So, a couple of things have happened recently that got me thinking I should post some stuff again. First, obviously, is the unveiling of Disney Epic Mickey. You can read all about it in the November issue of Game Informer magazine, and all over the GI website these days.

Frankly, I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the response. I don’t know why, but I expected to get more grief about making a Mickey Mouse game. Nice to see that, for the most part, folks are open to the idea — even enthusiastic!

As a result of all the press, I’ve been bombarded with emails asking me weirdly personal questions about my favorite Disney things — theme park rides, characters, comic book artists and writers. Figured I’d just post some answers here to settle things down a bit. (And if you’ve read my earlier posts about compulsive list making, you know I’ll take any opportunity to make a list of my N favorite things!) So here goes:

FAVORITE RIDES

If you’re expecting anything earth-shattering here, forget it. I love the traditional favorites:

• Disney Animation Academy: Come on, they can even teach ME to draw Disney characters. How cool is that?
• Fantasmic!: What a great show – exciting, romantic, technically amazing, and it’s as close as Mickey’s gotten to being a hero in years. Plus, the music just does it for me. Great, great score…
• Haunted Mansion: Grim Grinning Ghosts, the stretching room, changing paintings. I’m in.
• Imagineering Blue Sky Cellar: I love behind the scenes stuff. What can I say? I only wish this were bigger and even cooler.
• Indiana Jones Adventure: Best. Disney. Ride. Ever. I ride it every time I go to the parks.
• Mickey’s PhilharMagic: Great 3D and it’s genuinely funny.
• Pirates of the Caribbean: Do I have to say anything?
• Space Mountain: A mostly horizontal roller coaster? Count me in. I’m not wild about vertical g’s but horizontal g forces are great. And it’s in the dark. I love it.

COMIC BOOKS

I’m only talking Disney here, right? I’m a huge comic geek (about which I guess I’ll blog some other time), but as far as Disney artists go, here’s my list. Not many surprises here — well, it might seem odd that Paul Murry isn’t on the list, but I’ve just never really loved his stuff. And Romano Scarpa’s books are fine but, again, just never did it for me. Anyway, here are the guys who DID make my cut:

• Carl Barks: Best. Comic. Writer. Oh yeah, and Artist. Ever. End of discussion.
• Floyd Gottfredson: The Mickey guy for over 40 years. While the animation studio was reducing Mickey to straightman status, Gottfredson always treated him like the hero he should have been.
• Noel Van Horn: My favorite Disney artist and writer working today. If you can find a copy of his story, Shadows, you’ll know why I love this guy’s work so much. He takes Mickey places most artists wouldn’t dare. And while his art style is simple, it’s so damn expressive. Love it.
• William Van Horn: Like father like son, I guess. William is Noel’s dad and talent definitely has a genetic component! William Van Horn’s duck stories are over the top, action packed, slapstick at its best.
• Don Rosa: The heir apparent to Carl Barks and many people’s favorite Disney artist/writer. I like his stuff a lot, but find his art style almost TOO detailed and his reverence for the Barks canon a little too constraining. I admire Rosa’s work a lot, but reading it is a little too much work for me to flat-out love it.
• Carson Van Osten: I’ve had the incredible pleasure and honor to work with Carson and, man, can the guy draw! Holy cow. His personal take on Mickey Mouse was hugely important to the Disney Epic Mickey game. And he did a bunch of character design work for us that’s mind-blowing. His comics work from the 70s on ain’t bad either! (He tells great stories, too! And played bass in the band The Nazz! What a guy.)

CHARACTERS

Again, don’t expect a ton of surprises (other than that I’ve never been much of a Goofy fan… and I thought the introduction of Launchpad McQuack into the duck universe was unnecessary and kind of unfortunate).

• Scrooge McDuck: Filthy rich, adventurous, fearless, softy at heart (but don’t let on!). He swims in the coins in his money bin. Coolest character in the Disney family, easy.
• Mickey Mouse: Um. Hello? He’s the Mouse!
• Oswald the Lucky Rabbit: Funny, funny cartoons. Complete anarchy. Does completely impossible things, constantly.
• Donald Duck: I’ve never been able to understand a word Donald says (sorry Ducky Nash and the rest of the Donald voice artists…), but who cares? When he gets red in the face and explodes with anger, it’s great fun. (If you haven’t seen the cartoon Donald’s Crime, find it.)
• Ludwig Von Drake: I think I learned more from him than I did from many of my teachers! And that accent made me laugh every time when I was a kid.
• Stitch: Easily the best of the recent Disney characters. The writers and animators really let loose with him!
• The Aracuan Bird: The most trouble-makingest Disney character ever. As close as Disney ever got to creating something that would have fit right in in a Tex Avery cartoon.
• Chernabog: Scary, scary, scary!
• Maleficent: Scarier, scarier, scarier!

That’s a start. Let me know what your favorites are.

Thursday, March 26th at GDC was more of the same for me — hanging out with friends, relaxing, attending some sessions… Here’s the lowdown.

First thing I did was hit Hideo Kojima’s design keynote.

Solid Game Design: Making the “Impossible” Possible
Hideo Kojima

I was introduced to Hideo Kojima once, at a restaurant where we both happened to be dining, but he was pretty into his sushi at the time, and I was anxious to get to mine, so I don’t suppose he even remembers. I certainly didn’t get a chance to talk to him and, so, figured I should take advantage of the opportunity to hear what he had to say this year. It ended up being a pretty interesting hour.

His key point was that game design is the art of The Impossible Possible — an idea I find pretty appealing. The talk was about the road he takes to make that happen. For him, making impossible things a reality takes an understanding of Hardware Capabilities, Software Capabilities and what he called Design Ladders (or what others might call “Raw Creativity” or “Designing Around Hardware and Software Constraints”).

In describing his creative process, Kojima talked about identifying a problem (e.g., Get a Character Over That Wall) and then coming up with a bunch of ways the problem could be solved. Eventually, he settles on the coolest solution and executes that solution. I was dumbstruck that he goes to the trouble of thinking up all those answers but then limits the player to only one. In other words, the concept of choice belongs to developers, in Kojima’s world, not to players! Pretty much the same approach I like to apply to design, but applied in a completely different way. My thinking is, if you’re only going to offer players one way to solve a problem, well, for starters, maybe you really want to make a movie… But, if you’re going to go to the trouble of thinking up a bunch of ways to “get over the wall,” as he put it, why not attach some consequences to different wall-climbing approaches and let players in on the fun? Clearly, you can’t argue with the guy’s success, but I can’t help thinking how much players are missing out on…

Anyway, the talk was structured around the history of the Metal Gear series. Pretty fascinating. He talked about each game in the series and how he tried to set a new, impossible goal for himself and the team with each one. Reminded me a lot of how Richard Garriott approached things when he gave me a crash course in electronic game design back in the day. But instead of Richard’s “scrap everything and build from scratch” approach, Kojima takes a careful, incremental approach to innovation, introducing just one new thing each game, building on the foundation of earlier games.

