Those that make money, are quiet… Those that aren’t making money are the loudest, and those that are concerned they won’t make money, complain all the time.

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. – FXOBoss

Humility comes from not showing the world that you just did what you did, because you aren’t doing it for the world. You are doing it for you. You don’t live for the world. You live for you.

When was the last time you were loud about your accomplishments, how did it make you feel?

So you decided to watch the Avengers? Good choice.

Are you deciding to watch it? I’ll take the decision for you just go watch it.

I got to see one of the first shows in Bangalore in India for the Avengers movie release. This is a little strange considering that the US has it’s release slated for the 4th of May. I know.. Those guys made the movie and we get to watch it first. Somehow the outsourcing Karma is all right in the universe. I am not going to ruin the movie for you , instead I’m going to give you a prelude to the movie so that you can understand what happens in the start and what everyone is talking about because for non comic book fans (and I am as huge as it gets) this was a treat that the story line was maintained.

The director Joss Whedon didn’t fuck it up. I sort of expected it to be like Iron Man 2 or the Green Lantern where the story and characters had so much potential but then fell into that commercial spiral we all know that destroys movies.

Quick Summary

Loki, Thor’s brother, decides to come to Earth and capture it. He wants a kingdom to rule and he decides Earth and it’s beings were designed for submission. So he gets this cosmic cube called the Tassaract which helps him to open a portal to the netherworld where his minions live. Did you know that the word minions was popularised by the phrase “Loki and his minions”?. I digress.

He comes to earth and quickly traps Hawkeye and the scientist friend of Thor and makes them do his bidding. They steal the Tassaract from SHIELD headquarters where it was stored and kept to make weapons of mass destruction. That’s when shit hits the fan and Nick Fury (played by Samuel Jackson) decides to put together the Avengers Initiative. A collection of beings so powerful that they alone can do what cannot be done by the humans.

And that’s where the fun starts.

Plot lines/ Interesting things

Given the potential for this movie to go wrong in so many ways. I am surprised that Joss pulled a winner out of this hat. Many times during the movie I’d be reminded of the Transformers like scenes that take place. The art work and the sci fi team really hit this out of the ballpark. At no point was one painfully reminded of the terrible work that happened in movies that preceded this. And it is a delight to see Computer Graphics Imagery in damn near perfection.

What gives this movie a lot of flesh though isn’t the plot or story line as a whole. Some bad guys come to take over earth. it is defended. That’s the premise but boy what an interesting blend of characters and comedic timing moments. From Iron Man’s cockiness to the Hulks burliness movements, there wasn’t a single minute where I thought “wtf am I doing here?”.

An interesting thing to note was the third Bruce Banner introduced. Bruce Banner is a character that is plagued by 2 things. When will he be captured. And being the intelligent but submissive genius in all his efforts. His gamma radiation signature is key to Loki’s efforts to take over Earth but I won’t ruin it for you. I think Mark Ruffalo’s performance has been a good one. Though I still think the best Bruce Banner was Edward Norton.

But always overshadowed by the cocky alpha male in the audience, Robert Downey Junior. And boy does he make a splash. Fantastic as always. Those who can grow a beard would get his style, I’m betting Rs 500 on it.

The characters are  Black Widow (Scarlett sigggghhhhhhhh), Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk (definitely my favourite), Thor, Hawkeye  and Nick Fury.

All in all a great watch and one that I highly recommend. Go go watch it.

Hated always for listening to rap.
Labelled derogatory, called it crap.
He listened it on and on,
This play of words, words that go snap.

So i made that up. I’m in love with rap. More for the musical precision with beats and lyrics. It’s a very hard thing to do and say. You can’t just make up shit, you have to have that shizzle in rhythm. Throughout the college years, I think I was the only one listening to people like Dr.Dre, Eminem, Snoop Dogg and stuff. I tried to get some people into it but mostly I was ridiculed. At those times I wished I had an opportunity to buy them into the awesomeness of Rap.

Well many years later, it’s here. Watch the trailer. This is a movie I’m definitely buying.

Interesting decisions are ones where players don’t just choose the same thing every time (if that’s the case, let the computer do it automatically) and they aren’t ones where you choose randomly. It has to involve actual thinking. He explained many different sources of interest, such as choices that have differnet levels of risk. Or that are short term vs medium term vslong term. Or that are tradeoffs along some other dimension. Or that even involve non-gameplay customization, as that is very interesting to lots of players too.

Sid cautioned us that we aren’t “paid by the decision,” meaning that game designers sometime have a tendency to think more decisions is always better. This can lead to overwhelming the player though.

This is perhaps one of the hardest things to pull of as a Game producer. Increasing complexity in a game is inversely proportional to the participation/engagement of the audience. I have had the chance to play games at a high level (or so I’d like to think) and I work in the social gaming industry. They are 2 ends of the spectrum and an ideal overlap would be something like League of Legends (a socially competitive real time game) and at the heart of is what Sid Meier, of Civ fame, talks about in that Game Developer Conference note by David Sirlin.

If you are given a choice to decide. You must have incrementally better choices at every stage to choose from. If you have one correct choice to proceed all the time, then there is no game here. There is no aspect of improvement or learning. You either get it right or you don’t. Game over.  But in strategic games, like Starcraft 2, you could choose to further your economy, or speed up your technology or decide to all in in an attack and every one of them is a valuable decision and NOT a game ender. That’s the beauty of competitive gaming. When you are ahead, you try to get more ahead. You try to soak in the leads and slowly garner them. You cannot have a black and white decision introduced into the game because eventually after a wrong try, the user is going to get it right and where’s the fun in that.

