Lately I seem to refer to myself a lot as “old-school” when it comes to talking about tech. I don’t feel too old-school in the game industry, but when it comes to web tech I definitely am. I can rock some PHP and MySQL, sure, but when it comes to web apps what I really want to use is C++. Because it’s the language I know best.

At Casual Connect this week I went out on a limb and asserted that C++ would be the next great language for the web. And why not? There are so many people out there who know C++, and have code they’ve written in it over the years – why shouldn’t these folks be able to leverage their expertise? I don’t think HTML5, Flash or Java are going anywhere, but enabling C++ on the web is a really interesting thing.

Of course, we’re going down that road with the development of Native Client for Chrome. The idea is that you recompile your code using a GCC-based compiler that produced sanitized executables, and then the code runs in a multi-layer sandbox that provides high performance and access to hardware acceleration through libraries like OpenGL ES 2.0. I’m pretty excited about the possibilities… and I’m looking forward to hooking it into all sorts of “new-school” JavaScript APIs to take advantage of what the web has to offer.

I think the combination may be hard to beat – hardware acceleration and access to web APIs. FTW!

Now I better get back to work – lots to do.

I’m heading to Casual Connect Seattle next week with a group of fellow Googlers and we’re looking forward to meeting lots of casual and social game developers. We’re setting up meetings now. We’ll largely be talking about things related to the Chrome Web Store (although admittedly, that’s an awful lot of things ). Love to hear from you if you’re interested in a chat while we’re there.

We’ll also be in two presentations: One with our friends at Kongregate, Unity, and Adobe… okay, it’s called “Browser Tech Smackdown” so we may not all be friends afterward! Browser Tech Smackdown is Tuesday at 2pm.

Our second presentation is Thursday at 5pm, just before we all go get beers to celebrate the end of a successful conference. In “Games and the Google Chrome Web Store”, we’ll talk about how you can get your game into the store for launch, using Flash, HTML5, or C++-based technologies.

We’re really looking forward to the conference. Hope to see you there!

Wow, it really has been 12 weeks? Dang. I stopped counting around 10, I had to check the calendar. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so busy! Well maybe when I was working on the first Game Programming Gems book. I’m working to keep on top of all the things being done by Google that are game-related – things like iGoogle, Android, Chrome, ChromeOS, GoogleTV, and a number of APIs that are extremely game relevant – and that’s just a heck of a lot of material coming my way. I’m slowly getting better at surfing the waves of email and docs coming at me, but some days I still get overwhelmed with all the info I’m trying to assimilate as I ramp up at Google.

Today was a nice day, I stayed in the San Francisco office instead of heading down to Mountain View. Most days I take the shuttle down the San Francisco peninsula in the morning, from San Francisco to Mountain View – it takes roughly an hour. The shuttle has wi-fi, which is great, but it is a bit difficult to get serious work done, with the bus bouncing up and down as it does. I have numerous times accidentally deleted messages when the bus has hit a particularly rough patch of road. Makes me very appreciative of UNDO, let me tell ya. But by and large the shuttle is a win, since it makes me more productive than spending an hour cursing at the traffic on the way down and again on the way back.

One of the things I’m really excited about at the moment is the Chrome Web Store. Later this year, we’ll put a store within Chrome, to enable developers to more easily distribute and sell web apps. Of course, I’m thinking all about games, I want to make sure we have lots of games in the store for the launch – Flash games, HTML5 (Javascript) games, Native Client (C++) games – so I’ve been talking to a lot of game developers and tool manufacturers.

It’s been fun for me to slowly get more up to speed on the world of HTML5, although I do have C++ flowing through my veins.  The thing is, it doesn’t matter what I like – it matters what game developers are using, and I think it’s pretty damn cool that people are making HTML5/Javascript games. The Google Pacman Doodle is a Javascript game, for example, and it is pretty awesome.  I’m looking forward to seeing more games made with WebGL, too.

Well I’ll keep this short for now. I’m planning to ramp up the blogging again, for realz this time. So many interesting things going on that I want to talk about

Trawling around the net today, I stumbled across this MobileCrunch article on user review seeding. It’s about a company I know, Reverb Communications. The gist of the article is that they are advertising as part of their services the ability to seed user reviews on iTunes. It’s presented in this article like – oh my god, can you believe this is happening, these guys are so horrible!

Having been in meetings with Reverb (for work that was pro bono, so I’m not partial), I’ve actually found them to be one of the better PR/marketing agencies I’ve worked with. So for me to see them getting beaten up for what is a fairly common practice makes me mad.

At the same time, I don’t want to defend the practice! Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of working with a number of book publishers, game publishers, and PR/marketing agencies. I’ve been aware of online user review seeding happening – with both negative and positive reviews – in a handful of these companies. I personally find this to be a questionble practice, but many just see it as a way to do free marketing. So it’s important to recognize that it is occurring. It’s not too dissimilar from “street teams” that travel to bars and tell people how great a certain model of digital camera, or car, is. This is also questionable, and pretty inexpensive.

It’s surprising to me how many people in the article’s comment thread are surprised by the fact that this is occurring. I just assumed everyone knew it was going on. The practice makes individual user reviews less valuable, and the aggregated scores more valuable. It’s a lot harder to spoof 1000 reviews than it is to spoof two or three.

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Re-reading what I just wrote, I remember how mad I was the first time I found out someone was seeding user reviews. I was pretty pissed too, because it seemed to break an unwritten trust rule of online user reviews. But I always used to treat the Internet like it was a special place, removed from some of the practices of the real world. It might have been once, but now it’s actually pretty much the same. In good and bad ways.

Gads, I sound like I’m scolding “get your head out of the clouds” or something. I’m the last person who wants to do that, I’m an idealist at heart. But I find myself balancing it with realism more often lately. Maybe that’s what happens as you get older. I wish I could trust everything everyone says online, but it’s just not realistic.

What’s important is for people to understand why someone is saying a particular thing – and this is an important skill everywhere. That positive user review? The user might be from the developer’s family. That commercial bashing the public policy option for U.S. national healthcare? Might be paid for by an insurance company who fears that they will be forced to charge less for their insurance policies. That politician advocating for funding for a bridge in their district? The district itself might not actually need it, the politician might just be trying to curry favor with a small group in order to get voted into office again.

I trust a comment or review from my circle of friends much more than I do from people or companies I don’t know or can’t easily evaluate the background of.

“If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is”, “Your mileage may vary”, etc.

You’ve heard about the Indie Game Challenge, right? It’s a similar concept to the Independent Games Festival, highlight independent game development, but being thrown by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences, the same folks that do the DICE Summit each year (which is fantastic, by the way!) The Indie Game Challenge is a collaboration with GameStop and SMU Guildhall, and the prizes are pretty significant – $100K for the winners!

They’ve produced some pretty amusing videos highlighting possible games for the event… Gave me a laugh. Check them out! I’ll embed one here and link to the other three.

Office Worker:

Makeover Master

Housework

Catbox Fever