Russell Wark

It’s nice to see that a game I worked on 12 years ago is still appreciated today! http://bit.ly/pVf12

Gadget.

The iPhone is pretty much the ultimate gadget. But it’s not just a gadget, it’s a game changer.

The release of the iPhone initiated a paradigm shift in internet connectivity. All of a sudden, there’s this device that is universally useful - it’s a phone, a full-featured internet browser, a GPS, a games console, a book reader, an email and text client, a camera… the list goes on. And, in the short time that the iPhone has been available, it now accounts for over 50% of all mobile internet access. With the forthcoming 3.0 system software, it’s all set to get even more impressive - cut & paste (yay!), turn-by-turn GPS satnav, peripheral access and many more new features.

But, the real revelation of the whole iPhone experience is the App Store. The quality and variety of apps are now driving sales of the iPhone itself, even to those who wouldn’t usually consider getting such a thing. As a means of distribution, it’s yet another paradigm shift. It’s streamlined, cheap, straightforward, not to mention a cash cow for those who can successfully sell their app, and has brought back small-team and solo development in a big way. This makes me very happy.

Before I got into the whole web design and development spiel, I worked for a video games company. I always wanted to be involved in the video games industry, ever since I programmed my first game in BASIC in 1983. The hot technologies at the time were the original Playstation, the N64 and the PC (in the nascent 3D PC gaming days, when the original 3Dfx card was king). Even then, with such comparatively humble technical requirements compared to the games that are produced now, the teams working on the games were already 20-30 people, not including project management, QA, etc. From my friends who are still in that industry, I’m told teams of over 50 people aren’t unusual these days, with some big games having teams of over 100 and development cycles measured in years. I can believe it.

This is a far cry from the early days of computer games (and, indeed, all software) development, when it was often just one or two people in a bedroom or basement, and, often, the software was better for it - leaner, more focussed, usually more original, unconstrained by market and brand influence, and developed by people who obviously have a passion for what they do. Some of these early coders became bona fide cult superstars - people like Sid Meier, Andrew Braybrook, Archer Maclean, Jeff Minter, David Braben, Lord British, Matthew Smith and many others were revered by 8- and 16-bit fanboys the world over, and with good reason - these people developed their games single-handedly, including all programming, graphics, sound, gameplay and level design. I realise those days are more or less gone, but, even so, Rolando, one of the biggest-selling iPhone games to date, was largely developed by just one person, with two other people providing input on graphics and sound.

This brings out the enthusiasm in me, as well as those long-repressed bedroom-boy coder instincts. The fact that Rolando made a fortune also helps - with low development overheads, an easy distribution model and only three people to divide the loot between, for those who can get in on iPhone development, the rewards can be huge. Certainly more than my first game on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum that I wrote in 1985 - I made the princely sum of £200 (about $300). A fortune for a 13-year-old (it paid for the BMX bike I wanted at the time), but not much in the greater scheme of things!

Guess what… I’ve got the iPhone development book. I think this is something that any self-respecting agency should get in on - the potential is HUGE. Good work is possible on this platform with small, adaptable teams, and it’s only going to get bigger. Thanks, Apple.

Multilingual.

Well, I think the time has come for me to learn a new programming language. We’re having a bit of a slow month at work, so I have my boss’ blessing to use some of this time to learn some new skills.

So, I’ve narrowed the list of things I want to learn down to four things:

• Ruby On Rails
• JSP
• iPhone development
• Adobe Flex

I’m leaning towards RoR, as it seems reasonably straightforward to get into. I haven’t got a clue where to begin with JSP - Java development is a huge, sprawling and utterly unfathomable thing to me. Do I need to learn full-on Java to do JSP? What are Struts and all these other buzzwords? I’ve taken a look at the iPhone development book too, and, on one hand, it seems relatively straightforward, but it’s also “proper” programming, having to pay attention to memory, stacks and stuff like that, and I haven’t done stuff like that since my Amiga days! Plus, Objective-C, Apple’s preferred programming language for the iPhone, is weird - lots of strange syntax that I don’t entirely understand. Now, Flex I have a bit of a headstart with, since I’m reasonably well-up on Actionscript. It’s a bit of a different paradigm for Flash development though, and that might take a while to get used to.

