gewgaw

No Muxtape to listen to while I crank on my scheduling and UI docs this afternoon.

Poopie!

Great article on Jen’s 20×200 site - which is a favorite of mine. Thanks for the link, Carley!!

I took some CRAZY macro photos this weekend - mostly spiders but also flies - and flies that are about to become part of spiders!

Nothing is creepier to me than giant spiders. This one is living behind my friend’s house - in a giant jasmine bush. It’s probably - 3 inches across (it’s body is the size of a quarter).

*shiver*

Surreal, awesome movie created with Boom Blox by a Japanese player!

Tip: To achieve this effect (odd music as background for your movies) - go into the options menu on the front screen and turn the in-game music all the way down. That way you get the sound FX but can have your very own soundtrack!

:)

Hey kids! The IGDA Education SIG (formerly EduCom which we did the cuirriculum work with) is organizing a Global Game Jam - to be held between January 30 and February 1st 2009! If you know someone who would like to host a site, fund it or participate - pass on the word!

GO GO GO Game Jammers!!

WOOT! BRAID is officially released on XBLA so go on ahead and buy it already!!

CONGRATULATIONS to Jon, Dave & everyone who supported Braid over the last few years!!!

Every end makes room for a new beginning. As Seth pointed out here - each creature that leaves the earth is in some way welcoming another to join us here. And so…. I have made room in my heart for another kitten - nearly a year since Sabine passed away.

Hello Mika!

Mika was found about a month ago - abandoned by her mother. Starving, lonely - she appeared on my friend Stuart’s back porch - and mewed at his own cats through the window. Malnourshed and infested with fleas - she was taken in by my other friend Jen (who makes it a personal mission to rescue cats - including the strays that make a home here on the EALA campus from time to time).

Of course - Mika began to make regular appearances here at work, as Jen nourished her to health and began looking for a home. After several weeks I could no longer resist the pull of this cuddly, adorable soul. She’s the calmest, sweetest lap cat one could ever ask for and I cannot wait to bring her home at the end of the month. I need all the cuddles I can get.

Thank you for making an appearance in my world, Mika! I will give you a good life.

This month’s U of C magazine has 2 great pieces in it that I wanted to share.

The first is on my friend Lauren’s work re: The Female Complaint.

Berlant first conceived The Female Complaint two decades ago, when she realized that Erma Bombeck, the late-20th-century newspaper and magazine columnist who satirized suburban family life, was “writing the exact same sentences” as Fanny Fern, a mid-1800s humorist who skewered marriage and middle-class domesticity in her weekly New York Ledger columns. Both women drew large and loyal readerships: Bombeck’s books were best sellers, and Fern became the nation’s highest-paid newspaper writer. Berlant found it “depressing” that two women living 150 years apart would churn up the same struggles, “but I was also curious. It meant something wasn’t changing.” Her curiosity yielded a 1988 Social Text article, “The Female Complaint.”

The article conceptualized what she calls female complaining: a mode of self-expression that simultaneously protests “patriarchal oppression” and concedes its inevitability. “What’s interesting,” Berlant says, “is that from its origins women’s culture has a big critique of male dominance, both in the political sphere and at home, but it also wants something like the good version of that normativity to be the condition of happiness. It’s like Julia Roberts at the end of Pretty Woman saying, ‘I want the promise.’” But time and again women find that promise to be fantasy. “In subordinate populations’ intimate publics, the presumption is that the general world is not organized around their flourishing,” Berlant says. “So hip-hop culture is about police, and women’s culture is about being disappointed in love and with children and at work.”

In The Female Complaint, Berlant returns to the “discourse of disappointment” in 19th- and 20th-century women’s culture, analyzing it through close study of literary, theatrical, cinematic, and political works and histories of psychoanalysis and liberal public theory: Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Show Boat; Imitation of Life; Now, Voyager; Landscape for a Good Woman; The Life and Loves of a She-Devil; and Uncle Sam Needs a Wife. Most of those works have been remade, or else adapted to the screen or stage. “If people are returning to something many times, it means it has a story to tell that isn’t finished,” she says. In her book’s preface, Berlant asserts that the “unfinished business” relates to an unresolved question—”the desire for and cost of feminine conventionality.” Women return to the same stories, she says, “for a re-encounter with the problem of survival.”

I’ve had a couple of gender-related experiences at work lately - one relating specifically to the scarcity of female designers in our industry - and the second, to statements about how openly emotional communication styles that some women have can make some men uncomfortable in the workplace. Neither of these was a fun conversation - both had their frustrations. So they have been on my mind for the better part of the weekend.

Before I saw the article on Lauren’s new book, I was toying with the idea of writing to a few women I know personally- to see if they had any advice about my current train of thought (essentially setting the stage for the Female Complaint). Instead, I decided to share the ideas here.

- - -

Question: Do the two gender/work conversations I had this week directly reinforce each other?

Specifically - emotion at work is a reality within both Game Development and Academia - realms where the main product of work are new ideas. Whether it’s a game, a business plan or a thesis - there are bound to be heated disagreements about design, features, schedules. The collaborative and creative nature of these environments (which attract so many core contributors) actually create tension on a daily basis. Emotional talk is bound to occur.

