June 22, 2005
Extreme Garbage
jon and i were pinging the other day about how remarkable it is that remnants of that horrible naming trend during the dot com boom still exists today. i think alot of you know what i am talking about. these are the names that were dreamed up by slightly off-the-mark marketing guys, with the awkward hopes of TRYING to conjure up coolness. their formula is textbook - combine some ingredients like a "shocking" word with "internet-cool" appeal, and add .com. we can all picture these jokers sitting around an expensive table, leaning back in their aeron chairs, convincing each other that by coming up with a hip and trendy name, they could sit back and take orders, and that they could spend their time planning their retirement at the age of 35.
though this trend bleeds into other areas, the small web design or ad agencies are are the worst offenders of this. we hypothesized that it may have started back with the brands of those hot sauces...lol, you have to check out this link...or with the micro brew industry that--quality of the beer aside--have brought us painful names like Rogue Dead Guy Ale and Fat Tire Ale.
i'd love to collaborate to build a scroll of shame of some of these company names...here are a few to start:
avenue a’s razorfish - razorfish.com (who's success may have caused the tipping point)
digidog studios -http://www.digidogstudios.com/
pilot fish studios - http://www.pilotfishseo.com/
blue wave solutions - http://www.ibluewave.com/
…and my personal favorite:
house of tears design - http://www.houseoftearsdesign.com/
its also fun to dream up new ones! like:
screaming-banchee-interactive.com
extremedia.com
chipotle-design.net
feelin-hot-hot-hot.com
Macarena-design.com
demi-glaze-orgy.com
punch-a-lady-in-the-face-web.com
if you share our ire, i encourage your posts to add to the "real" or "new" lists!
Posted by brianf at 02:55 PM | Comments (1)
June 10, 2005
"No joke...He's a Balanese pop-star"
twain insisted i post this one, so here goes...did you ever know those people who you know haven't quite hit their stride? at four11, we worked with this guy called karsten who was an it ops guy. never quite seemed like silicon valley was the place for him...the guy goes dark for like 7 years, then we get this email from another co-worker, discovering where karsten has resurfaced.
he writes "No joke...He's a Balanese pop-star." and attaches this pic:
turns out, according to this website, he has found his niche: "American bandleader Karsten Schroeer swapped a life in San Francisco for the cosmopolitan blend of Singapore culture and music, before making the next musical progression to Bali. The band's Bandung musicians—Bagja Subagja, Asep Sukmana and Gun Gun Permana — perform on traditional instruments."
Posted by brianf at 07:17 PM | Comments (1)
June 09, 2005
ok, now i have seen it all
seems like many who has lived in new york has got a cocktail party story that goes something like, "then that morning i was walking down the street, and i saw {---}. It was then that i knew it was time to leave new york." though i'm not ready to pack my bags, i may have my story.
i just walked outside my door in the west village to get a sandwich for lunch, and see i big dude with a zz top style beard sitting on the stoop next door. i do a double take as i catch a closer glimpse of his left ear. he has got a piercing - but not just any decorative earring hanging off. now, we've all seen those large "hole in the ear" piercings that, in my humble opinion, dont exactly look flattering nor particularly "edgy" anymore. as well, we are all guilty of screetching the remote to a halt while surfing past a PBS documentary showing african tribes with rocks hanging from their ears.
this dude had clearly outdone any punk or tribesman i've ever seen - he had a SMALL 6" FLASHLIGHT driven right through the hole in his ear. let me repeat that: he had a SMALL 6" FLASHLIGHT driven right through the hole in his ear. as i strolled by, i had a fleeting thought about how convenient that must be if he is on the job, and under a sink or something, but then i remembered what i was looking at: he had a SMALL 6" FLASHLIGHT driven right through the hole in his ear.
+
=
WTF?
