Jamie Antonisse

...have finally been answered.

There is a Santa Claus.

I have been waiting for this show to come out on DVD since... well, since DVD was invented. For some fascinating legal reasons beyond the scope of this post (but well within the scope of this site) it has (had!) been widely accepted that the show would never be released.

If you've seen the State, you are probably, like me, dancing around with a lampshade on your head, trying to type a blog post in celebration but unable to see the keys through the lampshade. If you've never seen The Stsyr upi str s fpivjnsh smuesud dp ejp vstrd@

Here are RJ's answers to the 534 questions. Aren't they great?!?!

My answers to follow soon.

1. Create an online display space for yourself (this will be part of how you become famous as a result of your work in this class)
Here it is...

2. Articulate a collective participation strategy (i.e., how will you take advantage of being part of a participatory culture?)
I think that in order to harness a participatory culture the methods of content generation and submission must be simple to use and as accessible as possible, but that rewarding feedback is essential to maintaining participation. In an arena where continuous participation occurs or can occur, some methods of personal identity are valuable for ensuring frequent high-quality output from participants. Being able to establish a persona or reputation allows the participants to separate themselves from the collective and promotes competition, which improves the overall quality of the content being produced and increases personal satisfaction and investment. Keeping a project open to manipulation and keeping little to no restriction on submitted content gives the project the ability to adapt to the desires of the community and allows it greater ability to remain relevant.

2a. Decide on and articulate your own strategy for creating a productive tension between theory and practice in your work.
The method I like to use when balancing theory and practice is to start with a series of questions that I would like to answer, and begin reading, starting with Google searches and Wikipedia. While researching, I continue to write down any new questions that surface as well as any potential answers I read or come up with myself. After doing research, I select certain questions that I want to explore and then decide on ways to answer the questions or at least approach them. The next step is to spend time attempting to answer the questions through a series of potential designs, working through them to completion so that I have a series of potential prototypes that I could build. I then take the designs and write down any questions I have about them or questions that I believe they ask for themselves. I also think it is important here to consider any assumptions I may be making about the design and how it would be built in practice. Here I may decide to pursue further research if I feel the questions warrant this, or I may decide to work on actual production of the project. At any pause or direction-changing decision, re-evaluation of the questions on the list as well as my assumptions for the project is in order.

3. Define proficiency and an economy of value for the realm in which you intend to work (i.e., how do you want your work to be judged?)
I prefer that my work is judged in a personal light as well as in a broader academic or social context. Working in game design, I want to know what kind of personal effect the game has on the player and how they react to what the game presents to them, including their expectations, desires, etc. Overall, I want to know if what I produce is fun and memorable and whether it is something the player wants to play with again. Personally, I will feel I have succeeded if my games get people to want to play them when they're not playing them, if they encourage people to share my games with others, and if the player feels truly engaged with the experience.

4. Post a Personal Inventory in your display space that addresses the following:
3 things you already do well
- Generating rapid simple prototypes of designs
- Designing complete game systems (game loops, risk/reward structure, economies)
- Drawing off of game history and established game traditions and practices. Good background knowledge of the industry and the field

3 things you want to learn
- 3D modelling
- Advanced programming, both graphics and systems/networking
- music composition/generation

3 things you want to be great at
- creating games that appeal to wide varieties of audiences
- presenting game experiences that are memorable, powerful, and different/innovative
- understanding the player

5. Post a few links, names or readings that you are interested in exploring as part of the research for these projects.

- Carl Jung (wikipedia entry)
- Silent Hill (wikipedia entry)
- Psychonauts (wikipedia entry)
- Edgar Allen Poe (wikipedia entry)

These are not RJ's answers. I wrote these myself.

1. Create an online display space for yourself (this will be part of how you become famous as a result of your work in this class)
My display space shall be... this display space. http://interactive.usc.edu/members/jantonisse.

2. Articulate a collective participation strategy (i.e., how will you take advantage of being part of a participatory culture?)
In the exchange of ideas, I'd like to create an atmosphere of honesty while maintaining positive feedback and encouragement between our cohort. As a former teacher, I believe its important to create an environment in which opinions can be expressed and mutually respected without stifling discussion and collaboration.

