Game changing creativity, erm.... not yet

Below is one of the latest TED video releases, which my Friend Ty brought to my attention via Facebook this morning. There's a postulation / suggestion, inference that delivering this technology to mass market will have a major effect at several different levels, should we be .... certainly the TED audience seemed.. impressed.



Now I was very fortunate a few years ago while working for Microsoft Game Studios doing some liaison with Media LAB Europe in Dublin to see their development of some, what I considered at that time to be, genuine game changing technology, specifically their 'Mind Balance' alpha brain wave monitoring and response game implementations, which allowed non GUI, none physical interaction, response and control between Man and PC. Stunning and awe inspiring are what springs to mind when I recall being one of their guinea pigs.

I may be missing the point in the TED talk but it is suggesting innovation in that sort of sixth sense' sense, and despite the gasps of the TED audience, and a sort of reverse engineering of the semantics of 'sixth sense'itself, it didn't meet it's billing or my expectation regarding 'intuition' i.e. it merely struck me as a wear a mobile device that allows a sort of 'minority report like' superimposition of data onto a projective mobile screen'. All of which purports to combine six areas of communication. It's not as suggested by the title, a non physical, beyond the seen realm revolution, thus it sorta strikes me more as a kinda 'combinational creativity exercise' rather than genuine innovation or actual original development. Which further suggests more of a PR, patent public declaration activity that might impress weary mobile/Cell handset manufactures, for me it screams :

iphone + projector + additional data access (revenue) + additional Peripherals (more revenue)

In truth I enjoyed Barry Schwartz's advocacy for practical wisdom much more.

2009 - A year of writing dangerously – my new years resolution

I really enjoy the works of Umberto Eco, they are literary, scientific, clever, funny, educational, enthralling and entertaining. Linguistically layered and complexly constructed with considerable craft, each bravely offers the masterful expression of dangerous ideas. Something to which a writer like moi should aspire maybe ?

Should I assume that the birth of a dangerous idea for 2009 might mimic their unscrupulously inauspicious gestation in previous years ? i.e. start as seemingly innocent exploratory inquiries like:

‘Can we minimize causalities as we search for peace ?’

or...

‘How do we pull apart the very fabric of the universe while smashing together subatomic particles we don’t actually understand?'

or even how about...

“I’ve had enough of my capitalist extortion, material greed and controlling society, I think I may confess to stealing from my own bank, my own clients, my own society, my very own soul”.

Such infant ideas, while patently wrong, ill-judged or reflectively abhorrent, at such an early stage, are not genuinely dangerous in that classic Eco sense. Those may pose some moral dangers, they maybe evoke equally idiotic reasoning and speculation leading to dangerous action but their initial ‘dangerousness’ is confined to local or specialist audiences or specific knowledge communities. It’s really only when they have been implemented and disseminated to the great unwashed or unread do they become truly dangerous.

A genuinely dangerous idea – the earth isn’t flat, God has a sense of humor, there is more truth in fiction than in fact, BTW the world is choking on Carbon Dioxide; from first expression these hold the potential to change the human paradigm, change the very nature of being on this planet, undermining current understanding, questioning the fundamentals of our personal existence. Will such an idea emerge in 2009 ? While I truly admire popular modern scientists who write, eg Richard Dawkins, Dan Gilbert, Anderson, Gladwell, et al, etc, I don’t believe any of the ideas they have eloquently propounded in their recent books (generally borrowed anyway) can be categorized as dangerous.

Original Work from writers, Ruskin, Pascal, Orwell, Swift, Joyce, Beckett, like Eco, is firmly founded on ideas, skillfully underlayed (no speedy Gonzales jokes plz) with suggestions and questions which change how we potentially provide ourselves with answers. The subtlety employed beyond a scientists’ soapbox ‘here’s what I think, this is what I know’ style of intellectual provocation, the writing becomes dangerous, not only because it contains dangerous ideas but because it acquires a new value in and of itself. Such stuff of value is what I want to learn more about in 2009.

As a writer I do learn by reading yes, but must also learn by writing, writing is the only place value can lie for me if I consider myself a genuinely creative writer. In 2009, that’s the only value I’ll be seeking to create, as I embrace dangerously muddled complex expressions of dangerous and hopefully entertaining ideas. As ever I’m equally prepared to be entirely wrong about striving to write dangerously. While that idea itself may well be dangerous for me in that its attempted execution could mean just that for my writing. At the very minimum I do look forward to trying to be dangerous on the page/web and in approach. I'm looking forward to it.

Happy New Year.

A head in the game

I needed a laugh recently, for reasons I'm not going to detail right now, suffice to say I really needed cheering up. I also had a stinker of a flu so was behind in doing email, etc, etc & my usual surfing rounds, visiting those sites and communities of which I have been a long time member, I happened upon a bit of ole banter from three even older friends of mine. Namely Mal, Chris & Steve, chinwaging like a crowd of old codgers over at gamedevelopers.ie , they were kindly & light heartedly discussing one of my past creations the 'guy' above:

Danger Magee: Irish Eco-Warrior Goose.

Now When I say that Danger was 'my' creation, it actually took an on-site team of ten people to get us to the point of capturing that 'in-game' shot above in one of the prototype levels, our team of ten were further enabled by off-site teams in both NDL and Havok and elsewhere. It was a 'Goose' but everyone kept forgetting that and for some reason kept calling Danger a duck ! When everyone knew all too well that ducks don't wear bullet belts or confederate caps, I mean, come on guys....

While I did come up with the idea of Danger the goose, in that I wrote the game and level bibles and all that creative type jazz, Kev and PC and Mark all helped to get him, proportioned, low poly modeled, rigged, cycles going, and eventually into our Beta PS2 Engine. It was a genuine collaborative effort, with Nick and Paul as driving forces behind making it happen. Joe, Tony and John were doing additional bits and pieces.

That was almost ten years ago, and despite a couple of significant publisher offers; when we brought the working prototype demo to VC's for matching finiance they just couldn't understand the appeal of a funny smashing stuff up 'game' ? Let alone why anyone would want a game to be physics driven, explosion laden, for a new console yet to launch, and all that wrapped up in a comic environmentally subversive message to boot ? or to quote one bright moneyed spark:

"I mean this is 1999, who's interested in the the global environment or computer console games for that matter ?"

Of course not long after that, Abe hit big as we ran into the dot com bubble and cash flow challenges. The VC's decided to support an array of insightful technologist's with the .com suffix and life with a little less Danger went on for us. Our Goose was cooked before he ever got outta the egg.