The Sunday Poem: Apples

 Posted by (Visited 5742 times)  The Sunday Poem  Tagged with: ,
May 262008
 

In Latin, the words for “apple” and for “evil” are similar in the singular (malus—apple, malum—evil) and identical in the plural (mala).

– Wikipedia

This apple from Tajikistan gave birth to all the fruit:
The red ones, gold ones, tart ones, green and russet hues.

Each branch was mated to a branch carried over miles
And honeybees deployed in ranks to stoke the woody fires.

The names themselves are everywheres: from Fuji to Orléans,
Grannies, Coxes, McIntoshes and countless other brands,

Which carry in each half-cut star and in their very style
The memory of Kazakh slopes where first they grew in wild.

The blossoms spread, pink and pale verging on the blue,
Until we had the legends: the gold ones Hera grew;

The one that Eris tossed to Paris, causing wars in Troy;
Immortal orchards grown in eddas, Idun’s deathless joy;

A snow white princess poisoned; Atalanta’s race;
Johnny and all those orchards over which he traipsed;

The tree of knowledge, good and evil, our original sin.
This is quite a burden for fruit to bear within.

We have made the apple ours, and on it grafted history,
And yet the breed runs on, profusions to a tree,

This fruit humanity resents, but loves and needs.
Every apple carries still inside those bitter seeds.

Wii Fit

 Posted by (Visited 6563 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
May 232008
 

Ah, the irony of writing about Wii Fit while eating a ridiculously sugar-laden donut. Oh well.

Initial thoughts:

For a while there, I thought a balance-board-shaped Clippy was going to be my personal trainer. Someone at Microsoft must be kicking themselves, realizing that after all these years, the equivalent of Clippy is outselling their console.

It’s funny to have my Mii gain weight to match me. Then it’s not.

The balance board is significantly sturdier than any given piece of kit in Rock Band. On the one hand, the balance board is meant to be stood on by people of up to 330lbs. (Not jumped on, they insist, though the game then proceeds to ask you to jump on things.) On the other hand, you are supposed to hit drums repeatedly with great force. I suppose this is a testament to how sturdily the balance board is built…

The biggest problem with Wii Fit is that it’s a grab bag of (pretty good) activities, rather than a training regimen. You seem to have to build your own regimen, and if you don’t feel like aerobics that day, you can just blow them off. It would have been nicer if the game did a little more handholding and told you what to do.

Players who attack pirate servers

 Posted by (Visited 8720 times)  Game talk  Tagged with:
May 222008
 

imaekgaemz.com » On Player Loyalty

After finding a pirate Meridian59 server…

I spend the rest my time in this illegal world schmoozing with the admins, trying to finagle server access to cause a little havoc. After an hour or so of this, everyone on the server is killed by an admin command (I didn’t do it.) Amidst the OMG WTF NOOB ADMIN broadcasts from all the players who just lost their last hour of character building–and all the gear they had, I notice there are are two new admin characters logged in with the names “Psychochild” and “Q.”

While laughing my ass off, I call Brian hoping to hear his trademark cackle while he and Rob wreck another pirate server… but he has no idea what’s going on. “So wait,” I say… “You’re not logged into this server right now?”

No, he wasn’t– So I log back on and start talking to the false PC and Q. — Long story short, it turns out that they are two old players from NDS’s Meridian59 who don’t play anymore, but have taken down quite a few pirate servers.

An interesting read. 🙂

The multi-head world

 Posted by (Visited 5363 times)  Game talk  Tagged with: ,
May 222008
 

It’s nice to finally see real movement towards a very old idea, the world that surfaces radically different experiences on different client platforms. With the announcement that Disney Fairies will have a Nintendo DS version, we see this finally coming to fruition.

Making clients that work on more than one platform or device is a tricky challenge, and one thing that has been talked about forever it seems is the notion of having a separate client that accesses a different portion of the world than the main client. For example, every MMO I have ever been involved with has discussed the notion of a cell phone client just for auctions, trading, checking your shops, and other sorts of low-rendering-requirements tasks.  And yet, the movement towards this stuff always seems sort of tentative.

Disney’s jumping in with both feet, with the notion from the get-go being that Fairies is a property you interact with on many levels, and the DS version and the web version are just two ways (with perhaps “central authority” existing in the web version). For that matter, the toys are also just another way.

When you are engaged in the process of building alternate realities, this is the right way to think about it. The client is just a window into a larger world. Creators should be thinking of their worlds as properties and entities that exist independent of rendering method, interaction method, and so on. And the strongest properties will be those which are not rendering dependent and yet retain a strong central creative identity, designed for everywhere.

Universal client will come — but there are always going to be different real life situations that demand different levels of engagement, and you want your players to be able to engage in every way they might want. Forcing them to sit at a desk is to force them to interact with your brand your way, not their way.

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