Holding the Baby

Had a visitor today who brought her four month old baby round to see us. Other people's babies are great. You can hold them for a while and when they burst into tears, look like they are going to throw up or make a funny smell (or all three at once) you can hand them back to the parent with the words "I think she wants you now..".

Actually Ellie was great, and took me back to the halcyon days when our two were tiny tots and didn't know more about programming and science than me.

But What Will We Buy?

I was going down the escalator in the HMV shop in London yesterday when it occurred to me that soon everyone in this bustling, busy, store would have no reason to be there. In a few years only those who want hardware will actually need to turn up. All the music, movies and games will be available digitally via the Internet. If you factor in piracy, we are pretty much there now I suppose.

I began to wonder what we will actually go out buy in the future. I think that people's love of shopping will drive them out of the house to purchase stuff, but I'm not sure what they will actually take home. Maybe the entertainment vendors will still let us take boxes home, but now they will just contain keys to downloaded material. Maybe eventually all the media shops will vanish. In the future the high street will contain nothing but clothes shops, chemists and Starbucks......

Return of the Ex Grads

Today was kind of special. We had some of our ex-graduates come to see us. These are people who are now working in the games industry, and they popped by to say hello and see what we are doing. Unfortunately I was moving at speed, having to pick up the pieces that seem to result if I go away from the office for a couple of days. So all I managed to do was grab photographs. There was no time for much chat. I'll fill in the details when Jon lets me know who's what.

The chap on the right (who's name I completely forgot to note down) is an ex-Hull grad who now works for Blackrock Studios. The game that is being played on the big screen is a yet to be released title they brought along to show off. From what I saw it looked pretty darned good.

Now, some of these people I do know. In amongst this gathering are the Electronic Arts posse, including Steven Yau (third from right in dark blue). He was once a project student of mine and is the chap who wrote the article about how how to break into the video games industry. It seemed to work for him.....

Finally, these two look pleased because they are team D&D, who have made it into the next round of the Microsoft Imagine Cup XNA Game Development competition. You can find out more about their entry here. Well done folks, and good luck.

Open Day Book Plugging

We had an open day today. Loads of people turned up and so we had to move the talk into one of the lecture theatres. You were a great audience, and I apologize for plugging my book so shamelessly. (I just got my own copy this morning and I was rather proud of it).

I also apologize for vanishing so abruptly in the middle of the afternoon. Four of our student teams were taking part in the Imagine Cup accelerator event in Manchester, and I had to rush off and catch a train over there.

I hope you had a good afternoon, and that the trip to Hull was worthwhile.

Rare Come to See Us

Kieran and Kostas came to see us today. They both studied at Hull and now work for Rare. They are part of a series of game company visits that are taking place at the moment as our students show off what they have been doing, with a view to getting into the games business.

Kostas did our game development MSc course some time back. He is famous in the department as the winner of one of our programming events. I took some pictures this afternoon, but I've not got them with me at the moment, so I'll put them up later. Instead, here is a blast form the past, Kostas is the one right at the front looking thoughtful (as well he might..).

Thanks for coming guys, it was good to see you.

Only 5% Evil

One of the sessions at GDC last week (it seems ages ago) was given by Peter Molyneaux, who is a fascinating character with a great gaming history, being pretty much the creator of the "God" game genre. He was at GDC to talk about Fable 2 which looks really good. Sort of like Oblivion but more so. And you get a dog. And your friends can join you on quests.

At one point he mentioned that the best games force you to make choices and then live with the consequences of your decisions. In Fable 2 the nastier you are the nastier you appear in the game. Which seems a bit unfair on ugly people who are actually nice folks, but there you go. Perhaps I am over simplifying again.

Anyhoo, in the course of the discussion he mentioned that according to research, only around 5% of players choose to take "the dark side" in games like this. Most players prefer to reach their goals using wholesome means. Peter saw this as something of a wasted opportunity for gamers, in that the game maker still has to create all the scenarios and dialogue for the naughty actions and so you are not playing the game to the full until you have experienced it as a villain.

