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Seven Songs

June 5th, 2008

It’s Thursday, I’ve missed the last two weeks, I need to get something up here, and I saw some deranged old man doing this, so I figured it was as good an idea as any. Then I realized I’d misread it:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

I’m going to change it around a bit and just list seven “notable” songs I’ve been listening to recently. Not necessarily good or bad, but worth mentioning.

1) Magnetic Fields - Born on a Train
I’d never even heard of this this band, but I knew that a band with the name “Magnetic Fields” existed, so I only stumbled upon this song while looking for a musical accompaniment to this movie. It’s beautiful. So is With Whom To Dance, which reminded me instantly of…

2) Chumbawamba - Learning To Love
Probably because they lifted the tune wholesale, as good folk music so often does. Fitting, as both the songs’ lyrics deal with similar conundra, but Chumba go so far as to provide a solution in their case.

3) Apocalyptica - Fade To Black
Listened to this today because I had to explain to someone why this band is great in theory but lacking in execution. Even when they add a drummer, they still never seem to capture the heaviness of their source material. Cellos have an huge dynamic range, and skilled (and creative) cellists can squeeze more sounds out of a cello than Tom Morello can out of a guitar. This band, however, bores me to tears.

4) The Ex & Tom Cora - State of Shock
Speaking of skilled cellists… It was a dead heat between this and Hidegen Fújnak a Szelek (based on the Hungarian folk song, which Chumba also eventually borrowed). This won out because I could find the a link to the version with Tom. Sometimes I like to listen to music in odd orders–alphabetic by band, or chronologic–because I still get the coherence of listening to full albums, but the bands and styles of music come out in an almost pseudorandom series so I get to hear music I might not be looking for. Today, iTunes happened to be sorted by year, so this list contains a disproportionate number of songs from 1992. After finishing this album it moved on to…

5) Operation Ivy - Here We Go Again
I don’t think I’ve heard this song in 10 years, and it’s still so good. The lyrics are amazing, insightful, and always relevant:

Analyzed the world I was born into, but I could never understand
Knew I never wanted to grow up if that meant being a “man”
Dominating strict competition is the meaning of our lives
Stomping on the weak keeps us the winner of the battle in our minds

6) Beastie Boys - Professor Booty
Yet another ‘92 release. Again, this whole album was really inspiring to me growing up. Good beats, clever rhymes… this track wins for the line, “I been though many times in which I thought I might lose it. They only thing that save me, has always been music.”

7) Russian Circles - Harper Lewis
I have to include at least one item in the list that I haven’t been able to stop listening to for weeks, and this is it. Again, this whole album is excellent. All the interweaving layers, shifting drums, build ups and light/heavy interplay that I love. For whatever reason the drums really stand out to me. They’re relatively simple, but I don’t think the drummer ever uses the same beat twice in the whole album. This particular track reminds me of one of my favorite things that I’ve been missing in the Bay Area. Like a thunderstorm, it starts out with rumbling toms and bass in the distance, then comes a light trickle of guitar, then the pressure builds and builds until… wait for it… wait for it… here it comes… CRACK!… BOOOM! DOWNPOUR! No link because you need to go get this yourself and listen to it on something with bass. Lots of bass. Headphones need not apply.

7.5) (’cause I can never stick to rules) Crass - The Immortal Death
This one’s been stuck in my head for a few days now, for a reason I can’t quite mention yet. Crass were masters of managing tension, building it up and up and up until it exploded and collapsed into chaos, combining harsh guitar tone, driving drums, and both vocals and lyrics pushing the uncomfortableness to eleven. This epic, written in response to the idiotic Falklands War, exposed the connection between war, gender, sexuality and death and is ever relevant today.

Alright, now I’m supposed to find seven people to pass this to? Let’s go with Anouk, since she just asked about it, Matt, Bob, and Joe, since I know they have taste and are in dire need of an update; and John, Jon, and Seppo, ’cause I know they have taste and will probably do it.