Posted by brianf at 05:25 PM | Comments (1)
June 08, 2005
not just a facade
Keep an eye out for the forthcoming launch of Facade which is expected to be the most progressive interactive story game yet. Guided by artificial intelligence, 30-something characters within the game make decisions from themselves and have realistic emotions. Though i'm not ready to declare "tipping point", i think what this game is attempting to do could have huge impact not only in the gaming industry, but in software in general. to date, the most mainstream attempt at software trying to understand us and convey emotion has been the annoying paper clip guy. but there is a very engaging middle ground--between people and their machines--that lives somewhere between paper clip guy and where Facade is heading...
Redefining the Power of the Gamer
By SETH SCHIESEL
Published: June 7, 2005
MARINA DEL REY, Calif., June 3 - Standing outside the apartment on Thursday, Walter could hear the barbs and retorts of a failed marriage's final throes.
The game "Facade" is controlled by artificial intelligence techniques.
Walter's friends, Grace and Trip, had invited him over. Now, though only every third word seeped through the door, Walter could hardly mistake the bickering.
At Walter's knock the voices stopped. The couple adopted brittle masks of happiness. But as their banter moved from Trip's new bartender set to recent Italian vacations to Grace's latest apartment makeover, the couple gradually returned to the needling exchanges of domestic strife.
As Grace and Trip retreated to opposite sides of the living room, sniping about old grievances, Walter appealed to the couple's loyalties, trying valiantly to reconcile his friends.
This is the future of video games. In their modern riff on "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" Walter was the only human. Grace and Trip were virtual characters powered by advanced artificial intelligence techniques, which allowed them to change their emotional state in fairly complicated ways in response to the conversational English being typed in by the human player.
It was one version of the future here this past week at the first Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment conference. It is a future where games are driven as strongly by characters as combat, where games are as much soap opera as shooting gallery and as much free-form construction set as destruction arena. The apartment drama, a 15-minute interactive story called "Facade" that is scheduled to be released free next month (interactivestory.net), was one of the demonstrations offered to the roughly 120 game makers and academic computer experts who attended.
"As we try to create more immersive experiences, these artificial intelligence techniques are helping drive games forward and this is one of the areas that could really explode," Bing Gordon, chief creative officer at Electronic Arts, the No. 1 video game company, said after his talk Wednesday night. "We hope that the folks here start thinking about artificial intelligence as a feature, like graphics is a feature or sound is a feature."
While the adaptability and behavioral subtlety in recent classics like "Black & White," "Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri" and "The Sims" have impressed gamers with their seeming-intelligence, those titles have been but an early step.
"For a long time, games have been judged largely on their graphics," said Ian Lane Davis, a conference organizer and chief executive of Mad Doc Software, which recently created the well-received Empire Earth II, a real-time strategy game. "The graphics hardware is now getting powerful enough that basically everything looks good now. So what is starting to differentiate games is what is happening inside the characters, how the opponents behave and make plans, how comprehensively and realistically the worlds respond to what the players want to do."
"At the same time," he added, "players are demanding a lot more freedom. Often they don't want to be put on a roller coaster track that just takes them along one path, no matter how entertaining that one path may be. They want a range of choices and they want those choices to matter in creating the overall experience. You put together all of these demands, and that's why you're seeing all of this attention now on artificial intelligence in games."
Outside the game world, the term artificial intelligence is used to label technologies as disparate as air traffic control systems and automated vacuum cleaners. At the conference, much of the discussion was about specific game activities that, to a human, would seem more intuitive than rational, like using conversational language.
But one of the broadest and most powerful approaches to artificial intelligence may be one that does not focus on determining specific behaviors. ("Does the computer general know that it should use tanks and artillery together?")
Rather, it is a move to structure programs so that they absorb available information and then generate their own strategies to achieve sometimes-contradictory goals ("protect the hostages" versus "kill the enemy," for instance).
Traditionally, game programmers have created activity through explicit if-then statements: if the player attacks the castle, then send pikemen to defend it; if the player corners the market on wheat, then invest in corn. That process is known as scripting. But what should the computer do if the player takes an action that is not in a script?
