As a side note, as of last week this domain is ten years old which makes it yet another thing making me feel old right now. So to freshen things up I redid the theme. It’s unfinished and had been sitting in alpha for months as I very anally pushed every single pixel and tweaked every alignment, but I figured this was a good a time to get it out as any. It was about time I upgraded this site to HTML5, if not 100%, to match my Tumblr.
We boarded the plane at high noon. By three in the afternoon I was on the ground again, nearly ten hours passed. A direct flight from Paris to Toronto is eight hours long, but this one had a stop-over in Quebec to let off all the Quebecois. The final one hour stretch from Quebec City to Toronto Pearson airport was wonderful; the majority of passengers had disembarked, leaving a mostly empty and spacious plane for the more English speaking passengers. I kept trying my French with the stewardess, partly out of habit and partly because this might be my last time I can do so for a while. I am now in anglophone land.
The in-flight entertainment was a Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker movie followed by a Twilight movie. Once this was announced and we hit cruising speed I quickly got up and pulled out my little netbook and the thumb drive which I had preloaded with music and some better entertainment. Minutes after booting, I switched off VLC, stopped my movie, and did something rash: I opened Flash CS3.
With my legs stretched out and crossed–oh how wonderful it was to have seat 1A–and the EEEPC balanced on my knees, I started making things to kill the time. I set up basic DisplayObject structure, created an mp3 loader and player, played around with audio visualization, created some blurring effects and filters, used the visualization data to generate “enemies”, brought in user input and player bullets, and, as a whole, got into a serious groove. In less time than it took to show to horrible movies I had the basis for a playable music game.
It probably won’t amount to much in the end but it stands as a testament to the creative possibilities that arise when you are trapped in an uncomfortable place with nothing to do and no means of escape. If this is true, then my being in Mississauga should herald a new creative era.
This story kind of spontaneously happened over instant messenger, but it turned out decent enough so I’m posting it here with a few additions and cleanups. It is 100% true.
Once upon a time not too long ago
there was a solitary nomad who said “to the south I’ll go!”
He found himself a new home
that was halfway to Rome!
So he packed a suitcase with a lot of heft
and met the landlord before he left.
The landlord gave him Keys of Four,
one for the building, for mailbox, and two for the door.
The nomad booked a train for the Friday evening
excited about all the things a new city would bring.
He got there that night and got into a cabbie
and as he drove through his new city he found it none too shabby.
The taxi driver was new so he got a little bit lost
but he got a nice view of the city without much extra cost.
The heavy suitcase was unloaded and he paid his fares
and then struggled to carry it up four flights of stairs.
He was at the apartment door
with his Keys of Four,
the stairs he managed to survive,
but a new problem arose: he needed Keys of Five!
So he called the landlady in Nice who called it a “disaster,”
interrupted from partying on a Friday night, starting to get plastered.
She booked a train to Cannes that very same night
while the nomad wandered around to see the sight.
People were out reveling, dining, and having fun at that late hour
while the nomad was hungry, frustrated, and oh so sour.
He couldn’t venture too far because of his gear
so he sat on the street as midnight came near.
Eventually she arrived after one in the morning
but let this story act as a warning:
if moving to a city far, far away
remember to charge your phone, it’ll save the day
While I look forward to the start of a new decade and all that comes with it, I am somewhat sad to see this decade of zeroes end. It was the kind of decade where everything fit into place. I turned twenty in 2000, was twenty-five in 2005, and end it at twenty-nine in 2009. As of tomorrow that nice alignment fades away and as the twenty-xxs continue on I, in a month’s time, begin my thirties.
The 00s began on a tremendous low. I was still a teenager, a freshman at the University of Toronto, living with my parents in suburban Mississauga, broke and broken. I was miserable, newly uncertain of my future, and hopelessly lost. Before that first year was out, just ahead of December’s winter exam season, I effectively gave up. I stopped going to school, skipped all my exams, and abandoned all of my courses. Thousands of dollars, most of it in the form of scholarships, went to the shitter.
It could have been the setup for a devastating decade, but a month later, I managed to find, without even looking, a job at a local internet start-up as a Flash developer at a time when Flash was exploding thanks to newly released version 5. It was nothing but luck, I was in the right place (dreamless.org) at the right time, but it was the defining moment of the decade for me. Everything that came after came because of that. In the years that followed, I expanded my web skills, built up almost nine years of industry experience, and developed a diverse portfolio of projects and brands. My entire decade revolved around work and while I have absolutely no regrets about how it turned out it did mean that I missed out on some things.
