This week

Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday

the resonance of great games of the past

In a recent blog post, I was pondering one of the few overlaps I have with Miyamoto-sensei: I don't play games. And, like him, I still love everything about games. if it were not so, I'd pack in my job and do something more interesting, like driving a bus. Which makes you think: why is driving a bus so attractive? I hate being on buses, but driving a bus is a boyish thing to do, kinda like being a sailor, truck-driver or train-driver.

Its the mysogynist in me, but I can't get used to women driving buses ...

Back on topic - why is driving a bus so attracting? Its like a video game, or vice versa, lots of things to avoid, lots of power, lots of 'enemies' (taxis, other cars, etc), lots of targets (pedestrians, cones, etc.). GTA for real would involve buses not naff red sports cars! You just can't get that feel of reality, size and momentum on a computer simulation.

We are all buzz-driven people. We hate being bored, are easily bored, and are always looking for things to create a buzz. A new buzz? This may be why new games don't kick me. I watch them and enjoy watching them, but can't move the hands towards the consoles ...

What I want to talk about is the buzz of the older games. No, I'm not going to do the old fart bit and say Frogger was better than Gears of War. That is clearly rot. What I do want to do is point out that there is so much in the older games that there is little room for new kinds of gameplay in the newer ones. Yes, the graphics, sounds, music, interaction, etc. are better, but the older games seem to have around 95% of what exists in the newer ones.

And humans are t-shirt people. We collect them, the move on. We get bored. Fashions change because we need new experiences.

I have watched my kids grow up, through cheesy pop, to heavy rock, to whatever they find gives them a new buzz. Radio 1 and its ilk are for a group of people who like the crack - often obscene and not possible on private stations - and Radio 2 is for the droll presenters. The music is pap that fills the gaps in chat.

Of course, humans also like familiarity. That's why we get Final Fantasy XIIIIIIIIII being developed. We all live in a safe zone where we get what we expect and feel comfy. For my dear wife it is ITV3 with its endless murders in posh parts of England. For me it is Wagner or Bttehoven. I can actually listen to entire Wagner operas and enjoy them. Because I know what they will provide and it goes on for hours and hours.

So, why do we stand by some old experiences and walk away from others? Why does Star Trek TOS now bore when once it enthralled. Or why does, as a friend told me, Country and Western suddenly appear, bite you on the bum, and you go rabidly for it's twinky zippiness? There is clearly a funny bone being tingled by this new thing.

I can still look at old games and feel the buzz they gave me at the time. The theme tunes and bloops from old games create a huge smile. Its just that the bit of my brain labelled 'video games' lacks a slot that fits GTA, even though I knew it was always going to be a great game.

What fills the gaps when the familiar becomes stale? Life is short, sometimes very so, so it is hard to be exact. I've tried drawing, jazz horn, swimming, cowboy movies and the cover discs on Word. Some new things buzz a little and become an 'interesting I'll get back to it', but few things ever become as hugely hypnotic as games once were.

You see, games have a way of holding your attention that nothing else does. They are all encompassing and engrossing to the point that you'd rather have bum-cramps and bladder pain than hit 'hold' for a few minutes. How many of us have been playing games on a hand-held in a public loo cubicle? (OK, hands down now - and wash them afterwards!)

This 'buzz' thing that games create, even in an echo from decades ago, is as great as a where-were-you-when-kennedy-was-shot, they dig deep into our psyches and carve deep grooves in our memories. WIll these memories ever fade? No, I think not, but perhaps the remembered buzz might do so.

I had a strange thing happened to me recently. I have always loved Neil Young's 70's albums. Perhaps it was because I was listening to his more recent acoustic stuff, but I stuck on Zuma and was, well, bored. I could not believe my response. I felt like I would never enjoy the album again.

So, just when you think you understand entertainment and how it works in memory and the present, the human response changes.

Games are such an insight into how our minds motivate an work. I need to think more on this.

predicting the future

I had a meeting with a chap at Scottish Enterprise West, one Colin Cross, and we got talking about student enterprise. Well, that was the topic of the meet, but we were just exploring ideas as we went along. And we wondered: what's the next great idea?

As we chatted an idea came into my mind. Not that this is the next great idea, just as an illustration of what is involved in creating that next great idea.

I was thinking about Second Life. You know, the AI-free virtual space where you wander around, meet people, etc. Kinda The Sims in cyberspace, and basically as interesting (i.e., not very, IMHO.) The question was going round the old brain: what could you do with Second Life entrepreneurially?

The idea that jumped to mind was: how about a company which creates second life chat and meeting spaces for companies still rigidly stuck in Web 1. It came about as we considered how clunky and unfriendly the world-facing Internet pages of both our organisations are. Don't believe me?: go to www.scotent.co.uk or www.uws.ac.uk and try to have a chat with me or Colin. Impossible.

So the idea is: take a games engine - in this case, Second Life - and use it for communicating between people.

So there we have the nub of much of enterprise: find a gap. However, finding a potential gap is one thing, but how do you turn it into money?

Where we both agreed is that, in creative industries the business plan is not of much use. I'm not implying you jump in and spend all your gathered funds like Alistair Darling going to the bank. (Actually, he was spending OUR gathered funds!)

Its just that a business plan requires a static model to build upon. Creative gap-finding needs more dynamism and eclecticism than a Business Plans For Dummies tome would allow for.

However, this has to be balanced by the fact that enterprise is about making money. Is there a need for a company who creates corporate meeting spaces for staff or staff-customer chats in Second Life?

This isn't a question which can be answered because there is absolutely no such market in existence. Is there a demand for it? Nobody knows as (see former sentence!) There is no clear link between here's-a-market and here's-a-product so here's-a-potential-profit. Life is full of unanswerable questions.

The very essence of creativity in games is risk-taking. I know that EA, Disney, Microsoft and Sony are highly risk-averse, at least in software terms. And even the creation of new platforms is a risk-avoidance strategy as old platforms stop selling.

However, Nintendo have beaten the pants of everyone else by taking risks. They nearly went under and did a Sega. The N64 was not great until Zelda The Ocarina of Time hit the shelves and saved the company. They left that one late! The Dreamcast was a safe seller, but didn't set any heather alight. The DS was a strange little box which did a GBA, again. Dr Kawashima is strange and wonderful. The Wii is very odd, as are its games.

This is not to suggest that Nintendo are woo-hoo-let's-go-for-it people. They are calculating, as far as these things can be calculated. But they also have an extra special factor that balances costs against opportunities, which Sony, for one, does not have.

Microsoft have it, a bit. After all the Xbox was a big risk, but it was never going to risk the family silver if it failed. Apple did it with the amazing iPod, iMac and Macbook. Again there was less risk for them than for Nintendo as Microsoft would have bailed them out again to avoid the monopoly finger pointing at them again. But, Steve Jobs creations are truly awe-inspiring.

So, is Nintendo just Miyamoto-sensei? Is it all this one man who makes a difference? In some ways the answer is yes, as truly as GTA is Dave Jones and Black and White was Peter Molyneux.

However, human and games-related creativity does not end with those bods. Somewhere out there the next generation of games-related risk-takers sits planning great new ideas that can be sold for millions, or billions. What advice can i find from my musings?

Think big thoughts. Count costs. Don't easily dump projects that aren't going anywhere. Perhaps they are going somewhere else. Follow that muse and see what can be done. After all what *is* The Sims? There is no genre for a new kinda game. It has to be created after the fact. All I can say is that you need to allow idea to develop, and this means allowing time and resources for these.

Two wee tales. I once worked for Rolls Royce aero engines in Glasgow. I signed the usual contract when I joined that all RR employees signed: everything I think of everywhere at any time while a RR employee and for 6 months fter leaving RR belongs to RR. Effect: nobody thought of anything until they had been 6 months out of RR. Creativity was non-existent.

A second wee tale. I once had a student who wouldn't get down to writing t can be rolled out. Find sugar-daddies to help you, but avoid the kind of crooks who appear on Dragons' Den as they make more mistakes than successes. Who are these people anyway? They are money-makers, not creativitists. his Modula-2 code for my Software Engineering module. Eventually he spent so much time not doing his coursework, I failed him. He left degree-less and, one year later, his game, Lemmings, hit the stands. One year further on he was a millionaire.

What would you rather have: a degree from The University of Puddleton, or a million-seller game? Enjoy your studies, but remember to keep the main thing the main thing: write games. Keep being creative.

do old gamers just get tired and fade away

I read that Miyamoto-sensei doesn't play games any more. It has even been said that he is responsible for Nintendo's drift away from the hard-core gaming people towards the women and their ilk who like the Wii and Dr Kawashima. Is this a curse - to gradually drift away from games.

I well remember many years ago my teenage son asking me, 'Dad, when I am old, will I like classical music?' I replied, 'Not neccessarily." The relief in his face was tangible! He feared that I, clearly an old fart, only liked classical music because I was, well, an old fart. And so, when he achieved fart-hood, he too would degenerate into liking the naff.

