Category Archives: Technology

Sharing video game history

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Scott Steinberg’s article on CNN.com this morning got me thinking. Not about museums per se, but making historic games available for people to play and study.

However, let me first get something off my chest about video game museums. I’m really happy that some museums are sprouting up, and I’m a big fan of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games. But I really wish we had a video game museum in the San Francisco Bay area, which was the home of Atari. What better place?

We do have the Musee Mecanique, which is fantastic and specializes in early-1900s games. We also have the Pacific Pinball Museum, which you could say specializes in 1940-1980 games. What about 1980-2010 games? Arcade games? PC games? Console games? Where will people go to see these?

About a year ago I got together with a group of local folks with the same interest and we had a chat about the idea of starting up a local video game museum, but we’re all very busy and it was difficult to keep the momentum going. I still think about it a lot though.

However, there is one thing I’m spending a lot of time thinking about at work lately, and that’s Native Client, the sandbox for running compiled code inside of the Chrome web browser. Having compiled C++ games able to run in the browser is something I get very excited about. It makes me wonder – would it be possible to get some of these old games running in the browser via MAME? That could really lower the barrier to playing some of the historic older games… although admittedly nothing is quite like the experience of playing them on the original hardware.

I wonder, would it be interesting to emulate the old tools as well? I’m inspired by people creating new games for the Atari 2600, like Ed Fries’ Halo 2600 and Ian Bogost’s Guru Meditation. To me it would be very interesting to see what the experience was like of creating games for the Atari 2600 or Intellivision “back in the day”.

I’m going to do some playing around and see what I can get to work. Native Client is still fairly young, and under rapid development. But it could wind up being a wonderful way to share the love of historic video games with others.

Third Week at Google

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Wow has it really been three weeks already? On one hand it feels like it has zoomed by pretty fast – on the other hand it has felt a bit like dog weeks. It has been a very busy time!
A lot of folks have emailed assuming that, or asking if, I’d be completely focused on Android. First off, my apologies for failing to respond to many of you – I’ve been so focused on work that my personal email (and LinkedIn, and Facebook, and Twitter DM) is a cluttered mess. But secondly, you bet, I’m focusing on Android because it is a great games platform, but I am not dedicated to Android. I am dedicated to: GAMES! The Android team is doing really well, and they have engaged with the game developer community more than any other team at Google. Some of you have shared with me ways they can improve, and I really appreciate that! There are also many other interesting things going on at Google that are game-related. Many of them you will hear about over time, and many of them are already available and just not widely used for games yet. Google is a big place, with lots of smart people and interesting tech, and I’m enjoying fascinating conversations.
Of course, Google I/O is coming up in a few weeks, so if you’ll be there and are interested in meeting up for a chat, drop me a line!
On the personal side, I am slowly getting less hectic, although I am still thinking about work 24/7. :) Taking the Google shuttle to work as much as possible is helping my state of mind – an hour on email and news on a comfy bus is much preferrable to an hour focused on crazy traffic in my comfy car. (Though I do like my comfy car!) I won’t always be able to take the shuttle, but when I can it is definitely a win.
Last Thursday MB and I took an evening to finish emptying out my old office on New Montgomery Street. While I was sad to leave there since I’d been in that office about two years, I think MB might have been even sadder since now our office is full of boxes and office furniture parts. Part of the weekend was spent reducing that, but if anyone in San Francisco is interested in a big huge Scandinavian Design desk and shelf unit, let me know!
It was the first weekend since starting at Google that I’ve been at home and relaxing, and that helped me clear my brain a bit. I realized I need to spend more time reducing entropy. :) Mac and I are becoming friends, and that helps since we are living together pretty tightly now. I still feel like I’m wearing mittens when using the Mac sometimes, but going back to my WinXP laptop I miss the two-finger swipe and the overall MacBook reliability. However, my Win7 desktop still wins out over all. And what’s up with only being able to resize a Mac window with the little doodad in the lower-right corner of the window? Ugh! Anyone know some decent freeware to fix that?
Shuttle pulling up to campus. Will sign off for now!

