Arcades

Took the kids to a 'fun center' arcade style place this weekend.

It's been some time since I set foot in an arcade.

I was not surprised to see that many of the titles were several years old and that turnover isn't as rapid as it used to be.

I was surprised (though I guess I shouldn't have been) to see how many titles were licensed/ported versions of PC and console games from the big publishers. EA's Nascar, Ubisoft's Blazing Angels, etc.

I'd be curious to know how much revenue the publishers make from the arcade ports/licensing. What used to be the main event for video games is an afterthought, I'd guess.

Book Review: Small is the New Big

Another library find was Seth Godin's Small Is the New Big and 183 Other Riffs, Rants, and Remarkable Business Ideas.

I've given Seth plenty of linkage from here in the past and am a big fan, though I've had mixed reviews of his books (1, 2).

This one gets a B+ rating. The book is basically a mixed bag collection of stuff he's posted on his blog, in book form, so there's no single big idea or arc to the story. That being said, if you like his stuff, and I usually do, there are some gems in here and if you like it in book form, then go get it.

Book Review: Following Through

Following Through caught my eye when looking for something else at the library, and so I picked it up.

Really poor pick. I was hoping for a 'system' as promised on the cover, and when I read 'system', I think GTD-style, methodology, mechanical, etc.

Instead, I got a very disjointed structure, filled with long-winded analogies used to fill the pages and prop up the weak common sense advice. Skip it.

Definitely not recommended.

PAX'09 Pix

Just a few pix I snapped with the phone:

People for whom "mobile computing" means wagons and hand trucks. I love these people, and not just because they help pay the mortgage.

Lanfest room. Where they wheel the hand trucks to.

Opening day keynote. Just to give you an idea attendance size.

John Baez from The Behemoth, neck deep in merch and confusing attendees on whether they are game developer that sells t-shirts or a t-shirt developer that makes games. I went over to say hi and John said "Hi! Help me open these boxes!" yes, they were that busy. Awesome.

Sony was showing Eyepet, an augmented reality game/toy that was VERY cool. (It interacts with things you draw on paper on the table in front of you)

Geek Chic, selling very slick high end furniture for board/tabletop gaming. Some hides your game stuff under a classy dining room table, other furniture attempts to hide nothing, but rather augments your games to Bond-villain-lair style furnishings.

One booth had a mechanical bull dressed up as a demon warhorse from their MMO. Awesome. Would love to see this for a Chocobo or other game creatures. Or Blaster from Beyond Thunderdome. WHO RUNS BARTERTOWN!?!

PAX'09 thoughts

I did a whirlwind trip up to PAX yesterday, leaving at 5:30 for the 3hr drive up to seattle, and arriving home at around 11:30. Six hours in the car wore me out, but well worth it for what I compressed into the remaining time.

I hang my head in shame and say this was my first PAX. When I was living up in Seattle I had schedule conflicts that kept me from attending the past couple of them. Decided I'd make the effort this year and was glad I did.

Some quick thoughts on the event, with a few topics requiring lengthier posts later.

The event itself: Wow. PAX has grown up. I think the E3 Supernova helped them get escape velocity, and now even with E3 making a comeback, PAX remains a big deal. We'll wait to see attendance numbers, but it felt like a 10k+ attendee event.

If you haven't been, I'd describe it as follows: GDC is the nerdy kid you knew in high school. E3 was his Jock older brother who drove a Chevelle and got all the chicks and gave him wedgies. PAX was the middle brother who listened to GWAR, wore combat boots, played D&D and smoked weed while doing it, and who mom and dad didn't really mind skipping out on the family reunion. :-)

There are panels and other sessions at the event but they aren't the point of the event itself, which is really a mix of game/geek culture celebration, fan-fest, and game companies exhibiting their goods to the hardest of hardcore gamer fans. Oh, and there's a pretty big lanfest and some board gaming thrown it for good measure.

Talks: I only attended two talks and a keynote, but I'd say that the fact that these aren't the main focus of the conference, and the quality is indicative of that. Not that the ones I attended were bad, but the quality varied, showing that it was largely up to the individual moderating the panel. (Vs GDC which scrutinizes talks and speakers to quite a degree).

I attended a panel on 'game developer parents' that had a number of industry veterans who are also parents (and two of whom were former co-workers of mine), who were supposed to discuss issues around games and parenting. I'd say it was 10% that, and 90% anecdotes about their kids, which would be ok except that those were half sage advice and half boasting about their offspring. mildly disappointing.