Pretty interesting talk, but I’ve let too much time lapse and that’s about all I remember. Have to listen to the audio to refresh my memory!

Next I went to a talk about “physical play,” not so much because I’m all that into the topic (in fact, I wasn’t even sure what the speaker meant) but because I was intrigued to hear what a guy from MIT’s Media Lab might have to say to a room full of game developers. Turns out, it was a swell talk.

Physical Play: Siftables and Other New Forms and Formats for Interaction, Collaboration and Creativity
David Merrill

Merrill, an MIT Media Lab researcher (http://web.media.mit.edu/~dmerrill/siftables.html), talked about alternate control mechanisms (alternatives to keyboards or switches), from the Theremin to the mouse to multitouch screens to the Wii remote. The most interesting observation in his historical overview was that nontraditional control schemes work much better when there’s force feedback involved. Guess that makes sense.

The bulk of the talk revolved around Merrill’s own project – something called “Siftables”  (http://siftables.com/). Siftables are little square blocks, each with a tiny screen, motion sensors and proximity sensors. Each Siftable can perform simple functions on its own (displaying a word or a number or a mathematical symbol or a face) but — cool! cool! cool! — can respond to what other nearby Siftables are doing. (At the trivial level, think of the opening of the TV show, The Brady Bunch. A set of Siftables can recreate that people-in-a-tic-tac0toe board sequence and look at and respond to each other…)

The possibilities inherent in the Siftables idea are incredible. I want ‘em. Now. Merrill talked a lot about the educational possibilities and all but the “board” games you could create with these things would be incredible. Check out the website and you’ll see what I mean. We should all just start brainstorming now so we’re ready when Siftables take the world by storm!

Experimental Gameplay Sessions
Jonathan Blow et al

Okay. Have to calm down. Take a deep breath. Be rational. There. Better.

This was easily the high point of the show, for me. I was completely blown away. The level of creativity on display here was amazing.

First up, Jenova Chen (That Game Company) talked about the iterative prototyping process that led to the creation of Flower (a game that’s totally worth playing if you haven’t already). Like all of us, the Flower team tried all sorts of things — all sorts of mechanics and goals and challenges — before settling on their final, leisurely, nearly goal-free game design. If anyone doubted that iteration was the heart of game design or, at least, of game design in a world of unknowns and new ideas, this talk would have convinced you.

One of the speaker/demo-ers showed off his ”4D game” – Miegakure – a game set in a four-dimensional space, unfolded so mere 3D mortals can (nearly) parse it. I barely understood what the guy was talking about and by the end of his brief talk and demo my head felt like it was going to explode, but, man, do I want to try to figure it out! Proof positive that there are whole universes (maybe literally) of new ideas to explore in gaming!

Some guys from an outfit called Hazardous Software showed off ”Achron” – which looked to be a gen-u-ine time-travel RTS. Incredible. I’ve been wanting to do another time travel game since I worked on Martian Dreams but didn’t know how to pull it off. These guys seem to have done it. Just go to their website and check it out. Really cool.

I won’t bother with all the details (this is already going on too long) but I have to say I was especially inspired by Shadow Physics, Closure and Unfinished Swan. All of the presentations were terrific (and I hate to leave anyone out) but these three really did it for me on the gameplay, aesthetic and creative levels. The ways in which each used lighting, physics and rendering as gameplay tools should provide all of us non-indie gamers a little kick in the butt to ratchet things up, creatively. Simple, beautiful and at least potentially incredible games….

Basically, the whole indie scene is killing me right now. Something changed in the last year. If this session, and the IGF booth proved nothing else it’s that the indie game movement is really on the move. It’s not just  a bunch of guys fooling around or building their portfolios — it’s a bunch of talented, dedicated, professional developers making great, polished, playable games. I don’t know whether to root for them to get publishing deals (so they can keep making their own cool stuff) or whether to root for them to fail to get a deal (so I can hire them all!).

Frankly, as a player, I’m really drawn to indie games these days. World of Goo… Flower… Braid… Just great stuff. Everyone in the mainstream of games who attends GDC should try to squeeze into the perenially-sold-out Experimental Gameplay session — if not to be inspired than to be scared witless by the creative guys who are going to be stealing all our jobs if we don’t up our game dramatically!

(On a related note, there were a ton of games on display at the Independent Game Festival booth (http://www.igf.com/02finalists.html) worthy of note. Tag: The Power of Paint… Pixeljunk Eden… The Graveyard… Night Game… Blueberry Garden… Feist… Musaic Box… Amazing stuff!

Oh, and if you want to read more about the Experimental Gameplay Sessions (and find links to a bunch of games I didn’t get into here), check out this article from the Guardian by Aleks Krotoski. Reminded me of a bunch of games I neglected to mention that you ought to check out. Too many games, not enough time or space to blog about them all…

So that was day 2 — quite the inspiring day, actually.

The show proper opened on Wednesday, March 25th and I hardly knew what to do with myself. I mean, as I said in an earlier post, it’d been YEARS since I had attended GDC and not been stuck in my hotel room madly revising slides for one talk or another. Mostly, I spent the day sitting at one of the tables on the 2nd floor of the Moscone Center, waving at friends who were distracted by the need to prepare for their talks and talking with folks who drifted over to say hi. (Spent a fair amount of time that way with ex-Champions game guru Steve Peterson, MMO guy Raph Koster and got to meet Cory Doctorow, whose book Little Brother I happened to be reading on my phone thanks to Daily Lit…). Good times, as they say…

I did manage to attend a few talks on day 1, though. Here’s the scoop on those:

Discovering New Development Opportunities (Nintendo Keynote)
Satoru Iwata

I was a little surprised that much of this talk was about Shigeru Miyamoto’s development style — not disappointed, but surprised that someone other than Miyamoto himself would discuss it. Anyway, from the sound of it, Miyamoto seems inspired by the things in his life (as are, I think, most successful designers). Starting with an idea you think is “marketable” or “niche-filling” or any of the other myriad starting points for projects seems foolish to me. Great games come from personal passion, not business objectives. Someone burns to do something and they do it with dedication to quality that goes as far as anything can to ensuring success… Anyway, I was not at ALL surprised that Miyamoto’s games come from a personal place… From what we heard at the talk, once a subject’s been settled on, the approach is very methodical, very iterative, very into defining the essence of fun with a small team (and often for a very, very long time) before expanding into a real game and a real (for which read “expensive”) team. We could all learn from that!