Posted in Music | 4 Comments »

Still Our Blood Runs Red

May 17th, 2008

With the sounds of Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun echoing in my eardrums, I departed SFO international airport en-route to Shanghai. This was my first trip to China and I, partially by choice, had very little idea what to expect. Whatever I expected, it was far more than Christina did, blindfolded as she was, ears plugged with loud, full-spectrum music selected by me to drown out any clues to our destination that might leak over the airport intercom. We were off on another of our surprise trips, and this time I was the one choosing the location.

Just a week earlier, I had gone early in the morning to pick up our visas at the Chinese Consulate in San Francisco. When I got there, I found a long line of people leading down the sidewalk and a convoy of news vans and police cars. The entrance to the building had been roped off with police tape and a large black mark scarred the steel shutter guarding the door. Earlier that morning, someone had thrown an incendiary device at the Consulate. The social unrest that had recently exploded in Tibet and spilled over into the nearby western provinces of Qinghai, Gansu, Sichuan, and Xinjiang had spread all the way across the Pacific Ocean.

SF Torch demo
SF Olympic Torch demonstration.
Photo: Christina

I had begun reading about the protests heating up in Tibet, after decades of active, peaceful demonstration, and becoming bloody with Chinese paramilitary police firing their weapons directly into crowds and killing many people. With the Beijing Olympics rapidly approaching, the Chinese government is trying to eradicate all traces of dissent and whitewash its appearance. As the saying goes, “The nail that sticks up gets hammered down”, but by now the foundation has rotted, and every strike of the hammer resonates vibrations that pop up five more. What China has not learned from history is that the harder they clamp down the more people will resist. The resistance itself is taking advantage of the international attention focused on China, brought by the Olympics, to gain it’s own visibility and sympathy.

A few weeks earlier, I met someone at a book fair who was quite a bit more familiar with China and its politics. He advised me to be careful talking about politics with the locals, especially those in the eastern part of the country, as they are quite sensitive on the matter. The guide books I read said to avoid it all together. Why is this, I wonder? Is it nationalist loyalty to the government? Or merely an apolitical stance stemming from having carved out a comfortable position in life, and not wanting to be disturbed by Tibetan separatism, Taiwanese independence, and Hong Kong autonomy. Are they just trying to thrive?

By the time we were set up in our hotel, I had already broken numerous laws just by bringing my laptop into the country, containing cryptographic programs allowing me to check my Umich email using PuTTY SSH or log onto my work’s VPN network. So what was a few more? I wanted to check out the extents of the Great Firewall of China, the internet censorship that I had heard so much about. Wikipedia was blocked. Google was not, as they have a complicit agreement with the Chinese government to block questionable content. But Wikipedia results still showed up in Google Search, including snippets of text from the blocked sites. Come on, Google, you guys are supposed to be the masters of information; I thought you’d be better at this. If you can’t even handle that, what are you going to do once all the Tibetans learn to type in l33t-speak? I attempted to circumvent the blocks by viewing Googles cache of the page, to no avail (but I didn’t think to check archive.org). Of course, it was no problem to connect to a computer back in the US over VPN and view whatever I wanted, but this is not something most Chinese citizens have the opportunity to do.

Through this all, I was reminded by my internal soundtrack of the perils of such high concentrations of power and authority. The aforementioned Red Sparrowes album beautifully tells the story, merely with inordinately long song titles and instrumental music, of the Great Leap Forward campaign and the millions of people who starved to death as an ultimate result. While weather conditions were partially to blame, the main cause was a combination of poor planning by so few by leaders, so far removed from the majority of people and separated by so many levels of hierarchy, with each level trying to ingratiate themselves with their superiors. (Which doesn’t actually sound too different from our modern corporations, just on a much larger scale.)

