Friday, September 25, 2009

Project 10 to the 100 remerges from the depths of Google (Vote until the 8th of October)

About 1 year ago Google announced a seemingly interesting little project called 10^100, which happens to be the number that the name Google comes from, correctly spelt Googol. In any case, the project involved people everywhere submitting ideas to change the world and Google dedicated 10 Million dollars to help get some of the projects off the ground.

At the time of its announcement a public voting stage was to occur after several weeks of review from google. Things did not go according to plan. They received more ideas than the had expected, more than 150,000 in fact, from all over the world. In any case this slowed the project significantly and the voting stage was delayed; for almost 1 year.

Today Google has announced that voting is open however on review of the 16 ideas one can vote on, one notices that each are quite broad and each are relatively obvious ones. The kind of thing you might think of walking home late at night thinking about how you want to change the world. (Does anyone else do that?)

So Google encourages us to vote before the 8th of October. It will be interesting to see how the public responds to these kinds of ideas and perhaps it will be good indication of an area to concentrate some effort in the future.

Go Vote! http://www.project10tothe100.com/vote.html

Posted via web from Mark Whiting's posterous

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

There is Something More About Korea

Kim Miru is not only doing great things but reminds me of some of the reasons I enjoy Korea so much. This may sound strange but I think, the way she talks and thinks and formulates such an interesting outcome with what I see as such clear and honest logic all contribute to the model I find so appealing here. Of course this is not the only model in Korea and of course there are many aspects of the modern culture which I do not adore, for example the undue regard for certain hierarchical relationships which tend to reduce the opportunity for good innovation and changemakeing, see the Korean Air case

I am also hoping to do some urban spelunking myself in the coming months as there are what look to be a few interesting places under Daejeon and Seoul.

Posted via email from Mark Whiting's posterous

Some (Old) Thoughts on Design

I was looking threw some old stuff and found this short description of some notions in design I like. I think this has not changed since I wrote it about a year ago but it has developed a bit. Perhaps I should put together a newer perspective. 

Anyway, it would be nice to know what you think.

For a little context on my work, below is a brief outline of my design ideologies. 

My ultimate goal in design is to use contextually aware and honest information in order to improve human happiness and progress through the development of elegant designed-systems and the implementation of appropriate strategies. 

First, I believe in the generation of a fundamental knowledge schema derived from investigating the underlying problems that cause the problems we usually set about solving. Essentially, I think a good comprehension of problems and ways to represent them clearly are invaluable but uncommon tools in the design process. 

Second, I strongly uphold a sense of “honest” information: quite simply, the clarity, relevance, and truthfulness of data and how it is used to make decisions. I think “honest” information and systems are a key to both good human interaction and truly sustainable design. One aspect of design that exemplifies this idea, to me, are the design principles which drive open formats: they are designed to do just enough and not more in order to maximise transparency, simplicity of interface, and extensibility. 

Third, I find great pleasure in approaching problems with all the available resources and information while maintaining a strong willingness to discard traditional methods of finding solutions. I think history is one of our greatest design tools, whether it be used through bio-mimicry or simply studying the Greeks. I do believe that the current level of historical sensitivity and appreciation is low. This is not to say that design should be an archaeological exploration; I simply think that we are not referencing our ancestors' creative solutions and processes. 

Fourth, I see it as a goal of humanity to approach life as a potentially meaningful expedition. Having lived and travelled in poorer parts of the world and befriended people from a variety of cultures and of a range of personality types, I feel increasingly that the progress many Western countries uphold comes only at a grave cost to human happiness. I feel that people I have met in almost every other context are happier and more engaged with their own lives than those in many Western countries, despite the differences in medicine, technology, and economy that are often used to make poorer and less "developed" countries seem disadvantaged. My hope is to help normalise the notion of progress globally as a way of improving the life expedition of the world's population - improving the actual quality of life, as opposed to the standard of living as typically measured by GDP, poverty rate, income inequality quotients, etc. 

Finally, and in some ways a combination of the previous points, my hope is to use clear, fundamental knowledge with empathetic and honest ideologies to create designed-systems that are globally conscious, to be used realistically and advantageously to improve value. 

I know this goal, both generally and with all of the limited specificity I provide, is common among many individuals and largely seen as being unachievable, however, I think with the five elements of methodology I have mentioned and a boundless passion for simply making things better the difficulties can be reduced. I think there is a good model to role out improvement to anything considerable by design or innovation and while I think that model is well represented in the appropriate technology school of thought, I think a complete and brighter future will be facilitated by universally appropriating solutions for their contexts. I believe in working to bring a better future sooner.

Posted via email from Mark Whiting's posterous

Monday, September 21, 2009

Inappropriate Technology (More Appropriate Technology)

"Phone numbers written on the wall of this old-market Kashi apartment block - being able to call ahead potentially saving visitors a journey up 3 flights of stairs. The practice becomes practical when the visitor is carrying a personal communication device." Jan Chipchase

I really like the little things we can use big technology for. It is a very interesting phenomenon though not a strong trend in the west as far as I have seen.

What do you think?