Iwata also talked fairly extensively about how Nintendo wanted to be friendly to developers of all types and went to some lengths to make clear how important hardcore gamers are to Nintendo. This was all great to hear. But what floored me were the sales stats he talked about — notably that the Wii Balance Board has shipped nearly as many units as the PS3 has total! Wow. I mean, it’s pretty common knowledge that Nintendo has surpassed both PS3 and 360 in units sold, but to hear there are — what did he say? 15 million-ish Wii Balance Boards out there. That took me aback. That starts to sound like a peripheral more people should be supporting. (Of course, that was probably EXACTLY what Iwata hoped the audience would leave believing, so I’m feeling a little used right now…)

There was some talk about the DSi and camera games and all, which looked kind of cool. (Now that I have a DSi I’m a LITTLE less excited than I was before, but still a nice little device.) A demo-er came out and showed off a camera game and a simple animation toolkit that looks like it’ll allow users to create some lovely 2D cartoons. Can’t wait to get my hands on that.

But the best came last – video of a new Zelda game for the DS is coming “later this year.” Woohoo! Bring it on!

And then everyone who attended the talk got a copy of Rhythm Heaven for the DS – a variation of Rhythm Tengoku, one of the best DS games ever, but never shipped in the US. If you don’t have it, go get it. Great little game.

Lighting with Purpose
Jay Riddle (Disney Interactive Studios), Paul Ayliffe (Blackrock Studios)

Okay, I admit I went to this talk mostly because Jay and Paul are Disney guys I like and respect a ton, but I’m hugely into lighting these days and wanted to make sure I didn’t miss out on any pearls of wisdom because I work with these guys and assume I’ve heard all they have to say on the subject.

As it turns out, that was a really good idea. The talk was really nice and did touch on some stuff I hadn’t heard them talk about before about how to use lighting to achieve aesthetic and gameplay effects. Jay was nicely conceptual while Paul was nicely concrete. I love that Jay comes at things from a film background and was able to show examples from movies as well as games. And I’m always blown away by what Blackrock does graphically and take advantage of any opportunity to learn how they do such amazing things, vusually. Frankly, I need to get both of those guys to give those talks at Junction Point some time.

Next year, a follow-up that gets into even more specifics, particularly with regard to how lighting can create specific moods, and how color plays into things would be great.

David Perry’s Lunch with Luminaries
David Perry, Gary Whitta, Brian Fargo, Rob Pardo, Will Wright, Neil Young (and me!)

Other than the super embarrassing title of this event it was a ton of fun — one of those things that has me gawking like a kid in a candy shop wondering what I did to deserve being here with all of these guys! There’s been enough online coverage that I won’t go into details, but I got to give Blizzard’s Rob Pardo a (totally joshing) hard time about MMO’s and how much I’d prefer it if Blizzard would Just Give Me Diablo 3 RIGHT NOW. And for the first time in MY life, at least, I actually got Will Wright to admit that I was right about something we argued about — specifically, the big impact cloud computing was likely to have on games and game development. (I think it’s going to be huge and he, at least at the start of the discussion, didn’t think it would change things at all.) I got into a little good-natured sparring with Neil Young as well, about how I totally don’t get the mobile gaming business and development model, and I got to hang out with Brian Fargo (one of my heroes when I first got into the videogame business), all of which, together made the lunch a huge win for me. Hope I get to do it again at some future GDC!

Everything Old is New Again: Using Musical Style to Enhance Storytelling
Lennie Moore, Garry Schyman

I went to this session expecting to hear about music gameplay – a topic I’m intensely interested in. (Not music games per se or rhythm games, but how we can introduce musical play ideas into traditional game types.) The panelists didn’t actually address this topic at all, but it ended up being a great session nonetheless.

What these guys DID talk about was how composers can suss out what developers really want, musically speaking, and how they research and echo specific musical styles and/or the music of specific time periods.

I came away impressed enough by both composers – their working methods, their collaborative process, their musical knowledge, their connections, their versatility and, of course, the quality of their work. A nice surprise, only because I didn’t know either of the panelists and expected the panel to be about something it wasn’t about, yet I learned a ton.

That was it for day 1 of GDC 2009. I’ll be back with whatever I can remember of day 2 soon.

I know some time has passed since GDC, but I’ve been meaning to post some thoughts about the show since I got back, so here goes. I spent a week out in SF and did enough stuff that I’m going to break this up into several posts. Part one, covers Monday, 3/23 and Tuesday, 3/24.

First off, let me just say that this was a weird show for me — good, REALLY good even, but weird. I’d have to go back and check, but I’m pretty sure this year was the first time in way more than a decade  that I had no obligations at the show — no lectures, no panels, no business meetings. I had some lunches planned but that was it.

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, but GDC is a heck of a lot of fun when you don’t have to edit slides and fret about stuff! I love speaking at GDC, and hope I get the chance to do it again soon, but it was a nice change of pace to be just a civilian.

My week started on Monday, with the IGDA Education Summit. I’ve been involved in one way or another with the IGDA’s education effort for quite some time. Fact is, I’m really proud of the curriculum framework Robin Hunicke, Eric Zimmerman, Doug Church and others (and I) came up with years ago — as proud as I am of just about anything I’ve done professionally. It’s not so much that the framework was so great — that’s something for others to determine – it’s the fact that this year, as in so many prior years, I’ve seen evidence, and been told, that a lot of colleges and universities are using the thing as the foundation of their courses and programs.

And this year’s Edu Summit revealed that there are more colleges and universities offering game development/game studies programs than ever. I spent a fair amount of time hanging with faculty and students at some of these programs and was pleased to meet people who weren’t employed by or being educated at the Usual Gang of Suspects. Lots of places offer game studies and game development courses and degrees now.

Frankly, the people teaching in these programs still often lack professional experience, but there are more and more ex-pros teaching now than in the past. Things are trending in the right direction there, if you ask me. The students I interacted with this year seemed sharper, better trained and better prepared for careers in development than at any time in the past. (This, by the way, jibes with the fact that more and more of the people I hire are coming from academic programs. I always expected this would happen, but I didn’t expect it to happen so quickly. Wherever the academics are coming from and whatever they’re doing, they’re really starting to do it right!)