Nanjing Road, Shanghai.
Photo: me

How the western press can continue to refer to China as “communist” is beyond me. From what I saw and what I’ve read, China is unlike any description of communism I have ever come across. With the economic changes begun by Deng Xiaoping and expanded under Jiang Zemin, the country maintains a market economy much closer to capitalism but with many state-owned businesses mingling with private enterprises. Everywhere I looked there were influences of western capitalism and consumerism. Chains like McDonalds and Starbucks were scattered throughout the city. The hotels in Shanghai were almost entirely run by American franchises. But when it comes to governing, China is authoritarian to the core. The government tightly restricts who can cross its borders. The government tells the press what it cannot print. The government tells people what they cannot view on the internet.

Poster by Michael Parisi and Rebecca
Cadman via Eyeteeth

But despite their best efforts—no matter how many journalists are kicked out of the country, nor how much censorship the Chinese government forces on the press or the internet—once information is free, there is no way to control it. Indeed, as the Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism points out, as China’s government starts blocking large, general purpose sites like YouTube just to prevent their people from seeing protest videos, they will only upset more people who use the site for non-threatening purposes, in turn spurring more people to become dissidents themselves.

The rise in information technology has brought about a democratization of information. Just as the abundance of digital cameras set free a Critical Mass rider in Minneapolis, so too will it liberate China. Every tourist has become a foreign correspondent. Any kid with a cellphone camera can be an investigative reporter. Videos and (graphic) photos depicting police suppression of demonstrations in Tibet and nearby provinces surfaced on wikileaks.org mere days after the actions had occurred.

While the Chinese government may block direct access to such websites, there is no way they can prevent the information from spreading. Peer-to-peer file-sharing protocols like BitTorrent bypass the need for central (and therefore, controllable) servers altogether and in some cases, can even provide a degree of anonymity for the end-user. The RIAA has been entirely unsuccessful at stopping the sharing of music files. How long will it be until the Chinese people have vast networks of shared, otherwise prohibited, user-created news, artwork, and opinions completely circumventing any central authority? Will the revolution be televised on YouTube?

[via]

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May 2nd, 2008

I can’t help but think there is some connection between this and this.

That is all.

What, that’s not enough? Fine. Here are ten random words I just thought of off the top of my head:
Senior
Lawn
Hypocrite
Lycanthropy
Sixteen
Uncomfortable
Cranberry
Twixt
Enormous
Canterbury

Do with them what you will…

Posted in Less-than-uncategorized | No Comments »

Addendum

April 25th, 2008

Addendum Addendum: You can actually compare this to a Banksy.

Posterchild just linked to an excellent video:

It’s an experiment. What if you took a famous contemporary studio artist’s work and plunked it on the streets? Would anyone notice? Would anyone care?

It just goes to show how much people can get sucked into their little worlds of academia (or whatever the art-world equivalent is) and completely lose touch with the reality outside their walls.

Favorite quote: “Imagine if art suddenly appeared in the real world, on the street.”

But it does have some (sincerely) good ones:

Art is usually defined by the intention for it to be a work of art and the context in which you see it. - Amy Cappellazzo, Head of Contemporary Art, Christie’s

Art is about creating images and passing on ideas. If it succeeds in making people think, even for a few seconds, it has done a lot already. - Luc Tuymans, Painter

(I might as well start attributing these quotes if I’m going to collect them.)

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What is art, again?

April 24th, 2008

Since I just won the… heh… Post-Graduate Dissertation on Games As Art Award for my entry in Ludumdare, I thought I’d come back to this topic once more.

To start it off, here’s some great ruminations on the subject, as animated by the Wallace & Grommit guy:

[via [via]]

Then we have this.
Important moment in history

What exactly is the art here? Is it the plaque? The YouTube video it is sourced from? The “performance”? Or the comment about how technology has made us obsessed with documenting every moment of our completely unremarkable lives.
[more]

At least the proliferation of small, cheap recording devices does have some redeeming uses.

Next is one of my all-time favorite street art pieces, Pixelator.