I attended Ron Gilbert's keynote which was humorous and moving, but not mind-blowing or anything (like say, Will Wright's Siggraph keynote)

I attended a legal issues in games panel, with a variety of legal folk around the industry. Was suprised when they asked "how many people here are lawyers or law students?", and had like 40 people raise their hands! This panel was better run (but not excellently run) and covered a number of timely topics, with the panel offering opinions on each. A few of which were:

• The "Edge" trademark hullaballoo: Tom Buscaglia had to tread lightly around this one because of Langdell's IGDA involvement, etc. The short version of the opinion was that trademarks and copyrights have their place and people have a right to defend them. In this case, both parties have behaved very poorly from the outset and dug themselves into a hole.
• The project Entropia Banking license thing (my question to the panel on this one was what their impressions where, and whether they subscribed to the theory that eventually all MMOs are banks, and regulation is inevitable): At least one panelist agreed with the theory, and two expressed sentiment that the Entropia thing in particular was a good thing, shows games offering more, growing up, etc.
• SW Patents: The usual lawyer-speak about "ya better file 'em!", but Tom B had a good answer to an audience question/comment about SW patents being evil, etc. He made the point that (a) the patent portfolio isn't the problem nearly as much as poor scrutiny of claims at the USPTO, and (b) a patent portfolio is something that can serve as collateral to borrow against with banks, and that Harmonix in particular did so against their patent portfolio and used that cash to survive a tight spot before their big hit. i.e. While there are plenty of examples of patent trolls, this is a counter example of patents saving what otherwise would never have become Guitar Hero.
• First amendment/free speech vs regulating violent games, etc. Good precendents set now with universal defeat of these initiatives across more than a dozen states. Sign of games success and also their growth into a major media. "they join the club of art forms across history that have been feared and attacked in similar ways: movies, rock music, etc"

The show floor:

A mix of exhibitors from the major publishers (EA, Ubi, etc) and HW vendors (Sony, MS, Intel, Alienware) but with a disproportionately high number of indie studios meeting their fans and selling merch. (Twisted Pixel, Dofus, The Behemoth, many others).

Trends:

Cosplay: Wow there was a lot of it. Plenty of galleries online.

Indie Games: Lengthier post on this later, but there's both good and bad here. The "indie game" meme has caught up with publishers, and so they are nabbing up titles whereever they can. Good to see guys getting funded, but this results in muscle put behind these titles and ups the pressure for higher polish etc. As an example the quality of some of the showcase titles in the Xbox Indie games (formerly community games) was fantastic, but these are looking like multi-month, multi-person team titles, and it's not clear that these games can generate the numbers on that channel to justify the investment. Not picking on MS, this is a problem across the board about which I'll post a lengthier piece when I get some time.

Some photos in my next post.

Steampunk Shuffle

From the steampunk challenge, which contains a number of brilliant ones and a few more videogame inspired ones.

"It's complicated" - or - Beating Facebook made easy

Occasionally, I'll see this on someone's Facebook profile and it always gives me a chuckle:

I find it ironic that FB gives this as an option to describe your 'relationship status', while they give no such distinction for relationships themselves, and relationships (aka 'friends') are the currency upon which FB is built. For that matter, this is true of all social networks.

Relationships are indeed complicated, and yet they aren't treated as such by these services.

I preface this post by saying that I have never worked for a social networking service, nor have I designed or built one, nor have I ever had source code access to one's inner guts.

Despite this, I have the intertube blogger bravado to state that (a) all of today's social network services are fundamentally broken, and (b) I know how to fix them. I'll also explain why I think this is going to come to a head over the coming year or two.

First, the problem. There are three components to it, two of which really just complicate the first primary issue.

First: Relationships are things, not properties of things.

I believe today's SNs are defined with connections between people being just that, connections. In database parlance, you have a table of properties describing an individual, one of which is a link to a table of 'friends', where this is a list of pointers/IDs of other individuals in the SN.

What that means is that the relationship itself is just a pointer connecting two people. But relationships are more complicated than that aren't they? As a hint, when we discuss relationships we often use nouns, not only adjectives. More on this in a minute.

Second: Not all relationships are created equal.