Posted via web from Mark Whiting's posterous

Friday, September 18, 2009

The World in Food

These images come from an interesting campaign for the Sydney International Food Festival. I like them because this is often how I think of countries, by their foods. I think living somewhere where you can get food that makes you happy is crucial to having a good time over a prolonged period. I wish there were more foods represented by these flags as many of the foods I associate with these nations are not represented, but I think it is a pretty neat effort none the less. 

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Mark Whiting's posterous

Meetings that make you want to sing

I like meetings which are made up of a room full of people who all contribute in interesting and relevant ways in response to one another. Other kinds of meetings seem to almost always be bad.

I am not sure if I can think of other kinds of meetings which are good. Can you suggest any ways in which an alternative model is a lot of fun? 

Actually, I think classes should undergo similar treatment. I really don't like classes that are just listening, however a friend reminded me that potentially some members of some classes will not produce valuable comments, to which I think the only response is to remodel both the classes and the student base until a good match is found. 

What do you think?

Posted via email from Mark Whiting's posterous

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Real world tips on running distributed studios

This seems to me to be a great selection of tips on how to effectively run a distributed studio or workgroup. This is interesting to me because I travel a lot and I like to work with people who are often on the other side of the world. I think with some of these practices, many great things can happen and perhaps, practices of this kind can offer a much stronger future for people engaged in small specialty firms.

On aspect mentioned by the author, Christopher Natsuume, which brings some interesting ideas is that of scalable teams which need not deal with many expenses of keeping people involved. However the really interesting opportunity here is to create specialisations which can be offered more easily to a wider selection of companies etc. This is a little related to the term coopetition which people have been talking about a bit recently and is a quite interesting model for new businesses.

Introduction

Boomzap is a completely virtual studio. We have no physical office, and everyone works from home on a flexible schedule. Our team includes about a dozen full-time, exclusive contractors in America, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Russia, and the Philippines. Some of our core team members have never met in person, and most of them see each other about once a year. Even more confusing, many of our staff members live very mobile lives: For instance, I split my time between Seattle, Singapore, and Yokohama. We have been doing this successfully since 2005.

I get a lot of questions about how we make all of this work, and I would like to share that with you. Although this article will likely be of most use to other small, outsource-heavy studios like ours, managers in larger traditional studios may find some useful information here as well. But first, I’d like to explain why we do business the way we do, and what the benefits of a work-from-home, distributed business model are:

  • Access to the Best Developers in the World: We can hire anyone anywhere, and not worry about relocation, visas, etc. And our employees don’t have to uproot and leave their communities to work with us. In fact, we have people happily working for us hundreds of miles from the nearest game studio, in places other game developers would not think of living.

 

  • Lower Labor Costs + Cost of Living Adjustments = Happy Developers: While wages in Asia are not as low as many North American developers would hope, our staff costs are certainly competitive. But for us, instead of seeing this as a chance to get dirt cheap labor, we see it as a chance to create a competitive advantage in our development environment. Rather than adjusting our salary rates down in those countries where we could get away with it, we peg all of our company compensation to Singapore wages, regardless of location. While this policy may not be best for developers in the US or UK, it makes our staff in places like Russia, Malaysia, and the Philippines some of the best paid developers in their local communities. This allows us to hire the absolute best in those regions—and keep them very happy.
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  • Lower Support/Overhead Costs: We don’t pay for office space, computers, electricity, coffee machines—or even paper clips. We do pay a little more to our developers to make sure they can afford the equipment they need, but come on—they are game developers; they are going to have the best machines they can afford at home whether we pay for it or not. We just avoid unnecessarily duplicating that cost at the office, and let them put that savings in their pockets as compensation.
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  • Freedom to Efficiently Mix Personal and Professional Time: Our model allows everyone in the company to adjust their work schedules to mix with their personal schedules in the most efficient manner for them. This not only saves time that might otherwise be wasted on commuting (for example), it also allows our staff to do things that they couldn’t easily do in a more traditional office—like go to school part time, teach a class, or whatever. The value of that freedom—and the happiness it creates—cannot be overstated. It points out that the benefits of working for an organization like ours extend far beyond time and money.
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  • Work/Life Balance + $$$ = Loyal and Dedicated Staff
    To be clear, the end effect of this is that our staff loves working for Boomzap. Any manager knows that retaining good staff is one of the keys to growth, and our structure not only allows us to pick the best staff from around the world, it helps us retain them. In fact, since 2005 we have not had a single staff member leave voluntarily.
  • Sounds like a pretty good deal, right? Well, it is. But the trick is that you can’t run a virtually-distributed studio like this in the same way you run a more traditional studio. While there isn’t enough space to explain all of our management strategies in detail, let me share with you our Top 10 strategies for running a virtual development studio. To be clear, this is what works for us, and depending on your team, pipeline, and structure, these suggestions may or may not work for you. So judge and use accordingly.