One of the edu summit panels covered the recent Global Game Jam (http://globalgamejam.org/). The concept of “game jams” is one that seems worth embracing, whether in an academic setting or a professional one – as a way to generate ideas, build team camaraderie, refresh creative juices, etc. All of the speakers had interesting things to say, but I was most intrigued by some comments from Ian Schreiber. Specifically, he talked about the need to impose constraints when “jamming”: constrain theme or mechanics or aesthetics or tech. That’s great advice even when you’re not thinking about a game jam. Constraints are, as we all know, good for creativity in any context. It’s amazing the impact a different set of constraints has on design and the development process (something publishers — and developers — should pay more attention to!).

Jane Macgonigle (http://www.avantgame.com/), who’s affiliated with the Institute for the Future (http://www.iftf.org/) gave a really interesting keynote. I disagreed with some of what she had to say, but it was certainly interesting, entertaining and thought provoking. Basically, she claimed that over the next couple of decades, games would change the world (we’re in agreement there!). She saw games driving educational efforts, moving people to political action, bringing people together across cultures, creating happiness and so on. Game designers, she believes, are going to be the prime movers and shakers of this century.  She wants us to call ourselves “fungineers,” something I refuse even to consider. Basically, I don’t think of myself as a guy who provides “fun” or even “happiness” to players.

I much prefer to think of myself as the pea under the mattress (I hope SOMEONE gets the reference…) or, put another way, I like to think of myself as a provocateur. I want players to think about what they’re doing, as they do it… to think about WHY they’re doing what they’re doing… to have something they can take from their game back into the real world. There’s certainly fun to be had in that sort of thinking activity, but it’s not the first thing I think about.

I also took issue with McGonigle’s idea that games should move people to specific, desired actions or beliefs. Certainly, we’re capable of doing that — we can be a very effective propaganda tool, I’m sure. But I don’t really want to convince players of anything, or get them to behave in a particular way — honestly, I don’t think anyone should aspire to that. If we turn our interactive medium into just another way of selling people on ideas, we’re missing the point. Games should be a dialogue, not a lecture… a discussion, not a lesson. What we should be doing is allowing people to explore conceptual spaces and draw their own conclusions about them. I don’t ever want to be as coercive as McGonigle seems to want us to be.

(As a note, Jane McGonigle was one of three people who, during GDC, spoke about the “science of happiness.” This is a meme I need to investigate…)

Jesse Schell gave the other edu summit keynote, in which he discussed his idea of game design “lenses,” another way (near as I can tell) to say “game design patterns.” Whatever he calls ‘em, Jesse’s take on the design process — and ways to break out of existing molds and old habits – is worth checking out. His book and accompanying card deck are interesting and maybe useful (haven’t finished reading yet, so can’t say for sure…). Check out http://artofgamedesign.com/.

The rest of the edu summit was spent hanging out with students and faculty folks, which was great fun. A nice, relaxing way to start the week.

More on GDC soon…

I just heard from a friend that Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has died. Damn. I eulogized, if I can call it that, Gary Gygax a while back, and now Dave…

Dave never really got a fair shake, or appropriate credit, or his due as one of the creators of roleplaying, but he never let that get him down, at least not around me. He was one of the sweetest, kindest, humblest guys I ever met. And, man, did he loves games. He was an ace designer, by all reports a creative player (though I was never lucky enough to play with him), a dedicated teacher and a mentor to scads of up-and-coming game developers. He always had time to chat, was always interested in what others were doing, how they were doing, what they were playing….

It’s unlikely the mainstream press will report Dave’s passing the way they noted Gary Gygax’s, which is a real shame. Those who knew him, and those who know the facts behind the legend, will remember Dave with equal, maybe greater, affection. He was one of the Good Guys, an all-around fine fellow, as my wife would say, and he’ll be missed. More important, he’ll be remembered as long as people roll those funny dice and create characters and tell stories together in a way they might never have been able to if Dave hadn’t arrived on the scene.

Dave changed things, but was never changed by them. I can’t think of a better epitaph than that.

My AT&T Tilt gave up the ghost last week (you should see the screen — it looks like something Jasper Johns might have painted) so I decided to take the plunge and replace it with an iPhone.

The decision was pretty straightforward, really. If this year’s SXSW and GDC did nothing else, they convinced me that the iPhone’s a legit gaming platform and, to keep current, I need to know what’s going on in that space. Plus, everyone I know is joining the iPhone club and I’ve been feeling a little left out.

So I’m now in Day 4 of cult membership and, I have to say, though the experience has been largely positive, I have mixed feelings about my new digital pal.

One the plus side, as a phone it’s really pretty rockin’. The call quality is terrific and I seem to get better signal strength than I used to, even though I’m using the same provider and going to all the same places.

As an internet device it’s amazing. I feel like I’m really web-surfing for the first time ever on a phone.

As a game platform, it’s swell. I already have more than a screen of games of high enough quality that, if I were Nintendo, I might be a little bit concerned. And the ease with which I’ve been able to acquire those games (along with a bunch of cool apps) is astonishing — the App Store is everything online commerce should be and usually isn’t. If I’m not careful, I’ll go broke — a buck here, a buck there adds up quickly.

As an entertainment device, the iPhone is as cool as everyone says it is. That screen! It’s beautiful (at least it was for the first three hours I had it, before it got all thumbprinty). Movies look great. Pictures look great. Music sounds great. Books — hm, nice, but I’m spoiled by the Kindle.

(A brief aside — anyone who thinks the iPhone is a great ebook reader hasn’t played with a non-backlit e-ink device. There’s simply no comparison and people should just stop talking about how the iPhone’s going to make the Kindle and devices like it obsolete. This Will Not Happen.)

E-book lameness aside, the iPhone is really remarkable, if what you’re after is seamless connectivity and constant distraction.

However, as a “smart phone,” at least as I use smart phones, the iPhone actually seems kind of dumb.

For the longest time, I was a Treo guy. If not for a falling out with my service provider which doesn’t warrant discussion here, I’d STILL be a Treo guy. After that, I became a Tilt and Blackberry guy. And I’ll tell you right here and now, no virtual keyboard can match real buttons. The iPhone comes as close as anything I’ve tried and it’s not remotely comparable.

The iPhone’s inability to sync with Outlook Notes and Tasks is deadly. I use Outlook’s Notes and Tasks functions as brain-extenders and have a hard time living without them (especially Notes).

