I’m taking a night class in graphic design - I have a lot of ideas for web-based side projects, and taking the class is cheaper than hiring a designer. Plus, there’s a weird, alchemical quality to the skill of graphic designers, which I see as an “art with rules” that I’ve always been curious about.

I worried that a night class would cater mostly to housewives looking to “have evening activities”, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised. The teacher, a self-described old-school old fart, seems to be aiming to train professional designers. This is not my goal, but it’s definitely going to be an honest class.

Nevertheless, in every course one seems to meet the same archetypes of obnoxious classmates: the Oversharer, who feels the need to provide long personal stories illustrating each element of the lesson. These seem particularly common in management classes, and thankfully graphic design doesn’t lend itself well to this. However, no night class I’ve ever taken has ever been without a Commentator, the one sitting in front making unfunny jokes on everything the teacher says, thinking it’s banter, but really just delaying the proceedings needlessly. Who are those people?

A large part of the game Mass Effect involves conversation with other characters. They say something to you, you pick among a choice of replies and they react to what you say. Depending on how charming or intimidating your own character becomes over the course of the game, more extreme dialog options become open to you. Experimenting with how characters will react to different lines is most of the fun of the game for me.

But I knew this could get really good when I was admiring a beautiful view with Kaidan, my male subordinate, and he inadvertently let slip something that suggested he was into me.

Now, it doesn’t matter that poor Kaidan looks like Erik Estrada and is written the way a male game designer thinks I want a man to be (basically a 32-year-old telekinetic virgin). I felt the same fuzziness, the same “whoa, did I just hear that?” feeling in my gut as when a new romantic interest is expressed in real life. I wondered how far it would go, and suddenly all my conversational choices with Kaidan revolved around nurturing the budding flame.

Later in the game, I met Liara, a knockout of a blue-skinned alien chick who’s also a socially awkward scientist. No matter what conversational options you choose, Liara wants you bad and overcomes her geeky shyness to let you know it. Indeed, nothing you say seems to turn her off (written the way a male game designer wants a woman to be?). She wasn’t particular about the fact that I’m a female, either. See, her race, the Asari, only has females (yah). In fact, she’s so easy that the first time I played through the game, I accidentally slept with her. And by trying to be a weeeee bit coy with Kaidan, I ended up crushing him.

So the next time I played it safe, acting all but abusive to Liara (because let’s face it, I felt she’d violated me in the first playthrough) and playing mother hen to Kaidan’s paper-thin male ego, and successfully ended up with him in the end.

In a surprising development, last night the two of them confronted me to make a definitive choice. Oh, the drama. I opted for Kaidan but noticed that I did have the option to ask if I could have them both. Now THAT, my friends, is replayability.

In other situations in the game, I wanted to choose one option to see what would happen, but just couldn’t morally bring myself to do it, or would feel truly sorry for the impact I’d had. I couldn’t abstract away the emotions just to satisfy my game designer’s curiosity. And that’s huge.

Mass Effect doesn’t come close to giving me as powerful or complex emotions as I’ve felt watching great cinema, but it comes closer than any game ever has before, and to me that’s a step forward for the medium. I guess the most important thing it made me feel, then, is hope.

New Year’s Eve is one of my favorite days of the year. Though the blank slate of the new year is obviously just an illusion, it’s a very powerful image for me, and I really look forward to putting 2007 behind me. I can’t recall a less pleasant year.

Poor 2007 suffered from the comparison with 2006, where I lost 15 pounds, produced a very successful game (at least commercially) and met a Scotsman. In 2007, I managed the toughest project of my career and to be perfectly honest, lost a lot of my happy thoughts and energy in the process; for the first time in many years, I didn’t run in a single race.

It hasn’t been all bad, of course. As the game is almost out now, we can see what it’ll be like, and I’m truly happy with what’s been achieved. I decided to learn the piano, bought one and learned how to play it. Jonathan moved to Montreal and adjusting to life à  deux was easier than we were both expecting. I travelled for fun, to Scotland and Turkey, for the first time since buying the house. Difficult times are times of growth and I’ve earned some truly novel insights in 2007. There have been lessons that take me in new directions, but they fetched a dear price in sweat and tears.

A few eclectic highlights, for the love of lists -

Best books I read: Mary Queen of Scots, Zag

Worst books: Hey Nostradamus! (there’s nothing for it, I just don’t like Coupland), The Dip

Honorable mentions: The Ghost Map, Theft: A Love Story

Most influential book: The 4-Hour Workweek

Best movies: Michael Clayton, Ratatouille, Into the Wild

Best musical discovery: Death Cab for Cutie

Most annoying new development: Facebook’s Fun Wall

Most disappointing developments - society: Bali Climate Talks, the Bouchard-Taylor Commission

Most cautiously encouraging development - society: The delay of Canada’s restrictive new copyright bill

Best game played: Mass Effect

Happy new year 2008 to all lightspeed chronicles readers, I hope you look forward to 2008 as much as I do!

There’s an addictive little facebook application called “Compare people”, which presents you two of your friends at random, and asks you to… well, compare them on some random dimension. You may end up having to say who, between your lead programmer and your ex-beau, you’d rather be on a desert island with, who’s more likely to win in a fight between your former client and your girlfriend, etc. It can lead to some pretty funny thought experiments.

Of course, it also tells you how you’ve rated when compared to others by your friends, and from what I gather, my friends, at least my facebook friends, don’t know me. Sure, I’m organized and bad to go shopping with, but I seem to rate best on my singing voice (?) and my manners, of all things, winning 100% of the time in those dimensions. Similarly, my friends don’t think I study much (25% win rate) and that I’m a pretty bad public speaker (0%).

