(It’s important to note that his brother posted this on the net, and said that his suicide had nothing to do with his work, and was apparently in relation to personal problems.)

Working in journalism, I understand the need to frame information in a way that allows people to understand why they should care, but I much rather would’ve had news stories refer to him in ways that people didn’t know as well. Take the moment to read his blog a bit and realize that he had a great sense of humor. Mention that he was a parent who lampooned irresponsible parents (here, “I can’t stop my little children from playing 37 hours a week of Baby-Killer 3, because I don’t understand this little letter on the box it came in!”) or even an Army Reservist.

Of course, his blog immediately got comments with people saying they hoped he burned in hell, largely because of the Star Wars thing. Thus goes gamerdom… A bunch of assholes. The additional shame there is that it’s not like he ever got to make the game he wanted to make. He was just a guy with a job.

Of course the irony is painful; he really came across as the kinda guy most gamers would have absolutely loved. Just read this, written by a guy who actually DID know him. Chances are you’ll say “Damn, I wish I had a chance to know that guy.” That’s what I’m saying right now. If he’s going to be remembered as something to do with games, then why can’t he be “the guy who solved server over-population problems with a simple blog post:” http://web.archive.org/web/20050323233508/http://mythical.blogspot.com/ (You’ll have to highlight that first post. For some reason the Internet Archive fucked up the color.) Or the guy who said (something to the effect of) “To have a good MMO, you have to start with a world that would be interesting even without players.” Why can’t he be a guy who knew that better things were possible and fought that on the front lines?

Man, gamers are assholes.

Bah. Well, here’s his blog: http://mythicalblog.com/. I’m going to see if I can find some nuggets of wisdom left behind. Y’know, I recall him saying something along the lines of “you guys are tired of me talking about my game ideas all the time” once, but I can’t find it. I completely disagreed with that statement.

Some highlights from the past few weeks of Jeff Freeman’s blog:
Freeman Fights Torture
Freeman on (the lack of) Storytelling and Story Arcs in MMOs when compared to serial TV
Freeman on ‘banning’ players.
On Journalism, Entertainment Journalism, and Game Journalism

Heh, looking at it, he was quite the aggregator of quality media, too. Man, I’m going to regret not buying that buy a beer.

Recently indy dev Cliffski asked pirates why they refused to pay for games. This was his conclusion.

Thankfully he realized the problem with DRM; it only has to be cracked once, and then it’s pointless and only serves to bug legitimate users, so he’s dropping it. He also lowered some prices of his games to boot, so, win for consumers! (And hopefully this will help his longterm sales, and not just the short term because of the notoriety gained.)

But there’s an even bigger picture to look at, so let’s do that. Allow me to become a bit of a futurist here and share with you how I could see things happening…

Pirates win, content owners fail.
First, pirates win while content developers lose. That’s not hard to figure out, really. In fact, it’s starting right now as piracy becomes more and more rampant*. Content developers are realizing they can’t sue everyone and are creating better websites like Hulu to keep people from downloading and keeping them from making any money. To be frank, I firmly believe that eventually people will take the attitude that “bits should be copied freely,” and industries will soon scramble to find new ways to ensure they stay on top. They’ll fail. I expect them to go to commercial-driven content, but that’ll just piss people off when they can stream it for free from illegal sites* that will probably be far more user-friendly anyway, and media companies will be relegated to sideshow status at best.

Amateurs win, while professionals flounder.
Much like we’re seeing the beginnings of now, as Big Media struggles to find its place, actual artists (who are savvy) will thrive like never before. Musicians will spread their music freely, and sell out concerts with ease. They’ll sell audio recordings of the concert you just witnessed for cheap, and the bigger bands will even be able to sell you videos of the concert as you leave the venue. If you read this, you probably already know names like “Penny Arcade,” and “Jonathan Coulton,” but note that even Trent Reznor is giving away his music now. If Big Media can’t make this method work for them, expect to see ‘amateurs’ operate at the same level, if not bigger than ‘traditional’ artists.

New professionals win, consumers win.
Those artists, the indie ones? If ’success’ is as easy as ‘making a living at your art,’ then let’s hope it becomes the norm. (Cross your fingers.) And here we come to the root of exactly how future media could work. Everyone will get the digital files for free. Any person can download and publish any movie, song, art, game, etc. at any time. (A definite win for consumers in my book.) Sure, donations are great, but musicians/performers/actors can charge for life performances (yes, I’m predicting a resurgence of live theatre,) and traditional artists could sell their canvases/sculptures/works. In fact, anyone can sell physical products, just look at the approach of some of these artists. But, what would be the meat and potatoes of games?

