slackerton

i'm a video game designer/director and a house dj and producer... although not always necessarily in that order. actually, i'm a lazy bastard first and foremost. everything else just falls under intrests. i'm currently living and working in shanghai, djing around asia, and steady pimping.i'm on a mission out here musically - bringing proper house music to china. to me house is a common language that transcends socio-economic barriers and genuinely brings people together in a way that you simply don't find that often anymore - *especially* in spiritually and morally vacuous places like urban california, but i still believe that it can happen anywhere. out here house is 'real love generation'. it's martin solveig and david duretta. it's shiny venues full of beautiful people in expensive clothes. i blame the french. ; ) i'm chipping away at that piece by piece. in all honesty i've played some straight painful gigs out here. i spent the first 6-8 months picking up the dregs as far as gigs are concerned. not bangin enough for some places, not 'intelligent' or 'alternative' enough for others. it's paid off tho. the last 3-4 months have really been different. i helped start china's first underground house afterhours, and i've been playing frequently enough to really get my mixing dialed in. i've found that energy level is what people here respond to more than anything. drastic changes clear floors faster than i've EVER seen, and the kids here seem to stick with you longer when you work tunes that are more songs than tracks in frequently. i think it grounds the mix a bit. anyways, i've started getting pretty good at putting my sets together in a way that gives the kids here what they need to keep the energy and vibe up. then it's all about strategically sneaking in the goods. they might not appreciate it on average as much as i do, but do it well enough and frequently enough and they'll start to associate that sound with that feeling. and let me tell you - seeing 2000+ chinese kids getting DOWN to derek carter when presented properly... that's a good feeling.here's a few pics from some of my gigs: club SOS in hangzhou a shot of the crowd. they use lasers and smoke like it's goin out of style. and dancing girls (the paid kind) all over the place they had friggin tshirts. surreal. it's never enough to just be a house dj around here - which drives me nuts. when they asked me what kind of house i play i told them - i play some deep stuff, some of the more upfront jackin stuff that's been coming out lately, acid, i dunno... whatever so long as it's good. the result? apparently i play the best deep jackin' acid house. heh. in xiamen i got interviewed by the local media. apparently i was playing during some big music festival... a friend of mine saw me on the news the next day. too funny.so, i moved to china. occasionally i will be reminded of this fact when i'm on the subway or walking down the street... 'jesus christ. i'm in china.' i'm working for ubisoft - a french game company with offices in shanghai. they've got about 500 or so employees out the studio, and have been doing business out here for about 8 years. unfortunately, the local guys that have been with the company for a while have spent those years porting games from one machine to another... not exactly the most creative work and not the kind of thing that prepares you to develop a new IP. so, ubisoft brought a number of experienced senior-level developers out from europe and north america to help develop the aspects of the studio that are needed to make new games. for some of us (particularly game designers), this really involves being a mentor - as game design isn't something you can really learn how to do in school. eventually - if everything goes well - we'll make our own jobs obsolete.i've been kicked out of six different apartments (that i can remember) because the music was too loud. as a video game designer i made more money than both of my parents combined by the time i was 20. i dropped out of college to make games for sony. i dropped out of sony to play with glowsticks. i moved to montreal when san francisco got ugly. je parle français comme un enfant retardé. i left montreal because i couldn't take pride in my work. i miss burlington.i'm a big believer in karma. maybe not in the traditional hindu context... but i have been kicked in the nuts by the relativity of the universe too many times to ignore it. if a tree fell in the woods and nobody was around to hear it, i'd probably end up with a paper cut.i think that life is a contribution. i think that art is communication. i think i like pie. no, i know i like pie. i think that wanting the world to be a better place requires making the world a better place through your own actions. i think living in the states is a drag. i think living in los angeles was the absolute worst thing i've ever needed to do.i've shipped over 10 games in as many years. mostly as designer (level designer or game designer), sometimes as a producer. some i finished, some i didn't. some i only started. i'm most proud of my work on crash 2:wrath of cortex (my first real level design experience - just me and the tyrannical mark cerny... yikes), syphonfilter (which i actually created - did the original concept and game outline, came up with the actions characters, levels, targeting system... didn't finish it tho. i burnt out after a year and a half - and i started raving way too much), and medal of honor: rising sun (i was lead designer on the multiplayer, coop, and online, also designed one of the single player levels - yamashita's gold - and did a whole bunch of other work that is too boring to get into). i also worked on a bunch of other crap you've never heard of. the game industry is funny like that... you'll toil for months and months - sometimes years - on something that gets shit-canned for one reason or another. a lot of my best work nobody'll ever see unless they're looking at my professional portfolio. it cracks me up when i hear artists bitching about selling out. wanna sell out? become a game designer. you get to sell out on a regular basis - sometimes it seems like your best ideas always get squashed by some corporate dipshit who wouldn't know good design if it jumped up and bit him on the ass. still, i've been a lot luckier than most.it's a strange thing straddling two social environments that lie in almost diametric opposition. it makes it difficult to do either thing well, but thems the breaks. i know that if i spent my time really focusing on music i could be doing a whole lot more than i'm doing now. i also know that if i spent more time playing games and getting back in touch with the industry it'd make me a better designer. oh well. the kinds of people you meet in a game development studio are rarely the kind of people you meet out in a club. well, this is probably more true of making games in the states than most places (seems like most english guys i've worked with get actually (not a lot of people can really appreciate the range shit i have to deal with, much less relate... but thank god for the few that do. it was FAR worse back in the states, but guys at the office are pretty oblivious - they think that djing is all about getting high and getting laid (grossly overexxaggerated, as djing has *rarely* gotten me laid). and party people... well the serious partiers have only the most tenuous grasp on responsibility as it is, so they generally have no idea what's involved in leading the design of a game that costs upwards of 20 million us dollars, strangely enough, they all seem to like the words 'tweak' or 'tweaking'. as far as i can tell they're using it for different things, but it's really only something a person in my peculiar position would be able to witness and appreciate the irony of.