2a. Decide on and articulate your own strategy for creating a productive tension between theory and practice in your work.
Theory should influence an idea at the concept level... it's extremely useful for the creation of original ideas. However, I don't believe theory should restrict the sorts of works we create as interactive designers (unless it's an ethical/moral concern).

3. Define proficiency and an economy of value for the realm in which you intend to work (i.e., how do you want your work to be judged?)
I am almost guaranteed to answer this question incorrectly... but for now, I would like my work to be judged in two ways:
First: experientially. As a gut reaction, what "works" for a user? Is the experience interesting? Engaging? Fun? I'd like brutal honesty in these reactions.
Second: Analytically. Looking past immediate visceral experience, I would like to engage in a dialogue about our/my intention, whether that intention was addressed from a user perspective, and how we can find a middle ground between what we/I wanted to express and what the user wanted to experience.

4. Post a Personal Inventory in your display space that addresses the following:
3 things you already do well
- High-level concept design
- Writing (narrative fiction / narrative scripts)
- music composition/sequencing (specifically in Garage Band)

3 things you want to learn
- I want to become a self-improving time management machine
- I'd like to become passably proficient in 3D modeling software
- I'd like to improve my execution of lower level/detail-oriented design
An just for good measure, I'd like to get better with...
- C++, on a deeper level.
- Photoshop
- Sound mixing

3 things you want to be great at
- Writing compelling interactive content
- understanding the translation of interactive digital concepts into algorithms
- Detail-oriented design (see above) that serves a larger concept

5. Post a few links, names or readings that you are interested in exploring as part of the research for these projects.

- Godel, Escher, Bach (logical structures, recursion)
- Mythology and theory of myth (Carl Jung (just like RJ!))
- I need to think about this more.

"Most of the things in my wallet make me seem really enlightened... yet I obviously use a fork to eat my yogurt."

-John Brennan III

Pure poetry, John. This describes almost everyone I've met in the IMD!

Like so many of my blog posts recently, this is only a test.

I always suspected, but I was never sure until now. Thank you, Boris! You've saved 532!

For celebration/good measure, here is one of Kirby's finer collaborations. A nickel to anyone who can actually watch the whole thing!

I don't have too many occasions to be proud of my work... but I'm pretty happy about this. I made it for "Wrath of the Transperator", a Flash game that Matt Korba, Paul Bellezza, Phil Gregorchuck, Mike Brazil and I have been working on for the upcoming B-Game competition. Check out the song, which I composed in GarageBand (the now-ancient '05 edition) with a little much-needed falsetto help from my roommate Adam.

If you're too cool for quicktime, stop whining and download the song here.
More on the game to come soon.

Here's a list of everything I had on my person on August 30th at 2 p.m., just in case you were wondering. Financial/identifying info has been left out to prevent strangers from anonymously depositing money into my accounts. I don't need your charity. [ed. note: yes I do]

Today I had an idea. I decided to drive my sad little stick shift car down the 405 to visit a friend.... in Long Beach.... at 5 p.m. on a Tuesday.

If you live or have ever lived in Los Angeles, you now know that I am not a smart man.

The lost station Eliza floats through space, drifting ever closer to Earth, its erstwhile home. In the abandoned corridors nothing makes a sound any longer; the only survivors are the static, flickering dispassionately on cracked monitors, and, shut away within a solitary room, the cursor.

Presiding over the void, the cursor blinks, regular as a pendulum, green and black, at the end of a sentence. The cursor blinks, green and black; it waits, in infinite patience, as it has waited these last three months.

Welcome to the Cache: Press Enter.

I have a lot of admiration for a wide range of people, I really do.

But I don't have many heroes, at least not by my own definition. To me, a hero is someone who has earned my unmitigated respect, a rational human being (real or imagined) whose choices, in their context, mirror those I'd like to make in my own life.