Games.
If games follow suit, then what will games offer that will keep them viable in the eye of gamers? What is the true essence of ‘art’ in games that makes it a notable difference from all other arts? Interaction. Gamers will be charged subscriptions to play in a world of premier dungeon masters. With all games made of open source, bare bones tech, Game Runners will create an experience that will build up their reputations amongst gamers as good, bad, dense, or grandiose. Just like musicians and directors have their own styles, so will Game Runners.

Yeah, this is the only way to get rid of pirates… Leave nothing for them to pirate.

*More people are born with piracy being the norm, bandwidth rises, latency falls, and advanced processing allows for greater compression. Given these things, in our lifetimes I expect we’ll see very high quality games streamed with relatively little caching (and of course high quality video/audio streamed with no problem.)

I’ve wanted to make a Care Bears game since I first played the classic DuckTales and Chip ‘N Dale: Rescue Rangers for NES, and I tossed the idea out on a lark a few years back and some guys didn’t dismiss it. One evening I sat down and thought up the main multiplayer mode. First, note that the game was intended as a 3d platformer in the vein of Psychonauts/Mario64, but, well, with Care Bears.

And yes, of course there’s also a single player platformer element which would be the main focus on the game, but I’ve not taken the time to plot out how why the Smog Hogs’ (yes, my idea,) floating Pollution Plaza crashes into Care-A-Lot, and how the game will properly allow players to visit past notable locations from Care Bears lore (in a Psychonauts style of retreading earlier worlds to make for new content found when using alternate Care Bears with slightly different abilities.) But this post is about the multiplayer mode!

The multiplayer game gives each player a Care Meter that starts off at either 100, or -100, depending on which team they’re on (Care Bears or Smog Hogs.) Each player has the ability to shoot his Care Bear Stare out of his tummy symbol, and a secondary ability dependent upon what their tummy symbol is. (The secondary ability should typically involve a recharge time, and often is in the form of their tummy symbols, from rainbows or storm clouds that players can walk/fly on, to power-ups (four leaf clovers or trophies) that give players short-lasting extra abilities.) Half of the players will start on the team of the Smog Hogs, which have a Care Meter value of -100, completely uncaring. The Smog Hogs still have the same abilities as typical Care Bears, but there’s one difference.

Despite their team, when a player is hit with a Care Bear Stare, their Care Meter raises (to the max of 100.) But when an Uncaring Bear hits a player with an Uncaring Stare (Glum Glare?) their Care Meter decreases (to the minimum of -100.) When the 0 threshold is crossed, the player changes from their current team to the other. It’s essentially a giant game of ‘tag’, but with Care Bear Stares instead of bullets.

And yes, I’m serious. I think this game would rock. Y’know why? Who wouldn’t love to drive this bad boy around in battle?!

The Impressioning Begins.

I went for a tour a few months before I decided. (I had just about decided anyway.) Let me warn you, they lay it on really fucking thick. They put you in a small club-like building and have a concert. They then show an “impressive” reel of media that graduates have worked on including movies, studio sessions and video clips from albums, tour concerts, and yes, video games. I had worked at a local TV station for four years preceding this, so instead of being wowed by the music and the editing, I was mostly thinking “Oh man, that sucked. I would’ve done this here, and that there.” And the campus (that they show you, not the renovated strip mall you actually go to school in,) looks like the inbred baby of college computer lab and a too-well-funded dot-com from the 90s. Classrooms everywhere have giant oval windows into the hallway, making every class a potential fish tank for tours. There’s lots of stained steel on window sills, and bold colors like red and blue used as trim on yellow and white walls. Of course for lots of people this was probably hip and trendy when they first did it. This was in 2002, I was twenty-two, and this decor was the kind of stuff I (and most of you, I’d guess,) poke fun of as ‘cliche’.

