Every since Ryan and Carlos, his roomate and recent culinary school graduate, introduced me to Ferran Adrià and his lab/restaurant El Bulli (beautiful photos can be perused here), I've been fascinated with the idea of this experiment with food, which I consider an example of nerd food. What Adrià does is disassemble and recompile the elements of food - tastes, textures, smells, colors - to create something completely different and new. He reprograms food.

Here in the Bay Area, we live under a tyranny of Alice Waters - a benevolent dictatorship, to be sure, full of good intentions, but her basic philosophy, which has since spread to all parts of the U.S., strictly stipulates that food is naturally good and ought not to be tampered with more than necessary. Good, high quality food can shine best with minimal handling. Her techniques evince a deep respect for the natural structures of meat, vegetables, pastas, spices, and so on. Her food is delicious, and her work with farmer's markets and school's eating programs are very deservedly much admired.

But Adrià takes a different approach. He wants to challenge the eater, to mystify, to tease, to astonish; his way is controversial, perhaps, because it may be seen as elitist, anti-Julia Child, who gracefully imbued the home cook with the power to prepare masterful French dishes in her own kitchen. No home cook could prepare the bulk of Adrià's dishes, which were often developed after six months in a laboratory.

There's really no point to this entry other than I wanted to announce to the world that I finally beat my buddy (The Rock God) at Guitar Hero, and made a fun image to rub it in. So please, if you've stood on your friend's necks after hitting them between the eyes with your best shot, feel free to finish them off with this.

Thank god for Unsung and David vs. Goliath GIS.

Some of you may know that I work at 1UP.com now producing a program called The 1UP Show. Basically, it's the beginning of an exploration of ideas I've had over the last few years, exploring them right here on GGA, and made possible now by the involvement of my friend and colleague Ryan O'Donnell. Before we got hired at Ziff Davis--and we were hired within ten minutes of eachother, funny enough--we had often sat on Ryan's balcony sketching out our ideas, dreaming of wacky things, including a puppet show about games. Yeah, that one didn't work out. Yet.

At 1UP, we got the chance to essentially do what we wanted. We knew we wanted to cover videogames on video, but we weren't sure how to proceed, since Ryan didn't like my puppets. Just kidding. We knew what we liked, and what we didn't. We tried to do a roundtable show early on, but we found it dull as dishwater--so dull that the format actually obscured the interesting conversation and the personalities.

The first time we tried to do something completely different was the one-off "Gaming to the Max" which was the video segment to complement Jeremy Parish's week-long SNES Retro/Active feature, a time warp in which we treated SNES games like current products. Yeah, it was really silly and, looking back on it, really flawed, but given our time constraints and the fact that we aren't actors the project schematic was too ambitious. We definitely learned from that.

For all the adulation that comes his way, Will Wright is a modest, self-deprecating, humorous man with a really whimsical approach to giving a keynote speech. A couple of years ago at GDC, for example, he took to the stage as an opportunity to enthuse about one of his favorite topics, the Soviet space program. What does that have to do with videogames? Well, nothing.

Nothing, and everything. This is, after all, Will Wright we're talking about. and he has the kind of hungrily obsessive mind that seeks for consilience in everything - for the links that twine subjects together, for the force that underlies the entire universe.

And that's sort of what he talked about today, splitting time between his latest obsession, astrobiology, and the way the Maxis team prototyped Spore. By the end of the talk it seemed the two threads had converged, and I felt like I had taken an epic journey from microbes to the vast reaches of the universe - and learned a little story about the Russian space program, to boot.

If you've ever seen Will Wright talk, you know that it's nearly impossible to write about it. First, he races with dizzying speed from one point to the next, hardly glancing behind his shoulder to see if you're keeping up. And then the topics he covers - they are extremely complex subjects that people spend their entire lives trying to understand, and he references them and passes to the next in an instant. He dropped a quote that I think is very appropriate to his talk as well as to life: the Irish poet William Butler Yeats said, "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." Wright seeks not to cram you with his knowledge, but I think he really just wants to inspire his listeners to seek it out for themselves, and to knit the disciplines together, as he has done, to reach a greater understanding of humanity, life, the universe, and everything in it.

This morning we started the GDC with Phil Harrison's keynote speech called "Beyond the Box". It was the usual Sony affair, with charts of how much hardware and software they've sold interspersed with pretty excellent technical demos. But it left me wondering, all this technology, and we're still only interested in how well we can blow things up?

Really, aside from Ted Price's new Ratchet and Clank demo and a new "lots of ducks" demo which was transformed, this time, into a "lots of fish swimming" demo, the other exhibitions were all about massive destruction: of cars, of environments, of people. The only suggestion that something like behavioral simulations could also be enhanced was in a Warhawk demo, where the way the enemy shot at you was called "Ambient Warfare."

Personally, I'm just tired of shooting stuff.

