What if everything was like Fitocracy?

[Update: Answer -- "Eliminated a traitor to the Pointocracy: 100,000 pts!]

Developer X made a successful game for Microsoft’s console. X hired Developer Y to release a version for iOS. Y hired the company I work with, Developer Z, to help them.

Somewhere along the way, Microsoft bought X outright. Apple then visited Y to help them help X publish a “Microsoft” title for the Apple platform. Y extended that OEM help to us (Z).

Which is how I came to be involved in a game development Skype meeting with a couple of Apple Engineers today, focusing on ways to reduce memory consumption while maintaining asset quality (make game go fast, look good).

I’ve worked in games for years and never talked with anyone from either Sony or Microsoft, who have been the go-to OEMs in the field. Nintendo used to give someone on one of my teams code drops, so presumably there was some communication going on there.

Anyway, Apple is certainly awesome to work with. Their software tools alone destroy the competition, and on top of that they have wicked developer support and fantastic documentation. If they ever decide to get into games in a really big way I think they’ll have a shot at crushing it.

Or maybe they’re already big into games. Maybe they just don’t care about big console clunkers. I certainly understand the feeling.

The superhumans of the MentalPolyphitness group on Fitocracy have increased our average level to the point that we can now invite lots and lots of people to join the group directly. Comment below if you would like the invite code. I am taking the group’s temperature and we might open to the “general public” shortly (to the extent that I can reach them).

Continuing with my thinking that working out should be a game, because exercise’s reward ramps are broken, I’ve signed up for Fitocracy, a massively social game where you exercise to level up, earn points, etc.

I have a bunch of invites, 10, and if anyone would like to play along at home to start getting points and achievements and trophies and graphs for your routine slog then comment below and I’ll hook you up.

Alternatively, sign up with GSWA6 as your invite code and hop on the Penny Arcade team. Maybe we can make our own MPF group and crush people — Ryley does CrossFit and Jared does… things? Jared can be the elvin ranger, Ryley tanks berzerker-style, I am the leader/wizard. Protect me!

[Update: the group is "MentalPolyphitness" on Fitocracy. I want to make a sidebar widget to publish our leaderboard. I am currently farm-grinding push-ups. ]

[Update: Okay, that's all my reserved invites. They regenerate at 1 per day, and I'm guessing everyone I invited gets them too? I still have six, so yeah: open season on Fitocracy invites -- request away.]

Shape Type is a lot harder than Kern Type. Looking forward to more from Method.

Holy shit Take This Lollipop is good new media! Watch it tonight or Hallowe’en night before you go out.

The negotiations are still in process but it looks like I will soon be on a long term contract at a studio in the fashion/media district. There’s a small chance I will end up in the financial district at a place offering stock options — but I’ve long since learned the trick of offering someone a piece of the glorious future. They’d also have to trump my locked-up chunk of the gritty now.

I can’t say too much — this is high tech so obviously everything is tip top secret on pain of enhanced interrogation and rendition to room 101 — but I’ll be at an iOS studio that is expanding to the major consoles, and I’m one of the relatively few people in TO with seventh generation console programming experience. I guess.

From their hiring questions (it turns out they liked that answer!) I will probably be building interface design tools and display systems. I used to think that I was doomed to do interface development forever, but as I matured it turned out to be interesting and useful — even something I do for fun — “become what you are.” I reckon this change of mind is largely due to “interface” stuff sounding sexier to my design brain now.

It’ll be useful for me to update my company’s paperwork and web presence shortly — I’m going to start banking deductions and development incentives because “we” have nontrivial revenues now. It might be time to outsource some economically efficient subset of “our” business to India.

Aside: I wrote this on my slide phone while waiting to see a doctor. An older guy sitting across from me interrupted a girl tapping away, “look, everyone’s on their phones” — and we all were — “I am more oldschool.” She smiled and went back to tapping. He turned back to the television.

McLuhan might say that we were all modifying our environment with electronic technology. Doctors’ waiting rooms have always needed cybernetic enhancement — even with something as low-tech as a book or magazine. The real space of a waiting room is far less interesting than ANY possible virtual environment. But privileging an anonymous broadcast over personal, perhaps social, engagement is oldschool in a strange way: It’s anti-tribal, googie even, as if the future had come and gone in 1986.

Watching reports about stocks I don’t own, weather that isn’t here, and traffic I won’t encounter is a much more passive, disengaged way to spend time than [micro]blogging and playing Marble Cannon. Or killing those goddamn smug pigs in Angry Birds. The old guy was essentially complaining that we were impoverishing his technological-environmental experience without identifying that experience itself as impoverished. We were much more socially engaged, albeit in our own isolated universes: I was talking to people all across Canada and he couldn’t engage someone across an empty chair.

I had McLuhan in my pocket too, to cybernetically modify the streetcar ride home: “The Medium is the Massage”. I should have given it to the old guy, but while I was writing this he got bored of waiting and left.

Aside’s aside: it occurs to me that “small” games should be tribally social: “eclectically” multiplayer, instead of “massively”. They should all have “friends” leaderboards, baseline. Maybe matching the scope of a game to the scope of its social engagement is a good guideline.

Click through this link for a little game-thing where you fly the Galaga ship around a hi-rez snap of the moon. Eventually I’m going to add enemies. Make sure you refresh. HTML5 + Javascript. You probably want Chrome for this one.

[Update: There's some kind of lag which can mess up the control binding. Just reload, I'm looking at it. Controls: up = forward, back = reverse, left = rotate left, right = rotate right.

Oh yeah, it also has a(n unmutable) soundtrack -- "They Moved the Moon" by Warren Zevon, off his late 80s cyber[punk|folk] concept album Transverse City. It’s super 80s.]

Via Kotaku, a time-lapse Guts Tank mural.

If I ever get a 60×25 wall, I’d want the Mecha Dragon.

This is making the rounds, I found it — of course — via BB: Kern Type is a game where you practice your kerning!

Method.ac, the parent site, is dedicated to teaching technical people design skills — edu-gaming as advertizing, sweet! I’m sure when the site proper opens I’ll write more (having the site fully functional on release of the advert-edu-game would be the only trump play here).