One important thing to note is that class at Full Sail is not like class anywhere else. Classes usually last eight hours a day, and six days a week. Yes, I was in class more than most people reading this work. The first two months were bullshit general media information classes, and a ‘media law’ class that was horribly out of date so far as software went. But after these classes are split off into their respective fields. You take (took, back then anyway,) two classes at a time at Full Sail. This is usually one programming course and one non-programming course. The first programming class we took was simply titled “C++” which I still contend was some type of shorthand for “See? Fuck You.” The two month course, where most were one month back then, ended with my failing, because I failed the final. I made a 69.5 on the final. One more question right, and I would’ve passed, and likely things would be different now. I would’ve stayed with a different group of friends who passed easily,) and that can matter. But the class itself was great. I started off strongly and the teacher named Arthur (a Divine Rank 20 God of Insanity,) kept assuming I knew C++ before I came into the school because I did so well. But at some point I just started slowing a little, and got another question wrong on the daily test at the end of class. By the end of the class, as you saw, I was in poor shape.

After the passing it on the second shot, came the class Data Structures. Mike Barnoske was the fucking man. I loved his class and his sense of humor. Hell, I loved hash tables and spoke data types as a second language. Shame I didn’t actually have much use for them again until over a year later. Math classes weren’t really easy or hard to me, so no biggie there. But then we entered our next programming class, the world of Dustin Clingman.

Like Arthur and Barnoske, Dustin’s a memorable guy because he’s the kind of boss you want. And for the “Real World” type of learning environment Full Sail purports to offer, he’s the perfect man for the job. He was fun, funny, serious about work, completely practical, willing to give you enough rope to hang yourself, and happy to fail you (so you’ll learn next time!) And he had a bit of a thing for taking puzzles posted from the IDGA forums, where he was very active at the time, and using them as puzzles in class (heh, and people wondered how I knew the answers so easily. It pays to do research into your field, people! :D) For his two month class we had create singleton wrapper classes for everything in Direct X (audio, video, images, memory, error reporting, etc.) along with other work. Then, after that class, we had him for another two month class in which he formed us into groups and we made our first game. Well, our first ‘game’ game, anyway. My group? Rampage!

Classmates and Problems.

Notice I’ve not mentioned my other classmates much. Well, I’m going to go into that for a while, because in Dustin’s second class is where I had my first major personality conflict since… Probably seventh grade. I met a guy who seemed cool on my first day at the school. Nate. Nate and I became pals with a guy who turned out to be a brother-in-law to an “Industry Legend.” Then we met three other guys who were pals, Brad, Lyle, and Richard. Eventually I float between this crowd and a second clique. Nate, Andy, Brad, and Richard went on to be all palsy for a while, and Lyle and I failed, so we hung out with said second clique members who also failed. (Herein: pals.) As we knew each other, we didn’t hang out with the new class as much as we could’ve. Over time a couple of my pals dropped out and we got to know the ‘new people,’ so we meshed a bit. But in that second class of Dustin Clingman, where we made a game, my team was (in ascending order of talent, as I saw it at that point,): My pal, me, a seemingly cool guy who went on to be an EvilAvatar Forum Member (Simon,) and Simon’s pal.

So, here we were. In Simon’s pals house late at night working on our game. This is what I came to Full Sail for! This is what it was all about! I just ‘knew’ that when I came to this place, I would meet other people as passionate as me about making a game, and we could be the next id Software! We’d do things, damn it! And we did do things. We argued a little, at first anyway. I think Simon and his pal assumed I was a better programmer than I actually was at this point. I’ve always loved to talk a big game, so they knew I talked shit. But I’m quick to follow my game with an honest aside of “You know I’m just joking, right? I suck at most of this. I mean, I did fail.” and Simon’s pal, who was the best of us, probably disregarded the aside and thought I was a complete asshole, instead of a partial one.

So, I asked for help. He says “Sure, in a minute.” He’s working on his own code, so I totally understand. He was in his groove. Then my pal, the weakest coder of the group, asks for help and gets it instantly. Then Simon asks for help and gets it. Then I ask again, and he says sure, after a smoke break. He finishes, My pal asks again, and gets it. I ask the other two guys to look at my code, and they can’t figure out the problem. I wait a few, remind him I need help, and he says ‘in a minute’ again, so I wait. I’ve already pointed out I talk lots of shit, but I’ve always thought it was evident I was joking, so I took his ignoring of me as being rude and unfounded. I then, knowing that my code is the problem, say “Dude, I can’t figure out what’s going wrong. I think your code is busted. You’re function isn’t passing me something right.” He looks at me and I realize I finally found a way to get a reaction. Instantly Simon’s Pal is shocked, dumbfounded, aghast, and a growing more pissed by the second. He then comes to check out what I’m talking about. This sets off a little flag in my head. “If I want any help at all from this guy, I’m going to have to insult him into helping me.” He finds the problem in my code within fifteen minutes. This is over an hour I’ve wasted trying to figure it out, and he ignores me over here struggling, but he finds it in fifteen minutes. Now I’m pissed. My subtle insults toward him, him jabbing back at me, and us being grumpy toward each other becomes the dreaded routine when working together. (Obviously in retrospect it was both petty and pathetic on my part, and may have been completely perceived on my part, and accidental on his. I’m willing to take a good 90% of the blame.) But at this point, I’m beginning to doubt if I’ll find people like me at Full Sail.