    Ten Commandments

    #1: We Don’t Track Hours—Ever

    The #1 question I get about managing Boomzap is: “How do you know if they are working or not?” That’s simple: I don’t care. I know how much work a professional developer should get done in about 40 hours a week. I assign that work every Monday, and I expect it to be done by the end of the week. If it is, I don’t care how long it took them to do. If it’s not, they work through the weekend to make it happen. In point of fact, I hope they are doing it in less than 40 hours, and using the rest to do . . . whatever else makes them happy.

    The economics of this are simple: If you want to reward the staff for working quickly, you can’t make “hours worked” a constant, because then only quality and quantity remain variable. In a traditional situation where “hours worked” is a constant, the reward for working quickly and efficiently is just getting more work. Worse yet, in that traditional model you end up offloading work from crappy workers to top workers since the top workers are going to be chewing through more tasks in the same time. Thus, you inadvertently create a “do less work” reward for crappy workers while punishing the good ones in direct proportion to their efficiency. That really sucks.

    Instead, at Boomzap we hold quantity and quality as a constant, and allow the staff to use time as an adjustable variable: They have a set task list and a minimum standard bar, and they set their own schedules for completing their work. If they can get good work done faster, their reward is that they get the rest of the time off, and if they can’t, they will quickly find that they are working a lot of weekends. In this model, inefficient workers self-select for removal from the team, as they will end up working a lot of overtime (and probably leave). At the same time, efficient workers find themselves with more free time—in direct proportion to their efficiency—and free time is a form of additional compensation. Having your best workers compensated daily results in good juju.

    #2: We Do Daily Builds

    In a studio where you can’t just walk the halls, go see what people are working on, and give them input, it is critical that you have a mechanism for checking what people are doing that gets them the feedback they need on a daily basis. To solve this, we have a super strict policy on daily builds. At the end of every day, there is a new build of the game with all new art and design assets included. We judge the staff by this, and nothing else. At least 90% of my communication to the staff is based on direct feedback on the daily build. I make sure the staff gets this feedback every day so that they know if they are going in the right direction. This process of daily builds and reviews is the lifeblood of our company. When it breaks down, the projects break down.

    #3: We Mix Full-time Contractors with Project-based Contracted Specialists

    There is no point in tying up your best resources with work that could be done perfectly well by more junior staff, or work that could be done faster or better by specialists. The trouble is that keeping junior staff or specialists on permanent salary is expensive. So what we do is keep senior generalists on staff to create the structure and core design of the game, and then we outsource the bulk asset production to specialists and managed studios that we hire on task-based contracts. Since more than half of the people working on Boomzap projects at any time are these one-off specialist contractors, we can interchange about half of our total game development force at any time depending on our needs—or scale back to less than half our team without laying anyone off. This is hugely powerful in controlling cash flow.

    The key is that we’re not outsourcing so that we can pay our outsource partners less. In fact, some of our contractors are much more expensive than our core staff. We’re outsourcing to move the risk of idle time out of our studio. For instance, we outsource all web work, all sound, and all bulk production of hand-painted backgrounds and portraits. This is all work that specialists can do quickly to a high level of quality, and work that we only need for certain stages of production. We pay more for them when we use them, but we make that back in savings by “firing them” when we don’t need them.

    #4: We Hire Full-time Staff Primarily Based on Character

    Our model is great for mature, motivated staff capable of high levels of self-discipline. Sadly, there are a lot of great programmers, artists, and designers out there who don’t have the personality to work from home on their own schedule effectively. You have to be very careful to test for this, and not hire those people.

    We do this by having a full-month test followed by a three-month probation period before anyone enters the studio—even developers we know well. The month test is skill-based and answers the core questions about whether one is capable of doing the work or not. The three-month probation is personality-based, and answers questions about self-management abilities. In the few cases where we shortened that three-month period, we regretted it. We have even started lengthening that period for people who we don’t actually know personally.

    The bottom line here is that if you are going to have people working within this model, recognize up front that some people—including some great people—just won’t work out. But for those who are independent and self-motivated, our model works very, very well.

    A side note on this: some people have interpreted this issue as “virtual studios cannot hire young or inexperienced developers” – which we categorically disagree with. Some of our best workers are young, highly motivated interns, and some of the people that didn’t work out were highly trained professionals who had long since gotten used to the old way of doing things in a game studio, and were unable to adapt. The issue here is less about experience and more about motivation and personality.

    #5: We Delegate Authority to a Project-based “Confederation” Structure

    Another question I get often about the Boomzap structure is: “How do you manage all of those people when you can’t meet with them or talk to them?” Which is just another way for a producer to ask: “How do you get everyone on the staff to do exactly what you want?” The answer to that is simple. We don’t. Everyone in the company is assigned to a specific project. They know what project they are working on, and within that project they have enormous freedom and power. Our designs are very high-level by design, as are our tasks. We don’t micromanage our staff—not just because we hate micromanagement, but because doing that by email is prohibitively time-consuming. Instead, we create small groups of three-to-four people that are empowered to go make these games on their own. We manage them very loosely and give them the freedom to make their own decisions.