But, I have always loved classical music. It is to me the nearest thing to heaven on this rather cruddy and crummy earth. I was born into loving it, and I still relax and depart the ills and hurts of this life through Beethoven, Wagner, Schubert and Elgar (well, his 'Gerontius', anyway, the rest of his stuff is often pretty pap.)

As we grow oder, some thing do change. But others do not. And here I have to confess ... I used to play lots and lots of games, but now I do not. I have become a non-gamer. Other things come and go. I used to be a prolific programmer, but I woke up and it bored me. I used to play jazz horn, but I realised I wasn't very good (merely good) and so moved on. I tried painting, but I only sketch landscapes now cos I aint very good at people and animals.

Yet, games remain a huge part of my life. Not least because I teach games. And - here's the rub, most games academics I know don't play games any more. Imagine a musician who didn't listen to music, or a painter who didn't visit art galleries, or a footballer who didn't go to football matches, or a theatre critic who didn't go to the theatre.

That's a rich mix, and as I put it together I could see parallels. For there are football fans who don't go to see football matches, and there are followers of Formula 1 racing who have never seen a racing car, and train spotters who never go on trains, and people who buy fishing gear but never get round to going fishing, or people with an expensive personal gym of keep-fit equipment who never use it, etc.

The list of human oddness is endless. We are complex beings. It is simply a fact. As a wise man said, I don't do the things I ought to do and I do the things I ought not to do (try saying that late at night!)

So, I teach games. I get games. I enjoy designing games. I enjoy seeing my students design and create games. Games are for me a medium to learning. I suppose there are French teachers who never go to France.

On the very odd end of the scale I knew someone, studying Arabic at St Andrews University, who was rebuked by her professor, 'My dear, your spoken Arabic is execrable.' Her reply was succinct, 'Oh, but I never talk to Arabs!' And she got her degree with honours.

Strange thing, life ...

games design resources

I've put some I know up at http://jnsak.wikispaces.com/gamedesign. If you know more, please email me, or add a comment. ta.

Games are not narrative

There is a simplistic idea that games are stories, or, as the hoi polloi, the cognoscenti, of the intellectual edge of media studies and the arts would have it narrative. This is wrong on two grounds.

Firstly, it attempts to steal the ownership of games from gamers and game developers, capturing the whole idea of games and games talk and storing it away in musty ivory towers. If they are allowed to do this then games become a late night arts show chat circuit guest, to be wheeled out, mumbled over with touching fingertips by some dude in a strange jacket talking to some other dude in a strange hat.

On their scales - those who are - touch-nose-touch-nose - better educated and smarter than the ordinary run of us - can then claim games as their domain and reduce us to less than their chattering classes. On their scale the greatest book ever written is Ulysses by James Joyce (an unreadable pile of tat that nobody ever enjoys wading through) and the greatest living author is Salman Rushdie (I made it to the end of Satanic Verses; a turgid poser of a tome that was insulting to Muslims, Christians and humanity in general.)

Everyone knows that the greatest living author is Jo Rowling. Why? Because she is the most popular read of our times, has made children read for the first time in decades, has attracted adults back into reading, and tells a good tale well. But, forget the arts rubbish about her striving in a garret, writing her books over a long cup of coffee in a cold Edinburgh coffee house with no means of living. Its a nice movie 'narrative', but she was paid by the government in a grant to write her first book.

I digress. Back to the point. To the arty-farties who would steal games from the gamers, the greatest movie is Citizen Kane. Sheesh - have you ever watched that. What was that about? Eh? Was there a plot, who were the characters, what was the bit at the end about? It was as watchable as '2001 A Space Odyssey'. Poser-tat, all of it.

The greatest movie of all time? Probably Star Wars. With the plot of a John Wayne movie, the special effects of early Star Trek, and the backing of no arty brown-nosers, this movie hit the world like a bombshell and remains, to all ages, a thirty-year-old wonder (I am almost said 'wunderkind'; this pontifical stuff is catching!)

So, No.1, games are not narrative because those who would impose this label upon games wish to steal them from us and store them in their little boxes in their little arty rooms, and, NO, you can't look in the box unless you can say the magic words: narrative, juxtaposition, vis-a-vis, etc. These people are theives of the people's property and should, IMHO, be first up against the wall come the revolution!

So, having stripped the narrative-bods naked, whipped them soundly, and sent them home to bed, what was the second reason, John?

The second reason that games aren't narrative is that GAMES ARE NOT NARRATIVE. There may be, on occasion some storyline in a game, there may even be a long storyline in a big game, but the storyline is not the game. I don't play a game to enjoy the story. I play the game to enjoy playing the game. Its about the gameplay, not the story.

Take Starfox on the SNES. Wow! In my view - YMMV, I concede - the greatest game of all time. There is the 'a long time ago in a galaxy far away' part of the storyline, but that isn't what makes the game GREAT. Its the characters working together in realistic AI ways, the squeekes and bleeps they make, the angry ones when you fire at your buddies, the flying round skyscrapers, the feeling of achievement at each level, the stirring music (better than any of the sh*t* you can hear on BBC Radio 3 of an afternoon or Radio 1 anytime since around 1978).

Its a great game because I enjoy the sounds, images, progress, challenges and activies. To not see the game as a great game is to deliberately, by pre-imposed conclusions, miss the point. You can't think of Starfox as a story about you and your friends conquering the planets through adversity. At the end you enjoy the whizzes, explosions, the feeling of being there. What our virtual friends call, 'presence'. You get this when you are on a phone; you are not here you are 'elsewhere'. Yes, you get this when you read a good book, or listen to good music. But the music isn't narrative, it's notes.

Ah - I hear the arty ones say - you didn't say 'books' there did you. Got you, John. Books are narrative aren't they? Ha! Yes, but only if you reduce your mindset and library to novels. I have lots of great books that I read and use that aren't narrative. I have a great atlas of Glasgow that is used every week. Its a book. It doesn't tell any story. I impose my story upon it (to put that arty spin on it. See, I can do this too.) And I have dictionaries, encyclopaedias, etc.

Even history books aren't real narrative. They are a taking of historic events and imposing a sensible storyline upon the past. History isn't narrative, we impose our narrative upon it. Academically, this is what is called 'sensemaking'. History isn't a novel. We make it into one for our own meanings.

Back to games. Games aren't narrative because those who would make the field so as posers wishing to put their own narrow intellectualism upon our field, hence robbing us of the real 'fun' of games. The good news is that they can pose on about movies and novels, but, take heart, outside late night BBC4 nobody's listening. And games aren't narrative because they are about that wonderful human emotion: fun. So is great music - from Beethoven's 5th Symphony to What's That Coming Over The Hill Is It A Monster, Is It A Monstaaaaah - and great movies - from Blazing Saddles to Ben Hur.

Its all about fun. But, what is fun? That's for a later blog.

my BBC website photo

http://www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/outdoors/galleries/gallery044/03/#title

educating new gamers

It was nice to get out and back into networking again.  Hanna invited me to be one of a roundtable at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival (it may have had another similar name; it certainly had a few more; names of corporations and events are sooo confusing nowadays.)  My colleague Daniel planned to attend all four days, but I was just in for the Tuesday afternoon event on Games Education.

What struck me about the event was the lack of knowledge about games education spouted by the speakers, despite being profs.  This is worrying as it shows a lack of cohesion in games education.  if people can stand up at conferences and say things which are frankly incorrect, then there is a lot of non-knowledge out there, potentially.

One speaker said, 'a games company is more likely to take someone with a poor 2nd from UCL over someone with a first from Abertay.'  This is simply wrong.  But, allow me to explain the speaker's thinking as well as the real situation.  UCL is the key.  University College London (one of the semi-independant University of London Colleges) has a great reputation in 3D graphics dating back to the great Mel Slater's work.  In my old virtual reality days I once spent 30 minutes watching this man being unable to work a projector at a conference at UCL.  That convinced me of his greatness as the projector was clearly so far below his level of thinking (no sarcasm, a quite true observation.)  His team did great things.

SO, the 'UCL is much better than Abertay' thinking goes along this line: UCL does much, much better 3D graphics programming training than Abertay so its graduates are much much better for the games industry and the games industry knows it.

The first point is true.  UCL students are much much better 3D graphics programmers.  The other two are nonsense.  Why?  Because writing games is about a potent mix of being talented, knowledgeable and creative.  Given a bucket of graduateness, even if the UCL graduate has a bigger bucket being smarter and better educated (perhaps), you cannot get games knowledge, a sense of 'fun' and console knowledge into the UCL bucket as it is already full of 3D grapchis programming.

In short, the UCL graduate doesn't know what a game IS and so is unable to create a game.  Employers know this.  They don't want an employee who can write amazing code to make clouds move in real-time if these coulds ar superfluous to the game or - worse still - boring.