Apple hates middleware

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So Steve Jobs has finally told the world why Apple doesn’t want Flash on its platform. And the answer is: cross-platform middleware “…ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.”

REALLY?

Haven’t we moved past this as an industry? I imagine there are a bunch of old-school assembly language programmers out there saying “yeah! And compiled code wastes so many cycles!!” At some point, the convenience to the developer needs to triumph.

I remember when the game industry went through this middleware conundrum. Back before Grand Theft Auto 3, the common sentiment was “…games that use game engines all look the same!” And arguably, games running on Criterion’s Renderware at that time did LOOK the same, but it wasn’t because of the game engine, it was because of the lack of capabilities of the graphics hardware. Once shaders became available, games suddenly dramatically diverged and looked QUITE different. As a point of fact, what Renderware gave developers was the ability to make their games more quickly and more cheaply, allowing them to experiment more with the game design and create more interesting CROSS-PLATFORM experiences that players loved. See Grand Theft Auto 3, for example. Renderware was a big win for game developers, which is why it quickly became hugely popular and then was purchased by Electronic Arts.

Steve’s argument is that cross-platform development tools result in “…developers [being] blocked from using [Apple's] innovations and enhancements because they are not available on [Apple's] competitor’s platforms.” In actuality, Apple’s developers wouldn’t HAVE to use Flash if it’s on the platform. They could still use Apple’s native APIs and would be able to access all the unique features of Apple’s platforms. Or, Apple could work with Adobe to help them enable platform-specific extensions to Flash. These are common practices in the game industry – game developers want to make their titles unique so that they stand out in the market, and one way they can do that is to use platform-specific features well.

I imagine there is more to the story than Jobs is able to share, because his argument just doesn’t hold up. Middleware is important to developers. Blocking middleware on your platform is a sure-fire way to alienate many of them. If he really wants to head down this path, I am more than happy to invite those developers to work on Google platforms. We LIKE making the lives of developers easier. :-)

Second Week at Google

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Well, it’s been two weeks at Google now – actually this is the first day of week three. This morning I’m trying out the Google shuttle bus. The commute from San Francisco to Mountain View typically takes me between 50 and 90 minutes. The traffic on Highway 101 varies wildly, but generally sucks and leaves me in an angry state by the time I get to work. Google has a bunch of shuttle buses on common routes to get people to work more easily. And the bonus is that they have wi-fi installed. So theoretically I can arrive at work more relaxed, get some work done, and save on fuel costs – a win/win/win. The closest bus stop in San Francisco is a 10-minute walk, so hopefully with the bus’s use of the carpool lane this will be a total win all the way around. We’ll see. Left the house  at 7:30, caught the bus at 7:43.

My second week was just as busy as the first, or maybe even busier. But at least I’m getting used to my productivity tools. I find myself mostly working on my laptop – a MacBook Pro – and while I still find the MacOS harder to use effectively than Windows 7, the hardware is an absolute joy. You mean I can close the lid without worrying about losing docs? Nice! And it auto-connects to wi-fi and holds the signal? Yay! And I can sweep two fingers on the trackpad to scroll up and down? Why didn’t anyone think of that sooner? (Oh yeah, no one else has multi-touch trackpads.) So, I’m not a Mac convert, but I’m getting along with it better and better.

I used Synergy to tie my Linux desktop’s mouse and keyboard to the Mac laptop, so when I’m at my desk I have a much more ergonomic keyboard and mouse and a couple much larger displays. That works out great.

On the software side last week I found myself bailing out of the cloud a lot. I just haven’t figured out a good analog to my hierarchical file system, so I have only been using Google docs for ToDo’s and sharing with others. Meeting notes etc have wound up in TextPad and on my desktop or in folders. I had to do a couple presentations last week and I tried used the presentation software in Google Docs, but quickly abandoned it in favor of using Powerpoint and then uploading the result back into the presentation app. I was just much, much more effective in Powerpoint, and I was in a hurry. Friday I got Keynote installed on the Mac, and I’ll give that a go today.