They certainly aren't all "friends". Of course, if all you've got is a pointer, then you've limited how much you can differentiate between relationships. At least LinkedIn uses the more generic and neutral "Connections". At least this is a term that comes with less baggage.

Third: Having this flaw in the initial design results in kludgy solutions to resulting problems that may cripple the SN.

Software design flaws are, like many things, easier to see in hindsight. In the case of database design, one clue is the amount of bandaids. We see this happening today with FB's kludgy filtering tools. I want this person to be part of this list or that list, etc.

The current 'lists' approach that FB is using is basically a kludge that lets you segregate 'friends' into a couple different groups (e.g. personal friends vs work friends). I'd imagine that each pointer now has an added field of 'type' and this is used to filter functionality ('what kind of friend is this? the kind that receives only this kind of spam but not that kind').

This will only work so long though, and the more people want to overload functionality (what if I want another type, or I have friends I want to be in both lists, etc), the more the bandaids will become cumbersome to handle and for users to manage.

The solution:

As I hinted above, I beleive there are some clues in the grammar used.

For starters, Treat relationships as nouns, which means they are entities and constitute another table in the database design of the social network.

Relationships have attributes. They have a history, a beginning and end, different properties describing what they do/don't entail, and those evolve over time. e.g. Bob and Susan went to school together but only met in their 4th year, became co-workers later, belong to the same church, etc. These are the 'adjectives' that describe the relationship. Relationships can also be assymetrical.

There are verbs too. Certain actions or activities that are part of a relationship.

I'd imagine there'd be a couple ways of implementing this. Tables for different relationship types, or a huge table sparsly populated at the outset. The choices of how to implement this will present tradeoffs between complexity, storage requirements, possibilities, etc.

At the end of the day, there will be some sweet spot in the tradeoffs that will provide the right mix of expanded functionality vs ease of use and storage/compute burden.

I'll also guess what the main pushback is going to be:

(1) The compute and storage requirements will explode! The answer to this one's easy. Tough! Both are getting cheaper, so pick the right entry point and run with it. (Remember when everyone thought Gmail was crazy for offering unlimited storage?)

(2) It will be difficult and cumbersome for people to manage: Agreed. One approach might be to pre-populate defaults people can override, or to start with a basic 'connection' and a peel-the-onion approach through both management over time and learning through history.

It may be complicated, but that doesn't mean people don't want to make sense of it.

There are three reasons why this is going to come to a head.

First the collision/connection of social networks is going to lead to a need for additional filtering/segregating, and this is going to result in a lot of bandaids for SNs that aren't built to handle this need. We've all read stories about someone's FB photos being seen by coworkers, etc. This is only going to get more complicated as people's FB feeds get seeded with their Xbox gameplay achievements or their WoW guild's political chat. The bandaids may snap.

Second, this connection of social networks is only entering its first phase, a phase where individual identities are linked (e.g. My Xbox Gamertag and my FB profile). I beleive this will enter a second stage where other entities in the SN may be shared, like the relationships themselves.

For example, today (or when the FB/Xbox integration ships anyway), I have to belong to both SNs and then tell them both that this gamertag is linked to that FB profile. However, what if I want to be friends with someone on FB when I don't have a FB account at all, but DO have an Xbox Live account? Not possible with the current bandaid solutions, but possible if relationships are tracked separately.

There's a third reason this is going to come to a head, one that arguably going to be an issue sooner than the above one. This is that people will desire more than a 1:1 mapping between identity and persona. Today, most SNs assume that your persona is your online representation of your identity. (In fact, one can argue that one reason FB stole a lot of thunder from MySpace is that it had a looser coupling between identity and persona but thats the subject of another post). However, on some MMOs, someone (one identity) may have multiple characters they play (personas).

The clash between identity and persona is going to messy on a number of fronts. In some contexts (FB, linkedin, paypal, etc) we look for identity to be real-world concrete. In others (say, playing a frilly kitten-girl in a korean MMO) someone may be looking for anonymity. Worlds collide, etc. All the more reason we provide people with tools to manage these things, rather than just labelling everyone 'friend'.

Anyhow, as these three reasons become real issues, there's an opportunity to offer a better type of SN, and beat Facebook at their own game, by being the 'next-gen social network'.