The top-flight Abertay (West, Bolton, Teeside, John Moores, Derby, etc.) graduate knows his skills and knows what they are for.  So, in the real world it is the games programming graduate who is employed over he mere graphics programming graduate.

This is, to the elitist world of universities, non-sensical.  But it is exactly what is happening.  For example, to bring it home, many of our honours (before they are classified as 1st, 2nd, etc.) graduates get jobs before they complete their course.  AT this time we have two of this year's graduates without jobs and one of the companies who took one graduate have asked us for everyone we have left to offer them jobs too.  Without even interviewing them.  Why?  Because it is the clear and relevant skills that these graduates have which puts them ahead of the pack.

West's BSc CGT degree is possibly unique as being the only one where all the honours graduates get jobs before the start of the next academic year.  This is a simple fact, and I doubt whether it is true of UCL's computing graduates.

The second, related, shibboleth mentioned was that new universities only train while old universities educate.  This isn't true & certainly isn't true in my experience at West (and some other new universities.)  The reason it isn't true is related, I suspect, to the fact that the academics at the new universities came through the old universities some time ago.  As one education academic put it to me: academics are downwardly mobile!

So, in my case I got my first degree at Glasgow University (founded 1451) where I studied Mathematical and Computer Sciences, then, after some time as a consultant I read for a research degree in Computational Science at St Andrews (founded 1413) and am plodding my through a doctorate in education at Edinburgh (founded 1582) in the very building where the Act of Union between Scotland and England was signed back in 1707.  Ohhhh.  Sooooo ooooooolllllldddd.  Prof Connolly has a 1st in Maths from Glasgow, writes the definitive book on databases. 

You see, we teach education because we were taught education.  However, I'm not hugely interested in what stuff I can get into my students' brains.  I want to know what they can do with it and what it means to them.  This is the trend in modern education - medicine, teaching, etc. - to get educated and practicable graduates over the mere I-can-spout-Ovid and the I-can-fix-that-washer schools of teaching.

So, a good university teaches facts, the application of facts, and the udnerstanding of the meaning of the application of fact.  That creates a graduate who can do, understand what he is doing, and choose what to do next.  As such, there is probably not much difference between a new and an old university in what is taught and how it is taught.  They are more like overlapping venn diagrams.

The final one was over the need to interface with industry.  I'v already talked of this before following Sony's brickbats at us.  The people from the old universities just could not understand what we meant when we said Sony et al simply weren't helping us enough.

I think the reason is that our aims and foci are quite different.  An old uni academic has his own aims.  We have ours in the new universities.  These personal aims are quite, quite different.  The old uni prof creates work for publication, peer review, pushing the field forward using a budget he gains from research and other bodies.  His aim is to push forward the boundaries of knowledge through in-depth investigation.  He is, at core, a researcher.

The new university academic is obsessed with educating his students well.  We simply do not have money for any real research, so we concentrate upon creating the best graduates we can.  This is also because, yes, our students do tend to be more B's and C's than the new university's A's and B's students.  Their students come from better backgrounds of parental support and high school level education; more likely to be confident upper middle class - sociologically B1's and B2's- than our mix of lower middle class and aspiring working class - B3's and C1's.

So we need to create commercially relevant graduates.  In this, yes, we are training people (but so are academic medics, engineers, teachers, etc.)  To do this we need the right equipment and knowledge.  And it is Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo (and Apple, Sun, etc.) who hold this knowledge.  And it is they who simply will not impart any of it the the universities.

Yes, it is nice when Sony or Microsoft give some bit of kit to a research team at Edinburgh to play some research on.  But, we need 20 Wii dev kits and the same number of PS3, iPhone, iPod, etc. kits would be great.  Plus short courses for our staff to go on get quickly around the creating of games for these devices.

Ask Nintendo fo help?  Got a set of t-shirts on that one.  No joy.  Ask Sony for help?  Once upon a time they gave us Yaroze boxes for PS1 programming.  Pretty poor clunkware, and easily cloned by students, but it was a real breakthrough.  Ask Microsoft for help with games development and they go very surprisingly quiet and closed.  Frankly, I have had more help from Apple than Microsoft, but then Apple drop Java and go for the ancient objective C (I'm-Steve-Jobs-and-I-once-had-a-computer-called-nextwhich-ran-this-programming-language-which-bombed).  Apple is a country run by a dictator.

We need help from the games industry in the same way as medical education needs help from hospitals and education colleges need help from schools.  Without this we are making bricks without straw.  it can be done - and is being done.  We are doing it, as are quite a few others.  But it is this more than anything else which explains why so many universities are producing unemployable games graduates.

You see, it IS all Sony's fault.  I hope their brick hits a plate glass window and rebounds back on them.  In fairness, it should.

So, back to the conference.  Was it a waste of time.  In some ways, yes.  It was poorly attended, poorly advertised.  There was a lack of kids and students there.  And the big games companies had voted with their feet no to attend.  I only met two other games academic at the 'games education' event.  One works in the floor above me in Paisley and the other was a music/games psychologist researcher from Glasgow Cale.

So, poorly attended and lots of rubbish talked.  (I even talked some rubbish too about Skillset, but was corrected by a useful chap in the small audience!)

But we made some good new connections with new people in games.  So, it was worth it.  But, please, everyone who went there, forget (almost) everything you heard from the podium ...

explosions

I got two invitations yesterday to video games events.  One was from the inexhaustible Brian Baglow who is organising a four-day event in Edinburgh.  The other was from a person wanting me to attend a similar event in Nottingham.  I also got invited to a one-day event at The Lighthouse to do with educating people in the arts (in which I, and they, include video games).  And on Tuesday I am speaking at a roundtable event at another Scottish Government organised event on video games training.  Oh, and I also got an email from an old buddy, Sheila Robinson for a meet-up and a chat (Sheila got me to to go to Canada twice to speak on video games at the Baddeck conference.)

In the back of my head, I also need to talk with Allan Gauld of BT, Andy of Specialmove, Frank at Govan High, my colleagues at West, and a Biblical host of others about video games.  While avoiding collisions with ex-colleagues with whom I remain persona non grata at best.

I have given up attending Baddeck, VSMM events, and others.  I haven't even got round to attending E3, GDC or others.

Explosions.  Way back in 1996 when I was first asked to do something about the state of education for the games industry by old buddy former student Dave Jones (of GTA, Lemmings and other fames), the games industry was compact and simple.  The Sony Playstation had happened and everyone was turning and staring at us.  At the launch party for the first named degree in games something extraordinary happened: the press turned up.  There followed weeks of radio, television and press interviews until I called a halt and stopped talking to them.

You're probably aware of the Big Bang Theory.  You know, the universe popped out of nothing in a humungous explosion that created time, space, matter and politics.  Well, I sometimes feel that I have been in a Slightly Smaller Bang.

In 1996 there was some stuff going on, obviously, but easily enough to keep up with.  In 2008 I live in awe of Frank Kermode who can and does watch every movie made, apparently.  In video games you would need a set of parallel lives to play every game ever written, plus a back-up staff of scores to hunt down and set up each of the games.

The now-gone, veteran broadcaster, Alistair Cook, in one of his weekly Letter from America broadcasts on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday mornings, talked about a similar problem in just trying to watch TV in the USA.  The listings come in something like a telephone book.  If the entire book was read, digested, reflected upon and then decisions made on which programmes to watch, half the time would be lost that the book covers.  Also, there are hundreds of TV channels all broadcasting simultaneously.

Alistair's question was: how do you get on top of all this stuff.  You see, Frank Kermode can watch (almost) every movie made as: they are transferred onto media that still work today, they are relatively short.  My doubts with Frank is that he can't see every movie on the Heisenberg Principle: as he can't know about every mode ever made, some get lost, what is a movie (is that accidental capturing of my feet walking on my mobile phone a movie, or is a movie not a movie until it is published publicly?)

What Alistair said about US TV, which was part of his life as a broadcaster/watcher of US life, was that you pick what you can, how you can, and report on what you have seen.  Frank may not be actively doing this, but somehow his universe is selecting what he sees.

So, as a games academic, what can I learn about keeping up with the games industry?  Well, certain things are givens, like those unmovable blocks of pre-allocated time in a Gantt chart.  My givens are: teaching (15 hours pw, 24 weeks per annum), teaching preparation/marking/students-support (about 2/3 of the above), R&R (7 weeks per annum, 2 hours per day average), sleep (8 hours per diem).  Realistically that leaves about 2-3 hours per day in working time for everything else.

I use time on trains to work, that gives me back 1-2 hours per day.  I must make visits to partners in schools, colleges, government, acadaemia, etc.  All said and done, that leaves NO time to visit games companies and games shows.  And very little time to play games.

Of course, I could R&R on video games, but that isn't R&R, that's work, if you take my drift.  One of my fave R&Rs these days is going to the gym.  Lost 2st (30lbs, 60kg) in the past couple of years and enjoy the relaxation after in the sauna.  That's R&R.