Any and all suggestions are welcome…

Hooligans.

So, apparently Britain isn’t a good place for kids.

I can believe it. All it takes is a cursory look around any British town centre to see the state of Britain’s youth. Surly kids in hoodies looking threatening, teenage mothers everywhere, teenage shoplifters being carted away in police vans, all the reports of teenage drug dealers, burglars, muggers, car thieves… not to mention their complete and utter lack of manners and societal graces.

On the plus side, the ones that do manage to bypass this infectious youth culture turn out OK - I did. Those who are subject to good schooling, good parenting and proper discipline, and who are brought up to respect other people and the world and think for themselves still stand a chance, but there seems to be fewer people like this than ever.

I don’t know what the answer is. More discipline at home and at school perhaps? More responsibility for the parents? Possibly. But I think it goes a lot deeper than that. Kids need ambition and the drive to work towards it. Society is setting them a bad example by showing them that people with no ambition, drive or apparent intelligence can get by in life and this needs to end. Having a kid in your teens is practically a career choice for some people out there - you get a free house and free money to spunk away on Iceland ready meals, Lambert & Butlers and Super Tennants. These things would be a start though - Bring back grammar schools and corporal punishment, and do away with the benefits that encourage kids to be unemployed, get rid of the culture of celebrating the loser (May she rest in peace, but Jade Goody has a lot to answer for) and encourage the media not to cater to the lowest common denominator.

So, where is the best English-speaking place to bring up kids? Not the UK, obviously. Not the US either - I won’t subject any hypothetical kid of mine to the US healthcare system, the insular education system or having to do the pledge of allegiance. South Africa? Not if you don’t want to get shot. Canada’s supposed to be quite good, as is Australia. And Ireland was the highest-placed English-speaking country in the European rankings.

Ambition.

Sometimes I think I’m ideologically incompatible with the US. Many people here want to be millionaires, have the biggest houses, biggest cars and so on. I don’t. Never have, really.

My ambition is different. It’s about comfort, rather than “bigger, better, faster, more”. And my preferred route to this level of comfort is that I want to get good enough at something where I can earn a comfortable wage for only two days’ work a week. Time is far more valuable to me than money. There’s no point working every hour your particular choice of deity sends in order to earn every possible currency unit you can, if you’ve got no time to enjoy it.

Of course, being a child of the First World, I can be materialistic, but I want “nice” things, not necessarily big or expensive things. My ideal house is a modest three-bedroom brick house with a two-car driveway and a tiled roof - a far cry from some of the gargantuan clapboard monstrosities I see here. What’s the point? Houses like that have rooms you might walk into twice a year. And, thanks to cheap construction, will probably blow down in a bad storm. (I suspect many of these McMansionites have never heard the story of the Three Little Pigs).

My dream car is something small with four-wheel-drive - the current Subaru Impreza hatch fits the bill. I want a normal-sized, but nice TV. That’s pretty much where I’m coming from. I’m happy to travel by train, stay in hotels instead of having a holiday home, and have no interest in brand names or labels (unless it’s Apple - my one indulgence).

Better? No. But definitely different.

Space.

Boris Johnson, the Mayor Of London, is my favourite politician.

OK, he’s a Tory, which means I should hate him on principle, but he has two redeeming features. Firstly, his scruffy, foppish demeanour and overstated, plummy, upper-crust accent is a parody of a politician, more like a character who should be appearing on “Little Britain”, and I think we need more people like that in politics. Politics should have more colourful characters instead of old, anonymous grey men. Secondly, and utterly out of character for a Tory, he actually has the ability to speak the truth.