Claiming that there's an opportunity to stop the Facebook juggernaut seems like blasphemy, but people's loyalties are fickle on the Internet. The list defeated undefeatables (MySpace, Everquest, Friendster...) is long. FB is no more immune than any of them were, and the coming problems and opportunities as SNs collide may be the disruption that allows someone else to better serve people's needs.

I'd like everyone to just get along as much as the next guy, but the first step toward that might be in admitting that we're not all friends. It's more complicated than that.

Book Review: The 4-Hour Workweek

I recently finished reading The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich and I have to say I have very mixed feelings about it.

I had the book recommended to me by a couple friends, and by the end of the first chapter it had me questioning whether those friends really had their heads on straight. Nevertheless, I pounded through it and found a few redeeming benefits in later chapters.

At it's worst, the book is all the snake oil slick of a late night get-rich-quick infomercial. The author rambles on about how he's taken the time out from motorcycle racing down the Andes and Scuba diving under the polar ice cap to bestow upon you the wisdom that let you get rich working only an hour a week, just like Bob, Sue, and other anonymous success stories.

If you can get past this, and I almost didn't, the book then has the added flaw of trying to do too much. It's a personal productivity self-improvement book, a guide to starting your own low-maintenance business, a lifestyle guide, and a travel book to boot.

I'd dismiss it entirely, but there are some redeeming gems hidden within the pages here. The personal productivity part is basic 80/20 rule and goal setting, but has some gems about outsourcing and on different ways in looking at work-life balance and measuring 'wealth'. The business how-to is basic "you too can make riches on the internet" fare, but with a very useful set of links to contract manufacturers, 3rd party support companies, etc. Similarly, there are a few gems in the last section.

Also the question of the author's ethics comes into play. For example, some parts of the business section of the book speak to developing real product, gauging market demand for it, etc. Then in other parts he outlines how to pass yourself off as an expert on anything by reading the top few books on the subject and sprinkling in a pinch of bravado. Short leap from there to fraud, in my book. (Then again, I'm a blogger, so I guess I'm a little guilty of the 'unqualified expert' sin by definition).

Do I recommend the book? No. I will say that if you looking to start your own business or if any of the other topics he covers sound interesting to you, you may find a few nuggets of wealth in here, but it's not optimal time use to scan through this book to get it. At the very least, scan quickly and read only the parts you think matter. The rest of the filler you can get of network TV at 2 AM next time you have insomnia.

Hecker gets let go, goes Indie

Kotaku and Gamasutra picked up on the news Chris broke that EA laid him off. He's now going to work on an indie game called 'SpyParty', a prototype of which was shown at the 2009 GDC EGW. I'm pretty sure this version was born out of an even earlier prototype done as part of the 2005 Indie Game Jam 3 and shown at the 2005 GDC EGW, in a barrage of 'people interacting' jam prototypes.

Anyhow, SpyParty's got a fantastic core idea, and Chris is f***ing smart and driven, so I'm excited to see the game when it eventually ships.

Good rant on the 'games as art' thing

From Damion Schubert's (Bioware designer) wonderful Zen of Design blog.

All this being said, narrative is a red herring in the discussion of games as art. Let’s put it this way: can oil paintings succeed without great cinematography? Can classical music be great without a killer screenplay? Can a Ming vase be great without compelling characters?These are very silly questions.

Each artistic medium has its own rules for what makes that particular craft capture the viewers eye and imagination. For video games, narrative is an exceptionally powerful tool – one used exceptionally well in Knights of the Old Republic and Starcraft, for example. But I posit that many games without story, games like Civilization and Minesweeper, are elegant, artful games with barely a lick of developer-provided narrative. The art found in these games is less about what you find in a movie theater, and more about what you find in an ancient Chinese puzzle box.

Go read.

Is Amazon fanning the Kindle(ing) flames?

I've been following the Kindle with some interest for a while. I *really* want one, but not as long as it's as closed a model as they are currently pursuing. I want to get e-books from other places, and I'd like an RSS reader please... which really means an open development platform so that RSS readers can compete... which quickly leads to other ebook retailers, and you see why they aren't that interested in it.

Anyhow, Amazon got themselves in a pickle when they had a licensing issue with a number of books from a publisher, which in turn led to them reaching out an disabling them on users Kindles out in the wild - something the users didn't know Amazon could do.

Kind of like coming down to your kitchen in the morning, seeing the toaster missing, and finding a note from Sears saying "Sorry, we decided we shouldn't have sold this to you, so we took it back. Here's your $20. Hope you weren't expecting toast this morning. Might we suggest oatmeal?"

