PlayFirst Grapevine

Halloween used to be the only chance some people had to pretend to be something other than what they are. Wear a facsimile of some cartoon character's likeness, or plaster make-up on your face or make some holes in a sheet and throw it over yourself. You could be as scary or as scared as you felt like acting. Claim a new name or no name at all. Claim to be 142 or 12 or 69, whatever age you wanted. But the next morning, masks were discarded, paint washed off, and facades dissolved in the sunlight, back to mundane dross.

That was before the Internets. Deliberately pluralized there to make a point. An Internet is a collection of networks. It's my contention that there's more than one of those collections, a whole set of them, and they don't completely overlap in all points. When most people think of the Internet, if they ever do, it's in terms of websites. You click your mouse on the name of some place or the path to some thing and your computer whisks you away to it. It's transparent to you. That's one Internet.

If you ever send Instant Messages, that's another kind of Internet. It's close to the first in some places, but divergent in others. It's near real-time, for one thing. It's a back and forth dialogue which requires user input. It's not the same thing every time like some of the websites are.

Do you send email? That's a third kind of Internet. Before my technologically savvy readers bust out the pitchforks, I hasten to add that I speak here of subjective experiences and perceptual models, not of the underlying fundamentally shared protocols and routes.

But they've all got some things in common. I'll talk about that next time.

G'day! I'm PlayFirst's newest web engineer. If you've noticed the ESRB ratings in our catalogue, you've already seen some of my work. Now kids can play our games without anybody worrying about objectionable material... as long nobody objects to kids being encouraged to wait tables for customers who all dress alike, presumably for minimum wage. Okay, so the ESRB ratings might not be that exciting, but I also contributed to the Mystery of Shark Island sweepstakes, and I've been working on some features that will knock your socks off! I'm just not allowed to write about them yet.

There are other things I can't write about, including, as the guideline puts it, things 'I wouldn't discuss with my mother'. Mum's pretty open-minded so it would be wrong to take that literally, but it does eliminate a lot of my traditional blogging topics. 90% of what's left gets filtered by the rule against politics. But these are good restrictions if they stop me from becoming the blogging junkie I once was. I often blame the tech crash for me not finding a good geek job in Amsterdam in 2002, but my blog addiction was also a big part of the reason.

I eventually did get back to work, not just in Amsterdam, but also in Malaysia, and then back home in Sydney, and then back in my other home in the Bay Area. All my gigs have since been in Silicon Valley, but I live in San Francisco proper, so I really wanted a City job. But the ones I interviewed for were with stuffy financial firms, and I wanted a job that would have a direct positive impact on everyday people. Then a friend told me about this position at PlayFirst, and I realized the benefit casual games bring to the community. Now I make a living for a company that helps people unwind and get a bit of extra enjoyment in their daily lives. Yay.

Another good restriction on our blog entries: their length. This means I can't continue rambling today, and you can get back to your unwinding and enjoyment.

Hey everyone!

Just a reminder - don't forget to check out the Mystery of Shark Island sweepstakes! It is really exciting... just think, you get to play a cool new game AND enter to win one of five colorful new MP3 players! Go to the Mystery of Shark Island page and click on the sweepstakes link to learn more.

Good luck! Solving this mystery could be music to your ears!

I'm not merely unknown, I'm also lazy. Last time I talked about music and learning. I'm not immune to the search for novelty, myself.

What I do when I'm looking for new music is I turn to the web. I visit Magnatune or Pandora or last.fm You can try before you buy without even seeing the sky.

This would be the point at which a responsible blog writer would mention if they stood to gain from a link to a commercial site.

You can infer from the lack of such statement that I'm either irresponsible, unable to profit from such a link, or both.

So don't feel bad that you used to listen to terrible music or that you soon will hate the music you enjoy, now. Hop to it and start finding something new to get tired of!

I gotta go catch up on the songs of one of my favorite bands, Beatnik Turtle's [free!] Song of the Day. Don't bother telling me that they suck. That's what I like about them!

I was talking about a particular kind of learning last time.

Maybe you've learned a shorter route home from the bank. Maybe it's a different way to cook eggs. Maybe it's the name botanists call the flowers growing in your lawn. Maybe it's the distance to the star nearest to Earth[1].

Most learners are capable of retaining those new things they've learned. Maybe only long enough to take an exam about it, maybe it lasts a lifetime. Everything you learn changes how you think and that means how you perceive and how you respond, both. So that song you used to groove on which now seems so vapid and pointless? What happened is that now you know more. You know enough to recognize the simple construction of that song and it doesn't give you the same thrill.

Maybe you get a thrill of nostalgia but that's just a pale imitation of the thrill of novelty. Because every brand new song by every brand new band is a new chance to learn something. To expose your built-in learning machine to a new set of patterns. You'll learn what the music has to show you, and then, as always, you'll drop it and move on. There's no reason to be upset about it, it's just how you're built.

Hey, there are more new bands forming every day. One of them must suck less than the stuff you're listening to today. You could bore yourself stupid trying to find them on the radio, or you could go browse a record store, or you could go to live shows or you could find a friend on the cutting edge of what's new[2].

But that's a lot of work. How would a lazy person deal with it? I'll tell you next time.

[1] It's named Sol and it's eight light minutes away, more or less.
[2] Hint: it's the friend who thinks your music is boring and old.

Just a quick update to let you all know that our April calendar is here! Take a look... this one is super cute and features all the adorable flowers from Plantasia.

Hope you guys like it!

A classic refrain of the chattering classes has always been that "things were better in my day", and I have to say not true.

Having a four year old son (favorite games: Pirate Poppers and Peggle), has allowed me to compare first hand my own childhood with his, so here are four things that are way better.

1. Parks: Have you seen the surfaces they now put in park playgrounds??? They're practically like a trampoline, so no injuries. Back in my day if you fell off the slide, you didn't bounce, you cracked.
2. Museums: Back in my day, boring boring boring - some terrible exhibit you couldn't touch with some lackluster description in small print. Now it's actually fun - interactive exhibits that actually really teach you something - for those of you in the Bay Area - the San Francisco Exploratorium is a must for any kid 3 years and up.
3. Digital Video Recorders: My son was watching a cartoon in a hotel recently, and his first reaction to the ads coming on was "fast forward through them Daddy" - nearly all of his (deliberately limited) TV experiences have been with our DVR and so we always skip the commercials.
4. Cameras: My wife took a picture of him with a regular 35mm camera the other day - instantly he came to her and said "show me the picture" - he's only ever known the instant gratification of digital photography.

So were things really that much better in the good old days?