OK, this Apple tablet thing...

Wired has a fantastic essay on the much-rumored Apple Tablet, a mythical flat-screen portable computer that would be part Kindle, part iPhone, and part MacBook. The consumer press (and Apple-watching blogs) are completely convinced this thing is going to happen, and now that print media companies are signing NDAs with Apple, the noise is kind of hard to ignore.

Wired figures that the tablet is part of a unique pattern that comes with being Steve Jobs: find an old, stodgy business model, update the model, and profit obscenely. It worked with music (the iPod and iTunes), desktop computers ("at a time when consumer portables were the future" came the iMac), cell phones (notice how much phones don't suck anymore thanks to iPhone competition), and retail stores (brick-and-mortar is dying, remember? Hence the Apple Store..?).

The mag does get a little dramatic. The author's also convinced that this amazing device would be Jobs' swan song (on account of his health), which isn't necessarily the case. But the ingredients for the next Jobsian breakthrough are all there: print media are the next endangered species and Jobs is stepping in to save them, save journalism, save their business model and skim a hefty sum off the top from serving it all up through a sexy Apple product.

I still suspect that everyone's missing something, some kind of great R&D breakthrough. The iPhone had an unbelievably sexy touchscreen that most consumers didn't think possible. The iMac very quickly gave everyone high-quality LCD monitors for their desktops. The iPod was a unique application of laptop hard drives. 

I spent 30 minutes writing out educated predictions, but they were all totally bland and easily replicated (and probably already written by big gadget blogs or somesuch). Stuff like a ubiquitous network connection and putting everything (I mean everything) in the cloud. But that's too easy. Microsoft, Mozilla and Ubuntu are already working on that publicly. That lets you exclude hard drives, which are expensive components, but there's already flash memory for that. 

There has to be some part of the equation that we pedestrians just can't see. I'd sign an NDA to find out what it is.

Will work for debt reduction

It's come to my attention that out of my incoming graduate class, I'm probably on the high end of debt incurred, thanks to 
a) out-of-state tuition
b) little funding from UCSD

I'm going to start working ASAP to remedy this situation, or else I'll be repaying loans until I'm 36. Expect Blake to be very very busy sometime soon.

Still, that won't be all that bad. I signed up for this gig partially to be busy. Life as a writer in Texas was too slow to be sustainable. And now that I'm here, I've eased into having less of a life. Upon my arrival, going out three nights a week was the norm. Now, some four months later, I got back from hitching a ride across town for the sake of a free Chipotle burrito. I really don't feel that bad about the decline in activity, which makes it OK for me to marginally become a little bit more of a loser by working anywhere between 5-20 hours a week.

These days, I get my gaming once a week via CO-OP. It's the only game-related show I watch religiously, and that's saying a lot. It's six guys getting really deep about the games they review, and they're consistent about it. They'll cover everything, from AAA releases during release week to indie games and iPhone stuff. And there's some little sketches and banter, too, which keeps you from being overwhelmed with Gaming Information and lets you 'get to know the guys' in the same sense that Top Gear fans know about the hosts of that show. Give it a whirl; it's better than the rest of Youtube's Top-Gear-Wannabe gaming flotsam, and a thousand times more interesting than hearing pro bloggers mouth-breathe into a Skype call for an hour. (Unless you're Robert Ashley - if you're him, you can talk in your awesome stoner voice all day.)

Dear West Coast...

[this post is best read to the tune of Ice Cube's "Today Was A Good Day"]

So here I am in sunny San Diego,
Thinkin' 'bout when I'll be on that payroll

And here every other car's a Ferrari
It makes you start thinkin' that money's so godly

And you'd be forgiven to think
That life's just bling and bitches and weed

So please don't shoot me ('cause your gangstas are hard)
But your coast's own hip-hop is really sub-par.

Diet Update: ABORT ABORT ABORT

Man, what an adventure No Carbs Week turned out to be.

By about Monday night, I was already deciding this was a bad idea. Taking away bread, tortillas and pasta removed almost my entire repertoire from my kitchen and left things like sandwich meat to go bad as I looked at it longingly while eating yet another bowl of rice and veggies. Worse still, it might not end up being all that healthy, as anyone with half a brain noticed when the Atkins diet just moved a lot of people a few bunless burgers closer to heart disease.

Then things got really bad, and not in a dietary way. I went to the doctor on a Wednesday morning for a routine appointment, and I ended up in the office in horrendous pain. I was moved straight down to Urgent Care (essentially a low-rent ER) and after a couple of hours of agony, I was given some painkillers and so much IV fluid that my face swelled up. I was diagnosed with dehydration and a kidney stone.