    This functions much more like a confederation of independent projects than the more centralized structure of many other studios. Each team has the independence and authority to make large changes to the design and product without having to check with the “central powers” and as a result, the central overhead becomes much smaller. To be clear, in a system with strong project teams, this works great. In a system with weak teams that need more oversight, this system would likely fail. So knowing your staff capabilities is key.

    That being said, it is important to note that key to doing this well is being able to accept good work you didn’t expect. All too often studios spend a lot of time chasing a single vision-holder’s dream for a project, and they end up in an endless cycle of revisions trying to perfect that vision. The trick to delegation and empowerment is being able to look at work that is not completely what you expected and/or wanted and objectively judge whether it is good work. Doing so has two great effects: 1) Your staff will really feel empowered when they see that the work they are doing gets put in the game without constantly being retooled to fit someone else’s vision; and 2) Sometimes you’ll get stuff that is actually better than what you had in mind.

    Remember, delegation is not just the delegation of work, it is the delegation of responsibility. If you want a team to truly start taking some responsibility for their work, you cannot constantly undermine their efforts by forcing them to revise work just because it’s not what you would have done. “Is this what I wanted?” is not the question. You’re better off asking: “Is this something the customer would enjoy?”

    #6: We Hire Managers Who Can Actually Do Things

    One of the great benefits of our model is that it’s impossible to hide workers who aren’t contributing. Middle managers who lurk in the corners of larger studios “optimizing procedures” and “facilitating meetings” don’t actually have anything to do in a virtual business model. And we haven’t missed them a bit. Everyone on the team, the founders included, do real live production tasks like scripting, testing, and level design. Because the only way we can judge the staff is by assets produced and placed in the build, the incentive to actually produce things is pretty overpowering. Better yet, because our managers are actually forced to work intimately with the technology, they are more in tune with what the rest of the staff is doing, and can better judge the time required for tasks, etc. This is all to the good.

    #7: We Depend on the Three P’s: PowerPoint, Prototypes, Photoshop

    I hope I am not the first person to tell you this, but nobody reads design documents. In fact, when working at larger studios, I made a habit of inserting the line “I will pay $5 to anyone who reads this sentence” into the center of any document over 50 pages. In 10 years of development nobody ever asked for their money. That’s a true story. Problematically, the industry has solved this problem by holding meetings. Lots of meetings. Since we can’t do that, we have to find a different path.

    For starters, we do the initial design for a game by using short PowerPoint presentations full of diagrams, scanned-in drawings, references from other games, and Google images. (That’s right: Not a Word document.) The PowerPoint is generally a mockup of every major screen in the game—with minimal text callouts—describing what the game will look like and how it will play. Next, we let the programmers build a rough prototype version of the design using a bunch of grey boxes and placeholder art cut from the PowerPoint slides. When this is playable, we have something to reference in our notes and MSN discussions. The prototype and a daily sheet of notes referencing it and suggesting changes becomes the “design document.” When we finally have the prototype really fun and playable, the artists take screenshots of the demo and attack them in Photoshop, creating mockups of the final screens as they will look to the player.

    When we have all of that, we go into full production. Usually someone will sit down with the PowerPoint and the prototype and create a series of simple lists that defines the tasks to be done to complete the production of the game—which is as close to a design document as most of our games ever get. Most of our games have shipped with less than 20 pages of documentation, and we still wonder if that’s too much.

    #8: We Use “Producer-Programmers”

    Another powerful secret to our development is that every project is run by a “producer programmer”—a highly skilled programmer who not only writes the core game code for the game, but who oversees the actual production of all assets for the game. We build our teams like this for a couple of reasons, the most important of which is that the producer working with the artists and sound designers on the project is the actual person adding those assets to the game. This removes many steps of conversation in the team and solves a lot of unnecessary communication issues. Additionally, it allows the producer to directly test and prototype new ideas—without the communication cycle of a producer explaining and a programmer interpreting that explanation.

    #9: We Create An “Idiot-proof” Pipeline

    Development studios often spend a lot of “communication time” trying to help artists, designers, and musicians get their work into a game. Because we can’t have two or three people sitting at a desk sorting out these problems, and because expecting our programmers to document labor intensive pipeline processes is both wasteful and naïve (as anyone who has ever asked indie programmers to write documentation knows!), we go to great lengths to make the tools for driving the assets into the game as simple as possible.

    Our biggest tool for this is Excel, which we use to generate any script in the game including sprite lists, sound files, level design variables, object variables, localization strings, etc. The Excel sheets have a big EXPORT button that spits out a script, and nobody has the ability to break anything in script. Remember, automization means that all errors are systematic errors, and those are easier to both find and fix. And because anyone can read an Excel sheet and fill in variables, most people can figure out how to get their assets into the game without ever talking to a programmer.

    Our level design tools are similarly simple. They are all WYSIWYG mouse-driven editors that are directly accessible from within the game engine—which allows our designers to get in and effectively build and test levels within a few minutes. Because the producer who defines what datasets are going to be manipulated in the game is also the one making the export sheets and editor, this process ensures a high level of idiot-proofing.

