The last two weeks have been a whirlwind of activity. First, Yuki and I flew to Vienna, Austria where we visited our friends Lev, Christoph, Claudia, and Babsi. While there we attended the Game City event and visited the swank offices of Avaloop. While sleeping in Vienna we took advantage of its location to make day trips to Salzburg, Budapest, and Bratislava. We’re in agreement that Budapest was an awesome surprise.

Next we went to Copenhagen to attend the Unite 2008 conference. I covered the event for Gamasutra; here are some stories that I submitted:

• http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20773
• http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20779
• http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=20813

While there I had the chance to participate in a round table interview with Unity execs, Atari President Phil Harrison, and former Criterion CEO David Lau-kee. If Gamasutra doesn’t post the entire interview I’ll eventually post it here on my site.

Other highlights from Copenhagen included the Danish Design Center (a museum of product design) and a brand new restaurant in the trendy Norrebro neighborhood. It was very reasonable, the service was friendly, the latte was outstanding, and the atmosphere was cozy. It is called Café N, except there is an Arabic-like tilde above the N. You can find it here.

And finally, I’ll be leaving Copenhagen tomorrow morning and heading to Toronto to represent Core Talent Games at GameON: Finance 2.0. Core Talent Games was announced earlier this week and is a new venture that I’ve been working on with the other co-founders since April. I love it when a plan comes together.

Yuki and I went for a walk around San Francisco last weekend and came upon a bunch of public art, most of which was done by Shepard Fairey, famous for the André the Giant “Obey” art.

I really like the treatment on these pieces—with the ripped layers revealing gorgeous pattern work.

He is also know for the Obama “Hope” posters.

Two other displays that we came across: an abstract advertisement for SPORE and the Apple Store’s window display which prominently featured our friends at the Retronyms’s Recorder App. Recorder has been in the top 10 paid apps and the #1 business app since launch. Congrats guys!

Yesterday was pretty eventful. First of all, the Game Career Guide was released, you can get it here for free as a web viewable magazine, or as a downloadable PDF. It includes a top ten list for aspiring producers, written by my good pal Michael Boccieri (page 58). It also includes a quiz written by me (page 103), with a few questions by my friend Brandon Sheffield. Some of my more sarcastic questions which didn’t make the cut are viewable in this post’s comments.

Next up, Kongai, Kongregate’s Online Collectible Card Game was finally released. My friend Sirlin lead the design on this project and has really done a great job with it! Early in the project I helped Sirlin with some of the usability and mechanics design. I got my first chance to play it today and was really happy to see that many of my contributions made it into the final game.

And Finally, my friends Charlie and Max at Unknown Worlds announced that they are rolling their own engine for their forthcoming game Natural Selection 2.

No wait! This just in, my friends Dan and Zach at The Retronyms released their first iPhone app. Yestesterday was truely a day of releases! The app is called, simply, Recorder. You can see a video of it in action by following that link, or a funier one here. Both videos were made in another Retronym application called InOneTake.

What is The Question? You have probably asked it many times before. It takes different forms such as: What is the purpose of life, What is “it” all about, Who am I, or any other existential question.

Many people have questions like these and there are no shortages of people selling answers or cheap solutions.

Some examples of “answers” are cosmologies such as one where God loves you and when you die you will be with Him in Heaven, The Secret Law of Attraction, or even Buddhism, science, or drug induced peak experiences.

While some of these might provide solace, ways to improve your life or your intellect, or insight into The Answer, none of these provide The Answer itself.

Unfortunately, The Answer to The Question isn’t easily transmitted. It is as if—despite the sages that have come before us, with their teachings and their writings and their methods—we must each reenact the journey for ourselves; to perpetually rediscover all the depths that have already been explored. You can’t look it up on Wikipedia and you certainly won’t find it in this blog post; if you could, The Answer wouldn’t be referred to as The Unknowable.

The Answer is ever elusive because
The Question is ever evolving.

Why is the answer to questions like “What is it all about” and “Who am I” so elusive? It is because as answers are discovered by the question asker, the question asker evolves and thus so does the question. As one’s understanding deepens, “it” and “am” and “I” deepen even further, just past one’s grasp. In this way, answers to The Question are always temporary—satisfactory only to the old you. As in the Tao Te Ching: “The name that can be named is not the constant name”.

Don’t despair

As you progress in life you often times feel like you’re losing ground, less certain about your abilities or your wisdom, than when you were younger. With The Question coming up time and time again, and with some of the answers that come up, it is understandable that one might come to a nihilistic view, an existential crisis, or depression.

However, this infinite treadmill can be a source of comfort too; no matter how much you “get it” there is always room to “get it” more. Whatever span of life you have left, you can use it to grow the depth and span of your relationships, to strive towards liberating all sentient beings, to improve your artistic abilities, to reaching ever higher levels of awareness, etc. You may never achieve The Answer, but you’ll be more impressive than if you had never attempted.

So, What is “it” all about?

I invite you to leave a comment with what you think it is all about.

I’m inclined to say that it is all about growth via asking The Question in pursuit of The Answer. Though this answer might get me hit on the head by a Zen Master’s stick!

Foot notes:

• From a Zen standpoint you can get The Answer in an instant. It’s not that “you” “get” The Answer, it is that you are The Question and there is no Answer, or you are The Answer and there is no Question, or both. This will get me hit too :)
• If you only ask The Question, but have no actions in life you’ll probably become suicidal. Better to live an integral life where you ground The Question in a meditative practice, keep physically active, socialize, and eat a healthy diet.