This post on his official blog got me thinking. The last four paragraphs, in particular. To quote the man himself:

“The other day I was using a borrowed car and a demented German satnav took me out of Manchester. We went through Stockport and Stalybridge and at a place called Tintwistle we picked up the A628 and suddenly the road was flying over the moors, the Pennines, and I had a sensation of driving over the vast spine of England, and I thought, stone me, look at all this room.”

I myself have been guilty of seeing the UK as completely London-centric, forgetting about all the wonderful places in its more far-flung areas. Now, one of the reasons I actually like being in the US is all down to the amount of space - there’s plenty of that in the UK too if you know where to look. In the little town of Tintwistle that he mentioned, you can buy a lovely, stone-built 3-bedroom house for £95,000. Or rent one for £400 a month. You’re in easy commuting distance of Manchester, have the awe-inspiring views and scenery of the Pennines on your doorstep, and the lower cost of living of life “oop north”.

If Manchester had more wine bars and branches of Starbucks, the London-Manchester GNER train would be full of ex-Londoners seeking escape, I’m sure of it.

Relics.

We hear all the time about the chaos the music industry is going through in light of downloading. Well, I’ve thought of a way that the record industry can save itself.

Bring back vinyl.

I have come to the conclusion that maybe the CD’s days are numbered. If people want music for their iPod, car stereo, etc, they can download the MP3. If they want it in a physical format, they can buy the vinyl. I know it’s never really gone away, but I think there’s a lot more life left in the old vinyl format. To many people’s ears, it sounds better, plus you have to potential for proper, full-size album art, and to have an album formatted properly (side one, side two and so on). This sort of stuff is very desirable, as well as something you just don’t get with digital. There is something special about handling and putting on a record, as opposed to a CD, about having that big cover… it makes music seem more special and less of a disposable commodity.

So, downloads for the people who either want their fix of disposable music, or who only ever listen to music on the go, and vinyl for those who actually want to build a physical music collection. Maybe provide a voucher with every vinyl album purchase so people can officially download the digital version of the tracks for free.

I’ve always said I’m an ideas man. And speaking of good ideas, I’ve got to patent my design for a real musical instrument based on the Guitar Hero controller…

Efficiency.

I’ve always been a proponent of the philosophy of “doing more with less”. Not sure why, it’s some kind of deep-seated thing that probably goes back to my earlier days of using computers.

Every time you hear about a new computer game these days, the computer requirements for it have gone through the roof - you need this speed processor, that speed graphics card, and so on. If you can’t make it work on what is the standard hardware of the time (which was, of course, the latest, whizz-bang, all-singing, all-dancing hardware just a year or two ago), you just tell everyone they have to upgrade their hardware.

Smacks of laziness to me - it wasn’t like that back when I got serious about using computers. My Amiga had a 7.16MHz processor, the default graphics and sound hardware, and maybe a RAM upgrade at the most, from 512K to 1MB. And watching what very clever people did with this setup over the years was eye-opening, especially being part of the demo scene, where all the cleverest programmers lurked, playing pirated games, making free international phone calls and innovating more in their bedrooms than most professional programmers did in multi-million-dollar offices.

These clever sticks pushed the hardware beyond its limits, with more and more clever effects, larger numbers of moving objects and more colours on screen than had been concievable even a year or two before. There is something to be said of having fairly tight limits to work within - it brings the best out of people.

In the realm of computing, the only time you see this philosophy at work is in the world of console gaming - as a rule, you can’t upgrade the processor, RAM or graphics card in your Xbox, you just have to rely on the ingenuity of the programmers to extract more and more from whatever hardware they are presented with. You also see it with mobile phone games - my phone (Sony Ericsson K800i) has better graphics capabilities than my Amiga ever did, and I can talk to people using it, too. Shame I can’t attach a Kempston joystick to it and play these games on a screen that’s actually bigger than a postage stamp.

Outside of computing, this philosophy isn’t dead either, although it is becoming marginalised. Take the Japanese kei car, for instance.

