Nobody hated sharks more than I did growing up. I couldn’t even look at a picture of them without being nauseous, and I’ve never swam (swum?) in the ocean because of it. But when I saw this trailer I was intrigued.

Sharkwater just came out on DVD and I highly recommend it. Watching it this morning did make me nauseous, but only at the human indifference portrayed and the weight of the consequences. When you see what’s happening to the oceans and to the world’s top predator, you will not stand for it.

This has been brewing for many months, and today I can blog it. Late last week, I resigned from my post as Game Director. I won’t go into the specifics of my reasons for this move here, but suffice it to say I haven’t taken employment elsewhere as a videogames producer (or any other position for that matter). In my estimation, Artificial Mind and Movement is an employer of the highest integrity, humanity and professionalism, the best I’ve worked for. Nevertheless, I haven’t enjoyed being a game director there in a while.

Considering how highly I esteem A2M, I doubt things would be better elsewhere, so I haven’t traded this job for another one. Wanting more control and flexibility over my conditions, the manner in which my work is done, and consequently the final result, I’ve decided to just leave, trust the future and see what interesting doors open.

In the meantime, I’ll pursue two avenues: freelancing, and working on a special project. I’ll write more about each shortly.

Rock Me Amadeus just came on the Internet radio, and it’s such a feel good song. It reminded me of that funny car ad that was playing recently in theaters, with German car engineer types driving wildly while this song played really loudly in the background.

Enjoying that ad always kinda sat wrong with me, considering the fact that Falco died in a car crash. Didn’t anyone tell the ad agent?

Sounds daft, but this video of incredible creatures of the deep is really worth watching!

I once heard someone say, upon learning that snakes have pelvic bones, that “it might be because they’re in the process of evolving legs”. I didn’t go into it at the time, but that’s wrong. Evolution doesn’t start with a specific result in mind, thinking “I’d better put in a pelvis so I can pop out some legs in a couple of generations”. Evolution just tries things at random, and if one of those random trials happens to be more useful at promoting survival and reproduction, then that mutation can spread through the population. The essential part is that generally, every little change has to provide an advantage of its own, in order to spread and become established in the population. So if the snake doesn’t get an advantage from having a pelvis, then the latter is more likely to be vestigial than a transition to eventual legs.

I like to think about that process when it comes to changing habits in my life. I watch Million Dollar Baby and think I’d kill for Hillary Swank’s buff shoulders. Sure, I could tape inspiring pictures of her on my fridge as an incentive to go to the gym, but that’s focusing on the end goal. And when it comes to doing something day in, day out, like pumping iron, it’s not going to work for long if it’s not fun every step of the way.

Now, making something feel good the whole way through doesn’t mean you should never do something good for you if it’s not a party. God knows, most mornings I’d rather stay in bed than go for a run in the cold - but the idea is to focus on the way you’ll feel once you’re out there, and the energized (and pleasantly stiff) feeling you’ll get throughout your day, rather than the long-term goal of 22% body fat. This is something that may happen, way down the road, if you keep up a healthy lifestyle on a regular basis. The key point is to focus on the near-immediate small payoff rather than the long-term large benefit.

That, to me, is how you make something rewarding the whole time, and how you make a good new habit sticky, and even addictive.

Lapsus au déjeuner avec Pat ce matin, en parlant de son iPhone:

“Est-ce que l’interface se manipule bien avec un gland heu, gant?”

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.