The Second Wind.

It was during Dustin’s second class I thought about taking a break, and also thought about just quitting. Not just this incident mind you, but my of my mail three pals one smokes weed all the time, another drinks beer all the time, and the third was just annoying to me. I’ve never smoked anything, and I haven’t drank anything since I was… What, sixteen? (This was ‘04, and I was 23-24.) It was then that I start to hang out with Brad and Nate, who had discovered they could be better friends than their larger group. I hung out a few times with them previously and we kept in contact on IMs, but now it became a frequent thing. I’ve never slept well, but they were pulling all-nighters at Denny’s now, so things were good. (Of course the fact that I was the only one of us who had a vehicle helped as well. I hold no delusions about that. But in college, owning a car is a great boon to your social life, so use it when you can!) But, they were good guys.

And the creative writing class we took (I forget the fancy name for it) during the second month of Dustin’s second class was actually one of my favorites because I dig writing, even if I get no personal writing done. Most of my classmates didn’t dig it, or downright loathed it, and the teacher was painfully aware. She was a nice enough lady to me, but some folks gave her hell sadly. In this class we did some ‘design’-ish work, in one instance we were split into ‘dev teams’ and each member had to design a level. Another interesting assignment was to attempt to contact an industry professional and talk to them about the industry. It was sadly vague, but full of potential. The man I contacted gained my interest because he mentioned a game in his blog that no one else at the school had even heard of. Rocket Jockey.

Jamie Fristrom. Not enough could be said about this cat, honestly. Then working on Spider-Man: The Movie, and eventually giving birth to the Spider-Man: The Movie 2 swinging that we all loved so much, I saw he worked on Die By The Sword. If that’s not enough for you, you’re no gamer. But he also worked on a few kickass Dreamcast ports I had previously fell in love with (Spider-Man, THPS 2X,) so I said, “Hey, this it a guy whose brain I want to pick!” So, I emailed him. Just over a week later, after the class ended and I received a ‘50′ for that assignment (at least I sent something out, she said,) he emailed me back! Thus began much emailing and pestering of him, and a growing interesting in gaming blogs. Over the course of the following few years he took a shine to me at some point and decided I wasn’t a total asshole, bless that man. And through his blog I eventually started talking to another pro who turned out to just be a swell guy, Brett Douville. Maybe it’s the ‘how you read it’ aspect of an email/a letter that allows the reader to bring so much to it, that was really just me wanting to find cool people out there. Maybe they were completely uninterested in me. But they kept emailing me back, and I took a liking to these two guys. Between Brad, Nate, and Jamie, I got a second wind.

The Birth of Fun.

Re-energized by forming a great friendship in Brad, who actually lived less than thirty yards from me in my apartment complex, re-strengthening my friendship with Nate, and ‘meeting’ an industry professional who was a great guy, I was enjoying things again. I decided to get my second loan and stay in school. Hell, more than that, I started enjoying life. I started hanging out at local record shops, I started dating for the first time in Orlando, and I found a weekly LAN party that took fifteen hours to play two (sixteen player) rounds of Halo, a few hands of Munchkin, and occasionally Risk. If you can find it, life in Orlando is great. And that made school far more tolerable than it was before. But…

Back to class!

The next few classes actually went by in a flash. It doesn’t help that it was two and a half years ago and I can’t recall all the classes, but I remember thinking even then that time was flying. The OpenGL class was, well, wonderful. I joked on the teacher some because he was a Mac guy in a gaming school, but he wasn’t bad. But I loved OpenGL. For those who’ve always wondered the difference between it and Direct X, (back then, anyway. I’ve not touched DX in an iteration.) OpenGL is graphics for programmers. Any type of graphical change you want to make to the engine is just a few lines of code away! Hell, even crappy 3d programmer art is cake by just plotting a few points!