And, talking around fellow academics I find a similar tale: no time to keep up with the games industry as life, work and family take up all the available time.  This is a real problem.  At the validation of the new Games Development degree we were instructed to spend more time visiting games companies, perhaps being seconded.  But, there are very few real games academics out there, and the few of us there are are too thinly spread to do this.  Keeping up with the now tens of billions of dollars/pounds/euros of the games industry with its household names, is just too hard for the few academics working in the UK's universities and colleges today.

I used to say to students that in Computing we could overturn every principle of Physics.  Every one except time.  Time beats us every, well, time.  I remember generating animations for a game.  After a couple of hours, with a week to go, I knew we didn't have enough time as the frame generation rate was too slow, even with the farm running 24/7.  It was a real feeling of despair that with one week to go we needed one and a half weeks.

I have ten years of teaching left in acadaemia (unless they farm me off as an old fart before then.)  Unless we make changes to how we work the UK games academics will become ever more detached from their subject.  Because the subject is exploding in complexity, content and age, while we are standing still, at best, and letting it get out of our limited grasp.

This requires changes to how we work as academics and to how the games industry works with us.  

Which brings me back to my event schedule over the next few days.  The roundtable in Edinburgh is about Sony's criticisms of UK games teaching.  They have called for centres of excellence to be set up.  I have a couple of problems with this.  First, what Sony know about UK acadaemia can be written on the back of a fag packet (if such a thing can still be found today!)  'Cos Sony never come into universities and see what we do, any more than we go to them, yada, yada.

Now, the Sony's and Microsoft's are huge corps.  I am also small beer in a megacorp that is the new West of Scotland uni.  And UWS is a very small part of the Scottish Government's education spend.  I can achieve very little in terms of change (that too would take time I aint got), but Sony, West and the Scots Government do have that scope and option.

If UK acadaemia is to catch up with the games industry and truly become a centre of excellence in games teaching then those who have the power, funding, time and resources to get this fixed must act.  I am a positive-minded chap, it isn't too late, and there is a lot of positive mindset about this.  Nobody buys that 'centre of excellence' PC cr*p.  Quality is real, not in the packaging.

Sony may have done us a favour in opening up the debate.  I for one will be entirely honest, because its only in facing problems we can get them fixed (its the old engineer and scientist in me!)  I reckon this is an issue worth returning to every year and seeing what progress we are making.

on the importance of uncertainty

There is a creed doing the rounds today that some things are really, really true and everything else is not.  You'd reckon it was an uber-religious thing heading off from the wackier corners of the worlds of belief - scientology, Islamism, etc. - but you'd be wrong.  And, as a scientist, it worries me that we, the scientists, are now wanting to be seen as The High Priests Of All That Is True.

We are such complex things, human beings.  My own little corner of the world is 'playing games', and I love how you cannot get your head around how complex all of this is.  As a Computer Scientist I like to think we have an advantage over the Natural Scientists (like Biologists, Chemists, Physicists, etc.)  Actually, a set of advantages.

One is that we are still in a nascent era of our technology.  Computing only goes back, really, to the 1950's.  Video games only to the 1970's, and to the 1980's as a recognised marketplace.  That is all within my own lifetime.  If we ask the question: where will Comp Sci and Video Games be in 10, 20 or 30 years time, we frankly don't have  scoobie.  We can guess, pontificate, argue and discuss; but we don't and can't know.

The future, you see, ain't yet writ.  Heisenberg kinda said that we can never know more than 50% of the causes of anything.  Now, if we can't know 50%++ of what is going on, we can't make a reasoned guess as to where it is all going.  It's a bit like hitting a ball with 99.9% accuracy.  After 10m it may be +/-5cm from target.  After 100m it is +/-50cm of target.  After 1km it is +/-1m off target.  After 100km it is +/- 100m off target.  And, this to a 95% accuracy (i.e. there is a 5% chance we are more than .1% out.)

Guessing the future is for fortune tellers, not for scientists.  As Computer Scientists we can be ever so 'umble on this one.  Will computers ever 'think'?  No idea.  Will we have direct brain->computer comms?  No idea.  Will my wristwatch be as powerful as a Cray in 20 years time?  On past guesswork, mebbes, but I really don't have a scoobie on this one either.  Nor does anyone else.

It's nice to be in an area of amazing flux.  Video games have rapidly gone from annoying little things that play on pathetic boxes, up to today's astounding graphics and music explosions that last for hours on a box a million times more powerful than the one that took men to the moon.  But, where will we be in 10, 20 or 30 years time?  Not a clue.

When I started in Computing, back in 1976, I could see even ten years later that it was a far more exciting place to be than, say, Law, Banking or even the Biology I originally decided upon studying.  Why pick on Biology?  because it has got too big for its tiny little boots and is making unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable claims to absolute truth.  And this just isn't the place of any science which is, by definition, a study of knowledge, not theosophical pontification.

Computing Science does have its nuttier ends.  There's a chap in Cambridge (the town, not the Uni) who thinks people are machines and can, using replacement surgery, live forever.  We are, you see, just like computers and everything can be replaced, in a kinda blood'n'guts/cum/PC World kinda way.  He forgets the uncertainty of our knowledge on humans, medicine, pain, psychology, sociology, surgery, etc.

Claiming certainty is something we must never do, IMHO.  the problem with this claim is that it is, ipso facto, a certainty.  kinda like 'I disagree with everything you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.'  These are both contradictory statements.  But, they are, nonetheless right.

Computers are slaves.  You program them; they jump.  The link is amazing when you consider just how impossibly complex the high level language code, the operating systems code and the hardware wiring of a video game system is; more complex than anyone can ever understand.  But, these are just wires and electrons, nothing more.  And we know this because we were there when they were created, we designed them, we upgrade and replace them.  Sorry, Will Smith, it is You Robot, never Thou Robot, or, I Robot.

Not everything else in the universe is not humanly created.  Allow me to rephrase that: much else in the universe is humanly created.  Our societies have grown from small villages of families to today's mega-metropolises.  Back in Roman times the population of Britain was around 1m, today it is 60m.  Greater London is now effectively 30m people of all races, faiths, languages, moralities, diseases, social statuses, etc.  Greater London is effectively a mcrocosm of The World.

This is a human creation, by design, accident, population growth and immigration (some legal, some not).  So, the Tory Mayor Boris Johnson is happy to be seen dancing at the Gay Pride festival; incongruous.  Can anyone understand Greater London?  Can anyone understand Britain, Europe, the USA, Canada, Russia, Japan?  Can anyone understand Upper Skelmorlie (where I live!) or the University of The West of Scotland (where I work)?  No.

So, we have here humanly created institutions that are impossibly complex and incomprehensible as totalities.  This is called, of course, Sociology.  But, to beat another bat, this early C20th creation has a long way to go to even begin to make a start in understanding what people are doing with other people.  Anthropologists help a bit.  As do Psychologists.

My father was a Civil Engineer.  He built roads.  He was part of the teams who built the M8 through Glasgow.  An utterly brilliant road which goes straight through the city, with branches off, allowing access to any part of the city within 20 minutes of the M8.  Brilliant.  Back at the ranch in 2008, we have a road that clogs utterly for 2-3 hours a day every day.  Traffic travels so slowly that you can walk across the busiest city road bridge in Europe in perfect safety.

If we ask the question: is the M8 a disaster?, we cannot even begin, however, to answer the question.  Like the Hitch Hiker's Guide to The Galaxy's search for the ultimate question and answer, we don't understand what is happening, and can't relate it to what we want to understand.  'Is the M8 a disaster?' is simply not a question that has any validity in terms of ever being able to find any useful answer.  We can philosophise and explore the question, which may prove helpful in planning a future M8 strategy, but the M8 simply is.  The M8 is.  It is as open to question as the moon, the stars and the sea.

This is called 'metaphysics', posing and trying to answer stupid questions.  Great mental fun, but totally pointless in terms of anything useful being produced in terms of an answer.

In Computing Science we have our own: will computers think?  will PS3 be a success?  will Nintendo abandon games and go for sports training machines?  will Microsoft drop the XBox financial disaster and go all out for MS Office?  There are a host of unanswerables, perhaps even imponderables in every science, and we have ours.

So, back to the Biology bat.  I studied Biology and Zoology as part of my 1st degree at Glasgow University.  It is a subject often called science-for-girls as it lacks much depth and complexity.  No need to get your head round n-dimensional sub-atomic backwards-in-time-facing forces and particles here.  No need to handle probability states of matter in solutions and increasingly dodgy models of the universe (my Chemist son gives the Atomic Table a few decades more, but that is all; he has 3 Chemistry degrees, BTW.)

