03.31.07
Posted in Hardware/Technology, Humour at 16:50
I love my computer. It’s fast, it’s powerful, it has two delicious TFT monitors, it can run any game smoothly on the highest settings (until Crysis comes out), and I know exactly where everything is - almost. But there’s one thing about it that just irks me to no end. During start-up, the BIOS checks for IDE harddrives, and since my disk is connected with SATA, it finds none. In a pathetic attempt to communicate this, it prints prominently:
Detect drives done. No any drives found.
I’m used to programmers who are horrible at spelling. I’m not sure how it works out, but it’s no rare occurrence to find a horribly spelled and syntaxed comment in otherwise flawless code. They type functions like this up perfectly: else if (((AnimSequence == 'Pickup') && bAnimFinished) || ((AnimSequence != 'Pickup') && !IsFiring())), yet they can’t spell “canister”.
But seriously. When you write something that I have to look at every time I turn on my computer… please get somebody who can spell to check your work afterwards.
- Music: Feeder - Piece by Piece
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03.30.07
Posted in Games at 17:07
I re-discovered Steam this week, and as a direct result thereof, sort of un-discovered my studies.
Of course I already knew you could download demos on Steam, but for some reason it never seemed to hold any interest to me. Only now do I realize what a great tool a demo is! You can try out a ton of games, and thus draw inspiration from certain design decisions and/or pick apart the gameplay in the demo for further analysis in your head, without having to pay a fortune for all of them.
So I downloaded some demos. I also bought a game.
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03.29.07
Posted in Humour at 21:22
www.bustedwonder.com/exterminus
Torsten: Cool comic. Any suggestions for how the imagery should be interpreted?
Jonas: No, I was hoping you could come up with something. I’m relatively blank.
Torsten: Well, I do have something, but it’s a little loose.
Jonas: What’s your suggestion?
Torsten: If we imagine the train as a kind of communication sphere for the two, and the many tentacles etc. as their feelings and especially their interest in each other, it makes pretty good sense in that they start to appear when they see each other, and retract when he’s about to leave the train. At the same time, we see that he starts to dissolve by stepping out of the train, but regains his body when he crawls back into the “conversation bubble”. The conversation adopts another tone when he returns, and all the feelings come back, but now they’re different because they reflect the change. But I have no idea how well that holds up.
Jonas: Yeah that fits well with the thoughts it created in me (although I wasn’t sure how to verbalize it). I was wondering if the somewhat macabre emotion-metaphor could be grounded in an idea that feelings sort of eat up the outer facades when they emerge to the surface.
Torsten: That’s quite possible. Or perhaps that emotions and thoughts leave marks in people. He still has a big hole in the chest when he gets up to leave.
Jonas: Yeah that’s a good point too. But anyway, cool comic 
Torsten: Agreed agreed. Old bean. *Gets out a briar pipe.*
Jonas: And I think your/our interpretation holds up, old chap. *Adjusts the monocle.*
Torsten: Quite, quite.
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03.26.07
Posted in Hardware/Technology at 23:29
I’ve been running Linux and Windows as a dual-boot setup on my laptop since I bought it used a few weeks ago. The laptop is mainly for taking notes during classes, but being a geek, I am exceedingly happy with all the power it’s packing; just knowing it thinks faster than I do is necessary to my enjoyment of working on it.
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03.21.07
Posted in Game design, Games, Other media at 14:07
I stayed home from today’s lecture so I could catch up on the Film History reading. It’s a subject that wobbles precariously between entertaining, fascinating, and boring. But it did get me thinking about the internationality (is that word?) of the games industry - funny how most things make me think about games these days.
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03.18.07
Posted in Personal at 15:19
Four good photos from the first three months of 2007.
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03.16.07
Posted in Other media at 23:15
Wow. I just saw Donnie Darko 
. What an amazing movie. Even my dad liked it, although I’m willing to bet he didn’t get at least half the plot. I say this with some certainty because I’m not sure I got half the plot.
I’m usually not very big on film analysis, mostly I’m studying Film and Media for the Media part. Specifically, Computer Media (to which around 3% of our curriculum is dedicated - not bitter!), but this is one of those movies that could motivate me to pay more attention during our Fiction Theory and Analysis classes. It is also the kind of film that absolutely makes me realize how much the world needs film scholars, because otherwise, how the Hell will we ever come to understand what happened in this movie?
Fantastic film. Gotta buy it now.
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03.13.07
Posted in Game design, Game news, The Nameless Mod at 23:19
It’s not a term I’ve ever heard of before - in relation to games at least - but it has a nice ring to it, and it seems quite adequate:
Gamespy: Warren Spector Grades the Industry (March 8, 2007)
Warren Spector uses “shared authorship” to describe games like Grand Theft Auto1, Knights of the Old Republic, or his own Deus Ex, where “when a player goes away from the [storyline] ’string’ you’ve created, the game should procedurally change. Like a good table top role-playing game, he explains, the game should be able to flex and bend to keep the player involved.” Well yeah, that’s pretty much the way to do it.
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03.04.07
Posted in Game design, Personal at 19:42
Sooo… I noticed my fellow Film and Media student and Game Studies Zealot Rasmus has set up a blog on a new domain of his, to rave reviews from largely fictional (and yet hilarious) journalists. I know most of you who actually read this aren’t really here because you care how I feel about game theory. I assume you visit this blog for one (or two) of three reasons:
- You hope I’ll drop some nuggets about TNM.
- You’re on my MSN contact list, and are afraid that any moment now, I may drop a pop-quiz on you about something I’ve written here, so you feel you better be prepared just in case.
- You’re a burglar who found the posts I’ve written about my computer, and you hope to glean some tips for how and when to best break into my house and steal all my hardware while I’m away.
If it’s #3, just give up right now, you’ll never get past my cats. Otherwise, you may want to check Rasmus’ site out anyway, he’s at least as interested in game studies as I am, and he has a year and a half of psychology behind him to spice it up with. You never know what gems he might drop on that blog.
If nothing else, now I’ve linked to his blog, so he can’t claim I didn’t do him that favour 
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