9:00am: Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap: Design Lessons Learned from Rock Band. Which began with the question: what do you do about the fact that everybody wants to have input into the design of your game? If a designer has tight control, then other people get mad when their ideas aren’t used, and you lose good ideas. But design by committee doesn’t work, either.

To solve this, you need a way to get everybody on the same page. Their answer: each game has One Question that you can always come back to as a touchstone. Compare this to Level 5’s answer from Wednesday (or, for that matter, Bioware’s answer from later on Friday); note also Iwata’s / Miyamoto’s claim that design documents don’t work to this end, because people don’t read anything. In addition, as an audience member pointed out to me after the talk, just phrasing your touchstone in the form of a question has benefits, in that merely repeating it gets you thinking about whether or not it applies to what you’re doing.

For Guitar Hero, the question was “Does this rock?”. For Rock Band, they began with the question of “Is this different from what we’ve done before?”, which is of course a lousy question: there’s no way to focus a team behind it. After a lot of experimentations/investigations, they settled on a much better question, “Is this an authentic band experience?” So, for example, for the gameplay, this suggested adding big rock endings, coming back from the brink, and solo bonuses; it suggested avoiding powerups, guitars that caught on fire, and minigames.

So that gets everybody on the same page. Still, though, to really understand others’ suggestions demands mind reading, and can lead to graceless compromises. His solution involved something called perceptual control theory, which I don’t really understand, but the example he gave (which sounded kind of like a Theory of Constraints evaporating cloud to me) was: people complain about hard songs in random setlists. One bad solution is to say “what part of random don’t you understand?” and tell people to learn to play better. Another bad solution is to come up with some complicated algorithm to improve the setlists and make them not, in fact, random. A better solution: give people some info in advance about the difficulty of the setlist. (Editorial note: though, personally, I wouldn’t mind if I could pick the difficulty of each song in a random setlist independently.)

More on the theme of feedback from players: hardcore players will tell you, frequently at length, what they think about your game and what they think you should change about it. (See the previous sentence for an example!) One thing to keep in mind here is that the term “hardcore” contains multiple cultures; you have to interpret the advice you get in the context of the culture that spawns it. More casual players won’t tell you; fortunately, achievement data gives lots of information there. For example, in the original Rock Band, they were surprised at how much more popular the band tour mode was than the solo tour instruments (they’d thought of the former as relatively hardcore); they reacted by adding a patch to make the band tour even more accessible, which proved to be quite successful, and removed the solo tour style from the sequel.

Other tidbits:

• Separate design from content as much as possible. E.g. they needed to make it easy to drop in songs at the last moment; to make this work with all the various playlists that a song might appear in, they added a layer of indirection by having the playlists generated from metadata associated with the songs, instead of writing the playlists directly.
• Don’t design for some sort of ideal situation in your head: it will take a long time and probably won’t be what people actually want.
• A good use of user suggestions: one of the Rock Band 2 battles of the bands was entitled “Schrödinger’s Cat battle”, containing the songs “Dead” (The Pixies), “Alive” (Pearl Jam), and “Wanted Dead or Alive” (Bon Jovi).
• They’re the world’s largest manufacturer of drum sticks.

10:30am: Stretching Beyond Entertainment: The Role of Games in Personal and Social Change. A panel discussion including Peter Molyneux, Will Wright, Bing Gordon, Lorne Lanning, and Ed Fries. But, apparently, you weren’t supposed to be interested in what any of those guys might have to say, and the real draw was supposed to be the moderator, Rusel DeMaria, because for the first fifteen or twenty minutes of the panel, the moderator spoke more than all five of the panelists put together.

I was kind of expecting to be annoyed by Lorne Lanning, and my expectations were met: he even discussed Abe’s Oddyssee, and presented it as a game where, if you choose, you could kill the Mudokons with gruesome and entertaining death animations, only to realize the error of your ways when confronted with the bad ending. (I believe he even used the phrase “profound impact” when talking about this.) Whereas my experience was that you could choose to dutifully slog through the game’s puzzles, saving as many Mudokons as you could, and realize when you nonetheless got the (gratuitously callous) bad ending that the error of your ways was letting the game come anywhere near your console.

