gap between game design practice and academic theory… For anyone interested in the relationship between games and human experience, this book is a must-read.And for those wanting to design their own games, this book is a definite must have… a welcome addition to the libraries of both gamers and non-gamers alike.
I like juvie novels. “Juvie” is a term from the ghetto world of science fiction and fantasy, where it refers to books intended for a young adult audience–stuff in the tradition of Andre Norton, Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, and so on. The nice thing about juvies in genre fiction is that they don’t do a lot of talking down on the stuff that really matters.
Cory Doctorow turned me on to Scott Westerfeld‘s stuff when he stayed at my place during ETECH this year. So I went and got one of his books. Then three more. Now I’ve got all of them, I think.
Westerfeld’s stuff is highly readable; I confess that I grabbed two books to carry around with me, this one and Ted Castronova’s new tome Synthetic Worlds
More importantly, though, Westerfeld tackles interesting issues. In So Yesterday
In Uglies
The books have a lot to say about the ways in which body image affects our perception of people, the ways in which attractiveness can sometimes enable a person to succeed when they otherwise wouldn’t, and also about the ways in which rebellion is important but may also be damaging to society as a whole. Our heroine, Tally Youngblood, keeps trying to rebel and do the “cool” thing, which eventually becomes the “right” thing, but also keeps interfering in matters beyond her control. Despite all the portrayal of the true “adults” of the world (the Specials) as lupine, insectlike, sharp-toothed, and so on, you can’t help but have a sneaking suspicion that they are also living ina world which Tally doesn’t really understand.
Part of why these books catch my attention is that the transition from Uglies to Pretties is also very much the transition from real life to virtual. In a lot of ways, the story Tally goes through is the story that players go through in online spaces. Maybe that makes the admins the specials. That must explain the sharp teeth.