Back in the ’50s, in order to raise the standard of living and stimulate their motor industry, the Japanese government wanted to encourage their citizens to buy cars instead of motorbikes, and created a new category of car - it had mandated maximum engine capacity, and the footprint of the car could be no bigger than  3.4m x 1.48m. If a car could fit within these limitations, the car could be sold as a kei car, and be subject to considerably lower taxation, much less restrictive parking rules and so on. This has led to some remarkable ingenuity in extracting the most in terms of performance, capacity and comfort.

Those little 660cc engines now have supercharging and turbocharging so they can go as fast as their larger siblings, some of these cars have more room inside them than cars twice their size, some even have 4-wheel drive, and are not lacking in the creature comforts and safety features that modern drivers take for granted. This is as a result of state-mandated innovation, that resulted in some ingenious men in Tokyo, Nagoya, Osaka and Sapporo to extract the most from the least.

Maybe this is why the American philosophy on cars doesn’t gel with me. It’s the antithesis of the kei car philosophy - every new model of car is bigger than the outgoing one, for no appreciable gain. None of these cars are in any way cleverer than what came before, just bigger and maybe slightly prettier. There are precious few concessions to efficiency, good packaging and versatility. Because, apparently, this isn’t what the American car-buying public want. They actually want bigger and less efficient, even in these days of inflating petrol prices and environmental panic. Something about safety, apparently. But it’s more like socially acceptable, neighbourly dick-swinging, if you ask me - my SUV is bigger than yours, therefore I’m more virile and valuable to the human race, and all that.

It’ll probably never happen while the oil companies run the US, but it’d be nice to see an American version of the kei car mandate -  it’s hard to imagine, but it’d be great to see it happen. But, in the meantime, it’s great to see cars such as the Honda Fit and the Toyota Yaris selling well. They’re targeted at Generation Y, who will, of course, grow up to become the next generation’s movers and shakers - they believe in efficiency, climate change and the simple notion of making life cheaper for themselves, which is what this all comes down to.

Smaller, more efficient and more environmentally-friendly cars make sense on the simple premise that you pay less for them and they cost less to run, leaving you more money for other things.  You’re doing just as much with less. That’s efficiency, and that works for me.

So I’ll be off down the Toyota and Scion dealership before too long, I think.

Pastime.

Having had some time away from the music industry, and listening to stories of those who are still involved, I’ve had a chance to see some aspects of it for what they really are.

For me, the phrase, “music business” is an oxymoron. Music isn’t a business, it’s an artform. It’s something special that happens when you let a person, or group of people, with particular talents, loose to create. It’s not something that should be done in pursuit of a pay cheque. It’s something you do because you have to. What’s more, it should be fun. The urge is within you, and you have to satisfy it.

A former bandmate of mine very recently left his current band, because, to him, it was no longer about four friends playing music together, creating and having fun. It was starting to get too businesslike. This is the most valid reason in the world to me. Yet, the band are dressing it up as “inability to commit”. Is that what music has come to? Some macho competition where you need to keep up with everyone else, turning friends against each other in its pursuit? Apparently so. It certainly was when I was involved. That’s wrong.

Maybe it’s the socialist in me, constantly seeking that Star Trek-like post-scarcity society of abundance, but society needs musicians and other great artists, without the pressures of having to “make it big”. A society needs to protect and encourage its artists - art is the emotional capital of a society, and a society will be measured on its artists. Artists are certainly as vital to a society as any politician, industrialist or monarch in terms of their place in defining and outlining the landscape upon which a people rests. Art is also about people, and interaction - an artist, or artists, being able to pull something out of their audience, and out of each other. Relationships like this should be nurtured, not put under pressure. I just hope for an environment one day where everyone, not just artists, can pursue the fruits of their particular talents without getting caught up in a dog-eat-dog dick-swinging competition.

On the plus side, times are changing. You can “play the game” now on your own terms and get as much out of it as you’re willing to put in, with the likes of iTunes being open to all. To go back to the socialist comparison, the means of production is now back in the hands of the people, not the corporations. This levels the playing field, but, in doing so, raises the bar for everyone, as there is now so much more music out there for people to consume. This is healthy, and can only be good for the state of the art.