Wednesday, February 28, 2007

A New Home for Clubberjack

This blog is now located at www.clubberjack.net. Enjoy!

Friday, February 02, 2007

Art I would like to collect

I have a small collection of artwork, some pieces made by artist friends, some bought at various street fairs or shows (and some of my own work as well). I would like to expand my collection, and there are a few artists whose work I've seen online that I would love to purchase from. Here's a few of my favorites:

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Getting it Wrong (the price of security)

Perhaps you've heard about the brouhaha surrounding the bomb scare in Boston. You know, the one set off by magnetic LED graffiti that was part of a marketing campaign (and so on...).

What I think is lost in all of the rush to assign blame (on all sides) is that this is the cost of having a bomb squad. Bomb squads get called in on false alarms all the time (like this). Sometimes you get it wrong. What happened in Boston was simply a false alarm; someone mistook an object for a bomb. Everyone clamoring for lawsuits against Cartoon Network or decrying the overreaction of Boston officials needs to step back and remember that there's no point in having a bomb squad if they're afraid to get it wrong some of the time.

Of course, that assumes that you believe in the relative merits of having a bomb squad...

... and that the security response is timely...

... which, in this case, it wasn't (the "bombs" had been up for 2 weeks prior to this incident).

Then, of course, there's the two actual fake bombs that were found the same day (with no arrests made yet).

[UPDATE] Here are a few more interesting comments on the situation:

Guitar Hero: What exactly are you doing?

Jesper Juul made a smart little post about Guitar Hero over at the Ludologist. He makes the distinction between playing music and performing, and identifies GH as the later (as opposed to Singstar for example). This seems like a pretty good way of thinking about games like GH, they let you feel what it's like to perform, which is what the fantasy of being a guitar god is all about anyway. GH isn't about the skill of actually playing guitar. Singstar on the other hand is about the skill of singing.

On the flip side, completing a difficult section of GH does feel a lot like some of my memories from Middle School band, struggling through difficult measures of music on my trumpet. The elation of getting to the end without screwing up (much) is the much the same.

Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Game Design Link Dump

Not quite done with the link dumps for today (I guess this is what happens when I let them build up over time). Here are some lovely links to interesting game design tidbits:
The next few are all from Raph Koster's blog. I've been reading a lot of his posts lately and finding his writing to be very insightful. Or maybe he and I have a similar set of interests... In any event, in the future, I'll try to post links to Raph's writing only when I have a full reaction to log (and not just a "wow, cool"). This should keep me from posting a link to everything.

Creative Process

As an artist, I enjoy looking into the processes and spaces that other artists work out for themselves. Here are a couple of articles in that vein that I've enjoyed recently:
Update: Here's another one from EDGE...

Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Link Dump

Here's some links with minimal commentary:

Process Intensity

A concept that I've been trying to understand lately is process intensity. Here's a few links (mostly for my own reference):
I should have something intelligent to say about this soon.

Friday, January 05, 2007

The Importance of Movement

Recently, a couple of articles reminded me of one key part of virtual character development: movement. Whether it's the creator of the furby miming the movement of a dinosaur or Savion Glover dancing in a mo-cap suit, the motions that are injected into each character serve to create those moments that we, as viewers (or players or interactors) recognize as true.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Clockwork

These are too cool!

Creative Link Dump

Here's some more links relating to creating great experiences:

Link Dump

Here's a pile of random links from the last few weeks.