General bits

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5
Jan 10

City parking

Multi-storey car parks aren’t commonly beautiful places. They usually sit as ostracised blocks in the city, rough and slitted concrete walls facing the outside like the those of a gaol; an ugly and barely tolerated necessity of urban life.

How to redefine the multi-storey car park? If you’re stern Swiss architect Herzog & de Meuron, you try to invite the city into its structure, rather than close it off. 1111 Lincoln Road is a newly opened car park in Miami, situated on the border of its social downtown heart and its suburban sprawl.

Its angled concrete columns support floors uncharacteristically open to the balmy climate; inside lie parking spaces and an enclosed shop, with retail units layering the ground level, and condos at its side. If you’re inside, the structure’s geometry ascribes inclusive views of the city, according to Financial Times architecture writer Edwin Heathcote. And he says that it works the other way, too:

“The idea is to create a series of layers that extend the public realm up into the building, to attract events, parties and life into the structure. Both architects and developer see the structure as an experiment in a new kind of downtown transport architecture, a building as exciting to enter as to emerge from, blinking into the Miami sun. This may be optimistic, but it’s a good story.”

Not that this ideal hasn’t been attempted before. Gateshead’s Trinity Square was built with a restaurant on its top. Now it seems an incredible – and doomed – gesture of pride at the ideal of harmony between the motorist and the city. Its top levels have been closed since 1995, a decline that’s due in part to changing car access in the city centre. But the seed of its demise was surely more deeply planted – it was featured at the end of Get Carter in a scene in which it was implicated in the activities of a corrupt local businessman. That’s the usual image of the multi-storey – an embodiment of the unethical and sinister side of the city.

1111 Lincoln Road presents a different reading of the role of a multi-storey car park, even though it’s an idealistic if not fantastical one for most urban realities. It requires additional height to accommodate the numbers of spaces most car parks require and desirable shops to act as conduits between itself and the social, cultural and economic life of the city. But then, it’s also good to see a celebration of something otherwise so shunned.

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2
Aug 09

Shooting Wipeout

wipeout4

Every game should have a photo mode. Not just the ability to grab a screenshot but to be able to manipulate it and add effects. Wipeout HD’s photo mode is great. Instantly available from the pause screen, it only allows three simple camera types – trackside, cockpit and rotating around the ship – but has a suite of motion blur, exposure and depth of field effects that are lovely to play with.

wipeout3

Of course, these pictures, taken during runs in Wipeout Rage’s Detonator play mode, far from show precisely what you see when you’re playing the game. They omit the HUD, they’re not from the perspective you play from, they amplify the visual effects and the game has rendered each one with greater quality than it does in play. But I don’t care about such apparent artifice.

wipeout1

A battle rages between the desire to present a game truthfully, exactly as it appears when you’re playing, and presenting it interestingly in order to galvanise attention and provide entertainment for those reading it. But what the hell is truth?

wipeout2

A static screenshot can never express the moving image from which it was snatched. And, in fact, as games feature more post-processing effects such as motion blur, it’s becoming harder and harder to grab screenshots that come anywhere close to representing what you experienced when you were playing.

It all comes down to making a balance, of course. People need to understand what kind of image they’d be staring at through a game’s course. But there’s nothing wrong with capturing a bit of the drama, too. Videogames are glorious expressions of our fantasies, right?

More Wipeout images here.

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12
Jul 09

Synthetic drama #1: Battlefield 1943

battlefield1943

I spawn on board my team’s aircraft carrier on the Iwo Jima map and board a landing craft which a team member steers for Mount Suribachi. With a commanding position on the top of the hill that overlooks the whole island and strong defences, Mount Suribachi’s a key point to hold, and the enemy has it.

We speed to the beach the runs around the bottom of the cliff beneath the position. It’s so sheer that you can barely see the sandbag fortifications at the top when you look up, but some steep paths zigzag up. Our hope is that the enemy hasn’t bothered to cover their base’s back so we can pop up and take the flag for our own.

