Ye Elders of Israel

I kind of touched on this in my facebook random comment thingy. But where are all the guys that play piano? It's kind of funny that every ward I visited, I played piano for priesthood. And when I visited Walnut Creek, they didn't even have a hymn. That may change, now that they know I play piano.

Economics

You know, I kind of wish I studied more economics. I haven't even taken the basic 101. Well I did take MM's Game theory courses, but outside of game theory, and outside of the literature reviews I've read for my research in auctions, I kind of wish I had more economics background.

Now as I'm developing for a small game company, I regret not taking classes even more. Every decision we make, and resource we spend, we always have the underlying question, are we going to make money from this?

And for online games, this typically leads to a few different interesting paradigms:

1) A Subscription model
2) A RMT (Real Money Transacation/Trade) model where the basic game is free, but you pay for perks
3) Expansion based model - where online play is free, but new content is only acceissble via buying expansions
4) Free online play
5) Any Hybrid of those 4 (e.g., hgl is a hybrid free online but has subscription options)

So which model should games use?

They all have various pros and cons, and if anyone is curious, see
http://www.digra.org/dl/order_by_author?publication=Situated%20Play
for some good analysis, (and other various videogame conferences, just too tired to find them)

I also think a model based on CCGs (like Magic) can be a good model for videogames too. Needs to be done right though. (I really want to know how much Magic Online makes.)

Final Fantasy music

I'm a big fan of the music from Nobuo Uematsu

As I was randomly watching the trailor of the re-release of FF4 for the DS, the music instantly sparked many emotions within me. Which lead to me think, what really makes music sad? I definitely think there's some key components regardless of context(for instance, a fast intense sequence is not going to be viewed as sad). But for the most part, I think the event tied to the particular phrase, piece, or song has more to determine why we think it's sad. (assuming the piece has no lyrics)

I'm curious on a song such as Aerith's theme, if any emotion would be sparked by someone who hasn't play FF7. I guess this would be akin to sad music in Movies, but at the same time different. Videogames require a lot more time investment, and as playing as the chars, in my opinion you get a lot more attached and relate to the characters of the story than from a movie or tv series. And even so, If I even reheard the music played during the background during those sad scenes, I probably wouldn't be able to correlate the sad scene to the piece.

So are songs sad because they inherently are, or because they're attributed to a sad event? Or do both exist? (Or have we just been trained to associate particular musical themes to different emotions, e.g., with colors, pink->baby girl, blue->baby boy?)

The Bat Cave

Working at a gaming studios is definitely interesting.

One interesting dynamic is that only 1/4 of the lights are on at work. If any of you know me, I like light. and I like light all the time. I like the lights on during a movie, and not just a little light, butas much as I can.

Well, this kind of poses an interesting situation at work. The first week I was working here, I was actually right next to a window, so the daylight was bright enough to keep me normal. But then I got moved closer to the HGL team, and put into a corner where all the cubicle-ish walls block the light from the windows, and the 1/4 of them from the ceiling that are on. It's like total pitch black. I don't understand how the person before me was able to work. A & K refer to it as the 'bat cave'

But I guess being in computer science, I have learned a lot of students like working in the dark. And quite a few gamers like to play in the dark (I have the glow in the dark gaming keyboard to re-affirm that, even though i don't use it in the dark). So I guess Gaming programmers really like the darkness.

Well. I remedied the situation and brought two lamps. However, I bought too bright of bulbs, and so on the other side of my cubicle-ish area, you can see bright white spots. I just leave it as a nice surprise to anyone who walks on the other side.

But again, I ask, what's the fascination with working in the dark?

NDA's

Wow. How do I communicate all the cool things I'm doing at work without saying what I'm doing? Everyone is asking me how my first week of work went, and I struggle. Well I start off with, "Work is really fun!" and then that ends up being the whole conversation.

But I guess I can spend this time going into more detail. So far, I've been assigned solely to Hellgate:London. What makes work so enjoyable, is that it's a great mix of creativity and problem solving. It's easy to come up with cool ideas to improve the game. What's harder though, is designing something cool with limitations. I have to be able to create something new and innovative but with using as few of our programmer's resources/time as possible.

Sometimes I feel I'm in the middle of a tug-o-war at work. I basically have 2 bosses. One which is like a creative lead, who I brainstorm with and we settle on cool things to add to the game. Then we have the guy who's in charge of assigning tasks to the programmers. And he basically shuts down every idea we have. "We don't have time for that!" "That guy is swamped with the UI improvements!" "I have two programmers out on vacation next week!" But in a lot of ways it's good, it really helps me think out of the box, because I have a cool idea, but I need to figure it out within the limitations of the system.

Which, personally, I love these types of tasks, and think I actually excel at these type of things. Everywhere in computer science, there's this concept of a "blackbox" . That is, you have this mysterious black box, you don't know anything inside of it. All you know is you give it something, and it'll then spit something out. You then have to be able to do something else using the blackbox.

Toy Problem Example: You have a biased coin that doesn't have 50/50 odds. Instead, you get heads with probability p, and tails with probability 1-p. How do you use that coin to be able to get 50/50 odds? (Hint: The answer doesn't rely on the value of p)

So, getting back on track, I constantly want to do wacky things. The challenge I encounter at work, and what makes it fun, is figuring out how to do that within the bounds of the system.


Hmm, I digressed a lot, maybe I should of labeled this post BlackBox instead of NDA. But yeah, being under an NDA is very annoying, since what I'm doing at work is so cool and fun, I just want to tell everyone else!

Mass Transit

Wow, it's nice having access to a train/subway system. If I had to drive, I wouldn't want to live anywhere farther than 15 minutes from work. But with the BART (Bay Area Rapid Trasit), the Muni (San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency) and CalTrain I have so many choices to live. Basically I can live up to an hour away, and not be annoyed by the commute since I could just sit down on a train, relax and read, or play a game, or just sleep some more.

The harder thing now is choosing where to live...

San Francisco

Well, I'm here. It still hasn't hit me that this is going to be a permanent place of residence. I still feel like I'm on vacation. Probably because I'm still looking for a place and temporarily staying with A&K. Anyways, wow, today was busy, I visited both the Palo Alto and San Francisco wards. Both were really cool, so I'll probably end up wherever is most cost efficient and/or where I find good roommates.