    #10: We Hire Only Technical Artists

    Finally, we don’t actually have very many artists on full-time staff. We outsource most of the bulk art creation, especially the creation of assets like decals, backgrounds, portraits, and story art. All of this can be done quickly and efficiently by outsourced teams and returned to us in simple files that can be dropped into place with minimal integration work. The artists on staff are technical artists who handle things that require a deeper knowledge of our tools and technology—things like fonts, animated objects, particles, and user interface. This saves us the cost of keeping specialized concept artists on staff, but also protects us from the lost efficiency that would come from training contract workers to create assets according to a complex technical specification.

    Nine Essential Tools for a Virtual Studio

    These are some actual tools we use in our studio to help support our virtual development environment. This is not a sales pitch for any of these products, but they are working well for us as we operate a studio in which anyone, including the founders, can be anywhere in the world for essentially any length of time. You may have better ideas, but this is what works for us:
    1. CVS: If you aren’t using some kind of online source control and backup system, it’s just a matter of time before you will deal with some HD-crash-induced or file-swapping nightmare scenario that will cost weeks or months of manpower. While this is true for any studio, the odds of file management disasters are much higher in a virtual model. Which software you use is unimportant, but you really should be using something. We use CVS, but that’s just a personal preference from our technical director. Whichever one works for you is fine.

     

  • Basecamp: A nifty online team collaboration tool that we use for our projects. A cheap $25-a-month subscription gives us the ability to create as many project groups as we need, giving our publishing partners direct access to our daily project management and creating a single record of all design/production conversations. For things like posting the daily builds/notes, this is simply invaluable. The best part of it is that it can be configured to send email out when messages are posted, and you can reply directly to messages in your mail client and have them posted to Basecamp without opening a browser. Very cool.
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  • MSN Messenger: Our studio lives and breathes on MSN. We require all staff to be online and on MSN when they are working. In addition, they must set it to “auto-select away” when they are AFK so we know when they are available during the day to talk. We also ask them to set the “personal note” to let us know what they are up to. So if they go to the doctor, they add “at doctor until 3:00,” or if they are working on a particular part of a project they might add something like “drawing backgrounds.” Now everyone knows what everyone is doing without anyone needing to bother anyone. Also, if people want to be left alone, they set their MSN to busy. We have a strict “don’t bug busy workers unless it’s an emergency” rule, so people who want to really concentrate on their coding without constant interruption can keep focused, but they are still available if we have some kind of serious issue that’s stopping other workers.
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  • SkypeIn and SkypeOut: Aside from the free Skype-to-Skype calls we do between staff regularly, SkypeOut will let you call a real phone anywhere in the world from any internet connected computer. With a decent headset the connection is usually better than a cell phone, and at two cents a minute, its darn near free. Better yet, you can set up a SkypeIn number that lets people call your Skype account as though they were making a local call. We have ours set up in Seattle, since most of the distributors we work with are there, and dialing a 206 number makes them feel warm and fuzzy. Better yet, you can have your SkypeIn calls forwarded to any phone anywhere, including your cell phone. And it has voice mail! The end effect? People in the states can call you for free at the same number, regardless of where you are in the world, and you can call anywhere for two cents a minute. There—your telecommunication problems are over.
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  • Earth Class Mail: How do you keep publishers from sending checks and contracts to the wrong address? First of all, push them to do everything electronically. Automated Clearing House (ACH) is free, and pretty much any contract can be scanned and PDF-converted. As for the few Luddites who feel the need to write checks and send snail mail, set up a mailbox at Earth Class Mail. They’ll scan the envelope of any incoming mail, and send you an email about it. You can then forward it, shred it, or have them open and scan it for you – all from a web browser. It’s not free, but for the few mails you have to get, it’s pretty cheap. They have sites around the states (ours is in Seattle, perpetuating the pleasant illusion that we have a Seattle office). Be careful, though: When you set this up, choose the non-PO-box option, because sometimes you’ll deal with people or services that won’t deliver to a PO Box.
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  • MyFax: If you have a scanner there is no reason on earth to have a fax machine. Set up an account at MyFax, and have all of your faxes delivered to your email. It’s simple, clean, and dirt cheap. And more importantly, you end up with a permanent, US-based, toll-free fax number that never changes, regardless of where you go.
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  • PayPal: I don’t need to tell you that if you need to pay people internationally, PayPal is the only way to go. We use this for all of our contractors in the US and Europe, and not only does it get them paid immediately, it creates a great record of all payments out. Also, since you can use a number of different solutions for paying into your PayPal account, you can play with this to create short-term credit for cash-crunch situations at relatively low cost.
  • NOTE: The author has dropped usage of PayPal since the service added a "rather onerous" international payment fee to a lot of countries, including those in which BoomZap operates. They are currently looking for an alternate solution, however until now PayPal has served them well and could still be considered for your individual needs

     

