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| audiosurf vs. the music game genre |
Posted 2010-02-01 21:42:17 by
Jim Crawford
Playing a good music game, I slip into a groove with the song and get to know it from the inside. When I'm playing at my best, it feels like I'm letting my conscious mind go, so my reptile can brain take over, process the audial and visual information in synchronicity and translate the patterns directly into commands to send to my limbs or fingers. To “become one with the music” is a cliche because it happens and it is awesome. After mastering a song in a rhythm game, I find that I understand the song, musically, much better. This is the magic of rhythm games: they put you inside the song and show you how the music is constructed, by giving you high-level visual patterns to match with the music and asking you to prove that you “get” them.
Sometimes I get into a similar flow-state in Audiosurf, finishing with an unexpectedly high score. Afterward, I invariably realize that I was completely ignoring the music. The visual information presented by Audiosurf is mostly random. The patterns that connect to the music are coarse-grained at best and misleading at worst. It is not edifying. By associating itself with games like Amplitude and Rock Band, Audiosurf is a scam.
Sidebar: Impressed by Audiosurf's pattern-detection code? Here, let me ruin the magic for you. Audiosurf looks for three patterns in the audio stream, all trivial to detect from a DSP standpoint:
- Periodicity in the low frequencies. This allows Audiosurf to undulate the “road” at the tempo of the song.
- Transients covering a wide spectrum, such as a distorted guitar stab or a snare drum. This allows Audiosurf to place colored blocks that, more or less, fit the music. Often, it screws up and places a block slightly ahead or behind the stab, asking the user to internalize false patterns.
- The overall loudness of the music, which feeds into the speed of the player's vehicle and the slope of the road.
The rest is just tuning the algorithms involved. Well, that, and the human brain's tendency to see patterns that don't exist.
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| ASL |
Posted 2010-01-20 23:06:20 by
Jim Crawford
Elena pointed out to me one way in which American Sign Language is awesome:
| <Elena> | http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEjRHFom1Kk |
| <Elena> | i'd especially like to bring your attention to the line "we met all kinds of people and we, we fucked everyone" |
| <Elena> | in ASL, the sign for "meet" is two fists with the index fingers extended, brought into contact at the base of the hand |
| <Elena> | and ASL allows a type of syntactic marker that oral languages can't |
| <Elena> | ie, you can set an object or person in a location in space, and then refer to them by signing in/at that location |
| <Elena> | (very useful when you're talking about a number of people) |
| <Elena> | so, the line for "we met all kinds of people" is expressed by signing "meet" in multiple locations |
| <Elena> | excellently, the sign for "fuck" is the same as the sign for "meet" but with the middle finger raised as well |
| <Elena> | so "we fucked everyone" is expressed by signing "fuck" at each of the locations where "meet" was just signed |
| <Elena> | to me, that seems really poetically done |
(Elena has a more thorough writeup of this over on her Livejournal.)
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| alan |
Posted 2009-12-07 21:24:58 by
Jim Crawford
Alan died on November 14th.
Alan's relationship to me was complicated. He was my mom's boyfriend of 20 years and my half-sister's uncle. That counts as complicated, right? He was a long-time mentor of mine. He taught me to code, how to communicate, how to fucking think. He shaped my life to an incredible degree. But I didn't really consider him a father figure, probably because his relationship with my mom was rocky enough that I didn't feel emotionally close to him.. . .
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| how not to robot |
Posted 2009-10-28 16:01:47 by
Jim Crawford
| <Elena> | "he came russian into the riting office" |
| <Me> | that's actually hilarious |
| <Elena> | that is not the sort of error a robot would make D: |
| <Elena> | it's like asimov thought the robot was like, spell-checking a dictated story without applying any linguistic knowledge to it |
| <Elena> | except that he also uses incorrect spellings like "herd with his good hering" |
| <Me> | "russian" is brilliant |
| <Me> | "i've got to misspell this word, but i just can't see *how*" |
| <Elena> | i like "he came russian" as a poetic phrase, like "vladislav came, russian, into the office" |
| <Jim> | hahaha that's awesome |
| <Elena> | but man, asimov |
| <Elena> | you just don't understand robots at all |
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| how to art |
Posted 2009-10-03 01:08:36 by
Jim Crawford
| <Me> | the context of having established a degree of competence -- or in that case maybe just cynicism -- changes how you interpret new work placed in the same context |
| <Jason> | i think if i release an album, im obligated to make something really arty and technical for the opening track.. then i can go directly into gabber with fart noises and farm animal sounds |
| <Me> | yeah :) |
| <Jason> | me on the toilet. time stretched to 24 hours. on a suitcase full of zip disks. |
| <Me> | and you can't listen, it's a visual installation of a closed suitcase on a pedestal |
| <Jason> | no oxygen in the gallery. only argon. |
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| game design as an act of cruelty |
Posted 2009-09-30 22:00:15 by
Jim Crawford
On the Another Castle podcast, Anna Anthropy talked about how in Mighty Jill Off she was trying to draw parallels between the designer/player relationship and the dom/sub relationship. I.e.: the designer is supposed to dominate the player, but in such a way that the player can deal with it and enjoy it. The designer must be subtle and responsible about it, because it's trivial to make the game too easy or too hard.
I replayed Mighty Jill Off yesterday.. . .
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