Will Wright said some interesting things, though; the one that stuck with me was his claim that the works in other media that have brought about the most social change are those that have honestly depicted bad behavior instead of those that have depicted good behavior. (So, hey, video games are halfway there!) The John Holt fan in me was amused by Bing Gordon’s anti-schooling rabble rousing. But, all in all, not a good choice.

12:00pm: The Dating Game, with Dustin Clingman, Richard Dansky, Wendy Despain, and Steve Meretzky. (And with much more active and effective audience participation than any other session I attended.) This was my most pleasant surprise of the conference: I mostly went because I loved Planetfall and because, frankly, there wasn’t a lot else in the time slot, but it turned out to be thoroughly delightful.

The question that the session posed: in the U.S., the canonical thing to do on a first date is go to a movie. (Well, dinner plus a movie.) What would have to change for playing a video game to replace going to a movie? They broke down their analysis into a number of subquestions; basically, it came down to why are movies an actively good first date and why are games an actively bad first date? But the discussion went in all sorts of directions at different times, so I won’t stick to the script, instead just listing some of the points that were raised:

• Movies are in a public, neutral space: currently, video games usually aren’t played in such a space.
• That public space is dark, giving you some privacy.
• Movies are a shared experience, with no scope for dominance in your shared experience. In particular, competition is bad, which is one strike against games.
• But cooperation is good: you can imagine bonding more strongly while working together to create something while playing a game than you might while watching a movie.
• One audience member reported a game date working well when they were playing a cooperative light-gun shooter side by side in a sit-down semi-enclosed arcade cabinet, which addressed all the above issues.
• In a movie you have your hands free, and you won’t die a gruesome death if you look away from the screen and at your companion for a bit.
• When going to a movie, it’s typically the first time both people have seen it, and you don’t have to worry about differences in prior expertise, so both participants are on a more level playing field.
• Multiple audience members brought up the example of a carnival as a successful first date, and a Japanese audience member said that was quite common in his company. And games are part of the carnival experience; they can provide a way for people to show off something they can do well (while dominating an external situation instead of the other person), which can certainly be attractive.
• Movies give you something to talk about afterwards, allowing you to get to know the other person without exposing too much of yourself right off the bat.
• There’s an established “date movie” genre; what can we learn from it, what makes it successful?
• Movies (especially date movies) hit on emotion a lot.

They didn’t come to any grand conclusions—it was much more in the spirit of “let’s see what we can come up with when thinking about this together” than “here’s how to solve this problem”—but I thoroughly enjoyed the meandering discussions that occurred.

1:00pm: Lunch, in the delightful company of Michael Abbott, Wes Erdelack, and Manveer Heir.

2:30pm: Lionhead Experiments Revealed. Molyneux speaking, and I expected more out of him. Lionhead lets people propose/run experimental projects between games (kind of like Google’s 20 percent time, but less bold), so Peter talked about that and showed some examples as experiments. But nothing about the details of their structure or about the experiments he showed particularly grabbed me.

4:00pm: The Iterative Level Design Process of Bioware’s Mass Effect 2. My writeup for this turned out to be long enough that I’m splitting it off into a separate post.

The latter is region 2; now I have to figure out how to play it as well. I’m planning to use my Mac for that; my options are:

1. Use an external DVD drive, set to region 2.
2. Use the internal DVD drive, with software that can read from all regions.
3. Use the internal DVD drive, set to region 2.
4. Use the internal DVD drive, with new firmware.

Which is more or less the current order that I’m planning to try them in: I have an external DVD drive around, so I might as well set it to region 2, but if I have to end up setting the internal DVD drive to region 2, no big deal – I don’t plan to start watching DVDs on it in general, and if I change my mind later, the machine will let me change regions back to region 1.

Still looking for a copy of Only Yesterday. I was thinking about doing an order from Amazon Japan soon; I guess I’ll just throw it on that.

