For the market access, absolutely, but also for the collaborative access. It has made things possible cheaply that were very expensive. From IrishSpace forward, online collaborations have been a big part of my fun.

Projects that have been fun for me of late have been writing for children’s plays (soft lazy 60s rock works sooo well) and writing for virtual worlds. The first is local but immediate. Watching the 3 to 5 year olds head bang is great, then finding the teen agers line dancing back stage is aweing. IOW, one can reach across the generations and provide them fun. The second is the mental challenge. Virtual worlds open up an emerging market to us. The game industry is very tough to penetrate at a distance, but the virtual worlds markets are easier, and yes, a matter of spending times on lists networking, perhaps giving away some work for the fun of it until another artist reaches gets and opportunity and ‘natches at the gate. On the other hand, I can do both of these because I have a well-paid day gig. Am I a hobbyist? At 3D, oh yes, at music, lord no. But does that matter if they feed each other.

IMO, if being on stage with Gates and doing mouse-magic gets her a feeding opportunity, then yes, well worth doing. Is she set for life? No. That is why I gave you examples of places I’ve been. The only way to be set for life is to win a lottery and even then, best watch the money and TCB. The way to have a happy life is to choose well. Cheating isn’t always but is mostly a bad choice unless one is playing liar’s poker.

The game is the rules. Raph is right about that. It is not the experience. You are right about that.

There is an article at CNet.com today which is an interview with Saul Williams. Contrast what he has to say about his options and choices in this production with Trent Reznor and what Reznor has to say. I found the comment about the ‘freedom from race’ pointed. There was another black artist, Charlie Pride, who faced the same dilemmas. Even earlier, Buddy Holly and the Crickets faced this. I’ve faced it myself living in the land of the chord police and the bluegrassNazis.

So we choose and accept it. That’s all. What we get from the web is more opportunities, not more choices in the local shape. It is just as hard to be noticed. What we get from technology is more power to do more things ourselves, but that won’t make up for the fact that better players on the same song makes for a better recording in many cases. It comes down to the juxtaposition of feel and breath that affects touch. A recording captures that. Sometimes one guitar and a voice are quite enough for one listener but may not satisfy the singer/songwriter.

So choose. Be glad for it.

Cheap digital recording for songwriters.

…and engineers, and producers, and labels :9.

Digital distribution.

Both great advances. More access means more choices. When there are barriers to access, the consumer trying to find the 10% they want is faced with frustration. Should we call it Sturgeon’s Dilemna? Actually I wrote an essay on this for my college admission last year. I think I concluded something along the lines of the only ones threatened by this influx of content is anyone unwilling to define themselves as something.

So there I am again at pushing for recognition of individual talents or groups known for retaining talent rather than monolithic entities pumping out mediocrity to reach a ‘broad market’.

So, what we need is to facilitate an influx of content and talent…*grins*

To quote Worm, your Honor, “Tear down the wall!”

But who gets to decide what counts as cheating vs. bad game design? It sounds like you don’t think it should be the developers.

Well, my off-the-cuff answer is that I can tell the difference when I see it. But anytime players as a group skip “intended content” it means there is a problem with the content or the mind set of the players. If it’s player mind set they probably got that idea either from another game or from earlier content in your game. As a game designer you can attempt to influence that mind set. (I’d refer you here to the designer notes in Portal for examples.)

Work-arounds are bad policy. Picture an office setting. One printer breaks down. Instead of getting it fixed or replaced, people just start using the other printer. The broken printer takes up space, the working printer gets twice as much work which leads to longer wait times for your documents. Then finally weeks later it breaks and no one can get any printing done until the repair man comes. It’s the same in virtual worlds. If the only way to compete a seemingly-basic * quest is to go online and read where to kill the thing that drops the other thing lives, then someone should call the repair man.

* The phrase “seemingly-basic” is meant to indicate that it is possible to intensionally have very hard quests that need groups of people to resolve, they just should look like they are that kind of quest. “Bruce the undead is hard to find, you might need to ask your friends to help out.”

The point I was making was that if everything were easy, there would be nothing worth doing. People who rise to the top of a ladder should get special privileges. There should be inequality. Challenge is how we differentiate those who succeed from everyone else.