That career, if you can call it that, is the reason why I am now in Paris. It is also why, during my four months here, I have seen so little of Paris. I’ve done nothing but sit in front of my MacBook. Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful for all the people that have hired me and wanted to work with me and thought my work was good. I am thankful that my career has given me the ability to be so independent and autonomous, allowing me to work anywhere I can plug my laptop into the internet. It’s all been great, but as I look back on my life during the last decade and my life during my twenties I see a lot of time and very little living.
That is why I am going through another change of scenery. I’m leaving Paris behind, and its cramped apartments and its excess dust and its hustle and bustle, as I head down to the Cote d’Azur for the winter. As I do so, I plan on leaving all the internet distractions behind. Apart from some loose ends with already committed-to projects, I don’t intend to work. I don’t intend to Tweet much. I don’t intend to surf much. And I don’t intend to write to weblogs.
In many ways this has been the decade of the weblog, and I had been there for the whole of it: as of today this weblog is ten years old. I started a little Blogger.com site back in December 1999 and while it moved around and evolved quite a lot, as has my voice, the essence of it is very much the same as it ever was. Ten years of my life documented on the internet. It’s kind of scary to think about, but mostly kind of mundane. It’s also something that, having existed for a third of my life, feels so completely normal and natural that it’s not anything that I can ever give up. The topics and the interests and the style might change, but once you find your public voice, no matter how few people are listening, you don’t want to lose it. It will continue to be so. I will write and link and create for the next decade and beyond. Bring on the tens!
But in the meantime I’m going to go and attempt to live for once as I try to find my private voice.
I’ve previously mentioned my official and certified title of regional Super Mario World champion. I still have the proof, in writing, from Nintendo itself.
As it says there, my skills and talents won me a sweatshirt. During my cleaning and packing prior to coming to Paris, I found it. I photographed it. I reminisced about winning it.
Super Mario World
The first thing you might notice about the above form letter is that I was the high scorer of Super Mario World. This in itself is weird because scoring has never been a goal of any Mario game. Sure, the early games tallied points but it was always acknowledged as a legacy of videogames’ arcade roots and not something inherent to the game design. No one paid attention to it as the goal always was to beat the game. Indeed, all the obsessive challenges around these Super Mario revolve around beating it as fast as possible. There are many speedruns[1], but playing Mario for score isn’t an expected thing.
By the time the competition arrived in Mississauga, I was already well versed in Super Mario World. I was twelve and I had already beaten it multiple times, found all 96 levels, including the star road, and beaten those, and discovered a few weird exploits. This, of course, was in the days before the likes of gamefaqs.com so all of it was earned the hard way: by sheer will of persistence. Never underestimate a twelve year old’s ability to make the most out of a single game. Of course, in all that time I never played the game for score so this competition required some adjustments.
I had previously, however, maxed the score out at 9,999,990 using one of those found exploits. As anyone that has played an old Mario game knows, continually jumping on enemies (or chaining them with a hit shell) without hitting the ground basically doubles the amount of points you are rewarded. Jumping on one goomba gives you 100 points, hitting a second, without landing, gives you 200, then 400, 800, 1000, 2000, 4000, 8000, and then a 1UP. At this point you stop getting points, but you start accumulating lives.
In the forest area of Super Mario World, about half-way through the game, there are caterpillar enemies, called Wigglers, that have unique characteristics in the game. Jumping on a Wiggler would net you points as normal, but it wouldn’t kill them. It’d just make them angry. Pissed off Wigglers would turn red and mean and start frantically moving around their area becoming more of a nuisance. You could keep jumping on them in this state, but it’d do nothing and it’d net you no points.
What I noticed was that if you went a screen away from an angry wiggler and then back again they’d respawn in their calm states. This meant that if you were adept enough with the cape and flying through the air, and if there were enough wigglers in a level, you could float back and forth continually, crash landing on them, and accumulate as many 1UPs as you wanted. I figured this would be a good way to collect lives for some of the harder star road levels, so I found a good, open space in one of the levels and went to work. What I didn’t account for was the game glitching out completely after you earned your third or fourth 1UP.
A pointer in the memory must have gone astray because the “1up” pronouncements soon became scrambled graphics and the lives gained became arbitrary additions and the score started to increase by seemingly random values. Scores increase almost exponentially and in less time than it takes to complete a level you can accumulate the maximum 9,999,990 points. Something about those damn Wigglers must have caused an overflow and all the counters went crazy. An example of this can be seen in this video here, although this player did it in a more clever way, and easier location, than I remember doing it. This glitch might be relatively common knowledge now, within the right circles, but back then it was privileged information. I was on top of it, I knew the game back to front, and I was ready for any Super Mario World competition.
