Most of Yahoo's nerfy services aren't designed for the smug wannabe technocrats of Slashdot -- they're designed for their moms. That said, Flickr and del.icio.us are pretty good services, Yahoo Maps suffer only from a lack of imagination, and even Pipes has a reasonable geeky appeal.
What no one seems to be asking amidst all this keening and armchair reffing is what good Yahoo's failure would do for the web. Do you really want a duopoly on major web services? Yahoo's failure wouldn't clear any space in the canopy for new competitors -- Google and MS will continue to either buy or one-up them once they gain buzz, as they have all decade. Without the deep pockets of either of its competitors, it's amazing that Yahoo has survived this long.
Sorry to walk away from a good book-dumping, but I hope Yahoo survives.
Funny to read this today, after I spent a couple of hours yesterday searching Google for something that doesn't exist -- a Plucker type app for the iPod Classic. What struck me was just how badly Google performed. Any search containing the word "iPod" seems to return pages upon pages of blog entries about the (long since released) iPhone. What one tends to find with a Google search are a lot of loud, content-light blog entries, popping with ads, with short dashed-off articles broken across several pages. "Relevance" in Google seems to have the most to do with activity -- posts per day per site, repeated introductory blurbs on every page, modestly-trafficed forums devoid of meaningful discussion. Google does a pretty decent job with common searches, reasonably well with obscure searches, but very badly with the rest -- the middle of the long tail.
Google rose to prominence by being the best of a pretty weak set of players. It's still only the least bad solution, and there are a lot of things it does poorly. In classic AltaVista, you could type a few words of a song in quotes and find the title and lyrics. Type a long quoted string into Google, and you're likely to come up with nothing.
If Wikia manages to best Google in any type of search I'll applaud it. Search choices beyond Google and Trying to Be Google would be most welcome.
How much time have we all spent looking at a blank browser window with "...completed 12 of 13 items." at the bottom?
Whatever else I might think of it, Facebook has a nice trick that appears to work as follows. The page loads with a blank graphic where the ad should be. Afterward, an onLoad script fires requesting the ad and replacing the blank graphic with it. The ads take a moment to load: the page is instantly on. Proper priorities.
(As a corollary, I've got a Dice ad at the top of this page sapping so many cycles it's making it hard to type. Pri-or-i-ties. Something tells me I'm shouting at the wind.)
Why does it blow your mind that the young'uns will work these absurd hours? Here's how it goes:
Young'un: Hello! I'm entering the working world under a staggering mountain of college debt.
Old'un: Will you work 70+ hours a week for months?
Young'un: Gee, that sounds kind of exploitative.
Old'un: This guy will. Don't worry though, I hear Starbucks is hiring.
Young'un: No no, I'll take it.
Old'un: Perfect! By the way we've cut bonuses.
Young'un: Oh.
Old'un: I mean, I still get them. But you don't. Sounds fair, right?
Young'un: Well not...
Old'un: I have a wife, a house and a family. Think you'll have those anytime soon?
Young'un: No, I guess not.
Old'un: That's the spirit!
Young'un: But if I work hard and produce good work, I'll be able to steadily move up to where-?
Old'un: No. It's simple supply and demand.
Supply and demand is no excuse for bare exploitation. As near as I can tell, the only sin of the young'uns is believing they'd do at least as well as their parents did.
Overall I'm pleased with the Amazon mp3 store. Good interface. Good prices. Previewing tracks and albums is intuitive, the samples are high quality, and you don't wind up with a desktop full of little.rm files after previewing them all.
The selection can be lean, even with slightly out of band tastes. I can only find one full VNV Nation album, while Rotersand turns up a remix album, and Seabound is MIA. That said, discovering new acts based on what you already know is easy and -- dare I say it -- fun, at least in the heavily incestuous world of electronica.
I didn't enjoy having to install an application to download full albums. I also didn't enjoy being forced to purchase using "one click" -- why can't I shop and then check out? I read through the terms of service, and there's no mention of watermarking or inclusion of my account info in the files, but I wouldn't call that conclusive. Will I get a nastygram from Amazon if someone swipes my SD card? Hopefully we won't find out.
