Talking to some others, today I realized how much I use my phone now (and how little I use it *as* a phone).

Off the top of my head, this is my 3Gs iPhone usage, not in order:

Texting (SMS)
Calendar/scheduling
Weekly grocery list
Email
Twitter
Facebook
Directions/maps (I’m directionally impaired)
Reading (fiction)
Reading (non-fiction)
Reading (daily news)
Reading (political sites)
Reading (graphic novels)
Reading (blogs)
Wikipedia checks (ie, looking up words, history, etc)
Recipes (while cooking)
Listening to music (with headphones)
Games
Locating nearby places (food, coffee, movies, etc)
Buying media
Watching movies
Note-taking
Buying/canceling Amazon products (not just books…dishes recently)
Photography (for amusement)
Photography (to share)
Photography (to remember something, like the way someone else has decorated their house)
Home/car maintenance (while working on something)
Stock values
Weather
Tracking calories/exercise
Calculator
Recording audio snippets (for odd work tasks)
Checking local events (live music, festivals, etc)
Updating Netflix
IM (when on the road)
Approve blog comments
Identifying music (playing around me)
Phone calls

I’m excited by projects here at Arkane Studios and I’m hopeful for games underway at other independent Austin companies: Certain Affinity, Edge of Reality, King’s Isle, Blazing Lizard, Pixel Mine (who just got nominated for a couple of awards, I think), etc. There are a few interesting startups in the background too, coming soon. Larger companies like Nintendo, Disney (Warren’s group), and Bioware hold great promise, and I’ve even got high hopes for (ex-Deus Ex designer) Ricardo Bare’s project at Midway.

Because of the year we’ve had, I’m hoping that Austin GDC will be exciting and reflective this year; a bunch of smart people coming together to network, socialize, share ideas and debate the process of not just shipping games, but making games great.

I’m giving a career-track talk aimed at new people coming into games now, at a time when no one knows what the industry will look like in 5 years.

There’s a charge in the air…is it the imminent hurricane or is it something else, generated by passion… by people who love what they do, who want to pick themselves up and charge the hill again?

Check out Unlocking the Psychology of Achievements, via GameCyte.

I have an in/off relationship with Achievements; I love it when games use Achievements to highlight interesting gameplay native to the game, and I think they’re an interesting tool for creative teams.

But this part depresses me:

Based on personal experience, completionists need goals to achieve and do not enjoy open-ended game experiences.

In a way, it feels like Achievements cater to some inner obsessive-compulsive, rather than encouraging play in what I see as the right spirit. Is the player there to immerse himself in the experience or to carefully set up a situation where he can get three enemies in a straight line and headshot them all with one bullet?

Given the nature of our medium, I suppose both are actually valid in their own way.

We watched The Shooting (with a young Jack Nicholson) and Two Lane Blacktop (starring musician James Taylor). Both were interesting and beautiful films. (It was actually a triple feature, but I didn’t stay for the Weird Wednesdays showing of the third Monte Hellman film…)

Below are phone pics of 1) Lars talking to Hellman, and 2) the poster the Drafthouse put out. Unfortunately, I was too busy listening to Charles’ passionate introduction to catch a photo of him on stage.

I rattled off my emo moments without hesitation, which means it was a great year:

(WARNING: SPOILERS.)

1) The first time I saved a Little Sister in Bioshock. The perfect swell of music, the little form struggling in your hands, the voice…all perfect. Much more powerful that first time.

2) The moment the puzzle game became a story game in Portal, via empathy for whoever had come before me… Never has so much been said with so few “words.”

3) One of the rainstorm gun battles in STALKER, with an enemy in the dark breathing hard on the opposite side of a pillar. I felt hunted. Honestly, it was like playing an intense game of Capture the Flag in the woods at night at age 13…exhilarating, scary and empowering.

4) The staggering death, post nuke, in Call of Duty 4. “Omg, someone finally did it.”

5) The pistol slide sacrifice at the end of Call of Duty 4. Captain Price is counting on the FNG in a way that is still emotionally evocative. Amazing use of drama.

I think 2007 reinvigorated my faith in games, which had (perhaps understandably) flagged. And all but one of those moments came via console.

I can wait for the followup to these games (in addition to Fallout 3, Far Cry 2 and Mercenaries 2)…omfg, so much goodness.

I’ve been watching a few new people deal with the Apple paradigms and, of course, struggle. I remember the first time I got an iPod, vs the prior non-Apple MP3 players I had. It’s always a struggle at first for me, no matter what platform. “You’re converting my files to what format? Where are they…hidden now? I can’t sync my iPod at home and at work? I can’t back my music from home up on my work machine…why not, since my iPod is basically a portable harddrive?”

Intuitive just means “like something I’ve done before.”

What’s interesting to me is the weight we give to annoying features vs pleasing features. For instance, the iPhone does most things much better than my Blackberry. I am fascinated by the fact that the iPhone supports web browsing so well, has YouTube, the screen is gorgeous, the fingertouch interface is revolutionary, and it doubles as an iPod. But again I still have a Blackberry simply because the iPhone keyboard annoys the hell out of me.

So which is “better?” Do negative or positive weights matter more? How strong one way or the other does something have to be to overcome all other considerations? For that matter, is the suckiness of the iPhone keyboard a negative, or is the Blackberry’s a positive?

I will eventually get an iPhone: One device, with phone, camera, the web, my music, etc…it’s unbeatable. So I’m sure I will eventually overlook the 3 or so really annoying things about the iPhone in favor of the pleasing features. In currently prefering my Blackberry, I’ve simply already accepted the features that annoy me on the Blackberry. (And there are a bunch…)

Additionally, I find that there’s an interesting flirting with death feeling that comes to mind when I’m playing. There’s the sensation that as you go deeper the layers of the world get darker, colder (imagined) and more dangerous; early in the game, the entities that swim several layers below you seem truly threatening. And so in addition to evoking a number of peaceful, positive feelings, the game also sometimes gives me this type of self-destructive thrill…oblivion is below, just keep diving.

It’s amazing that so much springs from such a minimal, elegant game design. I love it.

Great game(s), of course, but what struck me was how smartly Syndicate was abstracted. Anything that the game could represent in detail was featured at a low level, in terms of systems granularity and even physical proximity. Everything else was seen at just the right distance, concealing weaknesses in terms of mechanical variation or precision, animation fidelity, number of character models, etc.

Often, when starting a new project, we forget this and assume that everything in the game needs a very granular, close-up representation. There are so many great lessons in our favorite games.