begin panic

The difference between a self-proclaimed cynic and a self-proclaimed realist, a parable

Jim needs to buy his wife something to cheer her up and pauses to consider some flowers. “Flowers always just die,” he thinks to himself, and moves along.

Bob also needs to buy his wife something to cheer her up and also pauses to consider flowers. “She never takes care of the flowers I give her,” he thinks to himself, and moves along.

I like to sum both personas with one third-party-proclaimed title:

Dick.

Nintendo’s Grave Mistake

As the 3DS admits a flop of a release, Nintendo shareholders are putting pressure to release their software for iOS. The shareholders see the App Store that sells software like hotcakes to everyone from Jimmy-hardcore-gamer to his grammy. But Nintendo’s balking, claiming it will never be a software company. And I know exactly why.

Nintendo is driven by innovation, and the best software innovation utilizes hardware innovation.

Look back for yourself and see this is true of all of Nintendo’s most popular systems.

But I’d like to argue that there’s a way Nintendo could turn everything around. They could continue to innovate with hardware and make software for the increasingly-popular iOS because there’s a segment that’s just dying to be utilized, and Nintendo should be first in line to drop all their console and handheld development and enter this arena:

There are no good controllers for the iPhone.

There it is. Make an innovative controller for the iPhone with a partnership and Apple stamp of approval, and wallah—you’ve just dived back into the game you used to rule with a mighty hammer. You make the best damned controllers on the market, and they always offer neat new things you can do with gameplay.

Can you see how this isn’t any different from anything they’ve done before? The NES gamepad ruled the atari joystick and by itself opened up way more gameplay options. The SNES controller did the same thing, and because of it we started to see complex games with complex controls that seemed to do about anything.

Then the N64 came along. Funny how this happened well after Sony and Sega both had been offering 3D games for a long time. But it was the N64 controller—not any console specs—that taught all of us how to properly control a game with a third dimension.

The Wii obviously caused a storm of popularity in the same way as all the others. Aside from the SNES, not a single one of these consoles was the powerhouse king of its day. They just had the best dang controllers.

And without going into the historical detail of adoption, the interesting thing is every other successful console-maker has copied Nintendo’s controllers—not their console system, mind you—in the next generation.

Now the big “N” is looking to release their new big boy, the Wii U, and it’s impressive in many ways: very fast hardware that’s poised to take the processes-per-second crown for the next year or two.

And then there’s that new Wii U controller.

I’m not capable of making a good prediction of whether this will sell. It seems pretty nifty, and I’m sure Nintendo’s got a few gameplay ideas up their sleeves based on this new setup.

But I can’t shake the notion that the same thing could be accomplished by slapping a controller shell around an iPhone and using airplay with and AppleTV to do the same dang thing. Though there are some important differences between the two setups.

The iPhone and iPod Touch:

• Will feel less expensive than a Wii U controller because they’re more useful to own
• Multitouch screen will always be way better and more responsive
• Will have way more processing power and ram than Wii U controller
• Are already in millions of homes
• Will keep getting better and faster without any Nintendo development cost
• Will get upgraded every couple years by their users

And the downside:

• The current, A4 AppleTV doesn’t have the same horsepower as the Wii U console will.

But certainly an A6 or maybe A7 would be comparable? And at the point that these ARM chips become comparable to multicore intel setups—and they will—what’s the point of designing the console anyway, if you’re Nintendo? It’s not faster than anything, it doesn’t do anything special outside that one, very important part to gaming innovation: the controller.

Innovate to your heart’s content, Nintendo. Make games more fun and go bold new places, guys. Please, please don’t ever stop doing that.

Just do it with your controllers on the iOS platform for your shareholders and the rest of us.

Consider the upside from a company like Nintendo:

• Never worry about keeping console technology current
• Tap into the iOS user base where users upgrade their own hardware every two years.

Can you imagine a better scenario for Nintendo than to have a user base who updates their own hardware every two years in a platform that’s every bit as strict and walled off as Nintendo’s own console hardware? It sounds like they couldn’t ask for a better scenario.

Sadly, the big N already told us this scenario won’t ever happen, and that is a grave mistake at this point in the game. That sucks for Nintendo.

And Apple will never make a Nintendo-calibre controller for their platform.

That sucks for us.

Utopia 101: Developers

I’m pretty excited to be reaching the official 2.0 release for Formo and have been thinking about what it’s taken to get it to this point.

Any decent sized project has its ups and downs, changes and setbacks, but one thing stands out the most in my mind about this whole process:

I’m continually amazed at the amount of support from the open source community.

Take Formo for instance, I’ve worked with individuals from all over the world brainstorming in emails and Github about what direction makes the most sense and — perhaps just as useful — why many of my ideas are garbage.

These are people who won’t ever make a penny from this project, yet they are ever willing to contribute ideas, guidance, and even code to the cause.

And don’t underestimate what kind of contributions these really are. These contributions are every bit as well-executed as these individuals are producing in their full-time, paycheck-providing occupations.

It’s all done to benefit the whole community and is therefore wholly worthwhile to the contributor. And thus it only makes sense to also contribute the project to the community as well.

It’s like one big Utopia of people missing only one thing to become a true, self-contained society of cooperatively exalted humans: more females.

If the island of Lost had some sort of tunnel to Stack Overflow, do you really think Jack and John Locke would’ve had to come to blows about whether to push the button?

No frikkin’ way.

There’s someone who’s already seen what happens when you don’t push it and will write up an answer with references and examples. And furthermore, others will validate his answer (complete with comments and equal experience) so Misters Shephard and Locke won’t have to take much time to find the best approach.

If they posted the ‘button project’ to github, they’d receive correspondence — unsolicited, mind you — about various approaches to ridding the island of the button and avoiding the source of conflict altogether.

No one would’ve trusted Ben Linus, that’s for sure.

No cryptic non-answers.

No need for filler episodes in season 2 and early season 3.

Indeed, I remain convinced the Losties would’ve reached a Utopian state had they access to Github, Stack Overflow and the Kohana forum.

I’m unaware of another community as benevolent as my fellow open source developers.

May you forever remain true to your Octocat t-shirts and mugs.