Once I'd made my purchase and installed the application, the downloads were quick. On my Mac, the Amazon application created an "Amazon MP3" folder in my music folder and generated subfolders for artist and album in the iTunes style. The tracks were automatically imported into iTunes, although I found it odd that the application didn't create a playlist of the album. One question I haven't found an answer to is whether, like in iTunes, I can purchase the remainder of an album for the (discounted) album price if I have already purchased tracks individually.
Bottom line, Barry Adamson's "King of Nothing Hill" sounds great in iTunes, will play in TCPMP on my Palm Zire and can ride a thumb drive to my client onsites. At the same album price offered on the iTunes Store for a track that's locked to play only in iTunes on my own machine, I'd call that a deal.
I actually applaud Palm for dumping no more money into this. The future of notebook computers is bifurcation between "desktop replacements" and ultra low cost subnotebooks, into which Palm's project was too expensive for what it would do, and too underpowered and potentially quirky for anything else. For heavy graphics work, there's really no such thing as a "desktop replacement"; 3D will always need a big, heavy desktop. But writing, email and light web browsing are horrible things to be chained to the desktop/home office for -- a perfect market for a $200 Linux subnotebook, but hard to justify at $500.
I still use a Palm Zire 31 every day. My Zire keeps my calendar and address book, plays podcasts and music with TCPMP, and displays offline reading material with Plucker. I don't trust or care to deal with the restrictions of a locked phone for any of the above, and I don't care if my cheap, came-with-the-plan phone takes abuse.
Yes, there may be some money left in high-end smartphones for corporate users, but Palm needs to recognize that not every mobile gadget needs to be a phone. If they learn their lessons from this one and manage to make an economical subnotebook down the road, more power to them. In the meantime, they might do well to remember that PDA's didn't take off until they themselves brought it back at a much lower price point than Apple's Newton.
While all genres have made their way into videogames, horror is the only one I can think of that's grown its own significant subgenre there: Survival Horror. There is precident for survival horror in films, especially Romero's movies, but true survival horror seems to require interaction. It's not enough to emote with a character onscreen making choices with uncertain outcomes, it's when those choices are yours to make that the hair really stands up on the back of your neck.
Masters of the Universe (2009) (pre-production) (screenplay)
Unbroken (2003)
The Stranger (2003)
Fast Forward (2002)
Producer:
Unbroken (2003) (producer)
Risk/Reward (2003) (associate producer)
The Stranger (2003) (producer)
Fast Forward (2002) (producer)
Miscellaneous Crew:
Saved! (2004) (assistant: Sandy Stern)
Family Secret (2000) (assistant to director)
Editorial Department:
Family Secret (2000) (assistant editor)
Basically, Marks self-produced a couple of indy shorts early in the decade, then there's a big gap where he fell off the radar. Hard to say if he was script doctoring, working the business side of the industry, or just had enough money to bum around Hollywood bugging people to read his screenplays. Suddenly he reappears screenwriting two big (the studios hope) franchise relaunches.
I have to wish him all the luck personally, but resumés like this don't fill me with confidence about the final product.
Very cool, but why one artist and one sound designer, floating between fifteen developers? Every team should have at least its own artist -- and don't think we aren't into this sort of thing.
You've got the Massachusetts College of Art, one of the best and one of the scrappiest art schools in the country, right across the river. Next year, think about reaching out. You'll be amazed at the response, and the amount of polish these kids can do on deadline.
One of my jobs is at a hardware store. With the city's energy-saving initiative, we get three dollars back on every $4 CFB we sell -- they ring up for the customer at $1 each. That's $1 per bulb compared to about $1 for a pack of 4 incandescents. Not only can the compact fluorescent bulbs be expected to last more than four times as long as the incandescents, each "60 watt" type CFB draws only 15 watts. A "100 watt" CFB draws about 22 watts. Get customers spitballing the costs, and they snap them right up. There is a market for energy efficiency, when people really get thinking about the numbers.
