Building a better bot

Other than the winners of the Nullarbor contest the other big announcement from the Perth IGDA meeting was that of the The 2K Bot Prize.

ECU’s Philip Hingston took the stage to tell us about the comp to build a better bot.

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What is Digital Content?

This morning I was asked to describe or list the areas that the term Digital Content means to me. I immediately rolled off a list of areas but obviously any list like this is going to be somewhat arbitrary.  For example I tend not to include web content, although I can think of several web projects that clearly do fit.  The defining or unifying concept that I see behind the term is convergence, so for me Digital Content is that which is most converged at this moment. Web & Audio are good examples where much of the digital aspect has diffused back into the wider economy (who even talks about tape recorders?).  Obviously I’m coming from a game perspective though, so in the interests of transparency, I thought I would post my list here for discussion:

• Game Development
  • PC/Console, Handheld, Online, Casual, Phone, MMO…
• Animation
  • Game, TV, Movie, Web, Advertising, Visualisation
  • Flash, 3D, Keyframe, MoCap
• Simulation at various levels of fidelity
  • Entertainment, Familiarisation, Training, Scientific, Visualisation, Military
• Edutainment
  • Entertainment, Training, Teaching
• Interactive Art

Anti-Agile?!?

I was on a panel at ASWEC in Perth yesterday, talking about Agile development.  There was some people that seemed to think that Agile was close to Anarchy and a nuber of people challenged the idea that code is the best documentation.  One thing that I wanted to ask everyone; do you normalise your data?  If you do, then surely for all the same reasons you avoid duplication of columns in your tables, you should avoid duplication of models of your system.  The code is the only complete set of documentation for any system; any other documentation will be wrong.  This doesn’t mean you don’t want some of it for different reasons (users, perhaps) but unless the model directly generates the code and changes can only be made to the code by changinge the model… once the code exists, the value of any abstract models (including documentation) decreases very rapidly.  I don’t want to start a flame war but can anyone disagree with that?

Coming to a Small Screen Near You

Yesterday I was part of a very interesting panel for LA Tech Week that was held out at Woodbury University in Burbank, CA.  Von Johnson organised a diverse group of technolgists with a remarkably wide range of perspectives into the future of screen-based entertainment,  Our remit was “mobile and broadband” which obviously left us a huge realm for discussion.  I was the only game guy in the room so the discussion did tend a little toward film & television but Von did an excellent job of moderating the panel and mixing things up.  Randy Greenberg also set the scene with a very rich and insightful perspective on the how mobile and broadband technologies have already and will continue to work their way into mainstream entertainment.  His analysis seemed to surprise much of the audience, separating distribution medium, content and business model into separate areas of discussion and weighting distinctions in content more by commercial than traditional weightings.  His analysis was so interesting that I wanted to reproduce it here and Randy kindly agreed.  Courtesy of The Greenberg Group you can click for JPG or PDF versions of his powerpoint.The panel discussion was quite lively and we covered a lot of ground, as might be expected from such a diverse group of people.  Apart from me, there was;

• Christopher Carey - CTO and Chief Marketing Officer, Technicolor by Thomson
• Randy Greenberg - President and CEO, The Greenberg Group
• Douglas Hunter - Vice President of Licensing, Dynamic Digital Depth (3D Technology Company)
• Jeremy Laws - Senior Vice President, Universal Mobile Entertainment, Universal Digital Platforms Group
• Elmo Weber - President, Nutshell Media - Content Summarization Software
• Moderator: Von W. Johnson - President and CEO, Von Johnson & Associates, Inc.

I don’t want to paint a detailed summary of all the topics of discussion here as I would not do it justice.  However, some of the interesting points that I took away;

• There will be increasingly complex content-recycling systems that will allow us to enjoy old TV series’ and movies on all of our various devices.
• Hollywood is learning from the music industry’s failures and although not all of the hierarchy “gets” digital on-demand distribution, there are a lot of folks that do and they are working hard to do interesting deals and repurpose or create content to take advantage of the tech.
• Saturday night football looks incredible in 3D and this likely will be the killer app to drive 3DTV into our homes, although we will have to wait for some of the novelty of HDTV to fade before things really get interesting.
• Blu-ray has an online component.  I wasn’t previously aware of this actually so I must read up on it.
• There was some disent but the majority agreed that HD-DVD has failed and Blu-Ray is victorious, so I really need to do that reading and Sony has finally won a format war!
• Very few projects from any significant motion picture company will rest entirely on the box office receipts; film companies are becoming more like IP exploitation companies and are interested in any distribution method that can turn a profit, especially if it has low cost of entry (repurposing content instead of remaking it).
• The strong communities that we’re so good at creating in the game industry are very highly prized by film marketers, whom are increasingly working to create communities that are pre-sold on a movie prior to release.  They aren’t relying on it yet but that is only a matter of time and the right project, presenting an incredible opportunity to the right collaboration of film-maker and game company.