Okay, I can start following you here a bit. After all, what seperates me from 800 unqualified monkeys who think the answer to ‘could it sound better?’ is always ‘yes, if I turn the main sends up some more’ running sound boards across the country?

Back to games, here’s my issue: why always just one or two ladders?

What you end up with is a few people who get there naturally, like they were born for it. Then, a whole pack of lobsters in a pail…many of which probably don’t belong in the environment at all. Later, the naturals actually have left, and the top is replaced by cheaters, exploiters, and those with incredible amounts of time….they get in front of the ‘not quite as naturally adept’ group (unsupported opinion). I don’t know if its actually improbability or flat out lack of vision that keeps the industry from establishing a platform that focuses on more than 2-3 things. If you define success in too narrow a way, a lot of folks outside the margins are pressured to ‘bend the rules a little’. Give them someplace more natural to expend their desire for accomplishment and they’ll probably do that instead of working some half-baked plan together.

We’ve talked a lot in the past about established and emerging web design concepts and their possible applications in game structures. What couldn’t badges of accomplishments read like a list of book purchases in an Amazon.com profile. A way to glance over a persons interests, playstyle preferences, and competence in those fields. A large part of what drives interest in this level of identity goes beyond the desire to eliminate (or mitigate, at least) the anonyimity factor of the internet. You can identify a reader of similar habits, read their reveiw of a book that you are considering, and know with some better than random certainty that you can find similarity in your expectations. How many more opportunities for interpersonal connections does that open up than having a very slim minority at the top and a mass of ‘others’.

The only movement available on a ladder? Up or down, relative to your peers. I don’t play sports games solo or competitively, I never got into fighter games. I was playing anything and everything that involved other people cooperatively or even at least let me direct a cooperative group (Bard’s Tale!) I want to go sideways, forwards (maybe backwards, sometimes :9), whats over that hill? Who’s coming with me!

Unless its the intent of the designers to emulate life-like class warfare, why restrict your designs by implementing the same kind of innefficient distractions at all? I’m not saying don’t respect success, I’m saying people express success in lots of incredible ways. If someone can’t express success in their own terms where they are, they probably ought to move along to a venue better suited to them. But thats assuming that one is available, and their friends are all okay with suddenly uprooting to join them, or willingness to part ways. Those are some stiff opportunity costs, from my perspective.

Why ignore the strength of Virtual Worlds where dozens of playstyles and challenge levels exist in the same overall environment? Which is where I, again, as an outsider don’t know if it is simply not feasible to address so many interests on budget or if clueless suits see fast bucks to make and wreck a great thing needlessly. Then comes the problem of convincing future investment in a similar pursuit that it would have worked if patience and diligence had prevailed.

That is the result of a promotional opportunity, and in all likelyhood once ‘Guitar Hero 4′ comes out she’ll find those doors slammed shut in her face.

That’s similar to saying that meeting people as a result of a monthly networking social can’t lead to future opportunities. Or that your boss can’t give you a great recommendation. Or anyone you meet at a friend’s birthday party can’t possibly open any doors for you. We’re all just people in our places, and our places have little bearing on who we are. If you approach people as who they are instead of under the guise of commerce, you’ll find that people can be a lot more reasonable than how they represent their businesses.

If she took advantage of her position, her proximity to an industry leader and other influentials, then there are a lot of opportunities, career and otherwise, that she could have seized. Nevertheless, playing a significant role in the promotion of a Microsoft product alongside Bill Gates, Robbie Bach, and Slash in front of thousands of industry professionals and press at Gates’ last keynote for the largest consumer electronics show in the world is definitely an item of interest one can promote, from which a great deal of value can be derived, and that can be associated with the promise of challenge in games.

The point I was making was that if everything were easy, there would be nothing worth doing. People who rise to the top of a ladder should get special privileges. There should be inequality. Challenge is how we differentiate those who succeed from everyone else.

I apologize for a trigger happy, somewhat defensive and judgemental review of your comment previous to mine, Morgan.

Don’t worry about it. I failed to properly communicate my drift to Len and ended up with an unintended comment that sounds really awful on a second read.

I appologize for a trigger happy, somewhat defensive and judgemental review of your comment previous to mine, Morgan. Yay for text communications and crotchety old opinionated stalwarts mixed together. But I think cooler heads tend to prevail here and another day starts we’re all aware of imperfections in both what is said and what is heard. Maturity, even among dissenting adults, is why I enjoy reading here….and adding imperfection of my own :9.