On a similar note, I built a bike light around a 3 bright white LED upgrade kit for a mini Maglite. It's bright enough to be seen in traffic (in fact it works as a decent flashlight, too) and runs on two AA batteries. I've changed the batteries once since July.
Am I the only one needled by obsolete technology? Oh wait, this is Slashdot...
Any game longer than, say, "Raiden" on the Sega Genesis is going to require a compelling scenario to make it fun. Even with a nice smooth ramp of feature introduction, power gaming is about learning to beat the engine, not role-playing the scenario. There are power gamers, and there are people who like to play a game to get away from things in a non-passive way. If you as a designer are trying to satisfy power gamers, fire the art and story departments. If you want to attract both types, you need to ask whether your difficulty levels are adding depth or just forcing the player to replay more and more sections. Does success come to the player from learning to beat the engine, or from thinking like a commander/participant in the scenario? Sadly, few games can claim the latter.
The one game mechanic I can't stand is memorization. When a game comes down to simply remembering a series of actions in a certain order to beat it, it takes me out of the scenario and makes it feel like work. There's a big difference between replaying the game out of choice, and replaying it piecemeal out of necessity.
Agreed on all points (especially the first season comment) but I'll go you one farther: Darwin is still the best realized "alien" crewmember in any scifi tv series. His psychology is distinctly nonhuman but comprehensible. He requires a different physical environment to live in. He communicates through a translation system, which is never treated as a babelfish-style magic bullet. Plus, he's just plain not a one to two meter tall biped. Usually, this sort of character would be treated as a pet, but when the writers were on their game he was decidedly an integral and uniquely valuable member of the series' crew.
I'll give O'Bannon's later effort Farscape props for attempting physically nonhuman cast members, but that's about it.
My my... Sometimes I think that if Slashdot threads never went off topic they wouldn't go anywhere.
Actually, the idea of dolphins having near or equal to human intelligence was being bandied about in a pretty high profile setting as recently as 1996. Remember Seaquest DSV?
I swear, that must have been the easiest show ever to pitch:
A TV executive taps his pen absently, briefly pursing his lips as he scans Roy Scheider's name off a proposed cast list. The lights dim. A lone desk lamp throws light up on a couple of jittery, curly-haired men with bad suits and an overlarge portfolio that'll never be opened. One stands up, and begins to gesture: "Okay, it's Star Trek... underwater!" The pen ceases tapping.
It depends on how sophisticated you want their formation flying to be. If the rules are A) Stay together, B) Don't crash into anything, and C) Seek some goal, simple emergent behavior can do remarkablly well. Craig Reynolds' Boids algorithm, developed in 1986, is an amazingly simple way to do it.
I'm not saying that flocking in the real world, even in "empty" space, isn't a remarkable challenge, but there are sometimes simple ways to create compex coordination. Marco Dorigo's ant colony optimization routines are another example.
I'm fascinated by this stuff. Jon Klein's open-source Breve simulation environment downloads with some great examples, and it's a great platform for wiring your own.
I have a friend who swears by ToonBoom, but I haven't done much with it myself.
I'm just finishing up some cutout animation (Monty Python-style) for a science museum. I considered Flash, but ultimately went with Animation:Master. A:M is actually a full-featured 3D character animation package, with a price closer to Flash. The advantages on this project were an excellent animation interface, forward and inverse kinematics with bones, rigging, smooth interpolation with many options, motion blur, and glow effects. On the flip side, building a character by applying texture maps to a bunch of parallel planes tends to take a while (about an hour per character, plus the time to cut them into pieces with Photoshop), A:M can be unstable, and animating with line art would be a whole different process -- although I'd be curious to see what someone could do using the.ai importer. Since I'm basically rendering a bunch of planes, with no lights or shadows, the final render took only a few second per frame.
If you're comfortable with a 3D package that's geared toward character animation, there are advantages to using it for 2D animation. If not, the learning curve is probably not worth climbing unless you're looking to branch out into 3D.