Yeah. I turn 25 in a couple months. Kidney stone. What.

I took the rest of the week off of school and spent it at home stuffing myself with Advil and water. By Friday I felt good enough to go back on campus for a couple small things and started to wonder if I hadn't been misdiagnosed.

Then, things took a worse turn on Saturday and I felt bad again, and I started to wonder if I wouldn't need to go to the real-deal hospital. Then, a couple extra Advil later, out popped a kidney stone, completely painlessly. 

Strange.

I've been back at school for a week, and I seem to be doing OK. I can't drink much coffee or alcohol (dehydration still hurts), but I'm able to go to school again.

And I'm not in debilitating pain.

We're taking a short break from dieting so I can get my life in order. I have a new theory for something to try, but that's a story for another post.

Really, are there no gamers at Google?

Why has there not been a single "20-percent time" project at Google resulting in anything even vaguely beneficial to gamers? 

 

Google is now The Big Dog in IT, if the price on Nasdaq is any indication. IT is inexorably tied with gaming. Ordinary office workers kill time with fantasy football or style blogs; IT guys always killed it with Quake.

It was called "Google's experiment with gaming" when it launched an abortive Second Life clone and shut it down a few weeks later. Not only was that a horrendous misnomer - that nonsense wasn't a game in the slightest - but the press sounded as if they permanently shut a door on Google's entry into an ever-growing market. Google stuck its toes in the water, the water was filled with piranhas, Google will never go near the water again. In truth, the Goog ignored the possibilities entirely, and its lack of gaming projects has left them excluded from a marketing sector.

If I had been a Google employee in the last 10 years, I would've done some stuff that gamers have wanted ever since I was just sinking my teeth into Quake III a decade ago. Stuff like:

Stats and Web integration across games
Quake III was barely on store shelves, and a stats company had emerged to track in-game performance and relay that back out to a bracket website. Basically, it automated pro gaming tournaments, gave fans the scores and numbers they wanted, and was viewable to both tournament attendees and fans spread around the world. Modern pro tournament organizers are still doing a lot of this stuff by hand, and that's shameful given the technology that was needed to give birth to pro gaming. It's just a tee-tiny baby step to bring this stuff back. 

And thankfully, someone is bringing it back. Bungie integrated basic online stats lookups in Halo 2, and really unleashed its potential with Halo 3. Players are getting a kick out of following their numbers (like accuracy, favorite weapons, best-performing maps, most likely areas to die) as much as simple stuff like Achievements. A few strategy-game makers are following suit, and Blizzard is sure to make a big feature out of it in StarCraft II. Valve also keeps detailed stats on its games for balancing and anti-cheating purposes, but its keeps all its data to itself.

Now imagine that this fun stuff wasn't limited to one AAA game every three years. Had Google thought to offer its quantitative expertise to gaming, gamers might have taken advantage by forming clans around the best-performing players, or speeding up the balance-tweaking cycle. It might have even given rise to some cool products, like Fantasy StarCraft for Korean fans. At the very least, Google would have had its name slapped on every game that had decided to open up to a sort of Google Games API.

Shareable video recordings of games
10 years ago, there were "demos," which were the term for saved replays of games. Entire matches were recorded and then could be replayed from any number of perspectives. This never really went away in PC strategy games, but they were once a standard-issue in FPS games, disappeared, and then reappeared as "replays" a couple years ago in Halo 3. These are distinct from the highlight videos you see on YouTube because "demos" or replays use game-specific data to be replayed inside the game itself. Instead of a 30-minute match weighing 500MB of compressed video, it's a 2MB game-readable data file. That's great if you own the game, but not so great if you usually play at your friend's house or just want to show off a quick move to a friend. 

As soon as the cloud took shape, the computing horsepower at Google should have tied game replays and YouTube together. Upload a 2MB demo, and in 5 minutes you have a YouTube link to your amazing come-from-behind victory for all to see. Now, Bungie is experimenting with selling this service with Halo 3 replays - but why sell a service specific to one game when Google could sell YouTube video overlay ads that are actually decently targeted to viewers for once?

------------

Hopefully those two examples show just how much impact Google could have on gaming, depending on what resources the company put to use. Whatever happened to using 20 percent time to innovate (Maps, Docs, Voice) instead of trying to replicate social networking services (the Second Life knockoff, Latitude, Wave, the list will probably go on)?

C'mon, Google. Ask around. There has to be a gamer or two in that GooglePlex of yours somewhere. Let 'em make a contribution - it could be really valuable.