It's so gorgeous!

I'm very envious of people who can create such detailed and marveous atifacts with their hands. I've tried painting and crafting and building but about all I can manage are simple line drawings and scarves. I can only knit in straight lines. But something like this, this is something really special. Doesn't it make you want to see little hobbit dolls living inside?

Actually, it also makes me want to film some stop-motion shorts or something... the detail is so amazing, and looks so great on film.

The shooting on the Virginia Tech campus was only hours old, police hadn't even identified the gunman, and yet already the perpetrator had been fingered and was in the midst of being skewered in the media.

Video games. They were to blame for the dozens dead and wounded. They were behind the bloodiest massacre in U.S. history.

Or so Jack Thompson told Fox News and, in the days that followed, would continue to tell anyone who'd listen.

MSNBC has a pretty good write up.

Namco announced a new, online multiplayer (yay!) Katamari: Beautiful Katamari. It seems a bit silly to tout next-gen graphics for this game, since graphics hardly matter - it's the art style and the whimsey and the music that matters most, of course. Still, the multiplayer aspect could be fun. And although Keita Takahashi, the original creator, is not part of the latest incarnation of the series, I think the Katamari model is not established and can be safely replicated by others. The only thing I worry a little about is the music. The Katamari music was so perfect; whoever puts the next soundtrack together has some big shoes to fill!

From the BBC, more news stories about romance:

Chocolate caused a more intense and longer lasting "buzz" than kissing, and doubled volunteers' heart rates.

Dr Lewis said: "There is no doubt that chocolate beats kissing hands down when it comes to providing a long-lasting body and brain buzz.

"A buzz that, in many cases, lasted four times as long as the most passionate kiss."

I love chocolate and all, but really, those people clearly don't know how to kiss.

I never thought I'd really see it, but it's possible that the day has finally arrived that gaming has tangentially influenced a car commercial.

I can't find the commercial on the web anywhere (or remember the company that made it evidently), but it seems there's a used car company commercial featuring 100 Mustangs flowing through the city streets on the way to a potential buyer's house. It seems like it was influenced directly from the 1K Project. (Which I'll just link here directly because I never get tired of watching it). It's certainly possible that the commercial director came up with the idea on his own (it's not the most original concept), but it just really has that 1K Project vibe.

Thanks to Overload in Colorado in the comments for pointing out that the commercial in question is from Autotrader.com. The "making of" (which also contains the commercial at the end) for "Armada" can be found here.

It must be spring, because in California at least, the sun's out, women are weaing diaphonaous skirts and high-heeled sandals, and the New York times is running stories about: the nature of sexual desire, the mystery of sexuality, and sexual selection.

Why do we call dating a "game"? Well, for one there are rules of play, both culturally derived (men should always at leaast offer to pay for dinner) as well as biologically mandated (the flash of the palm or the touching of the hair unconcsiously signals interest.) Understanding the interplay of those rules, however, is complicated, although as the articles referenced above prove, researchers have not stopped trying to read the code of human sexuality and desire.

For some reason (perhaps just feeling the spring blooming all around me like everyone else?) these topics have been on my mind frequently as well the past few days. What is the code of desire? How do we figure it out? How do we proceed, once we have?

Love is a game, a dance, because there is also pleasure in it. That first meeting, that flush of attraction, the flirting - those moments are all tiny rewards that make you want to keep playing. I know some people say they hate dating. I don't understand that. I love meeting new people and exploring them, as I do in games. Perhaps it's the difference between explorative play and goal-oriented play?

But what if we do figure it all out? What if a scientist can tell me, here, this is the specific range of pheromones you respond to; and having analyzed your dating history extensively, the perfect mate for you is between 5'10" and 6'2", has a BA, plays music, and enjoys cooking. That's what, presumably, sites like eHarmony try to do. What would I do with this information? I'm not sure.

Because it thrills me how unpredictable desire is. Just when I think I have it figured out, something will blindside me like a lightening bolt out of the sky. No action need be taken, necessarily; just feel it, know you're alive, and enjoy it. Explore the landscape of your own heart.