GPS I'm a bit leery of, but I think Sloppy is onto something with "one world, many systems." The phone's latency and reliability will be a bit low for realtime action gaming for some time (though Bluetooth vs Bluetooth is a very real possibility), but what about an occasional connect system? The phone loads a "mission," the player plays it (even underground on the subway), and afterward the results of the player's performance are communicated to the game server and a followup mission is loaded. There's a wonderful possibility for complementary gaming here.
Here's an example. The player has a pet in an MMORPG. He logs in with his phone. Since he's not at his computer, his character is resting at an inn and his pet is lying around. Suddenly, shock! A magpie swoops in through the window and spirits a gold piece off to its nest. Across a narrow ledge, along a drainpipe, over a small stream and up a tree is the magpie's nest, full of valuable nicknacks of varying weights and values. If the pet can overcome these obstacles, not to mention one very peeved magpie, and return any of these items to the inn, the player will mysteriously find them in his inventory the next time he logs in from his computer.
Obviously, action gaming is not the only way to go. Why not play greasemonkey and customize your spaceship between games? Why not smith a sword you can sell/trade/use in-game? Heck, why not fish? The key is that it has to actually affect your MMORPG character in some useful way. Complementary gaming could create a value-add for both the data plan and the MMORPG -- but I'm sure mobile companies would still be dumb enough to drive away customers by charging seperately for the game app.
I don't want to be dismissive, but this reads like the sort of Popularity = Box Office thinking that's gotten so many good people into so much trouble. Blizzard has been very industrious over the last decade, but Warcraft is still basically an homage to "The Lord of the Rings." What can this team hope to accomplish that Peter Jackson's hasn't already, and at what's almost guaranteed to be a lower per-minute budget? The most successful videogame movie so far is probably "Mortal Kombat," an unimpressive high water mark that gets by on simple cut-to-the-action unpretentiousness. Maybe that is the way to go: one hour of buildup and one hour of reasonably well blocked battle sequences. The trouble is, no matter how well it's done, it's still just an homage going up against its original.
I don't find any of this hard to believe. If we didn't subconsciously give away cues to our personalities, how would animation work? Or for that matter, acting? I think it's easy to be scared at just how much we do give away.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of Yahoo's nerfy services aren't designed for the smug wannabe technocrats of Slashdot -- they're designed for their moms. That said, Flickr and del.icio.us are pretty good services, Yahoo Maps suffer only from a lack of imagination, and even Pipes has a reasonable geeky appeal.
What no one seems to be asking amidst all this keening and armchair reffing is what good Yahoo's failure would do for the web. Do you really want a duopoly on major web services? Yahoo's failure wouldn't clear any space in the canopy for new competitors -- Google and MS will continue to either buy or one-up them once they gain buzz, as they have all decade. Without the deep pockets of either of its competitors, it's amazing that Yahoo has survived this long.
Sorry to walk away from a good book-dumping, but I hope Yahoo survives.
Funny to read this today, after I spent a couple of hours yesterday searching Google for something that doesn't exist -- a Plucker type app for the iPod Classic. What struck me was just how badly Google performed. Any search containing the word "iPod" seems to return pages upon pages of blog entries about the (long since released) iPhone. What one tends to find with a Google search are a lot of loud, content-light blog entries, popping with ads, with short dashed-off articles broken across several pages. "Relevance" in Google seems to have the most to do with activity -- posts per day per site, repeated introductory blurbs on every page, modestly-trafficed forums devoid of meaningful discussion. Google does a pretty decent job with common searches, reasonably well with obscure searches, but very badly with the rest -- the middle of the long tail.
Google rose to prominence by being the best of a pretty weak set of players. It's still only the least bad solution, and there are a lot of things it does poorly. In classic AltaVista, you could type a few words of a song in quotes and find the title and lyrics. Type a long quoted string into Google, and you're likely to come up with nothing.
If Wikia manages to best Google in any type of search I'll applaud it. Search choices beyond Google and Trying to Be Google would be most welcome.
On the nose, Josef.
How much time have we all spent looking at a blank browser window with "...completed 12 of 13 items." at the bottom?
