Handling tone or direction in a (game) team
This was a really good conversation about game team dynamics – especially for younger folks. I think it hits the nail on the head based on my own experiences. Here’s a summary (not my words):
It has become more common in most media (games/movies/etc) made by people under 30 where it’s “cool” to not take their creative work seriously. It’s easier to avoid serious work or make fun of a movie/game/topic (no matter how serious, dramatic, or well done) rather than embrace it and put their best work into it.
It’s sad because in most cases those people are just afraid to really try.
This is especially true if people are using self-aware meta humor about how bad things are in their work/group/project/life. Instead of figuring out how to fix it, they just lampshade it, by making jokes about how badly it’s going. I’m sure they’re doing it as a nervous habit because they don’t want people to criticize their game, so they’ve got to do it first and make their game’s defects “part of the joke.”
The only thing you can really do is talk to them about it and get them to agree to take it seriously. Then keep them on track. If that doesn’t work, you’ve got to find other people to work with. A good process is:
- First define what is at stake
- Prove how what they are doing threatens what is at stake
- State clearly “If we do this, then the result will be that”
- If you cannot prove anything, then just make your most persuasive case
Discussion thread:
You Can Succeed, Too!
Did you know Japan made 50’s style musicals? I was recently introduced to Kimi Mo Shusse Ga Dekiru – 君も出世ができる – or it’s English title: ‘You Can Succeed, Too!’. It follows the adventures of some aspiring young professionals trying to make it in the business world that’s split between tradition and modernity. Even though the movie is 60 years old, if you’ve ever worked in corporate world you’ll recognize each of the characters: the over-zealous corporate climber, the guy just trying to do the right thing, the aging boss, and the up and coming VP trying to apply the latest corporate techniques learned abroad.
It has some absolutely AMAZING set and costume designs, the music is composed by a famous avant-garde composer and famous jazz performers to the lyrics of a renown Japanese poet Shuntaro Tanikawa. The story is even more fun if you understand the traditions embedded in Japanese corporate culture.
The whole thing is astounding, super-catchy, and fun. I’m shocked it hasn’t gotten more recognition elsewhere.
You can watch it here on Rarefilm and at the Internet Archive. I only wish it were available on DVD/Bluray somewhere.
I found out about this gem from the guys over at Important Cinema Club podcast when they broadcast on Twitch (and then were promptly banned for a copyright strike)
Fifth Element – 1950’s style
Abandoned Films is back with another trippy, AI-generated movie trailer. This time, they took the 1997 sci-fi classic The Fifth Element and applied a 1950’s big-screen aesthetic.
While definitely not perfect, these AI generated trailers are amazing ways to generate and explore artistic concepts.
Home Alone House
The house used to film Home Alone is up for sale – though it has been thoroughly modernized. I personally think the remodel was terrible, but you can make up your own mind. Only $5.25 million, and it appears to already be pending sale.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/671-Lincoln-Ave-Winnetka-IL-60093/3360197_zpid
Breaking Kryptos
James Sanborn created an art piece called Kryptos for the CIA headquarters. It contained a strange grid of metal letters. People have been trying to break his code ever since 1990 when he created it.
Fast forward, and a big chunk of the mystery has been solved by amateur (and professional) cryptographers. This video does a great job explaining how it was broken.
Realtime Human ‘tele-operation’
Carnegie Mellon researchers have developed a real-time human tele-operation system. Using a simple camera, it is able to read the actions of a human person and then translate that into real-time full-body control of a robot.
Individuals can now seamlessly teleoperate full-sized humanoids to execute a myriad of actions. According to researchers, they can perform simple tasks like picking and placing objects to dynamic movements like walking, kicking, and even boxing.
Read the paper here: https://human2humanoid.com/resources/H2O_paper.pdf
There’s lots of possibilities for this kind of remotely operated humanoid robotic system. Remotely controlled humanoid robots could save countless lives operating in dangerous environments.
They could be used to go in and shut down equipment after dangerous chemical or industrial accidents. Search dangerous buildings for survivors after earthquakes. They could perform dangerous police or urban warfare operations without loss of life. Stop terrorist by defusing bombs. Another such place would be effecting repairs, shutdowns, and cleanup in highly radiated areas like Chernobyl, Fukushima, or when there are nuclear accidents. In the future, we may never need the horrors of Chernobyl’s biorobots to deal with such disasters.
Articles:
Blue-screen Windows on purpose
I wrote awhile back on how to crash Linux/cause a Linux kernel panic in order to test how your program can handle a crash – but can you cause a Windows blue-screen programmatically?
Raymond Chen of the New Old Thing describes a variety of methods to crash Windows purposefully. He also cautions against ad-hoc methods like killing winlogin.
Methods you can use to cause a Windows Blue-screen:
- Windows allows you to configure a specific keyboard combination to cause a crash. You set some registry keys and then can crash a system by holding right CTRL then pressing scroll lock key twice. You can also customize the key sequence via registering custom keyboard scan codes. If you have a kernel debugger attached it will trigger the kernel debugger after the crash dump is written.
- The best way to trigger an artificial kernel crash is to use NotMyFault, which is part of the Microsoft Windows SysInternals tools.
Art boats of Netherlands
‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands has a canal art boat float called the Bosch Parade. Some pretty interesting, and bizarre, boats. Looks like they’ll be doing another float June 20-23 this year if you’re in the area.
Create a playable game from a single image
Google researchers have published a new artificial intelligence model that can take a text prompt, sketch or idea and turn it into a virtual world you can interact with and play.
Named Genie, the virtual world model was trained on gameplay and other videos found online and is currently a research preview. The games are 2D platformer style games.
Genie can be prompted with images it has never seen before, such as real world photographs or sketches, enabling people to interact with their imagined virtual worlds-–essentially acting as a foundation world model. This is possible despite training without any action labels. Instead, Genie is trained from a large dataset of publicly available Internet videos. We focus on videos of 2D platformer games and robotics but our method is general and should work for any type of domain, and is scalable to ever larger Internet datasets.
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