So, just why do some Biologists now find themselves getting us all a bad name, peddling certainties we aren't equipped to push?  As they are part of the human domain, I have no certain answers.  It could be a childhood phobia, a feeling of inadequacy bundled up as megalomania, an idleness caused by a dull field, a lack of understanding of field boundaries; whatever.

What I do know is that uncertainty is part and parcel of human understanding and the world we live in.  I don't know really how we got here in Comp Sci, despite my three degrees, 30 years and some not insignificant work in the field with some amazing people.  Nor do i know where we will be in the future.  But, that doesn't bother me as the nature of Science is to explore the unknown and seek to rational explanations that are supported by the data available.

It is not the role of Science to go beyond our boundaries and to risk bringing ridicule, eventually, upon the wider scientific community as some have become ever so keen to do.

on peace and quiet

Just back from four days in Barra.  Where?  Its the most southerly inhabited island in the outer hebrides off the Atlantic coast of Scotland.  Its a wee gem of an island with lots of unique features.  I know, this is always said and regularly an exaggeration, but Barra is unique.  The island is ten miles round it by road, beautiful white beaches of silica-calcium sand which are mediterranean blue in the sun, the world's only airport that is a beach, a growing population of locals and young returners, a strong Gaelic language and unbroken Catholic heritage since St Barr brought the faith to the island, prosperous, clean, friendly and welcoming.

I had thought of telling no-one as it is too precious a gem to share, but that would have been selfish; probably.  

These were four days of sun, spectacular views, sitting still, standing around, drawing, photography, chatting, eating, drinking and sleeping.  A wee bit of heaven on earth.

Now, I hear you say, "John - isn't this a video games blog?"  Aye. you're right, it is.  So, what do four days of r&r have to say about the world of video gaming.  Well, a few things.  Way back when I started video gaming, sitting in pubs at Space Invaders table-tops, pushing orange/red buttons as the audio went haerk-haerk then haerk-haerk-haerk  beneath the spilt beer, I seemed to like fast games.  Tank Attack was weird, but fast'n'fun.  PONG! was, frankly, fast but dull.  

Anyhoo, at some time I couldn't do the fast games any more.  All that rapid reaction wrist'n'thumb-flicking stuff set my nerves a-jangle.  Was it old age?  Was it been-it-seen-it mode?  Whatever it was I found myself more into engrossing entertainment rather than quick-fix stuff.  But, very few video games did this at all, despite well.

Wolfenstein, DOOM and Quake were reminiscent of studies in the barf zone in my virtual reality research work.  Everything went too quick.  Army of Two has this also, with men running up mountain paths at ridiculous speeds and breathfully running on to complete another killing assignment, accompanied by more uses of the f-word than a drunked Glasgow ned on a Saturday night out.  It just aint right; people don't move that fast.

Yep.  YMMV 'n' all that.  Lots and lots of gamers love the fast-paced, quick action/reaction games.  But, many of us do not any more.  We want it reflective, reflexive, pondered upon, considered.  And by 'it' I mean our escapism from the horrors of reality.  Give me a couple of hours with a shoot'em'up and then I am likely immediately to go out and shoot up the next Min&Henry doing 25mph on the open road in their little Suzuki from Pearson's of Largs!

You see, fast action games don't do it for everyone.  I sometimes wondered about asking these people what they do do to relax.  But, I haven't, so I only have my own experiences: draw, walk, run, listen to music, read, fish, etc.  I do lots of things, but fast action games aren't one of them.

Do games have to be fast action?  No.  It is often said that the most popular video games of all time are Solitaire and Minesweeper on the Microsoft OS platforms.  Everyone plays them.  Why?  Well, Solitaire is deeply dull, but is loaded to allow you to win around 10 times more than in a real Solitaire card game.  So, 1: you win relatively easily, so a sense of achievement and calm is gainen from playing the game.  Also, when you win the card roll down, one at a time, in a beautiful cascade.  So, 2:it ends in an asthaetically pleasing way.  You feel good because the game says to you: you are a winner, and because it is artistic.

Minesweeper is quite the opposite.  The play-board is dull, the play is loaded against winning (unless you go for the 5 mines on a 100x100 board option!), and you lose with an ouch!  It is a frustrating game.  You play because it annoys you.  When you do, accidentally usually, win, you win with a dull oh! sound in your head.  It is such a stupid game, akin, IMHO, to surfing TV channels in the forlorn hope that there is something worth watching in the numbing crudness that is TV hell.

Solitaire creates a sense of calm, often after just one play of the game.  Minesweeper is an addiction that creates tension and disappointment.  And here we have two sides - perhaps the two sides of game playing: tension and satisfaction.  The one drives up the body adrenalin, the other calms the spirit.

To draw a parallel, when stuck behind someone so old that they are almost invisible behind the wheel of their 07 or 08 registered tiny car, doing either 35mph on the open road or, annoyingly, 40mph in 30mph zones (let's not even consider how they slow down to 20mph whenever the road turns more than 5 degrees, or how they - aarrgghh!! - speed up as you overtake them) - where was I? - breathe in - breathe out.  Ah, yes, Mins&Henrys annoying the heck out of other drivers.

Well, you can either get so far up their back bumper you can count read the speed on their dash, shout, weave out, just miss a bloody great truck that unexpectedly came round the bend, peep your horn (waste of time; they're deaf too), gnash your teeth, etc. until you can road past them satisfactorily either to find another Min&Henry, a bus, a traffic jam, or see the telltale flash-flash as you hit 50mph in the 30mph zone.

Result: arrive at home/work, ready to kill.  Not the right thing at all. 

Or, you can pull into a lay-by, put on some Neil Young Unplugged (YMMV), and be be-calmed for a few minutes until the annoying Suzuki is gone away, away, away ...  Result: arrive at work five minutes later than planned calm, pleasant and deeply saintly.

Video games?  Reminds me of the only game that has ever had this effect: MYST.  The game was slow, thoughtful, rich, engrossing and deeply, deeply satisfying, like a Belgian chocolate drink at a cafe by a canal in central Gent on a July Sunday afternoon. Ahh ... I'm there ...

I well remember a friend playing it in a lab of an evening.  The lab was dark now and all was quiet.  he had headphones on.  We dropped in and he didn't see us.  The other researcher with me said, 'Lets creep up and tap him on the shoulder'.  I said, 'No.  He'd crap himself in shock.'  So, we left him alone, floating in the calm virtual world that was the puzzles of MYST.

There were more Myst's and a Riven, but they never captured the essence of the original.  The developers thought it was a game and made the puzzles so fiendish that only cheat sites could get you through the levels.  Which broke the charm of Myst, which was in the being there.  Even when puzzles were apparently insoluble, you stayed to think and try until you broke through.  And the failing and the breaking through were soooo calming and forehead-crumpling and pleasing.

Which is probably why I spend more time these days in the real world than the virtual ones of video games.  In the movie, Amadeus, the ArchDuke says to Mozert on hearing the Overture to The Marriage to Figaro, 'Too many notes, my dear Mozert.  Too many notes.'  On the other hand, Salieri reads the very few notes of the Laudate Dominum and drops it on the ground, lost in the beauty of the far-too-few notes.

Where and when will we get games that take us apart to a quiet place, to renew, refresh, re-calm and rehumanise.  To return to our work as little Bruce Almighty's bearing the odour of sanctity.  We might even wave nicely to Min&Henry as they hold us up for ten minutes on the drive home.

On the importance of violence

Video games are violent, so they say.  From Wolfenstein through Quake to Army of Two, video games can be very, very violent.  On the other hand, Wii Sports is fairly tame, as is sodoku on your phone.  But, then again, failing to get that crossword puzzle done can cause you to throw that newspaper violently across the room.  And if you accidentally hit someone with your nunchuk, it hurts, to say nothing of sweaty hands sending controllers flying into expensive plasma screens - violence visible - causing immense despair as your dad threatens you with real violence over the lost £1,500 TV screen.

Violence is ever there with people so it seems.  Has there ever been a time when people were less violent?  Apart from the Eden folk in Star Trek TOS.  But, heck they learnt that even nicey-nice plants can kill, didn't they?

The century past, 20th if you haven't been counting, was the most violent of all history and prehistory.  (How do we know it was more violent than prehistory?  Because more people were killed violently in the 20th century than existed on earth before history 'began' with Julius Caesar.)  From The Somme, through Hitler, onto Stalin and into Pol Pot and Chairman Mao, uncounted hundreds of millions of people died at the hands of other violent people.

What were these killers like?  Were they all utter nutters out of the scripts of James Bond, Arnie Schwarzenegger or suchlike movies?  Willing to die a horrible death as they horribly killed others?  The record says: not so.  They were fairly ordinary, mainly men, who obeyed orders and killed Jews, intellectuals, dissidents and other wrong-thinkers at the drop of a hat.  Ordinary bakers, train guards, office clerks and farmers.