The fact that I can’t create and edit Office documents is causing me amazing grief already. The fact that I can’t seem to just get a list of documents I have stored on my device is totally weird. And I’m really having a tough time to adjusting to what seems to be a complete lack of menus that allow me to do things like Select All from a list of emails or documents and such like. I mean, I get that Apple and Microsoft are enemies, but hurry up and get iPhone OS 3.0 out there so people can start making some real productivity apps for this thing!

It’s like the iPhone is working so hard to be my friend it’s incapable of being my co-worker. It’s all fun and games when, at times, I want it to be serious. Still, there’s enough to like that I’m trying to stay calm and make do. Until 3.0 comes along and MS Office or Documents to Go or QuickOffice or something becomes available, I’m messing around with Evernote and a couple of other note-taking apps that seem promising. And I’m experimenting with Google Office for document, spreadsheet and presentation work. It’s too early to say if this’ll work, but I’m trying — really trying – to embrace the iPhone.

Right now, the device is feeling a little “emperor’s new clothes-ish” to me — amusing but not necessarily what you want in a ruler, and everyone’s too afraid of looking un-cool to say anything. I hope I’m wrong and come to love my iPhone as unreservedly as the rest of my fellow cult members. I hope it’s just too early in this relationship to be reaching any conclusions.

I hope that’s the case. For now, if you can help me learn to love the iPhone (as opposed to just liking it pretty well), lend a hand. If you’ve found games you absolutely love or apps you can’t live without, feel free to comment and let me know about ‘em! And if ANY of you have found ANY way to get an iPhone to sync with MS Outlook Notes and Tasks, PLEASE let me know — that’s just killing me.

So, I’ve now lived with my Kindle a few more months and, gotta say, I still absolutely love the thing. The ability to sample books before buying, the lack of stress involved with picking a book before going on a trip, the fact that you can always find exactly the thing you feel like reading at any given moment — just amazing.

I loved my Kindle 1 so much, I preordered a Kindle 2 the day Amazon started accepting them and I couldn’t wait — cooler looking device, longer battery life, better screen, quicker “page” turns, a little nubbin thing to move the cursor around instead of the goofy scroll wheel and no more accidental button presses. What could possibly go wrong?

Strangely enough, just about everything went wrong.

I know, I know… everyone’s all gaga over the Kindle 2. It solves all of the problems Amazon should have solved before shipping the first one, everyone says.

Well, I have to ask, are all these reviewers actually comparing the two devices or are they just making this stuff up? I’ve spent a lot of time with both now and I’ve come to the conclusion that the Kindle 1 is a better device in most of the ways that matter to me.

In fact, I gave my Kindle 2 to my wife, the lovely Caroline. (She loves it, btw…)

Here’s the scoop:

The Kindle 1 has a zany, asymmetrical look, rather than the sleek Apple-ish look all designers seem to strive for these days. But in making the 2 taller, they’ve thrown off the balance just enough to be annoying — it wants to tip backward in a way the Kindle 1 doesn’t, putting a small, but annoying, strain on the wrists. And in making it thinner, they’ve made it almost impossible for me (small-handed as I am) to hold it in one hand.

In making the buttons smaller, the designers of the Kindle 2 have forced the user to hold it just below the center point of the device, with hands in the 9 and 3 position — great for driving, perhaps, but not the greatest position to be in if you want to read a book for an hour or two. Sadly, you simply can’t reach the next and previous buttons unless your hands are positioned the way the designers intended. On the 1, I move my hands around all the time and can always reach the gigantic buttons I need to reach.

The inward hinged buttons do solve the problem of inadvertent page turns, but, in combination with the new form factor, my left-hand-hold with finger-flick page-turns is now impossible. Good gosh, people, it isn’t THAT hard to avoid accidentally pressing buttons!

Surely, though, there’s a huge win in having real cursor control instead of being limited to selecting a line and then using a menu to choose what you really wanted to select, right? Not so much. The cursor doesn’t move smoothly on the screen — it jumps one line at a time, vertically, and not very smoothly horizontally once you reach the line you wanted. I actually prefer the scroll wheel of the Kindle 1.

So there it is — the Kindle 1 is a better device than the Kindle 2. I’m used to the page-turn speed, I’ve never come close to running down my battery and, man, do I LOVE the fact that I have an SD card for infinite storage space.

There are, for sure, things that need to be fixed on the Kindle, but the 2 isn’t the answer — at least not for me. Bring on the Kindle 3, Amazon. I still love you and I’ll be ordering a 3, day one, too.

I’ve always been fascinated by word games. I love Scrabble and Boggle and Upwords and crossword puzzles and bowl-a-scores and TexTwist to death. But those aren’t the sort of word games I’ve been thinking about recently.

No, I’ve been thinking of word games of a different sort — the kind I grew up reading in the back of New York magazine. Anyone remember the old New York Magazine Competition, edited by Mary Ann Madden? My family used to gather around the dinner table and read it aloud each week, roaring with laughter at the witty responses of readers to Madden’s humorous problems. Some of these were hysterically funny.

In one Competition, readers were asked to submit brand names for products found in a drugstore. Responses included a bunch of fake birth control pills (Shed Roe, Off Spring, Junior Miss, Scionara, Kiddy Foil, Ova Kill, Bumbino, Heir Pollution, Teeny Bopper, No Kidding, Gene Fowler, Antiseedant, Womb Forwent, Absorbine Junior, Infant aside); deodorants (Pit Stop, Arrivederci Aroma); hair restorers (Hair Apparent, Balderdash); tranquilizers (Damitol); and a children’s antibiotic: (Mickeymycin).

In another, asking for names of prequels, some of the entries included: Kindergarten for Scandal;
Two Dalmations; Prince Kong; Malcolm IX; Little Richard III; We’re Running Low on Mohicans; Wee Willie Loman; Mrs. Warren’s Entry Level Position; The Personal Ads of J. Alfred Prufrock; The Baggage Check-In of the Bumble Bee; Cogito Ergo Subtotal; A Man Called Horsie.

That was pretty typical, though sometimes the Competitions got far more literary (and more challenging for 15-year-old me to suss out!). And if it whets your appetite for more, the bad news is the Competitions are nowhere to be found online (though this site at least cites some of them) and Mary Ann Madden’s three books of Competition complitions — Maybe He’s Dead, Thank You For the Giant Sea Tortoise and Son of Giant Sea Tortoise – are all out of print (how can this be?!). They’re available used if you dig a bit, but pretty pricey.