A kerfuffle took place on the intertubes, and Amazon went on to issue an apology:

This is an apology for the way we previously handled illegally sold copies of 1984 and other novels on Kindle. Our "solution" to the problem was stupid, thoughtless, and painfully out of line with our principles. It is wholly self-inflicted, and we deserve the criticism we've received. We will use the scar tissue from this painful mistake to help make better decisions going forward, ones that match our mission.

With deep apology to our customers,

Jeff Bezos, Founder & CEO, Amazon.com

Sounds really good. I beleive he think's doing the right thing. He is.

Except he's doing the right thing about the wrong problem.

One problem is that some people had their books taken from them post-purchase, and yes, it's good to apologize for that.

However, this problem is only symptomatic of the REAL problem, which is that people bought a device which comes with hidden restrictions, unclear terms of service, and the capability to change behavior and functionality at any point in the future. (Cory at BoingBoing has been on a bit of a crusade to get answers on exactly this)

So, kids, what have we learned?

1) There's a lesson here in the growing awareness of, and intolerance for, DRM in all it's forms. Every story about a consumer being burned by DRM adds to that awareness and intolerance.

2) While it was good for Bezos to publicly apologize, he's created another problem: He's shown that he's aware of the situation and therefore what was a puzzling silence on questions around the Kindle's functionality and DRM now seems like a deliberate silence.

In the meantime, I'll stick to dead trees. They tend to not disappear from the nightstand while I sleep.

Lessons from PopCap on Facebook Games

Another good presentation from James Gwertzman at Popcap. This one to the audience at ChinaJoy, about Popcap's experience launching Bejewelled Blitz on Facebook. The graphs of the adoption rates are pretty amazing in both their slope & uniformity. The graph on slide 9 was an eye opener too.

Lessons learned from SNS games at PopCap

View more presentations from gwertzman.

Security in the Cloud

Another good read: The Anatomy of the Twitter Attack. This is the first of a two-part techcrunch post about a recent Twitter hacking, where 300 confidential docs were stolen by a hacker and sent to, among other places, TechCrunch's email inbox. This article outlines how the hacker managed to get in, the next post promises to deconstruct Twitter's reaction to the theft.

The punchline is that (a) businesses increasingly relying on a mix of cloud services for hosting their documents, and that (b) each of these web services has a moderate level of security, but when viewed in aggregate, their security is seriously compromised.

It's a facinating read, in itself, but also makes me wonder what the implications are for online games and game services. If your identity games or game service becomes linked to your identity in other more significant places, will those be back doors to identity theft or other serious crimes. Will those running such games or game services safeguard my account info as well as my online bank? Will they legally be required to? Some say those games are actually banks anyway, so they may need to be.

Equality, Class, and Technology

Went through two really good reads this morning:

• President Carter's essay Losing My Religion For Equality. "The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter"
• danah boyd's lecture from the Personal Democracy Forum on The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online. "we've assumed that inequality in relation to technology has everything to do with "access" and that if we fix the access problem, all will be fine. This is the grand narrative of concepts like the "digital divide." Yet, increasingly, we're seeing people with similar levels of access engage in fundamentally different ways. And we're seeing a social media landscape where participation "choice" leads to a digital reproduction of social division"

Read both, think about technology, game design, etc.

Rock Band Network: Marketing Tool or Moneymaker?

This...

Attention Bands, Studios, and Labels:
Create. Play. Get Paid.
The Rock Band Network is Coming.

Coming Soon - Use our tools to author playable tracks. Upload and submit your tracks for review by the Rock Band Creators community. Approved tracks become available in the Rock Band Store and on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace*, and you get a cut of every purchase

Is just awesome.

It's interesting that they took the route of offering a cut of track purchases, when they could just as easily have claimed that tracks serve as a promotional tool for sales of the tracks on iTunes, etc, which they are.

Either way, its cool to see. It will be interesting to see how this evolves. In addition to laying out tracks, if music artists could add new character choreography, awards, avatar costumes, maybe involve fans in doing different RB track layouts and picking the best ones, etc.

It'll also be interesting if one of the 'doing RB tracks as money makers' and 'doing RB tracks as marketing tools for the music' intents becomes dominant.

Playfish CEO misses the point of FB Connect

This caught my eye (via Alice): 'Playfish CEO unsure of Facebook Connect'.

