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Gamespot Editor Fired Over Review

Jeff Gerstmann, one of Gamespot’s editors who has been around the longest, was recently fired. Rumour is that Eidos was paying Gamespot big bucks to advertise the game Kane & Lynch: Dead Men all over their site but Jeff’s honest review of the game gave it a dismal 6/10 ratings, thus obviously making the advertisement worthless. Apparently Eidos wasn’t too happy about this and it led to Jeff’s firing.

If this rumour is true then CNET, who owns Gamespot, has officially shot some of their extremities off. Anyone who has read The Cluetrain Manifesto or Gonzo Marketing knows about this kind of thing and the need for integrity when relaying news and reviews. As soon as that integrity is gone, people are going to jump ship and go elsewhere for this type of information. From the sounds of it, many people are already indicating they won’t renew their Gamespot subscriptions due to this fiasco.

BTW don’t know if this is a coincidence or not but the Eidos site is now timing out and inaccessible (however their Eidos Interactive site is still working). 

Related:  Blues News, Penny Arcade, Destructoid, Digg

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Massively

“Whoa”, as Neo would say. Just found a really great MMO gaming news site called Massively. I haven’t seen content this good since I used to read The Game Chair some years back. If you’re into massively multiplayer games and you love talking MMO design and theory, Massively has some excellent articles that you can peruse.

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Lighter Surfaces Deeper Complexities

You know the old saying about how people are like onions in that they have many layers to them? Well the interesting thing about this is that each of these layers varies in complexity. Thus the initial surface may appear light and straightforward, yet the deeper you go, the more complexities are revealed.

What I find even more interesting about this though is how it relates to good design. Some of the best appliances, devices, or programs I’ve used take this same approach. A very simple exterior that easy to understand and use immediately but with many layered complexities that give you more control the deeper you go and more time you spend using it.

The funny thing is that I never really thought about this approach with regards to websites before, yet it could be easily applied as well. I mean just like a relationship, you start off with light chatter about everyday things in common and then over time you begin speaking about more deeper and complex issues and discussions. Therefore the initial home page of the website talks about simpler things on an understandable level and the deeper you go into the website, the more you learn about the product, service, or person and the more complex the discussions may be.

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Balancing Giving With Getting

Miss Rogue writes about community freeloaders within social networks.

And don’t get me wrong, promoting your events, asking for connections and telling people about your company are totally viable, real and legitimate actions that are and should be performed within networks and communities every day. The trick is, just like a bank account, make sure you have a healthy account balance (ie. more deposited than withdrawn). As well, much like a personal bank account, it is beneficial to carry a higher balance. You never know when you’ll have a rainy day.

I look at these things on a simple relationship level and with every relationship in life, no matter what it may be, both sides should be both giving and getting something out of the relationship. I mean if one person is getting everything and the other person is giving everything, that’s an unhealthly relationship and it isn’t sustainable.

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Games Tedious As Real Life

Great comment quote on Gizmodo regarding the World of Warcraft.

“I played WoW from the day it was released for over 2 years. Then I realized two things. The first was that in order to do the fun stuff you need to be part of a Raiding guild, which was no problem. But that in order to go on raids you had to do work. When WoW got as tedious as real life there was no sense in paying it anymore.”

Massively multiplayer game developers seriously need to start figuring out ways that casual gamers can still participate within these games in meaningful ways. And by meaningful, I mean be able to contribute to larger community goals without having to play the game every night but instead just a few hours a week. Even better, make simple meta games within the main game so that people can contribute in simple ways using completely different interface clients (i.e. mobile phone / PDA).

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Communicating On A Level People Can Understand

We are all uniquely diverse within this world, as we’ve all come from different backgrounds and environments, as well as had different experiences throughout our lives. This is the most important thing to remember when trying to communicate our differing and unique identities to each other. In other words, if we can’t communicate on a level that a person can understand or relate to then they won’t have a clue as to what’s being said.

Something I myself need to take into consideration after rereading my ramblings from yesterday. Way too verbose for what I was trying to get across. Probably why a lot of people express themselves visually with artwork or photographs when they can’t find the right words to express themselves verbally.

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A New Game Called Life

One thing that I never mentioned in all this slew of realizations is that I think what made them possible was being able to get away from a lot typical things that I normally do. I mean for those people who know me, I love games, especially massively multiplayer games. I’ve always believed that games have the possibility to teach us things about ourselves by giving us a different perspective or viewpoint on things that we might not otherwise had the chance to experience.

