Category: Commentary

Hopefully you’ll find something interesting.

• A really good postmortem/analysis of funding a creative project on Kickstarter
• Alpha Release of Full Speed Nintendo 64 Emulator on the Raspberry Pi
• Unity for Beginners and Professionals
• Compelling 3D visual data analysis from @nautilytics – imports/exports, production, forecast (and made with Unity 3D)
• Two former Remedy and Rovio executives are looking to be the next big thing to come out of the Finnish video game industry, picking up $2.35 million in seed funding for their start-up studio.
• Tips for game developers talking to investors.
• Video games to make $82 Billion more than Hollywood films
• Arts Council Chair, Sir Peter Bazalgette, speaks at Digital First conference
• Charlie Brooker will be explaining “How Videogames Changed the World” on Channel 4 on November 30th at 9 pm.
• Using Unity 3D for Serious Games

From breakconf.org:

Hello! If you’re looking at this, welcome. Follow @breakconf on Twitter to be informed the moment everything’s unveiled (which, at the rate things are going, shouldn’t be too long). Oh, and keep 12-14 November, 2014 free in your diary.

—Christopher Murphy

I received this poster in email this morning from Sheree Atcheson. If you have a business that employs women, then please print this out and post it prominently. Email it out to your staff. Even to women who don’t code – because they might code in the future.

And if you don’t employ any women, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Get the poster here.

There simply isn’t enough evidence to convict someone of crimes from the Troubles because we can’t use forensics on decommissioned weapons or victims remains. Why not? Because the Good Friday Agreement said we can’t. To get the weapons decommissioned, we agreed as a nation to not scour them for fingerprints and put the criminals who used them behind bars. We, as a nation, agreed this. We got a vote. I’m guessing that most people didn’t read the detail but you can be absolutely sure that the politicians in the Executive, those who are loudly condemning this concept, were well aware of the implications.

As a result we’re going to have to rely on confessions and witness testimonials which, without hard evidence, are going to be challenged. And who’s going to come up and confess now if they haven’t for the last forty years?

The NI Attorney General thinks we should draw a line under crimes from the Troubles and stop chasing the unachievable. Politicians are, for the most part up in arms because their own hard line support comes from people whose way of thinking is tainted with winning a victory over “themmuns”. The problem being that there are “themmuns” on both sides and no-one is confessing or giving witness, not even some of the politicians who would be “in the know”. The very same politicians who are opposed to stopping investigations.

He’s not suggesting that we forget or forgive. This is a blunt instrument to create debate about how we deal with the past. Of course this is timely, with the Haass Talks. But someone needed to say it. It needed to be put on the table so it could set a marker on how we debate the concepts.

Thirty years ago a crime was committed again my family which we still deal with. It changed our lives irrevocably. I have come to terms with the fact that the police will never convict someone for that crime. They have their suspicions (which cover just about everyone from the milkman to the recent Canadian astronaut) but they will never, ever convict anyone. And that’s because there isn’t the evidence and, quite simply, there isn’t the time and resource.

People who say that you can’t put a price on justice are liars. We put a price on these things all the time. Politicians who court victims groups and promise justice are liars. They’re using the pain of victims as a political tool.

We need to do more for victims, this is plain. But there are better ways of dealing with this. Appropriate memorials of all victims. The young who did not grow up with the Troubles as a constant backdrop deserve better than we are getting now. How are we going to build a future when our eyes are fixated on the past?

Apart from my family history, there are apparently 3000 unsolved murders from the “Troubles”. Even if you allocated 3000 police investigators to those crimes you would not results. There is no evidence, there is nothing to investigate.

This is not about airbrushing over the pain of victims and their families. This is about not letting a desire for revenge and false promises of hope become how we paint our future.

From the Guardian: Videogames Have Transformed The Movie Industry

Andy Serkis: There was probably a time when people in the games industry wanted to emulate films, but now it’s very much the other way around: the technology is driven by video games. So, for instance, virtual production, pre-vis, many of the tools we use in the film industry have come out of the games industry.
…
I was listening to Classic FM this morningand the third top-ranked piece of music created uproar, because it was from a video game. It just goes to show where convergence is at. Video game technology and video games are acknowledged by Bafta now, and are rightly getting credit for what they are, which is extraordinary pieces of art.

I’ve said this constantly for years. Games are different. They’re not books, not films and not music. They’re not the web, they’re not just software. In truth they subsume all media. They are the ultimate expression of the digital media industry.

I was surprised the first time I saw a 3D scene rendered and how “raw” it was. The scene was designed to be viewed from a certain angle and there was no need to produce planes and shapes more than could be viewed. everything else was invisible. It reminded me of a legend that two craftsmen could produce cabinets of astounding quality, using the best materials but the observer could determine which was the master by inspecting the back of the cabinets. The artisan who decorated the reverse of the cabinet, the part that would never be seen, was the one who had the greatest pride in their craft.

Tools like 3D games and, in particular, those designed to work with tools like the Oculus Rift mean you have to pay attention to the back of the cabinet. You cannot determine whether or not the viewer will be looking from one angle or another. Players will find emergent ways to experience your media. Movies don’t have this problem because films are all shot from one point of view. We know that movie sets are balsa wood and we try to ignore every time we see a tombstone or a TARDIS door “wobble”. This is the back of the cabinet being seen for what it is: plain, undecorated and flimsy.

In games there are bugs that permit the viewing of material from slightly different points of view. This is the equivalent of “wobble”:

For obvious reasons these would never be seen in a movie. Though a lot of the scenes seem eerily reminiscent of “Gravity”.

These antics may be “glitches” but they highlight an experience that movies and books simply cannot replicate. A book that went into this level of unpredictability would be a farce. But games are a new medium; a new method of expression. And it’s necessary to treat them as games and not as movies.

This is short, awe-inspiring and, at the same time, makes me a little sad.

This is a longer, feet on the ground, video:

From MA.TT (Matt Mullenweg):

If Microsoft did this a decade ago we’d call for the DoJ to reopen their investigation. Apple has the best phone, best tablet, and in many ways the best operating system — we should not give them a pass for this blatantly self-interested and user-hostile stance. Defaults matter.

Emphasis mine. Keep that in mind.

And the DOJ would reply “Come back to me when they have a monopoly. Any monopoly. Of anything” because someone as smart as Matt Mullenweg should understand that you don’t get the DOJ involved when it’s just something you don’t like. You get them involved when there’s a problem with how a company is obeying the law.

Also, on the subject of defaults, Matt seems to be new to the Mac. Defaults are something that Apple has always been shy of. Sure, on the Mac they permitted you to set defaults for things they don’t care about (like which app to open a JPG with) but outside of that? They’ve removed most of the defaults over the years and this is not because they’re user hostile because if that were the case, their users would leave. No, it’s because they have figured out that the vast majority of their users actually do not give a damn. Further than that, the vast majority of their users would actually be adversely affected by apps that demanded to be the defaults.

If there is a problem with defaults then why doesn’t the “power user” community entreat developers to provide defaults in an agreed way? Apple isn’t going to cave on this because they’re shifting more product and making more profit than god these days. And it’s still open to interpretation that they’re right.

But you’re right. Apple should kowtow to the alpha geeks who demand defaults. These same alpha geeks who would be just as likely to switch to Android or Windows Phone if the new and shiny appeared. If “in many ways“, the OS on those handsets and tablets improved. That’s a valuable market to be sure.