Whatever else I might think of it, Facebook has a nice trick that appears to work as follows. The page loads with a blank graphic where the ad should be. Afterward, an onLoad script fires requesting the ad and replacing the blank graphic with it. The ads take a moment to load: the page is instantly on. Proper priorities.
(As a corollary, I've got a Dice ad at the top of this page sapping so many cycles it's making it hard to type. Pri-or-i-ties. Something tells me I'm shouting at the wind.)
Why does it blow your mind that the young'uns will work these absurd hours? Here's how it goes:
Young'un: Hello! I'm entering the working world under a staggering mountain of college debt.
Old'un: Will you work 70+ hours a week for months?
Young'un: Gee, that sounds kind of exploitative.
Old'un: This guy will. Don't worry though, I hear Starbucks is hiring.
Young'un: No no, I'll take it.
Old'un: Perfect! By the way we've cut bonuses.
Young'un: Oh.
Old'un: I mean, I still get them. But you don't. Sounds fair, right?
Young'un: Well not...
Old'un: I have a wife, a house and a family. Think you'll have those anytime soon?
Young'un: No, I guess not.
Old'un: That's the spirit!
Young'un: But if I work hard and produce good work, I'll be able to steadily move up to where-?
Old'un: No. It's simple supply and demand.
Supply and demand is no excuse for bare exploitation. As near as I can tell, the only sin of the young'uns is believing they'd do at least as well as their parents did.
Overall I'm pleased with the Amazon mp3 store. Good interface. Good prices. Previewing tracks and albums is intuitive, the samples are high quality, and you don't wind up with a desktop full of little .rm files after previewing them all.
The selection can be lean, even with slightly out of band tastes. I can only find one full VNV Nation album, while Rotersand turns up a remix album, and Seabound is MIA. That said, discovering new acts based on what you already know is easy and -- dare I say it -- fun, at least in the heavily incestuous world of electronica.
I didn't enjoy having to install an application to download full albums. I also didn't enjoy being forced to purchase using "one click" -- why can't I shop and then check out? I read through the terms of service, and there's no mention of watermarking or inclusion of my account info in the files, but I wouldn't call that conclusive. Will I get a nastygram from Amazon if someone swipes my SD card? Hopefully we won't find out.
Once I'd made my purchase and installed the application, the downloads were quick. On my Mac, the Amazon application created an "Amazon MP3" folder in my music folder and generated subfolders for artist and album in the iTunes style. The tracks were automatically imported into iTunes, although I found it odd that the application didn't create a playlist of the album. One question I haven't found an answer to is whether, like in iTunes, I can purchase the remainder of an album for the (discounted) album price if I have already purchased tracks individually.
Bottom line, Barry Adamson's "King of Nothing Hill" sounds great in iTunes, will play in TCPMP on my Palm Zire and can ride a thumb drive to my client onsites. At the same album price offered on the iTunes Store for a track that's locked to play only in iTunes on my own machine, I'd call that a deal.
I actually applaud Palm for dumping no more money into this. The future of notebook computers is bifurcation between "desktop replacements" and ultra low cost subnotebooks, into which Palm's project was too expensive for what it would do, and too underpowered and potentially quirky for anything else. For heavy graphics work, there's really no such thing as a "desktop replacement"; 3D will always need a big, heavy desktop. But writing, email and light web browsing are horrible things to be chained to the desktop/home office for -- a perfect market for a $200 Linux subnotebook, but hard to justify at $500.
I still use a Palm Zire 31 every day. My Zire keeps my calendar and address book, plays podcasts and music with TCPMP, and displays offline reading material with Plucker. I don't trust or care to deal with the restrictions of a locked phone for any of the above, and I don't care if my cheap, came-with-the-plan phone takes abuse.
Yes, there may be some money left in high-end smartphones for corporate users, but Palm needs to recognize that not every mobile gadget needs to be a phone. If they learn their lessons from this one and manage to make an economical subnotebook down the road, more power to them. In the meantime, they might do well to remember that PDA's didn't take off until they themselves brought it back at a much lower price point than Apple's Newton.