Now, we could blame the true madmen - Hitler et al - but that would be to miss the point.  It is said that in Scottish courts there are three main pleas from the accused: guilty, not guilty, and, it wisnae me a big boy did it and ran away.  And of these three, the last one is the most common plea made.  We cannot simply blame an obvious scapegoat like Hitler, or his Austrian nation, or his Jewish grandmother, or post-WW1 reparations to the French.

So, to today.  In a US school a boy makes a video on his iPhone, posts it on Youtube, takes his father's gun collection and goes to school to kill his classmates.  Do we blame Apple, Youtube, the gun lobby, the school board, etc.?  As someone once said: to every difficult problem there is an easy answer, and it's wrong.  Why a boy goes to school to kill his classmates is a question to be pondered, and, I would propose, one that we should never attempt to find the answer to.  For, to do so would belittle the entire complexity of frail human life and the societies and world we inhabit.

History tells us that men are violent, risk-takers, competitive and short-lived.  Historically males tended to die at a very young age, few lived on till later life, and most tended to marry in later life.  The Dickensian tale of the forty-year old marrying the 14-year-old girl isn't perversion, it was the natural order.  The Arab habit of marrying up to four women also reflects the male:female imbalance (albeit it non-mathematically) in marriageable males and females.

Who fights our official wars?  Generally and historically young men.  Who dies in historical wars?  Generally young men.  Why do young males so willing go to war to risk death, pain and disfigurement?  Again, a complex question with no simple answer.  But, one I ask whenever I see the Army recruitment stand in Paisley, Dundee or another poor city area attracting in post-pubescent kids with the promise of excitement.  And every ordinary mum with a son in the Army is so proud to see her wee boy come home bronzed, fit and looking like a man; a man in uniform, of course.

Did you catch that word up there?  Excitement.  Try saying to an ordinary girl: how do you fancy going to Iraq, shooting and being shot at, drilling until you sweat and hurt, building up strength and a stronger capacity to swear, wearing khaki drill, driving a tank, etc.  Most girls will be hard to convince.  But, just show a big green gun to a kid in County Square and he needs to convince himself that he doesn't want to join up.

I think we have a problem today.  And the problem is that we have broken the rule of Thomas Kuhn, the great (perhaps greatest) sociological philosopher.  He said we must use our social models to explain the world, not to remodel the world to fit our preferred model.  We have a model in the West today that says: violence is bad, boys should not be violent.  To me this is too like trying to teach your cat to stop chasing songbirds.  Or, to try and get men to stop looking at women.  Or to try and persuade young women away from the easy delights of pregnancy.  As they say in Scotland: disnae work.

The problem is the way we wish our world to be and how we wish it to be viewed.  We want to have a violent army that crushes our enemies.  We want to have a Police that will take violent action against those who would be violent against us.  But, we also don't want there to be any violence.  This is a classic late 20th century post-modern packaging fix: keep the contents the same, but try and change the wrapping.

You are as likely to remove violence from males as you are sexiness from females.  Yes, in a few small cases these can be done.  Nothing new here.  But in the bulk of maleness the tendency to act like a drunken lout when out with the lads will remain.  And for females the risk of bitchiness and the need to predate upon males until they get their own one (yes, they do that) will also remain.

Political Correctness is a nonsense; that is, it makes no sense.  You are as likely to change the way males think as you are to make my petrol car run on diesel (I put petrol in my wife's diesel car once; don't do it!)  Males and violence go together like love+marriage, peaches+cream, politicians+lies, porn+PCs, and guns+violence.

You see, its not video games, or guns, or hormones, or institutionalisation, or nationalism, or any other 'thing' that makes males take part in and enjoy the excitement of real or proxy violence.  Its just being male.

(Question to self: is that why girls don't play or develop video games as much as boys?  Answer to self: like I know - I'm just a guy!)

On the apparent puacity of new game ideas

Pop into Zaavi and have a look around.  Lots of digi stuff in plastic boxes: music, movies, games, etc.  The one in nearby Glasgow has three floors: popular stuff on ground floor, was-popular stuff on the 1st floor, and kinda niche stuff on the top floor.  At the far corner of the top floor there is a partially soundproofed area.  Here be found such oddities as world music and classical music.  And in one of the classical racks there is stuff they are selling off cheapo.

Down in Largs we have a popular two-floor branch of Woolies.  As you come in the door you are quickly welcomed past the coke and irn bru to the mini-Zaavi (if I can put it that way without getting sued!)  Here be found a fair size rack of games.

Now, there is a greater range of cheapo classical music on the far corner of the obscure top floor of Zaavi than there are games titles for sale in Woolworths.  I reckon - hvaing browsed both - that Zaavi cheapo classical was about 60 titles whilst Woolies near-the-front-door games had about 40 titles.

I can hear your brain wheels chugging: this isn't fair comparing Glasgow Zaavi with Largs Woolies.  It is as fair as can be made as we are comparing the unpopular end of a big Zaavi with the popular end of a popular seafront town Woolies store.  If I went round a Game store and compared this with the downstairs floor of a small indie music store, the comparative titles range would be in the order of 1 game : 100 CDs/DVDs.

Yet we are regularly told that the games market is of the same order of size worldwide as the recorded music and movie industries and a serious competitor with TV.  So, just why are there so few games titles compared to there increasingly less-successful competitors?

Part of the answer is in our mental barriers.  As humans we keep on classifying things.  Its what we do.  From the I-think-I-will-now-reorder-my-CDs-in-artist-surname-order fix on a dull winter evening to the utter strangeness of a citywide bus-timetable.  We create order out of chaos, but in doing so we reduce and simplify.

For example, say we said 'games' instead of video games in the same way people say 'music' or 'movies' as shorthand for 'recorded movies' or 'recorded music'.  What games do people play?  Football (amateur, professional, kick-around), word games (crosswords, banter, chat-ups), work games (must look good/not look bad/get promotion/look busy), board games, etc.  Video games are an electronic part of what we do in life.  As humans we seem to be always playing games one way or another.

Of course, games can be dangerous.  Looking busy at work is hard work when you haven't got enough work to do or don't want to do your work.  I had a summer job where I and others were sacked for hiding behind pallets in a factory; the atmosphere turned nasty and a fight broke out.  But, it was just a game, wasn't it?  

Do you remember the scene in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin when he is sitting with his usual cronies in the commuter train doing his crossword.  It is a game to see who finishes first, not about doing the crossword.  It is a game of who is alpha-male in the train compartment.  Reggie works out it is a game where cheating is easy - he just puts random letters in his grid and sits back looking smug.  I reckon that was three games going on: the crossword puzzle, the Im-best game, and, the I-can-cheat game.

My daughter came home with a large psychological leikert test sheet.  It was apparently designed to help you identify mental and character weaknesses.  At the end you were invited to send it off to the ch*rch of sc**nt*l*g* who would contact you to provide help.  Mmmm ... a very dangerous game hidden within an apparently fun game.

Last silly example, my eldest daughter used to drag me off to watch Dundee United at Tannadice Park ("yah-nay-t-it!').  During one rather dull patch a player fell over and broke his leg.  You could hear the *snap* right round the stadium, and the *oooohhhh*afterwards from the crowd.  Chap was stretchered off in great pain with doubts over whether he would ever play the game of football for money again.  Dangerous thing a game.

Of course we call this subcategory of games 'sport'.  But, I propose, in much the same way we call ours 'video games' or 'computer games'.  But, its all about game playing.  I didn't even mention the games the football spectators are playing (I remember the chant at Rangers fans when they had become a good and so a popular team again and were back to beating us: where were you when you were rubbish?  Brilliant!), TV people (we are the best TV people/person), footie owners (my person is so tied in with this club I will risk my personal fortune on it), non-attending 'fans' (my person is somehow tied in with being visibly attached to football-label), etc.

So, I think we are having a classification problem.  And we can see this as the Nintendo Wii creates ever more space for itself in Woolies and in Game.  'Are these games?' we ask as we look at the puzzles and sweat-inducing titles and peripherals.  Yes, they are games.

Finally, back to the title of this blog: the paucity of new game ideas.  Yes, if you define games as video games genres classified into existence in the 90's.  You can do this for football to: just Scottish football clubs, or, just top-rank European clubs, etc.  But, you can also include Kirkintilloch Rob Roy, St Andrews United and the church league clubs, etc.  It's all in the mind, this classification thing.

There will always be a limited range of shoot-em-up and beat-em-up games and, like Batman movies, they will sell well if they are good.  But, look beyond your horizons.  Great new worlds of new games and game ideas await you in the off-world space colonies, as someone once almost said.  Its all in your mind: reality is much, much bigger and the opportunities to do a Nintendo are still there for those with new ideas.

I wonder what today's video games market would look like to our PONG! playing predecessors?  But, that's another time and another blog ...

Skills versus Knowledge

It is a truth universally acknowledged that people go to university to learn things.  And these things are difficult things you could only learn from being at a university.  Was this ever true?  The trouble with this viewpoint is that it is just that: a point of view.  No that a viewpoint is of no use.  If I stand on a viewpoint, such as on a hill, I can see far and understand better where I stand.