I saw this as quite a hopeful sign, in that, perhaps humanity has a natural tendency to be nice when given the choice. Or perhaps it only applies to video game players (or at least 19 out of 20 of them).

How to Cheer Yourself Up

What do you do if you have had a rotten day, where pretty much nothing has gone right?

You give two lectures in quick succession at the end of the afternoon, to the .NET Post-Grads about class design and the First Year "Friday Afternoon Club" about inheritance in C#. Wonderful stuff. Special mention to the First Years, who were great fun and quite mad. I think teaching someone something is a great way to cheer yourself up.  And Tom had a copy of my book to show me, first time I've ever actually seen one. Perfect. I'm going home for Fish and Chips now.

Earthquake Alert

Such is life. I've only been back from the San Andreas Fault ridden California a couple of days and we go and have our own earthquake in the UK. 5.3 on the Richter Scale too, whatever that means (in our house this equates to "Rattling of windows, scary whooshing sound and ponderings as to the brick resistant properties of an 11 tog duvet.").

Actually it was rather frightening but there doesn't seem to have been any damage done. For me the worst part was the silence afterwards. It really was eerie.

Early Radio

As luck would have it I was due to do an early radio thing this morning. With added jetlag. Fortunately things worked out quite well, as my whacked out body clock had me wide awake at five in the morning, and I actually got to the studio early. Things seemed to go OK, and I staggered into work for a rest. Or something.

Bright and early Hull

A Mean Knight in Shining Armour

At 6:00 this morning I was sitting in the departure lounge (4:00am start - what joy). The girl sat opposite me was in a bit of a tizzy. Her iPhone had locked up and she asked if she could use my phone to make a local call. Being the kind generous soul that I am I said I'd rather not, because my free minutes don't work that well in the USA, in fact I get seriously gouged whether I make or receive calls (which made those two phone calls on Tuesday at 4:00 am unwelcome for a multitude of reasons).  Fortunately for her an American sat next to me was better placed to help, but I sat there feeling a right heel for not helping.

Anyhoo, it occurred to me that my best course of action was to solve the problem itself so I asked if I could see the defunct device.  It was stuck on an SMS send screen.  She reckoned that she had already tried to reset it but I'm made of sterner stuff. It turns out that if you hold down the menu and power buttons for long enough the device will actually shut down so that you can restart it. I wish I'd thought of doing that before I looked mean.

Live Forever with Ray

Ray Kurzweil gave the second GDC keynote. He was talking about the next 20 years of games, and specifically the behaviour of exponential growth in relation to human development.

Ray at the GDC

If something increases by a seemingly small percentage at regular intervals, the growth seems to chug along for a little while and then suddenly takes off at an enormous speed.  Start with 100 pounds and earn 10% interest per year. After 1 year you get 10 pounds interest. After 2 years you get 11 pounds interest. Three years gives you around 12 pounds. Spool forward a while and the rate of increase really takes off, after 10 years you have over 200 pounds. This is the principle that is supposed to pay off my mortgage, providing the rate of interest stays OK (which of course it hasn't.........)

Anyhoo, back to the keynote. Ray made the point that as technology progresses more and more of our businesses are becoming information based. He reckons that with a move to nano-technology for production industry will be information based, and that with the work on genome sequencing health already is, etc etc. And with exponential growth continuing in the field of information processing for the foreseeable future things are just going to get more and more interesting.

I'm not completely convinced by this argument myself, making wonderful hardware is all very well, but the human race has proved spectacularly inept making software and so I don't think that everything will turn out quite as rosy as the predictions from Ray. Having said that, he is rich and successful and I'm Rob, so we will see.