At the same time, however, games can both be a real time waster and also muddle your head with so many extraneous thoughts that you often become dazed to other things. I mean some games today are so complex they are almost like jobs, so much so that people are almost always deep in thought trying to figure out new strategies and ideas for the game (i.e. economy, combat, etc). Nothing wrong with that, if that is you actually get some enjoyment from it and it doesn’t become overly stressful to the point you’re no longer having fun.

For me, last month I decided I had enough of the World of Warcraft. I was just going to take a break till the new year but since I’ve been off, I’m not really sure I want to go back now. In addition, I had been playing Team Fortress 2 as well on the side. What started out as a fun silly game (i.e. Incredibles style) become very stressful, violent and aggravating, especially since it requires a high level of teamwork to pull off. Therefore as of last week, I’ve uninstalled both of these games off my computer.

Last but not least is EVE Online. I wasn’t playing it but decided to try it out again after removing WoW from my computer. While it is definitely much more relaxing to play then WoW and Team Fortress 2 (especially since I’m not really interested in the combat aspects of it), I noticed a reoccurring pattern happening again with it, similar to other games. What pattern? Well like with Team Fortress 2, I wasn’t really having any fun. It just seemed like an endless grind, more than anything.


EVE Online

I mean don’t get me wrong. EVE Online’s visuals like the World of Warcraft are extremely beautiful and many others obviously find the game very enjoyable. For me though, something was missing. It just seems like so many games today are focused too much around loot (i.e. making money or obtaining equipment) and skills (i.e. leveling) with very little focus on what I value the most, the experience (and ironically I’m finding our culture is imitating this). I mean I keep thinking back to many of the fantasy and science fictions books that I read earlier in my life and I keep wishing to find games that give some sort of emotional connection with the experiences within it. So far, especially with massively multiplayer games, I’m not seeing this. With earlier single player games I played though (even text based games like Zork), it was possible to achieve this as these games were often very cinematic, like reading an excellent novel or story.

So am I going to go back to single player games? Not sure. For now, I’ll keep EVE Online installed but not sure how much I’ll play it. If anything though, and I’m sure this will sound somewhat strange, I’m more interested in playing around with my site. Like a game? Well sort of. You see before when I wrote in my journal frequently, relaying stories, it enabled me to interact and share things with others which in turn allowed them to interact and share their stories with me. Therefore, in a sense this site became an interactive environment to communicate and share experiences with others similar to how games are interactive environments to allow people to communicate and share experiences online as well. Again for me, the most enjoyable aspect of this interaction is the emotional connection between myself and others who can relate to the stories in my journal.

So in a sense, could you say I’m starting a new game called Life? Not sure. I’ll let you know when I level up though.  🙂

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Be Real Creative

Yesterday I said I want to be real and I think an explanation is in order to fully understand the implications of that statement. In a nutshell, from a personal perspective, I was tired of trying to emulate others and tired of trying to be a “fancy” or “cool” business or company like others. It’s not me. Deep down I’m still that simple country kid who grew up on an acreage outside of Edmonton, Alberta. The kid who likes walking through the wheat fields with his dog reveling in the beauty of nature around him. That’s me.

So immediately when thinking about this, I knew that for me to be real I had to stop trying to copy or emulate others. I needed to turn off those thoughts and constantly be on guard against them. Instead I needed to turn off the machine that was me and restart myself as a person, as a distinct diverse individual. Even more so, I realized that I needed to start reveling in my diversity. I needed to stop trying to play it safe by copying others and instead needed to start taking risks of my own so that the real me could shine through, for better or worse. After all, none of us are perfect, no matter how much we want to be.

As soon as I started thinking about this though, about reveling in my diverse identity, something struck a chord in me and resonated deeply. I thought again about the multiple mediums out there constantly bombarding us to be someone else (i.e. Buy Dolt Cola! Britney does!) to the point that many young people today probably spend more time emulating someone else (being stereotypical) than trying to discover their own unique identity.

Realization struck me again as I knew that I wanted to be a part of helping people to discover their true identities and even more so to help them to communicate their wonderfully diverse identities to the world. Therefore, instead of clients who were trying to be like someone else, I wanted clients who wanted to take risks in striving to be diversely different be they individuals setting up their first blog, small businesses launching their first product site, or artists trying to get their unique message or vision out to the world. I wanted to work with people who weren’t afraid to show the world how different they really are compared to others.

Again I immediately realized a couple of others things when thinking about this. I now knew why I had such a deep connection with the 37 Signals book entitled Getting Real. It’s because I kept feeling that the “typical” way of working didn’t work with me and I wanted to work in a much more natural way. That being building things progressively bit by bit in a more natural evolutionary approach versus spending a lot of time trying to build everything all at once (trying to achieve perfection in one swoop) which only leads to stress for both myself and the client due to all of the intertwined complexities of the project.