So while Batman is clearly a hero, he isn't exactly "my hero." [ed. note: it's the batarangs... don't you realize how silly the batarangs are, Batman? Don't you see?] Celebrities don't usually count either... they're so distant, so nebulous and so "managed" that I just can't bring myself to feel a close connection to them. I've never sat under a blanket, crying about a mouseketeer... it just doesn't seem healthy.

My list of heroes is a private tally that includes four, maybe five people.

This last Wednesday, I met a possible addition to that short list.

A little background: As I mentioned before, I've been working on this B-Game project called Wrath of the Transperator with some folks from the IMD (and one talented Business School student). A large part of our job has been in keeping active on the TIG forums, you know, for PR reasons... so a few days ago I posted a song I made, "Boss Fight", as a taste of what the game would bring.

Yesterday, I logged into the forums, just to see how things were going, and saw this.

You might miss it at first... right in the middle of page two. Is that....? No..... is that.... really....?

This is the long-overdue story of the game that consumed my May, IMD grad Herb Yang's not-so-originally titled but nonetheless unique Kingpin: The Game. While we were working at ICT, I'd keep John Brennan entertained with the saga of my secret life as a crime lord, and he always said that I should write it up... so these posts mainly goes out to him.

Tomorrow, a post about Transperator (featuring the lost music track, Level 2). But today, I am too tired for uploading, so I thought I'd post this instead.

Negativism

Technically, as it has no self-professing followers, Negativism can not be considered a religion. It is by some reckonings, however, the most widely held belief system on the planet.

Voting for the B-Game competition has begun! You can find Wrath of the Transpera(o)(i)(en)tor, nestled right at the alphabetical bottom. Or you can download and play the Flash game by clicking here.

Over the past two weekends, I did a bunch of work for this project... some of it appears in the final version, some doesn't. See the story scrolling by at mach speed? That was my stream-of-consciousness rambling (," he said with inexplicable pride). Likewise the music, which was a happy return to Garage Band composition + sequencing.

You WILL notice one level in which there is an ominous lack of music. It's in the third level of the game, which we presciently named "Level Two". I actually did compose a bit for that stage, a completely home-grown Nintendo tribute which sadly crashed the game every time it was included. I guess it had too much..... awesome?

It's actually my favorite track from the game, barring Boss Fight... so I felt like I had to put it somewhere. For anyone curious, here it is below (Pump the bass, and be patient in minute one, its a slow burn).

download

So play Transperator, our B-Game... we know it has some warts, but we love it anyway, and hopefully you'll have fun with it too. If there's any demand (and I mean ANY demand... I don't need much encouragement) I'll post the rest of the music and the Naked Lunch tribute piece that we call the "story".

I made a good decision on Thursday night. In fact, I'd say it was the second-best decision I made all week.

But the best, hands down, was biting the bullet and purchasing 21 sweet characters of internet retail. That's right, you are now looking at [a post by] the proud owner of

w w w . b i l b o b l o g g i n s . c o m

This is part two of the better-late-than-never* dash-stravagant saga-cum-review of Herb Yang's Kingpin: The Game. Welcome to the rave.

First off, I want to announce my ulterior motive for this post... to get Herb to run another round of his game. I've told various folks about my experience and many of them are interested to try Kingpin for themselves.

Alright, back to the story. Where was I? Ah, yes... the Butterfaces and the Beauties...

Who ordered the mystery show beard-off?

I think it was over at Julian Bleecker's IMD blog that I first saw the question, "why do I blog this?" asked and answered (second entry down, near the bottom). As questions go, it seems to me to be a rare but amazingly valid one. Why? Why am I putting this online, instead of in a shoebox, a journal, a trash can? It is a question that, if answered properly, might lead to a more reflective understanding of one's relationship to internet culture, and potentially of the way one relates to people in general.

That's the theory anyway. In practice, I did not start blogging regularly until I learned to ignore this question entirely.

The people (i.e. Hutson) have spoken, so here are all four songs I made for Wrath of the Transperator. I promise, this is the last time I'll do an original post about this music unless Ben Abrams makes good on his techno remix of Boss Fight.

For good measure, here's the link to the B-Game competition again... try playing the game if you dare.

This week's Sunday edition of Baghead will be postponed to next week in honor of October.