The Competition
The Nintendo Power Play Tour’s Mississauga stop was stationed in the Woolco parking lot at the Square One shopping mall, the depressing “heart” of the city. Cordoned off in the area were a few sponsor stalls and one giant trailer, inside of which was a single aisle with encased televisions and Super Nintendos on either side. The right side had the latest games to try and the left were all the competition Super Mario Worlds. People would line up outside until a group was let in. They’d flow in to the trailer and lay claim to a machine and a controller and once everyone was ready the machines would be reset. After five minutes the controllers would be deactivated and the rear doors opened. The staff would take a survey of the Super Mario World machines to see if anyone beat the current high score and, if they did, record their name and contact information. Then the machines would be reset and the next batch of people let in.
As long as you lined up after each go, you could play as many times as you wanted. I thought of the wigglers out there in the Forest of Illusion, but they were too far in the game to reach. For a moment I considered rushing the game, saving as often as I could, and then resuming from that point each round but the problem with that approach was that I wasn’t guaranteed the same machine each time. Not to mention the risk that someone would overwrite the save. There wasn’t even any guarantee that I could reach that point via five minute increments. I had to make due with World 1 and figure out strategies to maximize my score within that.
I played through the first few levels of the game a number of times, taking mental notes of what yields how many points, how long it takes, what’s a waste of time, and how much of a time bonus I could get at the end of a level. I was making good progress, and always looking over my shoulder at how others approached it, but it was slow and it wasn’t getting me a really great competitive score. There had to be a better way.
Then it dawned on me.
Intro
The first level of Super Mario World (technically the first level on the right as SMW is the only Mario game that I can think of without a defined first level.) acts as the typical Nintendo-styled introduction to the game. Everything in the level, and everything Mario can do, is organically revealed. There are no tutorials and no tips, just a plain game mechanic driven carrot on a stick.
To the right of the start is a shell lying on the ground with a platform above on which a bunch of koopas are walking. The setup is obvious, but in that instant it shows you a few things that can be done in Super Mario World. You can either kick shells or pick them up. If you pick them up, you can jump with them. Then you can throw them to dispatch enemies. And, most relevant to my needs, if you kill multiple enemies you will cause a chain and eventually get a 1UP.
That means if you play it right, and it’s hard not to, in the very first few seconds of the first stage you can net yourself 16,400 points. After that, all the time you spend collecting pittances, be it from Yoshi coins or other enemies, seems wasteful by comparison. That’s when I remembered one little trick in the game: if you play through a previously completed level, you can press start and select to cancel out of it. Then you can play it again. And cancel out. And, yes, I did that.
I would rush through the first level, just so I had it completed, then for the rest of the five minutes I’d spend going back to that same level for five second intervals. I’d kill those initial koopas and get the points then pause, hit select, drop back out to the map, and repeat over and over and over again. It might not be in the spirit of the competition, but it was damn effective. I honed my technique and did this about, at the very minimum, ten times. I must have spent over an hour playing Super Mario World in this way. Eventually I had a score I couldn’t beat anymore, 656,500, and I was comfortable enough with it to know that I could finally go home. I was right.
The Prize
A couple weeks later I got the above form letter and this sweatshirt:
The front features a large Super Nintendo logo adorned with extraneous brightly coloured triangles and circles, as was the style of the time. It’s very much of its era, stuck in that post-80s geometric pre-mainstream-grunge Parker Lewis look. With the fashion trends of the last couple of years, it’s almost fashionable again. Or ironic.
The sleeves have the prerequisite junk food sponsor logos. I remember the Power Tour had, as was popular at that time, a Pepsi Taste Test booth near to the Nintendo trailer. As with every Pepsi Taste Test I’ve had, and I’ve had a few, I chose the competitor’s product. Every time.
The back of it has Mario riding Yoshi with more superfluous dots and neon pointing triangles and a green rectangle. Before I left I did try the shirt on and, to my surprise, it fit. It was a little snug, but then it wasn’t designed for someone of my age. That’s probably a testament to the weight I’ve lost these last few years.
Despite my victory, I still wonder what could have been. A few weeks later I received confirmation that I wasn’t the Ontario champion. I can’t remember the exact score, but I think I was bested by a 100,000 to 200,000 points. I think they were from Sudbury or the Sault. I’ve always wondered how they managed that, or what the theoretical best score in five minutes is. I never bothered to try. By then, I was already sick of Super Mario World and I had moved on to the latest and greatest (probably Super Mario Kart.)