Now that I think about it, both series do have some elements in common. Both set in a future world, where most of the technology feels like a not too distant (100-year old?) European style, but there are interjections of advanced technology controlled by mysterious forces. (More of that in this one than in Haibane.) Transcendence that isn’t particularly well explained, or really explained at all. (More of that in Haibane.) Hmm, maybe they don’t have much in comon after all; a lot more action here, more of an epic scale, more gizmos, somewhat more explanations.

We’ll take a break from his list now: Liesl’s dad gave her a few volumes of Slings & Arrows for her birthday, so that will be our series to spend time with for the time being. But I’m looking forward to getting back to his list: recommendations of that quality are a gift to cherish.

I started off studying the language with the help of JapanesePod101 and a textbook (Japanese for Today). Then I added Read Japanese Today, which I continue to think is an excellent way to learn kanji. I’d also been using Kanji & Kana as a reference book, so I got my stroke order right when writing characters for vocabulary cards; over the last few month, however, I found myself browsing through it more often in odd moments.

It’s a book I’ve had around since the last time I tried to learn the language. It contains the government-approved list of 1945 basic kanji, showing how to write each, giving the various readings and meanings, as well as a few compounds in which they appear. And does so in an order based more or less on how important they are. A great book to have around, if you want to immerse yourself in the basic kanji; last decade, I tried to go through the book and memorize the kanji in order.

But I went too far with the book. At one point, I could go through the first 200 characters or so, and write them down in the order given in the book, with the proper stroke order. Which is a very seductive thing to do: it gives you something to practice if you just have some spare time, or are falling asleep at night, or whatever. The problem is that my memorizing of my strokes got ahead of my memorizing of the readings and the meanings, so things got unbalanced.

Because of my bad experience, I stayed away from doing the same thing this time. But then I glanced through the start of the book and realized that I claimed to know most of the characters on the first few pages. So what’s the harm in memorizing the order in the book, and reviewing the strokes in my head?

Thinking about it more, I think that, not only isn’t there harm, there’s virtue in it. If I claim I know a character, even if I’m only interested in reading the language rather than writing it, I have to be able to recognize it completely reliably; given the number of characters that look similar, in practice I can’t claim that unless I could write the character. But vocabulary cards, by their nature, don’t give me practice in writing characters. So I have to find another way to practice writing them; memorizing them in the order in that book is as good a way to practice that as I can think of.

Having said that, I don’t want to forget what happened last time. I think/hope I’m doing a better job of managing my learning; the key here is to not have my memorizing how to write the characters get ahead of my memorizing their readings/meanings. If I do that, I’ll be okay.

The other book I’m reading right now is Japanese the Manga Way. It’s a relatively informal grammar of the language, with examples taken from manga. Which works well: besides being fun, manga gives a natural source of language examples that are closer to regular spoken Japanese than other written examples would be.

Other things I like about the book: for one, I can occasionally figure out what the examples are saying, kanji and all, before reading the explanations. And, for another thing, it presents the grammatical points in a rather different order than other sources that I’m using. (Perhaps because it isn’t constrained by having examples only use material that has been previously introduced.). I like seeing another lens on the language, and one which is perhaps a bit more coherent than others I have access to, one which is less intent on mapping the grammar to concepts in English.

The other thing I’ve been doing is watching (the excellent) Last Exile in Japanese with subtitles; again, nice to occasionally be able to figure out by myself what people are saying. Don’t get me wrong, the vast majority of the time I depend very much on the subtitles, but I’m starting to get the feeling that it might really stick this time.

Or maybe I’ll burn out in another couple of months! Always a possibility…

As I mentioned before, Miranda seems to have gotten serious about the idea of us writing a video game. And we actually have been spending some time on it over the last month, mostly at her prodding. So far, I’ve mostly been playing around with programming, while she draws pictures in a notebook. I’d been using rubygame as a programming framework, and I still might stick with it, but it doesn’t have support for sprites at different depths; this is a problem if, say, you want to have a character walk behind a tree. So now I’m thinking I’ll go with gosu: not much documentation yet, but it seems to be able to do what I want, its sample game is extremely short yet fully functional, and when I was poking around its web site, I saw several pages that showed signs of having been edited within the last hour. All good stuff.