Long Tail economics, as made possible by the incredibly cheap distribution powered by the internet, has had a huge cultural impact on music, the medium that currently takes the most advantage of its structure. It has fueled, I believe, the indie boom; and is challenging the hit-making model. The diversity of music widely available on iTunes or Amazon.com or any other retailer is astonishing - it's so much more impressive than the well-stocked Amoeba records I used to frequent as a music-loving teenager.

So, when can we apply this to games? I've been thinking about this for a while, and recently David Edery wrote a post about it, detailing some challenges we still need to overcome in order to transform Xbox Live Marketplace into a place for smaller or older games to live healthily.

On the same day, Harvey Smith wrote me to point out that Deus Ex just came out on Steam. That's the Long Tail at work.

But will it work for games the way it will for films and music? I think there is at least one other problem than those that David wrote about.

Consumers cannot move backwards in graphics technology.

Pick up Deux Ex today and see what I mean. We've been next-gen spoiled. I love the game, but it can't help looking awkward and primitive next to current releases. This may be overcomable: black and white films may have looked "primitive" when the transition to color was happening; but now filmmakers use it for effect, and film buffs appreciate the black and white medium for its own merits, its own beauty. Music doesn't have this problem either - those recordings made forty years ago still sound good, and in fact modern bands are playing around with recreating that garage style, that recorded-with-a-mic-in-a-coffee-can sound. Will games go retro like this too?

There are some games that don't age: Wind Waker is a stunning example of this. Because of its cel-shaded art and stylized animation, it looks just a fresh as it did when it was released. This problem is a version of the uncanny valley - the more "realistic" a game tries to look, the less successful it becomes as a representation of reality as graphics technology overtakes itself.

I have other questions about the long tail as it applies to games, too. Do game companies care enough about it to release their back catalogues? In other words, are they being paid enough to do that? Services like GameTap are of course doing a superb job of collecting and releasing a wide collection of games. I don't know what sorts of deals they are doing - for the companies, if GameTap pays anything, it's pretty much free money, so that's wonderful.

On the other hand, imagine in five years after the next console cycle that you want to play Guitar Hero II because you love Sweet Child of Mine (a very realistic scenario for me). You'd better hope the next console is backwards-compatible, because otherwise how will you manage to connect a unique peripheral to your GameTap service? Either that or you hope that Activision will have the prescience to release all the past Guitar Hero songs online so you can download and play the entire catalogue from your Xbox next-next-gen. I'm not sure Activision would do that, though I would gladly pay a couple dollars to have Sweet Child of Mine in my repertoire.

Of course, there is the whole realm of games that are smaller, more casual, and therefore much less subject to the vagaries of graphics technology or peripheral availability or outdated AI or anything like that. M.U.L.E. remains, to this day, a fun and challenging game. So does chess. Are those the games that will eventually take over the market as budgets become increasingly strained? Will the prevalence of long tail economics create an environment that kills off the big-budget dinosaurs allowing the little adaptable games to flourish in their niches?

Are the fittest games for the next era the casual and indie games?

So now that I have list of Jpop and Jrock songs (thanks, everyone!), I want to collect the media. Right now I've got a lot of low-quality videos from Youtube and Daily Motion that at least let me hear the song. But I want decent-quality MP3s of this stuff. Should be easy, just go to iTunes Japan, right?

Oh, if only it were that easy. But for some reason known only to the Apple overlords, only customers with billing addresses in Japan can purchase songs in the iTunes Japan music store. There is a work around, of course - American otaku are not to be daunted by such a small obstacle.

But it's irritating, from a philosophical standpoint, that customers outside of Japan can't use the internet to buy a digital download. Doesn't that seem backwards to you?

In any case I have ordered my prepaid iTunes card and will be soon using my aunt's address in Ibaraki to start downloading awesome Japanese music.

Back at the second-ever World Cyber Games there was a talk during one of the Business Conference panels by some Microsoft reps, who were excited about bringing the Xbox to South Korea. They talked about bringing South Korea's official pasttime, Starcraft, to the Xbox. Then one (Korean) audience member asked, "But will you have a keyboard?"