As Virginia Valian and others have shown - workplace responses to women (especially in the realm of conversation & idea exchange) are not always equal. In heated debates where a women is passionately engaged, men may follow-on or reinforce patterns of dismissal that damage the woman’s relationships with others in the group - however inadvertenly.

And as the conversations, publications and years accrue, even a small discrepency in the way women are evaluated leads to unfortunate results.

- - -

Now consider the other article I wanted to highlight - which covers Tanya Menon’s research into idea valuation and emotion in the workplace:

A behavioral scientist who studies organizational culture and decision-making patterns, Menon has spent more than a decade analyzing how businesses and businesspeople assess new ideas and why they often fail to grasp the value of innovations developed within their own ranks…

…Simple envy isn’t the whole explanation. Internal ideas are more easily scrutinized and picked apart than those seen from a distance. But personal motivation can be potent, Menon says. “In a business era that venerates creativity, novelty, and thought leadership, ‘borrowing’ knowledge from colleagues is not a career-enhancing strategy,” she wrote in a 2006 Management Science article. Bosses shower awards, bonuses, and promotions on innovators. Employees who learn from another’s idea may be perceived as followers, Menon says, and “managers reward the leader, not the follower. That gives me an incentive to cut down your idea and put my resources into promoting my own.”

Emotion also plays a role. People worry about losing social standing, looking like a thief, giving public deference to office rivals, and appearing weak or dependent. Corporate incentives and policies, Menon says, should ameliorate, not intensify, these reactions. In the Management Science article she and coauthors Leigh Thompson of Northwestern University and Hoon-Seok Choi of South Korea’s Sungkyunkwan University found that a simple “self-affirming” exercise, in which people listed some of their accomplishments—”even just ‘I’m good at art’ or ‘I’m a good tennis player’”—or described values they cherished, helped ease their sense of being threatened. “Afterward, they did not derogate an internal person’s ideas,” Menon says. “They felt more comfortable saying, ‘This is a good idea worth pursuing.’”

Design is an inherently a communication-driven job, where passion and emotion are critical to success - as is the general ability to distribute and champion ideas. A strong designer at any level must be able to access, leverage and edit the creative ideas of an entire team - convincing them that these ideas can be shaped into an overaching, aesthetically pleasing whole. Creative collaborations take the issues mentioned in Menon’s studies to a whole new level - as the day-to-day environment is one of continual idea exchange, valuation and validation.

If there are inequalities in the way gender effects the perception of core communications re: ideas & thought leadership - we have a problem.

I’m not sure if the connection exists - but if it did, it could effect the promotion of female design talent - or even create a lack of supply. IE: Most designers come to the job from another discipline - working up from test or into it from production, art or programming. So in theory, any issues w/r/t promotion would impact womens’ ability to make that career shift and get into design at all!

Could the emotion-scape of the creative workplace be working against female designers?

It wouldn’t even have to be that female designers *are* inherently more emotional (I doubt they really are) - just that the perception of their behavior casts them in that light for some males - which has that small, but long-term effect of keeping them from achieving thought leadership within the field.

There has to be *some* reason that when I search LinkedIn for “game designer” I get page after page of male candidates. At ~40 to 1 based on my informal survey - it’s an uphill climb to find women who are experienced and affordable for working on teams within our industry. And that is not good.

Great way to wake up #1: Gama’s post on BB’s chart-bashing performance in Japan this week! Super Sugoi!

And coming in at #2 - Scott’s Foe’s chat with Gama about his latest and greatest with Nokia. Congrats, SF!!

:)

Let’s do math!

It Works!

Looks like fun. Whee!

but this time - it’s personal!

In Clueless: The Game, the player takes on the part of Cher trying to find the perfect boyfriends for all her pals. Players will need to figure out what kind of guy their friends want by noticing what clothes these potential suitors wear and what sort of interests they have. Once Cher knows what they want, she will have to pick out the right elements to make the perfect man for them. Players will have to be quick! Love waits for no one!

Mean Girls: High School Showdown, allows players to take on the role of a student trying to restore balance to the many cliques in their high school and to end the reign of the terrible “Plastic clique,” the prettiest girls and the meanest of the mean. To do this, players will need to unite the cliques by using a few tricks of their own. Players can choose to take the high road by using kind words and revealing important truths at the right time, or use the Plastic’s own evil tricks against them, by using rumors, pranks and put downs. A mix of both might go a long way, too!

The classic 80’s hit movie, Pretty in Pink, is known as a movie that defined a generation, and now players will have the chance to relive the story in an all-new entertaining game format. Through a series of beautifully rendered scenes, players will need to solve a variety of fun and challenging visual puzzles in order to experience the memorable story about love, friendship, the clash of social cliques and how to rise above them. Andie, Duckie, Blane, and the rest of the unforgettable characters from both “the wrong side of the tracks” and not, return to play out the romantic fairytale love story, but this time with a dramatic difference… their fate will be put in the hands of the player.

!!?? - a puzzle game based on a class-war teen romance fiction? Say anything, but that!