So, right now, I’m trying to find time to convert my rubygame spike into a gosu spike; assuming it goes well, I think I’ll go with gosu. But what should Miranda do while I’m doing my programming?

She’s drawn lots of neat pictures, and I’m sure she could profitably continue along those lines for quite some time. But, if you’re doing things incrementally, you want something functional crossing all layers as soon as possible; by now, my programming is coming along well enough that I could imagine using a picture of hers, and she has drawings to give me. So the only thing stopping us from putting the two together (other than that I’m switching development frameworks!) is that I don’t know how to get her pictures in the game!

Given that, the next step is clear: rather than puttering around with game libraries, I should face up to my fears and attack that problem head-on. So when Miranda asked me this morning if we could work on the game this evening, I decided we should start on digitizing her pictures. Fortunately, my brother was kind enough to give us an all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax doohicky last Christmas; time to break in the scanner functionality. Which we did, giving us an electronic copy of one of her designs.

Next, a graphics editor: at the very least, we need the backgrounds of her images to be transparent instead of white. I’d considered and mostly rejected Pixen earlier, but hadn’t found anything better in the interim, so I decided to give that a try. Somewhere either from Scott McCloud or Penny Arcade I’d gotten the idea that the proper technique is to take a scanned-in drawing, add a transparent layer on top, re-ink and color the drawing on the new layer, and then hide the original drawing. Which took us half an hour or so to figure out, both of us being new to the software and ignorant about the details of the process, but ended up working out just fine. So the result is that two black-and-white pencil drawings have turned into colored PNG files with transparent backgrounds; I should be able to just stick them into the game (maybe doing a bit of resizing first) and see how they look. Which will be very exciting!

Watching her do this has also gotten me more convinced of the merits of graphics tablets: she was happy to ink in the lines with the touchpad, but I’m sure it would have been much easier with a tablet. I’m not going to go out and buy one immediately, but she’s sticking with the project well enough that my worries that she would lose interest in a graphics tablet are quickly diminishing. (She’s also spent a lot of time playing around with SketchUp over the last few months, incidentally.)

A fun way to spend the hour between getting home and starting dinner.

Three hours prior to [his death], Chopin saw a dream of a fairy-tale land populated by people with incurable diseases but also magical powers.

Now, I ask you: who wouldn’t want an RPG with that as its premise?

(Speaking of works about Chopin, of the first things Liesl and I went to together was a showing of Impromptu. We were supposed to go with our friend Jim Blandy, but somehow he neglected to show up. At first, we assumed he was setting us up, but no, he just forgot…)

We finished the DVD today, after which Miranda asked me if we could play through the ear-reddening game. So we did. Funny what she remembers me telling her about; it’s not like we’ve actually played go since I first taught her several months ago. She’s asked twice if we can play again this weekend, though.

And regretted it. I had no memory of the review by this time, so I was left with a vague idea that it was some sort of artsy Iranian movie which Stewart Klawans loved but I would think was really boring. Which is both unfair and wrong: for one thing, it’s Palestinian (oops), and, for another thing, I haven’t even seen any of these well-regarded Iranian movies that have come out over the last decade, and for all I know, they’re fabulous. (I guess I should add one of them to the queue, too?)

Before I could decide that it was a mistake, though, the movie showed up in my house. So after a bit of waiting around (and going on vacation), I finally couldn’t avoid the fact that this movie was sitting there, waiting to be watched. And I put it in the DVD player.

Surprise, surprise: it’s an arty Middle-Eastern movie. Starts with kids following and killing somebody in a Santa Claus outfit, then switches to a scene of somebody driving down a street, waving and smiling at everybody while insulting them from behind closed windows. And then it switches to somebody carrying dozens empty bottles up to his roof for unclear purposes. But, somehow, I kind of liked it. And then police showed up (or something), and he ran up to the roof and started throwing the bottles at them. A few more scene transitions, some fantasy elements, some actual bits of continuity between these scenes, and I was hooked.