  • Your Mailing List Provider: if you are running a casual game studio, you’re going to be sending a lot of emails. There are a lot of solutions, but cost for value, we’ve had pretty good luck with YMLP.com. It has good tools for importing addresses from various sources and collecting addresses from our website. Most importantly, you can get to your entire mailing list from anywhere, without even needing access to your laptop. It’s also useful when you are sharing mailing responsibilities, so you can have different people working with your mailing list without anyone swapping files, and with everyone being able to see a clear record of what was sent when.
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  • Portable Equipment: Last but not least, make sure when you are buying equipment, that you consider portability. My home work station is an Acer laptop with internal camera and a small second flat-screen monitor with a folding base. I also have a portable USB-powered flatbed scanner, a mini-printer, and a headset for Skyping. The whole lot of it fits in a single carry-on suitcase (though I am not a popular guy at the security stations at airports!). I can pack my entire “development studio” in about 3 minutes and take it anywhere. My office is anywhere there is an Internet connection and a table. A note: Try to buy only peripherals that power off the USB. This is super useful when traveling overseas, allowing you to essentially use your laptop as a power converter for everything else.
  • Conclusion

    I don’t pretend that our approach to development would work for everybody, but I can tell you this: It works very well for us. I hope this is useful to you, and hope even more that you’ll contact me with your thoughts and suggestions of how you have tackled similar problems in your own studio.

     

    Posted via web from Mark Whiting's posterous

    Saturday, September 12, 2009

    Dokdo

    To me this is a really lovely and elegant depiction. I hope more people can learn to do this

    Posted via web from Mark Whiting's posterous

    VECSiD Workshop at KAIST (in Korea)

    VECSiD is a project I am working on at KAIST with the Graduat School of Cultural Technology. The project is headed by Prof. JiHyun Lee and my role has been in developing a meta grammar, or a system of ideas to help create communicable cultural linkages.

    Rather soon we are holding a workshop for this project and I would like to invite anyone interested, and in Korea on the 24th and 25th of this month, to register and attend. Bellow is the invitation copy: 

    We cordially invite you to take part in a workshop and tutorial for the VECSiD Project (Visual Exploration of Cultural Style in Design) which will commence on September 24th 2009. We will involve several professors and researchers contributing to the project, from KAIST, Loughborough University, Sultan Qaboos University, The Open University, University of Leeds, and university of Hawaii. This project aims to define the distinguishing elements of Korean and Spanish traditional patterns and in doing so, define a new way of approaching the analysis of traditional elements for cultural comparison. The project also aims to produce a generalized tool for this purpose based on the concept of Cultural DNA and a meta-grammar approach. 
     
    We hope to see you at the workshop.
     
    Below is the program we will follow;
     
    [DAY 1 (September 24) – WORKSHOP]
    09:00 – 09:15 Tea & Coffee
    09:15 – 09:45 Welcome Address 
    09:45 – 10:30 Presentation I: Korean Patterns
    10:30 – 11:15 Presentation II: Spanish Patterns
    11:15 – 11:30 Coffee Break
    11:30 – 12:30 Discussion I: Comparison between current Korean & Spanish pattern study 
    12:30 – 14:00 Lunch
    14:00 – 15:00 Discussion II: Cultural DNA & a formal approach for the study of culture 
    15:00 – 15:45 Discussion III: Cultural DNA & a formal approach for the study of culture 
    15:45 – 16:00 Coffee Break 
    16:00 – 16:30 Presentation I: Korean Patterns
    16:30 – 17:00 Presentation II: Spanish Patterns
    17:00 – 17:15 Break 
    17:15 – 18:00 Summary and Q&A
     
    [DAY 2 (September 25) – TUTORIAL] 
    09:00 - 09:15 Tea & Coffee 
    09:15 - 10: 45 Introduction to VECSiD project
    10:45 - 11:15 Process of developing a Korean pattern , Bosangwhamun
    11:15 - 12:45 Process of developing Spanish Patterns 
    12:45 - 14:00 Lunch 
    14:00 - 15:30 Hands-on exercise (Korean pattern variations) 
    15:30 - 17:00 Hands-on Exercise (Spanish Pattern Variations)
    17:00 - 17:15 Break 
    17:15 - 17:45 Summary and closing remarks of 2009 VECSiD Workshop 
     
    If you are interested in taking part in the workshop, please register by 20th of September. For Registration, you may visit our website and follow the link of the registration form or write to the following email address. When you register, please specify your name, telephone number, e-mail address and student status (Master or PhD student).
    Many Thanks,
    VECSiD Preparation Committees
    Jieun Park, Mark Whiting, Sun-joong Kim, Haelee Jung

    I have also included a few images of the kinds of patterns we are using as cultural artefacts. 

    See the full gallery on posterous

    vecsid.pdf (1760 KB)
    View this on posterous

    Posted via email from Mark Whiting's posterous

    Friday, September 11, 2009

    iDesignThinking

    A pretty interesting little site with some nice definitions of Design Thinking and other related concepts. In particular I like this suggested definition:

    "Design thinking is what people do when they pursue their goals. Everyone focuses their thinking in order to satisfy wants and needs regarding a particular situation. They recognize and define information relevant to their purpose, consider alternatives, decide what to do, do it, determine if they are satisfied with the results, and if not, revise their approach until they are successful, all while learning through the experience."