Seriously - can you imagine how sweet it would be to work on the PIP game… if they were really trying to build out mechanics that made players *feel* like an outsider teen! I have certainly fantasized about building that game (especially for web - where I think it would be so great to play with grown up friends). I will withold judgement till I have played it. Mostly.

General note: It makes me sad that so many juicy design problems end up on the cutting room floor! There are not enough products and enough time to pursue most of the ideas that really get my design geek worked up… but there are some. Goal for this year is to participate in several (more direction, less day to day doing) and see how that works out.

What a wonderful place!

Cannot wait to start attending sessions in the AM…

SUPER SIMPLE AND SUPER AMAZING

One thing that is *not* happening to me in LA is a tan.

Last weekend Souris was kind enough to document my status as “human bling” - the term Ben, Neb and I coined for this unique beach-blinding status.

Here I am comparing to Mish - the other bright lady on our trip.

We decided that she’s pink, and I’m peach - but I do believe she’s the blingingist of the pair.

Even inside, I glare. Thank god for SPF 50+.

ONE:

I went to see Wall-E on Thursday at midnight (thanks for the invite Disney!!) with a bunch of folks from the team. I know that some people are not really into the switch mid-film to people (from straight up robot romance) but I did not find it as jarring as some. Overall, I thought the film was a triumph of expert, emotional puppeteering - and was especially intrigued by the type of romantic love it explores.

Think of the typical boy-meets-girl stuff you see in film. Rarely, if ever, does such a film feature the kind of strong maternal connection that exists between the two bots. I’m thinking specifically of the scene where Eve catches Wall-E in mid-fall, as his fire extinguisher/space rocket runs out. But the entire sequence, from first kiss to final cuddle, has a tone that resonates with motherly tenderness.

I was also struck by the sequences with Eve, where she is struggling to fulfill her duty almost mindlessly. Frustrated and angry she’s so happy to ignore the advances of her admirer. Focused to a fault, her dedication is destructive on more than one occasion. Career robot of the future meets reformed work-a-day joe with an eye for beauty. Watching that give way to a deeper understanding of what contact could bring - what kinds of unfulfilled longings might somehow blossom when acknowledged… that left me deeply moved.

It’s no secret that women’s lib has introduced complex questions about our professional, personal, romantic and reproductive drives and roles. Media, sometimes brash and alternatively bashful has attempted to address the issues. Sure, it’s a stretch to say that what I saw in Eve’s angry pouting and motherly embrace are allegories for the struggles of modern women. But the fact that I saw something that deep on the surface of this film really surprised me. Even if it was a totally personal, unique response - it speaks volumes to the success of these characters & their creators. Kudos.

TWO:

Los Angeles is spoiling me. Yesterday I woke up at 10 to breezy ocean smells and bright sun. A lazy morning with coffee and a book in the shade led to tea at Jin Patisserie (again, breezy shade & wonderful aromas)… and then to Sunfish Sushi with Team HP. Fantastic fish available in a posh, chain-potential setting… for $35. Then meeting up with Rodrigo to enjoy the karaoke stylings of LA regulars at Boardwalk 11. Strong drinks, kind local demi-celebrities… and Liz Phair in the songbook. What could be better?

I live 5 minutes from the office and have no desire to move elsewhere. But I know I cannot afford to buy a house where I live. And long-term, what ar the chances that my next awesome gig will be in this studio, so close to all that I’m beginning to love? It’s hard to imagine being spoiled like this forever, Westside style. But it’s getting harder & harder to imagine leaving.

THREE:

I miss my Lulu, so much.

Until she returns for E3, the new Death Cab record will have to do.

It’s about time!!.

:)

Finally - I got the Creature Creator up and running on my new laptop!

Meet Boudy - a seahorse-inspired land mammal with rump powered defenses:

and Nubbin - a spiney bird-lizard that lines its nests with smooth, black river stones (duh - they absorb & retain heat!):

Click and save the PNGs to capture for your game, and click through to see videos of them in action!

- - -

One of my favorite things to do right now is to look at human-like bi-pedal animation in the creature system. This video is actually pretty awesome, in that regard - fanciful. Fast-forward to the end to see the babies - it’s bizarre!

Endless hours of fun. You know it’s a Maxis classic when it’s depriving you of sleep!

:P

GO GO GO Team Spore!!

Some interesting number crunching in the vein of my earlier post on data.

After evaluating the raw numbers for the broadest category (both genders, all ages), it’s interesting to divide the total reported sales so far by the number of reporting Nintendo Channel players (which you can get by looking at the total hours played vs. the average playtime for a given player).

MORE fasciniating stuff! Yay - data!!

Props to JR for sharing thoughts on BB’s projected sales, marketing and overall expectations!

I was curious to see all the coverage in the last few days re: sales (overall charts) as opposed to sales on the Wii… and also, to see so few comparisons to other 3rd party titles (say Carnival Games, Zach and Wiki, or even Okami).

PS: Best wishes to Neil - we’ll miss you, and know you will rock in your next gig! Also - big ups and congrats to Lucy and Lou on their new roles within Maxis and my new home, Blueprint! Super things ahead!

PPS: Thanks to MJ for the sneak peek at MSK - so so so cute!!