And speaking of street art… say what you want about Banksy, his art, his methods, or the obscene amount of money he’s been making; but you’ve got to hand it to someone who can get governmental entities to agree that maybe, just maybe, some vandalistic graffiti might be “legal art”. And not just legal, but worth protecting and repairing? Because once they’ve accepted that even one piece of graffiti could be “art”, it is no longer a black and white issue. It becomes a subjective value judgment. With every new piece, they have to ask themselves, “Is this art?” “Is this one worth keeping, or destroying?”

Yeah, that’s right. YOU CAN’T STOP ART, MOTHERFUCKERS!

Posted in Art | 2 Comments »

Done

April 20th, 2008

I’ve always been interested in minimalism in other art forms. This of course, opens another can of worms: the great debate as to whether or not videogames are, or could be, art. I actually take a more of a conservative stance than most game developers in that I don’t think games are inherently art. Videogames are a medium, just like film, television, theatre, or music or painting. These forms of media can be used to create art, or entertainment, or advertising. And for the media that are generally regarded as art (painting, music, theatre) there are artists who constantly push the boundaries of the medium. They force people—artists, critics, and ordinary people—to ask questions. “Is this art?” “Can this really be considered music?” “What is the defining characteristics of theatre?” Some in particular do this by trying to create a piece that meets the smallest possible criteria of the definition of that art form.

Samuel Beckett’s play, Breath - 25 seconds long, contains no actors, no movement, other than the curtains, and the only sounds are two cries and breathing. But it takes place on a stage, it has a script, it contains stage-direction.

Napalm Death’s song, You Suffer - Regarded as the shortest song in existence at precisely 1.316 seconds long. But it still contains all the elements of any rock/metal song: guitar, bass, drums, vocals.

John Cage’s composition, 4′33″ - A three-movement composition for any instrument (or combination of instruments), made entirely of silence. The argument being that music is composed of sound that is organized in some fashion. Whether or not silence can be considered sound is up for debate, but some people consider the ambient noise of the audience and the performance hall (or location, generally speaking) to be part of the piece. You can even buy sheet music for 4′33″. Does that make it a composition? Does that make it music?

Robert Rauschenberg’s White Paintings - Seven entirely blank white panels. It is still paint on canvas. Is it still art? I’ve seen it displayed in the San Francisco MoMA, so by definition, it must be high art. Some argue, just like with 4′33″, that the painting’s interaction with it’s environment—the lighting, the shadows cast on the canvas, the museum patrons staring quizzically at the empty space on the wall—are part of the piece itself.

One thing is for certain. If we cannot ask these pretentious questions about videogames, then how can we consider them art?

So what is the most basic definition we have for games? Generally, it is regarded that all games must have a goal. This does not mean that the game has to be “winnable”. Take Asteroids, for example. There is no way to win Asteroids, but the goal is to get the highest possible score.

As another example, SimCity does not have a specific goal. It has a lot of numbers that can increase and decrease, but it is ultimately up to the player to decide how they want to play and what they want to achieve. Because of this, SimCity’s designer, Will Wright, refers to it as a “toy” rather than a “game” because there are any number of ways to play with it. But it is still regularly regarded as one of the “best games of all time” by numerous critics. Does that not make it a game? Clearly, even the requirement of a goal is somewhat lenient. Is score purely a goal, or just a metric? If so, what does this say about games, like Asteroids, where scoring is the only goal? Is the goal of Asteroids to achieve the highest score, or merely to survive the constant onslaught of cosmic rocks? If the latter, does that mean the player always loses?

The second requirement of games is that they must have rules. I once read somewhere (can’t find the source off-hand) that game design is the process of adding rules to a system to make it less efficient. The classic example being that if a boxer’s goal is to get his opponent to lay on the mat for 10 seconds, the most efficient way of doing that would be to shoot the other boxer in the head. Thus rules are added to the game so that the boxer can only cause his opponent to fall by using a certain style of punches. Whether or not this is accurate description of game design, or merely a cute sound bite does not change the generally upheld conception that games are made out of rules.