But, the view that a university is about imparting and gaining knowledge depends on much more than such a simple statement ay mean at face value.  Don't get me wrong.  I am not a dumb-downer, even if I have always taught at 1990's universities with less academically qualified students than I learned with at top-flight unis.  So, do my students learn less than I did?

Not - I know this sounds dumb - less quantitatively.  Stay with me on this.  In four years of study you learn four years of stuff.  Its the same amount of stuff at whatever uni.  Sorry, I can't be clearer than that as Computing Science stuff doesn't easily translate into Philosophy or Medicine stuff.  

Is the stuff qualitatively different: deeper, harder, broader, etc.?  Yes, of course it is.  Medicine is harder than Engineering which is harder than Computing Science which is harder than History.  Just check the diaries of students of each subject for the balance of classes, studying and partying. 

But, have we been making subjects ever easier down the years.  In some ways, again, yes.  Back in their college days the new yoonis taught 30 weeks a year and students were in classes 25 hours a week.  Now they are in classes for max 24 weeks a year and spend mebbes 15 hours a week in classes.  Do the sums: was=750hours, is=360.  

But, is less time in class less knowledge?  In some ways, again, yes.  If I lecture a class for 3 hours a week I can say far more than if I just do so, as I do, for 1 hour a week.  But, is more less?  Again, sometimes the answer is yes.  The fact that a lecturer can yabber on for hours doesn't mean the content is good; a kinda 3kg for the price of 1kg educational bargain.

Yes, we have lost content.  In my subject, Computing Science, there is an endless list of what we no longer teach: compiler design, stacks & heaps, machine code, procedural design, algorithms, etc.  Some of that we'd just love to teach but can't.  Why can't?  Because pressures on teaching cause effects on teaching.

These pressures are multifold: industrial requirements, student expectations, university equipment, textbook contents, personal knowledge, etc.  Courses change as the times around them change.  No man, as Donne put it, is an island.  And, to mix the metaphors, the ivory towers of academe don't exist on an island any more either, funding, staffing, administrivia, etc. all impose upon our teaching.

So, we change our course contents.  Computing Science, if it is to produce programmers, becomes more Applied Computing than CS.  Students learn less about the fundamentals, but still graduate as competent programmers (we hope.)  It's not just us, at St Andrews they teach Latin to 1st year students who have no school qualifications in the subject and those who do.  Those who do must learn more stuff than those running to catch up with them.  The 4-year bucket is only so big.

These days it is skills over knowledge, I admit.  But, this is not say it is poor for the graduate.  Time may tell, but perhaps even time won't tell as so much is so hard to tell, and the telling is often pointlessly historicist or biased.

What I do know is that we must produce graduates who know and can do at the same time.  Knowing is not enough any more by the greater measure of graduate usefuleness the world outside acadaemia is currently using.  He who pays the piper calls the tune.  I don't mind as long as the tune is good, and, IMHO, the useful graduate is a good, if different tune, from the merely knowledgeable graduate.

The importance of nonsense

Games are just stupid.  They waste hours, days, weeks and months of your life.  They cost a lot of money to play.  The platforms, internet connections and peripherals cost a lot of money too.  They consume power that costs a lot of money (your money.)  Games are stupid.

The trouble with the word, 'stupid', is that it implies stupidity.  And stupidity implies something base and pointless.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  Nothing people do is without an aim and purpose.  Even stupidity.

The trouble (2) with the word, 'stupid', is that there are people who believe they are above being stupid.  They take great pleasure in proving that if something is stupid it shouldn't be done.  They even define what they think the word, 'stupid', means.  And what does it mean?  It means what they think it means and what they think the can sell as a meaning to others.

We all disagree on what 'stupid' is.  I'll take an example of one of my pet hates: golf.  Gosh, golf is just so utterly stupid, IMHO.  In My Humble Opinion.  In MY humble opinion.  In MY opinion.  You see, claiming that my opinion is the truth is simply, well, stupid.

I have some great friends who love golf.  A strange walk, with a strange bag of clattering sticks, taking hours of your life away, with strange clothing (why is there a set of im-not-currently-golfing-but-I-am-a-golfer clothing and another set of im-currently-golfing clothing?  what's with the strange colours?  the strange Star Trek-esque sticky-out shoulder pads?  the women with visors and the men with baseball (baseball??) caps), the endless stultifying boring TV coverage (is it just cheap?), etc.

You see, I think golf is stupid because I don't get it.  And, to be honest, I don't want to get it.  So, I think it is stupid.  I'm not just saying this for the sake of the blog; I think golf is stupid.  Am I right?  Personally: yes.  Globally: case not proven.

When poked humans have the weirdest range of preoccupations: walking, gardening, TV watching, old book collecting, loud music playing, etc.  I expect there are some strange people out there for whom walking through mud and midges in pelting rain, sweating wet, to drop onto a wet hummock, to eat a squashed sandwich and a frozen chocolate bar on a wind-blown mountain top isn't a personal pleasure.  I don't get people who wouldn't enjoy this.  It's - again I am being honest - great fun.  Even the prospect of dropping dead on a mountain side and my body not being found until a thaw in summer 2031 isn't a bad way to go - beats taking an extra stroke on the 9th, as golfers sometimes exit life stage left.  (even the thought of being found dead in a pink jumper, yellow trousers, white shoes and a cap saying Fitleist (who him?) is to me unthinkably stupid.)

We humans also have a range of accepted tastes.  This word, 'taste', is a lovely way of defining other people's stupidities.  I know people who like the movie Zoolander.  Or listen to Queen.  Or think Graham Norton is, well, funny.  These people have different tastes from me (i.e. tey are stupid.)  There are, I believe, those who don't laugh at The Mighty Boosh, or find a Wagnerian opera long'n'loud'n'Germanic, or who can't appreciate the awful'n'good movie Excalibur.  These people have different tastes from me (i.e. I am stupid to them.)

You see, it goes both ways.  If you don't get my stuff then it is stupid to you.  And by no getting it you are stupid to me.  What a stupid word, 'stupid', is.

Maybe, just maybe, there are people out there who don't get video games and video gaming.  Maybe, just maybe, they do things with their time, money and living rooms that video gamers might, just might, consider stupid.  Maybe the anti-gamers like doing cross-stitch, or listen to Val Doonican, or do The Sound of Music in karaoke.  Maybe these aren't actually stupid things to do with your time.  Maybe these people have different tastes from video gamers.

Mario is daft, as is Sonic.  Final Fantasy is uber-geeky.  Gears of War is bang-bang-you're-dead fun to play.  These games take time, money and mental effort.  They are fun.  They aren't stupid.  

As our colonial cousins 'cross the pond would put it: Your Mileage May Vary.  

Going 2 uni or kolij

Way back in the dark ages when I was yooni-going the choice was remarkably simple: I went where my father and his father had gone.  This was, being a Scottish highlander, Glasgow.  It didn't matter too much what I did as it was simply having a degree that mattered.  But, even in the '70s times were a-changing.  I took Computing Science as a filler, found it really easy, and fell into a wide range of job opps as a trainee programmer.

This trend has continued, with a little of the pre-70's thrown in.  A friend of mine, now one of the army of vice principals at one of my old alma maters, St Andrews, has noticed that the days when a MA from that ancient pile got you a job, even if it is in the apocryphal Mediaeval Basketweaving, are gone.  Its what you can do that counts.

Its also who you know.  If daddy works in the city then it's a real advantage.  If daddy is a lawyer in Edinburgh then you are far more likely to get a job devilling in a chambers there than someone with a better degree who comes from a former mining family in Lochgelly in Fife.  The Elite still exists, if getting slightly more dilute in their powers.  (But don't take that necessarily for a long-term trend.)

The majority of people going to College or University these days are the first person in their family to do this.  Its a bewildering array of establishments and courses (aka 'programmes') on offer.  I'd like to take this opp to put some of my experiences as a father of 4 uni/college-goers on paper, with an admixture of my own experiences as student and educator.

1. Go to degree fairs - these are organised by such as local authorities in school assembly halls of an evening.  All the local unis and colleges will be there, plus some professional bodies (e.g. medicine, law, civil engineering), some major national unis, and some advisory bods.  Go there with a strong bag and collect every prospectus you can see.  Go with an idea in mind (e.g. I'd like to be a Vet/Games Developer/Artist) and ask questions off the staff at the stalls.  There won't be any real hard-sell.  If they ask you to fill out a card, do, but don't give a phone number (email and snail-mail addresses are OK.)

2. read the prospectuses - well, not every word.  I'd skip the welcome to "Rutland Technical University from the Vice Chancellor" bit.  Go through and see what courses are on offer.  There will be some you haven't even thought about.  You should consider everything.  Use pens, postit notes, fold pages over.  At the end of a few hours you will have a pile of thumbed and annotated prospectuses (or, prospecti, if you prefer!)