We inch up, aware of machine gun placements and snipers, but we remain unsullied – though quite what lies in wait at the summit is another matter. And then, as we near the top, bits of tree begin to fall down from above. From an explosion? Gunfire? What’s seen us? The branches roll past us and I stop still, training my sights on the crest of the hill with my heart in my mouth.

Suddenly, an enemy plane bursts over the remaining vegetation at the top with an incredible roar. I nearly trip backward as I crane around to see where it’s going, only to see it explode behind us. My breath catches and I zip my view back to the crest of the hill and see a second plane, one of ours, howl over it in victory.

It’s enough to bolster us for taking the flag, and we do – if only because there’s barely anyone there to defend it.

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5
Jul 09

Going public

About a day after releasing the game, I got a mail saying basically “well, you got my money, but I can’t play your app because it crashes.”

To me, this feels like getting punched in the stomach: Somebody gave you his or her money, and the app doesn’t work because you screwed up or didn’t test enough or didn’t think of some special case. They have every right to be pissed off, because you basically stole their money.

So says a Swiss programmer called Lukas Mathis about his first app for iPhone, a game called Goo Gun. His fascinating blog post reveals some of the pressures that result when a single coder, like him, releases a program for sale on a global marketplace.

Though his app is essentially sound, it’s subject to the vast range of conditions in which the 20-odd million iPhones (and lord knows how many iPod Touches) presently at large operate. Whether users have reset their machines to clear memory of unnecessary data and application processes, which can lead to the few cases of crashes and low memory warnings his game was throwing up. Whether users have installed the latest version of the phone’s operating system. Or whether they’ve been jailbroken – that is, whether the user has cracked the security on their iPhone in order to have freedom to install any program they like on it.

The latter condition can mean that the iPhone’s memory and resources can be eaten up by software that Apple has not certified, constricting other programs’ operations, but not that many users would know about that. And their natural reaction is to question the quality of the software they’ve paid for.

It’s a circumstance that throws up two interesting questions. The first is the legitimacy of cracking closed platforms like iPhone. It’s easy to feel that any product you’ve bought is yours and thereby believe you should have complete freedom over what you do with it. With that in mind, Apple’s control over what you can and can’t install on your iPhone is highly questionable. But Mathis’ predicament illustrates a convincing argument for such restraint – control the conditions and you have a chance to present a unified platform for programmers like him to create products for.

The other is the effect that the App Store has had in giving ‘bedroom’ programmers unparalleled closeness to the public. Without the resources of a large publisher behind them, they don’t have anything like the opportunity to test and hone their products against the vast array of conditions to which their apps will be exposed. And that leaves them exposed to the slings and arrows of public reaction – whether written for all to see on the App Store or sent in personal messages.

For all his fundamental confidence in his game, Mathis blames himself, but he sees the bigger picture. I wonder how well other programmers take it.

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4
Jul 09

Role model

linkblowshisnose

Our boy, who’s four, has trouble blowing his nose. Which is to say, he has no idea how to do it. “Blow out through your nose!” you tell him, and all he’ll do is sniff in. “Sniff out, like a dog!” you cry, but it’s to no avail. So far, we’ve had no luck in teaching him this apparently simple act.

Enter a new tactic. On most days, the boy’s favourite hero is Link. So how about getting Link to show him how to blow his nose? Enter dear Marsh, who has drawn a picture we hope can introduce the boy to the concept. Here’s hoping.

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27
Jun 09

Hello world! (again)

It’s time to stretch my writing legs a bit more, and therefore time to reinstate Rotational, a blog I managed to break irrevocably with overenthusiastic database fiddling a year or two ago.

What to expect: personal reflections on

  • videogames
  • spatial and visual design
  • technology and society
  • meeja odds and sods
  • stupid ephemera (should it not come under the above)

And a rather sporadic nature.