As far as cheating goes, I think where I’ve settled on this for now was covered a few entire topics back. Markets are created from demand, if you want to stop the cheating, get rid of the demand. If you want people to stop looking up information, don’t design a puzzle made up of blank cardboard pieces. Give me some edge pieces, some color groups, some transitions. I need to identify pieces and their functions, their place in the whole. If you sit me in front of a chess board without giving me instructions, I’m probably going to do a lot of things that an educated player would call ‘cheating’.

I don’t necessarily blame design only as ‘unfun’. What are we really saying there? Its a design that hasn’t taught me anything. Combat play, for example. If combat play gave more feedback and guidance, a player could spend their ‘grinding time’ feeling like they are honing a skill, rather than gathering xp for a skill-up. See, in that case having your character power-leveled could potentially go very badly. You hop on after a couple of days, your character is max level…..and you have no concept of controlling it. Under that system, you missed all the fun (learning, instead of tedium) and have restricted your chances to have fun going forward (taking the final exam without taking the course).

In the end, I just didn’t give a rats behind about being famous because I got what I wanted without the bother and had already found out it is hollow. Just my take on it…

But, see, that’s where you’re misunderstanding my example of the girl who performed on Guitar Hero 3 at the 2008 International CES. I’m not talking about fame, impressiveness, etc. I’m talking about access, or [educational] opportunities. That’s what I meant by “she’s set for life.” Think of what I wrote this way: she’s standing in a circular room in which the walls are doors to anywhere she can and can’t yet imagine.

The challenges of games are not limited to entertainment. They can be a means to improve mental health, simulate business environments, and train warfare skills. They can even be used, as per my example, to provide people with opportunities they would not have otherwise had.

Nothing I’ve run across replaces a living teacher and lots and lots and lots of practice.

As a Celtic guitarist, which is clearly more of a road to obscurity than fame, wealth, or power, I’d say that living teachers can be replaced by a great deal of inspiration, creativity, persistence, and lots of practice. I’ve never had a guitar teacher and never wanted one. I also don’t play music written by other people—an approach that I believe forces me to always be original.

IMO, the two things coming out of comp-sci that did the most for musicians were …

C) Digital distribution. There are good articles in a recent edition of Wired that talk about Radiohead’s marketing of “In Rainbows”. Radiohead is also interviewed, and they talk about their experience as an indie artist again as well as the problems they encountered in the business.

Money? Money changes everything. Choose.

I get the part about games and fun. If I ever play Bach where they came to Boogie, that lesson will be hammered into my head with broken bottles. OTOH,there is a wonderful outtake from an early MTV Awards show where someone mistakenly put Chrissie Hynde and Bo Diddley at the same table and she asked him what he thought. If you can find that, it’s a hoot.

IMO, if someone puts a GH savant on a stage and represents them as a virtuoso, it deserves the South Park episode but if you find that entertaining, do have fun. As much as having a cup of coffee with Gates and yakking markets would be fun, I don’t think he would be much good as a funky bass player (i might be wrong) and if not, who needs him in the act? Sarah Michelle Gellar? I’ll sit up all night teaching her the fingering to Louie Louie. There is no way the act isn’t better with her playing bass even if the beat is a little off.

One must have standards.

The active listening part is right. The problem is the hand to eye coordination patterns are wrong. IOW, bad habits. That said, there are certainly guitar controllers that can teach good habits and midi displays for it, but these are training systems. Actually, even lowly Guitare Pro has a fretboard animation for that. The trouble is the fingerings are usually wrong. Nothing I’ve run across replaces a living teacher and lots and lots and lots of practice. Guitar particularly is about touch and it is as the guy said in the Eddie and The Cruisers sequel, “as individual as a finger print”.

I think that as games GH and RH are great. I can conceive of bands using devices like that with stored loops and such, and really except for the length of the sequence, is that much different from what synthesists do now live? I try to remember that harpsichord players once decried that evil pianoforte invention and claimed it would dumb down the art too. IMO, the two things coming out of comp-sci that did the most for musicians were in order a) CHEAP digital tuners (boy, did that save time and stress) and B) Cheap digital recording for songwriters. Getting off the meter system is the only thing that actually makes it possible to be an indie when one has to give the songs away.