While all genres have made their way into videogames, horror is the only one I can think of that's grown its own significant subgenre there: Survival Horror. There is precident for survival horror in films, especially Romero's movies, but true survival horror seems to require interaction. It's not enough to emote with a character onscreen making choices with uncertain outcomes, it's when those choices are yours to make that the hair really stands up on the back of your neck.
Marks on imdb.com:
Writer:
Producer:
Miscellaneous Crew:
Editorial Department:
Basically, Marks self-produced a couple of indy shorts early in the decade, then there's a big gap where he fell off the radar. Hard to say if he was script doctoring, working the business side of the industry, or just had enough money to bum around Hollywood bugging people to read his screenplays. Suddenly he reappears screenwriting two big (the studios hope) franchise relaunches.
I have to wish him all the luck personally, but resumés like this don't fill me with confidence about the final product.
Very cool, but why one artist and one sound designer, floating between fifteen developers? Every team should have at least its own artist -- and don't think we aren't into this sort of thing.
You've got the Massachusetts College of Art, one of the best and one of the scrappiest art schools in the country, right across the river. Next year, think about reaching out. You'll be amazed at the response, and the amount of polish these kids can do on deadline.
One of my jobs is at a hardware store. With the city's energy-saving initiative, we get three dollars back on every $4 CFB we sell -- they ring up for the customer at $1 each. That's $1 per bulb compared to about $1 for a pack of 4 incandescents. Not only can the compact fluorescent bulbs be expected to last more than four times as long as the incandescents, each "60 watt" type CFB draws only 15 watts. A "100 watt" CFB draws about 22 watts. Get customers spitballing the costs, and they snap them right up. There is a market for energy efficiency, when people really get thinking about the numbers.
On a similar note, I built a bike light around a 3 bright white LED upgrade kit for a mini Maglite. It's bright enough to be seen in traffic (in fact it works as a decent flashlight, too) and runs on two AA batteries. I've changed the batteries once since July.
Am I the only one needled by obsolete technology? Oh wait, this is Slashdot...
Any game longer than, say, "Raiden" on the Sega Genesis is going to require a compelling scenario to make it fun. Even with a nice smooth ramp of feature introduction, power gaming is about learning to beat the engine, not role-playing the scenario. There are power gamers, and there are people who like to play a game to get away from things in a non-passive way. If you as a designer are trying to satisfy power gamers, fire the art and story departments. If you want to attract both types, you need to ask whether your difficulty levels are adding depth or just forcing the player to replay more and more sections. Does success come to the player from learning to beat the engine, or from thinking like a commander/participant in the scenario? Sadly, few games can claim the latter.
The one game mechanic I can't stand is memorization. When a game comes down to simply remembering a series of actions in a certain order to beat it, it takes me out of the scenario and makes it feel like work. There's a big difference between replaying the game out of choice, and replaying it piecemeal out of necessity.
Agreed on all points (especially the first season comment) but I'll go you one farther: Darwin is still the best realized "alien" crewmember in any scifi tv series. His psychology is distinctly nonhuman but comprehensible. He requires a different physical environment to live in. He communicates through a translation system, which is never treated as a babelfish-style magic bullet. Plus, he's just plain not a one to two meter tall biped. Usually, this sort of character would be treated as a pet, but when the writers were on their game he was decidedly an integral and uniquely valuable member of the series' crew.
I'll give O'Bannon's later effort Farscape props for attempting physically nonhuman cast members, but that's about it.
My my... Sometimes I think that if Slashdot threads never went off topic they wouldn't go anywhere.
Actually, the idea of dolphins having near or equal to human intelligence was being bandied about in a pretty high profile setting as recently as 1996. Remember Seaquest DSV?
I swear, that must have been the easiest show ever to pitch:
A TV executive taps his pen absently, briefly pursing his lips as he scans Roy Scheider's name off a proposed cast list. The lights dim. A lone desk lamp throws light up on a couple of jittery, curly-haired men with bad suits and an overlarge portfolio that'll never be opened. One stands up, and begins to gesture: "Okay, it's Star Trek... underwater!" The pen ceases tapping.