Dancing is a series of videos on wherethehellismatt.com. I found out about this on my friend Dan’s blog. These videos, which have gotten progressively better, are really amazing. If you have time I suggest watching them in this order: Dancing 2005, Dancing 2006, Dancing 2008; if you’re short on time then you can just watch Dancing 2008. I was very moved by these videos and have watched each of them at least three times! Matt, who is dancing, used to be a game designer!

The Passage is an Art Game that has gotten the attention of many designers. You can download it here. Play through it a few times (5 minutes per session) and then read the Creator’s Statement. I think this is a game that Matt would appreciate!

I wish that there was a greater amount of moving media. I’m really happy when short form, somewhat avant guard stuff—like the above—ends up being genuinely moving. When you compare this to the amount of stuff that tends to be just a distraction, or art for art sake, it becomes an unexpected treasure!

This past Saturday was perhaps the last time that there would be training at my Zen Master’s house. He’s fixin’ to sell the place and immigrate to France. While I was serving tea, he corrected my form, and I was struck that there would not be many of these opportunities left. After sitting, while we drank coffee, he said that I would need to find ways to continue training on my own on a daily basis, that it would be a necessary self discipline to go further, not only in my Zen training, but also in my professional life, and I knew he was right. So here is my resolve! To rise early every day to engage in 15-30 minutes of calisthenics, followed by 45 minutes of zazen. I also intend to supplement this with martial arts training in the evenings. I’m going to do this every day for a year, even if I’m traveling.

The importance of everyday training

In Japanese, the term for “everyday mind/body training” is “Mainichi Shugyo”. The importance of this cannot be overstated; the difference between training 7 days a week and 3 days a week is “night and day”. Traditionally it has been difficult for me to do much training outside of a formal structure, but as such this is something that must be done; doing something that isn’t easy to satisfy an internal will, versus an external will (like going to work because you don’t want your boss to yell at you), is also “night and day”. Announcing this aloud on my blog will hopefully encourage me to follow through on this resolution. If you see me, ask if I’ve been keeping up with my routine. If I haven’t, give me shit—and if I have, say “What do you want, a pat on the back? What you’re doing is only a matter of course.”

I just finished playing Lost Winds, one of the first titles available on WiiWare, and I dare say maybe the best exclusive Wii title to date. This is the first game that has compelled me to write a review since Okami, which is interesting because there are actually a lot of parallels between these two games. These guys did nearly everything right; I was engaged from the very first moments of the interactive opening title screen, all the way through the well paced progression of gameplay mechanics and ample save points, to the somewhat abrupt ending. The game cost me $10 and provided me with about 5 hours of solid gameplay. Frontier definitely put money where it matters. No waste of voice acting or FMV cut scenes; just gorgeous, stylized graphics, amazing puzzle and world design, first class controls, and innovative mechanics.

I did feel the game to be a little floaty at first, but this sense dispersed as the game progressed to a point where most of my mobility was accomplished via floating. I also wish that things like moving into position to talk to NPCs, climbing over a ledge, and eating a fruit were a bit quicker, though I concede this might risk some of the hero’s cute charm. Baddies were also a sore point for me, their frequency made me tired if I tried to dispose of them all, so I eventually did my best to avoid them. A final negative note: I couldn’t figure out how to beat the boss and resorted to looking at a walk through. It could be my fault for not exploring this particular enemy besting mechanic earlier in the game (if it indeed existed), but I’m leaning towards it not being intuitive enough.

The best part of this game was the iterative and innovative control and interaction mechanics. The player uses a Wii cursor to draw wind. As the game progresses they are able to manipulate the wind to a greater degree due to two synergistic occurrences; their dexterity and timing improve, and the variety of motions and effects available to them increases. Much of this is not explicitly called out in instructions but instead left to satisfying trial and error discovery.

The minimal website for Studio Interrupt, my new venture, went up earlier this week. Studio Interrupt shares the name of a previous entity through which I used to collaborated with friends during university; a name I continued to use as a documentary film maker before entering into the video game industry. Now, with much more experience under my belt, but the same collaborative spirit, I am devoting my full-time efforts to getting Studio Interrupt and our various productions off the ground. So far it has been an, at times intimidating, bag of fun, stress, limitless possibilities, learning, and a test of self-discipline. I’ve been getting tons of advice from entrepreneurial friends (thank you!), and a lot of buy in to our model and ideas from other developers.

Our focus is co-producing game projects, but we are very interested in collaborating with specialists from other fields as well. I can’t say too much more for now but I’ll definitely continue to update the world through this blog and the one on StudioInterrupt.com!

Toshio Iwai, a well known media artist and creator of Nintendo DS non-game title Electro Plankton, was in San Francisco a few weeks ago to demo his latest co-creation, the Tenori-On. His presentation not only included a breakdown of the Tenori-On’s development process, but also video from an SNES project that never got released (too ahead of its time?) and his various installation work.

Yuki and I had the chance to talk to him after his presentation, apparently he coded the demo for Electro Plankton himself in C++ because he “had been using it over the years for [his] installation work” and he felt that the concept would be misinterpreted if only presented in a document. Neat! His presentation was totally inspiring, filling me with so many ideas! I only wish that the beautiful magnesium, robot hand polished, 256 LED sporting sequencer was being released for less than $1,200.

Neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor gives a passionate first hand account of a stroke that affected the left hemisphere of her brain—and the resulting subjective experience—in this recent TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/229

This could be, and apparently has been, the spring board for many conversations.