I still wonder, in this day of speed-run videos, emulators, and tool-assisted play-throughs, what kind of score can be accomplished in five minutes. More so, I’m curious how close to an optimal strategy I came. As a late twenty-something, I don’t feel as though I have that level of patience and deftness anymore. I look back now and at often times I wonder if I really was more clever as a twelve year old than I am now. That sweatshirt, gaudy as it is, reminds me of that.
Yes, there are some low score runs, like this one for Super Mario Bros., but their inherent goal is the same: just beat the game. The low scoring is just an added obstacle. High score runs are unusual, partly because the score always maxes out.
I was up on Friday morning and rode out to Gare du Nord to catch an early Eurostar train to London. The trip from Paris to London is about two hours total which, for someone that grew up with the vast distances of Ontario, is mind-boggling. It’s a comfortable, easy ride and really the more civilized way to go. Sure, it’s more expensive than flying and takes twice as long in transit, but the overall experience is quicker since both train stations are located centrally, so you don’t need to go through the extra hassle of going out to the boonies to get to an airport, and you don’t have to deal with all that airport bullshit. The entire check-in process, including passport control and security, took less than five minutes.
My first order of business in London was to make my way to the Pixel-Lab’s Playful event. It was two tube stops from the station, but I decided to stretch my legs and walk it, without a map, and with the faintest of directions. It had been almost exactly a year since I’ve last been in London, when I spent three months there, but it easily could have been two weeks. Everything was instantly recognizable and navigable and despite the unfamiliar destination I managed to find my way without getting lost. Screw Google Maps, Human Brain™ is the real impressive application.
I arrived at Playful during the first break and stayed for all subsequent presentations. It was hit or miss. Some people were clearly not too comfortable in front of a crowd, others were just reading out their script, and others were engaging and entertaining. Russell Davies‘, James Bridle’s, and Rex Box’s, somewhat clunky but amusing overhead projector and transparencies powered, presentations were the standouts.
Russel Davies presents
During the lunch break, after a bit of Twitter-tag, I met up with Alex aka. rotational in what would be a precursor to many internet people first meetings. As they say on that side of the Channel, he was a good chap. We talked about the conference, writing for games, the magazine gaming business, and the internet like all true nerds would.
After the conference I headed towards my London City hotel, again by foot. The streets of London are far more stressful than the streets here in Paris. It was the evening rush-hour, already dark, and the hustle and bustle of the place felt very North American to me. I could feel my blood pressure rising just by being surrounded by it. Maybe I’m projecting, as I’m living a very casual, laissez-faire life over here.
I eventually found my hotel, just around the corner from the Eurogamer expo, and to my pleasant surprise I found that I had been upgraded to a deluxe suite. It was wonderful. A room more than five times larger than my current apartment. A large screen TV, two desks, a sofa, a speaker above the toilet so you could listen to the TV while you took a shit, and a cavernous shower larger than the entirety of my current washroom. I knew I wouldn’t want to leave.
So I didn’t and I skipped the Eurogamer Expo for that day while I relaxed and, later in the evening, headed out to The Crosse Keys pub nearby for the Indie Arcade Show & Yell arcade where I would meet up with more internet people, mostly consisting of those weird and crazy people of the Idle Thumbs forums including one of the organizers of the event, David aka. Nachimir. It could have been a disaster of an event — the plasma screen in the venue, specifically chosen because it had a plasma screen, didn’t work, putting a kibosh on any potential showing — but David’s tireless efforts to salvage it with a crowd of drunken indie devs and a megaphone turned it into a fun, if a bit disorganized, yelling match.
Joe Danger shown at the Indie Show & Yell, held up as some sort of monument to indiedom.
After a wonderful sleep and breakfast in the hotel I met up with Aubrey and we headed for the Eurogamer Expo and, not surprisingly, straight for the Indie Arcade. This tiny room with a bunch of PCs had more creativity and heart than the rest of the expo. There I played Joe Danger, easily one of the best games of the show, and chatted with the nice Hello Games people. Terry Cavanagh and Alex May, other swell chaps with whom I’d play 4 player Super Mario Bros co-op later in the day, were there to show VVVVVV and Euphloria, respectively. There was Time Fcuk and Squid Yes! Not So Octopus! and Super Yum Yum and Shooting Starcade. Leaving this little room and entering the vast spaces where the “mainstream” games were held was shocking in its contrast.