My 3d modeling class was a swell time too. For a second I actually thought “Wow, maybe I went into the wrong half of game development!) And AI was just as fun as OpenGL! Sure it was a lot harder, but the first time you program A* with a hash table and a grid that previously took your AI almost an hour to traverse takes less than a minute? You feel like a God.

Oh God.

Console. That’s the class that gave everyone nightmares, and rightly so. This is where we get into C for the first time (as opposed to C++) and it was brutal. The whole point to this class was that we learned C (the PS2 did not use C++,) and had to work on machines with slower processors and low memory. Feeding your code through the GCC compiler on the test machine was also worrisome. I stumbled through it, and didn’t do so hot, but didn’t suck. During the two month class everyone picks a project (either from a list or gets permission) and completes it before the two month class ends. And if it doesn’t compile, (read: if your code sucks) that’s a zero. You get no credit at all if it doesn’t work, and little credit if it works, but not how it should. When it came time to turn it in, my over-ambitious ‘weather emulating particle system’ either compiled and did nothing, or didn’t compile. That was a zero. I eventually got it to run as a low priority thread that would build a queue of lightning strikes in the background and either randomly strike, or you could ‘call’ a strike if the designer felt the mood struck. This was intended for use in scenery and skies, not in-game action, mind you. For some reason something I was doing to save time/space/speed (I can’t recall) wouldn’t let the rain or snow particle engine to work at the same time. Crazy. In C++ it would’ve been as easy as pie, I say, pie!

But back then at Full Sail, failing Console meant that you still progressed to the next class, but you had to come back and make it up later. Why? The next class was ‘Final Project’. This was where you and your pals got to make your game. Our was Necrophobic. A 3rd person multiplayer shooter where two teams of humans who survived the ‘zombie apocalypse’ had to battle for control of two resource points on the map (gas station and helipad) for two minutes if they wanted to escape. And two other resource points (hospital and ammo store) gave you bonuses (faster healing, more ammo, obviously.) While the two teams fought each other, zombies of varying types were also attacking players. So you had to worry about losing your resource points, and just dying. *shrug* I thought it a good idea.

My role in the game was ‘designer’, ‘producer’, and ‘gameplay programmer.’ All questions about what should happen when X, Y, Z happens in the game came to me. Someone needed the physics guy to fix something? I told him what was wrong, and what it should do. I really enjoyed that, not being ‘in charge’, as with six people there’s not much to be in charge of and everything was by-committee anyway, but being the go-to guy about things. It makes ya feel important. But while I was loving that, I was having a problem of a completely different type away from the team.

The End
I mentioned earlier I had started dating. So, now my girlfriend was getting mad that I hadn’t introduced her to my friends, and I was spending so much time with them. I tried to explain that this wasn’t just casual time with friends, that this was eight hours a day in-class, and the rest of the day after, and that I warned her beforehand that things at school were about to get serious. I told her there were only three friends there I even cared much about anyway, and that if she could bear with me, it’d be over soon. Instead of making this post twice as long, I’ll cut it short and say that one night we argued and she left, but not before she told me that she was glad she aborted my child. Did I not mention the “she was pregnant” part earlier? No? Guess why. I didn’t know. Yeah. That’s a pretty fucked up thing to drop on someone, huh? I mean, I’m pro-choice, but (and I’ve been called horrible names for this) I’ve always considered it a “parents right.” I know I’m not carrying the child, but that’s not my fault.

So, one can imagine that such news as “I’ve already gotten rid of the child you didn’t know I was carrying.” will affect the work. And it did. While I regret it now, I didn’t even tell any of my team about it. I didn’t want to give excuses, I just wanted to throw myself into my work. Hell, they didn’t even know I had a girlfriend, remember? The only teammember I still talk to from those days probably doesn’t read this blog, and definitely won’t read a post this long. But ‘throwing myself into my work’ didn’t work, and I did a horribly shitty job coding the gameplay. I’ve tell myself ‘She’ wasn’t enough of a reason, and that my malaise that seems to set in with time coupled with ‘Her’ is probably what did it, but it doesn’t matter. I really screwed over the team. The whole ‘two combatting teams’ thing was dropped, and it was just players running around shooting zombies. Our final game was significantly worse than expected given how well we did in the early milestones. In one fell swoop she took me out of commission for the remaining two months of ‘Final Project’, and I was no good for my repeat of Console that happened after Final Project. I failed it too.