Speaking in a panel at the Develop Conference 2009, Playfish CEO Kristian Segerstrale as revealed he is yet to be convinced by the prospect of the Xbox 360's forthcoming social networking service, Facebook Connect.

"I'm not too sure about social networking and Facebook integration on the Xbox 360, because not everyone has one, [snip] Social Networks do open up games to a far wider audience, but it has to be just a click away, and you don't want to have to buy a 360 just to get at it."

Hmm... has he even USED a 360?

One of the more groundbreaking elements of the 360 was that it shipped with a social network, Xbox Live. FB Connect is about building bridges between customers existing social networks, not starting a new one.

Dental Adventures, or how a little grey spot cost $20k

This has nothing to do with video games or the tech industry , but rather falls under the category of stuff I had trouble learning about and maybe my post can help someone else.

I'm about 95% of the way through a crazy bunch of dental work that started about three and a half years ago, have a little time on my hands, and figured I'd post about it. Those with a weak stomach for stories of dentistry or financial pain may not want to read on.

Five years ago or so, I noticed a small discoloration on my front tooth. Like a slight grey color beneath the surface, in one corner near the gum. It'd been there a while I'd asked dentists about it, but they'd always kind of said "hmm... not a cavity. Not sure. Just leave it."

Early in 2006 I got fed up and decided I wanted it taken care of and went to see a high end dentist (Spektor dental in Bellevue, WA, who are awesome). Dr Spektor consulted with her husband, who's a high end specialist, and they decided it was most likely root resorption. The wikipedia entry spells it out in detail, but the short version is that it's a condition where something (small defect or trauma to the tooth or such) causes your system to attack the tooth, killing it from the inside out. Unlike decay, it takes a long time to do its thing, but eventually the tooth has to come out.

So the doctor tells me that (a) it's not only in the one tooth I've noticed, but in a neighboring one as well, (b) the solution is to pull them out and put in implants, and (c) that because one of the teeth is out of line from the others, they want to put braces on me for a couple years first.

"Let me get this straight", says I, "you want to put braces on my teeth for two years, then yank them out? I'm getting a second opionion!" Turns out she was right.

To make matters worse, they break the news to me that I have a bunch of other work that needs doing (20 year old amalgum fillings that are starting to go, a crown that needs doing, a crown that needs replacing, etc), and that it'd be a good idea to do it all before I get the braces.

OK, off we go.

• March 06 through Aug 06 - Two crowns, various consults with specialists, numerous fillings replaced. Total out of pocket spend about $2500.
• August 06 - Braces on. After insurace this cost about $2500 out of pocket

Now it was a matter of waiting for the braces to do their thing, going in once in a while to get the wires replaced, etc. A major pain in the butt to floss (Waterpik's electric flosser is awesome btw), but not that bad. On the plus side, getting braces made me lose 10 pounds.

In early 08 I relocated to Oregon, so I had to find new dentist (Kaiser - meh), new orthodontist (Kaiser - Dr Ratliff - very good, but Kaiser is *ok*), new prosthedontist (Dr Halmos - awesome), new dental surgeon (Dr Henshaw - also awesome).

• Second half 08 I go see all the new guys and get various Xrays, consults, etc. Total spend about $500

With teeth almost straight, we start to coordinate all my stuff. Dental surgeon worries that my frenulum (little piece of skin attaching top lip to gum at center) is going to tug at the gum after the implant surgery, potentially pulling the gum up assymetrically. Solution: Snip it!

• March 09 - frenectomy, a 'minor surgery' that is fast, but smarts like hell for days afterward. Total out of pocket, $500 (IIRC)

Next up is the big surgery, the extractions! I was NOT looking forward to this. Again, further complications, it turns out that I have thin gums, so he's going to do a skin graft as part of it.

• March 09 - surgical stint made by prosthedontist to guide the surgeon, and temp teeth to cover implants while they heal (I forget the cost of this. $500?)

The day of the surgery was not fun. Go to prosthedontist, get stint and fake teeth. Go to Ortho, 30 min appointment to get wires removed. Go to dental surgeon, >4hrs in the chair getting skin graft from roof of mouth to gums, two teeth pulled, two 12mm titanium posts implanted in my skull, etc Maybe 25 injections in all. I lost count.