Yesterday, I played Oblivion for about four hours straight. I won't pretend that it's a flawless game. But it's the kind of game that snakes its way around an obsessive heart. I got into collecting herbs, wildflowers, and mushrooms and pretty much spent an entire afternoon jauntily roaming around a broad green valley filling my pouch full of tiger lilies, St. Jahn's Wort (that's how they spell it in the game), and shiny fungus varietals. Then I sat on a sunny hillock and experimented with making potions. I discovered a new recipe for a potion I named "Good Stuff" because it restored health and fatigue. Later, I discovered that I could joke my way to becoming friends with a shopkeeper who would buy my potions for very good prices. Forget about the main quest, I want to train to be a master alchemist!

No doubt there are games of this depth and complexity coming to the PS3 as well. But it seems a shame to me that so many exhibitions of technology focus on killing people. Ambient Warfare? I want ambient world.

Why is game creation so often about destruction?
-jane

Accordion Hero now has a brilliant post-mortem on Gamasutra.

I actually love the accordion, in all its quirkiness, but I think aesthetically I prefer the sultry Latin accordion of Argentinian tangoes to the bouncy Teutonic one that is the basis of the polka.

I haven't been able to write about this much yet because although it seems silly, but it's still painful to talk about. On the flight back from the DICE Summit, I lost my DS--which had sentimental value for me because my boy gave it to me for Valentine's Day. But more crushingly, the DS had in it my copy of Animal Crossing: Wild World, and my town, to which I had become greatly attached.

After all, I was about 10,000 bells away from paying off my third mortgage.

I had caught all the fish for winter, including the rare one that shows up only when it snows or rains, and had selflessly donated them to the museum. I had bred the purple tulip and was on my way to getting the rare black tulip.

I had collected the "exotic" set of furniture. I had decorated my cozy little house with bonsai trees. I had a "music room" with my favorite gyroids. I had I had gotten pictures from my dearest animal friends, Aurora and Pompom and Dizzy and even the snobby Maelle and Baabara. I'd made a killing on the speculative turnip market. I'd carefully cultivated friendships, writing flattering notes like clockwork twice a day.

I won the fishing tourney.

And most of all, I had the satisfaction of watching my town grow over the winter, with new flowers blooming and every kind of fruit dripping from the trees in my orchards; I loved my town theme song, I designed my town flag; in every way, I had made it my town.

I only hope that somewhere a sympathetic stranger has picked up my DS, turned it on, and has marveled at the fact that I have a golden watering can. Perhaps that kindly stranger will act as a guardian of my town, picking weeds and watering the flowers, posing as me to my animal friends to keep them happy.

Dear PC,

NVIDIA has released a couple new cards; one of which, at first caress, seems a decent value. $300-$350 to do the latest whiz-bang shit ain't too bad. I wish your species were longer-lived and your innards a bit more resistant to the ravages of time, but the higher powers have deemed thee as such and as such I choose to love thee. You're two years old now, and while you've been loyal and doggedly refused to let age and failing fans conquer your determination to keep on gamin', it's time for a little corrective surgery to hold off the effects of aging.

I know you need this new card, and as such will need a new motherboard because yours is not PCI-express. Would you like that? I think I know you well enough by now to say confidently that you would. That will of course necessitate new RAM--you've made that clear to me in the past. And yes, I know your processor will not work with the new you, either, so what else can I do but provide? I also know you will ask about your power supply, so let me just head off that discussion right now and tell you that I would make certain you have enough juice to remain hydrated.

Thus, your $300 upgrade is at around $1200. That feel about right, PC? Will that keep you satisfied for another year--maybe two? . . . you know, that's a helluva lot of burritos just to play Oblivion with my preferred RPG control scheme. Yes, I could go out right now and sell my organs (which have to last me decades, mind you) to upgrade yours. I could bask in your high-resolution bliss and mouse-look for just that much longer. Yes, I could do that. You want me to do it, don't you? You need me to, don't you?

Well you know what, PC? Fuck you. I mean, I love you, but seriously--fuck you. I'm done with your gold-diggin', 3D-positional-audio-that-has-never-fucking-worked-right, masochistic insecurities. I've had it up to here with you using my benjamins to wipe your ass and throwing parties with my credit card. Parties, mind you, to which you have never invited me! You have to have so many anti-infection shits running that you act like a schizophrenic hypochondriac on acid and yet somehow still manage to contract more diseases than Bangkok hooker. And if I hear you complain even one more time about "update this" and "update that" I fear I may jump off a tall structure just to make it stop. So, in the interests of preserving my finances--nay! my very life, I am officially cutting you off.

I've got my 360 and my 360 loves me as much as I love it. Call me superficial, but it's prettier, faster, and smarter than you would be even after that $1200 of "necessities," as you call them. From now on my new toys are only for drives not belonging to you. Don't blame me, you did this to yourself.

Sincerely,
-Matt