Travel

As you may know I’m currently on sabbatical from the games-industry and my company Starbreeze. After having the best job I can imagine for 8 years, I felt I needed a change of scenery and decided to take the money I had managed to put away and burn it on things that makes me feel wiser. You can see some of those things on this site, with small projects of different kinds; some art-projects, some game-projects and some other things that may or may not be good ideas.

The biggest of these projects is one that I haven’t really started on. It’s the project that I’ve been hoping to do for quite some time, and it’s the project that made me create this site in the first place. It’s the Collecting Smiles project.

The idea behind the Collecting Smiles project is to collect different smiles throughout the world. It is supposed to give me a reason to travel and force me to meet people I otherwise wouldn’t meet. In every country I visit, I will take a picture of a smiling person living in that country. I will also collect the smiles of other people traveling and while I don’t know how possible it is, I hope to collect the smile of a person inspiring the people of that country, ideally the president/prime minister. The goal is to collect all smiles in each category from every country in the world.

I just came back from what I guess you could call a dry-run of this project, where I visited Israel, Thailand and China, and I’m starting to realize how hard this will be (surprise!). Ambitions (and pretentious) as this may be, it’s still something I need to try and hopefully things will get rolling soon. Of course, I’ll make heavy use of the internet for this project with the hopes of eventually building a community to help me with the “inspiring-smiles” part. I’ve set up a prototype site for the purpose of the project that can be found here.

Posted: December 17th, 2007 under Art, Projects, Travel.
Comments: 2

Mud and plenty of wind can turn a tent into a flying dragon!

Oh sweet mud. I had the pleasure of attending the Roskilde Festival and watch a few bands like BJÖRK-INFLAMES-ROKYERICKSON-BEASTIEBOYS-DIZZEERASCAL-CSS-QUEENSOFTHESTONEAGE-MUSTASCH-BONDEDEROLE-FLAMINGLIPS-CULTOFLUNA.
But since this is a gaming-blog I will not bore you with that. Instead I’d like smoothly move the topic over to licensed music in games. In The Darkness we did a pretty cool thing. We crammed the disc full with video content that ran on the in-game TVs that were scattered all over the game. We had a couple of different channels with movies like To Kill a Mockingbird and a bunch of episodes of Flash Gordon. These were all public domain, so we could basically do what we wanted with them, but one of the channels in the game was reserved for modern Swedish metal-music. I think we have about 26 music videos in there performed by small Swedish metal bands like Closer, Defleshed, El Caco, F.K.Ü, Acid House Kings, man.machine.industry etc. It was a great way for us to get some extra spice into the game as well as for the artists to promote their music. Then, we ran into the legal nightmare. Most of these artists the were interested in having their songs in the game where registered with STIM as well as some other organization which I don’t remember the name of. Because of that, we couldn’t just have the artists’ permission to put the songs in the game, but STIM demanded huge amounts of money of us to have them in there. This is perhaps understandable since they are there to make sure the artists don’t get screwed and they tried to apply their standing rules probably created for TV and movies but they had little interest to work around them. Still, after some dreadful legal mumbo-jumbo and some tremendous work by our super-hero lawyer, they finally got the picture and everyone was happy.

This made me realize how young the games industry is in many ways. We want to grow up and be able to use all the resources all other media use, but the structure just isn’t there yet. We also tried to have a famous song running during the end credits but the number we were given to just use the lyrics where ridiculous, probably because they used the same payment scheme as the end-credits of a Hollywood movie. We found a good alternative to that as well, but it can be extremely hard run your head into the wall like that over and over again and I hope that this is something that will become easier as the industry grow even bigger.

Posted: July 17th, 2007 under Game design, Travel.
Comments: none

As a final US stop, San Francisco was really perfect and took the top spot of my favorite city ever. I got to hang out with Jordan from Irrational as well as Steve from Perpetual which was really cool.

San Francisco is also the home of GDC (apart from a year in San Jose). I’ve never been there myself, but it seems to have become bigger and more interesting every year. Still, it seems a bit on the hefty side to charge so much for a conference ($1450 for a classic pass), and of course the total becomes much higher for people traveling from Sweden.

Posted: July 9th, 2007 under Games, Travel.
Comments: none

I think I’ve been to Los Angeles about 10 times and have spend about two weeks per year here the last 5 years. Mostly due to E3 of course and this will be the first time for a long time that I’m not going. E3 is quite different this year as well since they have moved it from being in the main convention centre into a couple of hotels in Santa Monica. It’s probably not a bad idea. Still, Leipzig seems like a very good replacement for E3 and is maybe more interesting since it’s for most part open for consumers as well. And you don’t have to fly for 15 hours to get there, of course.

Posted: June 29th, 2007 under Games, Travel.
Comments: none

Quick stop on my way to the airport

Washington was very nice as well. So much cleaner than New York and with much more space for everything. Still, I prefer New York. Perhaps working with Darkness have made me appreciate dark and broody environments.

Posted: June 28th, 2007 under Travel.
Comments: none

View from my hotel

I love New York. I’m off on a short US promotional tour that will take me through a couple of US cities but I’m pretty sure this is the one I’ll like most. The Darkness is released over here today (yay!), but I’ve haven’t had time to check out any stores yet. Instead I’ve met Nate Wells who will promote Bioshock. It’s pretty amazing to be able to meet people behind legendary games like System Shock 2.

Posted: June 25th, 2007 under Travel.
Comments: none

I hate these

Why can’t they just print them out at the airport? They obviously have all the information. I never got a pen with me and no, I’ve never commited mass-murder. Nag nag.

Posted: June 25th, 2007 under Travel.
Comments: none