Certainly one has to be cautious in drawing conclusions based on this, especially since my facebook friends include people I haven’t seen since elementary school, but it’s a very entertaining way to waste time.

A few weeks after Sam Roberts won the Juno award for Artist of the Year, Nika and I bumped into him at Korova on St-Laurent. When introduced, I asked him what he did for a living.

At the gym this summer, I noticed a man standing near and looking at me expectantly. Thinking it was probably someone I knew but didn’t recognize right away, I said hello in my best can-I-help-you? tone. He then said:

“Hi, you’re my trainer. Are you ready to start?”

“Um, no, sorry, I’m not a trainer. I only said hi because I thought maybe we knew each other.”

“Ah. Well, that’s probably because you recognize me from the television.”

(Looks at me intensely, waiting for my acknowledgement that I know him. I stand there with a blank stare, increasingly embarrassed not to know who this “celebrity” is. Awkward seconds pass, and he takes off his glasses to help me better recognize him. I’m still completely clueless and uncomfortably quiet. He says, “I host the TV show Découverte“. I fake mild recognition, not very successfully. We quietly retire to our respective dumbbells).

Three weeks ago, a film crew came to the office to shoot a developer diary (Making Of) for the game. As they were setting up, the main interviewer and I went out for coffee, and I asked him if he did videogame shoots often. When we returned to the office, an animator informed me that these were the guys from Electric Playground, a well-known videogame show, and my coffee buddy had been none other than Victor Lucas, the creator and star of the show.

This may explain why it astonishes me to get recognized from this little page, which is so much smaller in scope, as happened this week at the Montreal Games Summit. Every time, I feel good knowing that there is someone on the other side of the screen, and guilty that I failed to recognize these guys.

 

I’m pleasantly surprised.

When I left for Turkey two weeks ago, there had never been a time in my life when I needed a vacation more. I knew that if I hadn’t gone then, something else would have given, and I just cannot afford to unravel right now. So I planned the type of vacation I needed: the kind with lots of intellectual stimulation, so that I couldn’t possibly think about work, and physical activity, to shake my body out of its ageing rut. Travelling is always an emotional refresher, a bit of a degausser of everyday life. But to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t sure this was going to happen this time, I doubted that two weeks would be enough to replenish the energy that’s been so recently elusive. I was wrong, and found myself last Friday in Istanbul pleasantly satisfied, looking forward to coming home, and to going back to work.

But crossing a few things off the life to-do list (getting a scrubdown at a 600-year-old Hamam, visiting Troy, scootering through Cappadocia) has that effect. Who knew?

This blog’s not dead. I’m not at a loss for content, or words. I’m not over the whole blogging thing. Frankly I’ve never been more under it.

Thing is, there’s been more interesting stuff happening lately than pretty much anything I’ve written about in the past few years. Not just good interesting, either. Bad, sad, difficult interesting too, and that’s often when I feel like blogging about it the most, but unfortunately I really can’t. Not for a little while yet. But it’s also light-at-the-end-of-tunnel-exhilaration interesting as well.

Of course, there’s been the usual everyday stuff to blog about as well, but if I blog about Comet’s Scottish Halloween dress whilst ignoring the real stuff, I feel I’m really just making small talk. And I hate small talk.

But I miss writing, and cutting myself entirely off from the online community in order to avoid possibly having to skirt some issues, well, that’s overkill. So there you have it. I can’t talk about everything that’s going on, but I will eventually, and hopefully it’ll make for a good story.

In the meantime, not-so-small talk on other stuff.

Jonathan and I have finally booked our vacation for this fall, and have decided that Turkey is the place. Because I was so handsomely rewarded for having read a bit of the history of the place when we went to Scotland, I decided to do the same with Turkey.

But so much has happened in Turkey! The Crusades, Alexander the Great, the Byzantine Empire, the Ottomans, Constantinople and, oh yeah, this little thing called the Trojan War! How am I supposed to learn everything I want to know in the months remaining?

There’s only one thing for a producer can do; come up with a plan and follow it through.

 

A couple of weeks ago, I watched Donnie Darko again for fun. It led me to read about time-travel paradoxes, which led me to theories of parallel universes which led me to string theory, which is apparently gaining acceptance by physicists and posits the existence of parallel universes (real ones!). In order to learn more without adding another book to my reading list, I ordered the Nova special series The Elegant Universe on DVD.

Although the documentary is sometimes really dumbed down, the animations are evocative and beautiful, the production value is excellent and the subject matter, nothing less than fascinating. Explaining something as esoteric as string theory, which says that there are 11 dimensions and that everything is made up of vibrating strings of energy, to the general public, is no small feat. Although I felt a little condescended to at first, by the end of the three 1-hour episodes I had brain sprain, and was glad the documentary was holding my hand as it was.

Wrap your head around these concepts for size: gravity may not stick well to our universe, and possibly seeps off into parallel ones. Our universe may exist on a membrane parallel to many others, and may have been empty until a collision with a neighbor transferred matter to our universe at the collision point. That’s why at the Big Bang, lots of stuff materialized out of nothing.

A fun way to spend a couple of hours getting smarter.

I’ve been wondering if it’s geeky of me to be reading The New Penguin History of the World.

Then yesterday I got a total thrill hearing that the mummy of Hatshepsut’s been found.

And I didn’t have to wonder anymore.