So, you’re kind of out of luck on the New York Competition front. And that’s why I’m so jazzed about my recent discovery that The Atlantic magazine runs a column by Barbara Wallraff (called, variously, Word Court, Word Fugitives and In a Word) that is clearly in the same vein as the old Competitions. And, like Mary Ann Madden back in the day, Wallraff and her readers routinely have me furrowing my brow, trying to keep up, and laughing out loud as I read.

There was one Word Fugitives recently that asked readers to submit words that described that peculiar phenomenon of things “that seem ubiquitous when you aren’t looking for them but that are nowhere to be found when you are.” Among the answers? Neverywhere… unbiquitous… ubiquitless… fewbiquitous… omniabsent… omnevanescent… ameniteases… elusiversal… You get the idea.

Another one I loved asked readers to submit words to describe the universal tendency to rearrange a dishwasher someone else has already loaded. The answers there included the thematically linked redishtribution, obsessive compulsive dishorder, dishorderly conduct, redishtricting, dishrespect and dish jockying plus the outlier (and my favorite) onecupsmanship.

If these pun-ishing pursuits didn’t make you laugh, there’s not much I can say to change your mind and you might want to stop reading right now. I live for this stuff. And reading Wallraff’s stuff got me thinking about some other word games I’ve been obsessed with and addicted to over the years:

• The New Yorker’s last-page caption-writing contest. This fills me with admiration for the wit of the readers, mostly because I’m so god-awful bad at turning visuals into wordplay. Frustrates the heck out of me…
• National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo), which I find so impossibly, wonderfully goofy I’ll have to join several of my friends who’ve tried it and give it a whirl someday. (That’ll happen after I retire or something, since I can’t imagine having even a month of free time to devote to writing a novel!)
• The Six-Word Memoirs web page, where people sum up their lives in, yes, exactly six words. I first discovered this in The New Yorker, back in February. Read the article here and then come back. I’ll wait. Did you notice anything odd about the story? Like the fact that EVERY SENTENCE IN IT HAD EXACTLY SIX WORDS! I caught onto that about halfway through reading it and just about died. Talk about wit and obsession in equal doses. A simple idea, but genius. I mean, it’s one thing to write a really (REALLY) short autobiography. It’s another thing to try to craft an entire article that’s as readable as anything in The New Yorker, while working under the constraint of sentences exactly six words long. I was in awe…
• The books written without a specific letter. (This is called a “lipogram” and the number of examples is, to my mind, pretty horrifying, if incredibly entertaining. The most remarkable of the lipogram texts are the ones that eschew the letter “e” (just try it…). Amazingly, there have been at least two, that I know of, Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright and the even more remarkable A Void by Georges Perec. (Perec’s work is the most amazing word-thing of all time, by virtue of the fact that it was originally written, e-less, in French as Las Disparitions  and then translated into English by Gilbert Adair who crafted a translation that ALSO includes no e’s whatsoever. That, my friends, is just crazy!
• And if you’re still with me and at all into words, by all means check out the BBC radio program I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue. By far the word-wittiest program in history and a laugh-out-loud hour you can count on.

Finally, in my catalog of word-game-wondrousness, is the “One-Pulse Word Game.” We used to play this at Steve Jackson Games all the time. I’m pretty sure Steve Jackson came up with it himself and I’ve often wondered why he’s never turned this sure-fire bit of gameplay goodness into a real game — surely, fame and fortune would quickly follow.

For those of you who’ve never experienced the…ahem… joys of the One-Pulse Word Game, here’s how it goes: Someone starts talking in words that have just one part — not two, nor three, but a lone part. Others join in the fun, in a mode of speech just as short. And they would do this, back and forth, as long as they could and as fast as they could — no pause to think, no stops or halts at all, when things went well (and if you could pull it off). It was tons of funs — it IS tons of fun. I play it now, in text, you see. Get good at it and wow your friends, or drive them off, as this can get old in no time.

I’ll stop now…

Twenty years after my departure from Steve Jackson Games, the One-Pulse Word Game remains one of the great joys in my life — not least because I’m pretty good at it — and that “it” is something most people aren’t good at. Call it a gift (as I do) or a curse (as the lovely wife, Caroline, does), it’s mine and I love it. Plus, there’s good, clean fun in doing something completely offbeat that most people don’t even notice you’re doing. And then there’s the annoyance factor once people do figure out that what they thought was a real conversation was just an excuse for you to have some private fun (something they usually realize only after you tell them you’re doing anything odd at all). But you have to get good at the one-pulse word game to reach the point that people don’t notice, so start practicing (not with ME of course!). Anyway, if you get good, you can rip — talking without pause for breath and offering up opportunities to annoy your friends no end. Life, as they say, is good!

And, as long as we’re on the topic of words, and one-syllable word stuff in particular, if you get into the One-Pulse Word Game be sure to check out the ”books in words of one syllable” published toward the end of the 19th century by McLaughlin Bros. You can find some of these books in e-book form, but I strongly recommend seeking out the real thing — the books were quite beautiful, something e-books, even on my beloved Kindle, are not. You can find the actual books on antiquarian book sites or ebay once in a while and they’re utterly fascinating — an early attempt, as I understand it, to encourage immigrant literacy by offering classic, uplifting fiction and works of American history in simple language for folks learning English as adults. I have a bunch of these books now and treasure them — and I owe it all to Steve Jackson’s One-Pulse Word game.

Anyway, I wish this was all going somewhere, that I had a point to all this. Sadly, I don’t, really.  The closest I can come to a point is that the word games I love all involve work on the part of the “user” — if you don’t think about what you’re reading, or hearing or whatever, the “jokes” don’t mean a thing. Reading a Competition or a Word Justice, or listening to I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue or playing the One-Pulse Word game requires thinking, interpretation, interaction. You’re not just regurgitating memorized data… you’re not just mashing buttons… you’re actually thinking, collaborating with the creator of the “gag.” And that typifies the games I most enjoy playing and, I hope, the games I make.

So, maybe there’s a point to all this, after all. But truth be told, I just spent a bunch of time reading a year’s worth of The Atlantic and laughing at the word games in the back, which got me thinking about the New York Competition back when I was a kid, which got me thinking about all those other word-oriented pastimes I’ve come to love over the years. And that led to this — yet another overly wordy blog post.

And on that note, I will end. In words of one syll… er… part.

Last month, I had the honor and pleasure of giving the opening keynote at the Montreal International Game Summit. I’ll leave it to others to assess whether my comments had any merit, but I can tell you the rest of the speakers put on a heck of a show.

This was my second time attending MIGS and it really seems like a show on the rise — just keeps getting better and better.

