Gareth Lewin's Blog

Has anyone ever considered the concept of open sourcing ideas? I mean, we obviously have open source software, and a lot of open sourcing of artist created assets. I realise there is a license issue, but I imagine a github like page for ideas. For the sake of this lets assume it's software related ideas. People could submit an idea, and 'license' it open-source. Then anyone could just use the idea, attributing it back to the person with the idea. I realise the folly in this in that people could "close source" all ideas and the world would suck. Well I guess that already exists, it's called software patents. Argh. Basically there are days when I want to do something cool, but I don't actually have an idea for something cool. On other days I have ideas for something cool that I don't have the desire / time / resources to implement, but would be happy to give the idea to someone else to implement. Oh well, a pipe dream.

Last week at the gdc I noticed two themes. The first was "how to make money in your game by fucking your players over", the other was a pretty strong push against sexism, racism, misogyny, etc. In one of the better sessions the talker called for zero tolerance in games. The game I play the most is valve's amazing dota 2 . It's a very hard team game and people get very emotional in the game, which turns to the typical gay bashing, sexist and racist outbursts from players. Most of the time if it is not directed at me I used to just ignore it, but no more. As a community, industry and most importantly as human beings we need to put a stop to this. Valve have an excellent reporting system and from now on I plan on reporting anyone using racist, sexist, queer-ist and other bigoted language. Everyone. Zero tolerance. Additionally I am going to point out to people that they are being douche-bags. I doubt the latter will work but maybe if everyone did it then it would hel...

I have been thinking a lot about the  Swiss Unconditional Income  idea and this post is a dump of my thoughts on the subject, hopefully when all put together will make a cohesive overview of where I stand. In the world we live in, having a job is one of the most important things you should do if you wish to sustain yourself alive, this is emphasized with  every   politician  talking about job creation as the solution to every problem. Why are pipelines in BC a good idea? J obs . Why are the oil sands good for Canada? Jobs . How do you encourage growth in the USA?  Jobs . Why do rich people get tax breaks, because they create Jobs  (well that's the excuse anyway). The question is, is this really true? How do we define a job? I define it (for the purpose of this post at least) as the way you generate money to buy the necessities (and possibly more) of life. So we (most of us) don't have a choice, we either work or we don't have a roof over our h...

In the future I hope twitch.tv/justin.tv will have a changes page and I can post this there, but until then I will post minor changes I make. About a week ago I added keyboard shortcuts to the players, please note you have to have the player focused (click on it), and the shortcuts will not work in fullscreen mode (flash's fault). Up/Down - Volume change Page Down - Mute Page Up - Un-Mute Control- P - Popout Control-F - Fullscreen If anyone has ideas for keys, feel free to tell me.

I don't often write a lot about Magic: The Gathering but I had a thought that I can't express in 140 characters. Has there ever been such a huge change in a metagame as we are seeing in both extended and standard right now? The reasons for Extended are easy, wizards have changed what Extended means so this is clear to everyone, but  I'm not sure if people have considered how standard is about to change. Historically when we had a rotation the new set was too small to have any big synergy and people were also just getting used to the previous block. Additionally the core set used to stick around a lot longer. This time everything is different. We have a set with a (seemingly) very high amount of good cards. The core set is rotating with M10 rotating out. All the tier 1 (with the possible exception of turbo-land) losing everything, from sovereigns to bloodbraid elves. And with RoE being a somewhat stand alone set, the Zendikar block is not significantly bigger to domi...

My friend roger wrote a post about xkcd a while ago. Since then, I have made this hilarious comic to describe my opinion about xkcd.

I assume when most people think of Twitter, they think of random boring information being sent into the Aether and just wasting space. I'm going to give two examples of a way that Twitter is not only useless but changing the way we communicate. On the 22nd of April Brian Tinsman and Erik Lauer, the lead designers of the latest Magic the Gathering expansion held a dev chat about said expansion. In general, it was terrible, not because of Erik or Brian, but because the questions were horrid. The next day, @mtgaaron (Aaron Forsythe - Director of R&D for Magic) did his own Q&A, he did it on Twitter. It was shorter in duration but significantly better than the dev chat, the reason for this is that Aaron could filter out the cruft questions, and answer the questions he found he could answer. Today @PeteCarroll (Pete Carroll - Head Coach of the Seattle Seahawks) did the same thing. He tweeted who's got questions? gonna answer some for the next few minutes... fire away...