One thing he said did intrigue me though. Ray reckons that the pace of medical development means that at the moment for each year that goes by we add around 3 months to the average life-span. If this is exponential, and he reckons that now health research is based on information processing it should be, in the not too distant future we will be adding more than a year to the average life-span each year, which means that we are in potential "live forever" territory. I'm not sure where this leaves video games, although I suppose we'll all need something fun to do during our infinite retirement....

The Great Smell of Rob

I keep ending up in Wallgreens chemist (or pharmacy as they call them here). It seems to sell everything I need. Today I went in having exhausted my supply of the great smell of Lynx. The shop keeps things that are mildly valuable under lock and key in the aisles, and so I had to press a button on the display to get someone to come and liberate what I wanted to buy. As soon as I pressed it a digitised voice announced loudly "Assistant to Deodorant Display". A girl with a bunch of keys turned up within seconds, walked straight past everyone else and up to me, and opened up the shelf so I could get what I wanted.

Perhaps I needed the deodorant more than I thought...

Jack or Master

Today I went to a couple more sessions in the IGDA Education Summit. I like going to these, whilst they are not always directy relevant to what we do at Hull, they are always thought provoking. The keynote, by Ian Bogost, started by making the point that game developers will always need to know how to program. Always good to hear. Then things diverged a bit from my experience. Ian talked about the old days, when only one or two programmers made entire games, and some modern day games, for example Everyday Shooter, which have been produced by one person. Whilst there are one person bands who can do all the audio, graphics and design parts of the game it is definitely the case that when seeking employment a game developer will be employed to write code.

The way I see it, if you have knowledge of the other aspects of game development then this makes you a better game developer. If you are one of the lucky ones who actually can do the whole thing, there is no reason why you shouldn't show off by making a complete game. Whatever happens you should try to make something that will get your name out there.

One point that was made well was that if you want to make a good game you need to recognise that you will need people that are not like you to be successful. Which brought us back to teamwork again.

Exploding Umbrella

It rained today. Lots. Unfortunately I hadn't packed much waterproof, and so it was down to Walgreens (which is rapidly becoming my favourite store) to buy and umbrella. They had a big display of them right in the doorway. I don't remember seeing it yesterday when it was dry...

Anyhoo, I bought a modestly priced device which is trademarked "St. Crawford London". Perhaps Americans think that the brits are better with rain. It looked OK so I opened it up and sallied forth. Whilst waiting at an intersection for the lights to change I noticed a button in the handle. So I pressed it to see what happens..... The results were most impressive. The canopy instantly compressed at speed, dumping a load of water on myself and those around me. A portable version of instant unpopularity. I re-opened the thing whilst avoiding everybody else's eyes and slunk across the road. Stupid rain.

Learning the Ten Commandments. And other useful stuff.

No pictures today. Work beckons. I started off the day at the Education summit. The keynote was given by Ernest Adams who set out his ten commandments for Game Developer Education. I've not got time to list them all, but I was particularly taken with number 9 "Award precision and punish hand waving" and number 8 "Gameplay comes first". It was also nice to see commandment 5 making the point that you should "Require Teamwork". Some of the others weren't that applicable to us at Hull, because we concentrate on the programming aspects of games rather than the whole game production process (that way our game development students graduate as genuinely useful computer scientists) but it was nice to find that we don't break any major ones.

Next came a session on how to create a successful game development course. It was interesting to see that as one the members of the panel were keen on teamwork and communication skills. One even said that you should encourage your students to enter competitions. Go Hull.

In the afternoon I changed tack and went to some XNA presentations. There were three excellent talks on how to optimise and debug XNA games. This stuff was great. Proper computer science being used in a really strong context. At the end they gave us a CD-ROM with the sessions on it. I hope that this material will also make its way onto the web at some point. If you are into coding you would love this stuff.

Then in the evening we staggered out to a free party and then ended the evening in the sports bar.

Haircut Sir?

Had my hair cut today. Not a thing I do lightly, or often for that matter. Still, it needed doing. I'm not that keen on being the one in the family with the longest locks. Don't think number one wife and number one daughter are that keen either. Anyhoo, my head is now much lighter, and washing my hair takes a lot less time.