If there was some good hierarchical file storage in the cloud and the presentation software worked better for me, I would love to be doing more there. Maybe I’m missing some things… I’ll keep looking at it.

One of the amusing and wonderful things about the Google Mountain View campus (the “Googleplex”) is that it is near a lot of wild open space along the San Francisco Bay. Last week I kept having wildlife sightings – and in the morning when the campus is quiet, with its lush trees, it is quite peaceful. Or at least more so than my urban San Francisco dwelling. I appreciate that a lot. Here are a few shots (Pokemon Snap style, I guess) from last week :-)

Wild turkey wandering around in one of the parking lots.

There have been some goats next door mowing the lawn.

This happy little bird was hanging out in the fountain at the garden.

The T-Rex doesn’t seem so mean in his old age.

My personal email is a massive graveyard at the moment, so I apologize if you’ve emailed me and I haven’t gotten back to you. I’ve been literally non-stop since starting at Google, including a trip on the weekend after my first week (though admittedly, that was for fun) and this past weekend, an IGDA board meeting all weekend. Still looking forward to taking a deep breath. Maybe next weekend. :)

Shuttle got to my building just before 8:30am. So from home to work, about an hour. Not bad – got a blog post written, time to check some email, time to imbibe some caffeine. We’ll see how the trip home goes!

First Week at Google

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I’m hanging out in an airport restaurant waiting for a flight. Seems like something I do fairly frequently. While I’m not exactly “Up in the Air”, I do enjoy travel quite a bit.

My first week at Google was extremely busy. On my first day everyone was encouraging me to take the courses for newbies that they have all week – it sure seemed like a good idea on Monday. But after midday Tuesday, all bets were off, as my schedule filled with people to meet and things to work on. With so many interesting things going on, the last thing I wanted to do was sit in a newbie class! (The good news is that they have them all recorded, so I’ll watch the videos later. :) )

One thing that has been incredibly marked for me has been the change in my productivity tools. I’ve gotten used to using Exchange, Outlook, and the suite of Office products. I really, really like the system I have down for file organization. And I’ve got a laptop with Windows XP and desktops with Windows 7. My first day at Google I got a Linux desktop and a Mac laptop. Beautiful pieces of hardware, but – woah! So different. And of course we’re using the suite of Google Apps products. I felt like not only did I need to learn a new environment and new job, but my productivity habits now also all needed to change. Yikes!

At first it felt a bit painful. As the week has gone on, however, I’ve realized just how valuable it is to have my data in the cloud. Mid-week, I converted my Nexus One over from my Gmail account to my corporate Google account, and suddenly all my business information – calendar and email in particular – was in my pocket. My manager was probably pretty happy, as I suddenly stopped missing meetings and messages. :) Then Thursday I started really using Google Docs. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am still having a hard time getting used to popping open a web browser to edit my documents, and I have yet to come up with an alternative for my trusty hierarchical file system. But the moment of epiphany came when, in the span of an hour, I had taken some notes in a meeting on the Mac, booted up my Linux box and made some edits, and then over a coffee meeting later I brought the doc up on my phone to review what I had written. Totally seamlessly, without worrying about copying files around or anything. Holy smokes! This whole cloud thing is pretty great. :-) But it is definitely a shift in mindframe.

Right now I’m at the airport, as I mentioned earlier. Today I did a bunch of work in the Mac’s Text Edit program. When I got home, I suddenly realized I needed to copy all that stuff onto a USB stick, since I was bringing my personal laptop (my Windows XP one) on the trip with me. It wasn’t a big deal, but one point I lost the USB stick and couldn’t remember if I had packed it. What if I forgot it? After a few moments of argh, once again the idea of the cloud really sunk home for me.

So it’s been an interesting week to be sure (and that’s leaving out all of the most interesting parts!) But the idea of the cloud, which sounded good in theory but I hadn’t put into full practice, is really growing on me. I’ve loved my Android phone for months and months… but when I embraced Gmail, Google Docs and Google Voice, all the sudden my cell phone became so much more useful. It’s a very interesting transformation.