What the World Needs Now...

[wickedorin]

It is a good day to share inspiration.

Further luscious quotes from The Fat Man on Game Audio: Tasty Morsels of Sonic Goodness. On making music, for games or otherwise:

A layman might only see the music as an object, frozen in time and space, and he might copy that and think he has done something wonderful. But here, there is no room for the Hand of God.

A more experienced musician would notice that the object has velocity. He would say, "Ah, I see where that came from, and I see where it was going. It represents and improvement on what went before," and he would copy that improvement, too.

But the object also has acceleration, and an overall formula to whole rules it dances across a multidimensional Cartesian plane.

The master learns as much of this formula as he can, admires it, wonders at its unfathomable mysteries. And then he writes his own.

On innovation:

And how do you do it? How do you innovate? It's easy: You take a risk. How do you take a risk? Simple. YOU DO NOT DO WHAT WORKS.

It's good to know what works. It's good to know what people seem to like. But the difference between doing only what works and what could work is the difference between following and leading.

Advice for anyone working in the creation of games:

You are to [scare the crap out of investors] by exposing those investors to your brilliant but untried ideas. And if the thought of that investor walking out the door with his money is too frightening for you, and because of that, you can only bring yourself to to propose "ideas that work" and "that people like", then you are not a game maker, you have no idea what makes games fun, and it is morally imperative that you go into another business.

And perhaps one even more important bit of advice for all story-tellers:

"Professor" [Brian] Moriarty concerned himself with that word "constellation," not as a noun but as a verb. He pointed out that the process of seeing shapes where they are only implied can be of great value. As one stares into the chaos, one tends to see what one wants to see. What he needs to see.

Some more sharing. I love Iwata Asks, it's always thoroughly interesting to me. (And rather illustrates what seems to make Nintendo different from far too many of their peers; they have fun. Even if Nintendo and I seem to have a bit of an up and down relationship, I can see the fun there; and they've never been shy about taking risks, attempting innovation.) There are two sections from the "special edition" that I just needed to point certain people toward, Prestige and Struggle, and Desperation and a Tragic Heroism. Personally, I would replace the word "desperation" with "hunger". And that's it, yes. People who still have a hunger for something tend to put everything they've got into what they're working on, whereas people who no longer hunger, have wants or desires... don't. I'll spare you a thousand musical examples, but I find that it proves true. What cracked me the hell up comes later on, though: "Well, what you're saying is actually terrifying. In the middle of making Super Mario 64—that Super Mario 64!—Miyamoto Shigeru realized, 'This is getting boring.'"

I adore Guillermo del Toro. So a two-part Irrational Interview with him was completely fucking awesome. Direct downloads to MP3s: Part 1, and Part 2. He discusses a bit of what drives him, that games are different than movies, and that no matter what you do you need to be passionate. (I'd still give a limb for him to direct a devil May Cry movie, but I guess that's just not possible anymore.) His comment about life being so short so you must choose things that you are willing to die for struck a chord. "At the end of the day, it's about love." Oh, and Ken Levine is there, which counts for something I guess. *grin*

Tempted to use the Metal Gear Solid series as my "what I semi-watch while crocheting so I'm not bored out of my fucking mind" again this year. I was startlingly productive the first time around, and... well, I love me the unapologetic over-the-top everything of MGS. I just can't seem to get the hang of playing it. Stealth? Pft.

I also love me some 1/6 scale Wild Tiger and Kotetsu, but the instant I saw "Medicom" I knew there's just no way. I'll call a $250 price point for each right now. (Maybe $280 for the light feature.) So. Well. Anyone know of decent steady work for someone who is perfectly personable until someone is an asshole and needs to be told so isn't customer-service oriented, has no desire to ever pursue any further "education" of any kind and always needs to be relatively close to a place to sit down because this body is alarmingly dysfunctional? ...No..? (There still isn't a phone sex line catering to geeks, a far as I know. I could so do that. TMI + The More You Know.)