a quiet, peaceful weekend at home

Wow. This is the first weekend I’ve been home since February, and with the website newly relaunched and my Linux feature for the June mag done; I can do whatever I want. Between SXSW and my parents coming to California, I’ve not been at Casa de Smith on a Saturday in ages. The only down side is that Gina’s not here to enjoy it with me (she’s in San Diego working an incentive trip).

So, what do I do with a glorious weekend alone? I’ve made a short list.

• Take Chloe to the park and/or beach
•  Listen to CDs I’ve bought, but haven’t listened to yet
• Listen to the last two Maximum PC Podcasts
• Weed the tree wells in front of my apartment
• Clean up my office
• Go grocery shopping
• Drink beer
• See 300?
• Play S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Cooking Mama, and Puzzle Quest and maybe finish Crackdown

That’s about it.

Some Maximum PC stuff

Sorry for the lack of followup on the SXSW stuff. I still have notes from Will Wright’s presentation, as well as the Make keynote, and I’ll post them as I have time in the future.

I’m super-busy right now, along with Dave “The Murph” Murphy and our entire web team, finalizing the content of Maximum PC’s website. We’re planning on pushing the new website live next week sometime, so keep your eyes peeled. We’ve got a nifty, highly customized content management system, that’s much more powerful what we’ve had so far. The upshot is that we’ll be pushing more magazine archival content live than ever before.

That’s great and all, but the really big news is that we’re going to have a bunch of blogs for editors and a few select community members. The editor blogs will give you a little bit of insight into what we’re doing at the mag, what we’re working on, and what we’re excited about. We have a few (still secret) community members who are going to be writing about things like Modding, Linux, and other topics of interest.

Look for the complete redesign sometime during the last half of next week! When we are 100% locked down on the date/time, I’ll post official details at Maximum PC’s old site.

Dialated eyes suck

Dialated eyes suck, originally uploaded by willski.

Chloe relaxing

Chloe relaxing, originally uploaded by willski.

Chloe’s pretty pooped out after a day in Sacramento.

Warren Spector

WARNING: i’m low on battery, so there are raw notes ahead, I’ll clean it up and make it intelligible later

Warren (the System Shock and Deus Ex guy) is talking about making great stories in games. He’s talking about the static worlds that are populated by static characters. Pacing is crap. Games get harder as they go along, as the players capabilities increase. This makes the games slower as they proceed, not anything else.

Games should be about something. Most games are all surface, rescue the princess, save the world. Nothing else. Bioware, maybe Valve are the exceptions. Five approaches to storytelling. Rollercoaster (linear game narrative. Mission 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. No real choices, just the appearance of choice, at best.

Second way, is the retold story. Games like WoW, Tetris, etc don’t really have a story. There’s no overarching narratives (or if there are, then most people don’t know about them.

Will Wright school – You make your own story. It’s just pure play. Requires creative people who want to create content.

Shared Authorship – branching storyline, like Wing Commander. Or alternately, you build a world and send people to different places at different times. Linear mission structures wtih different acts that have different sub-objects.

Procedural story generation – no script, player is in control of the whole thing. Tools ensure that the story is always interesting and powerful. Facade.

Refine vs. Replace – Do what works and make it better each time. Letting players choose mission order however they want is way more work than it’s worth. Faction interactions are a good way to do stuff. Track trends, rather than make them choose gates.

Must reward work from games well. Accomplishing story goal, getting something good, etc. Big or small, rewards are important. If I don’t do this, my brother will die is more compelling than getting a long straight piece in a hole.

Gamers can be paralyzed by choice. You need to give players cues and constrain them a bit.

Warren’s talking about character design being shitty, and representations not being particularly good. Warren likes the Miis, and says that people are more attached to their Miis than to whatever other character they play as.

In a game, you have a very limited game world, where people are locked on rails. Worlds, not sets. Make sure that players never see the limits of fidelity, fill it with scripted and simulated info. You have to make people believe that it’s a real world.

Chow party

Chow party, originally uploaded by willski.

First band (the lemurs) rocked! Second band (who cares) sucks so far.

DIY Keynote @ SXSW

DIY Keynote @ SXSW, originally uploaded by willski.

I’m getting ready to watch Phillip Torrone (from Make) and Limor Fried from Adafruit talk about DIY. I’ll update if anything interesting comes of it.

Arrived at SXSW

Arrived at SXSW, originally uploaded by willski.

Already had some great Austin BBQ!

I’ll be posting photos and stuff as I see things (or people) that are interesting! Also, keep an eye on the What I’m doing thing on the left, it should be regularly updated.

I’m installing Linux again

This time, it’s Ubuntu on my tablet PC. It looks like I’ll be able to get everything working now, including the pen input and WPA on the Wi-Fi card. Very impressive!

I’m planning on installing Beryl, so I can do this:
[youtube]Y6kd42jIaHk[/youtube]

And I bet you just use Verdana

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