    I am all about little d design. I really think it is a toolset that the world could benefit a lot from using more frequently.

    Posted via web from Mark Whiting's posterous

    Thursday, September 10, 2009

    HOW WE DECIDE: mind-blowing neuroscience of decision-making - Boing Boing

    Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide is the latest in a series of popular neuroscience books (Brain Rules, Stumbling on Happiness, Mind Wide Open, The Brain that Changes Itself) to (literally) blow my mind.

    Lehrer, author of the celebrated Proust Was a Neuroscientist, lays out the current state of the neuroscientific research into decision-making with a series of gripping anaecdotes followed by reviews of the literature and interviews with the researchers responsible for it.

    Lehrer is interested in the historic dichotomy between "emotional" decision-making and "rational" decision-making and what modern neuroscience can tell us about these two modes of thinking. One surprising and compelling conclusion is that people who experience damage to the parts of their brain responsible for emotional reactions are unable to decide, because their rational mind dithers endlessly over the possible rational reasons for each course of action. The Platonic ideal of a rational being making decisions without recourse to the wordless gut-instinct is revealed as a helpless schmuck who can't answer questions as basic as "White or brown toast?"

    But overly emotional decisions are also likely to lead us into trouble. There is clearly a sweet-spot between white-hot emotional thinking and ice-cold reason, and Lehrer is trying to find it. By the end of the book, I'm nearly convinced he has.

    My copy of How We Decide has literally dozens of dogeared pages that I've marked to return to in this reviews as examples of the kind of thing that made me go Wow! and sometimes even buttonhole nearby friends to read them passages. I'll run a few down for you here:

    Lehrer's description of the amazing ability of dopamine to "predict" upcoming events is gripping all the way along, but I was delighted to learn that neuroscientists call signals for missed predictions (that is, the signal released when dopamine is released in anticipation of a reward that doesn't come), emanating from the anterior cingulate cortex the "Oh shit" circuit. The ACC is closely wired to the thalamus, so activation of the "Oh shit" circuit galvanizes the conscious mind, bringing the stimulus right to the front of our attention.

    These mistakes are critical to good decision-making, as they are our best tutors. Lehrer describes a famous study from Stanford psych research Carol Dweck, who administered easy tests to 10-year-olds, who did well on it. The control group was praised for "being smart." The experimental group was praised for "trying hard." With only this difference, the two groups were then administered progressively harder tests. Dweck discovered that the "smart" kids did worse: they believed their initial good result was due to some innate virtue beyond their ken or control, and feared that a failure would show that they lacked this intangible. But the "hard-trying" group had been rewarded for taking intellectual risks, and so they continued. Afterwards, the "smart" kids rated the hardest tests as their least favorite; the "tryers" rated it as their most favorite.

    A seemingly very interesting book. I think the ubiquitous use of functional psychological information is something this world is yet to experience. Positive psychology and other related things, like this book, seem to me to be working toward that end.

    Posted via web from Mark Whiting's posterous

    Wednesday, September 9, 2009

    The Leica X1 - Something retrofresh for the camera industry.

    Leica releasing this little camera is doing something which I quite adore, they are creating, perhaps the first, actual high end digital portable. The interesting point here is that several years ago this camera category was quite popular, especially in japan, with products like the Minolta TC1 (probably my favorite camera of all time), the Nikon 28 and 35 Ti, and Leica CM and Minilux lines among several others form other brands. In any case, these were a great bread of camera and until recently nobody had invested in putting something like them together for digital. The X1 is not exactly suited for this product category but seems to have some nice compromises. In comparison to it's nearest competition, Canon S90, Richo RD1 and 2, Lumix and Sigma DP1, this product seems to be way more likely to be a real camera.

    The one thing I think could do with some work is for them to have included a better lens. This one is not too bright with only F2.8 and perhaps a more Leica style fixed barrel lens would look and last better while giving them a platform to include better glass. If that was the case however, I think the X1 would be competing too strongly with the M8 for their liking.

    Posted via web from Mark Whiting's posterous

    Tuesday, September 8, 2009

    A strange ISP marketplace makes Australia a place not worth living in.

    Caps on broadband use are holding us back.

    ONE of the great anomalies of the Australian broadband industry is the existence of usage caps, which around the world are virtually non-existent.

    In the US, some internet providers have talked of a 250 gigabytes-a-month limit. That has led to consumer outrage that forced those providers to desist lest they lose customers. This is despite the fact only 0.003 per cent of US broadband users exceed that level - just 0.21 per cent exceed 100GB.

    To an outsider, the Australian system seems very strange. Telstra boasts a basic package on its BigPond Cable Extreme network that, for $39.95 a month, gives 200 megabytes in usage. At Telstra's boasted 30MB a second speeds, that amounts to a minute of high-quality video downloads. After that you pay 15¢ a megabyte. It is hard to imagine that being an option for consumers.

    But even its Liberty plan, which costs $69.95 and offers 12GB a month - after which the extreme speed is slowed to the speeds of last century - only allows you 20 hours of video watching a month, provided you do nothing else. That's about 45 minutes a night.

