Career options: an analysis

My last blog post was almost a year ago. There hasn’t been a reason in particular why I haven’t made any blog posts during that time, rather I’ve simply prioritized other things since it’s been a busy year to say the least. Mostly, I’ve continued to study game design at the university college. I’m in my second year now, the third and final year starting after the summer. Since a year ago, we got a new game design teacher after our old one left, we canceled Project Different Reality (read about it in the update to this post), and I’ve made a few discoveries and decisions which I want to share.

Uwe Boll rocks!

So there’s an online petition to stop Uwe Boll from making more movies. The goal is to gather one million signatures, as of this moment there are 129 365. Personally, I’ve signed a counter-petition, which currently has 713 signatures. I haven’t seen any of his movies, but I’m really looking forward to Postal.

Prisoner’s Dilemma, continued

So last time I talked about the Prisoner’s Dilemma, I brought up an example regarding gaming consoles: how Microsoft and Sony would save a ton of money if they cooperated and built one single console instead of having one each. My primary reasons for why this would be logical is that they would only need one development team and budget, one marketing campaign, one support structure, and developers would only need to learn one console architecture.

And a happy festivus to the rest of us!

I’m currently in Nynäshamn (just south of Stockholm) visiting my parents and some relatives. Having bought a PS3 from Canada (that uses NTSC rather than the European PAL system), I’m getting a black and white picture on my TV in Karlshamn. I was hoping it’d work on my parent’s TV, but alas, I’m getting a black and white picture here too. I’m getting some cables that will hopefully enable me to connect the PS3 to my computer screen.

Anyway, happy Festivus!

Who wants Christmas ham in November?

Christmas is obviously an event that knows no boundaries. Not even time itself can stop if from popping up whenever it sees fit. Or rather, when the ad makers see fit. I took this picture with my cell phone November 1st. The Lidl store in question is perhaps a kilometer away from where I live. Its text says “We have everything for Christmas!” and displays a wide variety of foods normally associated with Christmas.

Now, one thing that Christians, at least in Sweden, seem to want to emphasize is that they provide a counter-weight to commercialism. While I personally don’t see why we need religion to do that, as we have political ideologies that provide even better counter-weights, Christianity does provide at least something positive in this regard.

Yay!

Today’s my birthday. Now I’m nineteen years old. Yay for me.

Life as a student is hard work!

As it turns out, studying at the university here in Karlshamn means a lot of work – much more than I’m used to. But it’s also a lot more fun than anything I’ve done before. So far, we have had few lectures and a lot of work to do on our own and in groups. One of the group projects has been to create a board game. We’ve already done this once, we had a week to deliver two copies. This time we had almost two weeks, but the expectations were higher.

Settled into my new home city

This post has been long, long overdue. Anyway, I’m now settled in Karlshamn, the city where my university studies for the next three years will be taking place. I live in a flat for students, so I share a kitchen with two others, and we each have our own rooms. Classes started a couple of weeks ago for real, and it’s been pretty hard work: one night between a Thursday and a Friday I was at the campus until 03:00, writing about “the storytelling society.”

Being a focus tester is the shit!

During two weeks in the summer of 2006, I was a focus tester at Massive Entertainment in Malmö, testing their now released RTS-title World in Conflict. The game has been getting unanimously great reviews, consistently scoring above 90%. And I’m in the credits.

And Arman Shrugged