The speaker - I wish I could remember who it was, it was a product manager from the Xbox group - shook his head definitively. "No, no keyboards. The console is for the living room. Computers and keyboards are for a different space."

"But," the questioner went on dubiously, "we are used to playing RTS with keyboards. How will we play without a keyboard?"

The Microsoft rep merely repeated, "We will never bring keyboards to a living room console."

Well, times change - and now we've reached the era when the distinction between locations and behaviors is really fuzzy. People *do* text in their living rooms, and they entertain themselves on their phones, and they watch movies on their PCs. So bringing a keyboard to a console doesn't sound as crazy as when Dreamcast did it (a console so ahead of its time in so many ways!) or when the Gamecube did. Anyone who has painfully tried to send a text message through xbox live using a controller will understand why Microsoft is releasing something like this. The only problem is, it is goofy. I mean, if this had appeared on any other website than Gamasutra I would have assumed it was a hoax.

But the new Live update and this peripheral is a sign that Microsoft is progressing on putting all their pieces together. The fact that the Xbox had to be modded to be fully functional - because Microsoft was so set on keeping it hard-coded to the "living room" - was fixed with Xbox 360, which has the best features of media sharing built in. And now they've added multiplatform support, further blurring the lines. It's certainly the way of the future - interconnect nodes of content accessibility and communication, all tied to a single user profile.

That said, it's goofy; it's an inelegant solution. Is there a better one? I'm not sure. I'll have to test this model out to see how it really functions in the context of gaming.

Well, they're here - both my Xbox 360 and my two Guitar Hero II for 360 controllers arrived today. Luckily the thoughtful sender of the latter included a snazzy gig bag for carrying both guitars in style. The 360 box, however, weighs about as much as a Mini Cooper. So, now I have to get them home somehow, and for some reason I thought wearing heels was a good idea today. Riding the train home will be interesting! I hope I can find a seat.

But at least I look really cute today. I should submit my photo to wardrobe_remix. With the gig bag strapped to my back.

My buddy Jerry over at Penny-Arcade today discusses what I'm sure a lot of folks (myself included) get frustrated about: unlockable content.

His concern is a real and valid one, and it's a tough road to hoe as a game developer. On one hand, the consumer deserves the whole product. They paid for it, they should get to play it. But on the other hand, if the player gets all the content up front, in many cases, this makes the game experience dull and unrewarding.

The example of Guitar Hero he uses is a good one for games that might be better served by having a great deal of content unlocked up front. I for one am frustrated with just the PS2 version of GH2 right now. I'm kinda stuck on level 7 on expert. I don't really know any of those songs, so I have to practice them ad infinitum 'till I learn them, and to be honest, I really don't care to play them. I just want to skip ahead to level 8. But then again, I really like the idea of unlocking that Encore, and coming into playing that song for the first time after beating that whole section, never having practiced it, and nailing it. There's a bit of a rush there. It's electric.

So as game developers we're challenged with balancing that experience out. If I had every song to pick from in GH2, I probably would have quit playing it a long time ago, never having beaten every song, and not feeling very fulfilled. I would have picked through the songs I liked, played those to death, and then just put the game away. It might not have been the compelling experience that GH1 was.

The experience, of course, isn't just relegated to Guitar Hero. I think we need to unlock content to a certain extent to keep the player interested. I guess the best example I have of this is in examining a few demos I played recently. The first three examples were Dead Rising, Crackdown, and to some extent, even RainbowSix: Vegas. These were all excellent demos, and when I started playing them, all three had me "sold" on buying a copy of the game. But the problem was that after replaying the demo a few times, I came to the conclusion that, basically, that was it. I had experienced the entire game in one demo. After playing the Dead Rising demo four times (for an hour total), I was left with "meh" and didn't care to continue the story. I was done hacking zombies. Same thing with Crackdown. I dare say that allowing me to level up 4 times in leaping in 20 minutes (giving the player all of the content up front) was a mistake. The demo is more fun than the "grind" of actually playing the game. To some extent, this proves Jerry's point, but the problem is that I burned out on the content in 20 minutes. I don't feel that I ever need to pick up and play Crackdown ever again. Most importantly, it cost them a purchase.