I mean, it’s not the best movie ever, or anything. But I’m very glad I watched it: a lot of pretty scenes, funny vignettes, and it hangs together quite nicely. I added Elia Suleiman’s other movie to the queue: that one I am actively looking forward to.

Examples:

• We’re finally letting her play Animal Crossing, because she’s reading well enough that she won’t constantly be nagging us to help her play. And she really loves it. She started on the DS version, but the GameCube version has been drawing her curiosity on the shelf for some time, so she started playing that, too. She prefers the latter, and, watching her play it, I’m surprised how much I agree – some of the gameplay changes are for the better, some are for the worse, but it’s just nice seeing the game on a full screen instead of a tiny one. I’ve even gone back and played a few times myself, if for no other reason than to answer letters that she’s sent me.
• She likes using computers, and wants to use both of them. So she’s quite frustrated that the mac is in for repairs (and taking longer than Apple had led me to believe) and that I’m still not letting her use the Linux box; my excuse for the latter is that I want to switch to Ubuntu first, and I have some things I need to do before doing that (rearrange filesystems, burn an Ubuntu DVD), and it would be easier to burn a DVD if my Mac were back. If it takes much longer, though, I’ll find another way: I do approve of Miranda using Linux, after all.
• She mainly uses the computer to draw, and Tux Paint will work fine on the Linux box. She’s also discovered browser games; there, the story isn’t so good, because Flash doesn’t work in 64-bit environments, and I don’t feel like going through the rigamarole of getting a 32 bit browser running there. (Java should work, though.)
• I let slip the fact that drawing tablets exist, which she’s quite curious about, but I’m going to wait a while before buying her one of those – she actually is fairly serious about her drawing, but I don’t think she’s come very close to exhausting the possibilities of analog methods, and I imagine a good tablet isn’t cheap enough to buy on a whim.
• She’d also like to have more software available. Which I’d be happy to get for her; I’m just not sure quite what she’d like the most. I just don’t have good info as to quality kids’ software. (Not that I’ve looked very hard.)
• She also is talking about how she wants to make her own games on the computer. (Her ultimate game is an improved version of Animal Crossing.) I’m happy to support that, and I’m not in a horribly bad position to help. Having said that, it’s not clear to me exactly what to start with – one simple question is, what language should she work in? Given the games she plays now, some obvious possibilities would be Java and Flash; I know nothing about the latter, though. Are its authoring tools free? I should do some research on that, and see if there are intro programming books that focus on game programming. (I would think that such a thing would exist somewhere – it must be one main reason why people become curious about programming.) Admittedly, I doubt that anything will come of this – I suspect that she’s much more interested in the fantasy of having written a game than the reality of programming, but who knows.
• She’s also getting more consistent about wanting to learn how to play an instrument. Not the piano, which is too bad; sometimes flute is the main possibility, sometimes violin. Her desires haven’t settled down enough for us to do anything about them yet, but I imagine we will at some point over the next year.

Other excellent daughter moment: we told her she could pick a DVD for Christmas (we knew she was already getting several others from relatives). At first, she wanted The Little Mermaid, but after thinking it over for a little while, she decided that she’d rather have the first volume of the anime of Hikaru no Go. She was also quite pleased with the manga of The Cat Returns, and read it through rather quickly.

• One movie at a time works if you’re sure you don’t want to watch more than one movie a week, and if you don’t mind missing occasional weeks due to shipping vagaries. Neither of those proved to be the case for us, so we’ve switched to two movies a week.
• The impetus for signing up was so that we could watch the rest of Haibane Renmei without paying full price. It turns out that that series is good enough that I’m sure we’ll want to watch it again, however.
• A couple of weeks after signing up, they sent me an e-mail asking if I could drop by Los Gatos. (As part of some sort of user-experience study.) I didn’t find the time, but it’s great that the company is doing studies like that. (And I suspect that even the act of asking customers helps build loyalty.)
• Their web design isn’t quite to my taste, for reasons that I’m having a hard time putting my finger on. Having said that, it’s pretty good, and the queue management page is nice.