I also knew why I liked using Squarespace so much as well, to the point that I only use it now when developing websites. It’s because I find it so usable, for myself and my clients, and it naturally fits with the way I work. So much so that instead of building graphical comps for some clients, I instead quickly mockup the site in Squarespace itself. Is it “perfect” and does it allow me to do everything I want? No, but what it does allow me to achieve, it does exceedingly well, far better than any other web development service I’ve seen to date. Therefore I’m more than willing to turn away clients who want to try to achieve “perfection” with some other content management service or app because they often don’t realize the dreadful complexities and stress of trying to use them after their site is done.

And finally to wrap things up, I realized I need some sort of mantra again to remind myself of all of these things on a daily basis. Therefore I came up with the two words “be real”. Yet again something felt like it was missing and I added the word “creative” at the end because that’s what I was trying to be with my work, creative. So all together, I now say “be real creative” as my daily mantra so that it reminds me of the values I want for myself and the values that I’m searching for in others, be it to work with them or to help them express their own.

What’s interesting about this mantra is that it could easily be a company name and I was seriously considering doing this, even obtaining the domain name of berealcreative.com for this purpose. However something stopped me. As soon as I started thinking about doing this, I reverted back to my old ways and starting thinking how I could emulate other designers in making a cool site for this company. I therefore knew this wasn’t the right path to take, at least not now. Possibly in the future. Even then though, I still have this aversion to being a “company”, as I want my individual diversity to be what people see instead of some corporate logo or identity.

If anything though, when looking at the word “creative”, I was reminded of the creative commons and how a collective of people seemed to suit this idea much better, as it relates better with the values trying to be relayed. Therefore just like I use this as a sort of daily mantra, I’m wondering if there are others who would like to use it as well, to the point that it could be a sort of mantra / mission statement banner on sites for those who strive to pursue the same ideals. Therefore instead of the idea being lost within the company, the idea stands on its own for anyone to use, as long as they believe its basic values.

Anyways something to think about. For now though, I’m just happy repeating it to myself to remind myself of who I am, where I’ve come from, and where I want to go.

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I Want To Be Real

Hmmm, where to begin. It’s been a while. I feel like I’ve been in hibernation pretty much since the middle of summer when I decided to step away from writing in my journal here to focus more on my work. And when I say focus on my work, I don’t mean so much working more as much as trying to figure out my identity in terms of my work. In other words, how do I differentiate myself from other web designers, instead of just being another “web guy”.

Back in May, I think I came close when I came up with the mantra of Connect. Empower. Inspire. This felt right to me but it felt like something was still missing. Since that time, I’ve been struggling with my site, trying to come up with some designs for it but no matter what I do, it just feels wrong. And this past week, I think I figured out why.

You see at first I thought maybe I wasn’t cut out for design work. But then I looked at my portfolio and asked myself why was I able to come up with designs for others that feel so right. I mean with a lot of my design work, I really try to understand the identity of the company or product first and then try to carry that across genuinely in my work without trying to hype it up too much. At the same time, I know that the most difficult design work a web designer can do is their own website.

And then last week, I was sitting there thinking about my work identity some more when I finally thought to myself, “I’m tired of having to think about my work / business identity! I just want to be myself!” Of course when I said this to myself, I realized that was the answer I had been waiting for. You see for the longest time, I kept looking at what other designers were doing and tried to pull identity ideas from them for my own site. Well of course their ideas didn’t work for me because I’m not them and their not me. Hilariously enough, for me to be myself, I just needed to stop trying to be someone else. That’s it.

“Easier said than done!” I’m sure those in the known are saying and you’re absolutely right. We live in a world where we are bombarded daily by multiple mediums to be someone else because that will make us cool, beautiful, rich, whatever. And that’s exactly what I meant the other day when I wrote about being real clear. When you finally get the chance to clear your head of all of this mental bombardment around you, it’s actually quite liberating and exhilarating. For it was at this point, that I believe I took another important step closer to my true identity of who I really am and what I’d really like to do with my work.

“I want to be real.” Yes that’s what I want to do. And believe me there’s a lot more to that statement than meets the eye. I’ll reveal more tomorrow just exactly what I mean by this.

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More Self Realization Remixes

There’s a big difference between what you want or desire and what you really need.

Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you should.

Being focused isn’t so much about tracking your goals as avoiding the myriad of distractions along the way.

Stop trying to be this, that or them. Start being you.

Be real.