It depends on how sophisticated you want their formation flying to be. If the rules are A) Stay together, B) Don't crash into anything, and C) Seek some goal, simple emergent behavior can do remarkablly well. Craig Reynolds' Boids algorithm, developed in 1986, is an amazingly simple way to do it.
I'm not saying that flocking in the real world, even in "empty" space, isn't a remarkable challenge, but there are sometimes simple ways to create compex coordination. Marco Dorigo's ant colony optimization routines are another example.
I'm fascinated by this stuff. Jon Klein's open-source Breve simulation environment downloads with some great examples, and it's a great platform for wiring your own.
I have a friend who swears by ToonBoom, but I haven't done much with it myself.
I'm just finishing up some cutout animation (Monty Python-style) for a science museum. I considered Flash, but ultimately went with Animation:Master. A:M is actually a full-featured 3D character animation package, with a price closer to Flash. The advantages on this project were an excellent animation interface, forward and inverse kinematics with bones, rigging, smooth interpolation with many options, motion blur, and glow effects. On the flip side, building a character by applying texture maps to a bunch of parallel planes tends to take a while (about an hour per character, plus the time to cut them into pieces with Photoshop), A:M can be unstable, and animating with line art would be a whole different process -- although I'd be curious to see what someone could do using the .ai importer. Since I'm basically rendering a bunch of planes, with no lights or shadows, the final render took only a few second per frame.
If you're comfortable with a 3D package that's geared toward character animation, there are advantages to using it for 2D animation. If not, the learning curve is probably not worth climbing unless you're looking to branch out into 3D.
GPS I'm a bit leery of, but I think Sloppy is onto something with "one world, many systems." The phone's latency and reliability will be a bit low for realtime action gaming for some time (though Bluetooth vs Bluetooth is a very real possibility), but what about an occasional connect system? The phone loads a "mission," the player plays it (even underground on the subway), and afterward the results of the player's performance are communicated to the game server and a followup mission is loaded. There's a wonderful possibility for complementary gaming here.
Here's an example. The player has a pet in an MMORPG. He logs in with his phone. Since he's not at his computer, his character is resting at an inn and his pet is lying around. Suddenly, shock! A magpie swoops in through the window and spirits a gold piece off to its nest. Across a narrow ledge, along a drainpipe, over a small stream and up a tree is the magpie's nest, full of valuable nicknacks of varying weights and values. If the pet can overcome these obstacles, not to mention one very peeved magpie, and return any of these items to the inn, the player will mysteriously find them in his inventory the next time he logs in from his computer.
Obviously, action gaming is not the only way to go. Why not play greasemonkey and customize your spaceship between games? Why not smith a sword you can sell/trade/use in-game? Heck, why not fish? The key is that it has to actually affect your MMORPG character in some useful way. Complementary gaming could create a value-add for both the data plan and the MMORPG -- but I'm sure mobile companies would still be dumb enough to drive away customers by charging seperately for the game app.
I don't want to be dismissive, but this reads like the sort of Popularity = Box Office thinking that's gotten so many good people into so much trouble. Blizzard has been very industrious over the last decade, but Warcraft is still basically an homage to "The Lord of the Rings." What can this team hope to accomplish that Peter Jackson's hasn't already, and at what's almost guaranteed to be a lower per-minute budget? The most successful videogame movie so far is probably "Mortal Kombat," an unimpressive high water mark that gets by on simple cut-to-the-action unpretentiousness. Maybe that is the way to go: one hour of buildup and one hour of reasonably well blocked battle sequences. The trouble is, no matter how well it's done, it's still just an homage going up against its original.
Not to turn the snark abruptly off, but Malcolm Gladwell wrote a hella good article about facial cues a few years ago: http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_08_05_a_face.htm
I don't find any of this hard to believe. If we didn't subconsciously give away cues to our personalities, how would animation work? Or for that matter, acting? I think it's easy to be scared at just how much we do give away.