Enter: the God of War 2 demo. Not only is it an outstanding game, it's an outstanding demo. It gives you tastes of mechanics piecemeal. You chop bad guys here. You swing from a rope there. You climb up a cliff wall here. You fight a boss segment there. It's not delivered all at once. It comes in waves, teaching the player, and drawing them further along into the gameplay experience. I think if it gave you every tool in the shed right up front, the player would be overwhelmed and confused.

But, the demo plays the most insidious trick, and it convinced me that unlocking content (properly, mind you) is key. Why? It pulled Gamus Interuptus. It didn't let you finish the boss battle. Surprisingly, I wasn't frustrated. I left the experience wanting more. It made me want to purchase the final product and experience what it was they were temporarily hiding from me. I realized that the entire game was scaled up with basically unlockable content.

Really, we play unlockable content every day, in every game. It's the nature of gaming. You can't fight the boss without first making it through the waves of grunts; you can't level up without first acquiring the experience points to do so; you can't just jump to the end of the game without playing the levels in order; you can't play the encore without first rocking the crowd. When unlocking content is done right, we love it, and hardly even notice it. But when it's done wrong...hooo boy. Hell hath no fury like a gamer's scorn.

Oh my god, Jason just posted this and I was fully enthralled for twenty minutes: the Flickr wardrobe_remix group. It's exactly what I was looking for - Fruits for the rest of us. Real people in real clothes. I've always loved street shots , because there's something so incredibly off-putting about the artificiality of high fashion photography - sometimes it can be effective and beautiful, but it almost never translates to an aspiration for me, because the models are far too distant, too plastic, too unreal. But this, this makes me not only say, "I want that!" but also say, "I can do that better!"

...which leads me to my gaming instinct, to my competitive side. Now I am actually mentally putting together outfits in my head that will "win". It's not like the group is a competition; there is no ranking, no voting. But the thing is, I will know when I've won, and that's the important thing.

I've been on Eastern Time lately - falling asleep by nine or ten, awake by 4:30 AM, long before the sun comes up in California. It's actually a refreshing change from staying up all night and then being late for work every morning because I could barely get up by eight.

So yesterday while I was browsing my internet at four in the morning, I finally bought the Xbox 360. What made me do it, finally, after all this time? Two things:

Sorry, World of Warcraft, I've got a new boyfriend and he's arriving in a white box today.

The aftermath of the Manchester United versus Roma game is just the latest soccer-related incident that shows a clear correlation between sports matches and violence.

And yet no one is seriously calling for a ban on football. Why not? Well, for one thing the fans would throw a riot that makes this event look like an Easter egg hunt; and second, because society recognizes that sports have a value that is greater than the unfortunate incidents of violence that sometimes follow in the wake of games. We need to educate society that video games, too, have outstanding value for us as a culture, as a society, as a people, that far outweigh the isolated acts of violence that may or may not be tied to playing them.

The question is, how do we do that?

Oops, sorry peeps, you only have one day left to apply for this odd, experimental position - an attempt to combine journalism with serious games. It's based around LA - you can telecommute but it says you have to check in to the office once in a while. $1,000 per week ain't bad!

*****

1. FREELANCE:
American Public Media
Contract reporter for sustainability journalism game
Los Angeles (can telecommute)
Application deadline: 04/06/2007
Posted: March 30, 2007
Freelance posting
American Public Media is looking for an environmental reporter with
expertise in human environmental impact to work on a groundbreaking
journalism game that will launch in advance of a fall 2007 series on the
sustainability of the consumer economy. As a Public Insight Journalism
game, data and comments generated by user play will inform the reporting
of the series.

This contract position is full time, pays $1,000/week, starts ASAP, and
will run for 5-8 weeks. The game team is based at the Marketplace offices
in Los Angeles. The contractor can work remotely, and would be expected
to come to the LA office at set checkpoints. The contractor needs to have
knowledge around human environmental impact, be comfortable with numbers
and creating and using databases. Apply for this position if you want to
break new ground and apply serious games to journalism!