Another requirement often cited is that games must have some form of player interaction. This could be as much as maintaining an entire fleet of spaceships in battle against another fleet, while trying to manage resource collection, empire expansion, and technology development, or as little as pressing a button to jump.

So, if games are defined as a goal and a set of rules with player interaction, what is the most basic, minimal implementation possible? For the sake of this contest, I’m going to limit this argument to “computer games”–that is, games that can be played on a computer.

Even the current version of my game has more than that. Since a game does not necessarily have to be winnable, or have an end-state, I can remove that part of the game, but I still need to have a goal. The current goal of the game is essentially to terminate it as fast as possible. That can still be the goal even if I take out the “game over” message and the ranking system (which take up the majority of the code). Alternately, I could make the goal to keep the game running as long as possible, similar to Asteroids, or Progress Quest. I don’t even need to keep a score inside my game as the operating system and the Process Manager already keep track of how long the game has been running.

Since the goal has changed, and therefore the rules have changed, I still need to communicate the new rules to the player somehow. My game has to have a name of some sort so to get to the most minimal state possible I’m going to make the game’s title the same as the full text of it’s instruction manual. How’s that for usability?

I still need to have player interaction, but does that mean my game has to accept input? Is the input that it takes to start the game and stop the game enough? If so, I can remove the input code as well.

So what is left? I’ve got a game, where the goal is to keep the game running as long as possible. The rules are… to keep the game running as long as possible? And the player interaction is to start and stop the game. I’d say that’s about as minimal a computer game as you can get.

Here’s the final tally:
KeepRunning
Platform: Windows (Tested on XP, 2000. Probably works with all x86 processors Win95 and greater.)
Source: 2 lines, 76 bytes (including copyright notice comment)
source v4
Executable: 5,632 bytes. (Future plans: write it in native assembly code, Linux, Mac ports.)

Screenshots:
KeepRunning
It's a new record!

Posted in Games | 1 Comment »

Step 2

April 20th, 2008

3:15 PM 4/20/2008 - Next step: more optimizations.

Source Code: 44 lines, 1,065 bytes
Optimizations: Going to hold off on this one, since I’m likely to change the design.

Executable: 40,960 bytes
Optimizations: In my haste, I realized I’d posted the Debug version. Switching to Release and tweaking the project settings got me all the way down to 6,144 bytes. That’s an 85% improvement! Awesome!

Design:
When talking about videogame minimalism, one of my favorite examples is Wario Ware. Each of Wario Ware’s microgames (the meta-game is another issue in itself) gives a one-word instruction, and makes the player figure out the rules, mechanics, and goals from that instruction, and from the game itself (in around five seconds, no less). Nowadays, even the most complex games, built by teams of hundreds of developers, have very little in the way of prior instructions. This is mainly because players just want to jump into playing a game without reading about how the game is supposed to work. Most of the time, a player with some previous experience with games can experiment with different inputs, observe the feedback from those inputs, and infer the controls. By playing and watching the game for a few minutes a player can usually figure out the goals of the game. Players are basically doing a pattern-matching search over the game-element archetypes that they have already experienced. This is not to say that this process is inherent in a game’s design, however. There is often significant effort put into designing the game’s input and output in a such a way to hasten the player’s understanding of how to play the game.

The main point here, though, is that it is not required of a game to tell the player exactly how to play. The player is often left to themselves to figure out how a game works. Given that, I think I can safely remove about half of my game. The player does not need to be prompted, I can just have the game wait for their input, and from the response to their input, they can learn the rules.

Doing this let me cut out another 5 lines of code.