This weekend’s DVD (we should have had two, but the other seems to have gotten delayed in the mail) was the first volume of the anime version of Hikaru no Go. Not as good as the manga version, but it was okay, and Miranda quite liked it. So she grabbed the first volume of the comic off the shelf, and started reading it. (In fact, she’s reading it right now.) And then she asked me to teach her how to play go. Which was fun, but quite different from teaching an adult how to play go: for one thing, adults are usually trying to figure out how to play as well as possible, while that didn’t particularly seem like an issue to her.

I don’t know if that’s good, bad, or neither. For whatever reason, I find it a little disconcerting (and it’s not the only time I’ve seen such behavior). But it’s a good idea for her to be focused on, say, actually enjoying herself. And one lesson I’ve taken from John Holt is that an important early stage in learning something is just messing around with it, getting your hands dirty with it. To that end, the less pressure there is to use it properly, the less pressure there is to do it well, the better: it increases the chances of the marvel of internal motivation taking hold, if nothing else. (And there are other benefits, too.) We’ll see if she wants to play again after the next DVD arrives…

And, as always happens in these situations, I was reminded that go is Teh Best Game Evar. Yesterday and a game with Karl Fogel a couple of weeks ago were the only times I’ve played go in the last two or three years. There was a reason for that decision – it’s hard for me to find time to regularly attend the local go club, and I find it easier to go cold turkey than to drop by the club once every few months.

But I still miss go. Maybe it’s time to start playing it online again. I think my hands will survive me doing that a little, and it happens fairly frequently these days that it’s 9:30 at night, I’ve finished my daily web browsing, I don’t feel like gracing the world with my words of wisdom, and I have half an hour or 45 minutes to kill. So maybe a go game would hit the spot then? I should look into online servers again, make sure that the world hasn’t changed too much, download clients if necessary. (Any blog readers feel like an online game?)

We’ll be moving to Sun’s main campus towards the end of the month. There must be enough go players there that I can find a game during lunch, surely? I don’t know of any formal go club; I’ll have to look.

But it’s becoming clear that much of that should simply be treated as sunk cost: maybe we’ll watch them, maybe we won’t, but we shouldn’t let it stand in the way of watching movies that we’re more interested in. So I bought a copy of the first volume of Haibane Renmei last week; after buying that, I realized that I wasn’t sure that I’d want to watch it over and over again, so why did I buy it instead of renting it? Oops. Having said that, we did enjoy it, and I could imagine buying the later volumes at some point, but for now signing up for Netflix and renting the rest of the volumes sounds like a better idea to me – for the cost of the remaining volumes, I could get seven months of a 1-DVD-at-a-time-Netflix subscription instead. (There are also a few other anime series that I’d like to dip into without spending hundreds of dollars.)

We’ll see how it goes, but I’m optimistic; and if that causes us to shift more of our free time to watching movies, that wouldn’t be a bad thing. I’m curious how their series management works; it looks like you can sign up for an entire series at once, and I hope that, if I do that, it will be smart enough to make sure to always send me volumes in order. So if, say, I’ve finished volume 1, and volume 2 is unavailable but 3 is available, it will wait instead of sending me volume 3.

Desirable qualities for a format, in no particular order:

• Quality should be as high as possible.
• File size should be as small as possible.
• The standard should be open.
• The standard should be unencumbered.
• There should be a wide range of software tools (including free ones and best-of-breed ones) to play the format, on all platforms I use.
• There should be a wide range of hardware devices (including best-of-breed ones) to play the format, in all locations where I’d like to use it (home, car, bus, jogging, …).
• There should be a wide range of software tools (including free ones and best-of-breed ones) to convert to/from the format.
• It should be possible to easily purchase content in this format.
• It should be possible to easily find free content in this format.
• I should be able to easily copy, excerpt, etc. the content for the forseeable future.
• The format should support adding metadata (titles, composer, performer, album art, …)
• The format should support aggregation (e.g. a podcast with multiple pieces of music should be a single file with indexing).