Indie Arcade
The problem with shows like this, where a lot of different games are placed within view of each other, is that they reveal just how same-y most of them actually are. No where was this more evident than in the 18+ basement where God of War 3 sat next to Dante’s Inferno. As I watched Aubrey fight some enemies by aimlessly swinging around a weapon in a dark area as some giant stone colossus menaced in the background, I looked behind me to see, in a completely different game, someone fight a bunch of enemies by swinging around a weapon in a dark area as some giant stone colossus was pissed off in the background. Then I played Bayonetta and I fought a bunch… stone colossus. It was all very depressing.
There was a Street Fighter IV machine — actually, a Playstation 3 inside a Taito arcade cabinet (?) — that was drawing crowds and, in the basement, a the Wii fighter Capcom vs Tatsunoko. Some dude was hogging the game, taking on all comers. I grabbed the second player Wii arcade stick (didn’t know there were any) and picked my characters and then that dude proceeded to unleash multiple ten billion point of damage, literally, combos on me before I could even figure out how to do anything. I managed to get about two punches in the match and quickly left in disgust. This one moron did more to dissuade me from ever looking at this game than anything in the actual game itself. Way to go!
Street Fighter IV: moment of defeat.
Heavy Rain was in the basement, which was too good for it. It should have been under the basement, dismantled, buried in concrete to be forgotten for a thousand years.
The game of the show, as far as I’m concerned, was the one that didn’t involve shooting, stabbing, or racing: New Super Mario Bros. Wii. If you were to judge all games at the expo by the amount of laughter and camaraderie from its players, as opposed to the typical, solitary dead stares most had, Super Mario Bros was the clear winner (Left 4 Dead 2 was second.) The simultaneous four-player co-op was a fun, competitive and cooperative, tour de joy. Much like the indie stuff, it stood out amongst the crowd as a sole beacon of colour. I just wish they didn’t use two Toads for players three and four.
3D videogames: making you look like even more of a nerd.
Afterwards, there was another pub session. The joys (and hats) of Hook Champ were often cited.
Sunday afternoon was lazy and rainy, spent mostly on a sofa with Street Fighter IV, Geometry Wars 2, and Channel4’s Peep Show. I wanted to reacquaint myself with the Lady of Shalott while I was in London, but I was tired and this was the most suitable end to the weekend before the evening train ride home.
Unfortunately, the entire trip made me miss my game consoles even more. Once a gamer…
Excuse the journaly nature of this entry.
Heavy Rain really was complete shit. I’ll probably elaborate on this later.
I stayed at the Apex London, which I recommend for obvious reasons. But I’d probably still recommend it if I wasn’t upgraded to a larger suite since the staff there was friendly and helpful.
This time next week I’m going to be flying over the Atlantic towards Paris. I spent four months in London and Paris last summer and it was great. I didn’t do much of anything, which is why it was so great, but I did start jogging and I read more and I got to know my camera a lot better. Ever since my Canadian return I’ve sworn that I would go back and I’ve been working hard over the last couple of months, perhaps a little too hard, to pay for it. Next week I fulfill that promise.
Last year I was there on a tourist visa. I was required to have a return ticket, I was limited to a short stay, and I was not permitted to work. This year there’s a subtle, but significant, difference: I am traveling on a European passport. More to the point, my flight to Paris next week is one way.
I’d like to say that I have it all planned out, but I really don’t. Apart from a three month commitment with a 150 square foot apartment in the upper 16e, I have no expectations. I hope to continue freelance web work for Toronto companies while I’m there — I’m taking two computers with me; this will be interesting during airport security screenings — which should sustain me for a while, but locally I have no idea what’s going to happen. Will I find freelance work for European agencies? Will I find a job? Will I move to other cities or countries? Will I have any shred of a social life as a foreigner? Or will I burn through all my money accomplishing nothing? Will I be found floating in the Senne one winter day? I don’t know.
That’s the fun of it though; it’s a grand adventure. A great send-off to my long dark twenties. When I will celebrate my thirtieth early next year, wherever I’ll be, it will be with a kind freshness that I could never have in a place that I’ve spent most of my life. I’ve been in a rut for so long I need something drastic in my life to kickstart a new decade. Leaving everything behind to go to another continent is high on the list of “drastic things to do,” so, that.
But the internet will persist wherever I go so, in the end, probably nothing will change. At least I’ll have some nice photos to show for it.