    No wonder so many people do their YouTube watching at work.

    Had the US and rest of the world had similar practices, requiring users to carefully watch their megabytes, YouTube and similar services would never had been conceived, let alone put into practice. Perhaps the carriers would have hosted content, under the cap, but then we would be in a world where they decided what we saw rather than the demonstrably better one where that choice is truly free.

    There are costs to bandwidth. But rather than being 15¢ a megabyte, they are in the order of 15¢ a gigabyte - or 1000 times less. So if you are using 500GB a month, you are costing your carrier $75 a month. It seems reasonable that you pay for it. But, in Australia, if you want to use 50GB a month, you'll pay $2.60 a gigabyte to Telstra. Paying for bandwidth is fine. Getting gouged for it is another matter.

    It is not just Telstra, although it has a special role. No internet provider in Australia offers a plan like they do in the US. The best ones are cheaper than Telstra but offer more by dividing between peak and off-peak use.

    They have not tried to grab market share by going for it and freeing people from dreaded usage monitoring.

    Why isn't competition working here? It is difficult to say but consider what would happen if a smaller provider lifted its cap to 250GB and charged 15¢ beyond that. It would attract a disproportionate share of those who would use that much. That may represent a small part of the market but a large part of its customers. Add to that the potential congestion caused by such usage - if concentrated in the evenings - on the equipment installed in Telstra exchanges, and that 15¢ a gigabyte may be something much larger.

    This is a problem that Telstra likely does not face. But it does face conflicts that might give it pause when lifting caps.

    For instance, a higher cap moves video watching online and out of the living room where Foxtel boxes reside. That is a cost it faces that others do not. But it is a cost borne of choice, the choice to be integrated with Foxtel.

    We are told that the new management of Telstra is more open and ready to meet the challenges brought about by the national broadband network. The NBN will have the capacity to break through usage caps. But why wait eight years?

    There is an opportunity for Telstra to demonstrate its new responsiveness and get rid of this anachronism. It could lift its Liberty plan to 100GB and likely face few additional costs if it charged 15¢ a gigabyte. It would send a strong signal to markets.

    For others, there is a similar route. Smaller providers need not offer high-cap plans widely, but, for example, as an employee deal with businesses they also serve.

    Think about it. Employees would be offered plans that gave them incentives to watch YouTube at home rather than at work. Employers would be happy and there would be only a marginal increase in traffic for the service provider as usage moved from work to home.

    There is a way out of tight usage caps that stifle appropriate internet use. These will not be costly given international experience, but will open up more services to broadband usage. The NBN will provide this, but Australians shouldn't have to wait that long.

    Joshua Gans is an economics professor at Melbourne Business School. He writes on these issues at economics.com.au

    I think internet quality is a significant determining factor in my decision of where to live. Now of course living in Korea I have very fast unlimited internet. In China however the network is rather slow for external sites which is one of the reasons I am not now living there. Similarly in Australia the situation is so ridiculous that in many towns working is almost impossible for me.

    Posted via web from Mark Whiting's posterous

    Sunday, September 6, 2009

    Healthy in Korea

    Having lived in Korea for 8 months now I think I am in many ways healthier than I have been for a while and I get sick much less frequently. I thank Kimchi.

    I should add, now when I eat almost any western food I can feel unhealthy elements and want to eat it much less. I no longer dream about eating cheese, chocolate and al dente tortellini.

    Posted via web from Mark Whiting's posterous

    Dark Roasted Blend

    Image: from, via

    I think Dark Roasted blend is one of my favorite.

    Posted via email from Mark Whiting's posterous

    Soccer Strategy and the Zen of Things

    Last night I watched the Korea - Australia soccer game in a bar here in Korea (Korea was victorious 3 - 1). As I watched it I began to think about the strategy problem facing each coach and each player on the field. My immediate reaction was firstly, that the strategies they seemed to be implementing were pretty unsophisticated, relatively in the box, and not all that good. As I considered ways to find better strategy for this context I also began to consider what would make a good team, how their quality could be developed and how they could interact with other teams to ensure more interesting football games. Of course this is a complex problem and there are many factors about which I have no idea, however, I think it is safe to say, that an external, and non physical, review of many sport's strategies could have a significant influence. 

    The next logical thing to consider was the business of providing strategic consultation for such highly vested teams. I wonder for instance, if IDEO has ever been approached to help a sports team design a better view of their game, and if there is such a thing as design trained consultants in the sports industry, offering suggestions on better team structure etc. 

    The last thought this situation led to was that of the Zen of complex systems, like the game of football. Several weeks ago I was considering the fact that most systems seem to have a Zen of sorts; an essential idea that holds them together and can be described as the ideal which makes all the other elements relevant. I considered that although most systems have a Zen, it is possible and likely that a system does not need to have such a formal notion, however, the thought occurred that what makes something a system is the presence of an underlying Zen. In any case, yesternight I wondered what the Zen of football would be like, and how different it is from the game that we watch and appreciate. 

    A conversation on this would be interesting.

    Photo: Reuters

    Posted via email from Mark Whiting's posterous