For additional information, including details on how to apply, see:
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/jobs/details.php?cat=free&ID=5467

That's weird. When I go to the Xbox home page, it automatically directs me to the Japanese home page. If only I could remember my Japanese gamertag!

(Yes, my gamerscore is 0 and I have no friends.)

Everyone says real estate speculation is like a roller coaster. Over at Speculative Bubble, they made that metaphor a little more real using Atari's Roller Coaster Tyccon. What an awesomely inventive way to visualize a graph! Also, look at where the ride stops - the next drop is going to hurt.

Thanks, Eric!

This is a bit self-serving, but the event I'm working on, the Austin GDC (formerly the Austin Game Conference) is now open to submissions from clever people like you.

Here's where you go do it: http://www.austingdc.net/conference/callforsubmissions.htm.

So gather your thoughts and submit something! You have until April 30th.

We all knew/hoped that this was happening, right? Harmonix, MTV, and EA announce the project Harmonix has been working on since Guitar Hero II, and it's Rock Band.

Read the Gamasutra story, the 1up.com story, the Gamespot story, and the USA Today story.

This is fantastic; and I can see the possibilities of next-generation music games already on the horizon. Pretty soon I won't even need to go to the studio to practice, my bandmates and I will just pick up our remote instruments and get online.

By the way, I'm disappointed that none of these stories mention how dreamy Harmonix CEO Alex Rigopulos is. I expected more out of you, Gamespot.

I wish I had time to go to this - it's in July, though, and I think I might be too busy in July. I'll see what I can do. Anyway, looks interesting:

*********

Games, Learning & Society Conference 3.0 -- July 12-13, 2007

The third annual Games, Learning & Society (GLS) Conference will be held July 12-13, 2007 in Madison, Wisconsin. Sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Education and the Academic ADL Co-Lab, the GLS Conference fosters substantive discussion and collaboration among academics, designers, and educators interested in how game technologies – commercial games and others – can enhance learning, culture, and education. Speakers, discussion groups, and interactive workshops will focus on game design, game culture, and games’ potential for learning.

For two years the GLS Conference has been the space for academics, industry leaders, educators, and policy makers to meet and to engage, not just in industry building, but in serious discussion about the current state of the field: where we ought to be headed, and what impact games can and ought to have on culture and society. We are planning the biggest and best year ever for this very important gathering, and we hope you will join us.
Confirmed presenters at GLS 3.0 include: Henry Jenkins, Jim Gee, Doug Church, Julian Dibbell, Elonka Dunin, Bob Gehorsam, Justin Hall, Yasmin Kafai, Eric Klopfer, Thomas Malaby, Andrew Phelps, Katie Salen, Lisa Galarneau, Ian Bogost, Ted Castronova, Kurt Squire and Constance Steinkuehler.

This two-day conference will be held at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Monona Terrace Convention Center, overlooking downtown Madison’s beautiful Lake Monona. Conference highlights include: a special session of hands-on workshops designed by and for videogame researchers and designers; a two-day lounge featuring Chat 'n' Frag sessions with key scholars and designers; fireside chats with industry leaders and special guests; a game room; webcasts of selected conference sessions; and our signature Thursday night dinner party.

I'm looking for good Jrock and Jpop - I used to be more into the scene but now I've really lost touch. There's a lot of new stuff out there. Here are some that I like:

B'z: Love Phantom
Electric Eel Shock: Rock and Roll Can Rescue the World
Gackt: Vanilla
Glay: Beloved
GO!GO!7188: Otona no Kusuri
Hamasaki Ayumi: Is This Love
L'arc~en~ciel: Blurry Eyes
Luna Sea: Storm
Mr. Children: Fake
Orange Range: Sayonara
Puppypet: Gogomonkey
Radwimps: Yushinron
Utada Hikari: Hikari
X Japan: Silent Jealousy

Also, Guitar Wolf - but man, their songs are all good, I can't just pick one.

Do you have any recommendations? What should I be listening to?

Yet another charming French-produced stop-motion animation, this time with a soundtrack composed quirkily of flute and voice. The French seem to be as into stop motion as Canadians are into circuses...