The last of those is the most notable as I’ve been fascinated by what people can get out of the Korg DS-10. Apparently, it’s quite a lot. For example, there’s this album (“Aliasing”) by Russian sound production firm The Sands and, from a ways back, two releases from Receptors. I received a nod for the latter on Offworld back in January and, through a confluence of events, including the above mentioned Tumblr, I am now an occassional contributor to Offworld.
Keeping with that theme, I posted two DS-10 YMO covers on Offworld. That seemed to mesh well with the kind of content they’re typically going for there. But when I came across another DS-10 related musical work on YouTube I didn’t know where to put it. It was not musical enough for the Tumblr and probably too ironic for Offworld. Then I remembered I have this thing, here, so I might as well use it more:
No, I never did go to the DigiPen Institute of Technology, but I had considered it. I remember reading an article about the school back in the mid 1990s, not long after it opened, in either Nintendo Power or EGM. It was mind-blowing for me at the time: I can do post-secondary education at a school specifically doing game design on Nintendo hardware? Best of all, the school was located in Canada? Sign me up.
I had thought about trying to break into the games industry in those youthful days, but up to that point it was this weird, nebulous goal that I had no idea how to get to. After reading that article, though, it felt tangible and close. I was a junior in high school and for the first time I was considering what to do after graduation.
It was around this time when I started fiddling around with my family’s old Tandy 286, an old shitbox that was already obsolete by about four years. The technology didn’t matter. My interests weren’t with the advanced PC games of the day, Doom or Quake but were focused on QBasic. I spent a summer hacking the language (my first) with only its built in documentation and two examples, Gorillas and Nibbles, as reference.
It was a slow and tedious process but within a few months I managed to make a sort of text-only adventure game (I had never played interactive fiction at the time; I was mostly emulating Shadowgate and Deja Vu.) It wasn’t very good but it was a start. A short while later I learned how to do graphics — all of it via code, there were no external editors — and made a, perhaps unsurprisingly, “Metroidvania“-esque side-scrolling platformer (the “Metroidvania” label was still years away from being penned.) They weren’t very good but they were the first videogames I ever made and they hold a nostalgic place in my heart. I just wish I still had the floppies holding them (and a floppy drive to access them.) sigh.
As I approached my final year in high school I sent for an information package from Digipen and that’s when I learned the disappointing news: Digipen had, that same year, relocated from Vancouver to Redmond, Washington. They were now international and, because they weren’t accredited at the time, they weren’t accepting international students. I might not have been able to afford it either way, but not having the option at all gutted me. The next year I went to the University of Toronto for Computer Science, got bored of the “discrete math” and the theoretical shit, and eventually, in my second year, quit. It’s been a long and convoluted road since then.
Anyway, I realized that I have a ton of old EGMs and Nintendo Powers stashed around here so I made an attempt to find this one article. I found a lot of great content from those days — ads, news, previews, reviews: the mid-90s were weird as it had reviews for SNES and Genesis games right next to 3DO, CD-i, and Amiga CD32 titles. Man, I completely forgot about that one — but not the article in question. Google seems to suggest that it might be in Nintendo Power #75, but I can only find Virtual Boy related scans from that issue.
One of the best weblogs to emerge this year was kokogiak’s The Big Picture. I was pleased to see it get the go ahead from legal because it was a risky venture for a major publication (if you don’t believe me, risk your sanity venturing into the comments of any post.) The large scale photos brought a new perspective to world events and brightly highlighted others that were not always reported. Alan Taylor’s curatorial duties have been excellent and as impartial as possible (though douchebags in the comments always disagree.)
The appropriately named The Big Picture proved that we don’t always need to consider users with: VGA displays, 640×480 resolutions, web safe colours, and modems. This isn’t the 1990s anymore. You can now provide photos larger than thumbnails that make the most of today’s display technology (millions of colours! *gasp*) Bigger is better. So with that in mind, here’s my own personal year in review.
I bought a new camera in April, a few months after giving my old one to my sister for Christmas. I bought it, in part, because by then I had decided what I was going to do with the rest of the year and wanted something good to document it.
The topics that I write about tend to be, more often than not, game centric. There was no overt decision to focus on this topic on this here weblog[1], it is simply what I know best. Hell, when I started this by creating an account on Blogger I wasn’t even that much of a gamer. Back then, fresh out of high school and in my first (and only complete) year of university, I was a mere dabbler. I had no time or money for games, save for the occasional moments on my then-already outdated PC and the rare bout on my even more dated Playstation.