These are, of course, incompatible goals, but never mind that. Given the above, what are the conclusions?

One is that DRM is to be avoided: it fails on the copy/exceprt criteria, and probably also fails on open standard and free tools criteria. Having said that, it’s almost impossible to purchase video without some sort of basic DRM being involved. So, in some circumstances, I guess I can live with DRM, as long as tools for cracking it are widely available. Which is, fortunately, the case for DVD’s, though I’m somewhat worried that hardware might start getting in the way there. (For example, my understand is that many current DVD drives force you to respect region encoding.)

What are suitable audio formats? The aforementioned Ogg Vorbis unfortunately doesn’t look so hot to me. The big reason is that best-of-breed hardware devices don’t play it: I can’t use it on my iPod. There’s very little content available in the format. And it’s lossy, so I can’t store content in it and convert it to other formats as necessary.

Also, its main advantage over MP3s is that it’s unencumbered by patents. The problem is, in this crazy day and age, I don’t know if I can even be sure of that. There are so many overbroad software patents being granted that I can’t be confident that any decent a/v compression format couldn’t be attacked by patent trolls.

So, basically, it only helps me if I want to burn a CD and play it on a computer using particularly purist tools. And that’s a situation where I never find myself. The only Ogg Vorbis files I had on my computer were from Lambda Expressway, but now I see it’s available as MP3s, so that won’t be necessary any more.

So, in practice, there seem to be three obvious candidates for music: Audio CDs, MP3s, and AAC files. Audio CDs are widely available for purchase, playable in lots of ways, as high quality as is easily available, easily convertible to other formats. The downside is that file sizes are somewhat large, and they’re lacking in the metadata department.

MP3s are quite widely available, too. File sizes are smaller; quality is generally acceptable for my listening purposes. They’re lossy when compared to CDs, though, which makes them less suitable for archival purposes. Better than CDs for metadata, but there’s room for improvement there. Bad for aggregation. Also, it’s quite difficult to purchase MP3s; I hope that will change in coming years (decades?), but maybe I’m over-optimistic. Tons of players.

AAC is one of my current favorites: it has most of the advantages of MP3s, but does better in metadata and, especially, aggregation. So it’s a great format for podcasts. Slightly fewer players, but enough of them for my purposes. The patent situation seems somewhat better than that for MP3s, but not perfect.

MP3s and AAC suit my needs for free stuff. For purchasing, CDs are good, but it would be nice to have a format that I liked that would enable me to purchase music digitally. Unfortunately, all the choices suck: Apple’s and Microsoft’s DRM solutions are both loathsome. So, for now, I’m buying music on CDs: I’d rather do that, wait a couple of days to have it shipped to me, and rip it myself, than have music delivered quickly and painlessly in either of those formats. I have to think that this suggests that the recording industry could find a way to make more money off of me if they were willing to give up on DRM; the recording industry is not, alas, well-known for its forward-thinking business acumen.

I am a little worried that, at some point, music that I care about won’t be available on CD. Recently, for example, I wanted to get music of some of the artists I liked from Next Big Hit. They’re all independent, so it wasn’t too surprising that I couldn’t find all of them at Amazon; that’s what CD Baby is for. But I couldn’t find any of the music from one of them there, either; looking at her website, I did find her music for sale, but not on a CD, and some of it was apparently only available from iTunes.

So it sucks that new artists are getting caught up in DRM protection that’s really designed to serve (or “serve”, perhaps) the interests of large labels. Fortunately, in this case I could just e-mail the artist directly, and it turned out that she did have a few copies of her CDs left over. But a taste of a world that I’d just as soon avoid.