3. sit down and consider this debris - what are you really interested in.  My eldest son found the only uni offering History & Politics as a single subject (i.e. not taught by two departments as effectively two half-degrees, but by one department as a single subject-degree).  My younger son found the three local yoonis offering Geosciences.  I found Zoology at the very back.

4. make a decision or two - local yoonis/colleges are cheaper to go to.  Accommodation can cost thousands over a year.  But, a good course is worth it in the long run (=life.)  Get your list down to a couple of different degrees (one is even better) and around half a dozen establishments.

5. make contact - phone them up.  This is wonderfully easy and a very telling way of learning a lot about a yooni.  If they don't answer the phone, try a couple of more times.  You'll probably end up talking to an admin jonnie.  (S)he will be able to answer questions about such as accommodation, travel, the going rate (i.e. what the likely entry qualifications are going to be, which can be quite different from that given in the prospectus), any interviews to get on the course, portfolios to be submitted, etc.  Get your list of questions written up in advance and make notes in the prospectus on what (s)he tells you.

6. make contact - speak to an academic.  These are the real people who teach the real course.  You will have to thole them for 3-4 years, so you must feel comfortable with them.  This is the really telling point: if they won't make space for you to make a personal visit and chat then write them off.  They are simply not interested in you as a person if they won't do this.  Make an appointment to see them and go.  Expect to spend 1-2 hours at the yooni.  Ask the really awkward questions: pass rates, drop-out rates, degree classifications gained, graduate destinations, staffing, equipment, course content, etc.  Yes, you can get this at Open Days, but, frankly, they are small beer compared to what you learn on a one-person visit.

7. make a final decision - go where you feel the vibes were right: happy, friendly academic staff, clear and Ok answers to questions, a course you fancy doing, geographical location (although I rate this one less as I happilly went to a non-city centre excellent uni and a small-town excellent one as well as a great city centre one.

8. you now know what you have to do to get on.  UCAS form compelted, etc.  Yada, yada.

9. what if your chosen course demands a subject you aren't currently studying?  Ask if there is a summer school to make this up or another equivalent you can get in the next few months.  If not then you have little choice other than to plan to read for another degree or to take a year more to get that extra qualification.

10.  straight to yooni or a year out?  Humanly speaking, a year out makes a huge difference when you are young.  An 18 year old is world-smarter than a 17 year old, and a 21 year old is an adult over a post-schoolkid 18 year-old.  It can also help earn a bit extra dosh.  But, any years put off are - think about this - chopped off the end of your working life.  This is the highest earning years of your life in all probability.  A year spent travelling to Jerusalem, Rio de Janiero or Rome is a year more working before retirement.  The choice is yours.

11. be prepared to work hard and enjoy yourself.  I loved all that generic classification stuff in Zoology (in the days before the proto-religious tree huggers and the anti-religious scientismists took over Biology *sigh*).  I loved how some lines of Algol made the processor jump.  And how you could write a program to write a program that didn't look finally like a program I would have written - ooooohhhhhh!  There are dull and heavy bits that have to be tholed: I hated reading all that French post-modernist philosophy (beautifully taken off by the Pythons in the line "c'est un choux?') at Edinburgh; bollocks, but bollocks that I had to pass.  There wouldn't be light without darkness, would there?

12. clearing - if you don't get the asked for qualifications there might still be some hope, especially if the course is not regularly oversubscribed.  They may ask for BBC, and you only get BCC, but they may have an extra 5 places, and they get the results a day before you (didn't know that did you?), so may have decided to take you anyway.  So - phone up.  If not, phone round the other establishments you were interested in and see if they will take you on clearing.  Move fast!  Some people have been turned down by a lowly Salford to be accepted by an uppity Manchester.  Its amazing how easy it can be to get into a major university to read a standard degree (e.g. natural science, social science) in clearing.

A final word in What Not To Do: don't just fall for the first thing you see offered locally.  An ad on a bus or in a newspaper is just that: an ad.  A visit from a college to a school with a speaker on the joys of being a psychologist is just that: a chance to begin thinking about courses and colleges.

Enjoy!

Degrees and Jobs

Looking back at many years in education, as student (Glasgow, St Andrews and Edinburgh universities), educator (West of Scotland, Paisley, Newport Wales, Bolton and Abertay) and father of students (Caledonian, Glasgow, Salford, Dundee and Abertay) I'd like to put down some reflections on the non-apparent linkage betwen a university degree and a job.

I suppose the place to start is with the games degrees.  Its a simple fact, not a boast, that I designed and rolled out the first named games degrees worldwide.  this is not to say that I was the first to take games seriously in acadaemia (David Seal at Bolton at least beat me to that distinction.)  But, if there ever was a degree designed to put people into jobs, its a games-named degree.

One of the problems is that the timescales of degrees don't match those of the employers.  It takes years to think of a new degree idea, to research it, to bounce it around industry, to reflect upon it, to decide whether to keep thinking or not.  Once you decide to 'go' i has to end up in a prospectus (published 1.5 years in advance of the new student entry date), and then it takes up to four years to get a graduate out.  How long is that?  Around 5-10 years in my estimation.  Then the degree has to run for another 5-10 years to be worthwhile.  Academics need to be trained and retrained, etc.

Against this the industry keeps changing.  Games consoles rise and fall.  Some of this is predictable, some not.  So, we can see the PS3 being thought about, mooted, hyped, games prepared for it, in secrecy, markets prepared before it arrives to a huge tada!  Or, the Wii hits the market and people just luuuuuurve it.  nobody, least of all Nintendo, expected that, so the market tilts to one side, stocks are unavailable, coders don't exist, dev kits are in short supply, this tanker takes quite a bit to turn.

Industry and acadaemia need to meet at the point of graduation.  The end-of-course ex-students need to find themselves in a place where employers welcome them in and find the useful.  This just aint happening enough in the games industry.  Lots'n'lots o graduates, few find employment, many posts are unfilled.

Of course, sitting on my side of the fence chucking stones over at the other side, the industry has much to take responsibility for.  This aint new.  Back in the '70's the Engineering Industry Training Board put a levy on non-training companies which went to training companies.  I'm not suggesting we do this, but that we recognise that the industry also has responsibilities to train new staff and to help the trainers of new staff.

That the industry does no more than pay scant attention to the training of new staff is obvious.  Few university games degree courses are ever visited by or input to by games employers, whether they are geographically local or global players.  The unis are left to use scant resources to create bricks without straw.

Quite simply there is too little resource in the system.  There are places making a decent fist of it.  But these are not obvious.  I attended a meeting where Skillset turned up to accredit a degree (to save my job I will only add: not my employer.)  The package of documentation was put together by management.  The academic staff knew nothing of what was going on until the meeting was called.  We turned up.  Skillset smiled at us and asked some obvious questions.  Management were present and the atmosphere was one of stick to the party line.  Despite clear and obvious failings in the degree programme Skillset gave it the OK.  I had the feeling they were going to do this anyhoo.

So, if Skillset is not a clear indication of the quality of a degree programme, then what is?  The only clear indication of the quality of a graduate into a hands-on industry such as video games development is a portfolio of work to show employers.  Indeed, pre-Skillset this was the way it was generally done.  A student brought along his work and showed it to the employer who decided on whether this was worthy of the kind of person they wanted to employ.

This is an easy one for employers, so I suggest they take this one and still run with it.  Little shows a student's worth than his work.  Grades are infamously flakey in the grand scheme of things, for a wide variety of reasons (yes, one is fraud, but that is the least of the problems with grading student work.)

For universities the creation of student portfolios is a challenge.  Unis are intensely beaurocratic organisations.  Layers and layers of management and admin jonnies create work for themselves by creating procedures and forms.  The nett result is that a straightjacket is created where passing or failing is the be-all and end-all.  But, what does 'he got 56% in Advanced Mathematical Modelling' mean?  Very little, to the employer.

The student, and the academic, must create what is a parallel instruction stream where the student spends his time at university creating useful work.  By 'time at uni' I mean all the years he spends between entering and leaving: holidays, weekends, etc.  During this time he must build his work, save it, comment upon it and keep it employer-facing using such as Bebo, wikis, blogs, etc.

Perhaps one day we will get the active and the recording part of acadaemia back together.  But, for now, we need to make sure that students spend their time creating useful objects - useful to them and to employers if not to admin jonnies - that show their work.

How do and should they go about this?  I'll leave that to another blog as my wife ha got up and is frowning at me for working on my hols at 8.45am.  And, the sun will shine today, my eldest and his wife are up from Manchester.  We'll take them across on the ferry to Dunoon as this gives a great view of the Firth of Clyde - mountains, sea-lochs, seaside settlements, blue skies, etc.

So - keep studying, keep working, keep enjoying life.

John S.

jnsak.wikispaces.com