That was during the start of a new generation. The ill fated SEGA Dreamcast was already three months old and the Playstation 2 loomed over the horizon, four months away. Those were exciting times for videogamers, but I was having none of it. My interests were focused on school and, more so, the internet[2], this whole new “weblog” thing, Napster, design, HTML, Flash 4, and the development and slow acceptance of the many standards that are now common on the web. These were heady one-point-oh days, full of homepages, no syndicated feeds, and teenagers younger than I getting millions of dollars to prop up internet businesses without any business.
It was the most doomed of all these ventures, Napster, that opened my eyes and ears to new things. My relationship with music throughout the 90s, in those pre-filesharing days, was a distant one. I became aware of things going on in the music world around 92 when I was watching Saturday Night Live and its live performances, when grunge was taking over the world. The confluence of these two things, in one set-destroying performance, is one of my earliest musical memories. I watched a lot of TV in those days and my limited contact with the music world came from that; I wasn’t an active music listener. It was around, for sure, but back then I was more intrigued by the sounds of F-Zero and Final Fantasy II and Actraiser.
High school was when I started to listen to the radio and watch MuchMusic, back when they still played music videos. It might be nostalgia, but those post-grunge years produced a massive amount of great music. It was hard not to get into something. While my listening was restricted to what was on the radio, and almost exclusively the mainstream and semi-mainstream new rock content of 102.1 The Edge, I’d occasionally get glimpses of material outside of that insular world. I remember the rare moments when MuchMusic would play Download’s Glassblower, Orbital’s The Box, and I recall absolutely loving and being amazed by FSOL’s My Kingdom.
My Kingdom
Those three examples filtered through to me because they were relatively popular for their time, but anything beyond the fringes remained invisible to me. If it didn’t have a single and a music video, it didn’t exist. I owned a handful of CDs, but most of my money went into games. That was something I was informed about, reading front to back every month’s issue of EGM, the Official Playstation Magazine, and, sometimes, Next Generation. I felt comfortable, as a consumer, that I would make the right decisions with my money. I knew what I liked. I rented games, I bought games, I played games, and I listened to games. Music, in contrast, was a risky venture. It’s funny, then, to consider that my biggest encounter with the electronic music of the day came from a game, WipeOut XL. I remember really digging Fluke’s Atom Bomb video at the time, for obvious reasons.
Atom Bomb
That’s why Napster (and, partly, the streaming online radio of the time) was so important. It allowed me to explore those weird, underground segments of music on my own terms. That made me into a massive consumer of music and instilled in me a fresh passion for it. This has grown over the decade through to today. During my four months in London and Paris earlier in the year, music was often the only company I had and, in that time, I filled my suitcase with a thirty new CDs. 2008 was a breakthrough. This is the first time that I feel genuinely qualified to rant and rave, in thorough detail, about the albums of the year.
Yet, I find it more difficult than ever to express that. As my tastes get more eccentric and I become aware of more history and lineage, I realize how much I have missed and how much catching up I have left to do.
Unlike music, games had a prominent role in my life — bonding with friends, leading me on my career path — since I was six. That little pre-millennial break during my late teens was a mere footnote in my personal gaming history. A two year hiatus in a twenty-three year story. It didn’t last: I bought a Playstation 2 several months after its 2001 launch, after I had my first steady income, further adding to the Dreamcast’s demise. In the years that followed I acquired a further twenty game machines, including all the current systems, a post-death Dreamcast, the Genesis I never had, the SEGA CD I never wanted except for Snatcher, Snatcher, and a pair of Neo Geo Pockets (nice little systems, those.) This is beyond prominent now. It’s a lifestyle.
When it comes to writing about media, five years of passion, and only one of a fervent nature, can not compare to a lifetime’s worth. I might not be the best writer — I’m still learning — but my twenty-five year gaming life gives me enough perspective and cultural history to, I hope, give me a unique voice. It might take me another ten years before I feel as comfortable expressing my opinion about music as I do about games.
So, basically, I just wanted to say that my album of the year is:
Portishead’s “Third.”
I actually get a little miffed when I get labeled a “games blog,” but I’m used to it.
We were some of the lucky few to have cable internet at the time and I was making the most of it.
You don’t need a life improvement book to tell you that the more you do a thing the better you get at it. This should be common sense. You can elaborate on the specifics more, as Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers” does by stating that it takes, amongst other things, 10,000 hours of work and effort to “achieve international stardom,” but the core idea is simple: practical experience defines skills.
