blakerson.com

I joined that team this week, and I made myself useful already by proofreading a final report that's going out to press in the next couple of weeks. Once it's out, I'll link the finished product. It's basically a census of all the "information" that's floating around out there, whether digitally or in print or on TV.

From here on, I'll probably be focusing my research on gaming issues, which should be a lot of fun while building some valuable experience at the same time. The plans are really preliminary, but I might be looking into systems like OnLive to see if they're really feasible. In theory, I'll be starting a research blog, which will be boring and dry but might be interesting to the gamers among us.

I've always been driven by solving problems in gaming. I tried to do it as a writer and wasn't very effective, but when big companies are pouring money into your work, they tend to listen. I'm pretty psyched for the chance to really try to actually solve some problems.

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.

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.

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.

It's remarkable how much career-oriented progress I'm making after just a couple of days of real-deal school. I needed an answer to the extremely frequent question "what's your career goal?" and the answer of "video games" just became habit. 

Everything else is just falling into line. I'm exploring game-related work for next summer and letting it shape the work I'm doing here, from research to topics for Japanese assignments.

I was so busy doing all that that I missed the real-world culmination of what I wanna do: the Tokyo Game Show, or Japan's E3. I went back and caught up on the news this morning, and I have a few observations:

-Final Fantasy 13 will be fantastic, following the theory that every FF game on a new platform is a classic: 4, 7, 10. Wow. If you just keep counting by 3s, you get the original Final Fantasy (unarguably a classic, look what it spawned) and, of course, 13. Maybe we should update the theory.

-Hideo Kojima is Japan's best export. Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker will be fantastic. See for yourself:

-Microsoft Natal came to Japan! People are playing Katamari Damacy with it, by kinda doing this retarded swimming motion, and now I understand the skeptics. Buuuuuuut...

-Natal could have some really broad implications. MS had another fantastic showing in Tokyo this year, and they had a panel where a trio of famous Japanese designers just started tossing around ideas for what you could do with the technology. Kojima was on the panel, and while he of course stated that he has some fantastic ideas for games that recognize your appearance and interact with you that way, his thoughts on the device itself were more telling: Medical imaging, or security cameras, could benefit from the tech.

That's huge. Suppose the technology works well enough to identify you from a relative distance away, say 15 feet. Tie that into the cloud, or Facebook, and you've instantly established a working surveillance society.

In short, TGS has had some really fantastic timing in terms of my life here. Professors, who I'm meeting for the first time, ask what I want to do, and now I can point a finger to this show and say "this." By which I mean "games industry + business development + exciting new technologies + big companies like MS + Japan." They may not get it themselves, but the important thing is that I'm able to answer the question.

Dear Blogger,

You have been utterly fantastic for the last 8 years - that's beyond an eternity in Internet Time - but our time together is coming to an end.

While your service was groundbreaking back in 2001 - "a free service that lets you make your own news site!?" the times have changed, blogging has become its own monster, and the art and science of writing your own ramblings have greatly moved forward. You, unfortunately, have not.

Which is why I've moved to posterous, a wonderful new blog provider that automates everything. I'm writing this post just by sending an email to post@posterous.com - brilliant, right? It even does cool things with video, audio, and photos, like automatically embedding video links, turning recorded audio into a podcast feed, and making galleries out of photos. I'm attaching a few recent fun pics from California out of principle. I've been exposed to the genius of the whole thing by Aroon, who has suddenly gotten back into the blogging biz because of it.

For readers, the move gives you more options to see my silliness. Facebook, as always, will get my newest posts, and the 'old' Blogger site will continue to be fed the posts from the 'new' site for as long as it's feasible. Twitter, as well, will get some love. Long story short: you don't have to update your bookmarks if you don't want to, but just entering snagger.org in your browser will ensure that you see what I intend for you to see.

I also want to thank Emily, whose flawless design work has stayed standing on my Blogger-based site for at least half an eternity (again, measured in Internet Time) - and will for half an eternity more.

As for me, I've felt the need to spruce things up on my own blog for a while now, but as Emily's talents have made her too busy in recent times I was left in a bind. With this move, I get a simple and clean new look, the technical things get easier, and more people get these posts in more ways.

It's a win-win-win, unless you're Blogger. In any case, here's to 8 more years of sharing and theorizing.

Love,

Blake