Attendance seemed significantly higher than 2005, the last time I was there, and the roster of speakers was stellar. Sadly, I face-planted myself on a Montreal sidewalk at the end of the first day (gave myself a concussion and everything!) and was unable to attend the second day of the show, but on the first day I attended talks by Randy Smith, Chris Hecker, Petri Purho and Laura Fryer, all of whom proved enlightening and entertaining. I also got to see a bunch of folks I don’t get to hang out with often enough — Disney’s own Michelle Jacob, NYU’s Katherine Isbister, Jason Della Rocca of the IGDA, Jon Blow and others. And I got to meet a bunch of new people I hope to spend more time with at other shows. All in all, a great experience.

Randy Smith’s talk about games as art was eye-opening — weirdly like a talk I’ve given several times over the years, about the unique characteristics of the games medium, but Randy supported the argument with data in a way I never thought to do and illustrated it with visuals that brought the argument to life in a way my word-oriented nature doesn’t allow me to do (at least not without a lot of effort!). There have been enough blog posts about the talk that I won’t recount it here but just throw in my vote for this as “talk of the show” (or the part of the show I was able to attend when I wasn’t at the doctor getting my freakin’ head x-rayed…).

Chris Hecker blew me away, too, by throwing so much data at the audience it was all a little overwhelming. His talk was about user-generated content and, at least by implication, how it will come to dominate the world of gaming. He had more amazing visuals of more amazing player-creations from Spore than you can possibly believe. The number of people uploading Spore content for others to enjoy is mind-boggling. Still, I remain sceptical.

Depending on users for content seems less than ideal to me — the example I usually cite when defending my luddite stance — that professionals should provide content and players should enjoy content — is the old TSR story. Basically, there were, back in the day around 15 million D&D players, of those, probably 10% acted as DMs. Of THOSE 10% were good DMs and 10% of the good DMs generated their own adventures. Of those who generated adventures, probably 10% were pretty good. And, finally, 10% of those were publishable. That adds up to about 150 adventures worth playing from a user-base of 15 million. And finding those good ones? Pretty darn hard. My odds are better sticking with the pros and paying for their work.

I’m probably dead wrong about this (given Will Wright’s level of success relative to mine!), or maybe I’m just trying to preserve my own job, but I remain a believer in providing tools for collaboration with players, with pros offering the things WE’RE good at and giving players power to do the things THEY’RE good at, rather than just handing over authorial control to everyone. (And, yes, before anyone throws it back at me, I HAVE played Little Big Planet, and my opinion remains unchanged on the topic of user-generated content…)

Kloonigames’ Petri Purho gave a talk about indie game development and the creation of Crayon Physics (which, if you haven’t tried it, is a MUST play you should go grab right now…). I mean, I do NOT get how the guy does what he does. Come on! (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, Purho is the “game a month” guy!) The idea that any game made in a month might be any good is mind-boggling. The idea that one of them could be as amazing as Crayon Physics is, well, it’s whatever’s more incredible than “mind-boggling.” The fact that he repeatedly said of himself in his talk that he wasn’t much of a designer is just ridiculous.

Honestly, as a non-programming, non-artist with deep roots in the commercial game business, there wasn’t much for me in the talk, in terms of career guidance, but there were some ideas that seem hugely applicable to folks in my situation, specifically: New ideas are out there and need to be grabbed and played with, rather than sticking with the tried and true; and you can and should turn ideas around as quickly as possible and with as little bureaucratic interference as you can manage, to cull the good ideas from the bad as quickly as possible. Frankly, “fail quickly and leave time for recovery” is my new motto and one that a lot of developers need to embrace. Petri came on that idea earlier and more productively than most.

Laura Fryer’s talk on being a producer was pretty swell, too. I spent most of the time wishing I’d been told all this stuff when I was a producer — and wondering how I could bring back the key points to my own production team at Junction Point. She really nailed the idea that being a producer isn’t about — or mainly about — schedules and budgets and all; it’s about fostering a culture of “production.” You want to create an environment in which everyone on the team is freed to do what’s best for the project. It’s about communication and doing whatever’s necessary to remove impediments to progress. It’s about ensuring that everyone on the team does whatever it takes to achieve greatness. Amen to that.

Sadly, that was all I got to see of MIGS this year, thanks to my nose dive into concrete that first evening. (Seriously, my face looked bad enough that I scared small children at the Montreal airport a couple of days later…) Still, though, I had a great experience at the show and look forward to attending again in the coming years. For all of you who didn’t attend, web search the various speakers and read up on what they had to say. Quite an education…

So, about six weeks ago, I bought an Amazon Kindle. How do I feel about it? Let me cut to the chase:

HOLY COW!

The first week or so, I wasn’t sure it was the life-changing thing Jeff Bezos and Oprah made it out to be, but man was I wrong. I love my Kindle (and, just to be clear, I’m not being paid to say this, have no connection with Amazon and have no stake in the Kindle’s success in any way, shape or form — I’m just a newly minted True Believer, won over by a seriously cool piece of hardware).

If you do a lot of traveling, just go buy one. Now. If you love books, at least consider it, even if you never spend any time in airports. If you have the scratch, go buy one even if you hate to read. Yes, it’s that cool. 

The fact that you can carry around an entire library everywhere you go is just incredible. Heck, the fact that you can carry around all of George R.R. Martin’s Ice and Fire series (well, as much of it as he’s written so far!) without giving yourself a hernia is amazing. Miraculously, all books are now, for me, the same size and weight (which probably drives designers mad but now means I don’t have to think about whether I want to lug some meaty tome around in my backpack — I just read what I want, when I want).

I mean, I just love this thing.