There’s a corollary to that. The better you get at something the more interested you become in how other people do that thing. You can only go so far on your own. After a while, if you want to continue to improve you need peers, that have been where you are, to offer collaboration or mentorship or even, simply, inspiration. While it’s completely possible to get through without any support, that community helps you through the problems, pitfalls, and general funks you might encounter. The cumulative effect of that is that you get to spend less time reinventing the wheel, to discover solutions that others have already documented, and more time tuning your central skill. Outside inspiration is a lubricant. It might make it easier to progress, but you still have to do the thing to get going.
My photography comes to mind. I might not have aspirations to become an “international star” or even a professional, I’m perfectly happy keeping it a hobby, but it is something I enjoy and an activity I want to improve. Having spent a lot of time working on it over the last few months — it helped to be in an inspirational setting — I’ve noticed a marked improvement in the average quality of my photos. I have also noticed that I’m far more interested in other photographers and their work. I spent time scouring the web for photographer sites, visited numerous shows and galleries, and browsed through many books.
Here’s the problem. With game design and development, which is something that I do want to be professional with, I’ve been going at it backwards. I consider myself opinionated on the subject. I have an extensive library of game design books and an even more bloated RSS reader pointing to all sorts of game design weblogs. I write about it, to varying success, and I talk about it and I have great friends, who do it professionally, to draw great inspiration from. I’ve been lucky in this regard, but I haven’t made the most of it.
That’s not to say that I haven’t made games over the last few years. I have made quite a few — mostly small web-based games, save for a couple exceptions — but I don’t feel any ownership with them. While in some cases I was given relative free reign, most of them were built to other people’s specs. I’ve completed nothing of my own in years. There’s been no application of my game design ideas and no refinement of my philosophies. There have been ideas, but no tests, no failures, no successes, and no feedback. There have been no excuses either.
I’ve been hoping for a job with creative control to come my way — or a commission or a client or anything with full trust in me — while I’ve been off doing other things like building sites for cereal companies and animating e-learning tools and working with content management systems for female contraceptives. They were all great learning experiences, but not what I want to do and not exactly the ideal setup for getting people to trust me with what I do want. It’s easier to set things aside when you have nebulous goals and delusions. Concrete thinking, and action, is needed.
My photography has been a catalyst. I don’t do that for anyone but myself, without expecting anybody to give me a wad of cash for it, and yet it has already rewarded me: one of my photos won me a free ticket to SXSW Interactive 09. And since I’m going to be down there (barring any financial disasters), I figure I’d make a vacation of it and head down to San Francisco for IGF too. I intend to have something to show to somebody for that.
Tuesday was an important day. It was my first full day back in Canada after four months of being down and out in Paris and London. It was my sister’s 21st birthday (not a big deal in Canada, but it does make me feel old.) There was that whole election thing south of the border. And, as I maintained that I would, I purchased a Playstation 3. I am finally 100% new console generation compatible, unlike my old Playstation 2 games.
My first experience with the Playstation 3 wasn’t a positive one: the UI for the Playstation Network registration was horrible. I can deal with the Playstation’s software keyboard, it’s not that bad, but the flaws in the system are with the general flow and error messaging. It was downright confusing. I had to input my security question three times because any error in another field (invalid user account, mismatched passwords) would reset that form field. This is bad form design.
After that initial registration screen came the choose your username form. I entered “n0wak”, hit submit and received a vague “username is invalid or taken or something” error message. Well, great. Not being able to use that dilutes my brand. It is an established and consistent username across a whole slew of sites and services and knowing that there was someone else out there using it made me feel dirty. Also, I couldn’t come up with a good alternative that wasn’t immediately rejected.
Frustrated, I shut down the registration process and searched a web-based alternative. Thankfully, Sony was prescient enough to offer such a service. Foregoing the irritating softkeys, I signed up, confirmed everything and linked my Playstation 3 to that account. This was the way to go.
Unfortunately, the username issue could not be resolved and I had to think of something new on the spot (always a potentially regrettable situation.) So any Playstation 3 owners out there should add runbutton to your friend lists. I used this because I own the domain. It’s always good to have a username that ties back to something, unless you are trying to be completely anonymous. I’m not.
Right now I’m digging into Little Big Planet and WipeOut HD. These are the games that, for the record, I specifically purchased the system for. Previous system sellers for me:
Wii – Wii Sports
XBox 360 – Dead Rising
Playstation 2 – Twisted Metal Black, Gran Turismo 3
XBox – Panzer Dragoon Orta
PSP – Lumines, WipeOut Pure
So yes, add me: runbutton.
About
This is the weblog of Mike Nowak, a freelance web nerd and digital nomad. I write mostly about games, music, film and tv, the web, and anything else I find of interest. This weblog has existed in some form or another since 1999.