In the time that I have been working as a product manager, I have come to note many many things about the industry and gaming in general. And I am extremely proud of the work we have done and extremely humbled by the company of my colleagues. I am working with some of the smartest and most fun minds at Playdom and I am quite grateful for the opportunity to be a part of this epic group.

Unfortunately since we have a contract and NDA signed, I can’t give you details about the game just yet. The thing is we do a lot of testing to get data to validate our claims and our guesses on game design. This could be completely out of the ball park figures (like in the case of a particular user who found a way to game the system) or it could be quite right on the money. It has also been tons of hardwork. Game design and product management in a social gaming company is not on the beauty and design but on the metrics and psychology. It’s probably the reason I love some parts of it. Repetitive stuff is exciting when you see improvement and every day, I see something to improve upon and it is very very exciting.

I hope to share a lot of things now that I found a way to figure out posting links easier on wordpress. I have been rambling a lot to take out the stress on my tumblr blog, but I won’t link it because Mom I know you are reading this and you wouldn’t approve of the language.

To everyone else, do give me feedback on what you think is missing and what would you like to see. It’s good to be back writing.

Bruce Lee, Be Like Water.

Ira Glass, Put in volumes of work

How does EG generate revenue? Are sponsorships mostly limited to gaming/hardware companies, or are you getting sponsors with broader appeal as well?
Mainly sponsorships, but not entirely. EG as a company has several wings to it, with the team being only one of them. Our fans are mainly interested in the team and its players, but to EG’s sponsors, EG is not only a team but an all-in-one marketing agency solution for the gaming demographic. We provide access to pro players, but we also run our own gaming tournaments, run our own broadcast streams, produce tons of interesting content, and do a bunch of other boring corporate stuff as well . Historically, our sponsors have mostly been endemic, but we’ve had a couple of general consumer brands in the past, and we’re hoping to bring on a few mainstream accounts for 2011

Evil Geniuses, EG for short, is one of the most popular teams in the eSports world. In this interview with PC world, Alex Garfield CEO of EG  talks about the team, players and generating revenue.

Most companies that focus on individual brands or teams are marketing companies. If you have marketable people you keep it for the sake of marketing and not necessarily for the value they provide as an individual competitor. This is what happened with Anna Kournikova and it’s why it happens with a lot of players like EG.Idra. They are supremely marketable even though not necessarily in the highest caliber of players. But it’s always a good idea to get insights into the eSports world.

He was kidding. And was high. Or both.

Either way, one of the things I get very itchy about is flaky net connections. I love being wired to the net. It doesn’t matter what I end up doing, I need to stay wired. That bandwidth juice has to be pumped in. If not, I go crazy. So it was amusing that yesterday when my net died (when I had very important work mind you), I switched to the iPhone to check up on news sites and reads and I found this good read by Nick Bilton on Unplugging for 30 minutes a day.

There’s a lot of boohoo science behind it, but this particular part was interesting.

Like everyone else, I really can’t imagine life without that little computer in my pocket,” he added. “However, there is an importance to being able to put it aside and let those daydreams naturally perform the cognitive functions your brain needs.”

That cognitive function he talks about is the natural process of forgetting and remembering. If you experience a sunset, chances are unlikely you’ll forget it. Just like the birth of your kid or the day you get married or have your first kiss. Those needn’t be captured but need to be lived through. So I thought this is a good thing to do.

30 minutes daily, I’m going off line completely. This means manually unplugging my internet. What will I do in the next 30 minutes I don’t know, I’ll probably end up reading a book or painting or design or learning the guitar. It doesn’t matter, it’s time away for one self.

I suggest you try it too with any other addiction. It doesn’t have to be the internet reading thingy that I’m getting off. Just get off daily on what you seem to consume so much that it overtakes your life.

Because life is in living. Not only on posting/sharing.

One that is also found in India and all it’s publications too. Forget the fact we have no good tech news reporter or reporting done in India, no one takes the time to think and write good shit.

Print circulation is dying and pageviews are all that matter in keeping advertisers happy. This means, whether writers like it or not, there’s an underlying drive for both sensationalism and more — more — more.

Read the stories that are published in the tech blogosphere tomorrow. Are most published because the writer put in a lot of work or original thought? No, most are published because more — more — more content leads to more — more — more pageviews.

Most are stories written with little or no research done. They’re written as quickly as possible. The faster the better. Most are just rehashing information that spread by some other means. But that’s great, it means stories can be written without any burden beyond the writer having to read a little bit and type words fast. Many are written without the writer even having to think.

There will be 25 stories about Google TV or something else tomorrow which will all say basically the same thing. Maybe one or two of those stories will have actual insight or information. Maybe none will. If any do, it’s the exception, not the rule.

He ends up with

You cannot be an authority on 20 different topics. You just can’t. But people are trying to convey that they are. And there’s often a perception that they are. And this horribly broken system works from the perspective of the pageview machine.

That being said one of the best sites for content is TechMeme. It’s like the meta search result engine for Tech news. I refer to it on a daily basis. I am yet to see good news reporting in India. Do you have any good sites you’d recommend?

 

His income comes from prize money, sponsorship and from lessons. Tyler didn’t want to state specifics about how much lessons with him cost, but said professional coaching services can run to over $100 an hour.

“If you’re aim is just to make money, then coaching is great,” Tyler said. “But you will never get better and you will never win [tournaments] if all you do is teach.”

He also said some his clients aren’t who you might expect. Some of them are 40-something business guys who just want to beat their friends or their kids.