After that, mouth all bloody and numb, back to ortho for another 2 hrs, where he gave me more novocain and vasoconstrictor and then put braces back on, with fake teeth covering gaps attached to the wires.

• April 09 - Surgery, gum tissue grafts, etc. Total out of pocket, about $8700.

Now it was a matter of that healing up and the bone growing in around the implants until they were solit enough to load.

• June 09 - bottom braces off (no cost)
• July 09 - top braces off, temporary crowns on implants ($800)

I'm more or less done now. It's a matter at this point of making sure the gums settle at the right height, and then getting the permanent, porcelain crowns put on (sometime in august or september), which will cost another $3000

So, in the end it's going to cost me a total of about $19k to have my little gray spot fixed. It needed to be done though, as it would have turned into far more. I'd never heard of root resorption but have since run into a number of friends that have had it and have had more or less the same process to go through. Maybe this post will help someone else running into the same thing.

Book Review: Meatball Sundae

I picked up Seth Godin's Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync? a while back. I'm a regular reader of Seth's blog and a huge fan, but was a little put off after reading The Dip and being disappointed in it. I packed it on vacation for airplane reading, and I'm glad I got around to reading it.

Meatball Sundae is pretty straightforward, and is presented in 3 parts:

- The first part presents the premise that the rules of marketing have changed, and yet applying the new marketing (whipped cream and cherries) to old world products (meatballs), the results are less than tasty. Those wanting to make sundaes need to first get back to basics and stop making meatballs. In other words, if you beleive (as you should) that marketing is the art and science of designing products and services and distribution methods FOR markets, then the new marketing means NEW products. [e.g. For games, this might mean asking "How can Facebook change our game design?", rather than "How can we use Facebook to sell more of our generic first person shooter?"]

- The second part breaks down the fourteen trends that are shaping this change in marketing. For those well versed in the web 2.0 mechanics, there's nothing new here, though it's a nice concise list. For those unfamiliar, it's an essential guide to the new world.

- The third part presents a range of case examples to help underline the points made in the first two parts.

All presented with Seth's engaging style, and in super easy-to-consume form.

Only downside I could think of is that I'd have liked more data backing up some of his case examples.

I'll be passing this one round the office for sure. Recommended.

For lunch today: A million mile tomato

A while ago I posted something about Matt Jones presentation on The New Negroponte Switch.

Now here's a link to a presentation, entitled Scope, from another principal at Schulze and Webb, Matt Webb.

I found it inspirational, and there's a couple bits of it that sent shivers down my spine. Well worth the read.

And then go find your '100 hours'

[As an aside, I thought the ultra-conversational, realtime-esque, voicing of his speaker notes was quite infectious. Interesting how he posts a deck for offline reading and still gets the energy across. Curious if other readers feel the same]

Book Review: Racing the Beam

I just finished reading Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort's Racing the Beam: The Atari Video Computer System (Platform Studies). Definitely the geekiest book so far this year for me and I really liked it.

It's the first of a series called 'Platform Studies', the goal of which is to look at the games of a given platform in the context of the platform's development, technology and business context, etc. The hypothesis is that these things end up shaping the games as much as their designers intent, and that therefore platform technology and business end up shaping the medium that is gaming.

The first of the series certainly does a good job making this case. The go over detailed looks at landmark games on the platform (e.g. Yars Revenge, Pitfall, etc) and how the hardware shaped their development. They also discuss the culture at Atari and Activision at the time, and how games built upon previous game development knowledge and innovation.

It's a great idea for a series, and Racing the Beam is a great start.

Two things like to see in future books in this series (or second edition of Racing the Beam?):

• There was no discussion of the European release of the VCS. The limited memory of the VCS meant that programmers had to program the graphics by re-writing the memory for each scan line in well-timed dance following behind the electron beam's trace across the CRT. Display and game simulation were hard-coded to one another, not asyncronous systems like on today's platforms. So, I'd imagine that games that were to run on a PAL televison would have needed modification. Were these the same programmers that did it? Were there games that couldn't make it because of some limitation, etc? Anyhow, would have been nice to know.
• While mention is made of the unit sales of some of the given game titles, it would have been interesting to include some tables spanning the console's life cycle. sales vs installed base vs unit sales of game titles. Were there 'evergreen' titles for the VCS? Did the sales curve decay grow steeper as the market was flooded with content?

This minor complains aside, I highly recommend the book.