For video, the story is less pleasant. There’s no long-standing open format like CDs. Videos that are on the web are generally either in Quicktime (which encompasses many different formats, but these days I can usually play it under Linux) or Windows Media (which I can’t play under Linux). Actually, that’s not even true – videos are frequently hidden behind Flash front-ends to the extent that I don’t know what the underlying format is, and can’t get at the bytes short of doing a tcpdump or something. MP3s and AAC both have analogues, namely MPEG-2 and AVC (a.k.a. H.264), which are as acceptable as their audio compatriates. And there are new physical formats coming out that do look noticeably better than their predecessor, and that will probably be harder to copy and play on free players. (And there’s no reason to believe that this is the end of video formats.)

The upshot is that, for video, I just stick my head in the sand. Fortunately, most stuff on the web I click on once to watch but have no desire to save. And almost nothing I really want to watch is in Windows Media format, so I don’t have to install that viewer on my Mac. I like watching DVDs, but will happily avoid upgrading to newer formats for the indefinite future. (And I’m cautiously optimistic that the general public will be slow to adopt either of the new formats.) I haven’t yet grappled with the whole backup issue: my DVDs aren’t showing signs of age the way my CDs are, and disk space isn’t quite cheap enough for me to want to back them up wholesale anyways.

I suppose I should look on the bright side: no matter what, we live in a much better world now than when we had to deal with LPs, cassette tapes, videotapes. New media are much more robust, much easier to copy, much higher quality, much more broadly available. And the current RIAA leadership will retire eventually.

And for the first twenty or thirty minutes, the low hopes seemed on track. Middle school girls confused about boys and life; whee. It could be worse – they were treated humanely enough – but it could be a lot better, too. But then it started pushing my buttons; I’ve always been a big bildungsroman fan, and I like kids who start figuring out what they want to do and pursue that instead of more conventional paths. (Somewhat ironic, given that I’m thirty-five years old and don’t know what I want to do with my life, but I suppose that’s a topic for another blog post.) And I rather choked up during the chamber music scene.

So a quite pleasant movie, when all is said and done. And with it, I’ve seen all the Studio Ghibli movies except for Only Yesterday (which Disney apparently has no plans to release, grr) and Tales from Earthsea (which only just came out in Japan; actually, apparently it’s not coming out until a week from now). Amazing studio, that, and I don’t think it’s just my pro-animation and pro-Japanese bias showing. (Let’s test the latter – would I like, say, animated movies about self-directed girls as much if Disney made them? It’s hard to tell, isn’t it, given the almost complete lack of such movies! But Beauty and the Beast is fantastic.)

While Miyazaki gets more press in this country, I’m not at all sure that I don’t like Takahata’s movies just as much. Don’t get me wrong, Miyazaki’s movies are wonderful. But the visionary intensity of his environmentalist movies can be a bit much for me, Porco Rosso is decent but not great, I don’t like Totoro as much as some (sorry, Jim), and Howl didn’t do a lot for me. They are all rather better than your average fare, and I really like Kiki and think I probably really like Spirited Away (I haven’t seen it enough), but I like Pom Poko a good deal more than most of Miyazaki’s movies (and in particular I prefer its less mystical treatment of environmentalist themes). I’ve only seen Grave of the Fireflies once, maybe three years ago; I should really watch it again, if I think I’m up for it, but my recollection is that it was quite good. And I’ve also only seen My Neighbors the Yamadas once, but it was rather charming. Hard to say; I guess the next thing to do is to track down a Japanese copy of Only Yesterday (the Japanese DVD apparently does come with English subtitles).

The theme song, however, I totally love. (Miranda and Liesl agree with this.) Very catchy in a rather understated way; and now I know what a ukelele sounds like. It’s in Japanese, of course, and, judging from one translation of the lyrics, I’d quite possibly not like it as much if it were in English.

I got a CD of Ayano Tsuji’s which contained this song. At first, I didn’t particularly like any of the other songs on the CD, but now they’re starting to grow on me. Maybe I’ll investigate further.

(Speaking of Studio Ghibli, I just noticed that Whisper on the Heart has just been released in the US; we’ll see if I like that movie any better.)