Phil Co, a level designer from Valve, recently came to speak at Animex 2007. It was interesting stuff. From his presentation [which focused on the development process for the Half Life games], the questions that came afterwards, and a nice chat I managed to have with him later on, I gathered the following information and impressions:

Early in his presentation, Phil mentioned that they are currently looking to recruit in practically all positions – to which the [largely student] audience reacted with audible enthusiasm. He later mentioned that they recently hired a couple of animators – one of whom previously worked on the action sequences in the King Kong film [where he fights with dinosaurs and rips their jaws apart]; while the other had a hand in modelling and animating Gollum. Once again I could hear the audience react among themselves, but this time I think it was the sound of dreams being shattered, and subsequently pissed on.

Unfortunately, the very positive picture of Valve that all this stuff points to seems to be quite the opposite of the games industry at large. Most games developers don’t appear to be anything like as well run or quality driven as they should be, if at all. While on one hand it’s very good to know that there is a leader among the industry that has gained success and respect for all the right reasons, on another, it’s sad to think that there aren’t many that compare, or even aspire to the same ideals.

It’s unlikely I’ll ever work there myself, and in a way I find that quite gutting. Assuming I do manage to get a job after I graduate, I’ll inevitably have to apply for somewhere more typical – and it seems as though when it comes to videogames and the industry, “typical” is often not a good thing.

Nevertheless, all this Valve and Animex business has given me a good kick up the arse for catching up on my final project, which obviously is a good thing. This is how my map currently looks, when I’m sneaky about only showing the nicer bits:

I’m still a bit behind on things as a whole, and at this point, I’d have to admit that these pictures look better than the level actually plays. But being deceptive and getting hopes up is what preview screenshots are all about, right?

I have an iPod, and I use it a lot. I like to give it a chance to surprise me now and then, so most of the time, I’m walking around with it set to “shuffle”. Sometimes I feel like being a little more specific about telling it what to play, to better reflect my mood at the time [and what I need to hear to fix it], but right now there’s just no way of doing it. Being able to select just one artist or album to hear at a time is useless to me, so seeing as I tend not to bother making rigid playlists, I’m basically stuck with filtering by genre.

For this purpose, genre is useless. Genre is for telling you where to go in a music shop. Genre is there to help ensure, in said music shop, that “alternative” Slipknot fans are kept seperate from people with taste. Genre is a terrible, irrelevent language for telling an mp3 player how you feel today.

I’m a big geek on stuff like information architecture and taxonomy. I put a very uncool amount of time and effort into trying to come up with the right way of organising my mp3s, to help me get to the right music when I want to hear it – but no matter how hard you try with genre, you just can’t win. What if I want to listen to summery, upbeat music, regardless of whether it’s guitars or synthesisers? What am I supposed to do with something like Eleanor Rigby? Do I really have to sit Pink Floyd next to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs in a room called “Rock”?

There’s something really wrong here, in how this music is having to be arranged, but the answer isn’t far away. All Apple need to do – being the sexy, progressive media technology people that they are – is notice how these days, all the cool kids are using Tags.

Instead of having to fruitlessly assign every mp3 to a single genre, what we really need is the ability to give our music as many tags as we want, that are relevent to picking it out from a crowd. So for something like Blondie’s “Atomic”, I might use tags like “guitars, disco, dance, feelgood, 70s, girls, party, cinematic, classic”, for which there would be a Tag Shuffle mode, where we can go through a list of all the tags we’ve used, and toggle them between being added to or taken away from the playlist.

That way, we’d be able to generate and refine some very focused playlists on the fly, very quickly, that are perfectly in sync with where we are, how we feel and what we want to hear. Wouldn’t that be absolutely, eyeball-stabblingly fantastic?

If you spend way too much time dicking around with these things like me, then yes – yes it would. It’s a great idea. Take this as definitive proof that if I ruled the world, everything* would be better. Vote for me, bake me cakes and send me all your money.

* iPods