With that second failing of console, I flunked out of Full Sail. All the failing had caught up to me, and I ran out of available time to earn my degree. In retrospect, I like to think of myself as a resilient guy, but it just really fucked me up for a long time. I ran into her a few months after that night and we talked. I wasn’t even really mad at her. She apologized for telling me, and said that she wished she had just kept it to herself. I do too, actually.

Soon I moved back ‘home’ to South Georgia. Somehow, that was even worse than the discovery I no longer had a child on the way. That was the true failure for me. To have to go back home, tail tucked firmly between my legs, after everything else that happened in the past few months.

So, moving from injury to insult, I lost my ‘finally moved away from home/South-West-Georgia’ freedom. I lost the child I never knew I didn’t have. I lost the one girl I actually liked enough that I would’ve introduced her to my mom given the chance. I lost my chance at a degree. I lost my game.

The Rebeginning
I get back home, and a couple of months later, I’m back working at the television station I worked at before I left for Full Sail. Doing the same shit job, for the same shit pay, two years later. Then something kinda odd happens. About three months after I get back home, I get a package from Full Sail. It seems there was a problem, my grades were reviewed, and I did indeed pass Console the second time. I have a degree! I’m submitting resumes to everyone under the sun now. I’m being flown around to interview for jobs that suck, but I’d be lucky to have. It’s crazy. And I found one person from Full Sail’s job placement that was actually helpful and actually talked to people! (I heard a rumor that he, Sean Kearney, quit after two or three months. Dunno if it’s true, but he was a great guy.) It’s almost like something could happen! Of course, it never did. I’m still at the station, now about two and a half years post-Full Sail. I’ve not coded seriously for at least half a year. But I’m in the journalism thing now, which is a weird story in itself.

About a year ago ‘She’ mailed me back a comic she had borrowed. Craig Thompson’s Blankets. It’s one of the best comics I’ve ever read, and I love my comics. I had already bought a replacement copy by this time, so, what did I do with the one she mailed back? Why, I burned it of course. Craig Thompson would’ve approved, I like to think.

I also came late to mobile phones when earlier this year I snagged a LG VX8100. Hearing Verizon was good for games, I went with them. That was my first mistake. See, “good for games” apparently means “good for people who like to buy a cell phone game, play it for a week, and delete it to make room for another game when they get their next paycheck.” So “good for games” means ‘lots of games’, not ‘a good choice of games.’ Especially considering that I can only order a tiny subset of games that Verizon thinks their customers want, and the list is updated once a quarter. That’s right, four times a year they review their list of available games. Wow. Be still my heart. (I think Greg Costikyan once had an idea on a better way to handle this, but for the life of me I can’t find it on his site.) And maybe I’m wrong for this, but I just can’t get excited over Call of Duty 2 on a cell phone. For the casual video game player, fine whatever, but for a gamer, it’s an offensive experience. Cell phones do not lend themselves well to game design conventions of those games generally thought of as more ‘epic’, for lack of a better word. Plain and simple: cell phones are physically made to play Tetris.

But it’s not all bad. Some folk are perfectly capable of making games that work well on cell phones. Tetris is the greatest game ever. Jewel Quest/Bejeweled style tile games work fine. But it’s games like Skipping Stone, which was lauded last year for its design, that give me hope. The game consists of simply pressing the ‘OK’ button when the stone falls to the water’s surface, in order to ricochet it back into the air. Not hitting it perfectly results in losing ‘power’, which determines your speed and the height of your bounce. The point is to skip as far as possible. Genius. Diner Dash also ports over from the PC surprisingly well. Think of it as playing a multilayered ‘Whack-A-Mole’ with restaurant seats. The trick is that instead of being either whackable or not-whackable, every ‘mole’(seat) has multiple states: ready to seat (where you sit new customers,) ready to order, eating, ready to pay, and ready to be cleaned. Each seat is assigned a number on the keybpad and the game quickly moves from a tutorial to button-pressing chaos as you try to clean seats for new customers while old ones take forever to eat. (Doesn’t anyone eat at home any more?!)

So, there can be good games on cell phones, but why won’t Mario ever work? Mostly because cell phone designers are dumb. They’ve been working on improving their own mousetrap for so long that they apparently forgot that functionality should determine design, not the other way around. Nokia, for instance, went insane…