Here’s why:

• For starters, it makes it easy to buy books — almost too easy, if you’re as weak-willed as I am. Yeah, yeah, you can go to Amazon, turn on 1-click and get a “real” book pretty easily, but there’s nothing that compares with downloading a sample chapter of a book (takes about ten seconds), reading said sample, ordering the whole book and just, well, reading.
• If you’re feeling cheap, there are several websites that offer tons of books in Kindle format for free — the usual Project Gutenberg fare, plus some legit publishers clearly trying to get authors in front of readers by offering their work for free. (You know, the “first one’s free” concept…)
• If you wear glasses shout a few hosannas ’cause you can adjust the Kindle’s font size at will.
• If you tire of the book you’re reading, open up another one. You can skip from book to book as mood and whim dictate.
• If you want to immerse yourself, the e-ink stuff (which I now think of as pure magic) allows you to read for hours. Just like a real book. Try THAT on your cell phone or laptop. I’ve done it. It doesn’t work. by contrast, you can stare at the Kindle screen for hours without eye strain. The only downside to the e-ink screen is a distracting reverse-image flash that appears every time the screen updates (i.e., when you “turn” the page). However, to my surprise, I stopped noticing it completely after just a few days — the virtual page-turn happens quickly and it’s almost as if you just naturally blink when you update the screen. The annoying flash isn’t much more distracting than turning a page in a “real” book and, for me, is no longer an issue. In fact (and I know this is heresy) I think I actually prefer reading on the Kindle to reading a “real” book… And I’m a guy who LOVES real books. (Just ask the folks who’ve had to help me and my wife move all of our books. It ain’t pretty…)
• The battery life is good enough that I couldn’t tell you how long the battery lasts — I’ve never run it down far enough to have a clue.
• You can add notes, highlight sections of text and look words up in the included dictionary or online.
• Plus, the Kindle works pretty well as an audiobook player and general music player. Nifty secondary features, to be sure.

So, is the Kindle perfect? No way.

There are some wacky UI and form factor issues that should have been addressed before the product shipped.

• It’s simply way too easy to press the Next Page or Previous Page buttons by mistake (though, to be fair, I got used to the buttons pretty quickly and now find this to be much less of a problem than I expected it to be).
• The keyboard, split in half, with the space bar on one side, is a total hack and not very useful.
• The scroll wheel takes some getting used to and having to access menus and use the wheel and the keyboard (sigh!) certainly makes it tougher to take notes or highlight stuff or look things up than I’d like.
• Deleting content should be a one-step process but it actually takes several steps, which is a royal pain.
• Determining how much space stuff takes up on the device is still a mystery to me.
• A lot of people think the Kindle looks clunky (though I kinda like it, and it feels good and fits nicely in my hands).
• Graphics are not good. It takes a longish time to change pages when the contents of the page you’re going to contains a graphic. And once the screen loads, images don’t look good at all. Graphics display — slowly — in grainy grayscale only, which is at best suboptimal.
• Finally, who thought it was a good idea to put the tiny on/off switch (and wifi switch) on the back? That’s a real pain, especially when the device is in its protective cover, which makes reaching the back difficult, at best, and far too often results in the battery cover falling off. (And, for the record, the battery cover is always coming off — probably my biggest peeve.)

Let me be clear: All of these problems don’t, as they say, amount to a hill of beans. For a first generation device, they add up to ”minorly annoying” at most. The Kindle’s downsides are trivial and far outweighed by the pluses outlined above. And there’s still that one, great, unprecedented thing about it that trumps everything else: You Can Carry An Entire Library With You Wherever You Go! This simple fact makes the Kindle one of the coolest devices I’ve played with since I got my first iPod.

If you’re still not sold, let me just put this into perspective for you by sharing what’s on my Kindle right now: The complete works of Charles Dickens, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. P. Lovecraft, Carey Rockwell (i.e., the Tom Corbett: Space Cadet series. Hey, it got me started reading SF books…), Mark Twain and S. S. Van Dine (author of the Philo Vance mysteries).

Oh, yeah, I have a few other books on my Kindle, too:

• Doc Sidhe by Aaron Allston
• Edge of the Jungle, The Log of the Sun by William Beebe
• Zuleika Dobson by Max Beerbohm
• One Shot by James Blish
• My Own Kind of Freedom by Steven Brust
• Sketchbook: Concepts from the Virtual World by Don Carson
• Talent is Overrated by Geoff Colvin (I’m reading this right now and so far so fascinating.)
• Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
• The Beautiful and the Damned, The Great Gatsby, The Pat Hobby Stories, Tender is the Night, This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• Walt Disney: American Dreamer by Neal Gabler
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (Read this. Now. Not quite up to the standard set by The Tipping Point, but very, very close, utterly fascinating and better than Blink.)
• Space Prison by Tom Godwin
• Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman
• Conan the Barbarian Omnibus by Robert E. Howard
• Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
• The Cosmic Expense Account by C.M. Kornbluth
• Retief! by Keith Laumer
• The Aliens by Murray Leinster
• Free Culture by Lawrence Lessig
• Fevre Dream, Game of Thrones, Storm of Swords, Clash of Kings, Feast for Crows by George R.R. Martin
• Inside Straight edited by George R.R. Martin (and including a story by my lovely wife, Caroline Spector.)
• Mothers and Other Monsters by Maureen McHugh
• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• Vintage Murakami by Haruki Murakami
• The Antichrist, Beyond Good and Evil, Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
• Common Sense by Thomas Paine
• Pandolfini’s Ultimate Guide to Chess by Bruce Pandolfini
• A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink (Please read this! Terrific, terrific book. If you’re a game developer, it will likely change the way you think about what you do — at the very least it’ll confirm that what we do is right in line with changing cultural needs.)
• The Cosmic Computer, Little Fuzzy by H. Beam Piper
• Presentation Zen by Garr Reynolds (another book I’m actively reading, which should make everyone who’s had to sit through one of my bullet-point and text-heavy talks very, very happy!)
• Adaptation by Mack Reynolds
• Topper, Topper Takes a Trip by Thorne Smith
• TOON: The Cartoon Roleplaying by Warren Spector (!)
• The Big Bounce by Walter Tevis
• Have You Seen by David Thomson
• Anna Karenina, War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
• The Coming Technological Singularity by Vernor Vinge
• Metropolis by Thea von Harbou
• Dream Factories and Radio Pictures by Howard Waldrop
• Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
• A Damsel in Distress, My Man Jeeves, Right Ho Jeeves, A Wodehouse Miscellany by P.G. Wodehouse
• Gladiator by Philip Wylie

If you’re counting (and I admit I’m guessing here), that means I have somewhere in the neighborhood of 500 books on my Kindle. And, on top of all that, I have a bunch of sample chapters from a dozen or so other books lined up and ready to read — novels, non-fiction… just a ton of stuff.

I expect a psychologist could have a field day with people’s What’s On My Kindle list but I didn’t share mine as an act of self-revelation. I shared it simply to make the point that I Will Never Again Be Bored As Long As I Live.

Used to be, I could scour the sagging and double-stacked shelves at my house until I happened upon Just The Right Book To Read Right Now, but away from home, I was out of luck — stuck with whatever I happened to have on hand. Now, I carry my library with me — to the doctor, on a plane, at a restaurant, everywhere – and I’m loving it.

Much as I love “real” books, I think Amazon’s discovered the future of reading in this e-ink/wireless download stuff. And the future is good.