I was amazed by the amount of my hair that was left on the floor after my cut. It put me in mind of a wizard wheeze, where you dump a huge pile of hair behind the chair of your victim as they have their trim. Then watch their face when they stand up and see how much has been removed.....

Thanks For Coming

If you came to see us today during our Admissions Event, thank you for coming. I mentioned a couple of things that you might find interesting and promised I'd put the links up. Here they are:

The phone screen questions that you ask an aspiring software engineer are here and the story of the Hull student who is now working in the games industry is here.

Games on Vista

Today I did something I've not done for a very long time. I played a game on my Windows PC. I picked up a cheap copy of World in Conflict yesterday and loaded it onto the notebook. I stopped playing games on my PC a while back because that's what I buy consoles for, and anyway they clutter up the hard disk and get in the way. That's changed slightly now, since I can install games on an external USB drive and Vista seems to manage game installation a lot better. There was no footling around looking for different versions of DirectX or putting the game in some strange place on the hard disk. It installed with a minimum of fuss and pretty soon I was in the thick of battle.

It worked really well. The game can get pretty complex, and it would be really difficult to control everything using a gamepad, you really need to keyboard and the mouse to keep on top of what is going on. And, thanks to the fairly meaty graphics support in the notebook, I was able to work at a resolution much higher than you normally get from console games, even the newer ones. It was great fun.

We are working on setting up one of our labs as a games room, where students and staff can play these games. We are just sorting out licenses and access at the moment. And I'm getting a bit of practice in.....

Portion Control

I followed a butcher's van to work today. Writ large across the back was the impressive claim "Specialists in Portion Control". I thought this sounded great. I can just imagine how it works.

The scene, an Embassy Banquet. Posh types with beautiful girls on their arms are milling around around making small talk and dancing to a small orchestra which is playing expensive tunes. In the corner a white hatted master chef is serving food with an immaculate silver service. Suddenly a man bursts through the crowd to the table:

Man: "Nobody move!"

The orchestra falls silent. Every body stops moving. All eyes turn to the man, who reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a warrant card with a shiny silver badge on it.

Man: "Mike Zuton. Portion Control."

The crowd gasps in amazement and fear.

Mike Zuton, to the chef: "You. Step away from that ladle."

The chef lays the ladle down and steps back, his eyes flicking around nervously. Mike Zuton pulls a small measuring jug from his pocket, fills the ladle with steaming soup and then empties it into the jug. There is absolute silence in the room as he carefully scrutinises the scale on the side.

Mike Zuton: "Just as I thought. Five mills over. You're going down this time Maurice"

Chef: "But, but, I swear it was an honest mistake"

Mike Zuton: "Yeah, right. Just like those extra Ferrero Rocher you've been sneaking onto the desert trolley. The ambassador isn't made of money you know."

Mike Zuton gets a whistle out of his pocket and blows a loud blast. Twenty uniformed officers burst through the french windows.

Mike Zuton: "Captain, get the Baguette Squad down into the kitchen, and remember, anything over fifteen centimetres, I want to know about it...."

..and so on.

Then again, perhaps it isn't like that at all.

I was funnier when I was younger

For some reason (actually a search to find the seven signs of ageing - don't ask) I found my way back to my old Crazy World site today. I had a read of some of my old posts, circa 2005.

I was much funnier then.

Perhaps the extra  cares of the world in the intervening three years have worn me down. Perhaps I have run out of whimsey.  Either way, I have now resolved to up the light hearted content (and probably the number of puns) and really, really write another Trip Hazard episode.

And maybe a sequel to The Little Brown Ikea Pencil of Doom.

You have been warned.

Update on 2008-01-31 16:58 by Rob

I've been worrying about this. Perhaps I'm just more grown up than I used to be. After all, by my reckoning I've got three of the seven signs of ageing.