I suggested she use a Marilyn Monroe wig.
14) Ideally in a game you have hardheaded adventures, but at the end you get a glimpse of the supernatural.
15) In Los Angeles everyone's writing a screenplay. In New York everyone's writing a novel. In San Francisco, everyone's developing a multimedia product.
16) There's a different mental construction in operation when you're playing tennis as opposed to when you're reading a book. With adrenaline-based competitive sports, the thought mode is: "/ want to kill this fucker." It's the spirit of testing yourself; accomplishment. You are gripped. Suspension of disbelief is not an issue.
17) A multimedia product has to deliver $1 per hour's worth of entertainment or you'll get slagged by word-of-mouth.
18) The great Atari gaming collapse of 1982 (*sigh* I remember it well).
19) Games are about providing control for nine year olds . . . "the bigger and neater the entity I can control, the better."
20) Multimedia has become a "packaged goods" industry now. The box copy is more important than the experience. But how do you write cool sexy box copy for a game like Tetris? You can't.
21) Cool term: "Manseconds": (Ergonomic unit of measurement applied to keyboards, joysticks).
22) "Embedded intelligence": (Intelligence buried in the nooks and crannies of code and storyboard design).
23) Last year at a Christmas party up in Seattle, there were all these little kids-all highly sugared and on the brink of hysteria-but instead of screaming, they sat complacently by the TV playing SEGA games. The games were like "Child Sedation Devices." It was spooky.
Susan was there. She said, "Just think, in 50 years these same kids will be sitting at the switches of our life-support systems figuring out a way to play a game by biofeedbacking our failing EKGs. Me, I seem to remember that when I was younger, overly sugared brats were sent down into the basement to fend for themselves, like Lord of the Flies."
24) How will games progress as 30somethings turn into 50somethings? ("Cardigan: The Adventure")
25) Flight Simulation games are actually out-of-body experience emulators. There must be all of these people everywhere on earth right now, waiting for a miracle, waiting to be pulled out of themselves, eager for just the smallest sign that there is something finer or larger or miraculous about our existence than we had supposed.
26) "The replayability problem" (Engineering a desire for repetition).
27) I think "van art" and Yes album covers were the biggest influence in game design.
28) I wonder if I've missed the boat on CD-ROM interactive-if I'm too old. The big companies are zeroing in on the 10 year olds. I think you only ever truly feel comfortable with the level of digitization that was normal for you from the age of five to fifteen. I mean sure, / can make new games workable, but it won't be a kick the way Tetris was. Or will it?
29) In the end, multimedia interactive won't resemble literature so much as sports.
MONDAY
Random moment earlier tonight: out of the blue Todd asked everyone in the Habitrail 2, "When they make processed cheese slices that are only 80 percent milk, what's the remaining 20 percent made from?"
Michael replied instantly, "Why, nonmilk additives, of course."
Today we learned that Bug had a piece of shareware on his computer that installs wood paneling all over your Macintosh desktopand he didn't even tell us! Grudgingly he gave us a download. "It's called shareware, Bug, not hogware."
So now we all have digitized wood paneling on our desktops. The rumpus room dream lives on inside our computer world.
Abe-maiclass="underline"
I am going to RANT today. 2 things: 1)
The US Dollar is the working currency not only of the domestic econimy, but of nearly every other country on earth (minus Europe and Japan). That must count for something. It's obviously grossly undervalued. Why does the Federal Reserve keep the value so low?
(insert conspiracy theory here)
And WHATS WITH THESE MUTUAL FUNDS AND PENSION FUNDS? I REFUSE to believe that money put into a bank in 1956 is *still* money in 1994. 1956 money may still technically be "there" wherever "there" is) - but it's undead money. It's sick. Evil. I can't believe that I*, of all people, am saying this, but there's something obscene about money that sits inside a bank and collects interest for decades. "lt;s hard at work," were told ...
OH RIGHT!
No, I think money is due for some sort of collapse. People are going to realize that money has a half-life - a decade or so? and then it becomes perverse and random. Expecting a pension kids? Ha hah ha!
I'm feeling like Bug today.
2)
Easter egg
platform
surfing
frontier
garden
jukebox
net
dirty linen
pipeline
lassooo
highway
We will have soon fully entered an era where we have creatted a computer metaphor for EUERV thing that exists in the real world.
Actually when you think about it, *everything* can be a metaphor for "anything*.
To quote YOU, Danieclass="underline" "I mean, If you really think about it."
Abe has a friend in research who's working on "metaphor-backwards" development of software products. That is, thinking of a real-world object with no cyber equivalent, and then figuring out what that cyber equivalent should be. Abe's worried because at the moment he's working on "gun."
Thought: sometimes you accidentally input an extra digit into the year: i.e., 19993 and you add 18,000 years on to now, and you realize that the year 19993 will one day exist and that time is a scary thing, indeed.
Actually, I've noticed recently that conversations always seem to reach the point where everybody says they don't have any time anymore. How can time just . . . disappear! Early this morning I told this to Karla as we were waking up and she said she's noticed this, too.
She also said that everybody's beginning to look the same these days- "Everybody looks so Gappy and identical." She considered this for a second. "Everybody looks the same nowadays because nobody has the time to differentiate themselves-or to even shop."
She paused and looked up at the ceiling. "Your mother doesn't like me."
"How can you get so random out of nowhere? Of course she does."
"No. She doesn't. She thinks I'm a hick."
(Oh God-not this stupid stuff again.) "You two never talk, so how can you even tell?"
"So you admit she doesn't like me?"
"No!"
"We have to do something together. We have no shared experiences or memories."
"Wait a second-don't / count?"
"Maybe she sees me as stealing you."
"Mom?"
"Let's arrange a lunch. We've been here how long? And we've never even had a lunch out together."
"Lunch? That's not much."
"Memories have to begin somewhere."
Now that I think about it, Mom never comes over to our work area. Ever. And the two of them never really do chat. It occurs to me that I should have noticed, and I realize that I'm worried about it.
A crisis in my new-and-improved life.
We shot Nerf darts (Jarts) for a few hours this afternoon down in the backyard to allow the sunlight to reset our circadian rhythms. We drank Napa Valley Cabernet like we were Gary Grant and made Klingon jokes. We used Dad's Soviet binoculars to inspect the enormous blue "Jell-O cube" down in the Valley below-a.k.a. the Air Force Satellite Control Facility, at Onizuka Air Force Base in Sunnyvale.
A citrus tree was blossoming outside the house; the air was lemony fresh and smelled like an expensive hotel's lobby.
Ethan was, as usual, in a beautiful suit, like one of those suntanned Academy Awards guys. (But again, his dandruff!) He greeted us with, "Good afternoooon, my precious content delivery system."
We asked Ethan if he wanted to throw Jarts with us, but he said, "Love to, kids, but antidepressants make me photosensitive. Sunlight kills me. My retinas'll get etched like a microchip. You kids keep on playing. Sunlight is good for productivity." He and Dad then went into the kitchen to discuss psychopharmacology while Mom made us a tray of Dagwood sandwiches.