Here’s the new tally:
Executable: 6,144 bytes, surprisingly this isn’t any smaller. Crazy. Computers are indistinguishable from magic….
Source: 39 lines, 901 bytes
source v1

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First Prototype

April 20th, 2008

1:00 PM 4/20/2008 - Okay, six hours to go. Looking at my original design for Resident Evil FLT_MIN, it’s clear that I’m going to have to make a few changes. Obviously, to avoid copyright issues, I need to change the name. For now I’ll give it the working title “RE FLT_MIN”. Also, it seems like it would take only a few minutes to come up with a prototype using Flash. Unfortunately, I don’t know Flash. Plus, even though the design seems somewhat minimal, it can easily be made *more* minimal. First off, look at all those fancy graphics. Font rendering? What was I thinking?

2:20 PM 4/20/2008 - Alright, I’ve got the first version of the game up and running. I still need to do some debugging, and put it through some usability testing… maybe a focus group. I want to post a shot of the source code, but unfortunately it doesn’t all fit on a single page. I suppose at this stage, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to do some optimization.

2:25 PM 4/20/2008 - Was able to cut code down by removing some unnecessary #includes. Also, I think it’s bad style to have un-braced if statements, but doing so cut down a large amount of vertical space.

2:55 PM 4/20/2008 - Okay. First prototype version is ready to download and play.

Here is the entire source:
source v1

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It all starts with an idea

April 20th, 2008

Okay, I’m registered. Now to start with some inspiration. Way back when Resident Evil 2 came out for the PS1, my friends and I loved it, and played it to death. There were two things that we were particularly fond of. First off, the voice “acting” was excellent. And by “excellent”, I mean perfect for the B-movie motif of a modern zombie movie (er… videogame with extensive cut scenes). The awkward pauses in dialog were further exacerbated by the long loading time for the PS1 to read the sound files off the disk. This, combined with the awkward hand-gesture animations made for some moments that would have made Ed Wood proud. For example the classic, “Stop!… don’t open… that door!” from from the first Resident Evil game. Or one of the initial exposition dialogs from the sequel:

Marvin:
About two months ago…there was this incident… involving zombies…
in a mansion… located in the outskirts of this city.
Chris… and the other STARS members discovered that…
…
…
(sinister voice) Umbrella…
was behind everything.
…
They risked their lives to reveal the truth.
But, no one… believed them.
Not long after that… (with emphasis) all this… started to happen.

But I digress… Our second favorite thing about the game was its constant confirmationitis.
“There is a key here, would you like to take it? (yes/no)”
“There is a lever here, would you like to use it? (yes/no)”
“There is a switch here, would you like to switch it? (yes/no)”

Based on this, we devised the obvious logical extension of the series. At the time, we called it “Resident Evil 3″, but actually “Resident Evil 0″ might have been more appropriate. Considering both those title have since been taken, and reconsidering our design of the game, I think this is probably the most apt title:

RE FLT_MIN

That screenshot is pretty much the entire extent of the game. Choosing “No” would send you to a Game Over screen. Choosing “Yes” would send you to an identical Game Over screen, which we called “the good ending”. Depending on how long you took to answer “Yes”, and how many times you had to switch the cursor between the two choices, the game awarded you a rank, from D to A. If you chose “Yes” really quickly… I’m talking within a matter of minutes, you’d attain the coveted ‘S’ rank. Achieving the S rank unlocked a bonus part of the game, which played exactly the same as the original, but the menu was blue instead of green. If you beat the “blue version” with an S rank, you unlock the “red version”, and so on…

This post is brought to you by nWe - New World Enteractive, a subsidiary of nWe - New World Enterprises.

Posted in Games | 2 Comments »

It begins…

April 20th, 2008

2:10 AM 4/20/2008 - Read Seth Robinson’s blog and discovered the 48-hour Ludumdare competition was going on. The theme this year is “minimalism”. Perfect! I’ve had some ideas for games with that theme for a while now, and this is the perfect motivation. Contest started on Friday, and ends “today” at 7pm, so I’ve got some catching up to do.

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Create

Seven Songs

Still Our Blood Runs Red

Addendum

What is art, again?

Done

Step 2

First Prototype

It all starts with an idea

It begins…

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