"The problem now is that the worlds are so complex and the variety of potential actions so vast that trying to direct the environments and the behaviors of computer-controlled agents through traditional scripting can become unmanageable," Jeff Orkin, an artificial intelligence programmer at Monolith Productions, said between sessions.
Three years ago, Mr. Orkin worked on Monolith's campy "No One Lives Forever 2," set in the 1960's. Now he is working on "F.E.A.R.," a game scheduled for later this year.
"We used to manually lay out all of the steps that an agent would take: do this, then do that, and if this other thing happens then try this," Mr. Orkin said. "Now we tell the agent: here are your goals, here are your basic tools, you figure out how to accomplish it."
"For example, let's say you the player are running down a hall and an enemy is pursuing you," Mr. Orkin said. "You get to a door and slam it behind you. The enemy replans and tries to kick it in, but if you hold it closed with your weight he will replan again and maybe come around and dive through a window. In the past, the programmer would have had to explicitly code each of these steps. Now, you put the character in the building and it figures out a plan on its own."
As put by Chris Crawford, a legendary game designer of the 1980's who now focuses on interactive storytelling technology: "As a game designer you are an absolute god. One kind of god says, 'O.K., now this leaf will fall a little bit here, and then this wind will blow a bit over there.' The other kind of god says, 'Here are the laws of physics. Go for it.' "
That conceptual leap from designer-as-determinist to designer-as-prime mover is what has made both the "Grand Theft Auto" and "The Sims" series so popular. The challenge is that even as gamers have come to expect more freedom in their virtual environments, they have also come to expect more explicitly directed cinematic moments, like the D-Day invasion scenario in "Medal of Honor," where players can feel as if they are living a movie.
"There is a real tension between wanting to handcraft the experience to generate a specific emotional response and wanting to allow a more open-ended environment so the player feels they are in control," said Doug Church, one of the designers behind the highly regarded "Thief" and "System Shock" series. "Artificial intelligence will help us bridge the two."
But perhaps that bridge will run in unexpected directions. Until now, artificial intelligence has often involved making computers accessible to humans. With his new project, "Spore," Will Wright of "The Sims" fame means to invert that concept.
"Until now, artificial intelligence has usually meant that the human creates or perceives a model of how the computer makes decisions," Mr. Wright said. "But what if the computer is instead analyzing the player, and the program is customizing the experience based on the internal model it has created of the human?"
"Spore" is meant to tailor a species' entire evolutionary experience - from amoebalike gene pattern to intergalactic emperor - to each user's individual play style. In that sense, future generations of games may process humans just as intensively as humans are playing the software. But not to worry, Mr. Church said: "We have a long way to go before we get there."
Posted by brianf at 12:12 PM | Comments (0)
June 07, 2005
free to fee you and me
i guess it is only fitting for yahoo to come full circle, and move to drop listing fees for y! auctions. it seems like yesterday that we had decided to clean up the site by adding fees, but i'm sure that given the minimal attention that yahoo has assigned the site in recent years, the inventory has surely declined. fairly smart idea to make it free again - essentially, take ebay seller money by forcing them to buy text ads instead of auction (which are just more complicated ads). the trick is to see if they can keep enough decent inventory flowing through the site to make it compelling and attract some audience. iideally, turn it into a text ad supported craig's list.
Posted by brianf at 12:03 PM | Comments (1)
June 04, 2005
team CHAN-MAN delights and amazes...again
so i am drinking my coffee and reading my mail this morning, and almost lose it all over the screen when i click on this image:
our friend gary chan, the reigning champion for entries in the "truth is stranger than fiction files", was somehow was called to be a MODEL in his local AM station's ad campaign in palo alto. he showed up at a photo shoot, and, sure enough, he was one of three people chosen. as twain put it, "to me, it would be less strange for [any of us] to be in a #$%$#% porn movie than GC to be in local print ads at the age of 37!" it is amazing, gary is a walking anomoly always surprising you when you least expect it - he embodies my favorite quote from ollie stone's jfk: "a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma!"
Posted by brianf at 03:18 PM | Comments (0)